00:00:00 ◼ ► Would the tech companies please do us a favor and stop making news happen for like a week or two?
00:00:05 ◼ ► So that way when people hear this podcast a week after we've recorded it, it's not too outdated seeming, please?
00:00:16 ◼ ► So we have some excellent happy news to report. There's a new member special and more importantly than that, it did not end up with us ending the show, which I was slightly surprised by. [Laughter]
00:00:26 ◼ ► So the new member special is ATP Insider Roast My Homescreen. So the three of us shared our first page of our iOS or iPhone homescreens and we picked them apart and eviscerated each other for it.
00:00:42 ◼ ► And as is usual for us, we immediately went off on a tangent, which we won't spoil now, but we didn't just talk about our homescreens, we talked about other aspects of our life.
00:00:50 ◼ ► And you'll see that very quickly when we start listening to the episode. And yeah, we've all talked about our homescreens before, but not with each other.
00:00:58 ◼ ► So now you will get to see all of our homescreens and you can have opinions about it. [Laughter]
00:01:04 ◼ ► All right, let's do some follow up. Josh Osborne had some of their own thoughts with regard to TSMC and American workers.
00:01:11 ◼ ► Josh writes, "Regarding the claim by Morris Chang, TSMC's founder, that if a machine breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning, but in Taiwan it will be fixed at 2 a.m.
00:01:19 ◼ ► U.S. factories with equipment that expensive run three shifts, 24/7. So if some machine fails at 1 a.m. in the U.S. or Taiwan, someone is working on it from 1 a.m. until it's fixed.
00:01:29 ◼ ► If an engineer can fix it by 2 a.m., it's fixed by 2 a.m. If it takes 16 hours to fix it in the U.S., it will tend not to be the same person for all of those 16 hours, which to be honest, probably helps fix it faster.
00:01:39 ◼ ► Whoever hasn't fixed it in the first eight hours summarizes what they did, and then someone fresh, with a different mindset, takes over and probably has ideas the other worker didn't.
00:01:48 ◼ ► The main point is that if a plant has a multi-billion dollar ASML fab, it is going to have someone, or multiple someones, on it at all times, even when it's not broken."
00:02:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like the founder, I don't know if that's the current CEO, but whatever, is just kind of hyperbolic bragging about the Taiwanese work ethic, which I'm sure is very formidable, but the specific example about a machine breaking down may be not entirely applicable.
00:02:19 ◼ ► Talking about the EU again, their regulators have accepted Apple's commitments to open NFC access to rivals. This is from MacRumors. "The European Union has accepted commitments from Apple to open its mobile payment system and give competitors access to the iPhone's NFC technology, bringing an end to a lengthy investigation by EU regulators into the technology.
00:02:37 ◼ ► According to the announcement, Apple has agreed to open up its payment system to other providers free of charge for a decade. Apple will let users set a third-party wallet app as their default rather than its own Apple Wallet. It will also allow rivals full access to key iOS features, such as DoubleClick to launch wallet apps, along with Face ID, Touch ID, and passcodes for authentication.
00:02:56 ◼ ► Apple has until July 25th to implement the changes. The company risks a fine if it violates the agreement, which will remain binding for 10 years."
00:03:04 ◼ ► So you might look at this and say, "See, Apple? You can get along with the EU regulators if you just agree to do what they want." But I look at this and I just know through the lens of all of the EU versus Apple stories we've been going over here, I look at it and I say, "First, wait, just for the next 10 years? What happens after that? Was this some kind of concession where Apple's like, 'Well, we don't know what the future will be like. Who knows what will happen then? So let's just say 10 years.'"
00:03:26 ◼ ► And second, you look at this and say, "Oh, it's so easy. A third-party should have access to the NFC chip. They should be able to use third-party wallet apps. Done and done. That's easy to implement. It's not complicated. There's no weird way to do it."
00:03:39 ◼ ► And I'm looking at this now and saying, "Does Apple get a percentage of all the sales made through third-party wallet apps? Does Apple get to approve all the third-party wallet apps? Is Apple going to reject third-party wallet apps that it thinks compete with its own and keep them in limbo until it can implement the same features in Apple Wallet?"
00:03:54 ◼ ► This is what's going through my mind when I look at this. "Oh, an agreement. They're going to do it." And the EU is like, "Apple said they'll do it. They're going to allow third-party payment apps."
00:04:02 ◼ ► And just like, what are the caveats? What's the core technology fee for this? Does Apple get a piece of all the transactions? And that's maybe unfair. Nothing in the story suggests that or whatever.
00:04:14 ◼ ► But that's my mindset now, thinking that whenever Apple complies with it, even when there's an announcement saying, "We agreed. We've come to terms. We're going to do this thing together," that potentially it's not as simple as we think.
00:04:24 ◼ ► It seems simple to me reading this press release. It probably seems simple to the EU. But what is Apple actually going to do?
00:04:30 ◼ ► I guess we'll find out whenever Apple, you know, they say they have July 25th to implement the changes. What form does that implementation take? Why, in this case, is there this agreement announcement rather than just seeing what Apple ships in the EU saying whether it complies or something?
00:04:46 ◼ ► I don't know. Obviously, I don't understand the bureaucracy and the nuances here. Maybe I'm forgetting about a press release they had about the DMA that said exactly the same thing.
00:04:54 ◼ ► But as with all this stuff, let's just wait and see what Apple actually releases before we celebrate for this one.
00:05:00 ◼ ► All right. After initially rejecting it, Apple has approved the first PC emulator for iOS. So it has this reading from Verge.
00:05:07 ◼ ► Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union.
00:05:24 ◼ ► I mean, it's good news. I'm glad to see that this, you know, because what this opens up is all sorts of fun retro emulation of old DOS and Windows XP and stuff like that.
00:05:36 ◼ ► And all the massive library of games and stuff and ancient applications that are useful on those platforms.
00:05:43 ◼ ► So, like, this is honestly great. I hope it sticks around. And I'm really curious to see, like, how this plays out.
00:05:56 ◼ ► I think maybe somebody either got wind from the EU of, like, maybe don't do this or maybe they were afraid of that happening.
00:06:05 ◼ ► But either way, it's a good outcome. It shouldn't have been rejected in the first place.
00:06:10 ◼ ► But this is a move in the right direction. Hopefully it doesn't get any more crap from Apple. But that's a big hopefully.
00:06:16 ◼ ► And remember, Apple rejecting it from its own store is one thing. The story that we talked about in a past episode was they rejected third-party stores, too.
00:06:23 ◼ ► And still, there are other things like UTM SE that have been rejected from the app store and still aren't allowed.
00:06:29 ◼ ► Like, I think IDOS is still banned or whatever. So there's no policy change that we can see.
00:06:33 ◼ ► The policy change was, like, oh, retro game emulators. And the ruling was UTM is not a retro game emulator. PC is not a console. Tough luck, right?
00:06:42 ◼ ► And then also, by the way, we're not letting it be in third-party stores because, nah, it didn't make any sense and surely angered the EU.
00:06:48 ◼ ► And so now it's available in both. It's available in the third-party ones or it will be soon enough. And it's available in the app store.
00:06:54 ◼ ► UTM SE, as you recall, is the version of UTM that does not have just-in-time compilations. So the performance is not great.
00:07:02 ◼ ► If you're emulating something that was really old hardware, you're probably fine. But if you're trying to emulate something a little bit newer, maybe it's going to be a little sluggish because just-in-time compilation really speeds up emulation.
00:07:12 ◼ ► And Apple is still forbidding that, presumably for security reasons. We talked about this on a past episode.
00:07:16 ◼ ► There are plausibly real security concerns about just-in-time compilation that Apple would have to do work to allow it to be deployed safely.
00:07:24 ◼ ► You could still argue that fine, it should still be allowed on third-party things, but I can kind of understand Apple not allowing it in the app store.
00:07:30 ◼ ► UTM SE, in fact, is so slow that the developer of UTM SE had said when we talked about the story last time when it was rejected, they said we're not even going to bother to fight Apple on this because we think the performance of UTM SE is so crappy because it doesn't have just-in-time compilation.
00:07:43 ◼ ► So they weren't even going to bother fighting for it, but lo and behold, they got it through and it's available. So you can try it.
00:07:49 ◼ ► I forget if this UTM SE can run classic Mac and classic Apple hardware stuff. Plain old UTM on the Mac can run versions of Mac OS, so I don't see why this wouldn't.
00:08:01 ◼ ► But that'll be another interesting test case, especially for Apple's own app store. Will they allow a classic Mac emulator, an Apple II emulator?
00:08:09 ◼ ► I don't see why they wouldn't, but you know, why use logic to try to predict what Apple will do about app store stuff.
00:08:18 ◼ ► Anyway, that would definitely be cool. And in the meantime, I think InfiniteMac.org still works in Safari on iPad and the phone and stuff if you want to try to fumble your way through classic Apple emulation.
00:08:29 ◼ ► Excellent. Now, that is very exciting. I saw somebody tweet, I don't remember who it was, but somebody said something like, "Hey, you know, if we can get reasonably modern operating systems on the iPad, maybe the iPad will actually be useful now," which I thought was quite fun.
00:08:46 ◼ ► Yeah, so I'm saying that multitasking in Windows XP on your iPad is a better experience than, I think it was Viticiu, is a better experience than Stage Manager on iPadOS.
00:09:01 ◼ ► "I oversee SEO for a large news publication, so I'm very familiar with making sure websites are crawlable and indexable.
00:09:07 ◼ ► While, yes, robots.txt, robots.exclusion protocol, and user agents are all voluntary and represent the sort of good neighbor, libertinism," is that a word?
00:09:17 ◼ ► I don't even know. Sure, we'll go with it. "Of the early web, we do have other methods of keeping bad actors out.
00:09:31 ◼ ► It does look like OpenAI has published their IP ranges as well, but they took some digging to find.
00:09:37 ◼ ► I eventually found it in a GitHub repository maintained by the MISP project, or Malware Information Sharing Program."
00:09:45 ◼ ► Yeah, IP ranges are definitely a thing. I remember doing that at my jobby job, being on both ends of that, both having to give our IP ranges to someone to say,
00:09:53 ◼ ► "Please let us do the thing that you're supposedly paying us to do," and in reverse, people who wanted to access some of our servers would give us the IP ranges.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And then someone would forget about those IP ranges, and years would pass, and those people who left the company, and then someone doesn't understand why something's not working,
00:10:16 ◼ ► We have a little bit of a tale to tell, and it starts on the 2nd of July, where we got information from Bloomberg that Phil Schiller will be joining OpenAI's board as an observer.
00:10:29 ◼ ► Again, reading from Bloomberg, "Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI's board as a part of a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties between the once unlikely partners.
00:10:40 ◼ ► Phil Schiller, the head of Apple's App Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation.
00:10:45 ◼ ► As a board observer, he won't be serving as a full-fledged director, so the people who asked not to be identified, because the matter is in public.
00:10:52 ◼ ► The board's observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft Corp., OpenAI's largest backer and its main AI technology provider.
00:10:59 ◼ ► The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers.
00:11:04 ◼ ► Having Microsoft and Apple sit in on board meetings could create complications for the tech giants, which have been rivals and partners over the decades.
00:11:11 ◼ ► Some OpenAI board meetings will likely discuss future AI initiatives between OpenAI and Microsoft, deliberations that the latter company may want Schiller excluded from.
00:11:19 ◼ ► Board observers often do oblige and exit meetings during discussions that are seen as sensitive."
00:11:24 ◼ ► When this was announced, it made some sense in that obviously we've talked about on the show the sort of cultural mismatch, let's say, between OpenAI and Apple.
00:11:36 ◼ ► But obviously Apple has done that deal with them for OpenAI, ChatGPT integration with Siri stuff and iOS 18 and all that.
00:11:45 ◼ ► And so they're together on something, and the rumor is there was no money exchanged. They're just like, "Okay, well, we're getting this out of you. You're getting this out of us."
00:11:54 ◼ ► So you can see this being part of that deal of like, "Okay, and also we'll get an observer role on the board, blah, blah, blah."
00:11:59 ◼ ► Microsoft has an observer role on the board because they invested, I think, like $15 billion or something into OpenAI.
00:12:10 ◼ ► Instead of $15 billion, I guess we'll bundle you with our OS. Now, Apple could say that's worth more than $15 billion or whatever, but it made some sense.
00:12:18 ◼ ► But Microsoft is so much more closely aligned with OpenAI being a huge investor and all this, right?
00:12:27 ◼ ► But it makes you wonder if this, at this point, rumored thing was actually part of the original arrangement or something negotiated after the fact.
00:12:46 ◼ ► Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI less than eight months after securing the non-voting seat.
00:12:52 ◼ ► Apple was reportedly planning to join OpenAI's nonprofit board, but now the Financial Times reports that Apple will no longer join the board.
00:12:58 ◼ ► The changes to OpenAI's board come as antitrust concerns over Microsoft's deal with OpenAI have grown in recent months.
00:13:04 ◼ ► UK regulators started seeking views on Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI in December,
00:13:18 ◼ ► The FTC is also investigating Microsoft Amazon and Google investments into OpenAI and Anthropic.
00:13:24 ◼ ► So Microsoft didn't buy OpenAI, which would have invited even more regulatory scrutiny.
00:13:29 ◼ ► In general, when there is some next big new thing in technology and one of the existing big companies from one of the previous big things
00:13:43 ◼ ► Because you kind of don't want every hot new thing to be immediately gobbled up by the people who are already there and successful in the market.
00:13:53 ◼ ► It's kind of weird that Microsoft and OpenAI, like there's been this slow motion rumbling about that.
00:13:58 ◼ ► It's like, well, Microsoft didn't buy them, but they made a big investment and they seem pretty cozy.
00:14:02 ◼ ► Now they're going to have someone on the board and regulatory pressure and people looking at it saying, should Microsoft be on the board?
00:14:11 ◼ ► Again, at this point, the Apple thing was still a rumor, although I believe it was sort of kind of, or it wasn't confirmed.
00:14:27 ◼ ► I think it makes perfect sense, even in an observer role, if Apple kind of doesn't trust OpenAI to, not that they're going to do anything necessarily nefarious,
00:14:50 ◼ ► And if Apple is going to be integrated so closely with this company, they might want to keep an eye on,
00:14:58 ◼ ► I'm not sure how much that would help them if one day they go to a board meeting and out of the blue they say,
00:15:06 ◼ ► Did your observer role help you with that, or do you raise your hand and say, sit down, everybody,
00:15:21 ◼ ► and maybe putting more pressure on them actually finalizing the long-rumored deal with Gemini or Anthropic
00:15:30 ◼ ► and a bunch of third-party AI model companies can plug into that as long as they do a deal with us.
00:15:44 ◼ ► we were told via the Washington Post that OpenAI has illegally barred staff from airing safety risks,
00:15:52 ◼ ► So the Washington Post writes, "OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Security and Exchange Commission
00:15:59 ◼ ► alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators
00:16:04 ◼ ► about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.
00:16:09 ◼ ► OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation,
00:16:23 ◼ ► "OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee non-disparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC."
00:16:34 ◼ ► Yeah, so you should explain what the SEC whistle--like, they're signing where they're right to get compensation under the whistleblower program.
00:16:42 ◼ ► So it turns out that the SEC has a whistleblower program, obviously, and there is a website for it, which we can put in the show notes.
00:16:50 ◼ ► And on that website, "The SEC's whistleblower program was established by Congress to incentivize whistleblowers
00:16:55 ◼ ► to report specific, timely, and credible information about possible federal securities laws violations.
00:17:01 ◼ ► The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information
00:17:06 ◼ ► that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered.
00:17:15 ◼ ► So if the SEC gets at least a million bucks, the person who said, "Hey, this ain't right,"
00:17:28 ◼ ► I've never heard of this program, but even specific programs who try to encourage whistleblowers.
00:17:32 ◼ ► And for people who haven't heard that term before, it's the idea of someone who's working for a company,
00:17:37 ◼ ► and they see something inside their company that they think is illegal, that they can go to the authorities and say,
00:17:44 ◼ ► "Hey, I work for company XYZ, and we're doing bad stuff. Like, we're doing something illegal.
00:18:03 ◼ ► You need some kind of protection that, don't worry, you know, either you can't be fired or, in this case,
00:18:10 ◼ ► you'll probably be fired, but you can get some of the money that we recoup if it's an SEC violation or whatever.
00:18:20 ◼ ► because they know when a company is doing a bad thing-- dumping toxic chemicals somewhere
00:18:30 ◼ ► or all sorts of things that are against the law that someone inside a company would know about--
00:18:35 ◼ ► you want to encourage them to essentially tell on their company and their bosses and so on and so forth.
00:18:44 ◼ ► All going all the way to the point of saying, "Even if you were involved in illegal activity,
00:19:02 ◼ ► as I think it was Kaye said, "That's not how whistleblowing works. You don't tell your boss,
00:19:06 ◼ ► 'By the way, I'm going to go to the federal authorities now and tell them about the illegal thing you're doing.
00:19:10 ◼ ► Just my employee agreement said that I have to tell you that, so I'm going to do that now.'"
00:19:29 ◼ ► "You agree never to say anything bad about the company, right, or otherwise you don't catch your severance," or whatever.
00:19:35 ◼ ► Companies are always pushing the limits of what they can get you to sign to be an employee,
00:19:49 ◼ ► Those are all examples of employers exerting power over employees, usually to the detriment of employees.
00:19:57 ◼ ► And if all the companies do it, then it's like, "Well, you don't like it, go work somewhere else."
00:20:01 ◼ ► Well, it looks like all the companies do that. Now the worker is at a loss because everybody does this terrible thing.
00:20:06 ◼ ► So I don't know how many of these things are illegal or will be deemed to be illegal or are illegal and just terrible.
00:20:13 ◼ ► I think the non-disparagement thing was dropped maybe by OpenAI, or maybe there was something else where it was like,
00:20:18 ◼ ► they won't get their stock options if they say anything bad about the company or all sorts of stuff like that.
00:20:23 ◼ ► And I think Sam Altman had to go, "Oh, we're never going to enforce that one, but if anyone ever tells you,
00:20:37 ◼ ► And if they refuse to remove the contract, you should think strongly about whether they're really not going to enforce it.
00:20:41 ◼ ► I mean, I would go even a little bit further than that and say, even if it's in a contract, don't assume they'll do it,
00:20:47 ◼ ► because they look at that and say, "Well, what if we just break this and what are you going to do, sue us?"
00:20:53 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I have been screwed by that in the past. Let me just say, I have not had great experiences selling apps in the past.
00:21:04 ◼ ► Yeah, so there's things like the National Labor Relations Board and other larger entities that say, "You as an individual employee are never going to be able to fight your giant employer over any of these things,
00:21:13 ◼ ► but there are large organizations that will try to back you with money and expertise and legal things."
00:21:24 ◼ ► This is why Apple would want to have-- yet another reason Apple would want to have an observer on the board,
00:21:29 ◼ ► because maybe they discuss issues like this in the board meetings and maybe Phil Schiller can say, "Hey, guys, this is not the way.
00:21:36 ◼ ► Non-disparagement agreements are not going to save you. Drop them. It's not worth your time. Concentrate on the important stuff.
00:21:43 ◼ ► The whistleblower protection thing, what do you think you're going to be doing that you need this protection?
00:21:51 ◼ ► Things aren't going great over there at OpenAI, I feel like. And also, by the way, the framing of this story,
00:22:00 ◼ ► and I think the Washington Post story, "Privoting employees from warning regulators about the grave risks technology may pose to humanity."
00:22:13 ◼ ► It's like stopping employees from warning regulators about-- and I'm waiting for them to say things my company is doing that is illegal,
00:22:20 ◼ ► and it immediately buys into the idea of "grave risk humanity" because the computers are going to take over and we're going to be enslaved in the matrix.
00:22:34 ◼ ► "Of course, we don't want companies-- Apple doesn't want whistleblowers telling us about their holographic glasses that weigh two ounces."
00:22:44 ◼ ► What glass is the weight to it? "Well, they don't exist, but come on, they're probably going to make them by next week or something."
00:22:52 ◼ ► It's the whole idea that OpenAI kind of believes, and many people who work there believe, that we have these LLMs, dot dot dot, real artificial intelligence.
00:23:04 ◼ ► I'm personally not currently extremely scared about being warned about the grave risks that their technology may pose to humanity.
00:23:13 ◼ ► Other than the normal way of just big companies exploiting their workers and emitting greenhouse gases to put bad content on the web.
00:23:26 ◼ ► They can ruin things in other ways, but it's not because they're going to make an evil hell 9,000 that's going to enslave us all.
00:23:32 ◼ ► If they get to that point, we'll worry about that, but right now I think it's not something that I'm particularly concerned about.
00:23:38 ◼ ► Considering they can't seem to even run a company at a teenager level of responsibility and dignity, I'm not sure they're that close to cracking the hell 9,000 problem.
00:23:53 ◼ ► Apparently, the Apple Watch SE is getting a refresh, and it's going to have a different kind of casing.
00:24:04 ◼ ► Apple is working on a new version of its lower-cost Apple Watch SE model, which it last updated in 2022.
00:24:09 ◼ ► One idea that the company has tested is swapping out the aluminum shell in favor of rigid plastic.
00:24:18 ◼ ► In a vacuum, first of all, we have to acknowledge that rumors about new Apple Watch cases, case styles, all these things, they have been comically unreliable.
00:24:30 ◼ ► So, who knows what this means, if anything. But, that being said, I think the idea of a cheaper Apple Watch, like ways to make the Apple Watch cheaper, it makes a ton of sense in an abstract way.
00:24:44 ◼ ► Because, you look at the market for smart watches and smart wearables that kind of compete with smart watches, like little Fitbits things,
00:24:51 ◼ ► there is a huge market for less expensive wearable computer watch kind of things, or fitness trackers, than what the Apple Watch SE currently reaches.
00:25:08 ◼ ► It's usually around that range. The thing is, if you look at what people actually buy and wear out there, the Apple Watch is doing great.
00:25:15 ◼ ► But, there is also a huge market of people who buy things that are a lot cheaper than that.
00:25:20 ◼ ► And obviously, there are regular watches that aren't smart, things like G-Shocks and Timex and stuff like that, those are way cheaper.
00:25:30 ◼ ► But, if you want fitness tracking, there is also this huge market of fitness trackers that Apple is currently not really competing that well with.
00:25:39 ◼ ► The Apple Watch is, by all means, a huge success, but there is this whole other market that is below what the Apple Watch prices cover.
00:25:52 ◼ ► So, if Apple wants to address that market, they're going to have to make significantly larger cuts to the Apple Watch than what we see them doing right now with the SE, which is basically like...
00:26:04 ◼ ► The strategy is basically like issue a special kind of cut-down version based on maybe some older components and without some of the higher-end features.
00:26:16 ◼ ► I heard this idea floated on a couple of podcasts recently and various analysts, things like, what if they actually release something that's more like a fitness band that maybe doesn't even run WatchOS?
00:26:32 ◼ ► What if it is just something that is like the Apple Band or whatever they would call it, who knows?
00:26:37 ◼ ► But maybe it doesn't even run apps, because the Apple Watch as an app platform is not very fully realized. It is not very, as far as I can tell, not very widely used as an app platform as far as third-party apps.
00:26:50 ◼ ► It seems like most people have settled in on using the Apple Watch for mostly just Apple's apps and even then, mostly notifications and fitness-related stuff and health tracking.
00:27:01 ◼ ► If you look at what those smaller fitness band kind of things do, they're not running whole apps on them.
00:27:19 ◼ ► But, that's enough for most people and that's actually what a lot of people want out of their products.
00:27:23 ◼ ► So, what's interesting is that, yeah, okay, if Apple can try to address this market by changing the case material, fine.
00:27:32 ◼ ► But, I think a better question to ask is, if they want to address a lower-end market, does it need to even be a watchOS running computer?
00:27:43 ◼ ► Does it need to be like the big, squarish screen or could it be something like a slim OLED that's just like a little strip or something?
00:27:53 ◼ ► There's so many things that people do with these fitness trackers that they're very happy to choose those instead of Apple watches.
00:27:59 ◼ ► And, I think if Apple wants to really expand its market of wearables on the wrist, that's probably the direction they should look at going.
00:28:09 ◼ ► But, I think I would challenge the assumption not does the Apple watch need to be made of metal, but does the Apple watch need to be a full-blown app running platform?
00:28:28 ◼ ► I don't know much about it, so forgive me, but I know that's a category people are very excited about recently.
00:28:33 ◼ ► There are rumors of Apple working on a ring, but there have been for years, obviously, that they haven't actually made a product yet.
00:28:39 ◼ ► So, I think people are very interested in fitness tracking wearables that are smaller and cheaper than the Apple watch and maybe are more discreet or can be worn in different ways or things like that.
00:29:00 ◼ ► I want to know what that looks like because the rest of the industry is doing it and succeeding at it and people like them.
00:29:07 ◼ ► So, if they want to broaden their appeal for lower-end or lower-priced Apple watch type products, I would look at that, not just making the case out of plastic.
00:29:17 ◼ ► Now, going back to the actual rumor, if it is just a plastic case, I think that could have some benefits.
00:29:24 ◼ ► Plastic is very light and very durable and, of course, it is, I think it tends to be cheaper than metal almost always.
00:29:59 ◼ ► But I don't think just changing it to plastic would make a big enough difference to the price.
00:30:05 ◼ ► Like, if it lets them drop it from $250 to like $225, I don't think it would be that much bigger of a difference.
00:30:14 ◼ ► I mean, they would have to be doing other things besides just the case material to meaningfully drop that price.
00:30:23 ◼ ► But I would like to see them try different types of wearables entirely in order to address that same market.
00:30:33 ◼ ► Like, rumors of inside of Apple efforts to take an existing product and make a cheaper version of it, right?
00:30:45 ◼ ► The Vision Pro was saying that the aluminum enclosure there is probably surprisingly expensive.
00:30:50 ◼ ► With the watch, it's not just because it's metal, but it's also because it's how many machining steps does it take to make that metal out of presumably a solid block of aluminum or whatever.
00:30:59 ◼ ► Whereas, you know, molding plastic into that shape is much more straightforward process than machining it.
00:31:05 ◼ ► The story here is like, oh, and I'm sure this is just speculation, but it's not presented as such.
00:31:17 ◼ ► So Apple is at like, you know, $250, they want to get down to $199 to compete with other smart watches.
00:31:22 ◼ ► That doesn't ring true to me, because since when does Apple care about matching the price of competing products?
00:31:29 ◼ ► But kind of like with the headset, and as you were mentioning, I think plastic or composite or something that's not metal has actual advantages for a watch thing.
00:31:40 ◼ ► Because weight does matter in some context. Someone is running with a watch or whatever.
00:31:44 ◼ ► Having a lightweight one is nice, right? Some people choose lightweight bands for that reason, right?
00:31:49 ◼ ► That's an advantage to plastic. It's not like it's a downgrade, oh, it's not as nice, whatever.
00:31:54 ◼ ► It's an upgrade in many ways. You know, durability, resistance to dents and stuff like that.
00:31:59 ◼ ► I just, when you're looking at the watch and you're trying to figure out where can I extract cost, it's tough.
00:32:07 ◼ ► Because that thing is small, you've got a screen, a battery, the SOC, the case, that's basically it.
00:32:16 ◼ ► You don't have a lot of stuff that you can remove. You could try to remove sensors and stuff, but it's really, that's getting into your thing, Marco.
00:32:27 ◼ ► But if you want a full-fledged Apple watch and you want to make it cheaper, like historically Apple has done the Tim Cook method, which is like, which one have we been making for four years?
00:32:34 ◼ ► And we've already earned out all the machines and all the labor and whatever, and now we can make it cheaply.
00:32:39 ◼ ► But I think if any product is going to say, let's investigate what we can do with plastics or whatever, I think the headset and the watch are two strong contenders.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And with the laptop, what we've always been talking about is, is there some material that might suit this, like carbon fiber or some sort of thing that is lighter than aluminum but just as strong?
00:33:00 ◼ ► The answer so far from Apple's product releases has been no, right? Which is fine. Like laptops are great. Aluminum is a good material for them, but you're always looking for the next materials breakthrough.
00:33:09 ◼ ► Since this is a rumor about the SE and not like the on again, off again rumored Apple watch 10/X for the 10th anniversary of the watch, it's going to be a total form factor redesign.
00:33:19 ◼ ► And by the way, the most recent rumor about that is, forget it, it's off. No Apple watch 10. We're bailing on that.
00:33:26 ◼ ► It's just going to look like the existing watch with a little bit bigger screens. But anyway, if there's going to be some materials breakthrough, a carbon fiber watch, some sort of composite material that is as strong as aluminum, but lighter and fancier and like whatever.
00:33:39 ◼ ► I assume that would be on a high end watch, not a low end one. But yeah, it's hard to extract money from the Apple watch if you want it to be a full fledged Apple watch, like the little chip that's in there.
00:33:49 ◼ ► Can't be too expensive. I imagine the screen is probably still the most expensive component, but who knows? Maybe the case is the most expensive. So I'm kind of rooting for this rumor.
00:33:57 ◼ ► I think Apple should look into other materials for some of its devices. And I think they have been looking to other materials. They just never got one. They said, this is it. We're going to ship this.
00:34:07 ◼ ► They've just been like, you know what? Aluminum glass. It's what we know. And it's still the best. It's still the best option. I just hope one day that won't be true for some product.
00:34:15 ◼ ► Although I would argue that the Vision Pro definitely wasn't the best choice, but sure looks nice in the showroom.
00:34:21 ◼ ► I wonder too, like for the environmental angle, I would assume, although I don't know this, but I would assume that their low end metal, which is aluminum, which is extremely easily recyclable, might be easier for environmental goals than plastic, which is not super easy to work into a recycling flow.
00:34:39 ◼ ► Yeah, but I mean there's like, so car makers have been walking this route of like Volvo and Polestar, I forget which one of them is more or less, like, you know, everything in this car interior is 100% recycled, including all the things that you would think are plastic.
00:34:51 ◼ ► It's recycled composite plastic made from bottle caps or whatever, right? There are ways to do plastic in a more environmentally sound way. And depending on what metals you're using, aluminum is probably not that bad, but various other metals that you have to mine from the earth have a big carbon footprint and everything.
00:35:07 ◼ ► So, also it's a very small amount of plastic or whatever. So I would hope that if Apple ever did anything that some kind of plastic composite or whatever, they do have options for it to be, you know, made from old tennis balls or whatever, whatever they, whatever recycled plastic.
00:35:23 ◼ ► Recycled plastic is not like, oh, it's magic, you get it for free, there's no additional waste, you know, it's just, it's better than, you know, straight brand new plastic made from petroleum or whatever.
00:35:33 ◼ ► But there is a spectrum of how good it can be. But yeah, aluminum, I mean, that's part of the reason Apple, I imagine, sticks with aluminum is they've been slowly transitioning their products bit by bit to be more and more recycled aluminum.
00:35:46 ◼ ► What does that mean? Recycled aluminum? Like how much better is it than mined aluminum? It's, you know, we don't get the details, but in general, Apple has been walking down that path and they may be racing ahead of what they can possibly do with recycled plastics.
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00:38:17 ◼ ► Yeah, that's very, very fair. I like Apple's take on various blacks and space gray and this and that and the other thing. They're ones that I prefer over others but they're all basically the same.
00:38:29 ◼ ► And so yeah, reading from MacRumors, Apple today announced that the existing HomePod Mini is now available in a midnight color option which replaces the nearly identical space gray color previously offered.
00:38:42 ◼ ► This is such a weird thing that it makes me, what I immediately thought is whatever company was making them the space gray mesh that you put over the top went out of business or otherwise ran afoul of Apple and they're just like, we're splitsville with this company and this color.
00:39:03 ◼ ► And so we need a new color that fills that slot and so rather than space gray which is one of the darker of the million space grays that Apple has ever made, we're going to make a new color and call it midnight solely because Apple is one of those companies that tends not to release a product in a particular color.
00:39:24 ◼ ► And then two years later, the thing with the exact color name is actually a slightly different color. Like imagine if you got a HomePod Mini years ago because it's like a 2020, 2021 product.
00:39:34 ◼ ► You got one years ago and then you decide you want a stereo pair so you buy one in the same color and they don't quite match. Like one is a little bit darker than the other.
00:39:43 ◼ ► Lots of companies will do that. Lots of products will do that and yes, this is setting aside like it was in the sun and the UV bleached or whatever, right?
00:39:50 ◼ ► If Apple makes a product with one of its ridiculous color names and they make it for years and years, it better be that same color all of those years.
00:39:58 ◼ ► That's the type of thing that I can imagine Apple being a stickler about. So I looked at this and I'm like, maybe they just couldn't get that old color and they had to get a replacement color but they don't even imply that it's also space gray which is ridiculous because as we said, they have a million different space grays.
00:40:10 ◼ ► But within any given product, any given year, any given model, space gray should be consistent. Like all the space gray iPhone 14 Pros should all look exactly the same even though they look totally different than the space gray iPhone 15 Pros and so on and so forth.
00:40:24 ◼ ► That's what I read on this story but boy, it's so weird because the HomePod Mini hasn't been updated in forever. What does it have in it? Like the S5 chip or something?
00:40:33 ◼ ► I think the HomePod Mini was released three or four years ago. It absolutely does not have enough RAM for Apple intelligence.
00:40:41 ◼ ► It gets a press release? Hey, here's a HomePod Mini in a color that is almost identical to a previous color but not.
00:40:50 ◼ ► So just be aware if you didn't buy a matching space gray one for your stereo pair, don't get this one. It won't exactly match.
00:40:56 ◼ ► Frankly, I kind of don't understand what's going on with this quote release. If they didn't have a press release, it would have made a lot more sense.
00:41:06 ◼ ► Okay, they updated the color. Oh well. But it's just so funny to me. Maybe they're trying to drum up sales of the HomePod Mini?
00:41:15 ◼ ► Because the HomePod Mini is a fine product. It's a very good value for sound quality, for how small it is, and how inexpensive it is.
00:41:26 ◼ ► It is one of the best values in Apple's lineup, really. The HomePod Mini costs as much as some Apple Watch bands.
00:41:32 ◼ ► So it really does make a lot of, it's a very good value for the hundred bucks it costs. It is by far the best smart speaker that is anywhere near its size. Like it is very, very small.
00:41:45 ◼ ► And produces surprisingly decent sound for its size and cost. So it's a good product. But yeah, it's ancient.
00:41:53 ◼ ► And I think the HomePod line is going to start looking even worse as hopefully Siri gets better with Apple Intelligence.
00:42:02 ◼ ► And so to draw any attention to it right before the launch of the Siri Apple Intelligence update, and have these products kind of be still fairly bad in that area, probably forever, that's a little odd.
00:42:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know. I've never entirely understood a HomePod. I've never owned one. I have friends that have them and like them very much. But I don't know, it's not for me.
00:42:32 ◼ ► All right, and then Apple has been rumored recently over the last few weeks in particular to have some sort of home accessories. So this is reading from MacRumors.
00:42:41 ◼ ► "Code discovered on Apple's back end by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.
00:42:49 ◼ ► The code references the device with the identifier HomeAccessory17,1, which is a new identifier category. The name is similar to the HomePod's audio accessory identifier.
00:42:57 ◼ ► The 17,1 in the identifier suggests that this device may receive Apple's upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year, allegedly.
00:43:07 ◼ ► With the A18 chip, the home accessory device will have the power for Apple intelligence. This code also indicates that this quote-unquote home accessory will be running a software variant of TVOS, much like the HomePod.
00:43:18 ◼ ► Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple's work on HomeOS, which could be the firmware running on this device.
00:43:24 ◼ ► The code also references two unreleased Apple TV models with the identifiers AppleTV14,4 and AppleTV14,5. Rumors suggest that an updated Apple TV could launch in 2024."
00:43:35 ◼ ► Additionally, there are rumors about touchscreen-ready interfaces that you can find in certain places, now reading from 9to5Mac.
00:43:45 ◼ ► The latest beta version of TVOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface that is touchscreen-ready. The new TVOS interface, or system shell, is internally called plasterboard, similar to springboard, the iOS system shell.
00:43:56 ◼ ► It provides some core interface elements for the system. 9to5Mac was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the TVOS 18 Beta 3 code.
00:44:05 ◼ ► The new TVOS plasterboard interface has a lock screen with a passcode keypad, similar to the one on the iPhone and iPad.
00:44:12 ◼ ► The plasterboard interface seems to be in early stage development, so there's not much to see beyond basic lock screen controls.
00:44:18 ◼ ► This is all swirling around the rumors of an Apple home thing, which I guess is in the same category as Apple TV or the various home pods, with a screen.
00:44:34 ◼ ► A lot of the imagined concept art in the rumor stories, they take a home pod and they would put a screen on the little circle part at the top of the home pod where it had the swirly lights or whatever, which is always kind of weird.
00:44:45 ◼ ► And other ones will just take a big home pod and slap a rectangular screen on it or whatever.
00:44:50 ◼ ► We've talked for years about the useful things that can be done on a screen with a home type accessory.
00:45:01 ◼ ► I know a lot of people have got the Amazon ones, and like many Amazon things, those screens end up as just an opportunity for you to show your advertisements, which is not great.
00:45:11 ◼ ► Presumably Apple would do less of that, except for advertising their own products, as we discussed in the previous episode.
00:45:24 ◼ ► This is also the vessel for everyone's hopes and dreams, because they're like, "It'll be a big home pod with amazing sound, and it'll have a screen, and it'll show my kid's calendar and everything on it.
00:45:33 ◼ ► And it'll also be my Apple TV, and it'll also be my mesh Wi-Fi router for the whole house, and it'll also be my internet gateway and my security."
00:45:43 ◼ ► If we looked at one that Apple has actually shipped into the home, they tend to not have a lot of computing power and not do too many things.
00:45:51 ◼ ► The Apple TV is the big bruiser in the home because it tends to have the best chip in it so it can literally do its job to show 4K HDR video or whatever.
00:46:01 ◼ ► And even that is massively underpowered compared to an M4 iPad or even an iPhone these days.
00:46:07 ◼ ► But a home accessory with a screen that is in your house, I squint at it and I say, "What will this be doing for me? Will this be a speaker? Will this be an Apple TV with a screen? That doesn't make sense."
00:46:22 ◼ ► A speaker with a screen makes me think, "Well, to do its job as a speaker is kind of at odds with the screen part." Or will it just be a thing that's not a speaker and not an Apple TV and has some dinky little watch chip in it and has a screen attached to it and just lets you see your kid's calendar and talk to Apple's voice assistant and hopefully, cheese, hopefully have enough RAM to run Apple intelligence.
00:46:46 ◼ ► And that would be, I guess, I don't know, I guess the equivalent of Amazon Echo or something, but those are all speakers too.
00:46:54 ◼ ► So I don't understand these rumors. I don't understand the, like, seeing actual code in tvOS betas that seem to show a lock screen only makes sense in the context of, I suppose, a thing with a device.
00:47:09 ◼ ► Because I'm trying to think, is there a context on tvOS, on an Apple TV where you have a lock screen? I don't think so. People don't have touch screen TVs and I don't think they'd make you use the keypad to unlock it with a numerical code or whatever.
00:47:19 ◼ ► But anyway, these rumors I've mostly been ignoring because there's been a lot of smoke but no fire here for years.
00:47:25 ◼ ► But now that there's actual code being released that has traces of this in it, that makes me think that something is happening.
00:47:31 ◼ ► So we've got device identifiers and we've got code, but for the life of me I can't think of what this thing could possibly be other than, like, a not very good speaker with a not very good screen on it.
00:47:41 ◼ ► I mean, I'm assuming, I mean, obviously I'm sure it would have some kind of basic speaker functionality.
00:47:47 ◼ ► I think it would be a lot like, you know, the Amazon Show kind of devices, but I think Apple's angle on it, hopefully, would be a lot like, is it called standby mode on the iPhone where you turn it on the side? Is that what it's called? Yeah.
00:48:00 ◼ ► - Standby mode for HomeKit? - Yeah, like, I think it would basically be like a projection of, you know, maybe it would run its own, like, iOS apps or more likely maybe it would like project the widgets from your phone for standby mode the same way your phone can project its stuff onto a nearby Mac.
00:48:16 ◼ ► Maybe that's how it would work, but I think that would kind of be Apple's angle, is like, it would be something similar to what we see as standby mode on the iPhone of just like a way for apps to project limited kind of dashboardy status kind of things to be displayed in the home along with obviously being a Siri terminal the same way home pods are.
00:48:39 ◼ ► My concern is not that it would be a crappy speaker. Apple has a really good track record of making extremely good speakers, especially for their size, for quite some time now, probably almost a decade.
00:48:51 ◼ ► Like, their audio engineering team has been really, really good and they make very good speakers now.
00:48:56 ◼ ► So I think I wouldn't be too skeptical about it having a good speaker system for playing music.
00:49:03 ◼ ► My worry is, as always, Siri, which, you know, we'll see, hopefully something new in this department would be able to run Apple intelligence and would be able to have the whatever advanced Siri stuff is going to come.
00:49:15 ◼ ► I think my larger worry is that what we've seen with the home pods so far is they really don't put a lot of effort into them and they're really buggy.
00:49:27 ◼ ► And so what this ends up giving us is hardware that is not updated very often with software that is unreliable and a voice assistant that is not very good.
00:49:37 ◼ ► And it's been very frustrating, as we talked about on the show, like, they make really great speakers and then, you know, Siri and the software kind of let them down over time.
00:49:46 ◼ ► If they're going to do something like this, what's going to change that? What's going to make them care more to invest in the, you know, the software and these products that are probably going to be, quote, "hobby levels of sales"?
00:50:01 ◼ ► Are they going to be able to actually push it and make them good and care about them enough to, like, follow through?
00:50:08 ◼ ► Because Apple starts a bunch of stuff and then, like, there's not enough follow through. So if this becomes that kind of product the same way the home pods typically have been, I don't think I would trust it to be very good or to stay very good over time.
00:50:20 ◼ ► But if they actually, like, put some effort behind it, this could be a really nice thing that many of us have on our kitchen counters in a year or two.
00:50:28 ◼ ► It makes sense if, you know, the home strategy is kind of like fumbling and slow as it's been to have some kind of, like, home control center, like in the ideal Apple home. All your accessories are home kit.
00:50:38 ◼ ► You control your climate controls on there. All your smart lights are on there. You can see your security cameras on there.
00:50:45 ◼ ► And then also you have access to all of your Apple information, like your calendars that you share with your family and just, like, having a screen somewhere in your house where it's like, you know, there's tons of ways to do that.
00:50:56 ◼ ► You can talk to your phone to do it. You can talk into the air and a home pod will hear you. Like, you can do all sorts of stuff to control that, but having a screen where it's like, this is my dashboard for my house.
00:51:04 ◼ ► That makes perfect sense. And it also does make sense why people see that and say, it should also be my Wi-Fi router and all the other stuff or whatever.
00:51:12 ◼ ► My concerns about it being a speaker, like, it should also be a speaker. Well, it probably has to have some kind of speaker, but I'm not concerned that it's going to be a bad speaker as in, like, just, you know, doesn't sound good for the cost of the speaker.
00:51:26 ◼ ► I'm afraid that the device will be, like, as expensive as a big home pod with the audio quality of the small home pod, the home pod menu, whatever.
00:51:34 ◼ ► And that's not a great combination. And, like, honestly, the, like, home dashboard screen thing probably shouldn't go in the same place as you would put a speaker unless it's a home pod mini quality speaker.
00:51:47 ◼ ► Because you're just like, oh, we want this to be in the kitchen. And it's nice to have music in the kitchen and it's fine. But if you have big home pods, people are setting them up or in the music listening room or whatever around their TV.
00:51:56 ◼ ► So I still think there is kind of a conflict. Also with the idea that the screen is some big flat thing that they have to arrange in some way where it doesn't bounce the sound from the speaker off, right?
00:52:06 ◼ ► Because you're not going to just, I don't, I don't envision it as being that little circle on top of the full-size home pod being a screen. I envision the screen being bigger than that.
00:52:13 ◼ ► Like, what I'm looking at this as kind of like a cheap home iPad, right? Because you need kind of at least an iPad mini-size screen, right? And something capable of running some kind of dashboardy widget-y type things on it, like the standby screen and all that.
00:52:30 ◼ ► I just, I don't know. I worry that, like, I think Apple, and to be clear, I think Apple should have a product in this category. They should have a screen thing that controls your house. I'm just not sure Apple is going to strike the right balance between the cost of the thing, the size of the screen, the quality of the audio, and the voice assistant.
00:52:46 ◼ ► Like, if this thing, if this product comes out and it can't do Apple intelligence, I'm going to be like, what are you even doing over there? And you may think, that's not going to happen. This thing hasn't even released yet. Surely it will be out with Apple intelligence. But everything is so compartmentalized, and to your point, Marco, the home, whatever section of the company does the home products does not seem to have a lot of resources, money, time, and effort put into it, right?
00:53:07 ◼ ► And that's not the fault of the people working on it. It's the priority set by the company, right? Which is probably based on the sales of those things or whatever. But if you're going to be in the home, be in the home. Have a full line of products. Have a suite of things that works together. Eventually have a Wi-Fi mesh router. But, you know, baby steps, right?
00:53:24 ◼ ► But a thing with the screen would be a good start. I just like it. What is what does this land in? It lands in an environment where the Apple TV is the best product in the entire, like, family of the home products, which not to be able to be as bad or anything, but who would have thought that years ago?
00:53:40 ◼ ► He's like, the home pod, the big home pod is still not setting the world on fire, and the mini is good for what it is, but it is still mini, and the number of updates these products get is low, and they're all all these products that depend entirely on you talking to them because they don't have any screens or any other interface are not getting Apple's new thing that you talk to, which really just puts a pall over the entire home product line of saying, oh, so all the things I talked to my house, they're not getting any smarter.
00:54:07 ◼ ► And there's been a couple stories about this people surmising like, you know, are theorizing how Apple might deal with that, you know, can they do it all on the server and send it back? Are they not going to do it on the server and send it back because that will require big software updates to deal with that because of the way they do things now, and it would make them even less responsive, and they're already not responsive because they're slow.
00:54:26 ◼ ► Like, it's not set in stone that these things will never get smarter, but our hopes are low, our expectations are low based on how again how much effort is put into these products to begin with and how reliable they've been for even the basic functionality that they've had for years and years.
00:54:41 ◼ ► Yeah, so I feel kind of like we're like, you know, when Jason Stahle has that like Apple report card every year and he asked about the home stuff and it's like, I always give it kind of a not great grade because I just feel like the effort's not there every once in a while there's a standout product.
00:54:56 ◼ ► I do like the Apple TV, but, you know, another product that's going to be hooked into this whole big ecosystem, you know, we're still waiting for that big matter and threads radio revolution to make everything more reliable and standardized and interworking with everything else and we're just not there yet.
00:55:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know, this is just something I personally don't have any particular need for so it's hard for me to get super excited about it.
00:55:22 ◼ ► I think it's something that Apple should absolutely be exploring and it sounds like that's what they're doing, but I don't know, I don't feel like I have a need for a screen in my kitchen and, you know, we have some friends that have a big Amazon doodad in their kitchen.
00:55:37 ◼ ► Probably like a 13 screen or something like that and it's just not for me and it seems like it does show some useful and informative things but generally speaking it's like you said it seems to largely be trying to hock different things at Amazon. It's just not for me.
00:55:53 ◼ ► I wonder how many people have an old iPad in their kitchen and use that as like their kitchen speaker through like the iPad speakers, you know what I mean? Like because having an iPad in the kitchen for doing recipe stuff or having a calendar up on is like I know a lot of people who have screens in their kitchen for that purpose.
00:56:09 ◼ ► So it's essentially the modern equivalent of the calendar that's like, you know, magneted to your refrigerator that shows all the kids activities and stuff. Most people track that online these days. Having a visual representation of the family calendar in the family place like the kitchen makes sense.
00:56:24 ◼ ► And also you can watch shows on it while you're doing dishes or pull up recipes or play music from from across the kitchen like a five year old iPads speakers or whatever, but iPads are expensive and not exactly well suited to that as they sit on whatever, you know, foldy triangle stand that they came with years ago that's all disgusting from sitting on kitchen counters or whatever.
00:56:45 ◼ ► You can imagine a better product in that area. But like when I look at the iPad, and then I look at everything Apple makes in the home, it's clear which one of those products gets more attention and is generally better executed. And it's the iPad. iPads are expensive, and they're usually pretty good, especially when they're new. And Apple's home products, neither one of those things is really true about.
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00:59:09 ◼ ► All right, this is from anonymous. Given Syracuse's frequent mentions of the ancient relic of a bygone time called Pearl...
00:59:20 ◼ ► I think it was implied. Is there a reason to learn Pearl today? No. Do we need to keep reading? I think we're good.
00:59:26 ◼ ► Obviously, there's always the chance of becoming the one person who can maintain this critical COBOL pipeline at a place that has such a case with Pearl.
00:59:35 ◼ ► But I mean worthwhile more in the sense of this will teach you something useful about programming that will benefit your non-Pearl work.
00:59:41 ◼ ► Or pure, this is a good intellectual pursuit. So obviously, Jon, you're going to say, "Heck yes."
00:59:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean especially with this framing. Like, this will teach you something about programming? Absolutely.
00:59:54 ◼ ► Like, one of the things I'm always touting about Pearl is that I'm so glad that I learned it very deeply very early in my career.
01:00:02 ◼ ► For many reasons, but also for this reason of like teaching you something useful about programming.
01:00:08 ◼ ► Every concept that I eventually encountered in some other language, I encountered first in Pearl.
01:00:19 ◼ ► And also, for whatever reason, the people attracted to Pearl use that ability to explore lots of weird computing concepts.
01:00:26 ◼ ► Stuff that took years and years to show up in other languages. And I'm not talking about regular expressions.
01:00:38 ◼ ► And obviously single-inheritance and multiple-inheritance and all the things that everyone knows from older languages.
01:00:49 ◼ ► How to make your own object system. How that should work. How to do meta-programming languages.
01:00:58 ◼ ► Now, it was in Pearl in a weird way made by one or two people that was not an official part of the language, yada yada yada.
01:01:03 ◼ ► But it's kind of like a little build-your-own-language construction kit because Pearl was so powerful and had so many capabilities to experiment with things.
01:01:14 ◼ ► And most of the experiments were in the Pearl ecosystem failures or didn't catch on or whatever.
01:01:19 ◼ ► But you would encounter them and maybe even use them to do a useful project and learn what their pros and cons are.
01:01:27 ◼ ► Were you to learn Pearl, even today, I think, and say it was like your first or second language, like you learned some other more mainstream language than you learned Pearl.
01:01:35 ◼ ► If you really learned all about Pearl and used it to do stuff, when you moved on to let's say Swift, there is very little in Swift that you would look at and not have seen something like that in Pearl.
01:01:44 ◼ ► Even all the weird concurrency stuff and all that, like, there are equivalents to that in Pearl and you'd squint and say, "Oh, this is how Swift is dealing with that problem. I've seen something similar to this.
01:01:56 ◼ ► And so, yes, I think you will learn tons of concepts if you really get into Pearl and into the ecosystem or whatever.
01:02:02 ◼ ► Now the ecosystem is kind of old and crusty at this point and you might have to do a little archaeology to find all those failed experiments in the past.
01:02:08 ◼ ► But having lived through it in real time when they weren't failed experiments, it did definitely prepare me for that.
01:02:12 ◼ ► Second thing is, benefiting your non-Pearl work, if you do anything where you might need a scripting language to do stuff on a UNIX system,
01:02:26 ◼ ► Obviously, you can do it in shell script and more advanced shells have more advanced features.
01:02:30 ◼ ► You could use any, you know, you can use Node.js, you can use Python, you can use Ruby, you can use any of these sort of dynamic programming languages and quote-unquote scripting languages.
01:02:39 ◼ ► But Pearl is still in that conversation. It's commonly found and depending on what you're doing, Pearl might be the fastest, best, and easiest way to do it.
01:02:48 ◼ ► Obviously, I do tons of stuff like this on my system in Pearl because it's the language I know the best.
01:02:52 ◼ ► But even if I didn't, even if you're not a Pearl person, you will have occasion to encounter a task where the best solution is a three-line Pearl script.
01:03:01 ◼ ► And your ability to make that three-line Pearl script instead of banging your head against a shell or trying to remember how to do it in your favorite programming language where you tend not to do tasks like that.
01:03:09 ◼ ► Pearl is a utility thing that has not gone away for decades and I think will be a good thing to have in your toolkit if you're kind of a Unix-assisted type person who needs to do Unix scripting tasks.
01:03:23 ◼ ► Because Pearl really does give you scripty, very friendly access to the whole Unix API.
01:03:29 ◼ ► It's even a great way to just like if you wanted to do something, you wanted to write it in C against the POSIX API, you can write that same thing in Pearl without having to worry about segfaulting or whatever.
01:03:39 ◼ ► And then figure out your ideas, figure out what you're going to do, and then go write it in the quote "real language" after that because the APIs are so similar.
01:03:47 ◼ ► And then, yeah, obviously, being the one person who knows Pearl in a company that has a huge codebase like that, hopefully you don't find yourself in that situation, but it is.
01:03:56 ◼ ► It is a thing that can potentially, like those COBOL people, get you paid a lot of money if you really are the only person.
01:04:03 ◼ ► Unfortunately, I'm going to say with Pearl, there's tons of people who know it, so it's not going to be like COBOL where you're going to be paid some huge sum of money to come in and rescue a company with a codebase that no one else can understand.
01:04:17 ◼ ► Do you think, genuinely, that there's an appealing or compelling reason to learn it for production code?
01:04:26 ◼ ► Like, if you were to do presumably something web today, would you suggest Pearl as a choice for some web-based thing?
01:04:35 ◼ ► Probably not for web-based stuff. For production stuff, as a glue language, it depends. If there's another language that a product is already using that can fill that role, then just use the other language.
01:04:51 ◼ ► But if you're in a situation where there's nothing filling this kind of glue role and the other language is Rust or Swift or something, I would say Pearl is better suited to those glue language type tasks than either of those languages.
01:05:02 ◼ ► So knowing it and being able to deploy it for the things that it's good at is important.
01:05:07 ◼ ► And, like I said, for one-off little thingies that you need to do to do some simple thing, it's good to know this.
01:05:14 ◼ ► I see people all the time trying to do stuff with shell script, and I look at it and it's like, this is why Pearl was invented.
01:05:20 ◼ ► Because shell script was annoying and you could make these complicated, huge pipelines in Unix with awk and grep and sed, and it's like, how about we just combine all that plus access to the full Unix API in one language?
01:05:31 ◼ ► That's Pearl, right? So it seems like people are going back in time and they're like, oh, I need to do this task, and they start writing a shell script, and in the shell script they're using sed and awk.
01:05:39 ◼ ► And it's like, you've forgotten your history. That was found to be unsatisfactory and not as portable as you wanted and slow and annoying and buggy, and that's what Pearl is for.
01:05:52 ◼ ► If you are in that mindset and you're comfortable with those tools, you will also be comfortable with Pearl instead of having to use multiple different tools and worry about different versions of grep across systems and worrying about if everybody has bash or if they're just using the born shell or if they're using fish or whatever.
01:06:06 ◼ ► Pearl still fills that role. There's no replacement for that thing. It's just that that is a much smaller job than like you were saying, Casey.
01:06:14 ◼ ► You're like, oh, if you had to write a web app, would you write it today in Pearl? No. Of course, I wouldn't write it in PHP either, but then what do I end up working on at the time? A PHP web app.
01:06:28 ◼ ► All right. Thomas Brock writes, what is the correct placement for the charging port on an electric vehicle? So you can check your answers. Here's my answer key in the form of a tier list for Thomas. The S tier was left front quarter panel. So that's basically in front of the driver's door in countries where the driver is on the correct side of the car.
01:06:46 ◼ ► A tiers left rear quarter panel, front center. I'm not what was front center means. Oh, locations. The tier list. What's what's in the A tier left rear quarter panel and front center.
01:06:56 ◼ ► Sorry, I'm with you now. B right front quarter panel, C rear center and F right rear quarter panel.
01:07:04 ◼ ► I think for me, this is actually relevant because follow up, we ended up getting Erin a car. She has, we have leased for the very first time a brand new XC90 recharge, which is a plug in hybrid.
01:07:17 ◼ ► So we sort of kind of have an electric car now and hers is in the front left front quarter panel. So in front of the driver's door. I don't love it. I would prefer it in the back of the car.
01:07:30 ◼ ► It works. It's fine. But you know, we back into the garage because we are awesome. And so the back of the garage is where the charger plugs into the house and then you have to sling it all the way up the garage into the front of the garage where the where the plug or where the receptacle is for the car.
01:07:52 ◼ ► And that I don't love that. And yes, I suppose we could turn the car around if we really wanted to. But we've been parking this way for the 16 years we've been in the house. We're not going to change now.
01:08:02 ◼ ► So for me, I think rear the driver's side in whatever your particular country is the driver's side of the car in the rear quarter panel is what I would say is the best place for it.
01:08:13 ◼ ► So I as the only one of us who ever drives electric until I guess this moment. I agree. So with some asterisks. So the Rivian has it in the driver's side front corner.
01:08:25 ◼ ► Tesla's all have it in the driver's side back corner. And Tif's i3 has it I think in the worst place, which is the passenger side back corner.
01:08:34 ◼ ► The main question is how easy is it to charge it where wherever and however you park. So I think the driver's side wins no matter what.
01:08:43 ◼ ► Like it driver's side is always the right choice for you know, you know, left or right driver's side definitely because a lot of times you have to get out plug it in.
01:08:50 ◼ ► Then maybe get back into the car for some reason like to check to see if it's starting or whatever or just to hang out in the car while it charges.
01:08:56 ◼ ► So driver's side is the right answer for side but front or back there's benefits to both. The advantage of the back is it's generally easier if you back in to wherever you are.
01:09:09 ◼ ► And you do have to consider like you're going to charge it both, you know, at home hopefully if you have some kind of garage or set up there like you can charge it at home.
01:09:17 ◼ ► But also when you get to a fast charger on a long highway trip and how are those set up and how easy is it to pull in and out of those.
01:09:25 ◼ ► Some of those you could have actually like pull through arrangements but that's fairly unusual. Most of them are like they're in big rows with like you know one side solids that you can't pull all the way through.
01:09:36 ◼ ► So it is more convenient to have it on the back corner if you are a good enough driver to want to and be able to back into things reliably.
01:09:47 ◼ ► It is quite entertaining because this is where again this is where all Teslas have theirs. It is quite entertaining watching Tesla drivers pull into superchargers who you can tell they don't do this very often maybe.
01:10:00 ◼ ► And you can tell like oh this person has never had to back their car into a spot before. And it is you know quite entertaining watching it but anyway that I think is the best.
01:10:11 ◼ ► It's like the most convenient spot for it is the driver's side and if you like pulling into things you know backing into things then the back and if not then the front.
01:10:22 ◼ ► Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. John do you have an opinion about this despite being completely ignorant?
01:10:27 ◼ ► I do I mean I haven't actually ever charged an electric car so this is all just speculative but I was kind of thinking about like with gas cars like why it is where it is on gas cars and obviously it varies from car to car. Honda is a driver's side thing but I don't even need to mention where it is front rear because at least in this country it's pretty much always the back half of the car somewhere.
01:10:47 ◼ ► Back in the 70s sometimes it was literally like a dead center back like underneath the logo of the car maker or whatever but in general these days it's you know it's some part of the back half of the car. Right thinking companies put it on the driver's side for the reasons Marco mentioned. And companies that are doing it wrong.
01:11:03 ◼ ► I disagree with that actually I think it's better because both our cars have the gasoline going in the passenger side and while on the surface I agree with you that it should be on the on the driver's side what ends up happening is almost everyone has it on the driver's side like almost every car manufacturer does it on the driver's side and so if you're a passenger side car you can just scoot right up to the pump because more often than not nobody's there.
01:11:27 ◼ ► Well that's what I was getting at is like why like why is the back part setting aside the side why is the back part where it is and it has a lot to do with how quickly you can fill a car up with gas and with the way gas stations are structured to be kind of like a line of cars and you go in you fill up you go out you when you fill up you go out sometimes they stack them like my local gas station stacks the pumps next to each other so there's a front pump and a back pump in each of the little rows with the expectation that if the person the front pump is there and you pull in behind them at the back pump and the back pump is there.
01:11:55 ◼ ► And you pull in behind them at the back pump and the person the front pump will leave and now you're blocking you're at the back pump but you're blocking the front pump but no big deal you're probably going to be gone in two minutes anyway because how long does it take to fill up with gas like it doesn't jam up the thing you could never do electric charge like that because then you'd be there for 45 minutes and people be like I want to get to the pump in the front of you but I can't because you're blocking me they would never arrange electric car chargers that way because the cars could be there for a much longer time than just a few minutes and that's why if you're wondering like why are we having this discussion about gas pumps versus charging.
01:12:26 ◼ ► It's a very different usage case where the expectation is and again I know people go into the thing and they buy potato chips and they take too long or whatever but anyway you could be charging for 45 minutes and hopefully you're not going to be clogging up a gas pump for 45 minutes so that's why there's a different answer.
01:12:42 ◼ ► My personal preference would be for the same reason that I don't like backing into parking spots I want the port to be on the front because I think it is more time sensitive for you to get into the parking spot or the charging thing than it is for you to leave it.
01:12:57 ◼ ► You need to clear the parking lot or the line of cars trying to find a thing or whatever.
01:13:02 ◼ ► Get out of the flow and into your charging spot fast so don't take the time to go and stop and back in or whatever go nose first and I don't think the front center is great for that because that's a place where you can hit things and it'll screw up whatever so it's got to be on the quarter panel and I think it should be on the driver's side quarter panel.
01:13:19 ◼ ► As Thomas wrote reading from his message here bonus points for Porsche putting a charge port on both the left and right side like in the Macan lots of car companies do that the fancier ones will have a charge port on both sides of the car so you don't have to argue about which side but again I think the front is my preference because I'm not a backer-inner.
01:13:37 ◼ ► For the record real time follow up the reason the gas cap or whatever the gas chute I can't think of the word I'm looking for the thing where you put the gas the reason that's in the back is because typically the gas can or gas can is in the back.
01:13:52 ◼ ► Exactly. Man words are hard. So anyway so although even even in like well I guess it even in rear engine cars is there like the gas tank does move around in some cars in some ways and again it has been in different places historically you can find lots of old cars where the you'll show it to a modern person they just won't be able to find where they're supposed to put the gas in and not because it's electric.
01:14:18 ◼ ► Russell Fitzpatrick writes I've been using Arc backup for many years backs up to back please be to cloud storage which bills me per gigabyte per month.
01:14:26 ◼ ► I also use time machine to a local disk the monthly cloud storage bill keeps growing as my backup is incrementally added to over time I'd love to hear if you have a strategy to keep backup sizes from endlessly expanding over time.
01:14:36 ◼ ► Do you tell it thin it or just keep adding to it indefinitely and accept that the monthly bill will keep growing until you retire from using computers.
01:14:43 ◼ ► Great questions which I don't have a good answer. I will say and I think we talked about last week the week before my backup vortex had a little bit of a chink in the armor in so far as the Synology that was living at my parents house had died or so I thought.
01:15:00 ◼ ► What it ended up happening was forgive me if I'm repeating myself is that the power supply which is external on this particular Synology because it's a physically small Synology the brick power supply had failed so I got a new power supply now it's right as rain.
01:15:13 ◼ ► But I bring all this up to say depending on what your particular setup is you could get a duplicate of in you know how much you're willing to spend on it.
01:15:21 ◼ ► You could get a duplicate even a physically smaller and cheaper duplicate of your main you know network attached storage and put that at a friend's house at a relative's house or something like that and potentially back up to it.
01:15:32 ◼ ► And Synology makes this really easy to do. Granted Synology's are not cheap and you know filling them with hard drives is not free.
01:15:39 ◼ ► But I don't ever really have to worry about the size of things because in a worst case scenario I'll just either replace or add a new drive and suddenly I've got that much more space.
01:15:49 ◼ ► Marco I have a feeling you will not have too much to add here since you've mostly gotten out of this game and then John let's finish up with you please.
01:15:55 ◼ ► Yeah I don't currently use Arc. I switched back to just regular backblaze ever since I stopped really needing to back up a NAS.
01:16:06 ◼ ► So if your entire data set can be what's on your computer possibly plus also what's on an external drive then regular backblaze will back that up for its regular flat rate.
01:16:22 ◼ ► It's only a problem when you start talking about you know backing up network devices and network shares.
01:16:37 ◼ ► I think the, I mean that being said like you know Arc, if the problem is just the incremental backups just being you know changed data as opposed to lots of new data.
01:16:49 ◼ ► I think the incremental backups have various like thinning features built into the clients.
01:16:56 ◼ ► So you know in this case Arc, I'm pretty sure it has like retention management features to help keep the backups set you know to only keep say the last you know 60 days or whatever you want to set it to.
01:17:10 ◼ ► Yeah it's not entirely clear like how the decision to use Arc with backblaze B2 and Bcharge per gigabyte was arrived at.
01:17:17 ◼ ► Like if you're just backing up a single machine you can get a flat rate thing which is a great deal right.
01:17:30 ◼ ► And if for whatever reason the cloud backup you have is going to charge you per gigabyte because you can't use one of the flat rate ones or you just don't want to.
01:17:38 ◼ ► You're going to be faced with the problem we all face which is that we accumulate data that we care about over time.
01:17:48 ◼ ► And mostly we've been relying on the fact that storage gets cheaper over time because of the advances of technology.
01:17:56 ◼ ► The only way to stop that data from getting bigger over time is to die because you're going to be taking more pictures of your family and you're not going to.
01:18:05 ◼ ► You don't want to go back and throw out the baby pictures once you get the graduation pictures.
01:18:27 ◼ ► Again that's not changing it too much but you can you know you can get a one time dividend from that.
01:18:41 ◼ ► These days where applications basically come from the Internet and are often subscription based anyway.
01:18:52 ◼ ► Look at your applications folder say hey if I was setting up a new Mac can I get all these applications somewhere.
01:19:06 ◼ ► But the applications folder is not only potentially large but also a huge source of churn every time like the Adobe Updater runs and does a bunch of stuff.
01:19:13 ◼ ► And then you're just wasting time and churn and filling your incremental backups with you know 30 days worth of the updates to whatever the Mac App Store and the Adobe Updater is doing behind the scenes right.
01:19:25 ◼ ► You can go through your photos and start thinning them but I would caution you that it's very easy to get into a situation where you're either frustrated or panicked and decide you're going to get some storage back by deleting some pictures and regret that a few years later.
01:19:38 ◼ ► Because I mean you don't want to keep every picture but deleting stuff that is literally irreplaceable like years old pictures is something worth considering and not doing when you're again and frustrated or in a hurry or something like that.
01:20:03 ◼ ► You know don't back up stuff you don't actually need to keep things that you can get elsewhere.
01:20:13 ◼ ► Like just you know don't stop backing them up and you're like but what if I look what if I lose all my media.
01:20:25 ◼ ► It's like after a while you will have paid more than it would have cost to just buy like the streaming version of it in five years if you lose it right.
01:20:36 ◼ ► Well hopefully you still have those disks but if you don't you can probably buy them somewhere.
01:20:49 ◼ ► Anyway like really think about like what is actually what do I actually need to back up.
01:20:52 ◼ ► But like in the end the thing you need to get wrap your head around is that as you keep living you will keep accumulating data.
01:21:00 ◼ ► And all you can do is try to bend the slope of that line down but it's never going to decrease.
01:21:18 ◼ ► It would eliminate any concern with power surges or outages and no need to have an ungainly and annoying UPS.
01:21:38 ◼ ► We wouldn't have to deal with those clunky ungainly and annoying UPS is the UPS is that big because that's how big a battery you need to power a computer for any amount of time.
01:21:48 ◼ ► So if you could put a small battery inside the Mac you would also be able to have a UPS that's the size of an Apple TV but you don't.
01:21:56 ◼ ► And that's kind of the problem to get a UPS that is worth anything that gives you enough time to do a panic shutdown that gives you enough time to do automated shutdowns which Mac OS supports you can do like hey I'm on UPS power I'm going to shut everything down right.
01:22:10 ◼ ► That battery needs to be big enough that it's heavy ungainly needs to be replaced like a UPS battery adds cost weight and volume.
01:22:24 ◼ ► Just it ruin Apple's computers and you're like well they put batteries in laptops and that's not a problem.
01:22:30 ◼ ► Apple's desktops are not designed that way even the gigantic Mac Pro all that space in there in theory is designed to hold stuff other than batteries and let me tell you the Mac Pro is already heavy enough please do not put gigantic battery inside it.
01:22:43 ◼ ► Yeah I mean I think the answer the answer really is number one like you don't want to get rid of ungainly annoying UPS is because then you have no footrests unless you use subwoofers.
01:22:55 ◼ ► But number two you're you're so close to it Ty you're so close to the to the solution here which is use a laptop as a desktop and then this problem goes away.
01:23:10 ◼ ► And the laptops are so good that you can do that and you're not really giving up anything and in fact sometimes like right now you actually have the best desktop performance available in certain contexts.
01:23:22 ◼ ► So anyway yeah that's I think that's the answer is if you really don't want if you really don't want a UPS and you want battery backup power for your desktop just get a laptop as a desktop.
01:23:32 ◼ ► Or just get a desktop computer with a UPS because that's what it takes to provide uninterruptible power to devices it requires a big battery and really honestly you want that big battery to be separate because that battery will eventually go bad and you'll need to replace it and all that you can do without touching your computer but just messing with your UPS.
01:23:51 ◼ ► Alright thank you to our sponsors this week Squarespace and Trade Coffee and thank you to our members who support us directly. One of the member perks that we offer is ATP Overtime a weekly additional bonus topic or segment about some topic that we kind of just couldn't fit in the main show or never quite got to.
01:24:07 ◼ ► So this week's Overtime for members is going to be on Apple's product longevity and in particular they released a longevity by design paper we're going to be discussing Apple product longevity and Overtime you can join at atb.fm/join to get there.
01:25:47 ◼ ► So while backing out of my own sandy driveway in the beach town, across the street from where I pull in.
01:25:57 ◼ ► Because keep in mind these are like the eight foot wide beach sidewalks are our streets.
01:26:20 ◼ ► Have you thought about, slight tangent, I was thinking about the other day that I already mentioned on the show.
01:26:35 ◼ ► You think there are kids, born today, living today, who if you really ask them, maybe they just refer to it as a telephone pole.
01:26:50 ◼ ► I really think the telephone pole is rapidly becoming one of those whatever, neologisms or whatever.
01:27:10 ◼ ► Because the funny thing is I actually bought that pole as part of my house construction.
01:27:34 ◼ ► It was like the second to last time I drove onto the beach for the season before the big summer rush.
01:27:40 ◼ ► And there were a bunch of people walking back and forth and a bunch of bikes going back and forth behind me.
01:27:54 ◼ ► I was doing a lot of checking side to side as I backed out because of all the pedestrians and cyclists.
01:28:06 ◼ ► And this tree has this stumpy tree protrusion off the side branch of the tree was cut off.
01:28:19 ◼ ► And this tree and pole that I have almost hit a hundred times, I finally actually hit the tree stump.
01:28:34 ◼ ► Now normally this is generally a good thing because again, these streets are eight feet wide.
01:28:46 ◼ ► That's the reason why I assume they turn them off during off-road modes because when you're off-roading, there's always crap around you.
01:28:53 ◼ ► I'm dealing with this with my wife's new car. She's got proximity sensors for the first time.
01:28:56 ◼ ► And there's a button on the dashboard. I said, "Look, just leave it off all the time until you're about to park and you want it."
01:29:01 ◼ ► Because otherwise you'll be here beeping all the time, but that's the time to use it. Backing out, pulling in, whatever.
01:29:07 ◼ ► Yes. And this one time I backed up and I hit the stupid tree diagonal stump thing and I put a nice big dent in my quarter panel.
01:29:17 ◼ ► Now, I have sent you the picture of this. I will put it as the chapter art of this chapter.
01:29:42 ◼ ► Well, I didn't say this last time or maybe I did mention it, but when I look at this, I immediately think of YouTube paintless dent repair videos.
01:29:47 ◼ ► And I say, "Oh, no problem. Paintless dent repair will take that out. No need to replace the quarter panel."
01:29:51 ◼ ► I went to two different body shops just to see what the first one told me was surprising.
01:29:58 ◼ ► And so I went to a second one and I'm like, "Hey, what do you think? Could this be popped back out or sucked?" Whatever they do. I don't know how to...
01:30:08 ◼ ► Yeah, so I asked about that. And the guy looked around, he looked at the stuff, he looked at how it was bent and basically said, "No, that's not going to do it."
01:30:22 ◼ ► And I told him, "You don't need to replace the bumper. I'm fine with that scuff. Just get the big dent out. How much is that?"
01:30:29 ◼ ► And I went to the body shop thinking, "I don't want my insurance rates to go up from this."
01:30:35 ◼ ► And so I had in my mind a price. I'm like, "All right, I think if it's below $3,000, I'll just pay them directly and not go through insurance."
01:30:46 ◼ ► I know how this is going to be a pain once insurance gets involved and raise my rates up and everything. Let me see what it's going to be.
01:30:53 ◼ ► And by the way, you haven't told us, you can't tell from this picture, did this dent impair any of the functionality of your tailgate and stuff?
01:31:02 ◼ ► Was this purely cosmetic or was it functional where you could see, "Oh, something is scraping now when I open the back of my car?"
01:31:07 ◼ ► It didn't seem to affect the tailgate or the little flappy thing on the bottom of it. So as far as I can tell, it had no functional problems as a result of this.
01:31:20 ◼ ► I could, yes. I did feel a decent amount of shame driving around with this dent. Because I'm like, "I'm driving around a bright yellow electric SUV on Long Island."
01:31:34 ◼ ► And Long Islanders, there's a lot of, let's say, political diversity on Long Island. And so the idea of seeing somebody who dented their new electric SUV or a Long Island parlance truck would be, I think, amusing and satisfying to many people in the region in which I live.
01:31:57 ◼ ► On the other hand, when you back up and hit that stump again, you'll hit it in the same spot and you won't even notice.
01:32:02 ◼ ► That's true. Well, unless I push it in further. Maybe then I'll break the tailgate. We'll see.
01:32:07 ◼ ► So anyway, I had the body shop take a look at this. And the first body shop says, "This is probably going to be something like $15,000."
01:32:17 ◼ ► And I was floored. I'm like, "You've got to be kidding me. Like, for what?" And they were like, "Look, you've got to take this off, you've got to do this, you've got to do that." And the reason I picked this body shop was that they were Tesla certified. And I know Tesla runs a pretty tight ship with some of that stuff. So I'm like, "All right, if they're a Tesla certified..."
01:32:35 ◼ ► Wait, wait, wait, wait. So Tesla will ship the cars with panel gaps as wide as a house.
01:32:46 ◼ ► Because a few years ago, when my Tesla was sideswiped in the parking lot in the ferry terminal, that was like a $6,000 repair. So I went to one of those shops and they were like, "This is probably going to be XYZ." But they said that they actually couldn't take the business because they weren't Rivian certified. And Rivian won't even sell them the parts unless they're certified. So I had to go to the second place. The second place looks and they're like, "Hmm. All right, yeah, we can do this. We'll get back to you on the price."
01:33:21 ◼ ► This? So first I'm like, "All right, well, okay, insurance." This is definitely going to insurance now. So Casey, you recently had the insurance bulk at spending, I believe it was $20,000 roughly, right?
01:33:42 ◼ ► It wasn't a tree. It was a pebble. It was roughly 20 grand and the car was allegedly worth 25-ish and so they said, "The heck with it. The car is totaled."
01:33:50 ◼ ► I would hope that they didn't total your car for this given that your car is much newer and was considerably more expensive when purchased.
01:33:57 ◼ ► They did not total the car. Thank God. I was worried about that. But the total price to get this repaired, I now have it back. It's perfect. The total price to get this repaired, $20,000.
01:34:14 ◼ ► The cost to allegedly replace your entire engine of Aaron's car is the same cost it takes to repair a quarter panel dent on a Rivian.
01:34:24 ◼ ► Did you get a parts list? Because I'm wondering, did they replace anything other than the sheet metal?
01:34:29 ◼ ► I'm assuming they replaced the bumper because it was going through insurance. So it's new bumper, new sheet metal. What else?
01:34:33 ◼ ► Yeah, so they replaced some kind of bumper and some trim, a couple of trim pieces along the boundaries of them.
01:34:40 ◼ ► I don't even know what most of these terms mean or are, but as far as I can tell, they had to take apart the entire car.
01:34:50 ◼ ► Everything was taken apart. Everything. Because I got back into it and I'm like, "Oh, they moved all the stuff in my trunk, of course. The whole trunk was clearly taken apart."
01:34:59 ◼ ► They took apart the center console at some point. They took apart my entire car, it seems. I don't know why. I don't know how cars were built.
01:35:08 ◼ ► I don't know how body shops work. And they did a nice job. The car looks good. It looks new again. But, oh, my God.
01:35:17 ◼ ► So now I understand why car insurance for these new nice EVs is kind of expensive. Sorry for my part in making it that expensive. Oh, my God.
01:35:33 ◼ ► Well, I think Rivian has, that's why Casey was asking about where the panel goes. The R1T specifically, I think, has one of their back panels is a very large piece of metal where it's not just like, if you look at a regular car where there's the C-pillar and then the trunk and whatever, it's kind of like these small units where it's like, "If you get a dent on this panel, we can just replace that small panel."
01:35:54 ◼ ► But on the Rivians in particular, especially the R1T, there are pieces of metal that go farther than you would think. Now, what a lot of body shops will do, at least in these YouTube rebuilding channels that I watch, is anytime there is a problem on a panel like this on a car, they will cut the panel and remove a reasonable-sized panel and then buy a new panel and cut that and match them up and weld it and sand it and blah, blah, blah.
01:36:20 ◼ ► An insurance company is not going to do that. An insurance company wants it to be new and they're going to replace the entire panel, whatever it takes. And if that means taking off all the lights in the back of your car, the windshield, all the things that are stopping them, just to get that one gigantic panel off as a single piece.
01:36:36 ◼ ► And by the way, you still probably have to cut it because it's probably spot welded in various places, right? Taking that whole thing off and then buying that one new part. The insurance company doesn't want it for it to be an artisanal thing where a craftsperson has to reassemble your car from a hodgepodge.
01:36:52 ◼ ► Like, look, this is the part. We removed the damaged version of that part, we buy a new one of those parts from everyone and we put the new one on. And if the part is huge, they're replacing the whole huge part. Or even if they won't sell the individual thing, like they won't sell you just like one part of the light bar or something, you have to buy the whole bar even though just one part of it is broken, that's what they'll end up doing.
01:37:14 ◼ ► So I have to imagine that either it was a very large panel that required lots of disassembly and reassembly, or that maybe there's like a crash bar in there in the back of cars in the front, there's various bars that are meant to bend on impact to absorb crash damage.
01:37:29 ◼ ► And you might have had to replace that entire bar if it got even dented a little bit because it's like, oh, now the crash bar has done its crash thing, so we need to replace that and that thread through the whole back of your car or something.
01:37:39 ◼ ► This would have been a great opportunity to have this problem put on a YouTube channel, the repair of your car so we could see exactly what was involved.
01:37:46 ◼ ► But did you get a breakdown on parts versus labor? Because that's the next thing I'd be interested in to see.
01:37:55 ◼ ► I would love for you to scan the receipt or report, not for public consumption, but for Jon and I, I know he and I both would love to just tear that apart and see how they got to $20,000.
01:38:09 ◼ ► Yeah, like what percentage of that is labor? Is it like 50% labor? 90% labor? And what were the parts cost? How much did that one panel did they replace? How much did that panel cost?
01:38:18 ◼ ► If you're buying a Rolls Royce panel versus buying a Honda Civic panel, even though they both look like equal sized pieces of sheet metal, the prices are very different.
01:38:28 ◼ ► The first body shop told me that, I don't know if I didn't verify this, but they said that they think Rivian sells only that whole side of the car.
01:38:37 ◼ ► You can't buy apparently just that panel. You have to buy the panel plus the two doors in front of it or whatever. So I think that might have been part of it. Who knows?
01:38:49 ◼ ► Oh yeah, there's definitely painting. They said they were going to blend it or whatever. I mean the car's only six months old or a year old.
01:38:58 ◼ ► I don't know. The car looks fantastic. It's all done now. It looks great. But yeah, I am very thankful for car insurance in moments like this. And I am just shocked that what looks like a fairly simple thing... $20,000.
01:39:17 ◼ ► That's why it's good to know a good paintless repair person. Because at a certain point, like maybe when this car depreciates more and you get a dent similar to this that might be close to totaling it, but you still like the car, PDR is the way to go.
01:39:32 ◼ ► Yeah, I wonder if... What I want to know is I want to learn the limits of that. I got to see how much that can do.
01:39:39 ◼ ► It's pretty surprising. As long as there's no structural damage and it's just the sheet metal is messed up, they can do amazing things. And you can decide, even if there's like, "Oh, the crash bar got this little quarter-sized dimple in it. Do you care?" You probably don't.
01:39:55 ◼ ► The thing I always worry about with these, they don't want it to be artisanal, so you're essentially not relying on a craftsperson to beautifully make this amalgam of stuff. But what you are relying on is the competence and care of the people who disassembled and then reassembled your car.
01:40:09 ◼ ► Because kind of like Apple's laptops or any other kind of device that's precisely assembled in a factory-controlled environment, when they disassemble it and reassemble it in the body shop, they don't have as much experience as the person who's working the assembly line doing that process day after day after day.
01:40:23 ◼ ► They don't have the machines, they don't have the temperature control, they don't have all the same tools, they don't have all the other parts off the car that make it real easy to put that part on.
01:40:30 ◼ ► So I'm always worried with any kind of car repair that it's not going to go back together quite the way it was. And it'll be a little bit loosey-goosey, a little bit squeaky. They didn't put one of the little things in. They broke a clip. They broke two clips.
01:40:43 ◼ ► Just recently I was watching one of my YouTube videos and this guy got a very expensive, fancy Porsche and he brought it back in. It was a comedy of errors.
01:40:54 ◼ ► But anyway, one of the things he's like, "Oh, when I roll down the window it makes this noise." It's like, "Oh, that's not good. This is a $200,000 Porsche." Rolling down the window is making a noise. What could that possibly be?
01:41:04 ◼ ► So he had it in, they were doing other stuff and they figured out what it was. He had paint protection film, PPF, put over his entire car because that's what you do when you get an expensive car.
01:41:14 ◼ ► And when they were doing it, one of the backing pieces that's on the PPF slipped down the slot between the window and the car.
01:41:22 ◼ ► And it was the backing from a piece of PPF that was scrunched up underneath the window. When you'd roll it down it would scrunch it up or whatever.
01:41:29 ◼ ► Someone didn't do that on purpose. That was just like it was probably on the roof of the car and it slid down and went in the slot. I'm always worried about that with any kind of car repair.
01:41:40 ◼ ► That's why in general you don't want to hit things with your car because taking apart a car and putting it back together, it's never going to be quite the same.
01:41:49 ◼ ► And it's really easy to forget a bolt, forget a screw, leave a little thing rallying around in there and not get it quite back together. The clips again, breaking the clips and saying, "Well, it's good enough."
01:41:58 ◼ ► That's part of the reason why you want to get a good place that does charge you an arm and a length because you hope they're going to be more careful than the place that gave you the cheap price. But there are no guarantees.
01:42:07 ◼ ► That is bananas, my goodness. But this panel is quite physically large. I don't know if it's necessarily bigger than an equivalent panel. I'm trying to imagine the rear of Aaron's car.
01:42:21 ◼ ► I don't think the equivalent panel is that much smaller, but nevertheless, the $20,000 is just bananas.
01:42:29 ◼ ► Unlike the R1T, it doesn't wrap over the roof because it's an SUV shape. I think if you look at the R1T's back panel, it goes up and around the rear glass. His doesn't do that.
01:42:40 ◼ ► That should have at least been cheaper. But yeah, if they had to buy it with the doors or something, I would just love to see a parts list in this.
01:42:46 ◼ ► But anyway, you just had to pay your deductible, I guess, and find out how much your rates are going to go up.
01:42:50 ◼ ► Oh my god, I'm scared. These are already not cheap to insure, but my god, it's not going to help.
01:43:04 ◼ ► Unfortunately, that would be literally a federal crime because of the land that it is on. It's on federal land.
01:43:20 ◼ ► So I'm guessing the village would have had the rights to say, "Hey, we've got to trim this tree back."
01:43:24 ◼ ► But I don't have the rights to remove the tree from either the village walk or the federal land that it's resting on.
01:43:38 ◼ ► Yeah, just look. I mean this time I'm like, it's funny, when I got the car back the other day from the body shop, I'm driving around, running some errands around town and I'm just being so careful every time I back out of anything.
01:43:53 ◼ ► I think I said on the show when my wife sideswiped her car in a parking garage and we got the door replaced and repainted. It was like the passenger side door.
01:44:02 ◼ ► I think it was less than a week when she had it parked in a parking lot and the person next to her opened their car into the exact door that we had just gotten repainted and dented it badly enough that we needed to get it repainted again.
01:44:15 ◼ ► When we went back to the same exact body shop, I'm like, "Hey, remember you did this door?" Once more with feeling.
01:44:21 ◼ ► Well, because literally the very first thing I did after picking up the body shop, the body shop is across the street from a storage facility that we had stuff stored in during the move.
01:44:31 ◼ ► And I had to go get stuff out of the storage facility. And so literally I drove across the street and then had to back it into the storage garage.
01:44:40 ◼ ► And I'm like, "Oh my God, if they actually see me dent this, that would be even worse."
01:44:52 ◼ ► Oh, of course I do. I used it like crazy that time. There weren't cyclists and pedestrians walking behind it the whole time, so I wasn't looking side to side. I actually used it correctly.
01:45:05 ◼ ► I wouldn't necessarily trust it. Also, the visibility pulling out of that driveway is very poor.
01:45:10 ◼ ► Like the angles that I can see. They're not great angles, so I kind of rely on my own sight a lot as well because I don't trust only what the cameras will see.
01:45:36 ◼ ► Right. No stumps. It would just be scratching the clear coat, but there would be a lot of clear coat scratching if I did that a lot.
01:45:43 ◼ ► Well, in Marco's defense, having spent very little time at the beach house, but enough to have seen it during the daytime,
01:45:52 ◼ ► that car, while it is in many ways the right choice for you, in so many ways, particularly the size of the car,
01:45:58 ◼ ► it is very much the wrong choice because it is way too large for the roads and where the quote unquote roads in which you're driving it.
01:46:05 ◼ ► And if I recall correctly, I think you had said it would probably be for the best if I drove you to the beach before I tried to break your car.
01:46:14 ◼ ► But I looked at this and even if you hadn't had offered that or kind of politely requested it,
01:46:20 ◼ ► there's zero chance that I would have done anything in the town with this car because it is just absurd how little clearance you have.
01:46:28 ◼ ► And John, I would love to sit here and make just immense fun of Marco for this $20,000 oops.
01:46:33 ◼ ► But truly, the oops was when you signed on the dotted line for the Rivian in the first place because it is just so big for that specific area of the country.
01:46:44 ◼ ► It was kind of fun though. In New York, you have to file the form with the motor vehicle's department whenever there is an accident over a certain dollar amount of damage.
01:46:53 ◼ ► And you have to like describe what happened. And my favorite part was you have to draw a diagram or illustration of the accident.
01:47:01 ◼ ► And they don't tell you like what level of detail. So I drew like trees, like fluffy, like I drew like the beach.
01:47:08 ◼ ► I drew a whole little diagram in that box and I'm like this is going to make someone's day I hope. Like someone reading this form filing it somewhere.
01:47:19 ◼ ► You'll be able to find it on the web somewhere. I'm sure it's enshrined in digital form somewhere. Like car, stump, path, arrow, stump.
01:47:37 ◼ ► Yeah. And now I'm so worried now about what John said about it like not being quite right.
01:47:42 ◼ ► Like I noticed like the trunk lid and like whatever the bottom thing in the trunk is that flops down.
01:47:48 ◼ ► It's like it's a little bit tighter when it closes. Like it doesn't lift up as easily as it used to.