catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

597: Apple Watch Shuffle

24 Jul 2024

OpenAI drama, wearable rumors and opportunities, and somehow also HomePod news?

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Roast My Home Screen
  2. Follow-up
  3. OpenAI-board drama
  4. Plastic Watch SE rumor
  5. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
  6. HomePod news & rumors
  7. Sponsor: Squarespace
  8. #askatp: Why learn Perl today?
  9. #askatp: EV charge-port location
  10. #askatp: Ever-growing backups
  11. #askatp: Batteries in desktops
  12. Ending theme
  13. Neutral: Repairs 🖼️

Roast My Home Screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would the tech companies please do us a favor and stop making news happen for like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week or two? So that way, when people hear this podcast a week after we’ve recorded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it’s not too outdated, seeming. Please?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have some excellent happy news to report. There’s a new member special.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And more importantly than that, it did not end up with us ending the show, which I was slightly surprised by.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So the new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey member special is ATP insider roast my home screen. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us shared our first page of our iOS or iPhone home screens,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we picked them apart and eviscerated each other for it. But we’re still friends. And I’m happy to. I’m happy

⏹️ ▶️ John to. And as is usual for us, we immediately went off on a tangent, which we won’t spoil now, but we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John just talk about our home screens. We talked about other aspects of our life. And you’ll see that very quickly

⏹️ ▶️ John when you start listening to the episode. And yeah, we’ve all talked about our home screens before, but not with each other.

⏹️ ▶️ John So now you will get to see all of our home screens and you can have opinions about

⏹️ ▶️ John them.

Follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Josh Osborne had some of their own thoughts with regard to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSMC and American workers Josh writes regarding the claim by Morris Chang TSMC’s founder

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if a machine breaks down at 1 in the morning in the US It will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it’ll be fixed at 2 a.m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey US factories with equipment that expensive run three shifts 24 7 So if some machine fails at 1 a.m In the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey US or Taiwan someone’s working on it from 1 a.m. Until it’s fixed if an engineer can fix

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it by 2 a.m it’s fixed by 2 a.m. If it takes 16 hours to fix it, in the U.S. it will tend not to be the same

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person for all of those 16 hours, which to be honest probably helps fix it faster. Whoever hasn’t fixed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in the first eight hours summarizes what they did and then someone fresh with a different mindset takes over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and probably has ideas the other worker didn’t. The main point is that if a plant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a multi-billion dollar ASML fab, it is going to have someone or multiple someone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on on it at all times, even when it’s not broken. I mean, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracks. Makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t, I mean, I feel like the founder, I don’t know if that’s the current CEO, but whatever, that is just

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, you know, uh, hyperbolic bragging about the, uh, Taiwanese work ethic, which I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John is a very formidable, but the specific example about a machine breaking down, maybe not

⏹️ ▶️ John entirely applicable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Talking about the EU again, their regulators have accepted Apple’s commitments to open NFC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to rivals. This is from Mac rumors. The European Union has accepted commitments from Apple to open its mobile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey payment system and give competitors access to the iPhone’s NFC technology, bringing an end to a lengthy investigation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by EU regulators into the technology. According to the announcement, Apple has agreed to open up its payment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system to other providers free of charge for a decade. Apple will let users set a third-party wallet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app as their default rather than its own Apple Wallet. It will also allow rivals full access to key iOS features, such

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as double-click to launch wallet apps, along with Face ID, Touch ID, and passcodes for authentication.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has until July 25th to implement the changes. The company risks a fine if it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey violates the agreement, which will remain binding for 10 years. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you might look at this and say, see, Apple, you can get along with the regulators if you just agree to do what they want.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I look at this and I just know through the lens of all of the EU versus Apple stories

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been going over here, I look at it and I say, first, wait, just for the next 10 years, what happens

⏹️ ▶️ John after that? Was this some kind of concession where Apple’s like, well, we don’t know what the future will be like. Who knows what will happen then? 10 years,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And second, like you look at this, oh, it’s so easy, you know, the third party should have

⏹️ ▶️ John access to the NFC chip, they should be able to use third party wallet apps, like done and done. That’s easy to

⏹️ ▶️ John implement, right? It’s not complicated. There’s no weird ways to do it. I’m looking at us now and saying, does

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple get a percentage of all the sales made through third party wallet apps? Does Apple get to approve

⏹️ ▶️ John all the third party wallet apps? Is Apple going to reject third party wallet apps that it thinks competes with the zone and keep

⏹️ ▶️ John them in limbo until it can implement the same features in Apple wallet? Like this is what’s going through my mind when I look at this, like, oh, an agreement,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to do it. So and the EU is like, Apple said they’ll do it. They’re going to allow third party payment apps. And

⏹️ ▶️ John just like, what are the caveats? What’s the core technology fee for this? You know, does

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple get a piece of all the transactions? And that’s maybe unfair, like

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing in this story suggests that or whatever. But that’s my mindset now, thinking that whenever Apple complies

⏹️ ▶️ John with anything, even when there’s an announcement saying, we agreed, we’ve come to terms, we’re going to do this thing together, that

⏹️ ▶️ John potentially it’s not as simple as we think. It seems simple to me reading this press release. It probably seems

⏹️ ▶️ John simple to the EU. But what is Apple actually going to do? I guess we’ll find out whenever

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you know, this is July 25th to implement the changes. What form does that implementation take?

⏹️ ▶️ John Why in this case is there like this agreement announcement rather than just seeing what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John ships in the EU, saying whether it complies or something? I don’t know. I don’t know. Obviously, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand the bureaucracy and the nuances here. Maybe I’m forgetting about a press release they had about the DMA that said exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. But as with all this stuff, let’s just wait and see what Apple actually releases before we celebrate

⏹️ ▶️ John for this one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, after initially rejecting it, Apple has approved the first PC emulator for iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it has, this is a reading from The Verge, Apple has approved UTM-SE, an app for emulating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and and barred it from being notarized

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and VisionOS. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who knows? I mean, it’s good news. Like, I’m glad to see that this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because like what this opens up is all sorts of fun, retro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco emulation of like old DOS and Windows XP and stuff like that. Like, and all the massive library

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of games and stuff and ancient applications that are useful on those platforms. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is honestly great. I hope it sticks around.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m really curious to see like how this plays out. But I think the answer is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how did it get approved afterwards? I think maybe somebody either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got wind from the EU of like, maybe don’t do this, or maybe they were afraid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that happening. But either way, it’s a good outcome. It shouldn’t have been rejected in the first place,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is a move in the right direction. Hopefully, it doesn’t get any more crap from Apple. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big hopefully. And

⏹️ ▶️ John remember, Apple rejecting it from its own store is one thing. The story that we talked about in the past episode was

⏹️ ▶️ John they rejected it from third-party stores, too. And still, there are other things like UTM-SE that

⏹️ ▶️ John have been rejected from the App Store and still aren’t allowed. I think IDOS is still banned or whatever. So there’s no policy

⏹️ ▶️ John change that we can see. The policy change was like, oh, retro game emulators. And the ruling was UTM

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a retro game emulator. A PC is not a console. Tough luck, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then also, by the way, we’re not letting it be in third-party stores because, nah, it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco make any sense

⏹️ ▶️ John and surely angered the, and so now it’s available in both. It’s available in the third-party ones, will be soon enough,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s available in the App Store. UTM-SE, as you recall, is the version of UTM

⏹️ ▶️ John that does not have just-in-time compilation, so the performance is not great. If you’re emulating

⏹️ ▶️ John something that was really old hardware, you’re probably fine, but if you’re trying to emulate something a little bit newer,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s gonna be a little sluggish because just-in-time compilation really speeds up emulation and Apple is still forbidding that presumably

⏹️ ▶️ John for security reasons we talked about this on a past episode there are plausibly real security concerns

⏹️ ▶️ John about just-in-time compilation that Apple would have to do work to allow to be deployed safely

⏹️ ▶️ John you could still argue that fine it should still be allowed on third-party fun things but I can kind of understand Apple not allowing it in the App

⏹️ ▶️ John Store so UTMSC in fact is so slow the developer of UTMSC had said when we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John the story last time when it was rejected they said we’re not even gonna bother to fight Apple on this because we think the performance of

⏹️ ▶️ John UTM-SE is so crappy because it doesn’t have just-in-time compilation. So they weren’t even gonna bother fighting

⏹️ ▶️ John for it but lo and behold they got it through and it’s available so you can try it. I

⏹️ ▶️ John forget if this UTM-SE can run like classic Mac and you know classic Apple hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Plain old UTM on the Mac can run versions of Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John OS so I don’t see why this wouldn’t but that’ll be another interesting test case especially for Apple’s own App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ John Will they allow a classic Mac emulator, an Apple 2 emulator I don’t see why

⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t but you know Why use logic to try to predict what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John will do App Store stuff. Anyway, that would definitely be cool and in the meantime I think

⏹️ ▶️ John infinite Mac org still works in like Safari on iPad and and the phone and stuff if you want to

⏹️ ▶️ John Try to fumble your way through classic Apple emulation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. No, that is very exciting. I Saw somebody tweet. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember who was but somebody said something like hey, you know if we can get reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern operating systems on the iPad, maybe the iPad will actually be useful now, which I thought was quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John funny. Yeah, so I’m saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that multitasking in Windows XP on your iPad is a better experience than I think it was Vatici, it was a better experience than

⏹️ ▶️ John stage manager on iPadOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No lies detected. Some more information on robots.txt. This is from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Lewis. I oversee SEO for a large news publication, so I’m very familiar with making sure websites

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are crawlable and indexable. Well, yes, robots.txt, robots.exclusion protocol, and user

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agents are all voluntary and represent the sort of good neighbor libertinism of the early

⏹️ ▶️ Casey web. We do have other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey methods of keeping bad actors out. Both Bing and Google Search and many others published their crawler’s bots

⏹️ ▶️ Casey IP ranges. Our infrastructure team can use those to put friendly bots on an include

⏹️ ▶️ Casey list. It does look like OpenAI has published their IP ranges as well, but they took some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey digging to find. I eventually found it in a GitHub repository maintained by the MISP project, or Malware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Information Sharing Program. We’ll put some links in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s, IP ranges are definitely a thing. I remember doing that at my jobby jobs, being on both ends of that,

⏹️ ▶️ John both having to give our IP ranges to someone to say, please let us do the thing that you’re supposedly paying us to do, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John reverse, people who wanted to access some of our servers would give us the IP ranges.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then someone would forget about those IP ranges, and years would pass, and those people would have left the company, And then someone

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t understand why something’s not working, and you have to figure it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out all over again.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s super fun. All right, that’s it for follow-up, which was very fast. Look at us go. Woo!

OpenAI-board drama

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a little bit of a tale to tell, and it starts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 2nd of July, where we got information from Bloomberg that Phil Schiller will be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey joining OpenAI’s board as an observer. Again, reading from Bloomberg, Apple Inc.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as a part of a landmark agreement announced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last month, further tightening ties between the once unlikely partners. Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation, As a board observer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people who asked not to be identified, because the matter is in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey public. The board’s observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft Corp, OpenAI’s largest backer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and its main AI technology provider. The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or exercise other director powers. Having Microsoft and Apple sit in on board meetings could create

⏹️ ▶️ Casey complications for the tech giants, which have been rivals and partners over the decades. Some OpenAI board meetings will likely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey discuss future AI initiatives between OpenAI and Microsoft, Deliberations that the latter company may

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want Shiller excluded from. Board observers often do oblige and exit meetings during discussions that are seen as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensitive.

⏹️ ▶️ John So when this was announced, it was kind of like in one, it made some sense in

⏹️ ▶️ John that obviously we’ve talked about on the show, the sort of cultural mismatch, let’s say between open

⏹️ ▶️ John AI, uh, and Apple. Uh, but obviously Apple has done that deal with them for,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, open AI, uh, chat GPT integration with, uh, series stuff in iOS 18 and all that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’re together on something and the rumor is there was no money exchange. They’re just like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’re getting this out of you. You’re getting this out of us. So you can see this being part of that deal of like, okay, and also

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get an observer on the board, blah, blah, blah. Microsoft has an observer on the board because they invested,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, like $15 billion or something into OpenAI. So Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John would be getting a board seat for a pretty good price. Instead of 15 billion, it’s, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we’ll bundle you with our OS. Now Apple could say that’s worth more than 15 billion or whatever, but it made

⏹️ ▶️ John some sense, but Microsoft is so much more closely aligned with open AI being a huge investor

⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, all this, right. And Apple is just like a company that open AI has done a deal with, but it makes you

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if this, uh, at this point, rumored thing was actually part of the original arrangement

⏹️ ▶️ John or something negotiated after the fact, but that doesn’t matter because.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was July 2nd

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on July 10.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and Microsoft ditch OpenAI board seats amid regulatory scrutiny. This is reading from The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge. Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI less than eight months after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey securing the non-voting seat. Apple was reportedly planning to join OpenAI’s nonprofit board, but now the Financial

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times reports that Apple will no longer join the board. The changes to OpenAI’s board come as antitrust concerns

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI have grown in recent months. UK regulators started seeking views

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI in December, shortly after the turmoil that led to the ousting of CEO Sam

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Altman and his return. EU regulators are also looking into the partnership alongside other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big tech AI deals. The FTC is also investigating Microsoft, Amazon, and Google investments into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OpenAI and Anthropic.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, Microsoft didn’t buy OpenAI, which would have invited even more regulatory scrutiny

⏹️ ▶️ John in general when there is some next big new thing in technology. and one of the existing

⏹️ ▶️ John big companies from one of the previous big things buys up the most prominent company

⏹️ ▶️ John in the next big new thing, regulators take notice, because you kind of don’t want every

⏹️ ▶️ John hot new thing to be immediately gobbled up by the people who are already there and successful in the market. That

⏹️ ▶️ John leads to bad outcomes. It’s kind of weird that Microsoft and OpenAI,

⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s been this slow motion rumbling about that, but it’s like, well, Microsoft didn’t buy them, but they made a big investment. investment. They

⏹️ ▶️ John seem pretty cozy. Now they’re going to have someone on the board and regulatory pressure and people looking at

⏹️ ▶️ John it saying should Microsoft be on the board? Oh, well Apple be on the board too, but it would be non-voting again at this point

⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple thing was still a rumor, although I believe it was sort of kind of or it wasn’t confirmed

⏹️ ▶️ John There was other sources besides just Bloomberg backing it up. So Anyway deals

⏹️ ▶️ John off no people on our board Why would Apple want to be on the board?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it makes perfect sense sense, even in an observer role, if Apple kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t trust open AI to not that they’re going to do anything necessarily nefarious,

⏹️ ▶️ John but open AI’s short history has been tumultuous to say the least.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s early history was also tumultuous, right? Young companies are not as sort of slow and

⏹️ ▶️ John steady as big established ones. And if Apple is going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John integrated so closely with this company, they might want to keep an eye on, Hey, how are things going over there? I’m not sure how

⏹️ ▶️ John much that would help them if one day they go to a board meeting and out of the blue they say by the way we just fired our CEO which is

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that happened. Did your observer role help you with that

⏹️ ▶️ John or do you raise your hand and say sit down everybody and you just get them all to get along or something? I don’t know but anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better than nothing. But without the observer role I wonder if Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ John less excited about this deal and maybe putting more pressure on them actually finalizing the long-rumored

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with Gemini or or Anthropic or one of the other companies, so that it really is like we have a platform and a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of third party AI model companies can plug into that

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as they do a deal with us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s wild. It’s a wild ride. And then it gets even more wild, because just a few days

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, as we record, we were told via the Washington Post that OpenAI has illegally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers have told them. So the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Washington Post writes, OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Security and Exchange Commission

⏹️ ▶️ Casey alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave

⏹️ ▶️ Casey risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation. OpenAI made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said. These

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorities. I’m pretty sure that’s not how whistleblowing works, but never the, anyway. OpenAI did not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey create exemptions in its employee non-disparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the SEC. This is super gross. This is super duper gross.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so you should explain what the SEC whistle, like they’re signing away their right to get compensation

⏹️ ▶️ John under the whistleblower program.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, what is that about?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it turns out that the SEC has a whistleblower program, obviously, and there is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a website for it, which we can put in the show notes. And on that On that website, the SEC’s whistleblower program

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was established by Congress to incentivize whistleblowers to report specific, timely, and credible information about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible federal securities laws violations. The commission is authorized to provide monetary awards

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information. That leads to an SEC enforcement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10 and 30

⏹️ ▶️ Casey percent of the money collected. So if the SEC gets at least a million bucks, the person who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, hey, this ain’t right, can get between 10% and 30% of whatever they collect. That’s pretty sweet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Most whistleblower, we have laws and various other statutes and this, I’d never heard of this program,

⏹️ ▶️ John but even specific programs to try to encourage whistleblowers. And for people who haven’t heard that term before, it’s the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John of someone who’s working for a company and they see something inside their company that

⏹️ ▶️ John they think is illegal, that they can go to the authorities and say, hey, I work for company

⏹️ ▶️ John XYZ, and we’re doing bad stuff. Like, we’re doing something illegal. I was asked by my boss

⏹️ ▶️ John to do something that’s illegal or unsafe or whatever. And the protections exist to say, who’s ever

⏹️ ▶️ John going to do that? Because obviously you do that, and you’re going to get fired, right? You’re going to get,

⏹️ ▶️ John or worse, you know, who knows? But like, ask the people who work for Boeing. It’s like, you need some

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of protection that don’t worry, you know, either you can’t be fired, or in this case,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll probably be fired, but you can get some of the money that we recoup, you know, if it’s an SEC violation or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in the government’s interest to encourage people to be whistleblowers because they know when a company is

⏹️ ▶️ John doing a bad thing, dumping toxic chemicals somewhere, or skimping

⏹️ ▶️ John on safety, or stealing, embezzling, or hiding their income, or all the sorts of things

⏹️ ▶️ John that are against the law that someone inside a company would know about, you want to encourage them to essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John tell on their their their company and their bosses and so on and so forth and you want to give them some protection

⏹️ ▶️ John for doing so all going all the way to the point of saying even if you were involved in illegal activity if you become a whistleblower you’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ John protected yada yada yada right making an employee agreement that says

⏹️ ▶️ John sign this thing to work for us by the way if you ever want to be a whistleblower you just have to tell us first

⏹️ ▶️ John and also you’re signing away your right to get any compensation as I think it was case that that’s not how whistleblowing works

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t tell your boss by the way I’m I’m going to go to the federal authorities now and tell them about the illegal thing you’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just my employee agreement said that I have to tell you that so I’m gonna do that now. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John that gives them plenty of time to shred evidence and fire you. So yeah, clauses like this, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the non-competes and stuff, employee agreements that say, you agree to

⏹️ ▶️ John sign away your rights. The non-disparagement thing, which I think there was also at OpenAI, was like you agree

⏹️ ▶️ John never to say anything bad about the company, right? Or otherwise you don’t get your severance or whatever. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John companies are always pushing the limits of what they can get you to sign to be an employee. And then, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John non-competes are similar. You agree that if you leave the company for any reason, even if we fire you, you can’t work in this industry for

⏹️ ▶️ John two years, blah, blah, blah, right? Those are all examples of employers

⏹️ ▶️ John exerting power over employees, usually to the detriment of employees. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if all the companies do it, then it’s like, well, you don’t like it, go work somewhere else. Well, it looks like all the companies do that. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John the worker is at a loss because everybody does this terrible thing. So I don’t know how many of these

⏹️ ▶️ John things are illegal or will be deemed to be illegal or are illegal and just terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the non-disparagement thing was dropped maybe by OpenAI or maybe there was something else where it was like, they

⏹️ ▶️ John won’t get their stock options if they say anything bad about the company or all sorts of stuff like that. And I think Sam

⏹️ ▶️ John Altman had to go, oh, we’re never gonna enforce that one. But if anyone ever tells you, don’t worry about

⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the contract, we’ll never enforce it. No, that’s not how the law works. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re not going to enforce it, they should remove it from the contract and if they refuse to remove the contract, you should think strongly

⏹️ ▶️ John about whether they’re really not going to enforce

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I mean, I would go even a little bit further than that and say, even if it’s in a contract, don’t assume

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll do it because that they look at that and say, well, what if we just break this and what are you gonna do? Sue us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like we have more money than you do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly like there’s I’ve been screwed by that in the past. Like there’s you know there was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me just say I have not had great experiences selling apps in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, there’s things like the National Labor Relations Board and other sort of larger entities to say

⏹️ ▶️ John you as an individual employee are never going to be able to fight your giant employer over any of these things. But there are large organizations

⏹️ ▶️ John that will try to back you with money and expertise and legal things. Anyway, all of this is whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who cares? A young company doing dumb things and being vaguely evil. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John why Apple would want to have another reason. Apple would want to have an observer on the board. because maybe they discuss

⏹️ ▶️ John issues like this in the board meetings and maybe Phil Schiller can say, hey guys,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the way. Like non-disparagement agreements are not gonna save you. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John drop them, it’s not worth your time, concentrate on the important stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John The whistleblower protection thing, like what do you think you’re gonna be doing that you need this protection? Like tell us about,

⏹️ ▶️ John just, things aren’t going great over there at OpenAI,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like. And also, by the way, the framing of the story, and I think the Washington Post story, like

⏹️ ▶️ John prohibiting employees from warning regulators about the grave risks that technology may pose to humanity,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that sentence really goes off the rails. It’s like stopping employees

⏹️ ▶️ John from warning regulators about, and I’m waiting for them to say, like, things my company’s doing that is illegal. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John immediately buys into the idea of, like, grave risk to humanity because the computers are going to

⏹️ ▶️ John take over and we’re going to be enslaved in the matrix, right? That is a big leap.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like I wish other companies were like that. And it’s like, of course, we don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John companies, you know, Apple doesn’t whistleblowers telling us about their, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John holographic glasses that weigh two ounces. What glass is the way to it? Well, they don’t exist,

⏹️ ▶️ John but come on, they’re probably going to make them like by next week or something, right? I mean, it’s the whole idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that open AI kind of believes, and many people who work there believe, that we have these LLMs,

⏹️ ▶️ John dot, dot, dot, real artificial intelligence. It’s like, you haven’t connected those

⏹️ ▶️ John dots. I’m personally not currently extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John scared about being warned about the grave risks that their technology may pose to humanity,

⏹️ ▶️ John other than the normal way of just big companies exploiting their workers

⏹️ ▶️ John and emitting greenhouse gases to

⏹️ ▶️ John put bad content on the web. They can ruin things in other ways, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re going to make an evil howl 9000 is going to enslave us all. If they get to that point, we’ll worry about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But right now, I think it’s not something that I’m particularly concerned about, considering they can’t seem to

⏹️ ▶️ John even run a company at a sort of teenager level of responsibility and

⏹️ ▶️ John dignity. I’m not sure they’re that close to cracking the HAL 9000 problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You never know. You never know. All right.

Plastic Watch SE rumor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, the Apple Watch SE is getting a refresh and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to have a different kind of casing. So this is from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple is working on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new version of its lower cost Apple Watch SE model, which it last updated in 2022. One idea that the company has tested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is swapping out the aluminum shell in favor of rigid plastic. Marco, as the token

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch person of the three of us, how does that make you feel?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In a vacuum, first of all, we have to, we have to acknowledge that rumors about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new Apple Watch cases, case styles, all these things, they have been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comically unreliable. So who knows what this means, if anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, I think the idea of a cheaper Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like ways to make the Apple Watch cheaper, it makes a ton of sense in an abstract

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way because you look at the market for smart watches and smart wearables that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of compete compete with smartwatches, like little Fitbits things. There is a huge market for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less expensive, wearable computer watch kind of things, or fitness trackers, than what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch, even with the SE currently reaches. Because usually the SE is like around, what is it, 250, 300, something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that? I think 250-ish, I think?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually around that range.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thing is, if you look at what people actually buy and wear out there, yeah, the Apple Watch is doing great, but there is also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge market of people who buy things that are a lot cheaper than that. And obviously, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular watches that aren’t smart, things like G-Shocks and Timex and stuff like that. Those are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way cheaper. Those are like 40, 50, 60, 100 bucks. But if you want fitness tracking,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is also this huge market of fitness trackers that Apple is currently not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco competing that well with. The Apple Watch is by all means a huge success, but there’s this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole other market that is below what the Apple Watch prices cover, It’s below

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it both in price and in size, honestly, that a lot of people prefer. So if Apple wants to address

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that market, they’re gonna have to make significantly larger cuts to the Apple Watch than what we see them doing right now with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE, which is basically like, the SE is just similar to the phone SE.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The strategy is basically like issue like a special kind of cut down version based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on maybe some older components and without some of the higher end features. But it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole Apple Watch. I heard this idea floated on a couple podcasts recently and various analysts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like, what if they actually release something that’s more like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fitness band that maybe doesn’t even run watchOS? Maybe it doesn’t even have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like full blown apps. What if it is just something that is like, you know, the Apple band or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, you know, whatever they would call it, who knows. But maybe it doesn’t even run apps. Because like the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an app platform is not very fully realized. it is not very, as far as I can tell, not very widely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco used as an app platform, as far as like third-party apps. It seems like most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have settled in on using the Apple Watch for mostly just Apple’s apps, and even then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly notifications and fitness-related stuff and health tracking. Well, if you look at what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those smaller fitness band kind of things do, they’re not running like whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on them. They’re mostly just watches that measure your steps or whatever. Some of them have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some pretty basic workout or sleep tracking kind of functions, but it isn’t doing everything that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a full-blown smartwatch does. But that’s enough for most people, and that’s actually what a lot of people want out of their products. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s interesting is that, yeah, okay, if Apple can try to address this market by changing the case material,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I don’t think it’s gonna change the world, but I see why they’re doing that. But I think a better question to ask

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, if they want to address a lower-end market, does it need to even be a watchOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco running computer? Does it need to have a full-blown screen? Does it need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, does it need to be like the big squareish screen or could it be something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a slim OLED that’s just like a little strip or something? There’s so many things that people do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these fitness trackers that they’re very happy to choose those instead of Apple Watches. And I think if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple wants to really expand its market of wearables on the wrist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably the direction they should look at going. I mean, I’m sure they have obviously, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would challenge the assumption Not does the Apple Watch need to be made of metal, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the Apple Watch need to be a full-blown app running platform, or can we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make something even smaller? You know, if you look at, you know, there’s now this new category of smart rings, even.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s literally like rings that you wear, that, like, I don’t know much about it, so forgive me, but I know that’s a category people are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very excited about recently.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are rumors of Apple working on a ring, but there have been for years, obviously, that haven’t actually made a product yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so, like, I think people are very interested in fitness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking wearables that are smaller and cheaper than the Apple Watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe are more discreet, or can be worn in different ways, or things like that. And so I would like to see Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start to maybe address that. Like, give me the Apple Watch Shuffle, even though I hated the iPod Shuffle. But give

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me the Apple Watch Shuffle. I wanna know what that looks like, because the rest of the industry is doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and succeeding at it, and people like them. So if they wanna broaden their appeal for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower end or lower priced Apple Watch type products, I would look at that, not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just making the case out of plastic. Now, going back to the actual rumor, if it is just a plastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, I think that could have some benefits. Plastic is very light and very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco durable. And of course it is, I think it tends to be cheaper than metal almost always.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s nice, but I think Apple’s buyers don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want plastic largely. Like they learn that with some of their cheaper iPhone experiments. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 5C was the big famous one. That was, there were a lot of things going into that. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not the lesson I would take from the 5C experiment though. It may be the lesson they did take, but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I don’t know how well that would actually work. I’d be curious to see it, obviously. And I do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think having it be even lighter weight would be appealing, but I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just changing it to plastic would make a big enough difference to the price. Like if it lets them drop it from 250

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like 2.25. Like, it’s not, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it would be that much bigger of a difference. Like, I mean, they would have to be doing other things besides just the case material to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaningfully drop that price. But I’m sure they have their reasons if they’re trying that, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would like to see them try like different types of wearables entirely in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco order to address that same market.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is very much like the Vision Pro rumor, like rumors of inside

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple efforts to take an existing product and make a cheaper version of it, which they do all the time. You mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ John about the phone SE or whatever. And it’s interesting that this rumor is about the case. At

⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro, I was saying that the aluminum enclosure there is probably surprisingly expensive. With

⏹️ ▶️ John the watch, it’s not just because it’s metal, but it’s also because it’s how many machining steps does it take to make

⏹️ ▶️ John that metal out of presumably a solid block of aluminum or whatever, whereas molding plastic into

⏹️ ▶️ John that shape is much more straightforward process than machining it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The story here, it was like, oh, you know, and I’m sure this is just speculation, but it’s not presented as such. It’s like, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John so Apple can compete with other smartwatches that cost 200 bucks, right? So Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John at like, you know, 250, they wanna get down to 199 to compete with other smartwatches. That doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John ring true to me, because since when does Apple care about matching the price of competing products? Apple’s happy

⏹️ ▶️ John to be 50 bucks more expensive, but kind of like with the headset, and as

⏹️ ▶️ John you were mentioning, I think plastic or composite or something that’s not metal has

⏹️ ▶️ John actual advantages for a watch thing because weight does matter in some context. Someone who’s running with

⏹️ ▶️ John a watch or whatever, having a lightweight one is nice, right? Some people choose lightweight bands

⏹️ ▶️ John for that reason, right? That’s an advantage to plastic. It’s not like you’re, it’s a downgrade, oh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not as nice, but whatever. It’s an upgrade in many ways, you know, durability, resistance to dents and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like that. I just, when you’re looking at the watch and you’re trying to figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out where can I extract cost, it’s tough, because that thing is small.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got a screen, a battery, the SOC, and the case.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s basically it. Like, you don’t have a lot of stuff that you can remove. You could, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John try to remove sensors and stuff, but it’s really like, that’s getting into your thing, Marko, of like, well, once you’re removing sensors, why don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John you just make it like a Fitbit thing or whatever? But if you want a full-fledged Apple Watch when you want to make it cheaper, Like historically

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done the Tim Cook method, which is like, which one have we been making for four years? And we’ve, you know, we’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ John earned out all the machines and all the labor and whatever, and now we can make it cheaply. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ John if any product is going to say, well, let’s investigate what we can do with plastics or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the headset and the watch are two strong contenders. And with the laptop, what

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve always been talking about is, is there some material, aluminum that might suit this, like carbon fiber

⏹️ ▶️ John or some sort of thing That is lighter than aluminum, but just as strong the answer so far from Apple’s product releases

⏹️ ▶️ John has been no right But just fine like laptops are great aluminum is a good material for them, but you’re always looking

⏹️ ▶️ John for the next materials breakthrough since this is a rumor about the SE and not like the

⏹️ ▶️ John On-again off-again rumored Apple watch 10 slash X for the 10th anniversary of the watch It’s gonna be a total

⏹️ ▶️ John form factor redesign and by the way the most recent rumor about that is forget it. It’s off No

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple watch 10 We’re bailing on that. It’s just gonna look like the existing watch with a little bit bigger screens, but anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s gonna be some materials breakthrough a carbon fiber watch some sort of composite material

⏹️ ▶️ John That is as strong as aluminum, but lighter and fancier and can do it like whatever I assume that would be on

⏹️ ▶️ John a high-end watch not a low-end one But yeah It’s hard to extract Money from the Apple watch if you want it to be a

⏹️ ▶️ John full-fledged Apple watch like the little the little chip that’s in there Is can’t be too expensive. I imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen is probably still the most expensive component But who knows, maybe the case is the most expensive. So I’m kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John rooting for this rumor. I think Apple should look into other materials for

⏹️ ▶️ John some of its devices. And I think they have been looking to other materials. They just never got one. They said, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is it, we’re gonna ship this. They’ve just been like, you know what? Aluminum glass, it’s what we know. And it’s still the best.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still the best option. I just hope one day that won’t be true for some product. Although I would argue that the

⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro, it definitely wasn’t the best choice, but it sure looks nice in the showroom.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder too, for the environmental angle, I would assume, although I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but I would assume that their low-end metal, which is aluminum, which is extremely easily recyclable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be easier for environmental goals than plastic, which is not super easy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work into a recycling flow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I mean, there’s, so car makers have been walking this route of like, you know, Volvo

⏹️ ▶️ John and Polestar, I forget which one of them is more, and this is like, you know, everything in this car interior is 100% recycled, including

⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that you would think plastic because it’s recycled composite plastic made from bottle caps or whatever right

⏹️ ▶️ John there are ways to do plastic in a more environmentally sound way and depending on what metals are

⏹️ ▶️ John using aluminum is probably not that bad but various other metals that you have to mine from the earth have a big carbon footprint

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything so and also it’s a very small amount of plastic or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John so I would hope that if Apple ever did anything that some kind of plastic composite or whatever they do have options

⏹️ ▶️ John for it to be you know made from old tennis balls or whatever, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John they, whatever recycled plastic, recycled plastic is not like, oh it’s magic, you get it for free, there’s no additional

⏹️ ▶️ John waste, you know, it’s just, it’s better than, you know, straight brand new plastic made

⏹️ ▶️ John from petroleum or whatever, but there is a spectrum of how good it can be. But yeah, aluminum,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s part of the reason Apple I Imagine 6 with aluminum is they’ve been slowly transitioning their products bit by bit

⏹️ ▶️ John to be more and more recycled aluminum. What does that mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John recycled aluminum? Like, how much better is it than mined aluminum? It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we don’t get the details, but in general, Apple has been walking down that path, and they may be

⏹️ ▶️ John racing ahead of what they can possibly do with recycled plastics.

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HomePod news & rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We got news earlier today, actually, that Apple has released a new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod mini in a new midnight color.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, is it a new HomePod mini or is it just a new color?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. It is a new color as far as I was aware. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as I can tell, that’s it. And even then like, is it that new of a color?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s very, very fair. Uh, I like Apple’s take on various blacks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and space gray and this, and then the other thing, um, uh, there are ones that I prefer over others, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re all basically the same. And so, yeah, reading from Mac rumors, Apple today announced that the existing HomePod mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now available in a midnight color option, which replaces the nearly identical space gray color previously

⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered the speaker remains in available in blue, orange, white, and yellow as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is such a weird thing that it makes me what I immediately thought is.

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever company was making them the space gray like mesh that you put over

⏹️ ▶️ John the top, went out of business or otherwise is a ran afoul

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple and they’re just like, we’re Splitsville with this company and this

⏹️ ▶️ John color. And so we need a new color that fills that slot. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so rather than space gray, which is one of the darker of the million space grays that Apple has ever made, we’re gonna make a

⏹️ ▶️ John new color and call it midnight. solely because Apple is one of those companies that

⏹️ ▶️ John tends not to release a product in a particular

⏹️ ▶️ John color and then two years later, the thing with the exact color name is actually a slightly different

⏹️ ▶️ John color. Like imagine if you got a HomePod mini years ago, this is like a 2020, 2021 product. You

⏹️ ▶️ John got one years ago and then you decide you want a stereo pair, so you buy one in the same color

⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t quite match. Like one is a little bit darker than

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the other.

⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of companies will do that. Lots of products will do that. And yes, this is setting aside, like it was in the sun and the

⏹️ ▶️ John UV bleached it or whatever, right? If Apple makes a product with one of its ridiculous color names

⏹️ ▶️ John and they make it for years and years, it better be that same color all of those years. That’s the type of thing that I can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being a stickler about. So I looked at this and I’m like, maybe they just couldn’t get that old color and they had to get a replacement

⏹️ ▶️ John color, but they don’t wanna even imply that it’s also space gray, which is ridiculous because as we stated, they have a million different

⏹️ ▶️ John space grays. But within any given product, any given year, and you get a model, Space Gray should be consistent.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like all the Space Gray iPhone 14 Pros should all look exactly the same, even

⏹️ ▶️ John though they look totally different than the Space Gray iPhone 15 Pros and so on and so forth, right? That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John I read on this story, but boy, so weird because the HomePod Mini hasn’t been updated in forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John What does it have in it? Like the S5 chip or something? I think the HomePod Mini was released

⏹️ ▶️ John three or four years ago. It absolutely does not have enough RAM for Apple Intelligence.

⏹️ ▶️ John It gets a press release. Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod mini in a color that is almost identical to a previous color, but not. So

⏹️ ▶️ John just be aware if you didn’t buy a matching space gray one for your stereo pair, don’t get this one. It won’t exactly match.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, I kind of don’t understand what’s going on with this with this quote release.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if they didn’t have a press release, it would have made a lot more sense. Okay, they you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, they of the color. Oh, well, you know, but like this, it’s just so funny to me like they’re drawing. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’re trying to drum up sales of the HomePod mini because the HomePod mini like it’s a fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. I mean, it’s a very good value for sound quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how small it is and how inexpensive it is like it is one of the best values in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s lineup really like it the HomePod mini cost as much as some Apple Watch bands. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really does make a lot of it’s a very good value for the hundred bucks it costs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is by far the best smart speaker that is anywhere near its size like it is very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small and produces pretty surprisingly decent sound for its size and cost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s a good product but yeah it’s ancient and I think the home

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pod line is going to start looking even worse as hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri gets better with Apple intelligence. And so like to, to draw any attention to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right before the launch of the Siri Apple intelligence update, um, and have these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco products kind of be still fairly bad in that area, probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. Um, that’s a little odd.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t know. I, I’ve never entirely understood a home pod. I’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey owned one. You know, I have friends with that have them and like them very much, but I don’t know. It’s just it’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, what a weird weird press release Alright, and then Apple has been rumored recently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last few weeks in particular to have some sort of home Accessories, so this is reading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Mac rumors Code discovered on Apple’s back end by Mac rumors confirms Apple’s indeed working

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a long rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod And Apple TV the code references a device with the identifier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey home accessory 17 comma 1 Which is a new identifier category the name is similar to the HomePods audio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accessory identifier The 17,1 in the identifier suggests that this device may receive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly. With the A18 chip, the Home Accessory device will have the power for Apple Intelligence.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This code also indicates that this quote-unquote Home Accessory will be running a software variant of tvOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much like the HomePod. Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple’s work on HomeOS, which could be the firmware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey running on this device. The code also references two unreleased Apple TV models with the identifiers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV 14.4 and Apple TV 14.5. Rumors suggest that an updated Apple TV could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey launch in 2024. Then additionally, there are rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about touchscreen ready interfaces that you can find in certain places. Now reading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from nine to five Mac. The latest beta version of tvOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is touchscreen ready. The new tvOS interface or system shell is internally called plasterboard. Similar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Springboard, the iOS system shell. It provides some core interface elements for the system. 9to5Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the tvOS 18 beta 3 code. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new tvOS plasterboard interface has a lock screen with a passcode keypad, similar to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one on the iPhone and iPad. The plasterboard interface seems to be at an early stage of development, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s not much to see beyond basic lock screen controls.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is all kind of swirling around the rumors of an Apple Home

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which I guess is in the same category as Apple TV or the various HomePods, with a

⏹️ ▶️ John screen. There have been many home accessories from other companies that have screens on them. A

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the like, you know, imagined like concept art in the rumor stories, they take like a

⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod and they would like put a screen on the little circle part at the top of the HomePod where it had the swirly lights or whatever, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is always kind of weird. And other ones will just take a HomePod, like a big HomePod and slap a rectangular

⏹️ ▶️ John screen on it or whatever. We’ve talked to everyone who’s had any HomePods or any discussion about them,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked for years about the useful things that can be done on a screen with a Home

⏹️ ▶️ John type accessory. I know a lot of people got the Amazon ones

⏹️ ▶️ John and like many Amazon things, those screens end up as just an opportunity for you to show your advertisements,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is not great, presumably Apple would do less of that except for advertising their own products as we discussed in the previous

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco episode.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I think a home device that has a screen on it could

⏹️ ▶️ John be very useful. This is also the vessel for everyone’s hopes and dreams

⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re like, it’ll be a big home pod with amazing sound and it’ll have a screen and it’ll show my kid’s calendar

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything on it. And it will also be my Apple TV and it’ll also be my mesh wifi router for the whole house and it’ll also

⏹️ ▶️ John be my internet gateway and my security. And then it’s just like, all right, let’s calm down. Like, if

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve looked at one, what Apple has actually shipped into the home, they tend to not have a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of computing power and not do too many things. The Apple TV is the big bruiser

⏹️ ▶️ John in the home because it tends to have the best chip in it so it can literally do its job to show like

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K HDR video, whatever, and even that is massively underpowered compared to

⏹️ ▶️ John like an M4 iPad or even an iPhone these days, right? But a home accessory with a screen

⏹️ ▶️ John that is in your house, I squint out and I say, what will this be doing for me? Will this

⏹️ ▶️ John be a speaker? Will this be an Apple TV with a screen? That

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make sense. A speaker with a screen makes me think, well, to do its job as a speaker

⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of at odds with the screen part. Or will it just be a thing that’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John speaker and not an Apple TV and has some dinky little watch chip in it and has a screen attached to it and just

⏹️ ▶️ John lets you see your kid’s calendar and talk to Apple’s voice assistant. and hopefully,

⏹️ ▶️ John geez, hopefully have enough RAM to run Apple Intelligence. And that would be,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, I don’t know, I guess the equivalent of, you know, an Amazon Echo or something, but those

⏹️ ▶️ John are all speakers too. So I don’t understand these rumors. I don’t understand, like, seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John actual code in tvOS betas that seem to show a lock screen

⏹️ ▶️ John only makes sense in the context of, I suppose, a thing with

⏹️ ▶️ John a device, because I’m trying to think is there a context on TVOS on Apple TV where you’d have a lock screen? I don’t think so. People don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreen TVs and I don’t think they’d make you use the keypad to unlock it with a numerical code

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But anyway, these rumors I’ve mostly been ignoring because there’s been a lot of smoke but

⏹️ ▶️ John no fire here for years. But now that there’s actual code being released that has traces of this in it, that

⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think that something is happening. So we’ve got device identifiers and we’ve got code, but for the life of me, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think of what this thing could possibly be other than like a not very good speaker with

⏹️ ▶️ John a not very good screen on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m assuming, I mean, obviously, I’m sure it would have some kind of basic speaker functionality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would be a lot like, you know, the Amazon Show kind of devices, but I think Apple’s angle on it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully, would be a lot like, is it called standby mode on the iPhone where you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it on its side? Is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it’s called? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Standby mode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for HomeKit? Yeah, like I think it would basically be like a projection of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe it would run its own iOS apps, or more likely, maybe it would project

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the widgets from your phone for standby mode, the same way your phone can project its stuff onto a nearby

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac. Maybe that’s how it would work. But I think that would kind of be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s angle, is it would be something similar to what we see as standby mode on the iPhone, of just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way for apps to project limited kind of dashboard-y status kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things to be displayed in the home, along with obviously being a Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminal, the same way HomePods are. My concern is not that it would be a crappy speaker. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a really good track record of making extremely good speakers, especially for their size,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for quite some time now, probably almost a decade. Like their audio engineering team has been really, really good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they make very good speakers now. So I think I wouldn’t be too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco skeptical about it having a good speaker system for playing music. My worry is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as always, Siri, which, you know, we’ll see. Hopefully something new in this department

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be able to run Apple Intelligence and would be able to have whatever advanced Siri stuff is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come. I think my larger worry is that what we’ve seen with the HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far is they really don’t put a lot of effort into them and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really buggy. And so what this ends up giving us is hardware that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not updated very often with software that is unreliable and a voice assistant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not very good. And it’s been very frustrating as we talked about on the show, like they make really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great speakers and then Siri and the software kind of let them down over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they’re going to do something like this, what’s going to change that? What’s going to make them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco care more to invest in the software and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these products that are probably gonna be like, quote, hobby levels of sales? are they gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to actually push it and make them good and care about them enough to follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through? Because Apple starts a bunch of stuff and then there’s not enough follow through.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if this becomes that kind of product, the same way the HomePods typically have been, I don’t think I would trust

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be very good or to stay very good over time. But if they actually put some effort behind it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could be a really nice thing that many of us have on our kitchen counters in a year or two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it makes sense if the Home strategy this kind of like fumbling and slow as it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ John to have some kind of like home control center, like in the ideal Apple home. All your accessories are HomeKit,

⏹️ ▶️ John you control your climate controls on there, all your smart lights are on there, you can see your security

⏹️ ▶️ John cameras on there. And then also you have access to all of your Apple information, like your calendars that

⏹️ ▶️ John you share with your family and just like having a screen somewhere in your house

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, you know, there’s tons of ways to do that. You can talk to your phone to do it, you can talk into the air and HomePod will

⏹️ ▶️ John hear you. Like you can do all sorts of stuff to control that, but having a screen where it’s like, this is my dashboard for

⏹️ ▶️ John my house. That makes perfect sense. And it also does make sense why people see that and

⏹️ ▶️ John say, it should also be my wifi router and all the other stuff or whatever. My concerns about it being

⏹️ ▶️ John a speaker, like it should also be a speaker. Well, it probably has to have some kind of speaker, but I’m not concerned

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s gonna be like a bad speaker as in like just, you know, doesn’t sound

⏹️ ▶️ John good for the cost of the speaker. I’m afraid that the device will be like

⏹️ ▶️ John as expensive as a big HomePod, but the audio quality of the small HomePod, the HomePod mini, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not a great combination. And like, honestly, the like home

⏹️ ▶️ John dashboard screen thing probably shouldn’t go in the same place as you would put a speaker,

⏹️ ▶️ John unless it’s a HomePod mini quality speaker. Cause you’re just like, oh, we want this to be in the kitchen. And it’s nice to have music in the

⏹️ ▶️ John kitchen and it’s fine. But if you have big HomePods, people are setting them up or in the music listening room or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John around their TV. So I still think there is kind of a conflict. Also with the idea that the screen is

⏹️ ▶️ John some big flat thing that they have to arrange in some way where it doesn’t bounce the sound from the speaker off.

⏹️ ▶️ John Cause you’re not gonna just, I don’t envision it as being that little circle on top of the full size

⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod being a screen. I envision the screen being bigger than that. Like when I’m looking at this as a kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John a cheap home iPad. Cause you need kind of at least an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John mini size screen and something capable of running some kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of dashboardy widgety type things on it, like the standby screen and all that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just, I don’t know. I worry that, like, I think Apple, again, to be clear, I think Apple should have a

⏹️ ▶️ John product in this category. They should have a screen thing that controls your house. I’m just not sure Apple is going to strike the right balance

⏹️ ▶️ John between the cost of the thing, the size of the screen, the quality of the audio, and the voice assistant. Like, if

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, if this product comes out and it can’t do Apple intelligence, I’m gonna be like, what are you even doing over there? And

⏹️ ▶️ John you may think that’s not gonna happen. This thing hasn’t even released yet. Surely it will be out with Apple intelligence, but everything is so compartmentalized.

⏹️ ▶️ John And to your point, Marco, the home, whatever section of the company does the home products does not

⏹️ ▶️ John seem to have a lot of resources, money, time, and effort put into it, right? And that’s not the fault of the people

⏹️ ▶️ John working on it. It’s the priority set by the company, right? Which is probably based on the

⏹️ ▶️ John sales of those things or whatever, but if you’re gonna be in the home, be in the home, have a full line of products, have

⏹️ ▶️ John a suite of things that works together. eventually have a wifi mesh router, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco baby steps, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But a thing with the screen would be a good start. I just like, what does this

⏹️ ▶️ John land in? It lands in an environment where the Apple TV is the best product in the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John family of the home products, which not that the Apple TV is bad or anything, but who would have thought that years ago?

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, the home pod, the big home pod is still not setting the world on fire

⏹️ ▶️ John and the mini is good for what it is, but it is still mini. And the number of updates these products get is low

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re all, all these products that depend entirely on you talking to them because they don’t have any screens or any other interface

⏹️ ▶️ John are not getting Apple’s new thing that you talk to, which really just puts a pall over the entire

⏹️ ▶️ John home product line of saying, oh, so all the things I talked to my house, they’re not getting any smarter. And

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s been a couple of stories about this, people surmising like, you know, or theorizing how Apple might

⏹️ ▶️ John deal with that. You know, can they do it all on the server and send it back? Are they not gonna do it all on the server

⏹️ ▶️ John and send it back? Because that would require big software updates to deal with that because of the way they do things now and it would

⏹️ ▶️ John make them even less responsive and they’re already not responsive because they’re slow. Like it’s not set in stone

⏹️ ▶️ John that these things will never get smarter, but our hopes are low, our expectations

⏹️ ▶️ John are low based on how, again, how much effort is put into these products to begin with and how reliable

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been for even the basic functionality that they’ve had for years and years. Yeah, so I feel kind of like we’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when Jason Snell has that like Apple report card every year and he asked about the home stuff And it’s like, I

⏹️ ▶️ John always give it kind of a not great grade because I just feel like the effort’s not there. Every once in a while,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a standout product. I do like the Apple TV, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, another product that’s going to be hooked into this whole big ecosystem,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re still waiting for that big matter and threads radio revolution to make everything more reliable and standardized

⏹️ ▶️ John and interworking with everything else. And we’re just not there yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. This is just something I personally don’t have any particular need for, so it’s hard for me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get super excited about it. I think it’s something that Apple should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely be exploring, and it sounds like that’s what they’re doing. But I don’t know, I don’t feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I have a need for a screen in my kitchen. And, you know, we have some friends that have a big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon doodad in their kitchen. It’s probably like a 13 screen or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just not for me. And it seems like it does show some useful and informative

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, but generally speaking, it’s like you said, it seems to largely be trying to hawk different things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Amazon. It’s just not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder how many people have an old iPad in their kitchen and use that as like their kitchen

⏹️ ▶️ John speaker through like the iPad speakers. You know what I mean? Like, cause having an iPad in the kitchen for doing recipe

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff or having a calendar up on is like, uh, I know a lot of people who have screens in

⏹️ ▶️ John their kitchen for that purpose. So it’s essentially the modern equivalent of the calendar that’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John magnet to your refrigerator that shows all the kids activities and stuff. Most people track that online these days.

⏹️ ▶️ John Having a visual representation of the family calendar in the family place like the kitchen makes sense. And

⏹️ ▶️ John also you can watch shows on it while you’re doing dishes or pull up recipes or play music

⏹️ ▶️ John from from across the kitchen on like a five year old iPads speakers or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But iPads are expensive and not exactly well suited to that as they sit on on whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, foldy triangle stand that they came with years ago that’s all disgusting from sitting on kitchen counters

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You can imagine a better product in that area. But like, when I look at the iPad and then I look at everything

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple makes in the home, it’s clear which one of those products gets more attention and is generally better executed, and it’s the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John iPads are expensive and they’re usually pretty good, especially when they’re new. And Apple’s home products,

⏹️ ▶️ John neither one of those things is really true about.

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#askatp: Why learn Perl today?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, you want to do some Ask ATP? I haven’t done that in a little bit.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Let’s do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. This is from Anonymous. Given Syracuse’s frequent mentions of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ancient relic of a bygone time called Pearl…

⏹️ ▶️ John You are editorializing. That is not in this person’s message. I think it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was implied. Is there a reason to learn Pearl today? Well, no. Do we need to keep reading? I think we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Obviously, there’s always the chance of becoming the one person who can maintain this critical COBOL pipeline

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a place that has such a, such a case with Pearl, but I mean worthwhile more in the sense

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this will teach you something useful about programming that will benefit your non-pro work or pure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a good intellectual pursuit. So obviously, John, you’re going to say, heck

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, especially with this framing, like this will teach you something about programming. Absolutely.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like one of the things I’m always touting about Pearl is that I’m so glad that I I

⏹️ ▶️ John learned it very deeply very early in my career for many reasons, but also

⏹️ ▶️ John for this reason of like teaching something useful about programming. Every concept that I

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually encountered in some other language I encountered first in Perl because Perl has the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John to be used to explore lots of programming concepts and also for whatever reason

⏹️ ▶️ John the people attracted to Perl used that ability to explore lots of weird computing concepts.

⏹️ ▶️ John that took years and years to show up in other languages. And I’m not talking about regular expressions. I’m talking about like stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that goes by different names in other languages, like roles and traits and different ways of doing class compositions.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, obviously single inheritance, multiple inheritance, all the things that everyone knows from older languages,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But like just so many different experiments, how to implement objects internally,

⏹️ ▶️ John how to make your own object system, how that should work, how to, you know, metaprogramming languages, like

⏹️ ▶️ John so much of that stuff was in Perl before it was anywhere else. Now, it was in Perl in a weird

⏹️ ▶️ John way made by one or two people that was not an official part of the language, yada, yada, yada. But it’s kind of like a little, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John build-your-own-language construction kit because Perl was so powerful and

⏹️ ▶️ John had so many capabilities to experiment with things. And most of the experiments were

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Perl ecosystem failures or didn’t catch on or whatever. But you would encounter them and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John even use them to do a useful project and learn what their pros and cons are. And so I really do appreciate Perl

⏹️ ▶️ John for that purpose. So were you to learn Perl, even today, I think, and say it was like your first

⏹️ ▶️ John or second language, like you learned some other more mainstream language, then you learn Perl. If you really learned all

⏹️ ▶️ John about Perl and used it to do stuff, when you moved on to let’s say Swift, there is very little

⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift that you would look at and not have seen something like that in Perl. Even all the weird concurrency stuff and all that, like

⏹️ ▶️ John there are equivalents to that in Perl, and you’d squint and say, oh, this is how Swift is dealing with that problem. And I’ve seen something

⏹️ ▶️ John similar to this. In fact, there was three failed projects in Perl that tried to do stuff like this. And so yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you will learn tons of concepts if you really get into Perl and into the ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Now the ecosystem is kind of old and crusty at this point and you might have to do a little archeology to find all those failed

⏹️ ▶️ John experiments in the past, but having lived through it in real time when they weren’t failed experiments, it did definitely prepare me for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Second thing is, benefiting your non-Perl work, if you do anything where

⏹️ ▶️ John you might need a scripting language to do stuff on a Unix system, I still think Perl is

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the best choices to do that type of stuff. Obviously you can do it in shell script and

⏹️ ▶️ John more advanced shells have more advanced features. You could use any, you know, you can use Node.js, you can use Python,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can use Ruby, you can use any of these sort of dynamic programming languages and quote unquote scripting languages.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Perl is still in that conversation. It’s commonly found and depending on what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing, Perl might be the fastest, best and easiest way to do it. Obviously I do tons of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John like this on my system in Perl because it’s the language I know the best. But even if I didn’t, even if you’re not a Perl

⏹️ ▶️ John person, you will have occasion to encounter a task where the best

⏹️ ▶️ John solution is a three-line Perl script. And your ability to make that three-line Perl script instead of banging your head against shell

⏹️ ▶️ John or trying to remember how to do it in your favorite programming language where you tend not to do tasks like that,

⏹️ ▶️ John Perl is a utility thing that has not gone away for

⏹️ ▶️ John decades and I think will be a good thing to have in your toolkit if you’re kind of a Unix sysadmini

⏹️ ▶️ John type person needs to do Unix-y scripting tasks, because Perl really does give you scripty,

⏹️ ▶️ John very friendly access to the whole Unix API. It’s even

⏹️ ▶️ John a great way to just like, if you wanted to do something, you wanted to write it in C against the POSIX API,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can write that same thing in Perl without having to worry about seg-faulting or whatever, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John figure out your ideas, figure out what you’re gonna do, and then go write it in the quote, real language after that, because the APIs are so

⏹️ ▶️ John similar. And then, yeah, obviously, being the one

⏹️ ▶️ John person who knows Pearl and the company that has a huge code base like that. Hopefully you don’t find yourself in that situation, but it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is a thing that can potentially, like those COBOL people, get you paid a lot of money

⏹️ ▶️ John if you really are the only person. Unfortunately, I’m going to say with Pearl, there’s tons of people who know it, so it’s not going to be like COBOL where you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be paid some huge sum of money to come in and rescue a company with a code base that no one else

⏹️ ▶️ John can understand. There’s still a lot of people out there who know Pearl and they’re employed using it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think genuinely that there’s a appealing or compelling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason to learn it for like production code? Like if you were to do presumably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something web today, would you choose, or would you suggest Perl as a choice

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some web-based thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably not for web-based stuff. For production stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John as a glue language, it depends. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it depends if there’s another, if there’s another language that a project is already using that can fill that role, then just use the other language.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re in a situation where there’s nothing filling this kind of glue role, and the other language is like

⏹️ ▶️ John Rust or Swift or something, I would say Perl is better suited to those glue language type tasks than either of those

⏹️ ▶️ John languages. And so knowing it and being able to deploy it for the things that it’s good at is important.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, for one-off little thingies that you need to do to do some simple thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good to know this. But I see people all the time, like trying to do stuff with shell script, and I look at it and it’s like, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is why Perl was invented. Because Shell Script was annoying, and you could make these complicated,

⏹️ ▶️ John huge pipelines in Unix with awk and grep and sed. And it’s like, how about we just combine all that plus

⏹️ ▶️ John access to the full Unix API in one language? That’s Perl, right? So it seems like people are going back in time, and they’re like, oh, I need

⏹️ ▶️ John to do this task. And they start writing a Shell Script. And in the Shell Script, they’re using sed and awk. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’ve forgotten your history. That was found to be unsatisfactory

⏹️ ▶️ John and not as portable as you wanted and slow and annoying and buggy. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what that’s what Pearl is for. If you are in that mindset and you’re comfortable with those tools, you will be also be comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ John with Pearl instead of having to use multiple different tools and worry about different versions of grapple cross systems and

⏹️ ▶️ John worrying about if everybody has bash or if they’re just using the born shall or if they’re using Fisher or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John Pearl Pearl still fills that role. There’s no replacement for that thing. It’s just that that is a

⏹️ ▶️ John much smaller job than like you were saying, Casey, like, oh, if you had to write a web app, would you write it today in Perl? No.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, I wouldn’t write it in PHP either, but then what do I end up working on at the time? A PHP web app. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you

⏹️ ▶️ John can, it will work. It’s just maybe not the best choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aye yi yi.

#askatp: EV charge-port location

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Thomas Brock writes, what is the correct placement for the charging port on an electric vehicle? So you can check your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey answers. Here’s my answer key in the form of a tier list. For Thomas, the S tier was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey left front quarter panel. So that’s basically in front of the driver’s door in countries where the driver

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on the correct side of the car. A tier is left rear quarter panel, front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey center. I’m not, what does front center mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Two locations,

⏹️ ▶️ John a tier list. What’s in the A tier? Left rear quarter panel and front center.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, I’m with you now. B, right front quarter panel, C, rear center,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and F, right rear quarter panel. I think for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is actually relevant because follow-up, we ended up getting Erin a car. She has, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have leased for the very first time a brand new XC90 Recharge, which is a plug-in hybrid.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we sort of kind of have an electric car now. And hers is in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey front, left front quarter panel. So in front of the driver’s door. I don’t love it. I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer it in the back of the car. Um, it works, it’s fine, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we back into the garage because we are, uh, awesome. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of the garage is where the charger plugs into the house and then you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sling it all the way up the garage into the front of the garage, where the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, where the plug or where the receptacle is for, for the car. And that, I don’t love that. And yes, I,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suppose we could turn the car around if we really wanted to, but we’ve been parking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this way for the 16 years we’ve been in the house. We’re not going to change now. So for me, I think rear,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driver’s side, in whatever your particular country is, the driver’s side of the car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the rear quarter panel is what I would say is the best place for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I, as the only one of us who ever drives electric until I guess this moment,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. So with some asterisks. So the Rivian has it in the driver’s side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco front corner. Teslas all have it in the driver’s side back corner, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TIF’s i3 has it, I think, in the worst place, which is the passenger side back corner.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main question is, how easy is it to charge it wherever and however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you park? So I think the driver’s side wins, no matter what. Driver’s side is always the right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice for, you know, left or right. Driver’s side, definitely. Because a lot of times you have to get out, plug

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in, then maybe get back into the car for some reason like to check to see if it’s starting or whatever or just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hang out in the car while it charges. So driver side is the right answer for side. But front or back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s benefits to both. The advantage of the back is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally easier if you if you back in to wherever you are. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do have to consider like you’re going to charge it both you know at home hopefully if you have some kind of garage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or setup there like you can charge it at home. But also when you get to a a fast charger on a long highway trip?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how are those set up? And how easy is it to pull in and out of those? Some of those you could have actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pull through arrangements, but that’s fairly unusual. Most of them are like they’re in big rows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like, you know, one side solids that you can’t pull all the way through. So it is more convenient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have it on the back corner if you are a good enough driver to want to and be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to back into things reliably. It is quite entertaining

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is where, again, this is where all Teslas have theirs. It is quite entertaining watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla drivers pull into superchargers who you can tell they don’t do this very often,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. And you can tell like, oh, this person has never had to back their car into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a spot before. And it is quite entertaining watching it. But anyway, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is the best. It’s like the most convenient spot for it is the driver’s side.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you like pulling into things, you know, backing into things, uh, then the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and if not, then the front.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think that that makes a lot of sense. John, do you have an opinion about this despite being completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ignorant?

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t actually, uh, ever charged an electric car, so it’s, it’s all just speculative, but it was the kind of thing about like with

⏹️ ▶️ John gas cars, like why it is where it is on gas cars. Um, and obviously it varies

⏹️ ▶️ John from car to car. Honda is a driver’s side, uh, thing, but I haven’t, don’t even need to mention where it is front

⏹️ ▶️ John rear because at least in this country, it’s pretty much always the back half of the car somewhere. Back

⏹️ ▶️ John in the 70s, sometimes it was literally like in a dead center back, like underneath the logo of the car

⏹️ ▶️ John maker or whatever. But in general, these days, it’s some part of the back half of the car. Right thinking companies

⏹️ ▶️ John put it on the driver’s side for the reasons Marco mentioned, and companies that are doing it wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree with that, actually. I think it’s better because both our cars have the gasoline going in the passenger

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side. And while on the surface, I agree with you that it should be on the driver’s side,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what ends up happening is almost everyone has it on the driver’s side. Like, almost every car manufacturer does it on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driver’s side. And so if you’re a passenger side car, you can just scoot right up to the pump because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more often than not, nobody’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what I was getting at. I was like, why is the back part, setting aside the side, why is

⏹️ ▶️ John the back part where it is? And it has a lot to do with how quickly you can fill a car up with gas

⏹️ ▶️ John and the way gas stations are are structured to be kind of like a line of cars. And you go in, you

⏹️ ▶️ John fill up, you go out, you go in, you fill up, you go out. Sometimes they stack them like my local gas station stacks the pumps

⏹️ ▶️ John next to each other. So there’s a front pump and a back pump in each of the little rows with the expectation

⏹️ ▶️ John that if the person in the front pump is there and you pull in behind them at the back pump, and the person in the front pump will

⏹️ ▶️ John leave, and now you’re blocking. You’re at the back pump, but you’re blocking the front pump. But no big deal. You’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be gone in two minutes anyway, because how long does it take to fill up with gas? Like, it doesn’t jam up the thing. you could never

⏹️ ▶️ John do electric charging like that because then you’d be there for 45 minutes and people be like, I wanna get to the pump in the front of you, but I can’t because you’re blocking

⏹️ ▶️ John me. They would never arrange electric car chargers that way because the cars could be there for

⏹️ ▶️ John a much longer time than just a few minutes. And that’s why if you’re wondering like, why are we having this discussion about

⏹️ ▶️ John gas pumps versus charging ports? It’s a very different usage case

⏹️ ▶️ John where the expectation is, and I know people go into the thing and they buy potato chips

⏹️ ▶️ John and they take too long or whatever, But anyway, you could be charging 45 minutes, right? And hopefully you’re not gonna be clogging

⏹️ ▶️ John up a gas pump for 45 minutes. So that’s why there’s a different answer. My personal preference would be for

⏹️ ▶️ John the same reason that I don’t like backing into parking spots, I want the port to be on the front because I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it is more time sensitive for you to get into the parking spot or the charging thing

⏹️ ▶️ John than it is for you to leave it. You need to clear the parking lot or the line of cars trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to find a thing or whatever. You need to get out of the flow and into your charging spot fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t take the time to go and stop and back in or whatever, go nose first. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the front center is great for that because that’s a place where you can hit things and it’ll screw it up, whatever. So it’s gotta be

⏹️ ▶️ John on the quarter panel. And I think it should be on the driver’s side quarter panel. Now, as Thomas wrote,

⏹️ ▶️ John reading from his message here, a bonus points for Porsche to putting a charge port on both the left and right side, like

⏹️ ▶️ John in a Macan. Lots of car companies do that. The fancier ones will have a charge port on both

⏹️ ▶️ John sides of the car. Then you don’t have to argue about which side, but again, I think the front is my preference because I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John a backer-inner.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, real-time follow-up, the reason the gas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cap or whatever, the gas chute, I can’t think of the word I’m looking for, the thing, where you put the gas, the reason that’s in the back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because typically the gas can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or gas can, the gas tank is in the back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. Man, words are hard. So anyways.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although even in like, well, I guess even in rear-engine cars is there, like the gas tank does move around in some cars

⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways, And again, it has been in different places. Historically, you can find lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of old cars where you’ll show it to a modern person, they just won’t be able to find where they’re supposed to put the gas

⏹️ ▶️ John in, and not because it’s electric. But yeah, we’ve really standardized on the rear quarter panel in this

⏹️ ▶️ John past few decades.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep.

#askatp: Ever-growing backups

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Russell Fitzpatrick writes, I’ve been using Arc Backup for many years. It backs up to Backblaze B2

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud storage, which bills me per gigabyte per month. I also use Time Machine to a local disk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The monthly cloud storage bill keeps growing as my backup is incrementally added to over time. I’d love to hear if you have a strategy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to keep backup sizes from endlessly expanding over time. Do you tail it, thin it, or just keep adding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it indefinitely and accept that the monthly bill will keep growing until you retire from using computers? This is a great question to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t have a good answer. I will say, and I think we talked about last week, the week before,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my backup Vortex had a little bit of a chink in the armor insofar as,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, the Synology that was living at my parents’ house had died or so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought. Um, what it ended up happening was, forgive me if I’m repeating myself, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the power supply, which was external on this particular Synology, cause it’s a physically small Synology,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the brick power supply had failed. So I got a new power supply and now it’s right as rain. But I bring all this up to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on what your particular setup is, you could get a duplicate of, and you know how much you’re willing to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. You could get a duplicate, even a physically smaller and cheaper duplicate of your main, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, network attached storage, and put that at a friend’s house, at a relative’s house or something like that, and potentially back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to it. And Synology makes this really easy to do. Granted, Synologies are not cheap,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you know, filling them with hard drives is not free, but I don’t ever really have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to worry about the size things because in a worst case scenario, I’ll just either replace or add a new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive and suddenly I’ve got that much more space. Marco, I have a feeling you will not have too much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add here since you’ve mostly gotten out of this game. And then John, let’s finish up with you, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t currently use ARC. I switched back to just regular Backblaze

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since I stopped really needing to back up a NAS. Because, you know, regular Backblaze will back up any kind of external

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive. So if your entire data set can be what’s on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, possibly plus also what’s on an external drive, then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular Backblades will back that up for its regular flat rate, so you don’t need to pay per gig. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of not really a problem. It’s only a problem when you start talking about backing up network devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and network shares. That’s when you start having to pay per gig for various solutions. Anark is good for that. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other solutions as well. So I don’t really personally have this problem,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly. I think the, I mean, that being said, like, you know, Arc,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the problem is just the incremental backups just being, you know, changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data as opposed to lots of new data, I think the incremental backups

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have various like thinning features built into the client’s, so, you know, in this case, Arc,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure it has like retention management features to help keep the backup set, you know, to only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep, say, the last 60 days or whatever you want to set it to. So I would look at some of those options

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re having that problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John John? Yeah, it’s not entirely clear how the decision to use ARC with Backblaze B2

⏹️ ▶️ John and BCharge per gigabyte was arrived at. Like, if you’re just backing up a single machine, you can get a flat rate

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which is a great deal, right? Backblaze flat rate for a single machine or whatever. I don’t know if there’s any NASs

⏹️ ▶️ John in the mix here. But anyway, no matter what, I think having a cloud backup is a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if for whatever reason, the cloud backup you have is going to charge you per gigabyte, because you can’t use

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the flat rate ones or you just don’t want to, you’re gonna be faced with the problem we all face, which is that we

⏹️ ▶️ John accumulate data that we care about over time. And the graph may be lumpy, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it just goes up, right? And mostly we’ve been relying on the fact that storage gets cheaper over time

⏹️ ▶️ John because of the advances of technology. But if you keep living, you’re gonna keep making data.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only way to stop that data from getting bigger over time is to die. Because you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be taking more pictures for your family and you’re not gonna, again, I’ve said this a million times, you don’t wanna go back and throw

⏹️ ▶️ John out the baby pictures once you get the graduation pictures. You wanna keep them all, right? Now, you can thin them. The

⏹️ ▶️ John question of like, how do I keep this under control? All you’re doing is slowing down the slope. You’re never going to reverse

⏹️ ▶️ John it. You’re always going to have more and more dead. But you can decrease the slope

⏹️ ▶️ John by doing things that Margo mentioned, the how many days worth of incrementals do you wanna keep? That’s a great knob to turn.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, that’s not changing it too much, but you can get a one-time dividend

⏹️ ▶️ John from that. Are you backing up stuff that you don’t actually care about? Are you backing up

⏹️ ▶️ John your applications folder? At one time, backing up your applications folder made sense. These days, where

⏹️ ▶️ John applications basically come from the internet and are often subscription-based anyway, there’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ John almost nothing in your applications folder that you need to back up. Confirm that. Look at your applications folder.

⏹️ ▶️ John Say, hey, if I was setting up a new Mac, can I get all these applications somewhere? Do I have all

⏹️ ▶️ John my serial numbers? Can I get the installers? Do I have some data in my applications folder

⏹️ ▶️ John that I shouldn’t, maybe I should move it out of there. But the applications folder is not only potentially large,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also a huge source of churn every time like the Adobe updater runs and does a bunch of stuff. And then you’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John wasting time and churn and filling your incremental backups with 30 days worth of the updates

⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever the Mac app store and your Adobe updater is doing behind the scenes, right? And things that grow

⏹️ ▶️ John without bound like your photos, You can go through your photos and start thinning them, but I would caution you that it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ John easy to get into a situation where you’re either frustrated or panicked and decide you’re gonna get some storage

⏹️ ▶️ John back by deleting some pictures and regret that a few years later, right? Because, I mean, you don’t wanna keep every

⏹️ ▶️ John picture, but deleting stuff that is literally irreplaceable, like years old

⏹️ ▶️ John pictures, is something worth considering and not doing

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re again frustrated or in a hurry or something like that. It’s tempting because very often it’s the biggest thing on your computer,

⏹️ ▶️ John but think twice. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a combination of those strategies, trying to find flat rate backup,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t back up stuff you don’t actually need to keep, things that you can get elsewhere. If you’re backing

⏹️ ▶️ John up a bunch of huge media files, throw them out. Stop backing them

⏹️ ▶️ John up. And you’re like, but what if I lose all my media? It’s still so much better than losing

⏹️ ▶️ John your kid’s baby pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t be paying per gig to back up ripped Blu-ray MKVs, because after a while,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will have paid more than it would have cost to just buy the streaming version of it in five years if you lose it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, you lose them all, just rebuy them all. Maybe it’s like, well, I won’t be able to get Blu-rays anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, hopefully you still have those discs, but if you don’t, you can probably buy them somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, here’s the thing. In the future, off in the distance, you can always go to eBay and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy Blu-rays for $2. Trust me, that won’t be a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or you hope. But anyway, really think about what do I actually need to back up? Like in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ John the thing you need to wrap your head around is, as you keep living, you will keep

⏹️ ▶️ John accumulating data, and all you can do is try to bend the slope of that line down, but it’s never going

⏹️ ▶️ John to decrease. You’re just going to have more and more data that you need to back up. just accept

⏹️ ▶️ John that and say it’s just a cost of doing business, uh… cost of being alive

#askatp: Batteries in desktops

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Ty Bolt writes, why doesn’t Apple put a small battery in desktop Macs? It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would eliminate any concern with power surges or outages and no need to have an ungainly and annoying UPS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get that, but it takes up space, it’s heavy, it eventually goes bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I don’t, I don’t think that the juice is worth the squeeze on this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John real, it’s real close to a revelation here. Why don’t they just put a small battery in them? We wouldn’t have to deal with those clunky,

⏹️ ▶️ John ungainly and annoying UPSs. the UPSs are that big, because that’s how big

⏹️ ▶️ John a battery you need to power a computer for any amount of time. So if you could put a

⏹️ ▶️ John small battery inside the Mac, you would also be able to have a UPS that’s the size of an Apple TV, but you don’t. The UPSs

⏹️ ▶️ John are huge, right? And that’s kind of the problem. To get a

⏹️ ▶️ John UPS that is worth anything, that gives you enough time to do a panic shutdown, that gives you enough

⏹️ ▶️ John time to do automated shutdowns, which macOS supports, it can do like, hey, I’m on UPS power, I’m gonna shut everything down,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That battery needs to be big enough that it’s heavy, ungainly,

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be replaced like a UPS battery, adds cost, weight, and volume. That’s why they don’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because the battery would need to be just, it would ruin Apple’s computers. And you’re like, well, they put batteries

⏹️ ▶️ John in laptops, isn’t that not a problem? It’s like, yeah, they’re designed to be battery powered. Apple’s desktops are not

⏹️ ▶️ John designed that way. Even the gigantic Mac Pro, all that space in there, in theory, is designed to hold

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff other than batteries. And let me tell you, the Mac Pro is already heavy enough. please do not put a gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco battery inside it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think the answer really is, number one, like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to get rid of ungainly annoying UPSs because then you have no footrests,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you use subwoofers. But number two, you’re so close to it, Ty.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re so close to the solution here, which is use a laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a desktop and then this problem goes away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like magic,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, like magic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the laptops are so good that you can do that and you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really giving up anything. And in fact, sometimes, like right now, you actually have the best desktop performance available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain contexts. So anyway, yeah, I think that’s the answer. If you really don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a UPS and you want battery backup power for your desktop, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a laptop as a desktop. It’s super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John easy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or just get a desktop computer with a UPS because that’s what it takes to provide uninterruptible

⏹️ ▶️ John power to devices. it requires a big battery. And really, honestly, you want that big battery to be

⏹️ ▶️ John separate because that battery will eventually go bad and you’ll need to replace it. And all that you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John without touching your computer, but just messing with your UPS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Trade Coffee. And thank you to our members who support us directly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the member perks that we offer is ATP Overtime, a weekly additional bonus topic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or segment about some topic that we kind of just couldn’t fit in the main show or never quite got to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this week’s Overtime, if you remember, is going to be on Apple’s product longevity.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in particular, they released a longevity by design paper. We’re going to be discussing Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product longevity in Overtime. You can join at atv.fm slash join to get there. Thank

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes at atp.fm And if

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Mastodon, you can follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to ♪ Are you accidental? ♪ ♪ Accidental! ♪ Podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long

Neutral: Repairs

Chapter Neutral: Repairs image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I just got my car back from the body shop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about this. So, remind me, you had tagged something in the beach town,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that right? Tagged? Like, bumped. You clipped it. Speaking of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quarter panels.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. So, while backing out of my own sandy driveway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the beach town, across the street from, you know, where I pull

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out. you know, keep in mind these are like, you know, the the eight foot wide beach sidewalks are our

⏹️ ▶️ Marco streets. And so maneuverability is very tight. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight foot wide walks, you know, behind me on my street is a telephone pole.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And next to that is a like kind of twisty, stumpy beech tree. I think it’s like a cedar or juniper

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. So it’s all, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you thought of that, just slight tangent. I was thinking about the other day that I already mentioned on the show. Have you thought about that

⏹️ ▶️ John recently? what you just said, what’s behind, when you back out, what’s behind you? What do you mean? What’s behind

⏹️ ▶️ John you? Say it again. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco telephone pole and a tree.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. A telephone pole. What the hell is a telephone pole?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You think there are kids born today, living today,

⏹️ ▶️ John who if you really ask them, maybe they just refer to it as a telephone pole. And you ask them, what does that pole have to do with the telephone?

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’d be like, honestly, I don’t know. That’s just what everyone calls it. They call it a telephone pole. Maybe it’s because it’s shaped like a telephone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I really think the telephone pole is rapidly becoming one of those whatever neologisms or whatever. that’s that’s the wrong term,

⏹️ ▶️ John but anachronism, whatever. Because I mean, you know, ask your kid if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John listening, ask your kid point to a telephone pole say what is that when they see telephone pole ask them? Why is it called

⏹️ ▶️ John a telephone pole?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can tell you at least this one is I know it’s a power pole because the funny thing is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually bought that pole as part of my house construction. I had to pay to have a pole moved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what I actually had to pay for a power pole. It was a whole thing. Trust me. You don’t you don’t want to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. Beach living. It was a very expensive pole. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a few, maybe a month ago, it was as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving was starting to slow down, it was like the second to last time I drove onto the beach for the season

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the big summer rush and it was starting to get a little crowded in town and there were a bunch of people walking back and forth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a bunch of bikes going back and forth behind me and I had to pull out in the direction I normally don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull out, like I almost always go in like kind of one big loop around the block. time I had to go the other way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I was looking back and forth like I was I was doing a lot of checking side to side as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backed out because of all the pedestrians and cyclists and for one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-second I forgot to look behind me. And this tree

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like this like stumpy like tree protrusion off the like like a like a low like side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco branch of the tree was cut off so like there’s like a side diagonal stump next to the telephone pole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this tree and pole that I have almost hit a hundred times, I finally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually hit the tree stump.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you not have proximity sensors on your car or do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it turned off? The proximity sensors are not enabled when the car is in off-road

⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes. Now, normally this is generally a good thing because again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these streets are eight feet wide. Yeah, it’ll be going off the whole time you’re driving.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re constantly near everything around you. That’s the reason why I assume they turn them off during

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off-road modes because when you’re off-roading, there’s always crap around you. You kind of just have to be aware of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m dealing with this with my wife’s new car. She’s got proximity sensors for the first time and there’s a button on the dashboard. I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John look, just leave it off all the time until you’re about to park and you want it because otherwise you’ll be here beeping

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. But that’s the time to use it, backing out, pulling in, whatever. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this one time I backed up and I hit the stupid tree diagonal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stump thing and I put a nice big dent in my quarter panel. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have sent you the picture of this. I will put it as the chapter art of this chapter. I would like you to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess what it cost to repair this quarter panel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think we did the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stance privately. Yeah, we already did the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guessing game. And if I recall correctly, that quarter panel runs halfway up the whole damn car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You mean height-wise or length-wise? No, no, no.

⏹️ ▶️ John How big is the piece of metal that you would have to remove to this? Well, I mean, I didn’t say this last time or maybe I did mention it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at this, I immediately think of YouTube painless dent repair videos?” And I said, Oh, no problem. Painless dent repair. We’ll take that

⏹️ ▶️ John out. No need to replace the quarter panel.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to two different body shops, just to see what the first one told me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was surprising. And so I went to a second one and I’m like, Hey, what do you think? You know, could this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, could this be, you know, pop back out or, you know, suck whatever they do. I don’t know how, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John how. PDR,

⏹️ ▶️ John painless dent

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco repair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I asked about that. And, you know, the guy looked around, he looked at the stuff, he looked at how it was bent and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically said like, No, that’s not going to do it. There was some minor damage to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bumper. You can see a little bit, but it’s more of a scuff on the bumper. And I told him, you don’t need to replace the bumper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m fine with that scuff. Just get the big dent out. How much is that? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to the body shop thinking, I don’t want my insurance rates to go up from this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I had in my mind a price. I’m like, all right, I think if it’s below $3,000,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just pay them directly and not go through insurance, I know how this is going to be a pain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once insurance gets involved and raise my rates up and everything. Let me just, let me see what it’s gonna be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, is there, you haven’t told us, you can’t tell from this picture, did this dent impair

⏹️ ▶️ John any of the functionality of your tailgate and stuff? Was this purely cosmetic or was it functional where

⏹️ ▶️ John you could see how something is scraping now when I open the back of my car?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t seem to affect the tailgate or the little flappy thing on the bottom of it. So as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had no functional problems as a result of this.

⏹️ ▶️ John So in theory, you could just drive around with this dent forever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free. I could, yes. I did feel a decent amount of shame driving around with this dent. Because I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m driving around a bright yellow electric SUV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Long Island.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that yellow isn’t seeming so smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, huh? And Long Islanders, there’s a lot of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say, political diversity on Long Island. And so the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing somebody who dented their new electric SUV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Long Island parlance truck would be, I think, amusing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and satisfying to many people in the region in which I live.

⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, when you back up and hit that stump again, you’ll hit it in the same spot and you won’t even notice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true, well, but unless I push it in further. Maybe then I’ll break the tailgate, we’ll see. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had the body shop take a look at this, and the first body shop says,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is probably going to be something like $15,000. Oh gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was floored, I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. Like, for what?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they were explaining, look, you gotta take this off, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, and the reason I picked this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco body shop was that they were Tesla certified, and I know Tesla runs a pretty tight ship

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some of that stuff, so I’m like, all right, if they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certified, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So Tesla will ship the cars with panel gaps as wide as a house. Yes. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once they get repaired, they need to be very, very, very precise.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yes. Cool. Because a few years ago, when my Tesla was sideswiped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the parking lot in the ferry terminal and I had that was like a $6,000 repair.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went to one of those shops and they were like, well, we they’re like, this is probably gonna be, you know, XYZ. But I’m like, but they were they said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they actually couldn’t take the business because they weren’t Rivian certified and Rivian won’t even sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them the parts unless they’re certified. So I had to go to a second place. The second place looks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re like, hmm, like, all right, yeah, we can do this. We’ll get back to you on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price, but we think it’s probably going to be even more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This so, and so first I’m like, all right, well, okay, insurance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is definitely going to insurance now. So, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you recently had the insurance bulk at spending, I believe, it was $20,000 roughly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? CASEY That was a pebble. PAUL That was a pebble,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. CASEY It wasn’t a tree, it was a pebble. It was roughly 20 grand and the car was allegedly worth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 25-ish, and so they said, the heck with it, the car’s totaled. I would hope that they didn’t total your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey car for this, given that your car is much newer and was considerably more expensive when purchased.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco PAUL They did not total the car. Thank God. I was worried about that. But the total

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price to get this repaired, I now have it back. It’s perfect. The total price to get this repaired.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twenty thousand dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the cost to allegedly replace your entire engine of Aaron’s car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the same cost it takes to repair a quarter panel dent on a Rivian. Did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you

⏹️ ▶️ John get like a parts list? because I’m wondering, did they replace anything other than the sheet metal? They did. I’m assuming they

⏹️ ▶️ John replaced the bumper because it was going through insurance. So it’s new bumper, new sheet metal. What

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else? So yeah, so they replaced some kind of bumper and that and like some trim, like, you know, a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trim pieces along the boundaries of them. But like I like, I don’t even know what most of these terms mean

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or are, but as far as I can tell, they had to take apart the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. Like everything was taken apart. Everything like, you know, because, you know, I got back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it. And I’m like, oh, this, they, you know, they moved all the stuff in my trunk. Of course, the whole trunk was clearly taken apart.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they took apart like the center console at some point, like they took apart my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire car, it seems, I don’t know why, I don’t know how cars are built. I don’t know how body shops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, but every, I mean, and they, they did a nice job. Like the car looks good. It looks new again, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. So if you’re now, I understand like why.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car insurance for these new nice EVs is kind of expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry for my part in making it that expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. Well, I think Rivian has, that’s why Casey was asking about where

⏹️ ▶️ John the panel goes. The R1T specifically, I think has like one of their back panels is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a

⏹️ ▶️ John very large piece of metal where there’s, it’s not just like, if you look at a regular car where there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like the C pillar and then the trunk and whatever, It’s kind of like these small units where it’s like, oh, if you get a dent on this panel,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can just replace that small panel. But on the Rivians in particular, they’re very, especially the R1T, there are pieces

⏹️ ▶️ John of metal that go farther than you would think. Now, what a lot of body shops will do, at least in these YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John rebuilding channels that I watch, is anytime there is a problem on like a panel like this on a car,

⏹️ ▶️ John they will cut the panel and remove the, you know, like a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ John size panel, and then buy a new panel and cut that and match them up and weld it and sand it and blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And insurance company is not gonna do that. Like insurance company wants it to be like new and they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John replace the entire panel, whatever it takes. And if that means taking off all the lights in

⏹️ ▶️ John the back of your car, the windshield, all the things that are stopping them, like just to get that one gigantic panel

⏹️ ▶️ John off as a single piece. And by the way, you still probably have to cut it because it’s probably spot welded in various places, right? Taking that

⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing off and then buying that one new part. Like what the insurance company doesn’t want it is for

⏹️ ▶️ John it to be like an artisanal thing where like a crafts person has to

⏹️ ▶️ John reassemble your car from a hodgepodge. Like, look, this is the part. We remove the

⏹️ ▶️ John damaged version of that part. We buy a new one of those parts and we put the new one on. And if the part is

⏹️ ▶️ John huge, they’re replacing the whole huge part. Or even if they won’t sell

⏹️ ▶️ John like the individual thing, like they won’t sell you just like one part of the light bar or something, you have to buy the whole bar,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s just one part of it’s broken, that’s what they’ll end up doing. So I have to, as well as asking what else was damaged, I have

⏹️ ▶️ John to imagine that either it was a very large panel that required lots of disassembly and reassembly, or that maybe there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like a crash bar in there in the back of cars and the front, there’s various bars that are meant to bend on

⏹️ ▶️ John impact to absorb, you know, crash damage. And you might’ve had to replace that entire bar if

⏹️ ▶️ John it got even dented a little bit, because they’re like, oh, now the crash bar has done its crash thing, so we need to replace that,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that thread through the whole back of your car or something, but this would have been a great opportunity to have

⏹️ ▶️ John this problem put on a YouTube channel, the repair of your car so we could see exactly what was involved. But

⏹️ ▶️ John did you get a breakdown on parts versus labor? Cause that’s the next thing I’d be interested in to see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably did. I don’t have it in front of me right now, but it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love, I would love for you to scan the report or receipt or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not to, not for public consumption, but for John and I, I know he and I both would love to just tear that apart

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see how they got to 20,000 dollars. What

⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of that is labor? Is it, is it like 50% labor? 90% labor? Like and what were the parts cost? How

⏹️ ▶️ John much how much of that one panel that they replace? How much of that panel cost was the panel, you know, because if you’re buying like

⏹️ ▶️ John a Rolls-Royce panel versus buying a Honda Civic panel, right, even though they both look like

⏹️ ▶️ John equal size pieces of sheet metal, the prices are very different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one thing like the first body shop told me that I don’t know if I didn’t verify this, but they said that they think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rivian sells only like that whole side of the car. Like you can’t buy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently just that panel. You have to buy like the panel plus the two doors in front of it or whatever. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might’ve been part of it. Who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John Did they repaint stuff? Is painting on your bill?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, there’s definitely painting. Cause well, cause they said they were gonna like blend it or whatever, even, I mean, the car’s only, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, six months old or a year old, but. I was saying like, how much did they repaint? Yeah, I don’t know. But I mean, the car

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks fantastic. Like it’s all done now. It looks great. But yeah, I am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very thankful for car insurance. Me too. In moments like this. And I am just shocked, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that what looks like a fairly simple thing, $20,000.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it’s good to know a good painless dent repair person,

⏹️ ▶️ John because at a certain point, like maybe when this car depreciates more and you get a dent

⏹️ ▶️ John similar to this that might be close to totaling it, but you still like the car, PDR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the way to go. Yeah, I wonder if, what I wanna know is like, I wanna learn the limits of that. I gotta

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how much I

⏹️ ▶️ John can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re pretty surprising, As long as there’s no structural damage and it’s just the sheet metal is messed up

⏹️ ▶️ John They can they can do amazing things And you can decide like even if there’s like, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John the the crash bar got this little quarter size, you know dimple in it Do you care you probably

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t the thing I always worry about with these like they don’t want it to be artisanal So you’re essentially not relying on like

⏹️ ▶️ John a crafts person to beautifully make this amalgam of stuff But what you are relying on is

⏹️ ▶️ John the competence and care of the people who disassembled and then reassembled your car Because kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s laptops or any other kind of device that’s precisely assembled in a factory controlled environment when they disassemble

⏹️ ▶️ John it and reassemble it in the body shop They don’t have as much experience as the person who’s working

⏹️ ▶️ John the assembly line doing that process day after day after day, right? They don’t have the machines that have the temperature control

⏹️ ▶️ John that all the same tools They don’t have all the other parts off the car that make it real easy to put that part on right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m always worried with any kind of car repair that it’s not gonna go back together Quite the way

⏹️ ▶️ John it was and it’ll be a little bit loosey-goosey a little bit squeaky They didn’t put

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the little things and they broke a clip. They broke two clips. Something is inside just

⏹️ ▶️ John Recently, I was watching one of my YouTube videos and this guy got a very expensive fancy Porsche

⏹️ ▶️ John and He brought it back in for the comedy of errors But anyway, one thing he’s like, oh when I roll down the window, it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John this noise like It’s like, oh, that’s not good. This is, you know, a $200,000 Porsche

⏹️ ▶️ John rolling down the windows, making a noise. What could that possibly be? So he had it in, they were doing other stuff for it, and they figured out

⏹️ ▶️ John what it was. He had paint protection film, PPF, put over his entire car, because

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you do when you get an expensive car. And when they were doing it, one of the backing pieces that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on the PPF slipped down the slot between like the window and the car.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was the backing from a piece of PPF that was scrunched up underneath the window. when you’d roll it down, it would scrunch

⏹️ ▶️ John it up or whatever. That’s, someone didn’t do that on purpose. That was just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it was probably on the roof of the car and it slid down and went in the slot. It’s, I’m always worried about

⏹️ ▶️ John that with any kind of car repair. That’s why in general, you don’t want to hit things with your car because

⏹️ ▶️ John taking apart a car and putting it back together, it’s never going to be quite the same. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really easy to forget a bolt, forget a screw, leave a little thing rattling around in there and not get it quite

⏹️ ▶️ John back together. The clips again, breaking the clips and saying, well, it’s good enough or whatever. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason why you want to get a good place that does charge you an arm and a leg, because you hope they’re going to be more careful than the place

⏹️ ▶️ John that gave you the cheap price, but there are no guarantees.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is bananas. My goodness. But this panel is quite physically large. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I don’t know that it’s necessarily bigger than an equivalent panel.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I’m trying to imagine the rear of Aaron’s car, and I don’t think the equivalent panel is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much smaller. But nevertheless, it’s the twenty thousand dollars is just bananas.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, unlike the R1T, it doesn’t wrap over the roof like because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey an SUV

⏹️ ▶️ John shape. I think if you look at the R1T’s back panel, it goes up and around like the rear glass. You know what

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? And his doesn’t do that. So that should have at least been cheaper. But yeah, if they had to buy it with the doors

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, yeah, I would just love to see a parts list in this. But anyway, you just have to pay your deductible, I guess, and find

⏹️ ▶️ John out how much your rates are going to go up. Oh, my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m scared because, again, these are already not cheap to insure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but my god,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not gonna help. Like you said, now we know why. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you go remove that stump?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, that would be literally a federal crime because of the land that it is on. It’s on federal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco land.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But someone cut

⏹️ ▶️ John off the big branch that the stump is a stump of, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who did that? Well, the part of it that was stumping out would have been covering the village walk,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m guessing the village would have had the rights to say, hey, we got to trim this tree back. But I don’t have the rights

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to remove the tree from either the village walk or the federal land that it’s resting on.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Well, maybe get an orange reflective cone and put it over that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I could just not back out that way anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, look

⏹️ ▶️ John at your rear view camera. Turn on your proximity sensors.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just look. I mean, this time I’m like, it’s funny. Like when I got the car back the other day from the body shop, I mean, I’m driving around,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco running some errands around town. And I’m like, just being so careful every time I back out of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like, don’t hit it again today. Like that would be so awful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I think I said on the show when my wife side swiped her car in a parking garage and we got

⏹️ ▶️ John the door replaced and repainted. It was like the passenger side door. It was I think it was less than

⏹️ ▶️ John a week when she had it parked in the parking lot and the person next to her opened their car into the

⏹️ ▶️ John exact door that we had

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just gotten repainted

⏹️ ▶️ John and dented it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco badly

⏹️ ▶️ John enough that we needed to get it repainted again. Went back to the same exact body shop. I’m like, hey, remember

⏹️ ▶️ John you did this door? Once more with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling. Well, because literally the very first thing I did after picking up the body shop, the body

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shop is across the street from a storage facility that we had stuff stored in during the move,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had to go get stuff out of the storage facility. And so literally I drove across the street

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then had to back it into the storage garage. And I’m like, oh my God, if they actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see me dent this, That would be even worse. But fortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was uneventful. You used the rear view camera then. You don’t have 360 camera on this thing? Oh, of course I do. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used it like crazy that time. Yeah, there weren’t like cyclists and pedestrians walking behind it the whole time, so I wasn’t looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side to side. I actually used it correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The 360

⏹️ ▶️ John camera doesn’t show a big enough range to be able to see walkers and cyclists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t necessarily trust it. Also, the visibility pulling out of that driveway is very poor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like the angles that I could see, they’re not great angles. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of rely on my own site a lot as well, because I don’t trust only what the cameras will see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s a whole thing. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do it again.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of shocked that Casey has not told you you need to back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. I used to back in. Backing in, there’s a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trees, bushes and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you can hit stuff when you back in instead of when you back out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like it’s, no stumps. Like I would just be scratching the clear coat, but there would be a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear coat scratching if I did that a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in Marco’s defense, having spent very little time at the beach

⏹️ ▶️ Casey house, but enough to have seen it during the daytime, that car, while it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in many ways the right choice for you, in so many ways, particularly the size of the car, it is very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much the wrong choice. Because it is way too large for the roads and the quote unquote roads in which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re driving it. And if I recall correctly, I think you had said it would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be for the best if I drove you to the beach before I tried to break your car. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked at this and even if you hadn’t offered that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or kind of politely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey requested it, there’s zero chance that I would have done anything in the town with this car because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is just absurd how little clearance you have. And John, I would love to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit here and make just immense fun of Marco for this $20,000 oops, but truly the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oops was when you signed on the dotted line for the Rivian in the first place because it is just so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big for that specific area of the country.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was kind of fun though. Like when I was in New York, you have to file the form with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco motor vehicles department whenever there was an accident, uh, over a certain dollar amount of damage. And you have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like describe what happened. Yeah. And my favorite part was you have to draw a diagram or illustration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the accident. Are you serious? And they don’t tell you like, you know, what level of detail.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m drawing, I drew like trees, like fluffy, Like I drew like the beach, like I drew a whole little diagram

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that box. And I’m like, this is going to make someone’s day, I hope. Like, could someone, you know, reading this form, filing it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere, like, I hope this makes somebody smile. It made me smile to draw it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll be able to find it on the web somewhere. I’m sure it’s in shrine digital form somewhere. Like car, stump,

⏹️ ▶️ John path, arrow, stump.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gracious. Well, I’m glad it’s back. How long was it gone? That like how long was the repair?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like three weeks. It was a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it makes sense, but they tore apart half the car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t. And now and I’m so worried now about what John said about it, like not being quite right. Like I noticed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the the trunk lid and like whatever the bottom thing in the trunk is the flops

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. It’s like it’s a little bit tighter when it closes, like it doesn’t lift up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as easily as it used to. And I’m like, oh, something’s different.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If

⏹️ ▶️ John you got away without something rattling inside your doors or side panels that aren’t doors, consider yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John of declare victory.