686: Write Two Letters

13:04Casey Liss:really bereaving because they really needed to be canned but anyway uh it's just you know the year range and some people thought it should have the year like of the original mac pro but no it's the it's the thing that's pictured on the shirt the thing that's pictured in the shirt was introduced in 2019 and killed in 2026 and yes i have already ordered one of these to go to john

13:21John Siracusa:turnis that's incredible and and we we are under the impression that he did receive the original

13:28Marco Arment:believe shirt right he sure did i know for sure that he did all right and that one again that's

13:32Casey Liss:two shirts because like the darker color shirts have light ink and vice versa so it's mac pro memorial mac pro memorial dark again ink color thing um then we have two shirts that probably should have been in the last sale but i don't know maybe it would have been too much but anyway last sale we did atp t568a and t568b our ethernet wiring standard shirts where we replaced the uh apple six color stripes and the atp logo with the colors of the conductors in uh an ethernet cable according to the t568 a and b standards well this time we have two more shirts t568 a and b but they're crossover cables uh you can we put links on the store page you can go to like the wikipedia page i'm pretty sure i got these right i quadruple checked like a million times and did so many google searches here's what wikipedia says here's what these things say i'm pretty sure that these are the correct wiring arrangements for a gigabit not 100 or 10 a gigabit crossover cable which isn't really a thing i think you need anymore because on all the ports auto sense and switch or whatever but anyway crossover cables are still a thing that exists and so now the colored stripes the top half has like what one end of the connector cable should be pins one through eight and the bottom half has what the other half should be and yes there are different crossover cables for five t568 a and b so we have the two crossover shirts um and they're really pushing the limits like last time we have like ugly shirts like because the internet wiring colors are not particularly attractive and now they're even less attractive because the colors are all mixed up but you nerds love it you love those networking nerds want to have the most obscure shirt that someone is sure to ask you about then you get to explain about ethernet wiring standards um then we have the m5 pro and max shirts because uh since our last sale those two chips came out those chips are good they deserve shirts there are no chip designs in the back because we haven't done that in a while but we've got m5 pro and m5 max in all the usual shapes and sizes uh we do like to bring back one old shirt in every sale and this time we're bringing back a shirt that we sold a couple of times that has been very popular atp pixels is back this is the one with the six color atp logo on it but it's drawn in pixels which is quite a printing challenge i guess people who bought this shirt a while ago know how well it held up but i have one as well i think it looked it came out really good it looks really good um it's chunky as the description said it's non-retina you can see the pixels it's chunky pixels it's the atp logo in a bunch of chunky pixels extremely difficult to manufacture seem to come out good last time fingers crossed for this time and then of course we have our traditional atp shirt our traditional atp zip putty we get the atp polo because it's short sleeve weather uh and we have the atp hat that is our wwc 2026 sale if anybody orders a mac pro memorial shirt and happens to go to wwc and gets it in time and can wear it there make sure you stare apple executives straight in the eye and look as sad as you possibly can and then just point to your shirt that's what we want we want

16:28John Siracusa:them to just feel terrible oh my word now if you wanted to save a little bit of money on your order

16:34Casey Liss:john how do you go about doing that atp members get 15 off everything in the store if you go to your member page which is linked at the top of the store page you'll get a code remember that if you are logged in to atp.fm just by logging in through your account and you are a an atp member then all the links that you click on should automatically autofill your discount code but if it doesn't do that you can always go to your member page and copy and paste it the old-fashioned way uh and based on how much these shirts cost and yes i know they're tremendously expensive especially if you're in europe we apologize for that um it behooves you to become a member at least just for one month just to get the discount on the shirt or two or whatever you buy uh because it's worth it to you'll you'll end up coming out ahead in terms of how much the membership costs and again we apologize for how expensive these things are this is not like you know i'll buy a shirt to support the show you want to support the show by membership membership supports the show shirts are a fun thing we do together so we have cool nerdy podcast shirts that's what it's for They're not economical.

17:33Casey Liss:They're not a big way to support the show, but they are fun and we do it for the people and we try to come up with good shirt ideas every year. So yeah, if you want a discount, become a member, ATP.fm slash join. There are links to that on the store page as well.

17:47John Siracusa:Excellent. And I will do my normal pitch. If you are driving, perhaps signal and then pull over. If you're walking, pull over to the degree one can pull over while walking, but do yourself a favor and write yourself a reminder, send yourself an email, do whatever you need to do. Use the DUE app. Use Marco's not yet released reminders app. Do something to remind yourself to make this order because the sale ends on Sunday, April 26th. And every single time somebody writes, usually me, saying, oh no, I missed it. Don't care. Do it now or leave yourself a reminder. ATP.fm.

18:23Casey Liss:I've almost missed it several times. I remember to do the John Ternus thing now because I had to look up my old order to find his address because apparently whatever I sent it last time worked. So I did that again. But yeah, set yourself a reminder because you will forget. And, you know, obviously we picked the date so we can promote this on three separate shows. But by the time the third show comes around, like maybe you don't download that show immediately or maybe you don't listen to it immediately. And by the time you hear the third one, maybe the sale is over. So yeah, Sunday, April 26th, it ends.

18:49Casey Liss:Don't put it off. If you want something, get it now.

18:52John Siracusa:All right, let's do some follow-up. There was something that was very startling and perhaps it wasn't new, but they really kind of chapped my behind about the studio display XDR. And when I was looking at it, when it was first announced, I noticed that the visa mount version of it was the same price as the version with the stand, which seems a bit egregious to me. And I popped off about it on Mastodon. I don't know if I'll remember to dig up my particular toot about it, but it was big. Like, what are you going to do about it? Energy is I think what I said. and that really made me upset, but I mean, I haven't ordered an XDR.

19:32John Siracusa:I don't think I'm going to. Again, famous last words. But there's good news. We'll see what happens. There's good news. The pricing has changed for the Visa Mount version. The version with the stand is still$3 ,200, but the Visa Mount version is$2 ,800. So that's now$400 cheaper. And friend of the show, Stephen Robles, got wind of this. In fact, I believe it was him that I heard it from originally. and apparently reached out to Apple via the business chat thing that I always forget exists, you know, in iMessage or whatever, and said, hey, am I going to get a refund here? And the Apple person said yes.

20:07John Siracusa:And he was kind of like, okay, sure. And then sure enough, a little while later, he got a refund for$400 plus tax. So it turns out it's the real deal.

20:16Casey Liss:Yeah, that chat person, that chat said basically everybody who purchased it, quote unquote, recently will get a refund. So that's nice. Obviously, you had to have

20:23John Siracusa:purchased the visa mount version to get a refund right right right this is so weird because apple

20:30Casey Liss:doesn't really drop prices as evidenced by the pro display xdr the earlier xdr uh never changing price for the entire life of the product despite being what five or six years old uh you know or the trash can or anything like that but this is so weird because this product just came out and it was weird that the visa mount version was the same price as the one with the stand but you know not that weird because casey was like what are you gonna do apple's gonna apple but no maybe they just forgot maybe they somewhat entered it wrong or something like it's so weird it's not like there was big public outcry from people buying thirty two hundred dollar monitors that we demand the visa mount person be cheaper like it just seems like someone made a mistake or something so weird

21:08John Siracusa:yeah it was very unusual but i'm glad that apple is doing the right thing and uh fixing the issue

21:14Casey Liss:very out of character and then the same week that happened i got an email from google telling me that they were doing a price drop on my Google One subscription, saving me$50. When does that ever happen? Normally you get emails from like whatever thing you subscribe to and say, as Marco puts, it's always like what pricing update, whatever the subject says.

21:32Marco Arment:An update on your subscription.

21:33Casey Liss:Yeah, it's not, it's ambiguous, but you always know this just means you're going to charge more money. But no, they sent an email and said, I forget what the subject was, it was something like an update to your subscription, like, oh, here we go. Ah, it's$50 cheaper per year. So I don't know what's in the water, but whatever it is, keep drinking it. Nice.

21:53John Siracusa:Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Ryan Himmelwright has a question for John. With the long-anticipated death of the Mac Pro finally here, John has made it clear that he intends to become a Mac Studio user. However, I'm curious to know what he expects his typical upgrade cycle to be once he makes the Switch. He has an every-other-year cycle for his iPhone, and I think his iPad criteria tends to be, will this make my bedtime media consumption better? While the Mac Studio is far from Apple's most frequently updated Mac, it's still updated more than Apple's recent proper Tower Macs. As such, John's previous criteria of whatever decade Apple decides to release a new Tower Mac will likely need to be revisited.

22:27John Siracusa:Thoughts? Also, before you answer that, it just occurred to me an ancillary question. Did you ever use, I'm sure we talked about this and it's slipping my mind, did you ever use the Vision Pro in bed and was that enjoyable or did you not bother?

22:39Casey Liss:You're just going for the double entendres this episode. Yes, I did. I talked about it on the show. I watch movies in bed with a couple of times. I prefer the iPad. That's what it boils down to. And Ryan basically got it right. Like the iPad I am looking like, is this going to make my bedtime watching better? Cause that's really all I care about. That's why I got the old one. I love it. I still love it. For the Mac studio though, my cadence is probably going to be not actually like as, as you know, more frequent as you would expect it to be because yeah, the Mac studio is updated frequently. Like I think they basically do it.

23:14Casey Liss:I mean, the M3 Ultra 1 setting aside, it's I could get like a new one every year, every year and a half if I wanted. The problem is the one I buy is going to be so expensive, especially with all the RAM and SSD price increases because of the stupid eight terabyte SSD. And once I put all that money in, I'm not going to want to buy another one for a long time. Like that just tends to be my inclination anyway. I've used all my Macs for a really long time because I tend to buy them stuff to the gills. And back in the day, I would buy ones that I could upgrade. so i'd use them for a very long time like my my my max was like my line of max is not that well populated it was the original macintosh motherboard updated to a plus then the se30 then i went from the se30 to i the power max 615 or the 6100 series power mac and then from that to a g3 tower and then from the g3 tower to the original cheese grater the g5 cheese grater and then from that to the Intel Mac Pro and then to the 2019 Mac Pro.

24:15Casey Liss:That's all the Macs I've ever owned for the life of the Mac. So there's huge gaps in there. Like going, I mean, I basically went from the SE30 to the Blue and White G3 because the 6100 was really my parents' computer. That's a long time. But by the time I switched over, like my SE30 was maxed out on RAM, had a bunch of external hard drives, had a 24-bit color card and an external Trinitron color monitor. Like I used them for a long time as I stuffed them to the gills. So with the Mac Studio, assuming I can even afford had a stupid eight terabyte Mac studio with a reasonable amount of RAM. That's going to be it for me for a long time as my bank account recovers.

24:47Casey Liss:Cause that's going to be so I'm just dreading how expensive it is. Every day there's a story that's like, Oh, SSD prices are growing up because of like, I know, I know. And Apple's prices are always terrible. So I, it's not the, the update frequency of the Mac studio that are the Mac pro or whatever that's stopping me. It's just how much it costs. And so, you know, it's kind of like, as I always say to people, like, uh, maybe wait another year and save up a little more money. That's my mode for everything. It's like, just keep putting a little money aside every year so that seven years from now you can get the new Mac that you want to get.

25:22Casey Liss:I don't think that will change much. We'll revisit this when we find out exactly how expensive the Mac studio I want will be.

25:28John Siracusa:Do you want to place a bet as to how much that's going to be?

25:31Casey Liss:I don't even want to think about it. This is a, this is a, this is how much college will cost for maggie situation i don't want to the only thing i have going for me is like well at least i don't need another monitor you hear that you hear that do not break do not break right because i'm reusing the monitor i'm still using i'm going to use this monitor for a long time especially since apple doesn't make one this big anymore i just need the little box i don't need a keyboard i don't need a mouse i don't just it's gonna be rough are the keyboard and mouse

25:56John Siracusa:usba for what the studio no no the one that you're currently the ones that you're currently using no

26:01Casey Liss:i'm using the the one that came with my mac pro it connects via lightning

26:06Marco Arment:to what degree do you think you would max it out like would you get the highest ram ram amount

26:13Casey Liss:offered which is currently uh well what let's make predictions what will be the highest ram

26:17Marco Arment:on that when this thing comes out because that's well true that is not a given um i'm gonna feel

26:21Casey Liss:bad getting a computer with less ram than my current one and my current one has 96 but you know i don't know what configs they're gonna i honestly i don't need 96 as i said when i got my my 2019 mac pro 96 gigs made me just not have to think about ram i haven't thought about ram since i bought it 96 is enough that i never never never have to think about ram i don't need a full 96 i would be sad though to get a 64 because you know it's a downgrade after six years so we'll see and then eight terabyte it's my only choice that's bigger than four and i need bigger than four so

26:50Marco Arment:right because so if you if you want above 128 you have to get the ultra chip in the current configuration.

26:58Casey Liss:I don't want above 128. I don't need any more than that. I'd be happy to get 96 again if they offered it. Well, they do offer 96 with the Ultra.

27:05Marco Arment:Or if you get just the max, just the max chip. You're looking at the M3 models though. Who knows what the configs will be like

27:11Casey Liss:for the M5 ones.

27:12Marco Arment:Right. You can do a 128 with the regular max chip in the current configuration. And that would get you with 8 terabytes, 128, max chip with all the cores, that gets you about 6 grand.

27:23Casey Liss:It's a bargain.

27:24Marco Arment:Yeah. I'm going to say you're probably going to end up between six and seven grand for what you want.

27:30Casey Liss:Yeah, that's probably about right. Although, again, I'm going to go for all the discounts I could possibly get through Apple Connections. So hopefully I'll save a lot of money.

27:38John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, I think that if this RAM and SSD stuff continues to go on, there is a distinct possibility you will spend more on the studio than you did on your$95 ,000 Mac Pro.

27:49Casey Liss:When you combine the monitor, that's not going to happen.

27:51John Siracusa:Well, that's true. I forgot. That's true. That's true. uh all right let's talk about the mac pro and the mac studio in a different way uh we were talking last last week about how much like thermal and power headroom there is in the mac studio and john it looks like you've done a little bit of science about this yeah this was it came up as

28:10Casey Liss:we were having conversations with our friends and fellow podcast hosts about the discussion of the mac pro and the the title of the episode which i believe was uh something that casey said was uh the ability to get hotter um which is a thing that uh i think uh apple could use in its desktop line because the mac studio is still pretty small like it's a it's a plus size uh mac mini but in the grand scheme of things it's not very big it doesn't have a lot of air moving through it it's mostly entirely filled with heat sink but as i think someone pointed out like the the ultra model of that if you get the studio with the ultra it comes with a different and better heat sink than the max version like i believe the ultra comes with like a full copper heat sink inside it which is another reason it costs more money and that's because like within those space constraints yeah it can handle an ultra but you have to upgrade from what i assume is like an aluminum heat sink to uh a copper one because you're really at the limit of what that case can dissipate and i was gonna look up the numbers and like oh this is gonna be a pain i gotta find someone's review where they've hooked it up to like a power meter but no apple has official support articles where they will tell you according to their specs what the max power dissipation of their computers are and it's pretty comprehensive so on this page we'll link in the show notes the max studio from 2025 with an m3 ultra 32 core cpu 80 core gpu 512 gigs ram 16 terabyte ssd like this they give you the exact specs so this is like the current max studio with everything maxed out i mean 16 terabyte ssd how much does that cost anyway um that has the max power dissipation or max power drawer whatever they're calling it here up to 270 watts to compare to my computer the 2019 mac pro if you got it maxed out which i did not with a 2.5 gigahertz 28 core until znw two radeon pro vega 2 duo mpx module so that's four gpus inside there 1.5 terabytes of ram of course and also the afterburner card and a four terabyte SSD, that thing does 902 watts.

30:09Casey Liss:So 270 versus 902. That's how much more headroom Apple has. If Apple had some kind of case that could dissipate more than 270 watts, and I feel like that's probably about the limit of the studio case, considering they went to a full copper heat sink in there and it has fans already. There is a lot of room. That's almost three times the heat they could be dissipating so hey apple if you want to use your new chip technology to make a chip with more transistors that dissipates more than 270 watts for the cpu and gpu combined and everything else inside the mac studio you're gonna need a bigger case with better cooling and i think that's something they should pursue but apple seems to disagree but anyway how much hotter the ability to get hotter three times hotter is how much

30:53John Siracusa:hotter they could get and for the record i looked up there's also on these spec sheets how many btus per hour a thousand seven for the studio three thousand seventy six for the mac pro yeah three

31:04Casey Liss:three times the power they had a case they could dissipate three times the power but they did not want it anymore um and yeah the slots are a whole other issue but yeah just maybe just like you know make the studio a little bit bigger give it better airflow uh and maybe crank it up to let's say 400 watts can you imagine i mean gaming pc is like 400 watts is like a mid-range gpu on its own

31:24John Siracusa:Not even including the whole rest of the computer.

31:27Casey Liss:So, yeah.

31:29John Siracusa:All right. Ben Frearson writes, in episode 684, John mentioned that websites will let you pick if you have multiple passkeys. I found this true everywhere except Apple's own websites, which unsurprisingly don't seem to recognize the concept of having multiple Apple IDs. I can speak. It's called Apple accounts now, Ben. Oh, that's true. I know this. See, that's why I stumbled. I know this because every time I visit developer.apple.com and try to sign in with my works developer account using the normal 2FA process, process, excuse me, I get interrupted by a prompt to use my primary Apple ID's passkey.

31:58John Siracusa:This is true, but it's pretty easy to say, I would like to use a different Apple account, please. I don't think I am as upset by this as Ben is.

32:06Marco Arment:Well, as far as I know, this gets me over time, because as far as I know, I don't think it's possible to use passkeys for more than one Apple account on a computer.

32:20Casey Liss:That's what it is. that uh this is this was discussed when passkey's first rolled out um and i experience this every single freaking day when i have to re-logged into uh app store connect for the 8 000th time um that i always have to do it with password and it always you know makes me do the the you know two-factor thing that apple thinks so here's here's the deal uh what i was told back when this first rolled out is that apple is aware this is an issue but this is not an issue that the passkey team can solve it is basically whoever controls like the developer websites because Apple's Apple ID login, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever used it, first of all, it predates passkeys.

32:59Casey Liss:And second of all, it doesn't work like normal web things do. Like you can have a two-factor code. You could have had it in Google Authenticator or any of those other apps. Now Apple has first-party two-factor codes where you enter the six digits. You know the whole deal with that. That's not how Apple IDs work. What happens with Apple IDs is you get a whole separate, different, special custom thing that brings up the map and shows you another thing with six digits on it that's different it is it has been its own thing its own login process for you know presumably for added security for ages and it seems like now that we have a solution that could like you know modernize like you know stop using that old thing that you were using start using this new thing they haven't gotten around to it and so when you log into your apple id on apple's developer websites you have to use the apple id that you are logged into the mac as if you want to use passkeys there is no way and this has been true from the day apple rolled out passkeys there is no way to log into let's say app store connect with a different different apple id than when you're logging into you can try the the passkey login and it will prompt you but it will always try to make you use the passkey for the apple id that you're logged into and that's because apple does its weird own thing with Apple IDs.

34:12Casey Liss:And every year, I hope, this will be the year they'll fix their stuff. And it's been, I don't know, two, three years now and they still haven't. So yeah, Ben, you're right. That's Apple's fault. It is not the passkey team's fault. It is the team who controls Apple ID login and or the developer websites that is making all our lives miserable. And it's also them that's making me get logged out of App Store Connect every 10 minutes.

34:35John Siracusa:All right. So with regard to Russian sanctions and things of that nature, This is a post from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation said that Apple Distribution International Limited, or ADI, which is the Republic of Ireland-based entity Apple uses to pay App Store developers, made two payments totaling£635 ,000 to a Russian video streaming platform in June and July of 2022, at a time when they were subject to UK sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. ADI voluntarily disclosed the payments to OFSI, and the agency confirmed that no breach had been attributed to Apple Inc.

35:10John Siracusa:itself, only the subsidiary. OFSI said Apple had relied on corporate affiliates to handle payment processing, sanction screening, and due diligence, but that companies are ultimately responsible for ensuring their own compliance with financial sanctions rules.

35:22Casey Liss:This came up because we talked about Ubiquity and things getting to Russians, and we said it doesn't really matter whether it wasn't us, it was our subsidiary or a third party or whatever. Ultimately, you are responsible. and as soon as that episode the story came out about Apple getting fined for exactly the same thing and yes they voluntarily disclosed it because if they didn't voluntarily disclose they would be fined even more but that's the law the law is you know as Marco would say it may not be your fault but it is in fact your problem pay$500 ,000

35:50John Siracusa:Indeed All right I wanted to quickly point out listener Neiman Goel I'm so sorry if I pronounced that wrong has created retinadisplays.com which is a very useful resource to figure out what your options are if you want a retina style display. And there are a lot of displays on here. I haven't like personally vetted any of these or anything like that, but in principle, the couple that I looked at sounded right and seemed reasonable to me. So this, as Merlin would say, gets my official okie-dokie. So good stuff.

36:22Casey Liss:Yeah, we still haven't, all the monitors that were announced at CES still aren't out yet because it basically takes the entire year for that to happen or for you to give up on the ones that really aren't going to ship. But this website, in the meantime, is great. You can filter based on size, technology, if you care about that, whether or not it is shipping, whether or not it is discontinued. It keeps getting better all the time. So kudos to Naaman about this website. It's very handy. Yep.

36:45John Siracusa:All right. Let's talk about color spaces and CIE 1931 and Apple's 2026 CMF. So we talked about this, I don't know, like a month, month and a half ago. And I think I had theorized that 1931 was the time in which the CIE spec was created. And I think there was some dubiousness amongst us about that, including from me. But many people wrote in to say, yo, that's right. It was in 1931 that the CIE 1931 color space was created. And then Eric Portis had a lot of really, really great feedback. Eric writes, the CIE 1931 color matching functions are not just a monitor calibration standard. They are the foundation of the modern science of human color perception.

37:22John Siracusa:There are three functions. And I wrote about the three-dimensional color space they create. As an aside, hi, this is Casey. I have never freaking understood color spaces. Maybe that makes me a terrible developer or an idiot or maybe both. I don't know. But I've never understood it. And Eric's post about it is very, very good. And we're going to talk about another post here in a second. But I really liked Eric's post. And if you have any interest in this or want to learn more, I really suggest it. So that's Eric's post, which we'll link in the show notes. And then Bartosz Szywanowski. I hope I got that somewhat close to right.

37:56Marco Arment:Probably Bartosz.

37:57John Siracusa:Bartosz. I think you're right.

37:59Marco Arment:Bartosz Czikhanowski, probably.

38:00John Siracusa:All right, we'll go with that. Thank you, Marco, for saving me on that one. Anyway, this person has done some phenomenal websites or pages about different things. Like the mechanical watch one, I still think that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen on the web. Like these are just incredible. And I didn't realize this was before I started following him that he did one on color spaces. And I didn't have the chance to read the whole thing before recording. It's quite a bit longer than Eric's, So you need to like properly have a sit down and read it. But it's also very, very good. And Eric had pointed to that and said that he also wrote a great article with many cool interactive examples about the CIE 1931 XYZ color space and how it relates to familiar concepts like sRGB and the spectral locus, aka the XY chromaticity diagram that you've probably seen a thousand times.

38:49John Siracusa:Eric then continues, the whole deal with Apple's 2026 CMFs, as far as I can tell, is over time, The R, G, and B light sources that drive color displays have gotten narrower in the range of wavelengths they produce. The red, green, and blue light sources used 100 years ago in the experiments that supplied the data for CIE 1931 CMFs emitted broader distributions of wavelengths in modern OLEDs and LCDs. Narrower sources stress, in quotes, color matching functions, more revealing problems.

39:16Casey Liss:And by the way, this is a thing that television reviews have really gotten into in the past few years as well, because they would measure the spectral color output of the R, the G and the B and whatever is producing the RGB light. And if you look at what the diagrams look like, what you want to see is big spikes at R, G and B. But if you look at TV from not too many years ago, even just like a W OLED from LG for like five or six years ago, it didn't look like spikes at all. you get like one pointy spike for the r maybe and then like the g and the b would just be this big plateau like a mound like you could barely see any humps in it you're like really that's the light that's putting out because what you want is pure red at a specific wavelength that you decided is the reddest red pure green and pure blue and then you can combine those in a predictable way you don't want your green to have a bunch of red and blue and mixed in with it and everything you want those spikes that's one of been one of the advancements of uh quantum dot oled tvs they would show look how much pointier the spikes are when we went from regular oled to qd oled it's like wow that's so much better but apparently as these spikes have been getting narrower and narrower it has been messing with the um the functions in the cie standard because they were built at a time when the the r the g and the b were much more smeared and spread out and i'm not sure what he means by stressing them but maybe it just reveals more problems with the the functions and equations that do the math on color stuff.

40:40Marco Arment:By the way, just before we leave the Bartosz-Chekonovsky area here, I know we kind of already did, but I was too slow. I cannot recommend enough. Casey promoted his stuff. I cannot recommend enough that you go and read any of his blog posts. Yep. Because the amount of work that he puts into these, every blog post is like some kind of explainer about usually some kind of science-y thing. And not only is his knowledge incredibly deep, but you end up learning so much and they're all filled with these interactive demos and diagrams and and like models and like it is incredible it's more like an application than than a post

41:20Casey Liss:if you're thinking oh it's a bunch of text and pictures that's not it these are basically

41:24Marco Arment:applications yeah it's and and you end up learning so much like like one of my favorite ones was the bicycle one it's all about like basically like the physics of how bikes hold up and work and I love Bartosz's stuff. I strongly recommend like it's the kind of thing. This is the kind of thing that used to exist on the Internet, just something that somebody put a lot of work into and is just putting out there for free. And it's delightful and mind blowing and amazing. And there's not that much of that on the Internet today, at least at least if there is, it's very hard to find. Bartosz's posts are that like it's exactly what nerds like us love about the Internet.

42:00Marco Arment:Like I we can't believe that he put all this effort into it and it's amazing and it just makes you smile from end to end as you as you play with it so definitely check them out and if you want to

42:09Casey Liss:compare it like speaking of the mechanical watch one just try you know a straight google search or like look on youtube you'll find a thousand youtube videos explaining how a mechanical watch works 90 of them will be ai generated garbage but i guarantee you none of those videos is as good as his blog posts it's so good like sometimes a video is not the right format for a thing you could make a really good video about how mechanical watches works but man it would be hard to beat his again i don't want to call them blog posts because like you get to do stuff in them you get to like you read and then it's like and this is how it works and you get to like interact with the page until you understand it until you get it until you see how it works a bunch of people have done it he's not the only one i think i saw one recently about uh what the heck was it it was Something having to do with like pixel art or like anti-aliasing patterns or something.

42:58Casey Liss:Oh, yes.

42:58John Siracusa:I saw that too. But now I don't think I can put my finger on it. But yes, yes, yes, yes.

43:02Casey Liss:But this particular format of like text images, but also interactive like application-y things that you can use, it aids understanding in a way that even a video can't match.

43:14John Siracusa:I mean, for God's sakes, the top of the mechanical watch post, there is an explosion, extrusion. What is the word I'm looking for? One of those things where you can see all the layers. Exploded diagram. Okay. Exploded diagram. of a mechanical watch that's interactive. This watch has got to be rendered in JavaScript or whatever, and you can explode out the watch. It just blows my mind. I cannot believe this is done with web tech. It's so freaking cool.

43:36Marco Arment:Yeah, whenever there's a new Bartosz post in my RSS reader, I'll save it for weeks until I have time to really sit and experience it. It's like saving up when there's a new movie that you want to watch or saving up for the finale of your TV shows. You can really watch it. Like, that's how I treat his blog posts, because they're just so good and so delightful.

43:58John Siracusa:Yeah, and he doesn't post often, but they're all incredible. But he has a Patreon, which if you're not going to go to ATP.fm slash join, that's the next best place to go. So you should check that out. I've been a patron for a while now, so you should definitely check it out. Going back to Eric Portis. Sorry, we got sidetracked there.

44:13Marco Arment:Sorry, Eric. It's really hard to follow that.

44:16John Siracusa:It really is. Problems with the 1931 functions have been known for a while. and the CIE itself updated its color matching functions in 2015, and Eric has provided a link, which we'll put in the show notes. It's impossible to convert from three-dimensional values, RGB or XYZ or XYY or whatever, derived from one set of CMFs to three-dimensional values derived from another set of CMFs because reducing actual spectral area, a continuous distribution of light across a range of wavelengths, to three values that represent the quote-unquote same color is a lossy operation. Approximately all digital imaging, cameras, displays, content is based on the CIE 1931 CMFs, and approximately nobody uses CIE 2015 CMFs because there's just no way to convert the 1931-based values to the 2015-based values.

44:59John Siracusa:Apple had the bright idea to scope their 2026 CMF to be, quote, white point only, quote, and there's another link that we'll put in the show notes. This means that the Apple 2026 CMF calibrated displays can render content encoded with the 1931 functions and shift every pixel's color value by the measured error between 1931 white and Apple 2026 white, as measured using the actual spectral distributions output by the display. I'm so curious, writes Eric, how Apple's 2026 CMFs differ from the 2015 CIE CMFs and what experiments or data they use to create them.

45:34Casey Liss:Yeah, I think this is such a great explanation, and it ties into the fact that CIE 1931 is literally from 1931. If there are problems with the standard, and it's not keeping up with modern technology as our screens get better and everything why don't we change it well i think that uh eric has explained here like there's no way to convert from one to the other so it's kind of like look everyone has to kind of agree to move to some new color measurement standard and even though they made a 2015 one people couldn't even move to that so apple's kind of like look we can't just make a new standard and everyone's going to use it we need to make something that we can convert from the cia 1931 into this so they're saying we'll just pin the white point and move everything else like we're in a bind here because we're using technology and math made in 1931 that is outdated and inadequate for the current problem space of modern monitors and yet we can't get everybody to just lift up and say all right everybody we're going to start driving on the other side of the road now or like whatever analogy you want to make and so that's why we're using a standard from 1931 because apparently getting off of it will require a degree of cooperation across many industries that is seemingly not possible.

46:40Casey Liss:So yeah, 1931, that's the year.

46:44John Siracusa:All right. We had a bunch of follow-up with regard to Long Island and the mainland. Craig Bowers writes, while for all visible purposes it would appear Long Island is an island, the U.S. Supreme Court has legally classified it as a peninsula and thus an extension of the mainland because of course the United States Supreme Court did.

47:02Casey Liss:Yeah, it's something I learned about in my Long Island studies class.

47:04Marco Arment:Oh my God. I love this so much because, yeah, apparently the East River kind of sucks.

47:11Casey Liss:When it was filled with poop, it was more like a land bridge.

47:14Marco Arment:Yeah. So the East River apparently does not really qualify geologically as a river. I believe it was a tidal inlet or something. And so, therefore, Long Island is not an island according to the U.S. Supreme Court based on some debate about how the states control different parts of it. so therefore John I believe I am correct well it's kind of like when the when the like the

47:40Casey Liss:government declares pizza to be a vegetable for the purposes of school lunches like the government says lots of things or like I think they did like tomato as a vegetable not a fruit kind of stuff it's like okay but like uh yeah this there there is in fact water surrounding it but not the right kind of water I do wonder like you know we always just look at our current Supreme Court cases that We can transparently see whatever is motivating the decisions. But like whatever was in U.S. versus Maine, like whoever was lobbying who say, no, it's not an island. It's a peninsula for the purposes of this thing.

48:11Casey Liss:Yeah. Peninsula. Sure.

48:12Marco Arment:Well, I think it's pretty clear. I think there's a pretty good history of New York kind of getting what it wants from the Supreme Court.

48:21Casey Liss:You know, especially versus Maine.

48:22Marco Arment:Right. Or, you know, look at like the Statue of Liberty debates with New Jersey. Like, you know, there's there's been a lot over time of like New York kind of just taking what it wants and problem solved.

48:33Casey Liss:We will legally declare this not we will legally declare this not to be reality. Done and done. Fair enough. I think it's the same thing with the pizza as a vegetable. That solves a lot of school lunch problems. Gracious.

48:45John Siracusa:And then Joel writes on the discussion in episode 685 about Long Island's location. John and Marco were both right and wrong. section 11.2 of the new york state coastal management program describes long island as distinct from the mainland and from manhattan which is geographically an island but geologically part of the continental u.s quote long island is a detached segment of the atlantic coastal plain separated from the mainland on the north by long island sound and from manhattan on the west by the narrow east river and the new york harbor the atlantic ocean completes the island's saltwater encirclement, quote.

49:19John Siracusa:Then back to Joel. Interestingly, section 2-5 of the CMP also references the mainland of Long Island in a few places, two of which are here, quote, the most extensive beaches in the state's coastal area are found on the barrier islands and mainland of Long Island, particularly along its south shore. And then the second instance, barrier islands earn their name in this way by protecting the waters of the inland bays and the shoreline of the mainland.

49:42Marco Arment:So it seems like mainland is used in lots of official government documents to refer to Long Island.

49:47Casey Liss:Well, again, the government says lots of things, but I will point out that, Casey, did you copy and paste these things from the email, like their direct quotes, the little passages here?

49:54John Siracusa:I sure thought I did, yeah.

49:55Casey Liss:Yeah, so the part with the saying, you know, that Long Island is a detached segment, blah, blah, blah, separated from the mainland of North of Long Island, right? If you notice in that passage, it says, separated from the mainland on the north by Long Island Sound, blah, blah, blah. But then in the other two passages where it says, found on the barrier islands and the mainland of Long Island, mainland has scare quotes around it in both instances separated from the mainland of long island kind of like when you see like fresh vegetables and the freshest in quotes you're like so one instance of this requires no scare quotes because it is accurate and direct and the other one is like well you know kind of like the mainland of long island quote unquote uh anyway the government doesn't know

50:39Marco Arment:anything about this well it does seem so this this usage reinforces the overwhelming uh opinion that we got from feedback and that most you know like dictionaries and things seem to define which is that mainland is a relative term that's not what the dictionary said that's what people want the dictionaries to say but it's not what they actually say it depends on which dictionary um it it seems as though mainland it refers to basically the the larger body of land compared to where you are on

51:07Casey Liss:a small body of land you're making up your own definition now but none of the definition said

51:11John Siracusa:that i don't know i don't know i can't say that that is an actual definition but i think it is a

51:16Casey Liss:pretty universally agreed people want it to be people do marco is right that people want it to be completely relative but then they get angry when i say uh describe fire island as the mainland from a smaller piece of land like no that not that not not the thing that i don't want to be mainland only the things that i do want to be and then there was like an island is actually called mainland with a capital m as a proper noun yeah yes there's a few a few things like that and we

51:38Marco Arment:hear from a few people in hawaii and new zealand about how the term is used there um but and yeah spoiler alert hawaii uses mainland to refer to the continental u.s um new zealand is delightful and i

51:50Casey Liss:forget what they said the new zealand has a thing the new zealand actually gets in under under the definition which a lot of people didn't know until i sent the definition back to them because new zealand has you know as people said 700 islands but anyway it's two big ones two big things that make up those in new zealand one is bigger than the other and that one is referred to as the mainland because according to i don't have the text in front of me but most of the definitions say like the larger part of a continent or country new zealand gets in on a technicality because the larger part of new zealand is the south island and therefore it is the mainland but unfortunately that is not the case for long island because it is not the larger part of the

52:27Marco Arment:united states of america well in conclusion john you are still wrong however i will offer one more one more additional side note to the listeners if you are trying to make an argument to us uh sending us the output of an llm does not make the argument i wanted to say this as well but

52:47John Siracusa:i didn't want to be a turd about it but yes we've gotten so i'll be the turd we've gotten so much people sending us just a transcript or perhaps a link to like a long-running conversation with the chatbot let me tell you i do not want to do i there's very little that i want to do less than reading someone else's conversation with a chatbot no thank you i mean it's kind of like reading their

53:09Casey Liss:diary it's like like i mean like i appreciate the sentiment but like it just feels weird reading like it's like reading someone else's google searches like it just it seems too personal

53:19Marco Arment:yeah i think it's for me it's like it's somewhere between google searches and somebody telling us about their dream. Like the thing is, you'll never find somebody on this podcast who likes chatbot LLM results more than me. I use them all the time. But that's not a source. It isn't an argument winner. It's a summary and sometimes fever dream of facts that may or may not be real and may or may not be helpful. That's something that you keep to yourself and you use for your own personal uses. But the output of an LLM is not information to win an argument. We are sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online.

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54:33Marco Arment:So I'm very happy to see that, and they're constantly adding more. But also, they support all kinds of other businesses too. So suppose you are offering services to people. Say you're a consultant. You can book that through Squarespace, through your own site in Squarespace. Say you're some kind of life coach. You have time slots. You can do that too. You can sell digital goods. You can sell things like e-books, PDFs. You can sell podcasts, like private podcast areas. You can have paid newsletters. That's all the rage these days, for a good reason. It's a great business. You can do that on your Squarespace site too.

55:04Marco Arment:So much is support on Squarespace. You've got to see for yourself. Start a free trial. You can start building your site, and you can see all of the wonderful features Squarespace offers, and they're so easy to use. So what's great about Squarespace is that you don't need to be a nerd to do it and there's no coding or software packages or anything like that. So it's really easy, not only for you as the busy nerd, but it's easy for the non-nerds in your life too, because they can do it themselves. They don't have to go through nerds like us. They can do it themselves, which is very empowering and it helps people just operate their businesses the way they should.

55:34Marco Arment:So check it out today at squarespace.com slash ATP. I strongly recommend try out that free trial. You'll see for yourself how great Squarespace is. When you're ready to launch, use offer code ATP for 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.

55:59John Siracusa:I'd like to do a little bit of, I guess, actually follow out. Sorry, upgrade. There was a podcast episode that came out, I want to say sometime last week, and it is entitled, I believe it's Knob Feel, the greatest podcast ad campaign of all time. So this is Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Green, and they did this podcast episode from their podcast, Phonograph, where they basically talk about the genesis of and kind of the contents of the ATP Cards Against Humanity toaster ads. And John talked to these folks. I talked to these folks. Our good friend Lex Friedman, the good one, not the bad one, talked to these folks.

56:36John Siracusa:And this podcast episode is really, really good, and I highly suggest you listen to it. I suspect, John, you have some more thoughts, though.

56:44Casey Liss:Yeah, when I tweeted about it, I said, like, I don't know if this episode is better if you already know the story of this stuff or if you don't know. But it is very much like, I don't know how to describe it, like, not this American life, but that type of like, or 99 % invisible or, you know, like a well-produced, scripted, interestingly put together exploration of a particular weird topic. Only it's about us. it's just so weird to hear a podcast like that about something that you did marco's in it as well you'll hear his voice so like all three of us are in this podcast um so yeah even if i feel like if you know everything that they're going to say it's still just fun to hear because like isn't it weird that they're talking about this that you know our our weird little podcast on this other really like fancy well-produced podcast but if you don't know it it's fun to see where the story is going i almost wish that casey hadn't spoiled what the uh the ad campaign is about but uh oh sorry and check it out like it's fine but you know it's not it's not a super

57:39Marco Arment:secret for anyone who's listening to well others our listeners would know from the title yeah yeah

57:43Casey Liss:but like it's a little overblown like the greatest podcast i campaigned all the time but it was certainly one of the weirdest that's for sure i mean there have been weirder and some of the weirder ones are pointed out in the show i won't spoil what those are as well but yeah it is very very focused on our tiny little circle of the world and it was a delight to hear and it was a delight to do so check it out we will put many links in the show notes because like i don't even know how to link to a podcast anymore obviously we have the overcast link but that's not like the

58:07John Siracusa:real site that's just marco's thing for it i've got the official link and that you think it's the lips and one is the official one no no it's uh phonograph podcast.com i've already got it in the

58:16Casey Liss:show all right well okay well there's there's so many links and there's also the pod.link site which is one of those sites that's like a landing page that says it has like every podcast player app in the entire world with little icons and it's like you know listen in overcast listen in Spotify listen and YouTube listen and Apple podcast listen just going down the whole side of the page and those sites I just assume will all disappear someday but anyway uh Casey's got

58:37John Siracusa:you covered you can find this podcast yep and I also did a little write-up on my site about that which I'll link which is not too terribly exciting but I mean most of what it what I was saying was how freaking weird and flattering is it that somebody's like history lesson is about us three dorks like that's really freaking cool and really freaking weird but uh it's good stuff it was it

58:57Marco Arment:It was delightful. I was it was incredibly like, you know, heartwarming to listen to. And I actually I listened to it in the car on the way upstate with my family. And so my son got to hear that. He's like, that's you. And they're talking about you. And it was it was it was a very nice experience for all of us.

59:14Casey Liss:My father's voice coming back from the car player. It's recorded.

59:18Marco Arment:Yeah.

59:19Casey Liss:Who knew?

59:19Marco Arment:And I think I accidentally blew them off and didn't get interviewed because I blew them off. And that was not my intention. Sorry about that. But thank you for making this podcast. It was delightful.

59:27Casey Liss:Yeah, I think when Casey presented the idea, it was like, this person wants to talk about podcast ads. Like, it wasn't clear that this was going to be – because I was just as surprised as anyone. And I said, hey, I'll talk to the person about podcasts. I don't know what they want to talk to me about, but I know about podcast ads a little bit. And it turned out it was good that I did it because I featured in it more than I thought I would.

59:48Marco Arment:Yeah, and it was interesting. I think for anybody who is interested in the kind of mechanics behind podcast ads, why everything's moving to DAI now, why ads like the kind we do seem to be significantly on the decline and going extinct. There's a lot of good info there, both from us and from the reporters and also from Lex Friedman. And information that you don't usually hear podcasters talk about, just how they're sold, what dynamics have gone on behind the scenes. So if you are interested in that whole market, I think there's a lot of interesting information there as well. But it's also just a nice story about our toaster ads.

1:00:24All right.

1:00:26John Siracusa:Marco did the unthinkable, what was it, a week ago? And you remembered how to post to your blog. I'm shocked that you knew how to do this

1:00:36Casey Liss:Did he remember or did he have to figure it out again?

1:00:38John Siracusa:Did AI post to your blog, Marco? Did you give the contents of the post to some AI and say please figure out how to get this on Marco.org?

1:00:46Marco Arment:Nope, and I also did not use any AI tools in writing this blog post

1:00:49John Siracusa:Very well done Alright, so all snark aside, why don't you tell us about this please?

1:00:53Marco Arment:You know, so everybody was celebrating Apple's 50th anniversary last week and I do think it's worth pointing out that we didn't do anything on this podcast to celebrate it

1:01:02Casey Liss:I mean, Casey's the one who should feel bad about that, but that is exactly appropriate for me. He's Mr. Anniversary. I'm Mr. No Anniversary, no nothing. So I'm on message.

1:01:12Marco Arment:That's true. And honestly, I think the other podcasts in our nearby podcast neighbor sphere, I think they did a good job covering it. And whatever they did was more of a anniversary celebration than anything we would have done. And so I'm happy to have left that to the other podcasts. They did a very nice job with it. So for me, I was trying to figure out, should I post something about Apple's 50th? I had a little bit of a hard time deciding on an angle because my feelings about Apple these days are mixed. They do a lot of good and they do a lot of bad. And there's a lot about them that I still love.

1:01:52Marco Arment:There's a lot about them that I will always love. And there's a lot about them that I wish they would improve. and we often on this show push for that like you know we the reason we push for things to improve when we think they're they're in a bad spot is that we love these products so much and if apple doesn't serve our needs very well or if they stop serving our needs the industry has made it pretty clear that they're not really going to pick up the the mantle and start serving our needs there's other things out there that are good but the way that we love the basic computer like the Mac, the personal computer, like the way that we love that and even to some degree the way we love other general purpose computing devices like iPhones and iPads other companies are just not going to do what we like in those roles for lots of reasons, many of them won't, many of them can't the market has moved on These are mature platforms, mature industries.

1:02:53Marco Arment:Things are locked down, locked out. If we want computers to be the kind of thing that we love, the way we've always known them, a lot of that responsibility falls on Apple. With the 50th anniversary, there was a lot of looking backwards. All the good things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and the older company and then over time, the middle of the company's era, all the great things they did. there wasn't a lot about the tim cook era in these retrospectives um except for like the you know tim cook scaled everything up yeah that's true okay i don't have anything really nice to say about the tim cook era beyond that and so i decided i'm not going to address that but i also i didn't want to do a retrospective about just you know jobs and was because i have i have thoughts about that that I'll save for another time.

1:03:53Marco Arment:And I also didn't want to just complain about everything in this blog post. We are obviously near the end of the Tim Cook era. And the John Ternus era seems like the most likely thing that's going to follow it. And so I kind of wanted to leave like, you know, a letter to John Ternus in almost a way of like, the way that I imagine, like, CEOs and presidents leave letters to their successors. I know that's actually a thing with presidents.

1:04:24Casey Liss:Sit down and write two letters, right, Casey? Nope. Come on, Marco.

1:04:29Marco Arment:For your first and last day?

1:04:30Casey Liss:I forget the rest of the reference. I don't remember where this came from. It's probably apocryphal, but maybe it's a real thing. But anyway, the thing is, I can't even give you the context. So basically, like, a new political leader comes into power and finds two envelopes on his desk. and they say if you get in trouble open up the first envelope if you get into trouble again open up the second one

1:04:53Marco Arment:so he eventually

1:04:55Casey Liss:gets into trouble he opens up the first envelope and inside it's a piece of paper that says blame everything on me basically blame everything on your predecessor and then he does that and it works and then time passes and he gets into trouble again he opens the second envelope and it says sit down and write two letters

1:05:12John Siracusa:it's very good

1:05:13Casey Liss:a letter to John Ternus blame everything on tim is it the first letter no and so what i what i wanted to do here was

1:05:20Marco Arment:basically like and in some ways you know i i'm pretty sure apple execs see blog posts they they see press they see this kind of thing they don't hear podcasts probably not but at least not all of them but i was pretty sure that if i wrote this this way if it was reasonably short if it was reasonably constructive and if i named it a letter to john turnus i was pretty sure there was a good chance he'd probably see it at some point from his vanity google searches who knows but like somehow this would be sent to him by somebody that like that i i think i think the odds of that knowing the way apple's execs you know do read a lot of stuff that is you know posted by our community i figured there's a good chance he'd see it and if not enough higher-ups would see it, it would still do some good.

1:06:09Marco Arment:And what I wanted to do is basically just reinforce our principles, not just what Apple stands for, but what like we who are on what we view as the good side of personal computers, like what we believe in with computers. And, you know, number one is we love computers. Number two is computers like serve us and they enhance our lives. We don't need our computers to control us, restrict us, take advantage of us, and that we are the owner of the computer and we are the customer being served. We are not the resource being harvested by a barrage of upsells and privacy invasion and tracking and all that other stuff.

1:06:58Marco Arment:I believe Apple best represents those ideals in the computing industry by a mile. They are way ahead of everyone else in all of those ideals. But I also firmly see and believe while they are ahead of everyone else, their own adherence to those ideals is declining and has declined significantly under the Tim Cook era. As they've pushed into services and upsells, there are promos everywhere. There are ads everywhere. The computer does feel like it is taking control away from its customers and owners and treating us more like resources to be harvested and annoyed. I think Apple is... They're in a dangerous place here for their ethics, their morals, their quality, and for the things that we care about.

1:07:55Marco Arment:So what I was hoping to do with this is keep it very short and try to advocate for this mindset to not be forgotten. And a little bit of historical reference to Jobs and Waz, because I do think Jobs and Waz, both in their very different ways, both very much believed in these things and practiced them. You know, Boaz wasn't honestly there for that long, but, you know, certainly the Jobs era, Jobs practiced this. Jobs pushed for this. He advocated for this. He cared about this. Tim Cook doesn't care about this stuff at all, doesn't even know about it, doesn't care at all. I think, I get the impression that John Ternus is a nerd like us, at least hopefully in the good ways.

1:08:43Marco Arment:he's probably he's he seems like a generally better rounded human being than us but hopefully he does seem like he is the kind of person who would share these ideals somebody who loves computers and wants to make good computers that serve their customers not just the vendor or not third parties he seems like the kind of person who would believe in this and so i wanted this to kind of get out there and reinforce these beliefs and bring them into the discussion and I think it did I mean I don't you know I haven't gotten like a ton of traffic or anything but like it achieved what I wanted to achieve and I and I think the way I wrote it it is very likely

1:09:21Casey Liss:to get to him somehow yeah when I read this I was thinking that I can I in my mind is like a companion to this that I'll never write um like because because when I think about stuff like this and this is actually this what you said about it actually reminds me a lot of um my thoughts and some of my words about the uh the case for a true mac pro successor blog post i had all those years ago especially in terms of like bean counters and car guys type of stuff or whatever and it's the same type of thing of like well mine was more of like a story thing whatever just like uh advocating for as you said like our values what we love about apple you know this is this is what we want this is the good stuff um and anything you're doing that is not this is not what we want right um and i read this and i'm like you know having soaked in the last many years of uh tim cook's leadership all i can think about is that i feel like what turnus needs in addition to this is like help with the situation that he's going to find himself in which is basically there will be things there'll be lots of things trying to make it seem like the stuff that marco is advocating is not the right thing to do.

1:10:38Casey Liss:What are those forces? What are the forces that are going to be buffeting whoever leads Apple next, trying to make them not do the stuff that Marco is describing? There are a lot of those forces. They are powerful. They are winning, like internal, external, in the world, within yourself. There's a million reasons why things have been going the way they are at Apple. It's not like, you know, someone is like a mustache twirling villain or whatever forces are aligned to make it so that if you are in this position you are like everything is telling you to do the opposite of what marco is saying to do and i feel like these what these people need is i don't know a thought technology something to hang on to something to like like some kind of thing they can hang their hat on that will give them enough stamina to withstand the forces that are buffeting them.

1:11:36Casey Liss:Jobs had it kind of easy in that like he never needed any additional support in that area. First of all, he founded the company. He just felt like he owned it. So it's like, you're not going to tell me what to do with my freaking company. So Ternus doesn't have that. Tim Cook doesn't have that. Jobs did. He was the founder and he was attitudinal. And so he's got that holding up. And second of all, he was so stubborn and strong willed and had his own personal beliefs that were sometimes weird or whatever. But in general, like he didn't have like he doesn't have a problem advocating for what he wanted like he just but that is not a common position that people who are in charge of trillion dollar companies have most of them with the possible exception of mark zuckerberg who is mustache rolling evil unfortunately um like you don't like if you're if you're not the person who feels like this is literally my company like i found it it is me it is mine you know like if you don't have that then all the world's forces come down on you and everybody around you and the board of directors and all the other executives and every shareholder and every and you can convince yourself that the customers want this too they're all making you junk up everything and put in more ads and drive service revenue and cheap out on your products and do all this stuff and for years apple held on to uh you know as much as it could the the thing that made it successful everyone everyone else was you know making netbooks or doing you know doing the financially expedient thing apple under the jobs to era was doing the opposite of all of that we are going to do things that nobody else does because they seem too hard or too expensive or too stupid or too niche or too esoteric and it's just like nobody cares about this don't waste time on that don't waste money on it it's not worth your time this is why apple is always doomed this is why apple will never succeed because you're doing stupid stuff that nobody cares about but if you do that hard enough it pays off in the long run and that was i feel like has always been the story of apple success doing things that everyone else thinks is a terrible idea and that is better in ways that nobody values and if you do it hard enough and well enough it turns out people do value that it's the argument i always make about like i always try to use analogies of like if you make an expensive product and it just gains a reputation for durability that you will have customers forever you have like generational customers even though everything else in your industry is telling you don't do that don't make your stuff high quality don't make your luggage like indestructible like you know making some really high quality indestructible luggage that costs five times as much as everyone else's like you dummy you should be selling your luggage at walmart that's how you get rich why are you doing this and it's like well if we do this for 50 years we will have such loyal customers because we will gain reputation as the company that makes the luggage that doesn't break our zippers don't break our things don't break down like even though it costs more we make it better or whatever whatever whatever attribute you want to be like and that is so hard to do because first of all you got to wait 50 years and second of all everything in that industry is telling you don't do it make your things cheaper make them reduce the cost of your materials manufacture them wherever it's cheapest no matter what no matter what everyone else says make sure it's sold through walmart like just do all this stuff and it's so hard for i and i know know it seems like isn't that a far cry from what apple does today and but like with every passing day every single thing that apple does i look at the the decisions they're making and saying you are giving in you know inch by inch to the forces that are trying to tell you to do the expedient thing that everyone else is doing and service revenue is just a perfect example of that so anyway i look at this i'm thinking turnus or the next apple leader needs a really good understanding of the things that are going to be the forces that are already aligned against them the day one they get in there so many forces are aligned against them inside the company and outside to make them do the wrong thing and make them think it's the right thing and then give them some kind of something to hold on to to let them fight that again you know they're not going to have what steve jobs had is like oh well this is my company and i own it and i do what i want and i also have really good taste right they're not going to have that maybe they don't even have good taste but they need something they need i don't know someone something something to hang on to some movie i was watching recently or i don't remember it was saying like how do you get your motivation it's like i i don't find a reason to do this i find someone to do it for like whatever whatever whatever makes it work whatever will give you the strength to make different decisions when everything in your world says that you should not that is the only thing that can continue to allow apple to be what it is and apple's got more of that than any other company to marco's point like they've got more of it than anybody else like i'm not saying though apple's just the same as dell they're not okay but it's the trend line that we don't like and so from the outside everything still seems like it's mostly okay but the trend lines are all going in the wrong direction mildly but they're all going in the wrong direction luckily apple started out way far above everybody and everything but yeah that's like this letter is one thing and then i feel like and you're gonna read this letter and you're gonna be like john turnis like nodding his head going yeah no i thought i believe all that that's great thumbs up i agree with you marco i'm gonna do all that but then you're gonna get into the job and you're not you're not gonna do it you're gonna continue to do what tim did and everyone's gonna tell you you're doing a great job when you do that and that's where things go wrong so yeah i don't know what the solution is but uh turnis doesn't listen to the podcast so this is not going to help him.

1:17:01John Siracusa:Well, maybe he'll get your t-shirt and then be like, you know what? I wonder about this John Syracuse fellow.

1:17:07Casey Liss:No, I just want him to feel sad for 1.5 seconds and that's it.

1:17:12John Siracusa:No, it was a good post, Marco. And, you know, I understand for a million different reasons why you don't really blog anymore, but I do miss the Marco that was maybe not a prolific blogger because I know that was a lot and it took a lot and blah, blah, blah, but I miss the at least periodic blogger. And I hope you consider doing it some more.

1:17:28Casey Liss:This is kind of like the, speaking of your efficiency, efficiency minded or maybe pragmatic. It's like Marco knows he's not going to shout Apple into doing what he wants. But he's like, maybe if I just write a sync summary of the values that I think Apple should pursue and present it pleasantly, here it is. And I'm always thinking, that's not going to work. They need tools.

1:17:48Marco Arment:They're going to be buffeted by forces in every direction.

1:17:50Casey Liss:They're going to agree with you tacitly, but they're just going to put more ads in things.

1:17:55Marco Arment:I mean, this is the best tool that we have. We know Apple is a gigantic company with gigantic forces acting upon them from everywhere in the world. People like us don't have a lot of influence on that. But we have a little tiny bit. I think over the years I have developed a pretty good sense of how and when to exercise this little tiny bit of power that I do sometimes have. and it doesn't i'm not expecting to move the needle in a noticeable way but maybe in a very very tiny way maybe this plants or reinforces some idea in some heads and maybe it makes it one percent more likely to to do the right thing sometime that that's worth it to me it's almost like parenting in that regard yeah right you know you have a tiny bit of power and you have to pick

1:18:57Casey Liss:and choose when you're going to use it and don't have too great expectations about how much it's actually going to do but you're if you can make a one percent change just declare victory

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1:21:06John Siracusa:Let's do some Ask ATP. We're going to do just a touch tonight. And Johnny Decimal Noble writes, during the recent Mac Pro discussion in episode 685, there was talk of RAM prices and how they're affecting the availability of certain configurations of the Mac Studio. I'm confused. Memory is unified. The memory in these chips is unified. It's not like Apple's buying DRAM transistors in the open market, are they? My mental model is that some giant machine in Taiwan has given a sheet of silicon and out the other end pops an M5 with 128 gigs of RAM. It's not like the RAM is bought in, cut up, and fed into the machine and soldered onto that chip, is it?

1:21:40John Siracusa:I don't understand how the global shortage of RAM affects the production of the M-series chips. I don't understand what effect it has on Apple at all. Nothing's changed inside those giant ASML machines in Taiwan. It doesn't care about global DRAM pricing. I'd love to know where my thinking is wrong. Everywhere. John, where did Johnny get this wrong?

1:21:59Casey Liss:I already applied on Mastodon to this, but I think this was a good topic because I do wonder how many people also have the same incorrect idea about what unified memory means. It's another one of those terms, kind of like the Mac Pro bereave shirt, where you kind of have to know about the shirt and stuff that came before it to make sense of the bereaved thing unified memory is like that so the quick answer to the question is uh next to the uh the socs the tsmc prints uh in your mac you will see a bunch of little ram chips that apple buys from the same ram vendors that everybody else buys their ram from sk hynix micron samsung yeah apple buys ram chips from the three companies in the world or whatever it is that make 90 of the world's ram and that's why the prices affect them so that's that's the quick answer the question is yes they do buy ram chips the ram is not uh you know printed on the soc which is a thing you can do uh there is s ram on there and stuff for the caches and there was ed ram on like the uh the gamecube i believe and like but but whatever uh when you buy a mac there are ram chips uh next to the so you can see them when you look at the the pictures of like a logic board or whatever but now why is it called unified what's what's the confusion here with the unified memory what is unified about it and it has nothing to do with where the transistors that make up the ram are although they are very close to the soc because again if you see like an m2 i sent a picture of an m2 chip it looks like a little square that says m2 but like three quarters of the square is the m2 soc and then one quarter of it is two ram chips and they're just they're like touching it they're so close to it they're right there and this they are soldered down next to it but they're just plain old ram tips but that's not what makes it unified what makes it unified is that in the olden days when you made a computer you had memory or you know ram or d-ram it was in you know sims or dims or whatever uh that the cpu would read and that was your computer's memory you got a computer with you know one megabyte of memory or whatever but then if you had a video card in that computer 3d 2d any kind of video card sometimes the video card would have its own memory just for the video card and that was called vram for video ram uh and the video ram would be used like in a 3d card it would store textures and geometry and the video ram especially on fancier yes the you know fancier 3d graphics cards would have huge bandwidth to the gpu that is on the video card like just really, really wide buses.

1:24:28Casey Liss:They're optimized for moving huge amounts of data into and out of the GPU. And how did that data get into VRAM? Well, the computer would ship it over, probably out of its regular RAM. And it would say here, video card, you're going to need these textures and this geometry to do your work, but send it over the bus PCI bus or whatever AGP bus, whatever bus was the bus of the day. And it would go into VRAM and the GPU would read and write to VRAM and do all of its stuff. So you had these two pools of memory, regular RAM that the CPU used, and then VRAM that the GPU used. Unified memory means not having a separate pool of VRAM and regular RAM.

1:25:09Casey Liss:Macs and the Apple Silicon age have one pool of RAM that is used by the GPU as its quote unquote vram and by the cpu as its regular memory and it's any part of the ram can be used by either one and they both have a really fast really high bandwidth connection to that ram that's how it works right um if it was just like uh you know just have a have a gpu and a cpu and just one pool of ram that one pool of ram would be too slow and too low bandwidth that's why they had vram special vram with really high bandwidth to the gpu but what apple did is they said we're going to take our ram and we're going to make it a huge wide fast low latency bus and solder the chips right next to the soc and now that pooled memory can use by both and this is one of the reasons why the uh early days of people saying like oh it's okay for a mac for a mac apple silicon mac to have a smaller amount of ram because it has unified memory and that makes it use less ram the opposite is true in back in the day if you had like you know one gigabyte of regular ram and 512 megabytes of vram you had a total of 1.5 gigabytes of ram in that machine 500 gigs for the video card and one or 500 megs of video card and one gig for the ram right if you unified that you'd want it to be combined you say okay well i'm just going to throw away the vram and leaving you with just the one gig now you have less ram so it seems like you have less memory it's like now i have the the gpu fighting with the cpu for who's going to get to use what part of the one single pool of RAM and in Apple's case that one single pool of RAM isn't any bigger so yeah it seems like you're using uh wasting more memory unless you always have the same amount you have even today if you buy a gaming PC you can get a gaming PC with 16 gigs of RAM and you can get a video card with like I don't know like 8 gigs of VRAM in it that's still to this day how gaming PCs work they have dedicated video memory on your nvidia card that's just for the GPU and they have dedicated RAM that's for the CPU but that's not how Apple things work and believe me Apple does not take a 16 gig computer and then take the eight gigs from the video card and combine them no you just get the 16 or 8 in the case of the neo um so again the way they make this work is because the ram is very fast that we always talk about those memory bandwidth figures that we give very fast very high bandwidth very low latency and it is equally fast when the cpu is using it or the gpu is using it and the cpu and the gpu are in the same soc even if they're not in the same die as they are in the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

1:27:37Casey Liss:So anyway, that's what's unified about it. It has unified VRAM and regular RAM into a single pool of RAM, but that single pool of RAM is on RAM chips made by the same RAM manufacturers to make everybody else's RAM chips. And that's why I'm going to pay way too much money for my Mac Studio.

1:27:58John Siracusa:Job done.

1:27:59Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete Me. 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. Every single episode has about 20 minutes maybe of extra content, one new topic that we couldn't fit in the main show. That's Overtime. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the Claude code leak and how Claude actually works. That'll be really interesting, so join to hear that. atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:29:30www.mastodon.com

1:29:38Marco Arment:A few weeks ago, I did an after show where I tried a Garmin smartwatch or sport watch, whatever they're called. A Garmin watch instead of an Apple watch. And my conclusion was basically, I see why other people might want something like this, but I don't want something like this. And it seems like it is a very bad smartwatch in order to be a pretty possibly good sport or activity watch. And I got a lot of feedback about that. I wasn't happy with how I tried it. I wanted to give it a better shot because one of the things I said in the episode was I figured out pretty quickly that I had not really gotten the right one.

1:30:23Marco Arment:I had gotten one of the smaller models, like a smaller, simpler model, and Garmin has a thousand models of their smartwatches, and I really did not... I realized pretty quickly, this is not the one that I would get if I was keeping it. But I decided not to keep it, and I returned it. But in response to people making very good points, I'm like, I really should... I should have given that another try, or a better try. So this time, I decided, you know what, I'm actually going to try again, but I'm going to get something that I'm pretty sure I will have a better experience with. That was not a Garmin watch.

1:31:09Marco Arment:It was a Suunto watch. So I heard lots of good things about this brand, Suunto. I think that's how it's pronounced. I forgot to look it up. Sorry. Suunto makes similar looking watches to Garmin's, like sport watches that are designed for super long battery life, endurance and really strong conditions that maybe you wouldn't want to bring something like an Apple Watch. And they seem very well regarded. In particular, I know our friend underscore David Smith told me that I should probably look at them. And it seems like they have a lot of fans. I looked at their, I was looking at their offerings the first time when I ended up with the Garmin.

1:31:49Marco Arment:and I couldn't quite decide what to get, and I went with Garmin. But this time I tried the Suunto Race S. Part of what I wanted was a good offline maps situation, and in Garmin's models, to get offline maps, you have to get a pretty large watch, and in the Suunto lineup, you don't. And so what I went with was the Suunto Race S titanium model. This is, in most ways, identical to the regular Race S. It costs$100 more and a titanium case. And one of the big advantages of that is it's very much lighter weight compared to the regular one.

1:32:31John Siracusa:Did you get graphite or canary?

1:32:33Marco Arment:It's gray. They're both gray.

1:32:36John Siracusa:Well, they're all gray. Dark gray or slightly less dark gray?

1:32:39Marco Arment:I believe, yeah, I got the dark one. But I ended up buying, they have an orange strap version that I just bought the strap separately on Amazon for, I think, 50 bucks. So here's my impressions of the Suunto Race S. Now, as for context, I took another very long walk and I was wearing both the Suunto and the Apple Watch Ultra.

1:33:00John Siracusa:This is the underscore pose. I was going to say, the prototypical underscore pose. Very well done.

1:33:05Marco Arment:Yep. I was definitely doing my best underscore impression.

1:33:09Casey Liss:You didn't make his face, though.

1:33:11Marco Arment:No, I mean, who can do that? I can't totally rip him off. You know, identity theft is not a joke, Jim.

1:33:16Casey Liss:You should be wearing way more watches, right?

1:33:18Marco Arment:So anyway, I did this long walk. I did 23 miles, one arm with the Apple Watch Ultra and the other arm with the Suunto Race S.

1:33:27John Siracusa:How long did that take? Just ballpark?

1:33:29Marco Arment:About eight and a half hours. 8.44.

1:33:33John Siracusa:That's a long time.

1:33:34Marco Arment:Yeah, there were a couple of breaks in the middle, you know, like 10, 15 minute breaks. But yeah, so 8.44 was a total time. I've also been using the soon to erase s for my regular three times a week workouts. These are kind of like, you know, mixed full body, you know, some weightlifting, some Pilates style stuff, some, you know, training kind of stuff, just kind of mixed workouts with the trainer that we do all sorts of stuff on mats and with dumbbells and stuff like that. This time, again, my goal here was, let me give myself the highest chance of liking this that I can. I decided not to have it forward notifications from my phone.

1:34:10Marco Arment:So it is just a sport and activity watch. It does not try to be a smartwatch because what I have learned is, you know, I learned from the Garmin experiment and the Suunto is no different in this way. The abilities of non-Apple Watch watches with iPhones are pretty limited in terms of notifications and, you know, there's no Siri access and stuff like that. And so I'm like, you know what, just to maximize my chance of liking this, let me try using it for what it really is and not try to make it a smart watch that that it really isn't um so first impressions it is so light now and and this is like you know the race s is their i believe their second smallest model this is a category of very large devices generally speaking so their second smallest model is still substantial in size like i would say it is similar in overall size to kind of between the Apple Watch Series 46 line and the Apple Watch Ultra.

1:35:08Marco Arment:So it's like right between those two, I think, in terms of like how big it generally looks on your wrist. But compared to both of those, it feels so light. The Apple Watch Ultra feels like a brick by comparison. The Suunto straps, way nicer than the Garmin strap that I had. Now, Again, Garmin has a very big product lineup. Maybe the one I had was one of the bad ones. Who knows? The Suunto strap, very nice. Silicone, you know, it's nice and flexible. It's light. I think it looks pretty good, you know, for what it is. Much, much nicer straps on the Suunto. Also, keep in mind, as I'm comparing this, I'm comparing it to the Apple Watch Ultra.

1:35:50Marco Arment:But the Suunto is only$300 in steel,$400 in titanium. The Apple Watch Ultra is$800. So this is half the price or less if you get the slightly heavier model, but it still offers similar battery life in terms of like if you're doing a long workout, like if you need like long workout time, if you're going to be on like a 12 hour hike or whatever, the battery life between this smaller Suunto and the biggest Apple watch is in the ballpark of each other. They're pretty similar. And if you want even more, you can get the bigger models, but I didn't want to do that. so anyway the screen nice and bright totally serves its purpose um i will say the always on screen kind of sucks uh but it's mostly it sucks if you try to use it as a smart watch which i was i was like when i tried the garment i was like let me try to make this a smart watch with this i'm like you know what these suck a smart watch is let me try to make it a sports watch so i'm not wearing it all the time i'm wearing my apple watch most of the time and when I am doing an activity that requires sports tracking, I put this on, either instead of or in addition to the Apple Watch.

1:37:03And so by using it that way, a lot of the other decisions they have kind of make more

1:37:09Marco Arment:sense. So the always on screen, when you're in an active workout, it shows the workout data always on. And you can turn it off to extend battery life further. But it shows the workout data exactly as you expect. It dims it, you know, if it's not like active, but otherwise it's there. When you're not in a workout, this has a customizable watch face, just like every other, you know, smart-ish watch. You can customize it. They have complications. They have a few different faces you can pick. There's like a face store you can go into on their app. By the way, the app and the setup process, way nicer than Garmin's.

1:37:44Marco Arment:Garmin's apps, plural, and setup processor, obviously burdened by lots of legacy and complexity and kind of just scope creep, I think, over time. Suunto, I believe, is a significantly younger brand. They have a lot less crap in them. They're much more simple. There's a lot less that's trying to get you to upsell to other things. It's just like a nice, simple, and in my opinion, better graphically designed platform. Everything about it was way nicer than the Garmin experience for me, including the experience of actually navigating the watch. Maybe if I had more time with the Garmin, maybe I would have gotten faster navigating it.

1:38:22Marco Arment:But the Suunto seems like it just makes a little bit more intuitive sense. There's a couple of buttons to learn, a couple of standards, but for the most part, I learned it a lot faster. And again, I think the general graphical style of Suunto is nicer. and frankly i think their hardware also looks nicer i mentioned already the straps look and feel and work better than the garmin that i had the garmin that i had um but also just like the watch case i think like it's a little bit more tasteful looking the garmin's have like a certain look of like extreme and sport activity you know and they kind of use color in weird ways and i think suunto just has a better style overall um then it came time to charge it their models have different chargers.

1:39:08Marco Arment:And so this one, I think, is one of the older ones because the Race S is like a couple of years old. And the Race 2 is the newer model, but it's only the big size so far. This charger is USB-A only. There appear not to exist any USB-C options. And because they're not all the same, that introduces some interesting complexities. So for instance, if I want more than one cable, I'm going to have to buy more and, you know, keep them wherever I might be. You know, maybe put one in the backpack, you know, like if I want to have it like charge like on my bed stand, my bedside table or whatever, like you quickly realize that the Apple Watch by being the dominant platform, it has certain kind of built in advantages.

1:39:56Marco Arment:And one of them is that there's lots of accessories out there made for Apple Watches because Apple sells tons of Apple Watches and has for a decade, and they've always used the same charger. So people have had time to make third-party cables, third-party docks, third-party battery packs that all can charge Apple Watches directly on them. And in this ecosystem, that just doesn't exist. The ZoomTune ecosystem is way smaller and way younger. And because they use different chargers for different models, if you brought this on a trip somewhere, and if you need to charge it. Now, it does have a very good battery life in standby mode of like, if you're just using it as a watch, it'll last many, many days.

1:40:42Marco Arment:But if you were like in a bind and needed a charger for this, if you were wearing an Apple Watch, you could go to any drugstore, any like airport kiosk or whatever, and you can get an Apple Watch cable to charge your watch. If you have something like this, good luck. You probably won't be able to find what you're looking for without like you know going to you know ordering something online and having it delivered to your hotel maybe if you're lucky you know so does this charge the same way as the apple watch does like inductive like a pad or a thing that like um it's not inductive there's there's contacts on the back

1:41:14Casey Liss:so but there's not a all right so there's not a port but it's just like yeah it's like it there

1:41:18Marco Arment:is a magnetically attaching disc that attacks to a usb cable um and it is it but it's a proprietary charging system that uses two pins on the back interesting i wonder if you could just like uh

1:41:27Casey Liss:buy any charger at a gas station and rip open the wires and just take the positive and negative and hold them to the two contacts on the bottom of the watch just apply five volts across these terminals and hope for the best yeah i mean like it's as i was asking whether it's inductive like that you needed some kind of coil that exactly matches and aligned to the thing but if it's

1:41:44Marco Arment:two like pin contacts that's real old school yeah i mean that's i maybe that would work i don't know but anyway so it it is like again it adds to the friction if you want to make one of these your daily driver. It just adds to the friction that it's not a standard charger. And unlike the Apple watch, which is also like not a standard charger, so to speak, but like it also is not dominant in the world and hasn't been there for long. And so odds are you won't be able to charge it with in any other way other than one of its official cables or a clone from Amazon that has all the same problems that the official ones do all the same limitations.

1:42:20Marco Arment:So the charging situation is bleak but the battery life is so good that like you can if you're just like keeping it around for doing occasional workouts while you're on a trip you wouldn't really need to charge it if you know unless your trip is longer than you know a week or two maybe as for other physical characteristics the speaker on the watch is just like beeps like a cheap digital watch like that it can be like you know it can play different tones of beeps but it doesn't appear to be like a real like pcm speaker which is interesting it's like using like back and john wouldn't know this but casey you would i know about pc sound i used to laugh about it yeah like pc sound like if you just had the pc speaker you didn't have a sound blaster and it's that it's that you could get the atari links

1:43:05Casey Liss:not the atari links the uh the links uh golf game voice i bet the uh sunto watch can make that noise oh i'm i'm it can it can make some noises all right

1:43:16Marco Arment:yeah so that's that's interesting but what i learned using this thing is that generally speaking as a computing device it is very primitive compared to the apple watch and you see that in a few different ways so one of them is yeah like the pc speaker kind of speaker um also the watch seems to have not really any concept of like multitasking so to speak in a practical way so like for instance the app the the watch will only sync to its app if the watch is on its home screen not in an app. The Suunto app on your phone will yell at you, put the watch back on the home screen so we can sync data.

1:43:54John Siracusa:Lovely.

1:43:55Marco Arment:There was a point where during my big walk, I wanted to change a setting. I wanted to turn off the always-on screen during the big walk to try to conserve power. And it turned out I didn't need to do that. It had plenty of power. It finished an eight and a half hour walk with 66 % battery left.

1:44:15John Siracusa:Goodness.

1:44:15Marco Arment:It was fine. And that's with the always-on screen on heart rate tracking and GPS.

1:44:20John Siracusa:Does this have the fancy GPS that you really, really wanted from the Apple Watch Ultra?

1:44:25Marco Arment:Yes, it does. It has dual-band GPS, L1 and L5. So, again, it's very ultra in a lot of these features. It competes directly with the Apple Watch Ultra in a lot of these features. But, again, at half or less the price and much lighter weight and, in some ways, even better battery life. Not always, but in some ways. So the always on screen when you're not in a workout only shows a dumb clock. Like when the Apple Watch is in like power save mode. It only shows the time. If you want to actually see your watch face, you have to like hit a button on the watch and that will bring up the watch face. And so the value of things like watch faces and complications, I think is somewhat limited by that.

1:45:12Marco Arment:the situation with watch faces and complications again they exist they're very limited very primitive a lot of things are missing so like they have built-in weather widgets and stuff that you can put as complications but there's very few metrics you can measure like they're like one of the things i'm disappointed by is that there's no uv index and what i always have on my apple watches is temperature uv index and timer as my bottom three complications all that stuff is very primitive and also so it has it has this feature where you can you can download offline maps to it which is great um it's not super granular i had to download all of new york to have any of new york and all of new york is a gig and it takes a while to send it it takes like an hour to send it over to the watch so it's uh you know it's a slow process but it does actually work.

1:46:01Marco Arment:Once the map is on there, map navigation works great. You can zoom in and out. You can, you know, it's, all that stuff is great. And I needed offline maps for this because this was upstate where there's not that, not very good coverage of any kind of, any sort. And also, by the way, these watches do not have a cellular option. Garmin does on some of their larger models. As far as I could tell, none of the Suunto's do, I don't think. Certainly this one doesn't. That's another thing, like, if you want this watch to have cellular for things like if you wanted to maybe take a run without bringing your phone with you, this isn't going to help you.

1:46:36Marco Arment:Similarly, most of these watches don't support local music playback to Bluetooth headphones. Some of the newest ones do. Many of them don't. So again, I think the Apple Watch has spoiled us for how good of a computing platform, how good of a smartwatch it is. but again this is half the price and way lighter and with very good battery life so i think we can forgive a lot of those things okay um i'm almost done here at some point in the last couple of weeks there was a software update that just happened automatically i didn't it didn't ask me it just did it and when i woke up the next morning my watch face and complications were blown away, reset to defaults, and my offline maps were deleted.

1:47:22John Siracusa:Oh, brutal.

1:47:26Marco Arment:Before that, the complications on the watch face didn't quite fit the layout of the watch screen. Like, there were some that were, like, overflowing their bounds. After that, that was fixed. So, okay. It feels like I'm using a beta. Suunto, yes, they are a younger company. It shows. their software is still a little a little rough in a lot of those ways so after that i reset up my watch face i downloaded the new york map again and had to send it over to the watch for over an hour again but i did get it to work but having a software update silently wipe out my entire watch face configuration and offline maps was a little disconcerting all right as for actually using it during workouts and during the giant walk.

1:48:19Marco Arment:Workouts first. It's really nice during workouts, actually. So this confirmed, first of all, I don't need it to be any bigger. One of the problems that I have with the Apple Watch Ultra in my regular workouts is a lot of times we are like on our hands, on the mat, or I'm lifting a big dumbbell with a workout glove, like a weightlifting glove. And a lot of times it's easy for like my wrist or the edge of the glove to accidentally push buttons on an Apple Watch. And I don't have the problem. It assumes the buttons are a little harder to push. So that's good. And also, that's also why I don't want one that's any bigger than this, because if it becomes bigger, then it starts getting in the way of my wrist movement, like if I flick my wrist up and stuff like that.

1:49:02Marco Arment:So I was very happy to have the size that I have for that. And there's never been a moment during this trial so far that I've needed a bigger screen or a bigger battery or anything. So I'm glad I have this smaller one. Um, cause again, even smaller, it's not small in absolute terms. It's just smaller than other sports watches of this type during workouts. I like that. It's given me every second. It's given me heart rate updates on the screen, always on all the time. So if I'm feeling like I'm really pushing myself in a workout, I can just quickly glance at the watch and I can see it does this nice, like ring around the outside of like heart rate zones.

1:49:40Marco Arment:And you can customize those zones, which I found very nice. So I was able to set like, you know, the of like the four or five zones that go around the face of the watch. You know, they're color coded, you know, like red, yellow, green. And I was able to set like where the boundaries are to match kind of, you know, what I want those to mean. So I can tell, am I pushing myself, you know, as hard as I expect to be or want to be? And I can adjust in response to that. That was very nice. And when doing these workouts, that's when I realized, oh, round is the right shape for fitness watches. I get it now.

1:50:17Marco Arment:But I still maintain that round is not the right shape for smartwatches, where you need to be reading text frequently, like from notifications. But now I understand round was nice for a lot of these things. It isn't always ideal, but it was nice for a lot of these things, including that kind of radial display of the workout. The way the screen is designed, and I felt this way about the Garmin, too, to an extent, although I didn't get too much into customization of the Garmin, but the way the screen is designed, it makes it obvious that like these watches are designed by people for sports and activities whereas the apple watch even like apple's workout app it's designed by graphic designers to make it look pretty but a lot of times the functionality is not quite there like with apple's workout app i often have trouble like distinguishing what the different numbers are like at a quick glance you have to kind of oh wait that's the time oh okay oh that's not the heart rate that's the pace or you know whatever it is like it's a little bit you have to like kind of look a little longer than you than you maybe should to distinguish because it's all just like a bunch of left aligned giant numbers whereas these watches the way they design their faces i think they use the shape better they use the space better and they have more differentiation between the metrics they're they're showing you so it's easier for you to see at a glance so that was i i find the sunto to be very nice during workouts.

1:51:39Marco Arment:Also on the big walk, I found it to be great for kind of just general like motivation because it had a few different modes you can switch between about like you can see like how far have you gone or you can switch it to a countdown to like how far it is back to where you started. Or if you load the route onto it, you can see like how far it is to the end of the route. So that was all very nice. I also loved that every mile, the Suunto would give me a nice little beep, like a little encouraging beep. Hey, I did another mile. And I found that to be a little delightful thing. I'd actually look forward to it as I knew I was approaching a mile marker.

1:52:20Marco Arment:Like, oh, I can't wait to get my beep, my celebratory beep. That I found delightful. And I also really enjoyed that the Suunto app afterwards, when you're reviewing the data, it has a lot more detail than the apple um fitness app does for reviewing workout data um and it it allowed me to like dive in and see like you know i can customize and see different charts and graphs and lay one on top of the other to see different metrics like oh i if i if i put like elevation over over pace i can see how how i slowed down when i was going up the elevation and stuff like that or you can see where your brakes were within the pacing and everything and you could break down like by by mile it didn't matter that i like pushed the lap button accidentally a few times um it also kept an automatic quote lap of each mile i did so i could go back later and review like speed per mile and you know pace and heart rate all that other stuff so that was actually really nice i liked the workout data review in the app um i don't know if it writes to health kit so far it isn't i don't know if that means it can't or if i just haven't enabled that yet or if there's some third-party tool i'd have to use to do that but right now it is not writing to health kit for my purposes i don't think i care but that could be a big deal to a lot of people um but generally speaking i really enjoyed it on the walk it again because it's so light and it did a perfectly good job of tracking the things i need to track on that walk i was really very impressed by it as a smart watch it's terrible all of these devices are terrible as smart watches for for iphone users i mean maybe it's better on android but for iphone users i wouldn't recommend anything except an apple watch for a smart watch if you want general purpose smart watchiness you want notifications to pop up on your wrist maybe you want to have like a nice watch face that has a lot of complications maybe that tells you useful things throughout the day you want to see your calendar you want to you know do all that stuff the apple watch is the one you should get if you want kind of the the best generalist you want maybe music features you want cellular uh all like for all of those kind of like if any of those edge case or if any of those use cases are important to you you want an apple watch if you only want to have one watch in your life you want an apple watch if you want easy charging on trips like there's so many things the apple watch is the best answer to so many of those things if you want siri if you want to be able to remotely unlock your mac or your phone with it like so many advantages to the apple watch but if you want a watch for workouts and taking on long treks like this or similar kind of extreme you know sporting uses i think the suunto is better but that's a huge amount of ifs it is a much more primitive device in all those other ways that allows it to be a better sports watch in a lot of ways again it's also half the price

1:55:22Casey Liss:and very light 8.6 grams is that weight difference you're feeling by the way 8.6 grams yep i don't believe that for a second i'm looking at apple spec page now what it might be factor in is because i'm assuming these weights on both apple's page and suunto's page are um just for the watch body and so maybe the strap you're wearing a really heavy like using like the link bracelet on the

1:55:44Marco Arment:ultra or something hold on i'll i will tell you give me one moment i'm getting a scale out of my closet all right the suunto suunto race s titanium with its strap is 53 grams yeah i guess they're including the strap and apple's not yeah so the apple watch ultra without strap is 62 um if i toss

1:56:02Casey Liss:on here i mean i have a couple straps here so 60 i think you mean 61.6 sure okay what apple's web

1:56:09Marco Arment:page says so if i use the um the ocean uh band their silicone one for the apple watch ultra the total is 97 um if i use the leather loop which i actually like a lot the total is 101 100 So, yeah. So, the Apple Watch Ultra is, with a strap, about twice the weight. Goodness. And you feel it.

1:56:29Casey Liss:Yeah, I guess the Suunto one includes the strap in its weight because it includes the strap. Although, no, the Ultra comes with a strap too, doesn't it?

1:56:37Marco Arment:Yeah, so just the Suunto titanium without the strap, I just took it off, is only 35 grams. And the Ultra is 62. So, that's a huge difference. And you really feel it. anyway i am going to keep the suunto uh i it's not replacing my apple watch but i am going to continue to use it during workouts if i have it so like if i'm on a trip i'm not going to bring it you know that's there's no reason for me to do that really although it is light and doesn't need a charger for a long time so maybe but um but you know for my for my regular workouts i'm going to keep using it for the big walk i'm definitely going to use it although i think i'm going to use it and an Apple Watch Ultra just to have multiple tracking things as backups and things like that.

1:57:23Marco Arment:But I'm very glad I tried this again. So thank you, everybody who told me that I gave Garmin's kind of a short shrift there. I still don't like Garmin's, but I do like Suunto.

1:57:34Casey Liss:Do they have this? Suunto, you took those straps off pretty quick. Do they have a mechanism like Apple's that makes the straps come off easy?

1:57:39Marco Arment:No, they have what the rest of the watch world called quick release spring bars. So it's a regular 22 millimeter spring bar mount on the watch and the straps are just regular spring. You could put these on any watch with a 22 millimeter spring bar setup, but they have these little tabs in the back that you can pull to one side and they pop off, which I think that's what Garmin did, but I forget off the top of my head.

1:58:02John Siracusa:Well, that's very fascinating. I was expecting that you were going to say, oh, I bought the wrong Garmin and such and such other Garmin is the right answer, but it seems like no. So at least as far as you're aware sitting here tonight, it's not the particular Garmin that's the problem. It's that you shouldn't have gotten a Garmin at all.

1:58:19Marco Arment:Well, I think, again, it depends on your use case. So Garmin has a number of significant hardware advantages and maybe software advantages too. I didn't get too far into that. But what I really wanted was something that was small enough that it would not interfere with my workouts or shirts or things like that. and you know lightweight was a plus and I wanted offline map support Garmin is pretty stingy with which of their models get offline maps and so the one I got was the Venue 4 which that was the wrong choice for me I think if I was going to buy a Garmin today I would probably get the 4Runner there we go so the Phoenix 8 is their like flagship kind of everything watch I would probably look at that, but it's pretty chunky for my taste.

1:59:08Marco Arment:The Forerunner line of Garmin looks like maybe a better fit for me, but you have to get the giant one, the 970, to get the offline map support for reasons I don't understand. I think it's just like market segmentation. And also keep in mind, that model is as much as an Apple Watch Ultra. It's like$750 and up. So again, Suunto has a pretty big price advantage here for generally similar utility to what I'm looking at here. But Garmin also, you know, Garmin has some watches that have cellular. They have better like music capabilities in many of their models. They have they have their high end ones even have satellite connectivity, which the Apple Watch Ultra 3 does.

1:59:47Marco Arment:Suunto doesn't have anything like that. And Garmin has like different screen technologies. They actually offer a micro LED screen for like sixteen hundred dollars. but you can if you want you can buy a garmin phoenix 8 like super edition that has a real

2:00:03Casey Liss:micro led screen it's super bright remember when apple was gonna make those for its apple watch like they invested in this they were they were gonna build their own micro led screens for the apple watch and they after a couple years they said i'd never mind yeah right well garmin did

2:00:16Marco Arment:it like you can you can get a phoenix 8 today uh sorry phoenix 8 pro micro led 1700 excuse me and only available in 51 millimeter size. So it's huge and very expensive, but they will sell you one if that's what you want. It's like super, super bright. So ultimately this has taught me that I appreciate this category of watch if I change what I expect it to solve for me. If I change the role that it has in my life, kind of scale back what I want it to be, I appreciate what it is. And it also makes me really appreciate that Apple's done a really good job with the Apple Watch. Like when you see what else is out there.

2:00:58Marco Arment:And yeah, I wish Apple would have every advantage that every other watch has. They won't. They can't. There are certain tradeoffs inherent with the decisions they've made. And I will, of course, reiterate that I think the Apple – I think watchOS in general is a really under-invested in platform by Apple and there is so much potential that they just have chosen not to address yet or ever. but the Apple watch really stands up against its competitors in a lot of ways. Like if what you want is the best all arounder, it's not even close. It's definitely the Apple watch. No question. And you should only be looking at these other categories of watches.

2:01:39Marco Arment:If you know for sure that the Apple watch is not satisfactory to you for some reason, and you're willing to give up all those other things to get, you know, to use something else. But these do have a place in the market. And so I'm glad I've gotten this experience to like figure that out better and to experience these to have, you know, maybe maybe a new better workout watch for myself. And again, for only 300 bucks or 400 bucks for the light one, I think it's a great deal.