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ATP

554: Is This Your Dog?

 

00:00:00   So, I'm a little bit hoarse, because I'm a little bit sick.

00:00:04   You're not going to get me sick, are you?

00:00:05   I don't know, I caught someone's allergies in quotes.

00:00:09   Mm-hmm.

00:00:10   Mm-hmm.

00:00:11   But anyway, you'll never guess where I'm recording from right now.

00:00:16   Not the beach?

00:00:17   Not the beach!

00:00:18   The Delaware.

00:00:19   Hi.

00:00:20   I am recording from my Rivian.

00:00:24   You're recording from your Rivian? What are you talking about?

00:00:27   Is your Rivian outside my house? Because that would be amazing.

00:00:29   That would be, oh, I gotta do that sometime. But I didn't do that this time. That's a little far.

00:00:33   Through a weird series of logistical events, you know, as listeners know, I recently bought a house,

00:00:41   and we're in the process of moving to, and it's taking up my entire fall,

00:00:44   because part of that moving process involves, the house that I bought is a bit of a fixer-upper,

00:00:50   and that's putting it mildly.

00:00:51   And so, they're doing a ton of renovation before we can move in.

00:00:55   There were like structural problems. We knew going in, you know, this wasn't a surprise,

00:00:58   but we accepted the project, because it was actually the least bad house that was available.

00:01:03   So, anyway, so as part of that, we rented an apartment nearby that would go month to month,

00:01:10   which is almost nothing around here.

00:01:12   And it's just like this, like the side of somebody's house that we knew, that was like a separate part of their house.

00:01:17   And so we're renting that so that Adam can like easily go to school here in the new town,

00:01:21   before our house is actually livable, which should hopefully be in about a month.

00:01:25   The apartment does not have good internet service.

00:01:28   Now, it has, the house, it's just owned by, you know, an older couple, they don't need much.

00:01:34   So they have some really basic cable broadband service from the local cable ISP,

00:01:38   and the speed tests I run on it usually are something like 20 megabits down, 4 up.

00:01:45   Oh, gosh.

00:01:46   It's not good, and it also fluctuates a lot.

00:01:49   I was not going to try to record ATP on that.

00:01:52   Now, naturally, even though the new house does not currently have plumbing or walls,

00:01:59   it does have gigabit fiber, because of course I got that installed.

00:02:03   Priorities, baby.

00:02:04   And it turns out cars mostly make really good sound recording environments,

00:02:09   because they are small spaces full of soft surfaces and mostly a bunch of different angles of surfaces.

00:02:15   So the sound gets diffused, it gets absorbed by the soft things, and there's not much room for it to echo.

00:02:20   But you've got glass windows all around. That's terrible for sound.

00:02:23   Yeah, but there's enough soft stuff and obliquely angled surfaces that the sound bounces around and gets absorbed correctly anyway.

00:02:29   Well, I guess you'll find out when you edit this, because right now Zoom is totally changing the audio,

00:02:33   so we can't hear what's really going on, but you'll find out.

00:02:36   The great thing, I have great, you know, precise climate control and everything.

00:02:39   It's actually quite cozy. Infinite electricity that, you know, I run my laptop off of and everything, so that part's all great.

00:02:45   Does the Rivian have podcaster mode so you don't get too hot?

00:02:48   Well, I had to tell it that I'm camping, which is not quite accurate. I feel like I'm kind of stealing camping valor.

00:02:54   Did you do the auto-leveling thing, so you're level while you're podcasting?

00:02:58   Actually, the button is right there on the screen. I've been afraid to push it, because I got all set up and then saw the button.

00:03:02   I'm like, "Eh, I don't want to mess anything up. It's working great right now."

00:03:05   So this is where I'm recording from. And interesting, so anyway, at the apartment, the Wi-Fi is terrible,

00:03:10   and we're not going to be there long enough to make a big stand.

00:03:12   The couple who's renting it to us is very nice, and they're being very generous,

00:03:15   and so I don't want to make a stink and make them change their whole ISP just for me.

00:03:18   And so I thought, "Let me try one of those 5G hotspots."

00:03:23   They've been around for a while, like, you know, the little standalone Netgear hotspots and similar other brands,

00:03:27   and I've never tried one before, and they do usually support high-gain external antennas.

00:03:33   So I thought, I actually, I had a trip that I recently went on that it would be useful for,

00:03:38   and I thought, "Let me give this a shot. I'll get it, like, you know, a few weeks early, and I'll try it at the apartment."

00:03:43   And so I actually got the Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro.

00:03:49   Nighthawk? What the...

00:03:52   All of Netgear's names are alike. Military, vehicle, manliness, like, it's terrible. They're the worst.

00:03:58   They look like Transformers or like KITT.

00:04:00   They're terrible. It's like, did a teenage boy name all this stuff? I mean, probably.

00:04:04   Right.

00:04:05   Anyway, so I got the Nighthawk M6 Pro, which is way less violent than it sounds.

00:04:10   And in fact, it's just a little black box of electronics.

00:04:15   But anyway, so I activated it on AT&T. That was a process. I don't recommend doing that process.

00:04:21   But once it was activated, it works great.

00:04:23   And I recently, I was traveling, and I was in a hotel last week, and I got to use it instead of my...

00:04:30   Like, I was like, "Let me see. Maybe I'll bring it to the hotel, and then instead of using hotel Wi-Fi,

00:04:34   let me see if this thing works." And I got the external high-gain antenna for it.

00:04:38   Oh my God. For hotel use, if you have good reception, which I did, it was remarkably good.

00:04:47   Now, it's not unlimited data, but like, the AT&T plans that you get with it, they start at like 50 gigs for 50 bucks-ish,

00:04:53   something like that. For hotel internet use, this thing was amazing.

00:04:57   Because unlike tethering, which I know Casey, you love tethering.

00:05:02   Ugh. Mm-hmm.

00:05:03   This thing is just broadcasting Wi-Fi. And it has Ethernet, too. It has a bunch of advanced stuff I didn't really need.

00:05:10   Oh, and I should clarify, this is a very expensive hotspot that I did not pay anywhere near the retail price for.

00:05:16   I believe the retail price is like $900.

00:05:19   It's $1,000 on Amazon right now.

00:05:21   Yes. But I got an Amazon, like, recertified, renewed, refurbished one for, I believe, $275.

00:05:29   Wow!

00:05:30   Yeah, if you look on Amazon now, there's a few that are a little below $300.

00:05:33   So I thought, well, I mean, you know, I'll take that risk, sure. And it's worked out fine.

00:05:37   I'm sure I can tell there's nothing wrong with it. It works great.

00:05:40   And it was, again, I would not recommend this at $1,000. But at 300 bucks? Eh, maybe.

00:05:46   It's actually, anyway, so the experience of using it, again, to those of you who have used these before,

00:05:51   this is going to be old hat. This is like me describing Wi-Fi to you.

00:05:54   But forgive me, I've never used one of these before.

00:05:57   It was great because what it does is it broadcasts its own Wi-Fi network,

00:06:00   and you don't have to individually have all your devices sign into the hotel Wi-Fi.

00:06:07   And the Wi-Fi connection doesn't expire after every day.

00:06:11   Then you have to go back into the hotel portal and re-enter your room number and all that crap.

00:06:15   You don't have to pay the five bucks extra per day to have the faster connection or whatever.

00:06:19   It's just like being on your home Wi-Fi. It's great.

00:06:23   And speed-wise, I really, you know, I wouldn't want to burn all my limited data downloading Xcode or anything over this thing.

00:06:30   But speed-wise, in most of my work, it was hard to notice. I easily forgot that I was effectively tethering.

00:06:37   And again, this was in a 5G coverage area with a strong signal with the antenna.

00:06:42   So I was getting very good service to it. But in those conditions, it was fantastic.

00:06:48   I don't know that I'm going to keep this plan active.

00:06:50   If you buy the thing up front, you know, for Amazon or whatever, instead of buying it through your carrier,

00:06:54   there's no contract usually. So I got this thing month to month.

00:06:57   And so I'm going to only turn on the plan when I actually am going to travel somewhere and use it.

00:07:02   But this is great. It is so much nicer. If you are somewhere to work,

00:07:07   it was so nice to just open up my laptop and it was just on. It was connected.

00:07:11   It's similar to when devices have built-in cellular. This is why we want this so badly.

00:07:15   It's that much better. And then everything was on.

00:07:18   My laptop, my phone, my watch, like all of the things, all of my devices were on the Wi-Fi all the time

00:07:23   for the entire handful of days I was there. It was fantastic.

00:07:27   So it's not for everyone. It's a little expensive. I get that.

00:07:30   But if that's for you, that's a good option to know about.

00:07:34   It also, they have all sorts of features like you can use it as a backup connection with your home router

00:07:38   and stuff like that. There's all sorts of features like that. I didn't test any of those. I didn't have time yet.

00:07:41   But anyway, I thought, great, this should fix the apartment internet connection too.

00:07:46   Because we're only going to be there for another month or so. Let me just get a better connection for that

00:07:50   and then I'll be able to use that while I'm there and be able to do the show from there if need be and so on.

00:07:54   And the apartment does not have a good service.

00:07:58   Not only is the Wi-Fi pretty slow, but there is basically no 5G service.

00:08:05   And here I'm going around the whole place sticking the suction cups from the antenna up against every single window in the place,

00:08:12   trying out different locations. They're all bad. There is nowhere.

00:08:16   I get like two bars of service at best anywhere in the apartment with both this thing and my phone and any other 5G device.

00:08:25   So unfortunately it does not help me at all there. And that's why I'm sitting in my Rivian recording this podcast

00:08:31   in a very awkward setup in front of my under construction house that has gigabit Wi-Fi.

00:08:35   We should move on and we will once again ask you for the very last time until this time next year

00:08:42   to go to stjude.org/ATP. S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP and give some money to some kids who really really could use it.

00:08:52   So here's the thing. St. Jude is a children's research hospital. It's based in Memphis, Tennessee.

00:08:57   And they do amazing work. And they do it for Americans and everyone else as well.

00:09:02   It is incredible the work that this place has done. And as one of the largest pediatric cancer hospitals in the world,

00:09:10   St. Jude treats more than 8,000 patients each year, many of whom are treated as outpatients, which is incredible.

00:09:16   St. Jude has achieved a 94% survival rate for a particular type of leukemia, which is a type of blood cancer,

00:09:24   that is up from 4% in 1962. So from 4% to 94%, I'd say they're doing okay.

00:09:32   The work they do is incredible. They are such incredible people there that all they want to do is to provide

00:09:38   health care and some sort of smile and good news for sick children and their families.

00:09:44   They don't charge their patients or their families a dime. The work they do is unbelievable and we really should applaud them.

00:09:52   So if you have any dollars or whatever your local currency is that you can scrape together and give to St. Jude,

00:09:58   be it $1, be it $10, be it $1,000, be that if you want to earn some stickers from me, $10,001,

00:10:06   because the leading donor is still $10,000. Which, by the way, I don't think you reached out to collect your stickers, so please do.

00:10:11   But anyways, if you want some ATP stickers, which are not for sale, and we will probably never put them up for sale,

00:10:18   because I love having it as currency/encouragement, anyway, if you want stickers, go to stjude.org/ATP.

00:10:25   Now is the time. Marco, you and I, I believe, have received new telephones. I think Tina has as well.

00:10:31   Marco, if you've received some new completely unnecessary device from Apple or someone else,

00:10:36   what can you do to help compute the recommended ATP donation?

00:10:40   Well, here's the thing. You look at the family of phone that you bought, whether it's the iPhone 15 Pro or the iPhone 15.

00:10:49   The Max is not its own family, so you use the Pro. You look at the base price of that family.

00:10:54   So the Pro is $1,000, the non-Pro is, what, $800? I forgot.

00:10:58   I don't remember.

00:11:00   You can figure it out. You're smart. So anyway, look at the base price of that.

00:11:04   Then you look at the receipt total from your order, including a year or two years of AppleCare if you chose the monthly AppleCare plan.

00:11:12   You look at the receipt total, sales tax, anything, all the different fees, accessories you purchased along with the phone,

00:11:17   higher storage tiers, whatever it is, look at that receipt total.

00:11:20   Subtract the base price of the family, $1,000, and that is your minimum donation, ideally.

00:11:26   So if you can swing it, and many of you can, that's wonderful, we're all very fortunate to be able to do that.

00:11:31   If you can swing it, that is your minimum donation to St. Jude.

00:11:34   If you can do more, great, do more. If you can't do that, do what you can if you can.

00:11:38   But that's your target.

00:11:40   Minimum target is the difference between your total receipt price for whatever you just bought that you didn't probably necessarily super need,

00:11:48   and the base price of the family. So good luck.

00:11:51   Indeed. And if you wanted to help compute that for you, is there a website or a slogan or like a name for this whole idea that we could look up?

00:11:59   Yes, this is called The Marco Offset, and somebody made a website that I forgot the URL. Is it just marcooffset.com?

00:12:05   It's themarcooffset.com.

00:12:07   There you go.

00:12:08   So you can plug in your particulars to themarcooffset.com, and you will get a suggested donation.

00:12:16   So please, September is Child and Cancer Awareness Month, which is why we're doing it now as we record Tuesday the 26th.

00:12:22   This is the last time you're going to hear this until 2024.

00:12:25   But please, please consider throwing a few dollars their way. Stjude.org/ATP. Jon, anything you'd like to add?

00:12:32   Even though September will end, you can give it any time during the year.

00:12:36   That is also true.

00:12:37   This is my last chance to give one of my usual pitches about this is to people in our audience who are software developers or some other fairly highly paid profession.

00:12:49   If you're just getting out of college or you're getting your first job as a programmer or whatever, I remember what that was like.

00:12:57   You feel like you're just trying to get your feet underneath you, and when you hear people talk about charities and stuff like that on podcasts, you say, "Oh, this is a good cause. I hope people give to that."

00:13:08   But you feel like it's something for other people because you are not yet in a position to do that.

00:13:13   And that's true. Maybe you're just getting your feet under yourself. You really don't have time or money to think about charity at this point.

00:13:21   But what happens is, especially if you are in one of these pretty well-paid technical professions like software developer or similar, you'll have your job for a few years, and maybe you'll move to another job or get a promotion or whatever.

00:13:36   And the years will pass by, and eventually, without realizing it, you will become one of those people who you used to think about as listening to charity pitches and giving money to charity.

00:13:47   Because if asked on a survey, "What percentage of people's income do you think they should give to charity?"

00:13:52   It's like, "Well, if they don't have a lot of money, maybe they can't afford to give anything, and that's fine."

00:13:55   But once people start making real money and they pay off their student loans or whatever, and they're finally getting their feet under them, they're thinking about saving for a house or whatever,

00:14:04   those people should give X percent of their money to charity. And it's really easy to say that and think about that when you're assuming it's other people.

00:14:11   But if you find yourself in your mid-30s having worked as a software developer for 5, 10, 15 years, chances are good that you are now one of those people who you used to think is supposed to give money to charity.

00:14:25   And if you aren't in the habit of giving money to charity, that abstract concept of what percentage well-to-do people should give to charity, you have that in your head.

00:14:35   But then look, when you do your taxes at the end of the year and say, "What percentage of our income did we give to charity this year?"

00:14:41   I'm not saying you have to give to St. Jude. You can give to whatever cause that you believe in, although we think this is a good cause.

00:14:46   And it's really easy to do, stjude.org/atp. Think about at the year end what charities are going to give. And the good thing is, for tax purposes and everything, you can give all the money on one day at the very end of the year.

00:15:00   It's not like you need to spread it out throughout the year, and sometimes that is something you can give monthly or whatever.

00:15:04   But please think about the idea that perhaps you, without you knowing it, have become one of those people who you always assumed would give money to charity.

00:15:12   Check your tax return and see if that's you. And if it's not, give a dollar or something. It's great. It'll make you feel good.

00:15:18   Indeed, stjude.org/atp. John, there's been some developments. This is a bit inside baseball, but this whole thing, it's almost too bad that nobody else gets to see the accidental channel in the Relay Slack, which is where we take, you know, that's our Slack channel for the three of us.

00:15:37   We usurp Relay's bandwidth, if you will. And watching this fly by over the last few days has been a true honest to goodness delight. John, can you tell me what you've been up to recently?

00:15:49   Yeah, last episode, Marco was saying, "Let me tell you how John gets me to add features to the website. He sends these pull requests over the fence that he's never even run.

00:15:57   A code that he's never even run, code that he doesn't even have the ability to run, and then that makes me just reimplement it and do it myself."

00:16:02   In a language he doesn't officially know.

00:16:04   Yeah, and he said this because I had just recently done that. Sent a pull request, noting full well, "Hey, I've never run any of this code."

00:16:12   I feel like two things here. One, Marco was employing his own version of the same thing, which I'll get to in a second.

00:16:18   But two, before I get to that one, he talked about me sending pull requests that I had never run. He had also never run that pull request.

00:16:28   And I know that because when I eventually did the number one thing that I got to in a second, I ran my pull request on a dev version of ADP.fm, and it worked the first time with no changes.

00:16:43   So if he'd only just accepted that pull request, merged it and deployed it, or merged it and tested it, it would have worked perfectly.

00:16:50   So here's the thing, how did I test it?

00:16:51   In all fairness, that one was a lot less code and a lot less broken than the first one you sent.

00:16:56   Yeah, well, you know, you win some, you lose some. Anyway, here's what Marco did.

00:17:00   Here's the first thing I was referring to. Here's how John gets me to make changes to the website.

00:17:06   Well, here's how Marco gets me to finally get a dev version of the site up and running. He talks about it on the podcast.

00:17:11   And so I said, "You know what? I started that project to make a Docker image that would run the dev server.

00:17:18   Let me finish that project." Because Marco called me out on another podcast, so that's what I did.

00:17:22   I picked up my Docker work that I had been doing, and I got the site up and running in Docker in a mostly working state.

00:17:31   And the very first thing I did was went to dev.atp.fm/specials and saw that the specials page that I had added worked perfectly.

00:17:41   But of course, I didn't stop there once I had a working dev server.

00:17:43   I just went down the punch list of all the easy, tiny little changes that are in our to-do document for the website.

00:17:49   And I did a bunch of them as well. And then Casey tried out my Docker thing, and it worked for him on the very first try.

00:17:57   So it's the magic of Docker.

00:17:59   And not only that, there was a small bit of user error on my part, wherein there was an expectation of an environment variable that I did not set correctly.

00:18:07   Casey doesn't know how Fish works. That's the problem. Fish is weird.

00:18:10   Hold on. Who does know how Fish works? That's not a valid complaint to accuse Casey of that. No one knows how Fish works.

00:18:17   Well, let me see. Here's the thing. He was using a Fish-ism, so he knows a little bit about how it works.

00:18:21   He needed to set an environment variable. But rather than setting an environment variable the way you would do it in Bash or the Borne shell or any other regular shell,

00:18:28   he set it doing it the weird Fish way. This is F-I-S-H, not P-H-I-S-H. It's not Marko's band.

00:18:34   Right. That shell I would know something about. The commands are very long.

00:18:38   Right. But he could have just used Bash cell syntax and it would work.

00:18:40   But instead, he used the special Fish syntax for the universal variable thing, which are like turbocharged environment.

00:18:46   I don't know. I don't use Fish. But anyway, he used the special Fish specific one, and that's not the same thing as environment variables and that tripped him up.

00:18:52   Anyway, continue Casey.

00:18:54   Thank you for that. But anyway, suffice to say, you're raking me over the coals here and I'm trying to compliment you.

00:19:00   This is the story of our relationship. Merlin, I feel you.

00:19:03   No, I was just saying that you actually do know something about the Fish shell because you were using a very specific feature that you had to have read the docs to learn about.

00:19:10   Fair enough. Well, alright, I'll allow it. But anyways, the point is, I go to run this, I thought I'd set my environment variable correctly.

00:19:16   Clearly, I was wrong. But, and this is the mark of a mature and well-seasoned developer, that when I ran it, the script that you had helpfully provided to start the whole, you know, download the container, start it, run it, and so on and so forth,

00:19:30   it immediately said, "Hey, I can't find such and such environment variable. What would you like it to be set to?"

00:19:35   Which was just chef's kiss. This is the sign of a mature developer. Immature developers, including probably me, would have just dumped and said, "You didn't set it, dummy!"

00:19:45   But no. John's script says...

00:19:47   No, immature developers would have done two things. One, they wouldn't have set minus X on the bash script, so it would have continued whether there was an error or not.

00:19:53   And two, it would just blindly continue with an empty string.

00:19:55   Yep, that's alright.

00:19:56   And then somewhere down the line, that would manifest in something not working and it would be totally unclear why it didn't work.

00:20:02   That's fair.

00:20:03   Anyway, I was very proud of you, and yes, it did work the very first shot. Your instructions were excellent. That was the other good thing.

00:20:09   It turns out documentation is helpful. Who knew? And John had excellent documentation, and it worked lickety-split. It was great.

00:20:18   And it turns out that just fixing something yourself is way better than filing a bug report and just waiting forever.

00:20:23   Well, we didn't have a bug report, so we just had a document with a to-do list. All I needed was the ability to do the things on the to-do list, and I did. And I'm doing the easy ones, to be clear. I'm still leaving all the hard ones for you.

00:20:34   It's also fair that the things on the to-do list, you keep writing them and I keep not looking at them. That's quite a metaphor, really.

00:20:42   You just gotta get the top two that we put in there recently, and I'll handle everything else.

00:20:46   I don't even know what they are.

00:20:47   You know.

00:20:48   Oh, you know.

00:20:49   Do I?

00:20:50   You do.

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00:22:45   iPhone 15. We're going to be bouncing in and out of iPhone 15 topics throughout the evening or day, whatever.

00:22:53   Whenever you're listening to this.

00:22:54   So the iPhone 15 data transfer over USB-C. We had some feedback with regard to this.

00:22:59   Samuel Polay wrote, "I was setting up my iPhone 15 Pro in the Apple Store."

00:23:04   Which, this seems an odd choice unless you have really crummy internet at home.

00:23:08   But hey, you know, whatever works for you.

00:23:09   Actually, there's a reason for that if you're treating it in as part of the purchase.

00:23:12   Oh, thank you. You're exactly right. I completely forgot about that.

00:23:15   I take it all back, Samuel. My apologies.

00:23:17   So Samuel writes, "I chose restoration from iCloud since the store's Wi-Fi was providing 100 megabits per second down.

00:23:23   But my estimate still came in at around an hour to complete.

00:23:25   An Apple Store employee saw this and plugged in an ethernet cable to my new phone.

00:23:29   The estimate then dropped to 10 minutes."

00:23:31   That's friggin' awesome.

00:23:32   I kinda wonder where the ethernet drops are within the Apple Store.

00:23:35   'Cause I don't remember having seen this in my--

00:23:37   Oh, inside the tables. You know, secret compartments.

00:23:39   Yeah, no, I know what you're thinking of. I just didn't realize there were ethernet drops in there.

00:23:41   Yeah, everything's tucked in those tables.

00:23:43   It's so funny, like, whenever you discover something new, like, if you, like, ask for a bag or, you know--

00:23:49   The funny thing is, like, if you need change from cache, like, they just, like, touch somewhere

00:23:54   and all of a sudden, boop, something pops out.

00:23:56   Like, "Oh, you had those in there?"

00:23:57   Yeah, right.

00:23:58   You just pull the right book on the bookshelf and the thing turns around and there's cache, yeah.

00:24:01   Yep, yep, yep.

00:24:02   But anyway, that's extremely cool and I think that's very fun and very awesome.

00:24:06   Although, I wonder, what is the best way to handle both power delivery and ethernet?

00:24:13   I guess one of those pass-through USB-C hubs, like, the dongles that have the ethernet and then the pass-through charging port.

00:24:18   Oh, yeah, that's true. Yep, yep, yep.

00:24:19   We'll get to that in the next bit of follow-up here.

00:24:22   Yeah, that's right. Oh, yeah, that, you know, I should've kept reading. I apologize.

00:24:25   So, Chris Jones writes, "After doing a device-to-device transfer,

00:24:28   my iPhone 15 Pro still seems to be pulling a lot of data from the cloud,

00:24:31   so I plugged the phone into my laptop dock and was saturating my connection at 400 megabits downloading stuff via ethernet."

00:24:38   That's awesome. That's super fun.

00:24:40   Yeah, so if you've got a laptop dock that supports USB-C stuff,

00:24:43   you can plug your phone into it to get access to the ethernet provided by that laptop dock,

00:24:49   which probably has an ether port on it or whatever.

00:24:51   Yeah, all the benefits of USB-C.

00:24:53   And to be clear, people are doing this, it's because they're trying to get better than Wi-Fi speed.

00:24:59   So Samuel was saying he was going to 100 megabits in Wi-Fi, but USB-C, you know, is 10 gigabits if you have the right cable for it.

00:25:07   I thought it was more than that, but you're probably right.

00:25:10   Yeah, I think it's limited on the 15 Pro to 10 gigabits, but even 480 megabits is better than 100 megabits, you know what I mean?

00:25:17   Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nope, that's incredible.

00:25:19   Eric Merrill wrote in with regard to USB-A to USB-C adapters,

00:25:23   "The USB-C spec, for backwards compatibility and cheapness reasons, allows some cases where a USB-C plug connector may supply power blindly without negotiation or additional resistors,

00:25:33   namely in A to C plug cables for charging, and certain power adapters.

00:25:38   But power adapters like this must have the cable permanently attached to the adapter, so there's only a C plug connection available.

00:25:45   Because of this, all USB-C socket ports must be able to receive 5 volts of power at any time without warning.

00:25:51   A USB-C socket port is never allowed to supply power blindly,

00:25:56   but a USB-A port is typically always supplying power and not expecting to receive power.

00:26:02   So when you connect a USB-C socket to a USB-A plug adapter, like the one Jon was describing,

00:26:07   you have created a USB-C socket port with 5 volts being output on it.

00:26:11   Depending on what things you plug into that port, you can connect two power supply outputs into each other, resulting in unexpected current flow.

00:26:17   There are safe ways to use these adapters, but they are not foolproof, and that's why they're prohibited by the spec.

00:26:22   So that would probably explain why there's so many people saying things melted or caught on fire,

00:26:26   because this is just not supposed to happen.

00:26:28   I know it's confusing with the A and the C and the plug and the socket and everything,

00:26:31   but basically, this is a violation of the spec, because you've got an A plug and a C socket,

00:26:37   and they're connected directly to each other. Normally you would have a cable.

00:26:42   People think, "Well, if it's a cable, isn't it just the exact same thing as the adapter, but with a long string between it?"

00:26:47   No, because the cable would have a plug on both ends, and there would be no sockets.

00:26:51   This is essentially an adapter, a dongle, and that's why you can find these real cheap, but they're not recommended.

00:26:58   And if you think about what those adapters allow you to create is, with one of those adapters that converts A to a C-hole,

00:27:05   and then one of those basic C to A charging cables, then you can create, by plugging those into each other through the Cs,

00:27:11   you can create an A to A cable. And that's what the problem is.

00:27:15   If you have two A ports, both supplying power to each other and not expecting to receive power into an A port,

00:27:22   that's a big problem, and so there are definitely risks for that.

00:27:26   So that's the kind of thing, it is possible to use these adapters safely if you are careful with how you connect them to things,

00:27:32   and what you are connecting them to, but as we know, it's generally, you know, electrical standards and safety standards

00:27:38   and things are usually designed in such a way so that it is impossible or very difficult to do the wrong thing.

00:27:44   And these make it very easy to do the wrong thing, if you don't really know what you're doing.

00:27:48   And this is one of the problems, like, for the first time in a while, you know, the entire USB spec until C,

00:27:56   all the various USB plugs and ports were always directional by shape. You couldn't plug a cable in the wrong direction.

00:28:04   You couldn't have an adapter that adapted things wrong, because, like, all, you know, the A was the source,

00:28:10   and all the different Bs were all the destinations, there was no way to have, like, you couldn't make an A to A cable legitimately,

00:28:16   and there would be no legitimate reason for somebody to ever buy one of those things.

00:28:19   So, that's why, you know, C made things more complicated, because with C, if you just have in your hand the end of a C cable,

00:28:26   you don't know whether that is sending or receiving power. And so you kind of have to, you know, things have to be designed a little more carefully.

00:28:33   All right, we have something labeled as Sharp Tech, which I think is a reference to Ben Thompson's podcast,

00:28:39   but nevertheless, what is going on here?

00:28:42   Yes, that is a reference to the podcast. This is about the, there are many kerfuffles, as Casey would say, related to the new iPhones.

00:28:50   This is one of them, we'll get to more in a moment. This is about the 15 Pro and presumably also the 15 Pro Max,

00:28:57   with their titanium outer ring thing, and a bunch of people online have noted that when they got their 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max,

00:29:06   they could feel something kind of sharp, where the edge, the titanium edge meets the screen.

00:29:15   Is this the front or the back glass?

00:29:17   The front, although I think some people also feel it on the back, but it's mostly people talking about the front.

00:29:22   And I had heard about this before my wife got her phone, so the very first thing I did, she's got the 15 Pro, natural titanium,

00:29:27   the very first thing I did was took it out and wanted to see if I could feel this thing people are talking about.

00:29:32   And I could, but of course now we don't know if I hadn't heard about this online, would I have noticed it?

00:29:38   I think I probably would have noticed it because it does feel different than the 14 Pro, which I have to compare it to.

00:29:45   Now obviously my wife's going to put a case on it, so it doesn't really matter, you're never going to feel this seam again.

00:29:50   And I think it varies from phone to phone, but everyone has been comparing notes in this MacRumors thread we'll put on there,

00:29:57   saying here's what mine feels like, here's what it looks like. It's very difficult to photograph because it's very, very small,

00:30:01   and the bottom line is there's like a little tiny gap between the screen and the titanium edge,

00:30:07   and I was trying to sort of quantify it in some way because taking a picture is hard.

00:30:11   This is the best I could come up with, and it's going to sound ridiculous, but it's the only thing I could do.

00:30:15   If you take the corner of a piece of paper and sort of put that corner at a 45 degree angle to the screen of your phone,

00:30:22   and then press it a little bit so the corner bends, and then slide that corner towards the edge of your phone,

00:30:28   it will catch when it gets to the titanium edge, on my wife's phone anyway.

00:30:32   It will catch for a moment, and eventually you'll be able to push past it.

00:30:36   If you do the same thing on a 14 Pro, it does not catch, it just slides straight off the edge.

00:30:39   Is this manufacturing variability? Is this just the way the phone is supposed to go together?

00:30:45   Are some people's phones different than other people's with respect to this thing?

00:30:50   I guess both of you have 15 Pros to look at now, if you feel from like basically put your finger on the screen,

00:30:55   and slide it off the edge to the right or to the left, can you feel something, sharp is the wrong word,

00:31:01   but can you feel the titanium edge? Can you feel like there's a little gap there? Can you feel it?

00:31:05   Yes, it's very subtle. I mean, I would never have called this something wrong.

00:31:11   To me, this is just where two materials meet, but I can feel the edge just barely.

00:31:16   I wouldn't describe it even as sharp, but I actually, I would say I feel it a little bit more on the back glass,

00:31:22   on the bottom edge of the phone. That, for some reason, feels a little bit more prominent to me,

00:31:28   but I wouldn't describe either one of them as even seemingly noticeable, let alone a problem.

00:31:33   You should check all the different edges, because that's another thing I did on my iPhone.

00:31:36   I'm like, well, is it more prominent on the upper left, upper right, lower,

00:31:40   and I did find a section of the phone where it felt more prominent.

00:31:43   There's such small things that it's hard to see, but again, compared to the 14 Pro,

00:31:47   just the way they go together, there's not really that same gap. What about you, Casey? Can you feel it?

00:31:51   Yeah, that's exactly what Marco said. I never in a million years would have classified this as a problem.

00:31:55   I don't think it is a problem. I can sort of feel it, particularly on the bottom left-hand corner of the front of the device,

00:32:02   but I would not consider this a defect. Maybe the tolerance isn't exactly up to normal Apple standards,

00:32:10   but had I not been told about this, there's no way I would have ever thought that there was anything even slightly wrong with this phone,

00:32:17   and I still don't really think there's anything wrong with it.

00:32:19   But yeah, there's a little bit there, but not enough to make a stink about, in my personal opinion.

00:32:24   I mean, again, this could just be the way this phone goes together, because there's lots of different ways you can do that joint,

00:32:28   and this phone is shaped differently. It's not exactly the same. It has the curve or whatever,

00:32:32   so this just may be the way the phone is supposed to go together, and it's just, you know,

00:32:37   like in a car, there are panel gaps in there with intolerances, whereas maybe the previous phones had more of an overlapping thing,

00:32:42   so when you have overlapping things, it's easier to hide differences and tolerances,

00:32:46   as long as the overlap covers any difference. I will say, though, that I think the fact that I can feel where the two materials join together

00:32:55   is less satisfying than if I couldn't feel it, so if this is the way it's supposed to go together,

00:32:59   I would recommend Apple reconsider it for the next phone design.

00:33:04   I don't think it's—not that I use it without a case, but if I did use it without a case, it's not as pleasing as, you know,

00:33:11   the 14 had very flat sides, but still, at least the joints were good, but if you think about something like the iPhone X,

00:33:17   the way that felt, the rounded sides or whatever, being able to feel any kind of seam or joint at that point

00:33:23   where you hold the phone, I think, is not ideal, so I would suggest to Apple that they think about this going forward.

00:33:29   Oh, and related to that, speaking of manufacturing variability, there is another Reddit post, Link, from that same forum,

00:33:35   someone taking a phone in an Apple store and looking at the very top of the phone, like head-on, the skinny end,

00:33:41   and they can kind of see underneath the screen, like the backlight leaking out between the titanium edge and the screen.

00:33:47   That seems like either the phone has been damaged by handling from, you know, the people who visit Apple stores,

00:33:52   which would not be surprising, because I bet those devices get a lot of abuse over the course of the day,

00:33:56   or it could be a manufacturing defect, but yeah, 'tis the season for manufacturing defects and variability

00:34:02   in the first run of the very new iPhone.

00:34:05   All right, and then we have all sorts of problems with the fine woven case,

00:34:10   and let me just start by saying that I did put the fine woven case on my phone when I received it on Friday.

00:34:18   I lasted through the end of the day, and then I decided I'm going to return it.

00:34:22   I don't have as visceral a hatred for it as seemingly everyone else in Under the Sun does.

00:34:29   I don't think it's that bad, the conversation we're about to have notwithstanding, but I don't know,

00:34:35   I just didn't care for it, and I really, really dislike not only the feel of the sides of it, but the look and the two-tone thing.

00:34:44   I just, I don't like it, and as people are saying in the chat, it's okay, but it's just too darn expensive.

00:34:53   Like, this is not a $60 case in my eyes. It's a $20 or $30 case, as far as I'm concerned,

00:34:58   in terms of the build quality and the way it feels in my hand. It's not, I don't like it.

00:35:02   So right now, I am caseless, casey-less. AppleCare is my case.

00:35:06   I do not plan to keep it that way because I've shattered the last two phones I've treated this way.

00:35:10   So I have not unequivocally concluded what I'm going to do, but I do have a peel case, P-E-E-L,

00:35:18   in my Amazon shopping cart, which I plan whenever we do the next family Amazon order.

00:35:22   I will send that through, so to speak. I will have that delivered, and I'll see if that does the trick.

00:35:28   I will follow up in the future.

00:35:31   Yeah, so my wife still got her fine woven case, and she's only used it for a few days now.

00:35:39   So far, it's holding up okay, but the very first night she had the case on the phone

00:35:43   and went to her nightstand to plug it in with the cables that we had wisely pre-ordered

00:35:47   to make sure there was USB-C connections in all the places where she needed them,

00:35:50   she said, "There's something wrong here." She couldn't plug the USB-C cable into her phone.

00:35:57   I'm like, "What do you mean you can't plug it in? Do you have the wrong cable?"

00:36:00   It's like, it's not going in. So I looked at it, and you could see that we had a high-quality anchor,

00:36:07   name-brand USB-C charging cable, three feet long, just on her nightstand.

00:36:12   And if you try to plug it in, the plug does not insert all the way,

00:36:17   because the hole in the bottom of the case does not allow the plastic jacket around the metal USB-C plug.

00:36:25   It doesn't allow it to pass through. The hole is too small.

00:36:28   And I was like, "Oh, I guess do we just have really thick cable ends on these?"

00:36:35   Lots of good string relief, whatever. And the answer is yes, this anchor cable does have a pretty thick plastic shroud around it.

00:36:41   But that made me start looking at the bottom of this phone a little bit more closely,

00:36:45   and it was immediately clear that the hole in the bottom of this fine woven case was not correctly centered around the USB-C port.

00:36:54   Like, not even close. Just visually, anybody can look at this and say, "Nope, that's not centered."

00:37:00   I mean, one of the ways to look at it is there's two little screws around the USB-C port itself,

00:37:05   and you can see a little bit of one of the screws, and you can't see any of the other.

00:37:08   But even if the screws weren't there, this is not centered horizontally, it's also not centered vertically.

00:37:13   Now, all that said, I did the test where I took the case off of the phone,

00:37:18   and then just tried to see if I could pass the plug-in through it, you know, without worrying about actually plugging the connector in,

00:37:23   because now it's just an empty case. The anchor connector still does not fit through the opening, even when there's no phone inside there.

00:37:30   So there's two issues at play here. One, if you have a USB-C charging cable that maybe you've been using for years on an iPad or some other device,

00:37:41   maybe check whether the cable you're going to use is able to pass through the hole in the bottom of your iPhone case,

00:37:47   or do like I do and get a bare-bottom iPhone case. Because that's something we didn't really have to think about with Lightning,

00:37:52   because everybody selling a Lightning cable or a case, it was kind of an ecosystem where you knew what you were going to get.

00:38:00   The case has to accommodate a Lightning cable, and Lightning cables have to accommodate cases, and they all grew up together.

00:38:05   So there was no instance where anyone was selling a Lightning cable that couldn't fit through a case hole,

00:38:09   and there was no one selling cases that a Lightning cable wouldn't fit through, right? Because it wouldn't make sense.

00:38:13   You know what's going to happen there. But USB-C cables have existed for years and years,

00:38:17   and many, many, many of those USB-C cables never had any expectation of ever being put into an iPhone,

00:38:23   because iPhones didn't have USB-C. And so, lo and behold, all of these, you know, this anchor cable, which we bought recently,

00:38:30   was nevertheless a cable that existed in an anchor's line for probably years, and it was not made with the expectation that it would have to fit through a hole in the bottom of an iPhone case.

00:38:38   And lo and behold, it doesn't. So be aware of this. I'll put a link in the show notes to two examples to the cable that didn't fit,

00:38:44   and I also found a tiny little short cable that I bought for, like, our little charging, like, shelf area that does fit.

00:38:52   And it was just luck of the draw that one of them fit and one of them didn't. But think about that, even if you're not getting the Apple case.

00:38:57   But yeah, the Apple case is getting slammed by everybody because the hole's off-center, and it's getting people very upset.

00:39:03   It's not just me that has an off-center hole. A lot of people have off-center holes. In fact, a couple people wrote in with our, you know,

00:39:10   tweeted that the Apple silicone case is also off-center, so I don't know if this is just a big manufacturing problem with their cases,

00:39:16   that they can't center the hole around the port. Maybe this has always happened and we just never noticed,

00:39:20   because, again, the Lightning connector, maybe there was enough, like, room around the openings that it wasn't a big deal,

00:39:25   but now the tolerances seem real close if you have a thick USB-C cable. So this is not going great for the fine woven case.

00:39:32   But the hits keep coming.

00:39:34   Yeah, well, and for what it's worth, I did break out my fine woven case from the box where I had put it in order to send it,

00:39:41   or bring it back to Apple, which I plan to do in the next, you know, day or two.

00:39:44   And anyways, I put it back on my phone very briefly, and the port, the hole seems to be perfectly centered on mine.

00:39:52   So I did get lucky in that regard. Unfortunately, it sounds like you did not.

00:39:56   Yeah, again, it's not just me, there's lots of people reporting this. Viticci reported that he brought his fine woven case on his iPhone to dinner with him,

00:40:04   and put his phone down on the table, and the next morning woke up and realized he had picked up a stain.

00:40:08   Because when you make things out of fabric or fabric-type material, you can pick up stains if you put it down in some kind of liquid.

00:40:14   Whoops.

00:40:15   I did peek at my wife's fine woven case before I came down here to podcast, and it still looks pretty much pristine, but I'll keep you updated on that.

00:40:22   But I can tell you from Christian Mumaw's tweet on September 23rd, in the Apple Store in Boston, the two fine woven cases on display looked like they were attacked by a badger.

00:40:34   Well, that's probably from people who read the Virg story, like, "Oh, you scratch!"

00:40:37   Exactly! Some people go online, they read a story about how these things scratch when you, you know, look ugly when you scratch them with your fingernail,

00:40:45   and then they go into an Apple store, and what do they do? They take their fingernail and they go *crack*

00:40:48   So, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are going to Apple stores. I mean, it kind of makes some sense. You want to know, "Hey, if I buy this case, is it going to scratch real easily?"

00:40:57   And one way to figure that out is to go *crack* and scratch the case.

00:41:01   And so we'll put a link in the shout-outs to this toot, you'll see two very, very scratched fine woven cases.

00:41:09   Yeah, it's not good.

00:41:11   There's a number of angles to this. Number one, I think anyone who's interested in a bunch of fine woven complaining and nerdery, definitely listen to Upgrade from, I think, today or yesterday.

00:41:20   There was a great segment, Jason was talking about how, like, there was probably a group at Apple responsible for "Make a premium case that we can sell for 60 bucks."

00:41:30   And when the leather went away, they're kind of like, "Uh, now what?" And they made this kind of in that price point and in that role rather than trying to figure out, like, you know, what can we actually make that's nice and doesn't need to keep that same price point or whatever else.

00:41:44   The leather cases were more expensive than this, though. This is under-pricing the leather ones. The leather one was like 70 or 80, wasn't it?

00:41:50   No, I think it was 60 bucks.

00:41:52   It was in the ballpark. Regardless, this is not a good case. This is an interesting first attempt. I hope they're going to revise this because, again, what they said in Upgrade, like, Apple's cases, you could always say they were expensive, but they were at least good.

00:42:10   And this is just, this is expensive and not good. And that's not great for them.

00:42:15   That being said, I got my Peak Design Everyday case, which I loved the iPhone 14 version of it, and I lasted about five minutes with it on my iPhone 15 Pro.

00:42:25   Oh, wow.

00:42:26   Because they did not add a button for the action button. They just had a cutout.

00:42:30   Oh, I did hear about this.

00:42:32   So most third-party cases for the 15 continued their previous approximate design where you would have a cutout where the silent and ring switch was. Because you weren't constantly pushing it in.

00:42:47   There was no way to have a sliding switch on a case that was any usefulness there. So everyone just had cutouts. You could reach in with your fingernail and flip it over if you really wanted to, but it was more difficult.

00:42:58   Well, I'm already so accustomed to using the action button for something fun that having it be buried in a cutout of the case made it too difficult to access.

00:43:07   And so I would strongly suggest anybody out there, if you're designing a case for the iPhone 15 Pro, that's got to be a button. It can't be a cutout anymore.

00:43:15   And anybody out there who has an iPhone 15 Pro and is case shopping, strongly advise get one that has a button there, not a cutout.

00:43:23   And look at the cutout on the bottom and make sure your cables fit in it.

00:43:26   I got a new case for my phone as well, my iPhone 14 Pro. I just went up to the attic and pulled down the bull strap case, which was basically a clone of the Ryan London leather case.

00:43:35   And I swapped them out so now I have a nice brand new case. Of course, I thought about it. I was like, you know, maybe I should just keep this one on because my Ryan London one has been on it for a year and it's kind of nicely broken in.

00:43:45   But it's also kind of like dented and I dropped it a bunch of times or whatever. So I'm starting over. I got a break in the bull strap case and it's working out well so far.

00:43:53   And the fine woven thing, obviously the manufacturing defects are bad. I don't like that the hole is not centered. The fact that cables don't fit, like the Anker USB-C cable I have, it doesn't fit both in width and in height.

00:44:06   So it's not like it's just one dimension. Both dimensions don't fit. If you made the case larger to accommodate this cable, I think the edges of the case might be too thin.

00:44:16   Like the top and bottom might be too thin. So I kind of understand why the opening is the size it is. It's just a very thick cable, but it's something to keep in mind.

00:44:23   But I kind of like how it looks and how it feels. Again, durability, I don't know how that's going to work out. It's only been like a week or whatever now.

00:44:29   But I think I like, I kind of like the rubbery-ish sides. I think the back looks and feels nice. I think it is, it would be a $60 case if you like how it looks and feels.

00:44:40   Because that's just an aesthetic thing and just a tactile thing. And if they can get the holes to line up with the ports. Because I feel like it's kind of an important thing for a $60 case.

00:44:48   And again, someone put in a picture of an Apple silicone case with exactly the same problem. So this may be something that has always happened and we've just never noticed that the holes in the bottom of Apple's iPhone cases have been off by a fraction of a millimeter or two.

00:45:00   Because it never mattered until people are trying to plug in cables that don't fit. And then they're staring at that bottom hole like I was and noticing that it's off.

00:45:08   Again, I'm a strong proponent of an iPhone case that does not have anything covering the bottom. Not for plugging in ports, so that's just a nice side effect.

00:45:17   But because you swipe up from the bottom to unlock the thing and I can't stand swiping up over the lip of a case. And Apple really needs to get on that.

00:45:24   I mean, it was last year the clear case didn't have a bottom lip.

00:45:27   Yeah, I was going to say, I haven't seen one yet, but they still sell the clear case. And honestly, I actually might get one because, oh by the way, before I get to that Simultime follow up, multiple people in the chat are reporting that apparently Peak Design agrees with me and they're going to revise the case and issue swaps or refunds.

00:45:44   That's amazing if that's true.

00:45:47   I can't believe that they would, you know, like everybody knew about the action button. I can't believe they would sell the case with that giant opening.

00:45:54   Look, I thought bad on me. That's, I mean, jeez, if they actually do that, that's, look, I love Peak Design. That's why I blindly give them so much for my business. That's kind of amazing if they actually do that.

00:46:03   Anyway, secondly, on the clear case, like right now, I think the Apple clear case might be the best Apple case period because...

00:46:13   Did you try the clear case in the 14 Pro?

00:46:15   Yes, I owned one. I used it until I got the Peak Design case, which was probably about maybe a quarter or half the year.

00:46:22   That's right. We talked about this last year. No, I did not like the clear case.

00:46:25   No, the only problem, it feels great in the hand because it's like nice tacky plastic. The only problem I have with it is that like any clear case, eventually you get a bunch of dust and crap under there and it looks really terrible.

00:46:34   Does it turn yellow? Do you know?

00:46:36   No, well, I mean, I only did it for maybe four or five months, but it didn't happen during that time, but it was great. If I hadn't discovered the Peak Design case halfway through the year, I would have stuck with it for the whole year.

00:46:48   I mean, imagine the reason that, I think we talked about this last year, like why doesn't the clear case have a bottom lip while all of Apple's other ones do?

00:46:53   I imagine it might have to do with the fact, like what I just said, if you do the cutout hole for the Lightning or USB-C port, it leaves such a thin piece of material above and below the port that maybe they're afraid it would like crack whatever material the clear thing's made of, so they just left it open.

00:47:08   Apple, please, open bottom cases. You used to make them all the time and then you didn't. Ugh, it kills me. So anyway, for iPhone 16 Pro, I will be third-party case shopping again.

00:47:19   This is like Unified Timeline. I understand that it is a do-or-die requirement for you. I don't understand why. You do you. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just don't.

00:47:28   No, it is better. It really is.

00:47:31   If you had a case, like Ignorance is less, as you would say, you haven't experienced this, so you're like, "Oh, it's fine. I don't mind it," or whatever, but as soon as you had a case that didn't have the lip, it's just so much nicer.

00:47:41   I mean, I guess, but I grabbed my 14 Pro, which is sitting next to me, and it has the Apple leather case on it with a big ol' lip on the bottom, and I don't mind it. Like, it just does not bother me like it bothers you, but to each their own.

00:47:54   So Jem wrote in with some feedback, "As a woman who has had to deal with phones being far too big for small hands for many years, I've found popsockets to be really uncomfortable. I find straps like this one," and we'll put a link in the show notes, "to be much more ergonomic.

00:48:08   There's plenty of versions available, including magnetic ones with card holders, etc. Just thought I'd pass the info along in case the popsocket gives you a cramp in your hand like it does for me."

00:48:16   We'll put a link in the show notes to this. Let me start by saying I've never tried one of these. This doesn't look like the sort of thing that I would enjoy, but I've seen several people make this recommendation, so maybe it's worth a shot.

00:48:29   And certainly it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a popsocket. It's like a third of the cost.

00:48:32   It's less ridiculous than a popsocket. A popsocket struck me as like, I know they have ones that collapse and everything, but it's just like, talk about adding a structural element to your phone. A strap seems much less intrusive because it can kind of lay flat when you're not using it and you don't have to like un-pop it or whatever, but I know people love their popsockets and it just becomes like part of the phone. It just, it always seemed kind of like it turns your phone into like one of those little puzzle pieces that you give like kids, you know, like little wooden puzzles. They have little plastic pegs so you can grab the puzzle piece real easily.

00:49:01   I should point out the Peeks on Everyday Case does have a loop option on it for 10 bucks more, but that's what this link is, is much larger. This is the whole height of the phone.

00:49:14   Yeah, you shove your whole hand through the screen.

00:49:15   Yeah, it loops through the camera hole down to the bottom of the case. I mean, that's quite, that's a huge ordeal.

00:49:22   It's like a popsocket is like, you know, there's like a peg in the middle that you put between your fingers, right? And this is the opposite of that. It's around the outside of your hand. Either way, it's making it so that if you open your hand, the phone doesn't fall, either because the popsocket is between your fingers or because the strap is over your hand.

00:49:38   Yep. Anonymous writes, "Now we are leaving all case-related things." And Anonymous writes in with regard to Apple and chip binning, which I think was an Ask ATP from last week. Anyways, when it comes to silicon chip production, both Apple and Intel create bins based on efficiency, but they do different things with the bins.

00:49:54   While Intel holds power fixed and lets frequency vary, Apple holds frequency or performance fixed and bins by power consumption. For example, a Mac Mini can tolerate a hotter SoC than a MacBook Air. Hotter meaning higher power consumption.

00:50:09   Just like Intel, Apple is motivated to use as much of the wafer as possible, not just for financial reasons, but also for carbon footprint. TSMC does not use particularly clean energy.

00:50:18   Yeah, this is really interesting. So, forgive me, I only have a rudimentary understanding of modern chip and chip design and chip manufacturing, but I know back in the days when I actually attempted overclocking as a PC user, a chip might run at a certain frequency just fine only if you increase the voltage a little bit.

00:50:38   And when you increase the voltage, it makes it use way more power, like in whatever steps we were dealing with back then, it makes way more heat, etc. But certain speeds were attainable only by increasing the voltage.

00:50:50   So, this is interesting. If things work at all that way today, which I'm sure it's more complicated than that today, but the basic idea is probably still there, that a chip might be able to perform at full speed, but you need to give it a bit more power to do so.

00:51:05   So, that's a really interesting idea if this is true, that they could bid based on, okay, the ones that can achieve full speed at the lowest power, those are going in laptops. The ones that need a bit more power, those are going in John's Mac Pro.

00:51:16   No, not my Mac Pro. But yeah, the whole idea is if you don't know, Apple basically more or less holds the clock speeds the same, but they're just picking the ones like, you know, which one uses more power to achieve the target fixed clock speed that we have.

00:51:30   And so, they'll try every chip off the line and say, is this a good one? We can achieve our single fixed clock speed. It's not fixed, it can change, whatever.

00:51:38   They're not selling faster or slower ones on their website. You just get what you get and it clocks up and down, right?

00:51:44   But the ones that use more power to do so, they'll save them for the ones that have better cooling systems. So, that's the way Apple has been.

00:51:50   Because as you heard last show, the variability in manufacturing exists no matter what. Like, there's no way to make, if they could make them all exactly the same on the wafer, they would, but they can't. So, there's always going to be "good ones" and "bad ones".

00:52:01   And what this is saying is within the line of laptops that use the same SOC, they're going to put the "good ones" in the ones with the worst cooling system.

00:52:10   And that's going to be the cheapest ones. The MacBook Air with no fan, right? And the "bad ones" are going to end up in a Mac Studio because they have a much bigger cooler there. Which is kind of the opposite of the way it is when you're bidding by clock speed, where you test them and you find the ones that can go a higher clock speed.

00:52:23   But, you know, Apple doesn't crank up the clock speeds. I think that maybe the Studio does have a little bit higher clock than the MacBook Air and those stuff.

00:52:30   So, basically, thermal throttling is a big deal, but that's another reason the "good ones" end up going in the MacBook Air, because it's going to thermal throttle no matter what. You don't want it to be thermal throttled so badly that it kills the performance of the chip.

00:52:40   Geeker1 apparently has thoughts on the A17 Pro, and they decide that it is powerful but should be more efficient. John, tell me about this, please.

00:52:50   Yeah, this is a YouTuber I hadn't seen before. I was really impressed by it because they're really diving as deep as they possibly can into the chip itself, going down to the point of more detail than Apple gave.

00:53:01   We read the detail that Apple gave during the event of wider decode and better branch predictor or whatever. There's also new ALUs in there as well.

00:53:11   So they have a chip diagram. They get these devices and then they probe them as best they can without cutting the top off the chip, so they're probing them with software or whatever to figure out what's different about the A17 Pro versus the A16.

00:53:24   So they have a bunch of diagrams giving that information, and then they tested them.

00:53:27   You know, A17 Pro versus A16 versus the latest Snapdragon SOCs and everything to try to dig into the point I was making on the last show of TSMC's 3nm. Does it take less energy per instruction executed?

00:53:45   Are we receiving any of the promise of a silicon shrink? And this is from the verdict chapter of the video after extensive testing. I would encourage you to watch it if you're interested in this topic. It's kind of long, but they do go into lots of detail.

00:53:58   This is from the verdict. This is Geeker1, whoever is the presenter on this channel.

00:54:04   Now I just feel a bit bad, not only about iPhones, but also about the future of the semiconductor industry. The A17 Pro, being the first 3nm chip, didn't showcase any clear advantages over TSMC's last-gen products, electrical-wise. I still don't have a die shot, so I don't know density-wise.

00:54:22   But if efficiency isn't improved at all, even with such a huge jump in fabrication, then how can we make chips better in the future?

00:54:28   He is not excited about 3nm based on the results. You can go through them benchmark by benchmark and see. By the way, you can also see that some of the Snapdragon SOCs are actually performing better in GPU, but they don't have the 3D ray tracing stuff or whatever.

00:54:43   Apple's lead in SOCs is still there. It still exists, especially in power efficiency. You'll see some tests where the A17 Pro is matching a Snapdragon using twice as much power. But it's not a giant clear-cut victory that it used to be. The competition is kind of catching up.

00:55:01   3nm, according to the tests that people have been able to do so far, is not really bringing the dividends people thought it would so far.

00:55:09   I wonder how much that is just that maybe Apple didn't take advantage of as much of the new design tweaks that are possible with the new process? I'm not sure.

00:55:24   One of the most convincing tests was that they got to the point where the A17 Pro was throttling, which is another issue. People are saying that the A17 Pro doesn't have as much thermal mass to dissipate heat, so it's hot faster. But anyway, they had a diagram of power draw and clock frequency.

00:55:40   The A17 Pro would be taking more power, but going a much higher clock than the A16. Then all of a sudden, at a certain point in the test, the A17 Pro throttles, and it throttled down to the same clock speed as the A16 was. And at the same clock speed as the A16, it used exactly the same amount of power.

00:55:57   That's not what you would expect from a shrink. You would say, "Oh, if you shrink, I can either go faster with the same power or use more power." It was a very convincing diagram.

00:56:10   Lend credence to the idea that 3nm is not buying us any power efficiencies, at least not yet. There are also other stories about how this 3nm process that TSMC is using right now, they have all these, like, we did the same thing with 5nm, they have these letter suffixes. This is the 5N process, or the 3E process. This is the first version of 3nm.

00:56:34   And supposedly, as early as next year, like the beginning of next year, they'll be onto a new variation of the 3nm process that is better than this one. So maybe just the very first 3nm process is not giving lots of dividends, but yeah, it seems like most of the things that are better about the A17 Pro have almost nothing to do with 3nm.

00:56:54   And it's more like, well, it has ray tracing, and it has another GPU core, and we can clock it a little bit higher, but when we clock it a little bit higher, it also uses more power, and that produces more heat, and the iPhone 15 Pro is not very good about dissipating that heat, and so are thermal throttles, and not impressive showing for the A17 Pro.

00:57:13   I do wonder how much that is the enclosure design, because the iPhone 15 Pro, when I was setting it up, gave me the "I'm too hot for full speed charging" kind of warning. It overheated while I was just transferring my old phone to the new phone.

00:57:30   I've never seen an iPhone do that. I've only seen an iPhone overheat in the sun, outside, that kind of stuff. I've never seen it overheat while on my desk in the evening, just transferring a bunch of data to it.

00:57:44   So it does seem like the new enclosure design for the iPhone 15 Pro, as much as I love it in other ways, which I guess we'll get to, but as much as I love it in other ways, something is not as good about the cooling.

00:57:55   For sure. I mean, you just go down to the fact that I don't think titanium dissipates heat as well as aluminum, but even if it did, there's just less of it, less mass, right? So you have less mass dissipating the heat, because the thing is lighter.

00:58:08   And Apple has never been particularly aggressive about the cooling of the phones. There have been some rumors about them using vapor chamber, heat pipe type things or whatever, but so far they haven't really gone whole hog with that in their phones.

00:58:21   Android phones, in many years past, have had to, by necessity, have much more robust cooling systems, because their SOCs just simply use more power, right? And there's a whole separate breed of Android phones that are like gaming phones, essentially. Some of them have fans in them, for crying out loud.

00:58:36   Really?

00:58:37   Yeah, they have way more robust.

00:58:39   I was about to make a joke about that. That actually exists.

00:58:42   Yeah, I think there's a couple of them that have tiny little fans. But even the ones that don't, they have more robust cooling systems, and they reap the benefits from it. It doesn't take much more effort in cooling to really, you know, because you just have to do something more than what Apple does.

00:58:56   But Apple has thus far decided that they're not particularly interested in expending space, weight, cost to allow this. And I think it's reasonable, like, people aren't running sustained batch jobs for their work on their phone that they need to run without throttling.

00:59:16   And yeah, all these phones throttle. But again, setting aside the thermal characteristics of the 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max, you know, watch this video, like when going the same clock speed as the A16, this three nanometer chip was using exactly the same amount of power, and that is not great.

00:59:33   Great. And you can say, oh, but it's doing more because it was just it was like a CPU test. It wasn't even like a ray tracing GPU thing where you can say, well, but it's doing more ray tracing stuff. So technically, it's still doing more work for the same power, like watts per instruction executed is not looking impressive and three nanometer.

00:59:48   And someone in the chat room said that the A17 is on the N3B process and next year will it will be N3E because E is after B, I guess anyway, we'll never gonna remember these things. But suffice it to say, TSMC continues to improve their process. And next year, there'll be a better three nanometer process. Hopefully they'll use that one for the Mac chips.

01:00:07   Oh my god, did you see what user Tyler in the chat linked to?

01:00:11   Is it a gaming phone?

01:00:13   This is a MagSafe compatible attachment fan.

01:00:18   Oh my word.

01:00:19   Sold by the gaming company, Razer that has $60.

01:00:23   Does it have RGB lights in it?

01:00:25   It sure does have RGB lights in it.

01:00:27   That must be for gamers.

01:00:28   Oh my god. Maybe well, maybe I should get this next time I have to do a phone transfer. Oh my god, this is incredible.

01:00:35   You gotta watch the video because in the video one of the things they do is they have they basically have phone coolers because they want to run some tests where they can guarantee the phone is not going to throttle so they massively cool them by sticking the phone into this rig that just like blows cold air at the back of a phone constantly when they're running it. This this is like a consumer version of that.

01:00:53   Seven blade fan with up to 6400 RPM. You know how loud that would be?

01:00:59   I got headphones in anyway, it's fine.

01:01:01   This is amazing.

01:01:02   That is kind of amazing. Holy Jamolis. Alright, and finally for follow up, John, I was 17 people's pets and places.

01:01:10   One of the things I was most excited about in this year's crop of OS is that I think we talked about when we were discussing their feature sets was the fact that you know, photos is going to start recognizing animals just like it recognizes people.

01:01:23   So I had been fighting with photos to have a people album that recognizes everybody in my family and a bunch of my relatives and so on and so forth.

01:01:30   I still of course do manually tagging of my immediate family, which is much more reliable because the faces thing occasionally forgets who everybody is and loses track.

01:01:39   But anyway, I'm trying to use a system. I'm like, but I have so many pictures of my dog, my my current dog, my past dog, and it has no idea who they are.

01:01:47   I know it knows it can identify dogs and has a little dog overlay that will try to tell you what breed your dog is and get it hilariously wrong all the time.

01:01:53   But it will find other dogs that look so much my dog, which is a fun feature.

01:01:56   But this year is like now pets can be people too.

01:02:00   And on my iPhone.

01:02:03   This is another thing when you have the shared the shared iCloud shared photo album, you don't it doesn't share faces.

01:02:09   We've discussed this before. It doesn't share album doesn't share faces.

01:02:11   Right. So any work that I do on my iPhone related to faces is pointless because the quote unquote real library is my wife's library or that my wife is the owner of the shared library.

01:02:21   And nothing I do on my phone can influence the face data for our real library.

01:02:26   But despite that, when I upgraded my phone to iOS 17, I went to the photos app on my phone and in the album section, what was previously the people album now said people, pets and places.

01:02:38   And lo and behold, it had little circles for everyone in my family.

01:02:42   And then it had my little dog in a circle and had my dog's name under it.

01:02:46   How the hell did you know my dog's name?

01:02:47   I guess based on the tag, because I've tagged, you know, I have a daisy tag for all the pictures of my dog.

01:02:52   But anyway, like, wow, this is great.

01:02:54   I can't wait until my wife upgrades and her Mac upgrades.

01:02:58   Right. And everyone gets upgraded.

01:03:00   I'll be able to finally go into the real photo album.

01:03:03   She's the owner of the shared iCloud photo library.

01:03:05   And she has the canonical set of actually curated over many, many years.

01:03:09   People place and face data.

01:03:11   And I'll be able to start tagging all the pictures of my dog.

01:03:13   Do that thing where it says review these faces.

01:03:15   Is this your dog?

01:03:16   Is this your dog?

01:03:17   You know, that's the exercise of doing this, right?

01:03:19   When I did it on my phone, it didn't give me any pictures to review.

01:03:23   And in fact, on my phone, it had a little tag, a little people thing for my wife.

01:03:27   And I went into it and had found one picture of my wife.

01:03:30   And I'm pretty sure I have more than that.

01:03:31   And then I went review additional pictures.

01:03:33   And it says, sorry, there are no additional pictures of your wife.

01:03:35   I'm like, are you sure?

01:03:36   Because again, on my phone, it's it has access to the whole shared photo library.

01:03:41   It's not just like my personal photos.

01:03:43   But the face data that I derive from that is only private to me.

01:03:48   So my wife has the canonical face data.

01:03:50   Anyway, when my wife upgraded all her stuff, I went into the canonical photo library on her phone.

01:03:56   And it just said people.

01:03:58   It didn't even say people in places.

01:03:59   I think it just said people.

01:04:01   And there was no dogs in there.

01:04:02   I upgraded her Mac to Sonoma.

01:04:04   Now it's running Sonoma.

01:04:05   And I've let it sit there all day.

01:04:07   And I go over it and launch photos on her Mac and go to the albums and it just says people.

01:04:11   Like what happened to people, pets and places?

01:04:14   Eventually it did say people and places, but it doesn't say pets.

01:04:18   I can go and look at a picture of my dog.

01:04:21   I have so many of them.

01:04:22   Does it circle my dog's face and say identify this dog?

01:04:25   No, it does not.

01:04:26   And so here I am once again, just as we discussed in the past episode,

01:04:29   begging Apple for a button that would say find faces now.

01:04:33   Only now I want it to say find pet faces now.

01:04:37   This is the main feature I want to use from this cycle of upgrades

01:04:41   is I want to be able to identify all my current and past pets in my photo album.

01:04:46   And it's been one or two days since I've upgraded this stuff.

01:04:50   And I can't use the feature because I don't know when it's going to decide to identify my dog's face

01:04:55   and the literal thousands of pictures I have of my dog.

01:04:58   I had a similar experience.

01:05:00   And for what it's worth, I am the Tina in our relationship when it comes to photo stuff.

01:05:05   My library was Canonical One and Aaron jumped onto it.

01:05:09   I was also super excited to see Penny pictures found in my photo library, in our photo library.

01:05:17   And I went and did the same thing and said, "Oh, it's not there yet."

01:05:20   And it took, I think, one overnight on the charger before my phone found Penny.

01:05:28   It did not label Penny with a name, but it found Penny and added her as a potential pet or whatever.

01:05:34   And I also noticed that, as you said, the album or whatever, the thing that you can go to is no longer people.

01:05:42   It's like you said, people, pets, and places.

01:05:44   But anyways, it took overnight when it was, well, I was going to say plugged in, but it was charging via Qi.

01:05:50   It took overnight to turn on this, presumably, while power was connected before it gave me that option and flipped that switch.

01:05:57   Now, I agree, it would be nice if you could say, "Do it now!"

01:06:00   But if you wait at least a night, which I guess at this point you probably have.

01:06:04   No, I've waited multiple nights. I know how this works.

01:06:07   I know they say, "Oh, we'll do it while your thing is plugged in and charging."

01:06:09   It's been multiple nights on her phone because she obviously got her phone basically on launch day.

01:06:13   So it's been multiple nights, plugged in every single night into a cable.

01:06:16   And her Mac is grinding away now using the thing I described before, which is basically launch photos, then quit photos, then look in Activity Monitor,

01:06:24   make sure you see photo analysis using some percentage of your CPU or whatever.

01:06:27   It's doing the work, and I have a huge library, so it's going to take a while, but it's the same problem I was saying before.

01:06:32   I don't want to have to wait for the lowest of low priority processes to do this, especially on her Mac Studio.

01:06:39   I wanted to say, "Use all the resources of this Mac Studio that is otherwise sitting idle while she's at work to right now find all the faces.

01:06:47   And maybe give me a progress bar that says how far along are you?

01:06:50   It's going to take a day, 24 hours, 15 hours, 2 hours."

01:06:53   But instead it's like, "I will only do it under special circumstances when I feel just right.

01:06:59   And even then I'm going to do it with the lowest possible priority."

01:07:01   I mean, how many nights does her phone need to be plugged in?

01:07:04   Is it aborting in the middle because it doesn't finish and it's not making any progress?

01:07:07   Is it going to do it after a week?

01:07:08   So frustrating.

01:07:09   This is a feature I want to use, and it's almost like, "Hey, if you have 10 photos on your phone, yeah, when you upgrade to iOS 17 you'll get these new features.

01:07:17   But if you have hundreds of thousands of photos, you'll get these new features at some point in the future.

01:07:23   Can't tell you when, no indication that it's doing any work.

01:07:26   Just trust us, it probably is, but it's the lowest possible priority."

01:07:29   Very frustrating.

01:07:30   It's my dog's face and I want it now.

01:07:33   I do.

01:07:34   And there's so many pictures.

01:07:35   You would think like it would do it incrementally.

01:07:37   Like there's just so many of them.

01:07:38   Like go reverse chronological, just thousands and thousands of dog pictures, right?

01:07:42   I don't want you to have identified all of them.

01:07:44   Identify one.

01:07:45   Just one so I can make the people have them, like make some progress.

01:07:48   But it's like, we're not going to do anything until I've scanned all 170,000 photos.

01:07:52   Alright, fine, I'll just keep waiting I suppose.

01:07:55   Alright, let's talk about new toys.

01:07:59   So, Jon, I guess we don't need you for a while.

01:08:02   You can go get a snack or whatever.

01:08:04   But Marco and I have new toys.

01:08:06   Marco, you got a 15 Pro.

01:08:09   What color, in what capacity?

01:08:13   I got one of the many shades of gray that's available in.

01:08:16   The middle one.

01:08:17   Oh, thank you.

01:08:18   The middle one?

01:08:19   Oh, totally, yes, indeed.

01:08:20   It's gray.

01:08:21   And 256, my usual capacity.

01:08:25   And I am so far extremely happy with it.

01:08:30   I mean, I know I say this pretty much every year.

01:08:33   So, the way this thing feels, I might try to go caseless the whole year.

01:08:40   Because it feels...

01:08:41   Oh, I've been thinking about it too.

01:08:42   It feels great.

01:08:43   It is noticeably lighter.

01:08:47   It is not as light as the non-Pro phones.

01:08:49   And that's clear as soon as you pick it up.

01:08:51   But the improvement is noticeable.

01:08:53   With the exception of the alleged sharp edge that Jon was talking about earlier,

01:08:58   I love the new rounded edges.

01:09:00   I think they really feel very good in the hand.

01:09:04   I think the phone looks fantastic from the edge.

01:09:07   And I mentioned this briefly last week,

01:09:09   but I really never see the back of my phone.

01:09:13   I only ever see the edges.

01:09:15   Because if I'm holding my phone, I'm seeing the front.

01:09:18   Then it goes in my pocket.

01:09:19   If my phone is out on a table or desk,

01:09:22   I'm not going to put the screen down and scratch it like a monster.

01:09:24   So the screen's always up.

01:09:26   Or if it's charging on a dock, then it's up also.

01:09:29   So, I pretty much never see the back of my phone.

01:09:32   It could be hot pink, and I think it would take me three days to notice.

01:09:35   So, the fact that the back of it is gray instead of gray or gray,

01:09:40   doesn't really matter to me.

01:09:42   The sides look fantastic.

01:09:44   That's what I care about.

01:09:45   The metal edges of the phone, that's the part I actually see.

01:09:48   That looks fantastic.

01:09:50   I'm extremely happy with it.

01:09:51   It feels great in the hand, as I said.

01:09:53   I'm very much enjoying playing with different options for the action button.

01:09:58   I'm currently using the flashlight,

01:10:00   because I actually use the phone flashlight somewhat regularly in my life.

01:10:04   And I've found so far that is best bang for the buck for me.

01:10:09   But I love what everyone's...

01:10:11   I've heard so many reports of people having good ideas for it.

01:10:14   So, certain people, like Grouper has a shortcut to toggle certain things.

01:10:19   Obviously, I tried launching camera with it,

01:10:21   and if you do launch camera with it, then it becomes a shutter button as well.

01:10:25   To me, that doesn't offer enough over just the regular lock screen,

01:10:28   long press camera button that I've been using.

01:10:30   And yes, I know, but the swipe, I never got used to it.

01:10:32   But anyway, so I tried camera, it wasn't good enough for me.

01:10:36   Flashlight I'm loving.

01:10:37   Some people have made like, you know, created new note shortcuts,

01:10:41   or certain like, you know, workflow-y kind of things.

01:10:43   Tons of good ideas out there.

01:10:44   Yeah, a lot of people are doing the thing where the button does something different

01:10:48   based on all sorts of factors, which to me would just make me think too hard

01:10:51   every time I press the button or it's going to happen.

01:10:53   But some of those factors are simple things like orientation.

01:10:56   If you're in landscape and you actually have an action button, it does one thing.

01:10:59   But if you're in portrait, it does something else.

01:11:01   You can combine that with things like, am I on Wi-Fi or cellular?

01:11:04   What is my current location?

01:11:05   Like basically anything that a shortcut can do, you can do.

01:11:08   Because, you know, you can just have as many conditionals as you want

01:11:11   and say, okay, well, if I'm home and it's in landscape and it's a Tuesday

01:11:15   and the tide is down, then when I press the button, it should bring up that like,

01:11:18   you can do anything you want.

01:11:20   People I feel like are going a little bit overboard, yeah, I just,

01:11:23   I set my wife's thing to I think camera.

01:11:26   I'm not sure she's ever pressed the button yet.

01:11:28   So I'll give you more news than that as we go.

01:11:30   Yeah, actually I don't think this is possible yet.

01:11:33   What I would love would be a lock and unlock of my car.

01:11:37   Because it's the proximity lock and sometimes I want to like just do it manually.

01:11:40   That would be nice.

01:11:41   You shouldn't be able to do that.

01:11:42   Like this is, by the way, is a new class of apps that I'm seeing

01:11:44   get much more popular now that the action button is here.

01:11:46   Apps that essentially the only thing they do is vend actions to shortcuts.

01:11:50   Yeah.

01:11:51   There's a whole bunch of those out there that people,

01:11:53   I think Gruber used one in one of his things.

01:11:54   There's another one that does like enter your, you know,

01:11:57   open AI key and we could do chat GPT things and, you know,

01:12:00   it's all just a connection to shortcuts.

01:12:03   So it's exciting to see people trying stuff like this.

01:12:05   And I think unlocking your car, that's something that should be possible

01:12:08   with the cooperation of the people who make the app that unlocks your car.

01:12:11   Or if there's like, if someone has hacked the API,

01:12:14   you can just figure out what blob of JSON to send to your car,

01:12:16   then you could probably do it yourself.

01:12:18   Well, it's this whole like Bluetooth short range thing.

01:12:20   I don't know how easy that would be.

01:12:21   Anyway, so it's been, the action button so far, loving it.

01:12:24   So far I'm very happy with the phone.

01:12:26   I am a little concerned about the thermal situation,

01:12:28   but I don't really, you know, my phone is not aggressively being used

01:12:33   as like a benchmarking tool or, you know,

01:12:35   I hardly ever play games on it.

01:12:37   So I'm probably not going to see problems with that, I hope, over time.

01:12:40   And having no case, by the way, is much better than smothering your phone

01:12:44   in a case that's keeping heat in,

01:12:46   because at least the heat is able to dissipate into the air

01:12:48   rather than being trapped in a snug rubber case or whatever.

01:12:52   Well, and hey, maybe you could make like, you know,

01:12:54   oh man, people can make heat sink cases.

01:12:56   That would be comfortable to hold.

01:12:58   There is one that's shaped like that,

01:12:59   or is trying to be an invitation of the 2019 Mac Pro,

01:13:02   actually not 2019, the current Mac Pro.

01:13:05   Like that kind of cheese gratery type look.

01:13:08   There's a bunch of metal cases that are like that.

01:13:10   So yeah, metal case should conduct that heat away better,

01:13:12   but I'm not sure, you know, people get that.

01:13:15   It's like, oh, this case makes my phone so hot.

01:13:17   No, if you're feeling the heat, that means it's leaving your phone.

01:13:21   If you don't feel any heat,

01:13:22   that means the heat that your phone is making

01:13:24   is trapped next to your phone.

01:13:26   So your phone is getting hot if your hand is not.

01:13:28   It's a trade-off.

01:13:29   You know, we were talking during the rumor show

01:13:31   about how they were allegedly shrinking the dimensions a little bit,

01:13:34   like very tiny amounts in each dimension.

01:13:36   I actually kind of noticed that.

01:13:38   It's not a huge difference, but it is noticeable.

01:13:41   So the combination of the rounded off edges,

01:13:44   the slight dimensional shrink, and the substantially lighter weight,

01:13:50   this really feels good.

01:13:52   I would say this might be the best feeling iPhone they've made

01:13:57   maybe since the Mini,

01:13:59   and this feels better in some ways, worse in others,

01:14:02   but mostly because it's bigger.

01:14:04   But this is a very, very good design in my opinion so far.

01:14:08   Again, I've had it for like two seconds,

01:14:09   so it's hard to know long-term.

01:14:11   I don't have any opinions of the cameras and stuff yet

01:14:13   because it's just too soon to know.

01:14:15   But so far, I am very happy with this,

01:14:19   and hearing everyone's reviews of how great the Max 5X camera is,

01:14:25   and I'm sure I want to hear from Casey a lot about this in a minute,

01:14:28   but I was a little bit tempted.

01:14:31   Maybe I should go Max this year, as many of us have been,

01:14:35   and I'm actually glad I didn't for two reasons.

01:14:37   Number one, I saw the rumor today that the iPhone 16 series

01:14:42   is going to get slightly larger again,

01:14:44   like by 0.2 inches for each one,

01:14:47   and so I'm like, all right, I don't want to get used to the big size now,

01:14:51   and then it gets even bigger next year.

01:14:54   But then also, I am loving that they just made this nice advance

01:14:59   in getting it lighter weight,

01:15:01   getting it a little bit nicer to hold in the hand.

01:15:03   I want to actually use that and benefit from those savings,

01:15:08   rather than immediately spending them by getting the next size up phone.

01:15:12   I've been asking for this for years, make the phones lighter,

01:15:16   the medium phone is a little bit too big and way too heavy,

01:15:19   make it lighter, make it a little bit smaller.

01:15:22   They actually just did that, and it feels great, and it looks great,

01:15:25   and so I'm happy to stick with and enjoy the smaller size

01:15:30   and actually really benefit from these savings.

01:15:33   So for me, I did the unthinkable, and as discussed last week,

01:15:39   I ordered a 15 Pro Max.

01:15:42   I bought it in the good gray, the natural titanium, in 512 gigabytes,

01:15:50   and in short, I think I like it.

01:15:56   I'm really uncomfortable with it.

01:15:58   I'm really not too comfortable with the fact that I kind of really like it.

01:16:01   - Have you broken it yet? - Not yet.

01:16:03   - Okay, good, that's good. - This is better than,

01:16:05   I think it was my 12, my 12 Pro, if memory serves,

01:16:09   that it was a podcast that I've told the story many times,

01:16:11   but it was Podcastathon Day.

01:16:13   We had been to a local fair.

01:16:15   Aaron's car was just utterly obliterated with dirt and whatnot,

01:16:18   so I decided to wash it real quick, but I wanted to listen into Podcastathon.

01:16:21   My AirPods weren't working for some reason.

01:16:23   This was when the windshield was still intact, right?

01:16:25   This was when the windshield was still intact.

01:16:26   Was her laptop dry?

01:16:27   Yes, both of our laptops were dry, but then, in the process of washing the car,

01:16:32   I was trying to go and do a quick Carl version,

01:16:35   and I jumped up with my phone that was in my back pocket of my shorts,

01:16:39   my brand new phone that I had had for literally six hours at this point,

01:16:42   and it fell out of my shorts onto the cement and shattered the back of it.

01:16:46   Thankfully, I did have AppleCare, because especially at that point,

01:16:49   it was like a $600 repair or whatever if I didn't have AppleCare.

01:16:52   But anyways, I've lasted for several days now,

01:16:55   so I've already beaten my record in a good sense.

01:16:58   But, yeah, so I got this 15 Pro Max.

01:17:01   I have always hated the big phones.

01:17:03   I always thought they were ridiculously oversized, ridiculously heavy,

01:17:06   and just ridiculous in every measure.

01:17:08   I have made incessant amounts of fun of Mike Hurley

01:17:12   and the big phone boys over at Connected,

01:17:14   which, per a lot of the run of Connected, was all of them.

01:17:17   And yet, here I am, hat in hand, saying,

01:17:22   "I would like to eat some crow, please."

01:17:24   I think I really frickin' like this phone.

01:17:26   I really do.

01:17:27   The weight difference between the 15 -- excuse me --

01:17:34   the 14 Pro and the 15 Pro Max.

01:17:36   So I put it on our very unscientific kitchen scale,

01:17:40   because I was curious what our very unscientific kitchen scale said.

01:17:43   And I know I could look up the numbers,

01:17:45   but I wanted to see, you know, what does this thing say?

01:17:47   I was going to say, Apple tells you right in the picture.

01:17:49   I have it right here.

01:17:50   No, no, no, I know, I know.

01:17:51   But I wanted to test it locally.

01:17:53   I wanted to see what that thing said.

01:17:54   Because I swear to you, they feel like they're either the same weight

01:17:59   or maybe the 14 Pro might even be heavier.

01:18:01   It is not.

01:18:02   It is unequivocally not.

01:18:03   Based on our kitchen scale,

01:18:05   and I wish I had looked -- I didn't have the chance to look

01:18:07   and see what the official rate numbers are.

01:18:09   But according to the kitchen scale, the 14 Pro, 208 grams,

01:18:12   15 Pro Max, 221 grams.

01:18:14   But I swear to you, it feels almost lighter,

01:18:19   which maybe I've been incepted by everyone telling me this

01:18:22   from the hands-on area, and maybe I'm lying to myself.

01:18:25   But it certainly does not feel like the boat anchor

01:18:28   that the 14 Pro Max felt like.

01:18:30   It is amazing.

01:18:31   That's because of the size.

01:18:32   I mean, it's like the same reason it's so impressive.

01:18:34   You get a tiny little 1 centimeter or 1 centimeter cube of tungsten,

01:18:37   and you got a block of aluminum that weighs twice as much

01:18:40   but is way bigger.

01:18:41   The tungsten thing feels impressively heavy,

01:18:43   because it's smaller, right?

01:18:44   So that's what you're getting.

01:18:46   If they were both the same size,

01:18:47   you'd be able to tell the size difference, the weight difference.

01:18:51   That's the word I want.

01:18:52   But because you expect the much bigger phone

01:18:54   to be much, much heavier, and it's only a little bit heavier,

01:18:57   yeah, that makes sense.

01:18:58   I do feel the same thing with Tina's phone.

01:19:01   I do feel the weight difference.

01:19:03   I still contend that it is mostly the absolute weight difference

01:19:07   and not the fact that the weight has been removed from the perimeter,

01:19:09   that it is a big deal.

01:19:11   But you can definitely feel it.

01:19:13   In a blind test, I could definitely tell the 14 Pro with no case

01:19:16   from the 15 Pro with no case.

01:19:19   By the way, I ran the numbers on Apple's site,

01:19:21   and the 15 Pro Max is actually less dense than the 14 Pro

01:19:26   in terms of like grams per cubic meter.

01:19:28   It is less dense.

01:19:29   Yeah, of course it is, because it's --

01:19:31   that's what you're feeling.

01:19:33   It's like when you get something that seems heavy for its size,

01:19:36   the 14 Pro seems heavy for its size,

01:19:38   and the 15 Pro Max seems light for its size,

01:19:40   because it's less dense.

01:19:41   Yeah, exactly.

01:19:42   So I'm curious, Casey, really, like how are you --

01:19:44   so it's like, you know, I've had the 14 Plus as a test phone all summer,

01:19:49   and I was developing the app against it and everything,

01:19:51   and I'm wondering -- because every time I pick up the 14 Plus,

01:19:54   I would always think to myself,

01:19:55   maybe I should try carrying this around for a week or so

01:19:58   and get used to the size and see if I like it,

01:20:01   because the 14 Plus is even lighter than the 15 Pro Max,

01:20:03   and so I thought maybe I should try,

01:20:05   see if I like the big phone,

01:20:07   and I would put it on my pocket and walk around for a couple hours,

01:20:10   and I would hate it.

01:20:11   I would only last at most a couple hours.

01:20:13   I'm like, I can't. I can't.

01:20:15   It's too big in my pocket, too big in my hand.

01:20:17   I was just never able to get used to that size,

01:20:20   at least in those short trial runs.

01:20:22   How have you found, like going from medium to big,

01:20:25   like are you used to it?

01:20:27   Did you get used to it quickly?

01:20:29   So there's several different things I want to talk about.

01:20:33   I'm not sure which one is the right one to do first,

01:20:36   but I guess let's start with in-pocket.

01:20:38   I wear guy clothes.

01:20:39   They're generally somewhat loose-fitting,

01:20:41   possibly and partially because I'm unfashionable,

01:20:44   but nevertheless, I'm not in a situation

01:20:46   where I felt like the in-pocket feel was a problem.

01:20:51   You know, it's definitely bigger, for sure,

01:20:54   but it's not a night-or-day issue.

01:20:57   What pocket are you putting the phone in?

01:20:59   Right front pocket, as I have for many, many, many years.

01:21:02   See, this is something I hadn't really thought about,

01:21:04   I don't know why, but until this year,

01:21:06   not because I got a new phone,

01:21:07   but because I'm transitioning from shorts weather

01:21:09   to pants weather again

01:21:10   as the seasons finally start to change here.

01:21:13   And one of the things I miss about shorts weather

01:21:16   is when I wear my shorts,

01:21:17   I put my phone in my right front pocket, right?

01:21:19   But when I wear jeans,

01:21:20   I find even with just a plain old 14 Pro

01:21:23   that my right front pocket is a little constricting.

01:21:28   Like, I feel the phone there more when I sit down.

01:21:31   I feel like I might be, like, putting pressure on the phone.

01:21:33   So I'm amazed that you can put a Pro Max

01:21:36   in your right front pocket.

01:21:37   Are you talking about jeans pockets,

01:21:38   or are you just wearing sweatpants everywhere?

01:21:40   No, well, sweatpants when I'm in the house

01:21:42   and, you know, shorts when I'm out of the house.

01:21:46   Today was the first day here in Richmond

01:21:48   that I think I could have done jeans and been okay.

01:21:52   Up until today, it has been warm enough.

01:21:54   All right, well, so you haven't done

01:21:55   the Pro Max jeans test yet.

01:21:57   Correct, that is correct.

01:21:58   And you know how I thought about it?

01:21:59   I would have run around today with jeans on.

01:22:01   I didn't even think twice about it.

01:22:03   But yeah, so the weight, not a problem.

01:22:07   The in-hand feel, it's not a problem,

01:22:12   but it's different for sure.

01:22:15   Now, I'm having a bit of a life crisis here.

01:22:19   I need you to be gentle in this very challenging time for me.

01:22:23   Did you get a kickstand for your phone?

01:22:25   Kind of.

01:22:26   Oh, no, did you get a popsocket?

01:22:28   He did do. He said he was getting a popsocket.

01:22:30   I got a popsocket, and for a day or two, I thought,

01:22:33   "I'm just going to return this popsocket,

01:22:35   because what kind of idiot uses a popsocket?"

01:22:37   And has it got to be really flat collapsible

01:22:39   if you want to get that into the front right jeans pocket

01:22:41   of a Pro Max with a collapsible popsocket on it?

01:22:44   I don't know the depth of a honest-to-goodness popsocket,

01:22:47   but it's not tremendous.

01:22:48   It's a little bit above the camera mesa,

01:22:51   but not obnoxiously so.

01:22:53   You would actually --

01:22:54   Yeah, it's one of the benefits of the giant camera mesa

01:22:56   is that it makes the popsocket look slimmer.

01:22:58   Exactly.

01:22:59   But I did, after a day or two,

01:23:00   I caved and opened the popsocket.

01:23:02   I think I kind of like it.

01:23:04   And I feel really gross about it,

01:23:06   because I was so anti-popsocket, and I think I kind of like it.

01:23:09   And so that's the thing.

01:23:11   So to more directly answer your question, Marco,

01:23:13   generally speaking, I don't think it's bad.

01:23:15   I think it's a little tough as a one-handed phone.

01:23:17   I am not in love with the Pro Max as a one-handed phone.

01:23:21   So you kind of have to embrace

01:23:23   that you either need to dual-hand, you know,

01:23:26   yield the phone, or you need to have some sort of affordance,

01:23:31   be it a strap like we talked about earlier,

01:23:33   or a popsocket or what have you, in order to single-hand it,

01:23:36   because I really feel like my prior strategy

01:23:39   of the load-bearing pinky

01:23:41   basically renders the top half of the phone unreachable.

01:23:46   Now, granted, there is reachability,

01:23:48   so you can swipe down on the home indicator,

01:23:50   and you can bring that down to within reach,

01:23:52   but I don't love that.

01:23:54   And so for now, I've been using the official --

01:23:57   It's a real honest-to-goodness popsocket,

01:23:59   the circular one, not the pill-shaped one.

01:24:01   And I'm not in love with the popsocket,

01:24:04   but I feel like it is extremely nice to have it

01:24:07   so that that can increase my range,

01:24:10   and I no longer feel like I need the load-bearing pinky.

01:24:15   The thing that bothers me the most, though,

01:24:17   is that I can barely reach the --

01:24:20   You typically use the phone in my right hand.

01:24:22   I can barely reach the left-hand corner of the screen,

01:24:25   like the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, with one hand,

01:24:28   and that is sometimes annoying.

01:24:30   So, like, in the Mail app, you know,

01:24:32   if you're looking at a piece of mail

01:24:34   and you would like to archive it or delete it,

01:24:36   you need to go to the bottom left corner.

01:24:38   Doing that one-handed is tough, and that's frustrating.

01:24:41   But all in all, I think I like it,

01:24:44   and I think especially once you consider the camera,

01:24:47   but even without the camera,

01:24:48   I think the juice might be worth the squeeze at this point.

01:24:51   Now that the bezels have been brought in some,

01:24:53   the weight is way down from where it was.

01:24:56   All in all, I think I'm into it.

01:24:58   And sitting here now,

01:24:59   I have absolutely no desire to return it.

01:25:01   That being said, the one place where this falls down real bad

01:25:04   for me is the action button.

01:25:06   I love the idea of the action button,

01:25:08   but it is so frickin' far away from my hand

01:25:11   that it's almost not even there,

01:25:14   at least when I'm single-handing it.

01:25:16   -You should try being a left-handed-to-phone person.

01:25:19   It would be right under your thumb.

01:25:20   -You make a very good point.

01:25:21   That is something I should probably at least investigate.

01:25:24   -You're just trying to get him to drop that phone, huh?

01:25:26   -Yeah, right. [ Laughter ]

01:25:27   -His less coordinated hand to carry this giant thing.

01:25:29   -Exactly. No, but you make a good point.

01:25:32   And I have set the action button to camera,

01:25:34   and I'm skipping ahead a little bit.

01:25:36   I want to talk about the transfer process very briefly,

01:25:38   but I went out this afternoon,

01:25:40   and took a few pictures.

01:25:42   Now, granted, it was miserable weather here this afternoon,

01:25:45   but I went out and took a few pictures,

01:25:47   specifically because I thought you would probably want --

01:25:50   both of you would probably want to see the differences

01:25:52   between the 3x and the 5x.

01:25:53   And so I am not the world's greatest photographer.

01:25:57   In fact, I'm at best an okay amateur photographer.

01:26:00   And I was kind of in a rush for uninteresting reasons,

01:26:03   and so I didn't do the best job of, like, framing these photos.

01:26:06   But I tried to get representative of examples of photos

01:26:12   with both the 14 Pro and its 3x camera,

01:26:15   and the 15 Pro Max, and the 5x camera,

01:26:18   which I've realized I don't think I labeled it always

01:26:21   as a Pro Max in these images that I'm about to share,

01:26:23   but that's okay. You know what I'm talking about.

01:26:25   So I'm going to quickly run through them,

01:26:27   and if you have questions, I'm happy to field it.

01:26:29   So I went to a park that's in the Richmond area.

01:26:31   And, again, it was disgusting weather,

01:26:33   so consider that when you look at the fidelity

01:26:35   of these pictures.

01:26:36   It was actively raining a little bit,

01:26:38   and so on and so forth.

01:26:39   So the first thing I did was I parked my car.

01:26:41   I parked it obnoxiously because nobody was at the park.

01:26:43   I was only there for, like, five minutes.

01:26:44   I don't need to hear any feedback about my parking job.

01:26:46   Also, I'm a former BMW driver,

01:26:47   so this is how I learned how to park.

01:26:49   But anyway, I parked the car.

01:26:52   - Now, BMW would have been diagonal across the spot.

01:26:54   - That's probably true.

01:26:55   - You're merely perpendicular across the spot.

01:26:56   - Right, exactly.

01:26:57   I should have thought about the fact

01:26:59   that I'm going to get a whole bunch of flak for this,

01:27:00   but I assure you I was one of, like, three cars

01:27:02   in a parking lot that was, like, hundreds of meters long.

01:27:04   But anyways, the point is I ran, and this was, I don't know,

01:27:09   30, 40 feet away from my car or something like that,

01:27:12   and there's a little, like, knee-height brick wall

01:27:16   between the grass and a concrete area that I'm standing on.

01:27:19   And I tried to frame the brick wall roughly equivalently

01:27:22   at the bottom of the frame.

01:27:24   And I took a shot with the 3X and the 5X,

01:27:26   and there's a big difference.

01:27:28   Like, there is a heck of a difference there.

01:27:31   And you can see that plain as day in these two shots.

01:27:35   So, yeah, so there you can see quite a difference.

01:27:38   I actually, it was not the next one I took,

01:27:40   but the next one I'll talk about.

01:27:42   I happened to be on my way out of this park

01:27:44   and noticed a goose.

01:27:45   This one, I feel like, is a little less dramatic.

01:27:47   I was probably, I don't know,

01:27:50   10 to 20 meters away from the goose,

01:27:52   but I took a picture with both of the 14 Pro, 15 Pro Max

01:27:57   with the 3X and 5X.

01:27:58   Again, I mislabeled it. My apologies.

01:28:00   But you can see here that the difference

01:28:04   isn't that dramatic to me in the goose itself.

01:28:07   But if you look at the amount of fencing

01:28:09   you can see on either side of the goose,

01:28:11   which will make sense if you're looking at the photo,

01:28:13   there's quite a bit more in the 3X than the 5X.

01:28:17   Less dramatic in this case.

01:28:19   Again, I was a bit closer up to,

01:28:22   a bit closer to the subject matter,

01:28:24   but still a difference nevertheless.

01:28:26   So then I thought, all right, let's take a look

01:28:28   and let's try all the quote-unquote lenses.

01:28:30   This image is freaking huge.

01:28:32   So I took one with the,

01:28:35   this is all in the 15 Pro Max.

01:28:37   I took it with the 1/2X ultra wide,

01:28:40   the main at 25, main at 28, main at 35,

01:28:43   and then the 2X main and the 5X main.

01:28:46   And so that's 48 and 120 millimeters.

01:28:49   Interestingly, and I don't think I did anything wrong

01:28:53   or weird or anything like that.

01:28:54   Maybe this is user error.

01:28:56   But the ultra wide, the 2X and the 5X are all 3024 by 4032.

01:29:01   But the main camera, the three on the main camera,

01:29:05   or the, I'm sorry, three of the four main cameras,

01:29:07   the 1X, the 1.2 and the 1.5, the 25, 28, 35 millimeters,

01:29:10   were all bigger, 4284 by 5712.

01:29:13   I don't know if I did something wrong.

01:29:15   I didn't knowingly do anything differently.

01:29:16   - You do the math, isn't that,

01:29:17   doing the 24 megapixel thing?

01:29:19   - Maybe.

01:29:20   - Yeah, I think.

01:29:22   - But I don't know why the 2X wouldn't also be 24.

01:29:25   But maybe the 2X had to bin,

01:29:26   because this is what we talked about before.

01:29:28   When you use the 2X thing, we were talking about the 14 Pro,

01:29:31   so I don't know what the 15 Pro does.

01:29:32   But on the 14 Pro, when you do the 2X thing,

01:29:34   where it takes the center crop of the main thing,

01:29:36   it will try not to bin those pixels

01:29:38   and use the actual native pixels.

01:29:41   But of course, the whole reason they use binning

01:29:42   is because if you use the native pixels all the time,

01:29:44   they get a lot of noise,

01:29:45   and there's not a lot of light gathering.

01:29:46   So if there's insufficient light,

01:29:48   which there might not have been sufficient light

01:29:50   on this kind of overcast day,

01:29:52   then it might be binning them,

01:29:53   and that's why you're getting that.

01:29:54   - That's a good call.

01:29:55   Yeah, I'm not sure.

01:29:56   But this is what I got out of the camera.

01:29:58   And so anyway, so I don't have a whole bunch to say

01:30:01   about this other than to say

01:30:03   you can see a truly dramatic amount of range

01:30:07   between the ultra-wide and the 5X.

01:30:09   Like, it is a humongous difference,

01:30:12   which I think is pretty cool.

01:30:14   And so far in my basic usage,

01:30:16   and I'm not gonna share these photos,

01:30:17   but in quick usage that I've had,

01:30:20   I've really enjoyed the 5X.

01:30:22   I think it might have been Mike

01:30:23   that said having the 3X as well would be nice,

01:30:26   like if there was a quad lens,

01:30:28   or a quad physical camera system.

01:30:30   But I think I am here for the 5X.

01:30:33   And I was at swim lessons with Mikayla, I think, yesterday,

01:30:37   and it's an indoor pool,

01:30:39   and the parents sit on one side of glass,

01:30:41   and then the pool area and the kids are on the other side.

01:30:44   And I would occasionally take pictures of her

01:30:47   while she was doing swim lessons with the 3X.

01:30:49   And even though I'm 10, 20 yards away

01:30:53   from where the action is happening,

01:30:56   it always felt like it was far away

01:30:58   even when using the 3X,

01:31:00   but I took a picture with the 5X,

01:31:02   and it was like we were right there.

01:31:03   And so for me, I think I made the right choice so far.

01:31:08   Again, just like Marco said, we've barely had these phones

01:31:11   for a few days at this point.

01:31:12   But so far, I'm really happy with the choice,

01:31:15   and I think it's worked out pretty well.

01:31:17   I have a couple other things to say,

01:31:18   but any questions or thoughts about the camera

01:31:20   before I move on?

01:31:21   -Tyler in the chat said that the 2X photo you put

01:31:24   is perfectly 12 megapixels.

01:31:25   Is that what you're saying, Tyler?

01:31:26   I don't know if that's the correct interpretation.

01:31:28   Yeah, so that means it didn't bin,

01:31:29   and it is doing the center crop 12 megapixel,

01:31:32   but then it is not doing the thing

01:31:33   that the 15 and 15 Pro are capable of doing,

01:31:35   which is combining the 48 and the 12 to make it 24.

01:31:38   -Mm-hmm. And again, I can't stress enough,

01:31:40   super overcast day, actively raining at the time.

01:31:43   Like, this was not the right time to do this experiment,

01:31:47   but this is the only time -- It's been rainy all weekend,

01:31:49   and this is the only time I had before we recorded tonight,

01:31:51   so I did what I could with what I got.

01:31:52   -And one thing I would suggest for the 5X camera --

01:31:55   I know people are like, "Oh, this is gonna give me reach

01:31:57   so I can see my kid at swim lessons better."

01:31:58   And that makes perfect sense.

01:31:59   But the other thing I would suggest, perhaps trying --

01:32:02   I don't know how this is gonna work out with the 5X camera.

01:32:04   You can find out and tell me.

01:32:05   120 millimeters is actually a fairly --

01:32:09   close to some fairly popular portrait lens ranges.

01:32:13   And in general, if you take a portrait photo

01:32:16   of somebody with kind of a wide-angle lens,

01:32:18   they tend to look not great, which is why portraits tend

01:32:24   to use a little bit, you know, higher focal range lens.

01:32:29   And people are very confused about this online

01:32:31   because they think, like, it's the lens itself

01:32:33   that distorts the people's faces or whatever.

01:32:36   That's not actually the case.

01:32:38   What distorts people's faces is being real close to them.

01:32:41   If you're real close to them, the view you have of their face

01:32:45   is going to be different than if you're real far away.

01:32:47   You can figure this out with geometry and math and lines.

01:32:50   And, you know, you basically -- you end up --

01:32:52   you can see more of the sides of their face

01:32:54   when you're farther away than you can if you're up close.

01:32:56   If you think of it being, like, an inch away from their face,

01:32:58   you're not even gonna be able to see their ears anymore, right?

01:33:01   But if you go far, far away, yeah,

01:33:02   you can see both of their ears. Look at that.

01:33:04   And how that's related to the focal length of the lens

01:33:09   is to get a person's face in the 5X lens,

01:33:13   you have to stand farther away

01:33:14   because if you're two inches away from them,

01:33:16   you're just gonna get their nose, right?

01:33:17   So you're like, "Oh, oh, I want to shoot you with the 5X lens."

01:33:19   What will you do? You'll back up

01:33:21   because you want to get their entire head in the frame.

01:33:24   And when you back up, you're moving farther away from them.

01:33:27   All this is to say, the only thing that changes

01:33:30   how a person's face looks in a camera sensor,

01:33:34   in a camera view, is how far away you are from them.

01:33:36   That is the only thing that will change your perspective.

01:33:38   No amount of lens stuff will change your perspective.

01:33:41   No zoom lens, no wide-angle lens or whatever.

01:33:43   The only thing that changes

01:33:45   how much of the person's ears you can see

01:33:47   is how far away you are from them,

01:33:49   which is why when you take a longer focal length,

01:33:51   like 120 millimeters, and you do a portrait,

01:33:53   you will have to move farther away to get the person framed,

01:33:56   and those type of things tend to be more flattering.

01:33:59   It will -- I don't know what the right expression is --

01:34:01   flatten out your face.

01:34:02   It will make your nose look less big.

01:34:04   It will make you look less like you're in a funhouse mirror.

01:34:07   That's why when, you know, people get their portraits

01:34:09   taken for the cover of a magazine,

01:34:11   and it's like a headshot, that is not taken

01:34:13   with the 11-millimeter lens.

01:34:15   It's like an 85, right, or, you know, 110 or 120,

01:34:19   and the person is farther away because it's more flattering.

01:34:22   So try that with the 5X,

01:34:24   because I think a lot of phone pictures people take,

01:34:26   like whether it's a selfie camera or just the 1X,

01:34:29   it's not the most flattering to your face shape.

01:34:32   That's a lot of the reason why I want to use

01:34:34   my "big camera."

01:34:36   You know, they have better-looking pictures of people.

01:34:38   It's simply because I'm using, you know,

01:34:41   even something like a 50-millimeter or an 85,

01:34:44   and I have to be farther away, you'll look better.

01:34:47   So try that.

01:34:48   Try taking some pictures of your wife and your kids

01:34:50   with the 5X lens, essentially as a portrait lens,

01:34:53   rather than the, "Oh, I want to zoom in

01:34:55   and catch my kid on the stage."

01:34:56   -Yeah. It also -- I mean, first of all, I would say

01:34:58   one of my favorite lenses I've ever shot with,

01:35:01   it was a 135 prime.

01:35:03   And so this -- you know, a 120 is very close to that.

01:35:06   And if you haven't ever shot with a 135 prime,

01:35:10   it's difficult to use in a practical situation

01:35:13   because it's a 135 prime,

01:35:15   but I would strongly encourage you,

01:35:17   if you're a photographer, rent one sometime.

01:35:20   It's a lot of fun.

01:35:21   Like, you get some amazing pictures out of it.

01:35:23   You know, also, one of the major differences

01:35:25   with using a longer lens is it is easier

01:35:28   and better-looking to get background blur.

01:35:31   So if you want your subject to be in focus

01:35:33   and you want the background to be blurred,

01:35:35   really, like, optically, not through AI algorithms and stuff,

01:35:38   if you want the actual optical background blur,

01:35:41   that is not only much easier to get

01:35:44   in a more severe way with longer lenses,

01:35:47   but it tends to look more pleasing

01:35:49   when you do get it compared to what's possible

01:35:52   on, you know, less narrow lenses.

01:35:55   And when you're dealing with something optically

01:35:57   like an iPhone, where you don't really have

01:36:00   the apertures and sensor size needed

01:36:02   to get real good optical background blur in most cases,

01:36:06   using the longer lenses is often easier.

01:36:09   If you use a long lens that's somewhat close to you,

01:36:12   like, as close as you can reasonably focus

01:36:14   and frame your subject, you can usually get

01:36:16   some pretty good background blur

01:36:18   without using any tricks at all.

01:36:20   - Take a look, I just put on our slack.

01:36:22   I occasionally do this.

01:36:24   If you work really, really hard

01:36:26   and find the few scenarios this works,

01:36:28   you can get legit background blur from an iPhone camera.

01:36:31   - Oh yeah, absolutely.

01:36:32   - But the scenarios in which you can do that are slim.

01:36:33   So take a look on our slack.

01:36:35   Here's me as I caption this on glass,

01:36:37   working real hard to get that legit iPhone background blur.

01:36:41   I mean, and it's not pretty.

01:36:42   Like, if you look at,

01:36:43   people don't see this picture,

01:36:44   it's a close up of a flower.

01:36:46   I'm like an inch away from this flower, okay,

01:36:49   with the sun behind it.

01:36:50   And being an inch away from the flower

01:36:52   and the flower being in focus

01:36:54   actually does give you a little bit of background blur,

01:36:56   but that is not pretty background blur.

01:36:58   I know this sounds dumb.

01:36:59   It's like background blur is background blur,

01:37:00   but in the realm of people testing cameras and lenses,

01:37:04   there's whole sections of every lens review

01:37:06   that we'll talk about.

01:37:07   How nice is the bokeh?

01:37:08   How nice are the bokeh balls as they call them?

01:37:11   Do they look smooth and creamy

01:37:13   or do they look like onion rings

01:37:15   or are they busy or noisy?

01:37:16   - Are they perfectly round

01:37:17   or do you see the blades and you know, it's--

01:37:19   - Yeah, exactly.

01:37:20   And sometimes you want a little bit, but yeah.

01:37:22   So the bokeh balls in this iPhone 14 Pro are not good,

01:37:28   but they're there, that's legit camera blur.

01:37:31   No portrait mode for me.

01:37:32   - And I would take that any day over portrait mode.

01:37:34   Like even, I haven't tried the new portrait mode yet,

01:37:37   but you know, I've seen the samples that people have posted

01:37:39   and they look significantly better than old portrait mode

01:37:41   to my eyes, but they still don't look quite real.

01:37:45   I would take real but bad background blur

01:37:48   every day over portrait mode if I had that option.

01:37:51   And so anyway, I would love, like if I,

01:37:54   if it was an option and maybe in the future it will be

01:37:56   based on shaky rumors right now,

01:37:59   but I would love a future in which that 5X lens

01:38:03   comes to the medium sized phone that I have.

01:38:06   I'm not willing to jump to the big phone for that alone,

01:38:10   but I am envious of it

01:38:11   and I wish I could get it on my size.

01:38:14   So I look forward to the future

01:38:15   and wish that might be possible.

01:38:17   - You know, and I'm glad we brought up bokeh

01:38:19   'cause I completely forgot there's one other thing

01:38:20   I wanted to say about the phone,

01:38:21   or the camera, excuse me.

01:38:23   So I took a screen recording

01:38:25   and I needed somewhere to upload it

01:38:26   so I uploaded it to YouTube unlisted

01:38:28   and then it became a YouTube short,

01:38:30   possibly because it's vertically oriented, I don't know.

01:38:33   But suffice to say what I did was

01:38:34   I was standing against the side of a train car.

01:38:37   This particular park I was at has a handful of train cars

01:38:40   parked at it, and I used the telephoto lens

01:38:44   to take a shot of a far away other train car.

01:38:48   The train car I was against is like a black color,

01:38:51   the one I was taking a shot of is blue and white.

01:38:54   And it did the thing where it offered me

01:38:57   the automatic portrait mode, you know,

01:38:59   it shows a little aperture F or whatever it is,

01:39:01   you know, at the bottom left hand corner of the photo.

01:39:03   So I tapped it and I took the picture

01:39:05   and then the video is me going in after the fact

01:39:08   and editing it.

01:39:09   And this is where you can decide, you know,

01:39:11   the virtual aperture, you can decide what's in focus

01:39:14   and so on and so forth.

01:39:15   And I will be the first to tell you that

01:39:18   even as an amateur photographer,

01:39:20   some of this like fake bokeh and, you know, fake blur,

01:39:23   it doesn't look stellar.

01:39:25   I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you

01:39:27   that this is better than a big camera,

01:39:29   that it's natural and so on and so forth.

01:39:31   I'm sure Joe Steele will have all sorts of problems with this.

01:39:34   But taking off the cranky amateur photographer hat

01:39:38   and putting on the just general user hat,

01:39:41   this blew my damn mind.

01:39:44   I am tapping around on this image,

01:39:47   focusing different pieces of the image,

01:39:49   some of which are 30 yards away from me

01:39:51   and some of which are 30 inches away from me.

01:39:54   And it doesn't always look stellar,

01:39:57   but it always to my eyes looks at least passable.

01:40:01   And you too might take issue with that

01:40:02   and I wouldn't really argue with you.

01:40:03   But the fact that you can do this is so freaking cool

01:40:08   and that you can do it after the fact.

01:40:10   I don't need to worry about getting the shot

01:40:12   exactly right in the heat of the moment.

01:40:15   As long as I see that the little F symbol

01:40:17   with the circle with the F in the middle

01:40:20   and the little F and the F in the middle,

01:40:21   as long as that's on when I take the shot,

01:40:23   I know I have at least a snowball's chance in hell

01:40:25   of getting this right in post,

01:40:26   even if I didn't get it right when I took the photo.

01:40:29   This is so cool.

01:40:31   I genuinely don't remember if this came

01:40:32   via software to the 14 or not,

01:40:34   but this alone might have been worth the price

01:40:36   of admission for the 15 Pro,

01:40:37   'cause this is so freaking cool.

01:40:40   My mind is blown by this.

01:40:42   - There have been a lot of features

01:40:44   for the iPhone camera over the years

01:40:46   that if you plan ahead

01:40:49   and if you set up the shot

01:40:50   and if you know or if your subject is very patient

01:40:52   and they're like, oh, just hold on,

01:40:54   let me get one in portrait mode or whatever,

01:40:55   or let me use cinematic video.

01:40:57   There's all these features that they've added

01:40:58   over the years that if you wanted a certain advantage,

01:41:02   you had to go turn it on

01:41:04   and deal with it from the start, plan ahead,

01:41:06   engage that mode, possibly at the expense

01:41:09   of other benefits from the other modes

01:41:10   that you were then disabling by using that mode,

01:41:13   like maybe you didn't get live photos,

01:41:14   maybe you didn't get the right resolution or whatever.

01:41:17   To have something like this where it takes away nothing,

01:41:22   you don't have to plan for it,

01:41:23   it doesn't cost you anything,

01:41:25   except some trivial probably amount of storage space

01:41:26   that doesn't matter for the depth data,

01:41:29   to just have that be there for you,

01:41:31   to me, it's like when they added live photos.

01:41:34   Live photos had that same thing

01:41:35   where they're really,

01:41:36   besides a trivial storage cost to them,

01:41:38   there really was not much downside

01:41:40   to having live photos enabled.

01:41:42   So all of your photos would just have

01:41:44   this little bit of bonus available to them

01:41:46   with no sweat off your back, whatever the expression is.

01:41:50   And so, I never know.

01:41:51   But anyway, so this is that now.

01:41:53   You don't have to plan for portrait mode.

01:41:56   You don't have to set everything up

01:41:58   and get everything right the first time

01:42:00   or have your subject hold still,

01:42:02   let me get one in portrait, no, none of that.

01:42:05   You just have it and you can deal with it later.

01:42:07   That's how you get more great shots

01:42:10   because then you don't have to,

01:42:12   you don't have to hesitate, you don't have to set it up,

01:42:15   you just take the shot, you just fire and that's it.

01:42:17   And afterwards you can say,

01:42:19   "Ooh, if I tweak this like this, it's even better."

01:42:21   That's true, like, you know, Apple iPhone camera magic.

01:42:25   I love when they do stuff like that.

01:42:26   - Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

01:42:27   And again, if I put on my curmudgeon hat,

01:42:30   which is the hat I normally have on,

01:42:32   I can take issue with so many things in this little video,

01:42:34   but that's not the point.

01:42:37   The point is, this camera is always with me.

01:42:41   It is unusual, maybe this is a problem,

01:42:43   but it's unusual for my phone

01:42:45   to be more than a few feet away from me, ever.

01:42:48   And so this camera is with me always.

01:42:52   And if I can do this sort of magic with this camera,

01:42:57   I mean, it's blowing my mind.

01:42:59   I'm watching this thing on repeat and it's every time I see it,

01:43:02   I'm the one who took the video and it's still blowing my mind.

01:43:04   And not only can you adjust what's in focus,

01:43:07   but you can adjust how much focus

01:43:09   or how much blur or no blur,

01:43:11   and you can turn the blur totally off

01:43:12   and then you've got what appears to be

01:43:14   a reasonably good photo from,

01:43:16   and of course there's a tremendous amount of depth to it,

01:43:19   but nevertheless, it's a pretty decent photo

01:43:21   that I took with the 120 millimeter lens.

01:43:23   This is so cool to me,

01:43:26   and this alone is worth the 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max.

01:43:30   Pick your poison, it doesn't matter.

01:43:32   This is so cool.

01:43:33   - Yeah, and what Marco was saying about features

01:43:35   that you get in post-processing

01:43:37   that you don't have to think about during,

01:43:38   as much as I really dislike portrait mode,

01:43:41   that philosophy, Apple should continue to pursue that

01:43:44   because what I want, and it's gonna take a while

01:43:46   before they're able to even do this technically,

01:43:48   but eventually they will be,

01:43:49   is I want them to implement essentially

01:43:51   the workflow I do myself,

01:43:53   which is shoot everything in both JPEG and RAW,

01:43:56   but throw away the RAWs unless I favorite them.

01:44:00   You know what I mean?

01:44:01   'Cause it's like, I don't have to decide,

01:44:03   is this because I have the same problem right now?

01:44:05   It's like, should I spend the 75 megabytes

01:44:07   to shoot this thing in RAW

01:44:09   or should I just take the JPEG?

01:44:11   And I end up just taking the JPEG

01:44:12   'cause I don't have the storage space

01:44:13   and I don't want everything to be seven,

01:44:14   but you have to think,

01:44:15   is this one of the ones I wanna spend the RAW on?

01:44:17   What if it just took everything in JPEG and RAW

01:44:20   and then give me like 30 days,

01:44:22   and if I don't hard it, chuck the RAW data in the garbage?

01:44:24   Kind of like the live picture thing

01:44:26   where if you, I think like if you deactivate

01:44:29   the live photo thing or whatever,

01:44:31   eventually it will chuck that sidecar, I think.

01:44:33   At least that used to be the case.

01:44:35   And I was wishing it kinda did the same thing with portrait,

01:44:37   but it's like, I don't wanna have to think about it

01:44:38   in the moment, just do all the things

01:44:40   and then later there should be some way for me to say,

01:44:43   do I want this to be portrait mode or do I not?

01:44:45   And I'm never gonna want to be portrait mode,

01:44:46   so it's useless, but RAW or not RAW,

01:44:49   I can make that decision in post pretty easily.

01:44:51   Which pictures actually came out?

01:44:52   Which ones do I care about?

01:44:53   And more likely, which ones like,

01:44:55   oh, this JPEG came out really bad, it's over-processed

01:44:58   or the shadows are crushed or something like that.

01:45:00   That's the one where I'm gonna wanna dig in there

01:45:02   and say, actually, since you took RAWs for everything,

01:45:05   let me see the RAW for this one

01:45:06   and see if we can recover something.

01:45:07   And even if I just recover something from the RAW

01:45:09   and then re-burn a JPEG and then still chuck out the RAW,

01:45:13   that's what I want.

01:45:14   You can't do it now because storage space,

01:45:16   processing time, the capture,

01:45:17   like there's a million reasons why you can't now,

01:45:19   but if phones keep getting faster

01:45:20   and then if TSMC's three nanometer thing

01:45:23   isn't a sign of the end of Moore's law

01:45:25   coming sooner than we thought,

01:45:27   eventually these phones should be able to shoot everything

01:45:29   in JPEG plus RAW.

01:45:30   And that's what I do on my real cameras,

01:45:32   but then I have to manually save the RAWs

01:45:34   for the ones that I favor.

01:45:35   That's something that the phone could do automatically.

01:45:36   So I'm looking forward to that in 10 years.

01:45:39   - Yep, indeed.

01:45:40   The transfer process, I wanted to quickly talk about that.

01:45:43   I did a device to device transfer.

01:45:46   Actually, I should have put this in follow-up.

01:45:48   So we talked last episode about how I was doing

01:45:51   a finder-based encrypted backup,

01:45:53   and I did the unthinkable,

01:45:55   and I left my phone in the office overnight

01:45:57   rather than next to my head in my bedside table.

01:46:00   - How did you sleep?

01:46:01   - Actually, I had a really crummy night's sleep.

01:46:03   - Knowing your best little buddy was so happy

01:46:05   and your best little buddy was so far away from you

01:46:07   in another room in the same house.

01:46:09   - Well, no, no, no, Aaron was next to me,

01:46:10   but my second best little buddy was across the house.

01:46:14   - And more probably Aaron's phone

01:46:15   in case you just needed that phone.

01:46:17   - Yeah, right, right.

01:46:18   But anyways, I left it overnight,

01:46:20   and it killed me, but I did it,

01:46:23   and I woke up, and the finder backup was not there.

01:46:28   And finder was like, "What are you talking about?

01:46:30   You never asked me to do a backup."

01:46:31   Well, great, thank you for that.

01:46:33   So that didn't work, so I did a device-to-device transfer.

01:46:36   I don't love that process.

01:46:38   I love the results of the process

01:46:40   because I had to log into almost nothing,

01:46:43   Slack being the number one offender in this department

01:46:46   'cause I had to log into my Slacks again.

01:46:48   But almost everything else came across lickety-split.

01:46:51   Even my WireGuard VPN came across,

01:46:54   which I didn't expect in a million years that that would work.

01:46:56   But everything came across just fine for the most part,

01:46:59   but it takes forever.

01:47:01   I started the process, and I had a sheet of paper with this written down on it,

01:47:04   and somehow in the last hour, I've thrown it somewhere.

01:47:06   But nevertheless, off the top of my head,

01:47:08   I started it roughly not in the morning,

01:47:10   and it showed me something to the order of six hours left.

01:47:13   It quickly dropped to about two hours,

01:47:15   and it ended up that it finished sometime between 11.15 and 11.30-ish.

01:47:20   I went downstairs to do something for a little bit,

01:47:23   and it was during that time that it finished.

01:47:25   I will say that it hung on two minutes remaining

01:47:27   for something like 20 minutes.

01:47:28   Again, I had it written down somewhere.

01:47:30   I don't know what happened to it.

01:47:31   But I don't love that process,

01:47:34   and I don't love that you can't use either phone.

01:47:37   I get it. I get why that is.

01:47:39   But I don't love it.

01:47:41   And I'm really, really hopeful that when I'm going from 15 Pro to 16 Pro,

01:47:48   when theoretically I can do a high-speed USB cable between the two of them,

01:47:53   I really hope that this process gets way freaking faster.

01:47:57   Although, as we talked about in follow-up,

01:47:59   I wonder if I should have put the 15 Pro on Ethernet,

01:48:04   if not for the device-to-device transfer,

01:48:06   which I don't think that would have mattered

01:48:08   because I think that's peer-to-peer,

01:48:09   but at least for the subsequent step

01:48:11   where it's downloading all the apps again from the App Store

01:48:13   and so on and so forth.

01:48:15   So I wish that was better and faster,

01:48:18   but I'm really hopeful that next year it will be.

01:48:21   But we'll see what happens.

01:48:23   But so far, I really like this phone.

01:48:25   I probably should find a case for it,

01:48:27   but I'm just rocking the PopSocket,

01:48:29   and although I'm embarrassed about it

01:48:31   because I feel like the PopSocket looks so ridiculous,

01:48:34   but I think I'm in the minority in saying so

01:48:36   because almost everyone uses one these days.

01:48:38   I'm slightly embarrassed by it,

01:48:40   but I really like this phone a lot.

01:48:42   I really, really do.

01:48:44   - Just own it, man.

01:48:45   It's cool.

01:48:46   Look, it is no longer an unusual position to take

01:48:51   to say that you like big phones.

01:48:53   Big phones have been here for a long time now,

01:48:56   and they offer some substantial advantages.

01:48:59   It's all about what you prioritize.

01:49:01   For many people, one-handed use,

01:49:04   like while moving, walking the dog,

01:49:06   trying to reach that bottom left button

01:49:08   is not as important as it being

01:49:11   your primary computer throughout the day,

01:49:13   which it is for so many people.

01:49:15   You get a way bigger screen.

01:49:17   You get way more battery life.

01:49:19   You get either tied for the best camera

01:49:22   or a better camera than the other pro every single year.

01:49:25   There's a lot of good reasons

01:49:27   that that's really attractive to people.

01:49:29   And so it's all about what's important to you.

01:49:31   What are your needs?

01:49:33   What trade-offs do you wanna make?

01:49:35   And what's most important?

01:49:37   In my life, I like to have that one-handed use.

01:49:40   I use it all the time.

01:49:42   And meanwhile, when I'm browsing my phone in bed,

01:49:45   I wish I had the bigger screen at that moment

01:49:48   when it's in my car mount,

01:49:50   since my car doesn't have frickin' carplay.

01:49:52   I wish I had the bigger screen at that moment,

01:49:54   but I've made the choice that the one-handed use

01:49:57   while walking is the more frequent need for me,

01:49:59   and so that's what I'm gonna prioritize.

01:50:01   But I'm very close to that dividing line

01:50:03   where, yeah, actually, I can see myself maybe down the road

01:50:07   as different things in my life shift around and change.

01:50:10   Maybe I would like the bigger screen phone then.

01:50:12   It's not so out of the question.

01:50:14   Here I am sitting in my SUV.

01:50:16   Three years ago, five years ago, I hated SUVs,

01:50:19   and I never thought I would ever buy one,

01:50:21   let alone enjoy it.

01:50:23   And here I am loving the thing, so look, it happens.

01:50:26   Our positions change over time,

01:50:29   and our needs and preferences and priorities change over time,

01:50:31   and that's fine.

01:50:32   Liking the big phones now is not only nothing to be ashamed of,

01:50:35   but surprisingly mainstream.

01:50:37   - He likes big phones and he cannot lie.

01:50:40   (laughing)

01:50:41   - Oh my God.

01:50:42   Thanks to our sponsor this week, Clean Email,

01:50:45   and thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:50:47   You can join us at atb.fm/join,

01:50:50   and we will talk to you next week.

01:50:52   (upbeat music)

01:50:55   ♫ Now the show is over

01:50:57   ♫ They didn't even mean to begin

01:51:00   ♫ 'Cause it was accidental

01:51:02   ♫ Oh it was accidental

01:51:05   ♫ John didn't do any research

01:51:07   ♫ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:51:10   ♫ 'Cause it was accidental

01:51:13   ♫ Oh it was accidental

01:51:16   ♫ And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

01:51:20   ♫ And if you're into Twitter

01:51:24   ♫ You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:51:29   ♫ So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:51:34   ♫ N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:51:39   ♫ U-S-A Syracuse

01:51:42   ♫ It's accidental

01:51:45   ♫ They didn't mean to accidental

01:51:50   ♫ Tech podcast so long

01:51:54   - One of the unexpected benefits of being in America again

01:52:00   is wow, Amazon's fast when you aren't on an island.

01:52:04   I have been living at the beach for three, four years,

01:52:09   full time, there is no door to door mail service,

01:52:13   there is no access for FedEx and UPS,

01:52:15   so stuff has to get sent over on a ferry the next day,

01:52:18   and you go pick it up with your wagon,

01:52:20   it's a whole thing which I find very charming and I love it,

01:52:22   but the downside is that Amazon stuff takes

01:52:25   up to a week to get there,

01:52:27   it depends on how it's sent and how it goes,

01:52:29   but you're looking at up to a week.

01:52:31   Whereas last night I had packed everything

01:52:35   from the beach to do the show, I thought.

01:52:38   I had everything set up and I realized last night,

01:52:41   oh wait a minute, my mic stand that I brought

01:52:45   is gonna be really annoying to use in the car,

01:52:47   'cause it was just one of those little tabletop

01:52:49   tripod looking ones, and I'm like there's no,

01:52:51   there's no where to really put that,

01:52:53   that I can lean up against it without bending my neck

01:52:57   the whole show, let me see what Amazon options exist.

01:53:01   Last night, in bed, I ordered a mic stand

01:53:06   that got delivered at 4 p.m. today, for free.

01:53:11   - Yep, yep, yep, yep.

01:53:14   - And I know, and this is something like,

01:53:15   yeah, everyone else in America is like,

01:53:17   yeah, we've had that, that's not new.

01:53:19   - And that's not even like the city people

01:53:21   have like same day practically, or like within,

01:53:24   you know that? - Well that's what this was.

01:53:25   It was same day, it was just, you know,

01:53:26   I was ordering it at 10 p.m., and it got here the next day.

01:53:29   - Yeah, I know, but you know what I'm talking about,

01:53:31   the ones they have in limited city things

01:53:33   have it really close to the thing,

01:53:34   you can order it and get it a couple hours later.

01:53:35   I've never experienced that, but it sounds really cool.

01:53:38   - I placed like four orders today for just random crap

01:53:41   that I'm like, I could go to the store for that,

01:53:43   but why waste the trip?

01:53:45   Why take the time to drive to the store?

01:53:47   - I can tell you one reason why though, by the way,

01:53:48   when you're asking about the Netgear thing

01:53:50   that was $1,000 on Amazon, you gotta be careful,

01:53:53   'cause occasionally you'll buy,

01:53:54   you'll wanna buy some incidental item,

01:53:56   and you won't notice that Amazon, yeah, Amazon has it,

01:53:59   but it's two to three times the price

01:54:01   that it is in the regular store.

01:54:03   Even for something simple like,

01:54:04   oh, a Duracell battery or something,

01:54:05   like is that how much Duracell batteries,

01:54:07   how much could a battery cost, $10, right?

01:54:09   (laughing)

01:54:10   If you don't look too closely,

01:54:11   and it's like, basically what it's saying is,

01:54:14   Amazon doesn't really carry this.

01:54:16   There is a seller who carries it,

01:54:18   who's selling it through Amazon at a massive markup,

01:54:21   so be careful about like, oh, I just want something in,

01:54:24   hurry, let me just order it on Amazon,

01:54:25   and you're like, wait a second,

01:54:26   if I just walk to the grocery store,

01:54:28   this thing is a third of, literally a third of the price,

01:54:31   so be careful about that.

01:54:33   - Yeah, that's fair, and there are certain things,

01:54:35   obviously, that are much better to get locally,

01:54:37   like, you know, because, again,

01:54:38   because we're in this apartment temporarily,

01:54:40   I've taken a couple trips around

01:54:41   to just get some little quality of life improvement issues,

01:54:43   like a shower caddy, a paper towel holder,

01:54:46   that kind of stuff, and a lot of that stuff is like,

01:54:47   this stuff is so basic and cheap,

01:54:50   and any grocery store would have this,

01:54:52   so I'll just get it when I'm at the grocery store

01:54:54   getting groceries anyway, you know,

01:54:55   that kind of stuff, that's simple,

01:54:57   but, you know, more specialized stuff,

01:54:59   like, oh, you know, my life would be a lot better here

01:55:01   if I had like, one of my good nail clippers,

01:55:04   and so, and like, you know,

01:55:05   I'm never gonna find that in the grocery store

01:55:06   or in a local store without driving around in bunk,

01:55:08   and it's like, all right, that kind of stuff,

01:55:09   I can get that shipped in like, you know,

01:55:12   the Amazon Day delivery, and it's no big deal,

01:55:14   and that, man, having like, modern Amazon is,

01:55:18   look, I know they do some shady stuff,

01:55:20   I know they're not a great company in all ways

01:55:22   by a long shot, but as a customer, my god, it's amazing,

01:55:26   and I know everyone else discovered this a million years ago,

01:55:28   but I'm just rediscovering this now,

01:55:30   and it's like Christmas morning every day,

01:55:33   like, oh, wait, I can just get that like, tomorrow morning?

01:55:36   (laughing)

01:55:37   It'll just show up, like,

01:55:38   I don't have to wait a week?

01:55:39   Wow, 2023, man.

01:55:42   - Bye man.

01:55:43   (beeping)