558: Multilevel Pizza Oven

42:02I really do like having that iPad available to me. And yet I just, I feel like this is such a mess. And, you know, they talked a lot on Upgrade about how this is, I think in no small part, an after effect of Apple's penchant or however you pronounce the word, their love of keeping old stuff around in order to make it cheaper. And that's your cheaper stuff. Rather than bespoke cheap things, it's just old things that they can now make cheaply. And that eventually can lead you to this situation. And it's a mess. Yeah. Unlike the laptops before, like you mentioned, you like your iPad. I like my iPad, too.

42:38That's the thing about the line. I think the individual products are probably well-liked by the people that buy them. This is not the same problem as when they were making bad laptops that had no ports and crappy keyboards that didn't work like the individual products are mostly okay it's when you step back and look at the range of products that they're offering for example if you're a customer saying which one should i buy that's the problem what eventually when you get down to an ipad and you buy it you'll probably be pretty happy with it because in general the ipads are pretty good at what they do and what people ask them to do is not that much and maybe the pro users are cranky at this point because the ipad pros have been updated but the individual products are not disasters again setting aside the software but the line the line is a mess and now the peripherals or peripherals are actually a mess again not that any individual peripheral is bad but they're so expensive and so limiting and so unclear about which one which peripherals it can even work with your thing versus which peripherals you like which versus which ipads they work with it makes the experience of selecting which product you want or upgrading your existing product to a quote-unquote better one way too fraught even if the individual product you end up getting you end up being satisfied with yeah all right so there is indeed an apple event it's going to be on hell night as it was called when i was a kid uh on october 30th yeah this was a thing or devil's night sometimes right really yep i've never heard that it's an east coast thing yeah well i don't know if it's east coast thing but anyway we're both from east coast we both know it it wasn't an ohio thing you said he double hockey sticks there i know well done anyway there's an event on october 30th the uh night before halloween it's at eight o 'clock at night eastern which i don't have a problem with but is very very unusual what is going on there it's spooky i guess so it is it's you could say it's scary late i mean scary fast apparently i love this because first of all the rumor mill has been very consistent over the last few months saying no new max for the rest of the year but there were some there were some naysayers you know but as we as the date approaches is always somebody's willing to put their stake down and said actually no before i said there wasn't but now there is going to be and i think i forget who it was that says that but they're right here it is and they even said it was going to be i think it was german who said no actually there's going to be an event it's going to be october 30th or 31st despite what people you know so it's been confusing but yeah there was so many consistent rumors that there there wasn't going to be event or nothing good would be announced in it but so the invitation the little invitation image that you get it says it's got a spooky black apple logo and it says scary fast and if you go to apple's website to their apple events thing you can see a little animation where the apple logo turns into i love seeing people describe this some people say it's the finder logo because of course it is the little face that you see in the icon for the finder on the end of your dock um it was also the originally the mac os logo uh back in the day and classic mac os uh now it lives on as the finder icon uh but either way both of those things say mac so if you're wondering what they're going to announce at the event on the 30th they're going to announce mac stuff maybe there'll be other stuff too but this is straightforward like there's you know and reading into the graphic it's dark and spooky uh that's all we get from it it's happening at 8 p.m that's spooky and mac so that leaves us in a weird place because as you know to mark everyone's saying yeah all the m3 stuff that you thought was supposed to come this year not only did it not come in the spring or summer it's not even going to come in the fall forget it it's all pushed to next year but this mac logo says some of it's not pushing next year they're going to announce something with the mac and here's the second thing it says scary fast i don't think that apple would use the phrase scary fast if they were only releasing mac stuff that have existing m2 whatever processors in it so that means they're announcing mac stuff with m3 something in something uh and i think when they originally released the m2 max and m2 pro they also use scary fast they said scary fast for the m2 pro and scary faster or something for the m2 max uh that doesn't mean anything because they're just reusing marketing terms or whatever but i'm actually kind of excited because they can't put a scary fast you know call it a scary fast event and say mac stuff is coming and not have m3 something and i had because of the rumors pretty much resigned myself oh no m3 stuff this year we'll have to wait until next year so i'm kind of excited no i'm very excited i'm really curious to see like what what is this because there's so much about it that's that is surprising so far we don't even know what it is yet but you know the the the kind of suddenness of this being announced out of nowhere is surprising the the timing is surprising the time of day being 5 p.m pacific 8 p.m eastern that's surprising and then the fact that the rumor mill was so sure until two seconds ago that none of this stuff was coming this year now all of a sudden we have pretty strong indicator that something about fast max is happening and so we can think about like you know what does that mean and you know so the the latest quote rumors at this point who knows whether this is leaks or speculation or whatever everyone thinks this might be about an update to the imac and possibly the macbook pro and that i think would make sense um some people are speculating it might be gaming related um i was getting my hopes up like maybe this is going to be some kind of you know new product size or shape or whatever whether it's like a new laptop you know maybe a 12 inch or whatever there was a loose rumor about that but this doesn't seem to have any kind of in-person invitations going out it seems like it's virtual only i haven't heard of anybody in the press getting an in-person invitation to go out there and that means no hands-on the lack of a hands-on experience seemingly probably suggests no new form factors of products no new shapes and sizes we can probably rule out things like are you gonna do a 12 inch macbook pro or whatever a 12 inch macbook or whatever and i think that might also rule out a giant imac you know like a replacement for the for the imac pro oh yeah but i don't know i don't even think there's good rumors about that i mean the only rumors about that is that's still a thing that Apple's going to eventually make to make me win my$1 bet with Marco, but not imminently.

48:49Yeah. So the safest bet here is probably, again, I'm with you, John. I think they probably wouldn't emphasize fast if they were using chips they've already launched. Like, you know, Gruber's guess was maybe this is just M2 update to the iMac. And I think one thing that, you know, the most conservative guess i think for this could be maybe they're bringing not only the m2 to the iMac which still has the m1 as we discussed last week maybe they're going to offer like an m2 pro configuration with the same iMac case that we have now you know there is some precedent for that obviously it's a bigger power envelope than the m1 uh to have like the pro configuration with the more cores but it doesn't go as far as the Macs and they did that with the Mac mini the Mac mini you can buy now with the M2 or M2 Pro, but not M2 Max, and it's still the same size.

49:40So maybe they're taking an existing product line that is currently M2 only and giving it an M2 Pro option. That would enable them to still not mess with TSMC's 3 nanometer capacity and everything for the M3, whatever else. That, I think, is the most conservative approach, and that could be, I'm thinking either the iMac or maybe the 15-inch MacBook Air. Because the 15-inch MacBook Air seems to not be selling well by a lot of reports, which is honestly surprising to me. I think it looks amazing. But maybe that product has slightly missed the market, and maybe they're going to juice it up with the higher-end config with the M2 Pro chip.

50:20Who knows? Maybe that replaces the weird 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar that is still being made. No, they'll never replace that. That's like whatever the last Mac was with the optical drive or whatever. They're going to keep selling that forever. yeah the md101 that's that's that's that's gonna be around for and i oh my god the existence of that computer makes me so so upset on so many levels because like from what i've heard they do sell a ton of them but i think the reason they sell a ton of them is because it's called macbook pro and it's way cheaper than the 14 inch and people who don't yet know that they're not interested in the touch bar or people are fine people who are legitimately interested in touch bar but let's be honest it's not that many i honestly think if it was not named macbook pro it would the sales would drop to almost nothing like i think that i literally think that's the reason people buy it and that's not a small reason and it drives me nuts on the scary fast thing here's here's the confusing part of this because you know we agree that scary fast it's got to be something more than a chip that they have already released it'll probably be m3 something or other this is why a show or two ago i had mentioned the possibility of like can you imagine if m3 based macbook pros came out before plain old m3 based laptops like that's that's not the order they've done it with the m1 or the m2 and it's generally not the order as we've discussed in the past that cpus go they tend to you know do the lower power smaller ones first before you make the more complex higher power ones just because that's how manufacturing works easier to make the smaller simpler simpler chip when you're first getting started on the process than to jump to the big one but i mean part of what we're getting at is like the m3 if you look at the schedules of when apple released the m1 and the m2 the m3 quote unquote should already be here by now but it's not and there are vague rumors that like oh the m3 has been canceled what what does that even mean are they not going to make an m3 no of course they're going to make an m3 but whatever they were planning on making and calling the m3 didn't arrive when we thought it would so that leads into a lot of questions with this event obviously 24 inch iMac is a great candidate and that's one of the strongly rumored ones government is flat out saying there's going to be near 24 inch iMac and case is the same although he's had some stuff about maybe the colors are different maybe how they attach the stand is different or something but anyway that product that could be with an m2 based thing but then what would be the m3 based thing m3 pro and m3 max based macbook pros same form factor no need for a hands-on they're scary fast fits the bill but the difficulty of figuring all this out it's like all right what happened to the m3 again like why don't have that it's going to be three now we have the a17 pro which is three nanometer um and we we keep talking about the the various tsmc uh processes and not being able to remember the name so i wrote them down this time so we can discuss them so here's the deal wait but hold on though before you get there i don't think an m3 is going to be three nanometer necessarily because the m2 is based on the a15 not the a16 so that means the m3 would be based on the iphone 14's a16 god there's so many numbers yeah but but they did the same thing with it with the with the m2 like i think it will you're right about the core base but the gpu is going to be the new ray tracy gpu i think so that's that's that and i think it will it will be on the new process yeah no i mean a lot of people assume that like oh because you know the the m1 was based on a15 or whatever m2 like but the the a series chips for the iPhone come out every single year.

53:35They have a very fixed 12-month cycle. The Mac chips don't need to follow that. Macs typically follow more like an 18-month upgrade cycle. I think they followed exactly an 18-month cycle for the M1 and M2, which is why we all expect the M3 to be here, especially when you consider that the M1 and M2 spanned the onset of COVID era when everything was madness. You would think things would be getting more, and they'd be getting more regular. But of course, we're going to three nanometers, which is the big wild card here yeah so you know basically they're going to skip some of the a cores to make m chips like they're just they're not going to use them all and that's fine yeah and so i i do think that they're going to be three nanometer but the three nanometer thing has been a source of confusion because of the different processes so here here they are from tsmc's website i'll put some links and the and the uh show notes um the one that the a17 pro is using is their very first one it's n3b as tsmc's baseline n3 node i don't think know if the b stands for baseline but it's a nice way to remember it and here's some description of it it uses up to 25 euv which is extreme ultraviolet layers with some expensive euv double pattern patterning allowing higher transistor density but at higher costs and fewer customers so this is what the iphones are using it's you know it's their very first run at this it's very sophisticated it's very expensive uh and people have been speculating that the only chip that they'll ever make with this process is the a17 pro because apple has bought all their capacity for this process and it's their first baseline process and the reason they think that maybe the only a17 pro will be the only one or at least the only one that apple ever buys from them using this process is because the next process is more attractive to more customers so that's n3e uh and this is again from an article like more clients have opted for the more cost-efficient n3e process technology with up to 19 euv layers is no euv double patterning offering lower logic density but better yields and a wider process window so this is actually worse than n3b but cheaper better yields like worse as in you can't do as many layers it has lower logic density uh but it's it it's easier to manufacture so it'll be cheaper right uh and this is uh cc way the chief executive of tsmc on the october 19th uh earnings call i think it was uh he says n3e has past qualification and achieve performance and yield targets that will start volume production in the fourth quarter of this year fourth quarter of this year it's kind of now isn't it yeah right and so n3e seems ready for someone who to make a chip that doesn't require as much logic density but is cheaper and when i look at that what i think is like so was the was the m3 originally going to be on the n3b process but n3b ended up either not having as much capacity or being too expensive and so that's why we didn't get the the m3 chip on schedule but now that n3e is here the mac can handle a chip that is a little bit bigger you know a lot lower logic density means there's fewer transistors per unit area the mac can support that because you're not jamming into a tiny little phone there's a little bit more room there and if it's cheaper that means okay if we manufacture an m3 this i'm sorry for the enunciation i hope the audio compression doesn't kill this if we manufacture an m3 processor using the n3e process then that will be cheap enough to put into a 24 inch iMac based on the M3.

57:02there there are two more processes out in the future one is n3p i know this is so bad e b p n3p which is an optical shrink of n3e offering enhanced performance reduced power consumption and increased transistor density compared to n3e all on maintaining compatibility with n3e's design rules this is it's not entirely clear to me how much design tweaking you would have to do between these processes but at least n3p is explicitly saying hey if you design for n3e when we go to n3p you don't have to mess with it too much you should be able to manufacture and then finally there's n3x yay a different number that doesn't have the same vowel sound in it a different letter rather n3x as you would imagine from the coolest letter is for high clock speeds higher voltages for high performance cpus maybe someday the m3 ultra will be based on this or maybe apple will never use it but anyway that is the roadmap n3b shipping now it's in your phone if you're interested in it, N3e, volume production in the fourth quarter, and I don't know about schedules for PNX.

58:00So given all of this, it makes sense that eventually when the M3 Pro and Macs come, whether that's on October 30th or in the future, they will use N3e. And I think N3e also makes sense for a plain old M3 to go into an iMac. I still don't understand why, what happened to the m3 based macbook air is n3e not good enough for the macbook air have they decided like we did last week that the 24 inch imac is more desperately in need of an update than the macbook air as the macbook air has been updated kind of recently and it's fine with the m2 these are all the mysteries that will be revealed it's not like apple's going to put up slides and say i'm our new m3 whatever processor uses the n3e no they're not going to mention that but we'll be able to figure it out eventually uh and if if if n3b like really is just too expensive and no one wants to pay for it probably not even apple except for the iphone that just as you know demarco must ship on a yearly basis apple's probably like we don't like this it's expensive and we wish it wasn't and we want everything to be on n3 as fast as we can but it's the only thing available to us so we'll just get it it is kind of disappointing to me that n3e is like essentially worse like not as good in many ways that you would care about but uh cheapness is is a feature so i i think you know i would not be shocked if macbook pros came out with m3 max and m3 pros i would be shocked if they came out and there was still no plain old m3 like the very first and the very first and only m3 uh chips that they would ship would be we've got the pro and the max and they don't even mention a plain old m3 that would be surprising to me despite the fact that i can kind of understand the rumors of the plain old n3 being quote unquote canceled because maybe they wanted to do an n3b and it just didn't make financial sense but part of the rumor about the 24 inch iMac by the way is like oh yeah they've been manufacturing them since june and they're all ready to go what they've been manufacturing them since june well that doesn't mean they're n3e because n3e is just going into volume production now june is not the fourth quarter so i am very confused by the set of rumors that we have again i'm glad last week we talked about what machines should be updated or need to be updated.

1:00:11The MacBook Pros are not on that list, but I'm not going to complain about M3 Pro or M3 Max MacBook Pros if they are released. So let me try to tie this together. There's a few little tidbits that I think might make this make more sense. Number one, there was a rumor recently that next year's iPhones will both use A18-based chips. So in other words, that they won't drop the A17 Pro down to the non-Pro phone next year. that was that was a recent rumor so basically the a17 pro appears to be the only a17 series chip that may exist and maybe that's why it's called pro that might also indicate that for instance it doesn't go into ipads i agree that they're going to brand it as a18 18 pro make well i shouldn't agree because that makes too much sense for apple's naming but that would make sense for the naming it doesn't mean that our earlier speculation about like this a cut down version of the a17 pro that may be what the 18 is it's just a17 pro with like some cores missing or whatever but they'll call the a18 and if you look at it you say well it has a different number of cores of course it's not the a17 pro it's a totally different chip i'm guessing n3b process the one that's the a17 pro is made on for the iphone 15 pro i'm guessing the iphone 15 pro is the only apple product to ever receive that process in a chip i think the n3e process is what they are using for the m3 based things because it wouldn't make sense to put m3 on m3b god these names well as long as long as we have these macs that have the pro max in them yeah like if that process is kind of a dead end and is very expensive apple doesn't want to be using that for years the m series chips are used for years whatever chip is in the pro iphone is used for one year or at least only needs to be used for one year yeah and by the way that phrase dead end like every one of the tsmc's processes and also like manufacturing like the five nanometer had a bunch of these little names that we couldn't remember as well and i imagine seven nanometer did as well like when you go to a new process node at least with tsmc and probably other companies you're always climbing that ladder yeah once they make a quote-unquote better process you stop using the other one so it makes perfect sense that n3b the first one would be left behind as soon as there's something better it is a little bit odd that the one that is supposedly better is not better in all ways it's better in yields and you know manufacturability and you know that that's good you know that's why people are going to go to it uh but you know it's not n3b is no more of a dead end than n5p i don't know what the hell the letters were there were five nanometer ones that apple used and then moved on from them because better five nanometer processes came out they weren't dead ends they were just a stepping stone on the way to better five nanometer process in fact i believe one of the one of their five nanometer processes was like n4 something kind of like the 5g that wasn't really 5g 5ge never on the fact that by the way that you know as many people point out when we discuss this and i think we talked about ages ago uh the number that we're talking about three nanometers five nanometers what does that refer to and the answer is not anything sane anymore it used to refer to something that made sense now it's it's not entirely a marketing term because things are getting smaller and you can fit more transistors per unit area but there's no good measurement which is why you can get away with the you know 5g and quotes thing or like the n4 process that's not like the n5 is it still five nanometer well it's n4 is it four nanometer it's like well what does those terms even mean it's it's complicated because of the way they arrange all the things in the little transistors in 3d space to actually say what the number means so all these things are essentially marketing terms for real technologies which is like how good are we getting at building chips with this process technology and yeah n3b its whole deal is it's good but expensive and it doesn't wouldn't surprise me if only the richest technology company in the world could afford to buy all of their n3b capacity for the must ship cannot miss this date iphone uh and you know it doesn't bode well for apple if it really did cost a lot but although i think the screen is still more expensive than the soc so n3b is not a dead and n3b is the baseline and we will move on from it just like we did from the baseline n5 process i think what we're most likely to see in the spooky event is imax and macbook pros because i i think it is it is totally plausible when you look at the timing of these if the if the you know the the cheaper higher yield n3e process is shipping in fourth quarter which is now that would line up with a few things number one it would make sense why they can they can start deploying the m3 now because they would want the m3 based chip family which will last for years in various products they want that to be on a high yield lower cost process that seems to have a brighter future number two that would line up with mingxi quo's thing originally saying this isn't going to happen until next year and now saying well it can happen now but it would be very low volume to start that would make sense for a process that's just coming online this quarter they probably can't make a lot of them and i think that is why we won't see the m3 yet because the m3 that goes in all their higher volume products they're not going to want to spend the yield on that if they only have low yield on the n3e process to start in this quarter they're going to want to put it in high price low volume products like the macbook pro but the 24 inch iMac is also a low volume product in fact i think it's lower volume than the macbook pros look maybe they maybe we won't maybe we still won't even get the 24 inch iMac who knows but they made them in june and august marco they're sitting there waiting to be shipped i love those rumors i don't for i call bs on that that's apple does not keep stock that long of giant things like iMac i mean i who knows things are so weird but like the idea like if they had said they had already started manufacturing them like all right i buy that room or whatever but like they made them in june what chips did they put in there like i mean again maybe if they sell so few 24 inch imacs that what they put in them was just like the very first run of n3e because the thing was like we'll start volume production in the fourth quarter uh but those imacs that wasn't volume production but why would they do that the imac is the imac still has the m1 and no one cares except us like what there's not this big rush that is the thing that we'll talk about after the event was the main thing that i care about with the iMac is ssd space and ram i don't i don't actually care whether it has the m3 i just want to see them update those things in the same way uh we'll see if they do that but uh i also believe there's got to be the macbook pros because they're the only thing that's scary fast there's not any ultra stuff coming they're not going to say the scary fast mac mini or with the m3 pro in it or something it's got to be the macbook pros and i know those are much lower volume than the cheaper laptops but they're apple's most popular pro products and so i don't know it just i i'm excited by new macs um if the if the 20 wrench imac comes out and has an m2 in it i won't care if it has reasonable ram and ssd um and the macbook pros like we're in a place where we're not there's nothing that desperately needs to be fixed about them if they just have better socs capable of higher performance and maybe more ram capacity with better gpus in exactly the same case that no one needs to have a hands-on about that's that's great that's i mean the big question mark is still the whole thing of like what are we getting out of three nanometers um are we getting the gains that we thought we'd be getting in terms of uh power efficiency and all that and so maybe jonathan deets will write in to tell it to defend the honor of the m3 when it comes out so yeah it gets hotter still but you can get your work done faster so the hotness lasts uh last time you can burn your battery much faster it's not that's not true but the efficiency is saying like it's like race to sleep right you you actually get the work done faster so it is better for your battery that's what higher efficiency means but using more power means there may be a higher peak temperature from all those youtubers or point their thermal guns at their laptops what do you think uh gets lifted first the base eight gigs of ram on most macs or the five gigs of free iCloud storage base eight gigs of ram it's gonna have five gigs of storage forever banners up somewhere at apple i agree what happens if uh this is a mac pro announcement i know we just got one but what if they did something fun to the mac pro john what could they possibly do to the mac pro that would be fun the very first m3 series chip available is the m3 mega that it's like it's the quad it's the only one they make oh my word and it's built on m3b so it costs seventy thousand can you imagine that would be scary but but that's not the way these things work though like you have to make the simpler chips first i know and i mean and the a17 pro is a good it's small like it's not simple but like it's in terms of how many transitions doesn't have the billions and billions and billions of transitions that the ultra is in let alone the quad so yeah no no rumors of that um you know maybe we'll get that in n3x in five years on the typical mac pro upgrade cycle.

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1:11:01All right, Marco. I don't care what either of you says. The time has come. It has been decreed. I want to know about your Sonos experiments, as long as they were positive, because if they're negative, I don't want to know. I have some negative Sonos experiences for you, Casey. Why do you do this to me? I'm so excited. Why do you got to bring me down? Because I am apparently the king of the bugs. Oh, God. I have the Sonos Toblerone, which I really enjoy. I take it to the shower with me, listen to podcasts. It's great. Love it. The Rome. What I don't love about it is that every single time I do that, I take my iPhone, hit the little thingy, and I pick the output device to be Sonos.

1:11:36I think it uses AirPlay. I don't know. It's that little menu that you pick where you want the sound to go from your phone. That's AirPlay. I pick my Sonos thing. And then I hit play. And what I hear is something out, like, it, it, out, cut, out. Oh, yeah. That happens to me. But I feel like if I just pause the iPhone, give it a two count, and then start again, it's fine. Yeah. So, you know, this has been going on for a while now, and it's like, well, maybe if I pause it and start it again, it will work. I have come up with a procedure that I now just do blindly every time this happens, which is turn off the Sonos device by holding on the power button, which is very hard to press, for way too long until it makes the I'm turning off sound.

1:12:16And then power it back up. And then reconnect. Sometimes it works. If that doesn't work, restart the phone. What? and i don't think i've ever had a situation where restarting both of them didn't fix it but yeah restarting the phone sometimes restarting the sonos fixes it sometimes i have to restart both the sonos and the phone yeah madness i don't know whose fault this is is it sonos's fault is apple's fault it's been happening for a long time and i'm annoyed anyway marco how much are you enjoying your sonos experience all right well actually before you get into that can we set the stage a little bit.

1:12:49So I genuinely don't recall where we left things. So the last I remember, you were considering potentially embracing the home theater lifestyle in terms of, I'm sorry, in terms of audio in the main room at the beach. But I might have that all wrong. So what problems did you set out to solve, which knowing you are very different problems than you actually ended up solving when all was said and done? So can you give me a lay of the land, if you don't mind, from before you dipped your toe into the Sonos pool, please. Sure. So where I had been was in my kitchen. I had a stereo pair of HomePods. This is, and it's kind of like a great room.

1:13:30It's a larger space. We hang out at the island all the time. So these are very frequently used speakers to play music, both while preparing food and also just while kind of hanging out. I do have a Sonos amp as my TV receiver, kind of, powering two passive speakers that are not Sonos speakers. And I have the Sonos sub for my TV. I love that combination. But this is for the kitchen, really. And this is where HomePods go to die, apparently. This is the area that I have most of my HomePod use, most of my voice assistant use, and a large portion of music listening that is not in my office in headphones.

1:14:09I am no longer using my HomePods. They have been disappointing. You don't say. Oh, God. So I was at an appliance store, and I found this little Sonos booth. It's just like this little demo table with a whole bunch of current Sonos products on it. This is the best executed demo table of audio gear in a store I have ever used. They had all these different speakers. they were all on and ready to go and you could using the little screen thing switch audio between them seamlessly it was fantastic whoever at sonos designed this you should get a raise like it was a it was by far the best store demo table i've ever seen um so anyway i was able to test out a lot of these speakers and and some of them i have be i'd have i have had before so the sonos one that is the little ish speaker that is kind of it's about the size of a of a full-size home pod it was sonos's entry-level speaker for a number of years i had the i had a pair of those before and like years ago and when the sonos one first came out i frankly hated it and i eventually gave it away everyone would say oh you got to try the sonos one it's cheaper than the home pods or whatever and yeah there was a reason it was cheaper it sucked it sounded way worse and yeah it integrated the Sonos ecosystem, but like the sound quality, it was, it was like an old computer speaker.

1:15:35Like it was not good at all. So very quickly in the set that I have in the living room, I have two Sonos ones. However, they're used as rear surround speakers, which is a very different application than what you're talking about. And for that purpose, I think they're pretty good. Yeah. They're fine for that. Yeah. I would, I would not be surprised if as standalone music speakers, these probably do not have the oomph that you really want to play music with just these. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, those not, the Sonos 1 was, you know, not up to the task to play music to my standards. And, you know, I know it can be a picky jerk about some things, but it's just, it was not good.

1:16:14It was not good. Anyway, so Sonos recently launched a couple of new products. They have the Aera 100 and Aera 300, these two new smart speakers, and I was able to hear these on this display, and I was able to compare immediately the Sonos 1 to the era 100 which is kind of the sonos one replacement now and the era 100 they've done a lot more sophisticated stuff there's more speaker drivers they have two different directions they fire tweeters now kind of like a kind of like the front third of a home pod and so they've amped things up a little bit no pun intended in the design and everything and the processing and the era 100 in this display sounded way better than the sonos one and so i thought oh okay let's talk Sonos I'm interested now they also had the first gen move which has since been replaced with a move to the first gen move was seemingly based on the speaker guts of the Sonos one and therefore sounded crappy in my opinion oh hard to I know people like the move but oh I love I have the original move the one that they just replaced as you mentioned I think this thing sounds excellent for what it is.

1:17:17Is it in this picture? It's the back left. Yeah, it's the back left. It's the other portable wireless one, but it's massive. Yeah. It is portable and it is massive. You are not wrong about either of those things. But I actually think this thing sounds phenomenally good given what it is. And I don't think I'm grading on that much of a curve, but it is surprisingly willing to play decent bass for something that you can just pick up willy-nilly and move around. I really have been impressed by the original move, but this so the one you heard was the move one or the move two well now i've heard both i'll get to why okay but this one was the move one okay so again i was able to compare and say you know what no i'm i'm not nuts i do i'm not remembering this incorrectly the move really did suck um you i will give you it did have good bass it's the rest of the sound that was the problem so anyway um and it was interesting to compare and and i the era 100 sounded very good the era 300 the new big one that has like Atmos support and has an upward facing driver.

1:18:16That's the one in the back center there. The AR300 sounded really interesting, a little bit weird, but really interesting. And then finally, the Sonos 5, it's a much older model, but it's still for sale. It's like it's the giant one in the back there. The Sonos 5 really sounded fairly basic. It sounded like, you know, an old speaker design, basically, and not that interesting. it didn't sound bad but it didn't sound good it was fine so anyway I thought this is interesting the era 100 and era 300 deserve a greater look and at about this time my home pods were degrading again my brand new second generation full size home pods were doing similar things as the first home pods always did to me which is just being unreliable just you know things would be slow or they wouldn't respond or Siri would fail or they would take forever doing AirPlay because they'd be trying to do the AirPlay handoff instead of just freaking playing the stream from my phone.

1:19:16All sorts of behavior with HomePods that just annoyed me. And this was at a time in my life when, again, we got a lot going on. We're very busy moving our house and everything. It's been a huge thing. I don't want to deal with tech problems if I don't have to. I don't want to deal with a million paper cuts with my speaker not working right and not playing music or giving me weird errors or delays or anything like that. Forgive me. I grew up with like regular music playing devices that you just pushed buttons and music would come out and it would be fairly instantaneous and like a hundred percent reliable i know that's a high bar with technology these days but i want things to be instant and reliable like that to me playing music is not a sophisticated thing it's a thing that you just do and technology these days has allowed us has allowed this process to become so much better in certain ways voice control is amazing having access to the entire library of you know the vast majority of published music from any major label by just speaking something into the air is incredible but when you just want to play an album that you already have that you already know that you play every week and it takes forever to do it or plays the wrong track play some weird live version etc like it's like what are you doing like just why why does this work worse than the cassette deck i had in 1991 so So very quickly to interrupt one more time, and I apologize.

1:20:39So are you looking to use some sort of shout into the air style dingus with the Sonos setup? Because that is something I don't personally have an overabundance of experience with. You can shout into the air to any of these speakers. Don't they all listen to you? All the modern ones, yeah. Yeah, but the experience I have had, and this is partially because I just haven't asked very much of them. You can ask for, you know, play this or play that or turn the volume up or turn the volume down. I haven't used them, though, as general purpose, like knowledge engines like you would a thing from Amazon or a thing from Apple or a thing from Google.

1:21:15And so I don't have any personal experience with that. I use the shouting to the air to move from one room to another or join a room into something that's already playing to turn the volume up and down to stop and start and so on. But basically, outside of media control, I don't think I've ever tried to set a timer on any of these things, for example, or an alarm or anything like that. So I'm just curious, Marco, is that one of the things you're looking for these to do? Because I know you can add like the Google Assistant, and I think you might be able to add the Amazon one too, I don't recall.

1:21:46And I'm curious to hear your experience with that as well. Yes, it depends on the model and the timing. Right now, current Sonos models don't have Google Assistant as an option anymore, as far as I can tell. Oh, that's right. They're in some sort of legal battle, I think. You can only add Alexa, and you can add Sonos' own Assistant, which I'll get to in a little bit. Anyway, I've been annoyed with my HomePods and their unreliability. It seems like the HomePod is a product made for conditions and expectations that I don't have in my house. I am kind of done with them. And this kind of breaks my heart to say because I still love the way they sound, but I'm just done with them.

1:22:27Anyway, so I decided, let me try the new Sonos products since the Aero 100 sounded so good in the store. I got myself a pair of Aero 100s that I've been living with for about a month now maybe a month and a half it's been a while now I took the HomePods I unplugged them and I put them in my office and then just put them in the closet and so I was living only with the Sonos Aero 100s for a while in the intervening time the Move 2 came out and I happened to want and have wanted for a long time something like that that's why I bought the first one and returned because I hated the sound But the Move 2 came out, and it looks like it was based on the Era 100's guts.

1:23:06So I got one of those as well. And then finally, I'm borrowing from a friend two Era 300s, like the big new one. It's still a countertop speaker, sort of, but it's bigger. That's the one with the Atmos. I mean, those ones are really focused on home theater. That's why they have the upward phrasing driver for the Atmos stuff. I know there's music in Atmos as well, but every single review I've seen of the Era 300s has been in the context of connecting it to your TV to be a sound system. They just don't seem like they would be good, from the size alone, that they would be good kitchen and countertop speakers.

1:23:39Oh, they're definitely not made for that, and I'll get to that as well. So I have some impressions. So first of all, the easy one, the Move 2. It's fine. It's not the best sounding speaker. It has all the wonderful conveniences of the Move 1. It's portable. It's battery-powered. It supports Bluetooth and AirPlay. it is really big and heavy just like the move one the move two does sound better than the move one it is seemingly based on the guts of the arrow 100 but it does not sound as good as the arrow 100 and that i'm kind of surprised by that uh i would i would have thought they would sound effectively identical and they don't the move two is good it is the worst sounding speaker in this test which is disappointing for its price and size does it have a handle yes it's kind of in the back you like scoop under it exactly if there's a cutout an ovular cutout in the back and you can there there's an area it's hard to describe it but there's plenty of room for your fingers to come up inside that ovular cutout so it is designed to grab it's very very easy to grab and it has a base which i believe the move to the base can be disconnected from the cable which is really nice because you cannot do that with the move one the base and the cable are all one piece But anyways, you basically just walk by and grab this thing and it'll pop right off the charging base and come with you.

1:25:00And it's really quite convenient. I really like the move to, it's what I have in the office if I wanted to listen to something with a little bit better fidelity than the studio display. Well, I would say actually quite a bit more fidelity than the studio display speakers. And then we also use that as an outdoor speaker for the far side of the yard. You know, our porch is, you know, obviously close to the house and that has a couple of regular non-Sonos speakers, but connected to a Sonos amp. I think it's an amp. I forget which model it is. But anyways, and then the Move, the Move 1, I will bring and put on the far side of the backyard.

1:25:35It's not a very big backyard. And between the two of them, you've got pretty much 100 % coverage of our like one quarter acre, whatever it is. And it actually works really, really well. And I, again, I quite like this thing. it's not perfect sound but i actually think it's it's better than the even the move one is better than you're giving it credit for but hey that's why everyone's ears are different i think one thing from the pictures of the move one thing i think the move has going for it in marco's testing scenario which we'll get to his next photo in a moment is the move just the move two and move one just have speakers facing a single direction like outward the move two has two angled tweeters so they kind of fire at 45 degree angles one big woofer in the middle i think same as the era 100 the the home pods have them in all directions obviously and the era 300 i think has them front back and upward yeah there's a whole bunch in the era 300 there's like yeah there are like front sides up like it's yeah the era 300 yeah because so putting on a kitchen countertop especially your kitchen countertop i would not want any drivers firing towards the wall because the wall is like an inch uh to be fair i don't think i don't think the era 300 has one that fires behind it is i mean i'm just looking from the shape of the thing i haven't seen a cutaway but it looks like it would have speakers firing backwards but maybe not no the whole rear section of that mesh it has speakers firing out the sides and up but i don't think it anyway the era 300 i'll start with that one the era 300 you being used for music is really weird so first of all so they have you know just like all the other speakers in this test including the home pods they have like a like an automatic tuning thing where they listen to your room and you walk around you wave the phone around and it plays weird sounds and it measures the response and everything before i did that tuning the era 300s sounded awful like really bad very like muffled treble huge booming bass like it sounded really bad um it was very strange but after the true play tuning it was radically different so the era 300s of all these they have the best bass of the group by a mile that makes sense they're the biggest so that they they have an advantage there they're also the most expensive but best base of the group by far.

1:27:41The weird thing about the Air 300 is that, as John mentioned, they're designed to be home theater surrounds. They aren't even designed to be your front speakers because Sonos, as far as I know, Sonos has no way to make them your front speakers. Yep, I believe that's right. They want you to use their soundbar. Yeah, they want you to use a soundbar as the front and these as the rears or sides. So it's kind of an odd product from that point of view. But anyway, using them to listen to music as a stereo pair, Dolby Atmos tracks sound fantastic on them. Significantly better than on the other speakers.

1:28:15Now part of this is when you're comparing an Atmos version of a song to the regular version, it's also just a different mix. So it's hard to compare it's hard to say this one's better sound quality I can say it's more pleasing. It's different though. And then when you play non-Atmos tracks on the Era 300s they mostly sound okay. Some of them sound bad. It was a weird set of speakers to use for music. For some songs, the Era 300 was the best speaker in this test by a mile. And for others, it was the worst. It was really weird. If you're going to listen to Atmos tracks, and even then, by the way, I could not get Apple Music to send Atmos to the Era 300s.

1:29:00The only way I could get Atmos to play, the only way I could get Atmos to play Atmos tracks for Apple Music is to call up Apple Music from the Sonos app, because Sonos can connect to Apple Music and whatever. So, use the Sonos app as the playing app to the speakers, using Apple Music as the backing service. Then, if it's sending to a group that only contains the Era 300s, then it will send Atmos. So, if you don't like listening to Atmos tracks, or you don't have a way to listen to them, or you don't like using the Sonos app to control your music, these are not good music speakers. Do not buy them for that.

1:29:34But again, that isn't what they are for. So let's move to the speakers that are designed for music, I think. The ERA 100s. These are the ones that are HomePod sized, near the HomePod's price, and seem to be direct competitors to the full-size HomePod. The ERA 100, I am extremely impressed by it. As far as sound quality goes, it's in the same ballpark as the full-sized HomePod. there are certain tracks that i think sound better on the home pods there are certain tracks that i think sound better on the era 100s it's really a toss-up on a lot of stuff the one the eras have way better bass than the home pod 2 the home pod 2 is just we know the home pod 2 is kind of weak on bass the era 100 has has much better bass also you can control it because they have eq settings in the app shocker oh my god you can control how a speaker sounds somebody send apple the message but you know until until they get that if ever um so yeah so as you can tweak it you can tweak bass and treble and this thing called loudness and whatever else um so that's very good and i've tweaked it and i i've my final eq is very it's just like a very it's like treble plus two everything else default just big marco energy there i know right um but overall the arrow 100 sounds great the only thing i can give the home pod the edge on is home pod still makes the best smoothest sounding vocals but the era 100 is very close and it's better bass and it has the controls and everything so i really enjoy the 100 um i would also say the that all of these modern sonos products have really good touch controls on the top they have there's more buttons they're labeled shocker um they are more intuitive to use they are faster and more reliable to respond they are less error prone in the sense of like accidentally brushing them and it actually like when the when the sonos speakers are playing music that is not being airplayed to them when it's just like when they're playing off their own services so basically the home the speaker's doing it directly those buttons are instantaneous you hit pause it pauses instantly you hit play it plays instantly you hit next track it's it goes to the next track instantly it is rock solid reliable it is everything i want music equipment to be that it so often now isn't and that is a huge advantage now with airplay This is an Apple-designed protocol being sent from Apple hardware.

1:31:58You would expect the Apple HomePod product would have a better AirPlay implementation, and it would be a better experience than using a third-party product that uses AirPlay like Sonos. You'd be wrong. Everything about AirPlay gets worse when a HomePod is involved. even when i would have when i was testing i would often have a group with with airplay sending to more than one speaker one of which was home pods and one of which was a sonos set the second a home pod is in an airplay group everything about it gets worse and more buggy it's slower you have weird bugs with volume and commands that get sent when airplay touches a home pod everything about it sucks and it's a shame it like and this has been a problem with every home pod i've ever had It's a problem with the minis.

1:32:46It's a problem with the ones. It's a problem with the twos. Every HomePod, everywhere I've ever used one, AirPlay is really buggy and slow. And Sonos AirPlay just works. It's amazing. It connects faster. It disconnects when you're done faster. It sends commands faster. It stays connected. It's more reliable. They don't fall out of sync. AirPlay on Sonos works the way AirPlay should work everywhere. And it's kind of amazing how much better it is on this third-party product than it is on Apple's own products. So love that because AirPlay is usually the most common form of playing for me. So that I like a lot because I don't want to always talk to my stuff.

1:33:24Maybe I should get a waterproof move too for my shower. Maybe. It's a little big for a shower. I just want it to play my podcast. I don't ask much. Yeah, it's really good at AirPlay. Like really good. So let's talk about voice control. There's two options. There's the Sonos voice control. they have their own voice agent thing voiced by the guy who plays gus fring what's that actor's name yeah giancarlo esposito i believe and yes gus fring is who you're thinking of yeah yeah the chicken guy from breaking bad it sounds he sounds amazing i love this guy and i love his voice and it's so it's so funny like when when someone's in the room who hasn't heard this before and you hear him respond everyone's like whoa who's that if you point out like oh it's it's so-and-so and everyone's like oh my god that's amazing and then like everyone starts asking it questions so it's good the only thing is sonos voice control you know the agent they've made with him it's a very basic voice control agent it is not very sophisticated at all yeah it only handles music it does not handle like general knowledge queries it is fast and responsive to things like play pause and volume and stuff like that i have found it is not quite as good as home pods at hearing me when loud music is playing home pods hear you like crazy it's it that's the best thing about home pods is how well they hear you and the sonos products have not been that good they've been close but not that good and their own voice agent is so primitive not only can it not answer you know basic questions about knowledge or start timers or anything but any kind of non-trivial query about music so for instance i have named playlists and i have apple music connected i can't say play my best of fish playlist and have it play that works every time on a home pod well every time that it responds so actually i feel like i've done this and it's worked but i haven't tried it in a while now i can try it live right now if you would like but i don't think that's going to make for great programming that's right i could i could have sworn i have tried this in the past and it has worked for me but i also only have a handful of playlists in apple music so it's not choosing from very much very many of them either so i don't know neither neither is mine maybe it was just a temporary failure maybe i'll try again um so the other option you have is Alexa.

1:35:38Now, I had Alexa stuff in the past, so I know roughly what it's good at, what it's bad at. I will say, again, back to music queries, I asked both Alexa and Sonos a question like, play the first album by the Cranberries. Now, both Alexa and Sonos, when I said play the first album by the Cranberries, simplified that question to play the Cranberries, and just started playing random Cranberries hits. when i asked siri play the first album by the cranberries i got it right so i think siri's actually showing to be better at music related queries than the other ones um in my experience at least back to alexa integration um it is exactly as annoying as alexa is everywhere you have to authorize it in the alexa app and then it'll try to upsell you on a billion different things please give us access to all of your data everywhere forever by the way did you know we can do all these other things that you give us more money and more data so you you have to say no to a lot you have to be very careful what you give them permission to do but as alexa always is it is shockingly fast and reliable that's what alexa is good at it's always fast and reliable and it's fairly accurate the general knowledge questions for it are actually pretty good it it slaughters siri on general knowledge questions it's not even close as good as siri is at music that's how that's how good Alexa is at knowledge.

1:37:03If you have that kind of usage pattern, it's very good for that. So overall, I've been extremely happy with the Sonos ecosystem. One thing I'm trying to do here in my life in general, I think it is better for me, it's better for the show, and I think it's for Apple, for me to start avoiding Apple's things they call hobby projects whenever better alternatives exist by more motivated companies to succeed. So you look at something like the Apple TV. They neglect it. It has a lot of shortcomings, but I've used the competitor's products and I still prefer the Apple TV. I still think it is generally the best streaming box out there.

1:37:50that's saying a lot because they really don't put much into it it seems but but you know the others are just worse but there's a lot of categories that i've been kind of carrying water for apple and i feel kind of like i've been had and the home pod is one of those categories it is actually pretty good at certain things but it seems like apple really couldn't give less of a crap to really make it great apple has a lot of products that are great and i'm happy to focus on those. I'm happy. Like my iPhone has never let me down. My Macs, generally speaking, recently, especially do not let me down.

1:38:27Even the iPad, which we complained about the, you know, the weirdness in the product lineup, but the iPad is a great overall product that is reliable. And while it doesn't have a lot of effort put into it from like a power user perspective, it does have a lot of effort put into it in general. Their core products are great and pleasant and they make me very happy to use and they rarely they rarely give me problems where i get into trouble with apple's products are when i like something more than it seems like they do or when i use something more than it seems like they do and the home pod has always given me that impression and unlike the apple tv what is now the case is there are better alternatives in this area you know tiff and i in our marriage we have a general principle whoever cares the most wins you know if there's some some decision that has to be made or you know some some like you know minor policy argument that we're having if someone cares a lot about it and the other person really doesn't whoever cares the most let them win like that's that's generally better and i think i can kind of apply that to a lot of tech products as well like sonos cares a lot about speakers because it's all they make this is their entire company like sonos is that this is what they do and the era 100 is one of their most important products because it's like their main entry level and probably highest volume speaker that they sell so yeah they're going to put a lot of effort into that if anything's wrong with it they're going to care a lot about it that's the experience they're going to polish that's their iphone so that makes sense they are super focused on making speakers.

1:40:04This is like one of their high volume products that they're going to make it really good. And they do Google's phones, you know, Google makes all these pixel phones. Google's phones are usually not amazing and they don't really take off in the market and they have a lot of shortcomings in part because that's not what Google's main business is. Google's main business is ads. And you can bet anything about Google's ad system. They put a lot of effort into that. They put a lot of effort into YouTube. That's another major Google projects that that's a huge important product for them. Google doesn't put a lot of effort into their phones.

1:40:35It's just not that important to them. The HomePod is a total afterthought for Apple. Apple couldn't possibly give less of a crap about the HomePod and it shows. So I have found that I am happier now getting away from Apple's hobby projects where there is some other competitor that's their main thing. And whether it's you know smart home stuff sometimes or these other like various accessory things they make like apple does a really great job at their core stuff that's what i'm going to spend my mental effort on and my and a lot of my money on and you know i am very happy to have found the apple of speakers who cares a hell of a lot more about this and i'm in like i i love the way these work they aren't perfect they aren't better in every way i kind of wish i could have i i hate to say this, I kind of wish I could have Siri on the Sonos 100 or the Sonos Aero 100 because I think Siri for the use as a music voice assistant is the best voice assistant for music.

1:41:43But otherwise, I like them a lot better than the HomePods. They make me crazy a lot less. They make me angry a lot less. They make me happy a lot more. That's what I need out of my speakers. Well, you let me know if they just start cutting out every two seconds and you have to reboot your phone to make them work. I think that's just you, John. Now, just very quickly, because this is going on longer than intended, but I've been fascinated by every darn moment. I know, right? And I've been fascinated by every moment of it, and I'm glad that your experience, by and large, maybe the particulars are a little different, but by and large, your broader experience, I think, echoes mine or vice versa.

1:42:15I have been really overjoyed with my Sonos stuff. It is not flawless, as you just said, but it is pretty friggin' reliable. It almost always works, unless your name's John Syracuse, and I cannot speak highly enough about how great the Sonos ecosystem interacts with itself. You can absolutely use AirPlay. That's not something I do often, with the exception actually of Shower Podcast. But once you have something playing on basically any Sonos speaker in the house, it is incredibly easy via voice, via physical controls, via the Sonos app, any number of ways, it is incredibly easy to start picking and choosing what other Sonos speakers to play that same content.

1:42:59And it can get to the point, and I know I belabored this when we first were talking about the Sonos stuff that I had gotten like a year ago, you can walk all around your house, including outdoors, varying distances from your wireless access points, and the music is perfectly in sync, just flawlessly in sync. I don't understand how I can go from my office with my move one, walk down the stairs, through the living room, out through the porch and go to the far side of my admittedly small lot. And the music is in sync through all of these spaces. It's unreal. I don't know how they do it. And if I want to remove one of the speakers from that group, I can say, you know, hey, dingus, remove office or hey, dingus, play this everywhere or whatever the case may be.

1:43:49It is incredibly, incredibly good. I really love this stuff. This is not sponsored. They have not given us a dime. It's just we the two of us, maybe I guess sort of three of us just really, really like their stuff. It is expensive. It is not cheap. and I was able to get a discount through a friend of a friend when I bought the overwhelming majority of my stuff. So consider that, that my value for money computation might be a little different than yours because I got a really steep discount on my stuff, which I'm incredibly thankful for. But honestly, it's one of those situations that now that I've lived it, I think I would, if I were to do it all over again, knowing what I know today, I would have been willing to pay full price for it because it's that freaking good.

1:44:33Yeah, I mean, there are markets for good stuff, even if it is expensive. If it's expensive because it's good, then there's a market for that. That's how most Apple products are. Apple does not make a lot of products that are super price competitive with their competitors. Apple is almost always the higher priced option in a market. and yet we are usually not only you know willing but almost happy to pay the apple prices well maybe that might be pushing a little far but we we accept the apple prices on things in so many categories because we want the best and usually apple's products are the best so it makes sense it's worth it to us you want the best computer you get the apple computer you want the best monitor you get the apple monitor like you know but it's just you know certain certain products that they occasionally are not the best but i again going back to sonos like their stuff is solid you know they they've had quite a history they've always been pretty solid like with the audio stuff though you know i for a while i i didn't really like the way their speakers sounded and that's why i love the sonos amp because it's a product that lets me just use my own speakers than it powers them.

1:45:48But their recent stuff now, like the Arrow line, is really interesting and sounds way better than what was going before. So I am really excited to see where they go. And this is an ecosystem that I'm happy to be in now because it makes me happy and it works well. And that is something that, again, in technology, oftentimes the tech that we expect to be, you know, improvements to our life, oftentimes causes more headaches than it actually provides benefits and oftentimes like you know the things that work 85 of the time can be really frustrating you know because it's like oh this is really great 85 of the time 15 of the time it it is slow or does something weird or breaks or have to reset the whole thing up from scratch so like you know see all smart home stuff ever it's with the exception of caseta which i still love uh anyway like you know so so rarely in tech do we find a product or a product line that actually delivers on its promise well and that's why on this show again like oftentimes that's an apple product and so that's why we are so happy to evangelize for those products to say this apple thing works fantastically if you have this kind of problem in your life get the apple thing it's amazing and in this case the apple thing's not but the great thing is the Sonos thing is.

1:47:11And there are not that many downsides to it besides the price and whatever your choice of voice system might be. But if you're willing to get over those things, they really work very, very well. I just want to point out that I have two Sonos Roams. I have one and my wife has one, and they both do this thing. In all fairness, the Roam is not one of their stellar products. I know. But Casey has one too, and he hasn't had this problem. But here's the thing. My two Roams I've had across multiple iPhones, many versions of ios across multiple years right so it's just weird to me i don't you know when you don't mean bugs they're gonna be bedeviled by this bug that i have a workaround for but the workaround is annoying every time i always go to that sonos app i'm like is there a software update is there you know because i just want a software update to the sonos thing to fix this problem but i mean ios has been updated my phone's been updated my wife's phone's been updated they both do it not all the time just enough of the time to be annoying bummer that's why i mean seriously i would get a more expensive Sonos because I do like you know the experience I like having a little waterproof thing I like playing you know I just need it to be small and fit on a shower shelf well the move is not that nope it sure isn't all right thanks to our sponsors this week Sonos uh no just kidding thanks to our sponsors this week Adblock Pro and Notion and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us atv.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Antimarko Armin, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.

1:49:24It's accidental. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So John, you've been busy. Yeah, I suppose. No, no, no, no, no. Don't I suppose this? John has been putting in a tremendous amount of work making all this possible. I was barely involved and Marco was also barely involved. This is almost all, John, and I genuinely appreciate all the work you've been putting into this because this was a not insignificant amount of work. We might discuss all of that work in a future members-only episode. But I want to talk about the changes we made and why we made them, which goes all the way back to when we were discussing the bad ad market for podcasts like ours.

1:50:14And we said we were going to send out a survey to our listeners to ask them a bunch of questions. And we did that, and we got a bunch of responses. And then you didn't hear anything from us for a while, partially because we were deciding what to do, partially because it takes time to analyze the data, partially because of scheduling stuff. But anyway, we did look at those server responses. I tried to analyze them as best I could. It is tricky because we had a couple of constraints here. One was I didn't want to ask a million questions in the survey. There are so many things that we could do. I didn't want to send people a 500-question survey that no one's going to fill out.

1:50:45So I really tried hard to make it as short as possible. There were multiple paths through the survey, but I think it was like less than 10 questions for each one. But that also meant the data we were going to get was only going to tell us about the few things that we asked. And we didn't ask. There was like an open ended. There's a bunch of open ended things where people could type anything they want. And I read through those. So that was kind of like we could get like any feedback people had. But we asked some very targeted questions as well. And obviously, a lot of the targeted questions were relevant to the one big change we did make, which was lowering the price of annual membership.

1:51:17And, you know, obviously, people write it and say, I wish everything was less expensive. Yes, everyone wishes everything was less expensive. Is that the right move for your business to lower your prices? Apple seems to think no. Here's the thing about lowering prices. Of course, I would be a member if you just lowered your prices. Some number of people said that. In fact, we asked this very specific question. It was one of the questions we asked. If we gave an annual discount equivalent to one free month, would you become an ATP member? And we could divide those into the people who had previously been a member and weren't or had never been a member.

1:51:53And people answered that question. And what we're trying to figure out is, hey, if we offer this discount, are we going to lose money? Because in case this goes without saying, we're trying to make more money, not less. So by rolling out this change and having every single annual subscriber renew at the lower price, we're losing money. The only way we can not lose money is to actually gain subscribers. That's the whole point. You lower the price, you make it more attractive. Maybe more people will sign up. and so we're trying with our non-business school education to figure out are we going to lose money if we do this so you think oh why why is it hard to figure out you have a survey you ask people hey would you become a member if we did this you ask them this this specific thing was one of the choices just add them up and do the math and you can figure out if you're going to make money but people don't always do what they say in surveys right checking a checkbox on a survey says yeah totally if you did that i'd become a member things change from when they answered it uh you know like maybe they changed their mind maybe they thought they would but so you have to say like how much do we think people will actually follow through on what they said they were going to do because when it comes time to spend actual money versus saying that you will are two different things second thing is not everybody who listens to the show filled out the survey it's not you know people don't want to fill out surveys they're boring whatever uh how representative are the people who filled out the survey are they nothing like our other listeners or our other listeners exactly like the people in the survey percentage-wise.

1:53:21These are questions that you have to answer to be able to figure out, are we going to lose money if we do this? It's like, how many people who said they would become a member will become a member? And can we extrapolate at all from the people who filled out the survey to the larger population of listeners? Or should we only consider the people who actually filled out the survey? So anyway, we did all this math. No, no, no, no, no. We did not. You did. And I say that not to make fun of you, but to thank you for all the work you put in. Well, I mean, don't thank me until we see how it goes. But anyway, we did a bunch of math.

1:53:54And, you know, you participated because we had a bunch of fields. There was like percentages of like, you know, of all the people who said X, how many of them said they would do Y, you know, what percentage will do it? A hundred percent, 50 percent, you know, like. So we have to come up with those numbers. And we mostly just pulled them out of our butt based on our instincts. Right. anyway uh it what it came out to was we probably won't lose money like it wasn't like well well this is gonna be great you know so you may be saying well why did you do this if you think it's like it's like on the edge maybe you lose money may you make money why did you do this uh one of the reasons is that it's a not a huge change i don't think lowering the price is going to make anybody angry so it's a thumbs up to that right um there's not huge risk like you know worst case you lose a little bit of money but maybe you make it up over the long term of getting new subscribers or whatever um and of all the things that we asked it was among the the more popular options it didn't have any you know sort of huge downsides right we also heard from people that they would like more members only content and i know we didn't sort of talk about this but i hope people have noticed that we are more consistently releasing members only content maybe you don't notice because it's like you know that it seems like they come out once a month or whatever but But it's been, we had skipped months in the past and now we haven't recently.

1:55:14And it's been like less than 30 days between things. And we're going to try to keep that streak going. So I hope people do appreciate that because that was something, part of the feedback. Hey, how about more members only content? And we are also trying to do that. That's not a cost thing. You just get that as part of your membership. And then finally, the silly thing that we did. This was not on the survey, I don't think at all in any way. But people wrote it in. People wrote it in in the little free form thing and emailed us. Again, not a lot of people. but they said i love atp so much that i wish i could pay more money how many people need to say that to you for you to spend time implementing it turns out not that many three i don't remember what the number was but it was not a lot and yeah like you could count them on appendages on your body it's not a lot of people but like why you know if they want to do that we should accommodate them and that was actually the most complicated feature we had to add because it's kind of weird like because you insisted on a free form text field for the price yeah pay what pay what you want right and we tried to hide it from the ui because like no one wants to do this we understand right but for the five people who do want to do it we wanted it to be there it is there uh one of the fact items is how do what you know because presumably the people who are saying that are already members so they have to change their membership to be this weird one there's a fact item for it atp.fm slash member slip slash fact hashtag patron i guess is how you would say it in the modern age the patron is the fragment part of the url no one knows that term anymore i don't know what you would call it but anyway it looks like a hashtag so we hope the five people who said that are listening to this and they will do that and we hope the more than five people who answered the survey and said hey if you gave me a discount an annual membership i would become a member I hope some of you actually do that because if you don't, we just lost a whole bunch of money.

1:56:59You know, we didn't originally do any sort of discount for the annual plan because we wanted to make it fairly straightforward. And to a degree, I personally think it, I'm going to say it feels slimy. I think that's a little aggressive, but it feels a little icky, maybe is a better word for it, when we're trying to coax you to spend more money than maybe you would want to by saying, well, if you commit to a whole year, we'll give you a little bit of money off. And really, I think especially Marco, but all of us wanted a very straightforward exchange. You know, you can give us either eight bucks a month or it was a$96 a year and that you get what you get and you don't get upset.

1:57:35And now we're making it slightly muddier. But the results of the survey were fairly emphatic that, oh, I'm just really turned off by the fact that I don't get any sort of discount for an annual, you know, an annual price. It really, really bothers me. We got some fairly aggressive versions of that statement. And so the flip side of that is another way of looking at it, which is also true, is that you pay for the flexibility of being able to cancel any time. If you pay for monthly, why is monthly more expensive than annual? What you're paying for is the convenience to say, oh, I don't want to do it this month and just cancel.

1:58:08Right. Whereas you've already paid for the whole year. You don't have that flexibility. So there are multiple reasons why an annual discount makes sense and is desirable to people. Yep. And plus, you know, you're only getting billed once a year rather than once a month and blah, blah, blah. Which saves credit card processing fees, which you don't care about, and is generally peanuts. But the main reason people asked for annual, because we didn't originally have annual, many people asked for annual is that it just didn't want to see a bill every month, like just the annoyance of it, right? And that does make sense.

1:58:39One bill a year is easier to deal with and track than having this thing come in every month. Yeah. So I don't know how much we want to talk about the nuts and bolts about how this works behind the scenes. Maybe we should save that for a member special. But suffice to say, a lot of this was far more complicated than you would expect. But if you are currently an annual member, and as far as you knew until you were listening to us tonight or today or whatever, you were paying$96 a year. John, remind us what those people have to do in order to get this new$88 per year price. If they're currently an annual member, they do nothing.

1:59:12Exactly. You do nothing. You do nothing. Like you can go to your member page right now and you will see it says the new lower amount. And like I said, people have already renewed. So we're pretty sure it worked. Like they're renewing at the new lower price. The old prices are gone. You can't buy them even if you wanted to. Everybody's subscription who was annual has switched to the new prices. So you don't have to do anything. Well, slow down though. If I wanted to do the enter my own price, I could put in$96 per year though, correct? Yes. Yes. Just making sure. Anybody can. I don't want to. If you do this, if you're one of the five people who does this, someone should do it just to test that it works.

1:59:46No one has ever done it in production. So please somebody be the person to test it in production. It was tested many times in depth. If you do this, you will get a little badge next to your name that I copied from Letterboxd that says patron. What do you get with that? The badge is what you get. That little yellow box, that is what there is no additional anything for patrons. I don't think it would be a good idea to like have this special tier for that. But anyway, like five people are going to do it. Who cares? But yeah, we're not using that language anywhere. but internally I needed things to name the variables and I called all that stuff patron stuff or whatever.

2:00:22So if you want to become an ATP patron, which is not a term that we use in public facing things, but I just said on the podcast, it's in the fact, that's the whole reason I made the fact I will add to that fact as people ask questions because people frequently ask things and I want to put them somewhere and that's what a fact is for. Yeah. And remind me, you know, so if I am currently at the new$88 per year plan, but I'd like to pay$888 per year, what i need to do then is cancel my current plan and go in and name my price and and start a new plan at that point is that correct yeah that's a new feature that i added as part of this because it just seemed like it was always so complicated and weird the fact is one feature of like how do i do this and the second thing is like on the member page when you cancel like you can't it's not like when you cancel it ends immediately when you cancel it you'll still whatever you paid for the rest of your term that you're paid for you will continue to get that obviously it's just that it won't renew essentially at the end of it uh but right on the member page now you can start a new one even though the old one hasn't run out yet which was a big thing that people were confused about or bothered by it's like oh i gotta wait for my monthly membership to actually expire before i can sign up for the annual and now you don't have to do that through some weird sleight of hand that i did with stripe where you end up getting like a free trial essentially so if you end you end your monthly membership of the month isn't over yet and you start a new membership the new membership will start when your old one ends but when you do the checkout thing uh it will it will count as a free trial until your old membership ends and then it starts billing that's just to make the math work out i tried to do it the more sane way where you can just forward date it or whatever but apparently you can't forward date past the end of the billing period so like past the i don't know what language to use so basically say you had an annual membership and you want to go to monthly and it's the middle of the year the middle of your year you cancel the annual fine great it's going to end at the end of your year right and you're like i want to sign up for monthly right now the feature that the stripe has that lets you forward date it to say hey start their monthly membership when their annual one ends it'll be like i can't start a monthly membership later than one month from now that's basically the problem like it is a monthly thing and the farthest in the future all that you started is one month from now or less and so you can't start a one month membership six months from now which is dumb so that's why i came up with the free trial work around which is also dumb but i explain it in the fact and on the screen where you do stuff so hopefully people won't be too confused by it and it's better than it was before where you'd have to like put a calendar reminder to remind you when your annual membership ends in six months to start your new monthly one that's very good very clever not clever it's a terrible hack but that's programmed for you indeed well i gotta say too like i i am so first of all i'm incredibly thankful that john is bored because John has had on his request list for the CMS that basically was like a list of to-do items that only I could do that John cared the most about by far.

2:03:17Again, whoever cares the most wins. Only you could do, to be clear, because you wouldn't let us do them. Right. So this has been built up for months, or years, actually. Years. Yeah. Look at the date on the document. ATP.fm wishlist. Created when. Yeah. I don't even have it open. I don't even know where it is. I know where it is. Yeah. Anyway, let's see. What does it say created? 2020. Oh, yeah. June 27th, 2020. Right. Because that's when we launched membership. I was going to say not long after or around the time that we launched membership. Yeah. So anyway, John's had this wish list for the CMS for a long time, and I have had no time to do it.

2:03:57because you know also between all my you know moving my house and everything i'm also trying to rewrite overcast basically like so it's that this is this was never going to happen as long as it was on my plate you did a bunch of stuff in the list though to be fair it's just recently yeah recently i've done very little uh but anyway so you know john's been caring about this the most for a long time uh and has all this you know newfound time since you quit your job and now your house is mostly fixed temporarily and you don't seem to have a lot of dying appliances right at this moment um so you had all this time and so i and i thought like this is always going to be on my plate because first of all i'm bad at delegating second of all neither of you guys knew php and i figured odds of you being willing to touch it were low and third of all you're bad at delegating yes yes uh but i was so wrong uh because not only were you super willing uh but you I mean it turns out PHP is not that hard so you learn it pretty fast we'll talk about it in an hour special and then the rigor to which you and Casey treated this like professional software pull requests code reviews testing staging I wouldn't go that far in fact I have some complaints about the QA process because there were some big bugs in there that I fixed oh my god well anyway oh no that's going to be me are my one person 15 minute QA team of Casey lists failed me.

2:05:24Well, that's more than I ever use. I know. Marco's the zero person, zero minute QA team. Yeah. The two of you, the way that you like, you know, professionalized this process. It's almost like we did this for a living. Almost. Imagine that. It's so much more professional than anything I've ever done. Like, which is funny because I've been a professional software developer for as long as at least Casey has. and almost as long as John has. Your boss is a weirdo. Yeah, like I never did any of this stuff. You really, you did it so like professionally and so honestly, I was blown away. So first of all, I'm very thankful that you did all this because I was never going to do it.

2:06:07You start worrying when I install Jira. Oh no, no, absolutely not. I quit. I will not subject myself to that again. I have PTSD about that. Don't worry. I really don't like throwing around that term, but if I was going to throw it around about anything, it would be about JIRA. Oh, gosh. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Anyway, so, second of all, I am so... This is so clearly the right choice to put it on you instead of me, because you're doing such a better job than I was. So, anyway, thanks, and, yeah, we should have done this a long time ago. My fault. it's all good we got there we got over the hurdle and that's all that matters and uh yeah i don't know if we really need to talk about it too much more because i know a lot of people aren't too terribly interested you know navel gazing and inside baseball and whatnot but and if we do talk about it on a member special we wouldn't be talking about the business stuff we'll be talking about it from like a programming perspective more general type of thing which is kind of also tech nerdy but don't worry it wouldn't be about the show it would be about the software let's see member special john's review of php that would be in there for sure but i think it'd be more expensive than that.

2:07:14Oh, I can't wait. Well, I mean, the literal thing we have in the show notes is John talks about working on the CMS and quote-unquote learning PHP. Oh. We got to make that. We got to do that. I will take this opportunity before we sign off just to thank everyone. I know I do this all the time, but it really does mean that much to all three of us. Thank you, anyone who has even considered becoming a member, those of you who are members. Thank you so much to all of you, and we appreciate you so very, very much. And who knows what new PHP trick John will pull next time. We'll all have to tune in to find out.