605: Manage the Moisture Situation

29:02But we didn't mention the wired charging last time. This is exactly why I put this item in here. Fast charging, being able to charge faster over wire is great, but I do worry, I mean, Apple doesn't do this. they don't even ship a brick with their thing the phone anymore i do worry about people who are like this is great i love my phone charges fast and then on their bedside table or wherever they charge their phone overnight they put a fast charger you're just beating up your battery for no reason like if you're about to go to sleep and you're going to plug in your phone plug it into the slowest charger you have right the charging your battery very quickly hurts the battery right sometimes you need it sometimes you're like i'm going to be home for two seconds or i'm in an airport or whatever use the fast charger that's what it's for but for your every day i plug it in here before i go to sleep or whatever uh use a slower charger because first of all it's not even going to charge all the way if you have the optimization on it's going to go to like 80 and then wait until an hour before i think you wake up and go off but during that time when it goes from like you know 10 to 80 you don't want to go as fast as possible so yes the iphone 16 can charge faster this does not mean you should change all of your chargers in your house to charge at the maximum possible wattage of your phone don't do that yeah and this that being said though i love this ability that they're adding.

30:10And I think this is one of the many things that if you look at the actual differences to the iPhone 16 lineup versus the 15 lineup, the general reaction to the event was, eh, it's kind of underwhelming. They didn't change that much. But I think that the actual story here is not that the phones are not substantially improved. It's that Apple didn't do a good job of telling us how they're substantially improved. But if you actually look at these specs, there actually are lots of improvements, like lots of little things here and there, like, you know, faster charging over the wire, also faster charging through MagSafe, also, you know, official Qi 2 support that will make things broader and easier in the future.

30:50Also, there's lots of stuff like the screen can now go down to one nit of brightness, so the screen can get way dimmer than it could before. Lots of people want that, like if you're like lying in bed next to your sleeping partner and, you know, you want to keep your screen as dim as possible while you're still reading stuff like yep there's there's a lot of improvements like that that are kind of all around the iphone 16 line um you know the 16 pro has all those cool new microphones and cool and like sound quality will probably be significantly enhanced in lots of things because of that like there's all sorts of improvements like this that are not super flashy in a presentation and also apple didn't even do didn't even attempt to show off many of them but those actually will make the phones nicer to use in just everyday use.

31:38So again, I think the narrative around these phones was not great in part because people tend to not value that kind of thing in that context. If they did a presentation that was all about just small everyday improvements to using these phones, nobody would care about that either. So I understand why they left some of them out. But everyone, including Apple, is focusing so strongly on Apple intelligence, which, again, I think is going to have a slow and maybe bumpy rollout, but certainly a slow rollout. And that's the story PR-wise. That's the story with Wall Street. That's the story with the tech press.

32:17but most people are not going to be using those features every day or they'll be using very simplified features like as we're going to talk about stuff like notification summaries and email summaries like you know they'll be using that kind of stuff but like most of the really flashy intelligence features are not going to be everyday things whereas stuff like your phone charges more easily like that's that affects everybody like that that can help everyone at some point so So I think this actually is a pretty good overall release as it looks so far. And we'll see how it turns out when we actually have the phones.

32:51But I think it'll be overall a better release than people are giving it credit for so far. Also, I think another big everyday thing will be the new thermal capacity. I really think that's going to be a big difference. Because as I've been using my 15 Pro all weekend, it gets so hot doing basic things. and like and i think again like thermal management is one of those things that you don't really think about most of the time because most iphones their thermal management is fine and when you have the iphone 15 pro where thermal management for the first time i think got worse than its predecessor or at least seemed to um you start noticing oh this is the thing that matters and so then when they fix it in the next generation like okay that's that's another you know another savings to bank um and on thermals by the way um so as as people's phones start arriving uh this friday for pre-orders.

33:40A little hot tip, because this will be our last episode before that happens. Two hot tips for your phone migration. Number one, you can now connect two USB-C or USB-C to Lightning phones with a cable for migration. And apparently that is faster migration in a lot of cases. So use a USB-C to see or see the Lightning, depending on what you're migrating from, cable for your migrations. That will probably be faster. And second of all... I think actually on the wire thing, I think you have to have iOS 18 on both phones. Is that true? Oh, maybe. I don't know. I mean, just to be safe, I would say maybe before attempting the migration, upgrade your old phone to iOS 18 to make sure that's not a limiting factor.

34:22I can not confirm this, but it's a good idea. Yeah. And then secondly, speaking of hot tips, phone migration is often throttled by thermals. and so if you can figure out ways to effectively cool both phones so for definitely take them out of their cases that that is like number one thing if you want your phone to run coolers take it out of its case um but also if you have things like my crazy you know fan coolers that use thermoelectric elements in a little mag safe fan that's a good time to use one of those um lower tech you if you have like ice packs you know you can like rest your phone you know obviously manage the moisture situation um but you know if you have like you know especially if you have like those big gel ice packs like if you just like rest your phone on one of those uh especially if you have enough capacity to rest both phones on one of those um while somehow i guess what's powering if they're going to do each other you might have to manage the battery situation yeah that's part of the problem of connecting them with the wire is you better have sufficient battery charge to do the migration you probably should if they're both fully charged you should be fine but be aware that unless you have some weird Y connector type thing, you're not going to be powering the phone.

35:30I guess you could MagSafe power them during the thing. Oh, right. Yeah, but then you have heat. But then you're blocking the ice pack with the MagSafe puck and whatever. Right, and MagSafe makes more heat. So yeah, maybe your best bet might be to plug both of them into power and just to make them do wireless. But that'll depend on how much data you have to transfer. But anyway, manage the thermals and the migration will go a lot faster. That is literally a hot tip. All right, and then do we want to talk a little bit more about demand of these new phones? Yeah, because we just come off the question of like, why are we getting the 16 Pro and not the 16?

36:00And it's interesting to see, supposedly, how the rest of the world is reacting, at least in week one, according to Ming-Chi Kuo. Right. So this is a report from 9to5Mac. This is the slug is lower iPhone 16 Pro demand. And so according to Kuo, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is down 16 % compared to last year. The Pro is down 27%. The Plus is up 50%. and the uh 16 just plain vanilla 16 is up 10 as well i'm telling you those colors those colors well but look at the so here this is interesting like basically that the pro phones are down i think makes sense because it's a testament to how good the non-pro phones are this year like even regular people who don't care about the specs or whatever can see that the non-pro and the pro have all the same buttons on them like oh have you heard of the new camera control that's on the non-pro action button that's on the non-pro like the things you can see yes everyone can see that that's one fewer camera right but like the non-pro phones look good this year and second is remember they were talking about like the plus phone like oh no one buys the plus phone it's not cheap enough compared to the pro max people just buy the pro max the plus phone being up 48 again according to these estimates based on supply chain yada yada yada is pretty amazing because it shows that people who want a big phone are looking at the pro max and going plus pro max like they're not what does the pro max have however it has all those pro features with the pro res video everything no one cares about it's got the extra camera and what people are saying is actually i'm going to take the plus this year right if these things are to be believed these are really weird numbers for like week one you know what i mean like week one you would expect it's all the early adopters or whatever and i'm kind of surprised to see the plus phone so again these are not apple's numbers these are estimates based on supply chains yada yada who knows how accurate they are but it's interesting to see the breakdown this year and unfortunately this is when we see this we're like oh it's great it shows how good the 16 the plane 16s are this year when apple sees this they're like we should make sure the plane 16s are a little bit or the plane phones are a little bit worse than the pro phones because apple likes to see that differentiation they like to push people up market to get the more expensive phones but in the years when the pro and non-pro phones are closer to each other i bet apple's margins go down because fewer people buy the pro phones that's a good point uh we talked just a moment ago about connecting via cable.

38:18And I've been really unreasonably excited to try this for migration this year because migration is always such like a bummer. And I am of the opinion that doing a phone-to-phone migration is what I typically do. I'll typically start by doing an encrypted backup to my computer just as a backup. The key here is to do an encrypted password-protected one because then that saves all your Wi-Fi passwords and things of that nature. And I'll try to do that like the night before I get the new phone. But then for actually transferring, I typically do a phone-to-phone transfer. And it usually works really well, but takes something like two to three hours.

38:53It takes forever. And I was debating between trying a couple of like USB-C Ethernet dongles and putting them both on Ethernet on the same network, seeing if that was faster. But actually looking at this, I might be able to just connect phone to phone with a standard USB 3 USB-C cable. So on Apple's comparison page, you can see the differences between the different phones. And I will say that another benefit of the Pro is that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max feature the USB 3 connections that are capable up to 10 gigabits per second. whereas the 16 and 16 plus are the lowly USB 2.0 from 804 years ago with speeds up to 480 megabits per second, which is 20 times slower than the pro phones.

39:45Wow. So I'm going to give that a shot. I'm going to probably use the hilariously expensive Apple Thunderbolt USB-C cable, which is completely unnecessary, but just so I know that the cable is not the problem and we'll see how it goes. And I'll probably stick them on ice packs like Marco said. and by the way this 20x thing this is a stat that apple actually puts on their website which is rare obviously they put it on the pro specs to try to show like this is how much better the pro is but 20x i know we mentioned this last episode when we were talking about the phones but i just want to reiterate again always had last time i was like oh you get the faster usb the slower usb and you may be hearing that and thinking i don't care how fast the usb is like whatever it'll be like just a little bit slower 20 times slower it's a lot it's not that the pro phone is so fast is that the non-pro phone is so so slow and usually it doesn't matter like usually because if you have a non-pro phone again you're probably not trying to pull off like video files onto your external ssd or do all sorts of big usually it doesn't matter at all right but on this one day when we are all transferring our data from our old phones be aware that if you have a non-pro phone even if you're transferring it to a pro phone you're going to be it's probably going to be slower than doing it over Wi-Fi, depending on how good your Wi-Fi is.

40:56So this is a shame. They should probably change it eventually, but just be aware 20x slower on the non-pro phones. And then Dave Mark had a really good reminder. And by that, I mean a piece of information I was not aware of. And so we talked about on the show, Casey. Oh, my God. It was a long time ago, John. It was more than it was more than an hour ago. You were aware and you became unaware title. So for those of us who are buying new Apple devices, there's a support document we'll put in the show notes and reading from that. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad and don't have enough iCloud storage to back up your current device using iCloud backup, you are eligible to get temporary iCloud storage.

41:33So they will give you enough time, which apparently all of us knew. They will give you like a month or something like that and give you basically unlimited asterisk, dagger, double dagger storage for the purposes of just transferring your device. and then once the transfer is complete, they will reclaim that storage on their end and you will lose it. But that's really cool. I'm impressed by this. Yeah, I think it's been out for a year or two now. I highly recommend people do this because it's a no-brainer. You're getting free storage for the purposes of doing your phone transfer. Take it. Take the free storage for this transfer.

42:04I would also encourage you to actually pay for the storage to have this backup permanently. But even if you can't or don't want to, it's free. It's not like they take your credit card and sign you up and you have to remember to cancel or anything like that. Nothing like that. It's just free temporary storage for the purpose of transferring your stuff. It'll let you do an iCloud backup. It will keep that backup there for some period of time, and then they will just chuck it away. There's nothing you need to remember to do or cancel or whatever. So take advantage of it. We will link to the Apple document that describes this in the show notes.

42:34We are brought to you this episode by Pioneers of AI, a new podcast. What will the AI revolution mean? for jobs, for our kids, for our relationships and our daily lives. A new podcast called Pioneers of AI is your trusted guide to this emerging technology. Host Rana El-Khalyubi is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, author, and investor, exploring all the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives. So listen to Pioneers of AI with new episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. And we will also link to it in the show notes. So once again, Pioneers of AI is the name of the new show.

43:14New episodes every Wednesday. Listen to Pioneers of AI wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to Pioneers of AI for sponsoring our show.

43:24Stu Mashwitz writes with regard to HDR still images. Preview absolutely does support HDR display still images. Try any sample EXR or HDR file you can find. I've got an EXR test pattern you can download and we'll put a link in the show notes. I'm not sure how to make EXR files, but the demo file, one of the demo files shows a gradient that just goes from black to various shades of gray down to white. But the white is like super max HDR white. If you want to blow your eyeballs out on your screen and see just how bright it will go, open that image and then look down at the bottom. Breaking news as of just a day or two back.

43:58Apple has received their FDA Food and Drug Administration authorization to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids. reading from The Verge just days after Apple announced a new hearing aid feature for the second generation AirPods Pro. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has authorized the software that powers its functionality. In a press release, the FDA describes Apple's solution as, quote, the first over-the-counter hearing aid software device. Very good stuff. Very, very good stuff. It's tough for Apple relying on the government to hit the deadlines or whatever, because Apple would have loved in the presentation to say it was FDA approved, but they missed it for like two days.

44:30So they just have to say, we think approval is coming very soon. And yeah, there you go. With regard to the watch bands, the new watch bands, particularly the Milanese Loop, I think, or even maybe a couple others, Wolf writes that the watch band really is titanium. It's inspired by the steel version, but the band is all about the titanium. That's what it says in the description at the Apple Store, which reads the titanium Milanese Loop, Milanese, Milanese, whatever, features aerospace-grade titanium mesh with a secure parachute-style buckle inspired by stainless steel mesh historically used by divers and designed for ocean activities.

45:04Made of lightweight titanium, it's perfect for any occasion. So this is just an asterisk though. That is the new Milanese with the ultra style that has like that ultra clasp on it. That one is titanium. The other Milanese loop that comes with the series 10 option and that has the same magnetic clasp that we've had forever, that one is still steel. And the new link bracelets are also still steel. Oh, interesting. They are color matched to the new titanium watch bodies, but it is the colors of the titanium being applied to steel for the other ones. Only this new ultra Milanese with the ultra latch style, only that one is titanium.

45:43I did not catch that. Thank you for the clarification. And speaking of watch bands, Josh Harris writes, this is the first time that Apple sold a gold colored link bracelet. The only other one they made was the 24 karat gold version given away to celebrities with the launch of the Series Zero. as a gold fan i was pleased to see it's finally official wonder why it took so long i am not a gold fan but i am happy for josh did they never sell the try for our card gold no they didn't it was so josh is right so they there were a couple of like you know when back when the apple watch launched like the very first one and they had the gold one they would like make they would like give it to certain celebrities to wear it certain events to promote it the way like fashion people do that kind of stuff so like there was at some point there were like a couple of times when a celebrity wore one to an awards show or something and they had a gold link bracelet at that time to pair with the gold watches to use in that context but it was never for sale to the public did they take it back like when people borrowed jewelry for the oscars you know did they give it back i would i would assume so because remember like there was there were a couple of instances of that where like the celebrity was wearing the watch but it was showing that like the like spacey setup screen on the watch screen and you could see in pictures like they didn't even set it up they hadn't set it up right yeah like it was just showing like the setup screen it's the blinking 12 on the vcr of celebrity watches yeah exactly um and then coming back to case corner uh the third party third party iphone 16 cases you had had opinions john about what to do with the flash do you want to tell us about this i mean i know we talked about it last week but do you want to uh revisit yeah so the apple case did what i thought uh all the cases should do which is put a little opening for the two cameras on the plain old iphone 16 so slim just a little capsule and then just put a little hole for the flash that's hanging out in your head i was afraid what cases would do is ah we have to we have to have a hole for the two cameras on the flash let's just make one big hole that covers them all and i was afraid they would make it like triangular uh apple's cases didn't do that they're great but here's a link we'll put in the show notes to at least one case that got lazy and said you know what we're gonna make a capsule opening for the cameras and just a little separate capsule opening for the uh you know flash and i just think it's clumsier to do it this way it looks kind of like a three-leaf clover instead of a capsule so you know uh results vary be careful when you're buying a case and consider uh one of the advantages of your non-pro phone is that you can have a smaller camera thing sticking out there's no no reason to have like the for example look at this one it's got like the ridge that prevents like the cameras from touching the the surface if you put it face down the ridge is also around the flash no need for that the flash is flush you don't need to have that ridge around it it just makes for a bigger thing on the back of your case so i don't like that and some people are doing it.

48:17Surprise, surprise. So Apple Intelligence is not officially a thing yet. You know, it's in beta. And we saw a post from Joe Kimberlin who had screenshot a series of toots from a friend of the show Ben Rice. Ben Rice McCarthy, excuse me. And so this summary was Ben had shared UK-based museum recommendations. And then Joe had put in the the toots that comprised this, which was Ben favoriting something that said finally, somebody else favoriting something that related to museums, and that same person mentioning that's not for some of us. You have to look at these. I'm not doing a great job. No, it doesn't mention museums, so here's the thing.

49:06No, it does. It's at museum shuffle. Right, yeah. That's what I'm saying. See, that's, so the summary is attempting to summarize three separate notifications and the three separate notifications include a username that is at museum shuffle that's the person's username do you think they only post about museums is it the only thing that is on that entire thing nothing in the body text of these three notifications mentions museums at all the only thing that is museum related is one of the people's usernames i missed that okay i got you and so this is this is an example of some of the limitations of apple intelligence features when attempting to summarize things it just gets fed a bunch of text but apparently it doesn't understand which part of this text are just at mentions of people who are in the conversation like the fact that that's a username and which parts are the body text which is what you're supposed to be summarizing and it's just like it's all text to me so if someone's username has a museum in it i'm like this must be a conversation about museums i mean maybe but also maybe not uh this is definitely an area of improvement and you know i do think that we had a couple items about this already and we're going to have another one in a second i do think that when apple intelligence actually ships to people with 18.1 or whatever stuff like this may end up being kind of like a you know a meme topic of like let's all make fun of the dumb things our phones say when attempting to help us by doing something simple as like summarizing a bunch of text you got three text messages it's up to the little computer in there to summarize them to give you a single placeholder item so you don't have to read all three in theory that's a useful feature feature but in practice if you see that summary like should you trust it or do you have to expand the things anyway like because you could see this and say maybe someone's giving me uk-based museum recommendations oh it's just museum shuffle was that mentioned in one of the things that's messed up i think this is going to be just you know a problem overall in like when for apple intelligence to be summarizing notifications well apple intelligence only knows the raw text of the notification that is provided by the apps to the system.

51:07Like, it's an API, you provided a couple of text fields, and that's it. They don't know the context that this is coming from an app where this is a Twitter-style username. They don't know that. And so I hope maybe over time, like, maybe the better solution to this would be, as Apple adds APIs that help us use Apple intelligence at all, let alone better, not that I'm bitter that they are launching this entire system with no apis um but anyway maybe they will be able to give developers separate fields to say like all right here you know here is the text to show to the user and then here is a second text uh you know property to fill out on this object that is the you know the the text to give to apple intelligence as what is the intelligence representation of this so maybe and that would maybe like strip out usernames and markup and stuff like that and that would be up to the app to do that by the way like because very very often these services don't do this i uh last time we talked about this i forgot to use the correct terms of art but it's a in-band metadata versus out-of-band metadata in-band metadata is what most services like maston on or twitter especially back in the day used to use where that you know at museum shuffle or whatever that's part of the body text of the thing and if you want to separate it you the developer of ivory or whatever maston client has to parse the text find the things that are at mentions extract them so on and so forth as opposed to a system where the uh the metadata was out of band where there was a separate thing even if it's just something as simple as and i think uh twitter did this in later years ranges of saying here's the string but the range from character 0 to character 15 is the first username and the next username is here and the next username is here again something is always parsing this and determining that but like to essentially uh not have to have every single individual app suddenly become like a parser to find all the urls find all the at mentions so on and so forth and reconstruct it um again i think uh modern twitter slash x does a better job of that i think mastodon also does a reasonable job of that with links and stuff but for systems like marco said that are just like oh i'm just going to chuck this text over the wall to the notification system that's insufficient for apple intelligence to figure it out i i feel like apple intelligence could be trained to know things like hey when you see an at mention or a hashtag what those things are because they're they're culturally common enough that it's worthwhile training on that and it wouldn't have to know the context it doesn't have to know that this app is amassed on an app i've just seen something looks like an at mention the same way humans do we parse it out or whatever and you could still run a foul of that and make a mistake but it definitely seems like apple intelligence needs more slash better training and there's no way on the phone itself this is what people think about apple intelligence they think they're going to somehow like i wish i had a way to correct it so it would learn that's not happening like the only thing that's changing the weights in that model is when apple releases a new version of that model which could happen every day if apple wanted it to but they probably knowing apple is not going to but there's no feedback mechanism for you to somehow train the model by correcting it and telling it no this wasn't to be out in museums There's no mechanism for that right now, which is disappointing, but it's the reason we're going to have to live with whatever foibles these things have, which really, I feel like, impacts their potential usefulness, which is what Cable's talking about.

54:27Cable, I think this is his second or third appearance complaining about Apple intelligence in beta. Well, here he is again. Yeah, so Cable writes, testing Apple intelligence on my Mac has led to many existential feature questions, with an asterisk, which we'll get to. But it definitely is funny how it has it out for my dad. And so this is a screenshot of conversations with two people, Megan and Stephen. And the summary is, agree with Cable. Stephen responds with nonsense. So rude. That's the summary. I mean, assuming this is a conversation with Cable with his parents. One parent's response was characterized as nonsense by the summary system.

55:04Lovely. The aforementioned asterisk, why? How does this help? I'm still opening the emails and the messages, regardless of the summaries. In fact, I'm more likely to open them more urgently, interrupting my work quicker because the summaries can sometimes miss key information, and I don't want my brain to think I read them when I didn't. The emails it prioritizes for me are often just emails about canceled calendar events already reflected on my calendar. So what is the goal? To read my email less? How does this help that goal? Yeah, so this is part of the thing with any kind of assistance, right?

55:33If you ever have a human assistant that you hire to help you with things and your human assistant tells you, okay, on the agenda today, you've got meeting X with this person, meeting Y with this person, you have to do this thing or whatever. That assistant is not valuable. If after the assistant tells you that, what you do is then go to your calendar and confirm everything they said just to make sure they didn't make any mistakes because what if they forgot that you have to pick up your kid from school and they didn't mention that? That's the whole reason you have the assistant is to make it so you don't have to do that.

55:59but with these type of assistants where they're not very smart and often make mistakes you if you have to go and double check everything they did is it saving you any time or would you rather have not just seen it at all and like cable said the worst case scenario is you look at the summary and your brain tells you okay i've dealt with that i've read that i saw what it had to say i can safely disregard that because this email is just telling me something that's not important but little did you know that there was something very important in that email and because you didn't read it but instead you read the summary that was generated for you that was inaccurate you now think you dealt with it and then you know i think we'll all learn from this with someone saying you didn't pick up little timmy at school i emailed you about it and it's like yeah i read that email you didn't say anything about that but you didn't read the email you read the summary and thought you had read the email so this i mean it's it's hard like we were talking about like the friend thing right what can this technology do in a way that fulfills the requirements summarizing notifications and email may be beyond the capabilities even though it sounds like such a simple thing maybe beyond the capabilities if it fails in ways that are a problem for you and then you know like they require you to read the actual email because then that's like what's the point of the summary then like you can't triage based on the summary if you can't trust what it says so i feel cables frustration obviously this is still a beta we'll all see how we deal with this i hope you can actually turn this off like don't try to summarize notifications for me like i see the goal like we all get lots of notifications and it's annoying seeing a giant stack of them like oh i have to read through them and see if any of them are important or whatever i have to go through all my email one by one we all hate that right we would love something to help us out but if the thing helping us out is untrustworthy i'd rather just don't try to help and I will just continue to go through my own notifications and email myself.

57:45All right. And then in front of the show, Zach Kahn writes with regard to Apple podcast charts. I think this was an Ask ATP a few weeks ago or something like that. Asking, you know, hey, does following on Overcast or Apple podcast or what have you, does that actually help? And so if you'd like, you can dig into the specifics behind that. But Zach provided three different links with regard to how all that works behind the scenes. And I'm happy that Apple provides this. Did you? I tried to read those documents. and i the question was like uh you know the question was like overcast like would just following and overcast do anything to apple podcasts and mark answered no it doesn't or whatever but then the other question was like what is following do an apple podcast and we had all sorts of theories yeah does it help the show because everyone always says please follow us it helps the show right and this document does kind of confirm that that's the case within the realm of apple podcast but it doesn't go into the nitty-gritty detail of exactly like how they calculate all these lists and what the algorithms are or whatever it's still of course not they don't want to reveal that because people the more you reveal about that people will game it right and so if you're expecting to go into these documents and say finally now i'll know exactly what happens when i follow something you're not going to find out that kind of detail but it's telling you you know directionally here is the here are the actions that you can take and those actions feed into these things in a way that we're not going to describe to you because you game it yeah i think actually this section is a really really really great summary of both what it looks at and why.

59:05So this is from the link that we've phrased as summary in the show notes. And it says, top shows and top episodes. While the exact algorithm cannot be shared to protect its integrity, the charts measure a mix of the following. Listening. When listeners are engaging with episodes, it's an indicator of content popularity. Follows. When listeners follow a show to receive new episodes, it's an indicator of their intent to listen. Completion rate. When listeners complete episodes, it's an indicator of content quality. I like that. I mean, it makes sense. Now, granted, it's not super specific, but I like that not only did they say this is what we're doing, but here's also why we're doing it.

59:40And Spotify gathers similar stats for its podcast. But of course, for our show, where a significant portion of our listeners do not use Apple podcasts, all those listeners doing all their activity listening to our podcast don't factor into this at all. Like there is no, as far as I'm aware, equivalent of like the Nielsen ratings back in the day where it's like a cross section of all humanity watching television as determined by this hopefully representative sampling. We don't have that. Right. We have Apple podcasts. If you use the Apple podcast app, they can track your behavior and your behavior influences their top charts.

1:00:14But if you're using literally any other podcast client, Apple has no idea what you're doing. Like because Apple doesn't host the feeds. The feeds are hosted on the individual people's websites and everything. and you know again if you're an oddball show like ours where the majority of our listeners are not using apple podcasts we're just losing out on that activity which is one of the many reasons why we're unlikely to ever appear in any kind of top charts i mean obviously we're a tiny podcast we're not going to appear there anyway but just it's it's just a part of the system that we have podcasts are very open uh but the things like that are necessarily uh sort of uh islands in individual isolated islands of statistics because nobody has an overview of everything, which I think is good.

1:00:56Like we don't want someone to have an overview of everything. But just FYI, nobody does. Then finally, for follow up, Huawei has a newspaper phone. It's a trifold. It's so ridiculous. But I mean, hey, if you like it, you like it. The replacement of this or the screen replacement of the or no, no, not the screen replacement. Excuse me. The whole phone is quite expensive. So reading from The Verge, Huawei has officially announced the world's first dual-hinged triple-screen foldable phone in China. The prices for the Mate XT Ultimate Design start at$19 ,999, or about$2 ,809 for the 25-gig storage model.

1:01:35That's roughly$300 more than a brand-new 16-inch MacBook Pro. 256-gig storage module. For almost$3 ,000, they couldn't give you more than 256 gigs of storage. Wow. All models are equipped with 16 gigs of RAM and two additional storage variants are available that cost 22 ,000 won or about 3 ,000 bucks for 512 gigs and 24 ,000 won or about 3 ,300 bucks for one terabyte. The Chinese retailer Vimal reported 3.7 million pre-orders before pricing was announced. Whoopsies. That's, yeah. So folding phones. They're still trying different ways to fold them. Like I waited for the one that folds up like an old paper map that you can never get refolded correctly in the car.

1:02:13Right. a gigantic thing that folds and like wow like this is really pushing the limits i mean it does it does unfold to a really big screen but like like it's like a full-size ipad practically or it looks bigger than ipad mini at least but that's such a straight and and it does look like when it is folded you can still use it as just a regular phone because the top third of the screen is still visible you know what i mean because of the way it folds but folding uh people are trying everything they can possibly think of and i guess there's enough customers out there saying that looks cool i want to have that because it reminds me of a sci-fi show and then once they get it they'll determine is this actually a good phone or is this just like a gimmick that i spend the first month showing everybody i know look at my phone it unfolds like this huh huh and then just you know it gets old or i mean it's like the the i am rich app look at my phone it was three thousand dollars huh right oh my god i mean whatever makes you happy i mean but i'm glad people are trying crazy stuff like this.

1:03:10Now that we have this foldable screen tech that has reached the point of maturity that you can actually start having a decent number of products out there on the market that use it, I like seeing weird experimentation with gadgets. Phones have been these kind of boring rectangles for so long that it's been a mature market. These boring rectangles are here for a reason. People like them overall and never bet against them. But I'm happy to see experimentation now that we haven't seen in a while. Like we haven't really seen this level of form factor experimentation since the very early days of the smartphone era.

1:03:45And now we're seeing all sorts of crazy ideas and most of them are going to be terrible, but some of them are going to actually have some merit and they'll be fun. So I'm happy to see this. Yep. Agreed on all counts. All right. Apparently Apple is doing activation locks on individual iPhone components. So reading this a bit long, but it's, I think it's worth it reading from nine to five Mac In 2013, Apple's introduction to Find My wiped out a huge chunk of the market for stolen iPhones, since they could no longer be simply reset and sold as a working phone. All a thief could do from that point on was strip an iPhone for parts.

1:04:17Back in April, Apple announced that it would be addressing that issue by extending activation lock to key iPhone components. Requested by customers and law enforcement officials, the feature was designed to limit iPhone theft by blocking a lost or stolen iPhone from being reactivated. If a device under repair detects that a supported part was obtained from another device without an activation lock or lost mode enabled, calibration capabilities for that part will be restricted. The release candidate builds of iOS 18 enable activation lock for iPhone parts. The feature, as previously described by Apple, links to your Apple account not only to your iPhone, but also to components such as the battery, cameras, and display, based on their individual serial numbers.

1:04:54It won't completely solve the problem, of course, as it doesn't cover all components, and there may be some who will accept a lack of calibration and annoying alert messages in return for a cheap repair. But it will make a huge dent in the market for stolen iPhones, because most people won't buy a device with obvious issues, especially when those issues suggest it may contain stolen parts. The downside, of course, is that the move makes it harder to repair an iPhone using parts harvested from legitimately acquired broken devices. Apple has already introduced the ability to remove activation locks from Macs when wiping them, rather than when setting them up as new.

1:05:24This is coming to Apple Business Manager too, so enterprise companies and customers will be able to remove Activation Lock from entire batches of managed devices when preparing them for sale. All that is needed now is to ensure that this also covers Activation Lock for parts. On the one side, this obviously is a real bummer for third-party people that are legitimate and are just trying to get cheaper repairs by harvesting a phone for parts that maybe the screen is shattered because I was washing my car or something like that. And yet the camera is fine. And I get that that's a real bummer for them.

1:05:56But I would say that broadly, this strikes me as a pretty good idea. Yeah, Apple's always fighting this battle. They have been since the iPhone was introduced. So it used to be the gray market for phones and the market for stolen phones. And this is this is a good way to do it with technology. Like, you know, stopping people from stealing your phone. People think about that and it's like, oh, I'll tie it to my wrist with a cable or I'll give people an electric shock when they get like, no, that's not how you solve these problems. That's how a five-year-old solves these problems. You solve it by making it not a profitable thing to do.

1:06:29And Apple has been slowly chipping away at that, saying if someone does steal your phone, what good is it to them? How much money can they make from that phone? And if you keep pushing down that amount of money and increasing the hassle, it will reduce iPhone theft simply because it is no longer as profitable as it used to be still there is some profit not every part of the activation locked but find my and activation lock on parts go a long way towards making it much more difficult to make money by stealing people's phones now since this is a technological solution it's just another technological cat and mouse race like okay well what is locked about them can that encryption be broken uh do people mind like part of the thing is like that the parts the parts will work but they will not be able to be calibrated and you may think who cares about calibration but many parts in the phone in particular things like the screen uh calibration is a surprisingly big part of what makes them work because they're not perfect pieces of hardware and the calibration process sort of makes it so that the system knows for example how much voltage and how much current do i have to supply so every single little sub pixel to get it to emit the amount of brightness that I expected to emit.

1:07:41And that varies across the screen. It's not like I just apply the same current and voltage across the whole screen and you get a uniform image. You don't. The screens have variations. Your screen will look weird and bad if it is not correctly calibrated. And so they're not like, even now they're not locking it out entirely like they do with like the face ID sensors where I think they just don't work at all, period. But things like the screen, I think they'll work, but they won't let you calibrate them, so they'll look bad. And so they're really trying to make it so that if someone steals your phone and harvests parts from it, maybe the most valuable parts are less valuable now because someone will only buy them knowing they can sell them to somebody who accepts having alert dialogues come up and complain about, you know, unauthenticated parts or whatever, and also accepts the fact that their screen is going to look worse.

1:08:28And, yeah, the flip side of this is that everybody who does phone repairs legitimately thinks this is terrible. You're locking down these parts. I can't have my business anymore because I can't unlock the parts. only apple can do it or whatever really i think it's not that apple can do it only the person who owns the device can do it so businesses having a way to like mass unlock and wipe their phones before they resell them that's important uh like this this article says max have the ability to do that if you want to sell your mac you want to wipe it so that your apple id is totally divorced from it and it removes the activation lock so owners can do it but someone who just stole your phone presumably can't do it because they don't have your password or whatever we'll see past conversations about shoulder surfing your lock code.

1:09:08And there was a toot that just went by this morning that reminded me of this, this article in The Gothamist talking about messages that have been sent to somebody by the people who stole their phone. Because the people who stole their phone obviously are not the brightest thieves. But the phone is locked, right? And they need it to be unlocked for it to become useful. So they're sending messages to sort of social engineer the owner of the phone and say hey can you essentially remove this phone from your apple id like deactivate find my remove it from your apple id which would then unlock it and open it up so then they could use it as a phone and they send us a series of messages trying to coerce slash fool this person into unlocking their phone culminating into violent threats at the very end which is not fun um but it just goes to show like certain caliber of criminal are already frustrated by the features that apple has they think hey i got a stolen phone this will be great i can use this as my phone or resell it as another phone and they realize oh no i can't do anything because it's activation locked and i don't know how to get around that so let me try to harass the original owner into unlocking it for me and this original owner happens to be smart enough to know what they're doing but i can imagine these this approach working what more than 50 of the time because people you know again people don't know what activation lock is they don't know all these details they just know their phone was stolen if they get a message that says some of the things that these messages say like oh you're about to be charged and i have your your financial information and i'm going to sell your phone and all your information is on and everyone's going to get it like people don't know if that's true or not right so they'll just be like oh i'll do whatever they say and unlock the phone and then they'll go away right and by unlocking it all you're basically doing is you know letting them use your phone as a fresh phone and sell it for full price or whatever so it It doesn't actually harm you to do it, but screw the criminals.

1:10:58Don't do that. Yeah, yeah. It's unfortunate that this has to be a thing, but here we are, and Apple's doing their best to try to ride the line between blocking out third-party repair shops and whatnot and also just helping us not get our phone stolen, which would be preferred. They had their rationale for this was in that product longevity document that we talked about where they explain why they do this. like it's not to screw over customers but it's to try to you know make it so that parts that are essential to security like face id and touch id can't be spoofed or faked with third-party ones or whatever they didn't even talk about the theft angle but i feel like that is another big side of this i do kind of love like the one of the apple approaches to discouraging theft is like all right you can steal these phones but we're gonna make your screens look bad that is like the most apple thing like your colors aren't going to be quite right no one would ever use a screen that doesn't look uniform, right?

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1:13:36All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Yov Zoldan writes, how do you explain to non-tech people, especially family, that your iPhone does not listen to you to show you ads? I can never get them to believe me. I think cross-site tracking is hard to understand, and the conspiracy theory is more attractive. Do you know of an easy-to-understand explainer video, maybe? Well, this got complicated in the time between we added this to the show notes and when we started talking about it just now, because there's been a couple of news reports, titles, Cox Media Group brags it spies on users with device microphones to sell targeted ads, but it's not clear they actually can.

1:14:08That was from TechDirt. We'll put a link to the show notes. And then from 404 Media, here's the pitch deck for, quote, active listening, quote, ad targeting. which is also not great. So I don't really know how to answer this question anymore to be completely honest with you. We get this question all the time. People are always wanting to know whether their phone is listening to them or they just write to us and insist that their phone is listening to them and here's why and they give some story about what happened, right? First of all, let's just say that we're talking about iPhones only. I have no idea what's going on Android with respect to this.

1:14:40But in the realm of the iPhone, it is extremely difficult to use the microphone to passively spy on people when people are not using your app and haven't given their permission those are a lot of caveats apps can trick you into giving permission app whatever wants to use the microphone allow maybe some you know someone who has a phone hit allow on that ages ago and forgot about it right and now that phone has that app has microphone access right but people who insist that their phones are listening to them will say things like i know i never gave this uh app uh access to the microphone or i don't even have the facebook app installed but i visited their website and i think it's listening to me now right people have all sorts of conspiracy theories about it and they're backed up by these anecdotes that we know are explained by not simple but non-obvious ways they track you across the web whether it be local storage cookies the fact that you're coming from the same ip address you're sitting in a group of people i never even looked up uh you know swing sets but immediately i got an ad for swing sets on instagram well it's because the person sitting next to you looked up swing sets and they're coming through the same wi-fi thing as you and yada yada right like there's a million ways that they can track you that are not listening to you but humans have a much easier time thinking well if i was trying to spy on somebody what i would do is i would listen to them like with my ears audio right and they think that is the most straightforward way to know what you're doing And it's not.

1:16:04We have the ad industry has so many other ways to track you that are so much better developed that do not require listening. That said, as every single time we've talked about this issue, one of the things we have said is, oh, believe me, they would love to be listening to you. It's not that they wouldn't do it if they could. They want to do it. They're trying to do it all the time. They're trying to do it. It's just that Apple is pretty good at stopping them. So this Cox Media Group bragging that say, hey, we have this technology that lets you sell targeted ads based on what people say because we listen on the microphone.

1:16:34They've been pitching that for years. And I'm sure that they have that technology. And I'm sure it will totally work if someone gives it microphone access. But those are a lot of ifs in that stack there, right? That's why these stories usually read the TechDirt one because they're usually pretty skeptical and sort of paranoid about like being spied on or whatever. But even TechDirt's been like, OK, well, they can pitch you that they can provide this technology. but they should also have to explain how are you going to get past the fact that you can't get access to the microphone on the iphone unless the user gets permission or whatever right show me the show me the do they have some technical hack to get around that or they're just using social engineering or whatever right um in the end though this is kind of one of those things where people feel bad if they think something is listening to the audio of what they say but somehow they don't feel bad if something is tracking them using cookies and ip addresses and and other sort of weird hacks right that one doesn't feel as bad because it's not a human experience right they would feel bad if a human was listening in on them when a computer is listening in it's more like a human to them they don't care about tracking of their data otherwise right so it's difficult to explain to that person like look at the end result is the same they know you're thinking about swing sets whether they pulled that out of the air or just got it because someone who was on the same wi-fi router as you looked up swing sets even though you didn't do it it doesn't really make a difference in the end right but people want to feel it's kind of like the discussion of free will i had on rectifs which i don't want to bring up on this show but feel free to find that episode if you can figure out how to use google and find it in the show notes right there's what's actually happening and then it's how you feel about it and how you feel about it is so much more important in this scenario people feel terrible about being listened in on and yes as casey said these like this story this cox media thing coming around again and again i believe this exact same company several years ago was pitching the same exact thing well anyway it's another news cycle here they are pitching it again getting themselves into the news all this is going to do is reinforce in the minds of conspiracy theorists that their iphones are constantly listening to them because they're like well it's proof they they they said they did it they admitted it how can you not see that and the nuances are lost on them and so in the end as with many conspiracy theories you can't convince anyone they're not true you can't prove a negative uh and one thing that is true is that every advertiser wants to do this and are constantly trying to do it so it's not outlandish that one of them could eventually break through but to show that one of them has broken through you would need a little bit more proof than we're provided here so i would say uh it's very difficult to be avoid tracking in any form whatsoever if you're really worried about something listening to you you should worry more about your voice control cylinders which literally are constantly listening so they can hear you say the wake word to them they can't hear the wake word if they're not constantly listening supposedly they're throwing away all the audio that doesn't contain the wake word but we know from past stories that sometimes some audio when they're awoken accidentally is stored on servers for a long period of times and listened to by humans for supposed qa purposes or whatever if you don't like these things don't buy something that is constantly listening to you and put it in your house uh same thing with cameras you hope that they're taking that video and putting it up on their servers and no human has access to it and it's end-to-end encrypted is it maybe maybe not uh that's why you really have to trust your vendor i think apple is one of the most trustworthy here because they are constantly fighting this battle because apple does not make its money through targeted ads to the same degree that google does and amazon has lots of things to advertise to sell to you but yeah it's a difficult situation and i would say to this person you're probably not going to convince anybody mostly just let them believe what they want to believe because in the end how is it going to even change their behavior are they not going to have a phone are they not going to have an apple phone because they think android is better than this just let them do what they want all right uh peter wagner writes it's been four years since magsafe came out for the iphone i'd love to hear your take on the current state of magsafe and your thoughts on it as part of the iphone ecosystem i really love chi charging and i personally use chi charging every night to charge my phone MagSafe specifically, I also like, but I think that isn't as important to me as the Qi charging.

1:20:48Although now that I say that, I look at my Pro Max with its pop socket on the back, and I wonder if I'm doing MagSafe dirty by saying it's not that important to me. Because actually, having something that I can... No, you know, I take this all back. Don't worry, we'll fix it in post. Actually, now that I think about this, between the pop socket that I probably will give up once I get my human-sized phone, but also the MagSafe battery pack that Apple made years ago that I got kind of on a lark because you two jerks wouldn't buy one, and I figured one of the three of us should that I actually freaking love.

1:21:20I don't use it that often, but oh my word, is it nice when I do need it. That's really nice, and the Qi charging. So yeah, actually, I take it all back. I'm all in on MagSafe. I think it's quite good. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I mean, I've been using it pretty regularly since it came out. um you know my my my typical like you know bedside charger is just a mag safe puck with that like micro suction tape on the bottom of it to keep it on the nightstand and the next to it is an apple wash charger with the exact same thing and it's you know it's a nice kind of minimal nightstand charging setup that works very well and mag safe you know chi charging in general is great for lots of reasons it's not it's not a perfect thing like wireless charging as mentioned in the past, wireless charging is a little bit inefficient.

1:22:07And so you do end up losing some of that power and making more heat as a result. That's why it's inefficient. It's turning some of that into heat as waste. And so that has a number of negative effects, most significantly that you are kind of warming up the battery more than necessary as you're charging it. And that's not amazing for battery health. And of course, you are wasting energy. But that being said, Qi charging is very convenient and it has a lot of other benefits too. Like for instance, you can have Qi charging pads and lots of different things that you wouldn't have like, you know, a plug for.

1:22:41You can, as we mentioned earlier in this show, you can power something via Qi while you are using its port for something else. You are also not wearing out the port by plugging it in every night if you're sitting on a charging pad instead. So it avoids a lot of those kinds of problems. but the problem with Qi the biggest inconvenience as a user with Qi charging is getting it centered and occasionally missing and so I think we MagSafe was Apple basically saying hey you guys this was a good idea this wireless charging thing but let us do it right for you and sure enough Apple made a couple of modifications to it when they made MagSafe most notably the magnets that automatically align it correctly and you don't have to worry is it centered is it a little bit off did i miss last night my phone's not charged like no magsafe it centers it every single time it has never failed like it is it is a 100 like you know attachment accuracy rate as far as like as far as i've had uh which was way higher than i ever had with chi and so and and as a result like look you see the chi 2 standard now chi 2 was basically the industry saying oh uh you were right our bad and then i'm saying oh let's let's actually take what Apple did and make it the new standard, basically, which is not the first time in the industry this has happened, by the way.

1:23:59But anyway, so that magnetic alignment is such a huge improvement. And that allowed them to do things like have higher wattages. Because one of the limitations of original Qi also is like, because it's kind of imprecise, inefficient, kind of broad area coverage that you have to do, it was reasonably unsafe to put a lot of wattage through it. in terms of heat management and everything else. So with MagSafe, one of the reasons MagSafe chargers were able to charge at higher wattages than Qi chargers is that Apple was able to know, like, okay, well, if it is connected in this, like, if it recognizes it in this certain way, we know it is properly centered.

1:24:39We know it's very close from within these certain tolerances, and therefore we can safely apply more current in there, and we know that less of it will be converted to waste heat and, you know, et cetera, and so it'll be safer. so again another big advantage to like that's that that helped a lot that they can raise the water zone to make it more useful so i think it's one of those things where again looking looking at the the iphone 16's advances if you if you told somebody like hey how much do you like you know magsafe they'd be like i guess it's fine you know but if you actually took it away and we went back to a world without it, we would realize, oh, we actually really missed that.

1:25:20That's actually a very useful thing. So many things have gotten better as a result of it. You have things like car mounts that can just stick it on there. You don't have to slide it into a bracket with a dock or whatever, and it's not quite aligned, right? Or it bends out with your case thickness or whatever. Get rid of all that. You have the bedside situation. Again, a lot of things become easier there. You have the accessory ecosystem, like Casey's pop socket, like the wallet. You have all these things that are now able to either mount to the phone or make the phone easier to use in some way or more convenient to use in some way because of the MagSafe design on the back.

1:25:54So it has a lot of those like little life improvements. So I'm actually very happy with MagSafe. I'm even happier that they've made it even better with the iPhone 16 series, allegedly with the larger coils and the higher wattage. That's all going to be great. So I think MagSafe is a huge success on the phone and I look forward to uh continued improvements yeah even as somebody who does not use MagSafe to charge pretty much ever mostly because I just don't want to deal with the the heat and degradation or whatever and I don't mind plugging the thing in it's just made a huge difference in my life simply because I have uh cars without car play and what I was doing before I was like Marco described it had a thing that clipped onto a vent and it was like a big clampy jaw thing and you'd have to like open up the clampy jaw and put your phone in it and hope that it stayed in there and by the way if you want your phone to charge now snake a stupid cable that you have to route from wherever your usb port is in your thing and plug it into the bottom of the phone and now you're ready to go but with magsafe i get into the car take my phone thunk it sticks you're exactly where i want it to be it is it doesn't fall off when i go over bumps and it's charging and i didn't have to do anything i just stuck it there i'm gonna when i go into the car i take it out and obviously this is barbaric people have carplay but you know not everybody has carplay what a difference in my life this has made to have a dashboard mount that i just stick my thing to and i feel like you know i like the fact that it is charging but the magnets the magnets are key right and i do have a magsafe puck on my bedside table and mostly what i use it for is i put my little airpods case in it because i don't really care if i wear out the battery in my airpods case because it's not a big deal and i can get a new case if it has ever been a problem but it hasn't been unfortunately the battery in the airpods themselves wears out quickly but hopefully the heat generated from magsafe charging my airpods case is not transferring too heavily to the airpods and anyway i've got new ones arriving soon so yeah i think magsafe is great like the the good thing about it is that it lets first of all if you don't like it it really doesn't take anything off your phone i'm sure it adds some few grams of weight for those magnets or whatever and the charging coil but it's not a big deal it doesn't change the appearance doesn't add a giant hump doesn't like make it heavier or bigger in a way that people care about right but second everybody can choose what it is they like about magsafe do you think of it as just a magnet to hold the wallet to the back of your phone do you use it for 100 of your charging is it a replacement car mount for you that's better than your old one it can do lots of things for lots of different people so even though you might look at it and say well i expected like never to see a wire again and the port to disappear from my phone and that didn't happen therefore magsafe is a failure i think it's been a smashing success i think everybody finds something they like about magsafe and it can improve their life and for the few people who don't find anything they like about MagSafe, it doesn't bother them.

1:28:31Great feature. Yep. Couldn't agree more. Jonathan Cirillo writes, what are your credit card setups? For example, Amex Gold for X, Apple Card for Y, et cetera. For me, I feel like we've talked about this at some point in the past, but for me, Aaron and I share, and this obviously is what works for us. It won't work for everyone. We share one primary checking account, one primary savings account. Obviously, So we have investments and other things like that. And then one primary credit card. And so when we were both working years, like traditionally working years and years ago, 95 % of our paychecks went into that shared account.

1:29:05And that's what pays the bills. That's what pays for food and everything else. And then we would siphon off just a little bit to personal credit cards that only we individually have access to, which are basically used for either I really want to buy this and I don't want to hear you complaining about it for either of us, or I'm buying you a gift and I don't want you to know about it. and so that's basically our setup it's very boring the credit card we have gives us a little bit of cash back I'm sure I could be maximizing my points and whatnot and so on and so forth but that's not a game I've ever really gotten into so my setup is really boring basically we share the same credit card account all basically all our retail purchases go on that and then we pay it off every month and that's basically it Marco what about you guys also fairly boring I have the standard setup from a nerd who was a nerd in 2006 which is I started having an MX blue cash card which was like the nerd pick to do back then and I had that for a while at some point in the last few years we crossed over the threshold at which it made more sense to get the platinum card because it's one of those cards where there's an annual fee but if you spend more than X you'll end up coming out ahead with the points and everything else and there's all sorts of other benefits with the platinum card.

1:30:24Among credit cards that offer various perks and benefits, especially if you travel a lot, it's one of the good ones to get, so look into it if you care. And if you spend stupid amounts of money, then it will usually pay for itself. That being said, not everybody takes American Express. And so I used to just have the American Express as the credit card and I would just use my regular bank debit card, which was a visa for anything that wouldn't take it. Then at some point, that visa, like the number got stolen or something. And it really freaked me out because debit cards do not provide nearly as much protection as credit cards in fraud situations.

1:31:01Because with debit cards, they're actually like directly taking the money. And there's usually some protection from your bank, but you don't have as many protections as you do with credit cards. And that kind of freaked me out that I was like giving direct access to my bank account to so many vendors that wouldn't take American Express. And so at that point, I got some other Visa credit card that was recommended. I think it's a capital. I don't even remember because I hardly ever use it for anything. So my current setup is I have the Amex Platinum for anything that will take it. For anything that won't, I'll use that backup Visa.

1:31:35Oh, it's an Amazon Prime Visa. That's right. I switched over. It's an Amazon Prime because those actually also provide pretty good benefits and anything i buy from amazon i have that as the default payment method because i think it's like five percent off it's a pretty substantial discount on amazon purchases um and there's and so if you buy a lot from amazon it's worth having the amazon prime card it's or and also if you buy a lot from whole foods because it's the same deal anyway amex for things that take it amazon prime visa for whatever doesn't and then my bank card is only ever used in my bank's ATM.

1:32:07I go to my bank's ATMs, that is the only place the debit card is ever put into. It's used for nothing else, mostly just for safety and to avoid the inconvenience of that getting stolen. We are a credit card family. My wife, in particular, has opened up many credit cards over the years. We've pared it down. But our system is generally one shared card. We both have the card. I think at various times it might have had different numbers for the two of us but most of the time it's had the same number but with two different cards with two different names on them and that's basically our main credit card that we use for everything it is also an Amazon Prime Visa just like Margo's because we buy so much stuff from Amazon and unfortunately Whole Foods and that gives good cash back reward things and everybody takes it it's taken everywhere we never got into the whole Amex thing or anything like that obviously we do have debit cards for our bank and everything that we just don't use them right i personally also have a quote-unquote corporate credit card that is the credit card connected to my business account oh yeah same and in theory i'm supposed to use that for all business expenses and i do for recurring business expenses like as we've discussed before if you have an llc in massachusetts you pay some godly amount of money every single year just to maintain that llc which is why everyone opens theirs in delaware or whatever but anyway i'm mine is massachusetts and so every year i have to pay that and so any sort of recurring fees like that or like my business telephone that i pay for another recurring fee I connect my business card, which is just another visa connected to my business bank account, which is in a different bank entirely.

1:33:36I connect all that up to that. Doesn't matter. I'm a single member LLC and it's passed through for tax purposes. It doesn't actually matter. But just at the end of the year, when you're trying to find all your business expenses, if you can just look at one card and say everything on this card is business expense, that makes it our life easier for us to gather stuff that we then hand off to our accountant to say, here are all the business expenses or whatever i don't always follow that unfortunately sometimes there's some things that i forget that were on the other card or whatever or there's a mix of them but you know we figure it out um and the thing that both of you didn't mention that i'm sure is absolutely true for all of us is that when we buy stuff from apple we use our apple card because it's like whatever six percent back or three percent or whatever whatever percentage back is that not true of you too like whenever you buy make an apple purchase use your apple card i don't have an apple card no neither do i you don't really at the time i i guess i haven't looked recently at the time it wasn't really worth the additional like you know whatever the very tiny benefit was for me over just buying it on my mx it wasn't worth it um but that that might be different now i think yeah i think there was i don't know what the percentage is now but i think briefly especially when apple card was brand new and i was buying new max it was like six percent discount when buying apple hardware or something i don't think that's still true but yeah i use my apple card whenever i buy anything from apple my apple card pays from iCloud when i just bought my phone that was on my apple card like anytime we buy apple hardware that is on apple card that is the only thing we use our apple card for mostly because apple has no idea how to make a good credit card interface like there needs to be a website apple where you can go and see all your transactions have you heard of the web but instead they're like oh just go to the app and scroll oh you can't see all your transactions tough luck oh you want them printed out in some kind of report tough luck like it's just they're so bad but i do it to get whatever the discount is for buying apple stuff specifically with your Apple card.

1:35:23And I don't use the Apple card for anything else because for anything else, for the most part, other cards I have, including our main Amazon Visa card, give you more cash back or points or whatever that you should be getting. So Apple Pay, when I double tap the side button and pay with Apple Pay, that's paying with the main family Visa card, right? And I have to remember, and sometimes I forget this, remember anytime I'm actually buying something from Apple, when I double tap the side button, don't just, you know, face ID, select the Apple card first because, you know you can pick which card you want on a per payment basis uh and do that uh and yeah i hate the stupid thing at whole foods where you have to like scan your stupid qr code for the whole food can't they just know can't they just know whenever i pay with my amazon prime visa thing like they're all the same company like can't you just figure it out but no you gotta scan the stupid code and then find out the code didn't even give you a discount on any of the ridiculously expensive items you bought this time it's annoying but i'll tell you what man you you make fun of whole foods I shopped at Whole Foods for a long time when I lived in Westchester There currently is not one anywhere near my house on Long Island And I miss it Now that I had the Whole Foods lifestyle And now I'm away from it I actually really miss it Whole Foods for all of its faults is awesome Next time you go grocery shopping just double the bill and send me the other half You can get that experience It's real easy Can I send you all my garbage groceries from Stop and Shop And you'll give me all the nice stuff from Whole Foods The only other good benefit of Amazon and Whole Foods coming together as that returning stuff.

1:36:50You can just go to Whole Foods with your thing and just give it to someone at a counter and say, here, take this. That is nice. It doesn't even have to be packed up or anything. It has to be in the box or whatever. We're like, I'm returning this. Take this. That is convenient. Real-time follow-up from the chat. Apparently, card.apple.com, thanks to Zach Knox. That is a thing, apparently. Yeah, no, their website is terrible. They used to not have one at all, and now they have one, and it's terrible. They need to look at every other credits or website to know what the bar is, and they're just below it.

1:37:42find out in ATP Overtime this week. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin, because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse, it's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So I have some updates about the Rivian.

1:38:56Okay. Now, to the degree you're willing to share, did you call in favors? Did you get special treatment? What is going on? No, I didn't even want to try that. I don't want a car that I can only get serviced in a reasonable amount of time by calling in special favors. That is not how I want to live my life. I don't want to be, you know, beholden to that. Although, to be fair, what most people said is you don't have to call in a special favor. If you just sign up for the appointment, that's it. And then just wait. Because you listed severe things in your appointment, they will bump you up on the schedule.

1:39:28Nothing you have to do. No special treatment. They have no idea who you are. That was the things that people were saying. That is what people told me. Here's what actually happened. I created that ticket with the items on it. That seemed pretty significant. I think not being able to move the driver's seat is a pretty substantial safety issue. Not being able to fast charge on highway trips reliably is also a pretty significant issue. Not having any air conditioning in early September, I would say, is a pretty significant issue. so i i waited like a day or two after submitting it to see because people said that that should happen um it didn't and then i ended up like there's like an interface in the app where you can you can message the service center like on the same thread as your service request so it's like a little chat interface so i submitted a couple questions in the chat i'm like hey um i'm hearing that maybe the ac coolant is also used to cool the battery and maybe that might be related to my my fast charging issues is it safe to drive this vehicle without the ac working because right now the ac doesn't work at all i think i bet they love it when people self-diagnose and write in with their theories about what might be wrong with their car sure yeah exactly i mean i'm sure but like but still like you know we heard from a bunch of people that apparently the the ac refrigerant system is used to charge the bat is used to cool the battery pack also and so therefore if the ac can't cool maybe the battery can't cool either and by the way this second part of what you did is a great customer service hack by mentioning in what is presumably an auditable uh you know area of like text chat saying is it safe to drive my vehicle should fire off all the warnings of like either a don't answer this question or b if they do answer it that'll great to come up in the lawsuit later when you say hey i asked if it was safe and you said it was safe and then my car caught on fire yeah leave leave a paper trail for things like that everyone that helps anyway um so you know i asked in the chat like you know is it safe to drive if the battery if the cooling system is not working basically um i did not hear back cool that's one of the options like i said don't answer that don't answer that yeah just no response um i was not moved up 10 days later they finally called me let me tell you what i did in the meantime uh oh no did you sell the car so i decided oh my god oh no oh no so i decided let me see what my options are here because as i'm sitting there waiting for like you know a week for a response and like not getting anything i'm like okay i don't think this is going the way the way i expect um and so i said let me just go see, you know, what are my other options out there?

1:42:09So I drove the Rivian over to BMW. Oh, no, Marco. No, no, no. I'm on Long Island. There are BMW dealers every 20 feet. I wanted to look at the Kia EV6, the Ioniq 5, and the BMW iX. For every other model that people suggested, I really, either it was a Tesla, and there's reasons I don't want to do that, or it was something that does not fit what I stated were my priorities, which is I need pretty long range. I would like a decent amount of interior space and cargo space. I would like it to have a hatchback or a liftback trunk, and I would like it to be a model that has existed for more than a year or two.

1:42:47I want something that's a little bit more established, and ideally from an established car brand, not a startup like Lucid or something like that. The i5 doesn't have a hatchback or a liftback. You can get the M5, the electric M5, the non-electric M5 wagon, but is there an i5 liftback? No, the iX, I'm saying, is the one I was looking at. You didn't look at the i5 or the i4, the two that I suggested? I did look at the i5. Too small? So, actually, I didn't test it, but I sat in one in the dealer. I looked around. So, the i5 is basically their BMW's electric 5 Series. I loved driving a 5 Series-sized car.

1:43:21It was great. The problem is that was before I was ruined by the Model S big liftback style. And I love the cargo advantages of a liftback. So I really don't want a standard trunk anymore if I don't need it. Secondly, you figure like what are you optimizing for if you pick a sedan over like a crossover or an SUV? What you're optimizing for mostly is efficiency, maybe physical footprint size. and when you compare the range the ix actually i think has longer rings than the i5 or at least it's or at least similar because they put a little bigger battery in it also the 5 series has such a big footprint now that the length and width of the 5 series of the i5 is almost the same as the ix so and if you compare them like the ix is just basically a slightly taller i5 significantly totally taller but that's part of the problem of bmw strategy of essentially making we make a gas version of the same car the i5 has enough room for a gigantic internal combustion engine under the hood uh and when you take out that engine the car does not get any smaller no and especially does not get shorter or narrower um so like i think when you compare the the actual measurements the i5 is something like it's like an inch or two narrower but it's like the exact same length as the ix or it might even be like an inch longer or something that's why i was saying you should look at the i4 but a backseat might be too small yeah and and the four series the the the way they make it sportier is they really they really crush the back seat uh both headroom and the cargo is not great either in that anyway so that's why the bmw i was looking at was the ix i've also just heard great things about it and anyway so all this is like i'm looking around like all right let me see like what are my options if i if i do want to trade in the rivian like what are my options here and then how can i get around the issue of you know it's broken just don't say anything so adam said you know let's go because i was describing like the options to him because and this was like after school one day he he'd like just come from sports practice and he was tired and i'm like all right i have time for one car dealer and i'm like all right do you want to go to like the small fun one i was thinking the the ionic 5 uh or do you want to go to like the big cushy one and he said let's do the big cushy one i'm like all right so we go to we go to see the ix first of all inside but Adam was immediately won over by it has this like accent lighting.

1:45:40It's RGB lighting for your car. It is. The kids would love it. I had no idea this was there. So every all the cars have this now. It's so terrible. I hate it so much. Oh my God. It's so fun. So yeah, like along every window strip on the bottom of each window and then like a couple of little lights throughout the cabin, there's these RGB lights and Adam's like, Oh my God, make it purple. So we know we made it purple during the test drive and he's like, all right, this, you got, you got to buy this car. you'd be shocked to learn that mercedes has like named themes like they have with with associated signature scents so it's not just like oh you can change the colors it's like well we've we've carefully selected these particular themes that involve a sound environment and a color scheme of the rgb lighting and a scent and it's just like oh come on that's amazing and bmw has like the ix has a bunch of weird stuff like that but anyway so adam is like super into it and i mentioned to the salesman i'm like hey and because as soon as of course you know i i knew what i was doing i i pulled up and i parked the rivian directly in front of the sales showroom so everyone could see it and it's like this glorious yellow goodness and the salesman immediately like hey how do you like that rivian and he said the yellow was the best color they don't make it anywhere i'm like oh he knows rivians okay like okay and this guy has good taste so i'm i'm off to a good start when he said how do you like that rivian what was your answer well i said it's a great off-roader you know it's it's a it's a really fun car all those things are true i love it when it's working well yes yes so anyway um he mentions his girlfriend happens to be the manager of rivian service place in brooklyn oh no and so you were like well sit down son we have to have a chat what are the odds like that is you're not making this up that this really genuinely that's incredible this is worth the reveal oh my god this is so good now I'm going to be mad if you did sell the damn thing so I'm like alright now I'm working with a different situation than I expected if you want good Rivian service go to a BMW dealer that's the moral of the story so anyway so I mentioned to him I decided it was okay to reveal something because of that I said listen I have two problems problem number one is that my car is worth too much to trade it in for a lease problem number two is the air conditioning does not blow very strong right now and it's a long wait for service and i can't get a service anytime soon that's the only thing you mentioned yes which is probably in all fairness it is true but there is more but in all fairness that is probably the root of both problems again self self-diagnosing so i mentioned those problems and this i think this anchors the deal in my favor already because he's he's like well if we took that in i could get that taken care of much faster i'm like great so anyway uh we do the test drive i freaking love the ix it's just ridiculously nice like way nicer than i expected it to be based on you know reviews and everything from the inside you can't see the outside yeah of course it's hideous on the outside but who like look i who cares like i don't i don't care how my car looks he's coming from a banana we know he doesn't care what it looks like on the outside the r1s is an attractive vehicle the ix less so yeah i'll give you that anyway but you know i i freaking love it so i'm like all right let's see like let me see what my option here is so i i'm like hey you know what what would you do for me on the rivian and so he has like the manager come out and appraise it and everything now i went in there i had i had looked up on websites like you know what are they i looked on cars and bids i looked on you know auto trader i looked like you know what what what do these things tend to go for that are, you know, because there's not that many R1Ss that are on the used market.

1:49:18So there's not that many data points, but there's enough that I can, I had like a number in mind and I'm like, all right, if this is roughly what they sell for in private sales to enthusiasts, I'd be happy to take like, you know, at least 10 % lower than that from a dealer trader. And I know I'd probably be fighting even to get that. They offered just barely a hair below the private sale price. Oh, wow. So I was like, hmm. I'm not going to get the Rivian service manager's boyfriend at another car dealer. This is a surprisingly good opportunity all of a sudden. So I'm like, let's run some numbers here.

1:49:54What could we do on the lease? How can we work this? So through a surprisingly small amount of squeezing, it turns out there were a lot of lease incentives at the time for the IX for some reason. I don't care why. I know there's like an LCI coming out next year. I know it's about to be updated. It's going to get probably going to get the Tesla port next year as part of the LCI, which is BMW's term for a mid-cycle refresh. I know they're going to improve some of the looks of the outside because people don't like it. I really care about none of those things right now. And so I, through just these wonderful lease incentives, it brought the price of the vehicle down like twelve thousand dollars like huh so i'm going to do this trade-in for a price that is way more than i could get than i thought with no trouble whatsoever and they're going to give me a big cut off the lease and i'm going to prepay most of the lease with the the part of the value of the trade-in they're going to give me a check for the rest Huh.

1:50:56So I did it. I now own an iX. What color? It's the Blue Ridge Mountain one. It basically looks like a shiny sky blue. It's like if the sky was shiny, that is how it looks. Did you get the 50 or the 60? I got the 50. I didn't test drive a 60. They didn't have one then. I got the 50 because I test drove the 50, and it was extremely fast. Like, I would say it's a similar difference as, like, back when I was getting my Model S, when they had, like, the regular mid-range one versus the, at the time, I think it was the Ludacris. Now it's the Plaid, but at the time, I believe Ludacris was the high-end one.

1:51:35At the time, it was like, you know, you could go to 0 to 60 in, like, four seconds or three seconds, basically. And the ones that were four seconds, that's incredibly fast for a car. That's very fast. and then the three second one i remember with the tesla i tested of that one and i believe i described it on the show as it felt like i was getting punched in the chest when i would floor it like it was actually kind of unpleasantly fast um so i decided with this one like the x51 or the 50x drive whatever it's called um the the quote slow one is already so fast this is plenty for me and it gets longer range and it's cheaper by a lot and there's more of them in stock everywhere what was the color again was it the phytonic blue metallic no the blue ridge blue oh it doesn't look that blue that's why i was looking for the blue oh that's grayish yeah no but it look up actual pictures of it the configurator does not really show what it's like yeah did you get what trim level did you get did you get the weird sport trim thing yes so the thing is to get one locally that's in stock because i asked like you know what's the order time and you know the lead time on an order is like three to four months i don't really want to wait that long and also like there was a time in my life when i really cared about every one of those details i don't care anymore like i really don't i i this i just like i just need a car that works it makes sense you're gonna have the car for like six months anyway well no i'm gonna have it for at least three years and i leased it um but although it's like the they i i put the rivian cost towards the lease as much as they would take so the lease payments are like 120 a month like it's just it's mostly prepaid that's incredible and it's and it's just and it's no there's like no interest and like it like it made no sense not to with all the lease incentives they brought the price so low it made it it made no sense to do a cash buy or anything like that rather than me asking you what wheels you have can you just send us a picture oh uh yeah let me try hold on so anyway it it's a great car i i really because i've been in you know tesla first and then rivian i i have not really had a super luxurious car in a while like since the bmw times the luxury level has certainly increased in the time that it's been it is it is certainly like the luxury technology has gotten substantially better it is just an incredibly nice ride like it still feels very much like a bmw like it is surprisingly sporty you know the handling for for a vehicle that's not super small the handling is very good compared to the Rivian it's night and day I mean the Rivian was a much bigger vehicle but the iX really drives incredibly well the the suspension and this doesn't even have the air suspension but the regular suspension is like super cushy and soft but you still you still feel a little bit sporty in the handling like it's a great balance like look at BMW knows how to make cars that feel good to drive like that's their whole thing but the luxury level like the cabin is so quiet when you close the windows it's so quiet a lot of little details that rivian i think hasn't figured out yet like for instance with rivian like there was pretty much no position at which you could roll down the driver window and no other windows and have it not do that like ear pumping thing oh yeah yeah buffeting or whatever whatever yeah whatever that's called but with the ix like it just doesn't do that at any level that i can find like when you when you close and open the windows you don't get that like ear sucking you know like it doesn't do that either um there's like you know little stuff like that that's just you know they've been making cars for a long time they engineer the crap out of them they know how to do it really well and that's that's what i what i'm happy to get out of an established car company you know what took me away from bmw years ago was the the wonderful advantages of evs like that's when i went to Tesla.

1:55:22It was because they were just EVs are just that good that it was worth me changing brands and taking a risk and giving up some of these things like just to have the EV drivetrain. But this is also now that same EV drivetrain now back in established car brands. And that's exactly what I was looking for making this change. So I'm actually so far. I mean, look, Now, there is one snag. Uh-oh. So I had the car for about 20 hours. Oh, no. Marco, no. Did the seats stop moving? I was sitting in front of my kid's school picking him up, and this message shows up on the dashboard, warning, high voltage system error.

1:56:02Oh, God. You can continue driving, but please have the system checked by your nearest service center to prevent malfunctions and subsequent damage. And this lease is a new car, right? Brand new car. It had like 50 miles or something, 40 miles on it. Like I had it for less than 24 hours and I get a service center error. You got to be kidding me. So of course, you know, I called them up. I'm like, hey, a little problem. But you know what? They got me in same day. They had given me a loaner, another IX. So they give me the same model car as a loaner. and I was out the door and they had it back in their hands in like two hours.

1:56:44That's service. Like, I don't expect products to be perfect. I know things go wrong, especially, you know, a version one of a car. Of course, a lot of things are going to go wrong. I know things are going to go wrong. What I need is for things to not go wrong most of the time. And when they do go wrong, for them to be easily fixed. And I said this last time, like, that's my priority with cars. Like, I don't need them to be perfect. I know they're not perfect. I need them to need very little from me in terms of maintenance and problems. I need them to mostly work. And if they have a problem, I need it to be easily solved.

1:57:17And even though I am very stressed out that my brand new car has a problem, I looked it up. It seems like a somewhat common software flaw with IXs that happen sometimes and they get fixed and they never have the problem again. So it should be fine. They still have it. I believe they're going to be giving it back to me today. When did it go in? thursday or yeah thursday oh my gosh yeah but they did give me a loaner immediately at this at this point in the story i start to wonder how many terrible electric car related tragedies would need to befall marco before he started looking at hondas i think it's a lot i think it's way more than his love of god john there are cars other than hondas jesus christ my guy or or a toyota right but like it's i mean i don't first of all i want to say for everyone who's listening don't let's discourage you from getting electric cars marco is being extraordinarily unlucky here this is not the standard experience as evidence from his years of using electric cars before this he's just has incredibly bad luck but given your incredibly bad luck i am wondering how much bad luck would it take for you to be like screw this i'm going back to internal combustion i think it would be a lot but i really feel like you're being tested by the universe here yeah no i i'm not a brand new car because like i mean because it really like even now that i'm now that i'm driving around a service loaner, even now driving this car, you know, almost a week later.

1:58:40It is so nice. It's a really, really nice car. And I'm also very happy now to be back in the CarPlay world. And the iX has very good CarPlay support. I you know when I back when I had the Land Rover briefly and I had CarPlay in that I remember saying on the show that it was a little disappointing and like whether I had it or not I had a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. It had CarPlay. And so I was able to get used to it really quickly and get back into it. When I then went back to the Rivian after using CarPlay, it felt like my car was broken.

1:59:26It's like, wait, how do I control? How do I switch from overcast back to music? There were so many little friction points. And I'm like, you know what? I really need a car that has CarPlay. Because first of all, it is better. It is better by a lot. And I have nothing really bad to say about Rivian in general. I think the Rivian was a fantastic vehicle that I just had some bad luck with. Part of the problem was indeed my fault for denting it. Part of it was inherent problems that actually predated that. Oh, and when I was cleaning out the Rivian, getting all my stuff out of it, there was this area, there's like a sub-trunk area where you lift up the thing in the trunk and below it is like another area and then below that's another area below that.

2:00:11as I was cleaning my stuff out of that the sub, like the lowest part of the sub trunk was wet. Everything in it was wet. It hadn't rained in days. All the stuff in it showed signs of long term water damage. Like I had a first aid kit there. It was moldy. I had to throw it away. I had like a couple of tools. They were all kind of just messed up from long term water damage. So there were multiple issues with that. No longer your problem. Right. Good luck to the girlfriend of the BMW salesperson. Yes. But like, and this is part of why I'm not really complaining about my car breaking immediately than having to be in service.

2:00:49I'm like, hey, you know what? I'm not going to say much about this. You're getting me back. That's fine. I'll have my car back. I think today will be good. Anyway, that's just version one car company stuff. When I had the Model S back in 2016, Tesla had already been selling the Model S for a couple of years, and they had the Roadster before that. They had already been selling cars and making cars for a little while, so they had worked out most of the 1.0 beta problems. Rivian is not there yet. I think they will be there in another couple of years. I think, you know, two, three, four years from now, like when the R2 comes out and hopefully the cool R3 comes out, like I think they're going to get there.

2:01:27I think they're going to really be an amazing company in a year or two or three. Like it's going to be great. And the ones they sell now are great with just, you know, some asterisks. Like, you know, if they need service, it's kind of a pain in the butt. They don't have that many service centers. They're backed up 10 weeks, whatever. Like there are some asterisks. I'm buying it now. But the bones of a good car company are there. and the cars are very good as long as you don't have some weird bad luck in certain things. But the cars are very good. So I have nothing bad to say about Rivian and I would be happy to consider going back to them in the future.

2:01:59The one thing that really gets me, that gives me pause for them really is their CEO's stance on not doing car play and on insisting that they do all the software themselves I think is pretty wrong. And I trust, you know, he seems like he's a pretty good CEO, pretty capable person. I like the way his head, I like where his head's at in most ways. But when you look at what people use CarPlay for, what Rivian is trying to do, Tesla basically says, we're not even going to try to replace CarPlay. We're just going to not have it and screw you. And we'll keep adding weird games to our cars that you can't play while driving.

2:02:38So why? But what Rivian says is like, we're going to try to integrate the things into the car so that you don't need to use CarPlay. And so when I bought the car, it had Spotify and Tidal as the music options. They have since recently added Apple Music. But when I look at how many CarPlay apps I have on my phone, when I actually go through the pages and pages of CarPlay, I have 15 CarPlay apps at least. There are various apps. I tried out that service Blink, Blinkist, whatever it is, that gives you summaries of books in 15 minutes. I honestly I don't think I recommend that service I have not really gotten much value out of it but I decided to try it anyway and like they have a CarPlay app and so as on that on the rental car up to upstate last weekend I listened to some books like some well some book summaries that somehow remove all of the value of the books you should have had Apple Intelligence do it they would have said this book contains nonsense next book honestly that feature sounds pretty I mean most of my email is nonsense sense.

2:03:39So I think that that might actually be a useful summarization thing. There are so many apps like Instapaper has a CarPlay thing where you can have articles read to you. There's CarPlay apps for things like ordering pizzas and stuff. Like if you can order your pizza on the way home from your CarPlay app. Like there are so many CarPlay apps that are too narrow audience or just they're never going to rise above the level of what somebody like Rivian or Tesla would integrate into their own systems. And using it from your phone is almost always better because your phone has the latest everything. It has usually a better computer and a more recent OS than the car will have.

2:04:18It will have better connections to data and to things like whatever, you know, whatever your services and logins and data things are, your phone will already be connected to all of them. The phone will always be better. And then the phone also, like Rivian also mentioned, like the CEO mentioned in a recent interview, that they have to work on messaging. Yeah. How are you going to do that over Bluetooth? There is very basic support in Bluetooth protocols for messaging things, but it's pretty limited. It's pretty basic. Whereas CarPlay, it just works correctly. You can message with iMessage. You can message with WhatsApp.

2:04:50Whatever you need to use, it's already on your phone. It's already connected. It's already logged in, and it works perfectly. You need to do things with that via voice. Siri does that for you. You can do it through CarPlay. you're never going to account you're never going to encompass what all what your users want to do with carplay by building in your own software piece by piece like this you will never cover it all and even if you do cover it all your versions will be worse than the versions on the phone some of which because car makers aren't that great at making software and some of it because the phone just has inherent advantages that the car makers can't match so i i really think that's a very wrong-headed approach to car infotainment.

2:05:31The idea that you're just going to replicate what everyone uses their phones for, it's just never going to happen. You're never going to get the breadth or the quality of what you can do on a phone with CarPlay and Android Auto and whatever else. You're never going to match that. And Rivian, they have decent software. Their driving directions and their maps are still not good. They still get place names terribly wrong. Again, you're never going to match google maps ways and apple maps like you're just you're not going to match it um and there's specialty things like my fire island uh sand driving mapping app that's like that's like a specialty mapping app that can't i never made it work with carplay because it's too small audience but like i could have made a carplay version of that i could never integrate that with rivian and will never come to me to integrate it with their system there's all sorts of specialty needs like that we're like yeah maybe maybe like the you know you can probably say like 80 of what people use is this handful of top apps.

2:06:25But how many people out there use zero other apps that don't fit in that bucket? It's probably not a lot. I bet almost everyone has one thing that would not be satisfied by Rivian's built-in deals or software that they have. And if you even have one of those things, it's a bad experience to own that car as a result. So it is totally wrongheaded to continue to not integrate CarPlay and to actively say, we're not even going to try to do that. so anyway that being said that is the one thing that i that i really don't care for rivian for otherwise i think they're they're making great vehicles and they have a great future ahead of them just right now it is still very much in that beta period and i learned from this experience i do not want a beta car i do not want a beta car company i don't even want a 1.0 car company i want like a 3.0 car company i want somebody who's been around the block for a few times And then finally, going back a little bit to the luxury angle, what Tesla does, they had to solve the significant economic problem of a huge cost center is the battery.

2:07:37And then you have to somehow put a car on top of it that feels like it's worth that price. But as a result, like you can't have as expensive of a cabin and other features on top of like a$40 ,000 battery and still be as good as cars that cost the same as you that have gas engines because gas engines are just inherently cheaper than giant batteries. so the Tesla approach which Rivian largely took on as well is we're going to try to get in the ballpark of similarly you know specced cars like in we're going to like hit a certain price point and we're going to try to be as nice as like you know in the case of the Model S something like you know an S-Class which is why they named it that uh or you know a 5 Series or 7 Series or whatever like another luxury car with a gas engine that's around this price point we're going to try to get as nice as those and they just can't and they never have and they never will because you know the you know mercedes for the s-class they have x dollars of margin over the cost of the engine to spend on making the car really nice in other ways and tesla just has way less of that margin to spend because the battery is so expensive so the way so what teslas really are are fairly basic and and kind of mid-range interiors like it's they're not like super cheap but they're not super nice and they're pretty minimal oh we're gonna get so much email you're right but we're gonna get so much don't forget also that the other place they save cost is by leaning into the futuristic aesthetic and say you know what remove everything from the interior of this car remove every button every opening every stock every control remove everything because every one of those things you remove saves you money exactly like they they say it's for minimal you know aesthetic and this is the future but it conveniently it also saves them a bunch of money So that is probably a large driver of those decisions.

2:09:26So what you get with Tesla and Rivian is fairly economical interiors that are not super luxurious on top of amazing drivetrains that have these giant batteries and these awesome motors. And like that's that's what you get with with those EVs. With the iX, it is more than a Rivian, although with the lease incentives, it gets very close. But anyway, what you get is an actual luxury car on top of a really great battery and drivetrain. And this, I think, is where Tesla and Rivian are going to continue to not compete very well. And this is where I think they are most vulnerable to competition from the big players.

2:10:05First of all, yes, establishment, service networks, things like that. Those are huge factors. But also, if you compare what you get in terms of interior quality and luxury niceties and just general luxury levels, what you get from the other brands is typically a lot better than what you get from Tesla and Rivian. With Rivian, I was getting it to be an off-roader first and foremost. And it is great for that. It is fantastic for that. It is the best off-roader I've ever driven. But as a$90 ,000 EV SUV, it does not compete in terms of niceness. Things like noise levels, just ride quality, handling quality, a lot of different luxury features that are inside.

2:10:55It's nice, but it's not luxury nice. And Tesla, I think not only is Tesla not luxury nice either. I think the modern Teslas are even worse than the ones I had. Like I recently was in one of the new Model S's and it was noticeably less luxurious than the ones I had. Like, cause you know, they've, they've had a pretty big revision since then. It just feels like they're cheaping out on everything possible to try to squeeze more margin out of the cars. You're, you're basically riding around like a plastic box on top of an amazing drivetrain. And it's, that's another reason why I didn't want to go Tesla because the new Teslas feel like cheap decontented versions of the ones in the past and even they were like decently luxurious but not super luxurious so anyway all that is to say i don't have the rivian anymore one one question about your new car um can you use the tesla supercharger network with an adapter officially no and in fact this was actually so you know when i was moving the stuff over from the rivian i brought my supercharger adapter and i i just stuck it in the door pocket the the driver door pocket because the the ix does not have a frunk um it just they just fill it up with engine stuff and other stuff like they put they fill it up with components so there is no frunk for you to use you can't you actually officially can't even open the hood there is like a like a special way you can open it if you really have to but officially there you're not you're not supposed to open the hood the front bmw logo you like flip it up and that's where you pour in windshield washer fluid and that's it yeah the mercedes the mercedes eqs their s-class electric version the same deal you're not supposed to open the trunk and what they did for the windshield washer fluid is even more ridiculous like you think the bmw flipper thing is ridiculous they added a door to like the front fender that opens up and this thing slides out for you to like they cut into the sheet metal of the car to make of course it's all electronic and like this thing slides out and this thing like you know hinges out and you pour it and it's like god people just let people open the hood i know you only want them to add the fluid just let them open the hood to add the fluid stop cutting holes in the side of your car and making these little mechanical things whatever so the bmw one is not even the worst in this regard but yeah the german manufacturers love to and and uh vw as well in some cars love to fill that front part of the car with the other stuff because they're like hey we got all this space we could give it people for storage now let's just fill this stuff and so they do oh one other thing to mention too the uh the ix has little spray washers for the front and back cameras well that's which that's that's one thing i wish rivian had that because like every single time i got out of the rivian like in a parking lot i would i would have to like you know lick my thumb and wipe it across the rear camera because it would get covered in dirt and crap all the time one of the things that uh manufacturers are doing with that is having the backup camera hidden essentially when you're not backing up so it's not that's my car supposed to road speed and it just like flips up but i i do kind of like the i like the ones that are always visible because i feel like having being able to see out the back while you're driving forward which like you can do on a tesla and other cars is actually convenient and if you're going to be looking at it all the time anyway it's still going to get dirty but yeah the washers so i mean it harkens back to the 80s when they put those little tiny windshield washer blades and the squirters on the headlights do you remember those days yeah i mean we never had a car with that but i've seen them and they look cool as hell yeah one thing too like so the the ix like so so tiff has the i3 as mentioned and it's from like 2019 or something like that the one of the reasons why i was comfortable going back to bmw is that the i3 despite being you know five years old now we've never brought it in for service it has been very low needs and that being said we also have very little mileage on it i think we're only up to like 7 000 miles you do need to change the oil in your range extender please bring it in it's gotta be sludge at this point probably yeah i should it's mileage and also time time i know well and the thing is like we i have to bring in the one of the back tires has a slow leak so i'm like i have to get it serviced in some way anyway so i might as well bring it in and have them do everything um but anyway that car the i3 it's one of the best evs i've ever experienced not because it's a great all-arounder it's not but uh it is a remarkable ev drivetrain it never loses charge like we can park it at the ferry terminal we could park it for like a month and come back and it has the exact same charge.

2:15:13It has no phantom drain as far as I can tell. The EV drivetrain has never caused us problems. It has never had any issues. It has never reported any issues. It just runs reliably. Different temperatures? Sure. Got to run the heater AC? Sure. It's just for such a relatively early EV platform, it was surprisingly immature from day one. I've been hearing that from reviews and everything about the iX as well. Whoever BMW has working on the high voltage systems with the exception of my error message that i'm that my car had after 22 hours um it is remarkably mature as a platform based on what people say like in reviews and stuff that it again like it's just like you can you can charge it at full speed at any temperature it's fine like there's like all the different like the various gotchas that a lot of kind of first gen ev platforms for manufacturers a lot of them have bmw didn't have those uh or at least if they did it would have been like even earlier i3s than what tiffs was which was reasonably late in the product cycle.

2:16:13So like what I'm buying into here is a pretty mature technology stack. And I also love, you know, the i3, it was one of those, you know, kind of based on a concept cars that you get into it and they're like, we're going to make this thing futuristic. And, you know, whatever that meant when the i3 first came out in, I guess, when was it around like 2016, 2015? Whenever the i3 first came out, they're like, it's the future. So we're going to make everything carbon fiber and eco-friendly. There's like all these like scratchy eco materials on all the dash panels on the i3. It's like it's a weird car.

2:16:48And then you get into it. It makes like weird sound effects. Like when you start it up or turn it off. It's like all these like science-y spaceship-y sound effects. And I love all that crap. I love like the weird personality they put into that car. Well, the iX, they did the same thing. But just newer and better. The amount of personality in that car, in the iX. they have these fake sounds that Hans Zimmer composed that like it the car has its own entire soundscape and yes you can turn it off I don't think I'm going to you can pick you can pick different ones too right yes you can like there's there's all sorts of weird BS and like that and I kind of love that like you know Tesla their whole thing was we're going to strip out most things that cars usually have and we're going to add in some dumb games that you can play while you're parked and that's about it rivian was like we're the adults in the room we're not going to add dumb games you can play but we will make a car that just quietly works really well on these adventure scenarios um and they're not gonna their rivian is not fun they are chill and cool the ix is like a bunch of germans on ecstasy we were like what can we do for the future like it's and it's so weird and fun like but it's it's a high-end luxury car so like it doesn't it's not like it's not like weird quirky it's it's more like this is that this is a version of the future from somebody's drug haze that i absolutely love it is so full of weird personality it's a sharper image car but it's nicer than that by the way marco you've gotten distracted tesla charging Bring it back.

2:18:29Oh, yeah. No. Sorry. I took it to the train. Oh, my word. Anyway, so yeah. So I had the Tesla charger in the door pocket when I brought it back to them. And because the error was the high voltage system, the service place called me like an hour after I dropped it off. They're like, um, we found this Tesla supercharger adapter in your car. Did you by any chance use that? I was like, no. I've had the car for like 20 hours. I haven't even plugged it into anything yet. And they're like, are you sure you didn't use it? I'm like, yes, I'm sure. I didn't go to a supercharger in this one night I had the car.

2:19:05I'm pretty sure I would know that. Like, yeah, I'm positive. Thanks. And they're like, well, you can't use those with the iX. We have not officially certified this to work. So it is kind of funny. If you happen to bring in a BMW electric vehicle for service, it's kind of like removing your third-party RAM before you bring in something to an Apple place for service. It's like, don't leave your supercharger adapter in the car because they will blame it probably for whatever problems you are having. So when you go on long trips, are you going to stop at a Tesla supercharger and use your adapter or no?

2:19:36Yes. Because why not push your luck? Your luck's been so good so far. So the Tesla, I think Tesla itself, I've seen like actual examples of people doing it. Like it does work. You just have to like so what Rivian had with Tesla was a data sharing deal where like you could you could just plug it in and the and the supercharger would recognize who you are and bill you through Rivian. The superchargers with adapters work with lots of other EVs that don't have that deal, especially the one the Tesla superchargers that have that have magic docks. that's the that's the one where the adapter is in the supercharger you don't have to own one yourself it's just in there and you can like log into the tesla app and authorize the whatever bay number you're on you know all right unlock number 4a and that's the one i'm parked at and you could go in the app and you can give tesla a credit card and you can just pay for it yourself and then you can unlock it with their built-in adapter and plug your car in lots of evs work with that including allegedly BMWs.

2:20:38So what the service center people say is we haven't officially announced anything, but really it works. So I do intend to actually do that when the time comes, but that time certainly has not come yet. Good grief. Well, congratulations on the new car. And one other thing too, now that we're talking about charging, one of the reasons why I felt comfortable doing a three-year lease starting now on a car that doesn't have the Tesla port next year when these cars start rolling out that actually have tesla support like there's going to be an ionic 5 update they just announced that it's going to have it starting next year there's bmw ix refresh that's alleged to have but i think it's not been officially confirmed uh starting sometime next year like probably in about a year these cars are going to start rolling off that have this port you know into the market but if those don't work like everywhere on day one that's That's going to be an annoyance and a problem.

2:21:34That is a version of buying a 1.0 car. And also right now, if I have an adaptable CCS car that is adaptable to MagicDoc Tesla chargers and some other Tesla chargers that can take the adapters directly, I feel like that gives me actually more options right now. Now, three years from now, when this lease is up, I think I'm going to want an NACS port car. Because at that point, there should be more movement in the charging infrastructure. Because like right now, you pull up to a lot of places and there are mostly CCS plugs and like maybe one or two NACS plugs on like a custom charging station. Or you can go to a Tesla charging station and then they're all Tesla plugs.

2:22:16But like there's – right now, it's enough of a mix in North America that I actually right this second would prefer to either have just a Tesla car, which can use their network only, but it's known to work everywhere. or a CCS car that's adaptable. And by all accounts, the IX is adaptable. It just is not officially certified to certain things yet. So fine, we'll work on that when the time comes. And again, in three years from now, I think that will flip. I think in three years from now, there will be enough NACS support across different brands that it will start to become worth it to just have an NACS car at that point.

2:22:52But we'll see. Right now, I'm happy to lock this in. and plus you know like my home chargers are ccs and like there's all sorts of like you know there's benefits right now to keeping at ccs but um you know the next car i buy will probably be not that but hopefully that is at least three years from now we will see well congratulations um i can't believe that either of us went crawling back to bmw and honestly i'm not sure if i would have expected me or you to go first but here we are well i mean just by the numbers uh sheer number of cars rotating through the households, you got to put your money on Marco.

2:23:28That's true. That is true.