Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Donate in ATP’s name! Follow-up: Mac mini redesign updates from Mark Gurman Minimum Mac RAM (via Brian) Apple’s 1996 revival JPEG XL support (via Kelly Thompson) Google’s Image Coding Comparisons Chromium bug Distance vs. effort vs. quality vs. speed FTC’s noncompete ban was blocked 👎🏻 World vs. App Store Spain 🇪🇸 Original announcement (en Español) India 🇮🇳 UK 🇬🇧 iPhone 15 exit interview Apple Watch Series 9 & Ultra 2 exit interview Ask ATP: How hard is it to maintain server compatibility for old Overcast clients? (via PG&E Delenda Est) Does following a podcast in Overcast “help the show” in Apple Podcasts or other ways? (via Marc Robinson) Post-show Neutral: Marco’s Rivian service Members-only ATP Overtime: AI Angst Authors sue Anthropic for training AI using pirated books NaNoWriMo’s self-own Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
John is hacking up a lung over here.
Yeah, John is very unwell. And I didn't find this out, or we didn't find this out until, I don't know, two minutes ago. So if this episode is only 15 minutes long, it's because we're taking pity on our good friend. And if it's hugely long, then it's like every time I feel unwell. So we'll see what happens. It is September, which means it's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
I feel like I didn't pronounce any of that with all the letters and the words, but here we go. We're doing it live. So I'm going to vamp while I pull up the official ad read and tell you that, hey, there are a lot of children that are unwell, and that's not okay. And a lot of them have some flavor of cancer, and that is also not okay.
And so we are part of Relay and we're also partnering with Relay. We're partnering with ourselves. I don't know. Just go with it. So we, Relay, have raised over $3 million over the last five years, starting in 2019. Wow. It's bananas. It's absolutely bananas. And because of that, Relay is going to have their name put on like this... It's more than a plaque, but put on like this board in the St.
Jude campus for all the corporate and personal donators that have just gone above and beyond. And that's super incredibly cool. And so... What we are doing is we're trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude does incredible, phenomenal work, and they do it in such a way that it affects people all over the world. So St. Jude is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee.
I will be there in a couple of weeks when Relay does their 12-hour podcast-a-thon. You can watch me melt into a puddle over the course of those 12 hours as I do everything I can to raise more money for these six children. But Here's the thing, St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and around the world.
90% of the children at risk of developing cancer live in low- and middle-income countries. That is unacceptable to St. Jude, and you know what? It's unacceptable to us. So that's why St. Jude launched St. Jude Global. That way, every child with cancer, no matter where they live, and also other catastrophic diseases, by the way, they have access to quality care and treatment. So when I was at St.
Jude in April, for the PlayLive Summit, they brought several different people on stage, and some of them were survivors and St.
Jude patients, some of them were family members, and the number of stories that we saw, actually not just on stage, but just in general with the people we met, the number of stories we saw where it was something along the lines of, I am in some foreign country, I have done everything that my country knows how to do with regard to either my cancer or my child's cancer or my brother's cancer,
and we were at wit's end. I mean, we were basically given a death sentence, and then somebody thought, you know, let's call St. Jude. Let's see what happens. And the number of stories that, you know, there's all these different ways these stories started that somehow or another involved really dire circumstances, but every single one of them ended with, we called St.
Jude, and within hours, within hours, we had plane tickets to go to Memphis, Tennessee, and they didn't have to pay for it at all, because St. Jude pays for it all. So in order for St. Jude to pay for all these things, we ask for you to donate whatever you can.
And actually live on air in just a minute, we will have my favorite and least favorite moment of the year when I somehow ruin my donation and it becomes a joke for the next year. So we're going to do that in a minute. But hey, there's one other reason you might want to donate or one other excuse perhaps to donate, one other justification for donation. And I like to call it the Marco Offset.
Marco, can you tell me what the offset is, please?
Yes, starting probably next week. Many of you out there are going to be buying new Apple products. You might have even bought some other things recently, possibly the new Android folding things. Maybe I saw there was a new Remarkable tablet today that looks really cool. All sorts of fun gadgets launching in this gadget season.
uh and you probably don't necessarily need to spend money on new gadgets maybe maybe you got something broken needs to be replaced but for the most part we all know that this is like these are mostly luxuries that we have that were because we're very fortunate to be able to afford nice electronics uh for many of us listening to this podcast um now when you buy your nice electronics that you don't
really maybe need but you're buying because you want a treat and they're fun and they're awesome you tend to purchase other things at the same time things like a case or additional storage upgrades or a keyboard or some other kind of accessory for the thing that you're buying you even also do things like you know apple care you know warranty services or you you certainly almost you know almost always in most places you have to pay sales tax
So you have all these kind of add-on fees and upgrades and accessories and taxes to the thing you are buying. I suggest when thinking about what your minimum donation to St. Jude's should be, add up all those extras that you tack on to your purchase or purchases, including all the taxes, all the storage upgrades, all the accessories and cases and warranties and all that stuff. Add up all that.
That should be your target minimum donation to St. Jude if you can swing it. And fortunately for us and for most of you out there, many of you out there are able to swing it, and that's great. And this is how you can assuage some of your guilt about these new tech products that you're buying by giving a nice chunk of money, if you can, to St. Jude.
Yep. So here's the thing. When we rally for a common cause, we become more than a community. We become beacons of hope for all. Yes, that is a little bit silly, but it's true. It's really true. So please join Relay and ATP and donate to St. Jude this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. You can go to
stjude.org slash ATP to just go straight to the donation area, which is what we're about to do, the three of us. Or if you want more information or if you perhaps want to start your own campaign, you can go to stjude.org slash relay. So S-T-J-U-D-E dot O-R-G slash A-T-P to just go straight to the donation. So now the three of us are going to do our annual donations. And here's the thing.
We always say we're going to do the gentlemanly thing of agreeing on exactly how much we're going to donate. And I believe, as with past years, we had agreed on $7,000. But we can never do that because we're all just difficult. So the question is... who is going to be the winner by donating the most, but also sticking to the gentlemanly agreement of $7,000.
So in past years, I should have looked this up. In past years, I think I've done $7,001 or $7,001. I feel like... That isn't enough. But I want to stick close to the $7,000. And so I am going to, as we speak, I'm going to say payment details. I'm going to see if I can Apple Pay this. And I'm not going to tell you quite yet exactly what I am going to do. I have to add an address. My mistake.
You're going to have to wait while I do that. But my thinking is... that I need to do just a little bit more. I'm hoping that's not a bad choice. And I probably shouldn't be telling you this while I'm on air because now Marco is probably just tripling his donation, which honestly I'm okay with.
I've already hit my button. I hit it while you were talking already. So I'm in.
Oh, all right. I should look, but I'm not going to. I promise I'm not going to.
I haven't looked yet.
All right. I'm hitting the Apple Pay button right now. Done. I donated $7,001.43 because 143 is short for I love you. One letter, four letters, three letters. And that's for Aaron. And so if we lost, it's really you being mean to Aaron is what's going on.
let's see how we do you definitely talk too much this year casey you're also you're incredibly bad at this game and uh i basically i basically conceded this game because uh like like uh like what's his name uh adrian vite or whatever i made my donation 35 minutes ago because i thought we were doing it before we started airing so you could have just looked and seen the amount that i did but apparently marco has just decided he's sick of losing this game i don't
Marco has decided enough is enough.
I have lost every year. Fair enough. Honestly, I was trying to give Casey a chance to win this year, but apparently Casey cannot be helped.
Wait, where did $17 come from?
I did $11 last year.
Oh my gosh. So the final donations from ATP, me and Aaron coming in last at $7,001.43. Then John Syracuse at $7,017 even. And then Marco and Tiff swooping in to take the lead, comfortably take the lead, I should add. Marco, how much did you two donate?
7,777.77. Well done.
I do feel like Marco is, again, it's a technical foul on massively exceeding the amount, but because it's for a charitable cause and because he had never won before, we're going to let it slide this time. But we can't support this kind of inflation.
Yeah, this is awfully large inflation. I mean, this is ridiculous. It shall not stand, but we can't get upset.
Anyway, so collectively, ATP has donated, according to my little calculator here, $21,796.20. Of course, that exact amount is...
what we would do but that's what we ended up at and by the way i have to say that we're i mean this is obviously it's a relay pledge drive and we have relay podcasts and we are really adjacent we are friends with them but i've always been proud of how much of the relay pledge drive is from listeners to a non-relay podcast atp listeners donate tons of money like we already talked about like the leaderboard thing we have for casey stickers or whatever
where, you know, ATP listeners with large means put huge donations in for the chance of getting those stickers, right? Sometimes people put ATP in their comments or whatever. We've been amazed by how much money and how generous ATP listeners are for this pledge drive. So that makes us proud of our listeners, and I think we're really helping out the pledge drive for St. Jude.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it is really kind of you to listen to us make this pledge. I know this is taking a long time, but honestly, sorry, not sorry, because it's worth it. So thank you so much. We really appreciate you. And again, I will reiterate, just because we donated $7,000 and change, some of us almost $8,000, even though we did that, you can donate $7. That's fine.
We're still happy about that. Don't let us lead you any other way. We're still very happy about that.
So please. The majority of the money is not the people donating thousands of dollars. It's small donations. Give 10 bucks, give 20 bucks, give five bucks, anything you can.
Yep. So please, stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E.org slash ATP. Thank you. Let's do some follow-up. Mac Mini redesign updates from Mark Gurman. So Mark had announced some expected Mac Mini redesign changes and whatnot, and then has gone back to the well and has clarified a bit. So Mark writes, the M4 Pro version of the Mac Mini will have five USB-C ports.
Three on the back, two on the front, like the Mac Studio. That model will also retain an Ethernet port, good, HDMI port, good, and headphone jack, sure. But prepare to say goodbye to the USB-A ports found on the current Mac Mini.
I'm happy with this. To me, the retention of most of the things on it, I'm happy with that. And USB-A, it's been very helpful to have USB-A ports on lots of things long into the USB-C transition. I do think it's now time that we can drop them on most things.
I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. Now we're going to get everyone writing to us about how wrong we are, but here, you know, you can't win them all. Then Mark continues, I've also been told that the computer's power supply will be internal. This was a big deal because they're saying, you know, the new Mac Mini is going to be roughly Apple TV sized.
And although the Apple TV does indeed have its power supply internal, which is to say you just plug in a cord. There's no brick involved. But, you know, that's kind of a computer, but not really a whole computer. And so people were justifiably a little worried that perhaps this wouldn't be the case with the Mac Mini.
Maybe it would go more like the current iMacs, which have the brick on the outside. But no, apparently the PowerSpy will be internal, which I am very happy about.
Do you know if the Logitech, like the little RF dongle things for their wireless mice because Bluetooth sucks, if they're USB-C now?
As far as I know, they're not. Now, I do take a little bit of offense at you saying Bluetooth sucks. Maybe I'm a Bluetooth unicorn, but I really don't see the issue with using Bluetooth peripherals.
It's so much worse than the little RF dongles in pretty much all possible ways.
except you don't have to have a dongle, which is great.
I mean, honestly, that is very like I've in, you know, various, you know, gaming laptops and stuff. I do use other mice besides Apple's magic mouse and other people in my family. We have mice all over the house. I have so far not found a compelling case for the custom RF dongles. To me, there's a compelling case for wired mice, especially on a gaming PC situation or just a PC situation in general.
There's a compelling case for wired mice, and there's a compelling case for Bluetooth mice. And the other options I just have not found to be worth their hassles. Like, I know they're lower latency and I know there are technical advantages.
It's not even that. That's all true. Like the advantages for it. And they actually have like gaming mice that are wireless now with some super wireless protocol, whatever. It's mostly the fact that the Bluetooth range and reliability is often at the limit for desktop computers, even for a laptop to keep it far away of working well.
like i mean my computer is my tower computer i can touch it with my hand it's not that far away but no bluetooth mouse can reliably communicate with this computer it's not that far away rf dongle i could be in the other room smooth as glass right and that's that's the advantage it's just so much better range and reliability at the cost of filling one of your ports with a little thing and the reason i ask about the little dongles is because yeah this is the mac mini you know
If you're going to get rid of a big port, get rid of it on the computer that has many in the name. It's supposed to be small. They're making it smaller. I get it. It's fine. Drop it. But the alternative is to have a dongle, like a little stupid white dongle or some other thing hanging off the back of it that you then attach your little RF dingus to if you have a mouse like that.
And that's more cumbersome than having a bigger computer with no dongle in some situations. So there is a balance here. Obviously, we should just be blaming Logitech. and say, why are you still shipping USB-A dongles?
You're not wrong.
Make a USB-C one. The actual thing that's in there is so tiny, I'm sure it could fit. But anyway, that's the only downside I can see. It's like, why would you still have USB-A ports? You've got those YubiKey things and DRM stuff for expensive applications and RF adapters for mice.
16.
16.
16. I'm sorry. Thank you. Brian writes, I was at Apple's 1996 Worldwide Developer Conference where Gil Emilio, I got that right this time. See, it's Gif, not Jif. Anyway, made the announcement during the keynote that all future Mac models would ship with a minimum of 12 megabytes of RAM up from 8. As I remember, that announcement got a standing ovation from the developers in attendance.
And then apparently after ruminating, and this is years later, I think, after ruminating about my recollections of the WWDC keynote, I'm no longer confident in my description of the response as a standing ovation. Oh, this was, I think, that Brian had written us a little while later.
Anyways, instead, the enthusiasm of the applause was more along the lines of, we were expecting the next RAM jump would be to 16 megs, not 12, but hey, we'll take it.
12 megabytes of RAM, kids.
We did a lot with a little back then. All right. Cigar Jaw writes with regard to the screen recording badge on outgoing video. Excluding the screen recording badge from outgoing video is actually possible, but it requires the full access screen capture API rather than the window selection one.
The way it works is that the screen recording badge is an extra child window added by the system that you can mask out while streaming. I didn't know that. The additional API is required since the window picker lets the system handle the selection, then it hands you the frames, and this includes the recording badge by default.
Removing it requires assembling the window list yourself, which is quote-unquote more sensitive.
So as usual, to provide a better experience to your users, you need to use the API that Apple doesn't want you to use.
With regard to JPEG XL, this is the alleged new codec that Apple's going to be embracing. Well, it's not that new, but Apple's going to be embracing it, which is new. Kelly Thompson writes, support for reading JPEG XL images has been available on Apple platforms since last year. They work in Safari preview photos and all the apps like Pages and Keynote. Here's the kicker, though.
You have all that beautiful dynamic range, but preview and Safari don't support HDR images of any type quite yet. Safari supports the HDR video, but not stills. Obviously, HDR images work great in photos. It's a weird state of half in, half out. JPEG XL has been jointly developed by Cloudinary, which I'd never heard of, and Google. For ages, JPEG XL support was behind a flag in Chrome.
Everyone was just waiting for them to turn it on. Then they released a chart saying, AVIF handily beats JXL and removes support. And we'll put a link to the chart in the show notes. The entire web responded, saying, in fact, the chart showed the exact opposite. In everything above quality 55, which is where the vast majority of images saved are, JPEG XL handily beat AVIF at every point.
In fact, JPEG XL isn't optimized at those low quality levels because it's not really usable. The Google team that works on JPEG XL is in Europe, and the team that works on Chrome is in California. Well, either way, from the Chromium bug tracker, request, reopen JPEG XL issue. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. You may already be receiving images in this format without even realizing it.
Major cloud delivery services already offer JPEG XL as an option to browsers that support it. One cool feature of the default JPEG XL encoder, CJXL, is that you can get to select an effort level from 1 to 10. If time isn't a critical factor, the encoder can spend more time optimizing file size. If not, you can compress them as fast as JPEG at the expense of some size.
Here's a beta version of a tool we developed for the upcoming JPEG XL website that shows the relationship between distance, effort, quality, and encoding speed.
It's kind of like if you have like ImageOptim and those other sort of PNG crush and all those utilities that say like use more computation time to make the image a little bit smaller. That's like built into this format. So you have an adjustable how much effort you want to put in.
to uh you know getting the smallest size possible which is just it's really just a honeypot for our web developers because every web developer will say i will spend 24 hours making this image smaller because it's going to be served a whole jillion times in the 30 seconds after i post it you know what i mean so every every little bit that we can crush this image uh makes it and that's the same thing with cdns uh vending jpeg xl versions based on the uh the browsers that they know support them or whatever
So yeah, JPEG XL could be out there and you could be receiving it. But yeah, the support in macOS, I'm hoping if Apple does announce, hey, these new iPhones have this new image format, if that even happens at all, I hope support comes to the rest of their platforms. Things like Preview and even Safari not being able to show HDR images
still images in any format let alone jpeg xl seems like a limitation that they should overcome and this would be the perfect time to do it so again i'm rooting for this rumor this is still just a rumor that apple's doing this but regardless of the rumor apple has been adding jpeg xl support slowly and steadily to their platforms it's just not fully baked yet and they certainly haven't announced that they're switching the iphone camera to use it as the rumor says they will
Moving along, we need to talk about the FTC's non-compete agreements ban, which, if you recall, the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, said here in America, hey, you can't have non-competes anymore. That's not fair. To which a federal judge said, hold my beer. Reading from The Verge,
A federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission's ban on non-compete agreements that make it difficult for workers to join their employers' rivals or launch competing businesses. The ruling prevents the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements from taking effect on September 4th, which is today, though the agency could still appeal the decision. On August 20th, U.S.
District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas, Texas, ruled that the antitrust agency exceeded its statutory authority to ban practices related to unfair methods of competition, saying the non-compete agreements ban is, quote, unreasonably overbroad without a reasonable explanation, quote, and would, quote, cause irreparable harm, quote. To whom, Judge Brown, to whom? I love that.
It would make us harder to retain talent if we couldn't legally handcuff our employees by telling them they can't get a job at the same industry for some arbitrary amount of time. Get out of here with that nonsense.
I love – it's just the things that are quoted here, like it's an unreasonably overbroad without a reasonable explanation. I'm pretty sure the people on the other side of this case gave a reasonable explanation for why non-competes are bad. Now, maybe they mean a reasonable explanation of why this particular agency has the ability to do this or whatever. It's frustrating.
You know, we would hope that collectively we can find a way that will survive judicial challenge to get rid of this horrible thing that is non-competes. The state of California did it somehow. The U.S. government still working on that. So fingers crossed.
It's so gross. I dislike it so very much. Moving along, though, apparently more governments would also like in on pooping on the App Store because Spain has launched an investigation to Apple's App Store. This was in July.
Reading from MacRumors, the National Commission of Markets and Competition, the CNMC, this week announced a probe into the App Store, citing concerns that the company might be imposing unfair trading conditions on developers who distribute their applications to the platform. The investigation was initiated ex officio, reflecting the significant economic influence of app stores in Spain.
Apple's practices could constitute an abuse of a dominant position, which is prohibited under Spanish competition laws and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TFEU. Additionally, India has an antitrust probe which finds Apple has abused its position in the apps market.
Reading from Reuters, an investigation by India's antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging in, quote, abusive conduct and practices, quote, a confidential report seen by Reuters showed.
The Competition Commission of India, or CCI, has been investigating Apple since 2021 for possibly abusing its dominant position in the apps market by forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app purchase system. And then going for the trifecta, the UK has entered the chat.
Reading from 9to5Mac, a UK antitrust investigation into Apple is officially closed, despite finding the company to be at fault after the regulator missed a legal deadline. Whoopsie-dipsies. However, a case seems almost certain to be reopened under an upcoming law,
ma what if all these governments are like cheating off each other or like the language in these stories from three entirely different outlets is so similar and the language of all of their complaints is so similar that's like these places smell blood in the water and they're like well this is a thing now uh everyone's you know trying to uh tamp down the app store citing the same type of things like a competition dominant abusing dominant position yada yada so everyone's getting in on the act now how will these all turn out who knows uh but uh
the problems for apple are just getting started as we as we said they would when this started like years and years ago we're like when one country does this more are going to follow it's not going to be like oh you're going to satisfy the japan trade commission and that'll be it you'll never hear about this again
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So it is time for everyone's favorite tradition, which was a genuinely excellent idea that Marco came up with a few years back. This is the iPhone 15 exit interview. Marco, would you like to introduce this?
Yeah, started doing this a few years ago. As Casey said, this is basically, you know, on the eve of the iPhone's replacement, the episode before they're going to have their event and launch the new one. I like to send the old one out kind of with an exit interview of, like, how was the outgoing phone this year?
You know, now that we've had a whole year of usage, and it kind of helps inform, you know, other shows, you know, more often do kind of direct, like, you know, predictions or wish lists of what we want for the next phone that will be announced, you know, presumably next week.
And I think having it kind of framed as an exit interview of the previous phone helps to inform kind of what matters and what kind of progress we're actually hoping to have and in what areas. So we're going to start with the iPhone 15 Pro. And now, to be clear, John, you didn't have the 15 Pro, right? This wasn't your year? Yeah, but my wife did. So I've experienced the phone. Right.
And Casey, you had the big one for the first time and I have the medium sized one, which I guess is the small technically, but it's, you know, there's only two sizes and neither of them are small.
Aaron did get a 15 Pro, not a Pro Max. So I've used it some, obviously not as much as she, in the same way that John has used Tina's some. But you are the only one of the three of us that has actually used it full time.
Great. So iPhone 15 Pro, I would say the number one thing that I absolutely love about this phone, USB-C. We were waiting for it for so long. They finally gave it to us in the 15 line. And this is not a small deal. This has been a big deal. This has been so nice. So not only do I have easier charging everywhere that I am, because all over my house, my backpack, traveling...
Now we just have one kind of cable, and it charges everything. It's amazing. There are no more lightning cables in my travel bag at all, and around the house, there are hardly any lightning cables necessary for almost anything. The only thing we use lightning for is...
charging apple tv remotes which we almost never have to do like that's literally like you know maybe twice a year we charge an apple tv well the modern ones the modern ones are usbc the the older ones were yes i just i just never upgraded to that one um so no more lightning cables for almost anything except for yeah apple tv charging for the remote um also on my desk i have to have one to power up um older iphones i use as test phones and also to charge magic mice and magic trackpads
that's it like oh and i guess a couple of my older airpods cases um but even like my travel airpods pros are now the usbc model there which is an upgrade i strongly recommend it's so good oh i really want to do it but i'm too cheap it feels so wasteful but like for but i had to get a second pair because one of the old ones finally died and it so i i got the new one oh man it's so nice
But anyway, yeah, having all USB-C, total game changer. I've even found that there's a lot of kind of like little things you can now do that you couldn't do as easily or at all before because it supports USB-C. So for instance... I can plug in my big Fuji camera with a regular USB-C cable, even just a, quote, charging cable that only uses, like, slow USB 2 speeds.
I can connect that directly from the camera to my phone and import photos. It's glorious. That's nice. So much little stuff like that just works. Some audio equipment works that way, too. Like, I have found it is just USB-C has been an awesome upgrade on the iPhone. And if you are still holding on to an older phone and you're wondering, like,
should i upgrade you know this year whatever usbc alone is a great reason to upgrade but you know that's obviously how much that's worth to you uh depends on the pricing but wow is it nice that is so much nicer like i knew it would be nice to just like you know get rid of some cables i had no idea how nice it would be so i am extremely even like you know simple stuff like you know you have like a usb you know battery pack that you're using to charge up something
And you went, oh, can I top off my phone for a minute? Yeah, sure. Just pop out whatever you're charging and plug it into the phone. And then you unplug the phone and plug in a laptop or an AirPods case or whatever, all with the same cable, all connected to the same battery without having to mess with things. Oh, it's so nice. It is so good. So yeah, USB-C A+.
Yeah, just to jump in really quickly, like Marco said, I knew this was going to be an improvement for sure. I didn't realize how vast an improvement it was going to be. It is so empowering. It's a bit dramatic, I think, but I can't think of a better word for it at the moment. It's so empowering to look at any of my devices, asterisk, And any cable I have nearby and say, yep, that'll work.
And maybe it won't be as quick as I want, be that data or power. But one way or another, anything can charge anything. Just the other day, on one of the final pool days we had before our little community pool had closed, a friend of ours came and she has an iPhone 15 Pro. I guess as well. Yeah.
Cause it's USB-C anyways, she has an iPhone 15 pro and it was near death because she had forgotten to charge it the night before. And I didn't have a charger with me, but I had my fully charged iPad with me and I had a USB-C cable in the car and I, said, hold on, I know what I'll do. And I went and I grabbed my USB-C to C cable from the car, plugged iPhone into her iPhone.
And sure enough, she slurped her phone, slurped up some of the charge from my iPad, which was totally fine. Having anything, being able to charge anything, again, asterisk, et cetera, et cetera, is so great. And to your point, Marco, not having to carry 44 different cables is so nice. It's just, it's so wonderful to not have to care if the thing I need to be charged is the computer, is the
it doesn't matter. All of them charge the same way.
Yeah. And the only downside I would say is that the USB-C hole on the phone does get like lint from your pocket in there in a way that is harder to remove than with lightning. With lightning, you could put pretty much anything up there and just kind of scrape it out and it would just kind of fall out. USB-C, I did have an issue earlier in the year where I thought my port was breaking.
So I just couldn't get cables to sit right or charge reliably. And it was just crap in the port. And I had thought it wasn't because I had just done like some basic, you know, clean out with like one of those plastic tools thinking like maybe this will do it. And it took like a little bit deeper of a clean to get all that stuff out. And it was just stuff in the port.
It was just, you know, harder to get out than lightning. But other than that, it's been it's been only benefit. And. And I also – I thought – and we've been talking for years before they did this. I really thought that the public perception of the USB-C change would be as harsh as it was when they switched from the dock connector to lightning.
Yeah, that's true. I thought the exact same.
like like regular people out there hated the switch to lightning from the dock connector because they were like apple is just doing this as a cash grab to you know to sell new cables and new new bricks whatever and you know this time i i thought we would have the same problem and we just didn't i think that's largely because usbc is not proprietary to apple and so when they made this change
There was already a massive marketplace of USB-C cables and chargers made by everybody, and so it was not as much of like, oh, they're trying to sell their own cable. I'd be surprised if Apple sells many of their own cables. I think most people just get whatever they can on Amazon, and it's fine.
I'm pretty sure if you go back and listen to old episodes of ATP, all those reasons you just cited were actually cited back when we were discussing this. I don't think either one of you or any of us actually thought it would be as bad because we listed those reasons. And lo and behold, it wasn't. Although, that said, I think it has been even quieter than we thought it would be.
Because when we were discussing it, we were like, okay, well, is this going to be as bad? Here are these mitigating factors that can make it not as bad. But not only was it not as bad as lightning to USB or lightning to... 30 pin to lightning. I think it was just... pretty much a non-issue. I mean, maybe it's more of an issue outside our circles. Maybe most people don't have a USB-C phone.
Maybe it's lacking. But right now, on the eve of the iPhone 16, I think it has exceeded expectations into how much better the transition was, even though I think we all said it was going to be better. We didn't think it was going to be this much better.
And I certainly did not think it was going to be, as you said, like this quiet, like no one. See, it's I heard no complaints from literally anybody that they changed the port. Like, you know, I mean, you're right that like, you know, they not everybody is on that that fast of an upgrade cycle. But still, I literally heard zero problems about this.
Oh, speaking of the port on the flip side, my wife's iPhone 15 Pro is the only USB-C phone in the house. And so we have the opposite problem here where it's not like we've gone to this whole USB-C lifestyle. We have those like communal chargers everywhere with lightning stuff. And we had to add the right number of USB-C things there.
Now, arguably, we should have been adding them before because we've got USB-C iPads. We just happen to have other places to charge our iPads. But now every place where there's a bunch of lightning cables, there's now at least one USB-C cable in the mix. Eventually we'll fully transition, but it's going to be a while because my wife uses, I believe, four, maybe three. She carries four iPhones.
She uses three of them for Pokemon Go. One of them is her work phone. So it's just like a brick. Can you imagine how much like four pro phones weigh in your bag? It's just so heavy. Anyway, it's going to be a while before all four of those phones are on USB-C. So I have a long road ahead of me with a combination of lightning and USB-C on all our communal chargers.
And while we're on USB-C here, I just wanted to give a shout-out to USB-C power delivery. As a spec and as a product ecosystem, USB-C PD has – and for the less nerdy people out there, that is the spec that allows USB-C to deliver much higher power amounts than old USB could ever deliver. That's how you can get USB to power an entire laptop by itself, for instance.
The move in general for so many tech products and even products that are kind of just barely tech products, the move to being powered by USB-C and USB-C PD wattages has made overall life so much just like a little bit nicer in a lot of ways. It's like the inverse of paper cuts, right? Like, you know, we complain about little paper cuts on little annoyances and products.
This is like, you know, whatever the opposite of a paper cut would be a paper circle. I don't know. I can't think of a good word that's funny, but it is just a little delights. I guess that's the word all the time.
little little delights where there are like there and you don't necessarily realize it once you've moved to the usbc world you don't realize how good you have it until you have to go use something older that has its own power brick or its own like older usb micro or whatever port and the world we have now is so nice because all that stuff about like wow i can charge all my like my phone and my ipad and my laptop from all the same thing
That's true, and that shows in lots of bigger ways now too. Like so many other gadgets or things are now powered by USB because it's just kind of cheaper and widely available and so many devices. I even have like a power drill that is powered by USB-C now and has its own built-in – Which is... And, I mean, look, I'm not a contractor, but for my purposes, it's totally fine.
Like, there was just... There are so many things like that now that are entering my life gradually over the last few years that just... Oh, this new XYZ thing, this is now USB-C powered. Like, you know, it could be so many things. Like... toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners, so many things are now being USB-C powered.
And the more stuff that you get like that in your life, the more those little conveniences and delights you run into sometimes. Oh, I need to get a new power adapter for my drill. Do I have to buy the proprietary thing from the drill company? No. It's just USB-C. I want to have a shorter or longer cable for this gadget.
Do I have to buy a special thing or see if anybody makes a weird one on Amazon? No. You can just use USB-C. There are so many little tiny things like that that add up in your life over time the more you're into the USB-C lifestyle. So thank God for the Europeans for forcing this upon Apple. And thank God for the ecosystem for being here and for...
pretty pretty gradually but now with quite some speed behind it um converting over to this wonderful lifestyle it is wonderful i love usbc even for the data side of it yeah it's a mess the power side of it is awesome yeah agreed let me give the eu partial credit because i think we said before i think apple would have switched with or without the eu it's just a question of the individual timing they might have even done it exactly the same time because they did do it earlier than required but uh
Yeah, Apple's lack of investment in Lightning and the lack of expansion in the capabilities of that port made it inevitable that they would eventually go to USB-C. So they have.
And I think, you know, one of their stated goals, one of the EU's stated goals was reducing e-waste. And I think largely this does that. Like, the move of so many things to USB-C power, I think really does reduce e-waste. Because, like, think of, again, like...
go through your tech closets and see how many things there are that have their own custom power bricks and stuff that now the modern versions of those don't because they can be USB-C powered. I think they make a pretty big impact here. So I, again, so happy about this change. All right, let's move on to the other headlining feature of the iPhone 15 Pro, the action button. It's funny.
It got out there. There was a little bit of drama here and there with cases. And then we pretty much never heard about it for the rest of the year. But I got to say...
i find the action button so useful that i instantly took it for granted like the idea now of using a phone without the action button would be a significant paper cut to me it was like a significant step down because i use mine i have it set up for the flashlight i know there's lots of other ideas people have for it but i need a flashlight fairly frequently and i use it at least twice a day and i just i love having that hardware button there it is fantastic
I use mine for camera. And I know that many would call that a kind of a novice or noob approach because there are many other ways to get to your camera, most of which are fairly quick. But I don't want to have to think about it or have to worry about swiping in just the right way that it actually listens to me and swipes the way I want it to go from the lock screen.
And so for me, I love having the camera as my action button action. And I use that at least daily. I don't personally think I would use the flashlight quite as much, but hey, that doesn't mean you're wrong at all. If it works for you, that's all that matters.
I don't know that I would be lost or anything without having the action button, you know, in a future phone if for some reason it went away, but I definitely would miss having it for sure. And maybe one day I'll use it for something more advanced. But yeah, I think the action button also gets a thumbs up from me for sure.
I think the camera is a perfectly good thing to use it for. My success rate at doing the swipe gesture for the camera is so low. I end up using what you would think would be the even slower one where you have to hold your finger on the little camera icon. It's like there's a delay. You're like, why are you using the one with the delay? That's got to be slower.
No, because when I try to swipe and it fails and I try to swipe and it fails, it's always like, oh, got to get the camera out quick, you know, because something cute is happening or whatever, right? That is the time when I am completely unable to get the camera out. So the action button is going to be great. But I have to say that...
When I need to get my camera out real fast, it's almost always my phone and not my wife's phone. So I actually haven't built the habit of using the action button, even though hers is set to camera, because I'm never grabbing her phone real quick to take a picture because going over to where she is or getting her phone is going to kill the time that would be required anyway.
I'm looking forward to my iPhone 16 with the action button so that I can build that habit because I can almost guarantee that pressing that side button is going to have a much higher success rate than me trying to swipe or me having to hold my finger down on that little thing. Yep, very much so.
And then finally, the only other thing I'll say about the iPhone 15 Pro is that the thermals really have been pretty bad. We all saw right at the beginning, we're like, this phone seems to run hot, really hot. It does. It does run very hot, and it does thermal throttle itself a lot in use, especially in the sun in a car.
That's why I had to buy a chiller phone mount that uses a thermoelectric element just to cool the phone down in the car just so I could keep the display on and take any power whatsoever. This phone runs hot, and it has run hot since day one. I think they successfully mitigated the bad press that could have resulted from that when people started reporting that right at the beginning.
They said it was a software issue, and they issued a software update It wasn't a software issue. It was a hardware flaw. This phone overheats much more easily than previous phones did. And the rumors are that the upcoming 16 pros that should be announced next week apparently have a modified and better thermal design.
And that's so that is when I look at my 16 pro wish list, it's actually really short. It's I want better thermals and I could use the 5X camera that Casey has, which it does seem like both of those things have been pretty solidly rumored the entire time for that phone.
I have to say, though, how many years? I think it's been like three or four years that there have been rumors of better cooling on iPhones. Vapor chambers, graphite sheets. Not just this year. Not just for the iPhone 7U, but last year. And the year before that. And the year before that. And we have never gotten them. So I really, really hope this is the year. Because those rumors are always there.
And the reason they're there is every year, like, again, if you have a phone out in the sun, they will overheat, right? Or when you first update your phone and it's doing all the indexing, they get hot.
people don't like that and so they're always like boy could there be better cooling and then you look at what apple has done with cooling and we know they could do more because android phones are like what what more can we do can we can we do more than just having you know a heat sink up against the thing and so on and so forth and yes you can lots of other phone makers have done things and so whenever we see the rumors apple's gonna do it they're gonna put those graphite sheets in there they're gonna use more thermal paste they're gonna use a vapor chamber
Every year, we're just disappointed. And obviously, the 15 Pro had the... What the heck is the chip? The A18 Pro? I don't even remember the numbers anymore. Yeah, the one on the new 3nm process. Right. So it was a really... They were pushing the limits with that chip on that process that...
Apple's already moving away from, I kind of see why it had thermal issues, and I also kind of see why this would have been a good phone to try out those graphite sheets, you know what I mean?
Like, but no, it didn't happen, so I really hope it does come on the 16th, but if we go another year and everyone says, oh, those rumors were for the 17th, not the 16th, I am going to be disappointed, despite the fact that, in general, I haven't noticed my wife's phone getting particularly hot, except for when she's playing Pokemon Go, in which case that makes all of her phones hot, but...
You know, as long as it gets the job done, as long as it doesn't stop working, which is your problem when you have it in the car, like it literally stops being able to be used for the thing you're trying to use it for because the screen gets so dim you can't see it anymore.
I don't know if the 15 Pro was over any kind of limit to bother people more than some past phones, but it's time for Apple to invest a little bit more in cooling on their top end phones.
You know, it's funny you bring all this up because I do agree that throttling is an issue and that the thermals are not stellar. But I would actually say, to my estimation, this was a mild improvement over past years. And, you know, when I'm using my phone at the aforementioned pool... I think it was the 14 Pro. Maybe it was the 13 Pro, but I want to say it was the 14 Pro.
That bad boy was so dark, I could barely read it pretty much always. Whereas this one, it definitely gets dim, and noticeably so. But I feel like not only would it recover quicker, but it didn't get as dim as either the 13 or the 14. So while I don't disagree that we do... I think we do need improvements, and I hope for improvements...
I actually thought that this was a slight improvement over years past, although not a great one.
I think you're just experiencing screen improvements there and not necessarily thermal improvements, right? Very well could be. Just the screen is brighter and takes less power at a given level of brightness. So now the dim one is not as dim and you're attributing that to better cooling or better thermals. But I think it's just screen improvements that you're benefiting from there. But anyway.
It doesn't feel like that's the case, but you very well could be right.
Either way, the experience isn't as bad as it has been. That's the thing, though. It's very situational. If you buy a car with a big glass roof and all of a sudden your phone is overheating because it's on the dashboard because it's getting more direct sunlight, you're going to say, oh, it's the phone's fault, but maybe it's because you got a new car, right?
All of these phones have always been very vulnerable to being in direct sunlight for any amount of time, and it's just a question of... Do you start putting your phone in more direct sunlight? If so, you will perceive that phone as being worse thermally. But, I mean, there's 15 pros I have heard people saying gets a little bit warmer than they expected.
And like a lot of these things, especially with the SoC, the heat is very localized, and it's when the SoC is doing a lot of work, right? The thing that gets hot is that little SoC in there. And so... On iPhone setup day, when it's redoing all your indexes and doing all that stuff, yeah, it's going to get real hot and people are going to notice.
But I think over time with normal phone usage where you just pick it up, scroll through something, and put it back down, it doesn't really get a chance to get that hot until you put it on the dashboard of your car.
And then I guess one more thing on the 15 before we leave it. I really do appreciate the titanium as a weight saving measure. I don't think it needs necessarily be titanium specifically. It could it could be lots of other it could be aluminum for all I care like aluminum was fine for a long time and it is lighter than titanium even. So that would be fine as well.
But I'm very glad they switched away from steel. I do know that apparently they switched to titanium and some of the structural changes they made inside, I think, were actually part of the problem with the thermals. And I believe that's part of why they had to revise them for the 16 line next week. But overall, it does feel very good in the hand. It feels great.
So I love the overall design of it, with the exception that I think the colors were garbage for the Profound. I got the natural gray one, which I thought... I don't know, last fall I was kind of in a gray mood and I thought this is going to be cool and different. And no, it's just gray.
I slightly disagree with you there. It is just gray, but I do think it's a cool gray, like a neat gray. But I do mostly agree with you. If you'll permit me to just carry on since I've already interrupted you. With regard to the 15 Pro Max, I don't hate the size. I don't hate the size. And I do like having a little more real estate.
Um, it turns out that if you have a phone this big and your hands aren't freakishly large, a pop socket is pretty much compulsory. Um, I have been thinking long and hard about what I will do if the Tetra prism five X lens comes to the pro to the pro, but not pro max phone.
So if the iPhone 16 pro gets the five X lens sitting here now, I think I'm going to go back to the smaller one with the, the, the human sized one.
That'll be the test, actually, because right now you're like, oh, the big phone, it's annoying, but it's nice to have more screen real estate. You're really going to find out how much you care about that screen when you go back to a smaller one. That's what you're going to notice.
If you don't notice, it takes you a day to find it or whatever, but if you look at that screen and you're like, I'm so used to seeing so much more stuff, or in this app I can see a whole other column of whatever's... That's going to really hurt you. So we'll see if you've irrevocably become one of the giant phone people or whether you were just a tourist in their land.
Right. And sitting here now, I think I was just a tourist, but I say that with little to no conviction. And the thing that frustrates me so about the big phone is that for my hands, for my body, it's really not a one-handed phone for anything more than swiping vertically. And even still, if I'm using one hand, I must have the pop socket out. And I actually have come around on the PopSocket.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But I think in a perfect world, I would rather go back down to the standard size phone, presumably stop using a PopSocket. I mean, we'll see what happens. And being able to use my phone one-handed because it really is uncomfortable to use these giant phones one-handed. And And I just really dislike that. I miss being able to use my phone one-handed.
And I think what would happen is I would get the smaller phone, if this is the way I go, I'll get the regular-sized phone, and I'll say, man... I do miss that screen, but oh boy, is it nice to be able to use my phone when handed again. And so I think ultimately that's going to win the day, but we'll see what happens now.
Now that I've shown that I can show myself, that is that I can handle a big phone. If there is some sort of big phone only feature that I feel interested in, like compelled by, then I'll just stick with the big phone. Now the current rumors are that I don't think that's going to be the case because But if it is, I don't think I would begrudge, for lack of a better word, getting another big phone.
But sitting here today, I don't think that's what I want to do. That being said, the 5X lens, I am very glad that I went for it and that I got it. There are definitely times that I want to be between 2 and 5 for sure. And I think, Marco, you were... not whining about this, that's not the word I'm looking for either, but you were concerned about this before it came out.
And I think it's a valid concern. There are definitely times that I want an in-between. And in a perfect world, I would want one half, one, two, three, and five. And I know that's nuts and that's not going to happen, but that would be excellent. But I stand by getting the big phone for the 5X lens.
I really do feel like it gives me reach in scenarios that I wouldn't have gotten nearly as good a shot otherwise. And I don't want to give that up. So if for some reason the regular size phone doesn't get the Tetra Prism lens, I will almost certainly stick with the big phone.
Having never had a big phone before, a lot of people would say that, oh, the battery life is infinite, not unlike the Apple Watch Ultra. You know, battery life is forever. It's amazing. No, or at least not in my experience. I don't feel like it's demonstrably better than the regular size phones. Maybe I'm using my phone more now. Maybe I'm a banana. Maybe I'm off my rocker. I don't know.
But I don't feel like the battery life was night and day better. I really don't. But I do think, to echo what Marco said, the USB-C, four thumbs up from me. The titanium, two thumbs up. I do think that the natural titanium is a good color, but I concur that the rest of the colors stink and it looks like they're only going to get worse.
But yeah, I mean, all in all, I really do like these phones a lot. I really have enjoyed it. The one thing I will say, and I will say again, and I've said this for the last several years, the front screen is too easily scratched. I scratched the snot out of this thing. I have no idea how.
It's so badly scratched that I am genuinely thinking I might become one of those lunatics that puts a screen protector on their phone because this thing is scratched to hell. And I hate that. I hate it. And normally, I would just go to Apple and use my AppleCare repair incident, and I'll probably try to do it to see if they'll do it.
But last time I tried this, they were like, oh, it's not damaged enough tough nuts. And I'm just barely honest enough that I don't just throw the thing on the ground in front of them and say, how about now?
It is definitely a weird incentive they've created. Right?
I'm saying. I didn't do that last year. I don't plan on doing it this year. But it is very tempting.
Sounds like somebody might need a phone pouch.
No, I hear you.
How are you scratching your screen? How is this happening? How are you still using a phone pouch? What year is this? I'm not, but Casey needs to be. I'm not using one. I have one scratch on my screen and it is very small. And I've had this phone for two years, right? I don't know what you're doing.
Unless you're going to have someone follow you around with a camera to find out what you're doing as you stick the phone into your pocket full of sand. Maybe you need a pouch.
Yeah, I genuinely don't know. And these are not small scratches. Like one of them is semi-horizontally. That's what I'm saying.
Are you putting it in your pocket with keys?
No, I don't. It's got to be me. I'm not saying it's not my fault, but darned if I know what it was. And I've been rolling mostly caseless this year because I never really found a case I loved. I adored, what was it, the peel case? I think we talked about this when it was new. I adored the peel case, but they had a cutout for the action button, which I could not abide.
And to the best of my knowledge, they never revised it. What was the one that they sent out?
That was Peak Design. Actually, that's the one I've been using the last few months.
Yeah, and I have nothing against the Peak Design case.
Oh, it's great, honestly.
I really loved the peel case so very much, but I could not abide the lack of anything for the action button. But I will say, in the defense of the glass, and actually David Schaub in the chat just reminded me of this, I have dropped this thing case-free a handful of times, not dramatically, but a handful of times in situations where I was like, oh, here we go.
Oh, well, at least I'll get a new screen now. But I've dropped it by accident a handful of times, and it's been no worse for wear, which I do appreciate. But golly, can I please have a less scratch-prone screen? And I think
I think this trade-off is the one Apple would say is the right one. It's better to people... Because you've seen people use screens that are just destroyed. So people's tolerance for using screens that are messed up is great. But shattering is over a lot of people's limits. So the trade-off is essentially, you can make it more scratch-proof, but then it's going to be more prone to shattering.
And so the balance Apple has chosen is... It's going to get a bunch of little hairline scratches all over it if you do whatever the hell Casey's doing. But it will be more resistant to full-blown shattering when you drop it.
And despite the fact that that might annoy some of us who, like, if you're very careful with your phone, a harder screen that was more scratch-resistant would be better for you. But hell, I've dropped my phone plenty of times. It's dropped off my nightstand onto a wooden floor plenty of times. I've dropped it off the dining room table onto a wooden floor. Yeah, but you're in a case, aren't you?
Yeah, I'm in a case. But you could still get unlucky with the way it falls in that situation. So I've dropped it enough times that I'm glad that it is as shadow-resistant as it is.
I mean, I am glad it's shatter-resistant for sure. And I do think you're right that this is a problem I can fix with a screen protector. And I think the more I think about it and the more I talk about it, the more I think I am probably going to not have to, but choose to do that for the next one. So if you have a screen protector recommendation that you swear by, please reach out via Mastodon.
Don't email us because it's too much to email, please. But I would love to hear from Mastodon or Threads for that matter, a screen protector that you enjoy.
And a clean room for Casey to apply it in.
Yeah, well, pretty much.
Some of them have gotten really advanced now. When you order most decent brand ones now, they come with basically little kits that you lay it in this plastic cradle and you...
flip this thing right down exactly the right angle like they get really uh pretty pretty complicated to try to do it right they're trying to help you as best they can because they know it's a difficult thing to do but if you're doing in like a house full of cat dander or something you're kind of fighting uphill battle i've actually heard you're often better off having either sometimes the apple store will have people who are willing to do it for you if you buy it there but i don't even know if they still sell screen detectors there but best buy does it too or something like that this is a skilled labor thing
Yeah, even mall kiosks that sell phone accessories will often do it for you for some small fee. I would actually suggest maybe trying that option. When you buy one and try to apply it, you're doing this in your house with whatever conditions you can best approximate that are actually somewhat near maybe being ideal, but not quite ideal. And you're going to do, what, two of these a year at most?
Yeah. So you're not going to have the experience and the finesse of somebody who's doing it like 10 times a day.
On the other hand, you will care much more than they will. If you're the type of person who's getting a screen protector because you can't send even a single scratch on your screen, have fun dealing with that single speck of dust that did get under there.
I mean, you're not wrong. But, well, this is a problem for Casey in a week or two. It's not a problem for Casey today. But yeah, in the grand scheme of things, I really enjoyed this phone, and for no other reason, I think I would be all in because of USB-C, and everything else was just a bonus.
You didn't even mention the plain iPhone 15, and I want to say that I think this year is one of the rare cases where Apple seems to have gotten caught with their pants down a little bit by the AI thing. They shipped a line of phones, the 15 and the 15 Pro, seemingly without realizing that that 15 wouldn't be able to run next year's headlining feature.
They're going to ship... Maybe they won't ship it by then because they're not shipping Apple Intelligence, but they could have ended up shipping Apple Intelligence that wouldn't work on their latest non-pro phone if they had actually shipped Apple Intelligence before the new phones came out.
I think it's unprecedented for a one-year-old phone not to be able to run the headlining feature of the next OS that came out after it a year later. And I just have to think it's because they didn't think that, oh, we can cheap out on the RAM on the 15. It's a big deal. The iPhone's got plenty of RAM. We're well within limits, blah, blah, blah. And here comes AI and LLMs using all your RAM.
I will look back on this line, the 1550 Pro, and always remember it as the year where the non-pro phone had this crippling disability that could have been prevented with being a little bit more generous with RAM, but wasn't.
And it put Apple in this strange, somewhat uncomfortable position of having to tell people who just bought a brand new phone last year that, yeah, you can't run Apple intelligence.
I think that speaks to just how far ahead iPhone components are planned. And how recently, relatively speaking, Apple realized they had to get in on the LLM game. Because the iPhone 15 non-Pro components were probably a lock, like, what, two years ago, maybe? We know they have pretty long timelines for a lot of that stuff. And so they probably started Apple Intelligence...
Shortly after that was decided or around the same time, maybe they didn't know yet when they started doing LLM research and development. Maybe they didn't realize, like, we're definitely going to need X gigs of RAM to run this thing. That was probably too early to know that.
And a lot of Apple's efforts over the last year or two, like they've actually open sourced some things and published papers about compressing LLMs to fit in smaller amounts of RAM. They've done a lot of work in that area. Why? We're seeing it now. This is why they care so much about that.
I think they are barely fitting it in the 8 gig phones. It's been a lot of hard work to get it to fit in the 8 gig phones. And you can argue whether they were late to the game on LLM or because the lead time just fell on them, they just couldn't help it. But this is another side effect of always being stingy with RAM. It's the unforeseen thing, right? It's like, we don't need this.
Why would we ever give ourselves any kind of buffer? Let's cut it as close as we possibly can, save every penny, because... Why would we give any excess RAM if we think the low-end phone doesn't need that? We want to provide product differentiation.
And the answer is, you never know when something might come along that makes your stinginess hurt you more than your stinginess is currently helping you. Now, Apple would probably argue, well, we're stingy 90% of the time, and we only lose out on it 10% of the time, so it's still a win. But, you know, I still think that...
being that stingy with RAM, like setting aside the AI thing, we've always said, when we talk about the Macs, selling them with too little RAM and having people upgrade or whatever, you want to give your users a better experience. And in general, more RAM gives a better experience. There are so many things more RAM does for you. Even on the 15 Pro, the fact that they had to work so hard
So you get Apple intelligence into 8 gigs. That was their highest-end phone. Even on that one, they could have still provided differentiation and given the Pro 10 and the non-Pro 8 instead of 8 and 6. Anyway, they seem to have snapped out of that with the 16s, which are rumored to all have the same amount of RAM, and the 17s are rumored to all have even more RAM, so we'll see how this goes, but...
This is, you know, like I said, I'm going to remember the 1515 Pro line with this one specific fact. Marco will remember it for USB-C, and I will remember it for the time that the non-Pro phone got left behind prematurely.
Well, and to be clear, it isn't only about being cheap when they limit the amount of RAM in phones. That is certainly part of it, and that's probably not a trivial part. But it's also about battery life. RAM takes power. Like just having a certain amount of RAM, you have to be applying power to that part of the chip, even if it's not using that RAM for anything.
Like even if it's, you know, marked as free by the OS, you're still powering that chip to a certain base level. That's how DRAM works. So, and forgive me for experts in the field, if I'm dramatically oversimplifying or there's a whole bunch of asterisks on that now, there probably are.
But in general, you don't want to put a whole bunch of RAM into something that's as battery constrained as a phone if you're not sure you're going to use it because it does take battery.
No, but it's like, again, this is the pro line, you know? You can give them a little bit more, which allows you to give the non-pro line eight, which apparently is okay, you know? Because the pro's got eight, and their battery life is okay with an even hungrier SoC, right? So the plain 15 would also have been fine with eight.
Like, you're right, it does take more RAM, but we're not asking for double. We're not asking double the RAM. Just a little bit more. Just give yourself a little bit of headroom. Just don't be as stingy. You can still be stingy, but just not quite as stingy, because you never know when that's going to pay off.
All right, so Apple Watch Series 9. I don't have a lot to say about the Series 9 except that I have found the double tap gesture, which was one of its new headlining features, to be fairly bad. I don't think it is fast enough or reliable enough to be useful. I have tried it over the last year many times. My hit rate with getting it to be recognized is low.
And even when it is recognized, it takes a decent amount of extra time that you have to be still having the watch be like raised up and looking at the screen stays on. And then it shows a little animation to confirm that it understood your tap. And you like it just feels very slow.
And I have just mostly resorted to nose tapping the way I always have if I have to be one handed to dismiss something because it is just faster and literally more reliable. Like it is more reliable for me to lift up the watch to my nose and tap it and hit the right spot on the screen than trying the double tap finger gesture.
So I don't know if that's just me, but I have found generally the double tap is really not very useful.
Yeah, I mean, I have a Series 8, and so this is going to be a very expensive September for us because we're going watch and phone. We are on a two-year plan on watches and a one-year plan on phones. I feel like my complaints about the watch are the same as they ever were, which is to say the battery life is just straight-up trash at this point.
Really? I don't find that. I mean, mine's a lot younger, obviously. It's a year younger. But I find the battery life on the Series 9 is great. But I also didn't have any problems with the Series 8.
Well, that's the thing is I think a year worth of Apple Watch battery is fine in my personal experience. Two years, not so fine. And that's been a real bugbear for me to the point that between Marco's friendly brow beating and also my friend in Richmond, Brad, just got a like a month or two ago.
got an apple watch ultra 2 or whatever the current one is and he will not shut up about how good the battery life is on this thing and at this point i think i am probably going to hold out until whenever the next ultra update is and if that's next week perfect that'd be preferred but if not i will try to hold out as long as i can and if i can't i'll probably just commit to the existing one but
So it's been so frustrating. And if I don't top off my watch at some point during the day, it will typically die sometime after dinner. And I'm just sick of it. I'm just over it. Now, also, part of this is also influenced by the fact that I have the little watch. I have the 40 millimeter, whatever the little one is.
Or 41, I think, for you.
Yeah, I forget what it is now, or what it was in Series 8. But I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of always having to worry about my watch's battery life. And so next time, it's going to be an Ultra.
So I'll come back to that in a second. The only thing I wanted to say about the Watch Series 9 specifically is that they removed the option for titanium with the Series 9. And I wish they didn't. And I hope for the Series 10 they bring back a titanium option for the non-ultra watch.
uh it was a bit like the titanium edition watch was not that much more money than a steel one it was really nice it was lighter i think it looked more refined it had like a nice brushed finish like it looked really nice it felt really nice on the wrist it was a way to have a little bit more subtle and a little bit lighter watch than the steel without going down in quality on things like the crystal that you have to do when you get the aluminum one
um the aluminum one looks like aluminum you know it looks fine but it doesn't look nice the steel and the titanium both look very nice and titanium i think was a little bit nicer of a look between the two and again i think it felt better and also apple watches tend to function better the lighter they are the taptic engine is more feelable um it moves on your wrist better it sets on your wrist better um so i really hope they bring back titanium as an option on the series 10 or whatever they're going to call it series x series 10 whatever
Before you move on, and if you'd rather table this for later, we certainly can, but I would also be curious to hear what the status is of Adam's Apple Watch. And I don't remember what generation that is, but we've been kicking around the idea of getting Declan one for an upcoming birthday. And I'd be curious to hear what your year or two on review is of that.
um the the original one that we got him a few years back now was an se like the first gen watch se um we replaced it a couple years back with i think a series five or six that i'd gotten amazon refurbished or renewed or whatever they call it um for fairly cheap um he doesn't wear it currently anymore
because the school banned them i guess kids would figure out like how to put notes in your apple watch to cheat on tests so they banned them so he hasn't worn it in a long time it's been sitting in a drawer it's probably fairly dead now but anyway so i don't for now he's just not using a watch and i don't know when or if that will return but we'll find out so about so going back to do you know kind of what i'm hoping for for the series 10 so number one titanium option um
And just for the record here, I'm not talking about software at all right now. I think the Apple Watch, the Watch OS X redesign changed a lot of things. I still am not super sold on some of the Watch OS X changes and placements and buttons and gestures and things like that. I'm still getting everything wrong all the time.
I'm still pushing the wrong buttons or swiping the wrong edge to do things that I didn't want to do. But maybe that's just me. And of course, I always have opinions on watch faces. But going back to just the hardware... I really hope, again, titanium option on the non-ultra series. Please bring that back. It was so nice. I'm also always hoping for... I guess that's this kind of software. Sorry.
I want display zoom on the Apple Watch. As you may know, my vision is slowly getting worse at close distances as I proceed through middle age. I use reading glasses for close-up reading of things sometimes. I'm not always wearing my reading glasses because I'm not always reading.
So I have found, as my vision has gotten slowly worse at short arm distance, very small complications and very small text in complications, like, say, the timer complication, which I use frequently, is getting a little hard to read. Now, iPhones have many different accessibility technologies for font sizing and UI sizing and different visual accommodations.
The watch has almost none, which is surprising. There is dynamic type on the watch, which is the global text size setting, but it doesn't affect that many things on the watch.
They also, on the phones, have this thing called Display Zoom, where that's the mode where when you set up your phone, I don't know if it still does this on all phones, but during that setup process, it'll ask you, like, do you want things to be this size or this size?
And what it does is basically scale the entire screen up to simulate the field of view of, like, the next size smaller phone that existed or exists.
So you so like you know if you have like a pro max and you pick that option it'll basically just blow up the screen dimensions of a pro into the pro max screen so you get everything scaled up perfectly the same way you would do like a resolution change on a monitor on a computer.
I want the watch to get that ability so that it can scale up everything, complications, the faces, everything, when you have a larger model watch to simulate the screen size of a smaller model watch blown up to its new size. I think that would be a great visual accommodation for people whose close-up vision is not that good or whose vision in general is not that good. Because...
Again, dynamic text on the watch is just not very well supported, doesn't go very far, and doesn't include almost anything on the watch face. So I would love to see that as an option. Again, that is a software thing, but maybe it's requiring a certain GPU or whatever. And of course, the rumored larger screens that might be coming might make that easier to pull off and make it better of a feature.
before we get to the screens I'll get there but I'm hoping they found a way to keep the blood oxygen sensor this is not a sensor I use frequently but it's nice to have it and we've had it and I think you know whatever they need to work out with Massimo you know to license that tech that patent I think they should just do it yeah
That is true. I am going to be really annoyed, just in principle, if the hardware, at least, for the blood oxygen sensor is not on whatever these new watches are. I'll be lightly annoyed if it remains disabled, which I expect it to, but I'll be really annoyed if it's incapable, you know, if this patent dispute ever gets fixed, if it's incapable of doing any testing or measuring.
That's going to really chat my butt.
Yeah. So again, it's a minor feature. It's not going to be the end of the world if I lose it, but I just don't want to lose it. Like over Apple being BSE about patent licensing. And I understand, look, we all hate patents, and they tried so hard, but you lost. Let's move on. The only other thing I'll get to for the hardware before we get to the screens is I really, really hope...
that the Apple Watch Series 10 supports Qi charging finally. Qi 2, as a standard, I believe accommodates small enough devices that I believe the Apple Watch could be charged via Qi 2 if the watch wanted to support it. So I'm hoping... Because again, going back to our charging delights and paper cuts earlier with USB-C, I have now one cable and one port for everything except the Apple Watch.
And yeah, you can get combo chargers that have a special Apple Watch pad off to the side. But you know what's much more common? Batteries and chargers and stuff that just have a Qi pad and USB-C holes. So I would love to just have Qi support. Let me buy a battery from Anker or whatever on Amazon that has a USB-C output and a standard Qi pad And I can put whatever I want there.
An AirPods case, a second phone, or an Apple Watch while traveling. That would be really nice. And again, I think Qi 2 has added what is necessary to make that work. So I'm hoping for that. Now, about the screen sizes on the watch. There's been all these rumors that the watch regular series is growing.
That there's going to be, you know, that basically the current small version, which I believe is 41 millimeter or 42, that is going to go away. And it's going to basically, like, that both of them are going to be going up in size by a decent amount. I think this is going to be a good move overall.
We've said over time that Apple has done a really good job satisfying the market for smaller watches way better than most of the smart watch makers have ever achieved it. But watch fashion and the smartwatch market have changed since the Apple Watch was introduced 10 years ago. And this happens. In the watch world, the sizing of how big a standard – and watches historically were very gendered.
So there were certain sizes like, all right, men's watches are going to be this size range for the most part, and women's watches are going to be this size range. Fortunately, in the era of smartwatches, first of all, a lot of the gendering has gone away to the point where now, if you buy the small watch, people don't say that's the women's version. It's just the small watch.
And the big one, women can wear it, and no one's going to say you're wearing a man's watch. Thank God we've gotten rid of all that BS. Also, since the smartwatch era has really taken off over the last decade, demand for large watches has gone up. Which is funny because in the regular watch world, like the mechanical watch world, watches had gotten very big.
Then they kind of started going back a little bit. They're actually getting a little bit smaller now. But smartwatches are going the other way. Part of the reason so many people bought the Apple Watch Ultra is not because they were going to be climbing a mountain and then diving into 200 meters of water. It's because they liked the bigger look. And that's for both functional reasons.
Yes, it has better battery life, bigger screen. That's great for smartwatches. But also, big watches are just in fashion right now. Really huge smartwatches are in style. And most people that I see are not wearing the small one anymore. I see a lot of people of a lot of different sizes and ages, and I don't see many people choosing that smaller Apple watch anymore.
Meanwhile, if you look at the smartwatch market... The current, quote, big Series 9, that's the one I wear. That's the one I think Casey probably should be wearing. The big one, relative to other smartwatches in the market, is actually fairly medium-sized. Many other smartwatches in the market are actually significantly bigger.
What the Ultra's success, I think, showed Apple and showed the market is that, yes, a lot of people choose it because of those technical factors, but a lot of people also just like big watches. Big watches are in.
especially smartwatch big big smartwatches that is just in fashion right now so if apple is truly getting rid of the smallest size and making them both bigger i think that's not because they're abandoning the market for small watches i bet it's more because the market abandoned theirs the market probably moved on and has not been buying the small watch very much at all
And I think people of all wrist sizes have been choosing bigger smartwatches over the last few years way more than they used to. So I think this is just Apple responding to the market and wanting to serve where the demand actually is. They did the same thing with phones and phone sizes growing over time. This is that they're doing the same thing with the watch.
I think they're going to raise the sizes of both of them and everybody will complain about it for about a week and then we'll try them and be like, oh, this is nicer. Yep. And then it'll be fine. And people will buy them like crazy, especially the biggest one, way more than we think they will. So I think this is going to be totally fine if they increase the sizes of the watches a little bit.
We'll all get used to it and it'll be fine.
All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP if we can. PG&E Delenda Est. I love people who provide these kooky usernames and no real names. Anyways, Marco, it's not even Halloween, for goodness sakes. Marco, how hard is it to maintain server compatibility with clients that are still going to be on the last iOS 16 or below builds of Overcast? Are you doing that thing?
No.
No, well, it is a good question, though, because at some point I do end support for the really old API protocols. How hard it is to maintain server compatibility in general with old clients if you just make a new copy of your API controller or functions or whatever and just call this one, like I'm currently on, version 6. It's really not that bad.
The main problem comes when you have to do significant changes to things like the server-side schema, like how your data is stored. So do you build in compatibility layers? How long do you keep those over time? Do certain problems occur when older versions of the app sync that maybe clobber changes from the new versions? And do you accommodate that?
Over time, that complexity grows, and how much you want to maintain it for a decreasing number of clients, eventually that trade-off becomes not worth it, and you say, all right, you know what, in a month I'm going to cut off support for iOS 12 or whatever. The downside of doing that, of course, is Overcast is a server-dependent app.
And so if the servers stop supporting a certain client version, that version of the app does not work anymore. It will not get new updates. You cannot add new podcasts. You cannot download new podcasts. You can't even log in. It will totally break that client. So I try not to do that until those clients are very old.
In this case, the specifics of the new API for the rewrite, the protocol with which the clients speak to the server and vice versa has totally changed. It's way lighter on the servers. It's way more efficient. The old protocol was very hard on the servers. And so you would think I would have a pretty substantial incentive to end support soon for the old ones.
But because the numbers drop off so fast for like how like there's not like in in, you know, a month or two, there's going to be a big chunk of those iOS 16 only people that fall off because they replace their phones.
Even though the old protocol is way less efficient and way harder on the servers, I don't have much incentive to end its support anytime soon because it's going to be such a tiny percentage of the user base that's going to be holding on to it. So that'll probably be supported for a while. We're talking probably years, multiple years, because again, there's not much reason to end it yet.
Eventually there will be, but the protocol is mostly what has changed, not the data storage layer.
And some of the things I'm doing, I'm trying over time to push more of the logic that was previously server-side logic, push more of it to the clients where possible, in part just to lighten the load on the servers, and in part because sometimes that's just way easier to do on the client, or I can offer better features if I do it client-side.
So, for instance, the the current test flight build, I have fixed a problem with the episode limit not being enforced. I've had this option forever of like, you know, you can you can limit a podcast to only keep the latest one or two or five episodes of that podcast. This feature, if I was launching a new podcast app today, I would never offer this feature.
It is so tricky and problematic, and that has been enforced server-side to date. This new test flight build enforces it client-side, and that's part of why it's fixed for a lot of people. because doing it server-side... Because there's all sorts of differences. I'll get into a very brief diversion here. The problem is the way the servers... Servers have to deal with data in very different ways.
They have to deal with scale in very different ways. So when you, as a user, when you subscribe to a podcast, what you see... Suppose you subscribe to a new podcast that has 1,000 episodes back in its feed. You subscribe. You now have in your app a thousand episodes that you don't have any history with. And then a new one comes out and maybe you play that one.
Well, to your client, that's a thousand and one rows in a table, most of which have all zeros in them. And then, you know, you have then that latest one, you can mark that as your progress or your plate or whatever.
On the server, if I added 1,000 rows to the table that keeps track of everyone's status of episodes, every time someone subscribed to a podcast at 1,000 episodes, it would take way more space and be way heavier and way more expensive to host. And more servers, larger backups, everything. Data size affects cost substantially. So that would be very bad. So on the server, I do tricks like...
when you subscribe to a show, I assume that the state of everything that precedes your subscription in that, in that feed is it's deleted, but not played. Like it's just, that's the default state of everything that precedes your subscription to a new podcast.
If you then go back and listen to an old one that of course I insert that row, but I have this, these, all these optimizations in place that like, okay, I'm not going to add all thousand of those as new rows to this table, because again, that would blow up everything. That logic wreaks havoc with episode limiting, and it's been so tricky to get it right server-side.
A couple years ago, I even let people opt into a beta of a new way to handle it because I thought I finally had nailed it and taken care of all those cases and all the edges and all the weirdness that somehow would still be efficient and would still not store nearly as much as it had to. I tried so many different ways to do this, and I never got it quite right.
So with the new way that the new app talks to the servers, I've developed yet more issues with doing that server-side. So what I'm going to do is once this version of this app is reasonably out there that does it all client-side – because, again, client-side, it's way easier to do. The client has no – I don't care if I take another five kilobytes on your phone. Right.
So the client can have 1,000 rows in the database when you subscribe to a feed because it's just keeping it locally. I don't care. It's a SQLite database. It's super light. So the client can do perfect limiting because it has perfect information, whereas the server is simulating perfect information with a bunch of optimizations.
So anyway, so what I plan to do is move that logic entirely to the client with the next release and then over time eventually tell the server to stop even trying to do that, to stop enforcing episode limits at all. Because that will make a lot of things easier, it'll reduce this bug potential in the app, and you don't want the server trying to do it at the same time the app is doing it.
So that's kind of my long-term plan here. Have the server stop enforcing that completely. When that happens, if you are still, say, on an old client, if all of your Overcast devices that you're logged into, if none of them have the new version that does this, your episode limits will just slowly increase, and things won't get automatically deleted once they pass that limit. And so...
things like that like kind of weird drift will start happening if you're still using a very old version of the api that's another reason why like eventually it does make sense to retire them because if they start like producing weird conditions or like things that could cause bugs for other clients you know you got to retire them then or find a way to limit them but for the most part
i'm because i'm moving more towards more stuff happening on the client and the server side feature set is fairly fixed i don't intend to really do much more server side unless we get into things like you know transcriptions but that's that's a whole other bag of worms because of all that i expect the ios 16 api to still work for a long time to answer your question in a very long way
Mark Robinson writes, when a podcast says follow us on Apple Podcasts, it really helps the show. Does listening through Overcast do that as well? Does Apple register that follow in a way that counts and helps the show? Also, how does it actually help the show?
Listening through Overcast doesn't do anything to affect Apple Podcasts or its rankings because Apple Podcasts does not know that you're listening in Overcast. If you subscribe to a podcast in Apple Podcasts, Apple does register that in some way, and it does help the show.
It helps the show mainly in ranking it higher and possibly helping it get on certain top lists or ranked lists that are occasionally used for discovery in Apple Podcasts. Over time, I think they're using this less in the sense that they are doing more kind of things you might like type of recommendations rather than top list of new and noteworthy this week or whatever.
So I think this is mattering less over time. But they basically – they historically have – used new follows as a strong signal but i think possibly at some times i think that was actually the only signal that would feed into like what shows up on their top hot list today because it is a pretty good signal overall like how many new follows is a show getting
And for the record, I actually try not to have those kind of metrics in Overcast that are global like that because it tends to reinforce the rich get richer. So I've moved away from most of those over time. But that is, as far as I know, that is still part of how Apple Podcasts does recommendations and rankings. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace.
Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is ATP overtime, a bonus topic every week just for members. This week's overtime, we're talking about AI angst. There are some tricky things going on with the AI world, including authors suing Anthropic and some drama over at NaNoWriMo.
We're going to be talking about both those things in ATP Overtime. You can join to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-
I'm not having a good time in neutral land right now. Uh-oh. Battery fault. Yes, so remember when that battery fault message popped up about a month ago?
Oh, I do, and I can't believe you haven't gotten the car serviced yet.
And I said at the time, I'll get it serviced as soon as I'm back off the beach for the school year. It's going to be a pain in the butt and driving all the way to Brooklyn for the Rivian Service Center. So I'm going to send you two photos in sequence here into the Slack group, and I'll try to put them as chapter art.
I have to say that this whole deal, like with EVs, we don't have an established culture the way we do with internal combustion engine cars about...
the various levels of severity of things that can happen and i know the culture is not consistent you'll know people who drive their car with a check engine light on forever and ever but most people who know something about cars if the check engine light comes on it's a sign that you should do something not like i'll do it in a few i'll look at it in a few months it's probably fine maybe it's fine or maybe your engine's about to blow up right whereas with evs
They all have their own error messages, their own things. And there's no sort of universal equivalent of like, you know, a light on the dashboard that we know these ones are serious. You know, oil pressure drops to zero. Stop the car. You know what I mean? Like things that we know about internal combustion with EVs. It's like, I don't know. Is that bad? Is a battery fault bad?
Right. And especially a battery fault that only shows up when doing DC fast charging on a highway. And then I reboot the car a couple of times and it doesn't show up anymore. Like, OK, I guess it's fixed.
Right. Like you don't you don't you don't have any like like a frame of reference for how how seriously should I take this?
Since I last reported on that, I have developed a few additional problems. Oh, no. So I mentioned, you know, the dramatically increased wind noise since getting the body shop to replace the side, which admittedly, that's probably the body shop's fault. But there was wind noise before they did their work also. There was just a little bit less of it.
But so, you know, wind noise, I got to get them to fix that. I had an increasing incidence of... what seems like the auto steer system crashing. Um, no, not literally, thank God, but I guess poor choice of words. Um, but the auto steer sometimes will just turn off and make a bunch of noise and it will say highway assist system failure.
And so that sounds like it crashed to me, but, or some sensor broke. Um, so I have to have them look at that. Um, also, um, I can no longer move the seat. Um,
of the car the driver's seat does not move unless i am switching between the two profiles the tick profile and the me profile hope you're hope you're happy with the profiles yeah it will not move like none of the adjustments work it is just stuck like it it refuses any other adjustment besides the profile switches so if i wanted to like you know let me put it up a little bit nope can't do that if anybody else needs to drive my car too bad if i need to move the seat back to like to get something out from under it nope too bad which to me that
That's actually probably like a safety issue that I should probably get fixed pretty immediately. And finally, I barely have air conditioning. The air conditioning has almost completely gone out. It blows very weak air and goes through lots of times when the fan will just like kind of slow down and it'll blow totally hot air. And then it'll go back eventually and blow slightly cold air.
But it's bad. Like today was only in the high 70s and it couldn't keep up.
it was not a hot day and it could not keep up and it was blowing warm air most of the time so the air conditioning i basically have no air conditioning or i have almost no air conditioning so i created a support ticket in there and you know the way you get service from rivian is you go to their app and you like report your problems you can attach photos and whatever else so i created the support ticket with all these issues um
I do find it very funny that apparently when you add five issues to a ticket, it says at the bottom, you've reached the max number of issues. Please submit these and start a new request. My car says otherwise, right? So I've reached the maximum number of problems with my Rivian that I can put on one service request. So I thought, okay, well, you know.
Maybe I'll get in the service center within the next couple of weeks, you know, get this done. I'm a little scared because I have heard that this level 3 charging battery problem, I've found a couple of forum threads that people said it took them like months to figure it out. So I'm not loving that, but we haven't gotten there yet. We'll see what happens.
So, okay, maybe I can get in the service center, you know, again, in maybe a week or two. Now to the next screen, which I'll send you now. These were the first available appointments.
Oh, no. Oh, that's not good at all.
The first available Rivian appointment in my entire region of New York is 10 weeks from now, November 13th.
That's undesirable.
Yes. And I checked. There's a couple other Rivian service centers that are like 100 miles away. And it's no better. It's the same. They're all out to November. You should check Richmond.
I bet there's not a lot here.
I am not happy right now. Like, I'm starting to fall out of love with owning a first version car rapidly. And I knew when I bought it, I'm like, this is the first version of the R1S. Maybe I'll have some problems.
i i don't think i fully appreciated how much this sucks that i i now feel like my car is unreliable in some pretty key areas um and is losing things like air conditioning like i'm pretty sure we solved that problem a long time ago um but no uh air conditioning also broken as well as the seat being too smart to move i am really tired of beta testing cars
Whatever my next car is, I think it's first of all, I think it might be sooner than I expect. But second of all, I think I just want to get something from a regular car company again, like an established car company that like I'm just I'm tired of the flux. And I think even though I love the features of this car in a lot of other ways.
This rapidly erases those gains in my head, like having to deal with service, especially dealing with bad service, like what this is turning out to be. To make a good car ownership experience, yeah, the car needs to be good. It also needs to have almost no problems during ownership, especially when they're new. This car is a year old.
It should not be having any of these problems, let alone all of these problems. after one year a car mostly shouldn't have problems in its first few years besides the basics of like you know maintain the very basics of the car like the brakes and the windshield wipers and stuff like that and the tires you know that that should be all you have to do for a car in the first couple years uh
and so you shouldn't have these problems at all but if you do have problems you need the service and servicing infrastructure to be there and to be near you like this is already you know having to drive to brooklyn like it's driving to the service center will take me an hour and a half on a good day like and and i'm and i'm in like the worst part of brooklyn where there's nothing around it's all warehouses and it's terrible and like god knows how many times i'm going to have to do that too um so it's already like a rough service situation um
And, you know, to have the service then be backed all the way out 10 weeks when you ask for it, like, that's... I'm going back to a regular car company. Like, I can't... But what would you buy?
Like, no argument. And I am disappointed by this just peripherally because you were so in love with that car when you first got it. Yes. And as much as I will always and forever make fun of the god-awful color choice you made, it was, is a great car. But I don't think you have a lot of really good options, especially for a battery electric vehicle.
Now, if you wanted to go back to like a Range Rover or Land Cruiser or whatever the hell it was you had before, then maybe. But if you're trying to go battery electric, what could you possibly get?
I was going to say, when the Land Rover is the more reliable option, you know you're in trouble.
Yeah, for real.
I think I'd be looking probably at like probably BMW again or maybe even Polestar. But that's also a little bit too new. I think I would have the same problems with Polestar.
No, but what of these cars? Like I don't think there's anything battery electric that either of these companies sell that would work for the beach, right?
I'm going to shortly stop needing that because I'm going to shortly stop qualifying for my permit and lose the permit.
Oh, that's a bummer.
It is.
You can go back to getting regular cars then. You don't have to get these stupid SUVs anymore.
That's right. Right. So that's why I might be in the market maybe in six months or something. I might be in the market for something that is smaller or at least... Like, you know, one of the options I'm looking at the BMW iX, which I think is actually a very attractive option. It's not an attractive vehicle, but it is a very attractive option.
Looking at that, looking at, you know, there's, you know, Hyundai stuff. There's Volvo stuff. There's a bunch of things. Many of them have the first year problem or like the first couple of years problem. And again, I just – I think I'd be looking at maybe something a little more established. The really sad thing is I really would not, I don't think, buy a Tesla right now.
Like for lots of political reasons, that just feels very bad to me. But I see why people do because when you look at the numbers of just like how much range does it offer and then what are you paying to get that car?
tesla is still way ahead of everybody like their cars get such longer range than almost everyone except lucid they claim they claim longer range but they're they're also one of the most distant from their claims so i wouldn't if you're just looking at this this thing but i had teslas yeah they're they're a little bs i know but they're they're they're cars out there now that are claiming less than tesla they just get the same range right so you can't go by the numbers that are on the package
sure but yeah i i think i'm gonna like well let me see i mean let me see what happens with with the rivian but like i like i feel like i can't depend on it to like i'm gonna take a long trip soon and i feel like can i depend on it to get there i'm i'm gonna get there without air conditioning but you know which is it's a already a problem and i probably can't have any other place service it because it's probably all special and proprietary and like so like i can anybody else replace the air conditioning whatever i probably not
um so like i don't know this is why like i'm getting i'm falling off the rivian train really fast right now because it like i'm having all these problems pile up over the last couple of months that are now going to be difficult to get fixed like that's oh not not happy you gotta wait to get all this fixed before you can even like trade in or resell this thing probably too
Well, it depends on how I'm doing.
Just don't let the buyer listen to this podcast. No.
Yeah, right? I wouldn't do a private sale. I would do like, you know, a dealer thing or something. But yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so there might be some turbulence there in the next few months. We'll see. Hopefully, I can last longer than that.
I'm really sorry to hear that. And what you said a moment ago, that you're not sure if it can reliably get you to your destination.
Yeah, because it almost didn't. I was almost stranded on the last trip I took.
Yeah. No argument. The moment any of my cars have gotten to that point where it's not, it's no longer an inconvenience, but a genuine concern that you might not make it. The moment that happens, I'm out. I need a new car in, or even if it's a new used car, that's fine.
But I need something different because I cannot, well, maybe cannot is a bit dramatic, but I refuse to be in a situation that if I need to get somewhere in my car that I am rolling the dice more than you always are as to whether or not I'll actually get there. And at that point, I'm out. So if you're me, you're already looking for something new.
And it doesn't even matter if you can get this into a service center before November. It's already the nails in the coffin. You're done.
Honestly, I mean, and fortunately, like, if that happens, I got the early pre-order pricing on it. So, like, I actually, like, I looked up, like, you know, roughly what the resale value of it would be. And, like, I would not be losing that much at all from what I paid a year ago. So it actually would not be that bad. But honestly, I'm thinking that direction because, like, so I'm in three days.
I'm driving a few hundred miles upstate. I can't really take TIFF's I-3 conveniently. Also, she needs it. Like, she's not coming. I'm driving to go see Goose in concert. So there's no way TIFF's going to that. Anyway, so I'm driving a few hundred miles in three days. And I need my car to work.
And that's like to already know that, OK, I'm not going to have any air conditioning probably on the trip. That's that sucks enough. But like to not even know, like when I have to plug in somewhere like am I is it going to charge? Maybe. Is something else going to go wrong with it? Maybe. Like, I don't know. I'm I'm feeling very bad about this right now.
Yeah, you know, honestly, if it were me, there is no question I would be going and renting a car.
I thought about that. I might do that.
I know it turns your stomach to think about, well, probably renting a car, but I know it turns your stomach to consider a gasoline automobile. But it is okay to slum it with us regular humans for the purpose of one weekend. That's 100% what I would do.
I think one of the latest Honda hybrids, I think you might enjoy those because Honda finally switched to the system where basically the gasoline engine is charging the battery and the battery is running the electric motor that turns the wheels most of the time. And that will be a more familiar experience to you.
Oh, it feels like a not very fast EV most of the time with some additional noise that I don't understand. You might like it. Why would I want that? Because it'll be reliable and it'll get you there. And it'll get better mileage than a plain old gas car. You have 50 miles per gallon in a Honda that you can get fixed anywhere that will get you to your destination no matter what.
I don't think you need to buy anything, but I do think you need to rent something for this trip to go see Goose.
Honestly, I'm thinking about renting something. But to rent a car, I'm going to be gone for three, four days. That's like $600 or something. It's not a small amount of money.
No, it's not that bad at all. In New York, it might be. Well, okay, that's fair. We rented a minivan for a week. And I think it was like $300 or $400. And that was a week. And it was unlimited miles, et cetera, et cetera. Now, granted, we are in Podunk, Richmond, Virginia. We are not in effectively New York City.
But I think it'd be more affordable than you expect if you're willing to slum it with a regular human car rather than some like Tesla or some other weirdo BEV or something like that.
Yeah, I don't know.
Obviously, you do you. You're a grown-ass man, but that's what I would do.
I think, like, you know, I certainly feel like a fool. I felt like a fool, like, you know, driving around a dented truck for, you know, a few months or whatever, or weeks, whatever that was. I would feel extra foolish renting a car because I can't trust mine to drive a few hundred miles reliably.
No, I wouldn't feel foolish about that, personally. I get what you're saying, and I think... Foolish is not the word I would use. I would feel dejected that it's gotten to this point, but I wouldn't feel foolish at all. But you're doing what you can to make what should be an enjoyable weekend enjoyable. And I love you like a brother. Well, no, in a better way than that. I love you, but...
i don't think it's a far stretch for you to throw money to fix it to throw money at a problem to fix it so i think this is right in your wheelhouse this is what i would do yeah but what's then like when i have to drive to thanksgiving in you know about 11 weeks like what's future marco's problem and then christmas after that and like it's i need my car to work i need like i i can't ah i'm so i'm like i'm unreasonably angry at this rivian experience right now
No, this is what I'm saying. I think I'm not doing you favors because I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with you. It's time to sell the car. Unless you can get it fixed by some miracle in the next week or two and you don't have a series of further problems, it's time to sell the car. Full stop. And I hate that. I hate that that's the case because I was there with you.
I saw with my eyes how happy that car made you. Even after I broke it for the first of what turned out to be many times. But...
i saw how happy that car made you it does not give me pleasure to say this to you this is not the normal like atp ribbing like i i genuinely think as your friend you need to sell that car because it is it is forever tainted it has its scarlet letter it is forever tainted in your mind and i don't blame you i don't blame you at all you could always get version two of that car where they consolidated the 17 control units down to two or whatever yeah that's true too yeah it's an option
Maybe the colors are so much worse than the fruit.
Oh, here we go. Are they really worse? Now I'm coming back to ATP ribbing. Are they really worse, Marco? Are they really? All right. Well, I'm sorry. Please keep us updated with how this turns out, both in a friendly way and because I think it'll be good for the show way.
Yeah, that's the main reason you should try to take the Rivian because whatever happens, it'll be a good story.