Pre-show: Politics later. #195: The Show Must Go On (Overcast link) 🗣️ ATP Holiday Store is open! 🗣️ Place your orders by 17 November! Follow-up: Mac mini Headphone jack placement Quinn’s observation Cruical 32GB DIMM Samsung SSD iMac Apple removes color-matched pointing devices option M4 vs. M4 Pro/Max SSD limits M4 Pro & M4 Max performance Walmart still sells a Mac with 8GB RAM Apple’s new USB-C Accessories require Sequoia Apple’s $69 Thunderbolt 5 cable (via Daniel Luz) There exists at least one dock with 10GbE (via Daniel Nelson) iFixIt’s iPad Mini (A17 Pro) teardown AppleTV gaming (via killvore) Keyboard Cleaning & MacBook Booting CleanupBuddy by Gui Rambo Alternative incantation from Daniel Pieper Power the machine off Left ⌃ and ⌘ as well as Right ⇧ for 7 seconds While still holding, hold the power button for 7 seconds This is not an SMC reset, but it’s close. Only lasts until the next boot 😑 Apple buys Pixelmator Apple buys stake in Globalstar Press release Globalstar Vision Pro v2 changes? Ming-Chi Quo Mark Gurman Post-show: Group therapy Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple Intelligence experiences Photo cleanup shoot-out by Joe Rosensteel Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP. 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
As we're recording this, this is the day after Election Day. We just got Trump for a second term. None of us are happy. We're going to save our sadness and wallowing and feelings about that for the after show. So we're going to do a regular show. You can go back and listen to our episode in November 2016 titled The Show Must Go On.
where we said something very similar, and we're going to do something, I think, very sadly similar. But, you know, the show must go on. We're going to try to have this be, again, our regular computer tech show, because in challenging times, people need normalcy from wherever they can get it. So here we are.
We talk about tech now, and we will talk about our feelings about the election in the after show.
With that in mind, let's talk about something that I think we can all agree is pretty awesome, and that is the ATP Holiday Store. You can go to ATP.fm slash store, and you can see all sorts of absolutely awesome merchandise. We've got M4 shirts. We've got M4 Pro shirts, M4 Max shirts. We've got monochrome colors. We've got monochrome comma colors. Sorry, that all kind of ran together.
We've got monochrome colors.
Well, you can have monochrome colors as long as it's singular colors each. That is a thing. Yes, exactly.
But anyways, we've got all sorts of different shirts that you can put these on. We've got tanks. We've got tees. We've got long sleeve. We've got pullover hoodies. All sorts of different stuff. We have brought back the ATP Pixel shirt, which I've had at least a couple of people say to me or reach out to me and say, you know, I didn't
I didn't go for the pixel shirt and then I saw one or I saw another picture of it or something like that. And I messed up. I should have gotten a pixel shirt. So you can, uh, this is your opportunity to grab one of those.
Yeah. Let me, let me tell you the, like when, when we design the shirts, we don't get advanced copies of the shirts. They they're printed all at once. So we see the shirts for the first time when you see the shirts for the first time. And yeah, when the pixel one showed up, I was like, Oh, this is, this is a special one. This is really good. Yeah.
So yeah, if you missed it the first time... We did test prints of the Pixel Ones, though, by the way. We did test prints of the original Pixel One, and then in this store around, the new addition to the Pixel is you can get it on sweatshirts, and we didn't know if it would work on that, so I saw a picture of a sweatshirt test print, and it seems just as good as the other style shirts.
But yeah, we don't get them in our hands, but we do at least, if we're nervous about it, we get a test print and take a look at it.
Yeah, because the Pixel one in particular, that takes a lot of, I think, precision and skill from the printer because it's a pretty hard thing to screen print a very large number of very small, differently colored blocks and have them all line up correctly and have the right gaps and everything and not bleed and all this stuff.
So it was a risk for sure to make that, and Cotton Bureau, of course, rose to the challenge and did a really good job with it. So yeah, definitely pick up the Pixel shirt. That's a really good one.
The other degree of difficulty on that one is that so, you know, as people know who hear us complain about this all the time, the more colors you put on a shirt, the more it costs due to the way screen printing works.
So obviously you've got a rainbow stripe colors on the ATP logo, but the pixel shirt, all of the stripes and all the letters also have shadows, which is a darker version of the same color. It's brutal. But anyway, pixels. Yeah. And by the way, speaking of the pixels design, which people, this is only the second time we've sold it and people seem to like it.
Getting lots of emails from people saying, hey, when are you going to sell the insert shirt we're not currently selling again? And I don't have answers for them. Maybe someday we'll sell a particular design again. But we just have so many products. We can't put them all on sale at the same time. So my advice to you is if you see something you like, buy it or maybe buy two.
Because who knows when it will ever come back. Some things we've only sold literally once. Some things we will probably never sell again since there's such narrow interest. Some things come back once every three years. So yeah, don't just assume, I'm not going to get it to sale, I'll get it next sale. Maybe it won't be for sale then.
The only thing we always sell is obviously our logo shirt with our plain ATP logo on it. But everything else is a rotating collection. So if you want them, get them.
Yeah. And it's not like a Disney vault sort of situation. It's just that generally speaking, we have at least a pretty good idea of what, what people are interested in and what's going to sell. And generally speaking, the kind of more esoteric stuff, for example, the ATP polo, which is available right now, I love it. Not everyone else does.
And so that will do every like second, third or fourth sale. So like John said, it's not that we're saying it'll, these things will never come back, although we're making no promises either. Um, But you should definitely grab at least one, if not a couple, if there's something that you like that's available. So we've also got the zip hoodie. We've got pullover hoodies. That's a new one.
We've never done pullover hoodie before. We've got the mugs that have come back in white and like a deep, deep, deep bluish purpley. What's the official name for this, John? Cobalt. Thank you. We've also got the ATP hat. Uh, all sorts of stuff is available. All of it is available until I believe it's Sunday, November 17th. Yes.
Sunday, the 17th at, uh, basically end of the day, New York time and, and literally end of the day, not end of the business day, not close the business, not COB, but EOD. Uh, that's just for you, John. But, um, anyways, so you can order until the 17th of November. You can go to hp.fm slash store.com. Now, John, I have two questions for you. Number one, what should you do if you're a member?
And number two, what if you want to become a member and aren't and maybe don't want to pay for it?
Yeah, so if you are a member, you have 15% off discount code that is on your member page. Go to atp.fm and log in and go to your member page. You'll see the code there and you can copy and paste it into the little promo code field during checkout. Or if you are logged into atp.fm when you go to atp.fm store,
and click through on any of the products, we will autofill your discount code for you, just so you don't forget it. But anyway, it's on your member page if you want to copy and paste it. 15% off. Totally worthwhile to use that. If you are not a member and want to become one, just so you can save 15% off, you can easily make up the cost of membership with the amount that you save.
Go to atp.fm slash join. You can join for one month and get the discount and be done with it. And of course, we also have ATP gift memberships, which you can buy for someone else. in your life who you think might want to be an ATP member.
Or if you're a member, you'll see a link that lets you send that link to somebody else and say, hey, buy me ATP membership for my holiday gift or for my birthday or for whatever. So those are also available to you right now on the store page and also on your member page.
John, if I'm already a member, a paying member, and somebody gets me a year subscription, what happens?
It just tacks on to the end of your current subscription. Now, gift memberships never expire, so you can just hold them and not redeem them, but you can also just redeem them immediately. They just add time to your subscription.
I think there is a sane limit where it'll always just keep adding time, but due to a limitation in Stripe, if you add four years of membership, or maybe it's longer than that, maybe it's seven years of membership... We can't, we won't continue your membership after your gift memberships run out because Stripe has a limitation in the way we're handling recurring subscriptions.
Anyway, you will always just add time. The only difference is at the end of seven years, we won't continue your subscription. You don't have to do that manually. But anything less than seven years or whatever the ridiculous amount of time is, we will just add, we will just continue your subscription, your paying subscription after your gift subscription runs out. So yeah, gift membership.
That's the gift that keeps on giving.
Indeed it does. And remember, you get a whole plethora of member specials if you become a member. And again, you get 15% off at the store. ATP.FM slash store. I will do our visualization exercise that I know all of you love so very much.
If you're driving, if you're walking, you can either use your turn signal because you're an adult or you can get to the side of the sidewalk or whatever the case may be. Maybe you're biking. You know, use the little arm signals if you need to. But one way or another, pause and go to ATP.FM store and spend all of your money. I mean, buy the things you are interested in buying.
Or if you are not in a position, you can do that. Where are you going or where will you have some free time later? Visualize that spot. Maybe it's your desk at work. Maybe it's your desk at home. Maybe it's somewhere else entirely. Maybe you're going to Wegmans to do work like I do most Wednesday mornings in order to prep for the show.
Wherever you may be heading, think about what it'll be like to go to atp.fm.store and buy some stuff when you get there.
You could also set a reminder with your voice assistant of choice. You know, one thing I have learned now that I have CarPlay, which is amazing, is that... Oh, wait, are we team CarPlay now? Of course we're Team CarPlay. I was always Team CarPlay. Well, yeah, there were times when I said, it's fine, I can do without it if I have to, but I always wanted it if it was available.
And over time, the I can do without it if I have to has gotten smaller. Yeah. Yep. But anyway, one thing I discovered is that when your phone is connected to CarPlay, you can usually just say into the air in your car, hey, thing, remind me in two hours to go buy ATP merchandise. And it will almost always pick it up without any waiting.
You don't have to say, hey, thing, and then wait for the car to be like... Waiting, waiting. What do you want to say? Like, you can just say in one phrase, hey, thing, remind me in an hour to go buy ATP merchandise. And usually that will work. So even in Casey's case where like, you know, oh, you can just try to think about it later. If you're anything like me, you will forget immediately. Me too.
God, I... Thinking back to my life before being able to set reminders via voice assistants that would then beep in my pocket and wrist at a certain time. Oh my god, how did I ever get anything done? And the answer is, I didn't. Likewise. How did I ever remember anything? I didn't. How did I get through life? I got in trouble a lot. But now, we...
now we are in a better place where we can be reminded of things with very little effort by sitting around or pretty much wherever we are so it's wonderful so you can use that ability to say hey thing remind me in an hour to buy atp merchandise all right let's do some follow-up uh we have some information with regard to the mac mini as is expected and other macs as well let's start with headphone jacks where is the headphone jack in the mac mini john
We didn't talk about it last time, but it's in the front, which is interesting. So here's the thing about the headphone jack. I don't think there's any perfect place to put the headphone jack on a computer the size of the Mac Mini. Because you can make an argument for the front. You can make an argument for the back. You can probably make an argument for the side.
I bet somebody can make an argument for the top because that thing is so little. You can put it in so many different places. It's, you know, people who want a clean setup, but they don't want to see that wire. They'd rather have the wire going from the back and underneath the desk and, I don't know, snaking up through some other thing.
People want it on the front because they're constantly plugging and unplugging it. People want it on the top because the Mac Mini is on a little thing next to them and they have good, easy access to the top.
Uh, if it's underneath your desk, all the, this changes, but so they had to pick somewhere to put it and they pick the front, which is so much more defensible sort of front and top are so much more defensible on a giant tower computer because it's just so hard to reach around the back of a giant tower computer, especially, you know, like it's, but the mini is so small, it could be literally anywhere on anybody's desk.
So I kind of feel for Apple in choosing the placement. Uh, but anyway, they chose the front and I don't think you'll see a lot of pictures in Apple's PR photography, uh, showing a wire connection to the Mac Mini anywhere in the front, let alone a headphone wire connected to the front. But there it is.
Yeah, I think we're lucky that they still have one at all. So, you know, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth too much. But also, I think, yeah, if you're going to have a headphone jack on a desktop computer, the best places for it are either the front or the side. And if you look at the Mac mini, like there's not really anything on the sides.
And, you know, if you put if you put it on the side, you know, that that kind of restricts, you know, certain positioning of the Mac mini. So, yeah, I think this is fine.
People like the back, too, because they don't want to see the wire. Well, it depends what you're plugging into it. You're right. So you don't see the wire. It's like, I never unplug it. I just want something plugged in the back. Like, say you have it hooked up to some other, like, bigger, more complicated piece of audio equipment than just headphones. It's like, I don't want to see that wire.
Like, imagine if, I don't know, you explained to me they have, like, headphone amps or something. I don't even know what...
kind of things you can connect to that jack but if it's something permanently connected and it's not your headphones like it connects to some other box that connects to a thing that connects to your headphones or connects to big speakers you wouldn't want that connected to the front because now you got to like immediately turn the wire around and have it go backwards like it's just so dependent on what your setup is what you're going to have plugged in there and how often you're going to plug and unplug it but
Then's the break. I guess if you don't like it, you can get one of, you know, USB audio connection and use one of the back USB ports. So you have options, but it's difficult to choose where to put the ports. And I just think it was interesting for Apple for so long, really not pretty against ports on the front of their computers.
Now, even the tiny Mac mini has not just the headphone port, but other ports in the front of it as well. The Mac studio has an SD card slot in the front of it, plus ports. It's a brave new world.
And that is where you'd want an SD card slot.
Yes.
But, no, I mean, keep in mind, like, you know, with, first of all, if you do, you know, what John said of, like, the nightmare scenario, having it permanently plugged in cord into the front of your Mac mini and you hate that it has to sneak around to the back, let me advise you on something. Get a right-angle headphone plug. Like, you can get a right-angle cord from Amazon for, like, $3.
So that helps a lot because then the cord goes straight down. I have a couple of things on my desk where I have like, you know, a wire that would stick straight out and I just, you know, went on Amazon. It's paid the three bucks to get a right angle plug on that one. That was exactly the right lane. So it wouldn't have too much excess and it made a much cleaner setup.
But also, yes, if you really are going to be doing something permanent that, you know, you always want something at the back and you want a really clean front.
odds are somewhere in this setup you're going to have a place to put a usb audio device and that you know whether you call it a deck or a speaker amp these are all this or a headphone amp rather these are all the same things it's just you know a usb audio device that has a headphone output of some kind and you can you know bury that wherever you want to bury it in your setup so that you have lots of options also one thing to consider i was just looking up the the weight of the mac mini is only 1.5 or 1.6 pounds depending on configuration um
this is you know less substantially less than a macbook air in weight um that's still going to be a little bit dense but it is possible if you had a headphone jack on the back and you tugged on that a little bit you could like twist the whole mac mini around you could like you know move the physical mac mini with the motion of your headphones if you pulled hard enough because again it's only one and a
So that's another consideration. Like they've made this so small and it's getting lighter over time. So you don't want it like being scooted around the desk needlessly either. So yeah, another reason why being on the front is fine.
Well, that's the Apple TV problem, and I bet it's true of the Mac Mini, too. If you connect cables to all the things in the back, power, a bunch of USB, Ethernet, those cables, the force on those cables, the stiffness of those cables, already may be, like, tilting your entire Mac Mini, like, on an angle off of the surface. Yeah. Or, like, pulling it to the side.
You try to align it so it's, like, parallel to the side of your desk, and you let go, and it just slides another two degrees because the cables are too stiff. Yeah.
cable like it's so small compared to the strength i have the same problem with apple tv pucks like sometimes you can find a place in your entertainment center where it sits just fine but sometimes it just wants to move because i mean hdmi if you have hdmi and you've got really thick hdmi cable uh it's a problem uh i don't know maybe you can just everyone every uh mac mini should come with like a custom made exactly the same uh proportions as the top of the case like tungsten slab that you can just put on top probably not good for cooling though no
All right. And then Quinn Nelson was perhaps the first person to point out something that we've heard pointed out to us many, many, many times. Quinn writes, you can buy another base model Mac mini. So this is 16 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD. For the price that it costs to upgrade a single Mac mini to 32 gigs of RAM and 512 gigabyte SSD. So let me repeat that.
If you have the base model, you can, in order to get to a sum total of 32 gigs and 512 gigs, you can buy an entire second Mac mini for about the same price as it costs to upgrade the original Mac mini with the same specs. It's bananas.
yeah if you well it's one dollar less yeah if you double the ram and storage it is double the price of the base model mac mini that's amazing and i wanted to break down we talked about this before and we didn't say they don't want to go into numbers but here let's go into numbers how does this work out so the base model is 599 okay that's 16 gigs of ram 256 ssd when you do the ram upgrade to 32 that is plus 400 dollars
that's adding 16 gigabytes to the base 16 at $25 per gigabyte. And you may be wondering, how much does that cost for real? Not an Apple Fantasyland. I tried to find something comparable, same speed RAM to the best of my knowledge. And I was super fair with this because I'm comparing it in this case to Crucial, which is a name brand, 32 gig LPDDR5X 7500 memory, right? But this Crucial thing,
It's an entire printed circuit board with associated capacitors and resistors and multiple chips and, oh yeah, also the two NAND chips. When you upgrade the RAM on the Mac Mini, it's just two different RAM chips that are soldered into the package that the SoC is on. It's not a whole other circuit board with its own associated circuitry coming with it.
It's not a separately packaged retail product. All right. So anyway, this crucial 32 gig thing is a retail product. And it costs $174.99 on the crucial.com website, which I'm sure is not the cheapest place you can get it. Doing the math on that, Apple's RAM upgrades are 6.5 times more expensive than buying a separate retail packaged printed circuit board complete memory module.
And this is one of those LP, low pressure compression attached memory modules for like a laptop or whatever. So this isn't even apples to apples. Apple is just taking two RAM chips and putting in two different ones. It's just, it's insane. So 6.5 times more expensive. The SSD upgrade to 512, you go from 256 to 512, that's a $200 upgrade.
And that's adding 256 gigs at 78 cents per gigabyte, which sounds cheap, but the actual retail cost per gigabyte of this type of storage is 12 cents per gigabyte. And again, an extremely fair comparison. A Samsung 990 Pro, one terabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD. The price per gigabyte is 12 cents per gigabyte, which is once again, amazingly, exactly 6.5 times more expensive for the Apple upgrade
than a separately packaged retail product that has its own printed circuit board, a whole bunch of other support chips, a heat sink, a box, everything associated with it. And when you do an SSD upgrade on a Mac mini or any of the other Macs, you can see people do them on YouTube. They will desolder the two NAND chips that are soldered onto the logic board.
It's just two NAND chips and they will buy two bare NAND chips and solder them in place. There's a whole bunch of other stuff you have to do to get the OS to recognize it or whatever.
But what I'm saying is the components that you are getting for this additional $200 are so much more minimal than the components in this standalone retail product printed circuit board that yes, also has NAND chips on it, but a bunch of other stuff from Samsung name brand 990 Pro. It's ridiculous. 6.5 times more expensive. So again, that's $400 for the RAM. $200 for the SSD.
Total upgrade price, $600. So you got your base Mac Mini. You want to bump it up from 16 to 32 and from 256 to 512? Or do you want an entire separate Mac Mini? Like, if you could somehow harvest...
The two 50-sync gig N chips that come with the second Mac Mini and somehow harvest the SSD, so the stuff that comes with the other Mac Mini, and then throw away the rest of it, it would still probably be the same price. It's ridiculous. Anyway, yeah, so the Mac Mini with 32 gigs of RAM and 512 SSD is $1,200 or double the price of the base model.
That's what we mean when we say Apple's upgraded prices are ridiculous. It's not like they're just a little bit more expensive. When I say like six times more expensive, I'm not exaggerating. That's literally what they are in the most generous possible comparison. If we actually compared like what is the retail price of just those NAND chips, I couldn't find that.
So I had to go for a Samsung 990 Pro to get the price per gigabyte, but... be assured that the actual retail difference in price is probably more like seven or eight when you get down to apples to apples. And then obviously the wholesale price that applies for this is, you know, one 18th of that, but whatever.
Boy, it's, it's a lot. It's a lot. And I mean, what are you really going to do? You're not going to buy a second Mac mini. You're going to upgrade as you need to, but it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt.
And the storage, at least you can buy external and tack it on and deal with that, which is annoying, but at least you can do it. But the Ram, there's not really any option. If you, it's, you know, it's, The RAM is soldered on, and it's also a part of the SoC package.
So like I said, I've seen people do SSD upgrades by desoldering and resoldering, which is an incredibly difficult operation to pull off and requires a lot of expertise and skill and the know-how to get the OS to recognize it. But at least it's possible. But I've never seen one attempt it with the RAM. So yeah, you're kind of stuck.
Oh, yeah. All right, so with the iMac, things seem mostly okay. However, if you're one of those people that really loves to have two pointing devices, both a Magic Mouse and a Magic Trackpad, well, tough nugs, because Apple apparently has removed the option to buy color-matched trackpad apps.
keyboard and mouse together reading from nine to five mac with the m4 model you know you can no longer get both the magic trackpad magic mouse in the past you could optionally buy both imac accessories as part of your purchase this means that if you want a trio of color magic magic keyboard magic mouse magic trackpad you're simply out of luck or you're going to ebay or you're going to apple store and like marco said give them your imac serial number and tell them you lost your trackpad when really you didn't and really you bought it with a mouse there's probably some way to do it but this is just another consequence of uh
Apple being weird about the color things. And it's kind of sad that you used to be able to do it, but now you can't.
There's also been a little bit of grumbling about SSD limits. So the M4 versus M4 Pro and Max have different SSD size limits, and they're also different between devices, if I'm not mistaken. So the largest SSD you can get, as an example, with the M4 Mac Mini is two terabytes. But the largest SSD you can get with the M4 Pro Mac Mini is eight terabytes. What's going on with that, John?
So sometimes it's the case that Apple is just not offering certain sizes in certain products for whatever reason. Like there's, you know, too many combinations of products. They decide, like, I forget what are the ones off the top of my head, but it's like one of them doesn't come with 32 gigs of RAM on the laptop, but it does on the mini or vice versa or something like that, right?
But for the storage size, we don't know this for a fact, but it is reasonable to assume based on the M1 and M2 and M3. The M series SoCs have the SSD controllers on them, essentially, and they have limits on the number and capacity of NAND chips that they can address.
And it is reasonable to assume, again based on the plain M1, M2, and M3, that the M4 actually can't address more than two terabytes, given current NAND sizes and number of chips that it can address. but the M4 Mac Pro can. So it's not like Apple is refusing to let you buy a plain M4 Mac Mini with 8 terabytes.
I believe it is probably the case that it literally can't address that given current NAND sizes. So keep that in mind. And, you know, there are plenty of places where Apple subdivides its product line based on, you know, capacities that don't really make any sense. And it's just a way of minimizing skews and finding the ones I think they're going to make the most money on.
But the plain M series very often in the past have just simply not been able to address as much SSD space as the larger ones. And that is almost certainly the case with the plain M4 as well.
All right, and then tell me about performance, specifically with the M4 Pro and M4 Pro Max.
Unlike what we'll talk about in the after show, there is some really good news in the world of Apple and Max, believe it or not. We talked about it when they had, what was it, Mac Week? That's what we could have called it. We could have done a pun on the publication that you two probably never read.
Anyway, when they released all those Macs on the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the new MacBook Pros with the new M4 processors, and we talked about how great they are. Now, since that show came out, there have been sort of preliminary, unconfirmed, uploaded Geekbench benchmarks for the M4 Pro and the M4 Macs in various devices.
This time is always so weird because technically these things shouldn't be in people's hands, although some plain M4s were shipped in Russia a while ago. But anyway, they're showing up in Geekbench. When people get their retail products in their hands, Geekbench sort of incorporates all the measurements and they end up on the leaderboards or whatever. But for now, if you explicitly search for...
the CPUs by the Mac identifiers. You can find results. We'll put links in the show notes so you can look at the results for yourself. Again, they are preliminary with a few number of data points, so take that for the grain of salt. And as I always say, Geekbench, like all benchmarks, may or may not be representative of anything you care about.
Making a good representative benchmark is very difficult. In the end, what you care about is, does it do the thing that I need it to do faster than my old thing? Whatever that thing is. Are you rendering things? Are you compressing audio? Are you compiling an Xcode? Whatever it is that you're doing, all you care about is how fast does it do that?
But things like Geekbench try to be a representative benchmark for the various parts of the computer so you have some way to compare it. So here they are with all those caveats in mind. There's some amazing stuff going on. We've talked before about the M4's single-core performance being amazing. We only really had measurements of that in the iPad Pro because that was the only thing the M4 was in.
But anyway, now the plain M4s are out. The M4 Pro has the same amazing single-core performance as the M4, but a little bit better because it's probably clocked higher and has better cooling. So M4 Pro is reaching... $3,900 in the single-core Geekbench benchmark. And how does that compare to its predecessors? That is a 26% increase over the M3 Pro.
It is also a 26% increase over the M3 Max because single-core really doesn't change. Pro, Max, whatever, like maybe they'll be clocked higher or maybe they have better cooling for sustained throughput, but single-core is usually similar. This was true back in the Intel days too, by the way.
Very often, if you wanted to get the fastest single-core performance, you would get, like, an iMac or something with a smaller number of cores because the big, like, 24-core or 12-core or whatever it was back in the day, the big multi-core thing that was in the Mac Pro had lower single-core performance because they couldn't clock those single-cores as high because the chip was just so big and hot.
But anyway, single-core is still great. Versus the M2 Ultra. which is the fastest SoC that you can get in the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, the M4 Pro single-core performance is 41% faster. Multi-core. Now we start to get interesting. Multi-core, remember the M4 Pro is 14 cores. It has 10 power cores and 4 efficiency cores. Multi-core is 22,000.
That is a 48% increase over its predecessor, the M3 Pro. The M3 Pro made some very different choices. It was the 6-6 arrangement, 6 efficiency cores, 6 power cores. So it's bound to not do as well in multi-core. The M3 Pro was just plain aiming for like, I guess... Better low power performance for lots of non-demanding jobs, but Apple has changed it to mine. It's mine.
The M4 Pro is really cranking it up. The M4 Pro's multi-core performance is 8% faster than the M3 Max. So now it is better than the previous Max chip. Oh, and by the way, the M4 Pro's multi-core performance in this one really hurts. 6% faster than the M2 Ultra.
Ooh.
Remember we're talking about the M4 Pro here. This is not the best M4 chip. This is like the middle one. There's M4, then there's M4 Pro. Its multi-core performance is better than the M2 Ultra. That's bad. Wow. That's real bad.
That's great.
This is a great problem to have. This is what happens when you don't update your chip for two years. Yes, it is. Right? I mean, M2 is old. Obviously, you can just look at the number, M2, M3. But the M4 Pro, and by the way, this is not reflected in our shirt sales. No one wants to buy an M4 Pro shirt. You should. The M4 Pro is crushing it this generation. It is most improved.
And granted, part of that is because the M3 Pro was so weird and different in how it arranged itself, which is why you get that big jump. But just forget about the M3 Pro and the 48% jump from the M3 Pro. It's better than the M3 Max. It's better than the M2 Ultra in multi-core. It crushes them all in single-core too, by the way, but it's still better in multi-core.
So what the hell is the M2 Ultra actually even good for? When you go look at memory bandwidth, again, huge jump over the M3 Pro, so it's 70% faster than the M3 Pro, because the M3 Pro actually went down in memory bandwidth from the M2 Pro, I believe. But it is 50% slower in memory bandwidth than the M3 Max. So that's where you're spending your extra money.
And it is 200% less memory bandwidth than the M2 Ultra. So if memory bandwidth is your concern, the M2 Ultra still is twice as big. And by the way, the memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second. And then, you know, the M2 Ultra is 819, right? The metal score, that's like the GPU benchmark, mostly the GPU benchmark that you care about.
I didn't even look at the OpenCL one because Apple does everything in metal these days. Metal score is 110K. That's 41% faster than the M3 Pro. That's 40% slower than the M3 Max, and it's 100% slower than the M2 Ultra. So... Why would anyone want an M2 Ultra at this point? Well, really, you shouldn't.
But if you have one, take heart to know that you have double the memory bandwidth and you are twice as fast as the M4 Pro in GPU benchmarks. But boy, if you have one of those older, beefier CPUs or SoCs, it's bad when the mid-tier M4 is kicking your butt in a lot of ways. So anyway, we go to the M4 Max. The M4 Max is the first... Personal computer chip in Geekbench to break 4,000 on single core.
I believe the M4 was already like the top single core performer, but the M4 Max has a bunch of ratings in there like 3,900, 4,000. So single core is even better than the M4 Max. Why is it better? Is it just because it's clocked higher? Is it just because they had better cooling? Is it just because someone got lucky on a run or put it in an ice pack?
Again, unconfirmed preliminary reports, but just no. Single core on the M4 is like the best in the entire industry. And these are chips that are in laptops, by the way. And iPads. You can go... You can go search Geekbench for like, what if I want to buy a really big, really hot, high TDP Intel desktop CPU? Surely that is faster. And the answer is no, it's not. You can search the results.
Again, it's just a benchmark, but single core is amazing. So the M4 Max is 29% faster than the M3 Max and 46% faster than the M2 Ultra. On multi-core, it's 26,000, which is not much higher than the M4 Pro, but still it's 27% faster than the M3 Max and 24% faster than the M2 Ultra. And then memory bandwidth, it's 546 gigs a second, 33% faster than the M3 Max, but 50% slower than the M2 Ultra.
And then in metal, 24% faster than the M3 Max and 15% slower than the M2 Ultra. So the Max... Continues a pace from the M3. M3, the M4 Max is, you know, just a steady upward climb. But because the M3 Pro took that diversion into not quite being as fast, it's got this huge boost.
Yeah, so if you've got an M2 Ultra and you bought it back when it was new, there are still some things that it does better. But it has been handily surpassed by the mid-tier laptop chip in single and multi-core performance. That is just, I really hope this whole thing with the Pro series is just an anomaly.
They don't plan on doing this because you can't release a bunch of Pro products, never change the price, and then not update them for two years. Otherwise, you're going to get embarrassing things like this. I mean, if they just keep up with this pace, the phone chips will be faster in every measure as well.
But it's a great time to buy a Mac, and it's not a great time to want to buy one of the desktop Pro Macs because they have fallen behind.
Oh, but maybe they'll come screaming back. We'll see.
There are rumors to that effect. And the main rumor that we talked about before is about the... The reason I mention this now is because I hope we'll find this out by next episode. Someone needs to get an M4 Max and cut the thing open and show us what the die looks like. Because remember on the M3 Max, someone did that and they said, hey, look, there's no interposer.
You can't take two M3 Max and stick them end to end and make an M3 Ultra. uh and that seems like it was true because apple never did make an m3 ultra and maybe it's because they never planned to and they didn't put that interposer on the m3 max and you can't stick to them end to end so when someone gets an m4 max they need to cut that sucker open and say hey
Is there that little strip in the bottom that looks like the silicon interposer where they take two Maxes and stick them together end-to-end? Because if that's not there, what that means is either Apple's never going to make another chip better than the Max, or when the M4 Ultra or whatever comes out, it won't be two Maxes stuck together.
But as the rumors suggest, it might be an entirely new chip that is just simply... even bigger than the Max, but it is not made up of two Maxes. And that would be smart, because as we've discussed in the past, putting two Maxes together, you end up with a lot of wasted stuff that you don't need doubles of, right? You don't need doubles of all the media encoders and all the other stuff.
It's more efficient to make one big honking chip More expensive. Much more expensive, potentially. But more efficient in terms of bang for your buck out of the... Not bang for your buck. Bang for your square meters out of the silicon area. For your buck, it's probably worse. Because the bigger you make the chip, the more expensive it is to get one out that works. So I'm looking forward to that.
As soon as someone cuts one of these open, we'll know if we're in for a surprise. But if someone sees an interposer, eh, it's just two M4 Maxes stuck together. Which, to be clear, would be great, but boring.
All right, and then a handful of people wrote in to correct us when we said, oh, you can't buy a Mac with 8 gigs of RAM anymore. Au contraire, Walmart is still selling that M1 MacBook Air with 8 gigs of RAM for $700, although as we record this, it's actually on sale for $650. But yeah, that still exists. That's still a thing in their lineup.
Yeah, I give that a pass. I mean, like, it's amazing that they went back and updated the M2 Air in addition to the M3 Air to be 16. They could have updated neither of them and just waited for the M4 Air in the spring to go to 16, but it said they went back two whole product lines. They just didn't go back to the M1 and upgrade it, which is fine, right? No problem with that whatsoever.
The new USB-C accessories, including those color-matched ones that we were talking about a little bit ago, apparently they require macOS Sequoia because they do not work with anything before it or even the 15.2 beta, which is too bad. Reading from MacRumors, the new USB-C accessories require macOS Sequoia 15.1 to work properly.
And as noted on the MacRumors forums, earlier versions of macOS do not work. There are reports from users running macOS Sonoma and Ventura who are having issues with the new devices. With the keyboard, touch ID and function keys don't work, and with the magic mouse, the scrolling doesn't function. In some cases, the accessories are recognized as older devices, inhibiting proper functionality.
And this isn't a problem limited to just people running older versions of macOS because there are also reports from developers who have installed the first macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta. It appears that the macOS Sequoia 15.2 beta was released before Apple could add in support for the new Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad.
I hope this is a developing story because don't you think it should be super prominent on these product pages? Like, don't buy this keyboard.
if you don't if you don't have at least 15.1 that seems like something really important it's not like there's some special feature that gets enabled by having 15.1 it's like the basic functionality of the input device so like if you buy a magic mouse and you come home and you connect it to your computer that's running let's say sequoia 15.0 and the scrolling doesn't work you take it back to the store and say this mouse is broken they say oh you should have known when you bought that mouse it requires 15.1 you need to update your os
That is super weird to me. Is it because of the USB control? Backport this, Apple. Provide an update at least to 14 and 13.
How long did they know ahead of time that these products were being released? Did one team not talk to the other? Surely these have been in the works for at least months. Why wasn't this in .0?
Who knows? Why don't they just work out of the box? It's literally the same keyboard, but with a USB-C thing. I'm sure there are third-party USB-C keyboards that you can buy and just plug into a Mac, and they just work. Yes. Like through some generic keyboard driver. But the Apple-branded one... That's why I couldn't believe this story, and I thought it had to be a mistake or whatever.
So I hope by next week it'll be like, oh, that wasn't really true. It was just some other issue or whatever. But this seems...
ridiculous to me so be aware as of as of the time this story was written which is uh granted october 31st uh people were buying the new keyboards and mice and discovering that they don't work right unless you have mac os 15.1 or later but not too much later because the 15.2 beta doesn't work either
Daniel Luz writes that the Apple $69 1-meter Thunderbolt 5 cable is a passive cable. 1-meter is the USB... What is IF here? USB IF?
Industry Forum or something?
Yeah, it's the USB Standards Group.
Thank you. The 1-meter is the USB IF's limit for passive cables, as is expected. Every compliant passive Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 cable is compatible with Thunderbolt 5. It's unclear to me, writes Daniel, what the situation is for Thunderbolt 3. There appears to be a Gen 3 that works.
If you have an old USB 4 cable, you might already have a Thunderbolt 5 cable as long as it's passive and at most one meter long. So perhaps the only difference between this new Thunderbolt 5 cable and the one that ships with the studio display is higher power delivery.
I think there's a little tiny 5, a little tiny light gray 5 in a square laser etched on the metal part of the USB-C connector as a further eye test of old people. But yeah, last time we said these cables are expensive because they have little chips on them, but apparently under one meter, no chips.
Apple itself says this is a passive cable, so it's just a very well-constructed, well-insulated $70 one-meter-long Thunderbolt 5 cable.
No capes! Daniel Nelson writes that there is at least one dock that supports 10 gigabit Ethernet, the OWC Thunderbolt Pro dock. I think I was the one who had said, as far as I know, there are no docks that exist that have 10 gig Ethernet. I knew that my beloved CalDigit TS4 has two and a half gig, but Daniel points out there is this one from OWC that does include 10 gig.
iFixit has torn down the iPad mini A17 Pro to see if there's any physical or hardware reasons for jelly scrolling improvements. And after watching this like six or seven minute YouTube video, I can tell you that no, there doesn't appear to be any hardware changes, but they do put the old one and the new one in super duper slow-mo or they take super slow-mo videos of them.
And you can see that it is unquestionably better now, but not perfect.
Yeah, it's better enough that seemingly all the reviewers, except for the one from The Verge, said, oh, it's cured, no more jelly scrolling. But if you watch it in super slow-mo, you'll see it is just much improved, but it still exists.
And a lot of the theories people have with the old ones is like, oh, they need to take the video controller and attach it to the screen from the top instead of the side, because when they do it from the side, it ends up driving the display in a way such that one half of it doesn't update as fast as the other half, and you get the jelly scrolling and yada yada.
So they opened this thing up and said, what do they do to fix the jelly scrolling? Did they do all those things people suggested? The answer was no. It's just exactly the same as the previous one. The hardware looks the same. It's in the same place. It's connected the same way.
So maybe it was just 100% a software fix or there's something about the fix that isn't detectable by iFixit, something inside the chips that they can't see or something. But yeah, what a weird situation. Like this complaint about the iPads existed for so long and they've seemingly... all but entirely fix the problem without changing the hardware in a way that I think it could detect.
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Kilvor writes in regarding the quote-unquote fork in the road for Apple TV, i.e. whether or not it wants to keep pursuing GPU and CPU power beyond what is needed for streaming video so it can play games better. The latest Apple TV is actually worse for games, even if the chip is better on paper, since in practice it thermal throttles a lot earlier.
This is according to an old colleague who was working on an Apple Arcade title, Absolute Monkey's Paw.
Yeah, that's such a weird thing. Like far be it for me to argue for fans, but the Apple TV had a fan that I couldn't hear. And when they got rid of the fan, it's like, oh, great, they don't need the fan anymore. But apparently they did. If you're running games on it, the fan apparently helps.
So these passively cooled ones that seem to be constructed much more cheaply than the much more expensive ones that had the little tiny silent fan inside it. Yeah, maybe those were the good ones. So yeah, I guess that's another fork in the road for them. If they want to pursue gaming performance, they probably need to bring that fan back.
I mean, in all honesty, though, the Apple TV is not a gaming platform. When they first revamped it as the app-powered platform years ago, they tried to make it everything. They tried to make it, hey, you're going to browse real estate listings on here, you can do your online shopping on your Apple TV, you can play games, and yeah, you can also watch TV shows.
And similar to the Apple Watch, we very quickly realized, okay, all of these things that this launched with claiming to do we really only want to do like one or two of them. And the answer with Apple TV is, yeah, this is really good as a TV, like watching thing, a video watching platform. It's not a great game platform. And it's, it's not because of hardware reasons.
Like, I think this is one of the, obviously with the exception of this throttling issue that this person, but like,
i think one of the things that's hard for nerds like us to get used to is that we can have devices in our computing lives now that have the computing power to be really good game platforms but just aren't for other reasons that seem like insufficient justifications for it not being a game platform like the apple tv is a terrible game platform for two big reasons number one
Just, you know, Apple and gaming, they just, you know, they mishandle it in so many ways. And what brings so many games to the iPhone does not bring games to the Apple TV. Number two, it doesn't come with a controller. And also, by the way, number three, the weird on-demand resource loading on Apple TV makes it hard to deliver good games. So...
The Apple TV, it has the hardware to be a great game platform. There's nothing stopping it hardware-wise from being a great game platform. But it's all those other ecosystem problems around it that make it so that's pretty much not going to be a thing. And, you know, we have kind of an embarrassment of riches in computing these days that the good thing is we don't need it to be a game platform.
Like if you want to play pretty good games on your TV, you can get like a $30 Raspberry Pi and install packages on that, especially if you're into emulators. Like that's a great platform for that. But like you can get a Raspberry Pi with game support that you can plug into your TV and it's pretty good quality games for less than the cost of an Apple TV game controller.
um so you know we have lots of other ways to play games but it is frustrating as nerds to see something like this that can have the ability to play really great games and just for kind of crappy reasons doesn't really get there yeah and that's that's the fork in the road that apple has uh do you want to keep making the apple tv have better and better socs in it if so to one end uh and even just taking away the fan like maybe you know makes it cheaper fewer parts you know no potential fan knows though again the old one was silent
but it makes it a worse gaming platform. Like I said, last time I tried to play a game on the Apple TV, there are games that play perfectly fine on the Apple TV. It's surprisingly powerful for its size and cost, and they were taken away from, like, they were no longer available. I'd played them on Apple TV before, and now they weren't there anymore, and that's not a great experience.
I can't remember the last time that happened on any other gaming platform or console. Like, it's not even like it was available on an older version of Apple TV. It was just it was removed from Apple Arcade or it was removed from the Apple Store or whatever. That's frustrating. I'm not expecting it to play super-duper fancy AAA games with... I'm not expecting it to be a gaming PC.
But for the games that do run comfortably on it, it's nice that it runs games. I think it should run games. And it can run them comfortably with its current size SoC, but Apple's mishandling of games ruins that. And going forward...
Until we get to 8K or something, there's not really much reason to double the power of the CPU and GPU because it can already play all your streaming apps without breaking a sweat. So, yeah, what is Apple going to do with this device? I assume they'll just keep upgrading the SoC just because they don't want to keep manufacturing the old ones.
And at a certain point, it's just less expensive to, you know, turn off the or stop paying for the seven nanometer line to be manufacturing chips and just take the five nanometer ones or whatever. but I personally hope they keep increasing the SOC because I believe there is a potential future in it as a casual game platform for the television.
I prefer it to... I certainly prefer it to buying a Raspberry Pi and hooking it up, and I prefer it to having to log over one of my big game consoles because right now it's the only gaming thing I have connected to my big TV, and it's just there for brief casual game sessions or a few particular games that are available on Apple TV, but... Yeah, we'll find out when they release the next one.
Find out what they do. Have they made it more powerful? Have they made it more expensive? Have they added a fan or is it just status quo?
Finally, in follow-up, keyboard cleaning corner. We were asked about this, I think, in an Ask ATP, but basically, you know, how do you clean your keyboard when you're powering off the computer and then mashing on any freaking key? We'll turn it back on.
And I think we had a couple of solutions at the time, but I also wanted to bring up a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, writes and makes Cleanup Buddy. We'll put a link in the show notes, which is another one of those tools that'll basically disable the keyboard for a little while.
And then Daniel Piper, or maybe Pepper Piper, I believe, wrote in and said, cleaning the keyboard on an ARM Mac can be achieved by doing the following. Hold down the left control and left command keys and the right shift key for seven seconds. And then while still holding down those keys, press the power button for another seven seconds.
After that, the computer can only be powered on by using the power button. I tried this, and it didn't work. Then I turned off my computer, and I tried it again, and it didn't work. Then I tried it, and I turned my computer back off, tried it for a third time, and I'll be damned if it didn't work. And it really does do exactly what Daniel said.
I guess I just screwed it up the first time, and I think your computer has to be off to actually have it engage.
It's not an easy thing to do. And when he first sent this, I replied and I said, that sounds like the way you did an SMC reset on T2 Max, but actually that particular finger twister is slightly different. We'll put a link in the show notes to that one. So even though it sounds like something you might've heard before, it's different.
And Daniel said he tried it while listening to the show just to make sure it works. And sure enough, it does. So it is complicated and it can be done. Lots of other people are like, why do you have this problem? Just turn on the screensaver.
Because if you turn on the screensaver, like with a screen lock, the only way you're going to do anything damaging to your computer is if you accidentally fat finger your password into the lock thing or touch the touch ID thing with your fingerprint. So...
this is not that big of a problem but if you really do want your computer to be off it is frustrating that it keeps turning itself back on so if you if you want to fix to that problem this will apparently work i do wonder what this is doing like that's why i was like oh no is this doing an smc reset is it going to reset some firmware things is it going to like turn on the boot chime when the boot chime was off have you noticed any ill effects casey from trying this
No, except that it only does it until the next boot. So you can clean your keyboard, do whatever, as long as you don't touch the power button. And then once you turn the computer back on, it forgets that this is the mode it was in, and it goes back to any button can turn the computer back on again, which I don't like. I wish I could make this like a permanent setting.
Yeah, they should just put this, like, instead of these weird, you know, key combo and things and holding stuff, just put it in, like, the recovery thing or put it something, like, they have a place where they have, like, the so you want to do a weird thing to your computer, like, when you boot in recovery mode or you hold down the power button or whatever. Put this there with a GUI or something.
Or add a feature to macOS. Maybe they'll get to it eventually that just says, I'm going to clean my keyboard, lock everything up. And I guess they would probably just say that's the screensaver, but... Anyway, like the boot chime, right? So on Macs, from the very first Mac, when you turn them on, they would make a chiming sound, and Apple has changed the chime over the years.
And then eventually, they added the ability to turn off that chime. And that used to be like a firmware setting, but now there's actually a GUI for it. That's a perfect example of something like some people don't want their Mac to make a noise when it boots or restarts or whatever, and some people do.
Some people don't want their Mac to turn on when they just hit anything on the keyboard, and some people do. Make the default what you think the majority of people want. And for everybody else, put a little tiny switch buried somewhere in system settings. We'll find it eventually.
So for topics, we have some somewhat breaking news from a little less than a week ago. Apple has come out of left field and has bought Pixelmator, which I don't think I certainly didn't see coming. I don't know that anyone really saw it coming, but there's a release on Pixelmator's website saying,
In part, it reads, Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.
Whoa. I think a lot of, some people did.
predict this i'm not in the the world of seeing who's going to get acquired by apple and image editing apps but some people in that world said oh yeah they expected this for a long time pixelmator is highly regarded company with highly regarded products that have received awards from apple in the past i don't know how many awards they've gotten but i think it's multiple um Uh, they're good apps.
Uh, they are Mac apps. I believe, uh, at least Pixelmator is written with AppKit cause it's that old. Um, and I'm not sure what their other apps are written in, but they're good apps. They are Mac apps. Uh, they are award winning. Uh, I think I own all of them except for maybe the iOS one, uh, cause I mostly do the stuff on my Mac.
uh and apple bought the whole company and apple being apple they're not going to tell you why they bought the company other than giving you remember they can statement they have like a text expanded shortcut that says apple buys small companies from time to time and blah blah blah blah like they never tell you like what they're buying it for but for those of us out here who like and use uh some of these apps you're immediately worried and saying
What's going to happen to Pixelmator or Photomator or whatever it is that you're doing? Obviously, the press release says no changes are planned at this time. But the big question is, did Apple buy this so they could continue developing the Pixelmator family of photo editing apps? Did they buy this so they could incorporate that functionality into their own Apple Photos apps?
Or do they buy it just as an acquihire where we don't care about your apps. We just want the people because it's really hard to find excellent Mac developers. Hey, there's a bunch of excellent Mac developers. Let's buy the company as a way of hiring all the people in the company and put some golden handcuffs on them that says their Apple stock doesn't invest until X or Y number of years.
And then just allow Pixelmator and Photomator to just wither on the vine and eventually stop working. Which one of those things is going to happen? I don't know, but... I'm kind of not happy about this acquisition.
Yeah, I think if you use the Pixelmator family of apps, you probably should be a little wary about this. Apple's track record here, from the point of view of you, the customer of these apps, is not promising. Now, again, who knows what will happen. It's a new situation. They could always do things differently now than they've done in the past, but... It's not a great track record.
So when they say no changes to the apps at this time, well, that doesn't mean anything. They posted this a few days ago. They could change it tomorrow. So that means nothing. They're very careful to not make any claims about the future, really, that are substantial. So what we know is that Apple has bought the company. It certainly seems like, you know, the team was a huge part of it.
I do think it's probably like, you know, there have been speculation on how much money it had to be because they're seeking regulatory approval and everything. It's probably, if I had to guess, too much money to pay just for a talent acquisition. They are not probably going to spend that much money to just get a handful of people to work for them.
That doesn't seem like it's worth it to them for that amount. So it is probably about buying at least the apps as well. But if you look at what are the likely outcomes here, I think the most likely is that they water down some of this and integrate it into the Photos app. So these apps then go away. That is the most likely in my opinion.
Second most likely is these continue to be standalone apps in some form. And then maybe Apple bundles them together with Logic and Final Cut and makes a pro bundle. Maybe they give it away for free. Maybe it's a $200 new version of Aperture. Maybe they keep the name. Maybe they don't. But either way, it still remains separate apps. That's possible. I just don't think that's the most likely.
I think by far, in my opinion, the most likely outcome here is... bits and pieces of this get integrated in possibly a watered-down way into the Photos app. That, I think, gives Apple the biggest bang for their buck, because they don't, like, you know, I don't think Apple cares about the existing customer bases of these apps, really. They just care about, like, what can we do with this asset?
And I think that's the way Apple will get the most bang for their buck, in their view. Although, you know, that is pretty rough for the customer. So we can hope, what I'm hoping for is more of an aperture situation, more of, like, They use this to continue their own efforts into making high-quality pro apps.
But the reason I'm a little wary about that is that we really haven't seen a lot of evidence to suggest that they're looking for that right now or that that's an interest for them.
Yeah, well, we have a couple of examples. One from recent history and one from ancient history. The recent history one is workflows. Apple bought workflows. Workflow. Workflow, sorry. Singular. And incorporated it into the OS and continued to enhance it. It's shortcuts now. And they didn't just like, oh, we'll fold it into the OS and then just like never update it again.
They've continued to work on shortcuts. It has sort of become an essential headlining feature of their operating system. They essentially bought from a third party and they didn't just like, you know, obviously shortcuts, the app went away, but I'm not sure that's workflow. The app went away, but it was pretty quickly replaced by shortcuts. And it's for the people who liked workflow.
I think they also like shortcuts. So that's probably the best it could possibly go. If Apple buys you and decides you're going to be part of our existing system. platform, right? We're not going to continue to sell you as a third-party app. You're literally going to be part of iOS or you're going to be part of an existing app like Apple Photos or whatever. That's like the best it can go.
That's normally not how it happens. Most of the time when Apple buys small companies, whatever they were making is never seen again. Now, the bad story about pro apps is Apple, many, many years ago, went on a series of buying sprees, buying up all these pro applications to essentially make its own pro suite of stuff. Final Cut Pro was bought from Macromedia, maybe. They bought Shake and Motion.
Logic, I think, was purchased. Aperture, I forget if that was purchased or they just purchased the people who were writing it or hired them. But anyway, they had a bunch of pro apps that they were making. They used to sell for a lot of money. And one by one, Apple has lost interest in those pro apps. Aperture went away. Shake went away.
I think they sold something called Color as a color correction. They sold these things for hundreds of dollars trying to sell them to professionals, and eventually Apple was like, we're losing interest. Final Cut somehow has survived, barely. But a lot of the other ones went away.
And so now when Apple buys an app like Pixelmator, any youngster who's like, wow, they're going to make a Photoshop competitor. It's like, look, been there, done that. Apple had a brief moment where it's like, we're going to make apps that compete with Adobe. and they gave up.
It's not because the apps were bad or terrible, but Apple stopped putting money into the development of them, and you will never compete with Adobe if you do that. Adobe will continue to put money into Photoshop. So if you're going to compete with Photoshop, you can't make the app once and ship it and say, huh, isn't it great?
Maybe we'll update it again in six years, but we're not going to tell you. That's not how to compete. So Apple needs to decide, do you want to make pro applications at all? If so, you could make a Photoshop-ish competitor product out of the Pixelmator suite of things. But if you do that, anyone who's old enough to remember Aperture and so on will go, eh, no thanks.
Apple doesn't seem like they're really committed to this whole pro app thing. I'm not going to switch my whole life to their platform and get all on board for it. Just when I'm just when the finally the good version of aperture comes out, it's the last version and they're never going to make it again. And now, you know, I'm screwed.
So there's that sort of past trauma of pro apps, which makes anybody over a certain age look at this and say, there's just no way. They are going to continue shipping and developing Pixelmator to the degree that the Pixelmator company was.
You know, Pixelmator, the company, was making new versions of Pixelmator Pro, improving it over time, adding, you know, when the AI features came around, Pixelmator Pro was one of the first apps to have it. They have a really good, like, you know, equivalent of Apple's cleanup tool where you, like, scribble over something to erase it or whatever. That's one of the first things I bought it for.
It's great at, right? In addition to just being a general purpose photo editor. I cannot imagine Apple deciding we want to be in that business. We're going to keep developing Pixelmator Pro. And even if Apple did that, everybody with a memory is looking at them and saying, I think I'll take a pass.
I think I'll stick with insert whatever they're using now, whether it's Photoshop or Figma or any other of the big apps that compete in that realm or something smaller like Acorn where you're like, I don't want something that big and complicated or whatever.
Now, if Apple does take the guts of these apps and try to shove them into photos, again, especially with additions of like the cleanup feature and everything, does that mean Apple's not going to take Pixelmator's AI cleanup thing? And maybe spoilers for overtime, we'll probably talk about some of these features and how they compare later in the show.
Or like if you look at the feature list, will they say, okay, well, 90% of these overlap. So which one do we take? Do we throw away all the photos features for adjusting levels and curves and saturation and brightness and brilliance and all those other things and highlights and shadows or whatever and swap them all out for the Pixelmator Pro equivalents? Or do we do 50-50?
Or do we just delete the entire code base of Apple Photos and replace it with Pixelmator? And how does that work across platforms?
like i don't as great as pixelmator pro is unless photos is going to become a pixelmator pro caliber image editor i don't want them to take the subset of features that are in pixelmator that are in photos and extract them from pixelmator pro and shove them in photos because as a user the result of that is the next version of photos i get has all the same features but it's
code that was ripped out of another app and shoved into an existing app and it's probably buggy because of that not because it was buggy when it was pixelmator pro but now they're just like ripping the guts out and shoving it in there and from my experience it's not any different did you add any new features well no but now they're pixelmator powered does that make a difference to me are they appreciably better than they were in photos like
I don't understand this, which is why when I look at it as an acquihire, you said they probably wouldn't have paid all these potential millions of dollars for developers. But there is something to be said for exactly how difficult it is to find good Mac developers. As we've said many times, I'm not sure how many good Mac developers there still are inside Apple. Let alone out there in the world.
And so this is just like a unicorn where it's like a group of dedicated hardcore Mac developers familiar with Apple's platforms who are actually good at making Mac apps. I think Apple does probably want those people. But yeah, it's probably too much money to just pay for the people. So I really don't know what they're going to use these apps for.
Yeah, I mean, I think the obvious answer is to suck some of particularly Photomator into photos, but I don't know. I don't know what this is about. And I don't think I've used Photomator, but a couple of times. I definitely do use Pixelmator as my image editor of choice, but that being said, I almost never, ever, ever edit images, so...
I don't have a whole lot of experience with their stuff, but I will say that the experiences I've had is that they are, as you said, Mac-assed Mac apps. Like they really, really are Mac apps. And I could imagine it as an Aqua hire, but I don't know. It seems like a whole lot of money to pay and a whole lot of effort just to get people to work on Macs.
on your stuff i mean it seems to me like it would it would be more than that that this is more of a test again we don't know the actual numbers we're just guessing because people are saying like oh they they wouldn't have needed to submit it for regulatory approval unless it was over some amount like apple to be clear no one announced how much this acquisition is for so we don't actually know so that is an unknown
Another angle on this is how people are saying it's like, boy, if Pixelmator can't make it as an independent Mac software developer, how can anyone? Because they were so good at what they did. They were, again, award winning. They made amazing apps. Everybody loved them. And they can't survive as an independent company. And I don't think that's the case.
I think they could survive as an independent company. But when Apple comes knocking with a giant bag of money. If you want a giant bag of money, you take it. Like everyone has their price. I don't think Pixelmator was like, at least I hope, or if it was on the verge of like financial ruin, it was mismanaged because they made really good products with a not too big company.
They should have been profitable and sustainable. I think they were profitable and sustainable. But Apple can solve that problem by showing up with a sufficiently large bag of money and saying, you know. So I don't think this is a condemnation of the Mac market.
It's bad for the Mac market because I liked them being an independent company that caused Apple to have to compete and caused Adobe to have to compete and gave me an alternative to an Adobe subscription. I loved it when they were independent. So I feel for the people who are like, oh, that's one of our last great –
independent Mac software developers gone because they got absorbed by Apple that does suck but I don't think it says anything about the viability of making good software for the Mac I think if you make good apps like Pixelmator did and sell them on the Mac platform you can make money if you do so in a way that doesn't require like 10,000 engineers or whatever the hell Twitter used to have right so overall I think this is bad news it's bad news for me because I like Pixelmator Pro it's bad news for the Mac market
Because I took a great player off the table. It's bad news for Apple's awards because who are they going to give them to now, right? But maybe it's good news for a bunch of really good developers inside Pixelmator.
Meanwhile, Apple is still throwing money out the window because they apparently have put $1.1 billion into GlobalStar's satellite network. And that includes an ownership stake. So reading from Six Colors, Apple satellite partner GlobalStar has disclosed changes to its deal with Apple, including a new influx of $1.1 billion from Apple tied to capital improvements and $400 million in equity.
which gives Apple a 20% stake in the company. This is quite a bit of money, but it's not necessarily a huge surprise. There aren't that many companies around with these kinds of capabilities, and by locking down investment, GlobalStar, Apple insures bandwidth and access. This is the company that they use for the satellite texting, satellite emergency stuff, etc.
This is what we kept asking. What is Apple going to charge for that? They're like, oh, it's free for the first year, but now it's free for another year. And now it's like, yeah, we're part owners of the company. So I guess this will continue to be free. Like it's not like this is one way to resolve it. It's, you know, we keep saying like it's difficult for
them to charge for this emergency type feature and we came up with all sorts of schemes and how they could like charge for it but retroactively after you've been saved right so they'll charge you at the time of using it but if you live through the thing you can send you a charge or something but it's like actually maybe we'll just invest 1.1 billion dollars and get a 20% stake in the satellite company and this is one of those situations kind of like tsmc and other things where it's like
you can shop around for somebody who has a bunch of satellites circling the earth or around the earth if they're stationary. But anyway, there's not a lot that there's not a lot of options, right? There's, there's this, there's Starlink, I guess, like how many choices do you have? And if you're Apple and you want to essentially protect yourself from,
Both by making sure that you can continue to offer this feature on your product because there's a lot of iPhones out there. And so you need a significant amount of capacity potentially. So you want to say, we don't want to stop shipping this feature. We build it into our phones. We want to keep shipping the feature. You can sign a contract with them or something.
But an even better way is to invest in the company and become a part owner. And now you have much more control over what they do. And you want to lock that up because if some other company comes in before you and buys them and kicks you out and now you can't make contracts with them or you have to deal with Elon Musk, which no one wants to do, that's bad for the company.
So this seems like a relatively smart investment. Although I do have to say $1.1 billion seems a lot for a feature that I personally view as one of those like...
cool like off in the corner features of an iPhone it's great that they have it but it's not something hopefully that everybody uses every day I know they allow you to text from it now but like how it's really just for emergencies and for people who find themselves in an area without coverage and they still want to text people like that's what this is for
So it is a boon for them to put it in their products, but it's not as strategic as say, you know, investing in someone to make silicon chips or like a new factory in Arizona that we might talk about in the future or whatever. So it is a lot of money, but I guess space equals a lot of money.
Yeah, I mean, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't blame Apple for doing it, and certainly the idea of this satellite features remaining free is appealing, and it seems like it would be crummy.
Not, you know, Apple's not above it, but it seems like it would be crummy to be like, well, we're perfectly happy to save your life if you're out, you know, boondocking or, you know, hiking in the middle of nowhere as long as you pay for Apple One. Like, that's not That's just not a great look.
They're never going to do that. They could charge you retroactively. But the thing is, these satellites, as amazing as they are, they're never going to be...
a major part of data communications on phones because there's just not enough bandwidth right it's not like hey you won't need a cell provider you'll do everything over satellite i don't think the global star satellite network even with this 1.1 billion dollar investment has any hope of becoming like a replacement for the cell network that now apple doesn't need carriers because they do everything through satellite setting aside the speed of light delays and all that other stuff or whatever
Which is no small thing to set aside by, because I believe they operate geostationary satellites, in which case there is no way that's ever going to compete.
So what I'm saying is this is an investment purely for the types of things they're currently doing. There's no future scenario where this has some amazing new use that we're not even thinking of. It's never going to be high bandwidth.
low latency like it's not gonna they're not gonna stream apple tv over to everybody's phones like that's just not gonna happen this is purely for uh you know when you absolutely need to connect and there's no other option outer space right and that is a very it's a great use case and it's an important one and it adds value to their products but it is never going to replace any existing thing they do so maybe 1.1 billion is just pocket change from apple so maybe it's not a big deal but uh
And again, with them investing in the company, maybe Apple foresees other companies wanting to do the exact same type of thing, whether it's a car company or, you know, Android phone seller that also wants to have the same sort of SOS type capabilities, powered satellites. If Apple is a part owner in the company, they get a share of that profit as well. So maybe it's just a smart business move.
By the way, real-time follow-up, they're actually not geostationary. They're actually low-Earth orbit satellites from Global Star. I did not know that, and I would not have guessed that. But that means they can be significantly lower latency than geostationary ones. However, it seems like they're not anywhere close to the high bandwidth usage of something like Starlink.
Yeah, there's just not enough of them. I mean, as many as there are there, and there are too many Starlink satellites, but as many as there are, there are far more cell phone towers in the United States and they're closer to you. Those cell phone towers are much closer to you and they're way, way more of them.
Uh, so that is, it's going to be difficult to compete with that, with things that are flying over you in space.
It's also, I mean, even with Starlink, like it's still a heck of a lot cheaper to build a cell phone tower than to launch satellites.
Yep.
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There's been some new rumors and rumors about changed plans for future Vision Pro hardware. Apparently, Apple hasn't totally given up on it. And according to Ming-Chi Kuo, production of a cheaper Vision Pro has been delayed beyond 2027. This means Apple's only new head-mounted display device in 2025 will be the Vision Pro with an upgraded M5 processor.
Additionally, Mark Gurman writes, I also continue to hear that Apple is seriously considering a device that offloads the computing components to an iPhone and serves as an accessory for watching movies. That's something that would be roughly akin to the glasses offered by companies like Xreal.
So the Ming-Chi Kuo one, I don't know if throwing this aside about the 2025 one is like...
reinforcing a past rumor or how well sourced it is but the cheaper vision pro is what we talked about in the past that's why this is a change of rumored plans again this is all rumored but the plan that we heard about was oh they're not going to make another high-end one first they're going to concentrate on the cheaper one and the cheaper one should be coming and we talked about maybe like 1500 and how can they make it cheaper and blah blah blah and the cheaper one will be coming like next year or something right and now the rumors have changed say you know that cheaper one 2027
So it's like, OK, well, if that was the only rumor when I first read this, I'm like, oh, that's not good. Because if the cheaper one is going to be the next one and the next one is going to be in 2027, that means we'd be stuck with the original Vision Pro until 2027 with no changes. That is grim. OK, but here comes this other rumor.
It's like, and that means if the cheaper one is delayed to 2027, all we have is the 2025 version, which is basically today's Vision Pro upgraded to an M5. And that's not bad, honestly. Remember, the Vision Pro is M2. Upgraded to M5, maybe it'll have an R2 processor in there or something. Presumably with the same screens and probably around the same price or whatever.
But that is a better Vision Pro. The rumors are that it will be able to do Apple Intelligence because it will have more RAM. M5 is going to be massively better than the M2. Same resolution on the screens means it'll be breaking less of a sweat while doing all of its stuff. Maybe it'll even get better battery life. That's a... second version of the existing Vision Pro.
The cheap one being delayed sounds real bad, but if they have the essentially upgraded Vision Pro in 2025... I think that does show basically the minimum expected level of commitment to the product. Again, ask Apple about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Apple's commitment to its various products sometimes wavers, but not having another Vision Pro product to 2027 is just untenable.
People would forget that it exists, right? And of course, they'd be selling the M2 model for $3,500 until 2027, which is ridiculous because by then, like the Apple Pencil would have more CPU power. But yeah, an M5 version in 2025 actually doesn't sound that bad to me.
I mean, I consider this the minimum to keep this product going, but if most of the change is just taking the existing one, upgrading the processor, and maybe making a few tiny tweaks around here and there, that's not going to move the needle on sales. No one is looking at the current Vision Pro and saying, well, I would have bought it if it was faster.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just what you have to do for the people who already want a Vision Pro to not feel like they should, to not be repelled by the fact that it still has an M2 in it, right? You want it to get better, you know, on some reasonable schedule. And so this is sort of just, think of it this way. It's just maintaining the existing product. It's not making a new Vision Pro.
It's not making a Vision Pro successor. It's just like, hey, the existing Vision Pro, every once in a while we do need to update these things because they get old.
right and more importantly it's not going to expand the market at all like if i think what what they have hopefully by now learned is like if they want to expand the market for their ar vr product uh you know category they need to go in a different direction in some way whether it's a substantial cheaper design or you know the glasses or you know just some other direction will be required but yeah you're right it is nice that they will be updating this product eventually maybe
And pushing the cheap one out to 2027, to me, basically reads like they couldn't figure out how to make a cheaper one in 2025. We talked about where are they going to get that cost from? What components are they going to remove and scale down? And you can rip out the eyeballs in the front, make the case out of plastic, try to put a cheaper SOC in there, but like...
those screens, if those screens don't get cheaper and Apple has limited control over that, there's not a lot of components you can totally remove and not a lot of ones that get cheaper. So I think they just did the math and said, we can't actually make
a substantially cheaper vision pro even though they i'm sure they want to because again if you're gonna if you're gonna move the needle at all this market you have to do something and one of the things is make it way way cheaper and maybe they just said we we can't do it or we could make it you know if i make it three thousand dollars and thirty five hundred who cares like that's that doesn't do anything so hopefully in 2027 they think they have promises from their part suppliers that will be able to get you screens that are good that are half the price of the current screens and you'll get rid of the front facing eyeball screen and
you'll put an m5 processor in 2027 which will be plenty fast but it'll be like a two-year-old chip by then like i think that's what that rumor means and then german's rumor about glasses that offload their stuff to the phone yada yada like that will obviously happen eventually but i have trouble seeing how unless apple is just going to like throw another like dart at the dartboard and say hey people sell products like this like the x real ones where it's just glasses and it's just like another way to have a screen why don't we try that
sure you can i guess but like that's not even in the vision pro family is it because that's just basically like screen on face that thing's not going to be watching your fingers for tapping and and doing all it's like it's not it's not a vision pro it is a way to look at movies on your on the plane in glasses that are smaller and lighter and cheaper and i don't i mean i haven't actually ever tried any of those products i've seen lots of reviews of them the things that are
Glasses with usually cheap, not very good-looking screens inside of them, but it's certainly a way lighter weight way to look at a movie on a plane, for example, than strapping on a gigantic Vision Pro headset. They don't look like glasses glasses, but they look like... dorky big computer. They're kind of like, remember those things you had, Marco, like the Bose? Yeah, the audio sunglasses.
Yeah, they're bigger than that, but not much bigger. Nothing compared to a Vision Pro, and they're way cheaper, and they look worse, and it's like, okay, that's a product that exists. Seriously considering, though, this is a German rubber, so I can't totally dismiss it because he's usually got pretty good sources, but... I don't know how Apple would try to sell that.
It's like, hey, we make this Vision Pro thing that does all sorts of amazing stuff, but nobody wants it because it's too expensive. Do you want a worse experience and lightweight glasses?
Well, honestly, I mean, I can kind of see the argument there. So, okay, two things we've already talked about. Number one, the Apple Watch. The first Apple Watch launched with all this functionality. They tried to sell it as doing a million different things. And we ended up learning it was really good at like two things. And that's enough of a product right there.
What we've learned so far with the Vision Pro, admittedly, is not much because it's still super young and super small and there's nothing there, etc. But what we've learned so far with the Vision Pro is people seem to like it a lot for watching movies. And some people want to be able to use their Mac screen in it. Although I know there's news in the beta there that's apparently better.
But, you know, we'll see. You know, how that plays out for everybody in practice. But, you know, for the most part, a large part of the good usage experiences of the Vision Pro come down to either using it as a screen for something else or watching movies on it, which is a fancy way of using it as a screen for something else. So...
If it turns out that is a huge part of what people want to do on this device and people keep saying, I would buy one if it was cheaper. Well, if you can deliver something that gives people those use cases for a lot cheaper, because again, like the rumors that we were saying earlier about like there's rumors of a cheaper Vision Pro. That's not to say a cheap Vision Pro, just a less expensive one.
The rumors that we've heard so far about the full-blown Vision Pro getting cheaper over time peg the price at something like $1,500 to $3,000 instead of $3,500. That's still way too expensive for most people to want to buy this thing. But if most people just want a fancy movie screen or a fancy external Mac display... then it turns out you can do that for a lot less.
There's a lot about the Vision Pro that you don't necessarily need or that you can downsize or adjust in different ways. So if that ends up being a good market for this, I think that's fine.
Because again, going back to our Apple TV discussion earlier, computing on the Vision Pro, and this is something I wasn't really able to say this for NDA reasons for the lab, but this is something I felt immediately when I started using the Vision Pro in the lab. And certainly once I bought my own, I felt it as well.
using like trying to compute on the vision pro getting you know using apps moving around apps navigating trying to get things done or you know certainly doing any kind of text but you know just any kind of like working in the vision pro or operating apps in the vision pro feels a lot like operating apps in the apple tv in the sense that you have a a very large but kind of far away canvas and
It's hard to get a lot of information density in a way that's useful to you with the perspective that you have. You have these kind of coarse input methods. You don't have a lot of input precision. Text input is pretty rough. Certainly, you don't want to be doing a lot of editing, moving around, like fine motor movements. It's not very good at that. It feels like using apps on an Apple TV.
Well, what if it turns out, again, just like I was saying earlier, the Apple TV has the hardware capability to be a gaming platform, a real estate pricing platform, a shopping platform. But what people actually end up doing with it, what it's actually best at and easiest to do on it is watching video.
But what if the Vision Pro, what if it turns out that what most people want to do with immersive VR glasses is... is either play games, which Apple, we know, is not going to be amazing at, or watch immersive content, or use it as a screen for something else. I think that outcome not only is likely, I think that's fine.
Certainly, that will change what the product should be, and maybe some of the things they've invested in won't end up panning out in that way, but... That is very possibly how this category will end up, and that's fine. And if it ends up that they mostly sell much less expensive glasses or headsets that are mostly just being relatively simple screens... that's still a perfectly fine market.
And, you know, this whole market with AR and VR, I mean, you know, obviously there's been all this news with, you know, Meta's glasses they came out with and the weird Snapchat things they came out with, or Meta didn't come out with them, the glasses they demoed and the Snapchat things.
And, you know, you look at like, what are we working towards with all of this huge investment with AR and VR, but mostly AR now? What are we working towards with all of that? What demand are we trying to solve with these products? And I think that the tech industry that is making these so far has not done a great job of convincing me that people want what this offers.
They're convincing me this is really cool. They're making things that are really cool. The demo really well, but... Then when you actually get one, maybe you use it for a few days, and then it's like, hmm, well, my work is better on my laptop or my Mac. My portable needs are better done by my phone. My movie watching is better done on my TV because I watch it with other people or whatever.
What we're finding is we're putting a whole bunch of... massive investment and product development and money and and hype and time and attention into these into this dream of like when we finally get ar glasses it'll be amazing But I actually don't... I think we might be putting too much on that as an industry in terms of our expectations and our attention.
In the same way that, again, when the Apple Watch was new, everyone was like, this is going to replace phones. And it just didn't and won't. That doesn't mean it's a failure as a product. It just means that the role of this product was not what everyone expected at first. Everyone expected it to replace phones. It will never do that. It's kind of not physically right for that.
What if AR and VR glasses are mostly just good for watching movies? That's not bad. It's just not the next big thing. And that's okay. There's room in tech for lots of different things that do lots of different roles. But it seems like everybody wants AR to be like the next big thing that replaces everything. And I just, I don't know.
When you look at the physical realities of this, I just don't see it.
So the tech's just not there yet. I mean, I feel like the things like X-Real and stuff are kind of like, let's meet, let's take this product and meet the tech where it's at today. And, you know, is the tech there to do something with the Abolition Pro? Not at a reasonable price and a comfortable thing. So what can we do with today's tech?
that makes a product that is actually somewhat attractive and useful. So cut out everything you can't do well and just, you know, oh, I just want to watch movies on a plane and I don't want to do it on a laptop, right? So that's where you get these glasses. And I'm not sure if that product is super successful, but it is really cutting down and saying, we'd prefer to do much more, but we can't.
We literally can't. The tech is not there. And no matter how much money you spend, it just gets bigger and bulkier, heavier, and it's not like the balance is off. So where is the sweet spot with current tech? It's kind of like Palm OS versus the Newton, right? Palm was worse, right? But the Newton was too big, too expensive, too heavy. It did so much more than Palm. This OS was so much better.
Didn't matter. It wasn't as good a product. So the X-Reel, I feel like, is trying to find that type thing. But with Apple investigating this, unlike with the Apple Watch, where they're like, oh, we introduced this product. It's basically like a little tiny iPhone. And it can do all these things. And then they found out the things that people want to use it for.
But the platform didn't really have to change radically. It was still called Apple Watch. It still ran WatchOS. Obviously, they changed WatchKit to whatever the successor was. But, like, in general, you could still call it Apple Watch, and it was fine, right?
With them coming out with something like this, like the XREAL thing, which doesn't watch where your hands are, doesn't track your eyeballs, doesn't let you use your virtual Mac, like, is that even the Vision Pro platform? Does it even run VisionOS? Yeah. Can you sell that as a vision with no pro suffix? Or can you say, actually, this is the Apple Studio Display eyeball? Is it just a display?
Is it even the same platform?
It's fine if it's not. Who cares if it is? Is it this platform that has no content and no software? Who cares?
I know, but that's what I'm saying. Would they even try to connect it branding-wise and computing-wise? Would it even run apps? Or would it just be a screen? I'm not going to say when you get it so wrong like they did with the Vision Pro, but if you decide... let's try a different Avenue. And then Avenue is sufficiently different from the one you tried before.
You do have that question of like, wait, are we rolling out a new platform? Like, is this, is this a new platform? Are we going to try to say that this is the same platform? They kind of did that with like the, the home accessories. Granted, they have no screens and people don't really know it's running audio OS or running a variant of TV OS or whatever.
It's kind of hidden, but like they had that same thing as, and then we'll see when they do with the, the home device that is room with the screen. Like it's, is that a new platform? Are we going to just pretend that's the same platform as the HomePod and the HomePod mini, even though that platform has changed a lot under the covers? Like the thing with the screen, what platform is that?
What app does it run? Like with the whole backdoor of like, It's not really another platform. It's just a thing that runs iPad and or iPhone apps, right? Like Macs run iPad apps. Vision Pro runs iPad apps. Is the Mac and the Vision Pro an iPad? No, but that's the way for us to take a platform that actually has apps for it and shove it onto other platforms that don't, right? It's so weird.
So this, I mean, this is just a rumor. They're considering it or whatever, but like... That'd be the thing I'd be watching for here.
Not so much the product that they roll out, because, again, there's a bunch of existing products on the market like this, and I don't think they're setting the market on fire, but they are certainly cheap enough for someone to buy as, like, just an impulse purchase for, like, a toy, and people seem to like them, and they're cool. Is it better than watching a movie on your laptop on the plane?
I kind of like watching video on my OLED iPad. A cheap pair of glasses is honestly not going to have the image quality. as my very expensive OLED iPad does. But then again, it's private and it's smaller than an iPad and it stays with me wherever I look.
So it does have some advantages, but I think Apple is going to, if they pursue this, they're going to have some very difficult decisions to make about what exactly they're doing. And the thing I suggested before of saying, this isn't a platform, this is a monitor. That is kind of like sidestepping it all and just saying like, look, it's a monitor. We'll update it every six years.
It comes with an A13 inside it. It runs a variant of iOS, but basically it's just a really cool screen that goes on your face. It's no power button. Yeah, exactly. And that is saying we are not ready to do AR, but we are ready to put screens in your eyeballs.
A while ago, we floated the idea on this show. I think every time Apple is rumored to update the Apple Watch SE and then it comes out and the price doesn't go down or it doesn't get an update, I think we frequently float the idea, does the Apple Watch SE or does the low-end Apple Watch even need to run apps?
and one you know because if you look at other wearables that compete with the apple watch you know there's obviously there's like the android smart watches that that are that have you know feature parity and stuff but or you know at least in the ballpark but then also there's this whole category of things like fitbits like smaller wearables that are mostly just activity trackers that either have no screen like a ring or they have you know
smaller screens that are basically just displaying like the time and your step count or something like that. Like, you know, much simpler devices that are not running full-blown third-party app platforms in them. And those are able to be substantially smaller, substantially cheaper, and therefore they get a huge market share.
Well, you know, there's not much pressure on Apple to do that necessarily for the watch because the Apple Watch is a hit. It has been, you know, successful and has been selling in large volumes since it was introduced. But what if the only way they could make the Apple Watch as the platform that they shipped, you know, with software and apps and everything, such as they were at the beginning.
But, you know, what if the only way for them to do that was for it to be $2,000 and have a bunch of trade-offs also? Yeah.
then you know it wouldn't have sold very well and then maybe there might have been more pressure on them to be like okay listen if you want to make a a smart wearable that people buy it you have to cut it down you have it has to be simpler and then maybe they would make something like a fitbit you know that's kind of the situation the vision pro is in they they shot for the the sky with this thing they they put in so much tech and the software platform is quite
quite advanced, and there's so much there. There's engineering, there's amazing hardware, amazing software. The capabilities that it has are just incredible, but that gave it some really bad trade-offs and made it very expensive.
Meanwhile, there are industries, if you look at the smaller gaming headsets or things like these extra glasses, which, yes, they are just screens in your face, and that's not a very big industry, but you start to see...
If there is pressure from down below in the price curve for these other products that people are choosing instead of the Apple Vision Pro, and Apple has this giant app platform building this thing that's not really working very well for them, then maybe the answer really is to make something simpler.
If everyone is saying we want this to be not only cheaper, but we need it to be a lot cheaper than what the current option is, they're not going to get there by retaining all of the functionality of the Vision Pro as we know it today.
So they can either wait a very long time for all of that approach to get cheaper, and of course they can revise the hardware to be cheaper, things like different manufacturing techniques, simpler materials, maybe get rid of the weird external eyeball display, stuff like that. There are ways to make it a little bit cheaper, but if they need to make it a lot cheaper...
That's going to take a very long time unless they dramatically cut scope. Now, granted, Apple's a very patient company. So it would not surprise me if they really did just want to wait 10 years for those little tiny screens to get cheaper or whatever. That might be their plan. I would be surprised if the product lasted that long, if that's their only plan. But hopefully it's not. But...
Also, you can look at, you know, does this category of product need to be what we shop for? Like, they were so ambitious with trying to, you know, trying to get us to all start talking about computing. Like, what was it? Is it ambient computing? Is that what we called it? Spatial computing. Spatial, that's it. I already forgot the term. It's been a week.
Well, right.
But what if the whole concept of spatial computing was not the right direction to go? That's what I'm saying. If you try to compute in the Vision Pro in regular productivity, switch around in apps kind of ways, it's not very good for that. What if that's just the wrong approach? And what if the right approach is something much simpler, like just making it mostly about video playback or whatever?
I don't think that's unreasonable to consider.
Or the right approach for this time. The right approach for this time and for this current state of technology. I think Apple should continue to pursue the high end because that's how you eventually get to the good version of that. But it's too expensive now. So what can you do with existing tech? What is the Palm Pilot version of this?
Again, with this rumor, another thing leaning in the direction of it being more like a monitor is they're basically saying offload computing to the phone. But you don't want your phone doing that much heavy lifting in service of projecting an image onto your glasses, right?
But if you just ask it to project video, if you're watching a TV show or a movie or a YouTube video, well, there's hardware decoding for the video, and that is actually one of the lighter things that your phone can do. It doesn't have to show the video on its screen, so it's saving on battery life on not lighting up its screen, right? It's using the battery that's in your glasses.
But it's doing networking. It's downloading the video, or if it's already downloaded, it's streaming it off the SSD. It's decoding the compressed video. It's sending the image, right? Yeah.
Anything more than that, where you're asking the phone to like track objects in 3D space and do stuff like the Vision Pro does to make like a stable floating window in front of you, your phone battery is going to get slaughtered. I mean, hell, the Vision Pro with a huge battery that's bigger than the iPhone itself, two hours battery life.
No one is going to want to sacrifice their phone battery life. That's what I was saying with the Orion glasses where it's a separate puck or whatever. It'll be that way for a while yet because what we ask these glasses to do in the sort of maximal Orion or Vision Pro type feature set,
is just too computationally expensive it will burn your phone's battery and no one wants to spend their battery on that but if it's just watching video i think people would people for first of all we know people will use their phone battery for that because they literally watch movies on their phone on the plane and that's lighting up the screen and sometimes they're using the phone speaker which blows my mind because you cannot hear anything on planes but anyway people do it you hear them on the on the the subway they've got their phones they're blaring audio they're watching video it's rude but it also kills their phone battery but they do it that's what they want to use their phone battery for
But yeah, a glasses device that uses the phone for compute, I think the correct balance would be, hey, phone, all you got to do is networking and video decoding, and then you just project to me.
Yeah, I don't know how I feel about this. I don't think that Apple wants to admit defeat on the Vision Pro. I don't think they want to go that much simpler because when they simplified the Apple Watch, the hardware was largely the same and actually got more complicated. It was the software that they focused. And
I agree that using the Vision Pro as a computing platform, in my personal experience, is trash when you don't have a TV, when you don't have a keyboard connected. And it's not stellar when you don't have a keyboard connected. And for me, the only time the... The only time the Vision Pro was really great as a computing platform was when it was simply a monitor for my Mac.
And I have not yet tried this new version of the display where you can get wide and I think ultra-wide versions of your Mac's display. It sounds incredible, but it requires a beta of macOS, which I am not going to be messing with, as well as the beta of VisionOS, which I would mess with. But...
The only time that the Vision Pro has really been a productivity tool for me was as a monitor for my Mac. And a lot of that is probably because I'm an old man who just prefers using the Mac. But I think a lot of that is because it's an imprecise tool. It's just not as precise as a Mac is or an iPad or an iPhone.
And so embracing what it is or what it's best at, which is to say a really, really nice screen that you happen to be able to strap to your head, I get that, but I just, I don't know.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would completely and totally get rid of basically all the smarts and just have a dumb display, which makes me wonder, okay, well, what's the Apple way of doing a display such that it's smart, but not quite as smart as a Vision Pro? And I don't have an answer for that. That's why Apple is Apple, and I'm just talking about it.
That's like a phone accessory. That's like an attachment to your phone sales. And by the way, with the Apple Watch SE example, that's kind of an example of what I imagine Apple's currently planning to do with the big expensive Vision Pro, because today's Apple Watch SE is massively more powerful than the original Apple Watch, right?
What they basically did was, let's just keep making Apple Watches until we can make a cheap one that is actually way more powerful than the first one that we rolled out, just due to the advance of technology that Screens are better. The battery life is better. It's thinner. It's lighter. Like they just waited many, many, many years.
And lo and behold, we have an Apple Watch SE that didn't have to go like the ex-real rumored route of saying like, we got to make a cut down version of it. It's got to compete with Fitbit. They're like, no, we'll just keep making Apple Watches. We'll just keep plugging away. An Apple Watch is an Apple Watch. There's no platform bifurcation. There's no limited version. It does certain stuff.
We'll just patiently sit here because, as Marco pointed out, the first one wasn't, with the exception of the gold one, thousands of dollars, right? The first one was in the ballpark price-wise. And they just did like they did with the iPhone. Mature the product. Start diversifying the product line. Eventually, you can make a pretty good Apple Watch for cheaper and just keep iterating on that.
And lo and behold, the Apple Watch SE now would have been amazing if you had taken it back in time to the original Apple Watch introduction. I think Apple would love to do that with Vision Pro. They're just... many years away from getting there. But in the meantime, the Vision Pro is so much farther away from the bullseye than the Apple Watch was, I can imagine them considering things like this.
Again, this is just a vague rumor that Apple is seriously considering it. And Apple was so slowly, even if they did roll it out, I'm not sure how they'd do it. But when I pictured it in my head, I pictured it as an iPhone accessory That is essentially a monitor that only has enough smarts to communicate with a thing that is rendering the video. And that's basically all I use it for.
And for that purpose, Casey, when you're like, oh, I want to play and I want to take out my Vision Pro from my giant backpack and put it on and be that guy. Even if the video quality, the image quality wasn't quite as good as a Vision Pro.
I think you might prefer these little monitor for your phone things to watch a movie on a plane simply because they're so much smaller and lighter and the thing itself would be cheaper. And you just, you know, if the image quality isn't quite as good, that's fine. It's still better than watching on your tiny phone screen on a tray table.
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All right. Let me start by reminding everyone, this is going to be group therapy for the three of us. If you're not interested, that's fine. If you disagree with the way we feel about this election, that's fine, I guess. You don't need to tell us about it. That's fine. You can skip this chapter. This is why chapters exist. just move right along.
But I think the three of us need this for the three of us. And hopefully maybe it'll be a little cathartic to at least one of you. Um, last night I was watching the coverage and as early as like eight, eight 30 Eastern, I was like, this doesn't feel good. And by nine 30 Eastern, which is when the first real big batch of polling started coming in properly, um,
Aaron and I looked at each other and we were like, I don't think I want to stay up for this. Like I was planning to stay up for me because we typically go up on a school night at like 10-ish at the latest. And I was thinking I was going to stay up till like 11 or maybe midnight and just ride this baby out and watch it come in. And I was mostly excited for it, to be honest with you.
And 9.30, the two of us looked at each other and we were like, okay. I don't like how this feels. I'm just going to go to bed. And we went to bed. I slept like trash. And at about five, I gave up and woke up, looked at the news and saw, Oh no. Oh no.
And by the time I actually hauled myself out of bed at like six 30 ish, uh, what was a theoretical ending became a official in the terms of like the AP called it, CNN called it, they called it for Trump. And, um, I've, uh, I've been really sad. I've been really sad all day. I've been really dejected all day. I've been really worried all day.
Not as much about me particularly, but I'm worried a fair bit for the women in my life. You know, I'm not... I'm too terribly concerned for Erin because, you know, we are officially done having babies. We are surgically done with having babies. So short of something very unusual happening, all of the baby related stuff, I'm not too worried about.
But there's a lot of women's health care that is not strictly about baby making, despite what many men seem to believe. Uh, and that concerns me. And I'm very concerned for Michaela. You know, she'll be 10 when this, well, she'll be 10, four years from now. We'll see if that's the end of, uh, of this term of presidency.
Um, I'm worried for, for her, but the people I'm really worried for are the people that are, that don't look like me. And I'm very scared for them. And I am at a loss for what to do. I've been interrogating within myself and talking with friends about, like, how did we get here? And we can talk about that if the two of you want to. I don't have any strong answers.
I have theories, but no strong answers. But I'm just – I'm really sad. I'm really sad that we as a country have decided that this is what we want. And, you know, even despite our full-throated endorsement last episode, which I stand behind – I think all three of us could make passionate arguments, and well, let me just speak for myself.
I can make a passionate argument that Kamala was not a stellar choice, but it was the choice we had, and so that's the choice I went with. And I feel like it's hard for me to wrap my head around, and it's hard for me to figure out
how do I tell my kids that a man who is convicted of how many felonies, a man who at least suggested, if not caused an insurrection on, on, on the Capitol of the United States of America, that, uh, seems to be saying very, very full-throatedly that he would like to prosecute or otherwise imprison or get rid of the people who he considers his enemies, be they domestic or foreign.
A man who's a pathological liar, a man who's cognitively falling apart, how can I look to my kids and say, there are consequences for your actions when, as far as I can tell, he's never had a consequence for his action other than failing upwards. And how do I accept that half of the country is enthusiastic about this? And again, I have some theories, but it's just hard to wrap my head around.
And, you know, we've got some feedback from last week's episode. Most of it was very positive, and I very much appreciate it. Some of it was not so positive, but thankfully, was mostly presented with respect, which I appreciated. But a couple of the people who wrote us were like, I couldn't believe that anyone could vote for Joe Biden. I couldn't believe that anyone would vote for him.
I feel like our country's going down the tube when we elected Joe Biden. And I don't doubt that that's how they felt, but I try to wrap my head around What the hell? Why? Why did you feel that way? And I got no answers. Like, I just got no answers. Like, the man was, especially this election cycle, you know, he bowed out because he was also cognitively falling apart.
But I don't think Joe Biden was a bad guy. Whereas Trump... is a bad man. And like, I don't know, where do, where do we go from here? What do we, what do we tell the women in minorities and, and you know, the LG, LBGTQIA community? Like, what do we tell these people? What do we do other than try to defend them when we can? And what the do we do?
This is obviously going to be a much bigger topic than we can cover. My feeling on this right now is I'm just massively depressed about it. I am fortunate that I don't typically suffer from depression, but I certainly feel depressed about this right now. Yeah, likewise. I woke up this morning and just couldn't do anything. And I still, you know, I'm going to be like this for a while probably.
Just, you know, hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, certainly hard to be motivated to do anything, and hard to think about anything else. You know, I think right now I'm in coping mode. You know, this is this pretty bad thing that has happened. Yeah. And the reality is whoever the president is affects different people in different ways in your day-to-day life.
For most Americans, it won't affect you much at all in everyday ways. It will probably affect you in kind of big-picture, long-term ways, in lots of ways that are not good. And if you are one of these people who is only being affected in bigger picture, long-term ways, you are lucky and you are privileged.
Because there are a lot of people who were affected in much more significant ways right from the start. Right now, I don't want to even try to address that because there is just no way to give it justice. Right now, I'm in coping mode. And everyone copes differently. I would encourage you...
as not a licensed psychotherapist, but instead as a person who talks about computers on the internet, so take this with a grain of salt, I would encourage you to let yourself feel your feelings. Don't try to hold it in. Don't try to hide it. Don't try to follow what other people are telling you to feel. Whatever you feel, let yourself feel it.
don't and i wouldn't i wouldn't at this point start pointing fingers and saying this is where we went wrong this is where the campaign or the candidate was too wrong or whatever like i this this is not a productive time to do that right now just let yourself feel it if you if you are mad be mad if you're sad be sad if you want to be furious be furious if you want to be despondent be despondent this is the lyrics of a terrible song
um figure out you know right now this is you know we were just hurt significantly deal with the pain deal with it like don't don't just try to shove it down and process it later no process it now uh this is this is what's going on right now for you um you know and i you know you got to figure out you know what what is helpful to your feelings and mood and what is not
And have an open mind to that. So, you know, one thing I have found so far, things that do not help me include reading the news. Because I know it's bad. I don't need to keep reading articles telling me how bad it is. I'm very aware of how bad it is. We went through this already in 2016 through 2020. We went through this. We've seen roughly how this is going to go. Now, in some ways...
I mean, in some ways, it's less of a shock because this happened already. And we can expect largely many of the same things to happen in the second term as what happened in the first term. It's probably going to be a lot of similarities. If you are like me in the sense that reading the news does not help you feel better about anything or move on with your life in a significant, actionable way...
What we saw the first time was basically a constant barrage of fire and motion in scandals. Every day there was a different scandal. It was overwhelming. It was basically a DDoS attack on everyone's attention.
because there was no like one scandal for anyone to focus on for more than a few days at a time because after a few days there would just be another one and can you believe what he did or said today like and that just that kept happening like almost every day That's going to happen again.
We're going to have that just overwhelming barrage, that DDoS attack of just scandal after scandal, lie after lie, awful, unethical or illegal thing he does after awful, unethical, legal thing. It's just going to be a constant parade of those things. That's how he operates. And that's going to... Nothing bad will happen to him as a result.
Casey, you said, how are you going to explain to your kids that this person can commit literal crimes and have no consequences? And the answer is...
rich and powerful people often don't pay for their they often don't pay consequences for their actions like that's just the reality of the world and that's what's happening here he's a very powerful person with a lot of very powerful friends and an important lesson to learn is that those people don't often pay consequences especially republican politicians
Their base does not hold them to those standards. So they – like Republicans do not care what their candidates do as long as they win. They don't care about any other factor. Priority number one above all else, above morals, above religion, above legal – like the laws, certainly above standards, number one is winning. And they don't care what their candidates do or what they're like.
Now, in terms of what people – trying to understand what people voted for here, they voted for a worldview. The people who vote for him are not looking at every single action and saying, well, I wonder if I can still vote for him even though he lied 14 times in the appearance he made or whatever. No one who is voting for him is thinking that way. It's tribal. It's almost a religious style thing.
It's a worldview. They are voting for a worldview. Now, they have been convinced that their worldview is the correct one. And everyone has different reasons why. And most of those reasons, honestly, are factually wrong or at least massively distorted. But the reality is they were sold Worldview successfully and they voted for it. And that's what we're going to have to contend with.
People knew exactly what they were getting here. They knew they were voting for a liar, a fraud, a criminal, a rapist, somebody who's done many worse things. They knew that, but they were voting for the worldview. And we're also, I think, going to have to cope with the fact that Democrats don't act as a block together. We never do. And so a huge challenge Democrats always face is...
How do we get more people who are already Democrats to vote for our candidate? And that's a problem that the Republicans don't have. Their people will show up and vote for any criminal as long as they bear that party name because it's all about winning first and anything else is secondary. But again, that's not how Democrats work. So Democrats need a different strategy.
I'm not a smart enough person in politics to be able to say what they should do next, but we've seen over and over again how we lose, and maybe we can figure out new things from there. But the reality is half the country is not –
You know, stupid or nuts like they they were sold a bill of goods and we have to figure out, you know, if we're on the other side of that, we have to figure out how we can reach them at all or how we can reach our own people and enough numbers to overcome them. And that's something to do over the next four years. But in the meantime, you got to find out what helps you. You know what?
How do you get through this? I mentioned earlier for me, reading the news does not help me. There's a reason why I did not read much news between 2016 and 2020, because it was just destroying my mental state. It was making me just angry and stressed and afraid all the time. By the way, you asked earlier, Casey, why somebody could possibly feel very strongly about Joe Biden. I honestly, I agree.
I don't know why people could possibly hate him so much. He seems like a really kind of neutral person to me. But the reality is that's what they have. People on that political side of the aisle don't. They have been fed a constant worldview stream of anger and fear and claims that make them hate this very neutral, like very milquetoast kind of candidate that makes them hate him.
They can't stomach him because they've been sold this incredibly severe worldview. I mean, Trump's entire campaign was basically anger and hate and xenophobia. That was everything he ever said was angry. He was constantly talking about how much America sucks. His entire campaign is everything sucks and is awful and it'll get worse if you don't elect me.
That was his entire campaign, but that reached enough people to matter. again these people there it's it's it's hard to understand them when we're on the other side of the aisle but they got there for a reason and you know so anyway all this is to say find ways right now it's so it's a fresh wound right now stop bleeding find ways to cope Experience your feelings.
If you want to feel a certain way, let yourself feel that way. If you want to be mad for a while, be mad for a while. If you want to go into mourning for a while, go into mourning for a while. Figure out what helps and what doesn't. So for me, reading all the news does not help. Reading social networks does not help.
You'll probably be seeing even less of me on the social networks as you were already seeing, which already was not a lot recently.
one thing that does help me a lot is i'm a very social person being around people helps me a lot exercise and especially spending a lot of time outside like just i today i took a big walk it was a it was a nice nice weather day and i just took a huge walk even though i picked the wrong shoes and they were a little bit too tight and they were it was a little bit
a little uncomfortable my feet were a little bit hot too but it didn't matter I was outside it was that that helped a lot you know spending a lot of time and then finally I have found that when I withdraw from the news cycle and put my time and attention into making things or doing work like being productive or being creative or producing output that also helps me a lot
Find whatever that is that helps you. It's not going to necessarily always be obvious, especially if you don't frequently need to deal with this kind of feeling.
But what will probably help, honestly, I think what helps me, I think will have a lot of overlap and what helps a lot of people, not everyone is social like me, but certainly I think most people tend to feel better with exercise, outside time, and productive time. And most people tend to feel worse doom-scrolling social networks and reading terrible news.
So maybe if you don't know what to do, maybe take that as a starting point. But otherwise, you know, look, we'll get through this. We got through it the first time. It was not a cakewalk. There were a lot of problems that resulted. There's a lot of damage that was done the first time that will not be undone for a long time. That's going to happen again. And we just have to be prepared for it.
I rode the ferry today and the ferry being a boat on Long Island has a giant American flag on the top. They always do.
listening to my headphones listening to music trying to get my mind off of things and i and i happened to look up at the sky and there was the flagpole flying the american flag you know boldly and proudly and i i gotta say i had very mixed feelings about that when i saw it in that moment because i was like man this is this is some some complicated feelings i'm feeling right now looking at looking at the flag of my country on on this particular day with these feelings but
America is about democracy. And as I mentioned last time, anything that tries to subvert or suppress that is the most anti-American thing you could possibly do. In this case, this was, by everything we know now, it seems like a very clear democratic result. That this is what the voters voted for. This is... This is America and it doesn't always go your way and it doesn't always progress.
It doesn't always make positive forward progress or forward motion. There's bumps along the way. There's regressions. That's what happens. That has definitely happened right now. And we're going to have to just keep plowing forward and figure out what's next. And it's going to be messy and it's going to suck for a while for a lot of people.
There's going to be damage done that will be, that will not be able to be undone for decades. That is what happens with America. And so we're just, we're going to be in a dark time for a while and hopefully sometime down the road, we will come out of it.
Make me feel better, John.
Uh, for anyone who's listening to this, who is, uh, on the opposite side of us and somehow managed to make it this point, uh, congratulations on your hate listening. Um,
Whatever email you're writing, you can just delete it right now.
No, they just want to hear the rest of the things we say so they know exactly how much they should hate us. But, like, I bet one of the things you're thinking is, like, this is so overblown. Oh, you're so sad because your team lost the Super Bowl. Who cares? Like, get over it. Oh, you're depressed. That's ridiculous. Like, what's the big deal? To try to explain, like...
You know, we're saying our real feelings here, but you may think our feelings are ridiculous. But to try to explain why this is different, like I'm old enough to have lived through the election of many presidents that I didn't want to win the election. Right. I've lived through many Republicans. I didn't want any of them to win. They did. Right.
None of them felt like Trump, you know, term one and term two. And there's a reason for that. Like this, this is different. All the people, all the people in your life, you see like, oh, you're so sad about the present election. Get over it. Why is it a big deal? Why are you so sad about this? This is worse than it has been in my lifetime for presidential elections.
When George W. Bush was elected twice. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe he was elected the first time. I couldn't believe he was elected the second time. Why are we doing this again? Are you kidding? We learned nothing, right?
But it was not as bad as this because George W. Bush, for all his faults, and there are many, and for all the terrible things his administration did, and there are many, had sort of minimum baseline level of humanity and at least an attempt to pretend to care about the duties of the presidency and the people who live in the country. And the whole thing with Trump has been like, there is no floor.
He doesn't know anything. He doesn't want to know anything. He doesn't care about anything. It's like trying to decide who's going to fly your plane and like, I don't care if this person knows or cares anything about planes, knows what a plane is, has ever flown anything before, cares about any of the people on the plane, doesn't actively want to kill everybody on the plane.
None of that matters, right? Trump is just like the bottom. Like, I can think of worse people to be president, but it's hard. And it's below the baseline. And so for people on our side, when we see him elected not once but twice, we think, you know, how many millions of our fellow Americans think this is acceptable? And we're sad about that.
Yes, obviously we're sad about all the people who are going to be hurt and, you know, and killed and have terrible things happen to them under his administration. But a big component of the sadness of both elections is all of us thinking we're in this country with these millions and millions of people who think this is acceptable for the presidency. Right. Like that. It's it's not a good feeling.
Can you imagine if you are on the other side of this? If the Democrats elected somebody who said we should kill all puppies, there was a big thing on that platform. We should totally kill all puppies. And that person was a, you know, had murdered their wives and was convicted, but got off on a technicality. So, you know, the murderer and he said we should kill all puppies.
He's not actually killing all puppies, but he thinks we should kill all of them. And we elected him president. Wouldn't you be sad thinking millions and millions of people think it's OK that the person who wants to kill puppies and killed his wife should be president? You'd be like, really? The puppy killing guy?
Like, I know he hasn't actually killed any puppies yet, but he said he wants to and he's going to really try to. That's okay. And we were like, well, but forget about the puppy killing. We'd like the other parts, but like, wouldn't you be sad thinking that so many of your fellow citizens think that's okay. And I was ridiculous.
Like, Oh, Trump doesn't want to kill puppies or whatever, but like, it's the same type of deal. Like there's just a minimum level of care and humanity and, and knowledge that Trump does not pass. And it's hard living in a world where you think that's okay for a lot of other people. It's hard thinking all the bad things that he says are okay.
Like you can say, well, I don't believe in all the things he says. I just like him and I just ignore all the bad stuff. But like at a certain point, knowing that your fellow citizens are on board with all that, not on board with it being done, but on board with saying the guy who says all that, he's my guy. I don't think he's ever going to do that stuff, but the guy who says all that, he's my guy.
That's a sad feeling. A sad feeling to know your fellow humans, forget about citizens, your fellow humans think this is good. And knowing that you're in the same country with them, subject to the same laws, under the same government... And you have to deal with the consequences of their vote. And again, that happens all the time. Sometimes your person doesn't win.
I did not feel like this when George W. Bush won, when George H.W. Bush won, when Reagan won. I was always young then, right? It didn't feel like this at all. This feels different. This feels worse because it is worse. That's why some people in your life are really sad right now. Maybe they're special snowflakes and they should just get over it and not be sad or whatever, but it is worse.
We feel worse. So I, whatever I posted this morning, I'm asked on like national sex, say your stomach day. I didn't feel like this in any other presidential election when, quote unquote, my person didn't win. This is different. This is worse. And, you know, we know what we're in for and it's going to be bad.
And I feel like the, you know, if you look at all, if you study history and see what it takes for a governing system to be sort of broken apart and broken down so that what was once sort of a functioning society that tried to raise the standard of living for everybody and do better over time becomes the domain of dictators and warlords. And I mean, it happens all the time throughout history.
Like how, how did these societies end up in a situation where there's like one super powerful person who's like oppressing everybody and doing terrible things and everyone else is suffering? How do you end up at that situation?
And the whole American experiment is to try to design a system where that's harder to do, but people are constantly trying to find a way to break down that system, to break away all the things that are keeping us from becoming like a lawless, becoming from Mad Max, right? Like just a warlord state, right? And we've made progress. If you look at like, you know...
Casey's reading the power broker and learn all about, uh, as a side effect, Tammany hall and all like the, the political corruption machines where politics was just a way of like, it was basically like street gangs essentially. And when you got elected, you gave money and jobs to the people who supported you and like, you know, graft and, and bribery. Like that was, that was, was the system.
And that was a bad system. And we had reformers who said, hey, this is no way to run a government because it lets like the people who are loyal to the political machine. It was like organized crime essentially, but that was the system of government. That's bad because the citizens suffer and it's the same reason having organized crime families battle each other is bad.
Even if they're not killing each other in the street, they're hogging all the money and good stuff for a small number of people and everyone else suffers. Let's reform the system. Let's add laws and ethics and try to have a different way of governing ourselves. It doesn't involve patronage and graft. And that took years and years of reformers battling to try to make our system better.
That's the example off the top of my head because I'm listening to the Power Broker podcast too and I've read the book several times. But that's history, not just in America, but over the entire world. It's difficult to make a governing system better. that is resistant to people chipping it away.
And if you don't constantly resist that, you end up with a small number of very wealthy, very powerful people living really great lives and everyone else suffering. And... The American system is currently in a regression where we had all these things that we're trying to be sort of bulwarks against that terrible thing happening that are being eaten away slowly but surely.
Citizens United, all the Supreme Court justices letting the president do whatever he wants as long as it's part of his official duties, reversing Roe v. Wade, like... You know, installing judges who are loyal to Trump instead of the law. Like, all the checks and balances that we had are being chipped away in service of bringing us back to essentially Mad Max and Warlords.
Which, by the way, is not a good system of government for the general citizen. Right? It's that whole... thought experiment of like, pick a time in history that you want to travel. You have a time machine. You can travel back in time to any point in history. Pick a time in history. The only wrinkle is you don't get to pick what role you have in that society when you land in it.
So you say, I want to go back to Roman times and I'll be like Caesar. It's like, oh no, you don't get to pick to be Caesar. You are just like a Roman slave. Now do you want to go back to the Roman times? Everyone wants to be in whatever time in history they glorify, assuming they'll be at the top of the hierarchy, right?
An actual good functioning society is one where you would say, yes, I do want to travel in time to that society, and you can randomly place me anywhere in that society, and I'll be fine because there is not an underclass that is trod upon by the upper class. And in America, we are unfortunately going in the other direction where we are.
chipping away the institutions that try to make life better for everybody in service of making life better for a small number of people while everyone else suffers. And part of that is convincing most of the population to vote for you to do that by feeding them information that makes them think that what they're doing is in their own interest when it really isn't.
And we will obviously disagree on that, but every time I even think about the idea of, like,
talking to somebody and trying to convince them of my political position i think of like the the uh the concept of trying to you know speaking of going back in time i'm gonna go back in time to the 1800s or uh in america and trying to convince somebody that women should have the right to vote i don't think like i if you really want to understand like another depressing uh thing that uh people are upset about um
Like, do you think you could go and convince somebody that women should have the right to vote in the 1800s? How difficult would that be? Presumably you believe it. You're a modern person. You're like, of course women should have the right to vote. It's stupid, right? Now go back in time to the 1800s and try to convince literally one person that that should be true.
And everything you say, they will have a comeback to, and it will just, your brain will explode. You're like, but, but, and they'll be like, it's ridiculous. Women should vote. What's next? Dogs voting? Doesn't make any sense, right? That's how a lot of us feel trying to say maybe don't vote for Trump. But people did it.
And trying to convince them makes my brain explode in the same way that trying to convince someone in the 1800s that women should vote would explode. There's nothing you can say to convince them. They have a completely sealed, completely logical, completely sensible, functioning, like Margo said, worldview that does not include the idea of women voting.
It took, you know, decades and decades of people fighting for it for us to finally get that done. And these days, I often think that we would never get a constitutional amendment to give rights to a minority group just because our current system of government has been so degraded that that will literally never happen because as long as one side doesn't like it, it's never going to happen.
Anyway, I've rambled on too long. I just wanted to explain, try to explain to the three people still listening, why people you know might be sad in a way that doesn't make sense to you and seems dumb. I understand why it seems dumb, but I want you to know that It's not just people overreacting or being overly dramatic.
For those of us on this side of the aisle, the two Trump elections feel different. I think they should feel different to any other human being. And I think across the globe, they do feel different to most human beings, but not apparently for half of the voters in this country.