530: You Are Not Nintendo

44:40And why would you want the well to fill faster? If you have a dark scene where there's less light, that means less light is needed to reach an equivalent sensor output. So basically, it seems like the sensor output, like the voltage, is determined by what percentage full is the little well, right? A big well with the same number of electrons as a small well will be lower percentage full. So if you put that same number of electrons in the small well, maybe it fills it to 90 % capacity, you get the 90 % of the voltage value and if you have a higher voltage that means it's higher above the noise floor of like the circuitry and the sensor and everything like that so if you're in a very dark scene you want to use the little well the high conversion gain mode to get better low light performance at the cost of less dynamic range and this is the cleanest way to lift the signal above the noise floor because it happens within the sensor itself before you get to any other part of the read pathway again see the video to see the read pathway and this is as opposed to uh the iso control which you know it's interesting we use the same terms for like film cameras and regular because in the world of film cameras uh i believe iso was just basically saying how sensitive is this film stuff to light right and whatever chemicals are on that film uh you know the sensitivity was measured with this iso number right obviously there's no film and no chemicals that are being exposed to light inside digital camera but they still use the same term the way iso works at least in this little diagram of the sony cameras is when you get those voltages from the photo sites adjusting the iso tells an amplifier that's behind that saying hey when you get the signals from the sensor amplifier you know crank up the signal you're getting by whatever amount as you crank up the iso it amplifies it more and more but of course that adds noise because there's noise in the amplifier circuit so on and so forth so by using the littler well the the the high conversion gain mode inside the sensors you get a similar effect but you get that within the sensor itself before you get to the stage where iso has any effect um and that's part of the reason why the most recent sony sensors have really good low light performance when they use the little well they do much better than when they use the big well and you may be wondering okay but when does the camera switch from using the little well to the big well is that a thing that i can control apparently not but you can find out where that is there's instructions in the video one way to do it is to just put the lens cap on your camera so it's just black and then like crank up the brightness on your screen on the back if you've ever done this you can see you know it's black right what i'm expecting to say the lens cap is on but as you crank up the iso you'll start to see noise in the blackness because you know noise see the video for all the different places where noise can come in there's a surprising number of them including photon noise which is scary um because the real world is not simple as you think it is and what you'll see is it'll be black with noise and as you crank up the iso it'll get noisier and noisier and noisier and then when you go one more notch up on the ISO it'll get wait the noise decreased and then it'll start to go back up again right when the noise decreases that's when it skipped switched from one of one of the buckets to the other the other way you can tell is you can go to one of these weird uh sensor measuring nerd websites the one he recommended was called photons to photos it's photons to photos.net put a link in the show notes and you can see charts for your specific sensor and your specific camera measuring various things i think the clearest one is the shadow improvement scale thing um and you can just pick like if you pick two cameras you can see it well this is the one i picked for the for the show notes here is showing um the a7 4 and the a7 s3 compared uh and it doesn't really matter so much what shadow detail is at some measure of something or whatever but you can see there's a discontinuity in the graph where all of a sudden it jumps that place where it jumps is where it switches from one of those buckets to the other and also by the way this one you can see that the a7 s3 has an incredibly low noise floor compared to the a7 IV.

48:27That's why the a7 III is beloved by video people, because it's less noisy. But anyway, you can mouse over these little charts and find for your specific camera, if you have dual gain ISO, you will see that jump in the graph, and you will see exactly what ISO level it occurs at, so you don't have to guess. I don't know why they don't just list this in the specs, but they don't. And finally, why doesn't Sony say that their cameras have this dual base iso which is a thing uh and here's what uh the video had to say about that sony reserves the term dual base iso for something specific in order for sony to say a camera has dual base iso both base isos need to perform the same way with regard to noise performance and dynamic range and to sony the alpha cameras don't qualify mostly because they don't have the same amount of dynamic range at the higher base iso as they do a lower base iso we just got done saying they don't have the same dynamic range they don't have the same noise performance their video cameras do so sony's video cameras advertise hey we have dual base iso but the photogamers don't it's a you know they you get trade-offs you get less dynamic range for the little well or whatever and and there's a sony article that tries to explain this does a way worse job than the video but we'll put it in the show notes anyway because it's an official source so there you have it uh something i definitely did not know about sony cameras not all sony cameras but apparently more recent ones that they have this this strange behavior where the performance of the sensor changes at a particular ISO level.

49:49And by the way, it's not the same ISO level for every Sony camera. That's why you have to look at these charts to find out where it is. And hopefully when you watch that video and you see what's actually happening inside your camera and how different it is from how you may be visualizing it, if you came from like the film world, it will help you realize all the different places in that chain where things can get screwed up and what effect the various controls on the back of your camera have on those various stages and what effects they don't have. anyway i thought this was fascinating uh and it sheds a lot of light on the process that we think is magic where you just point a camera at something and the sensor does some of the magical stuff and you get a picture and as always it's way more complicated than that as we were as i was like looking at you know watching this and figuring all this like you know how this stuff works what kind of blew my mind is thinking like wait a minute they're not just reading the sensor when i push the shutter button they're reading the sensor in a mirrorless camera whenever you're seeing through the camera whenever you're whenever you are like watching the screen on the back or using the viewfinder that sensor is sampling itself usually at least 60 times a second like so it's doing all of that at least 60 times a second that kind of blew my mind yeah that's part of the reason why i mean i remember when uh mirrorless was first kind of coming up one of the big complaints was oh it doesn't let you see through your lens right i can't actually see with my eyeballs the light right because the old the slr is that a mirror where the light would come into your camera hit the hit the mirror bounce upward hit another mirror and then bounce into your eyeball so your eyeball would be literally seeing the photons that were entering your camera but with mirrorless that wasn't happening with mirrorless you're looking at a tiny little evf electronic viewfinder a little computer screen your eyeballs even get to see the light because it's shoved against the camera or whatever and how that's bad but i mean there's many reasons why mirrorless eventually won out but one of them is you do get to see the entire imaging pipeline it's not you know because with with an slr yeah you get to see the photons but you don't get to see like what do my current exposure settings look like on a mirrorless camera it will show you oh you're way underexposing everything is dark you can't see anything because you you get to see like the if you were to take a picture now here's more or less what it would look like it's not exactly the same because there's more stuff that happens when you hit a shutter but it's much closer whereas if you're just looking through a camera lens you know your eye can adjust to to an aperture that may be underexposed or whatever it's their advantages and disadvantages but i feel like the trade-offs for mirrorless are well worth it which you know the market seems to agree with but yeah i think the the evfs on all these cameras run to like 120 frames per second too so again there might be trade-offs there where it's not doing like the full imaging pipeline every time but it's doing most of it one huge advantage that i found you know because i i shot slrs with the mirrors for years and And at first, I didn't like mirrorless more because I missed, like, when you look through the viewfinder, I missed that experience of shooting that way when you're looking through the lens directly.

52:44Like, you know, you kind of have infinite refresh rate when you're looking through like that. And it is very different. Can I pause you there? We should probably re-explain the difference between mirror and mirrorless. And I can take a stab at it, but please, either of you jump in when you're ready. in a big, big, big SLR camera, really anything with a mirror, there is literally a mirror behind the lens that takes all that light and pushes it up, kind of periscope style, up to the viewfinder, right? And so you are literally, this is what you guys were alluding to, or saying a second ago, is that you're literally seeing what the lens sees, not what the sensor sees, but what the lens sees.

53:18Whereas by comparison, and this is what you were talking about a second ago, Marco, with a mirrorless camera, that means there is no mirror, of course. And so the only way for you to see what the camera sees is for the sensor to be reading what's coming through the lens and then show that on a little LCD that's behind a viewfinder or perhaps, you know, the bigger LCD that's on the back of the camera. And so that's the difference between the two. And most cameras that I've used in my lifetime, in fact, I can't remember since film anyway, a time that I have used a mirrored camera. and it's kind of incredible that like with the old mirror equipped SLRs, every time you took a picture, that mirror would first flip up out of the way so then the light could hit the sensor and it was an incredibly complicated system.

54:07Mirror flips up, then the shutter behind it does its shutter thing and then you get to see the picture on the back and that had a number of advantages. I mean first of all the sensor, they kind of had to do it that way first because the sensors simply weren't advanced enough yet to give live video feeds you know for much of the slr's development and then also the the huge advantage they had was battery life because you didn't have to be running the entire sensor imaging pipeline constantly to just see like as you're waiting to take a shot you you were sitting there waiting to take a shot looking through the lens through the mirror and the camera was mostly idle as you were sitting there doing that and and then you know when you took the shot that's when it had to activate the sensor do the image processing run but you know that in that way they're only doing one image to be processed you know just the one that you took and then showing on the screen the screen was on for a few minutes but or you know a few seconds but for the most part like unless you were shooting in what later came was like later slrs did add the like continuous video shoot mode where you could use the screen on the back continuously and it would the mirror would flip up and just stay up and it would work the way mirrorless cameras do you know in in a brief way uh but when you weren't doing that when you were just using it normally the battery life of a regular slr was incredible compared to the battery life of mirrorless cameras um you know now you know everyone just accepts worse battery life because it's not that much worse though it's so much better than it was even the short period of time that i was buying interchangeable lens sony cameras the battery life on these new ones is just phenomenal compared to what it used to be and part of that is just you know silicon shrinks and stuff like that but part of it i think is just the efficiency of all of the parts on the inside like my the camera on my desk here i just you know i wish my ipad had this kind of standby time it just sits here for literal months and every time i pick it up it's still got charged eventually it will go down to zero over the course of like four months but you know i take these to the beach and i shoot literally 2 000 pictures and i have more than 50 battery life at the end of it right so it's like what more could you ask for and by the way the batteries are changeable and i have a spare if i actually needed but i've never needed now that i've gone to the the z size battery whatever the big sony size battery is which is not that big but like the previous size battery whatever the small one is that one's not big enough but the z size battery especially since now that my my a6600 also has the z size battery in that tiny little camera it's like infinity battery like it might as well be infinity because it's like i go to sleep before the before the thing's gonna run maybe if i shot something where i was like holding down the shutter for four hours straight at a sporting event i I would need to swap batteries, but 2 ,000 pictures of the beach, no sweat.

56:43And actually, the biggest thing I like about mirrorless and switching over, now that they're better, now that the EVFFs have much faster frame rates than they used to do. the battery life problem has been mostly or entirely solved depending on the system. You know, like, so now, like, the advantages that mirrored SLRs had are mostly alleviated now by mirrorless being better. But my favorite thing is that the mirrorless cameras, because the viewfinder is a screen, what they usually do is when you are looking at the viewfinder, it just shows whatever it would have been showing on the back screen.

57:17You know, it just, you know, it senses your eyes there. It turns off the back screen and it turns on the viewfinder. and my favorite thing is that in bright sun you can when you hit play to review the picture you just took to see if you got it you can look in the viewfinder and you can see the picture no matter what's going on around you light wise or distraction wise or whatever you can look through the viewfinder and see the picture you just took and review it to see like oh did i did i get what i wanted to get that is my favorite thing about mirrorless besides the fact they're just way smaller but other than that like it that's a game changer for me and that's one thing where like as i was looking at at very small cameras like you know looking at the rico and the you know fuji x100v and the sony rx100 series and stuff like that like looking all these small cameras not all of them have evfs and the ones that don't have them i really miss it when it's gone and even that even the cute little tiny pop-up evf on the sony arcs 100 i i still found myself doing that and being very thankful it was there and so so like that that to me has kind of become like a must have like if i'm gonna buy a non-iphone camera it's gotta have a viewfinder and not necessarily because i always want to shoot through it or even frequently will shoot through it but mostly because i want to be able to review pictures in bright sunlight i guess i suppose they could just make the back screens way brighter but that's probably harder yeah i mean they do have a lot of them do have a super duper bright mode but i'm never haven't really tried that because i assume that really would eat in my battery yeah it just i just used to be fun in fact when i'm at the beach i just turn the back screen off which also extends battery life because honestly you can't see it at the beach like there's no point right i'm gonna use yeah i'm aware the view fund of all time i do kind of miss the uh you know the sound of the mirror clacking up that's another sort of kind of like floppy listening to floppiness drives thing that younger generation probably won't be familiar with because that was definitely a uh it was an audio experience but also you could feel it you know there was the shutter the mirror clacking up the whole and i know slr is pre-day digital but just you know that whole experience was uh kind of going to disappear someday i imagine we are brought to you this week by collide and they have some big news if you're an octa user they can get your entire fleet to a hundred percent compliance if a device isn't compliant The user can't log into your cloud apps until they've fixed the problem.

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1:00:59justifiably about what General Motors has said recently, reading from Jason's post. General Motors has decided that the company's future electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company's own infotainment system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all of GM's EVs will run Android and offer access to certain Android apps. But any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will be gone. There's also a blog post from Gruber at Daring Fireball, which we'll put in the show notes. We'll put the original Reuters article in there.

1:01:38And I just, why? I mean, I know why. The answer is money. The answer is always money. But why? Read the Reuters thing, because that's the explanation. Well, there's the stated explanation, and then there's the likely real explanations. Well, I think the stated explanation is pretty close to the real one. Go ahead. Buyers of GM EVs with the new systems will get access to Google Maps and Google Assistant voice command system at no extra cost for eight years, GM said. GM said the future infotainment systems will offer applications such as Spotify's music service, Audible and other services that many drivers now access via smartphones.

1:02:09Quote, we do believe there are subscription revenue opportunities for us. Quote, Kummer said. GM executive Mary Barra is aiming for 20 to 25 billion dollars. It's billion with a B. in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030. So the answer, as always, is money. And the secondary answer is GM is dumb and bad at what they do. Because I know they want money. And I know it seems like that if we do this, we'll get more money. But I don't think they will. Yeah, I think we can look back at different parts of tech and different eras that we've achieved or gotten to use. And certain times, things are just better for consumers than they are at other times.

1:03:00And it's usually because of some accident or some standard was adopted or some company got a whole bunch of other companies to agree to something that later on, we don't get that kind of luxury again. So think of when open ecosystems then become like closed centralized services or become taken over by them. When services have APIs for a while and they shut down those APIs, things like this. And I think we can look at the era that we are in now where almost every new car sold and many of the cars for the last few years that have been sold support CarPlay and Android Auto and therefore support pretty much any phone you're likely to have.

1:03:44And if you have an older car that's older enough to have a din socket you can get a din a double din radio to you know add carplay yourself fairly inexpensively and easily and so we're in this era right now where almost everything asterisk tesla and rivian but almost everything else supports carplay and android and it's wonderful as a consumer using these products it's great because you can get into any reasonably recent car and there's a pretty good chance you'll be able to have these experiences and that's Ultimately, that's what people want. They want to use their CarPlay and their Android Auto because it's better than all the crap the car makers make.

1:04:24By far, it's way better. Even the car makers that actually used to make pretty good software interfaces by comparison to their peers, CarPlay is even better than what they do. It's just better. And I'm going to tell you, I don't actually like CarPlay that much. But it's so much better than what the automakers have made. And so we have this situation now where the automakers are totally marginalized in their UIs because all we want is get your crap out of the way so I can show my phone projection system on your display. That's what we actually want. We actually want get all your stupid custom stuff that you made that looks like – it looks like Elon Musk drew it usually.

1:05:07Like get all your – and I don't mean Tesla. I mean like the ones that are worse. like all the ones you look at like gm and all the vehicles that are marketed towards like you know men like those have the most comically overwrought disgustingly bad uis um so you know you have all these car makers who just have done horrendous jobs of making uis it's not their skill set as screens have gotten more ubiquitous as technical needs have gotten higher you know as the graphical capabilities of these screens have gotten better over the years the car makers have only gotten worse at making software for them like amazon with their kindle uis the kindle ui has only gotten worse over time as kindles have gotten better screens and more computing resources because it gives amazon even more rope to hang themselves with uh in terms of their horrendous ui design and that's how cars have gotten too like car uis are horrendous and they keep getting worse as the screens keep getting higher resolution and we keep putting more controls on the screens like The way everyone else is designing their screens is just getting worse.

1:06:11And so, but we have this great moment right now where we, for most new cars, we can just connect our phones and get all their crap out of the way and have what we actually want. I think that's temporary. Usually when we have these kind of, you know, very consumer friendly, more open ecosystems, oftentimes it's in the earlier part of the market. And what happens in the later parts of those markets is the people with the power realize they have the power and say, hey, why are we giving this away? Why are we letting other people control our stuff? Why are we not bringing this in-house and reaping more benefits from it?

1:06:49So you can see this in lots of places all over tech, of course. I think one of the more common places you see it recently is streaming services. You know, we used to have everything on Netflix. Over the years, the various rights holders have realized, why don't we just launch our own service and you know take this off of everyone else's and they have and now that world is worse and more expensive than it was before like that's just the reality like it's it's gotten worse for everyone um except for the people who run streaming services and now now we have to subscribe to 15 of them to get all the stuff we used to get in like one or two you look at you know the the music industry has gone in in and out of things like this but you know so these kind of things are all over the tech world.

1:07:32So I think the automakers have realized, wait a minute, why are we letting Apple show whatever they want on our screens when we can have our own Maps app and we can have our own subscription pricing that we charge people and we can charge them the 12 bucks a month for their GPS service or whatever. Car makers want that revenue for themselves. And so from their point of view, they're like, wait a minute, you know, we're just going to take this back. So, you know, we as consumers, we have a few things we can do in response to that. We can refuse to buy those cars. But as Tesla has shown, sometimes the cars are compelling enough that we're willing to forget about that.

1:08:13Or a lot of people just don't, they don't realize or they don't care. And they might not care until after they've driven it off the lot. And then like, well, I guess this car doesn't support that. I guess I'll use the crappy Bluetooth or whatever. you know but a lot of people don't realize or don't care so those of us who do care it's like we're kind of out of luck so we can say we're not going to buy these cars but ultimately you know this is this is gm today and this is going to go one of two ways either there's going to be enough backlash and they're going to see enough loss of sales that they're going to revert this decision and say oh never mind we'll add we'll add carplay and draw to back these cars or it's not going to affect the sales in a big enough way.

1:08:53And I think this is the more likely outcome. And then other automakers are going to be like, wait a minute, we can do that too. Why? Look, GM is making X billion dollars a year in recurring subscription revenue for their vehicles after sale by selling all these services on the touchscreen and no one's buying those on our cars because everyone's using their phones instead for free. So why don't we capture that value for ourselves? I heard Jason's arguments and I think he's more optimistic that consumers will prevail here, I'm not that optimistic. I honestly don't think that's the most likely outcome.

1:09:26I think the most likely outcome here is they're going to make a bunch of money from doing things themselves in a way that's worse for consumers, but we have not enough leverage over them in this way. And then other automakers will follow. And I think we're going to look back on this time as, wow, wasn't it great when every car had CarPlay? And in the future it's going to be a lot more fragmented, I think. Well, so GM is playing it safe here in that they're allowing the You know, Tesla and Rivian, the two big, you know, highest end, most high profile, most, you know, I'm not going to say most popular because Rivian is not selling, you know, that many cars.

1:10:01But like, I don't know, the best reviewed EVs, let's say, they're allowing them to be the anchors because the two best reviewed EV makers, Tesla and Rivian, don't allow CarPlay or Android Auto, right? And so GM is not doing this on all their cars. GM is only doing it on their EVs. And they're using the other popular EVs as an anchor. and say, well, this is just the way EVs are. When you have an EV, you know Tesla, they don't do this. You know Rivian, they don't do this. Well, with our EVs, we don't do this. But with all the other GM cars, still CarPlay and Android Auto. And I don't know how many EVs GM sells compared to the other ones, but it's presumably a minority of the cars that GM sells.

1:10:39So they're still kind of like dipping their toe in with this thing. And in this scenario, they're not at a competitive disadvantage if you're comparing EVs against EVs, which I think if you're shopping for a GM EV, maybe you are looking at other EVs more than you're looking at just other cars across the industry, right? Yes, but I think almost every other EV, or at least off the top of my head, every other EV other than Tesla and Rivian, and we probably shouldn't even be mentioning Rivian because their sales volume is so low, but pretty much everyone but Tesla, including Lucid, which by the way, I happen to see Lucid Air.

1:11:13Yeah, Lucid just changed. Yeah, and I happened to see one today for the first time. It looked pretty good. I was pretty impressed. But anyways, pretty much everyone else is including CarPlay, to the best of my knowledge. I might not have that exactly right, but effectively. Right, but the best EVs are Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid. I don't know, man. I don't know if that's true anymore. I really don't. Let's say the best reviewed is the best way to sell it. That's very different, first of all. That's an extremely different thing. They are the best vehicles, so that's why they're the best reviewed. I don't think there's any debate there.

1:11:43I don't think anyone is looking at, you know, Chesley, Rivian, and Lucid and saying these are not the three best EVs. In the classes that they compete, obviously, Lucid. I don't think anyone's looking at Lucid. I agree. Well, I mean, Lucid only has, Lucid doesn't have any cars that people want to buy. They just have a sedan, and who wants sedans, right? But among the sedans, they make literally the best four-door sedan EV. So, I mean, it's not even close. Well, but also, I think you're underselling GM's existing EVs, because I always get it backwards. It's either Bolt or Volt, and I always say the wrong one.

1:12:13yeah no they probably sell a lot of them but that's you know but they're they're actually really nice like my parents have whatever it is other than the fact they had to recall them because the battery's catching fire but yeah that happens to everybody eventually i'm serious every ev maker is going to have some recall i toyota had the wheels falling off with their stupid ev which is not well reviewed uh bolt had the batteries catching fire which like you know that's on the battery manufacturer like this those are growing pains right yeah everyone had the tesla had those you don't have any recalls i have for my tesla a lot like and i didn't even and mine was like the one by the time i bought my first tesla it was already out for like four or five years before that yeah and rivian had like the bolts like uh something the suspension components had the bolts retightened or something like that yeah something like that everyone has those but hold on we're getting yeah we're all we're getting off track here what i'm trying to say to you is i do not accept your assertion that tesla is still the only good option the bolts in my part i have driven my parents bolt many this is the the prior generation that now they have a different looking one.

1:13:10Like the GM has a different looking one. But my parents bolt. It is not as nice as a Tesla. I'll be the first to tell you that. But given that it was like half or maybe a third the cost, whatever it was, it is actually surprisingly nice. The Mustang Mach-E, surprisingly nice. I've not personally and I've driven one of those very briefly. I've not personally driven the new Kia and Hyundai EVs, but everything I've read is that they're really, really good. So yes, Up until maybe a year or two years ago, it was basically Tesla or nothing. And if you're a fancy lad, like arguably the three of us are, it's Tesla Rivian or nothing.

1:13:46But for regular people, I think there's a lot of really, really good options out there. And I think GM is going to be cross-shopped with the Kias and the Hyndais and all the other ones that are of roughly similar financial pain. They'll also get cross-shopped with the Model 3 for sure. but i think there's a lot more options out there than you're giving them credit for and that are good like i said i was just picking the the reason i'm picking the best of the best is because that's gm's cover right so what that what gm's cover is see we're being like the best of the best even though you're not cross shopping against the lucid air because it's way too expensive being like lucid is kind of like the companies that copy apple even though they're not really competing with apple because their cover is like it's kind of like a value signaling like we're like the good ones that you can't afford we're like tesla we're like rivian we're like lucid we're not like those other lesser things you know ford machi i know you think it's a good car but like don't you see how where it's like it's a value statement kind of like pricing is a is a value statement this is a value statement of like it's giving them cover to say we don't offer car play because those expensive guys don't offer car play too and i get what you're saying that like they'll they'll be cross shop with cars that are in similar market although like it's a tesla model 3 does kind of ruin that because it is kind of down in everybody's business in terms of pricing although a little little bit less so now because the model three keeps creeping up in price as tesla goes down the tubes with financially with some problems no didn't they just drop prices again yeah they had to drop that they were creeping up but then they had to drop them again because of they they want to sell cars like it's it's not a great situation over there but but no but the model three is very affordable tesla's prices have never stayed the same for more than a few months like they've always changed wildly yeah no but like you know i'm i'm in westchester uh for the moment and i'm you know looking around like this is like ground zero for you know new medium to high-end adoption of electric cars and i see there's still a ton of teslas around still by far the number one but i'm seeing a lot of uh the ionics is that kia or hyundai it's a hyundai hyundai uh ionic 5 you're saying the suv one yeah the ionic 5 tons of mockies tons of teslas multi now there's now two rivians within a block of my house there is tons of them and even and i've i mean i know this is not still even made let alone was ever mass market but like i was driving around i've been driving around tiff's little bmw i3 i freaking love that stupid car it's so stupid but so good in so many ways do they still make that no i think they stopped last year the year before because all of a sudden i'm seeing that car everywhere and it's not just because you mentioned it because i've known you've owned it for years and years and years but there's so many i3s and i've seen maybe it's i'm seeing the same three over and over again but like where are you getting these i3s from i guess they bought them used well the great thing was you could get a great deal on them because nobody wanted them so like we got an amazing deal on ours like it's yeah it's so and there there are so many good electric cars and there's more coming out all the time the market is big and growing like and and now you can kind of tell you know now that the more modern ones are required to make weird noises as they run for pedestrians to hear as i'm walking around like i'll hear something weird drive by and i'll look and it'll be something I don't even recognize, but it's clearly an electric vehicle.

1:17:01It's some kind of weird mid-sized SUV crossover thingy. That's some brand. I don't know. But they're everywhere. There's so many, and they're all different. And by most reviews, they're pretty much all really good. Because as you pointed out before, electric cars, just having an electric drivetrain is just a massive upgrade in so many ways from gas cars that you can have an otherwise fairly mediocre car, but people will love the thing because electric cars are just good overall. They're the SSDs of the car world. Right? Everyone loves their first SSD and everyone loves their first electric car, even if it actually sucks.

1:17:34Right. But it might suck in some ways, but it's so much better in other ways that you just love the thing. Tiff's i3 is like an ancient platform. It only has like 150 miles of range, but the thing is great. It's a great little car and people love the things. They didn't love it at the price that BMW have you tried to sell it for that was the main problem with the i3 well and it was it was very early to the market it was very ahead of its time i think its carbon fiber uh tub design was extremely expensive yeah that's why it was so expensive and also it's a form it's a shape of car that americans don't like but you know what it's an amazing shape we have fit so much in that car and it's such a small car it's very practical but americans do not like that it's basically a tall bubble like it's it it is very it has no footprint you can fit in every parking spot you can do a u-turn in a street without doing a three-point turn just turn around like the turning radius is amazing on it it's so small but because it's tall you have a pretty good you have great visibility out the whole thing you can fit anywhere and it actually holds a surprising amount of stuff given its size uh i love the thing and no one's making that anymore and like no one's making anything close to that size right now in the american market which is kind of unfortunate um but anyway there are so many good electric cars and you know your your assertion i forgot even what we're arguing about but your assertion i was saying they were using they're they're using the the better brands as cover for their decision but let me finish because okay like i said before there are ideas like i will make more money from this the reason i don't think they're going to and the reason i think this is absolutely the wrong decision and the reason i think that even if the entire industry goes the way you said marco and they all realize hey we can do this thing like they just basically it's a it's a chain of using the higher end brands as covered, it goes all the way down and they all get rid of CarPlay and Android Auto, it will be a terrible mistake and that will eventually be reversed.

1:19:24And here's why. These car makers do not have software platforms. They don't have app stores. They don't have APIs. They don't have operating systems. They do not have a software platform. None of them do. None of them have a glimmer of a hope of ever having one. And none of them currently have one. We can name all the software platforms off the top of our head windows mac os android ios that's pretty much all the ones that matter this and tailing off with with the tv os and the watch os and the stuff like that that's it what does it take to have a software platform you got to have apis you got to have developers you got to have a developer program you got to have support for them you got to have an sdk you got to have an ide you got to have a platform that you do development on you have to you know revise those things just bug tracker documentation yeah well you know less less so with apple but you know we know what it takes to have a software platform none of these car makers have that nor should they because that is it's such a huge business there have only been a small number of those in the literal history of the world and making new ones has proven to be extremely extremely difficult after the sort of cambrian explosion of the early pc days and the subsequent consolidation right and why does that matter because software platforms allow developers to produce software that has not existed before.

1:20:41Waze at one point didn't exist, and then somebody made Waze. And it turns out Waze is a good thing to use in a car. If those platforms didn't exist, iOS, Android, or whatever, no one is writing Waze for the BMW platform or any other single car platform. I almost wrote Overcast for the BMW platform, just whatever it's worth. Right. It's just, it's not economically feasible for individual car makers to have their own platforms that are going to have innovation. we know where people are writing applications they're writing it for the popular platforms maybe someday they'll be writing for somebody's headset or whatever we'll find out at wwc but right now they're writing them for ios they're writing them for android and to a lesser extent mac windows whatever you know like those are the software platforms so if these car makers kick software platforms out of the car which is what they're doing if they don't let car play you don't android those are ways for those existing software platforms to allow applications developed for those platforms to get into the car if car makers kick them out if they think hey we'll just write all the applications ourselves no you won't you suck at this and even if you didn't nobody can write all their own applications even nintendo can't get by only with first party games and nintendo is nintendo you are not nintendo right if you have none of those applications like you will just have a lesser platform you say okay well everybody does that then just everyone will have crap applications ah but if everyone has crap applications some the singular of the car company, singular with a C, the singular of the car world will say, you know what?

1:22:05Everybody else kicked all the other software platforms out, but you know what? Apple, Android, we're going to invite you back in. And suddenly it's their unique selling proposition for whatever brand of car this is that decides to do this, like the last place competitor, singular, right? It says, iPhone, you can come on our platform. And suddenly people are looking at singular again. No one was looking at singular before, but hey, you know what? If you want the iPhone, the literal only place to get it is on singular, which will eventually be called AT &T. And I was never a fan of singular slash AT &T before, but they have the iPhone, so I'm going over there.

1:22:35That's what'll happen. And it'll just reverse and ripple back through because there is absolutely no way that any of these car makers are going to make a successful software platform. And they're delusional if they think that you can either make one of their own, which will never, never, never work, or we don't need a software platform. We'll just write all the applications in-house. Go ahead, do that. You'll get singulared. That's what'll happen. And it may take two decades of pain and suffering to Marco's point. It'll suck for us the whole time if this reverses and goes through the whole industry and we got to wait for a whole other decade long cycle for these idiots to get their heads out of their butts.

1:23:06But inevitably, it will happen because there is no fighting against software platforms. That's where the innovation happens, that wherever the platforms are popular, where developers are making software, that's where it happens. And look at Waze. It's like, well, that's software innovation for like cell phones. We want software innovation for cars. That also happened on the phone. phones aren't cars but that's where all the good applications for cars came from on the because people can bring their phones into their cars so there's just there's literally it's like the worst decision ever to decide i don't want any of the world's most popular software application platforms to be able to use their software integrated into my car we're not saying like you gotta let them take over everything like apple wanted to do where they take over the instrument cluster and the climate controls or whatever like by all means car makers keep the car stuff to yourself all we're saying is carve out a little place on your dashboard for android and ios and whatever the hell future platforms but you know the headset thing who knows whatever for for that app ecosystem to be in your in your cars you should be thanking them so that they allow their apps to be in your cars because they add value to your cars value you can never make yourselves because you're never going to make a software platform as good as any of those and even if you did it wouldn't matter because you're just one car company if you're like well I'll make a platform for all car companies and everybody will use Ford OS.

1:24:23Yeah. Good luck with that. Well, I'll make a platform that's independent of any car company. Yeah. That's called iOS or Android for now, for now iOS is independent of any car company. And so is Android. Once Google starts making their cars and Apple starts making their cars, it makes things more complicated if that ever happens. But GM, this is a terrible decision. I know you think it's defensible and I'm sure like, you know, if it works the way Marco says for the next decade, you'll make those billions of dollars of revenue. And then the executives who were in charge of that will retire and tell their grandkids how successful they were as executives but then when they die some point later uh you'll have to reverse course because this is a bad decision all right two counterpoints number one tesla tesla is very successful despite what we think of their you know stupid leader they are a very successful car company that makes overall first mover advantage and they have good cars yeah overall very good cars um and people are very happy with them for the most part and so they and they have never supported carplay or android auto and it doesn't seem like that's in the cards for them i think they they seem to feel pretty strongly about not doing that and they have all their own built-in stuff and it is not great but it is first of all it's the best i've ever used that wasn't apple uh designed like it's it's there's lots of issues i have with tesla's ui and and especially that the weird redesigns that they did over time when i owned when i owned those cars but their their in-car ui was the best i've seen until rivian rivian i think is a little bit nicer but it's overall very similar in terms of quality and design work whereas everyone else is well below the two of them as far as i've seen but the point is tesla shows that you actually don't need carplay that you can be a wildly successful car maker making cars that people generally love and are willing to keep buying even though you don't have carplay so that's but that is a that is a pressure on them though everyone always wants tesla to integrate carplay and the more competitors tesla gets in terms of hey here's a pretty decent uh ev you can say well it's not as good as tesla but the counterbalance says yeah but this one has carplay or android auto that is that is a competitive disadvantage and i understand tesla's you know run by a stubborn child who's gonna do whatever like there's no reasoning with that or whatever but it's still you know i'm not saying it's a fatal decision for tesla but it is a disadvantage it's increasingly a disadvantage because if everybody else has it and you don't that's a disadvantage for you now again if the whole rest of the industry goes the way of tesla then that ceases to become a disadvantage and then tesla it looks even better because they have decent software but you know there there are there is pressure on them right now anyway to integrate android auto and carplay the fact that they're just not giving into it because again they're run by a stubborn child who doesn't really listen to reason that doesn't mean anything one way or the other like they're very successful because they made really good cars and they had a first mover advantage and like exactly yeah but and and they can and that's a perfectly that's not like oh well that doesn't count it counts totally that's that's a way to have an advantage but in the disadvantage column is no android auto or carplay it's just that their advantage column outweighs that right so i don't think they're proof like again if you if you had some company that could make cars as good as tesla and as cheaply as tesla and also had a carplay and android auto that would be better for them again i think that why did lucid backslide because lucid was also out of the gate without supporting either one of them and very recently lucid added support i think lucid is doing it because they have many disadvantages against tesla and that nobody knows who they are and this is their very first car and so on and so forth and they're like we need a little bit more in the advantage com what can we do easy carplay integration tesla doesn't have it we do uh you know it's it's a little thing but i'm saying industry-wide you know deciding that the whole industry doesn't need popular software platforms is just a big mistake.

1:28:06Second counterpoint, what GM is doing is not just making their own OS from scratch. What they're doing is switching to Android Automotive. Now, Android Automotive is not Android Auto. It's a quick recap. We covered this a few months back, but basically, Android Auto is like CarPlay. Show a projection of your phone on a screen in the car. Android Automotive is an entire real-time OS that takes over the gauge clusters and everything else in the car and it is the car's ui and the car makers can work with google to customize android automotive to be the underlying os of the entire in-car uh you know system the entertainment system the screens everything else oh and android automotive like you can't there are apps for it like there are third-party apps for it i think but it's like a very very small selection and it's very different uh requirements and everything so it's never going to be like you know a healthy ecosystem um by any means it's always going to be like a smaller subset but there at least is a path but what i think is going to happen is android automotive because it's like you know the new baseline it's going to be like android in kind of you know in a bad way where all the manufacturers are going to eventually switch over over over the long haul i think they're all going to switch over to android automotive as their like base os for their tech stack but they're going to customize it and limit it and restrict it like crazy because they can the same way that carriers used to heavily restrict android then customize and they would build their own you know special experience on top of it that had only their apps and required only their you know subscription stores and all that other crap like that's what it's going to be like old carrier branding on phones where like you know the verizon motorola phone or whatever was running Motorola's OS, but it was full of Verizon garbage and you couldn't change it and you couldn't install whatever you wanted.

1:29:59That's going to be what happens here, I think, where it is Android Automotive underneath and I think it's going to, again, I think it's going to be a very popular choice over time for car makers, but it's not going to give you the kind of freedom and flexibility that CarPlay and Android Auto do, where you're just running apps off your phone and it can be pretty much whatever you want. If it comes out like the cell phone market, though, say that becomes the Android of the automotive world, which would be fitting, given its name. The money in the mobile phone market is not so much on Android. Even though iPhone has minority market share, it has majority revenue and profit share.

1:30:32And if these car companies want to make a lot of money, following the Android route is probably not going to be as lubricative as following the iPhone route. And also, Android being massively successful in the most popular mobile phone platform in the world did not eliminate the iPhone from existence. Also, it didn't take money, didn't make the iPhone have a minority of the profits or revenue either. So that's a problem for these companies, especially the high-end ones because as long as apple still exists and still has the customers with all the money and still makes the most money on its platforms and still continues to have car play as a thing that exists someone's some singular is going to take them up on that offer and say hey everybody else has got android automotive with that limited selective android automotive things and the carrier junk all over everything and so on and so forth and it's the most popular automotive platform in the world it probably already is by the way android automotive is probably the most popular that tons of car companies use it i think even casey's volva uses at this point it's the most popular in the world but if you want to make money you got to support the apple thing because that's where the money is right yeah so i i think car makers if they think this will play out just like the phone market did that is not a positive scenario for them because they pick the one that doesn't make all the money uh and nobody is apparently picking the one that does make the money so we'll see how it goes but like and also by the way building on top of android automotive is the same thing that these car companies give lip service to of like oh you know why are we letting some other company own the platform that runs our cars well you're already doing that and you know why because you suck so bad at it that you just said let's just go to a lot of car companies tried to make their own and did such a bad job that they said you know what we changed our mind we're just going to use android automotive and brand it well but you know i i think there was a lot of like you know random middleware being sold you know qnx based whatever is like going on like they weren't right on their own os's yeah because in the car industry the car the car companies don't make the things themselves like suppliers do i forgot who the big supplier was of infotainment before Android Automotive swept through the industry, but they didn't make good software either.

1:32:22And by the way, Android Automotive is CarPlay compatible. One of the things it can do is show a CarPlay window, and it's fine. So it's really just down to they're going to, as the carrier in this model, they're going to just disable that. They're going to just not allow that to run. When you say a car supports CarPlay, it's probably running Android Automotive, and it's just showing CarPlay in the little carve-out for it that Android automotive products did either you recall if bmw switched android automotive recently too oh i don't know that would surprise me i don't know either because i think that they were so proud of their software platform and i think they wanted one of the last holdouts but i think i recall a story where they finally gave in i don't know someone from bmw will write it and tell us we'll have to see i i know that like the newer stuff like the ix i think it might run a very a very new software stack so maybe some of the newer stuff might be yeah anyway the point when you're running android automotive you don't know it that's the point of like it doesn't look there's no i thought the so we don't have android automotive and our volvo but the pullstar ones do run the newer ones yeah and i i haven't seen a screenshot i'm not gonna look it up while i'm talking but i thought it was at least slightly obvious that it was android but i may be wrong about that well it looks different right if maybe if you know what to look for but it's they're heavily branded like i think i think the hondas are android automotive at this point too like the hondas look like honda right the you know the kia ones look like kia the honda ones look like hyundai and it could be android automotive under the covers it is it is a lower level thing and to marco's point the carriers quote unquote can customize it up the wazoo that's the point of that platform that's i think that's what apple was trying to do with their thing who knows where that's going but they have the same idea look we're just like android automotive oh no apple would never in a million years allow any kind of customization like this that was their pitch was you can use our thing and you can customize it with your look and feel but you're right that they would allow less customization yeah it'll be like give us a tint color well i think it'll be more than tint color but less than android automotive not much more than tint color i don't know where that effort is going i remember there was in it was in like a presentation an event presentation i haven't heard much about it but things take a move slowly in the automotive industry so we'll see where it goes like again android automotive has taken years and years to like for every car company to eventually give in and say we give up trying to give money to i wish i knew what the manufacturer was there's a bunch of infotainment manufacturers that took on this hey we'll make the interfaces to your things and they made them in the 90s and they made them with bitmap displays and then they just they couldn't keep up and so android automotive has kind of taken over that type of thing but that is entirely i feel like even though it's it seems like it's technically related it is business model independent of this decision because you can use android automotive and choose not to support you know carplay or android auto at all and that's what i mean i'm assuming gm is using android automotive and it's also choosing not to support a carplay or android auto with it but they are choosing to support things like spotify and stuff like that so they do deals with spotify just like they do deals with sirius you know all the the car makers did that like they see the dollar signs in that and it is a way to make money like oh we don't have an app platform and we're never going to make one but you can get spotify and you can get audible and you can get sirius xm if they still exist and you know whoever we partnered with and we'll we'll take your money for that and it's like you know it's on star and all that it's the modern version of on star and sirius radio this is just these type of deals but that's not a software platform the next time the next really good car app comes out again for all we know it could be a glasses slash headset car app or something that's they're not going to have it but the carplay ones will because carplay is like look we don't know what's going to be on this little rectangle you just i just decide where the rectangle is and how you navigate to and from it and it is shows what's on your phone platform and that is an entire platform that we don't own that we don't control but that we don't have to support and that somebody else you know fosters innovation in and somehow developers make these amazing applications and then voila they get to appear in our car, which makes us have an easier sales pitch versus Tesla, which doesn't allow that to happen.

1:36:10I don't know. I think it's more likely that they'll do a couple of deals. They'll have like Sirius and Spotify and that'll be it. And people will say, OK, I guess that's enough. Like for many, like if you look at what people actually use on CarPlay, it's not a large number of apps it's a it's apple's built-in stuff and maybe a maybe a third-party mapping app which is almost certainly google maps or ways like that's that's just two they're even both owned by the same company even apple maps because i mean i feel like apple maps is at this point better than the in-car navigation of any car oh it is but again like but this is like when you look at what people actually are using it's like one map app that might be might already be google maps and therefore already might be included in Android Automotive.

1:37:00And then also, you know, whatever their streaming music app is of choice, which is most likely Spotify for most people. And so all they have to do is make a deal with like one or two, you know, music playing services and that's it. But that changes. That's the point of the platform. You don't know what's going to be the next popular app. Right now it's Spotify. Years ago, it would have been a different set of things, right? Like you don't know where the next Waze is going to come from. You don't know where the next Spotify is going to come from. You don't even know that Spotify is going to be on the top of streaming audio forever because at one point it wasn't.

1:37:29And right now it is like that's what a platform is. It's a place where no matter who ends up being on top, if we're running our platform right, you can get that on our platform because we have the customers with the money. And so here we are. Again, we may have been for a decade of very dark times where you can't use these things on any platforms. But I think inevitably it's going to have to come back around because there's no defeating software platforms. That's where the innovation happens. And that view you have is exactly the right view of a short-sighted executive who's going to retire soon, which is like, look, for the next 10 years that I'm working, we're going to do this deal.

1:37:58We're going to make tons of money that I'm going to retire. Success. But on the long view, if you're not supporting a software platform of entry, all those deals that you made with those companies for those individual car things, they will not be on top anymore. and the ones that are going to be on top will rise to the top not on the market of things that do special deals with bmw and gm but on whatever the popular platform of the day is whether it's still mobile phone platforms or headset platforms or whatever the heck it is that's where the new things come from that's where they rise up you know instagram doesn't rise to fame as a windows application okay it rises to fame as an application on a platform that windows didn't even worry about until it was too late right that's what will happen in the future i hope you're right but i i don't think probably be dead but you know yeah i don't i don't think that's a four-hour conclusion i hope you're right though yeah i think there's a couple of interesting things here i see both of your points and i i i think there's more truth to what marco's saying than i want to admit because i really don't want to lose uh car play in in the cars whatever cars i buy in the future um but you know i think a lot of the justification that a lot of people particularly the ev uh manufacturers are making is that, hey, we want to be able to do a really good job of helping you navigate and charge your car as you're on a road trip.

1:39:13I genuinely don't have the faintest idea if there's one or several apps that do a good job of this. And honestly, it doesn't really matter for the point I'm trying to make. But what happens if there is like a Waze for, or hell, even Waze itself, for mapping and charging where it is able to figure out Electrify America, Tesla, whatever else. Those already exist. Doesn't Google Maps do that already? I think, no, but like there's already apps that do this. You know, there's like PlugShare and a bunch of other ones. But do it incredibly well to the point that like Waze is the de facto standard for most people that commute.

1:39:49Is there something, and honestly, yes or no, it doesn't really matter. But what if there is a Waze for EVs, not in terms of traffic, but in terms of like route planning and whatnot. And I think that GM particularly was citing like route planning is one of the reasons that they want to control the whole widget is because, oh, we'll do route planning better than anyone else. And I think if there becomes a de facto standard or maybe there is, again, if there is one, it doesn't matter. But if and when that time comes, then it's going to be a real competitive disadvantage not to have Waze or the route planning thing with charging on your electric car.

1:40:27and that's going to make all these non-CarPlay, non-Android Auto electric cars seem real bad. That's just one path to where it can become a real competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, at least for now, all these other makers, Kia, Hyundai, a lot of these other ones, Chevy at the moment, they're all offering Android Auto. They're all offering CarPlay and I think people are turning to them more and more. I'm seeing more and more of these regular people EVs over time. I also wanted to point out, this was linked from Gruber's post, there was an interview between the Rivian CEO, RJ Skarange, I think is how you pronounce it, and MKBHD.

1:41:04And MKBHD specifically asked him, like, what's the deal with the lack of car play? And the quote from the CEO was, the thing about controlling the software stack is we get to continually make it better. So you've had your R1T, you've hopefully seen this every few weeks. We have a new software release that either adds features, addresses gaps, we listen to feedback, and our head of software development is on Reddit all the time hearing what people are saying. and he continues later, it drives our software roadmap and makes sure that we're delivering what customers want. Well, first of all, if you were delivering what they'd want, you'll give them frickin' CarPlay.

1:41:32But leaving that aside, I think the one advantage that the software-friendly EV makers, which is basically Tesla and Rivian, the one advantage that they have, especially compared to Apple, is that they can innovate and deliver fast. Now, I would also argue that it's not as big a deal for Apple because CarPlay itself doesn't need to innovate as much when you're offloading the mapping to another app, when you're offloading the charging to another app, when you're offloading the listening to podcasts to another app. But it is an interesting counterpoint, even though I am 1 ,000 % team CarPlay slash Android Auto, it's an interesting counterpoint that at least these software-heavy car companies actually deliver in a speed that certainly, I can't speak for Android, but certainly Apple is not delivering at that speed right now.

1:42:19I mean, yeah, they are fine, but like that's not that seems like an independent concern they should do that for all the things that their software controls which is the whole rest of the car like the climate controls all the features of the car the instrument cluster the the the automatic self-driving driver aid things like oh like yeah that's their job and the fact that they innovate uh they're iterating better than apple i mean we know that's not apple strength right but still uh on terms of the platform every year apple has a new ios and in general they get better and have more features is that CarPlay itself may be a much slower rate of innovation there, but I feel like the main job of CarPlay is connectivity, which they have done at least something.

1:42:57They went from wired to wireless. I feel like there's still room for improvement there, but they did something there. It's mostly just about make a place on the dashboard where our software ecosystem can have a foothold. And then exposed to that software ecosystem will be all the applications on iPhone or on iOS or on Android that want to be useful in a car. So even something like a podcast player, for example, might have awareness of the CarPlay exists and provide support for it. That's different than when you're holding your phone. So you can use Overcast while you're in your car. And certainly mapping applications like Waze are motivated to do that, even though you can also use it by just having the car, the phone mounted on your dashboard.

1:43:36Right. I think the whole idea of like sticking your phone to your dashboard is a weird thing that we have to do during this transition. and if things go the Marco way and we have these dark days where everyone kicks off Android Auto and CarPlay, people will go back to sticking their phones in the dashboard. We've already proven that we're willing to do it. That's what I do. You know, you do it in your Tesla, right? Or you'll probably end up doing it in the Arabian, right? I do it in my car that has CarPlay. Why? We've gone over this because it's better. Because CarPlay is nice to have, but it's actually not that good in certain ways.

1:44:12you know it admittedly it's better than not having it but uh but you know sometimes you have to actually see the phone for something like like ways in carplay is kind of buggy and sometimes you have to do stuff on the phone you know sometimes you have to like enter stuff on the phone it's not great you know you ideally you don't do that while you're moving and and what's great about a like you know dashboard clip for your phone is that you don't have to worry about all this crap that they're doing you know with disabling car player whether your car has or not like you can just put your phone there done and then it's the same and you can use ways the regular way that is the most reliable way to use ways and people are familiar with their phones like that's the main advantage that it has it's like you know it's not it's not learning a new thing you already have your phone you already use it all the time it is a familiar interface in place for you which in many ways i think makes it safer honestly like you know with carplay you know obviously the you know the way it's less safe is if you get tempted to like start texting people that's obviously worse but with carplay you have a learning curve and you have to kind of you know futz with stuff a little bit more but it has bigger targets in carplay you know and there's less you can do so like you know it the advantage of carplay is like if you go if you try to do something that you shouldn't be doing in your car it just won't let you like you just can't um the downside is you actually might spend a decent amount of time scrolling around the screen and there and possibly having your eyes partially off the road when you if it was just using your phone in a dock right next to the steering wheel you could actually be faster and have your eyes off the road less time but so it's it's kind of a complicated you know balance there it's not it isn't you know entirely on one side or the other but you know we we will always have that option as long as they keep having bluetooth that exists you know ideally we have better options but you know we might not and some scenarios you don't even need any car connectivity like i'm kind of amazed this hasn't happen i know car makers have done this stupid incredibly stupid thing which i think we'll look back on and laugh i laugh at it right now we're very high-end luxury cars in the back seat like in the center armrest they'll have an android tablet that comes with the car it really happens all like a literal android app it'll be branded and it'll be like hidden that it's android but it'll be an android tablet and you'll be able to put it on your lap and adjust the climate control all sorts of silliness right but like and we're talking about uh holders on the dashboard where we stick our phones to which is made way easier and cooler by magsafe i'm a convert now that i don't have to use a stupid clip i use the magsafe's gray but it's kind of amazing that no one has as far as i'm aware said you know what uh you know we're going to do the instrument cluster climate controls you know driving controls cruise control all that stuff right um but in the place in our dashboard where normally there would be a you know a big like a big touch screen we're not going to put that there instead just stick your ipad there it's basically an ipad mount and you don't even need any connectivity to the car because if you want to run a cool mapping application on a huge screen just use your ipad like or the luxury brands are like our car comes with an ipad but no one's willing to do that they all come with junky android tablets no one has been willing to say guess what the center touch screen on our dashboard it's an ipad i mean obviously apple would do that right if anyone's going to do that apple would but no car maker has done it yet so you see just how many times like we're talking you know how many people use cases on their phone look at go through a parking lot and next time you're in a big like place with a big parking lot and look in all the cars and see how many of them have a place for it to mount a phone and and then account how many of those cars already have carplay but like marco choose to mount the phone anyway it is this really common thing and i think if android auto and carplay ever go away entirely people will just continue to mount their phones and i i would hope that car executives would be like the same the reason i think the reason a lot of people integrated carplay is they understood as drivers of cars themselves and as observers of the car industry hey you know i look around and i see a lot of people with their cell phones mounted to their car dashboard can we make them not do that because it seems like that like we're trying to design interiors of our cars but now all of a sudden we have to account for where they're going to try to mount a phone why don't we just let them see their phone display on and then apple's like hello carplay we've been out here yelling at you month like okay well we'll do that that for me i think that's one of the main reasons that carplay even exists is because people voted with their dashboard mounts yeah and said we want this in our cars and if you don't put it in our cars i'm gonna block your carefully designed instrument panel or you know center stack or whatever i'm gonna block your climate control vents you know i'm gonna put i need to use this while i'm in the car if you don't let me and so i feel like that's part of the reason that cell phone sort of projection interfaces even exist and we'll just go back there again if they take them all away i think people will just go back to it again i don't think you know the rivian message here about like you know we want to control the whole stack we're going to do the whole thing like that's what they all say when they're trying to be like they're they have delusions of grandeur into thinking that they are going to make a software platform like we're as good as apple we can make a full software platform we can do everything ourselves kind of like steve jobs saying here's the iphone apple's gonna write all the applications itself that's tenable right no not tenable like if and if they had stuck with that it would have been a terrible decision right um so i feel like the car makers are kind of in the same situation whether they're lying to themselves or lying to us it's hard to say but i say by all means iterate listen to feedback do a great job on your interior interfaces consider physical buttons they're really important but people want the current popular platform which right now with cell phones in their cars in some form or another and if you don't give it to them they're gonna stick it to your dashboard with a piece of tape or something i've already ordered the rivian uh mount for pro clip usa you're preemptively just like blocking i mean the rivian's so big inside you have plenty of room well and like and like sometimes like sometimes they go out of stock for certain vehicle models so i'm like just in case i should probably you know i'll take the 20 risk and i'll order this now yeah i bet some people have had ipads like thinking of you know the whole uh oh yeah i've seen like ipad minis in like ubers and stuff yeah i was gonna say uber lyft like you know their whole business is based on that type of thing kind of like square you remember the square ipad like paying the square that type of thing you know like there have been places where ipads have appeared but just the phone is so much more ubiquitous or any kind of phone not just the iphone but phones are so much more ubiquitous that it's much more common but i i bet there are people out there who have ipads especially ipad minis mounted to their cars is just basically bigger phones yeah they totally do i've seen it like more than once yeah it's and for the record too like that i i watched that rivian um interview from with mkbhd i didn't necessarily take the ceo's answer as we will never do carplay i i kind of took it as like we're not doing it now and we we'll see like that's kind of how it read to me like it didn't it didn't seem like an out an outright like no we're not we're not going to do that kind of thing like it just kind of seemed like we don't want to be pressured into doing that right now right this second that's kind of what it sounded like and i feel like lucid making that move because mostly because they're the most desperate i imagine but lucid making that move is also kind of like you know rivian's kind of looking around right at tesla again just ignore tesla because it's run by a maniac right they're they don't apply logic to what they're going to do but rivian is definitely looking at lucid and going hmm i don't know i mean they're so underwater in terms of like they're trying to make a you know a new cheaper platform they're trying to build the cards that they're trying to sell that like it's rivian is a million things going on at once right so i don't blame them for deep right you know we'll worry about carplay if we're still in business next year like i give give rivian some runway here um but i i feel like in the current climate despite what gm is doing rivian is in the position now where if they if they rolled out android auto and carplay uh the people who already own them would be uh very happy and the people who haven't yet decided to buy them this would be in the plus column for them right now yeah i feel like i feel like with rivian it's it's it's felt more like you know we just haven't gotten to it yet and we don't have a good answer for that yet so we're just gonna you know kind of punt in this weird vague way but it it kind of kind of felt like because because look i mean it's not look we we know the actual implementation of of you know supporting carplane and dorado is for the most part pretty straightforward because the phone's just sending you a video stream you are literally just showing a video stream but you have to find a place within the ui that you made where that goes and that's the tricky part right you basically you make a window and you say here you're gonna have this you're gonna have control over this window that's how everyone else has done it and it works fine but you have to you have to sort of bend your ui around that though you have to say okay well when that goes there what what controls from our stuff does it hide do we have a little sidebar that we show it's always visible with our car stuff how do you navigate between them i'm not saying it's difficult that's what everyone does it's fine i know i know i'm not saying it's hard i'm just saying it does it does take some thought to do so if rivian was planning to do this it's going to take a little bit of effort especially since they're probably in the middle of whatever the next major revision of their you know their own software is you have to really incorporate that into the design to have it work there so what even if they're currently planning to do it i wouldn't expect it for a year oh yeah at least a year because you know obviously like you know they're they're still in pretty early days with like just getting stuff out the door you know getting stuff shipped getting stuff built getting stuff sold and working like obviously like they have a lot more on their plate and so that's why i kind of felt like that's like that's like you know a 2.0 or 3.0 feature and they're just not there yet but it would not surprise me if they add that sometime and it's like okay now we support it that's it like you know no no big fanfare just boom now it's there and at some random time in the future like no no warning just oh there it is you know because i it doesn't seem like it's a principled stand to not do it whereas you know with tesla it's instead of giving you like the one feature you actually want of showing this window with CarPlay in it that we have plenty of space for on our screen.

1:54:00Instead of giving you that one feature, we're going to build 17 games that you will never play and this fart simulator and whatever else that you really don't need in your car. And the one thing you need in your car, we're not going to do because we're run by a child. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Pork Bun. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will 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.

1:54:42Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T - Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental, accidental They didn't mean to Accidental, accidental Tech Podcast So long Oh my god, this ultra fine is driving me nuts. I'm so close If there was a Pro Display XDR in stock in the Westchester Apple Store today, I might have bought it. This thing. Ugh. Why don't you get a studio display? Right, exactly. Why wouldn't you just get another studio display?

1:55:42Not another. I'm sorry. A studio display. No. I really don't want one. It's not that much more expensive than the lg was if i spend two thousand dollars on a studio display that is two thousand dollars for something i'm not that into if i spend five thousand dollars on a pro display xdr i i hate doing that but the result is something that i really enjoy like i love the pro display xd well you gotta you gotta hold strong on that one though because there are you know any day could be mac pro day and if they're going to revise that display now would be the time to do it so You just got to hold out for, I think, another.

1:56:20I know. That's kind of what I'm waiting for. I figure there is probably a revision coming sometime soon. I'm not entirely confident that there's a revision. I'm just saying you got to wait to see. We're close enough now to something happening. And that's something they promised a Mac Pro. I think there's going to be a Mac Pro. Will there be a new XDR? I don't know. I give it like 50-50. But you got to at least wait to see. Because if they roll out the new Mac Pro and there's not an XDR, then you're safe. Just buy one, probably. Yeah, probably. I mean, to each their own. I'm not trying to say you're wrong.

1:56:49but you're wrong. You really think that the XDR is, what is it? It's$6 ,000 with a stand. Is that right? You really think it's$4 ,500 better than the studio display? Oh, no, definitely not. But here's the difference. My option is I can just keep using the UltraFine, which is, I'm currently doing that. Keep using the UltraFine when I'm in this location and just suck it up. That's free. I spent this money in 2016. So it's just, it's free, no additional money here. So I can do this for free, or I can spend$2 ,000 to get the exact same size monitor, which I now feel is too small because I'm used to the XDR.

1:57:31So I can get$2 ,000 for a nicer version of this too small monitor, or I can just use this for free. or i can spend more down the road at some point and get something i actually really like i really like the xdr Everything I've heard from the studio display kind of sounds like, eh, it's good, you know, comma. I don't know. I wouldn't say that. It's better than the LG. It is better than the LG, but is it$2 ,000 better than the LG? Because the LG is sitting here for free right now. See, you don't need it for speakers, and certainly the camera is garbage. But actually, early on, it was a little rough.

1:58:11Like, I had some audio playback issues. I was rebooting it from time to time. I've had zero problems with the XDR. Never, not even a single problem. No, no, I understand that. I understand that. But now I can't recall leaving aside the garbage camera, which the XDR doesn't even have one anyway. I haven't really had any problems with the studio display. And I got to tell you, you know, another thing worth considering, although I think ultimately you're right, but I really, really like having my 2-up 5K setup because I have my UltraMeh on my right-hand side and I have the studio display directly in front of me.

1:58:46My speakers are too big for that. That's fair. You've got a wider desk. Or why not just visamount the damn Ultramath? That would fix the stand problems. Yeah, that would fix some of its shortcomings. That's the thing. Every time I have I wouldn't say chickened out, but every time I've overcompromised on something for logic instead of following my feeling on something, I have almost always regretted it afterwards and i don't want to spend two thousand dollars on something that i that i will regret afterwards i would rather either spend nothing and keep the crap i have now for free or spend more on the thing i actually want again like throughout life like i i have done the compromise thing many times and every single time i regret damn it why why didn't i either you know wait until i could afford the bigger one or the better one or whatever or just stick with what i had like that's so many times i've had that dilemma and made the wrong decision i can identify it and i i see now it's like okay this the studio display it's nice but it's not nicer enough than the lg to be worth replacing the lg for my purposes right at the second if i was using it every day maybe to be different but you know right now it's fine and then the xdr is really nice and i love that it's not an ios computer in there that occasionally has weird bugs and has to be rebooted which again isn't really a thing anymore like literally it literally is a thing but like i have bad news for marco if there's an xdr revision you know it's come on the stupid a13 inside it i mean that's just i'm also glad that i got in before they started adding a series chips to the thing or whatever but it's i mean my guess is a revised xdr will be created on in in the image of the studio display just because assuming they're they're happy with that experience and i have crossed my fingers have not had any problems with my studio display but I know a lot of people have.

2:00:40So I don't know if, if I would be interesting to hear from inside Apple, like how is the studio display viewed? Is like, they decided they're going to make a studio display with smarts and they, they had a bunch, you know, we already have an OS and a chip and everything. Like we have that it's, it's called the A series chips. It's called iOS. We already embedded in lots of little things. We have, you know, there's inside our home pods, inside our Apple TV. Why do we have to make a custom chip and put it in our model? Let's use the A series. We talked about this before. so now they did that uh and from our perspective as consumers it's had its ups and its downs how does apple think it has gone do they think this is a great model we're going to use this for all our future displays or do they think hmm let's let's regroup was this the right decision you know did we do the right thing here or do we regret this do we think that you know the xdr type approach is better where it's just a bunch of you know whatever custom chips in there just for monitor stuff but compared to the studio display the xdr is a quote-unquote dumb monitor not really because obviously it's got like a you know usb hub and some thunderbolt thing and all sort you know there's stuff in there it's not nothing no chips in there but it's not hey this thing runs ios it needs to be rebooted and have firmware updates although the xdr did have firmware updates i believe it's just not like with a progress bar and ios a new version of ios being installed i just looked at um the the article uh from the very simple link in the show notes with the new the upcoming uh samsung and dell big monitors remember when those were announced i yeah we talked about those the hideous looking dell thing oh my god i just yeah i just scrolled down and saw the dell again for the first time since i guess january oh my god that thing is hideous oh wow that i don't care how much that costs i'd rather have the xdr it reminds me of like uh the tv review things i watch that one of the channels i watch has this thing where they do like they invite all the reviewers in to do a blind judging of all the televisions at the end of the year and the way they make it blind is they have like this elaborate you know like stuff like taped you know because you can only see the light up portion of the screen so they try to hide the rest of it so you can't see any other portion of it you couldn't do that with the dell because it was like that lumping stupid oh yeah camera thing could be bulging through you like you'd be able to tell that's the dell i can tell without even the screen being turned on there's no way you can hide it like the only reason the blind test works for tvs is they're all so uniform now it's so easy to hide the bezels and hide everything else in it but the dell is like no you cannot hide this ugly oh god like at least the samsung uh 5k one that they're doing at least they ripped off the studio display like pretty closely like that's samsung for you if you don't yeah exactly it's like if you don't have good design chops at least rip off someone else's good design dell is like nope we're great at this we're gonna do our own thing and then that comes out but hey the feature set on the dell is something else we talked about it before it is i mean look if if i don't think we have a price for that yet do we but man if if we ever if that thing ever comes out like if that's if that's at all price competitive it is gonna it is gonna be you know a pretty big deal but oh god what i mean it's not it's not a looker