603: Too Smart to Move

32:37Yeah, that's true. I thought the exact same. Like regular people out there hated the switch to Lightning from the dock connector because they were like Apple is just doing this as a cash grab to sell new cables and new bricks or whatever. And this time I thought we would have the same problem and we just didn't. I think that's largely because USB-C is not proprietary to Apple. And so when they made this change, there was already a massive marketplace of USB-C cables and chargers made by everybody. and so it was it was not as much of like oh they're trying to sell their own cable like i'd be surprised if apple sells many of their own cables i think most people just get whatever they can on amazon and it's fine i'm pretty sure if you go back and listen to old episodes of atp all those reasons you just cited were actually cited back when we were discussing this so i don't i don't think either one of you or any of us actually thought it would be as bad and then because we listed those reasons and lo and behold it wasn't although i that said i think it has been even quieter than we thought it would be because when we were discussing it we're like okay well is this is going to be as bad here are these mitigating factors that can be make it not as bad but not only was it not as bad as lightning to usb or lightning to uh 30 pin to lightning i think it was just pretty much a non-issue i mean maybe maybe it's more of an issue outside our circles maybe most people don't have a usbc phone maybe it's lacking but right now on the eve of the iphone 16 uh i think it is uh exceeded expectations into how much better the transition was even though i think we all said it was going to be better we didn't think it was gonna be this much better and i certainly did not think it was going to be as you said like this quiet like no one see it's i heard no complaints from literally anybody that they changed the port like you know i mean you're right that like you know they not everybody is on that that fast of an upgrade cycle but still i literally heard zero problems about this oh speaking of the port on the on the flip side my wife's iphone 15 pro is the only usbc phone in the house and so we have the opposite problem here where it's not like we've gone to this whole usbc lifestyle we have this like communal chargers everywhere with lightning stuff and we had to add the right number of usbc things there now arguably we should have been adding them before because we've got usbc ipads we just happen to have other places to charge our ipads but now every place where there's a bunch of lightning cables there's now at least one usbc cable in the mix eventually we'll fully transition but it's going to be a while because my wife uses i believe four maybe three uh she carries four iphones she uses three of them for pokemon go one of them is her work phone so she's just Just like a brick.

35:06Can you imagine how much four pro phones weigh? It's just so heavy. Anyway, it's going to be a while before all four of those phones are on USB-C. So I have a long road ahead of me with a combination of Lightning and USB-C on all our communal chargers. And while we're on USB-C here, I just wanted to give a shout out to USB-C Power Delivery. As a spec and as a product ecosystem, USB-C PD has, and for the less nerdy people out there, that is the spec that allows USB-C to deliver much higher power amounts than old USB could ever deliver. That's how you can get USB to power an entire laptop by itself, for instance.

35:49the move in general to for so many tech products and even products that are kind of just barely tech products the move to being powered by usbc and usbc pd wattages has made overall life so much just like a it's like a little bit nicer in a lot of ways it's like it's like the inverse of paper cuts like you know we complain about little paper cuts on little annoyances and products this is whatever the opposite of a paper cut would be. A paper circle. I don't know. I can't think of a good word that's funny. But it is just little delights. I guess that's the word. All the time. Little delights where you don't necessarily realize it.

36:30Once you've moved to the USB-C world, you don't realize how good you have it until you have to go use something older that has its own power brick or its own older USB micro or whatever port and the world we have now is so nice because all that stuff about like wow i can charge all my like my phone and my ipad and my laptop from all the same thing that's true and that that shows in lots of bigger ways now too like so many other gadgets or things are now powered by usb because it's just kind of cheaper and widely available and like so many devices i even have like a power drill that is powered by USB-C now.

37:09Oh, my word. It has its own built-in, which is, and I mean, look, I'm not a contractor, but for my purposes, it's totally fine. Like, there was just, there are so many things like that now that are entering my life gradually over the last few years that just, oh, this new XYZ thing, this is now USB-C powered. Like, you know, it could be so many things, like toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners, like so many things are now being USB-C powered. And the more stuff that you get like that in your life, the more those little conveniences and delights you're into sometimes oh oh this i need to get a new power adapter for my you know drill do i have to buy the proprietary thing from the drill company no it's just usbc i want to have a shorter or longer cable for this gadget do i have to buy a special thing or see if anybody makes a weird one on amazon no you can just use usbc like there there are so many little tiny things like that that add up in your life over time the more you're into the usbc lifestyle so thank god for the europeans for forcing this upon apple and thank god for the ecosystem for for being here and for for pretty pretty gradually but now with quite some speed behind it um converting over to this wonderful lifestyle it is wonderful i love usbc even for the data side of it yeah it's a mess the power side of it is awesome yeah agreed let me give the eu partial credit because i think we said before i think apple would have switched with or without the eu it's just a question of the individual timing they might have even done it at exactly the same time because they did do it earlier than required but uh yeah apple's lack of investment in lightning and the lack of expansion in the capabilities of that port made it inevitable that they would eventually go to usbc so they have and i and i think you know one of one of their stated goals one of the eu stated goals was reducing e-waste and i think largely this does that like the move of so many things to usbc power i think really does reduce e-waste because like i think again like go through your tech closets and see how many things there are that have their own custom power bricks and stuff that now the modern versions of those don't because they can be usbc powered it's i think they make a pretty big impact here so i again so happy about this change all right let's move on to uh the other headlining feature of the iphone 15 pro the action button um it's funny like we it got out there there was a little bit of drama here and there with cases and then we pretty much never heard about it for the rest of the year but i gotta say i find the action button so useful that i instantly took it for granted like the idea now of using a phone without the action button would be a significant paper cut to me it would like a significant step down because i use mine i have it set up for the flashlight i know there's lots of other ideas people have for it but i need a flashlight fairly frequently um and i use it at least twice a day and i just i love having that hardware button there it is fantastic yeah i use mine for camera and i know that But many would call that a kind of a novice or noob approach because there are many other ways to get to your camera, most of which are fairly quick.

40:07But I don't want to have to think about it or have to worry about swiping in just the right way that it actually listens to me and swipes the way I want it to go from the lock screen. And so for me, I love having the camera as my action button action. And I use that at least daily. I don't personally think I would use the flashlight quite as much, but hey, that doesn't mean you're wrong at all. If it works for you, that's all that matters. I don't know that I would be lost or anything without having the action button, you know, in a future phone if for some reason it went away. But I definitely would miss having it for sure.

40:47And maybe one day I'll use it for something more advanced. But yeah, I think the action button also gets a thumbs up from me for sure. I think the camera is a perfectly good thing to use it for. my success rate at doing the swipe gesture for the camera is so low i end up using the the what you would think would be the even slower one where you have to hold your finger on the little camera icon it's like you have there's a delay you're like why are you using the one with the delay that's got to be slower no because when i try to swipe and it fails and i try to swipe and it's always like oh got to get the camera out quick you know because something cute is happening or whatever right that is the time when i am completely unable to get the camera up so the action button is going to be great.

41:21But I have to say that when I need to get my camera real fast, it's almost always my phone and not my wife's phone. So I actually haven't built the habit of using the action button, even though hers is set to camera, because I'm never grabbing her phone real quick to take a picture because going over to where she is or getting her phone is going to kill the time that it would be required anyway. So I'm looking forward to my iPhone 16 with the action button so that I can build that habit because I can almost guarantee that pressing that side button is going to have a much higher success rate than me trying to swipe or me having to hold my finger down on that little thing yep very much so and then finally um the only other thing i'll say about the iphone 15 pro um is that the thermals really have been pretty bad uh it really you know we we all saw right at the beginning we're like this phone seems to run hot really hot um it does it does run very hot and it does thermal throttle itself a lot in use especially like in the sun in a car that's why i had to like buy a chiller phone mount that uses you know a thermoelectric element just to cool the phone down in the car just so i could keep the display on and take any power whatsoever like it this phone runs hot and it has run hot since day one and apple tried to i think they successfully mitigated the the bad press that could have resulted from that when people started reporting that right at the beginning and they issued a soft they said it was a software issue and they issued a software update it wasn't a software issue it it was a hardware flaw this phone overheats much more easily than previous phones did and the rumors are that the upcoming 16 pros that should be announced next week apparently have a a modified and better thermal design and that's so that is when i look at my 16 pro wish list it's actually really short it's i want better thermals and i could use the 5x camera that casey has which it does seem like both of those things have been pretty solidly rumored the entire time for that phone i have to say though how many years i think it's been like three or four years that there have been rumors of better cooling in iphones vapor chambers graphite sheets not just this year not just for the iphone 70 but last year and the year before that and the year before that and we have never gotten them so i really really hope this is the year because those rumors are always there and the reason they're there is every year like again if you have a phone out in the sun they will overheat right or if when you first update your phone and it's doing all the indexing they get hot people don't like that and so they're always like boy could there be better cooling and then you look at what apple has done with cooling and we know they could do more because android phones are like what what more can we do can we can we do more than just having you know a heat sync up against the thing and so on and so forth and yes you can lots of other phone makers have done things and so whenever we see the rumors apple's gonna do it they're gonna put those graphite sheets in there they're gonna use more thermal paste they're gonna use a vapor chamber every year we're just disappointed and obviously the 15 pro had the what the what the heck is the chip the a18 pro i don't even remember the numbers anymore yeah the one on the new three millimeter process right so it was a really they were pushing the limits with that chip on on that process that apple's already moving away from i kind of see why it had thermal issues and i also kind of say see why this would have been a good phone to try out those graphite sheets you know what i mean like but no it didn't didn't happen so i really hope it does come on the 16th but if we go another year and everyone says oh those rumors were for the 17 not the 16 i am going to be disappointed despite the fact that in general i haven't noticed my wife so i'm getting particularly hot except for when she's playing pokemon go in which case that makes all of her phones hot but you know it's as long as it gets the job done as long as it doesn't you know stop working which is your problem when you have it in the car like it literally stops being able to be used for the thing you're trying to use it for because the screen gets so dim you can't see it anymore um i don't i don't know what the 15 Pro was over any kind of limit to bother people more than some past phones, but it's time for Apple to invest a little bit more in cooling on their top-end phones.

45:12You know, it's funny you bring all this up because I do agree that throttling is an issue and that the thermals are not stellar, but I would actually say, to my estimation, this was a mild improvement over past years. And, you know, when I'm using my phone at the aforementioned pool, I think it was the 14 Pro, maybe it was the 13 Pro, but I want to say it was the 14 Pro, that bad boy was so dark I could barely read it pretty much always. Whereas this one, it definitely gets dim, and noticeably so, but I feel like not only would it recover quicker, but it didn't get as dim as either the 13 or the 14.

45:50So while I don't disagree that we do, I think we do need improvements, and I hope for improvements. I actually thought that this was a slight improvement over years past, although not a great one. I think you're just experiencing screen improvements there and not necessarily thermal improvements, right? Because I think just the screen is brighter and takes less power at a given level of brightness. So now the dim one is not as dim and you're attributing that to better cooling or better thermals. But I think it's just screen improvements that you're benefiting from there. But anyway, it doesn't feel like that's the case, but you very well could be right either either way the experience isn't as bad as it has but that's the thing though it's very situational like if you if you buy a car with a big glass roof and all of a sudden your phone is overheating because on the dashboard is getting more direct sunlight you're going to say oh it's the phone's fault but maybe it's because you got a new car right like these all of these phones have always been very vulnerable to being in direct sunlight for any amount of time and it's just a question of do you start putting your phone in more direct sunlight uh and if so you will perceive that phone as being worse thermally but i mean there's 15 pros i have heard people saying gets a little bit warmer than they expected.

46:53And like a lot of these things, especially with the SoC, the heat is very localized and it's when the SoC is doing a lot of work, right? The thing that gets hot is that little SoC in there. And so on iPhone setup day, when it's redoing all your indexes and doing all that stuff, yeah, it's going to get real hot and people are going to notice. But I think over time with normal phone usage, where you just pick it up, scroll through something and put it back down, it doesn't really get a chance to get that hot until you put it on the dashboard of your car. And then I guess one more thing on the 15 before we leave it um i really do appreciate the titanium as a weight saving measure i don't think it needs necessarily be titanium specifically it could it could be lots of other it could be aluminum for all i care like aluminum was fine for a long time and it is lighter than titanium even um so that would be fine as well um but i'm very glad they switched away from steel i do know that like apparently they switched to titanium and some of the structural change they made inside i think were actually part of the problem with the thermals, and I believe that's part of why they had to revise them for the 16 line next week.

47:57But overall, it does feel very good in the hand. It feels great. So I love the overall design of it, with the exception that I think the colors were garbage for the Profone. Like, I got the natural gray one, which I thought, I don't know, last fall I was kind of in a gray mood, and I thought, this is going to be cool and different. And no, it's just gray. I slightly disagree with you there. It is just gray, but I do think it's a cool gray, like a neat gray. But I do mostly agree with you. If you'll permit me to just carry on since I've already interrupted you. Go for it. With regard to the 15 Pro Max, I don't hate the size.

48:35I don't hate the size. And I do like having a little more real estate. It turns out that if you have a phone this big and your hands aren't freakishly large, a pop socket is pretty much compulsory. um i have been thinking long and hard about what i will do if the tetra prism 5x lens comes to the pro to the pro but not pro max phone so if the iphone 16 pro gets the 5x lens sitting here now i think i'm going to go back to the smaller one with the the human-sized one that'll be the test actually because right now you're like oh the big phone it's annoying but it's nice to have more screen with that you're really going to find out how much you care about that screen when you go back to a smaller one that's what you're going to notice if you don't notice it takes you a day you're like fine or whatever but if you if you look at that screen and you're like i'm so used to seeing so much more stuff or in this app i could see a whole other column of whatever that's going to really hurt you so you may we'll see if you've uh irrevocably become one of the giant phone people or whether you were just a tourist in their land right and sitting here now i think i was just a tourist but i say that with little to no conviction and the thing that frustrates me so about the big phone is that for my hands for my body it's really not a one-handed phone for anything more than swiping vertically.

49:47And even still, if I'm using one hand, I must have the pop socket out. And I actually have come around on the pop socket. I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But I think in a perfect world, I would rather go back down to the standard size phone, presumably stop using a pop socket. I mean, we'll see what happens. And being able to use my phone one-handed because it really is uncomfortable to use these giant phones one-handed. And I just really dislike that. I miss being able to use my phone one-handed. And I think what would happen is I would get the smaller phone, if this is the way I go, I'll get the regular size phone and I'll say, man, I do miss that screen, but oh boy, is it nice to be able to use my phone one-handed again.

50:28And so I think ultimately that's going to win the day, but we'll see what happens. Now that I've shown myself that is that I can handle a big phone, if there is some sort of big phone only feature that I feel interested in, like compelled by, then I'll just stick with the big phone. Now, the current rumors are that I don't think that's going to be the case. But if it is, I don't think I would begrudge, for lack of a better word, getting another big phone. But sitting here today, I don't think that's what I want to do. That being said, the 5X lens, I am very glad that I went for it and that I got it.

51:03there are definitely times that I want to be between two and five for sure. And I think, Marco, you were not whining about this. That's not the word I'm looking for either. But you were concerned about this before it came out. And I think it's a valid concern. There are definitely times that I want an in-between. And in a perfect world, I would want one half, one, two, three, and five. And I know that's nuts and that's not going to happen, but that would be excellent. But I stand by getting the big phone for the 5X lens. I really do feel like it gives me reach in scenarios that I wouldn't have gotten nearly as good a shot otherwise.

51:38And I don't want to give that up. So if for some reason the regular size phone doesn't get the Tetra Prism lens, I will almost certainly stick with the big phone. Having never had a big phone before, a lot of people would say that, oh, the battery life is infinite, not unlike the Apple Watch Ultra. You know, the battery life is forever. It's amazing. No, or at least not in my experience. I don't feel like it's demonstrably better than the regular size phones. Maybe I'm using my phone more now. Maybe I'm a banana. Maybe I'm off my rocker. I don't know. But I don't feel like the battery life was night and day better.

52:13I really don't. But I do think, to echo what Marco said, the USB-C, four thumbs up from me. The titanium, two thumbs up. I do think that the natural titanium is a good color but i concur that the rest of the colors stank and it looks like they're only going to get worse um but yeah i mean all in all i really do like these phones a lot i i really have enjoyed it the one thing i will say and i will say again and i've said this for the last several years the front screen is too easily scratched it is i scratched the snot out of this thing i have no idea how it's so badly scratched that i am genuinely thinking i might become one of those lunatics that puts a screen protector on their phone because this thing is scratched to hell.

53:01And I hate that. I hate it. And normally I would just go to Apple and use my AppleCare, you know, repair incident, and I'll probably try to do it to see if they'll do it. But last time I tried this, they were like, oh, it's not damaged enough, tough nuts. And I'm just barely honest enough that I don't just throw the thing on the ground in front of them and say, how about now? It is definitely a weird incentive they've created. right i'm saying um i i didn't do that last year i don't plan on doing it this year but um but it is very tempting sounds like somebody might need a phone pouch no i hear you are you scratching your screen how is this happening how are you still using a phone pouch what year is this i'm not but a casey needs to be i'm not using one i have one scratch on my screen it is very small and i've had this phone for two years right i don't know what you're doing that unless you're gonna have someone follow you around with the camera to find out what you're doing as you stick thrown into your pocket full of sand, maybe you need a pouch.

53:54Yeah, I genuinely don't know. And these are not small scratches. One of them is semi-horizontally. That's what I'm saying. Are you putting it in your pocket with keys? No, it's got to be me. I'm not saying it's not my fault, but darned if I know what it was. And I've been rolling mostly caseless this year because I never really found a case I loved. I adored, what was it, the Peel case? I think we talked about this when it was new. I adored the peel case, but they had a cutout for the action button, which I could not abide. And to the best of my knowledge, they never revised it. Like, what was the one that they sent out?

54:28That was Peak Design. Actually, that's the one I've been using the last few months. Yeah, and I have nothing against the Peak Design case. It's just... Oh, it's great, honestly. I really loved the peel case so very much, but I could not abide the lack of anything for the action button. but I will say in the defense of the glass and actually David, David shop in the chat has reminded me of this. I have dropped this thing case free a handful of times, not dramatically, but a handful of times in cases where I was in, in situations where I was like, Oh, here we go. Oh, well, at least I'll get a new screen now.

55:00But, but I've, I've dropped it by accident a handful of times and it's been no worse for wear, which I do appreciate, but golly, can I please have a less scratch prone screen? And I think, I think this trade-off is the one Apple would say is the right one. It's better to people, because you've seen people use screens that are just destroyed. So people's tolerance for using screens that are messed up is great. But shattering is over a lot of people's limits. So the trade-off is essentially, you can make it more scratch-proof, but then it's going to be more prone to shattering. And so the balance Apple has chosen is, it's going to get a bunch of little hairline scratches all over it if you do whatever the hell Casey's doing.

55:36but it will be more resistant to full-blown shattering when you drop it and despite the fact that that might annoy some of us who like if you're very careful with your phone a harder screen that was more scratch resistant would be better for you but hell i've dropped my phone plenty of times it's dropped off my nightstand onto a wooden floor plenty of times i've dropped it off the dining room table onto a wooden floor like it doesn't yeah but you're in a case aren't you yeah i'm in a case but you know like you could still get unlucky with the with the way it falls in that situation. So I've dropped it enough times that I'm glad that it is as shatter resistant as it is.

56:07I mean, I am glad it's shatter resistant for sure. But, and I do think you're right that this is a problem I can fix with a screen protector. And I think the more I think about it and the more I talk about it, the more I think I'm, I am probably going to not have to, but choose to do that for the next one. So if you have a screen protector recommendation that you swear by, please reach out via Mastodon. Don't email us because we're, it's too much to email, please. But I would love to hear from a mask on or threads, for that matter, a screen protector that you enjoy. And a clean room for Casey to apply it in.

56:36Yeah, well, pretty much. Some of them have gotten really advanced now. So when you order most decent brand ones now, they come with basically little kits that you lay in this plastic cradle. And you flip this thing right down exactly the right angle. They get really pretty complicated to try to do it right. They're trying to help you as best they can because they know it's a difficult thing to do. But if you're doing it in a house full of cat dander or something, you're kind of fighting uphill battle. I've actually heard you're often better off having either – sometimes the Apple Store will have people who are willing to do it for you.

57:12Yeah, I've heard this too. If you buy it there. But I don't even know if they still sell screen protectors there. I think Best Buy does it too or something like that. This is a skilled labor thing. Yeah. Even mall kiosks that sell phone accessories will often do it for you for some small fee. and usually like i would actually suggest maybe trying that option because yeah as john said like you know when you buy one and try to apply it you've done you're doing this in your house with whatever conditions you can best approximate that are actually somewhat near maybe being ideal but not quite ideal and you're going to do what two of these a year at most you know so like you're not going to have the you know the experience and the the finesse of somebody who's doing it like 10 times a day.

57:52On the other hand, you will care much more than they will. If you're the type of person who's getting a screen protector because you can't send even a single scratch on your screen, have fun dealing with that single speck of dust that didn't get under there. I mean, you're not wrong. But well, this is a problem for Casey in a week or two. It's not a problem for Casey today. But yeah, grand scheme of things, I really enjoyed this phone. And for no other reason, I think I would be all in because of USB-C and everything else was just a bonus. You didn't even mention the iPhone, plain iPhone 15. And I want to say that I think this year is one of the rare cases where Apple seems to have gotten caught with their pants down a little bit by the AI thing.

58:26They shipped a line of phones, the 15 and the 15 Pro, seemingly without realizing that that 15 wouldn't be able to run next year's headlining feature. They're going to ship, maybe they won't ship it by then because they're not shipping Apple Intelligence, but they could, they could have ended up shipping Apple Intelligence that wouldn't work on their latest non-pro phone if they had actually shipped Apple Intelligence before the new phones came out. Like, I think it's unprecedented for a one-year-old phone not to be able to run the headlining feature of the next OS that came out after it a year later.

58:57And I just have to think it's because they didn't think that, oh, we can cheap out on the RAM on the 15. What's the big deal? The iPhone's got plenty of RAM. We're well within limits, blah, blah. And here comes AI and LLMs using all your RAM. I will look back on this line, the 1550 Pro, and always remember it as the year where the non-pro phone had this crippling disability that was you know that could have been prevented with being a little bit more generous with ram but wasn't and it put apple in this strange somewhat uncomfortable position of having to tell people who just bought a brand new phone last year that yeah you can't run apple intelligence i think that speaks to just how far ahead iphone components are planned like and and how recently relatively speaking apple realized they had to get in on the LLM game.

59:43Because the iPhone 15 non-pro components were probably a lock, what, two years ago maybe? We know they have pretty long timelines for a lot of that stuff. And so they probably started Apple Intelligence shortly after that was decided or around the same time. Maybe they didn't know yet when they started doing LLM research and development. Maybe they didn't realize we're definitely going to need X gigs of RAM to run this thing. That was probably too early to know that. And a lot of Apple's efforts over the last year or two, they've actually open-sourced some things and published papers about compressing LLMs to fit in smaller amounts of RAM.

1:00:26They've done a lot of work in that area. Why? We're seeing it now. This is why they care so much about that. I think they are barely fitting it in the 8-gig phones. It's been a lot of hard work to get it to fit in the 8-gig phones. And you can argue whether they were late to the game on LLM or because the lead time is so long, they just couldn't help it. But this is another side effect of always being stingy with RAM. It's the unforeseen thing, right? It's like, we don't need this. Why would we ever give ourselves any kind of buffer? Let's cut it as close as we possibly can, save every penny, because why would we give any excess RAM if we think the low-end phone doesn't need that?

1:01:03We want to provide product differentiation. and the answer is you never know when something might come along that makes your stinginess hurt you more than your stinginess is currently helping you know apple would probably argue well we're stingy 90 of the time when we only lose out on it 10 of the time so it's still a win but you know i i still think that good. being that stingy with RAM, like setting aside the ai thing we've always said when we talk about the max with selling with too little ram and having people upgrade or whatever you want to give your users a better experience and in general more ram gives a better experience there are so many things more ram does for you even on the 15 pro the fact that they had to work so hard to get apple intelligence into 8 gigs that was their highest end phone even on that one they could have still provided differentiation and given the Pro 10 and the non-Pro 8 instead of 8 and 6.

1:01:54Anyway, they seem to have snapped out of that with the 16s, which are rumored to all have the same amount of RAM, and the 17s are rumored to all have even more RAM, so we'll see how this goes. But this is, you know, like I said, I'm going to remember the 1515 Pro line with this one specific fact. Marco will remember it for USB-C, and now we'll remember it for the time that the non-Pro phone got left behind prematurely. Well, and to be clear, it isn't only about being cheap when they limit the amount of RAM in phones. That is certainly part of it, and that's probably not a trivial part. But it's also about battery life.

1:02:23RAM takes power. Like, just having a certain amount of RAM, you have to be applying power to that part of the chip, even if it's not using that RAM for anything. Like, even if it's marked as free by the OS, you're still powering that chip to a certain base level. That's how DRAM works. So, and forgive me for experts in the field if I'm dramatically oversimplifying or if there's a whole bunch of asterisks on that now, there probably are. but in general you don't want to put a whole bunch of ram into something that's as battery constrained as a phone if you're not sure you're going to use it because it does take battery no but it's it's like again this is the the pro line you know uh you can give them a little bit more which allows you to give the non-pro line eight which apparently is okay you know because the pros got eight and their battery life is okay with an even hungrier soc right so the 15 the plane 15 would also have been fine with eight like you're right it does take more ram but we're not asking for double we're not asking double the ram just a little bit more just give yourself a little bit of headroom just don't be as stingy you can still be stingy but just not quite as stingy because you never know when that's going to pay off all right all right so apple watch series nine um i don't have a lot to say about the series nine except that i have found the double tap gesture which was one of its new headlining features to be fairly bad um i i don't think it is fast enough or reliable enough to be useful i have tried it over the last year many times my hit rate with getting it to be recognized is low and even when it is recognized it takes a decent amount of extra time that you have to be still having the watch be like raised up and looking at it so the screen stays on and then it shows a little animation to confirm that it understood your tap and you like it just feels very slow and i have just mostly resorted to nose tapping the way i always have if i have to be one-handed to dismiss something because it is just faster and literally more reliable like it is more reliable for me to lift up the watch to my nose and tap it and hit the right spot on the screen than trying the double tap finger gesture so i don't know if that's just me but i have found generally the double tap is really not very useful.

1:04:34Yeah, I mean, I have a Series 8, and so this is going to be a very expensive September for us because we're going watch and phone. We are on a two-year plan on watches and a one-year plan on phones. I feel like my complaints about the watch are the same as they ever were, which is to say the battery life is just straight-up trash at this point. Really? I don't find that. I mean, mine's a lot younger, obviously. It's a year younger. But I find the battery life on the Series 9 is great. But I also didn't have any problems with the Series 8. Well, that's the thing is I think a year worth of Apple Watch battery is fine in my personal experience.

1:05:15Two years, not so fine. And that's been a real bugbear for me to the point that between Marco's friendly browbeating and also my friend in Richmond, Brad, just got a month or two ago, got an Apple Watch Ultra 2 or whatever the current one is. And he will not shut up about how good the battery life is on this thing. And at this point, I think I am probably going to hold out until whenever the next ultra update is. And if that's next week, perfect. That'd be preferred. But if not, I will try to hold out as long as I can. And if I can't, I'll probably just commit to the existing one. But it's been so frustrating.

1:05:57And if I don't top off my watch at some point during the day, it will typically die sometime after dinner. And I'm just sick of it. I'm just over it. Now, also, part of this is also influenced by the fact that I have the little watch. I have the 40 millimeter, whatever the little one is. Or 41, I think, for you. Yeah, I forget what it is now, or what it was in Series 8. But I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of always having to worry about my watch's battery life. And so next time, it's going to be an ultra. So I'll come back to that in a second. The only thing I wanted to say about the Watch Series 9 specifically is that they removed the option for titanium with the series 9 and i wish they didn't and i hope for the series 10 they bring back a titanium option for the non-ultra watch uh it was a bit like the titanium edition watch was not that much more money than a steel one it was really nice it was lighter i think it looked more refined it had like a nice brushed finish like it looked really nice it felt really nice on the wrist it was a way to have a little bit more subtle and a little bit lighter watch than the steel without going down in quality on things like the crystal that you have to do when you get the aluminum one the aluminum one looks like aluminum you know it looks fine but it doesn't look nice the steel and the titanium both look very nice and titanium i think was a little bit nicer of a look between the two and again i think it felt better and also apple watches tend to function better the lighter they are.

1:07:24The Taptic Engine is more feelable. It moves on your wrist better. It sets you near your wrist better. So I really hope they bring back titanium as an option on the Series 10, or whatever they're going to call it, Series X, Series 10, whatever. Before you move on, and if you'd rather table this for later, we certainly can, but I would also be curious to hear what the status is of Adam's Apple Watch. And I don't remember what generation that is, but we've been kicking around the idea of getting Declan one for an upcoming birthday, And I'd be curious to hear what your year or two on review is of that.

1:07:57The original one that we got a few years back now was an SE, the first-gen watch SE. We replaced it a couple years back with, I think, a Series 5 or 6 that I'd gotten Amazon refurbished or renewed or whatever they call it for fairly cheap. He doesn't wear it currently anymore because the school banned them. i guess kids would figure out like how to put notes in your apple watch to cheat on tests um so they banned them so he hasn't worn it in a long time it's been sitting in a drawer it's probably fairly dead now um but anyway so i don't for now he's just not using a watch and i don't know when or if that will return but we'll find out um so about so going back to do you know kind of what i'm hoping for for the series 10 so number one titanium option um but and just for the record here, I'm not talking about software at all right now.

1:08:50I think the Apple Watch, the watchOS 10 redesign changed a lot of things. I still am not super sold on some of the watchOS 10 changes and placements and buttons and gestures and things like that. I'm still getting everything wrong all the time. I'm still pushing the wrong buttons or swiping the wrong edge to do things that I didn't want to do. But maybe that's just me. And of course, I always have opinions on watch faces. But going back to just the hardware, I really hope again, titanium option on the non-ultra series. Please bring that back. It was so nice. I'm also always hoping for, I guess this is kind of software, sorry.

1:09:26I want display zoom on the Apple Watch. As you may know, my vision is slowly getting worse at close distances as I proceed through middle age. I use reading glasses for close-up reading of things sometimes. I'm not always wearing my reading glasses because I'm not always reading. So I have found, as my vision has gotten slowly worse at short arm distance, very small complications and very small text in complications, like, say, the timer complication, which I use frequently, is getting a little hard to read. Now, iPhones have many different accessibility technologies for font sizing and UI sizing and different visual accommodations.

1:10:08The watch has almost none, which is surprising. There is dynamic type on the watch, which is the global text size setting, but it doesn't affect that many things on the watch. They also, on the phones, have this thing called display zoom, where that's the mode where when you set up your phone, I don't know if it still does this on all phones, but during that setup process, it'll ask you, do you want things to be this size or this size? And what it does is basically scale the entire screen up to simulate the field of view of the next size smaller phone that existed or exists. So if you have a Pro Max and you pick that option, it'll basically just blow up the screen dimensions of a Pro into the Pro Max screen.

1:10:54So you get everything scaled up perfectly the same way you would do a resolution change on a monitor on a computer. I want the watch to get that ability so that it can scale up everything. Complications, the faces, everything. When you have a larger model watch to simulate the screen size of a smaller model watch blown up to its new size. I think that would be a great visual accommodation for people whose close-up vision is not that good or whose vision in general is not that good. Because, again, dynamic text on the watch is just not very well supported, doesn't go very far, and doesn't include almost anything on the watch face.

1:11:31So I would love to see that as an option. Again, that is a software thing, but maybe it's requiring a certain GPU or whatever. and of course the rumored larger screens that might be coming might make that easier to pull off and and make it you know better of a feature um before we get to the screens i'll get there um but i i'm hoping they found a way to keep the blood oxygen sensor this is not a sensor i use frequently but it's nice to have it and we've had it and i think you know whatever they need to work out with massimo you know to license that tech that patent i think they should just do it yeah That is true.

1:12:05I am going to be really annoyed, just in principle, if the hardware, at least, for the blood oxygen sensor is not on whatever these new watches are. I'll be lightly annoyed if it remains disabled, which I expect it to, but I'll be really annoyed if it's incapable, you know, if this patent dispute ever gets fixed, if it's incapable of doing any testing or measuring. That's going to really chat my butt. yeah so i again just it's a minor feature it's not gonna be the end of the world if i lose it but i just don't want to lose it like over apple being you know bse about patent licensing and i understand look we all hate patents but and they tried so hard but you know you lost let's move on um the only other thing i'll get to for the hardware before we get to the screens is i really really hope that the apple watch series 10 supports chi charging finally chi 2 as a standard I believe accommodates small enough devices that I believe the Apple Watch could be charged via Qi 2 if the watch wanted to support it.

1:13:09So I'm hoping, because again, going back to our charging delights and paper cuts earlier with USB-C, I have now one cable and one port for everything except the Apple Watch. and so and yeah you know you can get like combo chargers that have like a special apple watch pad off to the side but you know it's much more common batteries and chargers stuff that just have a chi pad and usb c holes so i would love to just have chi support let me buy a battery from anchor or whatever on amazon that has a usb c output and a standard chi pad and i can put whatever i want there an airpods case a second phone or an apple watch while traveling that would be really nice and again i think chi 2 has added what is necessary to make that work so i'm hoping for that now about the screen sizes on the watch there's been all these rumors that the that the that the watch regular series is growing that there is going to be you know that basically the current small version which i believe is 41 millimeter or 42 that is going to go away and it's going to basically like that both of them are going to be going up in size by a decent amount i think this is going to be a good move overall you know we we've said over time that apple has done a really good job satisfying the market for smaller watches way better than most other smart watch makers have ever have ever achieved it but watch fashion and the smart watch market have changed since the apple watches introduced 10 years ago and and this happens like in the watch world the the sizing of what how big like a standard you know and watches historically were very gendered so there were like certain sizes like all right this is men's watches are going to be this size range for the most part and women's watches are going to be this size range fortunately in the in the era of smart watches first of all a lot of the gendering has gone away uh to the point where now like you know If you buy the small watch, people don't say that's the women's version.

1:15:12It's just the small watch. And the big one, women can wear it, and no one's going to say you're wearing a man's watch. Thank God we've gotten rid of all that BS. Also, since the smartwatch era has really taken off over the last decade, demand for large watches has gone up. Which is funny, because in the regular watch world, like the mechanical watch world, watches had gotten very big. Then they kind of started going back a little bit. They're actually getting a little bit smaller now, but smartwatches are going the other way. Part of the reason so many people bought the Apple Watch Ultra is not because they're going to be climbing a mountain and then diving into 200 meters of water.

1:15:48It's because they liked the bigger look, and that's for both functional reasons. Yes, it has better battery life, bigger screen. That's great for smartwatches, but also big watches are just in fashion right now. Really huge smartwatches are in style. and most people that I see are not wearing the small one anymore. I see a lot of people of a lot of different sizes and ages and I don't see many people choosing that smaller Apple Watch anymore. Meanwhile, if you look at the smartwatch market, the current quote big Series 9, that's the one I wear, that's the one I think Casey probably should be wearing, the big one relative to other smartwatches in the market is actually fairly medium-sized.

1:16:34Many other smartwatches in the market are actually significantly bigger. What the Ultra's success, I think, showed Apple and showed the market is that, yes, a lot of people choose it because of those technical factors, but a lot of people also just like big watches. Big watches are in, especially smartwatches, big smartwatches. That is just in fashion right now. So if Apple is truly getting rid of the smallest size and making them both bigger, I think that's not because they're abandoning the market for small watches. I bet it's more because the market abandoned theirs. The market probably moved on and has not been buying the small watch very much at all.

1:17:11And I think people of all wrist sizes have been choosing bigger smartwatches over the last few years, way more than they used to. So I think this is just Apple responding to the market and wanting to serve where the demand actually is. They did the same thing with phones and phone sizes growing over time. They're doing the same thing with the watch. I think they're going to raise the sizes of both of them, and everybody will complain about it for about a week, and then we'll try them and be like, oh, this is nicer. Yep. And then it'll be fine. And people will buy them like crazy, especially the biggest one, way more than we think they will.

1:17:47So I think this is going to be totally fine if they increase the sizes of the watches a little bit. We'll all get used to it, and we'll be fine. All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP if we can. PG &E, Delenda Est. I love people who provide these kooky usernames and no real names. Anyways, Marco, it's not even Halloween for goodness sakes. Marco, how hard is it to maintain server compatibility with clients that are still going to be on the last iOS 16 or below builds of Overcast? Are you doing that thing? I'm sure there's a term for it. Are you doing that thing where it's like something along the lines of API.Overcast.fm slash 2 slash, you know, endpoints?

1:18:23okay yeah did i just ruin your answer then i'm sorry no well so but well that it is a good question though because like at some point i do end support for the really old api protocols um how hard it is to maintain server compatibility in general with all the clients if you you know just make us make a new copy of your api you know controller or functions or whatever and just call this one like i'm currently on version six um it's really not that bad the main problem comes when you have to do like significant changes to things like the server side schema like how how your data is stored and like so do you do you like build in compatibility layers how long do you keep those over time do certain problems occur when older versions of the app sync that maybe like clobber changes from the new versions and do you accommodate that over time that complexity grows and how much you want to maintain it for a decreasing number of clients eventually that trade-off becomes not worth it and you say all right you know what you know in a month i'm going to cut off support for ios 12 or whatever the downside of doing that of course is you know overcast is a server dependent app and so if the servers stop supporting a certain client version that version of the app does not work anymore it will not get new updates you cannot add new podcasts you cannot download new podcasts like you can't even log in like it's it will totally break that client so i try not to do that until those clients are very old.

1:19:47In this case, the specifics of the new API for the rewrite, the protocol with which the clients speak to the server and vice versa has totally changed. It's way lighter on the servers. It's way more efficient. The old protocol was very hard on the servers. And so you would think I would have a pretty substantial incentive to end support soon for the old ones but because the numbers drop off so fast for like how like there's not like in in you know a month or two there's going to be a big chunk of those ios 16 only people that fall off because they they replace their phones even though the old protocol is way less efficient and way harder on the servers i don't have much incentive to end its support anytime soon because it's going to be such a tiny percentage of the user base that's going to be holding on to it so that'll probably be supported for a while you know we're talking probably years multiple years because again there's just there's not much reason to end it yet eventually there will be but the protocol is mostly what has changed not the data storage layer and some of the things i'm doing i'm trying over time to push more of the logic that would that was previously server-side logic push more of it to the clients where possible in part just to lighten the load on the servers and in part because sometimes that's just way easier to do on the client or i can offer better features if i do it client side so for instance the um the current test flight build i have fixed a problem with the episode limit not being enforced i have its option forever of like you know you can you can limit a podcast to only keep the latest you know one or two or five episodes of that podcast this feature if i was launching a new podcast app today i would never offer this feature it is so tricky and problematic and that has been enforced server side to date this new test flight build enforces a client side and that's part of why it's fixed from a lot of people because doing it server side because there's all sorts of differences i'll get into a very brief diversion here um the problem is the way the servers servers have to deal with data in very different ways.

1:21:59They have to deal with scale in very different ways. So when you as a user when you subscribe to a podcast what you see, suppose you subscribe to a new podcast that has a thousand episodes back in its feed. You subscribe. You now have in your app a thousand episodes that you don't have any history with. And then a new one comes out and maybe you play that one. Well to your client that's a thousand and one rows in a table. Most of which have all zeros in them. And then, you know, you have then that, that latest one, you can mark that as your progress or your plate or whatever on the server. If I added a thousand rows to the table that keeps track of everyone's status of episodes, every time someone subscribed to a podcast at a thousand episodes, it would take way more space and be way heavier and way more expensive to host.

1:22:49And, you know, more servers, larger backups, like everything, data, data size affects costs substantially. so that would be very bad so on the on the server i do tricks like when you subscribe to a show i assume that the state of everything that precedes your subscription in that in that feed is it's deleted but not played like it's just that's the default state of everything that precedes your subscription to a new podcast if you then go back and listen to an old one that of course i insert that row but i have this these all these optimizations in place that like okay I'm not going to add all thousand of those as new rows to this table because, again, that would blow up everything.

1:23:28That logic wreaks havoc with episode limiting. And it's been so tricky to get it right server-side. A couple years ago, I even let people opt into a beta of a new way to handle it because I thought I finally had nailed it and taken care of all those cases and all the edges and all the weirdness that somehow would still be efficient and would still not store nearly as much as it had to. I tried so many different ways to do this, and I never got it quite right. So with the new way that the new app talks to the servers, I've developed yet more issues with doing that server side. So what I'm going to do is once this version of this app is reasonably out there that does it all client side, because client side, it's way easier to do.

1:24:14The client has no, I don't care if I take another five kilobytes on your phone. so the client can have a thousand rows in the database when you subscribe to a feed because it's just keeping it locally it doesn't i don't care it's sqlite database it's super light so the client can do perfect limiting because it has perfect information whereas the server is simulating perfect information with a bunch of optimizations so anyway so what i plan to do is move that logic entirely to the client with the next release and then over time eventually tell the server to stop even trying to do that to stop enforcing episode limits at all because that will make a lot of things easier it'll reduce this bug potential in the app and you don't want the server trying to do it at the same time the app is doing it so that's kind of my long-term plan here have the server stop enforcing that completely when that happens if you are still say on an old client if all of your overcast devices that you're logged into if none of them have the new version that does this your episode limits will just slowly increase and like things won't get automatically deleted once they pass that limit and so things like that like kind of weird drift will start happening if you're still using a very old version of the api that's another reason why like eventually it does make sense to retire them because if they start like producing weird conditions or like things that could cause bugs for other clients you know you got to retire them then or find a way to limit them but for the most part i'm because i'm moving more towards more stuff happening on the client and the server side feature set is fairly fixed i don't intend to really do much more server side unless we get into things like you know transcriptions but that's that's a whole other bag of worms because of all that i expect the ios 16 api to still work for a long time to answer your question in a very long way mark robinson writes when a podcast says follow us on apple podcast it really helps the show does listening through overcast do that as well Does Apple register that follow in a way that counts and helps the show?

1:26:11Also, how does it actually help the show? Listening through Overcast doesn't do anything to affect Apple Podcasts or its rankings, because Apple Podcasts does not know that you're listening in Overcast. If you subscribe to a podcast in Apple Podcasts, Apple does register that in some way, and it does help the show. It helps the show mainly in ranking it higher and possibly helping it get on certain top lists or ranked lists that are that are occasionally used for discovery and apple podcasts over time i think they're using this less in the sense that they are they're doing more kind of you know things you might like type of recommendations rather than top list of new new and noteworthy you know this week or whatever um so i think this is mattering less over time um but they they basically they they historically have used new follows as a strong signal but i think possibly it sometimes i think that was actually the only signal that would feed into like what shows up on their top hot list today because it is a pretty good signal overall um like how many new follows the show getting um and and for the record i actually try not to have those kind of metrics in overcast that are global like that because it tends to reinforce like the rich get richer so I've kind of moved away from most of those over time but that is as far as I know that is still part of how Apple Podcasts does recommendations and rankings alright thank you to our sponsor this week Squarespace thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us atp.fm slash join one of the member perks is ATP Overtime a bonus topic every week just for members this week's Overtime we're talking about AI angst.

1:27:54There are some tricky things going on with the AI world, including authors suing Anthropic and some drama over at NaNoWriMo, where you're talking about both those things and ATP Overtime. You can join to listen atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Accidental Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

1:28:49So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-Marco-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-U-S-A. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long.

1:29:15I'm not having a good time in neutral land right now. uh-oh battery fault yes so remember when that battery fault message popped up uh about a about a month ago oh i do and i can't believe you haven't gotten the car serviced yet and i said at the time i i'll get it serviced as soon as i'm back off the beach for the you know for the school year it's going to be a pain in the butt and going you know driving all the way to brooklyn for the rivian service center um so i'm going to send you uh two photos in a sequence here into the slack group and i'll try to put them as chapter i would say that this this this whole deal like with evs we don't have an established culture the way we do with internal combustion engine cars about the various levels of severity of things that can happen and i know the culture is not consistent you'll know people who drive their car with a check engine light on forever and ever but most people who know something about cars if the check engine light comes on it's a sign that you should do something not like i'll do it in a few i'll look at it in a few months it's probably fine maybe it's fine or maybe your engine is about to blow up right whereas with evs they all have their own error messages their own things and there's no sort of universal equivalent of like you know a light on the dashboard that we know these ones are serious you know oil pressure drops to zero stop the car you know i mean like things that we know about internal combustion with evs it's like i don't know is that bad is a battery fault bad right and especially a battery fault that only shows up when doing dc fast charging on a highway and then i reboot the car a couple times and it doesn't show up anymore like okay i guess it's fixed right like you don't you don't you don't have any like like a frame of reference for how how seriously should i take this since i last reported on that i have developed a few additional problems uh oh no so i mentioned you know the the dramatically increased wind noise since getting the body shop to replace the side which admittedly that's probably the body shop's fault but there was wind noise before they did their work also So there was just a little bit less of it.

1:31:11But so, you know, wind noise, I got to get them to fix that. I had an increasing incidence of what seems like the auto steer system crashing. No, not literally. Thank God. But I guess poor choice of words. But the auto steer sometimes will just turn off and make a bunch of noise. And it will say, highway assist system failure. and so that sounds like it crashed to me but or some sensor broke so i have to have them look at that um also um i can no longer move the seat of the car the driver's seat does not move unless i am switching between the two profiles the tip profile and the me profile hope you're hope you're happy with the profiles yeah it will not move like none of the adjustments work it is just stuck like it it refuses any other adjustment besides the profile switches so if i wanted to like you know let me put it up a little bit nope can't do that if anybody else needs to drive my car too bad if i need to move the seat back to like to get something out from under it nope too bad which to me that might that's actually probably like a safety issue that i should probably get fixed uh pretty immediately um and finally i barely have air conditioning the air conditioning oh no it has almost completely gone out it blows very weak air and goes through lots of times when it the fan will just like kind of slow down and it'll blow totally hot air and then it'll go back eventually and blow slightly cold air but it's bad like today was only in the high 70s and it couldn't keep up like it was not a hot day and it could not keep up and it was blowing warm air most of the time.

1:32:57So the air conditioning, I basically have no air conditioning, or I have almost no air conditioning. So I created a support ticket, and the way you get service from Rivian is you go to their app, and you report your problems, and you can attach photos and whatever else. So I created the support ticket with all of these issues. I do find it very funny that apparently, when you add five issues to a ticket, it says at the bottom, you've reached the max number of issues. Please submit these and start a new request. request so my car says otherwise right so i've i've reached the maximum number of problems with my rivian that i can put in one on one service request so i thought okay well you know maybe i maybe i get in the service center within the next couple of weeks you know get get this done i have i'm a little scared um because i have heard that this level three charging battery problem i've found a couple of forum threads people said it took them like months to figure it out so i'm not loving that but we haven't gotten there yet we'll see what happens um so okay maybe i can get in the service center um you know again in maybe a week or two then over to the next screen which i'll send you now these were the first available appointments oh no oh that's not good at all the first available reviewing appointment in my entire region of new york is 10 weeks from now november 13th that's um that's undesirable yes so and and i checked i checked like there's a couple other like ribian service centers that are like you know a hundred miles away and it's no better it's the same like they're all out to november you should check richmond i bet there's not a lot here i am not happy right now like i i'm starting to fall out of love with owning a first version car rapidly and i knew when i bought it i'm like this is the first version of the r1s maybe i'll have some problems i i don't think i fully appreciated how much this sucks that i i now feel like my car is unreliable in some pretty key areas and is losing things like air conditioning like i'm pretty sure we solved that problem a long time ago um but no uh air conditioning also broken as well as the seat being too smart to move i am really tired of be a testing cars whatever my next car is i think it's first of all i think it might be sooner than i expect but second of all i think i just want to get something from a regular car company again like an established car company that like i'm just i'm tired of the the flux and i think even though i love the features of this car in a lot of other ways this rapidly erases those gains in my head like having to deal with service especially dealing with bad service like what this is turning out to be to make a good car ownership experience yeah the car needs to be good it also needs to have almost no problems during ownership especially when they're new they really this car is a year old it should not be having any of these problems let alone all of these problems after one year a car mostly shouldn't have problems in its first few years besides the basics of like you know maintain the very basics of the car like the brakes and the windshield wipers and stuff like that and the tires you know that that should be all you have to do for a car in the first couple years um and so you shouldn't have these problems at all but if you do have problems you need the service and servicing infrastructure to be there and to be near you like this is already you know having to drive to brooklyn like it's driving to the service center will take me an hour and a half on a good day like and and then i'm and then i'm in like the worst part of brooklyn where there's nothing around it's all warehouses and it's terrible and like god knows how many times i'm going to have to do that too um so it's already like a rough service situation and you know to to have service then be backed all the way out 10 weeks when you when you ask for it like that's i i i'm going back to a regular car company like i i can't but what would you buy like no argument and and i am disappointed by this just peripherally because you were so in love with that car when you first got it yes and as much as i will always and forever make fun of the god-awful color choice you made like it was is a great car but i don't think you have a lot of really good options especially for a battery electric vehicle now if you wanted to go back to like a range rover or land cruiser whatever the hell it was you had before then then maybe but if you're trying to go battery electric what what could you possibly get i was gonna say when when the land rover is the more reliable option you know you're in trouble yeah for real i think i'd be looking probably at like probably bmw again or um maybe even polestar but that's that's also a little bit too new i think i think i would have the same problems with Polestar.

1:37:48No, but what of these cars, like, I don't think there's anything battery electric that either of these companies sell that would work for the beach, right? I'm going to shortly stop needing that because I'm going to shortly stop qualifying for my permit and lose the permit. That's a bummer. It is. You can go back to getting regular cars then. You don't have to get these stupid SUVs anymore. That's right. Right. So, that's why, like, I might be in the market, you know, maybe in six months or something, I might be in the market for something that is smaller and or at least like you know one of the options i'm looking at the bw ix which i think is actually a very attractive option um not it's not not an attractive vehicle but it is it's a very attractive option um looking at that looking at you know there's you know hyundai stuff there's you know volvo stuff there's there's a bunch of things many of them have the first year problem uh or like the first couple years problem and again i i just i i think i'd looking at maybe something a little more established the really sad thing is i really would not i don't think buy a tesla right now like for lots of political reasons that just feels very bad to me but i see why people do because when you look at the numbers of just like how much range does it offer and then what are you paying to get that car tesla is still way ahead of everybody like their cars get such longer range than almost everyone except lucid they claim they claim longer range but they're they're also one of the most distant from their claims so i wouldn't if you're just looking at this but i had teslas yeah they're they're a little bs i know but there there are cars out there now that are claiming less than tesla they just get the same range right so you can't go by the numbers that are on the package sure but yeah i i think i'm gonna like well let me see i mean let me see what happens with with the rivian but like i like i feel like i can't depend on it like i'm gonna take a long trip soon and i feel like can i depend on it to get there i'm i'm gonna get there without air conditioning but you know which is it's already a problem and i probably can't have any other place service it because it's probably all special and proprietary and like so like i can anybody else replace the air conditioning whatever i probably not so like I don't know this is why like I'm getting I'm falling off the Rivian train really fast right now because it like I'm having all these problems pile up over the last couple of months that are now going to be difficult to get fixed like that's not not happy you got to wait to get all this fixed before you can even like trade in or resell this thing probably too well depends what I'm doing just don't let the buyer listen to this podcast no yeah right I wouldn't do a private sale I would do like you know a dealer thing or something but yeah i don't know i anyway so there might be some turbulence there in the next few months we'll see hopefully hopefully i can last longer than that i'm really sorry to hear that and what you said a moment ago that you're not sure if it can reliably get you to your destination yeah because it almost didn't i was almost stranded on the last trip i took yeah no argument the moment any of my cars have gotten to that point where it's not it's no longer an inconvenience but a genuine concern that you might not make it, the moment that happens, I'm out.

1:40:58I need a new car. Even if it's a new used car, that's fine. But I need something different because I cannot, well, maybe cannot is a bit dramatic, but I refuse to be in a situation that if I need to get somewhere in my car, I am rolling the dice more than you always are as to whether or not I'll actually get there. And at that point, I'm out. So if you're me, you're already looking for something new. And it doesn't even matter if you can get this into a service center before November. It's already the nails in the coffin. You're done. Honestly, I mean, unfortunately, like if that happens, I got the early preorder pricing on it.

1:41:34So like I actually like I looked up like, you know, roughly what the resale value of it would be. And like I would not be losing that much at all from what I paid a year ago. So it actually would not be that bad. But honestly, I'm thinking that direction because like like so I'm in three days. I'm driving a few hundred miles upstate. I can't really take Tiff's i3 conveniently. Also, she needs it like she's not coming. I'm driving to go see Goose in concert. So there's no way Tiff's going to that. Anyway, so I'm driving a few hundred miles in three days and I need my car to work. And that's like to already know that.

1:42:10OK, I'm not going to have any air conditioning probably on the trip. That's that sucks enough. But to not even know when I have to plug in somewhere, is it going to charge? Maybe. Is something else going to go wrong with it? Maybe. I don't know. I'm feeling very bad about this right now. Yeah, you know, honestly, if it were me, there is no question I would be going and renting a car. And I know it's like – I thought about that. I might do that. I know it turns your stomach to think about, well, probably renting a car, but I know it turns your stomach to consider a gasoline automobile. But it is okay to slum it with us regular humans for the purpose of one weekend.

1:42:47That's 100 % what I would do. One of the latest Honda hybrids, I think you might enjoy those because Honda finally switched to the system where basically the gasoline engine is charging the battery and the battery is running the electric motor that turns the wheels most of the time. and that will be a more familiar experience to you. Oh, it feels like a not very fast EV most of the time with some additional noise that I don't understand. You might like it. Why would I want that? Because it'll be reliable and it'll get you there and it'll get better mileage than a plain old gas car. You have 50 miles per gallon in a Honda that you can get fixed anywhere that will get you to your destination no matter what.

1:43:24I don't think you need to buy anything, but I do think you need to rent something for this trip to go see Goose. Honestly, I'm thinking about renting something, But to rent a car for, I'm going to be gone for like three, four days, that's like$600. I mean, it's not a small amount of money. No, it's not that bad at all. In New York, it might be. Well, okay, that's fair. We rented a minivan for a week, and I think it was like$300 or$400, and that was a week. And it was unlimited miles, et cetera, et cetera. Now, granted, we are in Podunk, Richmond, Virginia. We are not in effectively New York City.

1:43:56But I think it'd be more affordable than you expect if you're willing to slum it with a regular human car rather than some like tesla or some other weirdo be ev or something like that yeah i don't know i mean you do obviously you do you you're you're a grown you're a grown-ass man but that's what i would do i think like you know i i certainly feel like a fool i felt like a fool like you know driving around a dented truck for you know a few months or whatever or weeks whatever that was i would feel extra foolish renting a car because i can't trust mine to drive a few or miles reliably. No, I wouldn't feel foolish about that, personally.

1:44:29I get what you're saying, and I think foolish is not the word I would use. I would feel dejected that it's gotten to this point, but I wouldn't feel foolish at all. You're doing what you can to make what should be an enjoyable weekend enjoyable. And I love you like a brother. Well, no, in a better way than that. I love you, but I don't think it's a far stretch for you to throw money at a problem to fix it. So I think this is right in your wheelhouse. This is what I would do. Yeah. But then like when I have to drive to Thanksgiving in, you know, about 11 weeks. That's future Marco's problem. And then Christmas after that.

1:45:07And like, I need my car to work. I need like, I can't. I'm so, I'm like, I'm unreasonably angry at this Rivian experience right now. No, this is what I'm saying. I think I'm, I'm, I'm not doing you favors because I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with you. It's time to sell the car. Like, unless you can get it fixed by some miracle in the next week or two, and you don't have a series of further problems, it's time to sell the car. Full stop. Like, and I hate that. I hate that that's the case because I was there with you. I saw with my eyes how happy that car made you. Even after I broke it for the first of what turned out to be many times.

1:45:42But I saw how happy that car made you. It does not give me pleasure to say this to you. This is not the normal, like, ATP ribbing. Like I genuinely think as your friend, you need to sell that car because it is, it is forever tainted. It has its scarlet letter. It is forever tainted in your mind. And I don't blame you. I don't blame you at all. You could always get version two of that car where they consolidated the 17 control units down to two or whatever. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah. It's an option. Yeah, but the colors are so much worse. Oh, here we go. Are they really worse? Now I'm coming back to ATP ribbing.

1:46:13Are they really worse? Marco? Are they really? All right. Well, I'm sorry. please keep us updated with how this turns out both in a friendly way and because I think it'll be good for the show way. That's the main reason you should try to take the review in because whatever happens it'll be a good story.