612: Screen on Face

42:07kilvor writes in regarding the quote-unquote fork in the road for apple tv uh i.e whether or not it wants to keep pursuing gpu and cpu power beyond what is needed for streaming video so it can play games better the latest apple tv is actually worse for games even if the chip is better on paper since in practice it thermal throttles a lot earlier this is according to an old colleague who is working on an apple arcade title absolute monkey's paw yeah that's such a weird thing like Far be it for me to argue for fans, but the Apple TV had a fan that I couldn't hear. And when they got rid of the fan, it's like, oh, great, they don't need the fan anymore.

42:39But apparently they did. If you're running games on it, the fan apparently helps. So these passively cooled ones that seem to be constructed much more cheaply than the much more expensive ones that had the little tiny silent fan inside it. Yeah, maybe those were the good ones. So, yeah, I guess that's another fork in the road for them. If they want to pursue gaming performance, they probably need to bring that fan back. I mean, in all honesty, though, the Apple TV is not a gaming platform. When they first revamped it as the app-powered platform years ago, they tried to make it everything. They tried to make it, hey, you're going to browse real estate listings on here.

43:11You can do your online shopping on your Apple TV. You can play games. And yeah, you can also watch TV shows. And similar to the Apple Watch, we very quickly realized, okay, all of these things that this launched with, claiming to do, we really only want to do one or two of them. And the answer with Apple TV is, yeah, this is really good as a TV watching thing, a video watching platform. It's not a great game platform. And it's not because of hardware reasons. I think this is one of the – obviously with the exception of this throttling issue that this person brings. But like, I think one of the things that's hard for nerds like us to get used to is that we can have devices in our computing lives now that have the computing power to be really good game platforms, but just aren't for other reasons that seem like insufficient justifications for it not being a game platform.

44:06Like the Apple TV is a terrible game platform for two big reasons. Number one, just, you know, Apple and gaming, they just, you know, they mishandle it in so many ways. And what brings so many games to the iPhone does not bring games to the Apple TV. Number two, it doesn't come with a controller. And also, by the way, number three, the weird on-demand resource loading on Apple TV makes it hard to deliver good games. So the Apple TV, you know, it has the hardware to be a great game platform. There's nothing stopping it hardware-wise from being a great game platform, but it's all those other ecosystem problems around it that make it so that that's pretty much not going to be a thing.

44:43And we have kind of an embarrassment of riches in computing these days that the good thing is we don't need it to be a game platform. If you want to play pretty good games on your TV, you can get like a$30 Raspberry Pi and install packages on that, especially if you're into emulators. like that's that's a great platform for that but like you can get a raspberry pi with game support that you can plug into your tv and it's pretty good quality games for less than the cost of an apple tv game controller um so you know we have lots of other ways to play games but it is frustrating as nerds to see something like this that can have the ability to play really great games and just for kind of crappy reasons doesn't really get there yeah and that's that's the fork on the road that apple has uh do you want to keep making the apple tv have better and better socs in it if so to one end uh and even just taking away the fan like maybe you know makes it cheaper fewer parts you know no potential fan knows though again the old one was silent but it makes it a worse gaming platform like i said last time i tried to play a game on the apple tv there are games that play perfectly fine on the apple tv it's surprisingly powerful for its size and cost and they were taken away from like they were no longer available i'd played them on apple before and now they weren't there anymore and that's not a great experience i can't remember the last time that happened on any other gaming platform or console like it's not even like it was available on an older version of apple tv it was just it was removed from apple arcade or was removed from the apple store or whatever and that's frustrating like you know i'm not expecting it to play like super duper fancy you know triple a games with like you know i'm not expecting it to be a gaming pc but for the games that do run comfortably on it it's nice that it runs games I think it should run games and it can run them comfortably with its current size SoC, but Apple's mishandling of games ruins that.

46:29And going forward, until we get to 8K or something, there's not really much reason to double the power of the CPU and GPU because it can already play all your streaming apps without breaking a sweat. So, yeah, what is Apple going to do with this device? I assume they'll just keep upgrading the SoC just because they don't want to keep manufacturing the old ones. And at a certain point, it's just less expensive to, you know, you know, turn off the or stop paying for the seven nanometer line to be manufacturing chips and just take the five nanometer ones or whatever. But, you know, I personally hope they steep.

47:01They keep increasing the SoC because I believe there is a potential future in it as a casual game platform for the television. I prefer it to I certainly prefer to buying a Raspberry Pi and hooking it up. And I prefer it to having to log over one of my big game consoles because right now it's the only gaming thing I have connected to my big TV. And it's just there for like brief casual game sessions or a few particular games that are available on Apple TV. But yeah, it's it's well, we'll find out when they release the next one. Find out what they do. Have they made it more powerful? Have they made it more expensive?

47:33Have they added a fan or is it just status quo? Finally, in follow up, keyboard cleaning corner. We were asked about this, I think, in an Ask ATP. but basically, you know, how do you clean your keyboard when you're powering off the computer and then mashing on any freaking key? We'll turn it back on. And I think we had a couple of solutions at the time, but I also wanted to bring up a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau writes and makes Cleanup Buddy. We'll put a link in the show notes, which is another one of those tools that'll basically disable the keyboard for a little while. And then Daniel Piper, or maybe Pepper Piper, I believe, wrote in and said, cleaning the keyboard on an ARM Mac can be achieved by doing the following.

48:11hold down the left control and left command keys and the right shift key for seven seconds and then while still holding down those keys press the power button for another seven seconds after that the computer can only be powered on by using the power button i tried this and it didn't work then i turned off my computer and i tried it again and it didn't work then i tried it i turned my computer back off tried it for a third time and i'll be damned if it didn't work and it It really does do exactly what Daniel said. I guess I just screwed it up the first time, and I think your computer has to be off to actually have it engage.

48:46It's not an easy thing to do. And when he first sent this, I replied and I said, that sounds like the way you did an SMC reset on T2 Max, but actually that particular finger twister is slightly different. We'll put a link in the show notes to that one. So even though it sounds like something you might have heard before, it's different. And Daniel said he tried it while listening to the show just to make sure it works and uh sure enough it does so it is complicated it can be done lots of other people like why you have this problem just turn on the screen saver because if you turn on the screen saver like with a screen lock the only way you're going to do anything damaging to your computer is if you accidentally fat finger your password into the lock thing or touch the touch id thing with your fingerprint so this is not that big of a problem but if you really do want your computer to be off it is frustrating that it keeps turning itself back on so if you if you want to fix to that problem this will apparently work i do wonder what this is doing like that's why i was like oh no is this doing an smc reset is it going to reset some firmware things is it going to like turn on the boot chime when the boot chime was off have you noticed any ill effects casey from trying this no except that it only does it for the until the next boot so so you can you know clean your keyboard do whatever as long as you don't touch the power button and then once you turn the computer back on it forgets that this is the mode it was in and it goes back to any any button can it can turn the computer back on again which i don't like i wish i could make this like a permanent setting yeah they should they should just put this like instead of these weird you know key combo and things that holding so just put it in like the recovery thing or put it something like they have a place where they have like the so you want to do a weird thing to your computer like when you boot in recovery mode or you hold down the power button or whatever put this there with a gui or something or add a feature to mac os maybe they'll get to it eventually that just says i'm going to clean my keyboard lock everything up and i guess they would probably just say that's the screensaver but anyway like they like the boot chime right so on on macs from the early from the very first mac when you turn them on they would make a a chiming sound and i plus change the chime over the years uh and then eventually they added the ability to turn off that chime uh and that used to be like a firmware setting but now there's actually a gui for it that's a perfect example of something like some people don't want their mac to make a noise when it boots or restarts or whatever and some people do some people don't want their mac to turn on when they just hit hit anything on the keyboard and some people do make the default what you think the majority of people want and for everybody else just put a little tiny switch buried somewhere in system settings we'll find it eventually so for topics uh we have some somewhat breaking news from a little less than a week ago um apple has come out of left field and has bought pixel mater which i don't think i certainly didn't see coming i don't know that anyone really saw it coming but there's a release on Pixelmator's website.

51:28In part, it reads, Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come. Whoa. I think some people did predict this. I'm not in the world of seeing who's going to get acquired by Apple and image editing apps, but some people in that world said, oh yeah, they expected this for a long time. Pixelmator is highly regarded, company with highly regarded products that have received awards from apple in the past i don't know how many awards they've gotten but i think it's multiple uh they're good apps uh they are mac apps i believe at least pixel meter is written with app kit because it's that old um and i'm not sure what their other apps are written in but they're good apps they are mac apps they are award-winning i think i own all of them except for maybe the ios one because i mostly do the stuff on my mac uh and apple bought the whole company and apple being apple they're not going to tell you why they bought the company other than giving you know they can statement they have like a text expanded shortcut that says apple buys small companies from time to time and blah blah blah blah blah like they never tell you like what they're buying it for but for those of out out here who like and use uh some of these apps you're immediately worried and saying what's going to happen to Pixelmator or Photometer or whatever it is that you're doing.

52:51Obviously, the press release says no changes are planned at this time. But the big question is, did Apple buy this so they could continue developing the Pixelmator family of photo editing apps? Did they buy this so they could incorporate that functionality into their own Apple Photos apps? Or did they buy it just as an acqui-hire where we don't care about your apps, we just wanted the people because it's really hard to find excellent mac developers hey there's a bunch of excellent mac developers let's buy the company as a way of hiring all the people in the company and put some golden handcuffs on them that says their apple stock doesn't invest until x y number of years and then just allow pixel meter and photometer to just wither on the vine and eventually stop working which one of those things is going to happen i don't know but i'm kind of not happy about this acquisition yeah i think if you use the pixel mater family of apps you probably should be a little wary about this um you know the apple's track record here uh from the point of view of you the customer of these apps is not promising now again who knows what will happen you know this it's a new situation they could always do things differently now than they've done in the past but it's not a great track record so you know when they say you know nothing will change or no changes to the apps at this time, well, that doesn't mean anything.

54:12They posted this a few days ago. They could change it tomorrow. So that means nothing. They're very careful to not make any claims about the future, really, that are substantial. So what we know is that Apple has bought the company. It certainly seems like the team was a huge part of it. I do think it's probably, like, you know, there have been speculation on how much money it had to be because they're seeking regulatory approval and everything. it's probably if i had to guess too much money to pay just for a talent acquisition they are not probably going to spend that much money to just get a handful of people to work for them that that doesn't seem like it's worth it to them for that amount so it is probably about buying at least the apps as well but if you look at what are the likely outcomes here i think the most likely is that they water down some of this and integrate it into the Photos app.

55:09So these apps then go away. That is the most likely, in my opinion. Second most likely is these continue to be standalone apps in some form. And then maybe Apple bundles them together with Logic and Final Cut and makes a Pro bundle. Maybe they give it away for free. Maybe it's a$200 new version of Aperture. Maybe they keep the name, maybe they don't. but either way it's like still remains a separate apps those that's possible i just don't think that's that's the most likely i think by far in my opinion the most likely outcome here is bits and pieces of this get integrated in possibly a watered-down way into the photos app that i think gives apple the biggest bang for their buck because they don't like you know i don't think apple cares about the existing customer bases of these apps really they just care about like what can we do with this asset and i think that's the way apple will get the most bang for their buck in their view that although you know that is pretty rough for the customer so we can hope what i'm hoping for is more of an aperture situation more of like they they use this to you know to continue their own efforts into making you know high quality pro apps but the reason i'm a little wary about that is that we really haven't seen a lot of evidence to suggest that they're looking for that right now um or that they or that's an interest for them yeah well we have a couple of uh examples uh in uh well one from recent history and one from ancient history the recent history one is workflows apple bought workflows and they workflow sorry singular and uh incorporated into the os and continued to enhance it it's shortcuts now uh and they didn't just like oh we'll fold it into the os and then just like never update it again they've continued to work on shortcuts it is sort of become an essential headlining feature of their operating system they essentially bought from a third party and they didn't just like you know obviously shortcuts the app went away but i'm not sure that's workflow the app went away but it was pretty quickly replaced by shortcuts and it's for the people who liked workflow i think they also like shortcuts so that's probably the best it could possibly go if apple buys you and decides you're going to be part of our existing platform right you're not going to we're not going to continue to sell you as a third-party app you're literally going to be part of ios or you're going to be part of an existing app like apple photos or whatever that's like the best it can go that's normally not how it happens most of the time when Apple buys small companies.

57:32Whatever they were making is never seen again. Now, the bad story about pro apps is Apple, many, many years ago, went on a series of buying sprees, buying up all these pro applications to essentially make its own pro suite of stuff. Final Cut Pro was bought from Macromedia, maybe. They bought Shake and Motion. Logic, I think, was purchased. um aperture i forget if that was purchased or they just purchased the people who were writing it uh or hired them but anyway they had a bunch of pro apps that they were making they used to sell for a lot of money and one by one apple has lost interest in those pro apps aperture went away shake went away i think they sold something called color as a color correction like they sold these things for hundreds of dollars trying to sell them to professionals and eventually apple was like we're losing interest final cut somehow has survived barely uh but a lot of the other ones went away and so now when apple buys an apple at pixelmator any youngster who's like wow they're gonna make a photoshop competitor it's like look been there done that apple had a brief moment where it's like we're gonna make apps that compete with adobe and they gave up like it's not because the apps were bad or terrible but the apple stopped putting money into the development of them and you will never compete with adobe if you do that adobe will continue to put money into photoshop and so if you're going to compete with photoshop you can't like make it make the app once and ship it and say huh isn't it great maybe we'll update it again in six years but we're not going to tell you like that's not how to compete so apple needs to decide do you want to make pro applications at all if so you could make a photoshop-ish competitor product out of the pixel matrix we get of things but if you do that anyone who's old enough to remember aperture and so on will go yeah no thanks apple doesn't seem like they're really committed to this whole pro app thing i'm not going to switch my whole life to their platform and get all on board for it just when i'm just when the finally the good version of aperture comes out it's the last version and they're never going to make it again and now you know i'm screwed so there's that sort of past trauma of pro apps which makes anybody over a certain age look at this and say there's just no way they are going to continue shipping and developing pixelmator to the degree that the pixelmator company was you know pixelmator the company was making new versions of pixelmator pro improving it over time adding you know when the ai features came around pixelmator pro was one of the first apps to have it they have a really good like you know equivalent of apple's cleanup tool where you like scribble over something to erase it or whatever that's one of the first things i i bought it for which it's great at right in addition to just being a general purpose photo editor i cannot imagine apple deciding we we want to be in that business we're going to keep developing pixel meter pro and even if apple did that everybody with a memory is looking at them and saying i think i'll take a pass i think i'll stick stick with insert whatever they're using now whether it's you know photoshop or figma or any other of the the big uh big apps that compete in that realm or something smaller like acorn where you're like i don't want something that big and complicated or whatever now if apple does take the guts of these apps and try to shove them into photos again especially with additions of like the cleanup feature and everything does that mean apple's not going to take pixelmater's ai cleanup thing and spoilers for overtime we'll probably talk about some of these features and how they compare uh later in the show or like when like if you look at the feature list will they say okay well uh 90 of these overlap so which one do we take do we throw away all the photos features for adjusting levels and curves and saturation and brightness and brilliance and all those other things and highlights and shadows or whatever and swap them all out for the pixel meter pro equivalents or do we do 50 50 or do we just delete the entire code base of apple photos and replace it with pixel meter and how does that work across platforms like i don't as great as pixel meter pro is unless photos is going to become a pixel meter pro caliber image editor i don't want them to take the subset of features that are in pixel meter that are in photos and extract them from pixel meter pro and shove them in photos because as a user the result of that is the next version of photos i get has all the same features but it's code that was ripped out of another app and shoved into an existing app and it's probably buggy because of that not because it was buggy within it was pixel made or pro but now they're just like ripping the guts out and shoving it in there and from my experience it's not any different did you add any new features well no but now they're pixel made or powered does that make a difference to me are they appreciably better than they were in photos like i don't i don't understand this which is why when i look at it as an aqua hire you said like they shouldn't they probably wouldn't have paid all these potential millions of dollars for uh developers uh but the uh there is something to be said for how exactly how difficult it is to find good mac developers as we've said many times i'm not sure how many good mac developers there still are inside apple let alone out there in the world and so this is just like a unicorn where it's like a group of dedicated hardcore mac developers familiar with apple's platforms who are actually good at making mac apps i think apple does probably want those people uh but yeah it's probably too much money to just pay for the people so i really don't know where they're going to use these apps for.

1:02:53Yeah. I mean, I think the obvious answer is to suck some of particularly Photomator into photos, but I don't know. I don't know what this is about. And I don't think I use Photomator, but a couple of times I definitely do use Pixelmator as my image editor of choice. But that being said, I almost never, ever, ever edit images. So I don't have a whole lot of experience with their stuff. But I will say that the experiences I've had is that they are, as you said, Mac-assed Mac apps. Like they really, really are Mac apps. and I could imagine it as an acquihire, but I don't know. It seems like a whole lot of money to pay and a whole lot of effort just to get people to work on your stuff.

1:03:45I mean, it seems to me like it would be more than that, that this is more of a test flight. Again, we don't know the actual numbers. We're just guessing because people are saying like, oh, they wouldn't have needed to submit it for regulatory approval unless it was over some amount. To be clear, no one announced how much this acquisition is for, so we don't actually know. that is an unknown another angle on this is how people are saying it's like boy if pixel meter can't make it as an independent mac uh software developer how can anyone because they were so good at what they did they were again award-winning they made amazing apps everybody loved them and they can't survive as an independent company and i don't think that's the case i think they could survive as an independent company but when apple comes knocking with a giant bag of money if you want a giant bag of money you take it like everyone has their price i don't think pixel meter was like at least i hope uh or if it was on the verge of like financial ruin it was mismanaged because they made really good products with a not too big company they should have been profitable and sustainable i think they were profitable and sustainable but apple can solve that problem by showing up with a sufficiently large bag of money and saying uh you know so i don't think this is a condemnation of the mac market it's bad for the mac market because i liked them being an independent company that caused apple to have to compete and caused adobe to have to compete and gave me all to an alternative to an adobe subscription like i loved when they were independent so i i feel for the people like oh that's one of our last great uh independent mac software developers gone because they got absorbed by apple that does suck but i don't think it says anything about the viability of making good software for the mac i think uh if you make good apps like pixel mater did and sell them on the mac platform you can make money if you do so in a way that doesn't require like 10 000 engineers or whatever the hell twitter used to have right so yeah i in overall i think this is bad news it's bad news for me because i like pixel meter pro it's bad news for the mac market because i took a great player off the table it's bad news for apple's awards because who are they going to give them to now right but maybe it's good news for a bunch of really good developers inside pixel meter meanwhile Apple is still throwing money out the window because they apparently have put$1.1 billion into Global Star's satellite network.

1:05:59And that includes an ownership stake. So reading from six colors, Apple satellite partner Global Star has disclosed changes to its deal with Apple, including a new influx of$1.1 billion from Apple tied to capital improvements and$400 million in equity, which gives Apple a 20 % stake in the company. This is quite a bit of money, but it's not necessarily a huge surprise. There aren't that many companies around with these kinds of capabilities and by locking down investment in Globalstar, Apple ensures bandwidth and access. This is the company that they use for the satellite texting, satellite emergency stuff, etc.

1:06:31This is what we kept asking, what is Apple going to charge for that? They're like, oh, it's free for the first year but now it's free for another year and now it's like, yeah, we're part owners of the company so I guess this will continue to be free. like it's not like this is one way to resolve it it's you know we keep saying like it's difficult for them to charge for this emergency type feature and we can't with all sorts of schemes and how they could like charge for it but retroactively after you've been saved right so they'll charge you at the time of using it but if you live through the thing you can send you a charge or something but it's like actually maybe we'll just invest 1.1 billion dollars and get a 20 stake in this satellite company and this is one of those situations kind of like tsmc and other things where it's like you can shop around for somebody who has a bunch of satellites circling the earth or around the earth if they're stationary but anyway there's not a lot that there's not a lot of options right there's there's this there's starlink i guess like how many choices do you have and if you're apple and you want to essentially protect yourself both by making sure that you continue you can continue to offer this feature on your product because there's a lot of iphones out there and so you need a significant amount of capacity potentially so you want to say we don't want to stop shipping this feature we build it into our phones we want to keep shipping the feature you can sign a contract with them or something but an even better way is to invest in the company and become a part owner and that you have much more control over what they do and you want to lock that up because if some other company comes in before you and buys them and kicks you out and now you can't make contracts with them or you have to deal with elon musk which no one wants to do um that's bad for the company so this seems like a relatively smart investment although i do have to say 1.1 billion seems a lot for a feature that i personally view as one of those like cool like off in the corner features of an iphone it's great that they have it but it's not something hopefully that everybody uses every day i know they allow you to text from it now but like how it's really just for emergencies and for people who find themselves in an area without coverage and they still want to text people.

1:08:30That's what this is for. So it is a boon for them to put it in their products, but it's not as strategic as, say, investing in someone to make silicon chips or a new factory in Arizona that we might talk about in the future or whatever. So it is a lot of money, but I guess space equals a lot of money. Yeah, I mean, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I don't blame Apple for doing it. And certainly the idea of this satellite features remaining free is appealing and it seems like it would be crummy not you know apple is not above it but it seems like it would be crummy to be like well we're perfectly happy to save your life if you're out you know boondocking or you know hiking in the middle of nowhere as long as you pay for apple one like that's not that's just not a great look and they're never going to do that they could charge you retroactively but the thing is like these satellites as amazing as they are they're never going to be a major part of data communications on phones because there's just not enough bandwidth right it's not like hey you won't need a cell provider you'll do everything over satellite i don't think the global star satellite network even with this 1.1 billion dollar investment has any hope of becoming like a replacement for the cell network that now apple doesn't need carriers because they do everything through satellite setting aside the speed of light delays and all that other stuff or whatever which is no small thing to set aside by because i i believe they operate geostationary satellites in which case there is no way that's ever going to compete so what i'm saying is this is this is an investment purely for the types of things they're currently doing there's no future scenario where this has some amazing new use that we're not even thinking of it's never going to be high bandwidth low latency like it's not gonna they're not gonna stream apple tv over to everybody's phones like that's just not gonna happen this is purely for uh you know when you absolutely need to connect and there's no other option outer space right and that is a very it's a great use case and it's an important one and it adds value to their products but it is never going to replace any existing thing they do so maybe 1.1 billion is just pocket change from apple so maybe it's not a big deal but uh and again with them investing in the company maybe apple foresees other companies wanting to do the exact same type of thing whether it's a car company or you know android phone seller that also wants to have the same sort of sos type capabilities powered satellites if apple is a part owner in the company uh they get a share of that profit as well so maybe it's just a smart business move by the real time follow-up they're actually not geostationary they're actually low earth orbit satellites from global star i did not know that and i would not have guessed that but that means they can be significantly lower latency than geostationary ones however um it seems like they're not not anywhere close to like the high bandwidth usage of something like um starlink yeah there's just not enough of them i mean as many as there are there and there are too many starlink satellites but as many as there are there are far more cell phone towers in the united states and they're closer to you those cell phone towers are much closer to you and they're way way more of them uh so that is it's going to be difficult to compete with that with things that are flying over you in space it's also i mean even with starlink like it's still a heck of a lot cheaper to build a cell phone tower than to launch satellites yep and will remain that way for a very long time we are sponsored this week by squarespace the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website engage with your audience and sell anything from your products to your content to your time all in one place and all on your terms there are so many great features for squarespace to make websites incredibly powerful and incredibly easy for you but i'll spot just a couple today so they recently introduced design intelligence this combines two decades of their industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI tech to unlock your strongest creative potential.

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1:13:47There's been some new rumors and rumors about changed plans for future Vision Pro hardware. Apparently Apple hasn't totally given up on it. And according to Ming-Chi Kuo, production of a cheaper Vision Pro has been delayed beyond 2027. This means Apple's only new head-mounted display device in 2025 will be the Vision Pro with an upgraded M5 processor. Additionally, Mark Ehrman writes, I also continue to hear that Apple is seriously considering a device that offloads the computing components to an iPhone and serves as an accessory for watching movies. That's something that would be roughly akin to the glasses offered by companies like Xreal.

1:14:26So the Ming Tree Co one, I don't know if throwing in this aside about the 2025 one is like reinforcing a past rumor or how well sourced it is, but the cheaper Vision Pro is what we talked about in the past. And that's why this is a change of rumored plans again this is all rumored but the plan that we heard about was oh they're not going to make another high-end one first they're going to concentrate on the cheaper one and the cheaper one should be coming and we talked about maybe like 1500 and how can they make it cheaper and blah blah blah and the cheaper one will be coming like next year or something right and now the rumors have changed say you know that cheaper one 2027 so it's like okay well if that was the only rumor when i first read this i'm like oh that's not good because if they're if the cheaper one is going to be the next one and the next one's going to be in 2027 that means we'd be stuck with the original vision pro until 2027 with no changes that is grim okay but here comes this other rumor it's like and that means if the cheaper one is delayed to 2027 all we have is the 2025 version which is basically today's vision pro upgraded to an m5 and that's not bad honestly like you know the remember the vision pro is m2 uh upgraded to m5 maybe it'll have like an r2 processor in there or something presumably with the same screens and probably around the same price or whatever but that is a better vision pro the rumors are that we'll be able to do apple intelligence because it will have more ram m5 is going to be massively better than the m2 same resolution on the screens means it'll be breaking less of a sweat while doing all of its stuff maybe it'll even get better battery life like that's a second version of the existing vision Pro.

1:15:59The cheap one being delayed sounds real bad, but if they have the essentially upgraded Vision Pro in 2025, I think that does show basically the minimum expected level of commitment to the product. Again, ask Apple about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Apple's commitment to its various products sometimes wavers, but not having another Vision Pro product to 2027 is just untenable. People would forget that it exists, right? And of course, they'd be selling the M2 model for$3 ,500, still 2027 which is ridiculous because by then like the apple pencil would have more cpu power um but yeah an m5 version 2025 actually doesn't sound that bad to me i mean this i consider this the minimum to keep this product going but like if if most of the change is just taking the existing one upgrading the processor and maybe making a few tiny tweaks around here and there that's not going to move the needle on sales no one is looking at the current vision pro and saying well i would have bought it if it was faster yeah i mean i think it's just you have to just just what you have to do for the people who already want a vision pro to not feel like they should to not be repelled by the fact that it still has an m2 in it right you want it to get better you know on some reasonable schedule and so this is sort of just think of it this way it's just maintaining the existing product it's not making a new vision pro it's not making a vision pro successor it's just like hey the existing vision pro every once in a while we do need to update these things because they get old right and more importantly it's not going to expand the market at all like if i think what what they have hopefully by now learned is like if they want to expand the market for their ar vr product uh you know category they need to go in a different direction in some way whether it's a substantial cheaper design or you know the glasses or you know just some other direction will be required but yeah you're right it is nice that they will be updating this product eventually maybe and and pushing it out the cheap one out to 2027 to me basically reads like they couldn't figure out how to make what how to make a cheaper one in 2025 like we talked about where are they going to get that cost from what components are they going to you know remove and scale down and you can rip out all they rip out the eyeballs in the front to make the case out of plastic try to put a cheaper soc in there but like those screens if these screens don't get cheaper and apple has limited control over that like there's just there's not a lot of components you can totally remove and not a lot of ones that get cheaper so i think they just did the math and said we can't actually make a substantially cheaper vision pro even though they i'm sure they want to because again if you're gonna if you're gonna move the needle at all this market you have to do something and one of the things is make it way way cheaper and maybe they just said we we can't do it or we could make it you know if i make it three thousand dollars and thirty five hundred who cares like that's that doesn't do anything so hopefully in 2027 they think they have promises from their part suppliers that will be able to get you screens that are good that are half the price of the current screens and you'll get rid of the front facing eyeball screen and you'll put an m5 processor in 2027 which will be plenty fast but it'll be like a two-year-old chip by then like i think that's what that rumor means and then german's rumor about glasses that offload their stuff to the phone yada yada like that will obviously happen eventually but i have trouble seeing how unless apple is just going to like throw another like dart at the dartboard and say hey people sell products like this like the x-real ones where it's just glasses and it's just like another way to have a screen why don't we try that sure you can i guess but like that's not even in the vision pro family is it because that's just basically like screen on face that thing's not going to be watching your fingers for tapping and and doing all it's like it's not it's not a vision pro it is a way to look at movies on your on the plane in glasses that are smaller and lighter and cheaper and i don't i mean i haven't actually ever tried any of those products i've seen lots reviews of them the things that are glasses with usually cheap not very good looking screens inside of them but it's certainly a way lighter weight way to look at a movie on a plane for example than strapping on a gigantic vision pro headset like they don't look like glasses glasses but they look like dorky big computer they're like kind of like remember those things you had marco like the bows um yeah the audio sunglasses yeah they're bigger than that but not much bigger nothing compared to a vision pro and they're way cheaper and they look worse and it's like okay that's a product that exists seriously considering though this is a german rubber so i can't totally dismiss it because he's usually got pretty good sources but i don't know how people are trying to sell that it's like hey we make this vision pro thing that does all sorts of amazing stuff but nobody wants it because it's too expensive do you want a worse experience and lightweight glasses well honestly i mean i can kind of see the argument there so okay two things we've already talked about number one the apple watch the first apple watch launched with all this functionality they tried to sell it as doing a million different things and we ended up learning it was really good at like two things and that's enough of a product right there what we've learned so far with the vision pro admittedly it's not much because it's still super young and super small and there's nothing there etc but what we've learned so far with the vision pro is people seem to like it a lot for watching movies and some people want to be able to use their mac screen in it although I know there's news in the beta there that's apparently better, but we'll see how that plays out for everybody in practice.

1:21:12But for the most part, a large part of the good usage experiences of the Vision Pro come down to either using it as a screen for something else or watching movies on it, which is a fancy way of using it as a screen for something else. so if that if it turns out that is a huge part of what people want to do on this device and people keep saying i would buy one if it was cheaper well if you can deliver something that gives people those use cases for a lot cheaper because again like well you know and with the rumors that we're saying earlier about like there's rumors of a cheaper vision pro that's not to say a cheap vision pro just a less expensive one you know the the rumors that we've heard so far about the the full-blown vision pro getting cheaper over time peg the price at something like 1500 to 3000 instead of 3500 that's still way too expensive for most people to want to buy this thing but if most people just want a fancy movie screen or a fancy external mac display then it turns out you can do that for a lot less there's a lot about the vision pro that you don't necessarily need or that you can downsize or adjust in different ways so if that ends up being a good market for this i think that's fine because again going back to our apple tv discussion earlier computing on the vision pro and this is something i wasn't really able to say this for nda reasons for you know for the lab but this is something i felt immediately when i started using the vision pro in the lab and certainly once i bought my own i felt it as well using like trying to compute on the Vision Pro, using apps, moving around apps, navigating, trying to get things done, or certainly doing any kind of text, but just any kind of working in the Vision Pro or operating apps in the Vision Pro feels a lot like operating apps on the Apple TV in the sense that you have a very large but kind of far away canvas.

1:23:09It's hard to get a lot of information density in a way that's useful to you with the perspective that you have. You have these kind of coarse input methods. You don't have a lot of input precision. Text input is pretty rough. Certainly, you don't want to be doing a lot of editing, moving around, fine motor movements. It's not very good at that. It feels like using apps on an Apple TV. Well, what if it turns out, again, just like I was saying earlier, the Apple TV has the hardware capability to be a gaming platform, a real estate pricing platform, a shopping platform. But what people actually end up doing with it, what it's actually best at and easiest to do on it is watching video.

1:23:48But what if the Vision Pro, what if it turns out that what most people want to do with immersive VR glasses is either play games, which Apple we know is not going to be amazing at, or watch immersive content, or use it as a screen for something else? I think that outcome not only is likely, I think that's fine. Certainly that will change what the product should be and maybe some of the things they've invested in won't end up panning out in that way. But that is very possibly how this category will end up, and that's fine. And if it ends up that they mostly sell much less expensive glasses or headsets that are mostly just being relatively simple screens, that's still a perfectly fine market.

1:24:38And this whole market with AR and VR, I mean, obviously there's been all this news with Meta's glasses they came out with and the weird Snapchat things they came out with. Or Meta didn't come out with them. The glasses they demoed and the Snapchat things. And you look at what are we working towards with all of this huge investment with AR and VR, but mostly AR now. What are we working towards with all of that? what demand are we trying to solve with these products? And I think that the tech industry that is making these so far has not done a great job of convincing me that people want what this offers.

1:25:20They're convincing me this is really cool. Like, they're making things that are really cool, the demo really well, but then when you actually, like, you know, get one, maybe you use it for a few days, And then it's like, hmm, well, my work is better on my laptop or my Mac. My portable needs are better done by my phone. My movie watching is better done on my TV because I watch it with other people or whatever. Like, what we're finding is we're putting a whole bunch of massive investment and product development and money and hype and time and attention into this dream of, like, when we finally get AR glasses, it'll be amazing.

1:26:05But I actually don't, like, I think we might be putting too much on that as an industry in terms of, like, our expectations and our attention. In the same way that, again, when the Apple Watch was new, everyone was like, this is going to replace phones. And it just didn't and won't. That doesn't mean it's a failure as a product. It just means that the role of this product was not what everyone expected at first. Everyone expected to replace phones. It will never do that. It's kind of not physically right for that. What if AR and VR glasses are mostly just good for watching movies? That's not bad.

1:26:41it's just not the next big thing and that's okay there's room in tech for lots of different things that do lots of different roles but we it seems like everybody wants ar to be like the next big thing that replaces everything and i just i don't know i don't when you look at the physical realities of this i just don't see it so the tech's just not there yet i mean i feel like the things like xreal and stuff are kind of like let's meet let's take this product and meet the tech where it's at today and you know there's the tech there to do something with the abolition pro not at a reasonable price and a comfortable thing uh so what can we do with today's tech that makes a product that is actually somewhat attractive and useful so cut out everything you can't do well and just you know oh i just want to watch movies on a plane uh and i don't want to do it on a laptop right so that's where you get these glasses and i'm not sure if that product is super successful but it is really cutting down and saying we'd prefer to do much more but we can't we literally can't the tech is not there and no matter how much money you spend it just gets bigger and bulkier heavier and it's not like the the balance is off so where is the sweet spot with current tech it's kind of like palm os versus the newton right palm was worse but the newton was too big too expensive too heavy it did so much more than palm this os was so much better didn't matter wasn't as good a product so the xreal i feel like it's trying to find that type thing but with apple investigating this unlike with the apple watch with like oh we introduced this product it's basically like a little tiny iphone and it can do all these things and then they found out the things that people want to use it for but the platform didn't really have to change radically it was still called apple watch it still ran watch os obviously they changed watch kit to the whatever the successor was but like in general you could still call it apple watch and it was fine right with them coming out with something like this like the xreal thing which doesn't watch where your hands are doesn't track your eyeballs doesn't let you use your virtual mac like is that even the vision pro platform does it even run vision os like can you sell that as a vision with no pro suffix or can you say actually this is the apple studio display eyeball right is it just is it a display like is it even the same platform which it's fine if it's not who cares if it is like is it is it this platform that has no content no software okay i know but i'm saying like like would they even try to connect it branding wise and computing wise to like would it even run apps like or would it just be a screen right that's that's when you i'm not going to say when you get it so wrong like they did with the vision pro but when if you decide let's try a different avenue and that avenue is sufficiently different from the one you tried before you do have that question of like wait are we rolling out a new platform like is this is this a new platform are we going to try to say that this is the same platform they kind of did that with like the the home accessories granted they have no screens and people don't really know it's running audio os or running a variant of tv os or whatever it's kind of hidden but like they had that same thing as and then we'll see when they do with the the home device that is room with the screen like is that a new platform are we going to just pretend that's the same platform as the home pod and the home pod mini even though that platform has changed a lot under the covers like the thing with the screen what platform is that what app does it run like with the whole backdoor of like it's not really another platform it's just a thing that runs ipad and or iphone apps right like max run ipad apps uh vision pro runs ipad apps is the mac and the vision pro an ipad no but it's the way for us to take a platform that actually has apps for it and shove it onto other platforms that don't right it's it's so weird so this i mean this is just a rumor they're considering it or whatever but like that'd be the thing i'd be watching for here not so much the product that they roll out because again there's a bunch of existing products on the market like this and i don't think they're setting the market on fire but uh they are certainly cheap enough for someone to buy is like like just a you know impulse purchase for like a toy and people seem to like them and they're cool is it better than watching a movie on your laptop on the plane i kind of like watching a video on my oled ipad a cheap pair of glasses is honestly not going to have the quality the image quality as my very expensive oled ipad does uh but then again it's private and it's smaller than an ipad and it stays with me wherever I look, so it does have some advantages.

1:30:53But I think Apple is going to, if they pursue this, they're going to have some very difficult decisions to make about what exactly they're doing. And the thing I suggested before of saying, this isn't a platform. This is a monitor. That is kind of like sidestepping it all and just saying, look, it's a monitor. We'll update it every six years. It comes with an A13 inside it. It runs a variant of iOS, but basically it's just a really cool screen that goes on your face. It's no power button. yeah exactly and that is saying we are not ready to do ar but we are ready to put screens in your eyeballs a while ago we floated the idea on this show i think i think every time apple is rumored to update the apple watch se and then and then it comes out and or and like the price doesn't go down or it doesn't get an update i think we we frequently float the idea does the apple watch se or like does the low-end apple watch even need to run apps and one you know because if you look at other wearables that compete with the Apple Watch.

1:31:48You know, there's obviously, there's like the Android smartwatches that are that have, you know, feature parity and stuff, or, you know, at least in the ballpark. But then also, there's this whole category of things like Fitbits, like smaller wearables that are mostly just activity trackers that either have no screen, like a ring, or they have, you know, smaller screens that are basically just displaying, like, the time in your step count, or something like that. Like, you know, much simpler devices that are not running full-blown third-party app platforms in them. And those are able to be substantially smaller, substantially cheaper, and therefore they get a huge market share.

1:32:24Well, there's not much pressure on Apple to do that necessarily for the watch because the Apple Watch is a hit. It has been successful and has been selling in large volumes since it was introduced. But what if the only way they could make the Apple Watch as the platform that they shipped with software and apps and everything such as they were at the beginning. What if the only way for them to do that was for it to be$2 ,000 and have a bunch of trade-offs also? Then it wouldn't have sold very well and then maybe there might have been more pressure on them to be like, okay, listen, if you want to make a smart wearable that people buy, you have to cut it down.

1:33:02It has to be simpler. And then maybe they would make something like a Fitbit. That's kind of the situation the Vision Pro is in. They shot for the sky with this thing. They put in so much tech, and the software platform is quite advanced, and there's so much there. There's engineering, there's amazing hardware, amazing software. The capabilities that it has are just incredible, but that gave it some really bad trade-offs and made it very expensive. meanwhile there are industries you know if you look at you know the smaller gaming headsets or things like the you know these extra glasses which yes they are just screens in your face and that's not a very big industry but you start to see like if there is pressure from down below in the price curve you know for for these other products that that are that people are choosing instead of the apple vision pro and apple has this giant you know app platform building this thing that's not really working very well for them, then maybe the answer really is to make something simpler.

1:34:06Like maybe if everyone is saying we want this to be not only cheaper, but we need it to be a lot cheaper than what the current option is, they're not going to get there by retaining all of the functionality of the Vision Pro as we know it today. So they can either wait a very long time for all of that approach to get cheaper, and of course they can revise the hardware to be cheaper, things like different manufacturing techniques, simpler materials, maybe get rid of the weird external eyeball display, stuff like that. There are ways to make it a little bit cheaper, but if they need to make it a lot cheaper, that's going to take a very long time unless they dramatically cut scope.

1:34:45Now, granted, Apple's a very patient company, so it would not surprise me if they really did just want to wait 10 years for those little tiny screens to get cheaper or whatever. That might be their plan. I would be surprised if the product lasted that long if that's their only plan but hopefully it's not but also you can look at does this category of product need to be what we shop for they were so ambitious with trying to get us to all start talking about computing is it ambient computing is that what we called it spatial computing I already forgot the term it's been a week spatial computing that's the term No one said spatial computing before Apple did.

1:35:29That was not a term anybody used. Or since. Well, right. But what if the whole concept of spatial computing was not the right direction to go? That's what I'm saying. If you try to compute in the Vision Pro in regular productivity, switch around in apps kind of ways, it's not very good for that. What if that's just the wrong approach? And what if the right approach is something much simpler, like just making it mostly about video playback or whatever? I don't think that's unreasonable to consider. Or the right approach for this time and for this current state of technology. I think Apple should continue to pursue the high end because that's how you eventually get to the good version of that.

1:36:10But it's too expensive now. So what can you do with existing tech? What is the Palm Pilot version of this? Again, with this rumor, another thing leaning in the direction of it being more like a monitor is they're basically saying offload computing to the phone. but you don't want your phone doing that much heavy lifting in service of projecting an image onto your glasses. But it can, you know, if you just ask it to project video, if you're watching a TV show or a movie or YouTube video, well, there's hardware decoding for the video. And that is actually one of the lighter things that your phone can do.

1:36:40It doesn't have to show the video on its screen. So it's saving on battery life on not lighting up its screen, right? It's using the battery that's in your glasses, but it's just, it's, you know, it's, it's doing networking is getting it's downloading the video or if it's already downloaded it's streaming it off the ssd it's decoding the compressed video it's sending the image right anything more than that where you're asking the phone to like track objects in 3d space and do stuff that the vision pro does to make like a stable floating window in front of you that your phone battery is going to get slaughtered right i mean hell the vision pro with a huge battery that's bigger than the iphone itself two hours battery life no one is going to want to sacrifice their phone battery life that's what i was saying with the orion glasses where it's a separate puck or whatever it'll be that way for a while yet because what we ask these glasses to do in the sort of maximal orion or vision pro type feature set is just too computationally expensive it will burn your phone's battery and no one wants to spend their battery on that but if it's just watching video i think people would people first of all we know people will use their phone battery for that because they literally watch movies on their phone on the plane and that's lighting up the screen and sometimes they're using the phone speaker which blows my mind because you cannot hear anything on planes but anyway people do it you hear them on the on the subway they've got their phones they're blaring audio they're watching video it's rude but it also kills their phone battery but they do it that's what they want to use their phone battery for uh but yeah a a glasses device that uses the phone for compute i think the correct balance would be hey phone all you got to do is networking and video decoding and then you just project to me yeah i mean i don't know how i feel about this i i don't think that apple wants to admit defeat on the vision pro i don't think they want to go that much simpler because when they they simplified the apple watch the hardware was largely the same and actually got more complicated it was the software that that they focused and i i agree that using the vision pro as a computing platform in my personal experience is trash when you don't have a t or don't have a tv when you don't have a keyboard connected um and it's not stellar when you don't have a keyboard connected and for me you mean when The only time the Vision Pro was really great as a computing platform was when it was simply a monitor for my Mac.

1:38:54And I have not yet tried this new version of the display where you can get wide and I think ultra-wide versions of your Mac's display. It sounds incredible, but it requires a beta of Mac OS, which I am not going to be messing with, as well as the beta of Vision OS, which I would mess with. But the only time that the Vision Pro has really been a productivity tool for me was as a monitor for my Mac. And a lot of that is probably because I'm an old man who just prefers using the Mac. But I think a lot of that is because it's an imprecise tool. It's just not as precise as a Mac is or an iPad or an iPhone.

1:39:31And so embracing what it is or what it's best at, which is to say a really, really nice screen that you happen to be able to strap to your head, I get that. But I just, I don't know. I find it hard to believe that Apple would completely and totally get rid of basically all the smarts and just have a dumb display. Which makes me wonder, okay, well, what's the Apple way of doing a display such that it's smart but not quite as smart as a Vision Pro? And I don't have an answer for that. that's why apple is apple and i'm just talking about it that's like a phone accessory that's like an attachment to your phone sales and by the way with the apple watch se example that's kind of an example of what i imagine apple's planet currently planning to do with the big expensive vision pro because today's apple watch se is massively more powerful than the original apple watch right what they basically did was let's just keep making apple watches until we can make a cheap one that is actually way more powerful than the first one that we rolled out just due to the advance of technology that screens are better the battery life is better it's thinner it's lighter like they just waited many many many years and lo and behold we have an apple watch i see that didn't have to go like the x real rumored route of saying like we gotta make a cut down version of it's got to compete with fitbit they're like no we'll just keep making apple watches we'll just keep plugging away and apple watch is an apple watch there's no platform bifurcation there's no limited version that does certain stuff we'll just patiently sit here because as marko pointed out the first one wasn't with the exception of the gold one thousands of dollars right the first one was in the ballpark price wise and they just did like they did with the iphone mature the product start diversifying the product line eventually you can make a pretty good apple watch for cheaper and just keep iterating on that and lo and behold the apple watch se now is would have been amazing if you had taken it back in time to the original apple watch introduction i think apple would love to do that with vision pro they're just many years away from getting there but in the meantime the the Vision Pro is so much farther away from the bullseye than the Apple Watch was, I can imagine them considering things like this.

1:41:27Again, this is just a vague rumor that Apple is seriously considering it. And Apple was so slowly, even if they did roll it out, I'm not sure how they'd do it. But when I pictured it in my head, I pictured it as an iPhone accessory that is essentially a monitor that only has enough smarts to communicate with a thing that is rendering the video. And that's basically all I use it for. And for that purpose, Casey, when you're like, oh, I want to play it. I want to take out my Vision Pro from my giant backpack and put it on and be that guy. Even if the video quality, even if the image quality wasn't quite as good as a Vision Pro, I think you might prefer these little monitor for your phone things to watch a movie on a plane, simply because they're so much smaller and lighter and the thing itself would be cheaper.

1:42:08And you just, you know, if the image quality isn't quite as good, that's fine. It's still better than watching on your tiny phone screen on a tray table. Alright, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and One Passport Extended Access Management. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic that is exclusive to members. This week in Overtime, we'll be talking about our experiences so far with what's been released from Apple Intelligence. So you can hear all about our Apple Intelligence experiences so far in Overtime by joining at atp.fm slash join.

1:42:43Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:42:49Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-I-O-N-T-A-R-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-A-R-C-U-S-A-R-Q-U-S-A-R-C-U-S. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast, so long. All right. But let me start by reminding everyone, this is going to be group therapy for the three of us.

1:44:00If you're not interested, that's fine. If you disagree with the way we feel about this election, that's fine, I guess. You don't need to tell us about it. That's fine. You can skip this chapter. This is why chapters exist. Just move right along. But I think the three of us need this for the three of us, and hopefully maybe it'll be a little cathartic to at least one of you. Last night, I was watching the coverage, and as early as like 8, 8.30 Eastern, I was like, this doesn't feel good. and by 9 30 eastern which is when the first real big batch of polling started coming in properly Aaron and I looked at each other and we were like I I don't think I want to stay up for this like I was planning to stay up for me because we typically go up on a school night at like 10 ish at the latest and I was thinking I was gonna stay up till like 11 or maybe midnight and just ride this baby out watch it come in and I was mostly excited for it to be honest with you and 9 30 the two of us looked at each other and we were like, I don't like how this feels.

1:45:10I'm just going to go to bed. And we went to bed. I slept like trash. And at about five, I gave up and woke up, looked at the news and saw, oh no, oh no. And by the time I actually hauled myself out of bed at like 630-ish, what was a theoretical ending became a official in the terms of like the AP called it, CNN called it. They called it for Trump. And, um, I've, I've been really sad. I've been really sad all day. I've been really dejected all day. I've been really worried all day. Um, not as much about me particularly. Um, but I'm worried a fair bit for the women in my life. Um, you know, uh, I, I'm not too terribly concerned for Aaron because, you know, we are officially done having babies.

1:46:03We are surgically done with having babies. So short of something very unusual happening, all of the baby related stuff I'm not too worried about, but there's a lot of women's healthcare that is not strictly about baby making, despite what many men seem to believe. And that concerns me. And I'm very concerned for Michaela. You know, she'll be 10 when this, well, she'll be 10, four years from now. We'll see if that's the end of this term of presidency. I'm worried for her, but the people I'm really worried for are the people that don't look like me, and I'm very scared for them, and I am at a loss for what to do.

1:46:42I've been interrogating within myself And talking with friends about like how did we get here And we can talk about that If the two of you want to I don't have any strong answers I have theories but no strong answers But I'm just I'm really I'm really sad I'm really sad that We as a country have decided That this is what we want And you know Even despite our full-throated endorsement last episode Which I stand behind I think all three of us could make passionate arguments and, well, let me just speak for myself. I can make a passionate argument that Kamala was not a stellar choice, but it was the choice we had.

1:47:23And so that's the choice I went with. and I feel like it's hard for me to wrap my head around and it's hard for me to figure out how do I tell my kids that a man who is convicted of how many felonies, a man who at least suggested, if not caused an insurrection on the capital of the United States of America, that seems to be saying very, very full-throatedly that he would like to prosecute or otherwise imprison or get rid of the people who he considers his enemies, be they domestic or foreign. A man who's a pathological liar, a man who's cognitively falling apart, how can I look to my kids and say, there are consequences for your actions when, as far as I can tell, he's never had a consequence for his action other than failing upwards.

1:48:23And how do I accept that half of the country is enthusiastic about this? And again, I have some theories, but it's just hard to wrap my head around. And we got some feedback from last week's episode. Most of it was very positive, and I very much appreciate it. Some of which was not so positive, but thankfully was mostly presented with respect, which I appreciated. Um, but you know, a couple of the people who wrote us were like, you know, I couldn't believe that anyone could vote for Joe Biden. I couldn't believe that anyone would vote for him. Like, I feel like our country's going down the tube when we elected Joe Biden.

1:49:04And I don't doubt that that's how they felt, but like, I try to, I try to wrap my head around what the hell, why, why did you feel that way? And I got no answers. Like, I just got no answers. Like the man was, was especially this year, this election cycle, you know, he bowed out because he was also cognitively falling apart, but I don't think Joe Biden was a bad guy. Whereas Trump is a bad man. And like, I don't know where, where do we go from here? What do we, what do we tell the women in minorities and, and you know, the LG, LGBTQIA community? Like, what do we tell these people? What do we do other than try to defend them when we can?

1:49:42And I, what the do we do? This is obviously going to be a much bigger topic than we can cover. My feeling on this right now is I'm just massively depressed about it. I am fortunate that I don't typically suffer from depression, but I certainly feel depressed about this right now. Yeah, likewise. I woke up this morning and just couldn't do anything. And I still, I'm going to be like this for a while probably. just you know hard to focus on anything hard to do anything certainly hard to be motivated to do anything and hard to think about anything else you know I think right now I'm in coping mode you know this is this this pretty bad thing that has happened you know and and the reality is like whoever the president is affects different people in different ways in your day-to-day life.

1:50:43For most Americans, it won't affect you much at all in everyday ways. It will probably affect you in kind of big-picture, long-term ways in lots of ways that are not good. And if you are one of these people who is only being affected in bigger-picture, long-term ways, you are lucky and you are privileged. because there are a lot of people who were affected in much more significant ways right from the start. Right now, I don't want to even try to address that because there is just no way to give it justice. Right now, I'm in coping mode, and everyone copes differently. I would encourage you as not a licensed psychotherapist, but instead as a person who talks about computers on the internet, so take this with a grain of salt, uh i would encourage you to let yourself feel your feelings don't try to hold it in don't try to hide it don't try to follow what other people are telling you to feel whatever you feel let yourself feel it don't and i wouldn't i wouldn't at this point start pointing fingers and saying this is where we went wrong this is where the campaign or the candidate was too wrong or whatever like i this this is not a productive time to do that right now just let yourself feel it if you if you are mad be mad if you're sad be sad if you want to be furious be furious if you want to be despondent be despondent this is the lyrics of a terrible song um figure out you know right now this is you know we were just hurt significantly deal with the pain deal with it like don't don't just try to shove it down and process it later.

1:52:27No, process it now. This is what's going on right now for you. You've got to figure out what is helpful to your feelings and mood and what is not. And have an open mind to that. So one thing I have found so far, things that do not help me, include reading the news. Because I know it's bad. I don't need to keep reading articles telling me how bad it is i'm very aware of how bad it is uh we went through this already in 2016 through 2020 like we we went through this we've seen roughly how this is going to go now in some ways i mean in some ways it's less of a shock because this happened already and we can expect largely many of the same things to happen in the second term then what happened as what happened in the first term it's probably going to be a lot of similarities if you are like me in the sense that reading the news does not help you feel better about anything or move on with your life in an in a significant actionable way what we saw the first time was basically a constant barrage of fire and motion in in scandals every day there was a different scandal it was overwhelming it was it was basically a ddos attack on everyone's attention because there was no like one scandal for anyone to focus on for more than a few days at a time because after a few days there would just be another one and can you believe what he did or said today like and that just that kept happening like almost every day that's gonna happen again we're gonna have that just overwhelming barrage, that DDoS attack of just scandal after scandal, lie after lie, you know, awful unethical or illegal thing he does after an awful unethical legal thing.

1:54:21It's just going to be a constant parade of those things. That's how he operates and that's going to nothing bad will happen to him as a result. You know, Casey, you said how you're going to explain to your kids that this person can, you know, commit literal crimes and have no consequences. And the answer is rich and powerful people often don't pay for their, they often don't pay consequences for their actions. Like that's just the reality of the world. And that's what's happening here. He's a very powerful person with a lot of very powerful friends. And an important lesson to learn is that those people don't often pay consequences, especially Republican politicians.

1:55:03Their base does not hold them to those standards. So they, Republicans do not care what their candidates do as long as they win. They don't care about any other factor. Priority number one above all else, above morals, above religion, above legal – like the laws, certainly above standards, number one is winning. And they don't care what their candidates do or what they're like. Now, in terms of what people, you know, trying to understand what people voted for here. they voted for a worldview. you know they the people who vote for him are not looking at every single action and saying well i wonder if i can still vote for him even though he lied 14 times in the in the appearance he made or whatever no one who is voting for him is thinking that way it's tribal it's almost a religious style thing it's a worldview like they are voting for a worldview now they have been convinced that their worldview is the correct one and everyone has different reasons why and most of those reasons honestly are are like factually wrong um or at least massively distorted but the reality is they were sold a worldview successfully and they voted for it and that's what we're gonna have to contend with that you know if people knew exactly what they were getting for a liar, a fraud, a criminal, a rapist, somebody who's done many worse things.

1:56:37They knew that, but they were voting for the worldview. And we're also, I think, going to have to cope with the fact that Democrats don't act as a block together. We never do. And so a huge challenge Democrats always face is how do we get more people who are already Democrats to vote for our candidate? and that's a problem that the republicans don't have they like their people will show up and vote for any criminal as long as they bear that party name because it's all about winning first and anything else is secondary but again that's not how democrats work so democrats need a different strategy you know i'm not a smart enough person in politics to be able to say what they should do next uh but we've seen over and over again you know how how we lose and maybe we can figure out new things from there.

1:57:30But the reality is half the country is not stupid or nuts. They were sold a bill of goods. And we have to figure out, if we're on the other side of that, we have to figure out how we can reach them at all or how we can reach our own people in enough numbers to overcome them. And that's something to do over the next four years. But in the meantime, you got to find out what helps you. How do you get through this? I mentioned earlier for me, reading the news does not help me. There's a reason why I did not read much news between 2016 and 2020, because it was just destroying my mental state. It was making me just angry and stressed and afraid all the time.

1:58:15By the way, you asked earlier, Casey, why somebody could possibly feel very strongly about Joe Biden. I honestly, I agree. I don't know why people could possibly hate him so much. He seems like a really kind of neutral person to me, but the reality is, that's what they have, people on that political side of the aisle, they have been fed a constant worldview stream of anger and fear and claims that make them hate this very neutral, like very milquetoast kind of candidate that makes them hate him. They can't stomach him because they've been sold this incredibly severe worldview. I mean, Trump's entire campaign was basically anger and hate and xenophobia.

1:59:06That was everything he ever said was angry. He was constantly talking about how much America sucks. His entire campaign is everything sucks and is awful and it'll get worse if you don't elect me. That was his entire campaign, but that reached enough people to matter. So, again, these people, it's hard to understand them when we're on the other side of the aisle, but they got there for a reason. And, you know, so anyway, all this is to say, find ways. Right now, it's a fresh wound. Right now, stop the bleeding. Find ways to cope. Experience your feelings. if you want to feel a certain way let yourself feel that way if you want to be mad for a while be mad for a while if you want to go into mourning for a while figure out what helps and what doesn't so for me reading all the news does not help reading social networks does not help you'll probably be seeing even less of me on the social networks as you were already seeing which already was not a lot recently one thing that does help me a lot is I'm a very social person being around people helps me a lot exercise and especially spending a lot of time outside like just i today i took a big walk it was a it was a nice nice weather day and i just took a huge walk even though i picked the wrong shoes and they were a little bit too tight and they were it was a little a little uncomfortable my feet were a little bit hot too but it didn't matter i was outside it was that that helped a lot you know spending a lot of time and then finally I have found that when I withdraw from the news cycle and put my time and attention into making things or doing work, like being productive or being creative or producing output, that also helps me a lot.

2:01:03Find whatever that is that helps you. It's not going to necessarily always be obvious, especially if you don't frequently need to deal with this kind of feeling. But what will probably help, honestly, I think what helps me, I think we'll have a lot of overlap and what helps a lot of people. Not everyone is social like me, but certainly I think most people tend to feel better with exercise outside time and productive time. And most people tend to feel worse doom scrolling social networks and reading terrible news. So maybe if you don't know what to do, maybe take that as a starting point. But otherwise, look, we'll get through this we got through it the first time it was not a cakewalk there were a lot of problems that resulted there's a lot of damage that was done the first time that will not be undone for a long time that's going to happen again we and we just have to be prepared for it you know i was i rode the ferry today and the ferry being you know a boat on long island has a giant american flag on the top they always do i was listening to my headphones listening to music trying to get my mind off of things and i and i happened to look up at the sky and there was the flagpole flying the american flag you know boldly and proudly and i i gotta say i had very mixed feelings about that when i saw it in that moment because i was like man this is this is some some complicated feelings i'm feeling right now looking at looking at the flag of my country on on this particular day with these feelings.

2:02:29But America is about democracy. And as I mentioned last time, like anything that tries to subvert or suppress that is the most anti-American thing you could possibly do. In this case, this was, by everything we know now, it seems like a very clear democratic result that this is what the voters voted for. This is America. And it doesn't always go your way and it doesn't always progress it doesn't always make positive forward progress or forward motion there's bumps along the way there's regressions that's what happens that has definitely happened right now and we're gonna have to just keep plowing forward and figure out what's next and it's gonna be messy and it's gonna suck for a while for a lot of people there's gonna be damage done that will be that will not be able to be undone for decades that is what happens with america and so we're just we're going to be in a dark time for a while and hopefully sometime down the road we will come out of it make me feel better john uh for anyone who's listening to this who is uh on the opposite side of us and somehow managed to make this point uh congratulations on your hate listening um whatever email you're writing you can just delete it right no they just want to hear they want to hear the rest of things you say so they know exactly how much they should hate us but like i i bet one of the things you're thinking is like this is so overblown you know you oh you're so sad you're because your team lost the super bowl who cares like get over it but oh you're depressed that's ridiculous like what's the big deal uh to try to explain like you know we're we're saying our real feelings here but you may think our feelings are ridiculous but to try to explain why this is different like i'm old enough to have lived through the election of many presidents that i didn't want to win the election right i've lived through many republicans i didn't want any of them to win they did right none of them felt like trump you know term one and term two and there's a reason for that like this this is different all the people all the people in your life you see like oh you're so sad about the president election get over it but why is it a big deal why are you so sad about this this is worse than it has been in my lifetime uh for presidential elections when george w bush was elected twice like i i couldn't believe it i couldn't believe he was elected the first time i couldn't believe he was elected the second time why are we doing this again are you kidding we learn nothing right but it was not as bad as this because george w bush for all his faults and there are many and for all the terrible things his administration did and there are many had sort of minimum baseline level of humanity and at least an attempt to pretend to care about the duties of the presidency and the people who live in the country and the whole thing with trump has been is like there is no floor he doesn't know anything he doesn't want to know anything he doesn't care about anything it's like trying to decide who's going to fly your plane and like i don't care if this person knows or cares anything about planes knows what a plane has ever flown anything before cares about any of the people on the plane doesn't actively want to kill everybody on the plane none of that matters right trump is just like the bottom like i can think of worse people to be president but it's hard and it's below it's below the baseline and so for people uh on our side when we see him elected not once but twice we think you know how many millions of our fellow americans think this is acceptable and we're sad about that yes obviously we're sad about all the people who are going to be hurt and you know and killed and have terrible things happen to them under his administration but what big component of the sadness of both elections is all of us thinking we're in this country with these millions and millions of people who think this is acceptable for the presidency right like and that it's it's not a good feeling can you imagine if you are on the other side of this if the democrats elected somebody who said we should kill all puppies there was a big thing on that platform we should totally kill all puppies uh and that person was a uh you know had murdered their wives and was convicted but got off on a technicality so it was a you know he was a murderer and he said we should kill all puppies he's not actually killing all puppies but he thinks we should kill all of them and we elected him president wouldn't you be sad thinking millions and millions of people think it's okay that the person who wants to kill puppies and killed his wife should be president you'd be like really the puppy killing guy like i know he hasn't actually killed any puppies yet but he said he wants to and he's going to really try to that's okay and we were like well but forget about the puppy killing we like the other parts but like wouldn't you be sad thinking that so many of your fellow citizens think that's okay and i was ridiculous like oh trump doesn't want to kill puppies whatever but like it's the same type of deal like there's just a minimum level of care and humanity and and knowledge that trump does not pass and it's hard living in a world where you think that's okay for a lot of other people uh it's hard thinking all the bad things that he says are okay.

2:07:41Like you can say, well, I don't believe in all the things he says. I just like him and I just ignore all the bad stuff. But like at a certain point, knowing that your fellow citizens are on board with all that, not on board with it being done, but on board with saying the guy who says all that, he's my guy. I don't think he's ever going to do that stuff, but the guy who says all that, he's my guy. That's a sad feeling, a sad feeling to know your fellow humans, forget about citizens, your fellow humans think this is good. And knowing that you're in the same country with them, subject to the same laws under the same government.

2:08:13And you have to deal with the consequences of their vote. And again, that happens all the time. Sometimes your person doesn't win. I did not feel like this when George W. Bush won, when George H. W. Bush won, when Reagan won. I mean, I was a young man, right? It didn't feel like this at all. This feels different. This feels worse because it is worse. That's why some people in your life are really sad right now. Maybe they're special snowflakes and they should just get over it and not be sad or whatever but it is worse we feel worse so i whatever i posted this morning i'm asked on like national sex day of your stomach day i didn't feel like this in any other presidential election when quote unquote my person didn't win this is different this is worse and you know we know what we're in for and it's going to be bad.

2:09:06And I feel like the, you know, if you look at all the, if you study history and see what it takes for a governing system to be sort of broken apart and broken down so that what was once sort of a functioning society that tried to raise the standard of living for everybody and do better over time becomes the domain of dictators and warlords. And I mean, it happens all the time throughout history. Like how, how did these, these societies end up in a situation where there's like one super powerful person who's like oppressing everybody and doing terrible things and everyone else is suffering. How do you end up at that situation?

2:09:41And the whole American experiment is to try to design a system where that's harder to do, but people are constantly trying to find a way to break down that system, to break, to break away all the things that are keeping us from becoming like a lawless, becoming from Mad Max, right? Like just a warlord state, right? And we've made progress. If you look at like, you know, Casey's reading The Power Broker and learn all about, as a side effect, Tammany Hall and all like the political corruption machines where politics was just a way of like it was basically like street gangs, essentially. And when you got elected, you gave money and jobs to the people who supported you and like, you know, graft and bribery like that was that was was the system.

2:10:21And that was a bad system. And we had reformers who said, hey, this is no way to run a government because it lets like the people who are loyal to the political machine. It was like organized crime, essentially, but that was the system of government. That's bad because the citizens suffer, and it's the same reason having organized crime families battle each other is bad. Even if they're not killing each other in the street, they're hogging all the money and good stuff for a small number of people, and everyone else suffers. Let's reform the system. Let's add laws and ethics and try to have a different way of governing ourselves.

2:10:54It doesn't involve patronage and graft. and that took years and years of reformers battling to try to make our system better and go all that's the example off the top of my head because i'm listening to the power broker podcast too and i've read the book several times but like that that's the history not just in america but over the entire world it's difficult to make a governing system that doesn't that is resistant to people chipping it away and if you don't constantly resist that you end up with a small number of very wealthy very powerful people living really great lives and everyone else suffering and the american system is currently in a regression where we had all these things that were trying to be sort of bulwarks against that terrible thing happening that are being eaten away slowly but surely citizens united all the supreme court justices letting the president do whatever he wants as long as it's part of his official duties uh reversing roe v way like uh you know installing judges who are loyal to trump instead of the law like all the checks and balances that we had are being chipped away in service of bringing us back to essentially mad max and warlords which by the way is not a good system of government for the general citizens right it's that whole uh you know thought experiment of like uh if you had you know pick a time in history that you want to travel you have a time machine you can travel back in time to any point in history pick a time in history the only wrinkle is you don't get to pick uh what role you have in that society when you land in it right so you say i want to go back to roman times and i'll be like caesar it's like oh no you don't get to pick to be caesar you are just like a roman slave now do you want to go back to the roman times everyone wants to be in whatever time in history they glorify assuming they'll be at the top of the hierarchy right an actual good uh functioning society is one where you would say yes, I do want to travel in time to that society, and you can randomly place me anywhere in that society, and I'll be fine, because there is not an underclass that is trod upon by the upper class.

2:12:55And in America, we are unfortunately going in the other direction, where we are chipping away the institutions that try to make life better for everybody, in service of making life better for a small number of people, while everyone else suffers. And part of that is convincing most of the population to vote for you to do that, because by feeding them information that makes them think that what they're doing is in their own interest when it really isn't and we will obviously disagree on that but every time i even think about the idea of like talking to somebody and trying to convince them of my political position i think of like the the uh the concept of trying to you know speaking of going back in time i'm gonna go back in time to the 1800s or uh in america and trying to convince somebody that women should have the right to vote i don't think like if you really want to understand like another depressing uh thing that uh people are upset about um like do you think you could go and convince somebody that women should have the right to vote in the 1800s how difficult would that be presumably you believe it you're a modern person you're like of course women should have the right to vote it's stupid right now go back in time to the 1800s and try to convince literally one person that that should be true and everything you say they will have a comeback to and it will just your brain will explode you're like but but and they'll be like it's ridiculous women should vote what's next dogs voting doesn't make any sense right that's how a lot of us feel trying to say maybe don't vote uh for trump uh but people did it and trying to convince them makes my brain explode in the same way that trying to convince someone in the 1800s that women should vote would explode there's nothing you can say to convince them they have a uh a completely sealed completely logical completely sensible uh functioning like margo said worldview that does not include the idea of women voting it took you know decades and decades of people fighting for it for us to finally get that done.

2:14:44And these days, I often think that we would never get a constitutional amendment to give rights to a minority group, just because our current system of government has been so degraded that will that will literally never happen. Because as long as one side doesn't like it, it's never gonna happen. So anyway, I've rambled on too long. I just wanted to explain, try to explain to the three people still listening, why people you know might be sad in a way that doesn't make sense to you and seems dumb. I understand why it seems dumb, but I want you to know that it's not just people overreacting or being overly dramatic.

2:15:17For those of us on this side of the aisle, the two Trump elections feel different. I think they should feel different to any other human being, and I think across the globe they do feel different to most human beings, but not apparently for half of the voters in this country.