553: Cut the Bridges to the Mainland

34:13They support it all. They also have all this built in with amazing flexible templates so you start with one of their professional templates with designs for every different category and use case and then you customize the look and the feel and the colors and the icons and everything so it really looks yours it fits your brand your idea it doesn't look generic or anything like that so it is just a great platform that squarespace has built you can try it yourself at squarespace.com and start a free trial build your site see how it works for you i assure you you're gonna you're going to really love it and you're going to want to sign up so when you're ready to sign up go to squarespace.com slash atp and you'll get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain so once again squarespace.com for that free trial squarespace.com slash atp when you're ready to purchase to save 10 off thank you so much to squarespace for sponsoring our show uh somebody who's at holger elhard uh put together this is so brilliant and i'm so mad i didn't i I don't know if this is the person that put it together, but I tried to source it back to the beginning.

35:13But you know how these images go around the internet. So if someone else made this, write in and tell us and we'll give you credit. But this is as far back as I could trace it. So there's a mechanism on Apple's website where you can compare different versions of the iPhone. And Holger or whomever put together a screenshot of the iPhone 12, 13, 14, and 15. These are non-pros, mind you. And Holger selected blue, whatever the closest thing to blue was. Oh, they're all named blue. That's true. On Apple's website, you can pick which color you want them to be, and they all just say blue. And if you look at the 12, it's a pretty deep blue.

35:48The 13 is, I don't know, an average-ish blue. Then the 14 is a sky blue, and the 15 is freaking white. So as somebody said, as somebody else quipped, you know, Apple needs to replace the toner in their ink cartridge in their printer, because my word, this is one heck of a transition. Yeah, and Apple's press videos, like the event video that we all watched, and their website and the press photos and everything don't really show just how not colored these phones are because you'd be like oh the blue one looks blue the pink one looks pink the yellow one looks yellow like in all apples things but then i started watching like you know youtube reviewers and stuff showing the phones in their videos i'm like wow did they send this person five white phones they all look white it is an incredible challenge of like color i was watching the mkbhd thing he's got a bazillion dollars worth of camera equipment i'm like you could not find a camera that can show this phone is yellow if he held up the blue one and the yellow one and said which one is blue which one is yellow like those are two white phones right obviously the sides it's easier to tell from the sides but his fancy 8k red camera stuff and studio lighting was not able to discern anything but white on the back of these phones it's just yeah like not a saturated year for sure yeah definitely not uh with regard to repairability the iphone 15 Pro and Pro Max are reaping the dividends of the 14 non-Pro of last year in embracing that design.

37:15This is an article in Ars Technica which says, fixing damaged rear glass in an iPhone 14 Pro or an iPhone 14 Pro Max costs you$500 or$550 respectively if you didn't buy Apple Care Plus. That's half of what those models cost to buy brand new. For an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, that charge falls dramatically down to$169 or excuse me, basically$170 or$200, depending on if you're Pro or Pro Max. That is way better. And as someone who has broken the back glass on, I think it was a 12 Pro, thank goodness I had AppleCare because otherwise that would have been ugly. So this is great news. The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro cameras, there was some confusion amongst everyone about this.

37:59And so our friend Andreas Netsman writes, the iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro have identical main and ultrawide cameras, same focal length, pixel or sensor size, and aperture. If you listen closely in the event video, when Apple compares the 15 Pro main camera to the one in the iPhone 15, they're doing that comparison, I'm sorry, to the iPhone 15, not the 14 Pro, because the 14 Pro and the 15 Pro main cameras appear to be identical. Yeah, this was kind of a bummer. I mean, I got it wrong. I think a lot of people got it wrong because Apple said, you know, they talked about how it has the you know it has a bigger sensor and yeah it turns out it's a bigger bigger sensor than the than the non-pro 15 which which is you know we should have caught that that's on us right but still it is very sort of they were they didn't like it's on the screen if you see it like they're not lying but i feel like they are when they do these comparisons it's kind of like when they do the comparisons like look how much faster our computer is than the than the last intel when we shipped three years ago we see that and we go that's a dumb comparison but you know so they can show a chart the chart that shows something dramatic but we're not fooled by it we see the chart and it's like intel and m2 it's like yeah i hope you're better right you know but here it got past a lot of people so we have in the show notes here also petapixel had to they petapixel is where a lot of people the the two big youtubers that i used to watch from dp review went so they're you know no joke website and they just do camera stuff they also got confused and had to put an update on their article that said update the original story said the main camera sensor was the same but it was bigger but actually it's not it's just bigger than the 15 so apple pulled one past a lot of people including us uh but just to clarify uh it's the same uh main camera as the 14 pro yeah which is kind of a bummer to be honest i mean the the the big camera upgrade this year for the main camera um i was hoping it was both hardware and software and it seems like it's really software that that and and the software upgrade from the early reviews where it's using the 24 megapixel combo images which which which is kind of this you know these more advanced processing modes that kind of use interpolation and multiple exposures as the resolution step as well not just the exposure step it seems um and that that seems like i don't have that seems like it's going to be a substantial improvement but it is kind of disappointing that they they kind of made it sound like they had improved the sensor from last year and really you know the sensor is the same yeah so here's the thing um we continue with this but like uh andres continues to say that like one thing they did change is they changed the arrangement of the cameras because they wanted to put the two ones for spatial video next to each other right so the arrangement of like where the little circles is usually people don't even know which circle is which on like which is your 1x 2x but they anyway they changed the arrangement around a little bit right but what this means i think is that the camera like the actual camera hardware in the 14 pro and 15 pro not the max with the 5x but plain old 14 pro versus plain old 15 pro the camera hardware is and the little lenses and the sensors that are behind them seem to be essentially identical am i missing anything i don't think so i think that's correct leaving aside the 5x difference yeah and so here so here it is and and by the way the 3x camera sensor has not changed in three years the you know the ones on the pro that's been the same thing for the past three the iPhone.

41:15So here we have a new iPhone with essentially the same cameras as last year's iPhone. And you were like, Oh, I'm going to buy the new iPhone because it'll have better cameras. This, as Marco said, this year, it does have better cameras because the camera is more than just the piece of hardware. That's in a little circular thing. There's more to it than that. There's the image processor. There's the fact that it combines the 48 and 12. Like it is a better camera. So it's not like, Oh, Apple made an iPhone. The camera's not even better. No, it is. It's just not better in the way we're used to it being better, which is they actually put a different camera module, different lenses, different sensors, both, right?

41:46And on the 15 Pro, that's not the case. Obviously, the 15 Pro Max has the 5X camera, which is totally new, has not appeared in any previous iPhone, is the longest zoom, you know, so on and so forth. So that's a clear bump. But I think this is the first year I can remember where every single camera on the back of the thing did not change from the X Pro to the X Plus One Pro. Just to get ahead of the well actuallys, I thought they said that they put a different coding on it or something like that yeah that's true yeah you're right yeah they did have the the glare although the people who have tested it said if you weren't or if you're still gonna get ghosts and stuff you still will yeah yeah the petapixel video review actually did a good job with that um no i i think the spirit of what you said though is completely accurate i'm just trying to get ahead of the uh well actually crowd yeah and to be clear there may be other subtle changes because we don't it's not like they give us every technical detail the only thing we have to do is what andreas did which is like okay it's got the same aperture the same sensor size like the same zoom range the same like like every spec that they give us about it that's all we can compare with for all we know they did make improvements maybe the sensor reads out faster right maybe it's actually the same size sensor but it's better in some other way we don't know those details but usually when there's a camera update there's something that apple talks about when they introduce the product to say this is better for these reasons like say it has a bigger sensor better light gathering ability and just like you know they did actually brag about the coding saying we have a better coding that helps with flaring and stuff like that and i think it is an improvement but it doesn't entirely get rid of it.

43:09Yeah, and then it's worth noting as well while we're in this kind of section of the follow-up, the 5X camera in the Pro Max, the sensor is larger than the 3X camera sensor by about 25%. Yeah, which is not a small difference. It is kind of unfortunate that the 3X camera, you know, it's always been fairly mediocre and after three years, it's still the same. Not loving that. I mean, and the 5X, I think like, you know, again it's probably choking out more light because of the longer zoom range and everything but it has a bigger sensor to compensate for that so i imagine the 5x is going to be at least as good as the 3x and from the preliminary photos i've seen of people taking 5x pictures on their pro maxes in their reviews it looks pretty much as good or better than the 3x but of course you get more zoom so that's good yep with iowa 17 the iphone 14 pro can also take the 48 megapixel heat images which are approximately five megabytes versus 75 megabytes per image for the 48 megapixel raw files yeah i tried to figure out if because i have a 14 pro i tried to figure out can i take 24 megapixel pictures with the 14 pro it's got all the same camera hardware it doesn't seem like there's i haven't figured out how to do that yet so yeah you can take you know once you up your dios 17 you can take 48 megapixel heat fingers which is nice and like now in the little control on the camera lets you say do you want to take a 48 megapixel raw tap it again 48 megapixel heath i just wish there was a 24 megapixel option like obviously this not obviously i feel like the hardware in this phone could do it it would probably be slower because the pro it's doing more processing and it doesn't have the you know the a17 pro in there which presumably has extra stuff to do this uh so this could be market segmentation or they could just decide the performance wasn't adequate to do 24 megapixel on the 14 pro but when you say like oh the 15 pro the camera is better the camera system the overall thing is better a big part of that is the 24 megapixel thing and if they backported that to the 14 pro now it's going to be like well what is better about the 15 pro camera versus the 14 pro it's a little bit faster there's less you know processing time it's tough to say so i feel like this differentiation of keeping the 24 megapixel on the 15 pro whether legitimate or not does really put is the biggest separation between the two really yeah but keep in mind also like the non-pro 15 has the a16 chip from the 14 pro and but it doesn't have the same camera like that's the whole thing when they were comparing it they were comparing to the 15 so the main the main camera on the 14 pro is not on the 15 today what the 15 has is in some ways the sensor is better than the 14 pro from the reviews i've seen but it's also smaller so presumably less expensive so it's a confusing camera year yeah but i think ultimately what we're seeing here is that most of the camera advancement here is software that is being fairly artificially locked to the new phones which is i mean look the apple has done this before like this this is totally and it's look it's their prerogative to do it if they want to i don't i don't love it but they've done it before and you know oh well yeah so we'll We'll put some links in the show notes to some more reviews of the cameras.

46:15We'll put the Petapixel review from the two guys from the DP review, who did the DP review YouTube videos, who are really alike. And DP review itself, still alive. They have a written review about the cameras. Indeed. All right. So let's talk about the USB-C port and what that lets you do. Apparently, Apple has put together a whole list of things you can do. but one of them is use a display, which is super cool. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I've been so excited with the rumors of moving to USB-C and why I'm so happy that we are finally now having moved to USB-C is that there are so many seemingly edge case use cases that you'll now be able to do either that you couldn't do at all before or that would require some really ridiculous hardware adapters and stuff to do before.

47:10And this is one of those things. Yeah, your iPhone can now just dump out video over USB-C. The lightning port couldn't do that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah, the lightning port didn't have some kind of weird video out capabilities. I forget back in the day. Remember, wasn't that the one that Panic had taken apart where it was doing like an AirPlay thing? I don't think I'll be able to find a link for the show notes, but it was like AirPlaying or something like that. I think maybe even before there was such a thing as AirPlay, into some sort of server within the cable, the dongle itself.

47:41It was bananas. But anyway, yeah, so there's a support document, which we'll link in the show notes. Charge and connect with the USB-C connector on your iPhone 15. You can charge your phone. You can connect your iPhone to iPad, Mac, and other computers. You can charge other devices with your iPhone 15. Play audio, connect to displays, monitors, USB-C displays, HDMI displays, connect to other devices, including CarPlay-compatible cars, external storage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. so yeah i've seen a lot of people connecting their phones to the iphone 15 or 15 pro pro max to things to see which thing will charge which thing uh and you know some of the reviews are saying if you connect to usbc iphones the one with more charge will charge the lesser one because i somehow negotiate this other people were confused because they said when i tried this the phone charged it but when i tried that the thing charged the phone and i couldn't figure it out i recall when we talked about this ages ago that the order that you plug them in is potentially a factor and so far i haven't seen any reviewer even mention that as a factor so if you are testing yourself uh consider testing whether the order that you plug the items in makes a difference i don't remember if it does or not but it's one more thing to try yeah if i recall correctly i you know keep in mind that the iphone 15 and 15 pro being usbc they they seem to be fairly standard usbc PD compatible devices.

48:55And so I believe there is a protocol in USB-C power delivery that allows the devices to negotiate like who has more power here and who needs power here. And forgive me for those of you who know more about this than I do if I'm butchering it, but I believe there is some kind of protocol for that. So it would not surprise me if Apple implemented that protocol. And certainly, yes, the order that you plug things in from what we heard in the past is one of those things where like you know if you have like two usbc batteries and you want one to charge the other typically i believe the protocol is you connect the source battery first and then next you connect the destination yeah and by the way all these features that we're talking about this is part of the benefit of going to usbc it's not like something magical apple did this is part of the spec for usbc all the usbc devices we have and how they do charging and how they how usbc supports video out and how you connect monitors to max with usbc this is not you know this is part of the spec so they're reaping the benefit of moving to a standard that already has these capabilities and people are worried oh apple's going to implement it they're just going to have a usbc shaped hole but all you're gonna be able to do is charge no they implemented full usbc compliant with the standard as you would expect they would because they're one they were one of the early adopters of usbc they've been selling usbc uh devices for ages now and when they brought it to the phone they brought all the features with it yeah and this and this is why i don't care that the cameras are the same for the pro i just i want usbc and titanium so much i hear that something i would like to talk to you folks about perhaps next year i don't think we have time for today but especially next year when when for those of us who are idiots like us they upgrade every year what is the best way to do a phone-to-phone transfer is it a thunderbolt cable between them is it a couple of usbc ethernet adapters i think for this year the best thing is probably just to do the wireless stance that most of us have done in prior years because of the 14 Pro.

50:47But next year, I think all bets are off. There may be all sorts of different approaches that might make this quite a bit faster. And I am not looking forward to my multi-hour transfer from one phone to the other tomorrow. So we'll have to revisit this next September. I think some people did wired transfers this year, but obviously the source phone is going to be USB 2 speeds, no matter what, because you know what I mean? so it's going to be slow but i think it already does work over a wire so i imagine it would continue to work over the wire and only it would go 10 gigabits instead of 480 megabits but yeah we'll find out next year yeah i it occurred to me just a little while ago that i should prepare myself for this so i am currently attempting to back up my phone to my computer because wait a second i could put one of those high-speed thunderbolt cables between my computer and the new iphone and maybe i can do a restore from finder in order to in order to get the new phone set up in less than two hours.

51:38I don't know if I would dress the finder with this, but good luck. I don't know if I do either, but you know, can't hurt to have a backup just in case. Alrighty, moving right along. Praveen Kankatnala would like to know if you could follow up, John, and elucidate why the USB A to C adapters are fire hazards, which is what you said last episode. Praveen says, I tried looking this up, but couldn't find a satisfying answer. I've used a ton of these over the past few years. Now I'm a bit worried. What's going on here, man? lots of people wrote in saying i use these connectors should i be worried and they would send me links to their connectors often and they're not the connectors i was talking about and it's confusing to talk about but we will link in the show notes one of these types of adapters it is basically a usba plug like the rectangular metal thing that can only go in one way but it's externally symmetrical and then a usbc shaped hole in the back of it um and most people were setting the reverse it was like a usbc plug with a usba shaped hole on it which are much more common uh the reason i was saying they're firehizers i'm going on amazon and reading the reviews trying to find a reputable one and every single one i went to had some fairly i mean significant amount of one-star reviews that said melted caught fire never worked blah blah blah all this stuff and i was like surely there's going to be one of these that doesn't have melted or caught fire in multiple melted or caught fire but no they all did and that's what like what i was saying is I couldn't find one from like a reputable brand where I could if there was even a melted or caught fire I'd say well they maybe just got unlucky or whatever right um also when I was searching for this and trying to find ones to link to we have some of these in the house already in our house doesn't burn down my wife bought them I don't remember my room she got her usbc ipad originally she's got one that looks similar to the one that we're going to link in the show notes and she's used them and nothing terrible has happened I was disappointed by the idea that seemingly no well-known reputable brand makes an adapter like this which is why i was suggesting that people just buy a cable because you can buy a cable from a well-known brand that has the two ends that you want it to have and that will solve your problem these tiny little adapters that just turn a usba shaped hole into a usbc shaped hole for you that's what they're doing for you essentially they're conveniently sized and they just do the minimal job but there's something about i don't know maybe they're doing in too small space maybe they get hot maybe they're just made really cheaply and they're like they're like eight dollars and i was like sorting by price highest to lowest which i often do on amazon to say show me the one that's not garbage and then you know you find that ten thousand dollar item at the top like no scroll scroll scroll somewhere between eight dollars and ten thousand dollars is the one i'm looking for and i just couldn't find it so i ordered cables so anyway i don't need any of these you don't have to send me suggestions but that's why i was scared off of these tiny little connectors they're small cheap and plentiful but they all have scary reviews and i already own and i already own some you can kind of figure out like you know maybe one of the issues because you know first of all the reason why reputable brands don't sell those is probably because they're out of the usb specs yeah you're probably it's probably you're not allowed to make something like this according to the spec yeah maybe like you know if you're a usb if member or certified or something maybe maybe you actually aren't allowed to make these but at least you probably wouldn't want to at least but think about some of the conditions you could create with that kind of thing so for instance you could plug your apple you know 100 watt a usb c power adapter into the wall then use one of those adapters to feed that 100 watts of power into a usb a port on something that's weird and you know that could be a problem and you could figure like it may be possible to create some weird scenario like that that that could put a lot of voltage where it shouldn't be or something like that and i know i know there's different safety checks in place i mean you can do that with a usb c to a cable as well but yeah But anyway, so I'm sure it's reasons like that that probably prohibit a lot of these things from being made by any reputable company.

55:23Let's talk about material science, the iPhone 15 Pro and diffusion bonding. Robert Newman writes in, During this week's Apple event, it was explained that the titanium bands of the iPhone 15 Pro are diffusion bonded to an aluminum substructure. As someone that has some professional hands-on experience with diffusion bonding, quick aside, loving our coverage. The amount of different professions that our listeners are in is astounding. It makes me so happy. It really does. Robert continues, I was astounded to hear this. I didn't know there was a practical process for diffusion bonding titanium to aluminum.

55:53Diffusion bonding involves three variables, pressure of the bond line, temperature, and time. The term welding is usually used for processes where metal is melted, but diffusion bonding is different because there's no melting. When two materials are pressed tightly together, some atoms migrate out of one material and into the other. This can even happen at room temperature, albeit very, very slowly. Raising the temperature greatly speeds up the diffusion process so that a strong bond can be formed relatively quickly. The diffusion bonding temperature is always below the melting points of the materials.

56:21That was all news to me and very interesting. And Robert had some other part that I cut out talking about ways that he thought diffusion bonding might be able to be done. Like part of the way they squish the materials together is using metals that expand and contract at different temperatures is to sort of make it like a vice where when you heat it up one of the things expands or contracts faster or slower than the other causing pressure and so you could use the materials themselves to push themselves together while you know you're heating it up to get the heat for the diffusion bonding but the heat also uh expands and contracts things and at different rates causing them to swish together it was interesting speculation about how they might do it but uh but yeah diffusion bonding of course we have an expert in an audience on it um and i do wonder is it just you know does robert had robert just not heard of the diffusion bonding titanium to aluminum or has apple actually innovated in this area it could be either way all right let's talk about battery life and three nanometers and a couple of people have asked about this and i think presumably john was you know having some thoughts about this it seems like we're getting the same battery life claims as the predecessors as the 14 pro and pro max what's up with that and only a 10 cpu performance increase so what's up with that john tell tell us about three nanometers is it already a disappointment what's going on here yeah so when we're talking about three nanometer like oh we're talking about the phones or any of the stuff's coming it's like well when three nanometer comes we will reap the benefits of a silicon shrink the features on the chip will be smaller the chips themselves will take less power for the same number of transistors and obviously apple will use that to put more transistors on which they can use those new transistors to add more powerful features and the same stuff we normally get from a silicon shrink but when the these new iPhones came out, Apple did not really spend any time saying they said, oh, look at our new three nanometer process.

58:04But they didn't say, all right, well, what do you what do we get from that? Do these phones use dramatically less power and therefore get longer battery life? No, their battery life claims are the same as everything else. Are they dramatically faster? These are their Apple's claims in the event. They said 10 percent CPU performance increase and they put on the slide improved branch prediction and wider decode and execution engines those two things could account for a 10 cpu increase right and they said 20 gpu performance increase but of course they added 20 more gpu cores yes i mean yeah okay that makes sense and they added ray tracing features which is more things and you know there are improvements to the a17 pro that you know i think the neural engine is once again faster and bigger and better or whatever but the the sort of what we would expect from a shrink is like okay we did all that but also like it either uses less power or you've clocked it higher with the power over you had and that we'd get a bigger performance increase there's been some investigation of like what is the a17 pro uh revengeness on twitter said matching the code names with the comments that he's looking at source code it appears that h14 that's the code name corresponds to the a15 chip and h15 corresponds to the a16 chip that's not confusing at all however instead of instead Instead of H16, there is a comment called H16 call, C-O-L-L.

59:23Considering that call is the code name for A17, it is suggested that it is suggested great passive voice that the A17 Pro might be essentially based on the A16 architecture with cache optimization, clock upgrades and additional GPU cords. So what they're trying to say is this is kind of a, you know, S6, S7, S8 watch chip situation. obviously every a whatever chip is based on the previous one but there's some minimum amount of architectural change that we expect when they're incrementing that number going from the a14 to the a15 to the a16 we expect these cores are a little bit better they're not exactly the same as the cores were on the other thing the gpu cores are better than exactly the same now the a17 does that the gpu cores are supposedly all new right they have ray tracing features this is the fancy new gpu cores so it definitely qualifies but the cpu the power cores and efficiency cores those cores seem to be pretty much identical with the only things that apple mentioned being improved branch prediction which is a thing you know so they're not exactly identical the branch predictor is a part of the the cpu uh and wider decode and execution engines also important parts of the cpu but that the apple itself is only saying 10 performance increase now people are benchmarking these and sometimes getting now they're getting preliminary benchmarks sometimes getting better numbers than Apple promise.

1:00:38So maybe Apple is under promising on these, but it doesn't seem like a huge advantage. And we don't know because Apple didn't mention whether the rumors about the support chips in the new iPhones using less power because they're on shrinks. We don't know if that's true. Apple didn't say it. I haven't seen a teardown. No one has confirmed or denied that. All we know is what Apple claimed and they claimed pretty much the same battery life as you got before, 10 % better CPU, 20 % better GPU, which is nothing to sneeze at, but this is supposed to be a year with a shrink. So here's what I want to throw out there for us to think about as the year winds on and as we go into next year.

1:01:11TSMC's three nanometer process. Does it provide power savings? I know that's a dumb thing to say. I was like, of course we do a shrink. It provides power savings. You have to be more precise. Basically, like, does it take fewer watts per instruction than five nanometer did? Because obviously, you know, usually you use this benefit to your advantage. you say okay well five nanometer we can do more instruction for the same number of watts of power and we're going to use that to clock the chip higher because the power usage increases there we're going to add more cores we're going like we're going we're going to make the chip bigger we're going to use more transistors like i'm not saying they should just get you know lower and lower power over time but you get you should get a dividend from it so they added 20 more gpu cores right so that's a dividend right that those gpu cores weren't in the a16 and now that there's one more in the a17 and we get the same battery life so that could be them reaping this advantage but they spent very little time making any kind of claims about the power saving advantage of your nanometer and we we read off of like tsmc's own like marketing slides where they say like whatever it was 15 power reduction and 30 more speed or whatever so this is a thing for us to watch as apple ships new three nanometer products to see if we can discern and Is 3 nanometer better than 5 nanometer in terms of power usage per instruction executed?

1:02:36and i don't i'm not sure how we can determine that but i figured as more and more three nanometer things come out we'll have more and more evidence either for or against the idea that three nanometer may not be as big a leap over five nanometer as we thought continuing along um my our friend eric wielander has a pretty good and pretty brief video with regard to the thread radio that is in the 15 pro eric talks about a few things that that having a thread radio could make interesting and the thing that struck me the most was that apparently the way Thread works is some device needs to act as what's called a border router to bridge basically between the IP network and the Thread network and the iPhone 15 could or 15 Pro excuse me could go kind of around that because it can act kind of as its own border router I'm probably getting the details wrong on there on this but the spirit of what I'm saying should be accurate and so you can check out Eric's video which will link in the show notes if you're more interested in that.

1:03:33Eric has a really great channel on home automation stuff. Apple 2030. Apparently, it has always been a thing. Well, maybe not always, but you know what I mean. It's been a thing for a long time, and I just completely missed it. So it is not a new logo. It's not a new brand. And Josh Engelsberg writes, I found this Apple press release from the recent event that clarifies their carbon neutral goal, which reads, by 2030, Apple has plans to be 100 % carbon neutral across its entire manufacturing supply chain and all product life cycles. That means that every Apple device sold from component manufacturing, assembly, transport, customer use, and charging, all the way through recycling and material recovery, will have a net zero climate impact.

1:04:14And you can see more detail about this in question three of their environment FAQ. We will link both of those things in the show notes. Yeah, this was dug out of, what is it, the AirPods 2 second generation press release, right? You would think it would be so easy to find. and i was searching for it searching on the show last night i was searching for it like there's more detail on like question three of their environment fact as well but i would be you know shouting this from the rooftops because it is not what i expected last show i was like are you sure they're they're really accounted for customer use like i know they're doing that for the watch they said they're doing it for the watch but like for all their products that's what they mean by carbon neutral and yes that's what they mean they basically mean like from cradle to grave everything needed to build it to ship it to you everything you do with it the whole time you own it and then reclaiming it and recycling it all of that carbon neutral for every single product is their goal obviously they haven't achieved their goal yet they're just barely getting some watches and some configurations as their first sort of products they're touting like that but that's their goal and that is definitely non-obvious uh so i i would suggest to them that they bold those things in their in their claims and make it easier to find in their fact um because yeah it's not just about building them it's not just about having factories that run on solar panels that's not what it's about.

1:05:22It's about the entire impact of this product they are trying to offset. Which is incredible. And I definitely admire that. It's a heck of a goal and I hope they can reach it. All right. Carlos writes, continuing the trend of having listeners with every single career, again, makes me so happy, and work at a large environmental NGO, what is that non-government organization, which implements some of those Apple funded projects mentioned in the video that protect the world's soil plant and trees. 2030 is a fairly standard goal for environmental commitments. Some examples, U.S. government's 30 by 30 initiative to conserve 30 percent of the U.S.'s land, oceans, and freshwater by 2030.

1:05:59The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act has been designed to meet 2030 emissions reductions targets. The Paris Agreement has the goal of cutting 45 percent of the global emissions by 2030. And the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals is targeting 2030 for reaching all 17 goals. 2030 is going to be a hell of a year filled with disappointments about the Paris Agreement. But anyway, maybe Apple will meet their goal. You never know. And then And finally, will Tim Cook still be at Apple in 2030? And April 5th of 2020, there was a New York Times interview wherein Kara Swisher said, are you going to be at Apple 10 more years?

1:06:31And Tim Cook said, 10 more years? I probably not. But I can tell you that I feel great right now. And the date's not in sight. But 10 years is a long time and probably not 10 more years. Yeah, this is the last show when I made a joke about the 2030 thing of executives being long gone. I'm like, well, when 2030 comes around, Tim Cook probably won't be there. but i didn't do the math in my head i didn't remember when this interview was so i looked it up so it's just on the border tim cook might still be there in fact it would be a great career topper for him to go out and say hey we've achieved our 2030 goal and i'm also retiring uh so watch for that in 2030 hopefully we shall see all right we actually made it throw the fall up look at us go i'm proud of us all right so apple's performance gap do you want me to intro this john how do you want to handle no let me let me do this one all right so this was this is something that is not really related to the apple event that's just related to my pet peeves which you'll know but i was i was reading gruber's post on daring fireball about the apple event and i i came across this passage which again is not particularly about the apple event it's just an aside he says he's talking about the new gpus and the apple things and how apple is emphasizing the gpus and how they had a whole section with gaming or whatever so here's quoting from gruber while apple silicon gpus are also undeniably market leading for phones they're just as undeniably not market leading npcs where nvidia reigns supreme and then he says i firmly believe apple wants to do to nvidia with gpus what they did to intel with cpus match or surpass them in pure performance and utterly blow them away in performance per watt so he's saying you know what apple did with apple silicon to the intel cpus who just like smashed them that's what apple's going to do or aiming to do with their gpus because right now they're behind on gpus uh nvidia is the king of that.

1:08:14And so, but see, so he describes what did Apple do to Intel with the Apple Silicon stuff? And what he says is match or surpass them in pure performance and utterly blow them away in performance for what? And I got hung up on the first part of that match or surpass them in pure performance. I think a lot of people, especially if you listen to podcasts like this, where we're constantly going on and on about how amazing Apple Silicon is, and it is amazing. Start to think Apple Silicon is better than Intel in every way. And the two ways that, you know, the one way we always talk about is, oh, performance per watt, they're great on low power, so on and so forth.

1:08:48But also, they're the fastest, right? No. Apple Silicon does not match or surpass Intel CPUs in pure performance. Setting aside performance per watt, which we'll get to in a second, they just don't. If you look at Apple's best single core score, which is apparently the M2 Max on Geekbench, which again, it's just one benchmark, but you know, it's not close. It's 2 ,800 around for the M2 Max and Intel's best at three gigahertz is 4 ,200. Multicore M2 Ultra is Apple's best, 21 ,300. Intel's best, without getting into the ridiculous chips, 29 ,000, right? Apple does not beat Intel in quote unquote per performance.

1:09:30I'm not jumping on Gruber about this because I think this is an important point with my whole hobby horse of the Mac Pro and everything. we all start to think that that's true that apple silicon is better than intel in every front and it just becomes sort of received wisdom but they're not right and you may be saying this is like okay well but i don't care about pre-performance well i'm i'm saying it because gruber specifically pointed out as in contrast to performance per watt but but they they just don't and it's easy to think that they do but they don't but then people it's like okay but i don't care about the mac pro apple still makes the fastest laptops right apple's laptops surpass intel in pure performance right no they don't you can buy a faster intel laptop again in pure performance now does apple make the best laptop chips yeah i think so because laptops are kind of supposed to be battery powered and as soon as you unplug that fastest intel laptop it goes whoa whoa whoa i'm not plugged into the wall anymore i can't handle this i'm going to burn through my battery in five seconds and it throttles way way down right so if you want to make this statement the guru made you'd have to qualify it and you have to say match or surpass intel and pure performance and laptops when they're not plugged in it doesn't sound quite as impressive you know and again i think apple does make the best laptop chips because it's really important for a laptop chip not you know use 150 watts of power but they don't make the pure fastest and by the way intel you know intel has been behind in many reasons one of the reasons is their inability to fab things at modern sizes they're doing a little bit better on that we'll link in the show notes soon our technical article about Intel's upcoming laptop chips where they're getting a little help from TSMC.

1:11:06They're not getting in three nanometer because Apple bought all that up. So all poor Intel, uh, but they're getting a little bit better. But the point is, this is what I, you know, when I was talking about when Apple, Apple has seeded the high end, I didn't just mean the Mac pro. If it's important to you, like to go on, you know, to have like a mobile 3d rig where you take your laptop somewhere on site and you plug it in, you know, you put it in your luggage, you go, you land there, you open up your thing and you plug it in and you want the fastest possible laptop intel has that intel has the fastest possible laptop because they have the fastest possible chip yes you have to keep it plugged in but like if you care about the high end apple is just not competing there anymore which may be fine because again you like if you think about well you know i i buy volvos volvo doesn't have the fastest possible car no they don't volvo has nothing that can compete with ferrari like but sometimes you want a ferrari and apple doesn't sell that anymore and so it's important to keep that in mind i'm not saying that apple is doing anything wrong, especially when it comes to laptops, because I think it's the wrong trade-off to make on a laptop.

1:12:01Like Apple's making the right trade-offs. Again, I think they have the best laptop things. But if, you know, don't be fooled into thinking that because Apple Silicon is amazing and especially amazing for laptops, it also means that Apple Silicon is the fastest around. It's not, and it's important to keep that in mind. All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Joel L. writes all the pictures of Marco's car as rapidly changing chapter art made me wonder how those work. Are they embedded in the file, or are they loaded on demand by a URL? I believe MP3 chapters don't have much space allocated to them, so I can't imagine that you can put the whole image in.

1:12:40But if they're point-just URLs, then they are basically the same as tracking pixels if someone wanted to generate an individual image URL for each person and or point in the episode. Or excuse me, are they the same as tracking pixels? So Marco, what'd you do? Great question, and exactly right on that concern about dynamically loaded images being potential tracking pixels and privacy invaders so here's how those work so first of all they are not dynamic urls they are actually baked in as chapter images chapter images are part of the id3 tag and so they're size limited only by the size of how big an id3 tag can be and if you really stretch it id3 tags can be very large you know many many megabytes at least i don't have the exact number off the top of my head but size is not a is not a problem there it's simply that you are therefore forcing everyone to download all of those images as part of the mp3 so you don't want to make you don't want to spend a huge amount of the file size as images when that's really not what most people are there for so um you can indeed put full-size images in them and you can put many of them in there uh there was one episode where i put something like 70 images as chapter art to form an animation every couple of seconds during our theme song so that was when we when we embedded jonathan man's um butterfly keyboard song we'll link to that somehow so anyway um it is possible to do that they all fit and it's fine they're all part of the file and in fact oh and and the way i do it is i i just shrink them down to be maybe like a few hundred kilobytes each because the thing is like artwork that you're embedding in an mp3 for like chapter artwork or whatever is usually viewed at pretty small sizes so if you just use jpeg with pretty low quality settings like 40 quality on jpeg you can usually get pretty much anything down to a few hundred kilobytes and in the sizes at which they're being viewed it's totally fine like no one really notices the problem um so anyway um and interestingly what i like about this question is that joel correctly identifies like if you have a spec that you're trying to get past to have podcast players load images dynamically during playback that is absolutely a potential privacy hole and you can absolutely bet that that would be abused by ad tech companies so that's why there are a few like proposed specs and alleged standards out there standards nobody supports um for things like loading images via url upon playback or during playback and overcast will not support those standards for exactly this reason because right now, the way podcast ad privacy works is, yeah, they'll get your IP when you download the file because they have to.

1:15:18But after that, they'll get nothing from you. They don't know. Did you play the episode? Where did you play the episode? How long after downloading did you play the episode? How far into the episode did you get? They would love to have that information. And in an ideal world, that sounds reasonable. However, we all know it would be abused like crazy because that's what ad tech people do and so i don't i don't want to do that so anyway overcast will not support any standard that loads stuff dynamically like that unless i can do it in some kind of privacy protecting way and frankly i don't see that really happening so uh here we are all right mr writes can you explain how binning works with silicon chips do manufacturers count on x number of chips being defective how do they count on the defect being the same john what's going on there i mean they don't count on them being defective but they are like they they they see the results of how good is our fabbing if they could get 100 of them not to be defective they would but they can't so there's always some percentage of defects and they want to drive that down to be lowest um are they always uh you know have defects in the same way no absolutely not what they do is they partition off pieces of the chips that they can essentially say hey if anything is wrong in this whole gpu core basically like cut its bridges to the mainland i think they have like you know i don't know if they have like tiny little fuses that they blow in the thing or i don't know what the technology is but essentially they they separate they they electrically separate it from the whole rest of the chip and they are you know they just disable it entirely but you don't know where the error was in that gpu core could have been anywhere that could have messed up all sorts of places to just look if it doesn't work the whole gpu core gets cut off but there could be problem defects with the chip that span regions or they go in areas that they can't remove like there's essential parts of the chip that kind of have to be there and have to work and if those are busted the whole things gone so yeah that's how it works they every chip that comes off they will test to see which parts of it work and which part of it don't and sometimes if you're lucky one of the parts that doesn't work is a part that you can separate off because you decided ahead of time when you design the chip we're able to disable gpu cores or this or that the other thing and and so and if everything else works that's still a good chip and so you put that you you know you bin that one and say not bin as in the uk thing of throwing in the garbage can but you say if you separate them to different bins here are the ones where everything works here's the one where everything works except for one of the gpu cores here's the one where everything works except for one of the cpu cores or whatever part of the chip you have decided to have time that if we have a defect only in here we can isolate that and still have a good chip yeah there's also there's different types of binning so that's like you know what if you can disable a whole core and separate out the defect and the rest of it still works there's also apple doesn't really do this as far as i can tell anymore but um frequency binning where you know this is still a still a thing i think in most other places especially in the intel world certainly in the gpu world i assume um where you you have the idea of like you run this chip and it turns out this chip at the like highest uh power level and spec that you are selling this product line at maybe it doesn't pass the tests but maybe if you lower the clock speed down to you know you know 4.0 gigahertz instead of 4.2 gigahertz or whatever if you lower the peak speed down maybe it works at that speed so that's how they can sell slower speed chips if they sell multiple speeds again apple doesn't really do this with their chips but you know intel sure does um so this is one of the reasons why pc cpus are sold at different clock speeds that way they you know they can manufacture them and they as far as i know i don't know if this is still the case today this might be an overly simplistic view from the past but they would try to make all of them meet all the highest specs and then they would they would realize okay well only 10 of them actually can perform at 4.2 gigahertz so we're going to have that be the high speed that we sell we'll sell that one for more money and all the ones that don't pass that but pass at 4.0 we'll sell that as the next speed down and then maybe we'll sell 3.6 as the next speed down for those that didn't even pass that you know etc yeah that's part of the when we think about silicon chips and the whole world of computers being like you know digital logic right but in the end these are analog devices that's why things like how good your cooling system is and you know how well manufactured the tiny little features on the chip are you know like how how carefully arranged all the atoms are with all the pieces and traces on there uh it's an analog device in the end they're little analog transistors in there and they're manufactured in an essentially an analog process and each one is its own special little snowflake in many ways and that's why you have to kind of test them and say well this one runs okay at this speed at this temperature uh but if it goes if it gets a little bit too hot it crashes so if we bring the speed down like it's very sort of that's what the overclocking world is very much like doing like hot rodding cars right where you have an engine and you know an internal combustion engine it's clearly an analog device how fast can i make it go do we need to put new lighter pistons in stronger connecting rods right uh you know bigger intake like you're trying to see how fast will it go before it blows up and just like hot rodding these overclockers they run it until it doesn't work anymore like okay let's dial it back a little bit and they just get just at the ragged edge of how fast can i make this go and if i put liquid nitrogen on it and then you know super cool it and crank up the clock speed how long does it work before the game crashes obviously that's not the way most of us want to live and i imagine that's part of the appeal to apple of just saying look we don't do clock speed binning like what that means is when we get these apple silicon chips some of them could go much higher clock than others because that that variation still exists in the chips they're just not testing for it and selling based on it but there is the same variety and clock speed variability you know obviously different chips have different ranges of of where they'll work but if there was i don't think it's a big apple silicon overclocking community but hey you could get one and you can get a lucky one if you could crank that clock speed up so you know what my mac laptop or mac studio or whatever is actually stable at you know stock speed plus whatever gigahertz right or you put a bigger cooler on or whatever so um it is interesting that apple has chosen not to do that because back in the intel days they absolutely would and the power pc days as well because they were buying their chips from somebody else and intel bins like that and intel charges more for the ones that go higher speeds so apple will helpfully pass that on to us with their own little markup added all right jason falero writes with regard to our salute to lightning from a couple of weeks back does the industry have something on the horizon that would eventually supersede usbc's form factor it seems like a reliable and dare i say timeless design if there would be a revision what might that look like i'm personally curious from a water resistance standpoint and connector design to make things difficult to snap off or do you guys think that the slim oval form is here to stay and that pin designs and faster chipsets will allow for faster data or charging in the future I don't know.

1:21:54It's a great question. I get the vibe that we're going to have this physical connector for easily five, probably 10 or 15 years. I mean, look at USB-A. It's been around freaking forever. Yeah, that's the thing. USB-A, I think, is the biggest argument for why I think USB-C has a pretty long life ahead of it. Because USB-A came out 25 years ago, approximately. and it's only in the last few years being really replaced in a widespread way and it's still taken forever like i've just i before i came on i was watching another review of a you know 20 24 model of car that has in it usbc and usb a ports because they know some people still have the a it's taken so long to get even though the successor has been here for years and years the transition is taking a really long time so people are still selling brand new cars with both a and c ports uh because you know some people still have a stuff so is it going to be 30 years before the a ports are finally gone i mean i can tell you it didn't take that long for the 30 pin connectors to disappear although i know you still go to the hotels and see the 30 pin connector next to the the thing in the nightstand but anyway uh i hope we'll really know the transition is done when no car is sold come with a ports anymore but today is not this day but like i i think of course you know this is the this is the tech business i i think it is very, very likely, very, very likely that USB-C will be replaced down the road.

1:23:19But I really don't think that's any time that we need to worry about now. It would not surprise me if we are happy with USB-C, generally speaking, for at least 15 years. You know, when you look at how USB-A advanced over time, and you can see some of this has already happened with USB-C, what do you do? You take the existing pin out and you make it run faster you may you maybe you know adjust you know some fine electrical properties of how we use the x number of pins that you that are used for data or you introduce different protocols where you use the pins in entirely different ways you you kind of reconfigure them in logic to say all right well now we're going to use these three wires this way and these three wires this way and using this protocol you know we'll speak at this bit rate over these wires and using this error correction protocol we can squeeze a bit more out of it And you've already seen that with USB-C so far.

1:24:12You know, USB-C, to its detriment, has a billion different protocols and cable types and everything else as we talk about. But the connector is largely the same. Now, you know, over time, you can occasionally, you can add more pins if you're really clever about it. But that gets a little bit tricky. And that's not commonly done. but you know usba did last a long time because it was we were able to play those tricks look at ethernet ethernet is also a very very old wiring standard and we've we've been able to play different tricks with it over the years to occasionally raise its data rate and and make it last a long time and there's really nothing on the horizon to replace it at the moment either because we still have we still have decent headroom there and you know similar similar to that I think USB-C, we've already had multiple data rate standards for it.

1:25:04We've already had multiple protocol and kind of mode standards for how the different wires could be used and at what speeds and everything. So I think we're going to just see that progression over time. And down the road, yes, of course, it will be replaced by something else. The tech industry doesn't stand around still forever. But there's a lot of headroom built into the USB-C spec. There's a lot of power delivery possible. There's a lot of data delivery possible. There's a lot of different modes those pins can be in. There's a lot of pins to work with. So, you know, we can have a wish list of, you know, things we might like to improve about it.

1:25:41Yeah, it would be nice to have great water resistance. Yeah, it would be nice to have a connector that would be more difficult to snap off or whatever. Like, that would be nice. It would be nice to have something that was, you know, that was maybe more contact-based and less, you know, plug-and-hold based like MagSafe. But, you know, who knows? But I think we're going to have USB-C for most likely a pretty long time, simply because, again, look at USB-A and look at how long we've had that. Yeah, and one of the answers to the connector question is always like, oh, this will be the last plug connector and everything will be wireless afterwards.

1:26:12Like wireless standards also continue to evolve and we're already, you know, MagSafe is a big part of that and that will continue to get better and be supplanted by even better wireless ones, right? You know, Apple could, you know, accelerate this future by saying, well, we're not going to have USB-C ports anymore. Somehow we'll deal with the EU situation. and then just go all wireless. But I think there will be a successor plug design type thing. And you can just look at the USB-C connectors. How could it be improved? Well, it's not as small as Lightning was, and it could be smaller still. Like USB-C will eventually, probably sometime in our lifetime, I would hope, become the limiting factor in the thickness of iPhones.

1:26:47And when that happens, Apple will be looking around for something to do different, either by getting rid of the port entirely or you know coming up with a new proprietary port because no one in the industry has made something that is smaller than usbc and you know there are actually rumors that like i think apple has some patents on this but apple patents everything they ever think of like every company um like magnetic connectors that's what marco's kind of alluding to sound like magsafe but for data right um so you wouldn't actually have to have a hole in the device to stick a plug into just magnetically connected and there's all sorts of problems with that or whatever but anyway i think i think there will be a successor design but this this usbc design i think has just as much likes as usba usba is like one of the worst connectors of our entire lives right because of the external symmetry and internal asymmetry just frustrating just millions of person hours wasted putting the plug in twice or whatever um but it was still better than what came before it and one of the things that unifies all these things there was a if we're as old as the people doing this podcast at least we live through the essentially the parallel to serial transition right used to be the computer connectors very heavily leaned on parallelism which means having lots of wires going to lots of pins and you would you know the more wires you had the more data you could send because you'd send them send information along all those wires at the same time and eventually the computing part at the either end of the devices got fast enough and good enough and cheap enough that you could do serial interfaces where pretty much every bus since then has been like we just need ground and power and data transfer lines and we'll go faster by just shoving things through one at a time single file not really but you know single file send single file receive with various signaling mechanisms to to get more out of that we'll just go faster and faster serially and we all like that because if you've ever dealt with a scuzzy cable they were huge and they did not bend easily and they were temperamental and so yes serial is better than parallel but since then usb was a big part of that universal serial bus that's what the s is there for um we've had skinnier wires that are easier to deal with and all they've been doing is saying you know now that the wires are skinny maybe the connector shouldn't be gigantic either and that's usbc and that was lightning before it um so i think serial uh connection protocols and methods are here to stay because it has proven that we can really scale that up real fast and the convenience aspect of it is important um so i think uh you know look for usbc to be here until either we get rid of connectors or until devices require something smaller i think that is going to be the forcing factor because if you don't require something smaller and there's not some kind of fatal flaw that we haven't discovered yet in the usbc connector there's not a lot of motivation to have a different physical connector than usbc the wire the stuff we send over the wire will keep getting faster you know we have a thing in the notes about thunder thunderbolt 5 which we'll talk about in a future show you know thunderbolt uses the same you know connector standard or whatever it's going to keep getting faster but i think that connector is going to be with us until either wireless takes over entirely or essentially the iphone uh can't get any thinner because like kind of like the rj45 port on the side of a laptop like the you know the usbc port is the limiting factor in the thickness of the iPhone.

1:29:43And that's not happening anytime soon because we need that big battery. But who knows, in the future with solid state batteries and wafer thin iPhones, we might need a new connector. The real question is, what do you think we are totally rid of first? USB-A or micro USB? That makes me depressed to think about that. I think micro. I think micro. Because I think every device that I know of that I hate that has micro, I look at the modern version of that and they have usbc but usba is just hanging on everywhere and i honestly i was going to ask john earlier do you think which will happen first the last three pedal car is shipped or the last usba equipped car is shipped because both of them they are imminently dying the three three pedal parts aren't going away they'll just end up being like horses you know horses didn't go away it's just that if you have one now you're probably rich and weird fair i mean porsche the the latest 911 they came out with is like the the super duper that's the s slash t or whatever really expensive fancy whatever it's like it's basically i think it's like a gt3 rs without the big wing on it without the boy racer looks stick shift only because they know they they know there's an audience for this and i granted that audience is going to get old and die but i think it'll just be like you know the weird watch thing where they fetishize having a bunch of little gears that aren't as accurate as a ten dollar quartz crystal right three pedals going to be with us forever just in increasingly small, narrow areas.

1:31:09One can dream. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATV.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. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental 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 And T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.

1:32:10It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. Marco, you have spent a little bit of time in your Rivian. What's going on? Yeah, so now that I've... I just took the Rivian on a long trip, So I have some follow up and I have a few little exciting things I've tried as well. So first of all, in the latest segment of What Color Is My Car? It should be the name of a book like What Color Is Your Crystal? What color is your car? I have found the perfect color reference. My car is exactly the color of Jake the Dog from Adventure Time. It's the color of that Jake the Dog figurine.

1:33:03because on the show he is not that color anyway no my my car is jake the dog color it's exactly and and my family we've all watched adventure time we love it and they all as soon as we came upon this realization we were all like oh my god that's exactly it it's perfect and now my family calls my car jake and so and tiff want tiff wants to like somehow style the headlights so it looks more like his eyes i don't know how i'm a little scared to think about it but anyway so yeah the Rivian yellow is basically Jake color. It's very, very close. In some lighting anyway, because I think Jake does not change color as much as your car does.

1:33:40Fair enough. But it depends on how your TV settings are adjusted, probably. Yeah, I suppose. I don't know if there's like an official reference Pantone Jake color, but we'll see. So I have a few other little tidbits of feedback from various follow-up in driving it. last time I talked about it I was complaining that there was no like button that you could hold down or something to trigger Siri because most cars if they have like a steering wheel button for voice control usually if you have a Bluetooth phone connected usually like holding that down might trigger Siri over the Bluetooth connection or something a few people wrote in to say hey why don't you just say hey you know assistant instead of trying to push the button And so I started trying saying, hey, assistant.

1:34:25And yeah, actually, it works really well. It works fantastically. When my phone is on a mount in front of me, like, you know, next to the vents or whatever, like that's where I prefer to have it, like in non-CarPlay equipped cars, where my phone is on the mount using hey, dingus for it worked fantastically. it woke the phone up for any way it got the phone's attention but then it used the car's microphone and speaker for the siri session so i don't i don't know i think the phone's microphone is the one that's listening for the command like for the wake-up word but then once it is woken up it uses the audio devices in the car so it actually is pretty reliable the only little weird thing is that it's a little impatient like if i talk too slowly it'll stop listening and then then i'm back to you know playing fish and i'm like okay wait hold on i wasn't done yet then i go back and correct it but for the most part that actually works pretty well um so thank you listeners who pointed out that i can just say hey thing um sunglasses storage this didn't help at all nobody helped us whatsoever um one one person or two people wrote in to tell me i can store my sunglasses in they had this weird little like flip down compartment between your legs on the front ridge of the driver's seat so like you know the seat curves down like between your knees and down there like between that lip of the seat and the floor on the front wall of the seat is a little flip down sunglasses compartment now they tell you oh you can put because weirdly there's no glove box in the rivian i don't know why there's no good reason but so they're like oh you can put like your you know your car insurance and registration paperwork for cops and stuff put it in there and as soon as i tried to reach that when sitting in the seat i realized that would look to a cop exactly like i was pulling a gun from under the seat so i'm not going to do that that's terrible and so somebody suggested oh you can put sunglasses there the problem is putting sunglasses between your legs down by the floor there is no good way to reach that while you are driving like it is just it is incredibly cumbersome so that's a no-go i still have not found a place to put sunglasses in this car um the windshield wiper controls i don't know if it rains in california i i guess not we talked about these controls on a past episode do you remember i do and i i had forgotten when i bought the car that we because so here's here's how the reviewing windshield wiper controls work fortunately you can just like tap but not hold the washer fluid firing button and it will do a single wipe for it took me a long time to figure that out so there is a way to do a single wipe on press but if you want to change the mode the wipers are in either turn them on or speed them up or slow them down or whatever you there's like a little like up down rocker on the stalk and you twist it up to to move it up twist it down to move down but the first input is ignored because the first input when you when you twist it up once it doesn't increase the speed it starts showing the menu on the screen like and it shows you know in like the the main cluster area you don't have to look like on the main screen in the middle it shows it like on the driver's cluster but it still hit that up and it then starts showing on the driver cluster the levels of the wind wiper then you have to hit it up again to actually change the setting this is really stupid i like i am loving this car so far i think the windshield wiper controls might be the single worst thing about it like i i am shocked that they haven't changed this behavior in a software update yet it's already not a great control the way they've done it but it would be a substantially better control if the first input actually changed the position of the setting so make the first push up or push down actually move the setting up and down rather than just wake up the menu because that is ridiculous it would be substantially better if if the reason we talked about this is because when you press the thing up it returns to its center position like a joystick that you shove in one direction it springs back to the middle it would be better control if it worked like every other car's wipers where you actually turn something or move something into a position where it stays you know what i mean because then you could look at it and see where it is and you'd know you go down a little bit more for faster wipers up one more push up once for a swipe and then it will spring back to position but no because it's software integrated they can't do that because then there would be a conflict anyway see past episodes where we talked about this so on top of that this is a double whammy on top of that yes that's how the control works so it can integrate with the touchscreen but also they've decided that this is just now an affordance for you to get to the touchscreen controls or something like and then it's like oh it's not even a touchscreen you know you actually want to so So does it just show the current level, but does it bring up the controls where you could use the touchscreen to change it?

1:39:26I don't think it's accessible on the touchscreen. It's only displayed in the driver cluster. If it's not accessible on touchscreen, they should just use a normal WIPO control. Because the whole point of having a little toggle that springs back to the middle is because it's never in a position that could be in conflict with the touchscreen because it never changes position. I know. I don't know. everything of the rest of the car is so well designed in so many ways it's baffling how badly designed the wiper controls well and the lack of glove box and the lack of a glasses holder in a gigantic car with a huge amount of space inside it but there was just no room for a sunglasses holder in the headliner sorry yeah yeah um so yeah please fix the wipers also the automatic wipers are continuing in the series of cars that i have had nobody can make automatic wipers worth a damn as far as i can tell nor should they just put a wiper control we can do it ourselves yeah well and you have to do it yourselves because the automatic sucks so bad at least you can do it yourself at least you actually have stocks count your blessings you could have a tesla with no stocks and that's true otherwise i'm very happy with most of the setup of the stocks and the controls and everything that's what that's why this is so weird like they just totally blew windshield wipers and sunglasses that's really weird anyway all right now that i've had the car for a few weeks i can tell you with certainty this is the most attention and questions i've gotten from strangers with any car i've ever had i mean it is yellow that's the loudest car that's ever been made it is huge and it's yellow i mean let's be honest you're the only human i know that that bought an electric car that is louder than a bmw m5 because that car is so loud visually loud it it's it's bananas it is it's literally a banana it's it's literally jake first of all so anyway uh you know bananas are different plus then as we talk about color i i considered using a banana as a color reference object but there's just so many different colors of bananas like it's not that was a harder reference object to use anyway the you know when i first got my the The first Tesla, probably what was that, seven years ago or something like that, I did get a decent number of strangers saying, hey, how is that?

1:41:37Or, hey, how is it on long trips? I got a few of those. The Rivian gets so many more now. And it is staggering how many questions I get from strangers or people saying, hey, nice. I'm waiting for one myself or whatever. But so many questions. And I'll answer them because people tend to ask relatively the same handful of questions over and over again. and i consider it an opportunity to maybe in the future cause this person to buy an electric car if they were a little bit hesitant before they always ask two things they ask about the range and they ask if the battery can get wet which is funny like what interesting yes if you are it's a car you can't use in the rain it's a real california vehicle yeah well you got to figure how to use the wipers that's pretty challenging but you know it's funny when you think about it from a nerd perspective because we're like of course it can get wet but it actually like it's a huge battery and it's electric and people are trained to think you can't get electric things wet so i understand why they're asking that question it's kind of adorable i don't know i mean regular cars regular cars have batteries in them with exposed terminals but that's that is the question those two you know people ask you how far can you go into charge and the number two question i get is can you get can you get it wet that's absolutely i would love for you i i swear if i had electric car and someone asked me that eventually i would curiosity would get the better me and i'd be like why do you ask that just to make them do a little bit of introspection like think about it for two seconds because under even a few seconds of examination it makes no sense but like because it's because electric vehicles are weird like all their preconceived assumptions about everything goes out the window because this is an exotic strange beast to them so they have questions that if they thought about i'm like hmm but anyway yes please tell them this it's okay to get it wet yeah i have been it's been it's been in the rain and everything i'm getting like especially because like you know i'm driving at the beach which you know the the last part of the trip at the beach is down these little tiny local roads that are you know that are just these little wide sidewalks basically so if i have to pass a person you know we got to kind of like squeak you know one of us we kind of like scoot over i kind of scoot onto the little tiny berm and they kind of scoot over and i'm basically driving like right past them and so they're at my window level so i just leave the windows open at this point because people keep waving at me to ask questions.

1:43:55I'm getting stopped by everybody. The cops, random strangers. Everyone's like, hey, how do you like it? How does it work on the beach? Everyone is stopping me. I had pulled over next to the federal gate to get into the island. I had pulled over. They have a little parking lot to air down my tires. Somebody who was driving by saw my car after he had passed the lot, stopped, backed all the way up back to the driveway, and turned in just to ask me questions that's bananas people love the idea of rivians they're really they young people are like it's a rivian americans love trucks yeah and that now that the car the car is now you know when i'm at the beach the car is parked next to my house um but it's still early enough in the season that like drunk people still walk by at night on the weekend sometimes and like tip and i'll be lying in bed and we'll hear we heard this this like group of teenagers the other night dude let's meet by the rivian oh yeah okay it's right over here oh my word rivian's the new tesla you know the chat room points out that maybe people are asking about the battery as in like taking like an off-roader like through affording a river in your car that type of thing like maybe that's what they mean not going in the rain but like actually taking your truck into deep water and to that i would say don't bring any kind of car into deep water it's not i know they have the land rovers with the snorkel on top so the you know intake doesn't get filled with water but like honestly if you own a car don't put it in water ever yeah and and some of them have explicitly asked about that but that is not the common case um and yeah and the rivian it seems like it does no worse than most cars at being submerged but yeah it's generally a bad idea and in general yeah it's salt water just as bad as it is on an internal contravention do not put your car into salt water under any circumstances i'll end up seeing it on a youtube rebuild channel yeah so anyway um so that's that's it for the for the car impressions now i do have two little fun updates um having just taken it on a long trip one on this long trip i finally had a chance to try the tesla magic dock so this is something that briefly blew through the news a few months back tesla has started modifying some of its superchargers to have what they call the magic dock which is basically a a an adapter that dynamically attaches by the supercharger like it's it's kept internal to the supercharger and if you pull up to it with a with a ccs equipped car you know the other connector in north america if you come up with a ccs connect equipped car and you open the tesla app and you like unlock the the port in the tesla app by saying hey i met this supercharger unlock you know charger number 2d for use with my non-tesla vehicle it'll unlock it and kind of pre-install onto the supercharger plug this fixed blocky adapter that converts the supercharger into a ccs plug so it's a way that ccs cars can use tesla superchargers without having any other kind of adapters that you brought with you that technically don't really exist yet to use a Tesla supercharger with your CCS car.

1:46:59So I got to actually use a Tesla charger on this trip. And it was really weird. And the app was pretty buggy, but it worked. It was, you know, it worked. It charged my car. It wasn't super fast. I think I got about 75 kilowatts out of it. So not as fast. Like on the same trip, the Electrify America chargers that I was usually stopping at were going like 155, 160 kilowatts. So that, you know, it was not as fast as them, but that's that will vary per supercharger i'm sure it is able to be faster uh you know it with different equipment maybe or different conditions uh but anyway it worked it it cost about the same as electrify america's um like non-member pricing and tesla will also sell you so for those of you don't know electrify america and tesla both for this for this kind of arrangement um you pay a certain number a certain price per kilowatt hour around here it's about 42 cents per kilowatt hour or if you pay like 12 or 8 bucks a month you can get a lower rate for like you know 30 32 or 36 cents per kilowatt hour and so you know this is obviously like a customer loyalty kind of program for both brands and it seems like pricing wise i checked in with a couple of friends and it seems like the member price of tesla superchargers seems to be in line with whatever tesla owners pay just regularly so if you're a non-tesla owner you can pay a little bit of a premium or pay tesla 12 bucks a month or whatever to to have the owner pricing either way they're about the same as electrify america in most places but it varies it varies by location and time but anyway yeah it worked very few of the tesla superchargers have the magic dock around here but i'm looking forward to more of them adding it i hope they do because it was it was a nice option now with regard to the Electrify America ones, the going wisdom, if you listen to the media, is that it is impossible to get an Electrify America charger that works without trying four times.

1:48:54How bad was it? I went to two different EA chargers on this trip, and there's one nearby on Long Island that I've used a couple of times. The one on Long Island, there's, I think, six chargers there, and usually two of them are down. You can tell as soon as you pull in because the screen is off, so it's very obvious and you can just quickly change parking spots and that sucks but um you know it hasn't been a problem necessarily yet it just it just makes them less less nice um the ones i've that i went to on this trip the two different ones in in various parts of upstate new york um they were both totally fine and in fact and and this one that was at a random walmart uh in the albany region was the fastest charge i've ever gotten like having it sustain at like 155 kilowatts i've never gotten a charge that fast including my tesla previous lives i've never seen a charge that fast that was actually sustained at that rate so so far the electrified microchargers are the best option i have found for ccs and in some cases and they are the fastest option i found period that's awesome but again like this varies by region so much it's that's why it's a little hard to really compare um anyway so that's the magic doc and then finally i have a bit of a surprise i took this trip with carplay what you put a carplay head unit in your review oh god this is so bad just add more screens until it works yeah seriously oh that's so bad i have a bit to report on this experience so there have been over the last few years that you know because i've developed a carplay compatible app but did not own a carplay car and of course my office is not a carplay car i had a need for a carplay test device and in in the past what i've done here is i have bought a carplay aftermarket head unit that's made to go into like you know cars that don't have carplay but that have the double din stereo to stereo holes i've i've bought one of those and just put it in like a plastic case with a 12 volt power supply and have all this wiring and everything it's been a huge pain in the butt and it ended up making this huge you know project box size thing like the size of a lunchbox just to have a car play uh testing head unit in my office for development and then what happened a few years ago random manufacturers started selling what are effectively android tablets that are made for cars that can somehow i don't know how this works like with apple certification whatever somehow they can run car play and android auto on effectively a seven inch android tablet or a nine inch whatever but in in that size range those were not only much smaller, but also much simpler and much cheaper.

1:51:34So I switched my testing rigs to use those, and they also support wireless CarPlay, which is fantastic. And those used to cost about$300. Now they only cost about$100. They're really inexpensive. So if you want to add CarPlay to a car, the least invasive and least expensive way to do it seems to be these$100-ish 7-inch android tablets that are made for this purpose in cars i got one for the rivian because they keep getting smaller and cheaper and this one the one that i got was actually powered by usbc instead of having some kind of weird custom 12 volt thing that has to plug into the cigarette lighter and with the rivian usbc is much easier to get power to the front because new rivians no longer have a 12 volt socket anywhere in the front of the car the only ones in the trunk which is annoying the other way to get 12 volts in the front there's these adapters that tap the obd port the diagnostic port in the driver's footwell you can tap that and that supplies a decent amount of 12 volt power so there are adapters that will convert obd2 ports to usb or 12 volt sockets which is interesting and useful here so that's how i did this trip i got one of those adapters and i got this you know hundred dollar android tablet thing seven inch android tablet and actually had carplay here and i can report it works but here we go how do you play how do you play audio from it that's a fantastic question let me tell you is it bluetooth thing to the car good question obviously there's a problem there your phone connects to this thing via bluetooth your phone also connects to your car via bluetooth how does that work what happens to like the steering wheel audio controls on your car what are the what does that send to so the the most recent as far as i can tell the most recent of these weird android tablet carplay things have a capability and including this one where the phone and the carplay tablet negotiate to start because i'm pretty sure carplay works over like a peer-to-peer wi-fi connection yeah um so they negotiate over why They use Bluetooth to negotiate the Wi-Fi connection.

1:53:47And then the phone is able to remain connected to Bluetooth with the car. That's bananas. And this is the best setup that I've seen of these things. So they have different options. They have built-in FM transmitters. They have line-out jacks. So if your car has a line-in somehow, or if you want to use the FM transmitter, you can get the audio out that way. Or you can use the feature of these where it basically tells the phone somehow over some part of the CarPlay protocol. all it tells the phone hey you keep playing audio through through your other connection don't play audio through me so in this case it was extremely responsive the phone was playing audio directly to the car via bluetooth and was not involved with the bluetooth audio stack of this weird android tablet thing so the latency was the same as if i was playing just bluetooth audio which is not great latency but way better than most wireless carplay most wireless carplay it's like two seconds of latency.

1:54:41This was, you know, the Rivian standard, maybe one to three quarters of a second. So this was much, much nicer. It is the best audio setup that I've found for these things, and only the newest ones seem to do it. There are some downsides. Wait, wait, wait. So I understand that your car is playing audio to the Bluetooth thing, but all the controls are still appearing in the CarPlay interface, and those controls are controlling the audio, and so it's like, the controller is wireless CarPlay, but the transmission of audio is to the car itself. Yes. So, you know, CarPlay is merely a video signal that's sent to the car and then some kind of like touch input protocol that the car would normally send back.

1:55:19So that's what this unit is doing. This unit is showing the video stream, which is basically an AirPlay video stream as far as I know, showing the video stream from CarPlay and then sending input back and letting the phone deal with it. So there is no audio transmission happening between the phone and the CarPlay unit. So phone is playing audio directly to the car and the car's audio, you know, remote control buttons all work normally because as far as the car is concerned, this is just Bluetooth audio. And so if you hit next track on your steering wheel, that goes to your phone through Bluetooth and goes to next track.

1:55:53And then the CarPlay display reflects that fact because it's just displaying what's going on. correct yeah think of the carplay as simply a wi-fi connected monitor of your phone so there are some downsides and ultimately i will say i drove there with this carplay unit but ended up driving back without it here are some of the downsides so first of all my method of powering it through the obd2 port is not ideal because the obd2 port does not power down for a few minutes after you leave the car and if the car is plugged in and charging it never powers down um so this unit was just like on you know glowing with its empty interface and occasionally if i got too close to the car having my phone connect to it um even when i was not in the car like if i was just walking around where the car was parked like i was if i walked near the car my my phone would connect to this thing and so to actually use this well in a lot of situations you would want to have some kind of physical power switch and that's annoying let's be honest that's annoying um also it does not boot at the same speed that the car boots if you if it is powered off you get into the car and then maybe you know 15 20 seconds later then you hear this very loud boot chime noise from this thing that as far as i can tell you can't turn off it also see you can see in this picture below my phone icon it has this assistive touch like overlay that is like the home button of the unit that you can drag around anywhere in the screen but you can't turn it off so you have to like you have to leave this blob somewhere on the screen at all times now this is actually not necessary carplay has has a has a feature where the car can provide like a like an icon to carplay that says kick out of carplay and go back to me like on your carplay home screen one of the quote apps there might be the car and you tap that and it kicks you out of carplay so this button is not necessary in carplay mode but they have it here anyway and you cannot turn it off so it's just kind of blocking the screen annoyingly and again i've had now three of these like android tablet carplay style units and this is the only one that has this the rest dealt without it just fine i don't know why it has it it doesn't need it and you can't turn it off that's annoying um you know i've heard even even just on this week's upgrade they talked about this and i've even said this before wouldn't it be nice if apple added a mode for iphones that maybe you just mount your iphone in landscape mode in a car and it shows the car play interface yeah yeah it turns out after using this i know why they don't do that because this device has a seven inch screen that's way bigger than all the iphones it's too small seven inches is not big enough for carplay's interface the touch targets are very small it is easy to miss them it is tricky to hit them and as a result first of all i think you're losing some of the safety benefits of carplay when it's a little bit tricky to hit things um but it also is just kind of annoying and error prone so seven inches too small for this i think if you're going to get one of these style units for your car i would suggest going for one of the nine inch class devices instead there are a bunch out there most of them are seven some of them are nine go for nine if you can fit it i mean and that's its own question like where does it fit in your car can you see over it like does it block any part of your view obviously you don't want that in this case you know my hood covered all the view of this so it didn't matter but you know use caution when placing it and sizing it but seven inches is too small for carplay that's why the iphones don't have this mode as far as i know or at least that's a good reason why they don't have them also this being a hundred dollar android tablet it has a really crappy screen like the the screen quality like you don't realize how nice iphone screens are and how nice car it like built-in car display screens have to be until you put a cheap screen next to them and try to use in the same conditions it is not that bright um the the alignment of the polarizer is like slightly wrong for sunglasses so it's a little bit dimmer even still than it needs to be because it doesn't quite a line right with sunglasses you know and i even found like the the touch input is not as forgiving and fast so it almost felt like you had to apply pressure like an old resistive screen it's not but it's just that crappy of a touch screen that you have to kind of you know give it a lot of input for it to actually register um so it's it's not great as an input device and i found it kind of frustrating to use from that point of view and then finally the reason why i took it off before driving home today is after a few days i couldn't get it to reliably connect to my phone anymore like it just stopped like it it just i couldn't get into carplay mode no matter what i rebooted everything couldn't get it into carplay mode but it was somehow partially connected because then i couldn't get my phone to play audio through the car anymore for a little while had to reboot things again it was a whole thing it was super unreliable after only a few days so i took it off and i put my magsafe mount back up there and i just drove with my phone in the max i found using ways on the phone screen as i did in the tesla for its entire lifetime and it was fine so i can say this is a method that you can add carplay to a car it is incredibly surprising how inexpensive and easy it is to do but the experience you get what you pay for and rivian should just freaking add carplay like everybody else already like it's because it is and it turns out it is way nicer for all these reasons to have it just built into the car and for most cars you don't have to worry about that because most cars have it now but if you have if you have either a tesla or a rivian or an older car before carplay was around this is an option you might want to consider that you might not have known about but keep in mind it is kind of mediocre so many screens these cars geez the car has so many screens in it and you had to add another one i know yeah tell it believe me i think it's stupid too they should just add it like just add carplay you look rivian if you're if anybody from rivian is listening let me just say the rivian uh philosophy of like we don't need to do this whatever like rivian makes really nice touch ui i'm very happy with it overall they still need to do this like their navigation system is not good it is not i want to use ways the best three navigation systems in the universe right now are ways apple maps and google maps they are never going to be as good as even the worst of those three and i'll let listeners decide which one that is i think they're all pretty good now but it's like for instance place names in new york i don't know i have i haven't driven out of the state of new york i don't know if it's this bad everywhere else in new york typically you have uh in most places in most places that have people in them you have like if you have a village then outside of that you have a town outside of that you have a county and outside of that you have the state i cannot get the rivian navigation system to display village or town names correctly so for instance suppose you live in bayshore that's where the ferries are it won't say bayshore bayshore is the village it'll say islip which is the surrounding town so the addresses will say like now that i maple avenue i slip new york that's not what anything else calls this and so you have to keep double checking is that the right one is that the correct place that it's sending me I was just looking at, there was someone, did you see, Jalka put a link to historical maps, so of course I looked up historical maps of Long Island, and they had one that was showing things divided up, and it was like, why is Islip so huge?

2:03:20And it's like, oh, I see. It's, you know, they only, they didn't show, like, you know, Bayshore or anything, they would show just, just the, because there was nobody on the island, it was like from the, you know, 1700s or whatever. So, yeah, that's, it, I did the same thing when I was, I was zooming in on the thing, it's like you have to, a lot of the map programs, the thing that bothers me, how far do i have to zoom in before you show me the words bayshore yeah right because like as far as i'm concerned it's a pretty important thing because you think you're in bayshore no one says they're in islip right because islip is a different place are you in ci are you in bayshore like anyway yeah right like and even like you know if you would if you type in the address like the the way you would send mail to these places would have the local the local village name instead of instead of like the surrounding town or county but they but they so the rivian maps don't even list things the way anyone including the post office would list them so it makes it hard to know even if you're looking at the right thing so yeah there's little things like that like look and and of course the rivian music player is very very limited because it's only going over bluetooth and it has this built-in app for other things but it's terribly look rivian is fantastic at the ui design of things like the instrument panels like besides the windshield wiper thing which i already you know ranted about which is terrible but like the the the temperature controls the the various car controls of different features or modes or settings for the car.

2:04:37Those are all great. The typography is great. The graphic design is great. Things are easy to see, easy to read, easy to find. you still need carplay you see like you just you still do because you're never going to match navigation and audio apps in phones. You can't. That's not what anybody even wants you to do. Don't even try. You won't succeed and no one wants it. Just use CarPlay. You're never going to be better than Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze. You're just not. Don't bet against the smartphone. Work with it. That's how everyone else has gone. There's a reason for that. Just add CarPlay.

2:05:11Thank you very much. Maybe add Glovebox first. No, you know what? I can work around that. I can put a bag on the floor. The dashboard is so huge. It's like an aircraft carrier and there's no glove box. It's insulting. Yeah, it really is. But still, I'd rather have CarPlay. It would be such a differentiator because if you think about the cool kid, like Silicon Valley, new fancy electric car, you got Rivian and you got Tesla. This could be a differentiator. Like put CarPlay in there. And then suddenly, if you're an Apple person that wants a car that's actually put together properly, that's not you know uh that the company isn't run by a lunatic then all good reasons to buy a rivian yeah and like look rivian it's so good in every other way i found so far i freaking love this car it's really really good for god's sakes give me carplay like that's i still it's so frustrating it doesn't have it and look don't you don't need to overthink it make it a window make it one of like one of the main apps there's like you know the five or six main apps you have just make it one of those and you have it in a window and your other controls, the climate bar, the top bar, those are just around it.

2:06:19It's fine. That's totally fine. You don't need to make it fancy. You don't need to rethink. You don't need to reinvent the world. Stick car play in a window. You're done.