Pre-show: It’s early 🥱 ATP live announcement post Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Donate in ATP’s name! Calculate your Marco Offset Podcastathon: Casey will be live from noon → midnight on Friday, 20 September 🗣️ New ATP Member’s special: ATP Insider: Photo Workflows 🗣️ Follow-up: John finally admits what Casey and Marco knew last week It’s MicroLED not Micro OLED. The offending party has been sacked. AirPods 4 listening time Specifications AirPods 3 listening time Case Updates Beats iPhone 16 Pro Case with MagSafe Midnight Black Bullstrap Minimalist Case Black Edition iPhone 16 vs. iPhone 16 Pro (via Steve Stutz) New charging speeds iPhone 16 Pro demand is… not great? USB sync speeds A Public Service Announcement by Dave Mark Apple support article Preview does support HDR Test pattern FDA issues AirPods hearing aid certification FDA press release Apple Watch bands Titanium watch bands (via Wolf) Milanese Loop New link bracelet (via Josh Harris) Gold link bracelet in 2015 Third-party cases and the iPhone 16 flash Torras Apple Intelligence notification summary memes are surely coming Joe Kimberlin More from Cabel Sasser Zach Kahn provides details on Apple Podcasts charts Summary Following vs. Subscribing Distribution Huawei’s newspaper phone Apple starts activation locking components Thieves attempt to get a victim to remove activation lock (via Like Kanies) Ask ATP: Do our phones listen to us or not? (via Yoav Zoldan) Cox Media’s admission 404 reveals a pitch deck How do we feel about MagSafe these days? (via Peter Wagoner) Qi What are our credit card setups? (via Jonathan Cirillo) American Express Platinum Apple Card website Post-show Neutral: A Rivian update Members-only ATP Overtime: Will Apple pull a Google? Apple cuts jobs in online services division Ping Sponsored by: DeleteMe: DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Pioneers of AI: A new podcast exploring the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives. 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!
it is the morning which is really weird to be talking to you like everything about my setup is different like first of all it's light outside that alone that is very weird got the sun coming in through the windows i got my coffee in front of me yeah typically you're not wanting to caffeinate at 8 p.m when we normally record
There have been times when I have done that, but usually it would be something a little bit lighter, like green tea, like a little bit of caffeine, not as much as coffee. But no, today, this is full-blown coffee, because this is a school morning, and I was up early, and now it's still early. You're getting full coffee, me.
I got, like, my just cup of water instead of my flavored seltzer or weird hop water, because I figure those things, for some reason, just feel wrong at 8 in the morning. So here we have a totally different mode here. This should be interesting. Now... I did have some trouble selecting the emoji for going live message on Mastodon.
So I put a coffee cup for myself, and I wanted to have two other drinks for the two of you. And I could not find a glass of water emoji. I figured the most appropriate thing would probably just be coffee, water, water. But there were no glasses of water. There was a glass of milk. And I thought, well, maybe Casey would drink milk instead.
Because, you know, you have like certain kind of like, you know, childlike favorites in the food and drink areas.
Okay. Okay. Fair. Fair. I'll allow it.
But then I found the like fast food cup with a straw.
And I'm like, oh, that's Casey. That is more on brand. I will absolutely...
you should have waited for the new uh emoji update i didn't i don't think it's coming in ios 18 but i've seen people talking about it you know the one you know the emoji i'm talking about no there is a face with like bags under the eyes because they're tired like the tired face that's when that's what you should have put for me oh that's me all the time
And may I just say, Casey wrote that wonderful time zone post, which I will have to link because the way you represented the time zones of the world with emoji was just masterful.
Well, thank you.
Like I had to actually like because like, you know, some of the emoji I didn't recognize. I actually like and I was on I was riding the boat last night.
like you know riding the ferry home from the beach and i was like trying to squint and see this and i didn't have any reading glasses so i took a screenshot cropped it in so that so the built-in screenshot editor thing would zoom it in for me i know there's accessibility zoom i haven't gotten there yet but oh just give it time and i was like i was looking at each one and i'm like oh my god that's genius oh that's oh i figured that one out okay
Do you want me to explain or would you rather that be an exercise for the listener?
No, I'll link to it and they can see for themselves or make it the chapter art.
Truth be told, I was slightly worried. I really felt like I wasn't offending anyone with this, but you never know. You never know. And people have very strong feelings about local foods or, you know, what their area is known for.
And I thought, if you'll allow me to explain just one, I thought the bowl of rice for San Francisco, which was supposed to be rice-a-roni, you know, the San Francisco treat. Ugh! I thought that might be stretching a little bit, and I thought I would get some grumbling about that. But either it was so oblique that nobody caught it or nobody minded. So I'm happy with that.
See, I thought you were just saying they put rice in burritos in California, which is true. Well, that's also fair. People have very strong feelings about whether rice belongs in that kind of context. And so that's why I thought you were saying. But no, I did not catch the rice-a-roni reference at all.
Pilif in the chat says I probably would have used the avocado for California. Honestly, I probably should have used the avocado. It didn't cross my mind until Pilif said that, but that would have been a better choice.
I was a little... I was trying to go for all food items because I felt like that was the least offensive thing to use and yet still kind of have a little laugh at all these different time zones. And then I got to Mountain Time... And then I had nothing. In terms of food specifically, what is that strip of vertical space in the United States? I think Las Vegas is Mountain Time. Is that right?
No, Las Vegas is Pacific Time, which is weird. I think it should be Mountain Time, but it is Pacific Time. I think in part because it makes it easier to attract people from California because a lot of Vegas visitors can just drive there from California. Right, right.
uh so i was trying to think of some food item and you know colorado's mountain time well they don't have um uh bull testicles oh my god what is that rocky mountain oysters yeah is that right um uh yeah uh uh hoovy and john in the chat is saying a chili pepper for like um what is that like new mexico that would have been a good option actually i didn't think about that but i mean it wasn't perfect i was doing it on the fly but i i was pretty satisfied when it was all said and done
I also particularly liked Australia's, and I'll leave that as an exercise for the listeners.
Oh, and having that be the last one, chef's kiss. I laughed out loud on the ferry to nobody. It was perfect.
I am traveling tomorrow. And where am I going? I am going to Memphis, Tennessee. And why am I doing it? Because September is National Childhood Care, maybe International Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And this coming Friday... If possible, I will put a link in the show notes.
It may not be there when this episode is released, but I will do my best to put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video that will be premiering on Friday. Well, it'll be live on Friday. And so I'm going to Memphis to St. Jude to help raise money to help prevent and stop childhood cancer. I'm going to be participating in the Relay Podcast-a-thon. It'll be myself, Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett.
Kathy Campbell, Jason Snell, and we're all going to be on YouTube Live for 12 hours starting at noon on this coming Friday. This coming Friday would be the 20th from noon until midnight Eastern time. And so you can tune in, you can drop in and out. I'd love it for you to watch all of it, but I mean, that's a long time. So drop in and out as you can. It should be really fun.
I've never been there for it before. I've watched them, but I've never been there. So it should be a very fun time and I'm super duper excited and we're hoping to raise some money. So hey, Here's the thing. For the fifth year in a row, Relay is trying to come together to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Since 2019, we have raised well over $3 million. That is awesome.
This ad copy is just a couple of weeks old, and it said over $2.2 million. Oh, no, baby. We're over $3 million, and comfortably so. And that's super awesome. So here's the thing. It's estimated that more than 400,000 children worldwide develop cancer each year, and nearly half of them are never diagnosed. In the U.S. alone, more than four out of five children can survive cancer.
But in many developing countries, that statistic is reversed, and fewer than one out of five children diagnosed with cancer will live. And I speak for all of us here at ATP in saying, that sucks. We don't like that. So... Here's the thing. The most significant predictor of whether a child will survive cancer is where that child lives. And so starting in 2018, St.
Jude became the first and only World Health Organization collaborating center for childhood cancer. And so the goal of this, of the WHO, the World Health Organization Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer, is to raise the survival rate of six common childhood cancers to 60% by 2030. And man, that time is approaching. Ask Apple, too. So in 2021... St.
Jude and the WHO launched this global platform for access to childhood cancer medicines. It aims to provide free chemotherapy medicines for the next few years to as many as 120,000 children around the world with cancer. And St. Jude is currently piloting that.
And in this past April, they met with representatives from the program's first few countries to figure out the logistical details of how the process would work to get the medicines from ports of entry to hospitals. You can read a whole bunch more about this at St. Jude's website. But here's the thing. How do they do all that? They do that because people like you and me give them money.
It doesn't have to be $10,000 plus, although feel free. It can be $10. And that's also awesome. And as we record, this is the week that we're all, well, not all of us, but many of us are getting new toys. And Marco, you have thoughts about these new toys. Tell me about them.
I sure do. So you've heard me talk about this before. I'll make it quick this time. I've come up with this concept called the Marco Offset, which is basically to try to figure out what amount of money might I donate to St. Jude, maybe as a minimum starting point of what can I consider expendable that I can give to such a great cause.
And this is also iPhone buying season and other gadget buying season. So I came up with this idea of like, hey, just look at like whatever the base price of the gadget family is that you are buying. So, for instance, the base price of an iPhone, you know, whatever the base model of the iPhone family that you're buying costs. You go ahead and you get the higher storage.
Maybe you buy a case with it. Maybe you get the AppleCare with it. You certainly have to pay sales tax on it in most places. So subtract the base price from the total that you're actually paying. And there's all that padding on top of that that you kind of tacked on in your purchase process. That is your suggested minimum donation if you can swing it. And these days, many of us probably can.
That's great. And so if you can swing it, please do. And there's even a website that a fan made, B. Beck made, called themarcooffset.com. If you go there, and even the website's open source, by the way, which is great. Incredible work. Thanks, B. Beck. So themarcooffset.com will actually calculate this for you.
So you select which iPhone model you have ordered, and you put in the total that you've actually ended up paying, and maybe your AppleCare rate that you're paying every month if you're doing that. And it will tell you exactly how much your Marco offset is. And that is your suggested starting minimum donation. So everyone go there. Thank you. Please donate as much as you reasonably can.
Again, as Casey said, even $10 helps. And if you can do more, that's even better. So please do what you can.
So to do that, please go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and you can donate, again, as little or as much as you want. Here's the thing, St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer. With your support, we'll be one step closer to that day, one cure closer, one child closer. This month and every month, let's cure childhood cancer together.
Please do donate, stjude.org slash ATP. We have other fun announcements. We recorded a new member special, and we don't need to talk about it because I don't want to hear the feedback. So moving on.
Oh, you're going to like this, listeners. Oh, gosh. Oh, wow. So John had this wonderful idea. John tends to come up with most of the ideas for the member specials.
This one was suggested by a listener, actually, but that's the whole thing. People are always asking about this topic. And very often we're like, oh, we've talked about it before. Go back, listen to past episodes. And then every last which past episodes like, well, it's kind of smeared over our entire 11 year history. And I thought we should do a member special. And I thought it was a good idea.
Right. So what we did was we recorded ATP Insider photo workflows. And this is where the three of us detail our photo workflows, which I think as it ended up went from most bananas to least bananas, maybe, possibly. I think unquestionably mine is the most bananas by a very comfortable margin.
And so I am expecting that most of my time in Memphis, people will be making merciless fun of me for my bananas.
But we helped you on the show. You got lots of good constructive advice on how you might change your completely ridiculous photo workflows to be slightly less ridiculous. And I hope you took those action items, as they say, and did them.
after the show i have i have taken notes i have taken the action items in in five years when we do the same thing again because it's kind of one of those topics people are always asking about and potentially our photo workflows could change so maybe in five years we do this exact same thing again to see if our photo workflows have changed maybe because we get new cameras maybe because apple's photos app updates maybe because we've changed apps or whatever we'll see if you've actually changed at all or perhaps gotten worse
We'll see. I don't know. It's anyone's guess. But yes, ATP Insider Photo Workflows. And so here's the thing. In order to hear all of these member specials, of which just off the top of my head, there's probably been 15-ish at this point, something like that. If you want to hear all of them, you can go to ATP.fm slash join.
You can join the program for a little bit of money each month or a little bit more for a whole year at a time. And you can check all of these out. And we would love to have you. And you can also get the bootleg. the ad-free version of the show, if that's your thing. So check out atp.fm slash join. All right. John, I believe you wanted to start the program with your apology tour. Is that correct?
What do I have to apologize for? Oh, the pronunciation things. All right. Well, actually, the first time.
Actually, that's not what I was. I don't know where you're going with this. I'm talking about the camera control and how right Marco and I were.
I don't have to apologize for anything there. I said I had heard conflicting reports from people who were at the event. I wasn't at the event. I didn't touch the thing. I just said I heard that I thought based on watching the keynote that it looked like it moved. But then I saw people who touched the thing with their hands say that it didn't move.
Yeah, and Marco and I unequivocally stated that it does indeed move.
Yeah, but you didn't touch it either. You heard people say it moved, and I heard people say both things. So neither of us actually touched the thing, so we're just going by reports. Anyway, since then, we've gotten clarification, and all the people who are saying it did not move, they were fooled. I don't know why they were fooled. Maybe they just didn't pay attention.
Maybe they're, again, just used to the idea that if a button has haptics, that means it doesn't move. But the camera control, in fact, does move. That has been confirmed. Reportedly, it moves about as much as the power and volume buttons. Obviously, when we get our phones, we can check that out ourselves. But just to clarify.
All right. And then what did you get wrong?
Now I have to apologize, yes. Oh, I see. So that was not an apology. That was a clarification because I equivocated in the last thing. I said I heard conflicting reports, and I'm clarifying which one of the conflicting reports was correct.
I see. I think this is a distinction without a difference, but I'll let it slide.
It's a very important difference. But here on the last episode, I mean, this is why I listen back to episodes. I was listening back to the episode, and I heard myself saying, I'm like, What are you saying? And during the episode, I knew something was wrong, but my brain wasn't working right. But as soon as you hear yourself say it back, you're like, that's not right.
I kept saying micro OLED, talking about the screen technology that Apple was considering using for its watch. No, that's not what it's called. It's micro LED. Because there's like mini-LED and micro-LED and it gets confusing or whatever. Anyway, it's not micro-OLED, so I'm sorry for that error. Every time you heard me say micro-OLED, just replace in your mind micro-LED.
We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for micro-LED, which makes the very specific point that the inorganic nature of micro LEDs gives them a longer lifetime and advantage over OLEDs and allows them to display brighter images with minimal risk of screen burden. OLEDs, the O stands for organic light emitting diode, but they're not, they're inorganic in micro LEDs.
It's just a bunch of little tiny LEDs, very, very tiny ones placed onto the screen. And that's technology Apple couldn't figure out. That's technology everybody is pursuing. It is massively expensive because we don't have an economical way to put
you know thousands and millions of tiny little leds carefully placed on a thing like uh oleds and other things are kind of done like a kind of like a printing process like that's not what it's doing but can you imagine like an inkjet printer or whatever it makes them less expensive to produce uh but we don't have a way to do that with micro leds so even for a watch size screen apple bailed on that i said we can't figure that out forget it we'll just go with
uh more oled screens so anyway micro led is what it's called and it's not an organic led it's not pronounced microld oh and by the way the the element that is mixed into uh grade five titanium is vanadium not mandium that was just mispronunciation on my part so double apology there wow i love that you have what is this the phonetic spelling or what what do you call these letters with like the upside down the ipa yeah i just copied out of the dictionary thing you know yeah yeah can you actually make heads or tails of these because i cannot yeah
i know the schwa is like uh i know the e with line over it is a long e sure long a so you can say the nay d um i mean i'm impressed i think i know all the i don't know all the symbols i i that's why i go to like miriam webster site has a speaker symbol next to it and you just click the speaker and it it audio pronounces it pronounces it for you so that's very useful
AirPods 4 listening time. Also, breaking news, we're being told in the chat that the embargo has dropped on AirPods 4, perhaps AirPods Pro. No, I think it's AirPods 4. We haven't obviously had the chance to read any of them. But with regard to listening time.
Is it just AirPods 4 or is it also these AirPods?
Fair question. Reference acknowledged. I think it might be both. But in any case, we have some listening time updates. This is from the AirPods 4 specs page, which we will link in the show notes. You get up to five hours of listening time on a single charge or four hours of listening time on a single charge with ANC enabled on these AirPods.
This is in comparison to AirPods 3, which gets six hours of listening time with a single charge and five hours with personalized spatial audio enabled. So it's a decrease of one hour. It's not a direct apples to apples comparison, but effectively a decrease of one hour in each department.
It's kind of disappointing. I mean, they did make the stems shorter, but I think the batteries are not in the stems anymore on these. The AirPods 3 and the AirPods 4 both have like a button cell battery, I think, in the body of it, but the body also looks smaller. So just forget about all the fancy features.
Just the listening time, if you don't have any of the fancy features enabled, goes from six hours down to five. Kind of disappointing, but, you know, we'll see. I mean, improved sound quality and noise cancellation should probably be a net win.
You have some case updates for us.
Yeah, we talked about cases, obviously, in overtime on the last episode. But now I realized part of the problem with that is everyone is sending me messages telling me that I should try the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case because it has an open bottom. Guess what? I ordered the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case. I will be getting that to try it out.
And then the bull strap case that we mentioned that in overtime that does have an open bottom. Ryan London also has one. I preordered the since the last we recorded last episode, I preordered the bull strap case because it's shipping time seemed to be better than Ryan London. Ryan London was like promising it in like November or something. I was like, and bull strap was promising in September.
So I paid way too much money to try out the bull strap.
case that has a uh crater style cutout for the camera control as opposed to the beats case which has the apple quartz pass-through thingy so i will be able to try both of those things when they arrive yeah and for reference um for whatever it's worth i had been using the bull strap leather case for my iphone 15 pro for most of the um you know winter and then when summer came by i switched over to peak design because it's just better for moisture and
um and i just switched back to my bull strap case oh man they feel so good like i i i know leather is not great for the environment wow it feels good it like it the bull strap leather like it's it's so good so i'm looking forward to it so the case that's on my iphone 14 pro right now yeah it's it's very good And I think it has aged pretty well.
Like, I got a couple, like, scratches on the leather just from, you know, my own fault and stuff. But, you know, there's... Generally, like, I have the kind of dark gray one for that year. And it just ages very nicely. Like, there's, like, you know, slight color variations here and there just from wear. And, like, you know, the... the tackiness of it now that it's broken in is really nice.
The buttons feel nice. The, the, uh, raised lip around the camera bump, you know, is more of a gentle raise as John was saying last week. Um, so yeah, I, the bull strap slash Ryan London cases are extremely good.
Yeah. It's one of the, one of the nice things about, uh, whether it's going to be difficult to reproduce, like I said, um, a few times in the past, I used the Ryan London one for the first year of my phone and then the bull strap for the second. And the reason I swapped is because I do drop my phone occasionally. And the Ryan London one had taken lots of abuse on like the corners.
But one of the the nature of like leather is that when you get like a nick or a scuff or whatever, It's not that it's self-healing.
It's just that unlike, say, an Apple silicone case, where when a piece flakes off, that piece is never coming back, leather kind of scuffs, but then if you just kind of rub it back down in the opposite direction that it got scuffed, it kind of lays back down on itself. It wears better. When it wears, it's not immediately like, oh, this is broken.
I feel like the silicone cases or a plastic case, if you get a chip off of the corner or a piece falls off or whatever, that is forever going to look and feel damaged, and there's no sort of smoothing that over, whereas...
uh leather uh tends to smooth over a little bit it still felt scuffed and i still wanted to trade it up for the the bulls drop one which is unscuffed but uh that's something that's nice so yeah i keep hoping apple will attempt to make essentially an imitation leather that has the good qualities leather that i like but that is not actually leather but so far they haven't made a run at that they did fine woven which was not tempting to be imitation leather at all and then like this year i'm trying the beats one which is just plain plastic
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All right. Steve Stutz writes in with regard to the 16 versus 16 Pro. Steve writes, could you go in a little more detail about why none of you would get the non-Pro iPhone 16, even though all of you seem very impressed with it? What is it lacking that makes it a no-go? For me, this is one very simple answer. 5X. I want that deep, deep zoom.
I will do what it takes, as you see from this year, or in the year of iPhones that's now ending. I got the big phone because I really wanted that 5X. And that was all it was for me. That being said, those colors are so... I know we talked about this. The colors are so good on the non-pros that it really made me think. And as we talked about last week, they really are so good.
But I desperately want that 5X. Even though I know it's not the best fidelity in the world... having the ability to have some pretty strong and deep reach with my phone optical reach, that is worth the price of admission for me in every sense of the word. Marco, what was your excuse on this one?
For me, like I looked at it before and I did recently, you know, fairly recently have a non-pro phone when I used the iPhone 12 mini for that year. What I missed mostly was the like 2x lens. And it's not necessarily because they're any good because they're usually not. And, you know, now we're up to, yes, the 5x lens.
As mentioned, the optical quality of them is usually pretty rough compared to the 1X lenses. But they do provide a decent amount of utility. And sometimes I do use them for actual photos that I want to look at as well, where digital zoom on the 1X sensor is just not going to cut it.
That being said, the main benefits that would tempt me today are, as Casey said, the colors and the lightness of the phones in terms of weight.
The color is less of a concern now because as I mentioned, as they've shrunk the margins further and further, like the bezels have gotten so thin that now I actually enjoy using a case just so I can not cause accidental input around the edge as I grip the phone in different ways.
And I also will, as mentioned, frequently kind of lean the phone on things or stand it up on things to play audio when I'm doing stuff around the house. And I find without a case, it's just too slippery. It has too much risk of falling off of the surface that I put it on.
so that to me like i think i'm in the case world now you know for the long haul and so that kind of neutralizes the color advantage of this of the non-pro but the main reason why i wouldn't get it now is because i am so hooked on the pro screens once you get used to pro motion and always on A phone without those things seems noticeably broken.
And when you look at the actual pricing of the non-Pro versus the Pro, the price difference is not that big. Like, in absolute terms, yeah, maybe it's a couple hundred bucks, but relative to the price of the whole phone... It's actually not, you're not paying twice as much for the Pro.
Like you're paying like, you know, what, 15% more or something like it's, you're not actually paying that much more for it. And I find that the extra features that it provides are definitely worth that extra price to me. Now to lots of people, they're not. That's why they sell those.
That's why they sell the non-Pro phones because a lot of people don't care or really want that extra 200 bucks or whatever it is. Like they want to use that money in other ways. And so I get that there's lots of reason why people choose those, but it's mostly because they don't care about the pro features. And unfortunately, I do care about some of those pro features.
And as long as pro continues to mean the best screen features. I'm probably going to stick with that, even setting aside the camera stuff, which, again, I don't need the big cameras, but I do appreciate having them when I do. But for me, more than anything, it's about the screen and about the fact that it's really not that much of a price increase.
John?
Yeah, for me, like I said last episode, it's the 5x camera or the 3x camera or the 2x camera, like that third camera option. And also the top quality 1x camera, which is what I'm mostly taking pictures with. In general, the Profones tend to have better cameras. This year, it's not that big of a difference, but it does have the 2x faster readout.
And I do take RAWs and I do notice the lag sometimes.
uh and then the second thing for me is probably just like the just having the top end hardware and everything especially when we're coming into a year like apple intelligence where every little bit of cpu gpu neural engine whatever has got to help because i feel like we're pushing the limits of the thing so yeah i mean i have a mac pro and i'm going to go for the pro phones but yeah the main the main factors for me are cameras and secondarily the uh
the cpu stuff the the 120 hertz i hadn't really thought about that but i prefer that as well that's another thing pushing me in that direction when you pile up all these things it's definitely uh a no-brainer for me even though i also like the colors better on the 16 and i like the fact that it is both lighter and also slightly smaller i feel like the size of the 16 is more to my liking but i gotta go pro
Apple's new phones are going to charge faster, which is exciting. So I believe this is a report from Verge, but the entire iPhone 16 lineup can now charge at up to 45 watts, which is up from 29 watts. The 45 watt max of the iPhone 16 easily bests the Google Pixel 9's 27 watts or 37 watts for the Pixel 9 Pro XL. and is on par with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
But these all fall significantly short of the 240 watt, my word, plus fast charging capabilities of some Chinese phones. But still, that's pretty cool. I don't fast charge my phone often, but hoo boy, when you need to top up in a hurry with quickness, it is so genuinely convenient to have that as an option. And I'm really glad to hear that
Not only is it continuing to be an option, which I expected, but now you can do it even faster. Now, I think at this point, everyone is reaching for their email clients to say, oh, but that destroys your battery longevity. And that's why I don't do it very often. But I do love that this is a thing that we can do from time to time. And I forget if we talked about this last week. I think we did.
But MagSafe 2 or MagSafe 2 Plus, whatever they're calling the newest one. Yeah, we did talk about it. That also charges a bit faster. I don't recall the figure off top my head.
It's like 25 watts now or something instead of 15. But we didn't mention the wired charging last time. This is exactly why I put this item in here. Fast charging, being able to charge faster over wire is great. But I do worry. I mean, Apple doesn't do this. They don't even ship a brick with their phone anymore. I do worry about people who are like, this is great. I love my phone charges fast.
And then on their bedside table or wherever they charge their phone overnight, they put a fast charger. you're just beating up your battery for no reason. Like if you're about to go to sleep and you're going to plug in your phone, plug it into the slowest charger you have, right? Charging your battery very quickly hurts the battery, right? Sometimes you need it.
Sometimes you're like, I'm going to be home for two seconds or I'm in an airport or whatever. Use the fast charger. That's what it's for. But for your every day, I plug it in here before I go to sleep or whatever. use a slower charger. Because first of all, it's not even going to charge all the way.
If you have the optimization on, it's going to go to like 80 and then wait until an hour before I think you wake up and go off. But during that time when it goes from like, you know, 10% to 80, you don't want to go as fast as possible. So yes, the iPhone 16 can charge faster.
This does not mean you should change all of your chargers in your house to charge at the maximum possible wattage of your phone. Don't do that.
Yeah. And that being said, though, I love this ability that they're adding. And I think this is one of the many things that if you look at the actual differences to the iPhone 16 lineup versus the 15 lineup, the general reaction to the event was, eh, it's kind of underwhelming. They didn't change that much. But I think the actual story here is...
is not that the phones are not substantially improved. It's that Apple didn't do a good job of telling us how they're substantially improved. But if you actually look at these specs, there actually are lots of improvements, like lots of little things here and there. Like, you know, faster charging over the wire. Also, faster charging through MagSafe.
Also, you know, official Qi 2 support that will make things broader and easier in the future. Also, there's a lot of stuff like the screen can now go down to one nit of brightness. So the screen can get way dimmer than it could before.
Lots of people want that, like if you're lying in bed next to your sleeping partner and you want to keep your screen as dim as possible while you're still reading stuff. There's a lot of improvements like that that are kind of all around the iPhone 16 line. The 16 Pro has all those cool new microphones and sound quality will probably be significantly enhanced in lots of things because of that.
There's all sorts of improvements like this that are not super flashy in a presentation. And also, Apple didn't even attempt to show off many of them. But those actually will make the phones nicer to use in just everyday use. So again, I think the narrative around these phones was not great, in part because people tend to not value that kind of thing in that context. Like,
If they did a presentation that was all about just small everyday improvements to using these phones, nobody would care about that either. So I understand why they left some of them out. But everyone, including Apple, is focusing so strongly on Apple intelligence, which, again, I think is going to have a slow and maybe bumpy rollout, but certainly a slow rollout. And. That's the story PR-wise.
That's the story with Wall Street. That's the story with the tech press. But most people are not going to be using those features every day, or they'll be using very simplified features, as we're going to talk about stuff like notification summaries and email summaries. They'll be using that kind of stuff. But most of the really flashy intelligence features are not going to be everyday things.
Whereas stuff like your phone charges more easily, that affects everybody. That can help everyone at some point. So I think this actually is a pretty good overall release as it looks so far. And we'll see how it turns out when we actually have the phones. But I think it'll be overall a better release than people are giving it credit for so far.
Also, like even, you know, I think another big everyday thing will be the new thermal capacity. I really think that's going to be a big difference because like as I've been using my 15 Pro all weekend, like it gets so hot doing basic things.
And like, and I think again, like thermal management is one of those things that you don't really think about most of the time because most iPhones, their thermal management is fine. And when you have the iPhone 15 Pro where thermal management for the first time, I think got worse than its predecessor or at least seemed to.
um you start noticing oh this is a thing that matters and so then when they fix it in the next generation like okay that's that's another you know another savings to bank um and on thermals by the way um so as as people's phones start arriving uh this friday for pre-orders um a little hot tip because this will be our last episode before that happens uh two hot tips for your phone migration um
Number one, you can now connect to USB-C or USB-C to lightning phones with a cable for migration. And apparently that is faster migration in a lot of cases. So use a USB-C to C or C to lightning, depending on what you're migrating from cable for your migrations. That will probably be faster.
And second of all, I think actually on the wire thing, I think you have to have iOS 18 on both phones. Is that true? Oh, maybe. I don't know. I mean, just to be safe, I would say maybe before attempting the migration, upgrade your old phone to iOS 18 to make sure that's not a limiting factor. I can not confirm this, but it's a good idea.
Yeah. And then secondly, speaking of hot tips, phone migration is often throttled by thermals. And so if you can figure out ways to effectively cool both phones, so definitely take them out of their cases. That is, like, number one thing if you want your phone to run cooler is take it out of its case.
But also, if you have things like my crazy, you know, fan coolers that use thermoelectric elements in a little MagSafe fan, that's a good time to use one of those. Lower tech, if you have, like, ice packs, you know, you can, like, rest your phone, you know, obviously manage the moisture situation. But, you know, if you have, like,
Especially if you have those big gel ice packs, if you just rest your phone on one of those, especially if you have enough capacity to rest both phones on one of those, while somehow, I guess, what's powering?
If they're connected to each other, you might have to manage the battery situation. Yeah, that's part of the problem of connecting them with a wire is you better have sufficient battery charge to do the migration. You probably should. If they're both fully charged, you should be fine. But be aware that unless you have some weird Y connector type thing, you're not going to be powering them.
i guess you could magsafe power them during the thing oh right i get yeah but then you then you have heat but then you're blocking the ice pack with the magsafe puck and whatever right and magsafe makes more heat so yeah maybe your best bet might be to plug both of them into power and just to make them do wireless but you know that'll depend on how much data you have to transfer but anyway manage the thermals and the migration will go a lot faster that is literally a hot tip all right and then do we want to talk a little bit more about uh demand of these new phones
Yes, because we just come off the question of like, why are we getting the 16 Pro and not the 16? And it's interesting to see, supposedly, how the rest of the world is reacting, at least in week one, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.
Right. So this is a report from 9to5Mac. The slug is lower iPhone 16 Pro demand. And so according to Quo, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is down 16% compared to last year. The Pro is down 27%. The Plus is up 50%. And the 16, just plain vanilla 16, is up 10% as well. I'm telling you, those colors...
those colors well but look at the so here this is interesting like basically that the pro phones are down i think makes sense because it's a testament to how good the non-pro phones are this year like even regular people who don't care about the specs or whatever can see that the non-pro and the pro have all the same buttons on them like oh have you heard of the new camera control that's on the non-pro action button that's on the non-pro like the things you can see yes everyone can see that there's one fewer camera right but like the non-pro phones the
look good this year and second is remember they were talking about like the plus phone like oh no one buys the plus phone it's not cheap enough compared to the pro max people just buy the pro max the plus phone being up 48 again according to these estimates based on supply chain yada yada yada is pretty amazing because it shows that people who want a big phone are looking at the pro max and going plus pro max like they're not what does the pro max have however it has all those pro features with the pro res video everything no one cares about it's got the extra camera
And what people are saying is actually, I'm going to take the plus this year, right? If these things are to be believed, but these are really weird numbers for like week one, you know what I mean? Like week one, you would expect it's all the early adopters or whatever. And I'm kind of surprised to see the plus phone. So again, these are not Apple's numbers.
These are estimates based on supply chains, yada, yada, who knows how accurate they are, but it's
interesting to see the breakdown this year and unfortunately this is when we see this we're like oh it's great it shows how good the 16 the plain 16s are this year when apple sees this they're like we should make sure the plain 16s are a little bit the plain phones are a little bit worse than the pro phones because apple likes to see that differentiation they like to push people up market to get the more expensive phones but in the years when the pro and non-pro phones are closer to each other i bet apple's margins go down because fewer people buy the pro phones that's a good point
We talked just a moment ago about connecting via cable. And I've been really unreasonably excited to try this for migration this year because migration is always such like a bummer. And I am of the opinion that doing a phone-to-phone migration is what I typically do. I'll typically start by doing an encrypted backup to my computer just as a backup.
The key here is to do an encrypted password-protected one because then that saves all your Wi-Fi passwords and things of that nature. And I'll try to do that the night before I get the new phone. But then for actually transferring, I typically do a phone-to-phone transfer. And it usually works really well, but takes something like two to three hours. It takes forever.
And I was debating between trying... a couple of, like, USB-C Ethernet dongles and, you know, putting them both on Ethernet on, you know, on the same network, seeing if that was faster. But actually, looking at this, I might be able to just connect phone-to-phone with, you know, a standard USB-3 USB-C cable. So...
On Apple's comparison page, you can see the differences between the different phones.
And I will say that another benefit of the Pro is that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max feature the USB 3 connections that are capable up to 10 gigabits per second, whereas the 16 and 16 Plus are the lowly USB 2.0 from 804 years ago with speeds up to 480 megabits per second, which is 20 times slower than the Pro phones. Wow. So I'm going to give that a shot.
I'm going to do I'm going to probably use the hilariously expensive Apple Thunderbolt USB-C cable, which is completely unnecessary. But just so I know that the cable is not the problem and we'll see how it goes. And I'll probably stick them on ice packs, like Marco said.
And by the way, this 20X thing, this is a stat that Apple actually puts on their website, which is rare. Obviously, they put it on the pro specs to try to show like this is how much better the pro is. But 20X. I know we mentioned this last episode when we were talking about the phones, but I just want to reiterate again.
I always said last time, I was like, oh, you get the faster USB, the slower USB. And you may be hearing that and thinking, I don't care how fast the USB is. Like, whatever. It'll be like just a little bit slower. 20 times slower.
it's a lot it's not that the pro phone is so fast it's that the non-pro phone is so so slow and usually it doesn't matter like usually because if you have a non-pro phone again you're probably not trying to pull off like video files onto your external ssd or do all sorts of big usually it doesn't matter at all right but on this one day when we were all transferring our data from our old phones be aware that if you have a non-pro phone even if you're transferring it to a pro phone
you're going to be it's probably going to be slower than doing it over wi-fi depending on how good your wi-fi is so this is a shame they should probably change it eventually but just be aware 20x slower on the non-pro phones
And then Dave Mark had a really good reminder, and by that I mean a piece of information I was not aware of. We've talked about it on the show, Casey.
Oh, my God.
It was a long time ago, John. It was more than an hour ago.
You were aware, and you became unaware.
Title. So for those of us who are buying new Apple devices, there's a support document we'll put in the show notes and reading from that. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad and don't have enough iCloud storage to back up your current device using iCloud backup, you are eligible to get temporary iCloud storage.
So they will give you enough time, which apparently all of us knew, they will give you like a month or something like that and give you basically, you know, unlimited asterisk dagger, double dagger storage for the purposes of just transferring your device. And then once the transfer is complete, they will reclaim that storage on their end and you will lose it. But that's really cool.
I'm impressed by this.
Yeah, this is I think it's been out for a year or two now. I highly recommend people do this because it's a no brainer. You're getting free storage for the purposes of doing your phone transfer. Take it. Take the free storage for this transfer. I would also encourage you to actually pay for the storage to have this backup permanently. But even if you can't or don't want to. It's free.
It's not like they take your credit card and sign you up and you have to remember to cancel or anything like that. Nothing like that. It's just free, temporary storage for the purpose of transferring your stuff. It'll let you do an iCloud backup. It will keep that backup there for some period of time, and then they will just chuck it away.
There's nothing you need to remember to do or cancel or whatever. So take advantage of it. We will link to the Apple document that describes this in the show notes.
We are brought to you this episode by Pioneers of AI, a new podcast. Host Rana El-Khaloubi is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, author, and investor, exploring all the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives. So listen to Pioneers of AI with new episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. And we will also link to it in the show notes.
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Stu Mashwitz writes with regard to HDR still images. Preview absolutely does support HDR display still images. Try any sample at EXR or HDR file you can find. I've got an EXR test pattern you can download and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Not sure how to make EXR files, but the demo file, one of the demo files shows like a gradient that just goes from like, you know, black to various shades of gray down to white. But the white is like super max HDR white. If you want to blow your eyeballs out on your screen and see just how bright it will go, open that image and then look down at the bottom.
Breaking news as of just a day or two back, Apple has received their FDA Food and Drug Administration authorization to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids. Reading from The Verge, just days after Apple announced a new hearing aid feature for the second generation AirPods Pro, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has authorized the software that powers this functionality.
In a press release, the FDA describes Apple's solution as, quote, the first over-the-counter hearing aid software device. Very good stuff. Very, very good stuff.
It's tough for Apple that relying on the government to hit the deadlines or whatever, because Apple would have loved in the presentation to say it was FDA approved, but they missed it for like two days. So they just have to say, we think approval is coming very soon. And yeah, there you go.
With regard to the watch bands, the new watch bands, particularly the Milanese Loop, I think, or even maybe a couple others, Wolf writes that the watch band really is titanium. It's inspired by the steel version, but the band is all about the titanium. That's what it says in the description at the Apple Store, which reads the titanium Milanese Loop, Milanese, Milanese, whatever.
It features aerospace-grade titanium mesh with a secure parachute-style buckle inspired by stainless steel mesh historically used by divers and designed for ocean activities. Made of lightweight titanium, it's perfect for any occasion.
So this is just an asterisk, though. That is the new Milanese with the ultra style that has that ultra clasp on it. That one is titanium. The other Milanese loop that comes with the Series 10 option and that has the same magnetic clasp that we've had forever, that one is still steel. And the new link bracelets are also still steel. Oh, interesting.
They are color matched to the new titanium watch bodies, but it is the colors of the titanium being applied to steel for the other ones. Only this new Ultra Milanese with the Ultra Latch style, only that one is titanium.
I did not catch that. Thank you for the clarification. And speaking of watch bands, Josh Harris writes, this is the first time that Apple sold a gold-colored link bracelet. The only other one they made was the 24-karat gold version given away to celebrities with the launch of the Series Zero. As a gold fan, I was pleased to see it's finally official. Wonder why it took so long.
I am not a gold fan, but I am happy for Josh.
Did they never sell the 24-hour carrot gold?
No, they didn't. So Josh is right. Back when the Apple Watch launched, the very first one, and they had the gold one, they would give it to certain celebrities to wear at certain events to promote it, the way fashion people do that kind of stuff. So at some point, there were a couple of times when a celebrity wore one to an awards show or something.
and they had a gold link bracelet at that time to pair with the gold watches to use in that context, but it was never for sale to the public. Did they take it back like when people borrowed jewelry for the Oscars?
Did they give it back at the end?
I would assume so, because remember there were a couple of instances of that where the celebrity was wearing the watch, but it was showing the spacey setup screen on the watch screen, and you could see in pictures they didn't even set it up. Because they hadn't set it up, right?
Yeah, it was just showing the setup screen. It's the blinking 12 on the VCR of celebrity watches. Yeah, exactly.
And then coming back to Case Corner, the third-party iPhone 16 cases. You had had opinions, John, about what to do with the flash. Do you want to tell us about this? I mean, I know we talked about it last week, but do you want to...
revisit yeah so the apple case did what i thought uh all the cases should do which is put a little opening for the two cameras on the plain old iphone 16 so slim just a little capsule and then just put a little hole for the flash that's hanging out near it i was afraid what cases would do is ah we have to we have to have a hole for the two cameras and the flash let's just make one big hole that covers them all and i was afraid they would make it like triangular
Apple's cases didn't do that. They're great. But here's a link we'll put in the show notes to at least one case that got lazy and said, you know what, we're going to make a capsule opening for the cameras and just a little separate capsule opening for the, you know, flash. And I just think it's clumsier to do it this way. It looks kind of like a three leaf clover instead of a capsule.
So, you know, results vary. Be careful when you're buying a case and consider one of the advantages of your non-pro phone is that you can have a smaller camera thing sticking out.
there's no no reason to have like the for example look at this one it's got like the ridge that prevents like the cameras from touching the the surface if you put it face down the ridge is also around the flash no need for that the flash is flush you don't need to have that ridge around it it just makes for a bigger thing on the back of your case so i don't like that and some people are doing it surprise surprise
So Apple Intelligence is not officially a thing yet. You know, it's in beta. And we saw a post from Joe Kimberlin who had screenshot a series of toots from a friend of the show, Ben Rice. Ben Rice McCarthy, excuse me. And so the summary was Ben had shared UK-based museum recommendations. And then Joe had put in the...
the the toots that that comprised this which was ben favoriting something that said finally uh somebody else favoriting something that related to museums and that same person favoring favor mentioning that's not for some of us like you have to look at these i'm not doing a great job it doesn't mention museums so here's the thing here's here's no it does it's at museum shuffle
right yeah that's what i'm saying see that's so the summary is attempting to summarize three separate notifications and the three separate notifications include a username that is at museum shuffle that's the person's username do you think they only post about museums is it the only thing that is on that entire thing nothing in the body text of these three notifications mentions museums at all the only thing that is museum related is one of the people's usernames
I missed that. Okay, I got you.
This is an example of some of the limitations of Apple intelligence features when attempting to summarize things. It just gets fed a bunch of text, but apparently it doesn't understand which part of this text are just at mentions of people who are in the conversation, like the fact that that's a username, and which parts are the body text, which is what you're supposed to be summarizing.
And it's just like, it's all text to me. So if someone's username has a museum in it, I'm like, this must be a conversation about museums. I mean, maybe, but also maybe not. This is definitely an area of improvement. And, you know, I do think that we had a couple items about this already, and we're going to have another one in a second.
I do think that when Apple intelligence actually ships to people with 18.1 or whatever.
stuff like this may end up being kind of like a you know a meme topic of like let's all make fun of the dumb things our phones say when attempting to help us by doing something simple as like summarizing a bunch of text you got three text messages it's up to the little computer in there to summarize them to give you a single placeholder item so you don't have to read all three in theory that's a useful feature feature but in practice if you see that summary and
like should you trust it or do you have to expand the things anyway like because you could see this and say maybe someone's giving me uk-based museum recommendations oh it's just museum shuffle was that mentioned in one of the things that's messed up
I think this is going to be just a problem overall in like when for Apple Intelligence to be summarizing notifications. Well, Apple Intelligence only knows the raw text of the notification that is provided by the apps to the system. Like it's an API. You provided a couple of text fields and that's it.
They don't know the context that this is coming from an app where this is a Twitter style username. They don't know that. So I hope maybe over time, maybe the better solution to this would be as Apple adds APIs that help us use Apple intelligence at all, let alone better. Not that I'm bitter that they are launching this entire system with no APIs, but anyway.
Maybe they will be able to give developers separate fields to say, here is the text to show to the user, and then here is a second text property to fill out on this object that is the text to give to Apple Intelligence as what is the...
intelligence representation of this so maybe and that would maybe like strip out usernames and markup and stuff like that and that would be up to the app to do that by the way like is a very very often these services don't do this i last time we talked about this i forgot to use the correct terms of art but it's a in-band metadata versus out-of-band metadata in-band metadata is what most services like mastin on
or twitter especially back in the day used to use where that you know at museum shuffle or whatever that's part of the body text of the thing and if you want to separate it you the developer of ivory or whatever mastodon client has to parse the text find the things that are at mentions extract them so on and so forth as opposed to a system where the uh the metadata was out of band where there was a separate thing even if it's just something as simple as and i think uh
twitter did this in later years ranges of saying here's the string but the range from character 0 to character 15 is the first username and the next username is here and the next username is here again something is always parsing this and determining that but like to essentially uh not have to have every single individual app suddenly become like a parser to find all the urls find all the app mentions so on and so forth and reconstruct it um again i think uh modern twitter slash x does a better job of that i think mastodon also does a reasonable job of that with links and stuff but
But for systems like Marco said that are just like, oh, I'm just going to chuck this text over the wall to the notification system, that's insufficient for Apple Intelligence to figure it out. I feel like Apple Intelligence could be trained to know things like, hey, when you see an at mention or a hashtag, what those things are, because they're culturally...
common enough that it's worthwhile training on that and it wouldn't have to know the context it doesn't have to know that this app is a master on an app i would just see something that looks like an app mention the same way humans do we parse it out or whatever and you could still run a foul of that and make a mistake but it definitely seems like apple intelligence needs more slash better training and there's no way on the phone itself
this is what people think about apple intelligence they think they're going to somehow like i wish i had a way to correct it so it would learn that's not happening like the only thing that's changing the weights in that model is when apple releases a new version of that model which could happen every day if apple wanted it to but probably knowing apple is not going to but there's no feedback mechanism for you to somehow train the model by correcting it and telling it no this wasn't to be out in museums there's no mechanism for that right now so which is disappointing but uh it's it's
the reason we're going to have, we're going to have to live with whatever foibles these things have, which really, I feel like impacts their potential usefulness, which is what cable is talking about cable. I think this is the second or third appearance complaining about Apple intelligence and beta. Well, here he is again.
Yeah, so Cable writes, testing Apple intelligence on my Mac has led to many existential feature questions, with an asterisk, which we'll get to. But it definitely is funny how it has it out for my dad. And so this is a screenshot of conversations with two people, Megan and Stephen. And the summary is, agree with Cable. Stephen responds with nonsense.
So rude. That's the summary. I mean, assuming this is a conversation cable with his parents. One parent's response was characterized as nonsense by the summary system.
Lovely. The aforementioned asterisk, why? How does this help? I'm still opening the emails and the messages regardless of the summaries. In fact, I'm more likely to open them more urgently, interrupting my work quicker because the summaries can sometimes miss key information and I don't want my brain to think I read them when I didn't.
The emails that prioritize this for me are often just emails about canceled calendar events already reflected on my calendar. So what is the goal? To read my email less? How does this help that goal?
Yeah, so this is part of the thing with any kind of assistance, right? If you ever have a human assistant that you hire to help you with things and your human assistant tells you, okay, on the agenda today, you've got meeting X with this person, meeting Y with this person, you have to do this thing or whatever.
That assistant is not valuable if after the assistant tells you that, what you do is then go to your calendar and confirm everything they said just to make sure they didn't make any mistakes, because what if they forgot that you have to pick up your kid from school and they didn't mention that? That's the whole reason you have the assistant, is to make it so you don't have to do that.
But with these type of assistants, where they're not very smart and often make mistakes... If you have to go and double check everything they did, is it saving you any time or would you rather have not just seen it at all? And like Cable said, the worst case scenario is you look at the summary and your brain tells you, okay, I've dealt with that. I've read that. I saw what it had to say.
I can safely disregard that because this email is just telling me something that's not important. But little did you know that there was something very important in that email. And because you didn't read it, but instead you read the summary that was generated for you that was inaccurate, you now think you dealt with it.
And then, you know, I think we'll all learn from this with someone saying, you didn't pick up Little Timmy at school? I emailed you about it. And it's like, yeah, I read that email. You didn't say anything about that, but you didn't read the email. You read the summary and thought you had read the email.
so this i mean it's it's hard like we were talking about like the friend thing right what can this technology do in a way that fulfills the requirements summarizing notifications and email may be beyond the capabilities even though it sounds like such a simple thing maybe beyond the capabilities if it fails in ways that are a problem for you
And then, you know, like they require you to read the actual email because then it's like, what's the point of the summary then? Like you can't triage based on the summary if you can't trust what it says. So I feel cable frustration. Obviously, this is still a beta. We'll all see how we deal with this. I hope you can actually turn this off. Like, don't try to summarize notifications for me.
Like, I see the goal. Like, we all get lots of notifications and it's annoying seeing a giant stack of them. Like, oh, I have to read through them and see if any of them are important or whatever. I have to go through all my email one by one. We all hate that, right? We would love something to help us out. But if the thing helping us out is untrustworthy,
I'd rather just don't try to help and I will just continue to go through my own notifications and email myself.
All right. And then front of the show, Zach Kahn writes with regard to Apple podcast charts. I think this was an ask ATP a few weeks ago or something like that. Um, asking, you know, Hey, does following on overcast or Apple podcast or what have you, does that actually help? And so if you'd like, you can dig into the specifics behind that.
But Zach provided three different links, uh, with regard to how all that works behind the scenes. And I'm happy that Apple provides this.
I tried to read those documents, and the question was like, you know, the question was like Overcast, like, does following an Overcast do anything to Apple Podcasts? And Mark answered, no, it doesn't, or whatever. But then the other question was like, what does following do in Apple Podcasts? And we had all sorts of theories. Yeah, does it help the show?
Because everyone always says, please follow us, it helps the show. Right, and this document does kind of confirm that that's the case within the Realm of Battle podcast, but it doesn't go into the nitty-gritty detail of exactly how they calculate all these lists and what the algorithms are or whatever. Well, of course not.
They don't want to reveal that because the more you reveal about that, people will game it. Right, and so if you're expecting to go into these documents and say, finally, now I'll know exactly what happens when I follow something, you're not going to find out that kind of detail, but it's telling you...
you know, directionally, here are the actions that you can take and those actions feed into these things in a way that we're not going to describe to you because you game it.
Yeah, I think actually this section is a really, really, really great summary of both what it looks at and why. So this is from the link that we've phrased a summary in the show notes. And it says, "'Top shows and top episodes. While the exact algorithm cannot be shared to protect its integrity, the charts measure a mix of the following. Listening.
When listeners are engaging with episodes, it's an indicator of content popularity. Follows. When listeners follow a show to receive new episodes, it's an indicator of their intent to listen.' completion rate. When listeners complete episodes, it's an indicator of content quality. I like that. I mean, it makes sense.
Now, granted, it's not super specific, but I like that not only do they say this is what we're doing, but here's also why we're doing it.
And Spotify gathers similar stats for its podcasts. But of course, for our show, where a significant portion of our listeners do not use Apple Podcasts, All those listeners doing all their activity listening to our podcast don't factor into this at all.
There is no, as far as I'm aware, equivalent of the Nielsen ratings back in the day where it's like a cross-section of all humanity watching television as determined by this hopefully representative sampling. We don't have that, right? We have Apple Podcasts. If you use the Apple Podcasts app, they can track your behavior and... your behavior influences their top charts.
But if you're using literally any other podcast client, Apple has no idea what you're doing. Because Apple doesn't host the feeds. The feeds are hosted on the individual people's websites and everything. And again, if you're an oddball show like ours where the majority of our listeners are not using Apple Podcasts,
We're just losing out on that activity, which is one of the many reasons why we're unlikely to ever appear in any kind of top charts. I mean, obviously, we're a tiny podcast. We're not going to appear there anyway. But it's just part of the system that we have. Podcasts are very open.
But the things like that are necessarily sort of islands, individual isolated islands of statistics, because nobody has an overview of everything, which I think is good. Like, we don't want someone to have an overview of everything. But just FYI, nobody does.
Then finally, for follow-up, Huawei has a newspaper phone. It's a tri-fold. It's so ridiculous. But, I mean, hey, if you like it, you like it. The replacement of this, or the screen replacement of this, or no, not the screen replacement, excuse me, the whole phone is quite expensive.
So reading from The Verge, Huawei has officially announced the world's first dual-hinged triple-screen foldable phone in China. The prices for the Mate XT Ultimate Design start at 19,999 yuan, or about... $2,809 for the 25-gig storage model. That's roughly $300 more than a brand-new 16-inch MacBook Pro.
256-gig storage module. For almost $3,000, they couldn't give you more than 256 gigs of storage. Wow.
All models are equipped with 16 gigs of RAM, and two additional storage variants are available that cost $22,000 or about $3,000 for 512 gigs, and $24,000 or about $3,300 for one terabyte. The Chinese retailer Vimal reported 3.7 million pre-orders before pricing was announced. Whoops, oopsies.
Yeah, so folding phones. They're still trying different ways to fold them. I waited for the one that folds up like an old paper map that you can never get refolded correctly in the car, right? Just a gigantic thing that folds and folds. Like, this is really pushing the limits. I mean, it does unfold to a really big screen, but like...
like it's like a full size iPad practically, or it looks bigger than an iPad mini at least, but that's such a straight end. And it does look like when it is folded, you can still use it as just a regular phone because the top third of the screen is still visible. You know what I mean? Because of the way it folds. But yeah,
folding uh people are trying everything they can possibly think of and i guess there's enough customers out there saying that looks cool i want to have that because it reminds me of a sci-fi show and then once they get it they'll determine is this actually a good phone or is this just like a gimmick that i spend the first month showing everybody i know look at my phone it unfolds like this huh and then just you know it gets old
Or, I mean, it's like the I Am Rich app. Look at my phone. It costs $3,000, huh? Right. Oh, my God. I mean, whatever makes you happy.
I mean, but I'm glad people are trying crazy stuff like this. Yeah, yeah. Like, now that we have this foldable screen tech that has reached the point of maturity that you can actually start having a decent number of products out there on the market that use it, I like seeing weird experimentation with gadgets.
Phones have been these kind of boring rectangles for so long that it's been a mature market. These boring rectangles are here for a reason. People like them overall and never bet against them. But I'm happy to see experimentation now that we haven't seen in a while. We haven't really seen this level of form factor experimentation since the very early days of the smartphone era.
And now we're seeing all sorts of crazy ideas, and most of them are going to be terrible experiments. but some of them are going to actually have some merit and they'll be fun. So I'm happy to see this.
Yep. Agreed on all counts. All right. Apparently Apple is doing activation locks on individual iPhone components. So reading this a bit long, but it's, I think it's worth it reading from nine to five Mac in 2013, Apple's introduction to find my wiped out a huge chunk of the market for stolen iPhones, since they could no longer be simply reset and sold as a working phone.
All the thief could do from that point on was strip an iPhone for parts and Back in April, Apple announced that it would be addressing that issue by extending activation lock to key iPhone components. Requested by customers and law enforcement officials, the feature was designed to limit iPhone theft by blocking a lost or stolen iPhone from being reactivated.
If a device under repair detects that a supported part was obtained from another device without an activation lock or loss mode enabled, calibration capabilities for that part will be restricted. The release candidate builds of iOS 18 enable activation lock for iPhone parts.
The feature, as previously described by Apple, links to your Apple account not only to your iPhone, but also to components such as the battery, cameras, and display, based on their individual serial numbers.
It won't completely solve the problem, of course, as it doesn't cover all components, and there may be some who will accept a lack of calibration and annoying alert messages in return for a cheap repair. But it will make a huge dent in the market for stolen iPhones, because most people won't buy a device with obvious issues, especially when those issues suggest it may contain stolen parts.
The downside, of course, is that the move makes it harder to repair an iPhone using parts harvested from legitimately acquired, broken devices. Apple has already introduced the ability to remove activation locks from Macs when wiping them rather than when setting them up as new.
This is coming to Apple Business Manager 2, so enterprise companies and customers, excuse me, will be able to remove activation lock from entire batches of managed devices when preparing them for sale. All that is needed now is to ensure that this also covers activation lock for parts.
On the one side, this obviously is a real bummer for, you know, third party people that are legitimate and are just trying to get cheaper repairs by, you know, harvesting a phone for parts that maybe the screen is shattered because I was washing my car or something like that. And yet the camera is fine. And I get that that's a real bummer for them.
But I would say that broadly, this strikes me as a pretty good idea.
Yeah, Apple's always fighting this battle. They have been since the iPhone was introduced. So it used to be the gray market for phones and the market for stolen phones. And this is a good way to do it with technology. Like, you know, stopping people from stealing your phone. People think about that and it's like, oh, I'll tie it to my wrist with a cable or it'll give people electric shock.
Like, no, that's not how you solve these problems. That's how a five-year-old solves these problems. You solve it by making it not a profitable thing to do. And Apple has been slowly chipping away at that and saying, if someone does steal your phone, what good is it to them? How much money can they make from that phone?
And if you keep pushing down that amount of money and increasing the hassle, it will reduce iPhone theft simply because it is no longer as profitable as it used to be. Still, there is some profit. Not every part of the activation locked, but... Find My and Activation Lock on Parts go a long way towards making it much more difficult to make money by stealing people's phones.
Now, since this is a technological solution, it's just another technological cat and mouse race. Like, okay, well, what is locked about them? Can that encryption be broken? Do people mind? Like, part of the thing is, like, the parts will work, but they will not be able to be calibrated, and you may think, who cares about calibration?
But many parts in the phone, in particular things like the screen, calibration is a surprisingly big part of what makes them work because they're not perfect pieces of hardware.
And the calibration process sort of makes it so that the system knows, for example, how much voltage and how much current do I have to supply to every single little subpixel to get it to emit the amount of brightness that I expect it to emit. And that varies across the screen. It's not like I just apply the same current and voltage across the whole screen and you get a uniform image. You don't.
The screens have variations. Your screen will look weird and bad if it is not correctly calibrated. And so they're not like even now, they're not locking it out entirely like they do with like the face ID sensors, where I think they just don't work at all, period. But things like the screen, I think they'll work, but they won't let you calibrate them. So they'll look bad.
And so they're really trying to make it so that if you someone steals your phone and harvest parts from it, maybe the most valuable parts are less valuable now because they'll only be someone only buy them knowing they can sell them to somebody who is accepts having alert dialogues come up and complain about, you know, unauthenticated parts or whatever, and also accepts the fact that their screen is going to look worse.
And yeah, the flip side of this is that everybody who does phone repairs legitimately thinks this is terrible. You're locking down these parts. I can't have my business anymore because I can't unlock the parts. Only Apple can do it or whatever. Really, I think it's not that Apple can do it. Only the person who owns the device can do it.
So businesses having a way to mass unlock and wipe their phones before they resell them, that's important. Like this article says, Macs have the ability to do that. If you want to sell your Mac, you want to wipe it so that your Apple ID is totally divorced from it and it removes the activation lock.
So owners can do it, but someone who just stole your phone presumably can't do it because they don't have your password or we'll see past conversations about shoulder surfing your lock code. And there was a tooth that just went by this morning that reminded me of this article in the Gothamist talking about.
messages that have been sent to uh to somebody by the people who stole their phone because the people who stole their phone obviously are not the brightest thieves um but they the phone is locked right and they need it to be unlocked for it to become useful so they're sending messages to sort of social engineer the owner of the phone to say hey can you essentially remove this phone from your apple id like deactivate find my remove it from your apple id and
which would then unlock it and open it up so that they could use it as a phone. And they send us a series of messages trying to coerce slash fool this person into unlocking their phone, culminating into violent threats at the very end, which is not fun. But it just goes to show, like... certain caliber of criminal are already frustrated by the features that Apple has.
They think, hey, I got a stolen phone. This will be great. I can use this as my phone or resell it as another phone. And they realize, oh, no, I can't do anything because it's activation locked. And I don't know how to get around that. So let me try to harass the original owner into unlocking it for me. And this original owner happens to be smart enough to know what they're doing.
But I can imagine this approach working more than 50% of the time. Because people, you know, again, people don't know what activation lock is. They don't know all these details. They just know their phone was stolen.
If they get a message that says some of the things that these messages say, like, oh, you're about to be charged and I have your your financial information and I'm going to sell your phone and all your information is on and everyone's going to get it. People don't know if that's true or not. Right. So they'll just be like, oh, I'll do whatever they say and unlock the phone and then they'll go away.
Right. and by unlocking it, all you're basically doing is letting them use your phone as a fresh phone and sell it for full price or whatever. So it doesn't actually harm you to do it, but screw the criminals. Don't do that.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that this has to be a thing, but here we are, and Apple's doing their best to try to ride the line between blocking out third-party repair shops and whatnot and also just helping us not get our phones stolen, which would be preferred.
They had their rationale for this was in that product longevity document that we talked about where they explain like why they do this. Like it's not to screw over customers, but it's to try to, you know, make it so that parts that are essential to security like face ID and touch ID can't be spoofed or faked with third party ones or whatever.
They didn't even talk about the theft angle, but I feel like that is another big side of this.
I do kind of love like the one of the Apple approaches to discouraging theft is like, all right, you can steal these phones, but we're going to make your screens look bad. That is like the most Apple thing. Like your colors aren't going to be quite right.
No one would ever use a screen that doesn't look uniform, right? People will use their phones with giant spider web of shatters across it for a year and a half, but they won't use it if one side of the screen is slightly brighter than the other.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Jov Zoldan writes, how do you explain to non-tech people, especially family, that your iPhone does not listen to you to show you ads? I can never get them to believe me. I think cross-site tracking is hard to understand and the conspiracy theory is more attractive. Do you know of an easy to understand explainer video maybe?
Well, this got complicated in the time between we added this to the show notes and... when we started talking about it just now, because there's been a couple of news reports. The title's Cox Media Group brags it spies on users with device microphones to sell targeted ads, but it's not clear they actually can. That was from Tech Dirt. We'll put a link in the show notes. And then from 404 Media,
Here's the pitch deck for, quote, active listening, quote, ad targeting, which is also not great. So I don't really know how to answer this question anymore, to be completely honest with you.
Well, we get this question all the time. People are always want to want to know whether their phone is listening to them or they just write to us and insist that their phone is listening to them. And here's why. And they give some story about what happened. Right. First of all, let's just say that we're talking about iPhones only. I have no idea what's going on Android. Respect to this.
But in the realm of the iPhone. It is extremely difficult to use the microphone to passively spy on people when people are not using your app and haven't given them their permission. Those are a lot of caveats.
apps can trick you into giving permission app whatever wants to use the microphone allow maybe some you know someone who has a phone hit allow on that ages ago and forgot about it right and now that phone has that app has microphone access right but people who insist that their phones are listening to them will say things like i know i never gave this uh app uh access to the microphone.
Or I don't even have the Facebook app installed, but I visited their website and I think it's listening to me now, right? People have all sorts of conspiracy theories about it. And they're backed up by these anecdotes that we know are explained by...
Not simple, but non-obvious ways they track you across the web, whether it be local storage, cookies, the fact that you're coming from the same IP address, you're sitting in a group of people. I never even looked up, you know, swing sets. But immediately I got an ad for swing sets on Instagram.
Well, it's because the person sitting next to you looked up swing sets and they're coming through the same Wi-Fi thing as you and yada yada, right? There's a million ways that they can track you that are not listening to you, but... Humans have a much easier time thinking, well, if I was trying to spy on somebody, what I would do is I would listen to them, like with my ears, audio, right?
And they think that is the most straightforward way to know what you're doing, and it's not. The ad industry has so many other ways to track you that are so much better developed that do not require listening. That said, as every single time we've talked about this issue, one of the things we have said is, oh, believe me, they would love to be listening to you.
It's not that they wouldn't do it if they could. They want to do it. They're trying to do it all the time. They're trying to do it. It's just that Apple is pretty good at stopping them. So this Cox Media Group bragging that say, hey, we have this technology that lets you sell targeted ads based on what people say because we listen on the microphone. They've been pitching that for years.
And I'm sure that they have that technology, and I'm sure it will totally work if someone gives it microphone access. But those are a lot of ifs in that stack there, right? That's why these stories, you should read the TechDirt one, because they're usually pretty skeptical and sort of paranoid about like being spied on or whatever.
But even TechDirt's been like, okay, well, they can pitch you that they can provide this technology, but they should also have to explain how are you going to get past the fact that you can't get access to the microphone on the iPhone unless the user gets permission or whatever, right?
right show me the show me the do they have some technical hack to get around that or they're just using social engineering or whatever right um in the end though this is kind of one of those things where people feel bad if they think something is listening to the audio of what they say but somehow they don't feel bad if something is tracking them using cookies and ip addresses and and other sort of weird hacks right that one doesn't feel as bad because it's not a human experience right they would feel bad if a human was listening in on them
When a computer is listening in, it's more like a human to them. They don't care about tracking of their data otherwise, right? So it's difficult to...
explain to that person like look at the end result is the same they know you're thinking about swing sets whether they pulled that out of the air or just got it because someone who is on the same wi-fi router as you looked up swing sets even though you didn't do it it doesn't really make a difference in the end right but people want to feel it's kind of like the discussion of free will i had on rectus which i don't want to bring up on this show but feel free to find that episode if you can figure out how to use google and find it in the show notes right
there's what's actually happening and then it's how you feel about it and how you feel about it is so much more important in this scenario people feel terrible about being listened in on and yes as casey said these like this story this cox media thing coming around again and again i believe this exact same company several years ago was pitching the same exact thing well anyway it's another news cycle here they are pitching it again getting themselves into the news all this is going to do is reinforce
in the minds of conspiracy theorists that their iphones are constantly listening to them because they're like well it's proof they they they said they did it they admitted it how can you not see that and the nuances are lost on them and so in the end as with many conspiracy theories you can't convince anyone they're not true you can't prove a negative uh and one thing that is true is that every advertiser wants to do this and are constantly trying to do it so it's not outlandish that one of them could eventually break through but the
to show that one of them has broken through you would need a little bit more proof than we're provided here so i would say uh it's very difficult to be avoid tracking in any form whatsoever if you're really worried about something listening to you you should worry more about your voice control cylinders which literally are constantly listening so they can hear you say the wake word to them they can't hear the wake word if they're not constantly listening supposedly they're throwing away
all the audio that doesn't contain the wake word, but we know from past stories that sometimes some audio, when they're awoken accidentally, is stored on servers for a long period of times and listened to by humans for supposed QA purposes or whatever. If you don't like these things, don't buy something that is constantly listening to you and put it in your house. Same thing with cameras.
You hope that they're taking that video and putting it up on their servers and no human has access to it and it's end-to-end encrypted. Is it? Maybe. Maybe not. that's why you really have to trust your vendor.
I think Apple is one of the most trustworthy here because they are constantly fighting this battle because Apple does not make its money through targeted ads to the same degree that Google does. And Amazon has lots of things to advertise to sell to you. But yeah, it's a difficult situation. And I would say to this person, you're probably not going to convince anybody.
Mostly just let them believe what they want to believe. Because in the end, how is it going to even change their behavior? They are not going to have a phone. Are they not going to have an Apple phone because they think Android is better than this? Just let them do what they want.
All right. Peter Wagner writes, it's been four years since MagSafe came out for the iPhone. I'd love to hear your take on the current state of MagSafe and your thoughts on it as part of the iPhone ecosystem. I really love... Qi charging. And I personally use Qi charging every night to charge my phone. MagSafe specifically, I also like, but I think that isn't as important to me as the Qi charging.
Although now that I say that, I look at my Pro Max with its pop socket on the back, and I wonder if I'm doing MagSafe a dirty by saying it's not that important to me. Because actually... Having something that I can, no, you know, I take this all back. Don't worry, we'll fix it in post.
Actually, now that I think about this, between the pop socket that I probably will give up once I get my human-sized phone, but also the MagSafe battery pack that Apple made years ago that I got kind of on a lark because you two jerks wouldn't buy one, and I figured one of the three of us should, that I actually freaking love. I don't use it that often, but oh my word, is it nice when I do need it.
Um, that's really nice. And the Qi charging. So yeah, actually I take it all back. I'm, I'm all in on MagSafe. I think it's quite good.
Um,
And, you know, it's a nice kind of minimal nightstand charging setup that works very well. And MagSafe, you know, Qi charging in general is great for lots of reasons. It's not a perfect thing. Like wireless charging, as mentioned in the past, wireless charging is a little bit inefficient. And so you do end up losing some of that power and making more heat as a result. That's why it's inefficient.
It's turning some of that into heat as waste. And so that has a number of negative effects, most significantly that you are kind of warming up the battery more than necessary as you're charging it. And so that's and that's not amazing for battery health. And of course, you are wasting energy. But that being said, Qi charging is very convenient and it has a lot of other benefits, too.
Like, for instance. You can have Qi charging pads and lots of different things that you wouldn't have a plug for. As we mentioned earlier in this show, you can power something via Qi while you are using its port for something else. You are also not wearing out the port by plugging it in every night if you're sitting on a charging pad instead. So it avoids a lot of those kinds of problems.
But the problem with Qi, the biggest inconvenience as a user with Qi charging is... is getting it centered and occasionally missing. And so I think MagSafe was Apple basically saying, hey, you guys, this was a good idea, this wireless charging thing, but let us do it right for you.
And sure enough, Apple made a couple of modifications to it when they made MagSafe, most notably the magnets that automatically align it correctly and You don't have to worry. Is it centered? Is it a little bit off? Did I miss last night? My phone's not charged. No. MagSafe, it centers it every single time. It has never failed.
It is a 100% attachment accuracy rate as far as I've had, which was way higher than I ever had with Qi. And as a result, look, you see the Qi 2 standard now. Qi 2 was basically the industry saying, oh, you were right. Yeah.
are bad and then i'm saying oh let's let's actually take what apple did and make it the new standard basically which is not the first time in the industry this has happened by the way but anyway uh so the that magnetic alignment is such a huge improvement and that allowed them to do things like have higher wattages because one of the one of the limitations of original qi also is like
Because it's kind of imprecise, inefficient, kind of broad area coverage that you have to do, it was reasonably unsafe to put a lot of wattage through it in terms of heat management and everything else. So with MagSafe, one of the reasons MagSafe chargers were able to charge at higher wattages than Qi chargers is that...
apple was able to to know like okay well if it is connected in this like if it recognizes it in this certain way we know it is properly centered we know it's very close and within these certain tolerances and therefore we can safely apply more current in there and we know that less of it will be converted to waste heat and you know etc and so it'll be safer so again another big advantage too like that's that that helped a lot that they can raise the water zones and make it more useful
So I think it's one of those things where, again, looking at the iPhone 16's advances, if you told somebody like, hey, how much do you like MagSafe? They'd be like, I guess it's fine. But if you actually took it away and we went back to a world without it, we would realize, oh, we actually really missed that. Like that's actually a very useful thing.
So many things have gotten better as a result of it. You have things like car mounts that can just stick it on there. You don't have to slide it into a bracket with a dock or whatever, and it's not quite aligned right, or it bends out with your case thickness or whatever. Get rid of all that. You have the bedside situation. Again, a lot of things become easier there.
You have the accessory ecosystem, like Casey's PopSocket, like the wallet. You have all these things that are now able to either mount to the phone or make the phone easier to use in some way or more convenient to use in some way because of the MagSafe design on the back. So it has a lot of those little life improvements. So I'm actually very happy with MagSafe.
I'm even happier that they've made it even better with the iPhone 16 series, allegedly, with the larger coils and the higher wattage. That's all going to be great. So I think MagSafe is a huge success on the phone, and I look forward to continued improvements.
Even as somebody who does not use MagSafe to charge pretty much ever, mostly because I just don't want to deal with the heat and degradation or whatever, and I don't mind plugging the thing in, it's just made a huge difference in my life simply because I have cars without CarPlay. And what I was doing before was what Marco described.
It had a thing that clipped onto a vent, and it was like a big clampy jaw thing, and you'd have to open up the clampy jaw and put your phone in it and hope that it stayed in there. And by the way...
if you want your phone to charge now snake a stupid cable that you have to route from wherever your usb port is in your thing and plug it into the bottom of the phone and now you're ready to go but with magsafe i get into the car take my phone funk it sticks you're exactly where i want it to be it is it doesn't fall off when i go over bumps and it's charging and i didn't have to do anything i just stuck it there i'm gonna when i go into the car i take it out and obviously this is barbaric people have car play but you know not everybody has car play what a difference in my life this has made
to have a dashboard mount that I just stick my thing to. And I feel like, you know, I like the fact that it is charging, but the magnets, the magnets are key, right? And I do have a MagSafe puck on my bedside table. And mostly what I use it for is I put my little AirPods case in it because I don't really care if I wear out the battery in my AirPods case because it's,
not a big deal and i can get a new case if it has ever been a problem but it hasn't been unfortunately the battery in the airpods themselves wears out quickly but hopefully the heat generated from magsafe charging my airpods case is not transferring too heavily to the airpods and anyway i've got new ones arriving soon so yeah i think magsafe is great like the the good thing about it is that it lets first of all if you don't like it
It really doesn't take anything off your phone. I'm sure it adds a few grams of weight for those magnets or whatever and the charging coil, but it's not a big deal. It doesn't change the appearance, doesn't add a giant hump, doesn't make it heavier or bigger in a way that people care about, right? But second, everybody can choose what it is they like about MagSafe.
Do you think of it as just a magnet to hold a wallet to the back of your phone? Do you use it for 100% of your charging? Is it a replacement car mount for you that's better than your old one? it can do lots of things for lots of different people.
So even though you might look at it and say, well, I expected like never to see a wire again and the port to disappear from my phone and that didn't happen. Therefore MagSafe is a failure. I think it's been a smashing success. I think everybody finds something they like about MagSafe and it can improve their life.
And for the few people who don't find anything they like about MagSafe, it doesn't bother them. Great feature. Yep. Couldn't agree more.
Jonathan Cirillo writes, what are your credit card setups? For example, Amex Gold for X, Apple Card for Y, etc. For me, I feel like we've talked about this at some point in the past, but for me, Aaron and I share, and this obviously is what works for us. It won't work for everyone. We share one primary checking account, one primary savings account.
Obviously, we have investments and other things like that. And then one primary credit card. And so when we were both working years, like traditionally working years and years ago, 95% of our paychecks went into that shared account. And that's what pays the bills. That's what pays for food and everything else.
And then we would siphon off just a little bit to personal credit cards that only we individually have access to, which are basically used for either, I really want to buy this and I don't want to hear you complaining about it for either of us, or I'm buying you a gift and I don't want you to know about it. And so that's basically our setup. It's very boring.
The credit card we have gives us a little bit of cash back, I'm sure I could be maximizing my points and whatnot, and so on and so forth. But that's not a game I've ever really gotten into. So my setup is really boring. Basically, we share the same credit card account, all basically all our retail purchases go on that, and then we pay it off every month. And that's basically it.
Marco, what about you guys?
Also fairly boring. I have the standard setup from a nerd who was a nerd in 2006, which is I started having an MX Blue Cash card, which was like the nerd pick to do back then.
um and i i had that for a while um at some point in the last few years we crossed over the threshold at which it made more sense to get the platinum card um because there's one of those cards where there's an annual fee but if you spend more than x you'll end up coming out ahead with the points and everything else um and there's all sorts of other benefits with the platinum card like
Among credit cards that offer various perks and benefits, especially if you travel a lot, it's one of the good ones to get. So look into it if you care. And if you spend stupid amounts of money, then it will usually pay for itself. That being said, not everybody takes American Express.
And so I used to just have the American Express as the credit card, and I would just use my regular bank debit card, which was a Visa, for anything that wouldn't take it. Then at some point, that Visa, the number got stolen or something. And it really freaked me out because debit cards do not provide nearly as much protection as credit cards in fraud situations.
Because with debit cards, they're actually directly taking the money. And there's usually some protection from your bank, but you don't have as many protections as you do with credit cards. And that kind of freaked me out that I was giving direct access to my bank account to so many vendors that wouldn't take American Express. And so at that point,
I got some other Visa credit card that was recommended. I think it's a capital. I don't even remember because I hardly ever use it for anything. So my current setup is I have the Amex Platinum for anything that will take it. For anything that won't, I'll use that backup Visa. Oh, it's an Amazon Prime Visa. That's right. I switched over.
It's an Amazon Prime because those actually also provide pretty good benefits. And anything I buy from Amazon, I have that as the default payment method because I think it's like 5% off. It's a pretty substantial discount on Amazon purchases.
um and there's and so if you buy a lot from amazon it's worth having the amazon prime card it's or and also if you buy a lot from whole foods because it's the same deal anyway amex for things that take it amazon prime visa for whatever doesn't and then my bank card is only ever used in my bank's atm like so it's like i i go to my bank's atms that that is the only place the debit card is ever put into and it's used for nothing else mostly just to
for safety and to avoid, you know, the inconvenience of that getting stolen.
We are a credit card family. My wife, in particular, has opened up many credit cards over the years. We've pared it down. But our system is generally one sort of shared card. We both have the card. I think at various times it might have had different numbers for the two of us, but most of the time it's had the same number but with two different cards with two different names on them, right?
Yeah, that's Aaron and me.
And that's basically our main credit card that we use for everything. It is also an Amazon Prime Visa, just like Margo's, because we buy so much stuff from Amazon and, unfortunately, Whole Foods. Yeah. And that gives good cash back reward things or whatever, and everybody takes it. It's taken everywhere. We never got into the whole Amex thing or anything like that.
Obviously, we do have debit cards for our bank and everything. We just don't use them. I personally also have a quote-unquote corporate credit card that is the credit card connected to my business account. Oh, yeah, same. Yeah.
in theory i'm supposed to use that for all business expenses and i do for recurring business expenses like as we've discussed before if you have an llc in massachusetts you pay some ungodly amount of money every single year just to maintain that llc which is why everyone opens theirs in delaware or whatever but anyway i'm mine is massachusetts and so every year i have to pay that and so any sort of recurring fees like that or like my business telephone that i pay for another recurring fee i connect my business card which is just another visa connected to my business bank account which is in a different bank entirely and
I connect all that up to that. It doesn't matter. I'm a single member LLC, and it's passed through for tax purposes.
It doesn't actually matter, but just at the end of the year when you're trying to find all your business expenses, if you can just look at one card and say everything on this card is a business expense, that makes our life easier for us to gather stuff that we then hand off to our accountant to say, here are all the business expenses or whatever. I don't always follow that.
Unfortunately, sometimes there are some things that I forget that were on the other card or whatever, or there's a mix of them, but we figure it out. And the thing that both of you didn't mention that I'm sure is absolutely true for all of us is that when we buy stuff from Apple, we use our Apple card because it's like whatever, 6% back or 3% or whatever, whatever percentage back.
Is that not true of you too? Like whenever you make an Apple purchase, you use your Apple card? I don't have an Apple card.
No, neither do I. You don't?
Really? At the time, I guess I haven't looked recently. At the time, it wasn't really worth the additional, like, you know, whatever the very tiny benefit was for me over just buying it on my Amex, it wasn't worth it. But that might be different now.
I don't know what the percentage is now, but I think briefly, especially when Apple Card was brand new and I was buying new Macs, it was like 6% discount when buying Apple hardware or something. I don't think that's still true. But yeah, I use my Apple Card whenever I buy anything from Apple. My Apple Card pays from iCloud. When I just bought my phone, that was on my Apple Card.
Anytime we buy Apple hardware, that is on Apple Card. That is the only thing we use our Apple Card for, mostly because Apple has no idea how to make a good credit card interface. Like, there needs to be a website, Apple, where you can go and see all your transactions. Have you heard of the web? But instead, they're like, oh, just go to the app and scroll. Oh, you can't see all your transactions?
Tough luck. Oh, you want them printed out in some kind of report? Tough luck. Like, it's just... They're so bad, but I do it to get whatever the discount is for buying Apple stuff specifically with your Apple card.
And I don't use the Apple card for anything else because for anything else, for the most part, other cards I have, including our main Amazon Visa card, give you more cash back or points or whatever. That you should be getting. So Apple Pay, when I double tap the side button and pay with Apple Pay, that's paying with the main family Visa card. Right.
And I have to remember and sometimes I forget this. Remember, anytime I'm actually buying something from Apple, when I double tap the side button, don't just, you know, face ID, select the Apple card first because, you know, you can pick which card you want on a per payment basis.
and do that uh and yeah i hate the stupid thing at whole foods where you have to like scan your stupid qr code for the whole food can't they just know can't they just know whenever i pay with my amazon prime visa thing like they're all the same company like can't you just figure it out but no you gotta scan the stupid code and then find out the code didn't even give you a discount on any of the ridiculously expensive items you bought this time it's annoying i'll tell you what man you make fun of whole foods i shopped at whole foods for a long time when i lived in westchester
There currently is not one anywhere near my house on Long Island, and I miss it. Now that I had the Whole Foods lifestyle and now I'm away from it, I actually really miss it. Whole Foods, for all of its faults, is awesome. Next time you go grocery shopping, just double the bill and send me the other half.
You can get that experience. It's real easy. Can I send you all my garbage groceries from Stop and Shop and you'll give me all the nice stuff from Whole Foods? The only other good benefit of Amazon and Whole Foods coming together is that returning stuff. You can just go to Whole Foods with your thing and just give it to someone at a counter and say, here, take this. That is nice.
It doesn't even have to be packed up or anything. It has to be in the box or whatever. We're like, I'm returning this. Take this. That is convenient.
Real-time follow-up from the chat. Apparently, card.apple.com. Thanks to Zach Knox. That is a thing, apparently.
Yeah, I know. Their website is terrible. Like, they used to not have one at all, and now they have one, and it's terrible. Like, they need to look at every other credit card website to know what the bar is, and they're just below it.
Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Pioneers of AI, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is you get ATP Overtime, a bonus topic every week. This week on Overtime, we're going to be asking, will Apple pull a Google and actually abandon a long-running service?
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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-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O- So I have some updates about the Rivian.
Okay. Now, to the degree you're willing to share, did you call in favors? Did you get special treatment? What is going on?
No. I didn't even want to try that. I don't want a car that I can only get serviced in a reasonable amount of time by calling in special favors. That is not how I want to live my life.
I don't want to be beholden to that. Although, to be fair, what most people said is you don't have to call in a special favor. If you just sign up for the appointment, that's it, and then just wait, that's it. Because you listed severe things in your appointment, they will bump you up on the schedule. Nothing you have to do, no special treatment, they have no idea who you are.
That was the things that people were saying. That is what people told me.
Here's what actually happened. I created that ticket with the items on it that seemed pretty... Significant. I think not being able to move the driver's seat is a pretty substantial safety issue. Not being able to fast charge on highway trips reliably is also a pretty significant issue. Not having any air conditioning in early September, I would say, is a pretty significant issue.
So I waited like a day or two after submitting it to see because people said that that should happen. It didn't. And then I ended up like there's like an interface in the app where you can message the service center like on the same thread as your service request. So it's like a little chat interface. So I submitted a couple questions in the chat.
I'm like, hey, I'm hearing that maybe the AC coolant is also used to cool the battery. And maybe that might be related to my fast charging issues. Is it safe to drive this vehicle without the AC working? Because right now the AC doesn't work at all.
I bet they love it when people self-diagnose and write in with their theories about what might be wrong with their car.
Sure. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm sure. But still, we heard from a bunch of people that apparently the AC refrigerant system is used to cool the battery pack also. And so therefore, if the AC can't cool, maybe the battery can't cool either.
And by the way, the second part of what you did is a great customer service hack, which
by mentioning in what is presumably an auditable uh you know area of like text chat saying is it safe to drive my vehicle should fire off all the warnings of like either a don't answer this question or b if they do answer it that'll great to come up in the lawsuit later when you say hey i asked if it was safe and you said it was safe and that my car caught on fire
Yeah, leave a leave a paper trail for things like that. Everyone that helps anyway. So, you know, I asked in the chat, like, you know, is it safe to drive if the battery if the cooling system is not working? Basically, I did not hear back. Cool. That's one of the options. Like I said, don't answer that.
Don't answer that.
Yeah, just no response. I was not moved up 10 days later. They finally called me. Let me tell you what I did in the meantime. Oh, no. Did you sell the car? So I decided, let me see. Oh my God.
Oh no.
Oh no. So I decided, let me see what my options are here. Oh God. Because as I'm sitting there waiting for like, you know, a week for a response and like not getting anything, I'm like, okay, I don't think this is going the way, the way I expect. And so I said, let me just go see, you know, what are my other options out there? So I drove the Rivian over to BMW.
Oh, no, Marco. No, no, no.
I'm on Long Island. There are BMW dealers every 20 feet. I wanted to look at the Kia EV6, the Ioniq 5, and the BMW iX. For every other model that people suggested, either it was a Tesla, and there's reasons I don't want to do that, or it was something that does not fit what I stated were my priorities, which is I need pretty long range.
I would like a decent amount of interior space and cargo space. I would like it to have a hatchback or a liftback trunk. And I would like it to be a model that has existed for more than a year or two. I want something that's a little bit more established and ideally from an established car brand, not a startup like Lucid or something like that.
The i5 doesn't have a hatchback or a liftback. You can get the M5, the electric M5, the non-electric M5 wagon. But is there an i5 liftback? No, the iX, I'm saying, is the one I was looking at. You didn't look at the i5 or the i4, the two that I suggested?
I did look at the i5. Too small? So actually, I didn't test drive it, but I sat in one in the dealer. I looked around. So the i5 is basically their BMW's electric 5 Series. I loved driving a 5 Series-sized car. It was great. The problem is that was before I was ruined by the Model S big liftback style. And I love the cargo advantages of a liftback.
So I really don't want a standard trunk anymore if I don't need it. Secondly, you figure like what are you optimizing for if you pick a sedan over like a crossover or an SUV? What you're optimizing for mostly is efficiency, maybe physical footprint size. And when you compare the range...
The iX actually, I think, has longer rings than the i5, or at least similar, because they put a little bit bigger battery in it. Also, the 5 Series has such a big footprint now that the length and width of the 5 Series, of the i5, is almost the same as the iX. And if you compare them, the iX is just basically a slightly taller i5.
significantly taller but that's part of the problem of bmw strategy of essentially making we make a gas version an electric version of the same car the i5 has enough room for a gigantic internal combustion engine under the hood uh and when you take out that engine the car does not get any smaller no and especially does not get shorter or narrower um so like i think when you compare the the actual measurements the i5 is something like it's like an inch or two narrower but it's like the exact same length as the ix or it might even be like an inch longer or something that's why i was saying you should look at the i4 but a backseat might be too small now
Yeah, and the 4 Series, the way they make it sportier is they really crush the backseat, both headroom, and the cargo is not great either in that. Anyway, so that's why the BMW I was looking at was the iX. I've also just heard great things about it, and anyway... So all this is like, I'm looking around like, all right, let me see like, what are my options?
If I, if I do want to trade in the Rivian, like what are my options here? And then how can I get around the issue of, you know, it's broken.
Just don't say anything.
So Adam said, you know, let's go. Cause I was describing like the options to him because, and this was like after school one day, he, he like just come from sports practice and he was tired. And I'm like, all right, I have time for one car dealer. And I'm like, all right, do you want to go to like the small fun one?
I was thinking the, the Ionic five, uh, or do you want to go to like the big cushy one? And he said, let's do the big cushy one. I'm like, all right. So we go to, we go to see the IX. First of all, inside Adam was immediately won over by, it has this like accent lighting. Yeah.
it's rgb lighting for your car it is kids would love it i had no idea this was there so every all the cars have this now it's so terrible i hate it so much oh my god it's so fun so yeah like along every window strip on the bottom of each window and then like a couple little lights throughout the cabin there's these rgb lights and adam's like oh my god make it purple so you know we made it purple during the test drive and he's like all right this you gotta buy this car
you'll be shocked to learn that mercedes has like named themes like they have with signet with associated signature scents so it's not just like oh you can change the colors it's like well we've we've carefully selected these particular themes that involve a sound environment and a color scheme of the rgb lighting and a scent and it's just like oh come on that's amazing and bmw has like the ix has a bunch of weird stuff like that but anyway so adam is like super into it
and i mentioned to the salesman i'm like hey and because as soon as of course you know i knew what i was doing i i pulled up and i parked the rivian directly in front of the sales showroom so everyone could see it and it's like this glorious yellow goodness and the salesman immediately like hey how do you like that rivian and he said the yellow was the best color they don't make it anywhere i'm like oh he knows rivians okay like okay and this guy has good taste so i'm i'm off to a good start when he said how do you like that rivian what was your answer
well i said it's a great off-roader you know it's it's a it's a really fun car all those things are true i love it when it's working well yes yes so anyway um he mentions his girlfriend happens to be the manager of rivian service place in brooklyn oh no and so you were like well sit down son we have to have a chat
What are the odds? You're not making this up. This really genuinely happened. That's incredible. This is worth the reveal. Oh my God, this is so good. Now I'm going to be mad if you did sell the damn thing.
So I'm like, all right, now I'm working with a different situation than I expected.
If you want good Rivian service, go to a BMW dealer.
That's the moral of the story. So anyway, so I mentioned to him, I decided it was okay to reveal something because of that. I said, listen, I have two problems. Problem number one is that my car is worth too much to trade it in for a lease. Problem number two is the air conditioning does not blow very strong right now, and it's a long wait for service, and I can't get it serviced anytime soon.
That's the only thing you mentioned? Yes, which is probably, I mean, in all fairness.
True, it is true, but there is more. But in all fairness, that is probably the root of both problems. Again, self-diagnosing. So I mentioned those problems, and I think this anchors the deal in my favor already, because he's like, well, if we took that in, I could get that taken care of much faster. I'm like, great. So anyway, we do the test drive. I freaking love the iX.
It's just ridiculously nice, like way nicer than I expected it to be based on reviews and everything. From the inside, you can't see the outside. Yeah, of course, it's hideous on the outside. But look, who cares? I don't care how my car looks.
He's coming from a banana. We know he doesn't care what it looks like on the outside.
The R1S is an attractive vehicle. The iX, less so. Yeah, I'll give you that. But anyway, I freaking love it. So I'm like, all right. Let me see what my option here is. So I'm like, hey, what would you do for me on the Rivian? And so he has the manager come out and appraise it and everything. Now, I went in there. I had looked up on websites. I looked on cars and bids. I looked on auto trader.
What do these things tend to go for? Because there's not that many R1Ss that are on the used market. So there's not that many data points. But there's enough that I had a number in mind. And I'm like, all right, if this is roughly what they sell for in private sales to enthusiasts... I'd be happy to take at least 10% lower than that from a dealer trader.
And I know I'd probably be fighting even to get that. They offered just barely a hair below the private sale price. Oh, wow. So I was like, hmm. I'm not going to get the Rivian service manager's boyfriend at another car dealer. This is a surprisingly good opportunity all of a sudden. So I'm like, let's run some numbers here. What could we do on the lease? How can we work this? So...
through a surprisingly small amount of squeezing. It turns out there were a lot of lease incentives at the time for the iX for some reason. I don't care why. I know there's like an LCI coming out next year. I know it's about to be updated. It's probably going to get the Tesla port next year as part of the LCI, which is BMW's term for mid-cycle refresh.
I know they're going to improve some of the looks of the outside because people don't like it. I really care about none of those things right now. And so... Through just these wonderful lease incentives, it brought the price of the vehicle down like $12,000. I'm like, huh. So I'm going to do this trade-in for a price that is way more than I thought with no trouble whatsoever.
And they're going to give me a big cut off the lease. And I'm going to prepay most of the lease with the part of the value of the trade-in. And they're going to give me a check for the rest. Huh. So I did it. I now own an IX. What color? It's the Blue Ridge Mountain one. It basically looks like a shiny sky blue. It's like if the sky was shiny, that is how it looks. Did you get the 50 or the 60?
I got the 50. I didn't test drive a 60. They didn't have one then. I got the 50 because I test drove the 50, and it was extremely fast. I would say it's a similar difference as back when I was getting my Model S, when they had the regular mid-range one versus the, at the time, I think it was the Ludicrous. Now it's the Plaid, but at the time, I believe Ludicrous was the high-end one.
At the time, it was like, you know, you could go to zero to 60 in like four seconds or three seconds, basically. And the ones that were four seconds, that's incredibly fast for a car. That's very fast. And then the three second one, I remember with the Tesla, I test drove that one. And I believe I described it on the show as it felt like I was getting punched in the chest when I would floor it.
Like it was actually kind of unpleasantly fast. Um, so I decided with this one, like the X 51 or the 50 X drive, whatever it's called. Um, the, the quote slow one is already so fast. This is plenty for me and it gets longer range and it's cheaper by a lot. Uh, and there's more of them in stock everywhere.
What was the color again? Was it the fight tonic blue metal?
No, the blue Ridge. Blue Ridge Mountain.
Oh, it doesn't look that blue. That's why. I was looking for the blue.
Oh, so it's grayish. No, but look up actual pictures of it. The configurator does not really show what it's like. What trim level did you get?
Did you get the weird sport trim thing?
Yes. So the thing is, to get one locally that's in stock, because then I ask, what's the order time? And the lead time on an order is like three to four months. I don't really want to wait that long. And also, like...
there was a time in my life when i really cared about every one of those details i don't care anymore like i really don't i i this i just like i just need a car that works it makes sense you're gonna have the car for like six months anyway well no i'm gonna have it for at least three years and i leased it um but it's like the they i i put the rivian cost towards the lease as much as they would take so the lease payments are like 120 a month like it
Because it's mostly prepaid.
That's incredible.
And there's no interest. It made no sense not to. With all the lease incentives that brought the price so low, it made no sense to do a cash buy or anything like that. Rather than me asking you what wheels you have, can you just send us a picture? Oh, yeah. Let me try. Hold on. So anyway, it's a great car. I really...
Because I've been in Tesla first and then Rivian, I have not really had a super luxurious car in a while, like since the BMW times. The luxury level has certainly increased in the time that it's been. It is certainly like the luxury technology has gotten substantially better. It is just an incredibly nice ride. Like, it still feels very much like a BMW. Like, it is surprisingly sporty.
You know, the handling for a vehicle that's not super small, the handling is very good. Compared to the Rivian, it's night and day. I mean, the Rivian was a much bigger vehicle.
but the ix really drives incredibly well the the suspension and this doesn't even have the air suspension but the regular suspension is like super cushy and soft but you still you still feel a little bit sporty in the handling like it's a great balance like look at bmw knows how to make cars that feel good to drive like that's their whole thing but the luxury level like the cabin is so quiet when you close the windows it's so quiet
A lot of little details that Rivian, I think, hasn't figured out yet. Like, for instance, with Rivian, like, there was pretty much no position at which you could roll down the driver window and no other windows and have it not do that, like, ear pumping thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Buffeting or whatever.
Whatever, yeah, whatever that's called. But with the iX, like, it just doesn't do that at any level that I can find. Like, when you close and open the windows, you don't get that, like, ear sucking. Yeah. It doesn't do that either. There's little stuff like that that's just – they've been making cars for a long time. They engineer the crap out of them. They know how to do it really well.
And that's what I'm happy to get out of an established car company. What took me away from BMW years ago was the wonderful advantages of EVs. That's when I went to Tesla. EVs are just that good that it was worth me changing brands and taking a risk and giving up some of these things just to have the EV drivetrain. But This is also now that same EV drivetrain now back in established car brands.
And that's exactly what I was looking for making this change. So I'm actually, so far, I mean, look, now there is one snag. Uh-oh. So I had the car for about 20 hours.
Oh, no. Marco, no.
Did the seat stop moving? I was sitting in front of my kid's school picking him up. And this message shows up on the dashboard. Warning, high voltage system error. Okay.
oh you can get you can continue driving but please have the system checked by your nearest service center to prevent malfunctions and subsequent damage and this lease is a new car right brand new car it had like 50 miles or something 40 miles on like i i had it for less than 24 hours and i get a service center error you gotta be kidding me so of course you know i called them up like hey uh little little problem
But you know what? They got me in same day. They had given me a loaner, another IX. So they give me the same model car as a loaner. And I was out the door and they had it back in their hands in like two hours. That's service. Like I don't expect products to be perfect. I know things go wrong, especially, you know, a version one of a car.
Of course, a lot of things are gonna go wrong, but I know things are gonna go wrong, but What I need is for things to not go wrong most of the time. And when they do go wrong, for them to be easily fixed. And I said this last time. That's my priority with cars. I don't need them to be perfect. I know they're not perfect. I need them to need very little from me in terms of maintenance and problems.
I need them to mostly work. And if they have a problem, I need it to be easily solved. And even though I am... Very stressed out that my brand new car has a problem. I looked it up. It seems like a somewhat common software flaw with iXs that happens sometimes and they get fixed and they never have the problem again. So it should be fine. But they still have it.
I believe they're going to be giving it back to me today.
When did it go in?
Thursday? Yeah, Thursday.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah. But they did give me a loaner immediately. At this point in the story, I start to wonder how many terrible electric car related tragedies would need to befall Marco before he started looking at Hondas. I think it's a lot. I think it's way more than his.
For the love of God, John, there are cars other than Hondas.
Jesus Christ, my guy. Or a Toyota, right? But like, I mean, I don't. First of all, I want to say for everyone who's listening.
don't let this discourage you from getting electric cars marco is being extraordinarily unlucky here this is not the standard experience as evidence from his years of using electric cars before this he's just has incredibly bad luck but given your incredibly bad luck i am wondering how much bad luck would it take for you to be like screw this i'm going back to internal combustion i think it would be a lot but i really feel like you're being tested by the universe here yeah no i i'm not a brand new car
Because really, even now that I'm driving around a service loaner, even now driving this car almost a week later, it is so nice. It's a really, really nice car. And I'm also very happy now to be back in the CarPlay world. And the iX has very good CarPlay support.
Back when I had the Land Rover briefly and I had CarPlay in that, I remember saying on the show that it was a little disappointing and whether I had it or not, I'd be fine. And that's true. But what I realized when I drove the rental that kept breaking two weeks ago or last week, whenever that was. When I drove the rental, it had CarPlay.
And so I was able to get used to it really quickly and get back into it. When I then went back to the Rivian after using CarPlay, it felt like my car was broken. It's like, wait, how do I control? How do I switch from Overcast back to music? There were so many little friction points. And I'm like, you know what? I really need a car that has carplay. Because first of all, it is better.
It is better by a lot. And I have nothing really bad to say about Rivian in general. I think the Rivian was a fantastic vehicle that I just had some bad luck with. Part of the problem was indeed my fault for denting it. Part of it was inherent problems that actually predated that. Oh, and when I was... When I was cleaning out the Rivian, getting all my stuff out of it, there was there's this area.
There's like a sub trunk area where you lift up the thing in the trunk and below it is like another area. And then below that's another area below that. As I was cleaning my stuff out of that, the sub like the lowest part of the sub trunk was wet. Everything in it was wet. It hadn't rained in days. All the stuff in it showed signs of long-term water damage. I had a first aid kit there.
It was moldy. I had to throw it away. I had a couple of tools. They were all kind of just messed up from long-term water damage. So there were multiple issues with that.
No longer your problem. Right. Good luck to the girlfriend of the BMW salesperson. Yes.
This is part of why I'm not really complaining about my car breaking immediately than having to be in service. I'm like, hey, you know what? I'm not going to say much about this. You're getting me back. That's fine. I'll have my car back. I think today will be good. Anyway, that's just version one car company stuff. When I had the Model S...
back in 2016 tesla had already been selling the model s for a couple years and they had the roadster before that like they they had already been selling car making cars for a little while so they had worked out most of the 1.0 beta problems rivian is not there yet i think they will be there in another couple of years i i think you know two three four years from now like when they're when the r2 comes out and hopefully the cool r3 comes out like
I think they're going to get there. I think they're going to really be an amazing company in a year or two or three. It's going to be great. And the ones they sell now are great with just some asterisks. If they need service, it's kind of a pain in the butt. They don't have that many service centers. They're backed up 10 weeks, whatever. There are some asterisks on buying it now. But...
The bones of a good car company are there, and the cars are very good, as long as you don't have some weird bad luck in certain things. But the cars are very good. So I have nothing bad to say about Rivian, and I would be happy to consider going back to them in the future.
The one thing that really gets me, that gives me pause for them really, is their CEO's stance on not doing CarPlay and on insisting that they do all the software themselves, I think is pretty wrong. And I trust, you know, he seems like he's a pretty good CEO, pretty capable person. I like the way his head, I like where his head's at in most ways.
But when you look at what people use CarPlay for, what Rivian is trying to do, Tesla basically says, we're not even going to try to replace CarPlay. We're just going to not have it and screw you. And we'll keep adding weird games to our cars that you can't play while driving, so why?
But what Rivian says is, we're going to try to integrate the things into the car so that you don't need to use CarPlay. And so when I bought the car, it had Spotify and Tidal as the music options. They have since recently added Apple Music. When I look at how many CarPlay apps I have on my phone, when I actually go through the pages and pages of CarPlay, I have 15 CarPlay apps at least.
There are various apps. I tried out that service Blinkist, whatever it is, that gives you summaries of books in 15 minutes. Honestly, I don't think I recommend that service. I have not really gotten much value out of it, but I decided to try it anyway. And they have a CarPlay app.
And so on the rental car up to upstate last weekend, I listened to some books, like some book summaries that somehow remove all of the value of the books. You should have had Apple Intelligence do it. They would have said, this book contains nonsense. Next book. Yeah.
Honestly, that feature sounds pretty... I mean, most of my email is nonsense, so I think that might actually be a useful summarization thing. There are so many apps. Instapaper has a CarPlay thing where you can have articles read to you. There's CarPlay apps for things like ordering pizzas and stuff. If you can order your pizza on the way home from your CarPlay app.
There are so many CarPlay apps that are too... Narrow audience, they're never going to rise above the level of what somebody like Rivian or Tesla would integrate into their own systems. And using it from your phone is almost always better because your phone has the latest everything. It has usually a better computer and a more recent OS than the car will have.
It will have better connections to data and to things like whatever your services and logins and data things are. Your phone will already be connected to all of them. The phone will always be better. And then the phone also, like Rivian also mentioned, like the CEO mentioned in a recent interview, that they have to work on messaging.
yeah you know how you can do that over bluetooth um there's there is very basic support in bluetooth protocols for messaging things but it's pretty limited it's pretty basic whereas like carplay it just works correctly you can message with iMessage you can message with whatsapp whatever you need to use like it's already on your phone it's already connected it's already logged in and it works perfectly you need to do things with that via voice siri does that for you you can do it through carplay the
You're never going to account, you're never going to encompass what your users want to do with CarPlay by building in your own software piece by piece like this. You will never cover it all. And even if you do cover it all, your versions will be worse than the versions on the phone.
Some of which because car makers aren't that great at making software, and some of it because the phone just has inherent advantages that the car makers can't match. So I really think that's a very wrong-headed approach to car infotainment, the idea that you're just going to replicate what everyone uses their phones for. It's just never going to happen.
You're never going to get the breadth or the quality of what you can do on a phone with CarPlay and Android Auto and whatever else. You're never going to match that. And Rivian, they have decent software. Their driving directions and their maps are still not good. They still get place names terribly wrong. Again, like... You're never going to match Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps.
You're not going to match it. And there's specialty things like my Fire Island sand driving mapping app. That's like a specialty mapping app. I never made it work with CarPlay because it's too small an audience, but I could have made a CarPlay version of that. I could never integrate that with Rivian and Rivian will never come to me to integrate it with their system.
There's all sorts of specialty needs like that. We're like, yeah, maybe, maybe like the, you know, you can probably say like 80% of what people use is this handful of top apps. But how many people out there use zero other apps that don't fit in that, in that bucket? Probably not a lot.
I bet almost everyone has one thing that would not be satisfied by Rivian's built-in deals or software that they have. And if you even have one of those things, it's a bad experience to own that car as a result. So it is totally wrongheaded to continue to not integrate CarPlay and to actively say, we're not even going to try to do that.
So anyway, that being said, that is the one thing that I really don't care for Rivian for.
otherwise i think they're they're making great vehicles and they have a great future ahead of them um just right now it is still very much in that beta period and i learned from this experience i do not want a beta car i do not want a beta car company i don't even want a 1.0 car company i want like a 3.0 car company i want somebody who's been around the block for a few times and then finally i
Going back a little bit to the luxury angle, what Tesla does, they had to solve the significant economic problem of a huge cost center is the battery. And then you have to somehow put a car on top of it that feels like it's worth that price.
But as a result, like you can't have as expensive of a cabin and other features on top of like a $40,000 battery and still be as good as cars that cost the same as you that have gas engines because gas engines are just inherently cheaper than giant batteries. So the Tesla approach, which Rivian largely took on as well. is we're going to try to get in the ballpark of similarly specced cars.
We're going to hit a certain price point, and we're going to try to be as nice as, in the case of the Model S, something like an S-Class, which is why they named it that, or a 5 Series or a 7 Series or whatever. Another luxury car with a gas engine that's around this price point, we're going to try to get as nice as those. And they just can't, and they never have, and they never will, because...
Mercedes, for the S-Class, they have X dollars of margin over the cost of the engine to spend on making the car really nice in other ways. And Tesla just has way less of that margin to spend because the battery is so expensive. So what Teslas really are...
are fairly basic and and kind of mid-range interiors like it's they're not like super cheap but they're not super nice and they're pretty minimal oh we're gonna get so much email you're right but we're gonna get so much don't don't forget also that the other place they save costs is by leaning into the futuristic aesthetic and say you know what remove everything from the interior of this car remove every button every opening every stock every control remove everything because every one of those things you remove saves you money exactly
They say it's for minimal aesthetic and this is the future, but conveniently, it also saves them a bunch of money. So that is probably a large driver of those decisions. So what you get with Tesla and Rivian is fairly economical interiors that are not super luxurious on top of amazing drivetrains that have these giant batteries and these awesome motors. That's what you get with those EVs.
With the iX... It is more than a Rivian, although with the lease incentives, it gets very close. But anyway, what you get is an actual luxury car on top of a really great battery and drivetrain. And this, I think, is where Tesla and Rivian are going to continue to not compete very well. And this is where I think they are most vulnerable to competition from the big players.
First of all, yes, establishment, service networks, things like that. Those are huge factors. But also... If you compare what you get just in terms of interior quality and luxury niceties and just general luxury levels, what you get from the other brands is typically a lot better than what you get from Tesla and Rivian. And with Rivian, I was getting it to be an off-roader first and foremost.
And it is great for that. It is fantastic for that. It is the best off-roader I've ever driven. But as a $90,000 EV SUV, it does not compete in terms of niceness. Things like noise levels, just ride quality, handling quality, a lot of different luxury features that are inside. It's nice, but it's not luxury nice. And Tesla...
Not only is Tesla not luxurious either, I think the modern Teslas are even worse than the ones I had. I recently was in one of the new Model S's, and it was noticeably less luxurious than the ones I had because they've had a pretty big revision since then. It just feels like they're cheaping out on everything possible to try to squeeze more margin out of the cars.
You're basically riding around like a plastic box on top of an amazing drivetrain. And that's another reason why I didn't want to go Tesla, because the new Teslas feel like cheap, decontented versions of the ones in the past. And even they were like decently luxurious, but not super luxurious. So anyway, all it is to say, I don't have the Rivian anymore.
One question about your new car. Can you use the Tesla supercharger network with an adapter?
Officially, no. And in fact, this was actually so, you know, when I was moving the stuff over from the Rivian, I brought my supercharger adapter and I just stuck it in the door pocket, the driver door pocket, because the iX does not have a frunk. They just filled up with engine stuff and other stuff. They filled up with components, so there is no frunk for you to use.
You actually officially can't even open the hood. There is a special way you can open it if you really have to, but officially, you're not supposed to open the hood. The front BMW logo, you flip it up, and that's where you pour in windshield washer fluid. And that's it.
The Mercedes EQS, their S-Class electric version, same deal. You're not supposed to open the trunk. And what they did for the windshield washer fluid is even more ridiculous. You think the BMW flipper thing is ridiculous? They added a door to the front fender. What?
that opens up and this thing slides out for you to like they cut into the sheet metal of the car to make of course it's all electronic and like this thing slides out and this thing like you know hinges out and you pour it and it's like god people just let people open the hood i know you only want them to add the fluid just let's open the hood to add the fluid stop cutting holes in the side of your car and making these little mechanical things whatever so the bmw one is not even the worst in this regard but yeah the german manufacturer is
love to and and uh vw as well in some cars love to fill that front part of the car with the other stuff because they're like hey we got all this space we could give it people for storage now let's just fill it with stuff and so they do oh one other thing to mention too that the uh the ix has little spray washers for the front and back cameras well that's which that's that's one thing i wish rivian had that because like every single time i got out of the rivian like in a parking lot i would i would have to like you know lick my thumb and wipe it across the rear camera because it would get covered in dirt and crap all the time
One of the things that manufacturers are doing with that is having the backup camera hidden, essentially, when you're not backing up. So it's not exposed to road space. And it just like flips up.
But I do kind of like the ones that are always visible because I feel like being able to see out the back while you're driving forward, which like you can do on a Tesla and other cars, is actually convenient. And if you're going to be looking at it all the time anyway, it's still going to get dirty. But yeah, the washers.
I mean, it harkens back to the 80s when they put those little tiny windshield washer blades and the squirters on the headlights. Do you remember those days? Yeah.
i mean we never had a car with that but i've seen them and they look cool as hell yeah one thing too like so the the ix like so so tiff has the i3 as mentioned and it's from like 2019 or something like that the one of the reasons why i was comfortable going back to bmw is that the i3 despite being you know five years old now
we've never brought it in for service it has been very low needs and that being said we also have very little mileage on it i think we're only up to like 7 000 miles you do need to change the oil in your range extender please bring it in it's gotta be sludge at this point probably yeah i should it's mileage and also time time i know well and the thing is like we i have to bring it in because the one of the back tires has a slow leak so i'm like i have to get it serviced in some way anyway so i might as well bring it in and have them do everything um but anyway
That car, the i3, it's one of the best EVs I've ever experienced. Not because it's a great all-arounder. It's not. But it is a remarkable EV drivetrain. It never loses charge. Like, we can park it at the ferry terminal. We could park it for like a month and come back, and it has the exact same charge. It has no phantom drain, as far as I can tell. The EV drivetrain has never caused us problems.
It has never had any issues. It has never reported any issues. It just runs reliably. Different temperatures? Sure. Got to run the heater AC? Sure. It's just a... Like, for such a relatively early EV platform... It was surprisingly immature from day one.
I've been hearing that from reviews and everything about the iX as well, that whoever BMW has working on the high-voltage systems, with the exception of my error message that my car had after 22 hours...
it is remarkably mature as a platform based on what people say like in reviews and stuff that it again like it's just like you can you can charge it at full speed at any temperature it's fine like there's like all the different like the various gotchas that a lot of kind of first gen ev platforms for manufacturers a lot of them have bmw didn't have those uh or at least if they did it would have been like even earlier i3s than what tiffs was which was reasonably late in the product cycle um so like
what i'm buying into here is a pretty mature technology stack uh and i also i also love you know the i3 it was one of those you know kind of based on a concept cars that you get into it and they're like we're gonna make this thing futuristic and you know whatever that meant when the i3 first came out and i guess when was it around like 2016 2015 whenever the i3 first came out
They're like, it's the future. So we're going to make everything carbon fiber and eco-friendly. There's like all these like scratchy eco materials on all the dash panels on the i3. It's like it's a weird car. And then you get into it. It makes like weird sound effects. Like when you start it up or turn it off, it's like all these like science-y, spaceship-y sound effects.
And I love all that crap. I love like the weird personality they put into that car. Well, the iX, they did the same thing, but just newer and better. The amount of personality in that car, in the iX, they have these fake sounds that Hans Zimmer composed that like the car has its own entire soundscape. And yes, you can turn it off. I don't think I'm going to.
You can pick different ones too, right? Yes, you can. There's all sorts of weird BS in there like that. And I kind of love that Tesla, their whole thing was we're going to strip out most things that cars usually have and we're going to add in some dumb games that you can play while you're parked and that's about it. Rivian was like, we're the adults in the room.
We're not going to add dumb games you can play, but we will make a car that just quietly works really well in these adventure scenarios. Rivian is not fun. They are chill and cool. The iX is like a bunch of Germans on ecstasy. We were like, what can we do for the future? Yeah. And it's so weird and fun. But it's a high-end luxury car. It's not like weird quirky.
It's more like this is a version of the future from somebody's drug haze that I absolutely love. It is so full of weird personality.
It's a sharper image car. But it's nicer than that. By the way, Marco, you've gotten distracted. Tesla charging. Bring it back. Oh, yeah.
Sorry. I did get distracted.
Oh, my word.
Anyway, so yeah. So I had the Tesla charger in the door pocket when I brought it back to them. And because the error was the high voltage system, the service place called me like an hour after I dropped it off. They're like, um, we found this Tesla supercharger adapter in your car. Did you by any chance use that? Yeah. I was like, no, I've had the car for like 20 hours.
I haven't even plugged it into anything yet. And they were like, are you sure you didn't use it? I'm like, yes, I'm sure. I didn't go to a supercharger in this one night I had the car. I'm pretty sure I would know that. Like, yeah, I'm positive. Thanks. And they're like, well, you can't use those with the iX. We have not officially certified this to work. Yeah.
So it is kind of funny that if you happen to bring in a BMW electric vehicle for service, it's kind of like removing your third-party RAM before you bring in something to an Apple place for service. Don't leave your supercharger adapter in the car because they will blame it probably for whatever problems you are having.
So when you go on long trips, are you going to stop at a Tesla supercharger and use your adapter or no? Yes. Because why not push your luck?
Your luck's been so good so far. So the Tesla, I think Tesla itself, I've seen actual examples of people doing it. It does work. So what Rivian had with Tesla was a data sharing deal where you could just plug it in and the supercharger would recognize who you are and bill you through Rivian.
The superchargers with adapters work with lots of other EVs that don't have that deal, especially the Tesla superchargers that have magic docks. That's the one where the adapter is in the supercharger. You don't have to own one yourself. It's just in there, and you can log into the Tesla app. And authorize whatever bay number you're on. Unlock number 4A, and that's the one I'm parked at.
And you can go into the app, and you can give Tesla a credit card, and you can just pay for it yourself. And then you can unlock it with their built-in adapter and plug your car in. Lots of EVs work with that, including, allegedly, BMWs. So what the service center people say is we haven't officially announced anything, but, you know, really, really it works.
So I do intend to actually, you know, do that when the time comes. But certainly that time certainly has not come yet.
Good grief. Well, congratulations on the new car.
And one other thing, too, now that we're talking about charging. One of the reasons why I felt comfortable doing a three-year lease starting now on a car that doesn't have the Tesla port. Next year, when these cars start rolling out that actually have Tesla's port, there's going to be an IONIQ 5 update they just announced that's going to have it starting next year.
There's a BMW iX refresh that's alleged to have it, but I think it's not been officially confirmed, starting sometime next year. Yeah. probably in about a year, these cars are going to start rolling off that have this port into the market. But if those don't work everywhere on day one, that's going to be an annoyance and a problem. That is a version of buying a 1.0 car.
And also, right now, if I have an adaptable
ccs car that is adaptable to magic dock tesla chargers and some other tesla charges that that can take the adapters directly i feel like that gives me actually more options right now now three years from now when this lease is up i think i'm going to want an nacs port car because at that point there should be more movement in the charging infrastructure because like right now
You pull up to a lot of places, and there are mostly CCS plugs and maybe one or two NACS plugs on a custom charging station. Or you can go to a Tesla charging station, and then they're all Tesla plugs. But right now, it's enough of a mix in North America that I actually...
Right this second would prefer to either have just a Tesla car, which can use their network only, but it's known to work everywhere, or a CCS car that's adaptable. And by all accounts, the iX is adaptable. It just is not officially certified to certain things yet. So fine. We'll work on that when the time comes. And again, in three years from now, I think that I think that will flip.
I think in three years from now, there will be enough NACS support across different brands that it will start to become worth it to just have an NACS car at that point. But we'll see right now. I'm happy to to lock this in. And plus, you know, like my home chargers are CCS and like there's all sorts of like, you know, there's benefits right now to keeping it CCS.
But, you know, the next car I buy will probably be not that. But hopefully that is at least three years from now.
We will see. Well, congratulations. I can't believe that either of us went crawling back to BMW. And honestly, I'm not sure if I would have expected me or you to go first, but here we are.
Well, I mean, just by the numbers, the sheer number of cars rotating through the households, you got to put your money on Marco.
That's true. That is true.