603: Too Smart to Move

John is hacking up a lung over it. John is very unwell and I didn't find this out or we didn't find this out until I don't know a two minutes ago. So if this episode is only 15 minutes long, it's because we're taking pity on our good friend. And if it's hugely long, then it's like every time I feel unwell. So we'll see you next.

It is September, which it means it's childhood cancer awareness month. I feel like I didn't pronounce any of that with all the letters and the words, but here we go. We're doing it live. So I'm going to vamp while I pull up the official ad read and tell you that, hey, there are a lot of children that are unwell and that's not okay. And a lot of them have some flavor of cancer and that is also not okay. And so we are part of relay and we're also partnering with relay. We're partnering with other selves. I don't know, you just go with it.

So we relay have raised over three million dollars over the last five years starting in 2019. It's it's bananas. It's absolutely bananas. And because of that relay is going to have their name put on like this. It's more than a plaque, but put on like this.

This board in the St. Jude campus for all the corporate and personal donors that have done just gone above and beyond. And that's so super incredibly cool. And so what we are doing is we're trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital St. Jude does incredible phenomenal work. And they do it in such a way that it affects people all over the world.

And Jude is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. I will be there in a couple of weeks when relay does their 12 hour podcastathon. You can watch me melt into a puddle over the course of those 12 hours as I do everything I can to raise more money for these six children. But here's the thing. St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states in around the world.

90% of the children at risk of developing cancer live in low and middle income countries. That is unacceptable to St. Jude. And you know what it's unacceptable to us. So that's why St. Jude launched St. Jude Global that way every child with cancer, no matter where they live. And also other catastrophic diseases, by the way, they have access to quality care and treatment.

So when I was at St. Jude, Napol, for the Play Live Summit, they brought several different people on stage. And it was some of the more survivors in St. Jude patients, some of the more family members. And the number of stories that we saw, but actually not just on stage, but just in general with the people we met, the number of stories we saw where it was something along the lines of, I am in some foreign country.

I have done everything that my country knows how to do with regard to either my cancer, my child's cancer, my brother's cancer. And we were at what's end. I mean, we were basically given a death sentence. And then somebody thought, you know, let's call St. Jude. Let's see what happens. And the number of stories that, you know, there's all these different ways the story started that somehow or another involved really dire circumstances. But every single one of them ended with we called St. Jude and within hours.

We had plain tickets to go to Memphis, Tennessee. And they didn't have to pay for it at all because St. Jude pays for it all. So in order for St. Jude to pay for all these things, we ask for you to donate whatever you can and actually live on air in just a minute. We will have my favorite and least favorite moment of the year when I get somehow root when I somehow ruined my donation. And it becomes a joke for the next year. So we're going to do that in a minute.

But hey, there's one other reason you might want to donate or one other excuse perhaps to donate one other just justification for donation. And I like to call it the Marco offset. Marco, can you tell me what the offset is, please?

Yes, starting probably next week. Many of you out there are going to be buying new Apple products. You might have even bought some other things recently, possibly the new Android folding things. Maybe I saw there was a new remarkable tablet today that looks really cool. All sorts of fun gadgets launching in this gadget season.

And you probably don't necessarily need to spend money on new gadgets. Maybe you guys have something broken these very plays. But for the most part, we all know that this is like, these are mostly luxuries that we have that were because we're very fortunate to be able to afford nice electronics for many of the listeners podcast.

Now, when you buy your own electronics that you don't really maybe need, but you're buying because you want to treat and they're fun and they're awesome. You tend to purchase other things at the same time. Things like a case or additional storage upgrades or a keyboard or some other kind of accessory for the thing that you're buying.

You even also do things like Apple care, you know, warranty services or you certainly almost, you know, almost always in most places you have to pay sales tax. So you have all these kind of add-on fees and upgrades and accessories and taxes to the thing you are buying.

I suggest when thinking about what your minimum donation to St. Jude should be, add up all those extras that you tack on to your purchase or purchases, including all the taxes, all the storage upgrades, all the accessories and cases and warranties and all that stuff.

Add up all that, that should be your target minimum donation to St. Jude if you can swing it. And fortunately for us and for most of you out there, many of you out there are able to swing it and that's great. And this is how you can sway some of your guilt about these new tech products that you're buying by giving a nice chunk of money if you can to St. Jude.

Yep, so here's the thing when we rally for a common cause, we become more than a community, we become, we become beacons of hope for all. Yes, that is a little bit silly, but it's true. It's really true. So please join relay and ATP and donate to St. Jude this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. You can go to St. Jude.org slash ATP to just go straight to the donation area, which is what we're about to do the three of us.

Or if you want more information or if you perhaps want to start your own like campaign, you can go to St. Jude.org slash relay. So STJUDE.org slash ATP to just go straight to the donation. So now the three of us are going to do our annual donations.

And here's the thing we always say we're going to do the gentlemanly thing of agreeing on exactly how much we're going to donate. And I believe as with past years, we had agreed on $7,000, but we could never do that because we're all, we're all just difficult. So the question is, how do who is going to be the winner by donating the most, but also sticking to the gentlemanly agreement of $7,000. So in past years, I should have looked this up.

In past years, I think I've done $7,000 and $1 or $7,000 and $1.00. I feel like that isn't enough, but I want to stick close to the $7,000. And so I am going to, as we speak, I'm going to say payment details. I'm going to see if I can apple pay this. And I'm not going to tell you quite yet exactly what I am going to do. I have to add and address my mistake. You're going to have to wait while I do that. But my thinking is that I need to do just a little bit more.

I'm hoping that's not a bad choice. And I probably shouldn't be telling you this while I'm on air because now Marco is probably just tripling his donation, which honestly I'm okay with. I've already hit my button. I hit it while you were talking already. So it's mom. I'm in. Oh, all right. I should look, but I'm not going to. I promise I'm not going to. I haven't looked yet. All right. I'm going. I'm hitting the apple pay button right now. Done. I donated $7,000 and $1.43.

Because $1.43 is short for I love you. One letter, four letters, three letters. And that's for Aaron. And so if you lost it's really you being mean to Aaron is what's going on. So let's see how we definitely talk too much this year, Casey. Also, you're incredibly bad at this game. And I'm basically, I basically conceded this game because like, like, like what's his name, Adrian,

right? I mean, I donated $35 minutes ago because I thought we were doing it before we started airing. So you could have just looked and seen the amount that I did. But apparently, Marco has just decided he's sick of losing this game. Right. Marco has decided enough is enough. I have lost every year. Right. So I mean, I fair enough. Like this year I was trying to give. Honestly, I was trying to give Casey a chance to win this year, but apparently Casey cannot be helped.

Wait, what where did 17 come from? I did 11 last year. Oh my God. So the so the final donations for ATP, me and Aaron coming in last at $7,000, $1.43, then John Sircusa at $7,000, $17,000 even. And then Marco and Tiff swooping in to take the lead comfortably take the lead. I should add Marco. How much did you two donate?

And 7777.77 Well done. I do feel like Marco is get it's a technical foul on massively assuming that because it's for a charitable cause and because he had never won before, we're going to let it slide this time, but we can't we can't support this kind of inflation. Yeah, this is this is awfully large inflation. I mean, this is this is ridiculous. It shall not stand, but we can't get upset.

Anyway, so collectively ATP has donated according to my little calculator here, $21,796.20. Of course, that exact amount is what we would do. That's what we end up at. By the way, I have to say that we're I mean, this is obviously it's a relay press pledge drive and we have relay podcasts and we are really adjacent. We are friends with them, but I've always been proud of how much of the relay pledge drive is from listeners to a non relay podcast ATP listeners donate tons of money.

Like we already talked about the like the leaderboard thing we have for Casey stickers or whatever, where the ATP listeners with large means put huge donations in for the chance of getting those stickers, right. Sometimes people put ATP in their comments or whatever. We've been amazed by how much money and how generous ATP listeners on are for this pledge drive. So that makes us proud of our listeners. And I think we're really helping out the the pledge drive for St. Jude.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more than it is really kind of you to listen to us make this pledge. I know this is taking a long time, but honestly, sorry, not sorry because it's worth it. So thank you so much. We really appreciate you. And again, I reiterate just because we donated $7,000 in change, some of us almost $8,000.

Even though we did that, you can donate $7. That's fine. We're still happy about that. Don't don't let us lead you any other way. We're still very happy about that. So please, the majority of the money is not the people donating thousands of dollars. It's small donations, give 10 bucks, give 20 bucks, give five bucks, anything you can.

Yep. So please, stt Jude dot org STJ UDE dot org slash ATP. Thank you. Let's do some follow up. Mac mini redesign updates from Mark German. So Mark had announced some expected Mac mini redesign redesign changes and whatnot and then has gone back to the well and has clarified a bit.

So Mark writes the M4 pro version of the Mac mini will have five USB C ports three on the back two on the front, like the Mac studio. That model will also retain an ethernet port good HDMI port good and headphone jack. Sure. But prepare to say goodbye to the USBA ports found on the current Mac mini.

I'm happy with this like to me like the retention of most of the things on it. I'm happy with that and and USBA like it's been very helpful to have USB A ports on lots of things long into the USBC transition. I do think it's now time that we can drop them on most things. I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. Now we're going to get everyone ready to us about how wrong we are, but here you know you can't win them all.

Then Mark continues. I've also been told that the computer's power supply will be internal. This was a big deal because they're saying you know the new Mac mini is going to be roughly Apple TV sized and although the Apple TV does indeed have its power supply internal, which is to say you just plug in a cord. There's no brick involved. But you know that's kind of a computer but not really a whole computer.

And so people were justifiably a little worried that perhaps this wouldn't be the case with the Mac mini. Maybe go more like the current I max which have the brick on the outside. But no apparently the power supply will be internal, which I very I am very happy about. Do you know if the Logitech like the little RF dongle things for their wireless MySpace Bluetooth stocks. If they're USBC now.

As far as I know they're not now I do take a little bit of offense that you saying Bluetooth sucks maybe I'm a Bluetooth unicorn but I really don't see the issue with using Bluetooth peripherals. It's so much worse than the little RF dongles in pretty much all possible ways. Except you don't have to have a dongle which is great. I mean honestly that is very like I've in you know various you know gaming laptops.

I do use other mice besides Apple's magic mouse and other people my family we have mice all over the house. I have so far not found a compelling case for the custom RF dongles to me. There's a compelling case for wired mice. Especially in a gaming PC situation or just a PC situation in general. There's a compelling case for wired mice and there's a compelling case for Bluetooth mice.

And the other options I just have not found to be worth their hassles like I know they're lower latency and different like I know there are technical advantages. It's not even that that's all true like the advantages for it and they actually have like gaming mice that are wireless now with some super wireless protocol whatever it's mostly the fact that the Bluetooth range and reliability is often at the limit for desktop computers even for laptop to keep far away of working well.

Like I mean my computer is my tower computer I can touch it with my hand it's not that far away but no Bluetooth mouse can reliably communicate with the computer it's not that far away RF dongle I could be in the other room smooth is glass right and that's that's the advantage just so much better range and reliability at the cost of filling one of your ports with a little thing.

And the reason I ask about the little dongles is because yeah this is the Mac mini you know if you're going to get rid of a big port get it rid of it on the computer that has many in the name is supposed to be small they're making it smaller get it it's fine drop it. But the alternative is to have you know a dongle like a little the stupid white nonglow or you know some other thing hanging off the back of it that you then attach your little RF dingus to if you have a mouse like that.

And that's more cumbersome than having a bigger computer with no dongle in some situation so there is a balance here obviously we should just be blaming logitech.

Let's say why are you still shipping us be a dongle not wrong make a usb c1 like it's obvious the thing the actual thing that's in there is so tiny I'm sure it could fit but anyway that's the only downside I can see is like why would you still have us be a port so you've got like those you be key things and like DRM stuff for expensive applications and RF adapters for mice.

Indeed. Yeah yeah yeah all right so with regard to minimum amounts of Mac RAM which we were talking about in the context of going to what is it 12 gigabytes of RAM in future Mac 16 16 16 I'm sorry thank you. Brian writes I was at apples 1996 worldwide developer conference for Jill Amelia Gill Amelia I got that right this time see it's gif not Jeff anyway made the announcement during the keynote that all future Mac models would ship with a minimum of 12

megabytes of RAM for me as I remember that announcement got a standing ovation from the developers in attendance and then apparently after ruminating this is years later I think after ruminating about my recollections of the WDC keynote I'm no longer confident in my description of the response as a standing ovation.

Oh this was I think the Brian had written us a little while later anyways instead the enthusiasm of the applause was more along the lines of we're expecting we were expecting next RAM jump would be to 16 megs not 12 but hey we'll take it. 12 megabytes of RAM kids we did a lot with a little back then.

All right cigar job writes with regard to the screen recording badge on outgoing video excluding the screen recording badge about going video is actually possible but requires the full access screen capture API rather than the window selection one.

The way it works is that the screen recording badges the is an extra child window added by the system that you can mask out while streaming I didn't know that the additional APIs required since the window picker lets the system handle the selection and hands you the frames and this includes a recording batch by default. Removing it requires assembling the window list yourself which is quote unquote more sensitive.

So as usual to provide a better experience to your users you need to use the API that Apple doesn't want you to use. With regard to JPEG XL Kelly time this is you know the alleged new codec that Apple is going to be in great well it's not that new but Apple is going to be embracing it which is new. Kelly Thompson writes support for reading JPEG XL images has been available on the Apple on Apple platform since last year.

They work in Safari preview photos and all the apps like page and keynote here's the kicker though you have all that beautiful dynamic range for preview Safari don't support HDR images of any type quite yet. Safari support stage to our video but not stills obviously each year images work great photos it's a weird state of half in half out.

JPEG XL has been jointly developed by cloud an area which I've never heard of in Google for ages JPEG JPEG XL support was behind a flag in Chrome everyone was just waiting for them to turn it on. Then they released a chart saying AV a VIF handle beats JXL and remove support and we'll put a link to the chart in the show notes.

The entire web responded saying in fact the chart showed the exact opposite and everything above quality 55 which is where the vast majority of images saved are JPEG XL handily beat AVIF AVIF at every point in fact JPEG XL isn't optimized at those low quality levels because it's not really usable.

The Google team that works on JPEG XL is in Europe and the team that works on Chrome is in California well either way from the Chromium bug tracker request reopen JPEG XL issue will put a link to that in the show notes. You may already be receiving messages images excuse me in this format without even realizing it major cloud delivery services already offered JPEG XL is an option for two browsers that support it.

One cool feature of the default JPEG XL encoder CJ XL is that you can get you can get to select an effort level from one to 10. If time isn't a critical factor the encoder can spend more time optimizing file size. If not you can compress them as fast as JPEG the expense of some size. Here's a beta version of a tool we developed for the upcoming JPEG JPEG XL website that shows the relationship between distance effort quality and encoding speed.

It's kind of like if you have like image opt-in and those other sort of PNG crush all those utilities that say like use more computation time to make the image a little bit smaller that's like built into this format so you have an adjustable how much effort you want to put in to you know getting the smallest size possible which is just it's really just a honey pot for web developers because every web developer will say I will spend 24 hours making this image smaller because it's going to be served a whole

little bit more than we can crush this image makes it and that was the same thing with CDNs vending JPEG XL versions based on the browsers that they know support them or whatever. So yeah JPEG XL could be out there and you could be receiving it but the the support in macOS I'm hoping if Apple doesn't now say these new iPhones have this new image for that even happens at all.

So if Apple has been adding JPEG XL support comes to the rest of their platforms like things like preview and even Safari not being able to show HDR still images in any format let alone JPEG XL seems like a limitation that they should overcome and this would be the perfect time to do it.

So again I'm rooting for this rumor this is still just a rumor of Apple's doing this but regardless of the rumor Apple has been adding JPEG XL support slowly and steadily to their platforms is just not fully baked yet and they certainly haven't announced that they're switching the iPhone camera to use it as the rumor says they will.

Moving along we need to talk about the FTC's non-compete agreements ban which if you recall the FTC Federal Trade Commission said here in America hey you can't have non-compete anymore that's not fair to which federal judge said hold my beer reading from the bird. Federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission's ban on non-compete agreements and make it difficult for workers to join their employers rivals or launch competing businesses.

The ruling prevents the the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements from taking effect on September 4th which is today though the agency could still appeal the decision on August 20th US district judge Ada Brown and Dallas Texas rule that the antitrust agency exceeded its statutory authority to ban practices related to unfair methods of competition saying the non-compete agreements ban is quote unreasonably over broad without a reasonable explanation broke a quote and would quote cause a reputable harm quote to whom judge Brown to whom.

Brown's decision now stops the FTC from blocking non-compete nationwide after initially delaying the ban with a preliminary injunction in July the ruling upholds a lawsuit that tax firm Ryan LLC filed in April to challenge the non-compete agreements ban arguing that it would make it difficult for companies to retain talent. Here's an idea work harder to retain the friggin talent.

I love that it would make us harder to retain talent if we couldn't legally handcuff our employees by telling them they can't get a job at the same industry for some arbitrary amount of time. Get out of here with that nonsense. I love it's just the things that are quoting here like it's a it's a unreasonably overrrow without a reasonable explanation. I'm pretty sure the people on the other side of this case gave a reasonable explanation for why non-compete are bad.

Now maybe they mean a reasonable explanation of why this particular agency has the ability to do this or whatever. It's frustrating. We would hope that collectively we can define the wind away that will survive judicial challenge to get rid of this horrible thing that is non-compete. The state of California did it somehow. The US government is still working on that so fingers crossed. It's so gross. I just like it so very much.

Moving along though, apparently more governments would also like in on pooping on the app store because Spain has launched an investigation to Apple's apps. This was in July reading from Mac rumors, the national commission of markets and competition. The CNMC this week announced a probe into the app store citing concerns that the company might be imposing unfair trading conditions on developers who distribute their applications through the platform.

The investigation was initiated ex officio reflecting the significant economic influence of app stores in Spain. Apples practices could constitute an abuse of a dominant position which is prohibited under Spanish competition laws and the treaty on the functioning of the European Union. Additionally, India has an antitrust probe which finds Apple has abused its position in the apps market reading from Reuters.

An investigation by India's antitrust body is found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging in quote, abusive conduct and practices. A Confidential report seen by Reuters showed the competition commission of India or CCI has been investigating Apple since 2021 for possibly abusing its dominant position.

The app is using its dominant position in the apps market by forcing developers to use the proprietary in app purchase system. Then going for the trifecta, the UK has entered the chat reading from 9 to 5 Mac. A UK antitrust investigation to Apple is officially closed despite finding the company to be at fault after the regulator missed illegal deadline.

However, a case seems almost certain to be reopened under an upcoming law which will grant new powers to the competition markets authority or CMA. What are all these governments cheating off each other? The language in these stories from three entirely different outlets is so similar and the language of all of their complaints is so similar. These places smell blood in the water.

This is a thing now. Everyone is trying to tamp down the app store citing the same type of things like a competition dominant position. Everyone is getting in on the app now. How will these all turn out? Who knows. But the problems for Apple are just getting started. As we said they would when this started years and years ago. When one country does this, more are going to follow.

It's not going to be like, oh, you're going to satisfy the Japan Trade Commission and that will be it. You'll never hear about this again. Nope. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the ON1 website platform. For entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

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So it is time for everyone's favorite tradition, which was a genuinely excellent idea that Marco came up with a few years back. This is the iPhone 15 exit and exit interview. Marco, would you like to introduce this? Yeah, started doing this a few years ago. As Casey said, this is basically on the on the eve of the iPhones replacement, the episode before they're going to have their event and launch the new one.

So we're going to send the old one out kind of with an exit interview of like how was the outgoing phone this year? Now that we've had a whole year of usage and it kind of helps inform you know other shows, you know, more often do kind of direct like, you know, predictions or wish lists of what we want for the next phone that will be announced, you know, presumably next week.

Having it kind of framed as an exit interview of the previous phone helps to inform kind of what matters and you know what what kind of progress we're actually hoping to have and in what areas. So we're going to start with the iPhone 15 pro. And now to be clear, John, you didn't have the 15 pro, right? This wasn't your year. Yeah, but my wife did. So I've I've experienced the phone. Right. And Casey, you had the big one for the first time and I have the medium sized one.

Which I guess is the small technically, but it's, you know, there's only two sizes and neither of them are small. Aaron did get a 15 pro, not a pro max. So I've used it some obviously not as much as she in the same way that John has used Tina's some, but you are the only one of the three of us that has actually used it full time.

Great. So iPhone 15 pro, I would say the number one thing that I absolutely love about this phone, USB C, we were waiting for it for so long they finally give it to us in the 15 line. And this is not a small deal. This has been a big deal. This has been so nice. So not only do I have easier charging everywhere that I am like because all over my house, my backpack, my traveling.

Now we just have one kind of cable and it charges everything. It's amazing. There are no more lightning cables in my travel bag at all. And around the house, there are hardly any lightning cables necessary for almost anything. The only thing we use lightning for is charging Apple TV remote, which we almost never have to do like that's literally like maybe twice a year.

We charge an Apple TV. The modern ones are USB C the older ones were. Yes, I just never upgraded to that one. So no more lightning cables for almost anything except for Apple TV charging for the remote. Also on my desk, I have to have one to power up older iPhones that uses test phones and also to charge magic mice and magic track pads.

That's it. Like, oh, I guess a couple of my older AirPods cases. But even like my travel AirPods pros are now the USB C model there, which is an upgrade I strongly recommend. It's so good. I really want to do it, but I'm too cheap. It feels so wasteful, but like for, but I had to get a second pair because one of the old ones finally died. And it's so I got the new one. Oh, man. It's so nice. But anyway, yeah.

Having all USB C total game changer, I've even found that there's a lot of kind of like little things you can now do that you couldn't do as easily or at all before because it supports USB C. So for instance, I can plug in my big Fuji camera with a regular USB C cable, even just a quote charging cable that only uses like slow USB 2 speeds.

I can connect that directly from the camera to my phone and import photos. It's glorious. Like so much little stuff like that just works some audio equipment works that way to like I've found it is just USB C has been an awesome upgrade on the iPhone.

And if you are still holding on to an older phone, you're wondering like, should I upgrade you know this year or whatever USB C alone is a great reason to upgrade. But you know, that's obviously how much that's worth to you depends on the pricing, but wow is it nice. That is so much nicer.

Like I knew it would be nice to just like get rid of some cables. I had no idea how nice it would be. So I'm extremely even like you know simple stuff like you have like a USB battery pack that you're using to charge up something. And you want, oh, can I top up my phone for a minute? Yeah, sure.

Just pop out whatever you're charging and plug it into the phone. And then you unplug the phone and plug in a laptop or an AirPods case or whatever all with the same cable all can get the same battery without having to like mess with things. Oh, it's so nice. It is so good. So yeah, USB C A plus. Yeah, just to jump in really quickly, like Marco said, I knew this is going to be an improvement for sure. I didn't realize how vast an improvement. It was going to be.

It is so empowering is a bit dramatic, I think, but I don't I can't think of a better word for it at the moment. It's so empowering to look at any of my devices, asterisk and any cable I have nearby and say, yep, that'll work. And maybe it won't be as quick as I want to be that data or power.

But one way or another, anything can charge anything just the other day on one of the final pool days we had before a little community pool had closed. A friend of ours came and she has an iPhone 15 pro, I guess as well. Yeah, because it's USB C anyways.

She has an iPhone 15 pro and it was near death because she had forgotten to charge at the night before and I didn't have a charger with me, but I had my fully charged iPad with me and I had a USB C cable in the car and I said, hold on, I know what I'll do and I went and I grabbed my USB C to C cable from the car, plugged iPhone into her iPhone and sure enough, she's slept her phone slurped up some of the charge from my iPad, which was totally fine.

Having anything being able to charge anything again, asterisk, et cetera, et cetera is so great and your point, Marco, not having to carry 44 different cables is so nice. It's just it's so wonderful to not have to care if the thing I need to be charged is the computer is the iPad is the phone, it doesn't matter. All of them charges same way.

Yeah, and the only downside I would say is that the USB C hole on the phone does get like lint from your pocket in there in a way that is harder to remove than with lightning with lightning, you could put pretty much anything up there and just kind of scrape it out and it would just kind of fall out.

USB C, I did have an issue earlier in the year where I had to like, where I thought my port was breaking so I just couldn't get cables to sit right or charge reliably and it was just crap in the port and I thought it wasn't because I had just done like some basic you know clean out with like one of those plastic tools thinking like maybe this will do it and it took like a little bit deeper of a clean to get all that stuff out and it was just stuff in the port it was just harder to get out than lightning but other than that it's been it's been only benefit and I also like I thought we and we were just like, I think we're going to be able to do that.

I thought we've been talking for years before they did this. I really thought that the public perception of the USB C change would be as harsh as it was when they switched from the dock connector to lightning. Yeah, that's true. I thought the exact same like regular people out there hated the switch to lightning from the dock connector because they were like Apple is just doing this as a cash grab to you know to sell new cables and new bricks whatever.

And you know this time I thought we would have the same problem and we just didn't I think it's largely because USB C is not proprietary to Apple and so when they made this change it you there was already a massive marketplace of USB C cables and chargers made by everybody and so it was it was not as much of like oh they're trying to sell their own cable like.

I'd be surprised Apple sells many of their own cables I think most people just get whatever they can on Amazon it's fine pretty sure you go back listen to all the episodes of ATP all those reasons you decided were actually cited back when we were discussing this so I don't I don't think either one of you or any of us actually thought it would be as bad and then because we listed those reasons and don't be hold it wasn't well though I that said I think it has been even quieter than we thought it would be because when we were discussing it we're like okay well is this is going to be as bad here these mitigating factors that can be make it not as bad but not only was it not as bad as lightning to USB.

I think it was just pretty much a non issue I mean maybe maybe it's more of an issue outside our circles maybe most people don't have a USB C phone maybe it's lacking but right now on the eve of the iPhone 16 I think it is exceeded expectations into how much better the transition was even though I think we all said it was going to be better we didn't think it was going to be this much better.

I certainly did not think it was going to be as you said like this quiet like no one see it's I heard no complaints from literally anybody that they changed the port like you know I graduated I mean you're right that like you know they not everybody is on that that fast of an upgrade cycle but still I literally heard zero problems about this.

Oh the speaking of the port on the flip side my wife's iPhone 15 Pro is the only USB C phone in the house and so we have the opposite problem here where it's not like we've gone to this whole USB C lifestyle we have this like communal chargers everywhere with lightning stuff when we had to add the right number of USB C things there now arguably we should have been adding them before because we've got USB C iPads we just have to have other places to charge our

pads but now every place where there's a bunch of lightning cables there's now at least one USB C cable in the mix eventually will fully transition but it's going to be a while because my wife uses I believe for maybe three she carries four iPhone's she uses three of them Pokemon go one of them is for so she's just like a brick you know how much like four pro phones way and you're just so heavy anyway it's going to be a while before all four of those

phones are in USB C so I have a long road ahead of me with a combination of lightning and USB C at all our communal chargers and you know and while we're on USB C here I just wanted to give a shout out to USB C power delivery as as a spec and as a product ecosystem USB C PD has an effort for the less nerdy people out there that is the spec that allows USB C to deliver much higher

power amounts than old USB could ever deliver that's how you can get USB to power an entire laptop by itself for instance the move in general to for so many tech products and even products that are kind of just barely tech products the move to being powered by USB C and USB C PD wattages has made overall life so much just like a little bit nicer in a lot of ways

it's like it's like the inverse of paper cuts like you know we complain about little paper cuts on little annoyances and products this is like you know that whatever the opposite of paper cup would be a paper circle I don't know I can't think of a good word that's funny but it is just a little delights I guess that's the word all the time little little

delights where there are like there and you don't necessarily realize once you've moved to the USB C world you don't realize how good you have it until you have to go use something older that has its own power brick or its own like older USB micro or whatever port and the world we have now is so

nice because all of that stuff about like wow I can charge all my like my phone and my iPad and my laptop from all the same thing that's true and that that shows in lots of bigger ways now to like so many other gadgets or things are now powered by USB because it's just kind of cheaper and wildly available and so many devices I even have like a power drill that is powered by USB C now

and so it's own built in like which is and I mean look I'm not a contractor but for my purposes it's totally fine like there was just there are so many things like that now that are entering my life gradually over the last few years that just oh this new X Y this new X Y Z thing this is now USB C powered like you

know it could be so many things like toothbrushes vacuum cleaners like so many things and have been USB C powered and the more stuff that you get like that in your life the more those little conveniences and delights you're into sometimes oh this I need to get a new power adapter for my you know drill do I have to buy the proprietary thing from the

from the drill company no it's just USB C I want to have a shorter or longer cable for this gadget do I have to buy a special thing or see a family makes a weird one on Amazon no you can just use USB C like there there are so many little tiny things like that that add up in your life over time the more you're into the USB C lifestyle so thank God for the European

for forcing this upon Apple and thank God for the ecosystem for for being here and for for pretty pretty gradually but now with quite some speed behind it converting over to this wonderful lifestyle it is wonderful I love USB C even for the data side of it yeah it's a mess the power side of it is awesome yeah agreed we have the EU partial credit because I think we said before I think Apple would have switched with without the EU

it's just a question of the individual timing they may have even done it exactly at the same time because they did do it earlier than required but yeah Apple's lack of investment in lightning and lack of expansion in the capabilities of that board made it inevitable that they would have actually go to USB C so they have and I think you know one of one of their

stated goals one of the EU stated goals was reducing E waste and I think largely this does that like the move of so many things to USBC power I think really does reduce E waste because like think of again like go through your tech closets and see how many things there are that have their own custom power bricks and

stuff that now the modern versions of those don't because they can be USB C powered it's I think they make a pretty big impact here so I again so happy about this change all right let's move on to the other headlighting feature of the iPhone 15 Pro the action button it's funny like we it got out

there there was a little bit of drama here and there with cases and then we pretty much never heard about it for the rest of the year but I got to say I find the action button so useful that I instantly took it for granted like the idea now I've using a phone without the action

button would be a significant paper cut to me like a significant September because I use mine I have it set up for the flashlight I know there's lots of other ideas people have for but I need a flashlight fairly frequently and I use it at least twice a day

and I just I love having that hardware button there it is fantastic I use mine for camera and I know that many would call that a kind of a novice or new approach because there are many other ways to get to your camera most of which are fairly quick but I don't

want to have to think about it or have to worry about swiping in just the right way that it actually listens to me and swipes the way I want it to go from the lock screen and so for me I love having the camera as my action button action and I use that at least daily I don't personally think I

would use the flashlight quite as much but hey that doesn't mean you're wrong at all if it works for you that's all the matters I don't know that I would be lost or anything without having the action button you know in like a in a future

for some reason it went away but I definitely would would miss having it for sure and maybe one day I'll use it for something more advanced but yeah I think the action button also gets a thumbs up for me for sure I think the camera is perfectly good thing to use it for my

success rate doing the swipe gesture for the camera is so low I end up using the what you would think would be the even slower one or you have to hold your finger on the little camera icon it's like you have this a delay you're like why using the one with the delay that's got to be slower no because when I try to swipe and it fails and I try to swipe and it's always like oh gotta get the camera out quick you know something cute is happening or whatever right that is the time when I am

completely unable to get the camera up so the action button is going to be great but I have to say that when I need to get my camera real fast it's almost always my phone and not my wife's phone so I actually haven't built the habit of using the

action button even though hers is set to camera because I'm never grabbing her phone real quick to take a picture because going over to where she is or getting her phone is going to kill the time that would be required anyway so I'm looking forward to my iPhone

16 with the action button so that I can build that habit because I can almost guarantee that pressing that side button is going to have a much higher success rate than me trying to swipe or me having to hold my finger down on that little thing. Yep very much so.

And then finally the only other thing I'll say about the iPhone 15 pro is that the thermals really have been pretty bad it really you know we all saw right at the beginning we're like this phone seems to run hot really hot it does it does run very hot and it does thermal throttle itself a lot in use especially like in the sun and car that's why I had to like buy a chiller phone mount uses you know thermoelectric element just to

cool the phone down in the car just so I can keep the display on and take any power whatsoever like this phone runs hot and it has run hot since day one and Apple tried I think they successfully mitigated the the bad press that could have resulted from that when people started reporting that right beginning and they should have solved they said it was a software issue and they should have software update it wasn't a

software issue it was a hardware flaw this phone overheats much more easily than previous phones did and the rumors are that the upcoming 16 pros that should be announced next week apparently have a modified and better thermal design and that's so that is if I look at my 16 pro wish list it's actually really short it's I want better thermals and I could use the 5x camera that Casey has which it does seem

like both of those things have been pretty solidly rumored the entire time for that phone I have to say though how many years I think it's been like three or four years that there have been rumors of better cooling and iPhones vapor chamber its graphite sheets not just this year not just for the iPhone 70 but last year and the year before that and the year before that we have never gotten them so I really really

hope this is the year because that those rumors are always there and the reason they're there is every year like again if you have a phone out in the sun they will overheat right or if when you first update your phone and it's doing all the indexing they get hot people don't like that and so they're always like boy could there be better cooling and then you look at what Apple has done with cooling and we know they could

do more because Android phones are like what what more can we do can we can we do more than just having you know a heat sink up against the thing and so on and so forth and yes you can lots of other phone makers have done things and so whenever we see the rumors Apple's gonna do it they're gonna put those graphite sheets in there they're gonna use more thermal paste they're gonna use a vapor chamber every year we're just

disappointed and obviously the 15 pro had the what the what the heck is the chip the a 18 pro I don't even remember the numbers anywhere yeah the one on the new 330 meter process right and so it's it was a really good thing they were pushing the limits with that ship on on that process that Apple's already moving away from I kind of see why I have thermal issues and I also kind of say see why this would have been a good

phone to try out those graphite sheets you know what I mean like but no it didn't didn't happen so I really hope it does come on the 16 but if we go another year and everyone's out of those rumors over the 17 not the 16 I am going to be disappointed despite the fact that in general I haven't noticed

that we're getting particularly hot except for when she's playing Pokemon Go in which case that makes all of her phones hot but you know it's as long as it gets the job done as long as it doesn't you know stop working which is your problem when you have it in the car like it literally stops me able to be used for the thing you're trying to use it for because the screen gets so damn you can't see it anymore I don't

know if the 15 pro was over any kind of limit to bother people more than some past phones but it's time for Apple to invest a little bit more in cooling on their top end phones you know it's one of you bring all this up because I do agree that the throttling is an issue in that the thermals are not

stellar but I would actually say to my estimation this was a mild improvement over past years and you know when I'm using my phone at the aforementioned pool I think it was the 14 pro maybe it was the 13 pro but I want to say it was the 14 pro that bad boy was so dark I could barely read it pretty

much all this whereas this one it definitely gets dim and noticeably so but I feel like not only would it recover quicker but it didn't get as dim as the either the 13 or the 14 so while I don't disagree that that we do I think we do need improvements and I hope for improvements I actually

thought that this was a slight improvement over years past although not a great one I think you're just experiencing screen improvements there and not necessarily thermal improvements right good could be just the screen is brighter and takes less power at a given level of brightness so now

the dim one is not as dim and you're attributing that to better cooling or better thermals but I think it's just screen improvements that you're benefiting from there but anyway it doesn't feel like that's the case but I you very well could be right either either way the experience isn't as bad as I

but that's the thing though it's very situational like if you if you buy a car with a big glass roof and all of a sudden your phone is overheating because on the dashboard is getting more direct sunlight you're going to say oh it's the phone's fault but they miss because he got a new car right like these all of these phones have always been very vulnerable to being in direct sunlight for any amount of time and it's just a question of do you start putting your phone in more direct sunlight

if so you will perceive that phone as being worse thermally but I mean there's 15 pros I have heard people saying gets a little bit warmer than they expected it and like a lot of these things especially with the S.O.C. the heat is very localized and it's when the S.O.C. is doing a lot of work

right this is the thing that gets hot is that little S.O.C. in there and so on iPhone setup day when it's doing redo all your indexes doing all that stuff yeah it's going to get real hot and people are going to notice but I think over over time with normal phone usage

where you just pick it up scroll through something and put it back down it doesn't really get a chance to get that hot until you put it on the dashboard of your car and then I guess one more thing on the 15 before we leave it I really do appreciate the titanium as a weight saving measure

I don't think it needs necessarily be titanium specifically it could be lots of other it could be aluminum for all I care like aluminum was fine for a long time and it is lighter than titanium even so that would be fine as well but I'm very glad I switched away from steel

I do know that like apparently these switch 2 to titanium and some of the structural change they made inside I think we're actually part of the problem with the thermals and I believe that that's part of how they had to revise them for the 16 line next week but overall it does feel very good in the hand it feels great so I love the overall design of it with the exception that I think the colors were garbage for the profile like I got the natural gray one which I thought I don't know

last fall I was kind of in a gray mood and I thought this is going to be cool and different and no it's just gray I slightly disagree with you there it is it is just gray but I do think it's a cool gray like a neat gray but I do mostly agree with you

if you'll permit me to just carry on since I've already interrupted you with regard to the 15 pro max I don't hate the size I don't hate the size and I do like having a little more real estate it turns out that if you have a phone this big and your hands aren't freakishly large

a pop socket is pretty much compulsory I've been thinking long and hard about what I will do if the tetraprism 5x lens comes to the pro but not pro max phones if the iPhone 16 pro gets the 5x lens sitting here now I think I'm going to go back to the smaller one with the human sized one

that'll be the test actually because right now you're like the big phone it's annoying but it's nice to have more screen was that you're really going to find out how much you care about that screen when you go back to a smaller one that's what you're going to notice if you don't notice and takes you day or like find it whatever but if you if you look at that screen you're like I'm so used to seeing so much more stuff or in this app I could see a whole other

calm of whatever is that's going to really hurt you so you may will see if you irrevocably come one of the giant phone people or whether you were just a tourist in their land right and sitting now I think I was just a tourist

but I say that with little to no conviction and the thing that frustrates me so about the big phone is that for my hands for my body it's really not a one handed phone for anything more than swiping vertically and even still if I'm using one hand I must have the pop socket out and I actually have

come around on the pop socket I don't think it's a bad thing at all I but I think in a perfect world I would rather go back down to the standard size phone presumably stop using a pop socket I mean we'll see what I'm doing and being able to use my phone one handed because it really is

uncomfortable to use these giant phones one handed and and I just really dislike that I miss being able to use my phone one handed and I think what would happen is I would get the smaller phone if this is what the way I go I'll get the regular size phone and I'll say man I do miss that screen but oh

boy is it nice to be able to use my phone one handed again and so I think ultimately that's going to win the day but we'll see what happens now now that I've shown that I can show myself that is that I can handle a big phone if there is some sort of big phone only feature that I feel interested in like compelled by then I'll just stick with the big phone now the current rumors are that I don't think that's going to be the case but if it is I don't think I would

like begrudge for lack of a better word you know getting another big phone but sitting here today I don't think that's what I want to do that being said the five excellence I am very glad that I went for it and that I got it there definitely times that I want to be between two and five for sure and I think Marco you were not whining about this that's not the word I'm looking for either but you were you were concerned about this before it came out and I

think it's a valid concern there are definitely times that I want in in between and in a perfect world I would want you know one or one half one two three and five and I know that's nuts and that's not going to happen but that would be a good one but I stand by getting the big phone for the five excellence I really do feel like it gives me reach in scenarios that I wouldn't have gotten nearly as good as shot otherwise and I don't want to give that up so for some reason

the regular size phone doesn't get the tetraprisome lands I will almost certainly stick with the big phone having never had a big phone before a lot of people would say that oh the battery life is infinite not unlike the Apple Watch Ultra you know battery life is forever it's amazing no or at least not in my experience I don't feel like it's demonstrably better than the regular size phones maybe I'm using my phone now more now maybe I'm a banana maybe I'm off my

rocker I don't know but I don't feel like the battery life was night and day better I really don't but I do think to echo what Marco said Marco said the USBC four thumbs up for me the titanium two thumbs up I do think that the natural titanium is a good color but I concur that the rest of the colors tank and it looks like they're only going to get worse but yeah I mean all in all I really do like these phones a lot I really have enjoyed it the one thing I will say

and I will say again and I've said this for the last several years the front screen is too easily scratched it is I scratch the snot out of this thing I have no idea how it's so badly scratched that I am genuinely thinking I might become one of those lunatics that puts a screen protector on their phone because this thing is scratched a hell and I hate that I hate it and normally I would just go to Apple and use my Apple cares you know repair incident and I'm probably

try to do it to see if they'll do it but last time I tried this they were like oh damage enough tough nuts and I'm just barely honest enough that I don't just throw the thing on the granted front of them and say how about now it is definitely a weird incentive they've created right I'm saying I didn't do that last year I don't plan on doing it this year but but it is very tempting sounds like somebody might need a phone pouch no I hear you're using your screen how is

this happening how are you still using a phone pouch what years I'm not that's also a lazy needs to be I'm not using one I have one scratch I'm I screen it is very small and I've had this phone for two years right I don't know what you're doing that's it must you're going to have someone to follow your over the camera to find out what you're doing is you stick your pocket full of sand maybe you need a pouch yeah I genuinely don't know and these are not

small scratches like one of them is a horrible semi-horizontal you're putting it in your pocket with keys no I don't I it's gotta be me I'm not saying it's not a fault but darned if I know what it was and I've been rolling mostly caseless this year because I never really found a case I loved I adored what was it the peel case I think we talked about this one was new I adored the peel case but they had a cut out for the action button which I could not

abide and to the best of my knowledge they never revised it like what was the one that they sent out like a that was peak design I actually that's the one I've been using the last few months yeah and I have nothing against peak design case it's just it's great honestly I really loved the peel case so very much but I could not abide the lack of anything for the action button but I will say in the defense of the glass and actually David David shop in the

chat just reminded me of this I have dropped this thing case free a handful of times not dramatically but a handful of times in cases where I was in in situations where I was like oh here we go oh well at least I'll get a new screen now but but I've dropped it by accident a handful times and it's been no worse for where which I do appreciate but golly can I please have a less scratch prone screen and I think I think this tradeoff is the one apple would say

is the right one it's better to people because you've seen people use screens that are just destroyed so people's tolerance for using screens that are messed up is great but shattering is over a lot of people's limits so the trade office essentially you can make it more scratch proof but then it's

going to be more prone to shattering and so Apple the bounce Apple has chosen is it's going to get a bunch of little hairline scratches all over it if you do whatever the hell case he's doing but it will be more resistant to full blow and shattering when you drop it and despite the fact that mine annoy some of us like if you're very careful with your phone a harder screen that was more scratch resistant we better for you but how I've dropped my phone

playing time is dropped off my nightstand onto a wooden floor plenty of times I've dropped it off the dining room table onto wooden floor like it hasn't been here in a case aren't you yeah I'm in a case but you know like it can you could still get unlucky with the with the way it falls in that situation so I've dropped it enough times that I'm glad that it is as shatter resistant as it is I mean I am glad it's shattered resistant for sure but and I do

think you're right that this is a problem I can fix with a screen protector and I think the more I think about it the more I talk about the more I think I am I am probably going to not have to but choose to do that for the next one so if you have a screen protector recommendation that you swear by

please reach out via mastodon don't email us because we're it's too much to email please but I would love to hear from a unmasked on ortho ads for that matter a screen protector that you enjoy and a clean room for a case you do apply it in yeah well pretty much some of them have gotten like really advanced at like so like the when you order most like you know decent brand ones now they come with basically little like kits that like you like you like lay it in this like

plastic cradle and you like flip this thing right down exactly the right angle they get really pretty pretty complicated to try to do it right they're trying to help you as best they can because they know it's a difficult thing to do but if you're doing in a like a house full of cat dander or something you're kind of fighting uphill battle I've actually heard you're often better off having either sometimes the Apple store will have people who are willing to do it for you

yeah I've heard this by there but I don't even know if they still sell screen pictures there but I think best by does it to or something like this is a skilled labor thing yeah like even like mall kiosks that sell phone accessories will

often do it for you for some small fee and usually like I would actually suggest maybe trying that option because yeah as long as like you know when you buy one and try to apply it you've done you're doing this in your house with whatever conditions you can best approximate that are actually

somewhat near maybe being ideal but not quite a deal and you're going to do what two of these a year and most you know so like you're not going to have the you know the experience and the the finesse of somebody who's doing it like ten times a day on the other hand you will care much more than they

will if you're the type of person getting screen protector but you can't send even a single scratch on your screen have fun in dealing with that single spec of dust that did get under there I mean you're not wrong but well this is a problem for Casey in a week or two it's not a problem for

Casey today but yeah grand scheme of things I've really enjoyed this phone and for no other reason I think I would be all in because of USBC and everything else was just a bonus you didn't even mention the I felt play an iPhone 15 and I want to say that I think this year is one of the rare cases where Apple seems to have gotten caught with their pants down a little bit by the AI thing they shipped a line of phones the 15 and the 15 pro seemingly without

realizing that that 15 wouldn't be able to run next year's headlining feature they're going to ship or maybe they won't ship it by that reason or shipping app on the ones but they could they could have ended up shipping Apple intelligence that wouldn't work on their latest non-pro phone if they

actually shipped Apple intelligence before the new phones came out like it's I think it's unprecedented for one year old phone not to be able to run the headlining feature of the next OS that came out after a year later and I just have to think it's because they didn't think that oh we can

cheap out on the RAM of the 15 what's big deal the life on the upon a ram we're well within limits Bob Vaughan here comes AI and LMS using all your RAM I will look back on this line the 15 and 50 pro and I was remember it is the year where the non-pro phone had this crippling disability

that was you know the could have been prevented with being a little bit more generous with RAM but wasn't and it put Apple in this strange someone in a comfortable position of having to tell people who just bought a brand new phone last year that yeah you can't run Apple intelligence I think that

speaks to just how far ahead iPhone components are planned like and how recently relatively speaking Apple realized they had to get it on the LLM game because you know the iPhone 15 non pro components were probably a lock like what two years ago maybe like you know it's we know they they have

pretty long timelines for a lot of that stuff and so they probably started Apple intelligence shortly after that was decided or around the same time maybe they didn't know yet when they started doing LLM research and development

maybe they maybe they didn't realize like we're definitely going to need X gigs of RAM to run this thing you know that was probably too early to know that and a lot of Apple's efforts over the last year or two like they've actually open source some things and and published papers about

compressing LLM's to fit in smaller amounts of RAM they've done a lot of work in the area why we're seeing it now this is why they care so much about that I think they are barely fit in in the eight gig phones like all that it's been a lot of hard work to get it to fit in the eight gig phones and you can argue whether they were there were you know late to the game on LLM or because lead time to the long they just couldn't help it but this is another side effect

of always being stingy with RAM it's the unforeseen thing right it's the it's like we don't need this why would we ever give ourselves any kind of buffer let's cut it as close as we possibly can save every penny penny because why would we give any excess RAM if we think the low end phone doesn't need that we want to provide a product differentiation and the answer is you never know when something might come along that makes your stinginess hurt you more

than your stinginess is currently helping you know Apple probably argue well we're stingy 90% of time only only lose out on a 10% of the time so it's still a win but you know I still think that being being that stingy with RAM like setting aside the AI thing we've always said we talked about the max with selling them with two little ram having people upgraded whatever you want to give your users a better experience and in general more ram gives a better

experience there are so many things more RAM does for you even on the 15 pro the fact that they had to work so hard to get Apple intelligence into eight gigs that was their highest end phone even on that one they could have still provided differentiation and given the pro 10 and the non pro eight instead of eight and six anyway they seem to have snapped out of that with the 16s which are rumored to all have the same amount of RAM and the 17s and rumored to all

have even more RAM so we'll see how this goes but this is you know I said I am going to remember the 1515 pro line with this one specific fact Mark I remember it for USBC and I will remember it for the time the non pro phone got left behind prematurely well and to be clear it isn't only about being cheap when they limit the amount of RAM and phones that is certainly part of it and that's not that's probably not a trivial part but it's also about battery

life ram takes power like just having a certain amount of RAM you have to be applying power to that part of the chip even if it's not using that ram for anything like even if it's you know marked as free by the OS you're still powering that chip to a certain base level that's how d ram works so and

forgive me for experts in the field if I'm dramatically oversimplifying or there's a whole bunch of asterisk on that now there probably are but in general you don't want to put a whole bunch of RAM and something that's as battery can train as a phone if you're not sure you're going to use it

because it does take battery now but it's like again this is the pro line you know you can give them a little bit more which allows you to give the non pro line eight which apparently is okay you know because the pros got eight and their battery life is okay with an even hungrier S.O.C. right so

the 15 the plane 15 would also have been fine with eight like you're right it does take more RAM but we're not asking for double and as he double the RAM just a little bit more just give yourself a little bit ahead of him just don't be as

stingy you can still be stingy but just not quite as stingy because you never know when that's going to pay off all right so I'll watch series nine I don't have a lot to say about the series nine except that I have found the double tap gesture which was one of its new headlighting features to be

fairly bad I don't think it is fast enough or reliable enough to be useful I have tried it over the last year many times my hit rate with getting it to be recognized is low and even when it is recognized it takes a decent amount of extra time that you have to be still having the watch be like raised up and looking out to the screen stays on and then it shows a little animation to confirm that it understood your tap and you can like it just feels very slow and I

have just mostly resorted to nose tapping the way I always have if I have to be one handed to dismiss something because it is just faster and literally more reliable like it is more reliable to lift up the watch to my nose and tap it and hit the right spot on the screen then trying the double tap finger gesture so I don't know if that's just me but I have found generally the double tap is really not very useful yeah I mean I have a series eight and so this is

going to be a very expensive September for us because we're going watch and phone we are on a two year plan on watches any one year plan on phones I I feel like my complaints about the watch are the same as they ever were which is to say the battery life is just straight up trash at this point really I don't find that I mean I mind a lot younger obviously it's like you know I find the battery life on the series nine is great but I also didn't have any

problems with the series eight well that's the thing is I think a year worth of Apple Watch battery is fine in my personal experience two years not so fine and that's been a real bug bear for me to the point that between Marcos friendly brow beating and also my friend my friend in Richmond

Brad just got a like a month or two ago got an Apple Watch Ultra two or whatever the current one is yep he will not shut up about how good the battery life is on this thing and at this point I think I am probably going to hold out until whenever the next ultra update is and if that's next week perfect that be preferred but if not I will try to hold out as long as I can and if I can't I'll probably just commit to the existing one but it's it's been so frustrating

and if I don't top off my watch at some point during the day it will typically die sometime after dinner and I'm just sick of it I'm just over now also part of this is also influenced by the fact that I have the little watch I have the 40 millimeter whatever the little one is or 41 I think for you yeah I forget what it is now but what it was in series eight but I'm just sick of it I'm sick of always having to worry about my watch this battery life and so next

time it's going to be an ultra so I'll come back to that in a second the only thing I wanted to say about watch about the watch series nine specifically is that they removed the option for titanium with the series nine and I wish they didn't and I hope for the series 10 they bring back a titanium option for the non ultra watch it was a bit like the titanium addition watch was not that much more money than a steel one it was really nice it was lighter I think

it looked more refined I had like a nice brushed finish like it looked really nice it felt really nice on the wrist it was a way to have a little bit more subtle and a little bit lighter watch than the steel without going down in quality on things like the crystal that you have to do when you get the aluminum one the aluminum one looks like aluminum you know looks fine but it doesn't look nice the steel and the titanium both look very nice and the thing I think

was a little bit nicer of a look between the two and again I think it felt better and also Apple watches tend to function better the lighter they are the more flexible it moves on your wrist better such a nervous better so I really hope they bring back titanium as an option on the series 10 or whatever they're going to call it series X series 10 whatever before you move on and if you rather table this for later we certainly can but I would also be curious to

hear what the status is of Adams Apple watch and I don't remember what what generation that is but we've been kicking around the idea of getting Declan one for an upcoming birthday and I'd be curious to hear what your you know year two on review is of that the original one that we got a few years

back now was an SE with the first Gen watch SE we replaced it a couple years back with I think a series five or six that I've gotten Amazon refurbished or renewed or whatever they call it for fairly cheap he doesn't wear it currently anymore because the school band them I guess kids have figured out like how to put notes in your Apple watch to cheat on tests so they banned them so he hasn't worn it in a long time it's been sitting in a drawer it's probably fairly dead

now but anyway so I don't for now he's just not using a watch and I don't know when or if that will return but we'll find out so about so going back to do you know kind of what I'm hoping for for the series 10 so number one titanium option but and just for the record here I'm not talking about software at all right now I think the Apple watch in the watch OS 10 redesign changed a lot of things I still am not super sold on some of the watch OS 10 changes in

placements and buttons and gestures and things like that I'm still getting everything wrong all the time like I'm still like pushing the wrong buttons or swiping the wrong edge to do things that I didn't want to do like so but that's just maybe that's just me and of course I always have opinions on watch faces but going back to just the hardware I really hope again titanium option on the non ultra series please bring that back it was so nice I'm also

always hoping for I guess this is kind of software sorry I want display zoom on the Apple watch as you may know my vision is slowly getting worse at close distances as I you know proceed through middle age I use reading glasses

for close-up reading of things sometimes I'm not always wearing my reading glasses because I'm not always reading so I have found as my vision has gotten slowly worse at that at like you know short arm distance very small complications and very small text in complications like say the timer

complication which I use frequently is getting a little hard to read now iPhones have many different accessibility technologies for font sizing and element UI sizing and different different visual accommodations the watch has almost none which is surprising there is dynamic type on the watch which

which is you know the global text size setting but it doesn't affect that many things in the watch they also on the phones have this thing called display zoom where that's the mode where when you set up your phone I don't know if it still does this on all phones but when you during the that set up process it'll ask you like do you want things to be this size or this size and what it does is basically scale the entire screen up to simulate the field of view of like

the next size smaller phone that existed or exists so you so like you know if you have like a pro max and you pick that option it'll basically just blow up the screen dimensions of a pro into the pro max screen so you get everything scaled up perfectly the same way you would do like a resolution change on a monitor on a computer I want the watch to get that ability so that it can scale up everything complications the faces everything when you have a larger

model watch to simulate the screen size of a smaller model watch blown up to its new size I think that would be a great visual accommodation for people who's close to vision is not that good or is it in general is not that good because again dynamic text on the watch is just not very well supported doesn't go very far and doesn't include almost anything on the watch face so I would love to see that as an option again that is a software thing but maybe it's you

know requiring a certain GPU or whatever and of course the rumored larger screens that might be coming might make that easier to pull off and make it better feature before we get to the screens I'll get there but I'm hoping they found a way to keep the blood oxygen sensor this is not a sensor I use frequently I think you know whatever they need to work out with Massimo you know to license that tech that patent I think they should just do it yeah that that is

true I am going to be really annoyed just in principle if the hardware at least for the blood oxygen sensor is not on whatever these new watches are I'll be lightly annoyed if it's if it remains disabled which I expected to but I will be really annoyed if it's incapable you know if this patent dispute ever gets fixed if it's incapable of doing any testing or measuring that's going to really chat my butt yeah so I again just I it's a minor feature it's not going

to be the other world if I lose it but I just don't want to lose it like over Apple being you know B.S.A. about patent licensing and I understand look we all hate patents but and they tried so hard but you know you lost let's move on the only thing I'll get to for the hardware before we get to

the screens is I really really hope that the Apple Watch series 10 supports Qi charging finally Qi 2 as a standard I believe accommodates small enough devices that I believe the Apple Watch could be charged via Qi 2 if the watch wanted to support it so I'm hoping because again like going back to

our to our charging delights and paper cuts earlier with USB-C I have now one cable and one port for everything except the Apple watch and so and yeah you know you can get like combo chargers that have like a special Apple Watch pad off to the side but you know it's much more common batteries

and charges to have a cheap had and USB-C holes so I would love to just have Qi support let me buy a battery from anchor or whatever on Amazon that has a USB-C output and a standard Qi pad and I can put whatever I want there an AirPods case a second phone or an Apple Watch while traveling that would be really nice and again I think Qi 2 has added what is necessary to make that work so I'm hoping for that now about the screen sizes on the watch there's been

all these rumors that the that the watch regular series is growing that there's going to be you know that basically the current small version which I just 41 millimeter or 42 that is going to go away and it's going to basically that both of them are going to be going up in size by a decent amount I think this is going to be a good move overall you know we we've set over time that Apple has done a really good job satisfying the market for smaller watches

way better than most of the smart watch makers have ever have ever achieved it but watch fashion and the smart watch market have changed since the Apple Watch is introduced 10 years ago and this happens like in the watch world the the sizing of what how big like a standard you know and watches historically were very gendered so they were like certain sizes like all right this men's watches are going to be this size range for the most part women's watches are going to be

this size range fortunately in the in the era of smart watches first of all a lot of them during has gone away to the point where now like you know you don't if you if you buy the small watch people don't say that's the women's version like it's just a small watch and the big one women can wear it and no one's going to say you're wearing a man's watch like thank God we've gotten rid of all that you know BS also since the smart watch era has has really taken

off over the last decade demand for large watches has gone up and which is funny because in the in the regular watch world like the mechanical watch world watches had gotten very big and they kind of started going back a little bit they're actually getting a little bit smaller now but smart watches are going the other way part of the reason so many people bought the Apple watch ultra is not because they're going to be climbing a mountain and then diving into

200 meters of water like it's because they liked the bigger look and that's that's for both functional reasons yes it has you know better battery life bigger screen that's great for smart watches but also big watches are just in fashion right now really huge smart watches are in style and most people that I see are not wearing the smaller anymore I see a lot of people of a lot of different sizes and ages and I don't see many people choosing that smaller

Apple watch anymore meanwhile if you look at the smart watch market the the current quote big series nine it's that's the one I wear that's the one I think Casey probably should be wearing the big one relative to other smart watches in the market is actually fairly medium sized many other smart watches in the market are actually significantly bigger what the ultra success I think showed Apple and showed the market is is that yes a lot of people choose it because

of those technical factors but a lot of people also just like big watches big watches are in especially smart watch big big smart watches that is just in fashion right now so if Apple is truly getting rid of the smallest size and

making them both bigger I think that's not because they're abandoning the market for small watches I bet it's more because the market abandoned theirs the market probably moved on and has not been buying the small watch very much at all and I think people of all wrist sizes have been choosing

bigger smart watches over the last few years way more than they used to so I think this is just Apple responding to the market and wanting to serve where the demand actually is they did the same thing with phones and phone sizes growing over time this is that they're doing the same thing with the

watch I think they're going to raise the sizes of both of them and everybody will complain about it for about a week and then we'll try them like oh this is nicer yep and then it'll be fine and people will buy them like crazy especially the biggest one way more than we think they will so I think this is going to be totally fine if they increase the sizes of the watches a little bit will all get used to it and it'll be fine.

Let's do at least a little bit of ask ATP if we can PG&E Dylinda S. I love people who provide these two key user names and no real names. Anyways Marco it's not even Halloween for going to say Marco how hard is it to maintain server compatibility with clients that are still going to be on the last iOS 16 or below builds of overcast are you doing that thing I'm sure there's a

term for it are you doing that thing where it's like something on the lines of api dot overcast dot FM slash to slash you know and points okay yeah I just ruined your answer then I'm sorry no well so but well that it is a question though because like at some point I do end support for the really old

API protocols how hard it is to maintain server compatibility in general with all clients if you you know just make us make a new copy of your API you know controller functions or whatever and just call this one like I'm currently on version six it's really not that bad the main problem comes when you have to do like significant changes to things like the server side schema like how your data is stored and like so do you do you like build in compatibility layers

how long do you keep those over time do certain problems occur when older versions of the app sync that maybe like cloud bar changes from the new app and then you can accommodate that over time that complexity grows and how much you want to maintain it for a decreasing number of clients eventually

that trade off becomes not worth it and you say all right you know what you know in a month I'm going to cut off support for iOS 12 or whatever the downside been doing that of course is you know overcast is a server dependent app and so if the servers stop supporting a certain client version that

version of the app does not work anymore it will not get new updates you cannot add new podcast you cannot download new podcast like it you can't even log in like it's it will totally break that client so I try not to do that until those clients are very old in this case you know the the specifics of the new API for the rewrite the protocol with which the clients speak to the server and vice versa has to totally changed its way lighter on the servers it's way more efficient

the old protocol was very hard on the servers and so you would think I would have a pretty substantial incentive to end support soon for the old ones but because the numbers drop off so fast for like how like there's not like in in you know a month or two there's going to be a big chunk of those iOS 16 only people that fall off because they replace their phones even though the old protocol is way less efficient and way harder on the servers I don't have much

incentive to end it's supporting it time soon because it's going to be such a tiny percentage of user base that's going to be holding on to it so that'll probably be supported for a while you know you were talking probably years multiple years because again there's just there's not much reason to end it yet eventually there will be but the protocol is mostly what has changed not the data storage layer and some of the things I'm doing I'm trying over time to push

more of the logic that would that was previously server side logic push more of it to the client where possible in part just to lighten the load on the servers and in part because sometimes that's just way easier to do on the client or I can offer better features if I do a client side

so for instance the the current test fight build I have fixed a problem with the episode limit not being enforced I've had its option forever of like you know you can you can limit a podcast only keep the latest one or two or five episodes of that podcast this feature if I was launching a new podcast that today I would never offer this feature it is so tricky and problematic and that has been enforced server side to date this new test fight building forces a client side and that's part of

why it's fixed from a lot of people because doing it server side because there's all sorts of differences I'll get into a very brief diversion here problem is the way the servers servers have to deal with data in very different ways they have to deal with scale in very different ways

so when you as a user when you subscribe to a podcast the what you see suppose you describe you subscribe to a new podcast that has a thousand episodes in it back in its feed you subscribe you now have in your app a thousand episodes that you don't have any history with and then a new one comes out and maybe you play that one well to your to your client that's a thousand and one rose in a table most of which have all zeros and then you know you have then that latest one you can mark that as your

progress or your play to whatever on the server if I added a thousand rose to the table that keeps track of everyone's status of episodes every time someone subscribe to a podcast at a thousand episodes it would take way more space and be way heavier and way more expensive to host and you know more servers larger back up like everything did data size effects costs substantially so that would be very bad so on the on the server I do tricks like when you subscribe to a show

I assume that the state of everything that precedes your subscription in that in that feed is it's deleted but not played like it's just that's the default state of everything that precedes your subscription to a new podcast if you then go back and listen to one of one that of course I insert that row but I have this these all these optimizations in place that like okay I'm not going to add all thousand of those as new rose to this table because again I would blow up

everything that logic wreaks havoc with episode limiting and it's been so tricky to get it right server side couple years ago I even let people opt into a beta of a new way to handle it because I thought I finally had nailed it and taking care of all those cases and all the edges and all the weirdness that somehow would still be efficient and would still not store nearly as much as it had to I tried so many different ways to do this and I never got it quite right so

with the new way that the new app talked to the servers I've developed yet more issues with doing that server side so what I'm going to do is once this version of this app is reasonably out there that does it all client side because again client side way easier to do the client has no I don't care if I take another five kilobytes on your phone so the client can have a thousand rose in the database when you subscribe to a feed because it's just keeping it

locally it doesn't I don't care it's a sequel database super light so the client can do perfect limiting because it has perfect information whereas the server is simulating perfect information with the bunch of optimizations so anyway so what I plan to do is move that logic entirely to the client with the next release and then over time eventually tell the server to stop even trying to do that to stop enforcing episode limits at all because that will make a

lot of things easier it'll reduce this bug potential in the app and you don't want the server trying to do it at the same time the app is doing it so that's kind of my long term plan here have the server stop enforcing that completely when that happens if you are still say on an old client if all of your overcast devices are going to if none of them have the new version that does this your episode limits will just slowly increase and like things won't get

automatically deleted once they pass that limit and so things like that like kind of weird drift will start happening if you're still using a very old version of the API that's another reason why like eventually it does make sense

to retire them because if they start like producing weird conditions or like things that could cause bugs for other clients you know you got to retire them that or find a way to limit them but for the most part I'm because I'm moving more towards more stuff happening on the client and

the server side feature set is fairly fixed I don't intend to really do much more server side unless we've into things like you know transcriptions but that's a whole other bag of worms because of all that I expect the iOS 16 API to still work for a long time to answer your question in a very long

way. Mark Robinson writes one podcast says follow us on Apple podcast it really helps the show does listening through overcast do that as well does Apple register that follow in a way that counts in helps the show

also how does it actually help the show. Listening through overcast doesn't do anything to affect Apple podcasts or its rankings because Apple podcast does not know that you're listening in overcast if you subscribe to a podcast in Apple podcast Apple does register that in some way and it does

help the show. It helps the show mainly in ranking it higher and possibly helping it get on certain top lists or ranked lists that are that are occasional use for discovery and podcasts over time I think they're using this less in the sense that they are they're doing more kind of you know things you might like type of recommendations rather than

top list of new new and noteworthy you know this week or whatever. So I think this is a matter less over time but they basically they they historically have used new follows as a strong signal but I think possibly at sometimes I

think that was actually the only signal that would feed into like what shows up on their top hot list today because it is a pretty good signal overall like how many new follows the show getting and and for the record I think that's really trying not to have those kind of metrics in overcast that are global like that because it tends to reinforce like the rich

get richer. So I've kind of I've moved away from most of those over time but I but that is as far as I know that is still part of how Apple podcasts does recommendations rankings. All right thank you to our sponsor this week square space thanks to our members for supporters

ATV.FM slash join one of the member perks is ATP overtime a bonus topic every week just remembers this week's overtime we're talking about AI angst there is some some tricky things going on with the AI world including author suing and thropic and some drama over at nano-rimo where you're

talking about those things in ATP overtime you can join to listen ATP.FM slash join thanks everybody we'll talk to you next week and if you're into master thumb you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's k c list m a r c o a r m and t marco arm and s i r a c u s s e r q it's accidental we didn't mean to accept oh I'm not having a good time in

neutral land right now oh battery fault. Yes, so remember when that battery fault message popped up about about a about a month ago oh I do about about a month ago. Oh, I do. And I can't believe you haven't gotten the car service yet. And I said at the time, I'll get a service as soon as I'm back off the beach for the school year, it's gonna be a pain in the butt and driving all the way to Brooklyn for the Rivian Service Center.

So I'm gonna send you two photos and a sequence here into the Slack group. And I'll try to put the most chapter on. I'm gonna say that this whole deal, like with EVs, we don't have an established culture the way we do with internal combustion engine cars about the various levels of severity of things that can happen. And I know the culture is not consistent. You'll know people who drive their car with a check engine light on forever and ever.

But most people who know something about cars, if the check engine light comes on, it's a sign that you should do something. Not like, I'll do it in a few, I'll look at it in a few months, it's probably fine. Maybe it's fine or maybe your engine's about to blow up, right? Whereas with EVs, they'll have their own error messages, their own things and there's no sort of universal equivalent of like, you know, a light on a dashboard that we know, these ones are serious.

You know, oil pressure drops to zero, stop the car. You know what I mean? Like, things that we know about internal combustion with EVs, it's like, I don't know, is that bad? Is a battery fault bad? Right. And especially in a battery fault, it only shows up when doing DC fast charging on a highway. And then I reboot the car a couple of times and it doesn't show up anymore. Like, okay, I guess it's fixed. Right, like you don't have any like frame of reference or how seriously should I take this?

Since I last reported on that, I have developed a few additional problems. Oh no. So I mentioned, you know, the dramatically increased wind noise since getting the body shop to replace the silvic. Admittedly, that's probably the body shop's fault. But there was wind noise before they did their work also. There was just a little bit less of it. But so, you know, wind noise, I gotta get them to fix that. I had an increasing incidence of what seems like the auto-steer system crashing.

No, not literally. Thank God. I guess poor choice of words. But the auto-steer sometimes will just turn off and make a bunch of noise and it will say, highway assist system failure. And so that sounds like it crashed to me or some sensor broke. So I have to have them look at that. Also, I can no longer move the seat of the car. The driver's seat does not move unless I am switching between the two profiles, the tick profile and the me profile. Hope you're happy with the profiles.

Yeah, it will not move. Like none of the adjustments work. It is just stuck. Like it refuses any other adjustment besides the profile switches. So if I wanted to like, you know, I'll only put it up a little bit. Nope, can't do that. If anybody else needs to drive my car too bad, if I need to move the seat back to like to get something out from under it, nope, too bad. Which to me, that's actually probably like a safety issue that I should probably get fixed pretty immediately.

And finally, I barely have air conditioning. The air conditioning has almost completely gone out. It blows very weak air and goes through lots of times when the fan will just like kind of slow down and it'll blow totally hot air. And then it'll go back eventually and blow slightly cold air, but it's bad. Like today was only in the high 70s and it couldn't keep up. Like it was not a hot day and it could not keep up and it was blowing warm air most of the time.

So the air conditioning, I basically have no air conditioning or I have almost no air conditioning. So I created a support ticket in there and you know, the way you get service from Rivian is you go to their app and you like report your problems, you can attach photos and whatever else. So I created the support ticket with all of these issues. I do find it very funny that apparently when you add five issues to a ticket, it says at the bottom, you've reached the max number of issues.

Please submit these and start a new request. So my car says otherwise. I write. So I've reached the maximum number of problems with my Rivian that I can put in one on one service request. So I thought, okay, well, you know, maybe I'll get in the service center within the next couple of weeks, you know, get this done. I'm a little scared because I have heard that this level three charging battery problem, I've found a couple of forum through it.

People said it took them like months to figure it out. So I'm not loving that, but we haven't gotten there and we'll see what happens. So okay, maybe I can get in the service center, you know, again, maybe a week or two. And that was the next screen, which I'll send you now. These were the first available appointments. Oh no. Oh no. Oh, that's not good at all. The first available Rivian appointment in my entire region of New York is 10 weeks from now, November 13th.

That's undesirable. Yes. So, and I checked, like there's a couple other like Rivian service centers that are like, you know, a hundred miles away. And it's no better. It's the same. I'll like, they're all out to November. You should check Richmond. I bet there's not a lot here. I am not happy right now. Like I, I'm starting to fall out of love with owning a first version car rapidly. And I knew when I bought it, I'm like, this is the first version of the R1S. Maybe I'll have some problems.

I don't think I fully appreciated how much this sucks that I now feel like my car is unreliable in some pretty key areas and is losing things like air conditioning. Like I'm pretty sure we solved that problem a long time ago. But no, air conditioning also broken and as well as the seat being too smart to move. I am really tired of being a testing car. Whatever my next car is, I think it's, first of all, I think it might be sooner than I expect.

But second of all, I think I just wanna get something from a regular car company again. Like an established car company that like, I'm just, I'm tired of the flux. And I think even though I love the features of this car in a lot of other ways, this rapidly erases those gains in my head. Like having to deal with service, especially dealing with bad service, like what this is turning out to be. To make a good car ownership experience, yeah, the car needs to be good.

It also needs to have almost no problems during ownership, especially when they're new. They really, at least this car is a year old. It should not be having any of these problems all alone all of these problems after one year. A car mostly shouldn't have problems in its first few years, besides the basics of like, maintain the very basics of the car, like the brakes and the windshield wipers and stuff like that and the tires.

That should be all you have to do for a car in the first couple of years. And so you shouldn't have these problems at all, but if you do have problems, you need the servicing infrastructure to be there and to be near you, like this is already, having to drive to Brooklyn, like it's driving to the service center, will take me an hour and a half on a good day. And then I'm in like the worst part of Brooklyn where there's nothing around. It's all warehouses and it's terrible.

And like God knows how many times I'm going to have to do that too. So it's already like a rough service situation. And you know, to have the service then be backed all the way out 10 weeks when you ask for it. Like that's, I'm going back to a regular car company. Like I can't. But what would you buy? Like no argument. And I am disappointed by this just peripherally because you were so in love with that car when you first got it.

Yes. And as much as I will always and forever make fun of the God awful color choice you made, like it was is a great car. But I don't think you have a lot of really good options, especially for a battery electric vehicle. Now if you wanted to go back to like a Range Rover or Land Cruiser or whatever the hell it was you had before, then maybe, but if you're trying to go battery electric, what could you possibly get? That's what I was going to say.

When the Land Rover is the more reliable option, you know you're in trouble. Yeah, for real. I think I'd be looking probably at like, probably BMW again or maybe even Polestar, but that's also a little bit too new. I think I would have the same problems with Polestar. No, but what of these cars? Like I don't think there's anything battery electric that either these companies sell that would work for the beach, right?

I'm going to shortly stop needing that because I'm going to shortly stop qualifying for my permit and lose the permit. That's a bummer. It is. You go back to getting regular cars then. You don't have to get these stupid SUVs anymore. That's right. Right. So that's why I might be in the market, maybe in six months or something. I might be in the market for something that is smaller and or at least one of the options I've looking at the BMW IX, which I think is actually a very attractive option.

It's not an attractive vehicle, but it is. It's a very attractive option. Looking at that, looking at Hyundai stuff, there's Volvo stuff. There's a bunch of things. Many of them have the first year problem, or like the first couple of years problem. And again, I just, I think I'd be looking at maybe something a little more established. The really sad thing is, I really would not, I don't think, buy a Tesla right now. Like for lots of political reasons, that just feels very bad to me.

But I see why people do, because when you look at the numbers of just like, how much range does it offer? And then what are you paying to get that car? Tesla is still way ahead of everybody. Like their cars get such long range than almost everyone except Lucid. They claim, they claim longer range, but they're also one of the most distant from their claims. So I, but if you're just looking at this, this thing. But I had Teslas. Yeah, there, there are little BSEs.

I know, but they're, their cars out there now that are claiming less than Tesla, they just get the same range, right? So you can't go by the numbers that are on the package. Sure. But yeah, I think I'm gonna, like, well, let me see, I mean, let me see what happened with the Rivian. But like, I feel like I can't depend on it. Like I'm gonna take a long trip soon, and I feel like, can I depend on it to get there?

I'm gonna get there without air conditioning, but, you know, which is, it's already a problem. And I probably can't have any other place services, because it's probably all special and proprietary. And like, so like, can anybody else replace the air conditioning, whatever? I don't, probably not. So like, I don't know.

This is why like, I'm getting, I'm falling off the Rivian train really fast right now, because like, I'm having all these problems pile up over the last couple of months that are now going to be difficult to get fixed. Like that's not, not happy. You've got to wait to get all this fixed before you can even like trade in or resell this thing probably too. Well, it depends on how I'm doing. It's just a lot, but the buyer listened to this podcast. Yeah, right. I wouldn't do a private sale.

I would do like, you know, a dealer thing or something. But yeah, I don't know. I anyway, so there might be some turbulence there in the next few months. We'll see. Hopefully, hopefully I can last longer than that. I'm really sorry to hear that. And what you said a moment ago, that you're not sure if it can reliably get you to your destination. Yeah, because it almost didn't. I was almost stranded on the last trip I took. Yeah, no argument.

The moment any of my cars have gotten to that point where it's no longer an inconvenience, but a genuine concern that you might not make it, the moment that happens, I'm out. I need a new car. And even if it's a new used car, that's fine. But I need something different because I cannot, well, maybe cannot as a bit dramatic, but I refuse to be in a situation that if I need to get somewhere in my car, I am rolling the dice more than you always are. As to whether or not I'll actually get there.

And at that point, I'm out. So if you're me, you're already looking for something new. And it doesn't even matter if you can get this into a service center before November, it's already the nails in the coffin you're done. Honestly, I mean, and fortunately, if that happens, I got the early purer pricing on it. So I actually, I looked up roughly what the resale value of it would be and I would not be losing that much at all from what I paid a year ago. So it actually would not be that bad.

But honestly, I'm thinking that direction because like, so in three days, I'm driving a few hundred miles upstate. I can't really take tips I-3 conveniently. Also, she needs it. Like, she's not coming. I'm driving to go see Goose and Concert. So there's no way tips go into that. So anyway, so I'm driving a few hundred miles in three days. And I need my car to work. And that's like, to already know that, okay, I'm not gonna have any air conditioning probably on the trip, that sucks enough.

But like, to not even know like, when I have to plug in somewhere, like, is it gonna charge? Maybe, is something else gonna go wrong with it? Maybe. Like, I don't know. I'm feeling very bad about this right now. Yeah, you know, honestly, if it were me, there is no question I would be going and renting a car. And I know it's like- I thought about that. I might do that.

I know it turns your stomach to think about, well, probably renting a car, but I know it turns your stomach to consider a gasoline automomile, but it is okay to slum it with us regular humans for the purpose of one weekend. That's 100% what I would do.

Yeah, one of the latest Honda hybrids, I think you might enjoy those because Honda finally switched to the system where basically the gasoline engine is charging the battery and the battery is running the electric motor that turns the wheels most of the time. And that will be a more familiar experience to you. Oh, it feels like a not very fast EV most of the time with some additional noise that I don't understand. You might like it. Why would I want that?

Because it'll be reliable and it'll get you there. And it'll get better mileage than a plain old gas car. 50 miles per gallon in a Honda that you can get fixed anywhere that will get you to your destination no matter what. I don't think you need to buy anything, but I do think you need to rent something for this trip to go Seacuse. That's honestly, I'm thinking about renting something. But like the torrented car for, I'm gonna be gone for like three, four days.

It's like, you know, $600 or something. It's not a small amount of money. It's not that bad at all. We rent it in my van. Well, okay, that's fair. We rented a minivan for a week, and I think it was like three or 400 bucks, and that was a week, and it was unlimited miles, et cetera, et cetera. Now granted, we are in Pote-on-Crich, from Virginia, we are not in effectively New York City, but I think it'd be more affordable than you expect.

If you're willing to slum it with a regular human car rather than some like Tesla or some other weirdo BEV or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. You do, obviously you do you. You're a grown-ass man, but that's what I would do. I think like, you know, I certainly feel like a fool. I felt like a fool driving around a dented truck for a few months or whatever, or weeks or whatever it was.

I would feel extra foolish, renting a car because I can't trust mine to drive a few hundred miles reliably. And I wouldn't feel foolish about that personally. I get what you're saying, and I think foolish is not the word I would use. I would feel dejected that it's gotten to this point, but I wouldn't feel foolish at all. You're doing what you can to make what should be an enjoyable weekend enjoyable. And I love you like a brother. Well, no, in a better way than that.

I love you, but I don't think it's a far stretch for you to throw money to throw money out of problem to fix it. So I think this is right in your wheelhouse. This is what I would do. Yeah, but what's it then like, when I have to drive to Thanksgiving in, you know, about 11 weeks. Like, what's future Marcos, probably. And then Christmas after that. And like, I need my car to work. I need like, I can't. I'm so, I'm like, I'm unreasonably angry at this Rivion experience right now.

No, this is what I'm saying. I think I'm, I'm not doing you favors because I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with you. It's time to sell the car. Like, unless you can get fixed by some miracle in the next week or two, and you don't have a series of further problems, it's time to sell the car. Full stop. Like, I hate that. I hate that that's the case because I was there with you. I saw with my eyes how happy that car made you.

It's even after I broke it for the first of what turned out to be many times. But I saw how happy that car made you. It does not give me pleasure to say this to you. This is not the normal like ATP ribbing. Like, I genuinely think it's your friend. You need to sell that car because it is, it is forever tainted. It has its scarlet letter. It is forever tainted in your mind. And I don't blame you. I don't blame you at all.

You can always get a version two of that car where they consolidated the 17 control units down to two or whatever. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, it's, it's an option. Yeah, but the colors are so much worse than the first one. Oh, here we go. Are they really worse? No, now I'm coming back to ATP ribbing. Are they really worse, Marco? Are they really? All right, well, I'm sorry. Please keep us updated with how this turns out, both in a friendly way.

And because I think it'll be good for the showway. Yeah, that's the main reason you should try to take the ribbing because whatever happens, that'll be a good story.