629: An Upsetting and Confusing Time to Be Me

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57:03cores 120 gigs of second memory bandwidth your ram options are 16 24 or 32 with 32 gigs being uh 400 extra which by the way that ram that 400 extra ram going from 16 to 32 that is twice as expensive that 16 gigs of ram is twice as expensive as on a studio same thing for when you go for uh from 16 to 24 you are paying twice as much for the ram on your macbook air why because margins There's just not a lot of place to get the margins on the MacBook Air, and the numbers are smaller. So the RAM literally costs twice as much as Mac Studio RAM. Gracious. Storage options, 256, 512, 1 or 2 terabytes, with the 2 terabytes running$800 extra.

57:50You get Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4, which is 40 gigs a second, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3. The camera is the new-ish 12-megapixel center stage camera with support for desk view. the m3 macbook air by comparison had a 1080p facetime hd camera uh displays this is very exciting uh you can do up to two external displays with with the lid open uh with up to 6k resolution at 60 hertz you have thunderbolt thunderbolt 4 digital video output you have support for native display port 1.4 output output over usbc uh by comparison the m3 macbook air only had one external display with the lid open with up to 6k resolution 60 hertz and you have to close the lid to use a second display at up to 5k 60 hertz battery life 18 hours which is the same as the m3 MacBook Air.

58:39you have different power adapter choices 30 watt 35 watt dual for an extra 20 bucks or 70 watt which is also an extra 20 bucks again 13 15 inches midlight midnight starlight silver and a new sky blue which is also a very good peter gabriel song uh the sky blue i've not seen in person yet but looked like the standard wait that's silvers oh oh yeah oh there's a little bit of blue when i first saw photos of this i thought like the white balance was off because i'm like the white balance mostly off because the silver one looked bluish. No. That's how subtle it is. It's so subtle that it could be slightly off white balance or it could be the sky blue one.

59:19It starts at $9.99 for 13 inches, which is 100 bones less than it was before and it's$100 less still for education. And it starts at 16 gigs, which we already know because of the M3 and the M2, but just want to reemphasize. And then the 15 inch starts at basically$1 ,200,$1 ,199. $1 ,100 for education, which again,$100 less than before. Here it is, as Ben Thompson has said many times, or he's the one I've seen banging this drum most loudly. iPhones and a lot of Apple products have basically gotten cheaper over time on account of them not moving up with inflation. And now they're getting cheaper in a literal, well, I guess they're both literal, but they're getting cheaper in terms of the price tag, because the price tag has actually gone down$100.

1:00:01And you can pre-order these now. They'll be available on the 12th, which is really cool. and the M2 model is still available in some countries. Yeah, this is pretty, I mean, this is what everyone expected. M4 MacBook Air, we knew it would be great because we knew the M4 was great. We knew the MacBook Air was great. All you got to do is swap out the M3 for an M4 and we got that. And in between the time when we were anticipating it, they did the 16 gig RAM bump. So the base model, M4 MacBook Air for$1 ,000 is like the best deal on a laptop Mac that has existed in ages because you don't need to change anything about that except for the ssd because it's 256 but let's say that's plenty for you because that there is scenarios where 256 is plenty for people but if you listen to the show it's not if you're listening if you're listening don't just at least get the 512 for people listening to this show probably not but like look so when i was you know getting computer from my dad i was asked you know they don't have data basically right like they they use it as a glorified web browser and to like watch videos and stuff right they do have a photo library but they barely take pictures at all right so i did wonder could he fit into i wouldn't get to recommending but i did wonder academically and the answer is yes he could but i'm still gonna have him get the 512 um you can never upgrade it for the love of god at least get the 512 if you're a nerd you probably want the terabyte at least just please yeah but that's not really starts killing the price of this thing well yeah i mean so 512 was plus 200 bucks and that i feel like you could stop because they lowered the price 100 bucks so now it's only really plus 100 bucks right so whatever plus one terabyte is plus 400 bucks which is a significant portion of the price of this machine it really started to hurt but anyway uh this is straight up just an m4 version of the macbook air right down to it's still wi-fi 60 still bluetooth 5.3 it's the same as the m3 one but the m3 one was already a great machine i think the reason they can cut off a hundred dollars in this price is because this is like what the uh the third iteration of basically the same computer with just the the soc swapped out more or less this is a good deal on a good computer and the reason they can cut off the price is because there's not a brand new screen there is a new camera but it's like it's a camera that's been a lot of other macs like they didn't add any expensive stuff remember when it when they bumped the price 100 bucks when they went from the wedge shape to the non-wedge shape because that was an all new case and they had to recoup the cost of the fancy casing and all the stuff or whatever like this is the cycle it's kind of like car generations whatever generation uh macbook air this is towards the end of the generation it gets cheaper like and it's nice you know it's a miracle to see apple essentially passing on that that savings to its customers in the entry-level model they bumped the ram to 16 so now when people can get by without with the base amount of ram and they lowered the price because they've been making this generation for a while it doesn't have an hdr screen it doesn't have mini led they didn't like they didn't do anything to it it's the same as it was but what it is with the exception of a lack of sd card slot what it is is pretty and and a usbc port on the other side what it is is pretty good so boy like this is going to be such a phenomenal upgrade for my dad's computer because whatever he was running like it's it's too old to run uh whatever the minimum os version for turbo tax is so i think it's like a seven or eight year old computer or something whatever it is it's intel okay he's going to go from an older intel mac to m4 macbook air it's just going to be like a miracle like completely silent just everything is fast everything is instant the thing weighs nothing this the battery life is going to be just just insane compared to what his ancient computer was that he's just been leaving plugged in half the time like it's just going to be such an amazing upgrade uh and you know the only possibility is like well maybe the screen you know because he had a macbook pro before that um but i think the screen will probably be close but anyway i'm excited for him to get his new computer this is I'm going to buy this computer for my daughter.

1:03:49This is her college computer. I'm not sure how I'm going to spec it yet. She hasn't yet picked the color, but this is pretty cleanly good news. I would also say that I feel like we're kind of approaching maybe one or two years away from the end of this generation of the MacBook Air where they're going to have to, where they're going to have to, where I think they should do something like consider upgrading the screen. You know what I mean? Like, but this is a good time to buy. The M4 is a really good chip for a lightweight laptop. because it is low power, but single core is just so fast. And that's what you want if you're just doing simple things with your computer.

1:04:24Yeah, I love my MacBook Air. I have the M2 one. I absolutely love it. It is an amazing computer. As I mentioned last time or the time before, I've used it so much that I'm starting to wear out some of the keyboard keys. It's getting worse. If the sky blue color was better, I might be tempted to get this new one. But what is wrong with them with these colors? Okay, the MacBook Air now comes in silver-ish, silver-ish, silver-ish, and black-ish. Why? Why? You have four alleged colors. None of them are color. Why? I do like the midnight one, though, which is not actually black. It's actually very dark blue, apparently.

1:05:05But that does stand out in a crowd, I feel like. Yeah, because all the fingerprints stand out. No, I mean, it's fine. It looks, when it's clean, it looks decent. When it's clean and in good lighting, then you can see that it's not black, but it actually is navy blue. And it does look decent. I'll give you that. But like the other three colors, again, like when you don't look at Apple's website, look at like the videos of other reviewers or go see them in real life. And you could see like, oh, wait, that's the allegedly blue one. The sky blue model should come with the silver one that you can always carry around next to it so people can tell it's blue.

1:05:39It's the only way you'll be able to tell. You need the comparison. Your eyes will adjust to the white balance. And starlight to like sky blue and starlight. Starlight is not even gold, right? Yeah. Again, like you said, they look like different white balance settings on silver. Barely, but like white balance settings where you're not sure if you've bumped it. Yeah, it's so subtle that you need to see the silver one just so you can see, oh, that's not actually silver. Yeah. You might need to move your head a little bit too. Yeah. Oh, man. It's so weird. Why are they so afraid of color? Look at the iMac.

1:06:10The iMac is a really boring computer, but yet it got attention because it came in colors. That's why everyone loves the iMac. It's not because everyone needs a low-end desktop. Most people don't. They buy the iMac because it comes in really fun, bold colors. Why not do that? You know how many of these MacBook Airs they would sell if they came in like a real color? One. I don't need just one real color. Yeah. like these colors these are colors like the way john mayer sings just wow the most like and john mayer is an amazing like you don't realize he's an amazing musician but he's so soft-spoken in most of his music you like you can barely do everything he can play every instrument in the world and he has to be a great singer yes he's a really talented like instrument player and like he's really he's amazing at guitar like he's a really good musician but like he's so restrained in his music.

1:07:03And like, that's how Apple, like Apple, when Apple does colors, they do them pretty well. Like when they're real bold colors, they do a pretty good job of them. And they just won't do it the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of their products. Why? Yeah, I hate the Apple color situation. And I know that nobody is banged on this drum louder than Jason. And he's right. Like there needs to be a colors are at Apple to convince them that a, A, professionals like colors, and at this point, B, freaking anybody likes color, because you're right. It's, you know, what did you say? It's grayish, grayish, grayish, and blackish?

1:07:41I mean, that's pretty much right. Like, imagine, okay, granted, in this upgrade to the MacBook Air, which, as I said, I freaking love my M2 MacBook Air, and I'm very tempted to replace it just because the keyboard keeps breaking and I don't have time to get it serviced. But, like, I love this computer so much. this is the least inspiring upgrade it's like they keep doing these things where it's like well we we sort of gave you a color a little bit we sort we like i didn't i didn't get my nanotexture which again i didn't expect to i didn't get cellular which again i also didn't expect to although i think it is weird why didn't we get nanotexture it's like a one or two hundred dollar option anything you do to this computer is at least a one or two hundred dollar option so why not that's i mean that's true and i i i would welcome that if they ever add it i i am i'm not surprised though because even though i guess i know it's on the iMac now but it does seem like nanotexture is considered by apple marketing to be a pro tier thing um which is a shame and i would love to get the macbook pro 14 but it just doesn't feel as nice as this like when you're carrying it around in a bag and picking it up and opening up like going in and out of like trains and planes and stuff oh my god the macbook air is so much nicer than the than even the 14x pro it's it is so much lighter and you it just feels better in your hand it's easier to manipulate you know open and close in and out of bags and stuff it's just it is nicer the battery life is better there's no fan like there's just there are lots about it that are lots of things about it that are nicer for my in my opinion than the than the 14 inch pro um but i just you know in this generation like the same screen it's it still has the slightly blurry lower resolution pixel density of the uh bad old touch bar days they fixed that in the pros they did not fix that in the air so and it still has only 500 nits brightness so you know the screen it's still the same screen it's you know compared to pc laptops it's a very nice screen compared to other apple products it's a fine screen but it's lacking a lot of the the new hotness of other screens they make so it's still an amazing computer for most people i just do wish they would have given a little bit more in this update something else to make it a little bit exciting besides a drop of color on the new sort of bluish silver model this is not an upgrade product like oh you got one last year get a new one this year this is entirely like the product for people like my parents like if you are in the market for a laptop computer get this one because it's great if you just bought this computer last year there's almost nothing to make you upgrade because last year's was so good already and so is the m2 one but it's totally like these computers are not for people who are like let's see what the new thing is this year these are for like i need a new computer because my old one doesn't work or is crappy or is broken let me arrive in the store i need a laptop to do simple things show me what you got and in that role this thing fills that role even just a little bit better than the previous one does but it is absolutely not a product where it's like let's make people with m3 macbook errors really want to upgrade nope not this one and you know how you do that colors with colors like that Look, if you don't have massive hardware upgrades, then give it a different look.

1:10:55I'm not saying redesign the case. I don't think you're going to drive upgrades. Again, people who are buying$1 ,000 MacBook Airs are not upgrading every year. No. And I'm not even talking about every year. But just when you look at what happened with the 12-inch one-port MacBook that we all love-hated, people would often buy that as a fashion statement. like as like a fun thing like people don't always keep it in their uh inside coat pocket you might say yeah like people don't always purchase computer equipment rationally it isn't like well i it's time for the numbers to line up like no people buy stuff because they want it and love it like not everyone but not no one so there's a lot of people who will buy a product like you know same thing you see the same thing with the iphone like you know people who will upgrade a phone not because their old phone is broken but because the new phone looks really cool um that's that's a thing that people do and they do that with computers too with like you know desktops and laptops they do it there too not as much but they're still there so if apple would you know again it's it's a spec bump update we here at atp we support spec bump updates we love spec because the alternative is neglected products and we don't we don't want apple to wait around to give any update until they have something mind-blowing and big.

1:12:10No, feel free. Spec bump them whenever you can. That's great. However, it does help to make an otherwise fairly uninteresting spec bump update more interesting to do some kind of new cosmetic thing. And you can tell that Apple believes that too, which is why they keep adding colors, but they just keep adding the worst, the most barely colored colors that you can possibly do. like just i i think this imagine if that came out and it was like you know the same blue as the iphone 16 blue that everyone loves not the pro but the the base model iphone 16 that blue that everyone freaked out about last fall like and people were like switching away from the pro for the first time just to get that color imagine if the map book air was that color that'd be amazing they won't do it how if it was literally any of the colors of the imac has been offered it now for like four years they won't do that either i don't know why please do it for the love of god like supposedly they have tried colors internally and the story is that they actually don't look as good in person as you think they would because laptops are not the same thing as phones and tablets but you know try us apple we think you can figure it out and like and they literally sell tablets that are almost the same size and are in bolder colors slightly i mean we'll We got to that.

1:13:28Not that much bolder, but somewhat bolder still. They're bold enough that you could tell what color it is by looking at just one by itself. Yeah, exactly. When you only have one in the room, you don't have to say, is that the silver or the blue? No, you can tell. But barely. We are sponsored this episode by DeleteMe. DeleteMe makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So here's what Delete.me does. There's these data broker websites out there. They traffic in your personal data.

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1:15:30still more to go we've got the A16 iPad or I think it's actually on Apple's website the iPad-11 if I'm not mistaken I thought it was iPad A16, that was the whole point of the top item they didn't call it iPad 11th gen let me just double check well the url is 100 ipad hyphen 11 oh i know it's it's ipad uh i know but that's 11 inch oh i'm sorry you're right you're right you're right my mistake my mistake it's ipad parentheses a16 and it comes in 11 inch and 13 inch sizes but anyway the point is they didn't call it ipad 11th gen which is fine because you know who can keep track of these generation it's easy kind of easier to know this is the one that has the a16 in it which spoiler has the a16 in it they also simplified the naming it's not 10.9 inch anymore it's 11 inch which you get to get technical because it's got rounded corners like when you're doing diagonal measures are you measuring where the corner would be on the rectangular or you're measuring whatever it's 11 like it's 11 inch it's simplified the ipad a16 11 inch all right so it has the a16 with a five core cpu uh which which means there's one disabled core a four core gpu which means there's one disabled core which core is disabled in the cpu i could not determine this because it's is it two power cores and three efficiency cores or is it one power core and four efficiency cores like what i'm i'm assuming it's two and three uh i wouldn't make that assumption the efficiency cores are really small yeah well i i believe this is the only like there's no like non-binned version of this like if you get the ipad a16 this is the base model cheapest ipad that you can get and it is very cheap you get uh an a16 with five cpu cores and four gpu cores there's no non-binned version of this and this is kind of where i was getting it before like when it makes sense to continue selling old chips because the you know we'll get the second but the rumor was this would have a different chip like why do we see these chips show up why does the ipad mini have an a17 pro why does this a16 why does the ipad have an a6 only been to a16 at some point they tried to manufacture a whole bunch of a17 pros and a16s some of those chips had stuff in them that didn't work.

1:17:39You could throw them in the garbage or you could find a product to put them into. And guess what? They found a home for the A16s with stuff that doesn't work. It's just smart business. I think this is perfectly fine. I think an A16 in the base model iPad is good. If in exchange for that, you get a low price and I think you do. Now I have a question. Now that we're talking about binning again, I have what I think is a superstition. And I wanted to get your thoughts on whether it actually is a superstition. I will almost never choose to buy a bin CPU because I think it's almost like buying a refurbished product.

1:18:16If one thing broke. Yeah, I almost think like, maybe this will be less reliable for me over time. Like, is that irrational? Is there any basis for that in science? I don't know. I've also had this, I can tell you I've had that same thought, but I honestly can't come up with a rationale for explaining why I think that might be the case because I just I don't it's not like it was like a car made on a Friday when people weren't paying attention like there's an explanation where you can say plausibly this is why it might be different like what causes flaws there was a problem with this section does that mean that there's more likely to be problems with other sections I don't know what the origin of the problems is like I don't like is it just there might the only thing I can think of is that maybe like if the if the silicon wafer had problems like that wafer had problems for example then presumably the whole wafer has problems and so lots of bin chips came off that one wafer or something but yeah like it i do feel better about everything working uh versus some parts not working but i feel like on all these things when they test them like they're not guessing which parts work like they do a pretty good like when's the last time you got a cpu and one of the cpu cores stopped working like while you had it yeah when they ship them to you and they say it has this number of cores those cores pretty much work until you get rid of the computer especially marco but regular people do right i think that when they leave the factory they're pretty sure that the stuff they say is working is in fact working if it wasn't things would break real fast be like casey with his bad ram like you if some cpu core is doing math wrong uh or like has some problem you'll probably notice that pretty quickly maybe not in a gpu where you just get artifacts or something but anyway I don't know someone who knows more about slow can tell us but I I have absolutely felt exactly the same thing give me the one with all the working parts because it seemed like that like I just feel better knowing that they tried to make this thing I want the ones where they succeeded but then I pay ridiculous amounts of money to get that all right there is no apple intelligence apparently six gigs ram and this is an improvement over four gigs on the 10th gen couldn't couldn't quite go to eight and now is the ace can the a16 do apple intelligence that was the other question i had is like maybe like the neural engine is below the threshold but i don't think so i think no it can't yeah so anyway it's interesting at first i thought they left it at four gig but no according to mac rumors they went to six so they were close to eight but maybe even with eight it couldn't do it but anyway like i'm not sad about who cares this is not blowing ipad right now that that seems fine to me it does though really you know talking about the baseline feature set apple was pretty strongly saying like Apple intelligence is the baseline feature set, but not on the really low end models.

1:21:00Sorry. Uh, the cellular version is now ESIM only. You get three storage options, 128, 256 and 512. Uh, the starting storage is twice what it was for the, uh, 10th gen. And here you actually do get some colors, silver, blue, pink, and yellow. I am very here for it. Imagine that colors. They look great. Let's, let's do that in other places. And it starts at 350 bucks. $350. I mean you can look at this and say what is an FACE ID? why this? why that? but like you know the family resemblance is there it's a flat sided rounded corner iPad you know with no home button like it's just it's$350 an A16 with 6 gigs of RAM is pretty good for most things that people are going to use iPads for this is the MacBook Air of iPads essentially do you want to do web browsing and like do email stuff and like it just it's it's 350 bucks for this huge pretty good looking touch screen that you can do probably all the things most people do with ipads uh if it wasn't for the oled screen i could use this because all i do is freaking watch streaming video like it just i just need the oled screen but uh but everything else about it i'm not taxing my m4 cpu while watching streaming video on my ipad i'm not taxing it you know watching youtube videos and scrolling mastodon and slide over like i could do that on the 350 dollar thing if it wasn't for the screen yeah like this this is one of the best deals in apple's entire lineup i would say the base model macbook air is probably the best deal but i think that the base model ipad is probably second best like especially when you compare it to the other ipads just don't get a keyboard yeah like well when you compare it to the other ipads or ipad accessories this entire iPad is about it's in the same ballpark of the price of every keyboard that Apple now sells for iPads.

1:22:58Like most iPad keyboards are around 300 bucks. This is 350 for an entire iPad. The keyboard does not have a screen. True. So this yeah like most iPads are used in very low intensity situations. Most iPads are being used to watch video or browse the web or check email or be terminals for something else like they're used in really low need situations most of the time so this is like this is one of those products that is you know fairly uninteresting to the tech press like us most of the time you like we'll probably never mention it again but there's a huge number of people who buy these either for themselves or for their employees or children or students you know like it's it's a huge market out there and this is a really surprisingly good product for a surprisingly low price given the rest of apple's mo in most places which is we're going to bleed you dry and you're going to thank us for it so this is this is great yeah i mean this is just like the product being dragged across the line like this product line has been dragged across the many of the lines of you know the flat sided thing the rounded corners all that other stuff and once this ipad gets dragged across the oled line which will happen you know eventually you know or if not oled whatever technology has true blacks right eventually this ipad will have that because it will be the cheapest screen available like that will happen right i think it'll be a little while it'll be a while because keep in mind like this screen also historically has not had like the nicest lamination techniques and stuff like that also yeah yeah but but but again that will all that will all get caught up like because the the state-of-the-art advances and eventually the thing that was previously state-of-the-art is the cheapest like the this screen is better than the original ipad screen for example right so when that happens this is kind of like the same thing as like uh audio digital audio technology essentially uh satisfying the capacity of human hearing and video technology for flat images is approaching that rapidly when this thing gets a screen with true blacks there will probably be a 350 adjusted for inflation thing that you can buy that is like the ultimate watch streaming video in bed on your ipad device for 350 bucks like it'll be so cheap to just say oh i just want a thing that i can watch like you know video the way it's supposed to look uh that's cheap and light and does what i want it to do and i can do email and web browsing like that little thing that little ipad will you know i i'm excited about this because the idea that you could have a flat screen that shows this the kind of image that i get on my m4 oled ipad for 350 when that day comes i think that i feel like i'm living in the future like anybody can have the screen that would have blown your mind 10 years ago and it's a couple hundred bucks and you can have it around the house and give it to your kids and just you know the ipad for those use cases for the simple use cases for when you're not running up against the limitations of ipad os or paying fifteen hundred dollars for an ipad or whatever it's increasingly just an amazing device this really is like the ipad air of uh of tablets and in that role all of our frustrations with it fade away because like that's not this role like same with all my frustrations with the mac pro and the cpus all it fades away when you look at the macbook air it's like that's not what this computer is for that's not what these ipads are for and you know you can get it in pink all right and then finally we have the m3 ipad air you get cpu is for performance for efficiency cores all all cores are enabled gpu is nine core one core is disabled you get eight gigs of ram 11 and 13 inch sizes touch id there is no face id pencil pro and the usbc pencil are both supported same as its predecessor.

1:26:56The sound, however, is a little bit different. In the specs, this is reading from MacRomers, in the specs for the new 13-inch iPad Air, Apple has omitted the two-times bass feature from the device's landscape stereo speakers. Double bass was introduced in the previous generation 13-inch iPad Air with M2 chip in May of 2024. Your storage options are 128, 256, 512, and 1 terabyte. Your colors are bluish, yellowish, blackish, and purplish. starting prices same as previous air 11 inches 600 bucks 13 inches 800 bucks you can pre-order it now it launches on the 12th and there's also a new magic keyboard it has a 14 key function row a larger trackpad and the price of the magic keyboard what were you saying john the 11 inch magic keyboard the keyboard the keyboard is 270 and the 13 inch is 320 let me use this opportunity to remind you that the starting price, as John pointed out earlier, of the A16 iPad is$350.

1:27:56That is a mere, what is that,$30 more than the 13-inch keyboard. The keyboard. Yeah. I mean, I guess this is, you know, if you maybe get a third-party keyboard, if you really want a keyboard with this device, like if you're really going to end up using it as like a laptop, then you're really pressing up against like, maybe you should get a MacBook Air because of iPadOS. I don't know. People like iPads. But anyway, this thing, you know, oh the ipad a16 that comes in colors as soon as you get a little bit more power no colors are gone sorry yeah like as you ascend into the sky of resources the color gets drained out like oxygen and again this isn't this is not the ipad pro this is merely the air but once you get to the air it's like i'm sorry you're too high in for color yeah and then the pro has all of the color drained out of it yeah uh so at this one i'm starting to give a little bit of side eye about the lack of face id right because how long are we gonna wait how long are we gonna hold that as a differentiator uh i the touch id power button whatever my parents can't use it because apparently old people can't use touch id because their fingerprints are too wibbly wobbly um face id like this i feel like this should have been here the ipad air got face id but i guess not so it's like the ipad air does not look like a great deal to me because if you want the great screen or power get an iPad Pro.

1:29:13If you don't want that, what are you getting an iPad Air for? Is there something, is there some game you're playing that is too slow on the A16 iPad Air that you need the M3 for its GPU power? Is there a CPU thing that you're doing on your iPad that you're somehow not going to get a Pro, but the A16 is not good enough? Is the screen that much better on the iPad M3 iPad Air? Like, is it better at all than the A16 one? iPad Air, I mean, the prices aren't that bad you know six hundred dollars versus 350 but it's i feel it's kind of hard to justify the ipad maybe maybe when you do storage prices it works out better because maybe the the i don't know i haven't looked at the upgrade prices i didn't break it down for this one well i'll find out because my mom is going to get a new ipad i forget what she has now but it's ancient and uh i haven't actually gone through the exercise with her of like what do you actually want out of your ipad how much storage are you using she could end up getting an a16 one that might be fine for her she's certainly not going to get a pro because she doesn't need any of that but the iPad Air I'm not feeling great about it yeah so if you actually the smallest amount of storage that you can match across all three iPad lines is 256 and if you price match all of them as 256 11 inch you go 450 for the base model 700 for the Air and 1000 for the Pro so those are pretty spaced out when you match spec for spec.

1:30:39However, I also, I have to think like, who's the iPad Air for? Because, you know, back, you know, not that long ago, there was, you know, the iPad line. There was, it kind of became the iPad Air line briefly. And then there was the iPad Pro when it was newer. And the iPad Pro was kind of like, that was the one you bought if you needed like the pencil, the Apple keyboard, or if you needed like, you know, certain nicer Pro things. Originally, that was the only one that had the four speakers. So there were lots of reasons to buy the Pro. Now, what it feels like, and, you know, obviously this is not counting things like inflation, as mentioned earlier, but what it feels like is that the Pro has been pushed higher end.

1:31:20And now an iPad Pro, especially once accessorized, is a pretty expensive, you know, you're up to like, you know, the$1 ,400 kind of territory, like pretty easily with the iPad Pro. so that's feel like it's been pushed up leaving a big gap in the middle and what they've put in that gap is the iPad Air the modern iPad Air but the iPad Air doesn't have Face ID it doesn't have ProMotion so it still has a 60Hz screen and those are things that like you've if you've used a Pro you feel that it feels like a downgrade so it's hard now if you had a Pro in the past not because you needed like the best of the best simply because that used to be the nice one.

1:32:04Suppose you have a 2018 Pro like Casey and I had. Suppose you have those. If you're looking at what's in the lineup now, the Air is closer to kind of what you thought you paid for your Pro back in the day. Again, once Accessorite especially. But the Air is actually a downgrade from the 2018 Pro in some of those screen details, face ID. And that matters. You notice that. So it feels weird to be like a kind of like a pro, like a mid-range iPad buyer today if you were a mid-range to high-end iPad buyer in the past because it feels like now the mid-range has actually gotten worse relative to what you used to have.

1:32:47So it's kind of a weird gap in the lineup. And I'm not entirely sure who the Air is then for because everything I was just saying. What's the pencil situation? What's the pencil situation in the iPad A16? The pencil situation now is that every iPad supports pencils. Now, yes, they do support different ones, but they're not that different anymore. So now every iPad supports pencils. Every iPad supports keyboards with trackpads. So there's fewer of those differences. The details are a little bit different with each one. But does the iPad A16 support the pencil that magnetically attaches to the edge?

1:33:25And also, what's the camera orientation? I didn't actually look this up. I should have. Which edge is the camera on in the A16 in the air? um the uh the apple pencil usbc is what's supported on the base model ipad yeah so you don't get the magnetically attached thing although the camera on the base model ipad is on the landscape edge yes correct yeah just uh just like the new air and the new pro right yeah so the camera camera's on the landscape edge on both of them uh magnetically attaching pencil is arguably something that could have been dragged down to the 350 model but maybe those magnets are expensive who knows yeah like i i have a much easier job explaining why the ipad the base model ipad exists and why the pro exists in the air in the middle it's just going to kind of get it from both sides like you said it's it seems like it's too expensive for what you get but then you complain that you're not getting enough uses on that face id and just them deciding what feature set will go in this is really weird like i mean it granted it's a16 versus m3 it is a big cpu jump but it's kind of apple's own fault that we don't feel like again except for playing games there's any particular reason that you're going to be begging for a more powerful soc in your ipad and even then like with ipad games you're mostly just waiting for the in-app purchases to load like you know there's not that much resource drain that's going to take advantage of an m4 you know no i'm sure there's triple i games from four years ago that you can play on no like and that's what i think like i mean maybe that's part of the reason why i've been i've been motivated to buy any of these newer ipads because partly because again i'm not a i'm not a very powerful ipad user like god let me just vent for one second i so at the restaurant i'm i was setting up the new sound playing situation so i have i have they used to have literally they had an ipod touch to play music off of just out of its headphone jack into into like a mixer from the 70s and so it was there and the staff was like please replace that ancient ipod touch or they call it an i touch of course but i'm like all right i love it love it yeah so you should have recorded them saying that the last known person to say the word i touch in the united states yeah anyway so so i i i have the these two apps that the ipad has to run one of them controls the mixer so that they can control the volume and the inputs in the mixer and the other one is just whatever is going to play the music um so in this case it's i'm that's actually kind of in flux right now but i'm using this service called sound machine which is this like business licensed commercial music service and of course they have their own crappy app or you can access through other crappy apps.

1:35:54Everything's crappy. But point is, what I would have loved is to get a 11 or 13 inch, you know, big iPad and have these two apps running side by side in split view. That way they are always available. Well, the app that controls the mixer, it only runs in portrait orientation. Cool. Yeah, because it's basically a blown up iPhone. It isn't actually running in the iPhone mode, but it only runs in portrait. and still as far as i know as far as i could tell in 2025 if an ipad app only will support running in portrait even if you get a 13 inch ipad there is no way to run two of them side by side you can't like rotate it and just have okay just give me two portrait apps in landscape view you can't do slide over that's the temporary overlay right yeah it's like a it's like a floating thing you slides in and out i mean i guess maybe you could but that sucks like who's going to i'm not like the staff's not going to do that it obscures the app that's underneath it yeah like i wanted i wanted it to be easy for the staff and because you know not only are they like not all they aren't all nerds but they're also busy so like they only they don't have time to like go in and out of a bunch of different apps so i wanted to have and i was i was all prepared to get a 13 inch ipad air for this purpose but because that app for the mixer will only run in portrait an ipad os gives me no way to override that or to have two of them side by side and landscape on a giant screen then i'm like okay i guess i'll just get an ipad mini and leave it in portrait so that's what i did but it was like i couldn't believe like still really in this year ipad os still doesn't let you do same thing when you try to run iphone apps like instagram yeah exactly like your options for windowing and dealing with that are just so much more limited because it's an iPhone app.

1:37:42Yeah, you know what is not limited? The Mac. Like, if I used a MacBook Air there, I could run two iPhone apps side by side and it would be fine. Like, why can't the newest iPads do that? iPadOS, don't ask you to do anything complicated. Like, run two apps. But it can do that with other apps. Like, I just, oh, anyway. So, all that is to say, I ended up with an iPad Mini, which is basically just a small iPad Air. but I think the iPad lineup is still it's hard to justify buying the the really high-end ones for most people because people's needs for iPads generally are as mentioned earlier pretty low-end needs most of the time but I'm glad the high end is there for people who want it but I just think like the high end used to be for more casual users also and nowadays it's just it's so expensive But again, and then you put the iPad Air in the middle and it's like, well, the iPad Air is in some ways a cut down product from what used to be in those price segments.

1:38:45So I don't know. I'm kind of ambivalent towards the iPad Air. I wish – I guess what I wish mostly is that the Pro, especially the accessorized Pro, was not so incredibly expensive. But oh well, it's Apple. I mean I think what you really wish is that the middle thing had been dragged across more of the product feature lines. like if the middle one had face id uh and uh and uh promotion but the rest of the features that were basically the same you'd be like oh well if you don't want the m4 one and you don't need oled uh get the air because it's basically like the it's like the macbook air it's non-oled the cpu is not as good like maybe the thunderbolt is slower like you what you want like we make it makes so much sense of the macbook crow versus macbook air we're like yeah that that division of labor more or less makes sense the reason it doesn't make sense between the ipad pro and the ipad air is because the air is not filling the role like we feel like certain things that should be the baseline now right we're not saying that oled needs to be the baseline we're not saying the m4 needs to be the baseline but like face id should be and you know what i won't talk about on the mac but you know none of the macs have face id so it's fine um but it's such a glaring difference like it just i just don't think they kind of like the 16e i don't think they nailed the mix of features in the airline the price and everything the name of it the price of it like most things about the product are right but they didn't get the right the right ingredients in the mix like i don't think it needs the m3 i think they could put an m2 in there but if they have promotion like i don't know it just yeah this this line doesn't seem like it's in a great place and like i said i'll actually be curious to see when i do go through the exercise with my mom where we end up on the ipad uh because both my parents have unfortunately been trained by me over many decades every time i now recommend a modern apple product they're like i don't need the pro why aren't we getting the pro you always told me i should get the pro i'm like things have changed trust me you do not need a mac i've been getting the macbook pros because like they they use computers for years and years it was real important to get them a high spec macbook pro so it would work for years and years that's not an issue anymore with the m like the m4 macbook air will be fine for you trust me it'll be like a miracle like you just just don't you do not need a macbook pro you don't want a macbook pro this will be lighter this will just you know the only thing i said the only thing i asked him is is your screen not bright enough for you said no it's plenty bright i'm like macbook air right and so when we go to the ipads what is that discussion going to be they're gonna i think they have like i don't know if they have ipad pros but they have pretty good ipads for whatever decade they bought them in right and now it's time for a new one are they gonna end up with the lowest end iPad because that is the only model that makes any sense, we'll see.

1:41:24Alright, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and DeleteMe. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is our weekly bonus topic called ATP Overtime. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the state of Siri and is Siri falling further behind as we see things like, you know, the new Alexa announcement and and some updates on rumors of Apple's Siri overhaul. So what's going on with Siri? We'll talk about that in overtime. You can join us to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:42:03Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. So I have a weird problem that has already been fixed and I didn't do anything. Should you see your doctor about it?

1:43:13Right. Right. Um, it's so a couple of months ago, and unfortunately I don't know exactly what it was. I think it was correlated with an up, like a point update to Aaron's phone and my phone that suddenly I was not receiving any of the pictures from her iCloud photo library or the, the, through shared iCloud photo library, any of the pictures that she took. Right. These are pictures that her phone thinks are in the shared library. These are pictures that we've taken when we're standing next to each other or at home. Both cases, you know, they should be sent to the shared photo library. Again, I've verified everything.

1:43:53Everything looks good. This went on for like a month or two. And I complained about it a little bit online and asked for help. And nobody had any idea. And then I decide to file a feedback. God help me. and I had been pointed to there exist and I forget exactly where it is I'm sure you can search for it but there exist profiles that you can download the same sort of profile you would use for getting access to corporate stuff or whatever the case may be you can download a profile or certain betas yeah I think that's right so anyways you can download profiles for each of the different platforms that will do a lot more logging around photos specifically.

1:44:40And then getting that log file out can be a bit of an adventure. But I did this for a couple of days. And I did it on Aaron's phone and on my phone. And I'm going to butcher the details as to where you go. But off the top of my head, you go into settings and then like privacy. And then there's like analytics data or something like that. And you can search, thankfully, for photos. And so I did all that. And I went to go airdrop my log. And when I did that on Aaron's phone, settings crashed. So then I tried to do the same thing on my phone. I will give you one guess what happened. Settings crashed.

1:45:18So great. So now I'm next thing I know, I'm hooking up, you know, the fanciest USB-C Thunderbolt cable I can find just to make sure I get as much bandwidth as I can to my Mac. And I'm syncing to my Mac I'm partying like it's 2009 all over again. And I'm syncing to my Mac. And it takes freaking forever, despite using that$100 Apple Thunderbolt cable, which I think is overkill, because I think it's only USB, whatever the USB rates are, are lower than the Thunderbolt cable. It doesn't matter. I just wanted to get the best cable I could find. It takes freaking forever for both these things to sync.

1:45:52Then at least there's a PDF that Apple provides that shows you exactly where to go to find the log file. And it turns out these log files are like gigs. each, which is both alarming and potentially useful. So I go to file my feedback and I attach these log files to my feedback and I upload them on my symmetric gigabit internet connection. And feedback assistant says they didn't upload. I mean, I saw you using, thanks to iStat menus, John. I saw my computer uploading hundreds of megabytes worth of stuff, probably thousands of megabytes worth of stuff. And yet feedback assistant says, nope, not going to work.

1:46:36Can I do anything about that? No. No, can't. Just try again. And then I try again. Is there a progress meter? No. Do I know if it worked or not? No. Can I do anything about this? Hell no. So I have a feedback. I'm not even going to link the freaking thing in the show notes because it's useless. If you happen to work for Apple and would like to see the feedback number, reach out. I'm happy to send it to you. Why don't you put them up on Google Drive and put a link to the Google Drive in the feedback text? Because I don't use Google Drive. And either way, I don't think anyone will ever look at this anyhow.

1:47:11So why bother? I've already done hours of unpaid labor for Apple. I'm not doing more hours. You're trying to fix your own problem in this case. Well, but then all of a sudden, around the, I don't think it was because of the profiles, but around the time I was doing this whole dance, it started working again. Did I do anything? No. Did they do anything on the iCloud side? Maybe. Who frigging knows? But it's all working again. But how freaking, have we ever talked about that Feedback Assistant and the whole bug reporting process may not be up to snuff? Maybe we should talk about that sometime. We can do a member special about Feedback Assistant, which will basically just be Marco bleeping me for an hour and a half straight.

1:47:48honestly I don't know why you put yourself through that anymore because I'm an idiot Marco because I'm an idiot look Apple has proven look if you are hearing this as somebody who works in Apple and you're about to yell at me how much it matters look I enjoy or I appreciate that that's how you see it but that's not how it is to the outside so to the outside world it is extremely apparent we should not waste our time filing feedback the way Apple treats the outside world from the feedback system is hostile at best and certainly makes it very clear to us that we are wasting our time by using it. So honestly, like, don't put yourself through this trouble.

1:48:26Just don't, like, don't file feedbacks. Let Apple do their own QA work or improve their system so that it actually is worth it for us. Right now, they're doing either of those things. Yeah, but I mean, I wanted this to be fixed for me. So I thought, all right, if this is how I pay to play, then this is what I'll do. But you know what, Marco? I'm a frigging idiot because I shouldn't have even bothered. Ah, it makes me so mad. Now, the good news is it fixed itself. But the bad news is I went through hours of unpaid labor. Like, genuinely, this is stuff I wouldn't have done if I wasn't kind of hinted that this is what I need to do to get help.

1:49:01And I wouldn't have bothered. And this probably took me a couple hours. And let me tell you, my rates on the extremely rare occasion I do consulting are pretty lucrative. This was hundreds of dollars of work I did for Apple for nothing. And it just drives me absolutely bananas. This is hundreds of dollars of work that you threw away on something that you knew didn't work. Yes, because I'm a moron. Honestly, listeners, I hope you've heard me over the years. I hope that you know that in general, I'm not a super selfish person. I don't think I am. I think I try to be a good citizen of the world in a lot of ways that I can be.

1:49:46But when it comes to feedback assistant, I have to always tell myself, someone else will probably file this bug. I don't need to be the one wasting my time because odds are this thing I'm seeing, someone else will see it. Right now, I'm on the iOS beta for I think it's 18.4 now. I'm on the beta and this beta is terrible this is one of the buggiest point update betas I've had in years it's horrendous and I decided I'm just going to get off the beta what am I doing the only reason I've used the betas is A to be able to see things and maybe talk about them on the show which I'm pretty sure we're not actually supposed to be doing anyway but B I always thought like well if my app breaks in weird subtle ways on the beta I will see it and maybe be able to issue an update to avoid the problem before the the release comes out but that hasn't happened in years a point update breaking my app in a way that wasn't just fixed in the next beta has not happened in such a long time that i'm like why am i doing this for them and making my phone less reliable and frustrating myself sometimes like when i hit some bug or something works worse than it did before why am i doing that like again like the relationship between apple and us i think is very clear in recent times that like you know we are simply a resource that they mine um so why am i carrying their water why am i doing their their free qa for them why am i running their betas and why am i filing feedbacks when they're very clear to us what we mean to them so i i i will present the same question back to you like why do you feel the need to file bug reports when you know that odds are it will end in you being frustrated and having wasted your time and probably not achieving anything that's visible to you oh in this situation the only person who could help him the only entity that could help him was apple right it's apple stuff that's broken probably something on the server side right they're the only ones that can fix it so if you want someone to fix it that someone has to be apple and the way the only way to have any chance of getting apple to fix something for you i guess you could go through phone support which good luck that probably would have taken you more hours and be less productive.

1:52:00Or you can file feedbacks. Yeah. And the thing of it is, is that there's nothing actionable within the device because I can't go see a log. I can't go look at network status. I can't go. Can't hit the big refresh button. Right. There's nothing I can do. You can't clear the cache. Mm-hmm. And so, I mean, if you freaking write me and say sign out of your Apple ID, everyone is writing you to tell you to sign out of your Apple ID. No thanks. I will find you and punch you in the throat because that's not happening. and honestly, it shouldn't have to. And it probably wouldn't fix it anyway. So someone just posted about that.

1:52:33It's like everyone telling them to sign out of their Apple ID so they finally did it and it just made the problem worse. It wasn't hours and hours of trying to restore stuff. I think it was Dr. Drang, but either way, no, it's just, no, I'm not doing that and I shouldn't have to. And it's just so frustrating because this, to John's point, this was the only avenue I had. I mean, I guess I could have gone spelunking in console with Aaron's device connected to my computer, But like, again, no, I'm not doing free labor for Apple. It's, it's, or unpaid labor for Apple. It's just, no. And the thing of it is, is it was just insult, maybe not insulting, but I can think of a better word.

1:53:07It was insulting at every step of the way. Can I do anything to look into this as a technical user? As an iOS developer, can I really do anything to look into this? I mean, I guess I could have poured through their ridiculous, you know, ridiculously verbose debug output through console, but effectively, no. Was there any way to manage this on device? Not really. Okay, so then I want to go and I want to get the logs, which is a pain in the butt. I mean, I get why it's a pain in the butt, but it's a pain in the butt. And then I go to try to collect the logs and settings crashed. Then I go to try to collect the logs and I have to connect to my computer like a barbarian.

1:53:40Then I go to upload it to their bespoke first party app running on their operating system. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work three times in a row. Does it tell me anything about why? No. Can I do anything about it? Absolutely not. It's just bananas. And it's just frustrating. Now, again, it fixed itself, which is all that really matters in the end of the day. But it's just so very, very frustrating. But this is the thing, and I would even say maybe looking at it as unpaid labor, that actually is not quite, I think, productive because there are many cases in which, yeah, if I have an actual bug, I would actually pay to get it fixed.

1:54:19Yeah, yeah. But it's not so much that it's unpaid as much as wasted and unappreciated because the signal that we get from Apple from the outside, even though, again, yes, Apple employee listening to this, we hear you that it really makes a difference. and maybe four bugs that get to you and your team, that might be true. That's not the common case. And from the outside, it's very clear to us that the bugs we file are most of the time not even looked at. And if we do luck out and one of them does get looked at and get a response, the response is almost always so dismissive and obviously trying to just mass close bugs without doing anything, that it makes it it's very clear to us what it communicates to us is our work is not being looked at our work is not being valued our work is not being taken seriously and the people who are screening the bugs are just trying to go through the numbers and clear them out that's how it looks to us the vast majority of the time and that's and that's again even if we get a response that's what it is most bugs i have filed never got a response of any kind just sit there open forever so the it's very clear to us not so much that our work is unpaid but that our work is fruitless that that our work is pointless that that we are we are the chumps for even having devoted any time to this whatsoever so again i ask you casey i mean i know you knew this already before this what like i would strongly suggest just set that bag of rocks down and walk away like this is no longer like he's the lady his problem solved so he's gonna wait around for it to solve itself yes because that is probably what happened no well so i will give the counter example of like oh i don't need to file this because somebody else will i'm the somebody else um not not not really like actually sometimes when i look at a bug i think to myself no one else is going to file this like no one else will so if i want apple to know about this and no one else is going to file it i have to do it now that's rare most of the time you're right if there's some api bug someone else is going to find it it's going to be filed it'll be fine but not always the case.

1:56:22Here's the other thing. If only you file it, will they care and will they actually fix it? Well, I mean, you should, if you remember the show, which Casey certainly doesn't, but you might, Marco. What bug am I thinking of? I forgot. Oh, your window performance dragging thing? Open up a lot of windows, performance falls off a cliff when more than one user's logged in. I'm the only one who's going to find that bug. Let's be honest. Okay, but if you didn't complain on a podcast for a month about that, would that have gotten fixed? Not a chance in hell. Right, but I'm the only one who filed it you understand like they fixed it based on my bug you filed it and then you announced it on a podcast for a month like that's what got it fixed sure but but the point is if i didn't do that this would never have gotten fixed because it wasn't just talking about it in a podcast it gets it fixed they do need a feedback to actually do stuff about it who else is going to find multiple users logged in in bazillion windows i'm that's me i'm the guy who finds that bug no you know what's great actually if you just complain on a podcast about it for enough somebody in Apple who's getting paid to work at Apple files it themselves.

1:57:22So you don't have to file it. I don't think that anyone ever would have filed this because I don't think they could reproduce it because I don't think they really understood the problem and neither did I until I did it. So anyway, in those scenarios where I feel like this is not going to be found by anybody else, I need to file this. It wasn't particularly burdensome to file it. I think I filed it multiple times and I myself was narrowing down what is the deal with the bug. Do I have bad hardware? Is my video card bad? do I have some kind of corruption is it an os bug blah blah like it took a while for me to narrow it down as well but I did in some scenarios this is the only like okay it's the only I'm not going to fix this myself right if I you know when I eventually determined trying it on a different mac it's still there it's not the os tried os versions clean install like I did all the things I could do locally at a certain point it's like I can't fix this this is apple's it's part it's a problem with apple software and I've narrowed it down enough to be able to file it it did get fixed eventually yes the podcast obviously helped a huge amount but i feel like if i did not file this and i merely talked about it on the podcast it would not have been fixed and certainly if i didn't talk about it on the podcast absolutely this would not have gotten fixed because who's even going to find this bug so you know it's it's mostly fruitless i did file i had a list of when i was doing you know hyperspace development i have a you know a note with the running list of bugs i need to file and i filed about half of them um i have another half that i may or may not get to i got responses is about one of the ones that i didn't file believe it or not because i just talked about it in a place where apple people could see it and they were curious about it and the reason i didn't file well two reasons one you know i'm busy doing development i'm like like i don't consider it unpaid labor but it is time that i would take away from doing development and right now it's more important for me to do well i'm going to make a note of myself mental note if you get some you know if you get above this and you feel like you're finally in a good place with the app you should probably file this bug this bug this bug and this bug but one of the ones that i talked about frustratingly in front of some people who happen to be apple people i can't i tried to make a minimal reproduction you know start a new project blah blah do the bug and couldn't reproduce it so that one definitely goes in the pile of well i'll get to that one later if i want but someone from apple contacted me about that and said hey i heard you talk about this bug did you file a feedback for it i said no because i can't reproduce it but i described it to them and i said good luck and so i may eventually file that if i can narrow it down because i do like helping people fix bugs even if they're not my bugs.

1:59:47But yeah, you really have to decide what is a good use of your time. If it's a bug that someone else is going to file or if it's the ones I didn't file or haven't done anything about, I worked around them in my app. That's what we all do. You find something that doesn't behave the way you expect, you do a workaround. You find some way to make the app do something sane. You put a big scary comment that says, I'm doing this because X, Y, and Z. Maybe Apple will fix this someday. you know xxx to do whatever you want to do to mark it later you can remove this when apple fixes this bug and then you move on with your life because you can't every time you find a bug like do an exhaustive feedback and file it and wait for a response and it's just that's not productive so i think there's a balance to be struck between when is it time to file a bug is it really fast and easy to file this bug fire and forget and you just like hope it does something you're just voting with a bug filing a dupe or is it something that only you are ever going to find is only important to you?

2:00:42Or is it something that's just going to be taking too much time away from what you're actually trying to do? In which case, maybe write a two sentence note and then move on with your life. all right so what's your deal john i uh have i think i've talked before about how i have speakers connected to my computer but i turn them off all the time they're just not on so my computer makes no noise uh that's mostly the way i like it is very much unlike the way marco uses his computer wait what noise is made when the speakers are on beeps oh good system beep i mean i don't know what what noise is your computer i thought you meant like you could hear a hum you freaking bat but no i know no like a youtube the audio from a youtube video uh you know music audio from your mac you just sit there in silence generally speaking uh yeah um but anyway i do have how i use it yeah i know it's the opposite of your whole life casey you have music playing all the time we've established but you know when i do want to hear audio of watching a youtube video or you know um playing the rare case i play music i do have speakers connected uh but obviously i don't care about those speakers because I basically never use them.

2:01:51I was trying to figure out how old my current speakers are and I just couldn't find them. They're not in my Amazon order history. There's no receipts in my email. I don't, I honestly, I think I might've bought these in person. This is the problem with really old purchases, kids. Sometimes we used to buy things in person in stores and there's no record of that unless you're one of those people who obsessively like scans your receipts and I am not. Um, so as far as I could tell based on my photo library, which is the only actual life stream, like record of my life, the oldest picture I could find of these speakers sitting on my desk was more than 16 years old so i've had these speakers for 16 years they are cruddy uh creative gigaworks t40 speakers not the t42s uh numeral two but the plain old t40s they've got two very small mid-range drivers and a tiny tweeter between them in a vertical arrangement they're top ported they connect with a headphone jack there's a dc plug that uh goes into one of them and then there's a thing that connects the other speaker uh they have dials in the front of them they have an on and off switch on the back bass treble adjustments and volume oh my god these are okay i love you know speakers enough that i'm willing to forgive you know certain aesthetic sins because they sound good these would have to sound really good so that's the thing about the speakers anyway what's going uh on with these you're seeing them without the grills in them where you can see the stupid yellow speaker cons remember not the t42s not the t40 series 2 not the roman numeral 2 the plain old t40 which looked similar but not exactly the same but anyway they started just spraying static at me in a very unpleasant way uh so they're telling me we are not working i wanted to confirm that they're not working because like maybe it's the power cable maybe it's my mac maybe it's this right so i all i need to do they take a headphone jack in the back all i need to do is play some music into these speakers with a different cable connected to a different device should be easy right not when nobody's home because every other device i have in the house is usbc and they only have lightning to headphone adapters i was thought of using my daughter's insane cd player but i don't think that is a headphone jack anyway anyway um i ended up scavenging a uh you know headphone to headphone wire from my like airplane uh noise canceling headphone bag i found a lightning to headphone adapter i grabbed an old lightning ipad out of the attic and charged it i put it in connected it to the speakers and they're broken i mean they uh it's the speakers it's not my mac it's not the wire the speakers in a particular frequency range uh produce very awful static uh and so they need to be replaced so uh it's time for me to be looking at computer speakers which one of the things i do not look at constantly unlike televisions and cars and other things like that So I did not know exactly what I would be getting to replace them because I really don't care about speakers.

2:04:40And despite what Marco just said, one of the most important criteria for someone who doesn't care about speakers like me, for the speakers to be on my desk is their footprint, which I want to be small to reflect how important I think they are, and how they look. And although these are not beautiful speakers, I think they look okay. With the grills on the front, they're vertical slabs, they lean back a little bit, they're dark colored, they don't stick out too much. the problem with all of the quote-unquote good speakers which people would argue any powered speaker is not a good speaker or whatever the problem with higher quality powered speakers that you can connect to your computer is i find so many of them so ugly just so ugly to be fair that is true i cannot tolerate how and i know it's the wrong it's like why are you picking speakers based on how they look you listen to them you don't have to look at them but i do have to look at them yeah they're right next to your screen they're within your field of view all the time yeah like i i don't just i either want them to just like be unobtrusive but just not ugly and so many of these just bother me like the shape of them bothers me so much so i was really just narrowing the field based on what can i tolerate the appearance of that doesn't take up too much room and that really gets you into the territory of just terrible speakers as you can imagine like the ones i currently have because like i'm not picking based on sound criteria anyway i did eventually find myself being herded towards some speakers that i can tolerate the appearance of they are kind of small and i want i'm not i didn't buy anything yet i wanted to talk about this in this show just so people who own these speakers can tell me what they think of them here are the two choices these are from the company kanto k-n-t-o i have some speaker stands from them that are very nice that are holding up some speakers around my tv they also make a bunch of powered speakers um they make a line called the aura o-r-a i don't know how you're supposed to say it they make the canto aura and the canto aura four four is just no space canto aura four these are basically the same speaker the fours have a bigger woofer and therefore are bigger speakers uh if that was really the only difference no brainer canto aura i should just get that one because i don't need it bigger i'd smaller is better for me small footprint they basically look the same but the aura fours are just bigger why would i get them and the why is because as much as I don't care about speakers, they know how to get me on these things.

2:07:03The Aura 4s support 24-bit slash 96 kilohertz. Oh, God. And the 2s are 16-bit slash 48 kilohertz. And I know I won't be able to hear that, especially on a terrible quality speaker. It's like, why do I even care? But it bothers me. Oh, and by the way, the Aura 4s, 50 bucks more than the Aura. It's like, well, why would anyone buy the Aura? oh well what if you want it to be 0.9 inches narrower i do kind of want it to be narrow anyway i am leaning towards the aura 4 uh just for that reason and you know presumably they will sound better because they do have a bigger woofer and maybe i can get away with not having a subwoofer when i play video games that's the other time i turn the speakers on playing video games um so the only thing i have the only downside i know about them is they do not have any kind of adjustment on the speaker for like bass and treble and stuff which you know i can eq on the computer or on the source which is probably what you're supposed to do anyway or whatever but for a casual person like me i kind of like having bass and treble especially because some of the reports have been that the the aura 4 is a little bassier than the aura and i don't need bassier in my life i do like the subwoofer for like the little kick during video games of explosions and you know guns going off and stuff but anyway if you own either the kanto aura or the kanto aura 4 and you either like it or don't like it uh send me some email toot at me on mastodon tell me what you think of them uh and again mostly what i'm picking these on is because i can tolerate the appearance and also because they're they're powered they're usb so it'll be digital audio going from my mac instead of uh analog which which appeals to me they do support a sub out which i probably won't buy a sub with them but if i want a sub i like that i can just connect one to it uh that's what i'm leaning towards haven't bought anything yet please send me your feedback if you own the Kanto Aura and Aura 4 and what you think about them.

2:08:48All right, so I do want to give two little bits of, you know, data points here. Number one, I actually did look at Kanto a while back and I briefly owned one of their subwoofers. I also tried out the Kanto Tuk or Tuk, the T-U-K model, which is their like higher end model speaker. I actually ended up returning those because I thought they did not sound like their price. The subwoofer, I thought, was a little bit closer to a good value, but my opinion of them at the time was I think they were more of a design brand than an audio brand, to put it nicely, because they do look nice. I found them in person to be a little bit cheap looking and feeling, but they do.

2:09:42I mean, they're inexpensive speakers. I mean, the exception of the expensive one that you got, like most of their speakers are inexpensive. Yes. So, you know, to go into it with that in mind, I mean, compared to what you're coming from, I'm sure it will be an upgrade. As for the subwoofer and bass claims, the Aura 4 has a 4-inch woofer. You're going to want a subwoofer if you care about bass. a four inch woofer is or i mean a four inch driver in general on a speaker like you can get some bass out of that but not a lot like to get good bass out of a speaker driver you generally need to be bigger it's a way bigger it's a way bigger drive uh cone than is on my current speaker it's like way bigger that's true yeah so and you you currently don't have a subwoofer right no i did for a while but it was so bad i just disconnected it because it was just like not worth it like the problem is these speakers don't really support a subwoofer when i had the subwoofer is that weird arrangement where like the audio goes from the computer into the subwoofer and the subwoofer does like the crossover sort of yeah it's just a bit and it has an output to the speakers yeah that that's that's common but yeah but anyway the the the auras do actually they do auto crossover themselves like 80 kilohertz if you connect a subwoofer or 80 hertz sorry if you connect a subwoofer to them and so like yeah i'm not this is not this is not going to be neutral audio it's not going to be good audio like i'm not looking for that it's just I want them to look nice on my desk, to sound better than what I have, and to not take up too much room.

2:11:03Yeah, I mean, if you can get yourself into the subwoofer lifestyle, I think you'll be able to even better optimize for the other factors you care about. Because to get like any kind of bass that actually sounds like full range sound, you're generally looking at like a five inch driver at least. I mean, you can get it without it. I have a subwoofer attached to all my game consoles for that very reason. Tiny little satellite speakers, big subwoofer, you get the good game sound. Right, exactly. Like once you get a subwoofer in the system, then you can have the small desktop speakers on top that are pretty and tiny.

2:11:42And you lose a lot less of the overall sound when you have that kind of setup. But that being said, this was like a fine choice. Again, huge upgrade from where you're coming from. and given your state of preferences and what you want to spend and how much you care about certain things i mean i think the the 24 bitness of it is comical in this category of product why would they not put that in the small one you obviously have the chip does it cost two cents more just put it in it's i mean it could be just like a chip generation kind of thing but i mean you would not like the the difference in noise floor that the extra four bits of sampling resolution gets you no it's not it's not it's not gonna make a difference this is entirely like getting the getting the cpu where all the parts work because it makes you feel better no it's not like that because at least then you're getting more resources in this you literally cannot like not not only can your ear my computer won't even be putting out that audio anyway but if you think so okay what the the bit depth of sound what that gives you is more dynamic range before the before you hit the noise floor and already 16 bits gives you I think something like 100 decibels of dynamic range and 24 bits extends out to like 120 or something like that I forget the exact numbers but it's something like that but the thing is like not only can the human ear not hear that difference but these speakers probably can't produce that difference so like you're very unlikely to have that matter at all literally in any way it's not like you have one fewer cpu core it's it's like if the cpus computed five extra zeros on the end of every integer just for fun it was like like the good feeling that you get that the other parts will work better because because uh it had all the other things working on it that it's less likely to have a flaw or something but anyway yeah like the other thing about this the r4 it's like a little bit less than an inch wider and a little it's actually shorter than the current speaker so it's not that much bigger i figured it would give me a little bit more bass to maybe tide me over longer without a subwoofer like i said these are the cones on these things are like one and a half inches or something so it's still an upgrade and you may be asking yourself why don't you get the gigaworks t40 series 2 it's entirely because of the stupid little stand i have underneath them i think that makes them look uglier and also i do want something better than i had before i do want to actually upgrade so that's why i'm just not getting essentially the same speaker as i have you know 16 over 16 years is a good run for some cruddy little computer speakers that actually for their size and price that i got these for i think they like they're this is like a less than a hundred dollar speaker that i bought ages ago they're probably like 70 or 80 bucks when i bought them maybe less phenomenal sound for a 70 or 80 dollar powered computer speaker like incredible bargain they don't sound good but it's like 70 bucks i mean what do you expect like their their siblings in the same price range where they're like those disgusting white pc speakers that you get with like your gateway 2000 which is garbage i had those they were garbage so bad i had them too i had them attached to my mac and i can tell you they were in the same price class as these things and these are so much better so kudos to creative for filling a price point with speakers that were just so much better than everybody else's but now i am graduating upwards to more expensive speakers maybe see why i think you should go retro go for like those like clear sound stick things that came on max the sound sticks i was never a fan of those i think steven haggett still has them i don't know if she still is using no i was never a fan of the harman kardon sound sticks and the jellyfish sub but what about the like little like little ball ones that looked at you the spheres those spheres weren't bad i had them when i reviewed the g4 cube uh they had those they came with it as like part of the whole big package setup they were pretty good for like single driver little round speakers uh they and like that clear case It was like Apple quality.

2:15:39Like the clear case that they came in was solid enough. It actually was a pretty sturdy case. A lot of speaker quality actually has to do with the case. For people who don't know about speakers, believe it or not, the case significantly affects the speaker. And so when you can make a solid one, it does help. But, you know, in the end, they were one tiny driver. So what do you expect? Yeah. One thing that you will probably also, you know, encounter here. one thing i've noticed a lot is that speaker engineering and speaker technology has really come a long way in the last five to ten years like speakers that used to seem really good or used to sound really good compared to their peers like 10 to 20 years ago like they did back then but compared to a modern even like a like a mid-range modern speaker modern speakers largely, not all of them, but many of them are just so much better than speakers used to be.

2:16:34And part of that is, yes, they are now often doing DSP and kind of equalizing the sound to sound better on them to make up for their flaws. There's pluses and minuses to that, but that's fine. Also, just because of advances in engineering, we're able to engineer better enclosures. Like John was just saying, the enclosure around a speaker matters a lot for the sound just it affects like how the air moves in the speaker how resonances occur and like reflections and distortions like it makes a pretty big difference well there's been so many advances in speaker speaker design and technology over the last few decades that like we're not like people are like 3d printing insides of cases to minimize reflections and all sorts of fun techniques like that like we're so speakers have come a long way uh way more than you might assume like in the last five or ten years and modern speakers are really in in many cases a pretty big step above what we used to have and that's that's impressive because what we used to have was also really good but like they're even better now oh that's another another thing that i'm looking for in when i was looking at the speakers is the wires that come out of the back of them can't be humongous which you think wouldn't be a big deal especially if you're thinking of passive speakers but remember these are powered speakers and usually the power only goes to one speaker so you somehow have to get both sound and power to the other speaker and the the speakers that i prefer from my gaming consoles i like them because they're cheap and they sound good enough for games and they have strong bass but the the cable that connects from one speaker to the other is like like a garden hose like i don't know who cares why does that matter because i have to take i have to position the speaker like a left speaker has to be positioned to my left and the right speaker has to be positioned by right So I have to get this garden hose like cable that has to come from somewhere and go pretty far to the left for the left speaker.

2:18:25And it doesn't want to. It's like think of trying to manipulate a garden hose full of water. It doesn't want to be cable managed in any way. It wants to be this giant snake that's just like, you can't bend me. It's just I don't know what's in it. It's it's incredibly thick, like it's thicker. I'm trying to think of the equivalent. There is no equivalent cable. It is it is thicker. It is as thick as my outdoor extension cord. that's how thick it is think about an outdoor rated extension like oftentimes i have seen that cable be just an ethernet cable oh yeah no they yeah the you're thinking of the keff things because you're a fancy boy but yeah even even other ones like like i used to have like a little class d amp that did that same thing between its things like i i've seen that oftentimes the the cable that goes between the speakers on a on a powered speaker set oftentimes it is ethernet uh because like power ethernet for the power and then audio like yeah ethernet is common the other one at least at least it uses you know it uses rj45 and and you know cat six cables like it's not it might not be the ethernet protocol and you can pick whatever cable you want it could be nice and flexible you can use flat cables yada yada the the the canto or is used what basically looks like a four pin serial connector um and the wire is thin ish you know it's not bad it's uh the current my current one that i have my current cheap speakers essentially use what looks like speaker wire to connect the non-powered speaker so that's basically the best you're going to get i don't didn't expect that but um because it's analog right everything's analog in this thing it's analog audio going into it it's analog audio going between them i believe on the auras it certainly is digital going into the back because i'm going to be connecting it with usbc and then i believe it is digital from speaker to speaker as well i know there must be power as well so anyway we'll see how it goes but it well the point is it's not a garden hose i should take a picture of and send it to you maybe it's not as big as outdoor extension cable extension cord maybe it's indoor extension cord but it is monstrously thick and does not want to be cable managed in it it's because the peakers are so small too like when you try to pull the speaker towards you and it slides back because the cable doesn't want to make the 90 degree off the end of the desk like that's how ornery these cables are it's real bad speakers are nice though it's the i forget which i have i have like some kind of logitech like dolby thx sub it's just for gaming it's like it does not realistic sound but The on-desk speakers are small, and the subwoofer is not too big and unobtrusive, and it's real cheap to get the setup.

2:20:44I've bought two of these so far. Despite the fact that the stupid potentiometer or whatever the hell it is that is the volume knob gets staticky after a while, and I have to spray, like, an electrical contact cleaner into it, still, still I bought a second one even knowing that. It's kind of like my cheese grater.