682: Medium Core

10:58Casey Liss:Yeah, I'm pretty sure that, you know, I remember that when Apple was talking about that, like with the m1 that it had stuff that the phone chips don't but we're a long way from the m1 uh and you know they really beat things up so whatever thing might have been missing i talked about last episode that like it's kind of clear that apple didn't build the a18 pro with the mac in mind based on how difficult it was to add a second really slow usb port it's clear that apple wanted to add a usb port but it had you know it had limited options they needed a cheap chip the a18 pro was the chip it didn't support two usb they could have just included one that would have been like, oh, we always only wanted one.

11:32Casey Liss:This was actually made for Mac, but it wasn't. They wanted to, and they had to hack it in. So it's clear that the A-chips, at least the A18 Pro anyway, are not ideal for the Mac in terms of the peripherals and stuff, but I'm betting whatever things that it needed for Rosetta are there. I haven't seen anyone say, oh, and by the way, the MacBook Neo doesn't run Intel apps. And yeah, we'll talk more about this on Overtime. So I'm going to assume that it does, and whatever it needs to have for it, it has.

11:55Marco Arment:I wonder if it doesn't support virtualization at the hardware level. That would be a question, But I think if it didn't, we would have heard about it by now.

12:02Casey Liss:Well, yeah, it'll be interesting to see when people start stress testing these things. But the thing is, like, all those differences between the M and A were emphasized when the M first appeared. But we've had so many A's since then, I feel like most things have trickled down, except for stuff that is really of no use to the phone, because, you know, two USB ports on the phone is not a useful thing. And that's where the Neo got hamstrung. But all the other stuff, I think, probably is useful, whatever things are needed for Rosetta and so on.

12:28Marco Arment:Actually, you know what? Remember, we heard back when we were first discussing the rumors of what became CarPlay Ultra, we had heard that the way that was implemented was basically a virtualization layer on the phone that ran the gauge cluster version of CarPlay in a virtualized real-time OS. and then the rest of the iOS platform ran on its slice of whatever. I don't think we ever got good confirmation on that. But if that was true, then recent iPhones would have had to support hardware virtualization on the processor. And, you know, assuming that was all true. But anyway, even if that's not true, even if that was like the direction they might have gone or a direction they were experimenting with, they would have added that support if it wasn't already there.

13:19Marco Arment:So it is probably there.

13:20Casey Liss:And I'm assuming this stuff that Rosetta needs is like, you know some instructions that make certain things faster or whatever and as the uh the arm instruction set version has crept up since the m1 you know anyway we'll we'll find out if uh someone gets these in their hands or someone discovers i tried to run an intel app on my macbook neo and it didn't run at all uh but yeah anyway see over time i'll talk more about this

13:40Marco Arment:i would bet that that if it is supported i bet most intel apps run faster on the neo than they on the last Intel Macs.

13:50Casey Liss:Yeah, that's the way it's been on Rosetta for a while.

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16:03John Siracusa:Andrew Larson writes, the keyboard case for the iPad Air, and I think also for the regular iPad, has a moving trackpad and no backlight, just like the MacBook Neo. The keyboard case for the iPad Pro us a haptic trackpad and backlit keyboard actually that's not a hundred percent true i think it's 98 true my ipad pro which i'm using the original uh magic keyboard the original cantilevered magic keyboard from way back when i'm almost certain i've never bought a second one so i had this from you know whenever it came out originally sometime during the pandemic that uh that track pad is not haptic i am 99 sure now the current ones i think andrew's right the current ones are haptic but it's an interesting point that they're maybe not literally but kind of sort of recycling the ipad keyboards in in trackpads for the i don't actually know if they're physically the same it's

16:48Casey Liss:just pointing out that apple i think i had said in the last episode that apple hadn't shipped a physical moving trackpad in a while but they have just not on the mac it had been on those

16:55Marco Arment:ipad keyboards yeah jason snell actually mentioned exactly this on upgrade uh yesterday pretty much the same parts from that first magic magic keyboard the verge has a review which is worth

17:06John Siracusa:reading but among other things in their review they talk about ssd speeds and john you've been kind enough to put a table in here for us uh which is in our internal show notes but the short long and short of it is macbook neo uh the 256 gig version anyway will read and write 1.7 gigabits per second gigabytes that's what i said gigabytes per second um the m1 macbook air with a half terabyte is 3.4 gigabytes per second. The M5 MacBook Air with a one terabyte drive does double that. So we're basically doubling each step, uh, does double that at seven gigabytes per second. And the M5 max MacBook pro with four terabytes will do 13.6 gigabytes per second.

17:47John Siracusa:So it's basically, maybe not literally, but effectively doubling each step of the way.

17:51Casey Liss:And this, uh, this was getting to what I was asking last time. It's like, okay, well, what are the SSD speeds going to be like? Because people tend not to benchmark the, uh, quote unquote SSD speeds on phones. And this is a phone chip. And it turns out it's about half the speed of the M1 MacBook Air, which is a shame and not ideal for a Mac, but it's fine for the Neo. But what I think is another place where the 18 Pro is not, you know, really designed for a Mac, because the bandwidth we expect out of a Mac and the size of the SSDs and, you know, how much IO goes on and so on and so forth, the expectations are different on a Mac.

18:21Casey Liss:So I do wonder if that will change in the A19, A20 or whatever, you know, as the Neo evolves, I'm going to keep an eye on this because this is a you know quite a regression in ssd speed from from the walmart m1 macbook air which had twice as fast speeds and then it also to note i mean we didn't make much of this when we talked about it but like when the m5 macbook pro came out the plain non-suffix m5 macbook pro came out a while ago it was noted that um the ssd speeds basically doubled because i guess they doubled the the bus width or whatever they did anyway the m5 macbook air uh benefits from that as well, as does the M5 Max and M5 Pro, MacBook Pro.

18:58Casey Liss:SSD speeds are just getting better and better, so that's great.

19:02John Siracusa:Peter Puglio writes, with regard to John talking about the cost savings for the embossed Apple logo on the MacBook Neo and the more expensive inlaid alternative, Peter writes, I wonder if he was actually, if John was actually thinking about the iPhone 5 intro video where Johnny Ive explains how they used high-powered cameras to determine which glass cutouts best fit the inlay of the device body. I did not remember this until I watched the video and either Peter or John was kind enough to put a timestamp link in the show notes, which we will put in our show notes. But yeah, I do remember this having seen it and that is pretty bananas.

19:34Casey Liss:Yeah, that's the technology involved. I swear I saw one for the Apple logos as well, but who knows, I could have been mixing it up with this. But Jason has some more info on this topic.

19:43John Siracusa:So with regard to our dear friend Jason Snell over at Six Colors, he writes, the Apple logo on the top has changed too. It's still a separate part, but made of anodized aluminum rather than polished steel with a slightly different color shade than the rest of the device's body.

19:57Casey Liss:So this answers the question. I saw a lot of posts saying, Oh, the Mac book Neo, it's not a separate piece. It's just like carved into the surface. So it's just one big piece of aluminum. They kind of carve out a recessed area. That's Apple logo. No, it's still a separate piece. It's just not polished steel anymore. It's aluminum. I don't know if that saves any money. Cause I was saying the embossed logo is a money saving thing. because it's cheaper to just carve a little apple shape in it than it is to you know have those computer controlled cameras match up the parts and do the inlays no they still did the inlay the only difference is it's not two different materials maybe that makes it easier because they expand and contract at the same rate because they're both aluminum or something but apple gonna apple they could not bear to not have their extremely precisely inlaid apple logo next time you're looking at the top of your laptop when you're when you're cleaning the fingerprint smudges off the shiny apple logo on the back of your laptop look how well it fits look how well it fits in the aluminum try to find like a place where it's like doesn't fit or there's a gap or something it's pretty amazing and i guess the neos are just as amazing it's just aluminum in

20:52Marco Arment:both places yeah and speaking of that fingerprint magnet polished apple logo on the other laptops i wouldn't mind if that you know got a different finish in a future design because it's a fingerprint magnet and any little tiny scuff or scratch you will see that there forever something a little bit more brushed or textured like what they did on the neo i think that would be a welcome change for future redesigns.

21:16John Siracusa:Dave2D, the YouTuber, did a pretty good and relatively short review of the Neo, but among other things, Dave took off the back cover, so we got a view of the back cover, or what's under the back cover, I should say. Additionally, Dave mentioned that the Neo takes up to 30 watts from a charger, although it only comes with a 20-watt charger in the box. Whoopsie-dipsies. But under the back cover, you can see that there's a bunch of different, like, components, but it's not nearly as jam-packed. Well, maybe it's jam-packed. I don't know how to describe this, but it's not

21:47Casey Liss:jam-packed. The battery, as we noted, is so much smaller. It's like a third smaller than the MacBook Air. So normally when you open these things up, it's like battery everywhere. This has battery in the middle and then, of course, the trackpad in front of that. But then to the left and the right of the trackpad, instead of there being more battery, there is speakers, plastic space fillers, I'm going to say, because there's no way the speakers are filling all that space. I mean,

22:12John Siracusa:I wouldn't be so sure.

22:12Marco Arment:If you look at the design of modern iPads with good speakers, this is kind of similar to what they do, where they have like a big internal cavity that works as like a speaker, you know, sound channel. So I think, obviously, like I think the priority here was, of course, it was cost. And I'm sure one of the biggest reasons the battery does not fill the whole thing is cost. um so i think they had space and i think they chose to use that space of like let's make good speaker acoustic channels in here so that is almost certainly what those are or do they best

22:47Casey Liss:best they can with it we should open that up to see if like the speaker port is like i i know there's lots of different ways you can make sort of a winding tube inside a speaker body to enhance space and stuff like that but this is excessive if you look at how these the much better speakers in the macbook pros how much little how little space they take up and you're right that the ipad ones do take more space but like i feel like that's the same issue especially on the big ipads it's like well we've got the space we might as well use it for something but the point is on all apple's other laptops in recent years every ounce of space is filled with battery but not on the neo for cost-saving reasons you know that has a smaller battery because it can get away with a smaller battery and still have comparable battery life um and less battery costs less

23:27John Siracusa:money that's what it comes down to uh i was looking at a teardown it wasn't the i fix a teardown. I'll put a link in the show notes. It was somebody I didn't recognize, but some Australian. And they took apart the entire MacBook Neo. Now, granted, they accelerated some parts. There were literally, I think, 15 screws or something like that around the battery. But what was fascinating about this teardown was there was almost no adhesive anywhere in this thing. It was pretty much all screws top to bottom, which is extremely unlike any other Apple product teardown I've ever seen, which is very cool.

24:00John Siracusa:So I'm really into that. They were, this person was concluding, this is likely the most repairable Apple laptop ever.

24:06Casey Liss:Oh, and speaking of the trackpad, the day 2D video shows some of that as well. If you're wondering how it works, basically there is a, a button underneath the trackpad dead center. And then there is a little pin in the trackpad that presses that button. And that little pin or nubbin is attached to a sideways H shaped piece of metal and so wherever you press on the on the trackpad it presses down the entire metal h which presses down the center thing which presses the buttons in the center and then there's these two kind of leaf springs on the left and right in the spaces of the h to push the thing back up so he shows how it works i again i don't know if that's also how it works on the ipad ones but jason says it is um and dave also tested the speakers if you look at the uh what do you call it frequency response uh lines uh this shows the macbook pro versus macbook air versus the neo suffice it to say that what you actually want to see here is essentially a straight line uh from left to right uh and uh the less it is straight the worse it is and yeah the neo is not as good as the air which is significantly worse than the pro so that's what you would expect for the price um and then he also did battery tests which i thought was interesting i'm not sure how how he did them but he divided it up into heavy load and light load and demonstrates a few things obviously it demonstrates that the neo does have less battery life than the macbook air which has a battery that's one third uh bigger so that makes sense um and then the macbook pro this is the m5 max version gets worse battery life than the air which you would expect because of the uh bigger power demands and also you can see the thing that we've talked about in the past where if you max out the max chip uh it will use a huge amount of power and drain your battery very quickly so the heavy load time the m5 max gets the slowest heavy load time because it has the most machinery to use energy i think you get like 70 watts or something when you go all out on it um so yeah that really demonstrates although it's kind of not a fair fight because what they're doing is we're going to run you under heavy load until you run out of battery power whereas if you have a fixed workload the m5 max will use more power but it will get it done more quickly you know and then be idle again the race to sleep phenomenon so uh keep that in mind it doesn't mean that you will get worse battery life from your m5 max than either the other computers doing a specific task but it does mean if you just run a benchmark and leave it running until the battery drains uh it'll drain first on the m5 max also before we leave the uh this the neo going back

26:41Marco Arment:to the repairability angle and the design of the repairability. I think that is also like more important than ever for this type of price category, because when you have a less expensive product, you're going to sell it to, first of all, like kind of fleet users, think like schools and stuff like that, that have a whole bunch of them. And those need to be repairable oftentimes like quote in the field, like the school IT department sometimes does that themselves and they need to to be able to make simple repairs. And so that's important for that. But then also, when you look at different markets around the world that these are sold, there's a lot of places out there that rely on much less equipped or lower cost repair networks.

27:29Marco Arment:So when you think about if there's a country that doesn't have Apple stores, or that doesn't have a lot of Apple stores, or if you live many hours from one, or you're relying on a network of third-party repair shops or kind of more local options as a result of that, the simpler the product is to repair, first of all, you need the product to be cheaper usually to sell to a lot of those markets, but then the simpler it is to repair also over time, that makes it more accessible to more people. It makes it last longer for the people who need it and people who use it. So all of that goes in. Like repair and cost go hand in hand.

28:04Marco Arment:and this is again like a huge step forward for making macs more accessible to more places around

28:12John Siracusa:the world that's a huge deal yep couldn't agree more uh for what it's worth i did go to the apple store earlier today in order to look at the neo and the displays and i don't have that much to say about any of them but i will say i did like the colors uh i don't love the color matched keyboards personally but that's because i'm a bit of an old man uh but i like the colors i thought

28:34Marco Arment:they looked really great for what it's worth see i love that they match the color the keyboards to it because like that's again like when you're when you look at like what brought us all to apple in the first place it was little delightful attention to detail kind of things like that and even if you don't like the you know the the p color keyboard or whatever it's like you know even if you don't like the colors they chose i'm glad they did exactly that you know that when apparently also So they pre-configure Mac OS by default to use the tint color of the hardware, of the case. That's a great idea.

29:10Marco Arment:Little accents like that, that matters. That adds up. And that's how you win over new people to like, oh, I'm so delighted by this Apple product. People who've never had a Mac before, if they go for this, all those little delights, they're going to be seeing those for the first time. That's how you build loyalty and that's how you build a customer base. And again, this is why we're all here is for stuff like that. little delights over time that at one point it was our first time seeing that and again broadening the market it's such a nice thing that this is this is a hit as far as i can tell also before we leave the you know the neo too much here um i wanted to briefly mention briefly comment on like there's been a couple of videos out here and there um our friend tyler stallman did a great one about basically like pushing what the neo can do you know people often assume that low-end computers can't do some kind of perceived to be high-end task, whether that is stuff like software development, running Xcode.

30:08Marco Arment:The most common thing people always cite is video editing. And this has been a thing that we've been saying that, oh, you need an insert high-end model here to do video editing. But we've been saying that for a long time. the neo has approximately the performance of the m1 in many ways or better it's like m1 or better in most in almost every performance metric but when the m1 came out it when it was the high-end chip you know what people did on their computers they edited 4k video that was a common task that you would advertise the capability of doing on high-end computers of the time, edit 4K video.

30:58Marco Arment:So today, when the M1 is the low-end model, it didn't become less able to edit 4K video in the intervening time. Also, you know what else edits 4K video all the time? The iPhone. Well, this is a chip from the iPhone, from the good iPhone too. And iPhones have been shooting and editing 4K video for many years now. So the iPhone processor can, of course, do that. I think we often get lost in our perception of what we need hardware-wise. And our hardware needs Overton window shifts forward as hardware gets better. We always look at the current product line and say, oh, well, we are professionals.

31:43Marco Arment:So we need the MacBook Pro. We need the M whatever pro chip. And we need the pro resource levels for everything. But what that means shifts up over time. Now, granted, so does software. Like software will use more resources over time as they are available. But I think it is wise for us to not assume or state that a product can't handle some high-end application unless we've tried it or unless we've seen somebody who's tried it and seen the results and actually compare them, actually look at benchmarks or actually look at tests that actually do exactly that thing. The MacBook Neo is not right for a lot of people.

32:18Marco Arment:That's fine. But it can do almost everything that almost everyone wants to do with their computer. It might do it more slowly. It might not, you know, I think the RAM is probably the most limiting factor for a lot of those things. But again, this is a Mac. So we have swap and it's fine. Like most things can be done that most people will want to do, including photo editing, video editing, all those things that we think of as high end that you need a big computer for. Big computers will do it faster, better and nicer, maybe, but you don't necessarily need it. So I think it's again, it's wise to keep that in mind.

32:57Marco Arment:Like even low end hardware these days is so good that it can do almost everything just maybe more slowly.

33:06Casey Liss:my Tahoe dev machine is an m1 macbook air runs xcode i open as many things as i want no problem

33:14John Siracusa:we are sponsored this week by claude so let me tell you a true story this really really is true earlier this week i thought to myself you know claude has sponsored the show in the past they're sponsoring this week they were kind enough enough to give us a little bit of uh credit for a claude pro let me see if i can find a problem that i've really wanted to tackle and i've never been able to. And that problem was intense. The system by which an iOS app can vend actions to shortcuts. And for the life of me, I've bounced off of this API like five times. It's so inscrutable to me. I don't know if I'm a dummy or if the documentation is awful, but one way or another, I just could not get my hands around it.

33:55John Siracusa:And so I thought, let me see if Claude can do it. And so let me tell you that Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So my problem that mattered was building an intent. And I asked Claude by way of Xcode because it's all integrated. And I said, hey, can you generate an intent for me to get information about a movie or a show or a person? And it said, sure, what next?

34:25John Siracusa:And I said, okay, well, can you make another intent for me? And as the kids say, it effectively said, bet. And so next thing I knew, I have a small suite of intents ready to go on test flight, all thanks to Claude. This is an API that I could not get my head around, and Claude did it lickety-split. It was incredibly cool and genuinely eye-opening. But there's other things that Claude does. It'll do deep research. It has connectors via MCP, which is very, very in vogue right now. You can have it build artifacts. You can do, like I was describing, agentic coding. There's a learning mode where you can see exactly how it thinks and debugs and so on and so forth.

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35:22John Siracusa:Speaking of CPUs, then let's talk about performance cores versus super cores. uh brendan shanks writes that's new in xcode 26.4 beta 3 cpu family arm sotra which is h17s that contains p cores and m cores uh now there's a cluster type m enumeration to go with type e and

35:43Casey Liss:type p john can you translate all that for me please yeah so h17s is the code name for the m5 pro that was missing and i remember that rumor was like oh there's a bunch of these code names in a new version of whatever os it does but there's no h17s where's the m5 pro well i don't know why it wasn't in there but it's in there now uh and the m type is the you know it's medium it's between the e efficiency cores and the p which are not the performance cores but are the

36:11Marco Arment:super cores this is can we just like i'm just going to adopt this the naming nomenclature of just like small medium and big because that's what they are like there's the big cores and you know they call them super now the big cores are super cores okay the smallest cores are what are called efficiency cores in the base chips okay and then the pro and max now have a new medium core the base chip has small and big the pro and max have medium and big and it is indeed a new core yeah

36:44Casey Liss:and they used m probably i mean i don't know if they meant medium or whatever because it's not like it's large and small but anyway m is a lot easier to remember um we'll see if the the e-course ever gets phased out because the plane m5 has them but maybe like the plane m6 won't but we'll see um yeah so that that simplifies the nomenclature a little bit more and then uh quinn nelson had

37:04John Siracusa:some more info on this right so as per quinn um the m5 pro and m5 max are on n3p while the m5 plane was on n3e additionally citing baidu leakers uh with regard to the cores the super cores are 4.61 gigahertz with 10 wide decoding john what does that mean that means that when you're decoding

37:26Casey Liss:instructions uh you can do 10 at the same time it's like how much like how wide is the super

37:31John Siracusa:highway running through the chip sort of gotcha uh the performance cores which are m cores are 4.38 gigahertz with seven wide decoding so about 70 of the performance of a super core it also inherit they also inherit the dual operating mode of the efficiency cores which is to say that they can drop to a low power state for background tasks then the efficiency cores are 3.05 gigahertz with

37:54Casey Liss:six wide decoding yeah so i mean that that's small medium large like margot was saying 10 wide seven wide six wide so the whiff it's not that much wider than the efficiency core but the clock speed, it can go up to 4.38 instead of 3.0. So it seems like the clock speed increase alone is the main source of, you know, what makes an M core faster than an E core. It's just, it goes up higher. It's just clocked higher and it is a little bit more wide. Um, and you can see how it's, it's within, you know, shouting distance of the 4.6 gigahertz of the big super cores.

38:26John Siracusa:Then Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has some more differences between the chips, uh, with regard to l2 cache the super or p core has 16 megs the performance or m core has eight and the

38:37Casey Liss:efficiency or e core has six and it's interesting that in cache the medium is closer to the small than it is because it's the the largest twice as much so that's like what what makes a super core super one of the things is they just spend more transistors and more space on cache the minimum

38:53John Siracusa:clock speed we were just talking about maximums but the minimum clock speed for performance or super, excuse me, is 1300 megahertz, 1308 megahertz. The performance is 1344 megahertz, and the efficiency is a scant 972 megahertz.

39:09Casey Liss:Yeah, so the medium ones don't go as slow as they actually don't even, the big cores actually go slower than the medium cores, and they don't nearly go as slow as the efficiency cores, although I do wonder if this is the thing that Quinn posted about inheriting the dual operating mode to go to a low power state. I wonder if there's actually a lower clock speed below the 1300, but who knows?

39:29John Siracusa:Then Frederick Orange writes fusion architecture in one slide. This slide is not the reality. It's just to show the main IP blocks. I think the green surface is probably smaller. So we'll put a link to this in the show notes, but suffice to say, it appears to me that the CPU die is pretty much the same across the M5 Pro and M5 Max, but the GPU die is quite a bit different and there's some sort of

39:52Casey Liss:interposer like thing connecting the two well so that's the thing about this drawing i put this in here because it was i wanted you know someone was just coming up with like maybe it looks like this inside the chip because we haven't seen a real die shot and so this is kind of just you know i think the gpu thing is accurate it's clear that like when they just chop off half the gpu that's it's going to look like half the gpu is chopped off we've seen that before with the m1 and m2 maxim pro but i don't think there is a you know those green strips those interposer things i don't think that's how they're doing it the whole point with the um the new uh tsmc process of the 2.5d stacking thing soic mh is that it doesn't have that but i don't know enough to know so or wait to see an actual die shot but if you want to get an idea of like what kind of stuff is in the chip even if this is not how it's arranged or how it's connected to each other this which is basically a repurposing of die shots of earlier m series chips gives you an idea of what the difference is uh between these two chips and the relative sizes of the parts.

40:47John Siracusa:We also need to perform a correction from last week. Richard Allen writes, MacBook Pro storage upgrades didn't actually get any cheaper. It only looks this way because the base storage was doubled across the lineup. For the M5 or M5 Pro, this was accompanied by a 100-pound increase to the base models, previously a 200-pound build to order. In effect, this means that the price for storage is 100 pounds cheaper across all storage configs than the last gen, but the gaps between storage tiers remains the same.

41:14Casey Liss:Yeah, I asked how he was figuring this out because when I was trying to get this info for the review, I made the mistake of missing the deadline to check Apple's website for the upgrade prices. Like they do the thing where the store goes down. Anyway, I couldn't go to Apple.com and actually use the configurator for the old things. So I did what I usually do, which is go to archive.org to use the configurator as it existed before the new products came out. but archive.org cannot handle whatever javascript redirect stuff the apple store does and i could not get to the screen where i could choose the storage size options and so i asked richard what are you basing this on is it just based on your memory he said it was based on the mac studio storage prices which you can still go and configure because that hasn't been updated to the m5 yet and also his memory of what it used to be and obviously this is in pounds because he's in the uk but uh yeah it's it's tracking uh the uh price delta changes across generations is made extremely difficult when archive.org fails me the next time i'll have to remember to get all of the upgrade

42:16John Siracusa:prices before the machines come out all right there's also new keyboards on the macbook pros at least here in america dan morin writes interesting change between the m4 and m5 generations of macbook apple's replaced some of the keyboard labels with glyphs alone tab caps lock shift delete and return function control option command and escape all retain their labels so let me repeat that now there are just glyphs for tab caps locks shift delete and return they the following remain as words function control option command and escape uh also we are aware as dan writes that this has been the case outside the united states for some time but it's also the

42:52Casey Liss:case here now too yeah it's kind of weird because there's only a few keys it's not like you know it's like they're saving money by not having to localize those or whatever but it's you know most of the keyboard is the same but they're just standardizing um i don't know i think it's fine like i think it's useful because the menus use these same symbols like they use the up arrow for shift they use the little returnee glyph for return and the thing you know so if someone is looking in the menu and trying and seeing a keyboard shortcut they're like what key is that telling me it is it is good to see the same symbols on the keyboard uh i'm not sure you had to remove the word because you know command and option and stuff have both the symbol and the word but that's because command option, so on and so forth, are sometimes spelled out in Apple's own documentation.

43:35Casey Liss:They don't just use the symbols. They actually usually use the word. So, you know, I'll get used to it, I guess. And the rest of the world's been used to it for a while, I suppose.

43:45John Siracusa:We got a lot of questions about what are third-party alternatives to Apple's displays? You know, say I want something akin to the studio display or even the XDR, but I don't want to pay Apple pricing. What should I get? John, what are your thoughts on this?

44:01Casey Liss:Yeah, we've talked about a lot of alternatives in many, many past episodes. And I'm sure we'll revisit this topic in a future episode. But at this point, it's best to wait until all the CES announced displays are actually shipping and have been reviewed. We talked about some of those displays on past episodes, but they're not out yet. So rather than sort of go through a list of good alternatives now and say, this information will be out of date in a month, we might as well just wait until all the displays that were announced in CES are released and then we'll come back to it.

44:29John Siracusa:All right. And then Dan Boyle writes, I'm listening to the Studio Display XDR discussion and there was a comment about third-party monitors missing integration features that Apple monitors have. I've been using a Mac as my primary computer since around the turn of the millennium and haven't used an Apple-branded standalone display for probably two decades. What have I been missing on the integration side, aside from not burning a couple hundred extra dollars with each purchase? I mean, I haven't used... I've used the Studio Display and I have these LG 5Ks, I think what you're missing is that everything is just a touch better.

45:02John Siracusa:So like the panel on the studio display, this is the OG studio display, is better than the panel on the two LG 5Ks that I have. The LG 5Ks like to occasionally wake up slightly dimmed. Why? I don't know. They just do. The speakers on the LG 5Ks are absolutely terrible. Now, I haven't used any of my computer monitor speakers in like a year, thanks to my Sonos setup. but the studio display was reasonable and allegedly the new ones are much better uh the lg 5ks were truly terrible uh additionally by and large i don't really long for having buttons i did at the very beginning when the studio display had a little bit of software quirks to it but i haven't thought about the software in the studio display in like three years after the first six months or so they got that under control so i think what you're missing is just having a nicer version of everything but I don't know.

45:54John Siracusa:What am I not thinking of?

45:55Casey Liss:I think you're missing some integration stuff. So the Apple monitors, everything works on them. So there are keys on your keyboard to adjust brightness. Those are going to work with an Apple monitor. If the monitor has built in speakers, those are going to work with macOS. Does it have a built in camera that's going to work with macOS?

46:11John Siracusa:Now, all of that is true of my LG 5Ks, but what I didn't consider is stuff like True Tone and Night Shift and all that.

46:16Casey Liss:All that stuff. If there's adjustments in system settings that adjust things like what, when should the monitor dim when should not should we use night shift should this or that that's all going to work um also mac os knows about all of apple's monitors so they will come out of the box when you plug them in your mac knows about them knows what color profile to run on them like they're calibrated at the factory and so are a lot of third-party displays but if you get apple displays i mean again like like the asus advertising was talking about at ces if you open up your mac laptop screen and look at that screen and then you connect an apple screen to the laptop the the external screen is going to match the built-in screen on the laptop in terms of color and all that other stuff and asus was advertising that they can do the same thing because they have a color profile that matches it all this is that they're calibrated to be accurate out of the box i'm not even sure if you the studio display actually has a different panel than your lg but it's clear that it looks better than your lg lg possibly just because it's calibrated better and has more sophisticated circuitry driving it um but it's mostly stuff like like you were saying does it wake up when my mac wakes up do i have to plug and unplug it do i have to turn it on and off does the brightness feature work does it go to default to maximum brightness when i reboot my computer for some reason do the brightness keys on my keyboard not work do the sound keys on my keyboard not change the volume of the speakers that are in the thing all of that integration stuff like the hardware software integration and like you said if if there's a camera built in uh you said your lg has a camera and it works with mac os but maybe a new version of mac os doesn't support it you have to install a third-party driver it's that type of stuff that type of hardware software integration it's not to say you can't get it to work with third-party monitor the problem is most third-party display makers do not care enough about the mac to support the features in their monitor in mac os or maybe they support the features in their monitor mac os when the monitor was released and then as years go on they're like oh we're never going to make new drivers for that and the drivers stop working in a new version of mac os or something.

48:10Casey Liss:So it's not really a technical hurdle. It's that Apple cares enough about the Mac to make sure all the features in its monitor work when you buy it and continue to work when future versions of Mac OS come out. Yeah.

48:24John Siracusa:Imphaz asks, would you recommend getting a new studio display XDR or a used 32 inch pro display XDR for around the same price? I am going to give you the correct answer to this question. And then these two knuckleheads will give you the wrong answer. The correct answer is you get a new one. And yes, I understand the 32 is more than 27, but get a new one. Everything about that screen is better with the exception of size. So get the new one. Now, gentlemen, what's the incorrect answer?

48:48Marco Arment:I would say you are correct for one reason. We don't know if there will ever be a good first party Apple 6K option again. So what John was just saying about how, you know, third party monitors and what Casey was just saying, like all the things that make third-party monitors not very good with you know of an experience using using with max you are better off having an apple monitor but if you once you go 6k once you expand your monitor going up in monitor size is glorious going down in monitor size is painful so if you never use a 6k monitor you'll never get used to a 6k monitor so stick with your 27 inch 5k size and get the best one that now exists, which is Apple's new Studio Display XDR, get that while you still can.

49:39Marco Arment:Don't become a 6K addict like me. You can never go back. I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever have to go back. I mean, look, the answer is I would suffer through, you know, but if you never try 6K, you will never know 6K. And in every other way, the new Studio XDR is the better choice. So go with that.

49:59Casey Liss:I replied to this person on Mastodon and I said, I would get to use 6K display, but if you've never used a 6K display, get the Pro Display XDR. For the reasons Marco said, if you've never gotten used a 6K, don't do it. You're fine. You don't know what you're missing. Like Casey said, the Pro Display XDR is a better looking monitor.

50:22Casey Liss:And if you've never used 6K, you don't know what you're missing, so that's what you should get.

50:26John Siracusa:All right. Let's talk about the Studio Display RAM and storage apparently um as per mac rumors the studio display has an a19 with eight gigs of ram and 128 gigabytes of storage why who knows the studio display xdr the a19 pro has 12 gigs of ram

50:45Casey Liss:and 120 gigs of storage as well yeah it's a kind of a shame that uh you can't boot mac os on these things because let's be honest like as someone was saying like this is vastly more powerful than the 5k iMac was it is it's it is a powerful computer it's more powerful than macbook neo obviously like now i know that that a19 pro in there is doing presumably doing stuff uh for the monitor but i kind of feel like it could do the stuff for the monitor and also run mac os imagine if you i mean you're paying three grand for a studio display xdr anyway shouldn't it also just be a mac if you wanted to and yeah 128 is tight uh but it's kind of cool that your monitor could be a mac i'm sure some we'll figure out some way to hack it someday uh maybe when these things are old but yeah uh and why does it have that much storage probably because it's just those are the chips they had left over for that didn't work in phones or something and they just they came with 128 like i don't even know like is it is it less is it less expensive to get 128 than it would be to manufacture a 64 or whatever because remember the uh you know these are phone chips with like integrated storage not integrated but like it's it they're manufactured with with uh for use in phones uh and they have the storage that they have you don't need 128 to hold the os that's for sure and i don't think it's actually storing any data at all there and if it was it wasn't it's not going to be filling 128 but that's what's in there a fairly powerful mac caliber chip that is more powerful than and has more ram in the case of the studio display xdr than the MacBook Neo.

52:15John Siracusa:And speaking of the XDR, I went to the Apple store today, as I said briefly earlier, and I checked out the Neo and I checked out the studio display and the studio display XDR. Interestingly, the studio display was mated to a MacBook Neo. The XDR was mated to a Mac studio. and I got to tell you, they were, I don't know, two feet apart from each other. And there weren't that many people in the store at like two o 'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I went back and forth looking at the two of them. I used the UFO test website that we used for something in the past. I don't remember when it came up, but we used it for something.

52:57John Siracusa:And I used that website to try to like, see what the ghosting and blooming looked like. And I kept looking back and forth between the two monitors. And honestly, to my eyes, in a bright Apple store on a very sunny day in Virginia on a Wednesday afternoon, the only way I could tell that the XDR was the XDR was that the 120 hertz scrolling, I can tell immediately. In the same way that, you know, people who believe in Celsius say, oh, you can't tell one degree Fahrenheit difference. I can tell. So can John. So can Marco. In the same way, I can tell the scrolling, even just using Safari, I could see the difference in scrolling between the 120 hertz studios play XDR and the 60 hertz studio display.

53:40John Siracusa:That being said, for my admittedly crap eyeballs, in terms of like blooming and stuff like that, I really couldn't tell the difference.

53:51Casey Liss:I mean, there's no blooming on the plain studio display because there's one big backlight. What you should have just done is like run a movie in Letterboxd and so you can see the black bars above and below.

53:59John Siracusa:That's true.

54:00Casey Liss:Then you would notice that the black bars are gray on the studio display. And by the way, this brings up another naming problem that we're going to have. We have been referring to my and Marco's 6K monitor as the XDR for short, and that doesn't work anymore because there's two Apple displays that have XDR at the end of them. So this is going to be tough. But I guess as our displays have been discontinued and fade from history, XDR will start to mean the studio display XDR. But yeah, you'll notice if anything that has to do with black levels. And remember also we talked about that Safari, there's some setting in Safari that makes it only do 60 hertz unless you flip the setting and let it go higher.

54:37John Siracusa:Yes, and I tried to do that, and I think I succeeded on the XDR. Obviously, it didn't really make a difference on the non-XDR studio display, on the studio display plane. But again, I could absolutely tell. Even just scrolling my own website, you can see the difference.

54:51Marco Arment:Yeah, because to be clear, that extra setting was only to update the content of the webpage at more than 60 hertz, the scrolling of the webpage, which I think is where you notice it the most, is already 120 hertz.

55:03Casey Liss:I was talking about the Blurbusters UFO thing. That's where you needed that.

55:07John Siracusa:Which I did try to set. I'm not saying, this was a very unscientific test. I didn't think I would even have time to go to the Apple Store today had I realized I was going to have time. And I had a short window of time with which to do it. So if I had had the time, I would have better prepared for this experience and I would have figured out some video to watch or like figured out a good YouTube example, whatever the case may be. So don't take this, you know, don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying don't buy a studio display XDR or anything like that. But I was not as impressed by the mini LED portion of it as I expected in my extremely unscientific test.

55:42Casey Liss:You didn't watch it. You should have pulled up an HDR photo. Like that's the other thing you should have done because you're not used to even doing that because you don't have any HDR monitors. But like that's, you'll notice it immediately.

55:51John Siracusa:Yeah, that's true. I didn't think about that. again i should have done more research but john wouldn't let me that's how the song goes right yep totally uh all right so we're there are some videos of the studio display xdr video reviews of studios play xdr uh mkbhd notes that the power cable remains non-removable just like the og studio

56:08Casey Liss:display although i have to think i haven't looked this up but i have to think it is non-removable just like the quote-unquote non-removable power cable on the big home pod it's totally removable

56:17John Siracusa:No, I think you can. In fact, I thought, was it Panzerino that ripped it out of the studio display?

56:23Casey Liss:Yeah, I think we talked about it when they first came out. What they mean is it's not a plug. It's not a standardized plug that you can plug and unplug. So they're like, oh, if the power cable fails, you've got to throw out the homeowner. No, you can yank it out. It's just not a standard connector, and it's very difficult to get out, but it can actually be removed and replaced, just not by the end user. In theory, but having yanked the power cable out of a big HomePod, I can tell you it is possible to pull it out and put it back in. It's just way harder than you think it's going to be.

56:50John Siracusa:Kevin Sleich writes that the Studio Display XDR technology white paper goes into a lot of detail on all the new technologies into Apple's best desktop monitor. And I completely meant to read this earlier today, and it slipped my mind, so I have not done my research. Again, five demerits for Casey. But John, you did do the homework that this song asked you to do, so tell me about what's going on in here, please.

57:10Casey Liss:Yeah, this is a few things I pulled from the document that I thought were interesting. First, Apple is touting the super-wide viewing angle, and this is quoting from the document, and apple designed industry leading polarizer technology maintains accuracy and contrast for large viewing angle so when apple puts stuff like this in here they're always like this part of the monitor is apple designed i'm like all right well obviously apple didn't make the panel they're not a panel maker they got a panel from somebody else the panel makers often offer various options for things they can put on in front of the panel but it's like well no apple designed this polarizer it's a special apple like did they just make a bunch of requests did they just give a bunch of specs and say we want a polarizer that does x y and z but suffice it to say the apple claims that the thing on the front of their monitor that spreads the light out so it has a good viewing angle is an apple designed thing and it is quote-unquote industry leading so take that for what you will again as another potential thing of like what makes a difference between apple on a third-party one apple will tell you that their polarizer leads to better viewing angles i'm not sure this has been measured but it's a thing they claim and speaking of apple claiming things that they made that they're super proud of you may re uh remember the the abbreviation acronym tcon which stands for timing controller which is very strange because the t is for timing and the con is for controller um they were touting their tcon in the 5k imax a we made a special timing controller that uh because you have to basically run two head two displays and we combine them into one with our special timing controller well they're at it again uh as they say in the document timing controllers are used to control the timing and display of the pixels on an lcd panel studio display xdr introduces an advanced new apple design tcon they love designing tcons with four processing pipelines five embedded microcontrollers and a local frame buffer the tcon controls the led and lcd layers of the display separately treating them as two distinct displays with custom algorithms to seamlessly synchronize them into the final image so what they're saying is like there's the led backlight which has like whatever 2300 little leds and that is the lcd layer which has the millions of colored pixels and those two things are controlled independently continuing from the document it also stores and calibrate stores and applies calibration data to the pixels and the individual light characteristics for each of the 2304 led zones local dimming is controlled at eight times the display's maximum refresh rate to ensure seamless synchronization between the lcd pixel switching and led modulation so i think what they're saying is that they can turn on and off the backlight at eight times the refresh rate so eight times 120 um which in theory would make sure that the backlight isn't isn't ever lagging behind the lcd i'm not sure why it has to be 8x but that's what they say anyway continuing the t-con continuously monitors the brightness histogram and performs machine learning based content analysis to understand the content's blooming potential on the display then adjust the lighting to minimize bloom the t-con also detects certain patterns that may be difficult for the lcd panel to display and optimizes the display at the pixel level to minimize artifacts this is the kind of crap that you have to do when you have you don't have per pixel lighting control tv makers have been doing this forever which is like i've got these backlights i've got 2 000 backlights i got millions of pixels how do i decide which backlights to turn on and how bright to make them because i want to minimize blooming but i also want to have those bright brights you know it's it's a very difficult thing to do and they're coming up with always coming up with better and better algorithms to figure out what is the right at any given moment at apparently eight times the screen's refresh rate which leds should be on and how bright should they be based on what i know is coming in the screen that's going through our tcon controller so i mean that's reason number a million why i'm always in favor of pro pixel the lighting control because all these problems go away when you don't have to do this right which parts of the backlight should we turn on you just turn on the pixels right there are other problems that go with that so hard enough just to figure out just turning on the pixel but now you got to add this into the mix it makes it more difficult so uh they have had to do and i'm sure they did this on the macbook pros as well so i'm not sure why they didn't tout it there but like any mini led backlight screen has to do this type of stuff to figure out how to minimize blooming essentially and the early very primitive uh mini led backlit tvs did like a really primitive job of this they would just look at the image and say okay well based on the brightness of the image this is where it should and they had awful blooming um and it's not like like what has changed have we gotten better at mailing the led backlights mostly we've gotten better at controlling the backlights to minimize blooming based on what's on the screen but challenging situations like say star fields are always going to be challenging because you want pinpricks of light on a fully black background and that's tough to do when you have millions of pixels and thousands of backlights on the topic of calibration they're touting this apple displays undergo state-of-the-art calibration process however as new display technologies including ksf led backlight i don't know what the ksf stands for qd conversion sheet that's quantum dot conversions and oled have emerged even displays calibrated to identical targets using current standards can exhibit significantly different appearances.

1:02:13Casey Liss:This has revealed limitations in the standard color metric system derived from CIE-1931 color matching function, or CMF, widely used in the industry for display calibration. Apple has developed Apple CMF 2026 to aggress the limitations of CIE-1931 CMF, and the Studio Display XDR is the first Apple display to support it. So basically they're saying the standards that we use for calibrating monitors aren't sufficient anymore to, because if you calibrate two monitors using it and they're like, okay, they're both calibrated. Then you just look at both monitors. They're not the same. And so they've come up with their own calibration standard that is presumably better and takes into account all these new technologies like the variable backlighting and OLED and so on and so forth.

1:02:53Casey Liss:So, and of course they named it after themselves, the Apple CMF 2026. And that's what they'll be using on their displays going forward. I would imagine.

1:03:00John Siracusa:To be fair, the CIA 1931, I'm pretty sure 1931 is the year in which it was concocted. So it's probably about time for something new.

1:03:10Casey Liss:Is it, actually?

1:03:11John Siracusa:I think that's right. I may have that wrong, but I believe that to be true.

1:03:15Casey Liss:Anyway, it is an older standard, that's for sure. And it is, I'm sure it's a standard that predates mini LED backlighting and OLEDs and quantum dot conversion of colors. And finally, and I think most interestingly or strangely, they talk about display optimization modes. Studio Display XDR can optimize performance for the needs of different workflows. The default mode optimizes for lower latency to balance image quality and responsiveness resulting in performance similar to other local dimming lcds from apple so the default mode is basically will behave like your macbook pro's mini led display Reference modes optimize for higher quality, prioritizing temporal image quality and frame timing precision over maximum responsiveness.

1:04:00Casey Liss:In this mode, incoming frames are delayed by a small amount to perfectly synchronize the LCD with the backlight. This eliminates temporal artifacts that can occur with local dimming displays. All these problems you get when you don't do OLED. this added delay is also used to reduce the stutter that can occur from maintaining front of screen quality as the refresh rate varies so they give a diagram to try to just explain this like the default mode is it just works like your your macbook pro one but they have this reference mode where it's trying to avoid situations where the screen isn't behaving quite the way you want especially in situations where the refresh rate is changing because the adaptive refresh can go up to 120 and down to like 47 and everything in between but if you're watching if you're like using it for video and you want to see 24 frames per second video you want it to refresh at 24 so the diagram they give is trying to show like here's when frame one is ready here's when frame two is ready and here's when frame three is ready and then here's what's actually put out on the display and the optimized for lower latency one you can see that in the little timeline in the diagram if you love the document it shows a one a two and a three and they're equally spaced in the timeline.

1:05:05Casey Liss:But you can see, oh, frame two didn't get displayed when it was ready. Frame two couldn't get displayed because when it was ready, it's too late. The system had already redisplayed frame one again because the frame two wasn't ready yet. So frame two had to wait a little bit before it could go in. So now the actual gap between when frame one is displayed and when frame two is displayed is longer than the gap between two and three. And that's a stutter. You want your frames to be 124th, 124th, 124th. And now that's not the case, but it's optimized for a lower latency which is like look as soon as it's ready put it out as asap um the optimized for higher quality one shows one two and three equally spaced and it shows them being spaced out such that two becomes ready but it's like oh you're ready but we're not going to display you we're going to delay you so you're equally spaced between one two and three and it redisplays frame one again anyway the diagram is very confusing but it's basically like a trade-off that i think would only be important to like i guess video or anything else where it is really important that you see the actual frame rate and not get any weird stuttering that is a result of the display changing refresh rates or the display it's it's not the same as v-sync where it's like i won't display this frame until the the electron beam goes back to the top but it's similar in a similar idea like i don't think either mode has tearing because that's not a thing there's no electron beam here but it's like deciding should i display this frame asap or should i delay it to make an equal cadence.

1:06:32Casey Liss:I don't know how you pick between these modes. I don't know if the application tells the OS that it wants this mode or if it only works in full screen or something like that. But it does remind me a lot of the modes that are possible in gaming displays, which have different goals, obviously, but there's a million modes and technologies to try to make games look better and play better. And this seems more about fidelity to media. But this is apparently only a feature on the studio display xdr and like the calibration stuff only of interest to people who are willing to spend three thousand dollars on a monitor because they want the highest color quality and the highest possible fidelity and also this whole thing is dealing with as they say temporal artifacts that can occur with local dimming displays those oled displays can't come soon enough and by soon enough i mean i guess in another six years oh gracious i mean we're not holding our breath, right?

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1:09:30All right.

1:09:30John Siracusa:So I thought I would take over the show for the next little bit. I don't think I need either of you two anymore. Let's talk F1.

1:09:38Marco Arment:So John, what do you think about the Mac Pro?

1:09:40John Siracusa:Oh, God. See, there's been so many hours of Mac Pro content. You owe me like 20 minutes of F1 content. Thank you very much.

1:09:46Marco Arment:Go ahead.

1:09:47John Siracusa:But anyways, so Formula One is a bunch of pretty rich people spending money going around the world racing pretty big, pretty and fast cars. But I really enjoy it. I've gotten into it over the last several years. And there's been a lot of F1 news, particularly for Americans over the last month or two, because Apple has taken over rights to broadcast all of the Grands Prix. I think I have that right. Basically all the races here in America through Apple TV, which is super duper exciting. And I think we talked about it very briefly when that news had first landed here on the show. But now the season has begun.

1:10:26John Siracusa:We had our race in Melbourne or Melbourne, if you're Australian. And that was this past weekend as I record this, this coming weekend as I record this is the Chinese Grand Prix. And so I have done a little bit of Formula One-ing, if you will, of gone racing through Apple TV, and I wanted to talk about it a bit. First of all, right before the season started, I think it was early last week, there was genuinely bombshell news that Apple had arranged with Netflix, of all people, to do kind of a content exchange where Netflix is going to air a couple of the Grands Prix or races. I think the Montreal Grand Prix in particular, which obviously is in Canada, there might be a couple others, I forget off the top of my head, but they're going to air that on Netflix as well as on Apple TV.

1:11:13John Siracusa:But interestingly, Apple TV, you can now use your Apple TV or Apple One or what have you account to play the Netflix show Drive to Survive, which is fascinating and extremely cool because Drive to Survive is basically like a drama documentary about the prior Formula One season. They have a new, you know, like five to 10 episode run every year, typically coming out shortly before the season starts. And it is an incredible way to get into F1. If you are curious about F1 and really want to get into F1, I cannot recommend Drive to Survive enough. And you can now watch it on Apple TV, which is really cool because I canceled Netflix like three years ago.

1:11:56John Siracusa:And so I was really excited to be able to watch it. And as it turns out, for reasons that are not exceedingly important, last season was very, very interesting and very, very exciting. And actually, this season that just started is also interesting and exciting, and we'll probably talk about, or hopefully get to talk about why here in a second. But Drive to Survive is a great way to do a recap of last season and kind of understand who the players are, or the drivers are, I should say, but also the team principal, which is to kind of like the coach, and all the different teams, and understand what made last year so interesting.

1:12:31John Siracusa:And I got to tell you, it is weird whiplash. Going into the Apple TV app, which I rarely use to begin with, going into Drives to Survive, and then immediately being presented with a Netflix dun-dun from the Apple TV app, it melted my brain, fellas. It was so weird. And there's nothing wrong with it. It was just the weirdest feeling that somehow I'm watching Netflix via the Apple TV platform. Very, very weird. Apple has also provided a bunch of previews for the 2026 season. I'll put a link to a, like, I think it's 20 minute video that they've created, or perhaps Formula One has created that you can watch in Apple TV.

1:13:10John Siracusa:Just to give a very quick pitch for the 2026 F1 season, every five to 10 years, I think it's like five-ish years, there's a set of regulation changes that define how you build your race car. And this year, in 2026, we have a new set of regulations around not only the car, but the power unit, which is a combination of a gasoline and electric motor. And so the cars are smaller and they're not as long, they're not as wide, which means on certain tracks there's likely to be more passing just from a space perspective. the way they define a

1:13:47Marco Arment:formula to make they do all the cars yes they

1:13:50John Siracusa:define one formula for all the cars that's exactly

1:13:53Marco Arment:right honest question is that why it's called that

1:13:55John Siracusa:you know truth be told I'm not a big enough F1 fan to know I'm sure we're gonna get a million pieces of feedback about this I'm honestly not sure I believe that to be true because there's formula 2 formula 3 etc

1:14:05Marco Arment:oh I don't think I knew

1:14:06John Siracusa:that okay yeah they're they're they're like you know in the same way that there's you know double a baseball triple a baseball etc which probably doesn't Margaret doesn't know that either. Yeah.

1:14:15Marco Arment:No, honestly, I didn't know about AA. I did know about AAA because the Columbus team, the Columbus Clippers when I was growing up, was a AAA baseball team. There you go. And as somebody who likes hot dogs and having fun but doesn't care about professional sports, that was a great combination because you could go to a baseball game, which we did all the time on school trips and stuff. You could get great seats for not that much money. Everything was easier. You know, it's not nearly as hard for like, you know, parking and tickets and, you know, all the prices of everything and, you know, the crowds.

1:14:47Marco Arment:Like, it's like baseball, but fun.

1:14:50John Siracusa:Oh, gracious. You can send email to Marco about that. But anyways, so the new season, they have different regulations with regard to aerodynamics, different regulations with regard to basically the engine. All everything is turned upside down and inside out, not literally, of course. And so this is an incredibly good time to get into F1 because all of the people that have been winning for years, it is unlikely they will keep winning. Basically, every time they do regulation changes of either aerodynamics slash body styles or power units, usually the entire grid gets switched up and the people who sucked suddenly become good.

1:15:25John Siracusa:The people who were good suddenly start to suck. But now we're getting a switch of everything, the power units and the aerodynamics. So if you were even lightly interested in F1, I cannot stress enough, now is the time to jump in, particularly if you're American, because you can get F1 for quote-unquote free as long as you're an Apple TV subscriber. They made a lot of noise, Apple did, about how there will be quad box, which is Jason Snell's favorite thing. I like it as well, which is to say when you're watching an F1 race, when you're watching it live, and we'll get there in a second, you can do like one main feed and a trio of feeds off to the side.

1:16:01John Siracusa:So let's say you have the main race feed kind of front and center, and then off to the side you have maybe your three favorite drivers. Or maybe you have a map of the racetrack and two of your favorite drivers. Or maybe you have a map of the racetrack and the state of the tires and one of your favorite, your absolute favorite driver. And allegedly, there's also, actually reading from Jason Snell's coverage, there are 30 extra feeds, including a racetrack or driver data, podium channels as well that show the video of whichever cars are in the first, second, and third places, which is very clever, and all 22 driver cameras.

1:16:33John Siracusa:So every single one of these cars has telemetry. Every single one of these cars has a camera strapped to it. Well, maybe not literally strapped to it, but you get what I mean. And so you can watch the race from the perspective of your favorite driver if that's what you want to do. All of this is really incredible, and I've been living this world over the last couple of years, which we talked about several episodes ago through the really genuinely excellent F1 TV, which is Formula One's first party TV package that they use everywhere else in the world and is available here in America. But you can't pay for it anymore directly with F1 as you used to be able to do, and as I did to the tune of like$120 a year.

1:17:11John Siracusa:But now, if you're an Apple TV subscriber, you can link, and I'll put a link in the show notes of how to do this, you can link up your F1 TV account with your Apple account, and then you get the super mega ultra baller version of F1 TV with full 4k feeds and the whole rigmarole for quote unquote free, which is really great. And this is incredibly important right now for Americans because the Melbourne Grand Prix was at like, I think 11pm local time. So I stayed up to watch the first like three laps that I passed out. The Chinese Grand Prix, I think is that like one in the morning this coming Sunday or something like that.

1:17:44John Siracusa:I forget exactly when. Obviously, as they move to Europe and then to America, these races become a much more tenable time of day for Americans, but it's not great right now. Well, I decided to watch the race replay on Apple TV on Sunday morning after I'd woken up. And I quickly realized that on Apple TV, you can't do multi-view when you're doing the replay. And in fact, you can't choose any other audio feed. So a lot of people really like the Sky Sports crew, which is a British TV channel, I guess a cable channel, if I'm not mistaken. And when we got these things on ESPN, we would get their commentary, which was hilarious, as has been mentioned on Upgrade many times, because you'll hear these commentators say, and on your Sky Sports box, hit the red button to do blah, blah, blah, blah, sis, boom, blah.

1:18:34John Siracusa:And this is being broadcast on ESPN, where we don't have Sky Sports. It's very unusual. But a lot of people really like those commentators, despite the fact that they're deeply, deeply biased for anyone British. Not that I'm grumpy about it. So anyways, so you can't switch to the Sky Audio in the replay. You can't get any other cameras, can't switch to Sky Audio. The replays kind of suck on Apple TV, which is really surprising to me. And perhaps they'll get better and I'll follow up in the future if they do. But they really kind of suck right now. And it's funny because you can switch over to the F1 TV app, which is genuinely pretty good.

1:19:10John Siracusa:And you can get the replay with multicam, with the Sky Sports commentators, and the whole rigmarole. The other fascinating thing, and I would love for anyone who's listening to try this, even if you could not possibly care less about F1, when I did the race replay, first of all, it included like an hour of pre-show, which in the F1 TV app is separated into its own thing. And I didn't really love that. But the very first thing I saw was a f***ing ad for American Express. That was the first thing I saw when I started the replay. What are we doing? What are we doing? The whole value ad for Apple TV is not seeing any f***ing ads.

1:19:45John Siracusa:And now I'm seeing an ad for American Express front and center immediately. Sorry, John. Front and center.

1:19:50Marco Arment:Well, I mean, I think Apple has been very, very clear that Apple will put ads that it wants to put wherever it wants on all of its products, on all of its services, usually for its services. I mean, this is usually, This is a little bit. That's the thing. But Apple has already, by their actions, over and over again over many years, has already said, eh, we don't care about showing people ads. It's fine. We will take that tradeoff. They have already sold out that part of the user experience many years ago. And that is – I don't like that. I don't accept that. But that is true, that they don't care about showing you ads and promos as much as they want when it suits them.

1:20:34John Siracusa:Yeah. And I don't love it. I really don't. Oh yeah.

1:20:37Marco Arment:Neither do I.

1:20:37John Siracusa:Now, to be fair, I have not seen a live race yet and this coming week is not going to be that week either. So may I would presume, well, certainly the multi-view thing will get better in the live race. I don't know if there's going to be a like pre-roll ad or something like that in the live race. I really have no idea. But the other thing that's kind of chapped my bottom is that in the upper right-hand corner on and off throughout the race, it said in like a little like a half opaque, fade, not faded, but for lack of a better word, faded display in the upper right-hand corner, broadcast presented by American Express.

1:21:09John Siracusa:Pipe. Apple TV. What are we doing? What are we doing? That's not shown on F1 TV. I don't have to see any of this bullshit on F1 TV, but I have to see it on the, oh, the special Apple. We believe in design. We believe in nice shit. And I'm seeing this on Apple TV. Like, what are we doing here? I don't get it. I don't get it. Are there ads on the cars oh god yes but i mean but i mean that that's just noise at this point i'm sure there's

1:21:36Casey Liss:infinite ads in the video yes you're watching a bunch of billboards traveling 200 miles an hour

1:21:40John Siracusa:that is true you're not wrong you are not wrong i mean that's every sport i'm a little annoyed i didn't think of it that way until just now but you're not wrong uh but i don't know on that

1:21:49Casey Liss:topic though i have a question technical question i know you're watching f1 that that long but you were talking about the driver cameras and how you couldn't switch through them in the replace and and so forth and how they have a camera on every driver's car um i can't think of any other sporting event where such an integral part of the broadcast is attached to the competitors i know in other sports like they have the the camera that flies over the football field and the nfl and the wires and in other sports they have a thousand cameras around the stadium but those aren't they're not physically attached to the competitors like i don't i think maybe in the nfl they put like helmet cams on for something but they're not literally on every player that No, certainly not.

1:22:27Casey Liss:Integral part of the broadcast where if especially people get used to this, the expectation, first of all, it's the expectation of the producers of the show that they can choose any driver to show at any given time to build the broadcast. But second, with these apps, now the viewer also gets to choose. I want to see my favorite driver or whatever. Right. So this leads me to think, all right. What happens if the camera on whoever like the first or second place person is fails in the middle of the race? do they treat it like you know whatever like accident on the track everyone goes slow and they like fix the cameras or something no no no or do they say well tough luck the camera broke but we're not like we're gonna tell him to stop because that would really screw up the race because you know he's in the lead now and i mean i guess i mean i all i know about f1 is from the f1 movie with brad pitt so god knows what i did but like there are things that can happen on the track they can really mess things up for you if you're in the lead because like if there's a crash it's safety concern.

1:23:21Casey Liss:Everyone has to like stop racing essentially. Um, and same thing with, you know, people going to the pit stops and whatever. So has this ever happened? My question is what happens when the camera breaks? Surely this has happened at one point or another, what do they do?

1:23:33John Siracusa:Well, so as an example, when I've been watching the F1 TV app, there will often be a crash. And there was a couple of years ago before I was an F1 TV subscriber where a Roman gross, John, his car caught on fire. It was awful. I genuinely thought that the children and I had just watched this man die live on air. It turns out he was fine. It's an incredible story. It's worth looking into if you're interested in that sort of thing, because you know that it worked out all right. But before I realized how dire it was when they were still assessing the situation, or I guess it wasn't that crash, it was a different crash, but you could go back and look at the perspective of that driver as they're about to crash.

1:24:13John Siracusa:And again, in the four or five years I've been watching F1, this Grosjean one was the only time that I genuinely thought this man is either dead or severely injured. All these other crashes, they're usually up and out of the car almost immediately. It's a surprisingly safe sport given the danger involved with it. So anyways, when a crash happens, what you can do is you can flip over to that camera and watch their perspective of the crash. And then you'll see the driver get out of the car because the camera's like over their shoulder. And then they'll show like the crane picking up the car. And then at some point, one of the directors or whatever for F1 TV will be like, well, that's enough.

1:24:52John Siracusa:And then they'll just put up a logo of the team and that's that. And that's the entire rest of the race. If you go to that camera perspective, you just see a logo for like Red Bull or whatever. So they do not stop the show if the camera goes bad.

1:25:03Casey Liss:But that's for a car that crashed. I'm saying the car is racing. The person's in first place, but oh, their camera broke. The wire got loose. I totally understand.

1:25:12John Siracusa:I've never seen that happen. I'm not saying it hasn't happened.

1:25:14Casey Liss:I wonder if they have backup cameras, like they have a second one or whatever. It's just interesting to like, you know, the reason I'm thinking about it is because like oh a team could sabotage their own camera and you know make it break at an opportune time for them such that blah blah anyway because again all i know is the stupid brad pitt movie so who knows how realistic this is but it is a challenge because if you're a viewer and the person who's in first place like first and second place are dueling and you want to see through their camera and their camera breaks you miss out on that part of the bro you're never going to get that footage back so it's like it's you know and every sport is like that you like you know if it's dramatic play at the end of the super bowl or something which rarely happens but anyway um there's a thousand cameras in that stadium and if one of those cameras break don't worry there's plenty of other cameras like they'll get the angle they'll get the play like this it's their job they'll get you the content but if it's in a car like you can't the car is going zoom you can't sort of hop onto the car like a little droid and fix it for them they're too busy racing so anyway that's my question about cameras uh if what do they do when it breaks to answer that

1:26:13John Siracusa:a little bit. I've forgotten that as you're talking, it reminded me that I believe all the cameras have, or excuse me, all the cars have three cameras. They have the standard camera, which is over the shoulder of the driver. They have one that's really down low on the front wing of the car and one that's pointed behind the car. And so I would assume that if one of the three of those cameras fails, they would just lock in, for lack of a better word, on one of the other cameras. I don't know that for certainty, but that's what I would assume they do.

1:26:39Casey Liss:I've watched too many YouTube videos about plane crashes. Like, what about when all three cameras? That will never happen, right? Don't watch YouTube videos about plane crashes. It's not healthy.

1:26:49John Siracusa:Not a good idea. But yeah, I mean, as negative as I am about the advertising, which obviously I'm a touch negative, I do think that this is, on the whole, really great for Americans, really great to make the sport more accessible to Americans. Now, admittedly, ESPN is not that hard to come by. You know, basically anyone with a cable subscription had ESPN or has ESPN. but I do think that it's really neat that this is something that Apple is exploring. I bet you that whenever the time comes in a couple of weeks that there's a race that I can watch live, I suspect I'm going to be very enthusiastic about the live experience.

1:27:25John Siracusa:I also didn't mention that on the Vision Pro, I think you get five camera angles instead of four, which is exciting. But again, maybe they'll make the replays better as well. I mean, I'm not certain that that's going to happen, but I presume it will at some point. but sitting here now I'm kind of meh on the experience but I do think it has incredible potential and I'm really excited for them to realize that potential or in their defense I guess they have realized it's just I can't tell because I'm here in America where you know the races are on in the middle of the night so far but again I can't stress enough for the two of you and for anyone listening if you're even vaguely interested in technology in engineering in cars going fast in the drama of, you know, these incredibly big, loud personalities.

1:28:13John Siracusa:I really do think F1 is worth a look. And another thing that the F1 TV app does, and I'm pretty darn sure, I guess, Apple TV does do it as well. They'll also do a race in 30. So if you wanted to dip your toes in several hours after the race ends, they'll do a 30 minute cut of the race where, you know, they show all the exciting bits. And I can tell you the first race of this year, the first half, The first, you know, 30 or so of the 50-ish laps that they raced were really good and really, really exciting. The back half was kind of a snooze. But this is such a good time to jump into it. There's plenty of content out there, both within Apple TV and elsewhere, where you can check out, you know, what is F1 about?

1:28:49John Siracusa:How does it work, et cetera? This is a great time to do it. And if you are an American Apple TV subscriber, you really owe it to yourself to just give it a shot and just see, if nothing else, how are they handling these things? especially when I can tell you at some point multi-view is good or excuse me replays are good now and they have multi-view so even if you don't do it now you should do it later but I think you should check it out and I think the two of you I don't know if you have the attention span for a two-hour race either of you but I think especially the race in 30 might be interesting enough to you

1:29:17Casey Liss:to give it a shot and see what you think I'll watch the f1 sequel movie fair enough so in the

1:29:23John Siracusa:last week or two I forget exactly when it was Samsung had their big announcement for their new phones or I guess the new Galaxy line of phones, if nothing else. And they announced the Galaxy S26 and it has a feature. I didn't put this in the show notes because I kept forgetting. I'm assuming John did, but I'm really glad that which John or whoever put this in the show notes because I really wanted to talk about this. The S26 has something called the privacy display. If you're listening to this in a situation where you can watch a video for a few minutes, I strongly suggest you pause me for a moment and go watch Samsung's announcement video starting at 31 minutes and 10 seconds.

1:29:59John Siracusa:We'll put a link in the show notes that hopefully we'll have a timestamp on it, but one way or another, we'll have a link in the show notes for you. This is incredible. So I have some friends, some dear friends that live locally, right around the corner from me, basically. And the husband and wife, they both have these privacy screens on their phones. I'm sure you've seen this before, where you can only see what's on the screen, basically, if you're looking at it dead on. And if you're looking at it off, you know, on an angle of any sort, the screen is just like a deep gray or even black. It is annoying as hell when they show me their phone because they want me to see something on their phone.

1:30:34John Siracusa:But if they're not tilted exactly right, I can't see a damn thing.

1:30:38Marco Arment:Yeah, it basically makes the phone unusable in many common situations to get the privacy.

1:30:44John Siracusa:And that's, you know, that's not even taking into account the fact that the color is all like weird and, you know, everything looks kind of milky for lack of a better word. It's not for me, not my color.

1:30:54Casey Liss:And these are, I'm not familiar with this. I've seen them, of course. But I always assume it's a thing that you attach, that you lay on top of your screen, like a screen protector. Are there any phones that have a privacy display like that built into the phone? Or is it always an aftermarket thing that you stick to the front of your display?

1:31:11John Siracusa:So it's always an aftermarket thing until now. So the Galaxy S26 has what they call privacy display. And I'm very unclear on how this works. They did try to explain it. I can explain it to you.

1:31:22Casey Liss:It's in the video.

1:31:22John Siracusa:Yeah, well, and I watched the video and it went right over my head. So we'll come to how in a second. But what the net effect is, is that you have software control over whether or not the screen is in privacy mode or not. So you can control via software on the Samsung Galaxy S26, or I presume there's maybe a subset of the S26s, but whatever. It's the S26 Ultra.

1:31:43Casey Liss:I forget. There you go.

1:31:44John Siracusa:You get the idea. So you can control via software whether or not the screen is visible off-axis, right? Which in and of itself, I think, is super freaking cool. But then they went all Apple on it. You can, with software, say, hey, anytime I open the Wells Fargo app, blank the screen, not blank the screen, make the whole screen privacy mode. So that anytime you open your banking app, the whole screen goes into privacy mode. So presumably the only person that can see what's going on is you. But then it gets even freaking better. Then they have, I don't know the specifics about it, but they showed like a notification coming down from the top of the screen where only the notification is in privacy mode.

1:32:28John Siracusa:So a subset of the screen is in privacy mode. That's the coolest part. This is so freaking cool. And I want it on my iPhone yesterday.

1:32:37Casey Liss:I'm not sure you do, but first let me say one thing about this. We're calling it privacy mode. And what it means is you have to be looking dead on at it. The screen has to be perpendicular to your eyeballs. If someone is shoulder surfing you, it is very possible for them to be pretty much as perpendicular as you are and see the screen. It doesn't make your screen invisible to other people. It just makes it way harder to shoulder surf you because you have to be similar angle to the person viewing it. oh so if you think this is like now only i can see the screen well not true especially like i mean if you've ever spied at someone's uh computer or phone screen like on a for example on a plane where often you have a view that is fairly direct angle at the thing because you're right behind them and you're looking through like the crook of their their ear and their shoulder and their neck at their phone screen and they're holding their phone in their left hand and it's actually facing you just as much as it's facing them so just don't uh if you get a privacy display a, you know, like a stick on thing or this technology, don't assume it literally makes it invisible because people can still shoulder surf your, you know, passcode.

1:33:48Casey Liss:If you have a numeric passcode or something that, or see your messages or whatever. So there is that. But the other reason you probably don't want this is how it's implemented. And I, I, that's the reason I looked at this video and got the timestamp out because I wanted to know how they implemented it and they implemented it in a clever way, but also a kind of way that makes you go, uh no not great all right tell me more so what they've done if the video is to be believed the video is you know computer graphics it's not it's not showing like microscopic images of the screen which i have haven't seen yet but conceptually they've taken the screen filled with pixels and each pixel has an rg and a b sub pixel in it according to this video who knows if that's true and it's more complicated but anyway every pixel has an rgb sub pixel and they basically checkerboarded it like a like a checkerboard uh where every other square red black red black red black so the picture the whole display every square on the checkerboard is a pixel and each one of those squares has an r g and a b okay let's say the red squares on the checkerboard are regular pixels with huge wide viewing angles the black squares on the checkerboard have rgb sub pixels but then they have in front of them a like a pushed away from them a little screen with tiny little holes in it and that means that the only light that leaves those pixels is the light that is going straight because any light that's going on an angle hits the little screen thing so basically 50 of the pixels are normal pixels and 50 of the pixels are quote-unquote privacy pixels.

1:35:20Casey Liss:When they enable privacy mode, what they do is turn off all the pixels that are not privacy pixels. So 50 % of the pixels turn off for the regions of the screen that are privacy pixels. You can imagine that might have some problems. For example, some of the reviews said, hey, when I turn on privacy mode for the whole screen, the screen gets a little dimmer because you're literally turning off half the pixels. Now they probably drive the remaining half higher to try to counteract that but that's how it works and when you see that it works that way like okay now i totally make this and by the way it also essentially halves the effective resolution or whatever however you want to do again it's a checkerboard half the pixels are turned off so the ppi is cut in half for any region of the screen that is in privacy mode because some pixels are the the regular wide angle pixels are just plain turned off and only the privacy pixels are turned on and the way they show in the video is literally the privacy pixels are a regular pixel but then floating over it is a screen with four little holes in it for the art or three little holes for the rgb i think there might have been a white subpixel i forget um so it's just like shining a flashlight and the flashlight has a really wide angle but if you put a huge piece of paper in front of it and cut a tiny little hole now the only light that comes out of that piece of paper is the light that's going straight through that little hole and all the rest of the light just hits the piece of paper and bounces back um so it's very clever and that's how you get per pixel control but there's nothing you know there's no moving parts there's no you know thing that is switching on and off they're just turning off half the pixels for the regions that are in privacy mode and i think that may become feasible if you have like a 4x density thing because like you don't need the extra density or whatever and if we can eventually drive the pixels bright enough and by the way when you're in regular mode the privacy pixels are on so in the regular mode half of your pixels have a wide viewing angle and half your pixels have a narrow viewing angle.

1:37:11Casey Liss:So even that I feel like has got to hurt the viewing angle of regular mode because you're losing some of the light is not spread as wide as it should be. But the worst obviously is privacy mode where half of your pixels are literally turned off. So very clever, very cool. But I'm not sure I'd want an iPhone with this feature because I don't think I first of all, I don't need the protection it provides. Second, if I didn't need the protection it provides, I'd think very hard about whether I should be using my phone at all. Because I think This type of feature gives some people a false sense of security because if someone really wants a shoulder surf you, they just need to move to a different angle to catch what you're doing.

1:37:47Casey Liss:And granted, it makes it way harder. It is way better than not having it for privacy. But if you really need privacy, try not. If you can possibly avoid doing things that need to be private in a public place, do that instead.

1:37:58Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Claude, and Quince. And thanks 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. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the future of x86 instructions running in macOS. Join us to hear it atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:38:39Marco Arment:John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental

1:38:49Casey Liss:And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon

1:38:57Marco Arment: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 Auntie Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long A few episodes back, I, in the pre-show, gave a big rant, which you agreed with, Casey, about the workout app changes in watchOS 26. It's driving me batty. It's really bad. And I mentioned, I'm like, oh, I'm kind of eyeing a Garmin. I don't know. I had never explored the world of third-party smartwatches for iPhones before. Well, let me give a bit of background. For the last few months, I have been training for a very large walk.

1:40:04Marco Arment:There is an event that takes place every spring in Manhattan. This group called the Shorewalkers arranges something called the Great Saunter, which is a 32-mile walk around the perimeter of Manhattan in one day.

1:40:19John Siracusa:Whoa, that sounds awful and awesome all at the same time.

1:40:24Marco Arment:Yeah, I've been getting into longer distance walking. It kind of started as a tribute when I lost my dog this past summer and, you know, kind of walking in his honor. And then it just kind of grew from there into, oh, I want to do this crazy thing, which happens in May. and so you know you don't go from you know a routine of one or two mile dog walks to be able to walk 32 miles in one day um without hopefully you know some intervening steps in the middle of you know training training for longer walks and so what i've been doing is over the last couple of months like slowly ramping up you know the amount i've been able to walk and so that what that means is taking a lot of long walks um but you know of course being the nerd i'm like obviously I need to optimize the gear for this.

1:41:11Marco Arment:And, you know, I've optimized like the shoes. I use the toe socks, which look stupid. The Injinji toe socks. They look ridiculous. They are a pain in the butt to put on and take off, but you don't get blisters at all. And it's amazing. And thanks to a tip from our friend underscore David Smith. I've been using those toes, the thin version of those toe socks with an outer sock so that you get even more cushioning in a nice wide shoe. i've been having great luck with the ultra um torrent 8 wide shoe and it's great okay all that stuff aside i hope that's useful to somebody um but of course i'm optimizing the gear and the first thing i think is well can an apple watch go that long because i want to track the entire walk now there are breaks you know it no one's going to walk 32 miles without taking a break it takes like 13 hours you know so it's a long time um but you can you can stop here and there you know over the course of the day, you have time for maybe an hour and a half total of breaks throughout that, throughout the day.

1:42:09Casey Liss:You have to stop at every pizza place and have one slice. Yeah.

1:42:14Marco Arment:Anyway, so, you know, I can stop and, you know, top off an Apple watch with a charger, you know, a couple of times throughout the day if I, if I, if I need to. But of course I'm like, well, what, what if I had a smartwatch that was better for it? And literally like two days after I had said on our show that I was annoyed at the Apple Watch's workout redesign, I went on a very long, like a 17-mile practice walk. We did north to south of Manhattan.

1:42:45Casey Liss:His hair has gone gray. He passes every day. They say he walks the length of the city.

1:42:51Marco Arment:And I was using the Apple Watch Ultra. And at one point, I had like, you know, I'd gone into like a coffee shop to get some coffee in the morning. And I paused the workout because of course it yells at you. And then I know you can turn that off, but every so often the Apple Watch resets all of my notification settings and I don't know why. And so I get, I start to get reminded to like stand every so often, which is fun when you're on a flight or, or, you know, you get the notification saying like, it looks like you've been walking. Do you want to start a workout? It's like, I'm just walking like, you know, across the street.

1:43:23Marco Arment:Like, you know, it's fine. Or it'll say, you know, if you stop for a second while you're on a walk, you should pause the workout. That's what I did in the coffee shop. I forgot to unpause it. And I only realized that like a mile and a half later in the walk. And so I just lost that mile and a half of recorded progress in the Apple Watch. And this, you know, the Apple Watch, it's very much like the Apple TV. This is a product that is kind of half-assed by Apple. It could be so much better if they put more effort into it, but they seem like they're fine. mostly not doing that? Like, they don't seem like, they're not stepping on the gas on this product.

1:44:05Marco Arment:It's fine. It does fine. You know, it does well for them, like, in the market, and they don't seem like they need to try very hard. They don't think they need to try very hard on this product. And that's, look, and for the three of you inside Apple who get to work on the Apple Watch and who are trying very hard, more respect to you, but I think the company's not giving you the resources this product deserves. Anyway, so, I was annoyed at the Apple Watch, and I'm like, you know what, let me see what else is out there. So later that night, I ordered a Garmin to try. Now, I should disclaim, I probably got the wrong one for me.

1:44:40Marco Arment:So the one I got was the Venue 4 because it came in a small 41 millimeter size and because that size has dual band GPS support, which I get to in a second. in retrospect that model was probably a little too small for this particular use like battery life-wise and feature-wise i probably should have gotten one of the forerunner models the phoenix 8 is also like their flagship thing and that comes in a 43 millimeter size but when i see these watchers and other people they're so big and they're so bulky and they're big and bulky to achieve goals that i don't necessarily need like you know certain like durability.

1:45:21Marco Arment:Like I'm not going to be climbing a mountain face, slamming my watch against a rock. Like that's not me. And to Garmin's credit, they serve a huge range with their products. Like they have so many different models. But what I was looking for was something that was small enough to be comfortable and not look too ridiculous on my wrist. And also good battery size. And what I was especially looking for was dual band GPS. This is what I thought was only on the Apple Watch Ultra in the Apple world. So the reason why this is important is for most GPS receivers that we grew up with over time with most phones and most smartwatches until relatively recently was single band GPS, more recent advanced ones.

1:46:11Marco Arment:Apple first started talking about it with the Apple Watch Ultra, which is the only Apple Watch that has support for dual-band GPS. When you have dual-band GPS, you generally get more accurate GPS and faster locks and faster and better tracking, especially in places like lower Manhattan, where you have very tall buildings that are very close to the street. Like the streets aren't that wide. The buildings are close to each other and very tall, and it's hard for GPS signals to get properly recognized and received by little receivers on your wrist or in your pocket. So dual band GPS was very important to me.

1:46:50Marco Arment:Now, I thought it was only in the Apple Watch Ultra. And I even had a thought, like, why don't apps like Google Maps on the phone use the GPS in Apple Watch Ultra when you have it on to get dual band support? And then I did a bit of research and quickly learned that actually iPhones also now have dual-band GPS. And in fact, most modern smartphones do. So the iPhone Pros have had it since the 14 Pro. The non-pro iPhones got it this year in the 17, and the Air also has it. So all current 17-ish model iPhones, I don't know about the E, actually, I didn't look that up, but at least the 17, Air, and 17 Pro all have dual-band GPS.

1:47:34Marco Arment:If you have a Pro from the 14, you have it. and even like Google Pixels have had it since the 8 Pro or all 9s and 10s. I didn't look up Samsung's because there's too many of them. But anyway, dual band GPS, I thought it was a requirement. The Ultra is the only one in the Apple product line that has it. Other brands, including Garmin, also Suunto was another brand I looked at. They have lots of options that have dual band GPS. So anyway, so I got the Venue 4, the Garmin Venue 4. Again, I probably should have gone with the Forerunner 570 or the Fenix 8, but oh well. And the experience of trying a non-Apple smartwatch for the first time.

1:48:14Marco Arment:First of all, there are just paper cuts everywhere. So first of all, the experience of managing a Garmin in particular, Garmin has like two or three different apps that you have to use for different things. Like there's one that connects to the watch but there's a different one that you use if you want to buy watch faces and stuff and apps and like oh my god so it's it's already like off to a rough start um when you put the watch on you know you quickly notice oh apple watch bands are really nice these bands are not and it's like it's something that like if you would never worn an apple watch you would think other smartwatch bands were fine but apple like one thing the apple watch has gotten right since the start, they have really good bands compared to the entire rest of the watch business.

1:49:08Marco Arment:Their Apple watch bands are really nice. They're comfortable. They're functional. They don't necessarily always look the best, but they are very nice bands. Especially their rubber is really nice. Back when they made leather, their leather was really nice. They're great bands. Okay. So Garmin watch has a really cheap, crappy feeling strap. Now you can replace it with any standard, That one was an 18mm strap. Most of them are 20 or 22, whatever. You can get those on Amazon for nothing. So you can put third-party bands on it from the rest of the watch world, but you're missing out on the nice Apple straps.

1:49:40Marco Arment:The charging situation, it has a proprietary charger, again, just like the Apple Watch. It looks like an old phone charger, like before phones had USB. Like one of those kind of custom couple of prongs on the end of a black thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just kind of an elegant charger. Eh, small thing, but again, little paper cut. All right. so i start to use the watch and first of all it's very androidy in the way everything works and flows i don't know if it actually runs android i assume it might but little things about android that bother iphone users like there's no scroll bounces on the end of a scroll view um that kind of thing there's those are everywhere because of course it's a different platform and you don't realize it when you're not used when you know when you're used to the apple watch and also So watches have very small screens relative to other computing devices and relatively few buttons, but they usually have some kind of buttons.

1:50:30Marco Arment:And so you have to kind of learn to navigate a watch. And you don't realize how much muscle memory you have for navigating the Apple Watch until you have to try a different kind of watch. And when you go from an Apple Watch to a Garmin, the navigation of everything works differently. from simple stuff to like, you know, what direction you like. Do you swipe up or down? Do you swipe left or right to navigate certain things? How do you go back? What do the buttons do? Where are the buttons located? Like all of that stuff is different. So there's a pretty steep learning curve. And most of it I don't think was better.

1:51:05Marco Arment:It was just, oh, I just have to learn this thing that's different. And at this point, I will say, I'm sorry, Casey. Round is not the right choice for a smartwatch screen.

1:51:18Casey Liss:really i was gonna say this when this came up when we talked about it before but we moved on to something else but like round is totally the apple shape for a smart watch because it is impractical and some designer would insist upon it because of the circular because it's circular and it's so perfect and it's round and it's just like the most inside area for the least outside area and you know mathematically perfect circle but apple didn't do that apple was pragmatic Apple made it rectangular because they knew that most of the content besides the watch face was going to be like text and buttons and other stuff that's used to being a rectangular screen.

1:51:53Casey Liss:So despite YouTube both complaining, oh, do you believe, you know, Apple doesn't make a round display or whatever. If Apple had made a round display, all three of us would be saying, why didn't they just make a rectangular? So we're a tough crowd out here.

1:52:03Marco Arment:Yeah. And really, like, and that's a good point, John, because like when you think about when the Apple Watch was designed, this was like peak, you know, Johnny Ive had the least editing. and had his head furthest up his own butt at that time. That's how we got a gold one. He did get no ports on the watch. Right, yeah, no ports. To the point of the Garmin thing, which is a port. Sort of, yeah. But yeah, if there was a time when Apple would have done something totally over the top for the sake of design purity, the original Apple Watch design was the time for Johnny I have to do that. And even then, he didn't.

1:52:40Marco Arment:and it took only a couple of minutes of using the round watch for me to say, oh yeah, this is the wrong choice. Now, Garmin does actually sell a square model, but it doesn't have dual-band GPS. So I didn't consider that one. As you're looking at anything, scrolling anything, going through lists of anything, reading text from notifications, which I'll get to in a second, like doing all of those actions, everything you would commonly use a smartwatch for a round screen was worse than a rectangular screen i wish that wasn't the case because i think round watches look nicer as watches like as a thing that you wear round does look better but it doesn't work better for a smartwatch and anytime there's any text it just hurts because you just feel like you feel like you're fighting the hardware just to do the most basic thing of reading text on the screen because there's you have to scroll everything to see everything in every list um i would say otherwise like the available watch faces uh they're a little loud visually for my taste um the screen was nice it was fine but like the watch faces were um the way their complications worked they the complications kind of sucked uh if i'm honest um there are third-party watch faces that look all right um I didn't explore it much because I decided this watch was not for me a spoiler.

1:54:11Marco Arment:But so I decided I wasn't going to like, you know, start buying watch faces for two bucks each to look at them. But the experience of using a non Apple smartwatch on iOS is also pretty restrictive. And this is almost entirely Apple's fault. This is not Garmin's fault. This is this is entirely on Apple. And we'll see if if someone like the, you know, the regulatory stuff, especially in the EU, we'll see if this changes things much. But the biggest things you notice when you don't have an Apple watch, when you have a third-party watch, are you don't have watch access for Siri, which is – it turns out I do that a lot.

1:54:48Marco Arment:A lot of times, the reminders that I create for myself through Siri, a lot of those I do from the watch. I'll just hold it up and say, hey, remind me to whatever. um also speaking of reminders another restriction is you can't respond to notifications including you can't like use the extra buttons that show up on a notification so when i get a reminder alert and i want to hit snooze i can't do that on on a third-party watch only apple watches have access to do that um so this is not necessarily it's not garmin's fault but it is garmin's problem uh so uh that just it makes the experience much worse and there were basically every every part of it was full of more paper cuts to me um like i i realized uh like i would take it off uh but if i didn't turn if i didn't power it off if it was just off my wrist like like sitting on my desk you know if i wasn't using it every notification that came out of my iphone the garmin watch would buzz it would vibrate and it's sitting on the desk so it's you know it's very you know loud inelegant and literally every even though it is off my wrist so it knows you know it has a sense like the apple watch it knows i'm not wearing it but it still chooses to vibrate on every single one maybe there was a setting somewhere to change that i didn't get that far with it but it just became very obvious to me oh yeah this is this is not this is not working for me like I had to decide like how much do I hate the Apple workout app do I hate it so much to put myself through all of that you know just just to like how many paper cuts am I going to tolerate on this other platform that is really optimized for very different things than what I care about how many paper cuts will I endure there to spite the Apple workout app for that one big paper cut of how starting a workout is clunky now.

1:56:44Marco Arment:It was too far in the other direction. It was too clunky for me. So instead, I went back to the Apple Watch and I did one or two more practice walks since then. And there's an app. Obviously, there's third-party apps that you can use. There's third-party workout apps. And I first asked our friend, David Smith, I said, hey, should I be using Workouts++ for this and he informed me that that no longer exists. Whoops. But I still have it on my phone. That's how I view my workouts.

1:57:18Casey Liss:He's got hiking features in Pedometer++ these days, right?

1:57:20Marco Arment:Yeah, exactly. So first, other people online recommended that I try an app called Work Outdoors. Work Outdoors, I tried it out. It is hyper customizable. I would say if you are looking for something like Workouts++ that is still being made, that's something to look at. It's more like a workout app construction kit. I found it too much for like too, a little too nerdy for me. If you remember like old downcast, like back when, before I made overcast, the podcast app I used on my phone was downcast. I don't know if it still does. I haven't looked at it in a long time. It's still around, but I don't know if it's still like this, but it has like every option under the sun.

1:58:00Marco Arment:And that's part of what I liked about it was like, it had the options I wanted, but it was an intense app in terms of like settings configuration that's that's the vibe i got from work outdoors if you want something super custom you can probably build it with work outdoors as options and stuff but that was it was way too much for what i was looking for and then i remembered oh yeah underscore added a whole bunch of like long hike options to pedometer maybe you know pedometer plus plus maybe that's the app i should be looking at here especially since i already have it and I had it on my watch. I just didn't like, there's a whole like, like walking mode, like a hike mode of it that I just hadn't really explored before.

1:58:41Marco Arment:And so I tried that on my last practice walk a couple of days this past weekend and it was great. It was, I downloaded the offline map to it. So as I was walking around Manhattan this past weekend, I was able to, it showed a little arrow on the screen. I was able to, you know, go around all nice. when the screen was in like dim mode on the Apple Watch, it shifts to red, which probably saves somewhat on energy, but at least looks cool. It was like the experience of using Pedometer Plus Plus as my walk tracking app was way nicer than the built-in Apple workouts app. It was way nicer than any other apps I tried.

1:59:25Marco Arment:And it was way nicer than the Garmin's built and stuff. I recognize that like the Garmin and that world again they have a lot of needs they cover that Apple doesn't cover you know if you're going to be on a hike somewhere for multiple days you don't want an Apple watch you want something like a Garmin you know and you want one of the big ones that has like you know the eight-day battery like you want that you know or if you're going to be doing some kind of extreme sports that that need that kind of physical characteristics that the have, that's going to be better for you. But for me, where I'm mostly just doing walks and I do my other workouts, I have a strength training kind of set up over here.

2:00:04Marco Arment:I have a trainer that I do over FaceTime. But any Apple Watch can do that. It's one hour mixed workout. Apple Watches do that just fine. For these long walks, I'm using the Ultra for battery life and for that dual band GPS. And for that purpose, I think Pedometer++ with the Apple Watch Ultra is going to be my ongoing setup now. And when I do the real Great Saunter, the real 32-mile walk in a couple of months, I'm going to use that, I think. So all of this to say you just needed a different app on your Apple Watch? Yeah, basically. Yeah, that's... All right, good deal.

2:00:46John Siracusa:uh yeah yeah do you have any desire to try any of the other garment garments karma karma i don't

2:00:53Marco Arment:know well so i think the from what i have heard from from people in this world i think the next thing i would try would probably be the suunto um like they have a monocle called the race s that looks like it would be a reasonable size and it would have the dual band gps that i'm looking for. But it also just seems to me like the experience of using a non-Apple smartwatch with an Apple platform just has too many paper cuts and limitations that I don't think any of them will be necessarily worth it for me. Now, again, if I had a need for some of their physical differences that the other brands offer, I would consider that.

2:01:33Marco Arment:But the reality is the Apple Watch ultra will serve this need just fine for me i will based on what people are saying i if i want like you know full gps and full heart rate for the entire walk i might not necessarily need the full heart rate but if i want that for the entire walk the ultra might not last long enough um i might have to charge it like at one of the stops but it's fine i'm sure i can you know charge it at the halfway point when i stop for like you know a drink of water and a meal for a few minutes and I'm sure that will be fine.

2:02:02John Siracusa:Well, I'm glad you went on this experiment so I didn't have to.

2:02:05Marco Arment:Yeah, you were right on the verge.

2:02:07John Siracusa:Yeah, I really was.

2:02:08Marco Arment:But yeah, I think you would hit all the same paper cuts and I think they would irritate you just as much. Oh, yeah. And I think you'd be very disappointed in the reality of using a round screen smartwatch.

2:02:18John Siracusa:Yeah, I think you're probably right. And I do freaking hate the workouts app. I hate it. just today i was scrolling through the workouts app and i found the workout i wanted which was not dead center it was one off from dead center and i tapped on that workout and started the actual workout that was dead center because as i went to tap it the stupid play button came up

2:02:42Marco Arment:oh my god i hate it god i hate it so much when we had that rant a few people did write in and be like it's not that bad it's fine for me it's not that bad if you always do the same type of workout like if every day you wake up and you and you do outdoor run and you and you do an outdoor run every morning and that's all you do with it it's a lot less bad it's when you have to when you change between like i mentioned you know i do my workouts with my trainer so that's i do indoor other for that but then i'm on these walks so outdoor walk so or i might do an indoor indoor row if i'm using the rowing machine so like i will frequently switch between two or three different workout types i almost never do the same one twice in a row and so almost every time i'm using the apple workouts app i am changing like the first thing i'm doing is navigating to a different type but even that like and and oh and people also have mentioned um including people in our chat are saying now like you can just also start workouts via siri um you can also do it via shortcuts that's fine um that also works kind of frustratingly slowly and about 80 of the time in my experience but not 100 so like it's not that much better like i usually just i keep the workout complication on the face as as one of my main complications i could just tap it and you know go from there but um there is no like you know good reliable fast option that is anywhere near as fast as just older versions of the workout app were um also you know i mentioned earlier the thing where the i got mad because it it you know i forgot to resume it when i left the coffee shop and i lost a mile of my workout you know from being tracked I'll see you next time.

2:04:11Marco Arment:And the Apple Watch, when it started out a thousand years ago, it had to be really careful with battery. Now, it still has to be careful, but it has to be a lot less careful because we have way bigger batteries now. That's how we can have things like always on screens, cellular modems. We can have all that in there because the battery has gotten bigger. And especially when you look at something like the Ultra, it's way bigger. what i wish they would do is be a little more forgiving about the workout app so one thing they do for instance is when you when you have the feature enabled that it prompts you to start workouts if it detects that you're doing one if you leave your house and start walking on the block and a half a block later it says hey it looks like you're walking do you want to start a workout if you say yes it includes the data from that first half block once it figured out that it looks like you're working out, it starts recording that data.

2:05:05Marco Arment:That's great because what that means is if you mess up in some way, like if you start a walk without starting the workout, you have like an undo, you have like a save there. Like, oh, I didn't lose that progress. You saved it for me. Thank you. I would like to see that extended. So first, I think anything, any pause, it should, like once you start, like if I have a walk and I pause the walk because I have stopped moving once i leave the location i am at it should be smart enough to say hey you know what maybe i should prompt you because you just left where you were maybe i should prompt you and maybe i start recording this information so when you say yes i did in fact leave you you can patch that data in or stop or keep recording it in the first place um you know obviously with limits over time for battery life but like if i'm only pausing it for a few minutes and i forget to unpause it like you could record that for an hour afterwards and be fine especially on the larger model watches so i would love to have like a little bit of more forgiveness there like spend some of the power budget to build in forgiveness so that people don't so people have more of those opportunities to save themselves from their own mistakes secondly every single thing in the workout app should be undoable and right now i think none of it is for instance i am terrified that on this walk, I will accidentally end the workout early and I want it to be one big one.

2:06:32Marco Arment:I know that's stupid. I can just do another one. But right now, like you can't, I guess maybe some app might exist that can take two workouts and merge them, but Apple's doesn't do that. And I don't know if it's possible. And, you know, so like the workout app right now, if you accidentally end the workout, you can't undo that. If you pause the workout, you can't undo that. If you accidentally hit some button that adds like a segment or something, you can't undo that. There is so much about the work out that's incredibly unforgiving and i wish it wasn't because it's a computer and we have the technology to do that so there's so much about it that i that i i wish was this is true of the whole apple watch platform it is the best i think of its category for most people and again i can say the same thing about the apple tv the apple tv compared to its competitors is the best of its category for most people.

2:07:23Marco Arment:But it could be so much better if they just put more effort into it. And it seems like they took their foot off the gas with the Apple TV because it's fine. And I think the Apple Watch is not that much better. The Apple Watch is, for most people, the best smartwatch for them. Certainly for iPhone users. I think it is the best smartwatch for almost all iPhone users needs. But it could be so much better if Apple just put more effort into it. They just seem to think they don't need to or they or like the things they do to it are things no one's asking for and things that we keep asking for, they just ignore.

2:07:59Marco Arment:One of the many things that can make it better is just some attention to some of those workout mechanics. Like, first of all, obviously fix the horrible UI regressions that made it much harder to use and more error prone and take longer to start up. but also consider fixing some of those problems of just like yeah let's make this thing a little more humane and a little smarter and let's give people opportunities to do what they want to save themselves from mistakes to prevent mistakes in the first place and to save their data because that stuff matters like if you track your workouts and you just lose some of it that is very demotivating to a lot of people that can make somebody like you know quote fall off the wagon or whatever and like stop working out or if you know if you lose a streak if you break a streak like those have real psychological you know implications for a lot of people those have really measurable you know drops in in things you want to optimize you like you want people to keep working out you want people to feel good about their working out you want them to like to be consistent with their routines so if you if they like have some kind of discouraging problem like losing a workout or losing progress somewhere that can make them stop doing that or you know can really demotivate so anyway that's what i want to see with the apple watch is like we we are in a new era now with the apple watch where you have so much more power available to you because the hardware is so much better than it used to be i want to see them move some things

2:09:24John Siracusa:forward and that's that's one of the big ones yeah so i'm going to do this live and marco will cut it out if it isn't right. But one of the things that drives me freaking crazy, and it's just another perfect example of how broken the workout sap is, is that on the weekends, Aaron and I will go on walks of our neighborhood together. As it turns out, our neighborhood is like almost to the meter, a 5k walk. If we go through all the cul-de-sacs and so on and so forth, it's like a 5k. And so typically Aaron and I will, for the weekends, you know, for our exercises of the weekend, we'll go on a walk together and the kids will come for at least a portion of it.

2:10:03John Siracusa:And we'll do the full 5K, about three miles. And if it's raining or if it's extremely cold, instead, what we'll do is we'll use our elliptical that we have in the house. That's a very unremarkable, very not impressive elliptical, but it does the job, right? And depending on how much time I have and whether or not I've been fairly active already during the day, I might go anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes on the elliptical. And in order to do that, I need to open the workouts app in here. I'm going to do a live. I open the workouts app and I'm presented and I scroll down to elliptical. And if you just tap on the icon for elliptical, which is what I would do by default in order to get more details about the workout I'm about to do, it does nothing.

2:10:43John Siracusa:It just sits there. Great. Okay. So in the Northeast corner, there is, or at least on my watch right now, there is something that looks like a timer. And so, okay, fair enough. So I hit that. Great. All right. So it says your workouts, time 25 minutes. Well, I don't want to do 25 minutes. So I guess what I need to do is I need to edit this 25 minute thing. Okay. Fair. So in the corner of this little button that says time 25 minutes, there's a little pencil icon. So I tap on that. Okay. Fair enough. So then there, it says time 25 minutes, start workout, share workout, delete workout. Hey, well, I don't want 25 minutes.

2:11:19John Siracusa:So the time 25 minutes, I tap that. So now I'm presented with hours and minutes. I'm going to go back to 20 minutes, let's say, and I'm presented with the two spinners for hours and minutes. On the bottom, there's a giant yellow button that says done. In the upper left, there's a back chevron. So I'm going to change from 25 minutes to 20, and I'm going to hit done. And I'll give you one guess what is on the prior screen, because it goes, you know, navigates, pops up to the prior screen. And I'm now looking at the time, start workout, share workout, delete workout. Would you like to guess after I hit the done button, after changing the spinner to 20 minutes, what this prior screen shows?

2:12:01John Siracusa:Still f***ing shows 25 minutes. So what I need to do is instead I need to go back in and I make this mistake every time. So I've gone back in, I've hit the same button I just hit. Now I've got the two spinners again. instead of hitting the giant button that says done i need to hit the back chevron and now the prior screen says 20 minutes in what way does this make sense in what way does this make sense do the people that work on this app ever work out ever ever i don't understand i don't understand see that that overall feeling a lot of time a lot of the details about the apple watch

2:12:40Marco Arment:I think like you know Apple historically has had really talented people who are who have really great taste you know I started with Steve and then of course you know he instilled that culture among the company and people who had that kind of great taste were attracted to work there so you have all these people who have really great sensibilities for like what a good experience is what good design is how things should work in in clever delightful useful helpful ways and every single Apple employee that I have ever seen outside of the company wears an Apple Watch. So I know they're using it. But I don't get the impression when I'm using the Apple Watch that a lot of those people in Apple who have those opinions, who, like, are they being listened to with the Apple Watch?

2:13:31Marco Arment:Do they have the resources that they need to make the Apple Watch that good of an experience because it just seems just like a solid all-around b plus kind of product and apple strives to not make b plus products they strive for better than that and again in some ways the apple watch is great um but overall there's it could be so much better it's a computer it can do everything and they just don't do it they don't let it do it they don't put in the resources to do it they don't put in the flexibility to do it the you know the faces are still a disaster they're still like they're still like i still when i when i look around the built-in complications for so many things that just aren't there like why is there are no like sunrise and sunset complication for this certain size why does the one that's there always have text all over it like there's there's so many little things like when you try to when you look around what complications are available from apple for their built-in apps and features they're just so half-assed and and limited and the watch faces themselves like that's a whole thing where that that's a whole half-assed situation as well and just like are they do all those people who who care and and see these problems and limitations like what what do they need to make the apple watch better because whatever it is the company's not providing it to them and i wish they would because this platform it is the best of its category for most people but it doesn't mean they can take their foot off the gas it doesn't mean that they can't make it better.

2:15:13Marco Arment:Apple's ethos in so many ways has always been like, don't just be satisfied. Once you are dominating a category, that doesn't mean you should stop making good stuff. I know more recently there's been a lot more exceptions to that, but I wish they would push a little harder on the Apple Watch because it has so much potential and it has a pretty good foundation. You can do a lot with what they've built here, but they're not doing a lot and they could.

2:15:41Casey Liss:you get in line behind the mac speaking of platforms that are best in category but that apple is uh not improving at the rate we wish it was and in some ways making it worse sound familiar i think the mac is in a way better

2:15:55Marco Arment:starting place though than the watch like you know the mac is like a mature platform that already does everything we want it to do like it's already it's already built it's already great The Apple Watch, like, you know, the Mac is able to have questionable leadership and resources now because in the past it had all the resources. Like it was the main focus of the company for so long. And that's when all this stuff was being built. It's when it built this foundation of awesomeness. The Apple Watch never had that. It was never the focus. It was never like the golden child. It was never getting all of the attention from the company.

2:16:32Marco Arment:It was always kind of this like side division, seemingly, that always got what appeared to be very little resources from the company. And so it doesn't have that basis of laurels to rest on.