00:00:04 ◼ ► Everything about my setup is different. Like first of all, it's light outside. That alone-
00:00:17 ◼ ► There have been times when I have done that, but usually it would be something a little bit lighter like green tea,
00:00:22 ◼ ► like a little bit of caffeine, not as much as coffee. But no today, this is full blown coffee!
00:00:41 ◼ ► So here we have a totally different mode here. This should be- this should be interesting.
00:00:55 ◼ ► So I put a coffee cup for myself and I wanted to have two other drinks for the two of you.
00:01:01 ◼ ► And I could not find a glass of water emoji. I figured the most appropriate thing would probably just be coffee, water, water.
00:01:17 ◼ ► Because you know, you have like certain kind of like childlike favorites in the food and drink areas.
00:01:41 ◼ ► There is a face with like bags under the eyes because they're tired. Like the tired face.
00:01:49 ◼ ► And may I just say, Casey wrote that wonderful time zone post which I will have to link.
00:01:55 ◼ ► Because the way you represented the time zones of the world with emoji was just masterful.
00:02:13 ◼ ► So I took a screenshot, cropped it in so the built-in screenshot editor thing would zoom it in for me.
00:02:45 ◼ ► And people are very- have very strong feelings about local foods or you know, what their area is known for.
00:02:56 ◼ ► I thought the bowl of rice for San Francisco, which was supposed to be Rice-A-Roni, you know, the San Francisco treat.
00:03:01 ◼ ► I thought that might be stretching a little bit and I thought I would get some grumbling about that.
00:03:12 ◼ ► I see- I thought you were just saying they put rice and burritos in California, which is true.
00:03:21 ◼ ► And so that's why I thought you were saying, but no, I did not catch the Rice-A-Roni reference at all.
00:03:26 ◼ ► Oh, it was Pilif in the chat says I probably would have used the avocado for California.
00:03:53 ◼ ► What- in terms of food specifically, what is that strip of vertical space in the United States?
00:04:12 ◼ ► because the people- Vegas- a lot of Vegas visitors can just drive there from California.
00:04:41 ◼ ► I also particularly liked Australia's, and I'll leave that as an exercise for the listeners.
00:05:13 ◼ ► I will do my best to put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video that will be premiering on Friday.
00:05:21 ◼ ► And so I'm going to Memphis to St. Jude to help raise money to help prevent and stop childhood cancer.
00:05:34 ◼ ► And we're all going to be on YouTube Live for 12 hours, starting at noon on this coming Friday.
00:06:03 ◼ ► For the fifth year in a row, Relay is trying to come together to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:06:47 ◼ ► The most significant predictor of whether a child will survive cancer is where that child lives.
00:06:51 ◼ ► And so starting in 2018, St. Jude became the first and only World Health Organization collaborating center for childhood cancer.
00:06:58 ◼ ► And so the goal of this, of WHO, the World Health Organization Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer,
00:07:10 ◼ ► So in 2021, St. Jude and the WHO launched this global platform for access to childhood cancer medicines.
00:07:18 ◼ ► It aims to provide free chemotherapy medicines for the next few years to as many as 120,000 children around the world with cancer.
00:07:28 ◼ ► And in this past April, they met with representatives from the program's first few countries to figure out the logistical details of how the process will work,
00:07:50 ◼ ► And as we record, this is the week that we're all, well, not all of us, but many of us are getting new toys.
00:08:01 ◼ ► I've come up with this concept called the Marco Offset, which is basically to try to figure out what amount of money might I donate to St. Jude.
00:08:09 ◼ ► Maybe as a minimum, you know, starting point of like what can I consider, you know, expendable that I can give to such a great cause.
00:08:21 ◼ ► So I came up with this idea of like, hey, just look at like whatever the base price of the gadget family is that you are buying.
00:08:29 ◼ ► So, for instance, the base price of an iPhone, you know, whatever the base model of the iPhone family that you're buying costs,
00:08:35 ◼ ► you go ahead and you get like the higher storage. Maybe you buy a case with it. Maybe you get the Apple Care with it.
00:08:46 ◼ ► And there's all that padding on top of that that you kind of tacked on in your purchase process.
00:09:16 ◼ ► So you just select which iPhone model you have ordered and you put in the total that you've actually ended up paying
00:09:52 ◼ ► Here's the thing. St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer with your support.
00:10:08 ◼ ► We recorded a new member special and we don't need to talk about it because I don't want to hear the feedback.
00:11:04 ◼ ► And so I am expecting that most of my time in Memphis people will be making merciless fun of me for my bananas.
00:11:11 ◼ ► You've got lots of good, constructive advice on how you might change your completely ridiculous photo workflows
00:11:35 ◼ ► So maybe in five years we do this exact same thing again to see if our photo workflows have changed.
00:11:55 ◼ ► of which just off the top of my head there's probably been 15-ish at this point, something like that.
00:12:04 ◼ ► You can join the program for a little bit of money each month or a little bit more for a whole year at a time.
00:12:14 ◼ ► And you can also get the bootleg, the ad-free version of the show if that's your thing.
00:12:21 ◼ ► All right. John, I believe you wanted to start the program with your apology tour. Is that correct?
00:12:26 ◼ ► What do I have to apologize for? Oh, the pronunciation thing. All right. Well, actually the first thing…
00:12:38 ◼ ► I don't have to apologize for anything there. I said I had heard conflicting reports from people who were at the event.
00:12:44 ◼ ► I just said I heard that I thought, based on watching the keynote, that it looked like it moved.
00:12:54 ◼ ► Yeah, but you didn't touch it either. You were just going by… like you heard people say it moved, and I heard people say both things.
00:13:11 ◼ ► Maybe they're, again, just used to the idea that if a button has haptics that means it doesn't move.
00:13:20 ◼ ► Reportedly it moves about as much as the power and volume buttons. Obviously when we get our phones we can check that out ourselves.
00:13:38 ◼ ► I said I heard conflicting reports, and I'm clarifying which one of the conflicting reports was correct.
00:13:51 ◼ ► I was listening back to the episode and I heard myself saying, I'm like, what are you saying?
00:14:01 ◼ ► I kept saying micro OLED, talking about the screen technology that Apple is considering using for its watch.
00:14:20 ◼ ► We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for micro LED, which makes the very specific point that the inorganic nature of micro LEDs gives them a longer lifetime and advantage over OLEDs and allows them to display brighter images with minimal risk of screen burning.
00:14:44 ◼ ► And that's technology Apple couldn't figure out. That's technology everybody is pursuing.
00:14:47 ◼ ► It is massively expensive because we don't have an economical way to put thousands and millions of tiny little LEDs carefully placed on a thing.
00:15:02 ◼ ► That's not what it's doing. Can you imagine an inkjet printer or whatever? It makes them less expensive to produce.
00:15:10 ◼ ► So even for a watch size screen, Apple bailed on that. They said, "Eh, we can't figure that out. Forget it. We'll just go with more OLED screens."
00:15:25 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, the element that is mixed into grade 5 titanium is vanadium, not mandium. That was just mispronunciation on my part. So, double apology there.
00:15:35 ◼ ► I love that you have, what is this, the phonetic spelling? What do you call these letters with the upside down?
00:15:45 ◼ ► I know the schwa is like "uh". I know the "e" with the line over it. It's a long "e". Long "a". So you can say "the-nay-dee-um".
00:15:54 ◼ ► I think I know all the, I don't know all the symbols. That's why I go to the Merriam-Webster site. It has a speaker symbol next to it.
00:16:00 ◼ ► And you just click the speaker and it audio pronounces it for you. So that's very useful.
00:16:04 ◼ ► AirPods 4 listening time. Also, breaking news, we're being told in the chat that the embargo has dropped on AirPods 4. Perhaps AirPods, no I think it's AirPods 4.
00:16:13 ◼ ► We haven't obviously had the chance to read any of them. But with regard to listening time.
00:16:19 ◼ ► Fair question. Reference acknowledged. I think it might be both. But in any case, we have some listening time updates.
00:16:30 ◼ ► You get up to 5 hours of listening time on a single charge or 4 hours of listening time on a single charge with ANC enabled on these AirPods.
00:16:41 ◼ ► This is in comparison to AirPods 3, which gets 6 hours of listening time with a single charge and 5 hours with personalized spatial audio enabled.
00:16:49 ◼ ► So it's a decrease of 1 hour. It's not a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but effectively a decrease of 1 hour in each department.
00:16:55 ◼ ► It's kind of disappointing. They did make the stems shorter, but I think the batteries are not in the stems anymore on these.
00:17:01 ◼ ► The AirPods 3 and the AirPods 4 both have a button cell battery in the body of it, but the body also looks smaller.
00:17:08 ◼ ► So just forget about all the fancy features. Just the listening time, if you don't have any of the fancy features enabled, goes from 6 hours down to 5.
00:17:16 ◼ ► Kind of disappointing, but we'll see. Improved sound quality and noise cancellation should probably be a net win.
00:17:24 ◼ ► Yeah, we talked about cases obviously in overtime on the last episode, but now I've realized part of the problem with that is everyone is sending me messages telling me that I should try the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case because it has an open bottom.
00:17:37 ◼ ► Guess what? I ordered the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case. I will be getting that to try it out.
00:17:41 ◼ ► And then the Bullstrap case that we mentioned in overtime that does have an open bottom.
00:17:48 ◼ ► Ryan London also has one. I pre-ordered the Bullstrap case because its shipping time seemed to be better than Ryan London.
00:18:01 ◼ ► And Bullstrap was promising it in September. So I paid way too much money to try out the Bullstrap case that has a crater-style cutout for the camera control.
00:18:14 ◼ ► As opposed to the Beats case which has the apple quartz pass-through thingy. So I will be able to try both of those things when they arrive.
00:18:21 ◼ ► Yeah, and for reference, for whatever it's worth, I had been using the Bullstrap leather case for my iPhone 15 Pro for most of the winter.
00:18:29 ◼ ► And then when summer came by, I switched over to Peak Design because it's just better for moisture.
00:18:36 ◼ ► And I just switched back to my Bullstrap case. Oh man, they feel so good. I know leather is not great for the environment. Wow, it feels good.
00:18:56 ◼ ► Yeah, it's very good. And I think it has aged pretty well. I got a couple scratches on the leather just from my own fault and stuff.
00:19:04 ◼ ► But generally, I have the dark grey one for that ear. And it just ages very nicely. There's slight color variations here and there just from wear.
00:19:15 ◼ ► And the tackiness of it now that it's broken in is really nice. The buttons feel nice. The raised lip around the camera bump is more of a gentle raise as John was saying last week.
00:19:32 ◼ ► It's one of the nice things about leather that's going to be difficult to reproduce. Like I said a few times in the past, I used the Ryan London one for the first year of my phone and then the Bullstrap for the second.
00:19:42 ◼ ► And the reason I swapped is because I do drop my phone occasionally and the Ryan London one had taken lots of abuse on the corners.
00:19:50 ◼ ► But the nature of leather is that when you get a nick or a scuff or whatever, it's not that it's self-healing. It's just that unlike an Apple silicone case where when the piece flakes off, that piece is never coming back.
00:20:03 ◼ ► Leather kind of scuffs, but then if you just rub it back down in the opposite direction that it got scuffed, it kind of lays back down on itself.
00:20:10 ◼ ► It wears better. When it wears, it's not immediately like, "Oh, this is broken." I feel like the silicone cases are a plastic case. If you get a chip off of the corner or a piece falls off or whatever, that is forever going to look and feel damaged.
00:20:23 ◼ ► And there's no sort of smoothing that over, whereas leather tends to smooth over a little bit. It still felt scuffed and I still wanted to trade it up for the Bullstrap one, which is unscuffed.
00:20:33 ◼ ► But that's something that's nice. So yeah, I keep hoping Apple will attempt to make essentially an imitation leather that has the good qualities of leather that I like, but that is not actually leather.
00:20:43 ◼ ► But so far they haven't made a run at that. They did Fine Loven, which was not tempting to be imitation leather at all. And then this year I'm trying the Beats one, which is just plain plastic.
00:20:51 ◼ ► We are brought to you this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. So whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from products to content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.
00:21:12 ◼ ► And Squarespace, of course, now has wonderful AI features to help you save time. So you can kickstart or update written content on any website, product description, or email with Squarespace AI to generate instant personalized results that know and show your brand identity.
00:21:27 ◼ ► And so you can explain what your site is about, you choose your tone, you enter what you need to get short or long form text, and then of course you can modify it from there as you see necessary.
00:21:37 ◼ ► So no matter the placement, Squarespace AI makes it easier to go live, stand out, and succeed with your website.
00:21:43 ◼ ► And of course, Squarespace supports everything else you might need to make a website for your business. They have amazing payment support, amazing product selling support, whether you're selling digital goods, physical goods, time slots for things like courses, downloads, like ebooks or whatever else.
00:21:57 ◼ ► They have member support areas, you can have premium podcasts for members, they have everything you can think of for a modern ecommerce business. Squarespace has it. Newsletters, emails, amazing checkout things like buy now pay later, PayPal, Apple Pay support, all this stuff.
00:22:12 ◼ ► They have you covered. And you can see for yourself by starting a new site at squarespace.com with a free trial. Try it out. You can build your site for free. You can see how it works for you.
00:22:23 ◼ ► When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/atp and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So try it out, see how you like it.
00:22:33 ◼ ► Squarespace.com/atp for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for continuing to be just the best place to make websites and for sponsoring our show.
00:23:17 ◼ ► That being said, those colors are so good on the non-pros that it really made me think. And as we talked about last week, they really are so good. But I desperately want that 5x.
00:23:30 ◼ ► Even though I know it's not the best fidelity in the world, having the ability to have some pretty strong and deep reach with my phone, optical reach, that is worth the price of admission for me in every sense of the word. Marco, what was your excuse on this one?
00:23:44 ◼ ► For me, I looked at it before and I did recently, fairly recently, have a non-pro phone when I used the iPhone 12 mini for that year. What I missed mostly was the 2x lens.
00:23:58 ◼ ► And it's not necessarily because they're any good, because they're usually not. Now we're up to, yes, the 5x lens. As mentioned, the optical quality of them is usually pretty rough compared to the 1x lenses.
00:24:10 ◼ ► But they do provide a decent amount of utility. And sometimes I do use them for actual photos that I want to look at as well, where digital zoom on the 1x sensor is just not going to cut it.
00:24:21 ◼ ► That being said, the main benefit that would tempt me today are, as Casey said, the colors and the lightness of the phones, in terms of weight.
00:24:32 ◼ ► The color is less of a concern now, because as I mentioned, as they've shrunk the margins further and further, the bezels have gotten so thin that now I actually enjoy using a case just so I cannot cause accidental input around the edge as I grip the phone in different ways.
00:24:46 ◼ ► And I also will, as mentioned, frequently lean the phone on things or stand it up on things to play audio when I'm doing stuff around the house.
00:24:55 ◼ ► And I find without a case, it's just too slippery. It has too much risk of falling off of the surface that I put it on.
00:25:02 ◼ ► So that, to me, I think I'm in the case world now for the long haul. And so that kind of neutralizes the color advantage of the non-pro.
00:25:12 ◼ ► But the main reason why I wouldn't get it now is because I am so hooked on the pro screens. Once you get used to ProMotion and Always On, a phone without those things seems noticeably broken.
00:25:28 ◼ ► And when you look at the actual pricing of the non-pro versus the pro, the price difference is not that big. Like in absolute terms, yeah, maybe it's a couple hundred bucks, but relative to the price of the whole phone, you're not paying twice as much for the pro.
00:25:46 ◼ ► Like you're paying like, you know, what, 15% more or something? You're not actually paying that much more for it. And I find that the extra features that it provides are definitely worth that extra price to me.
00:25:58 ◼ ► Now to lots of people, they're not. That's why they sell those. That's why they sell the non-pro phones. Because a lot of people don't care or really want that extra 200 bucks or whatever it is.
00:26:07 ◼ ► They want to use that money in other ways. And so I get that. There's lots of reasons why people choose those, but it's mostly because they don't care about the pro features.
00:26:18 ◼ ► And unfortunately, I do care about some of those pro features. And as long as pro continues to mean the best screen features, I'm probably going to stick with that.
00:26:28 ◼ ► Even setting aside the camera stuff, which again, I don't need the big cameras, but I do appreciate having them when I do. But for me, more than anything, it's about the screen and about the fact that it's really not that much of a price increase.
00:26:45 ◼ ► For me, like I said last episode, it's the 5x camera or the 3x camera or the 2x camera, like that third camera option. And also the top quality 1x camera, which is what I'm mostly taking pictures with in general. The pro phones tend to have better cameras. This year it's not that big of a difference, but it does have the 2x faster readout. And I do take RAWs and I do notice the lag.
00:27:02 ◼ ► And then the second thing for me is probably just having the top end hardware and everything, especially when we're coming into a year like Apple Intelligence where every little bit of CPU, GPU, neural engine, whatever has got to help because I feel like we're pushing the limits of the thing.
00:27:16 ◼ ► I have a Mac Pro and I'm going to go for the Pro phones, but the main factors for me are cameras and secondarily the CPU stuff. The 120Hz, I hadn't really thought about that, but I prefer that as well. That's another thing pushing me in that direction. When you pile up all these things, it's definitely a no-brainer for me. Even though I also like the colors better on the 16 and I like the fact that it is both lighter and also slightly smaller. I feel like the size of the 16 is more to my liking, but I gotta go Pro.
00:27:45 ◼ ► Apple's new phones are going to charge faster, which is exciting. I believe this is a report from Verge, but the entire iPhone 16 lineup can now charge at up to 45W, which is up from 29W. The 45W Macs of the iPhone 16 easily bests the Google Pixel 9's 37W for the Pixel 9 Pro XL and is on par with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
00:28:10 ◼ ► But these all fall significantly short of the 240W, my word, plus fast charging capabilities of some Chinese phones. But still, that's pretty cool. I don't fast charge my phone often, but hoo boy, when you need to top up in a hurry with quickness, it is so genuinely convenient to have that as an option.
00:28:32 ◼ ► I'm really glad to hear that not only is it continuing to be an option, which I expected, but now you can do it even faster. Now, I think at this point everyone is reaching for their email clients to say, "Oh, but that destroys your battery longevity."
00:28:44 ◼ ► And that's why I don't do it very often. But I do love that this is a thing that we can do from time to time. And I forget if we talked about this last week, I think we did, but MagSafe 2 or MagSafe 2 Plus, whatever they're calling it, that also charges a bit faster. I don't recall the figure off the top of my head.
00:28:59 ◼ ► It's like 25W an hour or something instead of 15. But we didn't mention the wired charging last time. This is exactly why I put this item in here. Fast charging, being able to charge faster over wire is great, but I do worry, I mean Apple doesn't do this because they don't even ship a brick with their phone anymore.
00:29:14 ◼ ► I do worry about people who are like, "This is great. I love my phone charges fast." And then at their bedside table or wherever they charge their phone overnight, they put a fast charger. You're just beating up your battery for no reason.
00:29:24 ◼ ► If you're about to go to sleep and you're going to plug in your phone, plug it into the slowest charger you have. Charging your battery very quickly hurts the battery. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you're like, "I'm going to be home for two seconds," or, "I'm in an airport," or whatever. Use the fast charger. That's what it's for.
00:29:39 ◼ ► But for your everyday, "I plug it in here before I go to sleep," or whatever, use a slower charger. Because first of all, it's not even going to charge all the way if you have the optimization on. It's going to go to like 80 and then wait until an hour before things do wake up and go off.
00:29:51 ◼ ► But during that time when it goes from like 10% to 80, you don't want to go as fast as possible. So yes, the iPhone 16 can charge faster. This does not mean you should change all of your chargers in your house to charge at the maximum possible wattage of your phone. Don't do that.
00:30:05 ◼ ► Yeah. That being said, though, I love this ability that they're adding. And I think this is one of the many things that if you look at the actual differences to the iPhone 16 lineup versus the iPhone 15 lineup, the general reaction to the event was, "Eh, it's kind of underwhelming. They didn't change that much."
00:30:24 ◼ ► But I think the actual story here is not that the phones are not substantially improved. Apple didn't do a good job of telling us how they're substantially improved. But if you actually look at these specs, there actually are lots of improvements. Lots of little things here and there.
00:30:41 ◼ ► Like, you know, faster charging over the wire. Also, faster charging through MagSafe. Also, you know, official cheat to support that will make things broader and easier in the future. Also, there's lots of stuff like the screen can now go down to one nit of brightness. So the screen can get way dimmer than it could before.
00:30:57 ◼ ► Lots of people want that. Like, if you're lying in bed next to your sleeping partner and you want to keep your screen as dim as possible while you're still reading stuff. There's a lot of improvements like that that are kind of all around the iPhone 16 line.
00:31:12 ◼ ► You know, the 16 Pro has all those cool new microphones and sound quality will probably be significantly enhanced and lots of things because of that. There's all sorts of improvements like this that are not super flashy in a presentation.
00:31:27 ◼ ► And also Apple didn't even attempt to show off many of them. But those actually will make the phones nicer to use in just everyday use. So again, I think the narrative around these phones was not great in part because people tend to not value that kind of thing in that context.
00:31:48 ◼ ► Like, if they did a presentation that was all about just small everyday improvements to using these phones, nobody would care about that either. So I understand why they left some of them out. But everyone, including Apple, is focusing so strongly on Apple intelligence.
00:32:01 ◼ ► Which again, I think is going to have a slow and maybe bumpy rollout, but certainly a slow rollout. And that's the story like PR wise. That's the story with Wall Street. That's the story with like the tech press.
00:32:16 ◼ ► But most people are not going to be using those features everyday or they'll be using very simplified features like, as we're going to talk about, stuff like notification summaries and email summaries.
00:32:27 ◼ ► They'll be using that kind of stuff. But most of the really flashy intelligence features are not going to be everyday things. Whereas stuff like your phone charges more easily. That affects everybody. That can help everyone at some point.
00:32:41 ◼ ► So I think this actually is a pretty good overall release as it looks so far. And we'll see how it turns out when we actually have the phones. But I think it'll be overall a better release than people are giving it credit for so far.
00:32:55 ◼ ► Also, I think another big everyday thing will be the new thermal capacity. I really think that's going to be a big difference. Because as I've been using my 15 Pro all weekend, it gets so hot doing basic things.
00:33:09 ◼ ► And I think, again, thermal management is one of those things that you don't really think about most of the time because most iPhones, their thermal management is fine.
00:33:17 ◼ ► And when you have the iPhone 15 Pro where thermal management for the first time I think got worse than its predecessor or at least seemed to, you start noticing, "Oh, this is the thing that matters."
00:33:26 ◼ ► So then when they fix it in the next generation, that's another savings to bank. On thermals, by the way, as people's phones start arriving this Friday for preorders.
00:33:39 ◼ ► A little hot tip, because this will be our last episode before that happens. Two hot tips for your phone migration.
00:33:45 ◼ ► Number one, you can now connect two USB-C or USB-C to Lightning phones with a cable for migration. And apparently that is faster migration in a lot of cases.
00:33:57 ◼ ► So use a USB-C to see or see the Lightning depending on what you're migrating from cable for your migrations. That will probably be faster.
00:34:05 ◼ ► I think actually on the wire thing, I think you have to have iOS 18 on both phones. Is that true?
00:34:12 ◼ ► Just to be safe, I would say maybe before attempting the migration, upgrade your old phone to iOS 18 to make sure that's not a limiting factor. I can not confirm this, but it's a good idea.
00:34:24 ◼ ► And secondly, speaking of hot tips, phone migration is often throttled by thermals. And so if you can figure out ways to effectively cool both phones, so definitely take them out of their cases. That is the number one thing if you want your phone to run cooler, is take it out of its case.
00:34:43 ◼ ► But also if you have things like my crazy fan coolers that use thermoelectric elements in a little MagSafe fan, that's a good time to use one of those. Lower tech, if you have ice packs, you can rest your phone. Obviously manage the moisture situation.
00:34:59 ◼ ► But if you have those big gel ice packs, if you just rest your phone on one of those, especially if you have enough capacity to rest both phones on one of those, while somehow... I guess... what's powering? If they're connected to each other, you might have to manage the battery situation.
00:35:17 ◼ ► Yeah, that's part of the problem of connecting them with the wire is you better have sufficient battery charge to do the migration. You probably should. If they're both fully charged, you should be fine. But be aware that unless you have some weird Y connector type thing, you're not going to be powering the phone. I guess you could MagSafe power them during the thing?
00:35:36 ◼ ► Right, MagSafe makes more heat. So yeah, maybe your best bet might be to plug both of them into power and just make them do wireless. But that'll depend on how much data you have to transfer. But anyway, manage the thermals and the migration will go a lot faster.
00:35:48 ◼ ► That is literally a hot tip. Alright, and then do we want to talk a little bit more about demand of these new phones?
00:35:55 ◼ ► Yeah, because we just came off the question of why are we getting the 16 Pro and not the 16, and it's interesting to see, supposedly, how the rest of the world is reacting at least in week one, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.
00:36:07 ◼ ► Right, so this is a report from 9to5Mac. The slug is lower iPhone 16 Pro demand. And so according to Kuo, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is down 16% compared to last year. The Pro is down 27%. The Plus is up 50%. And the 16, just plain vanilla 16, is up 10% as well. I'm telling you, those colors, those colors.
00:36:31 ◼ ► So this is interesting. Basically, the Pro phones are down, I think makes sense, because it's a testament to how good the non-Pro phones are this year. Like, even regular people who don't care about the specs or whatever can see that the non-Pro and the Pro have all the same buttons on them.
00:36:47 ◼ ► Like, "Oh, have you heard of the new camera control? That's on the non-Pro. Action button? That's on the non-Pro." Like, the things you can see. Yes, everyone can see that there's one fewer camera, right? But the non-Pro phones look good this year.
00:36:58 ◼ ► And second, remember they were talking about the Plus phone? Like, "Oh, no one buys the Plus phone. It's not cheap enough compared to the Pro Max. People just buy the Pro Max." The Plus phone being up 48%, again, according to these estimates, based on supply chain, yada, yada, yada.
00:37:11 ◼ ► It's pretty amazing because it shows that people who want a big phone are looking at the Pro Max and going, "Plus? Pro Max? Meh." Like, they're not, what does the Pro Max have? It has all those Pro features with the ProRes video, everything no one cares about. It's got the extra camera.
00:37:26 ◼ ► And what people are saying is, "Actually, I'm going to take the Plus this year." Right? If these things are to be believed. These are really weird numbers for like week one. You know what I mean? Like, week one you would expect it's all the early adopters or whatever, and I'm kind of surprised to see the Plus phone and so on.
00:37:40 ◼ ► Again, these are not Apple's numbers, these are estimates based on supply chain, yada, yada. Who knows how accurate they are, but it's interesting to see the breakdown this year.
00:37:47 ◼ ► And unfortunately, when we see this, we're like, "Oh, it's great, it shows how good the plain 16s are this year." When Apple sees this, they're like, "We should make sure the plain 16s are a little bit, or the plain phones are a little bit worse than the Pro phones."
00:37:58 ◼ ► Because Apple likes to see that differentiation. They like to push people upmarket to get the more expensive phones, but in the years when the Pro and non-Pro phones are closer to each other, I bet Apple's margins go down because fewer people buy the Pro phones.
00:38:12 ◼ ► That's a good point. We talked just a moment ago about connecting via cable, and I've been really unreasonably excited to try this for migration this year, because migration is always such like a bummer.
00:38:26 ◼ ► And I am of the opinion that doing a phone-to-phone migration is what I typically do. I'll typically start by doing an encrypted backup to my computer just as a backup.
00:38:36 ◼ ► The key here is to do an encrypted password-protected one, because then that saves all your Wi-Fi passwords and things of that nature.
00:38:42 ◼ ► And I'll try to do that the night before I get the new phone. But then for actually transferring, I typically do a phone-to-phone transfer, and it usually works really well, but takes something like two to three hours.
00:38:52 ◼ ► It takes forever. And I was debating between trying a couple of USB-C Ethernet dongles and putting them both on Ethernet on the same network, seeing if that was faster.
00:39:08 ◼ ► But actually looking at this, I might be able to just connect phone-to-phone with a standard USB-C cable.
00:39:17 ◼ ► So on Apple's comparison page, you can see the differences between the different phones.
00:39:23 ◼ ► And I will say that another benefit of the Pro is that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max feature the USB 3 connections that are capable up to 10 gigabits per second, whereas the 16 and 16 Plus are the lowly USB 2.0 from 804 years ago, with speeds up to 480 megabits per second, which is 20 times slower than the Pro phones.
00:39:45 ◼ ► So I'm going to give that a shot. I'm going to probably use the hilariously expensive Apple Thunderbolt USB-C cable, which is completely unnecessary, but just so I know that the cable is not the problem, and we'll see how it goes.
00:39:59 ◼ ► And by the way, this 20X thing, this is a stat that Apple actually puts on their website, which is rare.
00:40:04 ◼ ► Obviously they put it on the Pro specs to try to show, like, this is how much better the Pro is.
00:40:08 ◼ ► But 20X, I know we mentioned this last episode when we were talking about the phones, but I just want to reiterate again, always had last time, I was like, oh, you get the faster USB, the slower USB, and you may be hearing that and thinking, ah, I don't care how fast the USB is, like, whatever, it'll be just a little bit slower.
00:40:24 ◼ ► It's not that the Pro phone is so fast, it's that the non-Pro phone is so, so slow. And usually it doesn't matter. Like, usually, because if you have a non-Pro phone, again, you're probably not trying to pull off video files onto your external SSD or do all sorts of big, usually it doesn't matter at all, right?
00:40:39 ◼ ► But on this one day, when we were all transferring our data from our old phones, be aware that if you have a non-Pro phone, even if you're transferring it to a Pro phone, you're going to be, it's probably going to be slower than doing it over Wi-Fi, depending on how good your Wi-Fi is.
00:40:55 ◼ ► So this is a shame. They should probably change it eventually, but just be aware, 20X slower on the non-Pro phones.
00:41:02 ◼ ► And then Dave Mark had a really good reminder, and by that I mean a piece of information I was not aware of.
00:41:16 ◼ ► So for those of us who are buying new Apple devices, there's a support document we'll put in the show notes and reading from that, if you buy a new iPhone or iPad and don't have enough iCloud storage to back up your current device using iCloud backup, you are eligible to get temporary iCloud storage.
00:41:32 ◼ ► So they will give you enough time, which apparently all of us knew, they will give you in like a month or something like that, and give you basically unlimited, asterisk, dagger, double dagger storage for the purposes of just transferring your device.
00:41:44 ◼ ► And then once the transfer is complete, they will reclaim that storage on their end, and you will lose it.
00:41:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it's been out for a year or two now. I highly recommend people do this, because it's a no-brainer.
00:41:57 ◼ ► You're getting free storage for the purposes of doing your phone transfer. Take it. Take the free storage for this transfer.
00:42:03 ◼ ► I would also encourage you to actually pay for the storage to have this backup permanently, but even if you can't or don't want to, it's free.
00:42:12 ◼ ► It's not like they take your credit card and sign you up and you have to remember to cancel or anything like that.
00:42:16 ◼ ► Nothing like that. It's just free, temporary storage for the purpose of transferring your stuff.
00:42:21 ◼ ► It will let you do an iCloud backup, it will keep that backup there for some period of time, and then they will just chuck it away.
00:42:26 ◼ ► There's nothing you need to remember to do or cancel or whatever. So take advantage of it. We will link to the Apple document that describes this in the show notes.
00:42:32 ◼ ► We are brought to you this episode by Pioneers of AI, a new podcast. What will the AI revolution mean? For jobs? For our kids? For our relationships and our daily lives?
00:42:52 ◼ ► Host Rana El-Khalibi is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, author, and investor exploring all the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives.
00:43:03 ◼ ► So listen to Pioneers of AI with new episodes every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. And we will also link to it in the show notes.
00:43:10 ◼ ► So once again, Pioneers of AI is the name of the new show. New episodes every Wednesday. Listen to Pioneers of AI wherever you get your podcasts.
00:43:24 ◼ ► Stu Maschwitz writes with regard to HDR still images. Preview absolutely does support HDR display still images. Try any sample EXR or HDR file you can find. I've got an EXR test pattern you can download and we'll put a link in the show notes.
00:43:36 ◼ ► Not sure how to make EXR files but the demo file, one of the demo files shows like a gradient that just goes from like black to various shades of grey down to white. But the white is like super max HDR white. If you want to blow your eyeballs out on your screen and see just how bright it will go, open that image and then look down at the bottom.
00:43:54 ◼ ► Breaking news as of just a day or two back. Apple has received their FDA Food and Drug Administration authorization to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids. Reading from The Verge just days after Apple announced a new hearing aid feature for the second generation AirPods Pro, the US Food and Drug Administration or FDA has authorized the software that powers this functionality. In a press release, the FDA describes Apple's solution as quote "the first over-the-counter hearing aid software device." Very good stuff. Very, very good stuff.
00:44:21 ◼ ► It's tough for Apple relying on the government to hit the deadlines or whatever because Apple would have loved in the presentation to say it was FDA approved but they missed it for like two days. So they just have to say "we think approval is coming very soon" and yeah, there you go.
00:44:34 ◼ ► With regard to the new watch bands, particularly the Milanese Loop, Wolf writes that the watch band really is titanium. It's inspired by the steel version but the band is all about the titanium. That's what it says in the description at the Apple Store which reads "The titanium Milanese Loop" features aerospace-grade titanium mesh with a secure parachute-style buckle inspired by stainless steel mesh historically used by divers and designed for ocean activities.
00:45:07 ◼ ► So this is just an asterisk though. That is the new Milanese with the ultra style that has like that ultra clasp on it. That one is titanium. The other Milanese Loop that comes with the Series 10 option and has the same magnetic clasp that we've had forever, that one is still steel. And the new link bracelets are also still steel.
00:45:27 ◼ ► They are color matched to the new titanium watch bodies but it is the colors of the titanium being applied to steel for the other ones. Only this new ultra Milanese with the ultra latch style. Only that one is titanium.
00:45:44 ◼ ► And speaking of watch bands, Josh Harris writes "This is the first time that Apple sold a gold colored link bracelet. The only other one they made was the 24 karat gold version given away to celebrities with the launch of the Series 0.
00:45:55 ◼ ► As a gold fan I was pleased to see it's finally official. Wonder why it took so long. I am not a gold fan but I am happy for Josh."
00:46:04 ◼ ► No they didn't. So Josh is right. There were a couple of, like back when the Apple Watch launched, the very first one, they had the gold one. They would give it to certain celebrities to wear at certain events to promote it. The way fashion people do.
00:46:19 ◼ ► At some point there were a couple of times when a celebrity wore one to an awards show or something and they had a gold link bracelet at that time to pair with the gold watches to use in that context but it was never first out of the public.
00:46:35 ◼ ► I would assume so. Remember there were a couple of instances of that where the celebrity was wearing the watch but it was showing the spacey setup screen on the watch screen and you could see in pictures they didn't even set it up.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And then coming back to Case Corner, the third party iPhone 16 cases, you had had opinions John about what to do with the flash. Do you want to tell us about this? I know we talked about it last week but do you want to revisit?
00:47:08 ◼ ► Yeah so the Apple case did what I thought all the cases should do which is put a little opening for the two cameras on the plain old iPhone 16. So slim, just a little capsule and then just put a little hole for the flash that's hanging out near it.
00:47:20 ◼ ► I was afraid what cases would do is "Ah we have to have a hole for the two cameras and the flash, let's just make one big hole that covers them all." And I was afraid they would make it like triangular.
00:47:29 ◼ ► Apple's cases didn't do that, they're great. But here's a link we'll put in the show notes to at least one case that got lazy and said "You know what, we're going to make a capsule opening for the cameras and just a little separate capsule opening for the flash."
00:47:42 ◼ ► And I just think it's clumsier to do it this way. It looks kind of like a three leaf clover instead of a capsule.
00:47:48 ◼ ► So, you know, results vary. Be careful when you're buying a case and consider one of the advantages of your non-pro phone is that you can have a smaller camera thing sticking out. There's no reason to have like the, for example look at this one, it's got the ridge that prevents the cameras from touching the surface if you put it face down.
00:48:07 ◼ ► The ridge is also around the flash, no need for that. The flash is flush. You don't need to have that ridge around it, it just makes for a bigger thing on the back of your case. So I don't like that and some people are doing it. Surprise, surprise.
00:48:17 ◼ ► So Apple intelligence is not officially a thing yet, you know, it's in beta. And we saw a post from Joe Kimberlin who had screenshot a series of toots from a friend of the show, Ben Rice, and Ben Rice McCarthy, excuse me.
00:48:35 ◼ ► And so this summary was Ben had shared UK based museum recommendations and then Joe had put in the toots that comprised this, which was Ben favoriting something that said finally, somebody else favoriting something that related to museums, and that same person favor mentioning that's not for some of us.
00:49:01 ◼ ► You have to look at these, I'm not doing a great job describing. No, it doesn't mention museums, so here's the thing. No, it does, it's @museumshuffle. Right, yeah.
00:49:08 ◼ ► That's what I'm saying. So the summary is attempting to summarize three separate notifications, and the three separate notifications include a username that is @museumshuffle.
00:49:20 ◼ ► That's the person's username. Do you think they only post about museums? Is that the only thing that is on that entire thing? Nothing in the body text of these three notifications mentions museums at all. The only thing that is museum related is one of the people's usernames.
00:49:37 ◼ ► This is an example of some of the limitations of Apple Intelligence features when attempting to summarize things. It just gets fed a bunch of text, but apparently it doesn't understand which part of this text are just @mentions of people who are in the conversation, like the fact that that's a username, and which parts are the body text, which is what you're supposed to be summarizing.
00:49:56 ◼ ► And it's just like, it's all text to me, so if someone's username has a museum in it, I'm like, this must be a conversation about museums. I mean, maybe, but also maybe not. This is definitely an area of improvement.
00:50:07 ◼ ► I do think that when Apple Intelligence actually ships to people with 18.1 or whatever, stuff like this may end up being kind of like a meme topic of let's all make fun of the dumb things our phones say when attempting to help us by doing something simple as summarizing a bunch of text.
00:50:29 ◼ ► It's up to the little computer in there to summarize them to give you a single placeholder item so you don't have to read all three. In theory, that's a useful feature, but in practice, if you see that summary, should you trust it, or do you have to expand the things anyway?
00:50:44 ◼ ► You could see this and say, maybe someone's giving me UK-based museum recommendations. Oh, it's just museum shuffle was @mentioned in one of the things. That's messed up.
00:50:52 ◼ ► I think this is going to be just a problem overall in, like, for Apple Intelligence to be summarizing notifications. Well, Apple Intelligence only knows the raw text of the notification that is provided by the apps to the system.
00:51:06 ◼ ► It's an API, you provided a couple of text fields, and that's it. They don't know the context that this is coming from an app where this is a Twitter-style username. They don't know that. And so I hope maybe over time, maybe the better solution to this would be, as Apple adds APIs that help us use Apple Intelligence at all, let alone better.
00:51:30 ◼ ► Not that I'm bitter that they are launching this entire system with no APIs, but anyway, maybe they will be able to give developers separate fields to say, like, all right, here is the text to show to the user, and then here is a second text property to fill out on this object that is the text to give to Apple Intelligence as what is the intelligence representation of this.
00:52:00 ◼ ► And that would be up to the app to do that, by the way, because very often these services don't do this. Last time we talked about this, I forgot to use the correct terms of art, but it's in-band metadata versus out-of-band metadata.
00:52:11 ◼ ► In-band metadata is what most services like Mastanon or Twitter, especially back in the day, used to use, where that, you know, @museum shuffle or whatever, that's part of the body text of the thing, and if you want to separate it, you, the developer of Ivory or whatever Mastanon client, has to parse the text, find the things that are @mentions, extract them, so on and so forth, as opposed to a system where the metadata was out-of-band,
00:52:40 ◼ ► where there was a separate thing, even if it was just something as simple as, and I think Twitter did this in later years, ranges of saying, here's the string, but the range from character 0 to character 15 is the first username, and the next username is here, and the next username is here.
00:52:53 ◼ ► Again, something is always parsing this and determining that, but, like, to essentially not have to have every single individual app suddenly become, like, a parser to find all the URLs, find all the @mentions, so on and so forth, and reconstruct it.
00:53:05 ◼ ► Again, I think modern Twitter/X does a better job of that, I think Mastanon also does a reasonable job of that with links and stuff, but for systems like Margo said that are just like, oh, I'm just going to chuck this text over the wall to the notification system, that's insufficient for Apple Intelligence to figure it out.
00:53:21 ◼ ► Now, I feel like Apple Intelligence could be trained to know things like, hey, when you see an @mention or a hashtag, what those things are, because they're culturally common enough that it's worthwhile training on that, and it wouldn't have to know the context, it doesn't have to know that this app is a Mastanon app, it just sees something that looks like an @mention, the same way humans do, we parse it out or whatever, and you could still run afoul of that and make a mistake, but it definitely seems like Apple Intelligence needs more/better training, and there's no way on the phone itself to know that.
00:53:50 ◼ ► This is what people think about Apple Intelligence, they think they're going to somehow, like, I wish I had a way to correct it so it would learn, that's not happening.
00:53:58 ◼ ► The only thing that's changing the weights in that model is when Apple releases a new version of that model, which could happen every day if Apple wanted it to, but probably knowing Apple is not going to.
00:54:06 ◼ ► But there's no feedback mechanism for you to somehow train the model by correcting it and telling it, no, this wasn't about museums, there's no mechanism for that right now, which is disappointing, but it's the reason we're going to have to live with whatever foibles these things have, which really, I feel like, impacts their potential usefulness, which is what Cable's talking about.
00:54:26 ◼ ► Cable, I think this is his second or third appearance, complaining about Apple Intelligence in beta, well, here he is again.
00:54:31 ◼ ► Yeah, so, Cable writes, "Testing Apple Intelligence on my Mac has led to many existential feature questions," with an asterisk, which we'll get to, "but it definitely is funny how it has it out for my dad."
00:54:43 ◼ ► And so this is a screenshot of conversations with two people, Megan and Steven, and the summary is, "Agree with Cable, Steven responds with nonsense."
00:54:51 ◼ ► So rude. That's the summary, I mean, assuming this is a conversation with cable with his parents. One parent's response was, "characterized as nonsense by the summary system."
00:55:03 ◼ ► Lovely. The aforementioned asterisk, "Why? How does this help? I'm still opening the emails and the messages, regardless of the summaries. In fact, I'm more likely to open them more urgently, interrupting my work quicker, because the summaries can sometimes miss key information, and I don't want my brain to think I read them when I didn't.
00:55:20 ◼ ► The emails it prioritizes for me are often just emails about canceled calendar events already reflected on my calendar. So what is the goal? To read my email less? How does this help that goal?"
00:55:30 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is part of the thing with any kind of assistance, right? If you ever have a human assistant that you hire to help you with things, and your human assistant tells you, "Okay, on the agenda today, you've got meeting X with this person, meeting Y with this person, you have to do this thing," or whatever,
00:55:44 ◼ ► that assistant is not valuable if after the assistant tells you that, what you do is then go to your calendar and confirm everything they said just to make sure they didn't make any mistakes, because what if they forgot that you have to pick up your kid from school and they didn't mention that?
00:55:55 ◼ ► That's the whole reason you have the assistant, is to make it so you don't have to do that. But with these type of assistants, where they're not very smart and often make mistakes, if you have to go and double check everything they did, is it saving you any time, or would you rather have not just seen it at all?
00:56:12 ◼ ► Like Cable said, the worst case scenario is you look at the summary and your brain tells you, "Okay, I've dealt with that. I've read that. I saw what it had to say. I can safely disregard that because this email is just telling me something that's not important."
00:56:23 ◼ ► But little did you know that there was something very important in the email, and because you didn't read it, but instead you read the summary that was generated for you that was inaccurate, you now think you dealt with it.
00:56:32 ◼ ► And then, I think we'll all learn from this with someone saying, "You didn't pick up little Timmy at school? I emailed you about it." And it's like, "Yeah, I read that email. You didn't say anything about that, but you didn't read the email. You read the summary and thought you had read the email."
00:56:43 ◼ ► So, I mean, it's hard. We were talking about the friend thing, right? What can this technology do in a way that fulfills the requirements?
00:56:53 ◼ ► Summarizing notifications in email may be beyond the capabilities, even though it sounds like such a simple thing, may be beyond the capabilities if it fails in ways that are a problem for you and that require you to read the actual email.
00:57:10 ◼ ► Because then it's like, what's the point of the summary then? You can't triage based on the summary if you can't trust what it says.
00:57:15 ◼ ► So I feel cable frustration, obviously this is still a beta, we'll all see how we deal with this. I hope you can actually turn this off. Don't try to summarize notifications for me.
00:57:24 ◼ ► I see the goal. We all get lots of notifications and it's annoying seeing a giant stack of them like, "Oh, I have to read through them and see if any of them are important or whatever. I have to go through all my email one by one."
00:57:32 ◼ ► We all hate that, right? We would love something to help us out. But if the thing helping us out is untrustworthy, I'd rather just don't try to help and I will just continue to go through my own notifications and email myself.
00:57:42 ◼ ► Alright, and then in front of the show, Zach Kahn writes with regard to Apple Podcast charts, I think this was on Ask ATP a few weeks ago or something like that, asking, "Hey, does following on Overcast or Apple Podcast or what have you, does that actually help?"
00:57:57 ◼ ► And so if you'd like, you can dig into the specifics behind that, but Zach provided three different links with regard to how all that works behind the scenes. And I'm happy that Apple provides this.
00:58:06 ◼ ► I tried to read those documents and the question was like, you know, the question was like Overcast, like, "Does following on Overcast do anything to Apple Podcasts?"
00:58:16 ◼ ► And Marco answered, "No, it doesn't." But the other question was like, "What does following do in Apple Podcasts?" And we had all sorts of theories.
00:58:22 ◼ ► Yeah, "Does it help the show?" Because everyone always says, "Please follow us, it helps the show."
00:58:25 ◼ ► Right, and this document does kind of confirm that that's the case within the realm of Apple Podcasts, but it doesn't go into the nitty-gritty detail of exactly how they calculate all these lists and what the algorithms are or whatever.
00:58:36 ◼ ► Well, of course not, they don't want to reveal that, because the more you reveal about that, people will game it.
00:58:40 ◼ ► Right, and so if you're expecting to go into these documents and say, "Finally, now I know exactly what happens when I follow something," you're not going to find out that kind of detail.
00:58:47 ◼ ► But it's telling you, you know, directionally, here are the actions that you can take, and those actions feed into these things in a way that we're not going to describe to you because you game it.
00:58:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I think actually this section is a really, really, really great summary of both what it looks at and why.
00:59:04 ◼ ► So this is from the link that we've phrased as summary in the show notes, and it says, "Top shows and top episodes.
00:59:12 ◼ ► While the exact algorithm cannot be shared to protect its integrity, the charts measure a mix of the following.
00:59:17 ◼ ► Listening. When listeners are engaging with episodes, it's an indicator of content popularity.
00:59:21 ◼ ► Follows. When listeners follow a show to receive new episodes, it's an indicator of their intent to listen.
00:59:26 ◼ ► Completion rate. When listeners complete episodes, it's an indicator of content quality." I like that. I mean, it makes sense.
00:59:33 ◼ ► Now, granted, it's not super specific, but I like that not only do they say, "This is what we're doing," but here's also why we're doing it.
00:59:39 ◼ ► And Spotify gathers similar stats for its podcast. But of course, for our show, where a significant portion of our listeners do not use Apple Podcasts,
00:59:48 ◼ ► all those listeners doing all their activity listening to our podcast don't factor into this at all.
00:59:53 ◼ ► Like, there is no, as far as I'm aware, equivalent of like the Nielsen ratings back in the day where it's like a cross-section of all humanity watching television,
01:00:05 ◼ ► We have Apple Podcasts. If you use the Apple Podcasts app, they can track your behavior and your behavior influences their top charts.
01:00:13 ◼ ► But if you're using literally any other podcast client, Apple has no idea what you're doing.
01:00:18 ◼ ► Because Apple doesn't host the feeds. The feeds are hosted on individual people's websites and everything.
01:00:22 ◼ ► And again, if you're an oddball show like ours, where the majority of our listeners are not using Apple Podcasts,
01:00:28 ◼ ► we're just losing out on that activity, which is one of the many reasons why we're unlikely to ever appear in any kind of top charts.
01:00:36 ◼ ► I mean, obviously we're a tiny podcast, we're not going to appear there anyway. But it's just part of the system that we have.
01:00:41 ◼ ► Podcasts are very open, but things like that are necessarily sort of islands, individual isolated islands of statistics.
01:00:53 ◼ ► Because nobody has an overview of everything. Which I think is good. Like, we don't want someone to have an overview of everything.
01:01:00 ◼ ► And finally, for follow-up, Huawei has a newspaper phone. It's a tri-fold. It's so ridiculous.
01:01:09 ◼ ► But hey, if you like it, you like it. The replacement of this, or the screen replacement of this, or no, not the screen replacement, excuse me, the whole phone is quite expensive.
01:01:18 ◼ ► So reading from The Verge, Huawei has officially announced the world's first dual-hinge triple-screen foldable phone in China.
01:01:23 ◼ ► The prices for the Mate XT Ultimate Design start at 19,999 Yuan, or about $2,809 for the 25GB storage model.
01:01:37 ◼ ► 256GB storage module. For almost $3,000, they couldn't give you more than 256GB of storage.
01:01:42 ◼ ► All models are equipped with 16GB of RAM, and two additional storage variants are available that cost 22,000 Yuan, or about $3,000 for 512GB, and 24,000 Yuan, or about $3,300 for 1TB.
01:01:55 ◼ ► The Chinese retailer Vimal reported 3.7 million pre-orders before pricing was announced.
01:02:01 ◼ ► Folding phones. They're still trying different ways to fold them. I waited for the one that folds up an old paper map that you can never get refolded correctly in the car.
01:02:18 ◼ ► It does unfold to a really big screen, but it's like a full-size iPad, practically. It looks bigger than an iPad Mini, at least.
01:02:27 ◼ ► It does look like when it is folded, you can still use it as a regular phone, because the top third of the screen is still visible.
01:02:37 ◼ ► Folding. People are trying everything they can possibly think of, and I guess there's enough customers out there saying, "That looks cool. I want to have that because it reminds me of a sci-fi show."
01:02:47 ◼ ► Once they get it, they'll determine, "Is this actually a good phone, or is this a gimmick that I spend the first month showing everybody I know?"
01:03:06 ◼ ► I'm glad people are trying crazy stuff like this. Now that we have this foldable screen tech that has reached the point of maturity that you can actually start having a decent number of products out there on the market that use it,
01:03:18 ◼ ► I like seeing weird experimentation with gadgets. You know, phones have been these kind of boring rectangles for so long that it's been a mature market.
01:03:27 ◼ ► These boring rectangles are here for a reason. People like them overall, and never bet against them.
01:03:37 ◼ ► We haven't really seen this level of form factor experimentation since the very early days of the smartphone era.
01:03:44 ◼ ► And now we're seeing all sorts of crazy ideas, and most of them are going to be terrible.
01:03:48 ◼ ► But some of them are going to actually have some merit, and they'll be fun. So I'm happy to see this.
01:04:04 ◼ ► "In 2013, Apple's introduction to Find My wiped out a huge chunk of the market for stolen iPhones, since they could no longer be simply reset and sold as a working phone.
01:04:16 ◼ ► Back in April, Apple announced that it would be addressing that issue by extending activation lock to key iPhone components.
01:04:23 ◼ ► Requested by customers and law enforcement officials, the feature was designed to limit iPhone theft by blocking a lost or stolen iPhone from being reactivated.
01:04:31 ◼ ► If a device under repair detects that a supported part was obtained from another device without an activation lock or loss mode enabled, calibration capabilities for that part will be restricted.
01:04:44 ◼ ► The feature, as previously described by Apple, links to your Apple account not only to your iPhone, but also to components such as the battery, cameras, and display, based on their individual serial numbers.
01:04:54 ◼ ► It won't completely solve the problem, of course, as it doesn't cover all components, and there may be some who will accept a lack of calibration and annoying alert messages in return for a cheap repair.
01:05:02 ◼ ► But it will make a huge dent in the market for stolen iPhones, because most people won't buy a device with obvious issues, especially when those issues suggest it may contain stolen parts.
01:05:11 ◼ ► The downside, of course, is that the move makes it harder to repair an iPhone using parts harvested from legitimately acquired broken devices.
01:05:17 ◼ ► Apple has already introduced the ability to remove activation locks from Macs when wiping them, rather than when setting them up as new.
01:05:23 ◼ ► This is coming to Apple Business Manager, too, so enterprise companies will be able to remove activation lock from entire batches of managed devices when preparing them for sale.
01:05:37 ◼ ► On the one side, this obviously is a real bummer for third-party people that are legitimate and are just trying to get cheaper repairs by harvesting a phone for parts that maybe the screen is shattered because I was washing my car or something like that.
01:05:52 ◼ ► And yet the camera is fine. And I get that that's a real bummer for them, but I would say that broadly this strikes me as a pretty good idea.
01:06:11 ◼ ► Like, stopping people from stealing your phone. People think about that and it's like, "Oh, I'll tie it to my wrist with a cable or give people electric shock when they get..." No, that's not how you solve these problems.
01:06:23 ◼ ► That's how a five-year-old solves these problems. You solve it by making it not a profitable thing to do.
01:06:28 ◼ ► And Apple has been slowly chipping away at that and saying, "If someone does steal your phone, what good is it to them? How much money can they make from that phone?"
01:06:38 ◼ ► And if you keep pushing down that amount of money and increasing the hassle, it will reduce iPhone theft simply because it is no longer as profitable as it used to be.
01:06:50 ◼ ► But Find My and activation lock on parts go a long way towards making it much more difficult to make money by stealing people's phones.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Now, since this is a technological solution, it's just another technological cat and mouse race.
01:07:04 ◼ ► Like, "Okay, well, what is locked about them? Can that encryption be broken? Do people mind?"
01:07:10 ◼ ► Like, part of the thing is that the parts will work, but they will not be able to be calibrated.
01:07:14 ◼ ► And you may think, "Who cares about calibration?" But many parts in the phone in particular are things like the screen.
01:07:19 ◼ ► Calibration is a surprisingly big part of what makes them work because they're not perfect pieces of hardware.
01:07:26 ◼ ► And the calibration process sort of makes it so that the system knows, for example, how much voltage and how much current do I have to supply to every single little sub-pixel to get it to emit the amount of brightness that I expect it to emit.
01:07:40 ◼ ► And that varies across the screen. It's not like I just apply the same current and voltage across the whole screen and you get a uniform image. You don't.
01:07:46 ◼ ► The screens have variations. Your screen will look weird and bad if it is not correctly calibrated.
01:07:52 ◼ ► And so they're not, like, even now they're not locking it out entirely like they do with the face ID sensors where I think they just don't work at all, period.
01:08:00 ◼ ► But things like the screen, I think they'll work, but they won't let you calibrate them so they'll look bad.
01:08:04 ◼ ► And so they're really trying to make it so that if someone steals your phone and harvests parts from it, maybe the most valuable parts are less valuable now.
01:08:13 ◼ ► Because they'll only be, someone will only buy them knowing they can sell them to somebody who accepts having alert dialogues come up and complain about, you know, unauthenticated parts or whatever, and also accepts the fact that their screen is going to look worse.
01:08:27 ◼ ► And yeah, the flip side of this is that everybody who does phone repairs legitimately thinks this is terrible, you're locking down these parts, I can't have my business anymore because I can't unlock the parts, only Apple can do it or whatever.
01:08:38 ◼ ► Really, I think it's not that Apple can do it, only the person who owns the device can do it.
01:08:43 ◼ ► So businesses having a way to, like, mass unlock and wipe their phones before they resell them, that's important.
01:08:49 ◼ ► Like this article says, Macs have the ability to do that if you want to sell your Mac, you want to wipe it so that your Apple ID is totally divorced from it and it removes the activation lock.
01:08:58 ◼ ► So owners can do it, but someone who just stole your phone presumably can't do it because they don't have your password or whatever.
01:09:08 ◼ ► And there was a toot that just went by this morning that reminded me of this article in the Gothamist talking about messages that have been sent to somebody by the people who stole their phone.
01:09:20 ◼ ► Because the people who stole their phone obviously are not the brightest thieves, but the phone is locked, right?
01:09:28 ◼ ► And they need it to be unlocked for it to become useful, so they're sending messages to sort of social engineer the owner of the phone to say, hey, can you essentially remove this phone from your Apple ID?
01:09:38 ◼ ► Like deactivate Find My, remove it from your Apple ID, which would then unlock it and open it up so then they could use it as a phone.
01:09:44 ◼ ► And they send us a series of messages trying to coerce/fool this person into unlocking their phone, culminating into violent threats at the very end, which is not fun.
01:09:54 ◼ ► But it just goes to show, like, certain caliber of criminal are already frustrated by the features that Apple has.
01:10:03 ◼ ► They think, hey, ha, I got a stolen phone, this will be great. I can use this as my phone or resell it as another phone.
01:10:08 ◼ ► And they realize, oh, no, I can't do anything because it's activation locked and I don't know how to get around that.
01:10:12 ◼ ► So let me try to harass the original owner into unlocking it for me and this original owner happens to be smart enough to know what they're doing.
01:10:24 ◼ ► Because people, you know, again, people don't know what activation lock is, they don't know all these details, they just know their phone was stolen.
01:10:30 ◼ ► They get a message that says some of the things that these messages say, like, oh, you're about to be charged and I have your financial information and I'm going to sell your phone and all your information is on it and everyone's going to get it.
01:10:40 ◼ ► People don't know if that's true or not, right? So they'll just be like, oh, I'll do whatever they say and unlock the phone and then they'll go away, right?
01:10:46 ◼ ► And by unlocking it, all you're basically doing is letting them use your phone as a fresh phone and sell it for full price or whatever.
01:10:58 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate that this has to be a thing, but here we are and Apple's doing their best to try to ride the line between blocking out third party repair shops and whatnot and also just helping us not get our phones stolen, which would be preferred.
01:11:14 ◼ ► They had their rationale for this was in that product longevity document that we talked about where they explain why they do this.
01:11:21 ◼ ► It's not to screw over customers, but it's to try to make it so that parts that are essential to security like Face ID and Touch ID can't be spoofed or faked with third party ones or whatever.
01:11:32 ◼ ► They didn't even talk about the theft angle, but I feel like that is another big side of this.
01:11:36 ◼ ► I do kind of love like the one of the Apple approaches to discouraging theft is like, all right, you can steal these phones, but we're going to make your screens look bad.
01:11:52 ◼ ► People will use their phones with giant spider web of shatters across it for a year and a half, but they won't use it if one side of the screen is slightly brighter than the other.
01:12:10 ◼ ► And there's a lot more out there than you think. Your name, your contact info, your address, your phone number, social security number, and also all that information about your family members too.
01:12:25 ◼ ► So, Delete Me is a great solution that can help remove some of this info from hundreds of data brokers.
01:12:32 ◼ ► So, this is how this works. You sign up with Delete Me and you tell them exactly what information you want deleted.
01:12:40 ◼ ► It is a subscription service and they send you constant monitoring reports showing what info they found, where they found it, and what they were able to remove.
01:12:49 ◼ ► They're always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing this personal information that you don't want on the internet.
01:12:55 ◼ ► So, they do all the hard work of getting that personal information off of these data broker websites.
01:13:00 ◼ ► So, take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me.
01:13:07 ◼ ► So, you can get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/atp and use promo code ATP at checkout.
01:13:32 ◼ ► Alright, let's do some Ask ATP and Yoav Zoldan writes, "How do you explain to non-tech people, especially family, that your iPhone does not listen to you to show you ads?
01:13:44 ◼ ► I can never get them to believe me. I think cross-site tracking is hard to understand and the conspiracy theory is more attractive.
01:13:52 ◼ ► Well, this got complicated in the time between we added this to the show notes and when we started talking about it just now.
01:13:57 ◼ ► Because there's been a couple of news reports, the title is, "Cox Media Group Brags, Spies on Users with Device Microphones to Sell Targeted Ads."
01:14:05 ◼ ► But it's not clear they actually can. That was from Tech Dirt, we'll put a link to the show notes.
01:14:09 ◼ ► And then from 404 Media, here's the pitch deck for "active listening" ad targeting, which is also not great.
01:14:17 ◼ ► So, I don't really know how to answer this question anymore, to be completely honest with you.
01:14:22 ◼ ► We get this question all the time. People always want to know whether their phone is listening to them, or they just write to us and insist that their phone is listening to them.
01:14:33 ◼ ► First of all, let's just say that we're talking about iPhones only. I have no idea what's going on with Android, with respect to this.
01:14:39 ◼ ► But in the realm of the iPhone, it is extremely difficult to use the microphone to passively spy on people when people are not using your app and haven't given their permission.
01:14:51 ◼ ► Those are a lot of caveats. Apps can trick you into giving permission. App whatever wants to use the microphone. Allow?
01:15:07 ◼ ► But people who insist that their phones are listening to them will say things like, "I know I never gave this app access to the microphone."
01:15:16 ◼ ► Or, "I don't even have the Facebook app installed, but I visited their website and I think it's listening to me now."
01:15:21 ◼ ► People have all sorts of conspiracy theories about it. And they're backed up by these anecdotes that we know are explained by, not simple, but not obvious ways that they track you across the web.
01:15:31 ◼ ► Whether it be local storage, cookies, the fact that you're coming from the same IP address, you're sitting in a group of people.
01:15:37 ◼ ► I never even looked up swing sets. But immediately I got an ad for swing sets on Instagram. Well, it's because the person sitting next to you looked up swing sets and they're coming through the same Wi-Fi thing as you and yada yada.
01:15:48 ◼ ► There's a million ways that they can track you that are not listening to you, but humans have a much easier time thinking, "Well, if I was trying to spy on somebody, what I would do is I would listen to them."
01:15:57 ◼ ► Like with my ears. Audio. And they think that is the most straightforward way to know what you're doing. And it's not.
01:16:04 ◼ ► The ad industry has so many other ways to track you that are so much better developed that do not require listening.
01:16:11 ◼ ► That said, every single time we've talked about this issue, one of the things we have said is, "Oh, believe me, they would love to be listening to you."
01:16:18 ◼ ► It's not that they wouldn't do it if they could. They want to do it. They're trying to do it. All the time they're trying to do it. It's just that Apple is pretty good at stopping them.
01:16:26 ◼ ► And this Cox Media Group bragging that say, "Hey, we have this technology that lets you sell targeted ads based on what people say because we listen on the microphone."
01:16:34 ◼ ► They've been pitching that for years. And I'm sure that they have that technology. And I'm sure it will totally work if someone gives it microphone access.
01:16:42 ◼ ► But those are a lot of ifs in that stack there, right? That's why these stories, you should read the Tektor one because they're usually pretty skeptical and sort of paranoid about being spied on or whatever.
01:16:52 ◼ ► It's been like, "Okay, well, they can pitch you that they can provide this technology, but they should also have to explain how you're going to get past the fact that you can't get access to the microphone on the iPhone unless the user gets permission or whatever."
01:17:02 ◼ ► "Show me the -- do they have some technical hack to get around that or are they just using social engineering or whatever?"
01:17:08 ◼ ► In the end, though, this is kind of one of those things where people feel bad if they think something is listening to the audio of what they say, but somehow they don't feel bad if something is tracking them using cookies and IP addresses and other sort of weird hacks.
01:17:26 ◼ ► That one doesn't feel as bad because it's not a human experience. They would feel bad if a human was listening in on them. When a computer is listening in, it's more like a human to them.
01:17:35 ◼ ► They don't care about tracking of their data otherwise. So it's difficult to explain to that person, "Look, the end result is the same."
01:17:43 ◼ ► They know you're thinking about swing sets. Whether they pulled that out of the air or just got it because someone who was on the same Wi-Fi router as you looked up swing sets, even though you didn't do it, it doesn't really make a difference in the end.
01:17:56 ◼ ► But people want to feel -- it's kind of like the discussion of free will I had on RecDiffs, which I don't want to bring up on this show, but feel free to find that episode if you can figure out how to use Google and find it in the show notes.
01:18:07 ◼ ► There's what's actually happening and then there's how you feel about it. And how you feel about it is so much more important in this scenario. People feel terrible about being listened in on.
01:18:16 ◼ ► And yes, as Casey said, this story, this Cox Media thing coming around again, and again I believe this exact same company several years ago was pitching the same exact thing. Well anyway, it's another news cycle. Here they are pitching it again, getting themselves into the news.
01:18:28 ◼ ► All this is going to do is reinforce in the minds of conspiracy theorists that their iPhones are constantly listening to that because they're like, "Well, it's proof. They said they did it. They admitted it. How can you not see that?"
01:18:39 ◼ ► And the nuances are lost on them. And so in the end, as with many conspiracy theories, you can't convince anyone they're not true. You can't prove a negative.
01:18:48 ◼ ► And one thing that is true is that every advertiser wants to do this and are constantly trying to do it. So it's not outlandish that one of them could eventually break through, but to show that one of them has broken through, you would need a little bit more proof than were provided here.
01:19:01 ◼ ► So I would say it's very difficult to avoid tracking in any form whatsoever. If you're really worried about something listening to you, you should worry more about your voice control cylinders, which literally are constantly listening so they can hear you say the wake word to them.
01:19:16 ◼ ► They can't hear the wake word if they're not constantly listening. Supposedly they're throwing away all the audio that doesn't contain the wake word, but we know from past stories that sometimes some audio, when they're awoken accidentally, is stored on servers for a long period of time.
01:19:30 ◼ ► And listened to by humans for supposed QA purposes or whatever. If you don't like these things, don't buy something that is constantly listening to you and put it in your house.
01:19:39 ◼ ► Same thing with cameras. You hope that they're taking that video and putting it up on their servers and no human has access to it and it's end to end encrypted. Is it? Maybe. Maybe not.
01:19:47 ◼ ► That's why you really have to trust your vendor. I think Apple is one of the most trustworthy here because they are constantly fighting this battle because Apple does not make its money through targeted ads to the same degree that Google does and Amazon has lots of things to advertise to sell to you.
01:20:02 ◼ ► But yeah, it's a difficult situation and I would say to this person, you're probably not going to convince anybody. Mostly just let them believe what they want to believe because in the end, how is it going to even change their behavior? Are they not going to have a phone? Are they not going to have an Apple phone because they think Android is better than this? Just let them do what they want.
01:20:17 ◼ ► Peter Wagner writes, "It's been four years since MagSafe came out for the iPhone. I'd love to hear your take on the current state of MagSafe and your thoughts on it as part of the iPhone ecosystem."
01:20:33 ◼ ► I personally use Qi charging every night to charge my phone. MagSafe specifically, I also like, but I think that isn't as important to me as the Qi charging. Although now that I say that, I look at my Pro Max with its popsocket on the back and I wonder if I'm doing MagSafe a dirty by saying it's not that important to me because actually having something that I can do...
01:20:57 ◼ ► No, I take this all back. Don't worry, we'll fix it in post. Actually, now that I think about this, between the popsocket that I probably will give up once I get my human-sized phone, but also the MagSafe battery pack that Apple made years ago that I got kind of on a lark because you two jerks wouldn't buy one and I figured one of the three of us should that I actually freaking love.
01:21:19 ◼ ► I don't use it that often, but oh my word is it nice when I do need it. That's really nice and the Qi charging. So yeah, actually I take it all back. I'm all in on MagSafe. I think it's quite good.
01:21:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm with you on that. I've been using it pretty regularly since it came out. My typical bedside charger is just a MagSafe puck with that micro-suction tape on the bottom of it to keep it on the nightstand and then next to it is an Apple Watch charger with the exact same thing.
01:21:51 ◼ ► And it's a nice kind of minimal nightstand charging setup that works very well. And MagSafe, Qi charging in general is great for lots of reasons. It's not a perfect thing. Like wireless charging, as mentioned in the past, wireless charging is a little bit inefficient.
01:22:06 ◼ ► And so you do end up losing some of that power and making more heat as a result. That's why it's inefficient. It's turning some of that into heat as waste. And so that has a number of negative effects. Most significantly that you are kind of warming up the battery more than necessary as you're charging it.
01:22:21 ◼ ► And that's not amazing for battery health. And of course you are wasting energy. But that being said, Qi charging is very convenient. And it has a lot of other benefits too. Like for instance, you can have Qi charging pads and lots of different things that you wouldn't have a plug for.
01:22:40 ◼ ► You can, as we mentioned earlier on this show, you can power something via Qi while you are using its port for something else. You are also not wearing out the port by plugging it in every night if you're sitting on a charging pad instead.
01:22:52 ◼ ► So it avoids a lot of those kinds of problems. But the problem with Qi, the biggest inconvenience as a user with Qi charging is getting it centered and occasionally missing.
01:23:03 ◼ ► And so I think we, MagSafe was Apple basically saying, hey, you guys, this was a good idea, this wireless charging thing, but let us do it right for you.
01:23:12 ◼ ► And sure enough, Apple made a couple of modifications to it when they made MagSafe. Most notably, the magnets that automatically align it correctly and you don't have to worry. Is it centered? Is it a little bit off? Did I miss last night? My phone's not charged?
01:23:25 ◼ ► No. MagSafe, it centers it every single time. It has never failed. It is a 100% attachment accuracy rate as far as I've had, which was way higher than I ever had with Qi.
01:23:38 ◼ ► And as a result, look, you see the Qi 2 standard now. Qi 2 was basically the industry saying, oh, you were right. Our bad. And then them saying, oh, let's actually take what Apple did and make it the new standard, basically.
01:23:56 ◼ ► Which is not the first time in the industry this has happened, by the way. But anyway, so that magnetic alignment is such a huge improvement and that allowed them to do things like have higher wattages.
01:24:08 ◼ ► Because one of the limitations of original Qi also is like because it's kind of imprecise, inefficient, kind of broad area coverage that you have to do, it was reasonably unsafe to put a lot of wattage through it in terms of heat management and everything else.
01:24:23 ◼ ► So with MagSafe, one of the reasons MagSafe chargers were able to charge at higher wattages than Qi chargers is that Apple was able to know, like, OK, well, if it is connected in this, like if it recognizes it in this certain way, we know it is properly centered.
01:24:38 ◼ ► We know it's very close and within these certain tolerances, and therefore we can safely apply more current in there. And we know that less of it will be converted to waste heat and, you know, et cetera. And so it'll be safer.
01:24:50 ◼ ► So again, another big advantage of Qi too, like that helped a lot that they can raise the wattage limits and make it more useful.
01:24:57 ◼ ► So I think it's one of those things where, again, looking at the iPhone 16's advances, if you told somebody like, hey, how much do you like, you know, MagSafe?
01:25:10 ◼ ► They'd be like, I guess it's fine, you know. But if you actually took it away and we went back to a world without it, we would realize, oh, we actually really missed that. Like, that's actually a very useful thing.
01:25:21 ◼ ► So many things have gotten better as a result of it. You have things like car mounts that can just stick it on there. You don't have to like slide it into like a bracket with a dock or whatever and it's not quite, you know, a line rider.
01:25:33 ◼ ► It bends out with your case thickness or whatever. Get rid of all that. You have the bedside situation. Again, a lot of things become easier there. You have the accessory ecosystem like KC's PopSocket, like the wallet.
01:25:43 ◼ ► You have all these things that are now able to either mount to the phone or make the phone easier to use in some way or more convenient to use in some way because of the MagSafe design on the back.
01:25:53 ◼ ► So it has a lot of those like little life improvements. So I'm actually very happy with MagSafe. I'm even happier that they've made it even better with the iPhone 16 series, allegedly with the larger coils and the higher wattage.
01:26:06 ◼ ► That's all going to be great. So I think MagSafe is a huge success on the phone and I look forward to continued improvements.
01:26:15 ◼ ► Even as somebody who does not use MagSafe to charge pretty much ever, mostly because I just don't want to deal with the heat and degradation or whatever and I don't mind plugging the thing in, it's just made a huge difference in my life simply because I have cars without CarPlay.
01:26:29 ◼ ► And what I was doing before was what Marco described. You had a thing that clipped onto a vent and it was like a big clampy jaw thing and you'd have to like open up the clampy jaw and put your phone in it and hope that it stayed in there.
01:26:39 ◼ ► And by the way, if you want your phone to charge, now snake a stupid cable that you have to route from wherever your USB port is in your thing and plug it into the bottom of the phone and now you're ready to go.
01:26:48 ◼ ► But with MagSafe, I get into the car, take my phone, thunk, it sticks to exactly where I want it to be. It doesn't fall off when I go over bumps and it's charging.
01:26:58 ◼ ► And I didn't have to do anything. I just stuck it there and when I go into the car I take it out. Obviously this is barbaric for people who have CarPlay, but not everybody has CarPlay. What a difference in my life this has made to have a dashboard mount that I just stick my thing to.
01:27:11 ◼ ► And I feel like I like the fact that it is charging, but the magnets are key. And I do have a MagSafe puck on my bedside table and mostly what I use it for is I put my little AirPods case in it because I don't really care if I wear out the battery in my AirPods case because it's not a big deal and I can get a new case if it has ever been a problem.
01:27:27 ◼ ► But it hasn't been. Unfortunately the battery in the AirPods themselves wears out quickly, but hopefully the heat generated from MagSafe charging my AirPods case is not transferring too heavily to the AirPods.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And anyway I've got new ones arriving soon. So yeah, I think MagSafe is great. The good thing about it is that it lets, first of all if you don't like it, it really doesn't take anything off your phone.
01:27:48 ◼ ► I'm sure it adds a few grams of weight to those magnets and the charging coil, but it's not a big deal. It doesn't change the appearance, doesn't add a giant hump, doesn't make it heavier or bigger in a way that people care about.
01:27:59 ◼ ► But second, everybody can choose what it is they like about MagSafe. Do you think of it as just a magnet to hold a wallet to the back of your phone? Do you use it for 100% of your charging? Is it a replacement car mount for you that's better than your old one?
01:28:11 ◼ ► It can do lots of things for lots of different people. So even though you might look at it and say, "Well I expected never to see a wire again and the port to disappear from my phone and that didn't happen, therefore MagSafe is a failure."
01:28:21 ◼ ► I think it's been a smashing success. I think everybody finds something they like about MagSafe and it can improve their life. And for the few people who don't find anything they like about MagSafe, it doesn't bother them. Great feature.
01:28:31 ◼ ► Yep, couldn't agree more. Jonathan Cirillo writes, "What are your credit card setups? For example, Amex Gold for X, Apple Card for Y, etc." For me, I feel like we've talked about this at some point in the past, but for me, Aaron and I share, and this obviously is what works for us, it won't work for everyone.
01:28:47 ◼ ► We share one primary checking account, one primary savings account, obviously we have investments and other things like that, and then one primary credit card. And so when we were both working, traditionally working years and years ago, 95% of our paychecks went into that shared account.
01:29:05 ◼ ► That's what pays the bills, that's what pays for food and everything else. And then we would siphon off just a little bit to personal credit cards that only we individually have access to, which are basically used for either, "I really want to buy this and I don't want to hear you complaining about it for either of us," or "I'm buying you a gift and I don't want you to know about it."
01:29:23 ◼ ► And so that's basically our setup. It's very boring. The credit card we have gives us a little bit of cash back. I'm sure I could be maximizing my points and whatnot and so on and so forth, but that's not a game I've ever really gotten into. So my setup is really boring. Basically, we share the same credit card account, basically all our retail purchases go on that, and then we pay it off every month. And that's basically it. Marco, what about you guys?
01:29:47 ◼ ► Also fairly boring. I have the standard setup from a nerd who was a nerd in 2006, which is I started out having an Amex Blue Cash card, which was like the nerd pick to do back then. And I had that for a while.
01:30:05 ◼ ► At some point in the last few years, we crossed over the threshold at which it made more sense to get the Platinum card, because it's one of those cards where there's an annual fee, but if you spend more than X, you'll end up coming out ahead with the points and everything else.
01:30:20 ◼ ► And there's all sorts of other benefits with the Platinum card. Among credit cards that offer various perks and benefits, especially if you travel a lot, it's one of the good ones to get, so look into it if you care. And if you spend stupid amounts of money, then it will usually pay for itself.
01:30:35 ◼ ► That being said, not everybody takes American Express, and so I used to just have the American Express as the credit card, and I would just use my regular bank debit card, which was a Visa, for anything that wouldn't take it.
01:30:48 ◼ ► Then at some point, that Visa, the number got stolen or something, and it really freaked me out, because debit cards do not provide nearly as much protection as credit cards in fraud situations, because with debit cards, they're actually directly taking the money.
01:31:03 ◼ ► There's usually some protection from your bank, but you don't have as many protections as you do with credit cards. And that kind of freaked me out that I was giving direct access to my bank account to so many vendors that wouldn't take American Express.
01:31:16 ◼ ► And so at that point, I got some other Visa credit card that was recommended. I think it's a Capital. I don't even remember, because I hardly ever use it for anything.
01:31:26 ◼ ► So my current setup is I have the Amex Platinum for anything that will take it. For anything that won't, I'll use that backup Visa. Oh, it's an Amazon Prime Visa. That's right, I switched over.
01:31:36 ◼ ► Those actually also provide pretty good benefits, and anything I buy from Amazon, I have that as the default payment method, because I think it's like 5% off. It's a pretty substantial discount on Amazon purchases.
01:31:48 ◼ ► And so if you buy a lot from Amazon, it's worth having the Amazon Prime card. And also if you buy a lot from Whole Foods, because it's the same deal. Anyway, Amex for things that take it, Amazon Prime Visa for whatever doesn't, and then my bank card is only ever used in my bank's ATM.
01:32:05 ◼ ► So I go to my bank's ATMs, that is the only place the debit card is ever put into, and it's used for nothing else, mostly just for safety and to avoid the inconvenience of that getting stolen.
01:32:19 ◼ ► We are a credit card family. My wife in particular has opened up many credit cards over the years. We've pared it down, but our system is generally one sort of shared card. We both have the card. I think at various times it might have had different numbers for the two of us, but most of the time it's had the same number but with two different cards with two different names on them.
01:32:39 ◼ ► And that's basically our main credit card that we use for everything. It is also an Amazon Prime Visa, just like Margo's, because we buy so much stuff from Amazon and unfortunately Whole Foods. And that gives us good cashback reward things and everybody takes it. It's taken everywhere.
01:32:55 ◼ ► We never got into the whole Amex thing or anything like that. Obviously we do have debit cards for our bank and everything, but we just don't use them.
01:33:02 ◼ ► I personally also have a "corporate credit card" that is the credit card connected to my business account.
01:33:08 ◼ ► In theory, I'm supposed to use that for all business expenses, and I do for recurring business expenses. Like as we've discussed before, if you have an LLC in Massachusetts, you pay some ungodly amount of money every single year just to maintain that LLC, which is why everyone opens theirs in Delaware or whatever.
01:33:21 ◼ ► But anyway, mine is in Massachusetts, and so every year I have to pay that. So any sort of recurring fees like that or my business telephone that I pay for, another recurring fee, I connect my business card, which is just another Visa, connected to my business bank account, which is in a different bank entirely.
01:33:35 ◼ ► I connect all that up to that. It doesn't matter. I'm a single-member LLC and it's passed through for tax purposes. It doesn't actually matter, but just at the end of the year when you're trying to find all your business expenses, if you can just look at one card and say, "Everything on this card is business expense," that makes our life easier for us to gather stuff that we then hand off to our accountant to say, "Here are all the business expenses," or whatever.
01:33:56 ◼ ► I don't always follow that, unfortunately. Sometimes there are some things that I forget that were on the other card or whatever, or there's a mix of them, but we figure it out. And the thing that both of you didn't mention that I'm sure is absolutely true for all of us is that when we buy stuff from Apple, we use our Apple Card because it's like whatever, 6% back or 3% or whatever percentage back. Is that not true of you two? Like whenever you make an Apple purchase, you use your Apple Card?
01:34:21 ◼ ► At the time, I guess I haven't looked recently, at the time it wasn't really worth the additional, whatever the very tiny benefit was for me over just buying it on my MX. It wasn't worth it. But that might be different now.
01:34:33 ◼ ► I don't know what the percentage is now, but I think briefly, especially when Apple Card was brand new and I was buying new Max, it was like 6% discount when buying Apple Hardware or something. I don't think that's still true. But yeah, I use my Apple Card whenever I buy anything from Apple. My Apple Card pays from iCloud, when I just bought my phone that was on my Apple Card. Like anytime we buy Apple Hardware that is on Apple Card, that is the only thing we use our Apple Card for. Mostly because Apple has no idea how to make a good credit card interface.
01:35:02 ◼ ► There needs to be a website, Apple, where you can go and see all your transactions. Have you heard of the web? But instead they're like, "Oh, just go to the app and scroll." Oh, you can't see all your transactions? Tough luck. Oh, you want them printed out in some kind of report? Tough luck.
01:35:15 ◼ ► They're so bad. But I do it to get whatever the discount is for buying Apple stuff specifically with your Apple Card. And I don't use the Apple Card for anything else because for anything else, for the most part, other cards I have, including our main Amazon Visa Card, give you more cash back or points or whatever that you should be getting.
01:35:34 ◼ ► So Apple Pay, when I double tap the side button and pay with Apple Pay, that's paying with the main family Visa Card. And I have to remember, and sometimes I forget this, remember anytime I'm actually buying something from Apple, when I double tap the side button, don't just face ID, select the Apple Card first.
01:35:51 ◼ ► Because you can pick which card you want on a per payment basis and do that. And yeah, I hate the stupid thing at Whole Foods where you have to scan your stupid QR code for the Whole Foods. Can't they just know whenever I pay with my Amazon Prime Visa thing that they're all the same company?
01:36:07 ◼ ► And I'm like, can't you just figure it out? But no, you got to scan the stupid code and then find out the code didn't even give you a discount on any of the ridiculously expensive items you bought this time. It's annoying.
01:36:25 ◼ ► Now that I had the Whole Foods lifestyle and now I'm away from it, I actually really miss it. Whole Foods, for all of its faults, is awesome.
01:36:40 ◼ ► The only other good benefit of Amazon and Whole Foods coming together is that returning stuff. You can just go to Whole Foods with your thing and just give it to someone at a counter and say, here, take this. It doesn't even have to be packed up or anything. It has to be in the box or whatever.
01:37:11 ◼ ► I think having it on the other end is terrible. They need to look at every other credit card website to know what the bar is and they're just below it.
01:37:19 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Pioneers of AI, and DeleteMe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm/join.
01:37:30 ◼ ► One of the member perks is you get ATP overtime, a bonus topic every week. This week on overtime, we're going to be asking, will Apple pull a Google and actually abandon a long-running service? We will find out in ATP overtime this week.
01:38:55 ◼ ► Okay. Now, to the degree you're willing to share, did you call in favors? Did you get special treatment? What is going on?
01:39:02 ◼ ► No, I didn't even want to try that. I don't want a car that I can only get serviced in a reasonable amount of time by calling in special favors.
01:39:15 ◼ ► Although, to be fair, what most people said is you don't have to call in a special favor. If you just sign up for the appointment, that's it, and then just wait. Because you listed severe things in your appointment, they will bump you up on the schedule. Nothing you have to do, no special treatment, they have no idea who you are. That was the things that people were saying.
01:39:31 ◼ ► That is what people told me. Here's what actually happened. I created that ticket with the items on it that seemed pretty significant. I think not being able to move the driver's seat is a pretty substantial safety issue. Not being able to fast charge on highway trips reliably is also a pretty significant issue.
01:39:47 ◼ ► Not having any air conditioning in early September is a pretty significant issue. I waited a day or two after submitting it to see because people said that should happen. It didn't. And then I ended up, there's an interface in the app where you can message the service center on the same thread as your service request.
01:40:06 ◼ ► So it's like a little chat interface. So I submitted a couple questions in the chat. I'm like, hey, I'm hearing that maybe the AC coolant is also used to cool the battery and maybe that might be related to my fast charging issues. Is it safe to drive this vehicle without the AC working? Because right now the AC doesn't work at all.
01:40:24 ◼ ► I bet they love it when people self-diagnose and write in with their theories about what might be wrong with their car.
01:40:55 ◼ ► So I asked in the chat, is it safe to drive if the cooling system is not working? I did not hear back.
01:41:23 ◼ ► Cool. That's one of the options. Like I said, don't answer that. Don't answer that. Just no response. I was not moved up 10 days later. They finally called me. Let me tell you what I did in the meantime.
01:41:55 ◼ ► I was like, okay, I don't think this is going the way I expected. And so I said, let me just go see what are my other options out there. So I drove the Rivian over to BMW.
01:42:13 ◼ ► I'm on Long Island. There are BMW dealers every 20 feet. I wanted to look at the Kia EV6, the IONIQ 5, and the BMW iX. For every other model that people suggested, I really, either it was a Tesla, and there's reasons, I don't want to do that, or it was something that does not fit what I stated where my priorities, which is I need pretty long range.
01:42:37 ◼ ► I would like a decent amount of interior space and cargo space. I would like it to have a hatchback or a liftback trunk. And I would like it to be a model that has existed for more than a year or two. Like I want something that's a little bit more established, and ideally from an established car brand, not a startup like Lucid or something like that.
01:42:52 ◼ ► The i5 doesn't have a hatchback or a liftback. You can get the M5, the electric M5, or the not electric M5 wagon, but is there an i5 liftback? No, the iX, I'm saying, is the one I was looking at. You didn't look at the i5 or the i4, the two that I suggested? I did look at the i5.
01:43:09 ◼ ► Too small? So I actually, I didn't test drive it, but I sat in one in the dealer. I looked around. So the i5 is basically their BMW's electric 5 series. I loved driving a 5 series sized car. It was great. The problem is that was before I was ruined by the Model S big liftback style.
01:43:25 ◼ ► And I love the cargo advantages of a liftback. So I really don't want a standard trunk anymore if I don't need it. Secondly, you figure out what are you optimizing for if you pick a sedan over a crossover or an SUV. What you're optimizing for mostly is efficiency, maybe physical footprint size.
01:43:44 ◼ ► And when you compare the range, the iX actually I think has longer range than the i5 or at least it's similar because they put a little bit bigger battery in it. Also, the 5 series has such a big footprint now that the length and width of the 5 series of the i5 is almost the same as the iX.
01:44:10 ◼ ► Significantly taller. But that's part of the problem of BMW's strategy of essentially making a gas version or electric version of the same car. The i5 has enough room for a gigantic internal combustion engine under the hood. And when you take out that engine, the car does not get any smaller.
01:44:22 ◼ ► No, and it especially does not get shorter or narrower. So I think when you compare the actual measurements, the i5 is something like an inch or two narrower, but it's like the exact same length as the iX or it might even be an inch longer.
01:44:38 ◼ ► Yeah, and the 4 series, the way they make it sportier is they really crush the backseat, both headroom and the cargo is not great either in that. Anyway, so that's why the BMW I was looking at was the iX. I've also just heard great things about it.
01:44:52 ◼ ► So all this is I'm looking around and I'm like, "Alright, let me see what are my options if I do want to trade in the Rivian, what are my options here?" And then, "How can I get around the issue of it's broken?"
01:45:09 ◼ ► So Adam said, you know, let's go, because I was describing the options to him, and this was after school one day, he had just come from sports practice and he was tired and I'm like, "Alright, I have time for one car dealer." And I'm like, "Alright, do you want to go to the small fun one?" I was thinking the IONIQ 5.
01:45:25 ◼ ► Or do you want to go to the big cushy one? And he said, "Let's do the big cushy one." Alright, so we go to see the iX. First of all, inside Adam was immediately won over by, it has this accent lighting.
01:45:47 ◼ ► Oh my god, it's so fun. Along every window strip on the bottom of each window, and then a couple little lights throughout the cabin, there's these RGB lights, and Adam's like, "Oh my god, make it purple!" So we made it purple during the test drive, and he's like, "Alright, you gotta buy this car."
01:46:00 ◼ ► You'd be shocked to learn that Mercedes has named themes with associated signature scents, so it's not just like, "Oh, you can change the colors." It's like, "Well, we've carefully selected these particular themes that involve a sound environment, and a color scheme of the RGB lighting, and a scent." And it's like, "Oh, come on."
01:46:19 ◼ ► That's amazing. And BMW has, the iX has a bunch of weird stuff like that. But anyway, so Adam is super into it.
01:46:26 ◼ ► And I mentioned to the salesman, I'm like, "Hey," because as soon as, of course, I knew what I was doing. I pulled up, and I parked the Rivian directly in front of the sales showroom so everyone could see it.
01:46:35 ◼ ► And it's like this glorious yellow goodness. And the salesman immediately was like, "Hey, how do you like that Rivian?" And he said the yellow was the best color, they don't make it anywhere. I'm like, "Oh, he knows Rivians, okay." And this guy has good taste, so I'm off to a good start.
01:46:58 ◼ ► Well, yes. So anyway, he mentions his girlfriend happens to be the manager of Rivian's service place in Brooklyn.
01:47:16 ◼ ► You're not making this up. This really genuinely happened. That's incredible. This is worth the reveal. Oh my god, this is so good. Now I'm going to be mad if you did sell the damn thing.
01:47:40 ◼ ► So anyway, I decided it was okay to reveal something because of that. I said, "Listen, I have two problems.
01:47:54 ◼ ► Problem number two is the air conditioning does not blow very strong right now and it's a long wait for service and I can't get it serviced anytime soon."
01:48:14 ◼ ► So I mentioned those problems and I think this anchors the deal in my favor already because he's like, "Well, if we took that in, I could get that taken care of much faster."
01:48:24 ◼ ► I'm like, "Great!" So anyway, we do the test drive. I freaking love the iX. It's just ridiculously nice. Way nicer than I expected it to be based on reviews and everything.
01:48:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I'll give you that. But anyway, I freaking love it. So I'm like, "Alright, let me see what my option here is."
01:49:03 ◼ ► Now, I went in there. I had looked up on websites, like, you know, what are they saying?
01:49:10 ◼ ► I looked at, like, you know, what do these things tend to go for that are, you know, because there's not that many R1-S's that are in the used market.
01:49:17 ◼ ► So there's not that many data points. But there's enough that I can, I had like a number in mind, and I'm like, "Alright, if this is roughly what they sell for in private sales to enthusiasts, I'd be happy to take, like, you know, at least 10% lower than that from a dealer-trader."
01:49:32 ◼ ► And I know I'd probably be fighting even to get that. They offered just barely a hair below the private sale price.
01:49:40 ◼ ► So I was like, "Hmm. I'm not going to get, you know, the Rivian service manager's boyfriend at another car dealer. This is a surprisingly good opportunity all of a sudden. Hmm."
01:49:51 ◼ ► So I'm like, "Let's run some numbers here. You know, what could we do on the lease? You know, how can we work this?"
01:49:57 ◼ ► So through a surprisingly small amount of squeezing, it turns out there were a lot of lease incentives at the time for the IX for some reason. I don't care why.
01:50:07 ◼ ► I know there's like an LCI coming out next year. I know it's about to be updated. It's probably going to get the Tesla port next year as part of the LCI, which is the BMW's term for mid-cycle refresh.
01:50:17 ◼ ► I know they're going to, you know, improve some of the looks of the outside because people don't like it. I really care about none of those things right now.
01:50:24 ◼ ► And so I, through just these wonderful lease incentives, it brought the price of the vehicle down like $12,000.
01:50:33 ◼ ► I'm like, "Huh. So I'm going to do this trade-in for a price that is way more than I could get, than I thought, with no trouble whatsoever.
01:50:43 ◼ ► And they're going to give me a big cut off the lease. And I'm going to prepay most of the lease with the part of the value of the trade-in.
01:50:59 ◼ ► It's the Blue Ridge Mountain one. It basically looks like a shiny sky blue. It's like if the sky was shiny, that is how it looks.
01:51:09 ◼ ► I got the 50. I didn't test drive a 60. They didn't have one then. I got the 50 because I test drove the 50 and it was extremely fast.
01:51:20 ◼ ► I would say it's a similar difference as back when I was getting my Model S when they had the regular mid-range one versus the, at the time I think it was the Ludicrous.
01:51:35 ◼ ► At the time it was like, you could go to 0-60 in like 4 seconds or 3 seconds basically.
01:51:47 ◼ ► And then the 3 second one I remember with the Tesla, I test drove that one and I believe I described it on the show as, it felt like I was getting punched in the chest when I would floor it.
01:51:54 ◼ ► Like it was actually kind of unpleasantly fast. So I decided with this one, like the X50 one or the 50X drive, whatever it's called, the quote "slow one" is already so fast.
01:52:06 ◼ ► This is plenty for me. And it gets longer range and it's cheaper by a lot. And there's more of them in stock everywhere.
01:52:20 ◼ ► No, but look up actual pictures of it. The configurator does not really show what it's like.
01:52:29 ◼ ► Yes. So the thing is, to get one locally that's in stock, cause I asked, what's the order time? And the lead time on an order is like 3-4 months.
01:52:37 ◼ ► I don't really want to wait that long. And also, there was a time in my life when I really cared about every one of those details.
01:52:54 ◼ ► But I put the Rivian cost towards the lease as much as they would take, so the lease payments are like $120 a month.
01:53:06 ◼ ► And there's no interest. It made no sense not to. With all the lease incentives that brought the price so low, it made no sense to do a cash buy or anything like that.
01:53:21 ◼ ► So, anyway, it's a great car. Because I've been in Tesla first and then Rivian, I have not really had a super luxurious car in a while, since the BMW times.
01:53:44 ◼ ► It is certainly like the luxury technology has gotten substantially better. It is just an incredibly nice ride.
01:53:53 ◼ ► It still feels very much like a BMW. It is surprisingly sporty. The handling for a vehicle that's not super small, the handling is very good.
01:54:03 ◼ ► Compared to the Rivian, it's night and day. The Rivian was a much bigger vehicle, but the iX really drives incredibly well.
01:54:10 ◼ ► The suspension, and this doesn't even have the air suspension, but the regular suspension is super cushy and soft, but you still feel a little bit sporty in the handling.
01:54:19 ◼ ► It's a great balance. Look, BMW knows how to make cars that feel good to drive. That's their whole thing.
01:54:25 ◼ ► But the luxury level, the cabin is so quiet. When you close the windows, it's so quiet.
01:54:32 ◼ ► A lot of little details that Rivian hasn't figured out yet. For instance, with Rivian, there was pretty much no position at which you could roll down the driver window and no other windows and have it not do that ear-pumping thing.
01:54:49 ◼ ► Whatever that's called. But with the iX, it just doesn't do that at any level that I can find.
01:54:54 ◼ ► When you close and open the windows, you don't get that ear-sucking, "whoosh," doesn't do that either. Little stuff like that, they've been making cars for a long time. They engineer the crap out of them.
01:55:06 ◼ ► They know how to do it really well. That's what I'm happy to get out of an established car company.
01:55:12 ◼ ► What took me away from BMW years ago was the wonderful advantages of EVs. That's when I went to Tesla. EVs are just that good that it was worth me changing brands and taking a risk and giving up some of these things just to have the EV drivetrain.
01:55:32 ◼ ► But this is also now that same EV drivetrain now back in established car brands. And that's exactly what I was looking for making this change. So I'm actually, so far, I mean look, now there is one snag.
01:55:54 ◼ ► I was sitting in front of my kids' school picking them up and this message shows up on the dashboard, "Warning, high voltage system error. You can continue driving, but please have the system checked by your nearest service center to prevent malfunctions and subsequent damage."
01:56:11 ◼ ► It's a brand new car. It had like 50 miles or something 40 miles on it. I had it for less than 24 hours and I get a service center error. You gotta be kidding me. So of course I called them up and I'm like, "Hey, little problem."
01:56:28 ◼ ► But you know what? They got me in same day. They had given me a loaner, another IX, so they had given me the same model car as a loaner and I was out the door and they had it back in their hands in like two hours.
01:56:42 ◼ ► That's service. Like, I don't expect products to be perfect. I know things go wrong, especially a version one of a car. Of course a lot of things are going to go wrong.
01:56:53 ◼ ► But I know things are going to go wrong. What I need is for things to not go wrong most of the time and when they do go wrong, for them to be easily fixed.
01:57:02 ◼ ► And I said this last time, that's my priority with cars. I don't need them to be perfect. I know they're not perfect. I need them to need very little from me in terms of maintenance and problems.
01:57:16 ◼ ► And even though I am very stressed out that my brand new car has a problem, I looked it up and it seems like a somewhat common software flaw with IXs that happens sometimes and they get fixed and they never have a problem again.
01:57:29 ◼ ► So it should be fine. They still have it. I believe they're going to be giving it back to me today.
01:57:43 ◼ ► At this point in the story, I start to wonder how many terrible electric car related tragedies would need to befall Marco before he started looking at Hondas. I think it's a lot. I think it's way more than his.
01:58:00 ◼ ► Or a Toyota, right? But like, I mean, I don't, first of all, I want to say to everyone who's listening, don't let this discourage you from getting electric cars. Marco is being extraordinarily unlucky here.
01:58:10 ◼ ► This is not the standard experience, as evidenced from his years of using electric cars before this. He just has incredibly bad luck.
01:58:16 ◼ ► But given your incredibly bad luck, I am wondering how much bad luck would it take for you to be like, screw this, I'm going back to internal combustion.
01:58:24 ◼ ► I think it would be a lot, but I really feel like you're being tested by the universe here.
01:58:32 ◼ ► Even now that I'm driving around as a service owner, even now driving this car, you know, almost a week later, it is so nice. It's a really, really nice car.
01:58:43 ◼ ► And I'm also very happy now to be back in the carplay world. And the iX has very good carplay support.
01:58:52 ◼ ► Back when I had the Land Rover briefly, and I had carplay in that, I remember saying on the show that it was a little disappointing, and whether I had it or not, I'd be fine.
01:59:03 ◼ ► And that's true, but what I realized, when I drove the rental that kept breaking two weeks ago, last week, when I drove the rental, it had carplay.
01:59:16 ◼ ► And so I was able to get used to it really quickly and get back into it. When I then went back to the Rivian after using carplay, it felt like my car was broken.
01:59:25 ◼ ► It's like, wait, how do I control, how do I switch from overcast back to music? There were so many little friction points.
01:59:32 ◼ ► And I'm like, you know what, I really need a car that has carplay. Because first of all, it is better. It is better by a lot.
01:59:41 ◼ ► And I have nothing really bad to say about Rivian in general. I think the Rivian was a fantastic vehicle that I just had some bad luck with.
01:59:50 ◼ ► Part of the problem was indeed my fault for denting it. Part of it was inherent problems that actually predated that.
01:59:57 ◼ ► Oh, and when I was cleaning out the Rivian, getting all my stuff out of it, there was this area, there's like a sub-trunk area where you lift up the thing in the trunk and below it is another area.
02:00:08 ◼ ► And below that is another area below that. As I was cleaning my stuff out of that, the lowest part of the sub-trunk was wet.
02:00:16 ◼ ► Everything in it was wet. It hadn't rained in days. All the stuff in it showed signs of long-term water damage.
02:00:24 ◼ ► Like I had a first aid kit there, it was moldy. I had to throw it away. I had a couple of tools, they were all kind of just messed up from long-term water damage.
02:00:41 ◼ ► Yes. And this is part of why I'm not really complaining about my car breaking immediately than having to be in service.
02:00:48 ◼ ► I'm like, "Hey, you know what? I'm not going to say much about this. You're getting me back, that's fine. I'll have my car back, I think today will be good."
02:00:55 ◼ ► Anyway, that's just version 1 car company stuff. When I had the Model S back in 2016, Tesla had already been selling the Model S for a couple of years and they had the roadster before that.
02:01:07 ◼ ► They had already been selling cars, making cars for a little while, so they had worked out most of the 1.0 beta problems.
02:01:14 ◼ ► Rivian is not there yet. I think they will be there in another couple of years. I think two, three, four years from now when the R2 comes out and hopefully the cool R3 comes out, I think they're going to get there.
02:01:26 ◼ ► I think they're going to really be an amazing company in a year or two or three. It's going to be great.
02:01:32 ◼ ► And the ones they sell now are great with just some asterisks. If they need service, it's kind of a pain in the butt.
02:01:38 ◼ ► They don't have that many service centers, they're backed up ten weeks, whatever. There are some asterisks, I'm buying it now.
02:01:42 ◼ ► But the bones of a good car company are there. And the cars are very good, as long as you don't have some weird bad luck and certain things.
02:01:51 ◼ ► But the cars are very good. So I have nothing bad to say about Rivian and I would be happy to consider going back to them in the future.
02:01:58 ◼ ► The one thing that really gets me, that gives me pause for them really, is their CEO's stance on not doing car play and on insisting that they do all the software themselves.
02:02:11 ◼ ► I think is pretty wrong. And I trust, he seems like he's a pretty good CEO, a pretty capable person. I like the way his head, I like where his head's at in most ways.
02:02:23 ◼ ► But when you look at what people use car play for, what Rivian is trying to do, Tesla basically says, "We're not even going to try to replace car play. We're just going to not have it and screw you.
02:02:34 ◼ ► And we'll keep adding weird games to our cars that you can't play while driving, so why?"
02:02:38 ◼ ► But what Rivian says is, "We're going to try to integrate the things into the car so that you don't need to use car play."
02:02:44 ◼ ► And so when I bought the car it had Spotify and Tidal as the music options. They have since recently added Apple Music.
02:02:52 ◼ ► But when I look at how many car play apps I have on my phone, when I actually go through the pages and pages of car play, I have like 15 car play apps at least.
02:03:02 ◼ ► There are various apps, like I tried out that service Blinkist, whatever it is, that gives you like summaries of books in 15 minutes.
02:03:10 ◼ ► I honestly don't think I recommend that service. I have not really gotten much value out of it, but I decided to try it anyway.
02:03:16 ◼ ► And they have a car play app, and so on the rental car up to upstate last weekend, I listened to some books.
02:03:30 ◼ ► You should have had Apple Intelligence do it. They would have said, "This book contains nonsense. Next book."
02:03:34 ◼ ► Honestly, that feature sounds pretty... I mean, most of my email is nonsense, so I think that might actually be a useful summarization thing.
02:03:41 ◼ ► There are so many apps, like Instapaper has a car play thing where you can have articles read to you.
02:03:47 ◼ ► There's car play apps for things like ordering pizzas and stuff. Like if you can order your pizza on the way home from your car play app.
02:03:53 ◼ ► There are so many car play apps that are too narrow audience, or just never going to rise above the level of what somebody like Rivian or Tesla would integrate into their own systems.
02:04:06 ◼ ► And using it from your phone is almost always better, because your phone has the latest everything.
02:04:17 ◼ ► It will have better connections to data and to things like whatever your services and logins and data things are.
02:04:28 ◼ ► And then the phone also, like Rivian also mentioned, like the CEO mentioned in a recent interview, that they have to work on messaging.
02:04:37 ◼ ► There is very basic support in Bluetooth protocols for messaging things, but it's pretty limited, it's pretty basic.
02:04:43 ◼ ► Whereas like CarPlay, it just works correctly. You can message with iMessage, you can message with WhatsApp, whatever you need to use.
02:04:51 ◼ ► It's already on your phone. It's already connected, it's already logged in, and it works perfectly.
02:04:56 ◼ ► You need to do things with that via voice? Siri does that for you. You can do it through CarPlay.
02:05:00 ◼ ► You're never going to encompass what you usually want to do with CarPlay by building in your own software piece by piece like this.
02:05:11 ◼ ► You will never cover it all. And even if you do cover it all, your versions will be worse than the versions on the phone.
02:05:18 ◼ ► Some of which because carmakers aren't that great at making software, and some of it because the phone just has inherent advantages that the carmakers can't match.
02:05:30 ◼ ► The idea that you're just going to replicate what everyone uses their phones for, it's just never going to happen.
02:05:36 ◼ ► You're never going to get the breadth or the quality of what you can do on a phone with CarPlay and Android Auto and whatever else.
02:05:43 ◼ ► You're never going to match that. And Rivian, they have decent software. Their driving directions and their maps are still not good.
02:05:51 ◼ ► They still get place names terribly wrong. Again, you're never going to match Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps. You're not going to match it.
02:05:59 ◼ ► And there are specialty things like my Fire Island sand driving mapping app. That's like a specialty mapping app.
02:06:06 ◼ ► I never made it work with CarPlay because it's too small an audience, but I could have made a CarPlay version of that.
02:06:11 ◼ ► I could never integrate that with Rivian, and Rivian will never come to me to integrate it with their system.
02:06:15 ◼ ► There's all sorts of specialty needs like that. Where like, yeah, maybe you can probably say like 80% of what people use is this handful of top apps.
02:06:25 ◼ ► But how many people out there use zero other apps that don't fit in that bucket? It's probably not a lot.
02:06:33 ◼ ► I bet almost everyone has one thing that would not be satisfied by Rivian's built-in deals or software that they have.
02:06:40 ◼ ► And if you even have one of those things, it's a bad experience to own that car as a result.
02:06:45 ◼ ► So it is totally wrong-headed to continue to not integrate CarPlay and to actively say, "We're not even going to try to do that."
02:06:53 ◼ ► So anyway, that being said, that is the one thing that I really don't care for Rivian for.
02:06:59 ◼ ► Otherwise, I think they're making great vehicles and they have a great future ahead of them.
02:07:04 ◼ ► Just right now, it is still very much in that beta period. And I learned from this experience, I do not want a beta car.
02:07:12 ◼ ► I do not want a beta car company. I don't even want a 1.0 car company. I want like a 3.0 car company.
02:07:28 ◼ ► They had to solve the significant economic problem of a huge cost center is the battery.
02:07:42 ◼ ► But as a result, you can't have as expensive of a cabin and other features on top of a $40,000 battery
02:07:59 ◼ ► So the Tesla approach, which Rivian largely took on as well, is we're going to try to get in the ballpark of similarly specced cars.
02:08:09 ◼ ► We're going to hit a certain price point and we're going to try to be as nice as, in the case of the Model S,
02:08:15 ◼ ► something like an S-Class, which is why they named it that, or a 5 Series or a 7 Series or whatever.
02:08:21 ◼ ► Another luxury car with a gas engine that's around this price point, we're going to try to get as nice as those.
02:08:26 ◼ ► And they just can't. And they never have and they never will because the Mercedes for the S-Class,
02:08:33 ◼ ► they have X dollars of margin over the cost of the engine to spend on making the car really nice in other ways.
02:08:39 ◼ ► And Tesla just has way less of that margin to spend because the battery is so expensive.
02:08:57 ◼ ► Oh, we're going to get so much email. You're right, but we're going to get so much email.
02:09:00 ◼ ► Don't forget also that the other place they save cost is by leaning into the future aesthetic and say,
02:09:05 ◼ ► "You know what? Remove everything from the interior of this car. Remove every button, every opening, every stock, every control.
02:09:15 ◼ ► Exactly. They say it's for minimal aesthetic and this is the future, but conveniently it also saves them a bunch of money.
02:09:25 ◼ ► So what you get with Tesla and Rivian is fairly economical interiors that are not super luxurious.
02:09:33 ◼ ► On top of amazing drivetrains that have these giant batteries and these awesome motors.
02:09:41 ◼ ► With the iX, it is more than a Rivian, although with the lease incentives it gets very close.
02:09:46 ◼ ► But anyway, what you get is an actual luxury car on top of a really great battery and drivetrain.
02:10:04 ◼ ► First of all, yes, establishment, service networks, things like that. Those are huge factors.
02:10:08 ◼ ► But also, if you compare what you get in terms of interior quality and luxury niceties and general luxury levels,
02:10:19 ◼ ► what you get from the other brands is typically a lot better than what you get from Tesla and Rivian.
02:10:24 ◼ ► With Rivian, I was getting it to be an off-roader first and foremost and it is great for that.
02:10:46 ◼ ► Things like noise levels, ride quality, handling quality, a lot of different luxury features that are inside.
02:10:57 ◼ ► And Tesla, not only is Tesla not luxury nice either, I think the modern Teslas are even worse than the ones I had.
02:11:05 ◼ ► I recently was in one of the new Model S's and it was noticeably less luxurious than the ones I had.
02:11:13 ◼ ► They have had a pretty big revision since then. It just feels like they are cheaping out on everything possible to squeeze more margin out of the cars.
02:11:39 ◼ ► One question about your new car. Can you use the Tesla Supercharger network with an adapter?
02:11:48 ◼ ► So when I was moving the stuff over from the Rivian, I brought my Supercharger adapter and I just stuck it in the driver door pocket.
02:11:56 ◼ ► Because the iX does not have a frunk. They just fill it up with engine stuff and other stuff.
02:12:06 ◼ ► You actually officially cannot even open the hood. There is a special way you can open it if you really have to.
02:12:13 ◼ ► The front BMW logo, you flip it up and that is where you pour in windshield washer fluid.
02:12:19 ◼ ► The Mercedes EQS, their S-Class electric version, same deal. You are not supposed to open the trunk.
02:12:29 ◼ ► You think the BMW flipped a thing of ridiculous? They added a door to the front fender that opens up and this thing slides out.
02:12:39 ◼ ► They cut into the sheet metal of the car. Of course it is all electronic and this thing slides out and this thing hinges out.
02:12:47 ◼ ► And you pour it and it is like, "God, just let people open the hood. I know you only want them to add the fluid.
02:12:52 ◼ ► Just let them open the hood to add the fluid. Stop cutting holes in the side of your car and making these little mechanical things."
02:12:59 ◼ ► The German manufacturers and VW as well in some cars love to fill that front part of the car with the other stuff.
02:13:07 ◼ ► Because they are like, "Hey, we got all this space. We can give people the storage. Nah, let's just fill it with stuff." And so they do.
02:13:11 ◼ ► One other thing to mention too. The iX has little spray washers for the front and back cameras.
02:13:22 ◼ ► Every single time I got out of the Rivian at a parking lot I would have to lick my thumb and wipe it across the rear camera because it would get covered in dirt and crap all the time.
02:13:31 ◼ ► One of the things that manufacturers are doing with that is having the backup camera hidden essentially when you are not backing up.
02:13:41 ◼ ► I like the ones that are always visible because I feel like being able to see out the back while you are driving forward, which you can do on a Tesla and other cars, is actually convenient.
02:13:49 ◼ ► If you are going to be looking at it all the time anyway it is still going to get dirty.
02:13:52 ◼ ► But yeah, the washers. It harkens back to the 80s when they put those little tiny windshield washer blades and the squirters on the headlights. Do you remember those days?
02:13:59 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean we never had a car with that but I have seen them and they look cool as hell.
02:14:13 ◼ ► One of the reasons why I was comfortable going back to BMW is that the i3, despite being five years old now, we have never brought it in for service.
02:14:25 ◼ ► It has been very low needs. And that being said, we also have very little mileage on it. I think we are only up to like 7,000 miles.
02:14:31 ◼ ► Although you do need to change the oil in your range extender. Please bring it in. It has got to be sludge at this point.
02:14:41 ◼ ► Well and the thing is, I have to bring it in because one of the back tires has a slow leak so I have to get it serviced in some way anyway.
02:15:06 ◼ ► Like we can park it at the ferry terminal. We can park it for like a month and come back and it has the exact same charge.
02:15:15 ◼ ► The EV drivetrain has never caused us problems. It has never had any issues. It has never reported any issues.
02:15:26 ◼ ► It is just a, like for such a relatively early EV platform, it was surprisingly immature from day one.
02:15:38 ◼ ► That like, whoever BMW has working on the high voltage systems, with the exception of my error message that my car had after 22 hours,
02:15:57 ◼ ► There are various gotchas that a lot of first-gen EV platforms for manufacturers, a lot of them have.
02:16:04 ◼ ► BMW didn't have those. Or at least if they did, it would have been even earlier i3s than what TIFs was, which was reasonably late in the product cycle.
02:16:17 ◼ ► And I also love, you know, the i3, it was one of those, you know, kind of based on a concept cars that you get into it and they are like,
02:16:28 ◼ ► we are going to make this thing futuristic. And you know, whatever that meant when the i3 first came out, I guess when was it, around 2016, 2015,
02:16:35 ◼ ► whenever the i3 first came out, they were like, it is the future, so we are going to make everything carbon fiber and eco-friendly.
02:16:40 ◼ ► There is like, all these like, scratchy eco materials on all the dash panels on the i3.
02:16:45 ◼ ► It is like, it is a weird car and you get into it and it makes like weird sound effects.
02:16:50 ◼ ► Like when you start it up or turn it off, it is like all these like science-y, spaceship-y sound effects.
02:17:04 ◼ ► The amount of personality in that car, in the iX, they have these fake sounds that Hans Zimmer composed that like, the car has its own entire soundscape.
02:17:25 ◼ ► And I kind of love that like, you know, Tesla, their whole thing was we are going to strip out most things that cars usually have,
02:17:34 ◼ ► and we are going to add in some dumb games that you can play while you are parked and that is about it.
02:17:41 ◼ ► We are not going to add dumb games you can play, but we will make a car that just quietly works really well in these adventure scenarios.
02:17:54 ◼ ► The iX is like a bunch of Germans on ecstasy, we were like, what can we do for the future?
02:18:00 ◼ ► And it is so weird and fun, but it is a high end luxury car, so it is not like weird quirky,
02:18:10 ◼ ► it is more like, this is a version of the future from somebody's drug haze that I absolutely love.
02:18:52 ◼ ► I was like, no, I have had the car for like 20 hours, I have not even plugged it into anything yet.
02:19:00 ◼ ► I am like, yes, I am sure I did not go to a Supercharger in this one night I had the car,
02:19:18 ◼ ► it is kind of like removing your third party RAM before you bring in something to an Apple place for service.
02:19:23 ◼ ► Do not leave your Supercharger adapter in the car, because they will blame it, probably, for whatever problems you are having.
02:19:29 ◼ ► So, when you go on long trips, are you going to stop at a Tesla Supercharger and use your adapter or no?
02:19:47 ◼ ► It does work, you just have to, like, so, what Rivian had with Tesla was a data sharing deal,
02:19:53 ◼ ► where like, you could just plug it in and the Supercharger would recognize who you are and bill you through Rivian.
02:20:01 ◼ ► The Superchargers with adapters work with lots of other EVs that do not have that deal.
02:20:10 ◼ ► That is the one where the adapter is in the Supercharger, you do not have to own one yourself.
02:20:14 ◼ ► It is just in there and you can, like, log into the Tesla app and authorize whatever bay number you are on.
02:20:25 ◼ ► And you can go into the app and you can give Tesla a credit card and you can just pay for it yourself.
02:20:37 ◼ ► So, what the service center people say is, "We have not officially announced anything."
02:20:58 ◼ ► One of the reasons why I felt comfortable doing a three-year lease starting now on a car that does not have the Tesla port.
02:21:09 ◼ ► Like, there is going to be an IONIQ 5 update that you just announced that is going to have it starting next year.
02:21:13 ◼ ► There is going to be a BMW iX refresh that is alleged to have it, but I think has not been officially confirmed starting sometime next year.
02:21:21 ◼ ► Like, probably in about a year, these cars are going to start rolling off that have this port into the market.
02:21:27 ◼ ► But, if those do not work like everywhere on day one, that is going to be an annoyance and a problem.
02:21:36 ◼ ► And also, right now, if I have an adaptable CCS car that is adaptable to Magic Dock Tesla chargers and some other Tesla chargers that can take the adapters directly.
02:21:51 ◼ ► Now, three years from now when this lease is up, I think I am going to want an NACS port car.
02:22:00 ◼ ► Because right now, you pull up to a lot of places and there are mostly CCS plugs and maybe one or two NACS plugs on a custom charging station.
02:22:15 ◼ ► But right now, it is enough of a mix in North America that I actually, right this second, would prefer to either have just a Tesla car, which can use their network only, but it is known to work everywhere.
02:22:32 ◼ ► And by all accounts, the iX is adaptable. It just does not officially certify to certain things yet.
02:22:43 ◼ ► I think in three years from now, there will be enough NACS support across different brands that it will start to become worth it to just have an NACS car at that point.
02:22:59 ◼ ► And there is all sorts of like, you know, there are benefits right now to keeping it CCS.
02:23:17 ◼ ► And honestly, I am not sure if I would have expected me or you to go first. But here we are.