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cover of episode 621: I'll Meet You Any Time You Want

621: I'll Meet You Any Time You Want

2025/1/9
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Accidental Tech Podcast

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C
Casey
一名专注于银行与金融实践的律师助理,擅长公私伙伴关系项目咨询。
J
John
一位专注于跨境资本市场、并购和公司治理的资深律师。
M
Marco
技术播客主持人和苹果产品专家
Topics
Casey: 我的 AirPods Pro II 充电盒发出一些无法理解的噪音,指示灯为橙色,我无法判断其含义。我尝试搜索相关信息,但没有找到答案。我希望有人能制作一个资源来解释这些声音的含义,例如包含音频片段的知识库页面或 YouTube 视频。 我遇到的问题是 AirPods Pro II 充电盒发出一些无法理解的噪音,指示灯为橙色。声音听起来像是悲伤的“do-do-do-do”,似乎提示充电异常,但信息不明确。我希望有人能制作一个资源来解释这些声音的含义,例如包含音频片段的知识库页面或 YouTube 视频。 Marco: 我没有遇到 AirPods Pro II 的电池问题或杂音问题。AirPods 和其充电盒会发出各种声音,这些声音能传达某种情感状态,但缺乏明确的解释。许多设备都使用单一的指示灯和声音来传达状态信息,缺乏明确的说明文档,给用户带来不便。20000 Hertz 播客的 Apple Sound Design 系列节目很好地介绍了 Apple 的声音设计,包括 AirPods 的声音。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

What issue is Casey experiencing with his AirPods Pro?

Casey is hearing indecipherable noises from his AirPods Pro charging case, which he interprets as a 'sad noise' indicating that the AirPods might not be charging properly. The case also shows an orange light, but he is unsure what it signifies.

Why are the noises from AirPods Pro difficult to interpret?

The noises from the AirPods Pro are difficult to interpret because they are not accompanied by clear visual indicators or a manual explaining the meaning of each sound. Additionally, the sounds are not easily searchable or describable in a way that can be entered into a search engine for clarification.

What is the significance of the orange light on the AirPods Pro case?

The orange light on the AirPods Pro case is ambiguous; it could indicate that the AirPods are not fully charged or that there is an issue with charging. However, without a clear explanation from Apple, users are left to interpret it based on context and intuition.

What is the purpose of the website statuslights.com?

Statuslights.com is a website that provides information about the status lights on various computer and telephony equipment. It shows what lights should be lit up and what each status light means, helping users troubleshoot issues with their devices.

What is the context of the 'gas car review' post mentioned in the podcast?

The 'gas car review' post is a humorous take on reviewing a gasoline-powered car as if the reviewer had never seen one before, highlighting the quirks and oddities of gas cars that people often overlook because they are considered 'normal.' The post contrasts this with how electric cars are often reviewed with a sense of novelty.

What is the main advantage of QD OLED screens according to John?

The main advantage of QD OLED screens is that they use individual pixels that can be turned on and off independently, eliminating issues like backlight bleeding and blooming. This results in better color volume, viewing angles, and color brightness compared to traditional OLED screens.

What is the significance of NVIDIA's DLSS 4 technology?

NVIDIA's DLSS 4 technology uses AI to generate up to three additional frames between traditionally rendered frames, significantly increasing frame rates. It leverages an AI model trained on millions of video game frames to predict what the next frames should look like, improving performance without requiring more powerful hardware.

Why did Marco and his wife decide to buy a restaurant?

Marco and his wife decided to buy the restaurant because it is a beloved community institution that they frequented. They wanted to preserve its quality and ensure it didn't fall into the hands of investors who might prioritize profit over maintaining its standards. They also saw it as an act of community service and historical preservation.

What challenges does Marco anticipate in running the restaurant?

Marco anticipates challenges such as managing a staff of 30, learning the logistics of running a physical business, dealing with insurance and liabilities, and navigating the complexities of restaurant technology like point-of-sale systems. He also expects a steep learning curve in delegating tasks and asking for help.

What is the significance of NVIDIA's Project Digits?

NVIDIA's Project Digits is a personal AI supercomputer designed to run sophisticated AI models locally. It features an ARM-based CPU and powerful GPU, allowing users to handle AI tasks without relying on cloud services. It is compact and can be linked with another unit for even more processing power, making it suitable for AI development and inference tasks.

Chapters
The hosts discuss the mysterious noises their AirPods Pro (2nd generation) make, expressing frustration over the lack of clear error messages. They highlight the absence of a user-friendly resource explaining these sounds and suggest the need for a knowledge base or YouTube video to address this issue.
  • AirPods Pro II produce various indecipherable noises
  • No clear documentation exists to explain these noises
  • The hosts suggest creating a knowledge base or YouTube video to clarify the meaning of the sounds

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

I've got a problem. I don't understand the noises that my AirPods Pro, I call them the Mark II. So this is the AirPods Pro with the better ANC, but before you could get the USB-C charging case. I don't remember the technical term for it. AirPods Pro II, because the ones with the case are AirPods Pro II parentheses USB-C charging case or something.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We're saying the same thing. So they're a little bit older now. I have had no battery issues. I've had none of the crackling or whatever it was that a lot of people, including I think Marco, had at some point or another. That was the first gen AirPods Pro 2, or the AirPods Pro 1 that had those. I haven't heard of any of those issues with the AirPods Pro.

to and I certainly haven't had them myself yeah likewise so waiting for you to close that parentheses Casey you're killing me keep going which parentheses I've got a problem with the air pods and then you went off on a tangent about which model you had I know what problem you have as we talked about before we started recording but please get to it right okay so let's get to it I got you tell the story I

So here's the thing. I will put one or both of the AirPods back into the charging case, right? And I not infrequently use them in mono mode. You know, I'll have only one in my ear, the other in the case, but I don't think it really matters. I'll put one of them back in the case and I'll hear some sort of noise and it sounds like a sad noise, right?

almost as though they're not able to charge. It's like a do-do-do-do or something like that. That's probably wrong, but I can't remember exactly what it is. Is it like drums? And is it from the case or from the pod? I'm pretty sure it's from the case. These are all fair questions. But I think it's the case saying something about this is unable to charge. But the problem is the extremely useful error information I get from the case, other than this just completely indecipherable noise, is that the light is orange. Okay.

Is that a good orange? I don't know. Is it a bad orange? Maybe. Who could know? So there's like that noise that happens from time to time. And then I feel like there's a doo-doo or something like that that happens from time to time. I really wish I'd had the patience, the energy, and the time to record these on the microphone and record.

you know, we could play them now, but unfortunately I had none of the three things. So I don't know what the noises are that my AirPods slash the AirPods pro two case makes when I try to reinsert an AirPod. And I did like five seconds of Googling, trying to figure this out and couldn't find anything. I feel like somebody needs to, and I don't know, maybe Steven Robles or something, put a YouTube video up or something like this, but somebody needs to have like a knowledge base page or some YouTube video that goes through here's

all the different noises your airpods can make and here's what they mean because i need help if only you understood the binary language of moisture evaporators you would know what they're saying i so i i have airpods uh for the non-pro airpods for and these are the first airpods that have been trying to speak to me in the same way that your thoughts are trying to speak to you and like you casey

I don't know what they're trying to say exactly. I give the sound designers credit for being able to convey some sort of emotional state through the beep boops. Because my old ones did not make noises like this. The cases make noise. The AirPods make noise. When I plug the case in, it makes a noise. When I take them out, it makes a noise. When I put them in, it makes a noise. And sometimes the light is orange, right? I'm not sure what it means, but I kind of like...

emotionally feel what the AirPods need. It seems like you want to be charged now. Like orange makes me think it's not fully charged and it needs to be. And sad noises make me think your battery is running low. And so I just kind of like intuitively do what I think the AirPods need me to do. But you're absolutely right. That's like, I get this product that has no on and off switches and just one light that changes a couple of different colors. And it speaks to me with these little beeps and boops. And I just have to sort of like,

do my best. It's like having a baby. You don't know what they want, but you just got to try to figure it out. There were two good episodes of the podcast 20,000 Hertz that went through Apple Sound Design, and they had some Apple Sound Designers on there to actually interview them. They were great episodes, highly recommended. And they did mention the AirPods. Do-do-do-do-do-do.

kind of, you know, sad battery noise, but that's, that comes from the AirPods when their battery is low. It sounds like what you're talking about is different. But yeah, there are so many more noises than that. But, you know, but give them credit for like, you can, you can describe it as a sad noise. Like you recognize like this is a sad noise versus the bing,

bing! When you plug it in, like, well, okay, that's... I'm plugging it in, and now it has power. Yay! Like, you know that. Kind of instantly... You know, there's no manual that tells you when it dings, that means I'm getting power, but you learn that. Well, it might have been a little piece of paper that no one ever looks at, like the sheet of... tiny sheet of paper with microscopic writing on it. I'm sure there's a webpage somewhere, just like there is for every, like, appliance, where it's like...

if the white light blinks three times with two second gaps between that means this and if it blinks once every one second and you're like you're like trying to gauge is that 1.5 seconds between them or one second and you're trying to stop watching it's like we're crying out loud people just this is not a great intro i know you want to save money it's like it's like they're it's like telegraph we can do everything through morse code all we need is a single led

I don't need any buttons, any displays, any readout. We'll just make people go to this web page and decipher what it's trying to say. And the bad part about using sounds is that you can't really copy and paste that into a search engine. So you can't go to Google and say, what does it mean when it goes do-do-do-do-do-do? Exactly. How do you spell that?

Right, you end up Googling for like blinking white light or whatever, and very often it's good that you'll find these thousands of other people who are like, what does it mean when my washing machine blinks a white light or something? But if there's only one light and they use that with like, oh, it's not blinking as fast as I... Sometimes the setup instructions say that. If you have gadgets where it's like, during setup, press and hold this button,

until the white light turns green, stays green, then blinks red two times, then let go. And it's like, what the hell? Like, what are we doing here? It's so Byzantine. So it kind of makes you wish for a terribly designed app on your phone to do it all. Now, it's very funny because some local friends of ours had some internet issues with their Fios. In fact, it's still going on.

One way or another, we went and looked at their ONT, their optical network terminal. So we opened it up, and I had my friend take a picture of it, you know, so he could call Verizon and be like, well, these are the lights that we have that are flashing at the moment. Meanwhile, he then Googled and found statuslights.com, which I just now, as we're recording, realized apparently that's based in Richmond.

And they have photos of all this different, like, computer equipment and telephony equipment and whatnot. And they show exactly what lights should probably be lit up and what each of the status lights means. And so I need this, but for AirPod noises. So please, somebody get on it.

I see this list of vendors on statuslights.com and Apple is notably absent from the A section. Yeah, I know. Exactly, exactly. But anyways, I would just love if somebody could please point me to the thing that I should probably be able to Google on my own and apparently could not. That explains with little audio clips

what are all the noises that AirPods could make. And just before we leave this topic, I wanted to reiterate what Marco said. I can't remember if I ever talked about it on the show earlier, but the sound of Apple 1.0 and the sound of Apple 2.0, which are the 20,000 Hertz episodes from a couple of months back, maybe a few months back now, that whole podcast is tremendous. I love it. It's incredibly, incredibly good.

However, even if you're not into it in general, anyone who enjoys this show would absolutely enjoy those two episodes, which we will link in the show notes. So you should definitely check that out. There's an episode on Rivian too, didn't there? Wasn't it the same? I think that's right. Yes. Yes, it is. I believe that's right. And Rivian noises, by the way. That's what I mean. Like the noises that Rivian makes inside the cockpit. We talked about it on the show. Anyway. Yeah, that was the one where they're like, well, we take this raindrop and then we distort it like crazy in these 10 different ways. So it sounds nothing like a raindrop, but nature. Yeah.

All right, let's do some follow-up. The gas car review post that we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, this started in overtime or in the bootleg a couple of weeks ago. Then we did some follow-up last week. We thought we found the actual link that Marco was talking about, and it turns out we didn't. But now we have.

So, Kay writes, is this the gas car review Marco was trying to find? It's the one I remembered. And shout out to Kagi for making it pretty easy to find when searching for, quote, funny review of gas car, quote. And this is Jeff.Greer.FM. And it's a gasoline car review, which is a lot less looking down the nose than the one that we thought was the right one for a brief minute last week.

To explain what we mean is a humorous review of a gasoline-engined car as if it had been reviewed by someone who'd never seen one to highlight how there are lots of weird things about gas cars that we don't think about because we're used to them as quote-unquote normal. And every review of an electric car is like, can you believe it's an electric car? Let me tell you about it. So that's the conceit. And there's just...

So many of these posts. This is apparently the one Marco was thinking of, but there are so many more people keep sending to us. It's not just the same posts sent over and over again in different places. There are variations on them. And now with AI, there'll probably be even more.

Yeah, and I like this one the best in part because I think, honestly, I think it's better written than the others. Also, I think the whole arrangement of it around comparing electric cars to an old Miata, I think it's just kind of charming and fun, especially because I used to be able to borrow an old Miata sometimes and drive it, and that's what I learned to stick on. So I kind of have some fondness for that vehicle. But anyway, this, I think, was the better one, and this was indeed the one I was thinking of. So thank you, people, for finding it.

All right. With regard to Marco's lost MacBook Air, first of all, Marco, have you found it? I did indeed find it. It was in a tote bag on a coat hook behind three coats in the closet.

How did you find it? So the way I found it was I first went to Backblaze because I said I couldn't see it in Find My. And I guess I must have had it disabled. I don't know why. Anyway, so I went to Backblaze because I think I'm like, Backblaze has some kind of finding functionality. And I hadn't apparently enabled, they have like a whole map functionality where you can actually locate your computer if you enable location services. I hadn't done that. But it did tell me the last IP address that it backed up from

my house IP address and it said that the last backup was basically while I was it was like you know a day or two before while I was gone still so I knew okay it's in my house somewhere

So I basically just exhausted every possibility. I searched everywhere, upstairs, downstairs, kitchen. I even looked in the garage. Did I somehow leave it in the garage when doing something and forget about it? I looked everywhere. But yeah, after about two days, I found it and still had 5% battery life left.

Oh, well, look at that. But yeah, it turns out you can use Find My to Ping or make a sound on a laptop, which is good to know. And thanks to Miles for reminding us of that. Yeah. And if you want a backup locating option for your laptop, maybe go to Backblaze and enable that map functionality.

All right. With regard to iOS 18 photos, we mostly got agreement from feedback and this is not a vote. It's fine if you agree or disagree. I'm just saying, you know, the people who decided to share with us, I think mostly agreed with our assessment. But Tim Luft writes, I prefer the new photos app. I really do think it's an improvement once you dial in your setup. Pinned collections are one of my favorites as they add a section at the bottom of the edit page called any collection or album.

which allows you to add more granular collections like media types or utilities. Also, John can rearrange his albums by opening it into the list view of albums, then tapping and holding on the album to move it up and down the list. When you come back out, that's the new order.

I would never have discovered this for multiple reasons. So first of all, the convention for reordering things on iOS is either it looks like a thing that you can reorder or that you can go into that mode where it puts the little grippers on them, you know, the three little lines, right? This does not have that. It's a totally, like, unique view that has a bunch of rounded recs separated by margins with, like, shadows underneath them. And then if you hold down on one of those things, it brings up a menu, like a press, like a long press menu, like an actual, like, context menu, right? But, like, so many things that are elsewhere, like, if you...

hold down and the menu comes up but you ignore the menu and you swipe then it like releases into your hand and you can move it around but then all right so now you've got it you're like aha this must be reorderable as you drag it if you drag it over another one of the rounded rectangles it like highlights it and if you release it there it'll pop up a dialogue at least there's a confirmation thank god it says

Do you want to merge these albums? You don't want that to happen. What you want to do is get it to release from its current position, drag it, and get it to start displacing the other items so they scurry out of the way and leave an empty spot, right? Yeah.

And so I went to this list and I found one of my albums that I wanted to be at the top. And it's way down on my list of like dozens of albums. And I got it to lift up and I started moving it. And I realized I didn't want it to highlight another thing. And so I got it to open a little gap in a space. And then all right, now I just need to drag it up to the top of the screen. So it starts, you know, scrolling, paging down and it starts paging and paging and paging. And I get to the very top. And once I get to the very top with that thing in my hand,

no little spaces are opening up for it. Nowhere, I can't drag it anywhere. I'm still holding down on it, right? I'm dragging it. I'm dragging it over the top of things. I want it to be the number one item, but I would settle for the number two or the number five or anything on the first page, but no space will open up for it. So,

So I give up and like I have to find a safe place to release it because I can't hit the escape key like a Mac OS. I give up, drag it aside, let go, scroll down again. Maybe if I go real slow, you know, like the gap or I get the gap to open up and now I just need to like push it up to the top and the gap opens up and it goes gap, gap, gap, gap. I'm not going to do it. I'm just I'm just leaving my finger right here. I'm not going to move it. It's a gaps are opening up and it gets to the very top. And lo and behold, the gaps are gone again.

And I had to take like seven trips, seven partial trips, always being sure to drop it in one of the gaps before the gaps stop appearing. Oh my God. What is the same people who worked on like control center and rearranging springboard and make this interface. Yeah.

maddening but anyway i thank tim because i did eventually get through by fighting with the system that i just described i did eventually get my top four or five albums to the top of that list that i had never thought was reorderable i never thought would have any effect on anything else but now in theory every time i go to get the list of albums those will be at the top so thank you tim and no thank you to whoever made that interface in ios 18 photos because it's bad excellent

We have a whole bunch of feedback with regard to the Magic Mouse. And John, apparently you got a little bit confused with regard to side buttons. Do you want to fix your story? Yeah, I said the Apology Mouse had side buttons. Easy mistake to make because the Apology Mouse has things that look for all the world, like the side buttons that would eventually appear on the Mighty Mouse, but they are not in fact buttons. Yeah.

Someone sent me a video of the Macworld keynote where the apology mouse was introduced and talking about it and saying how Steve Jobs on stage saying how everyone hated the hockey puck mouse or whatever. And I said, I'm in the audience in that video.

because I was there. I got the apology mouse for free, a thing Apple did very rarely. But one of the times they did it, everyone who was in the Macworld keynote got a free Apple mouse. Can you imagine a free Apple mouse? The other thing, by the way, it's like remembering the old days of Steve Jobs was part of the presentation was...

uh you know here's our new mouse uh people didn't like hockey puck here's our new mouse we think it's a great mouse and it's standard on every mac that we sell remember the old days when steve jobs was like as soon as you make a new thing the old thing is dead to me right just like forget it the old ones don't exist and now tim cook's like lightning accessories yeah we'll keep selling them forever anyway um uh my apology for getting the side buttons on the apology mouse wrong apparently it didn't have them but the mighty mouse did

I'm glad that we got that resolved. And speaking of getting things resolved, MKBHD's interview with Tim Cook, which all three of us were casting about trying to remember the exact circumstance of it. John, can you tell us what that really was all about? Yeah, so as we established on the show, it was WWDC 2024, but I didn't remember the exact context, so I watched the video again.

Here was the context: it was a blind ranking, which I didn't know what it was until I saw this video and then forgot and then saw the video again and was reminded. A blind ranking is where the interviewer tells the interviewee, "I'm going to list the top five things here."

and you have to rank them, but you don't know what the next ones are going to be. So if we're ranking like your favorite foods, and I said tomatoes, you don't know if my next one is going to be chocolate or prunes. So what do you rank tomatoes? It's a blind ranking. If you, if you rank it, you're number one. What if something comes along that's better? But if you, you know, so it's,

it's, I don't know, try it. It's a fun way to try to get your true feelings about something and have a, you know, a fun game where you never know what the next item is going to be. And you may regret your earlier ranking. So that's MKBHD saying to Tim Cook, I'm going to rank these. And Tim Cook's like, well, is this, is this supposed to be my top five? And Marquez is like, Oh, it's just a top five. Anyway, he does blind ranking of a bunch of things. He lists a bunch of items and,

eventually one of the items he lists, he says, the Magic Mouse. That's it. He's just like, the first one is, you know, I forget what the products were, but it's like this product, that product. Then he says the Magic Mouse. And he doesn't say it in a snarky way or anything, but it really looks like a total, like, self-owned by Tim Cook, because first of all, Tim Cook essentially, at the first item, re-subscribes

refuses to rank them. Like, he won't give them numbers. You're supposed to say, okay, you know, apples is my number two, and then the next one they say chocolate, ooh, that's my number one, and then they say something like better than, you know, he doesn't give numbers. He says, I'm not going to rank them. So, Stimcook just refuses to play the game, which, fine, whatever, media training, you don't have to answer the person's question. I love all of my products equally. Yeah, he does compare them to his children. But when they get to the Magic Mouse, he could have just said something, anything about it, but he goes...

The magic mouse. Do we make a mouse? And then he said something really awkward like it was such an incredible moment. Like, no. No, Tim, it was not an incredible moment. And you don't remember when it was introduced. And nobody does because it's just the magic mouse. But anyway, I stick to what I said last week. I don't think Marquez was...

coming out and saying, hey, Tim Cook, everyone hates the Magic Mouse. But Tim Cook's reaction to it made it clear that he was not prepared for this question. So we'll put a link in the show notes to the video with a timestamp, as we did last week. And then we'll also put a link to a very editorialized YouTube short made by the MKBHD channel folks that makes it seem like, does the 10,000 years later thing from SpongeBob or whatever, to make it seem like Tim Cook was bowled over. But if you watch the actual video...

They're just playing the blind ranking game. Tim Cook is refusing to do it. And they get to one of the items. And I think the only thing Marquez says is the magic mouse. And then Tim Cook self-destructs. So that's the context. You can take a look at it. I think the editorialized short is a little bit overdramatic, but...

It is one of the rare cases where Tim seemed flummoxed by not even a question, by just, I'm listing items in this blind ranking game, and the next one I'm listing is a proper noun that is the name of one of your products. Go. Well, I do think that toward the end, it was a very short segment, but toward the end of this 35 seconds of awkward, Tim starts talking about how they really had to work on, I think, the ergonomics or something like that. And Marquez is like,

the mighty mouse you know he's kind of saying to himself magic in so many words you're talking about he didn't say this of course but you're talking about the ergonomics of the friggin mighty mouse he's a magic mouse he's just trying yes sorry he's just trying to think of something tim is just trying to think of something to say like it's so clear he's like what can i say about this that is tim cook approved what are mice like ergonomic like how often does he use one

When's the last time we touched one? Oh, my word. It was very funny. We also didn't touch on the most ridiculous of the most recent mouse rumors. This is from Mac Rumors. Late, late, late last year, a report from Korean leaker Y-E-U-X-1-2-2-2 this morning suggested that Apple has created a prototype magic mouse that includes a mix of touch, voice controls, and hand gestures.

Okay. Mark Ehrman says, voice control in the new Magic Mouse I wrote about this month makes sense in light of AI and the fact that Apple is on a decade-plus cycle. From what I've heard, big focus is ergonomics and gestures and a relocated USB-C port. I'd expect a new keyboard, too.

Coming back to Mac rumors, Apple reportedly plans to release a new Magic Mouse alongside the OLED M6 MacBook Pro in 2026. So, Gurman says a lot of things, and this is just a real winner-like, that the voice rumors make sense,

in light of ai no they don't they don't make sense like well hold on i have one theory but before you get to the theory i want to talk about this lodge this logitech thing that was in the notes before i think it was before we had overtime but it was in the notes and it didn't make it to the show ever but it was in there for a long time because logitech the mouse maker came out with an update to their mouse driver that incorporated chat gpt and

into their mouse driver so you could like use the mouse and map a button on your mouse to like it would open up a thing and then you could I forget if you could speak a chat GPT query you typed it but the point was they added LLM chat GPT integration to their mouse driver and

That's immediately what I thought of when I thought of rumors that the Magic Mouse is going to conclude voice controls. All right, so go ahead, Marco. Convince me that voice control is going to be a good feature for the new mouse. Oh, I didn't say a good feature, but here's how this might make sense. Now, first of all, the report from the leaker says they've created a prototype that does this. That doesn't mean they're going to release it, but let's set that aside. Here's why they might put a microphone in a mouse.

The people who buy mice are generally using them either with desktops that have built-in microphones or maybe a laptop. Now, if that laptop is closed, the laptop's built-in mic is disabled in hardware. Okay, so if Apple is leaning very heavily into voice control to command your computer to do things...

microphones are very cheap hardware-wise. So maybe, because it also mentions the new keyboard, maybe they're just going to put a microphone in the new keyboard and a microphone in the new mouse and a microphone in a new trackpad. And that way, whatever your setup is, if it includes any Apple peripherals, the computer can always hear you tell it a voice command. Because that way, even if you have a closed laptop docked to a monitor that does not contain a microphone,

one of your peripherals would contain a microphone. Where is this microphone going to be that's not smothered by your hand? Yeah, I mean, maybe on the side? Like, I don't know. I mean, this is... I gripped my mouse on the side. I didn't say this was a good idea, but I can see, like... And also, oh, keep in mind, if they indeed have raised up the profile very slightly to accommodate a USB port somewhere on the front, then maybe they could put it next to that. I don't know. So...

So that's all I can think of. Like, why would you have a microphone and a mouse for, quote, AI? I think it's just like, you know, give one more input to Siri in the new AI version of Siri that might someday be out and might be good and might work. People are dying to use that. You know, give one more input.

And that way, like, we will hear you or maybe we'll hear you a little bit better. Maybe we can hear you if you talk a little bit quieter in case you're in, like, an office situation and you don't, you know, you don't want to, like, be yelling all the time. I'm saying you could pick the mouse up and hold it to your mouth and you might say perhaps in a Scottish accent. Goddammit, John. I wanted to make the same joke. Why do you take it from me? You already posted the link to the...

Now I don't get any gold stars. You want to do the voice, Casey? You can do the voice. Go ahead. Hello, computer. That's terrible. I can't do James Doohan. Doohan, Doohan. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Now I'm so mad at you because I'm getting no gold stars from you for thinking of the exact same reference. Does Marco have any idea what we're talking about? No. However, that being said, honestly, that could be a feature. Because, again, imagine if you're in an environment where you don't want to be talking very loudly.

If you pick it up to your mouth and just and the sheer act of picking it up. Oh, my God. Triggers the microphone because you don't like, you know, use accelerometers to say, oh, it's picked up now that could activate the microphone. And you could say, you know, hey, open up mail. You could say something really quiet. Like, oh, my God. That's not that crazy. Maybe we should put that as our next member special.

We should. Oh, that's such a good idea because Marco will hate every moment of it. It'll be delightful. Oh, God. All right. That's going near the top of my list. I think we should do that. No more discussion of it, Casey. We don't want to ruin it for Marco. Okay. I really have a lot of things I want to discuss right now, but that's fine. Okay. We also have some more mouse-related feedback. Mike writes, I feel like you missed the obvious change for a new mouse from Apple.

The current mouse still has a physical button. I'd expect a new mouse to replace that with two or three Taptic engines to provide clicking like every other device they make and probably haptics on movement as well. I think this is a terrible idea, but I also think Mike is very right that it is perfectly in keeping with the Apple hardware design ethos. I think it's a terrible idea just because it'll be draining your battery for no reason because you just do so much clicking. I think it's a terrible idea because I think you would find it annoying. And I also think it's totally something Apple would do. Yeah.

I mean, it's fine on the trackpad. Yeah, but the trackpad has a way bigger battery. Oh, that's fair. Well, is it fair, actually? I don't know. I assume you're right. I feel like weight on the mouse is more important because you're actually moving it. The trackpad doesn't go anywhere. We'll see. If they pull it off, well, fine. But honestly, is this necessary? On the trackpads, it makes some sense because it's like...

such a limited space and not having it move has like space benefits but like a mouse there's plenty of room it's out there in the open air like and on the trackpad too like the you can click anywhere on the trackpad and it feels about the same which is a huge area so to have that like in the olden days when they when the trackpads were like big you know they call them diving boards or levers

Hinged on one side. Yeah, you hinge on the top. You click it on the bottom generally with your thumb, and that felt good. But if you clicked it near the top, it wouldn't click or you wouldn't... It was harder to press. You had less leverage. Didn't they even put the feet as the clickers in the first Magic Trackpad? There was one that did feed clickers, which was another clever idea, but yeah. Yeah, but anyway. So the mouse, though, you're always clicking the mouse in a reasonably short area, and it's the same small area. So I don't think...

This is solving a problem in the mouse, and there would be the downsides, as you mentioned. It hasn't stopped Apple before. I also don't think it's solving a problem, but Apple loves Taptic Engines. Also, I've used these mice for a very long time. I've never had the button go bad. Like, never. Yeah. It's easy to make micro switches, but Apple loves Taptic Engines, so we'll see. Apple also loves profit margins. I bet Taptic Engines are more expensive. Yeah. That's true, too.

I don't know. And then we got feedback from Calamity Jan who writes, if Apple makes the mouse charge wirelessly, another reason to buy a MagSafe puck, they could make it symmetrical under rotation, which means they could design it to be configured for right or left hands. See the Apple Watch. You could wear it on either wrist and orient it with the crown facing in or out. No, this is a terrible idea.

I mean, there's a lot of terrible ideas. And the question is, is this a terrible idea that Apple would find attractive? I think no on this one, because I think it wouldn't be attractive enough to be symmetrical under rotation. Like, I think they just want like actual actual vertical symmetry, period, not symmetrical under rotation.

And a lot of people did suggest wireless charging of various kinds. Obviously, they're just putting it on your MagSafe. People suggested you could put it... It could work with the watch charger. They're obviously charging mouse pads that lots of vendors have. Although, I think Apple thinks mouse pads are gauche, let's say. In fact, in the Steve Jobs keynote with the apology mouse, he's like, and it's the first optical mouse that Apple has made. That means you don't even need to use a mouse pad. So I don't think Steve Jobs liked mouse pads either. I still like mouse pads because I'm old and they're nice, but whatever. Whatever.

uh yeah there are lots of different ways to potentially wirelessly charge your mouse that is one way they could solve the uh harpoon turtle problem the other way is they could just put a port on it doesn't see it doesn't it doesn't solve it because all that does is give you another reason you can't use the mouse while it's charging but now it charges more slowly yeah and i'm pretty deceit i know i'm i solve let's solve in scare quotes like like you said with the voice thing we're just trying to think what will apple do not necessarily is this a good idea

All right. Karan J. writes, the Logitech MX Anywhere is a symmetrical low-ish profile and way more comfortable than the Magic Mouse. I hope Apple copies this and we'll put a link in the show notes. It looks exactly like every other mouse. I think it's still too ugly for Apple. Like I agree, it's a low profile, it is symmetrical, also too ugly. This episode of ATP is brought to you by Wildgrain. Wildgrain is the first baked from frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries, and pastas.

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We got some very fascinating feedback with regard to Apple's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips. We were talking last episode, maybe the one before, about Apple potentially making their own chips for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And Ian Williamson points out Apple already makes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth silicon in the Apple Watch. This is the Apple Silicon W series. The Apple W2 used in the Apple Watch Series 3 is integrated into the Apple S3. What is the SIP system in package? What's

Thank you. Apple claimed the chip makes Wi-Fi 85% faster and allows Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to use half the power of the W1 implementation. The Apple W3 is integrated into the Apple S4 through S10 SIPs. And then additionally, Winnie Lewis writes, to aid John in developing excitement for Apple design Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, I've created this crackpot theory. Apple made radio chips are the first step toward an Apple mesh Wi-Fi system. No way, but that's awesome. Keep hope alive.

Yeah, so this is about Marco saying, you know, if Apple made their own chips, it could have big power advantage to the watch, and I agreed. Looks like they already did that, and we forgot. Sorry about that. Did either of you know this? I did not know this at all. As soon as they said it, I'm like, oh, yeah, that rings a bell. But, yes, it makes sense that they've already done it on the watch. And, you know, so they have the H1 chip that we talked about on the show is their chip for handling wireless stuff inside AirPods, and it has...

special sauce that we think makes them better than just plain old Bluetooth. That was one of the examples we used. You should have remembered that along with the H1, there's also the W1, W2, and W3 for the watch. But apparently on the Max, they're still using Broadcom chips. So this is just continuing along the path they've already started down.

And as for making it more likely to have a wet mesh system, there's just so much more to a Wi-Fi mesh system than the wireless chips. We all kind of wish that Apple would go back into that business. But, you know, I'm still waiting to hear those rumors. And so far, I haven't heard anything.

All right. In our final piece of follow-up for this week, James Andrews writes, one of the coolest LoRa projects, if you recall, LoRa is long range. It's what powers the Yolink stuff that John brought to the show and has now ruined my life because I want all of it. Anyways, James writes, one of the coolest LoRa projects is Meshtastic. It's more of a RadioHam-esque thing, but it's super cool and a quote-unquote fun time sink.

And this is described from Meshtastic.org as, I actually exchanged a couple of emails with James about this, or maybe it was masked on post, it doesn't matter. Anyways, anyways,

James was saying that, you know, what you basically do is have a Bluetooth powered low raw receiver that works with Meshtastic. And that allows you to basically send text messages and potentially other data back and forth to other people on the mesh network. This is the sort of thing that I would probably spend way too much time messing with. So I don't ever want to think about it again.

yeah that's kind of cool all right let's uh let's do our first real topic and uh marco i think you and i can buzz off from here on out because we're going to talk ces 2025 you two aren't reporting from the show floor nope sure aren't and i really don't care that much about tvs they're certainly not in the way that you do john so uh take it away and wake me up when you're ready

Well, you should care a little bit because a lot of this TV tech eventually comes to computers. And there is some computer tie-ins. But yeah, a lot of this is about TVs. CES is the time of the year when television manufacturers show their new TVs for the year, but then don't tell you enough about them. And certainly don't have them for sale almost ever. Although TCL did something a little different this year. Anyway, just to set the frame here,

Tons of TVs are announced at CES. I only care about a small subset of them. I care about the quote-unquote best TVs, the ones with the best picture quality, the ones that most accurately reproduce the picture of how it's supposed to look according to the people who made the TV show or movie, right? Because they make the thing in a certain way. The video is supposed to look this way. I want the TV to show it the way they made it.

and I want it to do the best job possible. So I only care about the top, highest-end TVs.

On that front, Sony has decided for the past few years they're going to be like Apple and say, we're not even going to show at CES. Everyone else can announce their TVs. We're going to have a separate event later in the year just for Sony so we get all the attention and we don't have to compete with all your other TV announcements. And so far, it's been working OK for Sony because Sony is the big dog. And so that's what they're doing. Sony was at CES. Sony was showing other stuff at CES, but not TVs. So, OK, Sony, you do you.

Samsung, maker of the Quantum.OLED screen, the best available screen technology for televisions, has predictably a new generation of their QD OLED screen. I'll put some links in the show notes to videos that will tell you about it. And the main thing that OLEDs, including QD OLED, have been doing over the past several years is trying to get brighter.

Because acute OLEDs in general are the best screen technology because every single pixel is individually controlled. And so you don't have to worry about backlight regions bleeding through and dynamically controlling them. It's just individual pixels. You turn them on and off. When they're off, they're totally off. When they're on, they're on. One pixel doesn't affect the ones next to it. There's no blooming. Like, it's the best technology. But the one weakness it has, if you can call it that, is it can't get super, super duper bright.

Of course, the TVs that can get super duper bright that aren't OLED have all the problems with that bright backlight bleeding through surrounding pixels and doing all sorts of other stuff. But anyway, people who want to get the very best TV but also want to watch it with bright sunlight coming through their windows and hitting the TV screens, they're trying to help you out. So this year, here are the specs for the new generation of QD OLED that Samsung has. They're given in terms of how big a region of the screen is lit up because...

If you light up the whole screen, you can't make it as bright as if you light up a small percentage of the screen due to power and heat reasons. So the way they describe that is an N% window. So and a 3% window, meaning there's a rectangle in the middle of the TV that is 3% the size of the entire screen. The new QD OLED gets to 4000 nits.

a 10 window gets to 2200 and full field whole screen 400 and that may be shocking to you but that is how all that's work 4000 nits at a 3 window 2000 at a 10 full field 440 now what's what's the reason for that is it heat like what why is that yeah it's heat and power to heat both heat and power um

because you've got you know it's organic and you've got the the burn-in issues or whatever it's it's both heat and power so it's a problem and you like you may be thinking like is i think that it may actually be true of apple screens as well like their laptop screens but they say you can go to 600 nits but i wonder if you make the entire screen white on your macbook pro if it is 600 nits or if it only counts as a percentage but probably does because they're not oleds but anyway

Even though these numbers don't sound impressive, they're way better than last year, right? And Samsung put this new panel and its flagship television, the S95F. They also offer the S95F in an 83-inch size. But beware, even though Samsung is being annoying like Apple, they won't tell you the 83-inch size does not use a QD OLED panel. They can't make it that big yet. The biggest one is still 77. But it's the same product. It's like, you know, if you buy these sizes, you get a QD OLED. If you buy the biggest size, you don't.

And Samsung will not tell you that, but people just put their phones up to the screen and take a picture of it and go, yep, that's not a QD OLED. So beware of that. And also there's a new version of Samsung's anti-reflective coating, which is very controversial because some people really like it because they insist on watching their televisions with giant bright lights on the screen. And other people hate it because the anti-glare coating diffuses light. And so if you have any light falling on it, it sort of makes it hazy and black and makes the blacks not really black.

hazy and gray rather makes the blacks not true black and it's one of the reasons you're getting an OLED so anyway I don't like Samsung TVs but it's important to talk about them because they make the QD OLED they're the only manufacturer in the entire world that makes QD OLED screens and QD OLED screens are the best OLED screens for reasons we'll get into in a second so next up is LG the biggest OLED TV maker LG had a technology that they called MLA micro lens array that we talked about on past episodes where they put literally thousands of lenses on each pixel and

Not on the screen. On each pixel has thousands of micro... When they say micro lens array, they mean micro lens. And they did that to try to make their screens have a better viewing angle because one of the advantages that QD OLED have is an amazingly good viewing angle because the color things are really close to you and the polarizer is like behind them, whereas in traditional LEDs it's reversed.

But the main advantage QD OLED has over non-QD OLED is non-QD OLEDs like LGs are WRGB panels. They have a red, green, and a blue subpixel, and then a massive white subpixel next to it. And they use that to achieve good brightness, but

but they're mixing white with the red, the green, and the blue. And as you can imagine, it washes out color. So QD OLED screens have the best viewing angles, the best color volume they can make the most different colors, and the best color brightness. They just have RGB, just plain old RGB, and they just make the R, the G, and the B brighter to make the screen brighter, which is how you would think they all work, but that's not how any other OLED works. So QD OLED...

still the king, but LG is trying to catch up and they were using the micro lens array last year. And I think the year before that this year, they have dropped the micro lens array from their flagship television. So how are they going to make it as bright or to try to compete with the QD OLEDs? They did it by using our old friend from the iPad tandem OLED, which still I don't have a really great explanation for other than there's a, there's an additional light emitting layer in the stack and the OLED stack. They just add one more thing that emits light. And somehow the other thing that emit light shines through. Anyway, micro,

multiple layers tandem oled just like on the ipad i think lg makes the tandem oled for the ipad i forget we've talked about it in past shows and i've already forgotten but anyway keep an eye on tandem oled because they got rid of mla and one of the disadvantages of mla is if light hits the screen at an angle it hits those micro lenses and scatters and again gives like a gray haze across the screen which you don't want it's messing up your black levels so they got rid of mla brought in tandem oled

Still WRGB, still has a white subpixel, still doesn't have the same color volume as QD's OLED, but LG is trying to do what they do. They don't know how to make QD OLED, only Samsung does. And by the way, Samsung gives these, sells these screens to Sony, which is why Sony is able to make great TVs, but we don't know what they're doing this year.

So here are the specs for LG's flagship. 3% window is 3,700 nits, 10% is 2,400 nits, and full field is 308. So it is not as good as QD OLED. It's a little bit better than the 10% window. These are estimates. These are not measurements. These are estimates. And then the previous ones were claims from Samsung. So we'll see when they review the TVs. But LG's hanging in there. It's interesting to see they ditched MLA.

And it's interesting to see the resurgence of tandem OLED. I don't actually... I think the tandem OLEDs in the iPad are just RGB and not WRGB. So keep an eye out for Apple slash Mac caliber screens from both of these technologies. One of the advances in QD OLED this year was they were bragging about is now we can make QD OLED smaller, which is a thing to brag about because you got to make the subpixels smaller. And so they were showing...

a 4K 27-inch QD OLED, which is not right for us Mac folks. We want it to be 5K at 27-inch. But then they had right next to it, coming soon, 5K QD OLED 27-inch. It's not an announced product, but we're getting close. That is like...

If you could get a QD OLED 27 inch 5k screen, that is something that would be amazing. And of course, Apple will ship it, you know, 15 years from now, whenever the hell they update their monitors, but keep an eye on that. Um,

And as for the LG panel that dropped the microblades, right? LG was pulling a Samsung and saying, we're not talking about, we're not going to tell you what we're doing. They didn't stop them from taking their phones and holding it up to the screen and being like, take a picture of the subpixels. They didn't stop them from doing that, but LG refused to say anything. Panasonic, on the other hand, said, oh, totally, we'll tell you all about our screen. We call it the primary RGB tandem OLED panel. Everyone's got different branding for this, but the fact is Panasonic buys their screens from LG. Everybody knows they do.

and Panasonic is branding their LG OLED as Primary RGB Tandem OLED, which I don't know, whatever. They all make up their own marketing names, but Samsung was out of the TV game in the U.S. for years. They came back last year with two new TVs. Now they have three. Their top tier one is the Z95B. It uses this tandem OLED from LG. It looks really good. Unfortunately, Panasonic uses the Fire TV software stack that everyone hates now,

which is a bummer. One of the things they were advertising on their TV was that it had an improved chimney cooling system. It takes cool air in from the bottom and sends it up the top. Again, heat, power levels. They're trying to work on that, but it's notable that Samsung is going to come back. And second to last on TVs, predictably, everyone's adding more annoying AI stuff to their TVs.

to the point where there's like Microsoft co-pilot like integrations, which, okay, I guess. I mean, it's basically like you can access the co-pilot by that through the TV. Okay. Uh, LG has an entire AI section on its TVs, including an AI remote. Uh, one of the controls moves is they, uh,

remove the input button from the remote in place of like some stupid AI thing that you have to like hold down and then it will bring up the input panel. I have AI upscaling, AI auto HDR, AI remastering, AI adapters, everything. Everything is AI. They will literally let you talk to voice assistants and LLMs through your television. Whatever. It's just making...

Everyone feels like they need to do it, but none of these things make TVs better. But just FYI, that's what everyone's doing this year. And finally, big TVs are big. That's been the trend for the past few years. Everyone wants to come and say, forget about those TVs that look good. Ours is really big. And they were just getting bigger and bigger.

Even Samsung has its cheat 83-inch flagship TV that's not even a QD OLED. TCL last year was showing off a 115-inch TV. Now TCL is saying, here's our 115-inch TV, and it's the mid-range model. And they're not showing you what the top-end one is. So it's probably bigger than 115. I don't know where people live that they fit these televisions. Because I don't know if you realize how big a 115-inch television is. It's really big.

And so now that's not even their biggest size. What is it going to be, 130 inch? Like soon you're not going to be able to get it in people's doors. Like they don't roll up. But just FYI, they keep making these things bigger because they can't make them better. So if you can't make it better, just make it bigger. And, you know, everyone loves big TVs.

So, yeah, that's all the TV talk. Just to keep update, the upshot is QD OLED and LG are still duking it out. QD OLED still seems like it's on top. I hate Samsung's TVs, so I'm waiting to see what Sony does with that QD OLED panel. What Panasonic does with it is also going to be good, but I don't really like the Fire TV OS. So not that I'm in the market for a new TV. I'm just, you know, watching as a fan.

But later in the year when Sony announces their new TV with the new QD OLED, that'll be interesting. And it's also interesting because Sony this last year didn't even get the new version of the QD OLED from last year. They just kept selling their TV from the year before. And it was still the best TV you could buy, right? So they're just like, we're sitting out a year. We don't need to bother. I don't know if it's because Samsung wouldn't give. Samsung wouldn't sell Sony the latest generation of QD OLED and they were keeping it for themselves.

So I'm not sure how that relationship is shaking out, but I hope Sony is able to give Samsung enough money to get this new QD OLED panel. I think they will because Samsung is this giant conglomerate

where there's one side of it called one part of it called Samsung display that sells their displays. And there's another part called, I don't remember Samsung electronics that makes a TV. And they're two different things. Samsung display wants to sell displays to Sony because their, their profit and loss is how many displays did we sell? And Samsung TV totally does not want them to sell displays to Sony, but that's a different part of the company. So real, uh, real healthy over there, but that's just the way it goes.

John, I'm impressed. That took a lot less time than I expected. Well done. And coming back to computer stuff, LG has announced a computer display. Indeed. It is called the UltraFine C.

6K with Thunderbolt 5 support. And as is traditional with CES, they won't tell us anything you want to know about it. Does it at least have the right density to be a Pro Display XDR competitor? Is it like 6K at 32 inches? We're not releasing that information today, Marco. Oh.

They literally won't tell you the resolution. It's like, well, what will you tell us? So here's the reading from, where is this from, MacRumors. Details are scant, you don't say. But we know that the LG UltraFine monitor, and they get the model number, features a nano IPS black panel delivering a wide color gamut covering 99.5% of Adobe RGB, 98% of DCI-P3. LG has not revealed the exact resolution. Another thing is unclear is whether it's 60 hertz or 120 hertz, and the price has not been revealed.

So what do we know about this? It is 32 inch. The 6K is in the name. The specs of the panel make it seem like not quite as good as the XDR.

Every story about this mentions the monitor that we've talked about in the last year, which is the Dell UltraSharp 32-inch 6K monitor, which is for sale and has actual specs. It's $2,500, 32-inch. It's 60 hertz, no HDR. It is slightly higher res than the XDR, so it's not the same panel. It's 6144 by 3456 instead of the XDR 6016 by 3384. And it's 99% P3, right? I'm assuming...

But the LG uses a panel like that, a 6144 panel. But who knows? LG's not telling us. But the density is probably in that ballpark. And it is 32 inches.

I don't like I don't know why they bother showing something at CES if they're not going to tell you like here's a monitor here's a size let me tell you how much of the color space it covers but resolution no we can't tell you no refresh rate no we're not telling you that either they never reveal the price fine you don't maybe they don't even know the price yet because it's not out yet but this is the thing to keep an eye on the LG ultra fine 5k was the ultra fine alternative to Apple's 27 inch monitors

Maybe the 6K will be as well. One thing I can tell you about the 6K is it is not as homely as the 5K because they copied Apple more faithfully this time. It looks like not quite as elegant XDR. It may be cheap and plasticky. We'll find out. But I think it is more attractive. Indeed.

Speaking of copying Apple, it's the end of an era because Dell is no longer making XPS computers. This was the, generally speaking, the good line of Dell computers since forever, basically. Reading from Ars Technica, Dell is killing the XPS branding that has become a mainstay for people seeking a sleek, respectable, well-priced PC. This means that there won't be any more Dell XPS laptops or desktops. Dell is also killing its Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision branding it announced today.

Okay, I mean, I'm not really sure why that was necessary, but surely you've come up with something that's better, right, Dell? Right? Right. Here's Dell's new branding. You can get Dell, Dell Pro, or Dell Pro Max. Folks, that is not a joke. That is not a joke. This is legitimately real. When I first saw this, I thought, there's no way that's real. Has to be a joke. Has to be a joke.

And by the way, before we move on from this, like XPS, Latitude, Inspiron, I know those names despite never owning a Dell and never wanting to own a Dell. So they are throwing away some substantial decades-long brand equity from XPS and Latitude and Inspiron and Precision I hadn't heard about, right? But like,

It's not just this is not like, oh, well, you know, they have a new line of things. And here are the names. It's let's throw away the names that did have name recognition. Maybe they have bad recognition. It's like when telecom companies change their names because everyone hates them. But anyway, let's talk about their new branding.

Right. So you can get a Dell, a Dell Pro, or a Dell Pro Max, but because it's Dell and because it's the PC industry, it's not quite that simple. You can get any of the following computers. You can get a Dell Premium, a Dell Plus, a Dell Base, a Dell Pro Premium, a Dell Pro Plus, a Dell Pro Base, or a Dell Pro Max Premium, Dell Pro Plus, or a Dell Pro Base. All of those exist. Right.

So Dell was apparently mocked at its own press event for copying Apple's naming convention. This is reading from nine to five Mac. This is so delicious. Oh my goodness. Uh, reading from nine to five Mac. If Dell hopes nobody would notice the origin of these names, it was disappointed. Quote, I'm wondering why you guys didn't choose something original because you essentially have Apple's branding here. One audience member quipped. Another said, quote, your branding sounds a lot like Apple. Aren't you just following them?

Despite claiming it did this purely for simplicity and not to copy Apple, Dell actually managed to make its PC lineup even less comprehensible than before. All three tiers are subdivided into base plus and premium variants. Is a pro plus better than a pro max base? How about a pro premium versus a pro max plus? Yeah.

And then Engadget, and we'll link them as well, notes that things descend entirely into farce when Dell also throws in size labels for its desktop PCs. Engadget writes, just try to read the names Dell Pro Max Micro and Dell Pro Max Mini without having your brain self-destruct. And yes, you can expect these machines to have their own plus and premium sub-branding. So yes, there really is going to be a Dell Pro Max Micro Plus. Ha ha ha!

It's amazing. Just amazing. Like, I just... Of all the things to copy from Apple, don't copy their bad ideas. Like, if you're copying Apple's naming, it's probably a bad idea because Apple's not great at naming. They get away with it because their products are good and the names become associated with the goodness of the products, but you probably can't get away with that. And the second thing is, you know...

come up with your own names. Like, you want... Like, they had their own brands. Again, maybe they had bad... You know, maybe people hate XPS or Latitude or whatever. I don't think so. I really don't. I mean, people hate Inspiron, I can tell you that, because they were very crappy laptops. But, yeah, XPS was fine. But, I mean...

Is anybody buying Dell desktop PCs? Not Alienware, which I think are good, actually. Alienware actually had some CES news, by the way. Apparently, people have been angry about Alienware for years because they will sell you an Alienware computer and it didn't take standard components. Like, you need to get an Alienware power supply. Like, it wasn't just like an ATX case. Oh, yeah, that's fine. It was annoying for everybody. Finally, Alienware is saying their new line of computers will accept standard components. So, good for them.

their branding has always been very separate who is buying like a dell tower and cares what the heck it's called like aren't aren't these mostly bought by companies i would imagine but who who even knows but yeah like like to copy apple's naming is bad because the names aren't good they're not good when apple does them they're not good when you do them and then to somehow find a way to make it worse not once over but twice over

because adding premium plus and base is terrible and then adding sizes to that like you can't just keep tacking around these meaningless suffixes right it's bad enough that you have you know like they kind of make the mistake of like Apple does like the M4 the M4 Pro and the M4 Max but there's no M4 Pro Max but the phone had Pro and Max and it had a Pro Max right like Apple kind of learned from its phone mistake

when I did the chips but then once you do max now you've got ultra which is higher than max and they were making extreme like Apple has painted itself into a corner with its names they're not great don't copy them and then certainly don't copy them and make them worse so bad show Dell

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NVIDIA announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs. Reading from The Verge, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed the RTX 50 series GPUs during a CES keynote announcing a $2,000 5090, a $1,000 5080, a $750 5070 Ti, and a $550 RTX 5070.

So, when we had a question on AskATP, I think a few months ago, they were like, oh, the rumors of the big M4 chips with their big GPUs, the ones that aren't out yet, like the M4 Ultra, if they ever make such a thing. Their GPU, that GPU could be amazing, or even an M4 Extreme, the GPU could compete with the 4090. How is that possible in such a tiny chip that sips power? And the answer to that question that I gave was,

A, the M4 Ultra is not going to be a tiny ship that sips power. It's going to be big, really big and hot and take a lot of power. But yeah, it'll be relatively, you know, you know, not going to take huge amounts of power, but still way more power than like the M4, M4 Pro or even M4 Max takes. And B...

It doesn't really matter if it competes with the 4090 in terms of bragging rights, because by the time that chip is out, NVIDIA will have replaced the 4090, which is already multiple years old. They'll replace it with their 5 series. And here we are at CES. NVIDIA is announcing their new GPUs. Apple hasn't even released an M4 Ultra or anything higher. And already NVIDIA has its next generation of GPUs as predicted. And the next generation is pretty good.

Nvidia says the RTX 5090 will be two times faster than the RTX 4090 thanks to DLSS 4 and the Blackwell architecture. John, do you want to take a little pause and explain to me what the hell that means, please? No, keep going. We'll pause at the end. All right, fine. But it will come at a cost. The RTX 5090 will have a total graphics power of 575 watts and a recommended PSU requirement of 1,000 watts.

That's 125 watts more than the RTX 4090. And let me just tell you, so we had, you know, weather come through over the weekend and it's not worth talking about, but suffice to say, I had charged up that tailgate battery pack that I use that provides, you know, full on AC power. It's a 20 pound battery or whatever.

And I charged that up just in case we needed it. And they tell you in the manual, you should store it at about half juice, you know, like 50%. And so now that we're through the weather, I decided I'm going to go discharge it back to 50%. The easiest way for me to do that is to hook my UPS up to it just for a few minutes, you know, 10, 20 minutes, whatever.

Because my UPS has got three monitors, a MacBook Pro, the Synology, the Eero router, all sorts of stuff hanging off of this, right? All off of my UPS. And I know you're not really supposed to hook a UPS up to a battery pack. I'm just doing it temporarily to discharge a battery pack, right? Well, the battery pack will show you what the usage is, how many watts you're using as you're using it.

My entire desk setup, a six base Synology, three 5K monitors, two of which are the ultra fines, which were probably not efficient at all. My MacBook Pro, my CalDigit TS4. I forget what else is on here. All of that together is about 500 watts. And we're saying that these graphics cards are 575.

Yeah. I mean, this is why, like, you know, when we're talking about when we're comparing Apple's GPUs to NVIDIA desktop GPUs, these are very different types of products.

we're literally talking about like a 10x level power difference here so that you know this is like you know nvidia is being limited by how much power you can draw from a standard us outlet at some point for these total pcs that are you know because like you know you can draw about i think 1500 to 1800 watts sustained like for most us circuits so like

When your GPU alone uses almost 600, not to mention the rest of the PC, you're really pushing boundaries here. At some point, gaming desktops are going to require three-phase power or something. So this is a very different type of product. This is not made for...

power efficient PCs, portable, anything laptop, anything like compact desktops. This is like what is the highest level of performance we can get from a GPU at any cost, because this is $2,000, at any cost and at any size and heat and power efficiency be damned. Because there are applications for that. Not just games, although games are a big one, but of course all the AI stuff these days. There's lots of applications for like

I don't care how much power it uses. I just need the highest performance. That's what NVIDIA delivers with these. That is not what Apple delivers with their computers. Now, we can and have had the argument of like,

Should the Mac Pro be that? Because the Mac Pro before the Apple Silicon transition was that. The Intel Mac Pro was actually sized to have a power capacity to fit just under a US outlet's power draw. Because you could put multiple of these 400-watt GPUs in there. And by the way, pricing-wise, it's like, oh, $2,000. That's so expensive. Yeah.

Apple has sold many GPUs, one of which is in my computer right now for way more money than that. And they were not nearly as powerful because they're like the MPX modules are like two times the cost of the actual GPU. You know, they're all AMD things. And there were, so yeah, uh, pricing wise, it's shocking to PC people, but we're like, Oh, um,

you can buy an ebay today a crappy gpu in an mpx module for an intel mac pro that will cost you more than the 5090 uh and will be like 1 15th the speed uh so yeah the pricing is all out of whack but yeah the case apple's mac pro case has the power supply for it and it has the cooling for it importantly it has the cooling for it one of the things that boggles my mind with uh the high-end uh

nvidia gpus is how they how uh gaming pcs and how the cards design their cooling this card the reference design for this card and all the companies that have their you know the nvidia shows a reference design and then like asus and gigabyte and all these other companies make their cards from you know like they're all selling basically the same gpu but with their own cards and their own coolers on them

The reference design has three giant fans, like, you know, I don't know, five-inch fans, whatever. Full, like, three giant fans slapped to the side of the video card. I don't know if they're blowing air into it or sucking air out of it, but the point is they're, like, picture a card slotted into a motherboard. And on the card, on the video card, are three giant fans attached to the card, blowing into the card or away from the card, right? Right.

And you're like, well, how does that airflow work in the case? And then you see in the case, the case has like three fans on the ceiling of the case and then two fans on the back of the case. And then the three fans in the card are facing down at the floor of the case. It's like, is there any rhyme or reason to the airflow? It makes Apple's design so like cold air in front, hot air in back.

Like, there's one direction of the airflow, there's one set of fans that just, the air goes from the front to the back, and gaming PCs are like, just put in a bunch of fans. Doesn't matter which direction they're facing. These ones face up, these ones face down, these ones face left, these ones face right, just turn them all up really high, everything will be fine. It's like, guys, like, get together on which direction you want the fans to be facing, and figure out where the airflow is going to come. Where does the cold air go in, where does the hot air go out, and come to an agreement, and they're like, nope.

And so it's like, cause they, they can't get together on it. So like, I see these video card fans, like they're basically pointing either upwards or downwards in a case that has openings in the front and the back. And that's why they're so loud anyway.

Gaming PCs. And as for the AI thing, Apple or Apple, Nvidia makes dedicated AI cards that cost way more than this and are way more powerful and are totally dedicated to AI. And that is why Nvidia was briefly the most valuable company in the world and still is in the running. But that's not this. But anyway, yeah, they are making even more powerful cards.

And it's great. And as Casey just said, they're claiming it's two times faster. And they're talking about DLSS4. This is an upgrade to their DLSS sense for deep learning supersampling technology. It includes new... This is reading from their copy. The Verge has an article about it. New neural rendering capabilities that on systems with the new RTX 50 series can do multi-frame generation, generating up to three additional frames per additional...

per traditionally rendered frame working in unison with the complex suite of DLSS technologies to multiply frame rates by up to 8x over traditional brute force rendering. Then they show a bunch of bar graphs from NVIDIA's presentation showing, look at this, the green graph shows the RTX 5090 and then the gray one shows the 4090. The 4090 used to be amazing, but look at these green lines. They're over twice as tall as the gray lines. Isn't this amazing? Now, if that just sounds like an alphabet soup,

You may be thinking, "Alright, so NVIDIA came out with a new card and it's twice as fast as the old one. That's amazing!" But if you know anything about the alphabet soup that I just read, you're like, "Okay, wait a second. What does it mean to have up to three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame and up to 8x over traditional brute force rendering? What are they talking about? Let me tell you what they're talking about." So, video games have to draw a picture on your screen.

And every, you know, 1/60th of a second or whatever, they have to draw a new picture if you want 60 frames per second. Right? So there's a deadline. They've drawn a picture. They're gonna need that next picture in 1/60th of a second if you want to have 60 of these frames every second.

And the old way of having higher frame rates is: Can I draw the frame in less time? Because if I can draw the frame in 1/100th of a second, then I can have 100 of those frames per second. But if it takes me 1/20th of a second, then I can only have 20 frames per second. So we want to take less time to draw the frame. Several years ago, all these companies decided: "That's hard to do, so I've got a better idea." Instead of asking the video card to draw every frame, how about we have the video card draw a frame,

And then we asked the video card what it thinks the next frame would look like if it could draw it. Based on the frames that had come before it, what do you think the next frame is probably going to look like? We don't have time to render it. But can you just like think about what it probably is going to look like based on the frames that came before it?

And the answer is yes. And that's DLSS. Does this like, how does this work? So like, is this like motion smoothing on a TV? Like, is this, do gamers actually want this? Yeah. So this is very much like motion smoothing. Um, there are, there've been many versions of DLSS. This is version four and every company has their own version of this under a different alphabet soup, acronym, uh, acronym. Uh,

And yeah, they would do it based on the frames that had come before it and the pixels that are nearby. And the whole point is, if you can do this faster than you can actually render a frame, you can double your frame rate because you get one, quote, traditionally rendered frame as an actually rendered frame, and then you get one we made this up frame.

for free essentially, while your game is rendering the next real frame. So you could double your frame rates. If you had a slower, older PC, but it supported DLSS, you could say, I can't, when I put this game into 4K resolution, I get 20 frames per second, but I want to play at 4K because it looks real good. So I'll turn on DLSS and now I get 40 frames per second.

and there's a little bit of artifacting and sometimes like a little bit janky and every version of dlss gets a little bit better of being sort of temporally stable and not having weird artifacts or whatever but that's you know that that's been a trade-off the gamers have been able to make you can always just do the traditionally rendered frame way which is like i'll just buy a more expensive cpu or gpu and increase my frame rate but if you have an older cpu or gpu and an older computer and you just want higher resolution you can use dlss the

The innovation this year with DLSS 4 is instead of looking at previous frames that the card had rendered and the pixels that are surrounding the pixel you're thinking about for the next frame, DLSS 4, I think it's the first one to do this, but I'm not entirely sure. But anyway, DLSS 4 uses, can anyone guess? AI. Because why would it not? Of course. It uses an AI model that they trained previously.

on video games. So it's not just guessing what the next frame is going to look like based on like the pixels that came before it that were just rendered on this card. There's an AI model that has been trained on millions and millions of frames of video games. So it has a better idea of what the pixel should be in this position in the next frame. And DLSS 4 will not just make one fake frame. It can make up to three fake frames. So you get one quote traditionally rendered frame and then it can make three frames.

out of that and say, I think I know what the next three frames are going to be. So that's why you can, you know, triple, quadruple, whatever your frame rate, because you get one regular frame and then we make up three frames. And by then you got one regular frame again and your frame rates go up. And it's not just based on like the three or four dozen frames that came before it. It's based on this AI training model that's been trained on thousands and thousands and millions and billions of frames of video games. It's actually very clever. But now I want you to look again at the chart.

look again at the chart and see those lines where the green lines are much higher than the gray lines and look underneath it in tiny text that says DLSS on them. Look at the one all the way on the left where it says Far Cry 6 and it says RT, which I think stands for ray tracing, but it doesn't say DLSS.

suddenly the green line is not that much higher for the 5090 than it was in the 4090. It's higher. It's higher than the 4090. And ray tracing games are often limited, not by the GPU power, but by like the ray tracing components of the GPU. And so this is not really a fair comparison. I'm not saying that the 5090 is only like 10% faster than the 4090. But what I am saying is that Nvidia's marketing materials are leaning heavily on the fact that

that the 5090 is really good at making up up to three fabricated frames for you to increase your frame rate. So this is an interesting turn of events where they're not content to brag about the actual increase

in frame rendering performance of their GPU. They want, they're more interested in telling you we can make up frames that are so convincing you won't even be able to tell that we made them up. And they're mostly right. Like to be fair, they're mostly right. Like a lot of the reviews of this are like,

We are taking great pains to try to... Granted, on YouTube, it's hard because YouTube will only do 60 frames per second, I believe. So they already have to show it at half speed if it's doing 120 frames per second. But the 59E will do like 240 frames per second. There are screens that were showing at CES and they're already out on the market that will do 500 hertz.

Right? And how are you going to fill 500 frames per second? You need to make up frames. And DLSS 4 is pretty amazing. And regular people probably won't be able to tell. It's just like you're getting performance for free. But just FYI,

They're doing it in a different way than you might expect. And yes, it is very much like you said, Marco, like motion smoothing, where the show, this movie is 24 frames per second, but you want to see it at 30 or 60 frames per second. So we'll just make up the in-between frames. And the TVs do a terrible job of this compared to DLSS 4. Like TV manufacturers don't care. That's why everything looks all janky and terrible. DLSS 4 is amazing, but it is a little bit...

it's not shady. It's not misleading. It's just, it's interesting that that's how Nvidia is framing their graphics performance. I'm not saying they've given up on making the performance better just by like,

as they say traditional brute force rendering also known as rendering but yeah but they are like they they should be proud of dlss4 it is amazing they've been working on dlss for years every other manufacturer has similar technologies but i think dlss4 is the best they're manufacturing three frames for every one that actually gets rendered but that's their that's their sort of like uh their big selling point that's the thing that's making their graph so high and it is

noting that this is happening in the graphics world. Eventually, why not just have the card make up all the frames and not have the game render them at all, I guess. I mean, look, for whatever it's worth, I think it's very impressive that

the GPUs can make up frames faster than they can just render new ones. And when you think about like how much, how many milliseconds do they have to, to make up each frame? It's not very many. Well, the good thing about doing the, the making up the frames is I'm pretty sure when they make up the frames, they're essentially working in a, as a 2d world.

Whereas rendering the frames is this world of polygons and light rays and like just, you know what I mean? And so like the problem space is massively narrowed. It's like you just need to make every pixel in this 4K image and I need you to make three of them. Whereas rendering the flame for real is like, hey, there's 10 million polygons, 50 lights bouncing around and ray casting and like there's so much stuff going on to figure out what those pixels should be.

Whereas if you have an AI model and you just have to make a grid of pixels, it is amazing that they can... The thing that's amazing is that they can do it in a way that doesn't look...

horrendous right like how how does it not just become a smeary blurry ridiculous mess and that is the magic but i kind of understand how it could be faster than doing it the real way every hand gets five fingers every four frames honestly it is kind of impressive like you know if they're using any kind of you know who knows what they mean by ai i don't i don't know the details of dls but they like models that they trained they trained it on video games by showing it frames and video games but like but to to execute

any kind of like reasonably modern am i leaving a small one to execute it like 50 times a second or whatever this is maybe more than that while also being a gpu to render the rest of the game the rest of the time that is a pretty impressive amount of you know just computing accomplishment right there um but that being said you know i don't know i mean i i well i don't know anything about this so maybe i shouldn't even be talking about it but it does seem like

Gamers are pushing their monitors well into...

territory that human vision cannot perceive um and it's very much like when when like high-end audio files are like i run my dac at 192 kilohertz and it's like you can't hear the difference between that and cd quality dude like you're telling yourself you can but like science is telling you that you can't i don't know where that line is with refresh rates for monitors but i'm pretty sure gamers are past it now no they're not they're not quite past it yet um

Remember the thing that I had in my blog that shows the responsiveness to drawing on a tablet? Do you remember that video that I'm always linking to? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. There actually is a pretty long way to go when you start. It's not like, can you see the difference? Because you're doing input. Now, granted, you're not drawing on the screen, but when you're moving the mouse or whatever to aim, because your input is influencing what's on the screen, it is much more like the scribbling on your finger demo, in which case...

there's actually a pretty long way to go. But the other thing to consider is, um, you don't always get your peak frame rate, like frame rate varies throughout the thing. And they just want to make sure like to get, to make sure your minimum frame rate is in that good responsive threshold, like scribbling your finger on the, on the screen, right. To make sure that's your minimum, your maximum is going to be at absurd levels. The other thing is that, um,

traditional LCD displays become smeary messes at these refresh rates, and they have to do all sorts of weird tricks to make that not happen that make the screen uglier. But OLED, OLED's response rate is insane, right? As you know from like the stuttery effect that some people don't like with OLEDs at 24 frames per second, the response rate of OLED pixels is incredibly fast. And so those two things combine to say we've got OLED gaming monitors that

And they like 240 Hertz on an OLED gaming monitor actually works like it fully 100% works. It does not become a blurry mess. You don't have to compromise that image quality. So those two technologies go hand in hand as does variable refresh rate and all that other stuff. G-Sync is NVIDIA's technology for this. So.

I think they're making some good progress. I think it is still an appreciable improvement in games. And we've just got so much farther to go in terms of like, what is the game actually rendering and how is the game world modeled? So as always, gaming will absorb every ounce of money, technology and power that you have, and it continues to do so.

Speaking of NVIDIA, they announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits. I hate how much I love this name. That's very, very good. Reading from The Verge, NVIDIA announced that it's launching a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits in May. The heart of Project Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet.

This kind of processing power used to require much larger, more power-hungry systems. This desktop-sized system can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters and has a starting price of $3,000. The product itself looks a lot like a Mac Mini.

Each project digit system comes equipped with 128 gigs of unified coherent memory and up to four terabytes of NVMe storage. For even more demanding applications, two project digit systems can be linked together to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters. Meta's late, excuse me, best model, Lama 3.1 has 405 billion parameters.

The GB10 chip delivers up to one petaflop of AI performance, which means it can perform one quadrillion AI calculations per second at FP4 precision, which helps make the calculations faster by making approximations. And the system features NVIDIA's latest generation CUDA cores and fifth generation Tensor cores connected to an NVLink C2C to a Grace CPU containing 20 power-efficient ARM-based cores.

So this is the idea behind this is so they're taking these things to note here first to note that they have an arm based CPU. It's like a 20 core arm CPU. That's probably pretty good, but that's not even the important part of this. Just just setting that aside for a second because we'll get to that in the next item. NVIDIA making arm CPUs like just general purpose CPUs and then they stick with it. One of their big giant GPUs, but this one is tuned for AI type stuff. This is letting you have a thing in your house that

That can run pretty big...

LLM models. So again, they're measured in number of parameters, 200 billion, you can get two of them to do 400 billion. Instead of going over the network and using one of NVIDIA's real like $30,000, you know, I figure what they are, the H100 series or whatever. NVIDIA sells GPUs that cost as much as a car that go in data centers that are running like chat GPT and everything. That's where NVIDIA is making all their money. Those are just so much bigger than these, so much more expensive. But if you want to have something in your house that can run a reasonable AI model, you

nvidia is making this little mac mini type thing which i'd say the pricing puts the mac mini to shame considering what you get in this box but what else is new anyway uh i don't know if there's a market for this product maybe people who are like doing experiments with uh with models and they like they think a 200 billion or 400 billion parameter model is something that they could toy with but it is interesting that this type of product like that they're starting to release this type of product saying like

Yeah, it's great that you can have computers in the cloud that do all this stuff. But usually we charge you money for using that. If you just want to have it, quote unquote, on prem, but not really because it's literally in your house and not in a data center. You can get your own one of these and stick it on your desk. And actually, it's not that big. Actually, it's just like a little Mac mini. And you can just have it sitting there headless and do your, you know, model development on this thing.

Now, I think when they say that it can run these models, I think they mean that you can do inference on them, as in you can put the model on there, run it, and then ask it questions. I don't think they mean that you would use this to train because training costs hundreds of millions of dollars and huge data centers and long periods of time. But still, worth noting two things. One, NVIDIA is continuing to make hardware that's starting to look a little bit more PC-like. And two...

The idea that there's a thing you could have in your house to do what ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Microsoft. Microsoft is opening. It was the third one I'm forgetting. Lama models. Do the stuff that's happening, Claude or whatever, that's happening over there in a data center. You can have that happen in your house and it will be closer.

and it will run on hardware you control. It could potentially be more private and you can use it for development. And the other thing like that is that this tiny little Mac mini is ugly as sin because they've got some weird particle board

salt and pepper notebook fake granite thing going on. I think it looks interesting. I don't know. To me, it's kind of like the Cybertruck. It's like, I don't think that's attractive, but I'm glad people are trying new things. It does not look like it's copying Apple, unlike much of the industry. So, hey, good for them. I can't tell even what they're going for. But anyway, yeah. And so the final item that I think we have time for today, because believe it or not, there is more from CES, but we can't get to it all. The final item is the next little, hmm...

Right. So, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang hints at plans for its own desktop CPU. It's long been rumored, reading from The Verge, that NVIDIA is planning to break into the consumer CPU market in 2025, and we may have already had our first look at its new processor. On Monday at CES, the company unveiled Project Digits, a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer powered by new GB10 Grace Blackwell superchip. RoboCopter, which is a new

Reuters reports that yesterday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hinted to investors and analysts that there are bigger plans for the ARM-based CPU within that chip, co-developed with MediaTek. Quote, you know, obviously we have plans, Huang said during an investor presentation, referring to the new 20-core desktop CPU, but said that he would, quote, wait to tell you what they are.

Co-developer MediaTek has its own ambitions, though, and Huang suggested that it may also bring the CPU to market, independent of NVIDIA. Now they could, this is a quote, now they could provide that to us and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market. And so it was a great win-win, Huang said. Yeah, so MediaTek. MediaTek makes many chips in the industry. One of the things they're known for is making the chips that power a lot of the TVs. There's a lot of...

with MediaTek over the past several years because their chips that are in the televisions are

have not had support for the latest HDMI standard on all the ports. So, for example, my television, it's a Sony television that uses a MediaTek chip for part of its processing to handle the HDMI and stuff, and it only supports two HDMI 2.1 ports that do 48 gigabits per second, and then the other two ports are lower bandwidth. The companies that don't use MediaTek and make their own chips, which includes LG and I believe Samsung, are

their chips can have four HDMI 2.1 ports and have for many years. And every year, there's a new MediaTek chip that comes out. It's like, surely this year, the MediaTek chip will support four HDMI 2.1 connections. And finally, this weird limitation where you've got two good ports and two bad ports, that'll be gone. And...

Insert TV brand here will be just like LG and Samsung and have full four ports. And here we are at the advent of HDMI 2.2. And MediaTek still, still does not have a TV chip that can support four HDMI 2.1 ports. And we're about to have HDMI 2.2. So I'm a little bit angry at MediaTek. But let's set that aside. NVIDIA, why would they be interested in making...

anything on the desktop for desktop CPUs. Well, we've talked about this before. Microsoft with its Windows on ARM and the, what was it called? The Copilot Plus PC branding thing where their ARM-based Windows computers are required to have certain minimum AI capabilities. NVIDIA must be looking at this and saying,

We could do that. We're the best at AI. We have the best GPUs. We've got this sewn up. All we need is a little ARM CPU, and we've got some of them, and we have some partners that help us, and ARM has chip design that's like, we can do this in our sleep. And I have to say, of all the different companies that are making chips that are embarrassing, Intel's sad chips, the ARM chips made for Windows PCs...

nvidia would probably be really good at it like they're pretty good at making chips they're definitely good at making the ai and gpu parts they're actually pretty good at mobile stuff we don't have time for it today but we'll get to it uh in a future show maybe talking about uh there is a mobile 5090 like marco has got those gaming laptops with mobile nvidia chips in them they do make mobile chips don't you know get them yeah low power is not nvidia's strength strength but you know

like this little this little mac mini thing that we just talked about the digits thing it's a tiny little computer it doesn't take a huge amount of power and it's surprisingly powerful so this is something to watch like if intel is going to be having its problems that we've discussed on past shows and they're and microsoft is trying to go to arm and as you know i'm rooting for them to go to arm so i can play windows games on my future arm mac uh still probably not happening but anyway um

I would love it if Nvidia said, you know what? All right, fine, fine. If no one else is going to do it, we will become the new Intel in the PC world. We will make not just the best GPUs in the world, but also...

we'll make the CPUs too. We'll put them on a little SOC. We'll put them in your laptops. Fine. Like they could be essentially the Apple of the PC world where they make the best silicon that everyone wants to put in their high-end things or whatever. And so far, they've just been like, why would we do that? We're making so much money making these AI products.

I don't figure out what they call them. They're not really called GPUs, but these AI things that cost as much as a car that people buy by the hundreds and thousands to train their models. We're making so much money doing that. Why would we even bother? But I think they're kind of in their eye and saying, if no one else is going to do it, maybe we will. And so I'm rooting for them. I'm not rooting for MediaTek because I'm still mad at them about the HDMI thing, but

Nvidia should just make its own CPU and they've already got their own GPUs and they should just take over the entire PC industry and provide competition for Apple. All right. So, John, it seems like every week we get at least a little bit of an update on your app. Can you give us even just a very quick update as to the state of the world? So I'm getting to the point where I'm going to start doing test flight beta of my app.

Uh, and, uh, one of the things that Casey did with his last app was open up the test flight to ATP members by, I, did you do it just by putting it on like the member page? Yep. That's right. Yeah. Putting the URL to get on the test flight on everybody's member page. So that would be a way, instead of sending out like invitation emails to everybody, you would just go to your member page and you'd say, Hey, do you want to try the test flight beta of John's app? Here's the URL for it.

I'm thinking about doing that. I'm probably going to do that. Not 100%, but I'm probably going to do that when I'm ready to do it, which means that when I do actually do that, there is multiple factors. One, I have to tell everyone the name of the app, which I haven't yet. You'd find out when the test flight came in, right?

Uh, to probably on a future episode, I will have to give this whole big spiel about what it's going to mean to be on the test flight for this app. I'll probably do what Casey did, which is like, okay, if you're an ATP member, you get access to the test flight. If you don't want it, fine, just ignore it. But if you do want it, you get it.

When the app is finally released, all those test flights will expire. Like it'll be a separate group just for ATP members and it will just be for the lead up to the release. So it's not a way to get a free copy of the app. Although unlike Casey's app, if you got on my test flight and use my app during the test flight period, you're

You could use it to find all the duplicate files in your drive and then just never have to buy it. And so maybe this is just an incredible money-losing proposition for me. But anyway, I'm still leaning towards doing it just for multiple reasons. One, Casey has told me he found the TestFlight beta, giving it to ATB members, valuable for his development. I mean, if you want to expand on that, Casey? Yeah, I mean, we don't need to belabor it, but very briefly, I had a pretty robust TestFlight crew, if you will, of...

I want to say 20 to 40 people that were friends or even, you know, somewhat distant friends, but friends that I thought would, you know, want to be able to give me some useful feedback, opening it up to a far more international audience, opening it up to people who are of different abilities and, you know, different, uh, familiarities with English, for example, uh, and just take different approaches to watching movies and TV shows and things of that nature. Uh, it really, really, I think made the app a lot better. Um,

It also showed me that there were some things that even though I feel very strongly about them, I need to cave because pretty much all of my users disagree with me. So a great example of this is I didn't include ratings anywhere in the app when it was starting the test flight cycle. And if it were left up to me, I would still not have them in the app because I find ratings to be silly and useless and I don't like them at all. I think they're a waste of time.

However, everyone said to me, where are the ratings? I must have the ratings. So after being browbeat for literally months about it, I eventually added the ratings. And I think even though I don't like them being there, I think for my users, it was the right call. So that's a silly anecdote about why I think...

opening it up to a much broader audience really helped make the app that much better. Not to mention, you know, bug fixes and things of that nature, which are obvious. So I really enjoyed that process. Obviously I cut everyone off as soon as the app was released. And I think, you know, for various, several reasons, I think John, you should do the same. But yeah, I definitely enjoyed it and I definitely think it was worthwhile.

Yeah, I will definitely need a lot of people to try the app. This is the app that I described as an incredibly dangerous app on a previous episode, especially in the test flight beta because it's messing with files on your disk. And if something's going to hose them, it's probably going to be a beta. So just FYI for people who are considering getting on a test flight, really think about it. The first several versions of the test flight, the first many versions of the test flight won't actually...

do the final replacement of your file with clones. It'll do everything up to that point. But yeah, I would just love to get a larger group to try it out and send me all their error reports. And again, our listeners tend to be tech nerds, so I bet they're good at providing good bug reports and all that stuff. So

Yeah, I'm definitely leaning towards doing it. Like the big downside, like I said, is that all I'm basically doing is eliminating all my potential customers because the only people who are ever going to buy this app are people who listen to the show and I give the app to every one of them for free and they get rid of all their duplicates. There's no reason for them ever to buy the app. Unlike Casey's app, because they're constantly watching new movies and TV shows and want to know who's in them. My app, they just fix everything on their desk and they're like, well, I don't need to buy this because it got on the test slide. But anyway, I'm still probably going to do it. More news on that in future shows.

All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Wild Green and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.FM slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus segment. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the news that Apple Intelligence summaries might be getting warning labels or some other kind of, you know, kind of

hedging features on them or reporting features on them as a result of some BBC News headline drama recently. So we're going to be talking about that in overtime. You can join and hear that and all of our other overtimes and all of our previous and future member content at p.fm slash join. Thanks, everyone. And we'll talk to you next week.

Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-M-A-R-

All right, before we get to our proper after show, which will be a Marco special, I wanted to take this time and I've had this, I didn't have it on my calendar, but I had it in my mind.

that at least once per year I'm going to do this, which is I want to thank the ATP patrons. And I don't want to do it constantly, and I don't want to have it be a thing that's in the show all the time, but once per year seems appropriate to me. You may be wondering, what the heck is an ATP patron? Am I an ATP patron? You would know if you were. Here's what ATP patrons are. First of all, you want to find out? Go to atp.fn slash patron.

ATP patrons are people who choose to become ATP members, but they want to pay more money than we charge for membership. Yes, you heard that right.

And why does this exist? Because people asked for it. They said, hey, I'm an ATB member, but I wish there was a way I could give you more money. And we'd be like, oh, that's very nice of you. But eventually, several years in, people kept asking about it. I'm like, you know what? They keep asking us for a way to give more money. I'm going to make it. And so I did. I called ATB patron, atb.fm slash patron if you're interested.

Obviously not a lot of people do this. I think I tried to explain it well on the FAQ that that URL leads to. But they're a small number, but they're very special to me for multiple reasons. First of all, isn't that nice of them? They want to support the show above and beyond what membership does. They don't want to keep buying t-shirts and other things like that. They just want to give more money on a monthly or annual basis.

above and beyond what we charge. The second reason is back last year, or yeah, I think it was last year when we did the annual discount to decrease the price of annual membership. We're so nervous about that. We did all these surveys about it because like as soon as we do that, if you just multiply the number of your annual memberships by the discount, that's how much money you're losing.

And you hope you're going to make up that gap by more people signing up. But let me tell you, when we did that annual membership, more people did sign up. But I had this thing that I was running. I'm like, are we in the black yet? Is this, you know, because on day zero, it's a money loser, right? And then you're like, okay, we're getting closer and closer to break even closer and closer to break even. It didn't look like we were going to make it. And you know what put us over the top?

ATP patrons. There's not a lot of them. I could read their names in the show if it wasn't a privacy violation and I won't do that, right? There's not a lot of them. But I look at the list of them all the time and it gives me warm fuzzies and it literally gives me additional dollars and it literally made our annual membership get past break even. So I just want to take this time once per year. I'm going to do this again next year. Thank you to every ATP patron. The small number of... I feel like I could meet you all and shake all of your hands. Thank you.

even the people who choose to pay one more dollar than the list price for membership, we appreciate it because that really shows us your ability to pay for it, your desire to pay for it. You wanted a way to pay more and now you have it. So I wanted to thank everybody out there. Thank you for being an ATP patron. That's all.

Yes, thank you for me as well. And I'm sure Casey too. Oh, very much so. I mean, any member, of course, you have our undying love and gratitude, but the patrons have just that little bit more. So thank you to all of you.

All right, so in the show notes, Marco has done what Marco loves to do and has written something deeply vague. In the show notes, our internal show notes, it says, Marco bought something, which honestly is evergreen because I feel like that's every episode. But then it says, parenthesis, long parenthesis. So, oh no, what have you done this time? Well, did he buy something long? Or is it going to be a long segment about something that he bought? Right, I'm guessing the latter.

Probably the latter. I have bought the second worst thing someone can buy. A boat? It's not a boat. That's the first worst thing. Bingo. Let me try to guess what it is. The second worst thing. A pickup. An Italian sports car. Oh, if only. I would say some sort of vehicle. I'm not clear what kind, though. Now, I want to first preface this by saying...

I'm only sharing this information because I really trust our audience to be good. Please don't make me regret sharing this. Please don't be creepy about this. Please, you know, don't make this weird. Wait, is it golf clubs? No, it's much worse purchase than that. Okay. All right.

Now, this was also never part of my plan, but sometimes life deals you a different hand than you expected and your plans change. Now, in the context, last winter, we're in the middle of a giant house move and a renovation of the new house. This was a massively stressful and disruptive time for my family, our home life, our logistics. Also,

Last winter. I'm in the middle of the giant Overcast rewrite. This is a massively stressful and disruptive time for my professional life and my app as well. So this is just a massively busy, disruptive, hectic time. And last winter...

The owner of my favorite restaurant... Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, my f***ing God. You did not buy... I don't want to name it, but you did not buy a restaurant. It's not a zoo. The owner of my favorite restaurant last winter, who is in his late 70s and wants to retire, says, I'm going to sell the restaurant. Marco, no. No, we need you on the show. You don't have time for this. No. We need you not to drain your fortune into this terrible money-losing business. Now...

I went back to Tiff and I was like, oh my God, they're selling. Cause I, you know, he, his family has been running it, but his kids don't live nearby. So they didn't, they're not going to run it after all. I never thought it would be for sale in the public market. And I went to Tiff, I'm like, crap, they're selling, you know, what a, what a shame. It's our favorite restaurant. And Tiff's like, should we buy it?

Do you try to give her the blame for this? Is this what's happening now? I cannot stand for this. This is not making me happy. I'm getting so stressed out just listening to this story. And I was like, well, can we buy it? What would that look like? We go to this restaurant all the time. Everyone there knows us. We know everyone there. The first thing we wanted to do was we met with the person who would probably manage it if we did it.

And we met with her and we're like, hey, how could this work? Could we buy this? And could you run it? It went great. And she was very, you know, very enthusiastic about the prospects and very supportive. Did you talk to anyone else who has ever owned a restaurant besides the person who was going to be getting money from you to run this restaurant?

And the reason this even seemed plausible is that relative to other restaurant situations, this is less difficult. So, you know, it wouldn't be starting a restaurant from scratch. It wouldn't be changing a restaurant. It wouldn't be buying a failing restaurant. Have you seen The Bear, by the way? Yes. Yes. At this time, we were watching The Bear. And it made you say, you know what? That's for me. So...

We went back and we're like thinking about it. We started looking at like if we bought it, how would we pay for it? How would this work? How would that work? And we were waffling over it. And as we were trying to figure out whether we should do it, one night Tiff said to me, could you imagine our life here without this place? You should have said yes. Because the thing is, if we didn't buy it,

I know what would happen. I know all the people at the beach who would have the money and the motivation to buy restaurants. And it would not be the same. And this restaurant is a beloved community restaurant. All the locals go here. Everyone loves this place who goes here.

What would happen to the restaurant if the other people bought it? Tell me the nightmare scenario. Give me the it's a wonderful life nightmare scenario. Either rapid changes into mediocrity or a gradual slide into mediocrity. The reason why everyone loves this place is that it's very good. It isn't just good for the beach. Because the beach, it's a captive audience. It's like living in a baseball stadium. Everyone there is guaranteed a certain number of customers just because...

they're a captive audience. And so not everything is good or, you know, sometimes things are overpriced or whatever. Like, you know, it's not an amazing environment for quality. Like a vacation town. Yeah. Right. This place is just good in absolute terms. Like it's better than it needs to be given where it is. And more importantly, it's consistent. It's always been consistent. And that's something that I cannot say about almost any other place there. And so...

Everyone loves this place. The locals are always there. The people who are spending all summer there. It's where you go when you know what's good. You go here. So when she said, could we imagine our life without it? I'm like, no. Because that's our place. It's a bar and a restaurant. It's our bar and it's our restaurant. It literally is now, apparently. Did you tell her you'd meet her anytime she wants? Well done. So...

we have bought it we bought a restaurant we bought a zoo oh my god congratulations but i cannot believe you've done this and please don't quit the show can you quit overcast before you quit the show please here's no i'm not quitting the show or overcast um

Here's why we thought we could do it. You know, you can buy Boom Boom Sauce from Penn's. You can bulk order the stuff. You don't need to buy an entire restaurant to get it. This is the most convenient way to get an unlimited supply of Boom Boom Sauce. I'm saying!

So here's why we, cause look, and we were talking to everybody, you know, we were talking like the accountant, the bank, the lawyer, everyone would say, you know, we're going to do this. And every single time everybody would say, why? Are you sure?

And of course, the second question was always, you know, do you have any experience running restaurants? No. I watch The Bear. We both worked in restaurants, but that's not the same thing. No, it's not. So...

The reason why is because we know all the people and everyone except the owner's family, everyone else is staying. The chef, the entire kitchen crew, the front of house staff, our manager, the assistant manager, everyone else is staying and they all support us. I don't know how to run a restaurant, but they do.

This is going to be a huge life change and a huge challenge. I know that. I am not so naive to think I'm just going to be able to breeze through this.

I mean, I've been working on the acquisition for a year. I already have a liquor license. I've already filed paperwork with the town. We've already done most of the stuff, like most of the setup paperwork. That's already behind me. I was doing it while we were renovating our house and while I was rewriting my app. I don't know if you've heard, but there were a few ATP episodes last year as well. Yeah.

So this has all been going on for a year. I think we can do it. And I think we can do it because we care so much. We love the place. And our priorities are maintaining the quality and maintaining the standards and maintaining the really good staff that it has. And I think with that drive, as opposed to like, you know, the thing is, and this is, you know, obviously from a position of privilege here, like,

This will not be our family's only income. And if it makes less money one year or if there's some – like a natural disaster that really impacts the beach that reduces things to the point where we actually lose money in a year –

We'll be okay. We can take that. That's what I was going to ask. Does this restaurant make money? And do you plan on it making money? Is this just a charitable thing that you're doing and it's just going to be a cost center? Or do you actually expect it to be a source of income and has it been in past years? Yeah, so as part of the deal, they shared their accounting of previous years with us. And we had our accountant look at it and just make sure everything kind of looked on the up and up and there were no weird tricks or anything like that.

And everything looks good. The fact is, so first of all, it's also a seasonal business. So we are only needing to work on it for like six months a year. And...

It does make money because, again, the beach, like certain things about working at certain things about operating at the beach are harder or more expensive. But also you do have a lot of customers. There is not that much competition and there can't ever be any more due to local zoning regulations. People want to go to the beach and go to a restaurant and go to a bar. So they make good money consistently. And, you know, we've run the numbers a bunch of different ways. And I think we can keep it making money while also having a general manager do everything

The vast majority of what the owners were previously doing. And I know this is going to be very, very hard.

Again, sometimes life deals you a different hand than you expected. I didn't ever want to own a restaurant or plan to own a restaurant. I never thought this particular restaurant would be for sale. I assumed it would have stayed within the family. This is the kind of place where in town people would... It's the kind of place you would describe as an institution, like some old steakhouse. That's what people think of this place. All summer, after we decided to buy it and after we were under contract...

Tiff and I, they were still open for the season, and we would go there all the time, of course. And we'd look around and be like, look at how much everyone loves this place. You look around and you see, because it's a small town, we know a lot of people in town. So you look around and you see, oh, they live here, they live here, we know them, there's our neighbors, there's our friends. You see everyone, and everyone just goes to this place to enjoy themselves.

Again, that's not true of everywhere. Like, you know, different places have different clientele, different dynamics. And like, this is like the home base of town. And if this would get worse or go away, that would be a big loss to the community.

And so we partly saw it as an act of community service or an act of like historical preservation almost. But also it is also a successful business. Like the only reason that they're selling it is because the owner is old and wants to retire. Like that makes sense. That's fair. You know, he's worked his butt off for a very long time. We kind of felt like it's us giving back to the community. And again, and this is from a place of great privilege that we could buy it because the reality of what would happen if we didn't would be,

A group of investors would have to buy it probably because prices are high out there because, you know, it's New York, it's fire around, it's real estate. It includes the building. So that is part of the reason why it's a safer business for us because we own the building too. Again, it's one of the reasons that makes this easier than many restaurant businesses is like when you own your own building, that's a pretty big deal. And we know that anybody else who would have bought it, again, it would have been a group of like, you know, dissociated investors and, you know,

When I see how that works in other places in town, it doesn't lead to quality very reliably. Sometimes it can work. It often doesn't. And we just didn't want to take that risk for a place that was so important to us and the community. And we knew that we can do this with our priorities and with our resources. We think we can do a good job. And if it turns out we can't,

We can sell it again down the road, but I don't think that will happen. I think we will be in this for the long haul. I mean, in the CGP Grey Cortex theme parlance, I kind of see this as the year of new challenges. In a lot of other areas of my life, the tech areas,

I kind of feel like I beat the game and I'm just walking around now, you know, like it isn't that there's no challenges left for me in tech, but, but I think I have done a lot in tech already. And I realized that not everything in my life needs to be tech. What, like what I'm itching to do right now is not launch a bunch more apps.

I like the app I run now. It's great. That's not all I want to do with my life is just make another app, then another app, then another app. I like this app, and I'm going to keep running it. I like this podcast, and I'm going to keep doing it. I also have other things in my life, other things I do, and I think this is going to be a big addition to that. One of the things that I find lacking in tech is in-person connection.

We're really good at other kinds of connection in tech. We've built amazing communication platforms and media platforms and networks. But when you're really having a challenging time or you really want to hang out with your friends, nothing beats in person.

And one of the places in person happens. Is it a bar or a restaurant? And the beach is a very special place to me. It always has been. And so for this to be my restaurant, my bar at the beach, it's such a community hub there, which is already a very special town to me. And so it's a place where I've gotten a lot of in-person connection.

And also doing this will allow me to broaden my horizons in a bunch of ways. Like, first of all, probably the scariest one, but one that I'm, I think I'm ready to tackle is,

I've never managed people. I've never had a staff, even of one. That was one of the first things I thought about, is that this man who says he would be a terrible boss and never wants to be a boss has now bought himself a staff of 10, 20, 30? 30, yep. Oh, gosh. Oh, no. Yeah, and again, granted, we...

We are delegating most of the operations to the general manager. I'm sure some of it will land on us, but we have a really good staff in place and we have a really good manager. And that will help a lot, like a lot. We wouldn't have done it without that in place. But, you know, obviously there will be challenges managing a staff. I've never even operated a physical business, even just the basics of like,

Real like business real estate. Like I learned that you that you pay very different rates for power and Internet service when you are a storefront. There's all sorts of like just realities, like different types of insurance. I have to have now different liabilities, workers comp like all there's so much stuff I've never had to deal with because of the types of businesses that I'd be running real life business things that I've never had to tackle. And yes, some of them are pains in the butt, but most of them are learning experiences.

There's also a lot of tech in a restaurant. A lot. Like, there's, like, you know, there's all, like, the, which I love the acronym, the POS, the point of sale system. I laugh every time I see POS. Those are all iPads and tablets now. They're networked. One of the complaints of the staff from the previous setup is that the networking wasn't very strong because, like, you know, some wall blocked the signal. Oh!

I'm like, Hey, I don't know how to run a restaurant, but that part that I can fix. Like, so that, you know, there's, there's, you know, opportunity like that for me to like help out in ways that I know how, like, yeah, I can transfer the website to a new domain. Like no problem. I got our email set up. I got like, can you make the menu? Not a PDF. Yeah, of course. Like, yeah. Like, you know, I've made fun of restaurant websites so much over time. Now everyone can come and make fun of mine. Um, hours. Uh,

yeah the hours and the phone number at the top the top and the phone number yeah and the address oh my god yeah there's like there's there's so much i mean look collaboration like today i was trying out notion and base camp because i'm trying to figure out like you know how do i organize tasks between you know like like me tiff and the manager like how do how do we do that like there's just so much stuff that huge areas of tech that i've never had to use there's things like

How do you have a TV signal that broadcasts two TVs in the bar that shows the same thing on both when the source is some kind of internet smart TV based like HDMI encrypted thing?

And I don't – is the answer like do you strip HDCP somehow? Is that a thing? Like I'm still working on that one. I don't know how to strip HDCP. If you know, tell me. They make splitter and repeater boxes. They use them on – I know about them because they use them for TV reviews when they want to show the same signal on three different TVs. But does it work with HDCP? Yeah. DRM ruins everything. All right. Anyway, so we'll do that. But like there's all sorts of – and part of it also like because it's at the beach –

There are huge areas of complexity that we don't have to deal with. For instance, at the beach, there's no delivery drivers because there's no drivers because there's no roads and there's no cars. So we don't have to deal with like DoorDash and Uber Eats and that. There's so much stuff we don't have to deal with there.

So there's all sorts of opportunities there for me to explore new tech. So don't worry. There's going to be plenty of show content possibilities as I discover like, wow, POSs kind of suck. Or it's all different. Hey, you know what? You can't just play music over the speakers. That's not legal. You can't just show pay-per-view sports on the TVs. That's also not legal. There's all sorts of stuff like that that I can discover that many of our listeners probably might use in their lives that we've never had exposure to before.

But also just purely from the angle of personal development and new challenges. I'm very much looking forward to this. It's a brand new type of thing.

Some of it I'm going to be good at just because I know tech and I'm good at paperwork. I've had a lot of business. I've done a lot of paperwork. So some of it's just that. A lot of it I'm going to be terrible at. And there's going to be a huge learning curve. And one of the biggest things, I'm going to have to learn to delegate and ask for help, which I am never. I've never been good at those things. But I'm going to have to be.

So I think it's going to be really interesting. I know on paper, this is a stupid thing to do. That's why like the accountants and the bankers are like, why are you doing this? Because on paper, this makes no sense. But the people who know the restaurant and who know us, the reaction from them largely has been, thank God we bought it, that someone else didn't. And that makes me feel like we're really doing the right thing.

So having watched now hundreds of hours of people rebuilding boats on YouTube, I have to say that I think the boat would probably be easier. But I will say this. After hearing your whole story, two things. One...

I think this restaurant sounds like it is much more likely to either make money or break even than the boat because boats really are a money pit. Whereas this is a business that already makes money and worst case scenario, you sell it because you have the real estate. That is your main asset and that is going to appreciate. So even if you lose money on the restaurant every single year, you could still come out even or ahead long term on this just by selling the property. So that's great. And two,

Everything you're saying about doing this as a community service makes total sense. Like we all know what happens when in the business world, private equity or in the, you know, the...

physical world, like investors come and just like, they want to buy this thing that makes money. And the first thing they want to do is how can we cut costs so that the profit increases? And so how can we cut costs? Let's, you know, fire people, make everything cheaper, anything we're spending too much money on. Can we find a crappier version of that that is still marginally acceptable? And you just...

drain every ounce of value out of the business by cutting costs and squeezing everything and just making it miserable until eventually it goes bust and then you're like, oh well, we made money during those years and it's just, it's a terrible thing. And I know you're not saying that the people who would have bought it instead of you are that bad, but it's the same type of dynamic where they don't care

about the restaurant as an institution. They see it as a business, which is why I think the bankers and the accounts are saying, as a business move, this makes no sense. It would be better if you just took this money and invested it somewhere.

but as a way to prevent someone who sees it as a business from buying this business and treating it like a business and, you know, immediately cutting costs and decreasing quality because, Hey, you have a captive audience and you're going to be making money anyway and essentially ruining your favorite restaurant. It does make some sense. So I think this is a noble thing that you're doing. I think it is, uh,

I'm not going to say foolish. I'm going to say, let's say brave. Let's use that. Let's say it is a brave thing that you're doing. It sounds like you're doing it for the right reasons. Would you say that Marco has courage? He's not removing a headphone port from the restaurant. We continue to have headphone ports. And like I said, I feel like in like now that you told me that they own the building and you've got the property that makes me feel so much better about, and the fact that the business has been making money up until that point, that worst case scenario, uh,

Oh, well, you will be able to sell it. That real estate will even when when the hurricane comes and washes every building off of the island, you will still be able to sell that real estate because it will still be worth money to somebody who's going to rebuild after the hurricane wipes all the structures off. Right. So I wish you luck. I hope you don't get too distracted from ATP. And I think you are trying to do a very good thing.

Thank you. I mean, look, how have I been the last year? Well, yeah. I mean, have you ever met anyone who runs a restaurant? Do they seem relaxed to you? No, but I appreciate what you're saying. And what you said a minute ago about the pressures of investors who treat it as a business, that's why we didn't want to go to a group of investors. Because even, again, even if they have the best of intentions, they're not going to be

The reality is, if you're looking at it as an investment, you want to return on your investment. You want to make money. How can we reduce costs and increase income? And that's not what you're trying to do. You're literally trying to say, how can I make this not become bad? Right, exactly. Which is a different motivation. Yeah, and what I've told the GM is like,

Like, you know, when you if you have to make a decision between something that is like doing something like the best way or the right way or something that might save a little bit of money, do it the best way. I'd rather be the best and make less money than maximize for money.

And that's something that groups of investors don't have the privilege of doing. Like they, they have to make money and they can go into it with the best of intentions. But the reality is that over time, that's what they, that's what they want. That's what they need. So that tends to happen over time with anything that has like a bunch of investors. Whereas we can actually just treat it as a labor of love. That does not, that's not to say it's going to lose money. It won't, but you know, as maybe the first year, cause we, you know, we're going to do some upgrades here and there, you know, some, you know, kitchen equipment and stuff like that. But,

For the most part, we intend for this and we think there's a pretty good chance that it will be a profitable business. It's not going to have the margins that software has because our margins are embarrassingly great. But it will be a business and we can still make a profit while also making it really great. Do I need to have...

You know, a backup cell connection on the internet connection so that we can have our TVs and our POS work during a power outage? No. Business-wise, that's probably, you know, $60 a month we don't need to spend. But I'm going to spend it because I want it to be good. You know, one of the other things, like there's so many opportunities in restaurants. We see it. Again, these are seasonal businesses.

in a place where it's expensive to get stuff shipped to it. A lot of businesses have to cut costs just to stay afloat on little shortcuts here and there. And one of those things might be like towards the end of the season, if they run out of their main kegs, they don't order new kegs if they're going to close in like three weeks because, well, a keg is $100 or whatever, and we might not make that much on it.

I'm going to direct the staff. Whatever is our set that we have, you know, two beers at the end of the season, we're

Just keep them in stock. If you run out, just order another keg. It's fine. I would rather the customers know that they can get what they want until the day we close than to go there and be disappointed. There's all sorts of opportunities like that for like, you know, I am not a good restaurateur yet. Maybe I'll become one someday. Maybe I'll never be one. I don't know. But I am, I know people and I know business stuff like that. From my app business, I know a lot about things like

pricing psychology, customer feelings, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction. I know a lot about that stuff. So there are things I can bring to this business, even if it's not anything regarding the actual logistics of running a restaurant yet. So I do think this is going to be very interesting, but I like the new challenge of it, and I like the diversification of it, and I like the community service angle for it. And

Even though I know I'm going to be totally underwater this summer, hopefully just figuratively, with all sorts of work and just a hectic situation for a little while.

I also know I'm not doing it alone. If I try to do it alone, I will definitely fail. But I also know that I can't and am not doing it alone. You know, Tiff and I are both in this together and we have a really good staff. I cannot keep saying that enough. I'm not saying this as a like, you know, Apple support the troops kind of thing. They really are an excellent staff. And that's why we are doing it. That's why we knew we could do it. And I think we will be pretty good at keeping the good people.

at getting the best people and keeping the best people. And because we will be good at that, everything else I think will follow. We are good at keeping good people on the beach. So we'll see how it goes.

I think you should do, I don't know if this is helpful for the show, maybe good for after shows, is what I think you should both do is you should all do every job at the restaurant over the course of the summer. Yes. For some period of time. Yes. You got to be a waiter. You got to be the hostess. You got to wash dishes. You got to be a line cook. Well, maybe not a cook. I don't know. Everything that you think you could conceivably do that you would like hire someone for the season to do, you should also do just so you understand that job and so you can have hilarious stories about how bad you are at it.

I am so here for this. No, I want to take a moment and echo what John said that while I, as your friend, I am deeply worried that you are biting off so much more than you can chew. She's such a worrier. I am, and I am naturally a worrier. And I'm also worried that, you know, it's going to have an impact on the show some way, somehow. And I don't mean that to be a turd. I'm just saying, you know, this is a, this is going to be an incredible time suck. Hopefully it isn't, but it,

it's likely to be an incredible time suck so i hope that things are still kosher with the with you know getting everything done in in a timely fashion and so on and so forth but with all that caveating aside um when we joined our local pool which i've talked about from time to time on the show this was i want to say 2022 i might have that wrong but we joined our local pool and we

It's a very unremarkable pool. In fact, in a lot of ways, it's kind of a crappy pool. Like the facilities are not great, but that's not the point. The point is it's a place where we can go and swim around in the summertime, or at least that's what we thought we were signing up for. In reality, what we signed up for was a third place. You know, we've talked about this, I think, in the past, but for so many people, there's your home, your work, and a third place. And maybe that's church or something like that.

Maybe it's a club or something like that. But our family, the List family, didn't really have a third place for a long, long, long time. And obviously none of us really did during COVID. Coming out of COVID, we decided to join the pool. And even though we wanted it as a place where we could go and have some fun during the summer, you know, just the four of us, it very quickly became our third place.

And as someone who did not grow up with any particular organized religion in my life, which I would argue is mostly for the best, but that's neither here nor there, I didn't really ever have a solid third place. You know, I had work or school and that was it in home. You know, I never really had a third place. And the pool was an incredible, incredible value.

addition to our lives. Not because it's some hoity-toity fancy pool. Again, it was built in like the 70s. It's arguably falling apart as we speak. Like, it's not fancy, but that's not the point. The point was, it was a place where we could gather with friends. And...

I would pay, maybe not literally, but I would figuratively pay any amount of money to keep that alive because it became incredibly important to our family. And since you and Tiff are in the position that you can literally pay some money to keep your third place alive, it does make perfect sense. I fear for you, but it makes perfect sense. And I echo what John says, that this is a very bold thing to do. It's

If you're going to have a midlife crisis, this is a fun way to do it. And I hope it remains fun for both of you for a very long time. Way more fun than maintaining a boat. I can guarantee you that. And to be clear, like, you know, with the show and, you know, your worries...

I would give up Overcast before I give up ATP. I don't think I'd need to give up either one, honestly. This has been quite a year trying to get the Overcast rewrite, the move, the house move, getting all this stuff done during this year while also going into contract to do the financing, going into contract for this, getting the liquor license temporary approved, all this stuff that I've been doing. All of that stuff in the other world, in the Overcast world,

The huge amount of time Overcast took in 2024, it's not going to take that much time in 2025 in all likelihood. Like, the massive rewrite is pretty much done. You know, there's still... The whole app isn't done, but the rate at which I need to be writing code every day has dropped dramatically. And again, like, and in tech, I kind of feel not just that I kind of beat the game, but like, the world of tech that is...

let's say above us, like, you know, larger things, you know, larger moves, larger trends, larger companies, you know, the, the, the big social networks and, you know, the big, the big tech companies, uh,

A lot of the fun has drained out of that for the small players like us. And look, I'm going to love computers forever. I love Apple products, even as Apple the company is being a little bit turdy in certain areas. I love Apple products. I love computers. I will want to talk about these forever. But the big – all the stuff about metas, social policies, and all this stuff –

I am getting so worn out and burnt out with that kind of stuff. And when you look at a lot of these bigger companies, the world of big tech, the nerds left the stage a long time ago. The business people have been running things for quite some time. And the world of big tech looks a lot like the world of any other big mature industry. The higher up you go or the bigger you try to get, the less I'm interested.

I like the small stuff. I mean, you know, besides the fact that Apple's the biggest corporation, whatever, let's set that aside. Like, you know, I love Apple stuff, but like I love Apple stuff to do small stuff. I don't want to start the next giant AI startup to replace millions of people's jobs. Like that's the last thing I want to do. I don't want to run a social network where I'm having to make really difficult moderation decisions and deal with all the problems that result from running a social network.

I don't want to have my platform be the one that people are harassing people on or controlling elections or causing world events to shift. Like, I don't want any of that. That sounds incredibly unappealing. I don't even want to be on those platforms, let alone run one. Or, you know, I don't even want to be using those apps, let alone own one. A lot of tech, I feel like,

The nerds are in our area over here off to the side and the rest of big tech has gone somewhere else without us. And that's a place often that I don't want to go. But our nerdy world is still here and will always be here.

Just there's now this other bigger world that doesn't really care about us, maybe uses the libraries and stuff that we write. But for the most part, like they're off on their own doing their money thing and their business thing. And us nerds were over here doing our thing and they don't care about us anymore if they ever did. And there's less and less overlap between those two worlds, I think, over time. So I am exactly where I want to be in the world of tech. I don't want to expand my tech footprint anymore.

And I frankly am not that interested in a lot of new areas of like, you know, how could I make a startup that expands and gets really like... I really don't want that life for myself anymore because the world that I used to do that in is not the current world. The current world is very different and requires very different things. So...

My passion, though, for tech stuff is still very real. Like, you know, just the other day I was talking about the cool terminal ink thing and I still love buying all this Apple. Guess what I'm going to fill the restaurant with? Apple hardware and ubiquity hardware and possibly even some low raw equipment. What's going to go in the walk in freezer to detect a water leak? Probably a Yolink low raw thing. Like there's there's a lot of ways. And I love all that stuff.

And so that's the area of tech, the application side of it, the enthusiasm side of like the nerdy stuff, the smaller areas. I love all that stuff and I always will. So I'm happy to continue to embrace that part of tech, but not to be in like, you know, the tech startup scene or even any larger of a role in the tech press scene because that's not really my scene anymore. And so this is, I'm enjoying this as, you know,

So diversification and new challenges, both diversification of my income and diversification of my skill set, I'm going to really enjoy, I think, having a restaurant. And yeah, it's going to be really hard. And I'm not going to enjoy it every day. I'm sure there's going to be days where I'm like, why did I do this? But I think there will be aspects of it that I really enjoy and really feel proud of at the end of the day. And I think it will bring me a lot of satisfaction. Yeah.

Well, congratulations to both of you. Best of luck.

When I visited you, it was during the winter almost a year ago now or a year and a half ago or something like that because it was November, wasn't it? And the restaurant at the time was not open, and I thought that was a seasonal issue. Maybe it was a time of day issue, but I never got to experience it. And so now I have yet another excuse to find a way to come up to Fire Island and come visit. It says, I want to try this pizza with boom-boom sauce, damn it. That's not my restaurant, but that's –

Oh, no! Damn! I thought it was. Well, now I feel like an idiot. All right. Well, that's okay. I mean, we currently don't have anything on our menu that has Boom Boom Sauce, but that doesn't mean we can't.

Oh, well, see, the change is already being made. Well, now I feel like a real big dummy, but that's okay. But nevertheless, I will look forward to visiting the restaurant at some point and eating whatever it is you are willing to serve me. If you want, the Boom Boom Sauce Pizzeria building is for sale. You can join me in this venture. First of all, I'm sure I don't have that kind of money available. And secondly, no.