Dewain Robinson with Eero Pro, Ecobee SmartThemostat, Jabra Elite and Surface Pro X – HGG431
Dewain Robinson joined us to talk about his hands on experience with the Eero Pro, why he installed the Ecobee SmartThemostat, some experience and hands on with the Jabra Elite 65t and 75t and a look at Microsoft’s X Cloud. We also looked at his new Surface Pro X and he answers the question of who should own it! I think you will enjoy the show.
Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg431
Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #431 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.
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Podcast, Home Gadget Geeks, Dewain Robinson, Eero Pro, Ecobee SmartThemostat, Jabra Elite, Surface Pro X, battery life, Apple, Microsoft, Project X Cloud, ipad pro
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Home Gadgets
Eero Pro Wireless Mesh
https://eero.com/shop/pro-wifi-system
Price: $499
Ecobee SmartThemostat with Voice Control
https://www.ecobee.com/en-us/smart-thermostat-voice/
Price: $249 on sale currently for $199
Travel Gadgets
Jabra Elite Active 65t
https://www.jabra.com/bluetooth-headsets/jabra-elite-active-65t
Price: $189
RAVPower 18W PD 10000mAh portable Charger
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N3RGNY6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Price $26.99
USB-C Power Delivery and Charge / Full charge back from 0 to 100 in 3 h 16 minutes
Surface Pro X
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/8vdnrp2m6hhc?activetab=overview
Price: Starts at $999 My Config $1615.78
Razer Blade 15 Advanced
https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-blade
Upgradeable RAM / SSD / WIFI
$2499.99
Xcloud
Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e
Price $369
Xbox One Controller (Bluetooth Capable)
Price $39.99
Jim Collison [0:00]
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks show number 431 recorded on January 23, 2020.
Jim Collison [0:22]
Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all your favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from the average guy TV Studios and Mike I’m not sure like if it wants to snow if it doesn’t want to snow if like what it doesn’t want to snow it a weird temperature. It’s like a slushy out there. What right I mean, it’s your driveway to get you ever clear your driveway I
Mike Wieger [0:46]
did last night but then today it’s like this slush. I started I didn’t have time when I got home to do and then it gets dark so early so you better have a light on your snowblower.
Jim Collison [0:54]
It’s like a 711 exploded on my driveway. Like there’s just Slurpee slosh. Everywhere I don’t like it Dwayne course you’re not. You’re not dealing with any of that right Dewain, you’re I’m sure you got great. 65 hyosung Right, right.
Dewain Robinson [1:09]
What is the mythical thing you call it snow?
Dewain Robinson [1:13]
It snowed here. Once in one year the ones that know it this weekend
Jim Collison [1:18]
snow Okay, well, barely it’s gone now right?
Dewain Robinson [1:21]
I Well, I mean it never actually even got on the ground but it was nice. It kind of
Mike Wieger [1:28]
it was pretty big.
Dewain Robinson [1:29]
It was like it look like rain but float here.
Jim Collison [1:34]
Little little float here. Well, we actually it is it’s kind of pretty this time of year with with snow on the ground. We’re getting fresh snow, a little bit of fresh snow every day. Of course we post the fresh show notes as a bad transition. The average guy.tv Don’t forget you can join us live on our mobile app available for you free that is not cold. It’s hot in time for you to get your hands on that head out to Home Gadget Geeks. com Download the app Android iPhone. Phone both available for you. It’s free. Want to thank our Patreon subscribers for that don’t forget to join our discord group actually both Facebook and discord have been doing really, really well at least so the average guy TV slash discord, the average guy.tv slash Facebook, I don’t discriminate I’m on both unlike Wieger I am on both platforms he’s gotten all Discord. So if you want to go out there and talk about gaming or PC hardware or really anything about your home automation stuff we’ve been talking about lately, head out to our discord group, the average guy TV slash discord or Facebook on the other side. Don’t forget Ryan’s coming on here in the next couple weeks he live stream last night talking about their CES coverage. They got a lot of great stuff a bunch of us jumped out there to watch me and Mike. I was listening to that to their podcast, right? Yeah. Wow. Like if you’re into hardware, you want to listen to those guys. Right? So head out to think computers.org and then slash ces 24 there’s the coverage. Did you take anything away from last night as you were? Kind of Listen, there was a lot of hard We’re talk a lot of hardware well
Mike Wieger [3:01]
and that’s bad for me because right now I’m in a hardware buying mode guy got a few ideas though of some upgrades but the hard thing for me is that a lot of the new stuff isn’t compatible with the system I’m building but i’m i’ve got a list now of items. I’m like, oh, if I go if I do a next upgrade, I think that could go in it. And then Ryan, I have been streaming on Twitch so they stream on Twitch afterwards actually right over the past few nights have been on Twitch together and I think I’m gonna get back to that after this podcast getting back on on Twitch and just having some fun with the community to Joe skis. It was always out there stopping by and it’s pretty good time afterward. So they weren’t a good show over there.
Jim Collison [3:35]
Bob and Ryan coming on here in the next couple weeks I think early February and but get gets we’re going to kind of cherry pick the best of their CES coverage hardware first and come out for that show for sure. Yeah, you’re gonna you’re gonna want to come out as well. And so Ryan, thanks for saying yes to that. We have a retraction Mike, maybe first ever, Home Gadget Geeks retraction.
Mike Wieger [3:56]
Can you officially done there’s probably been a lot that we should have done
Jim Collison [3:59]
probably you’re probably How did we mess up last week?
Mike Wieger [4:01]
So, yeah, we said Ed Navarro sent over the NVIDIA Shield winner.
Jim Collison [4:07]
Yeah, you said that. So Eddie Romero’s PC, Eddie, Eddie Navarro is a guy worked with, like 15 years ago. And that was just in my head. And I named it that, you know, I think you say something, and you just kind of know it’s right. But it’s not. Right. That was the case. So Eddie, thanks for your thanks for your generosity on that to Mike as well. Sorry, I it’s it’s a sign of old age. I’m definitely getting there. So. And I apologize to Eddie Navarro who has no idea that I even mentioned on the program, and I haven’t seen him in 15 years. But Eddie Navarro if you are watching, sorry that I mixed you up. And, and thanks
Mike Wieger [4:43]
Ed Ramirez for sending over it’s it’s still been a rock solid machine. I’m loving it in the bedroom. It’s a perfect, cool machine for in there.
Jim Collison [4:50]
Cool. Then one more update before we get to Duane and that is I’ve solved the Wednesday Thursday night issues. So Dwayne. Last week, we threw out like hey, Lots of things are coming up on Thursdays. What if we moved to Wednesday night? And Mike overwhelmingly the live audience here? Yes. Last week was like, Wednesday is great. I mean, I I had no nobody said no. Then during the week I heard from a few of the podcast listeners were like, Oh, I tried it. I tried to, you know, tune in from time to time and Thursdays are really better than Wednesdays. So I kind of thought about it today. And I thought hey, here’s the deal. I’m gonna keep it Thursday and just move it when the Wednesday when I need to like that’s I don’t know if I need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Right? I mean, I think they’ll probably be five six Thursday’s where I need to move it. I don’t know, Dwayne, I know about you. But all the business stuff seems to land on Thursday nights when they want to do an evening event. Do you find that to be true? Like everybody does? Thursday night parties, for whatever reason? Yeah.
Dewain Robinson [5:52]
Wednesday is not a popular night.
Jim Collison [5:55]
Here in United surges night. Yeah, kind of Church Night and then you know what to do it on Friday.
Dewain Robinson [6:00]
Right, what I think about meetings on on Thursdays
Mike Wieger [6:08]
and Fridays, right? And
Jim Collison [6:10]
he Dewain put up a picture of a baby’s face. Are you saying that I’m crying? Is that what you’re saying? Or you’re crying or I don’t like it, okay? So if you are, if so we’re going to kind of, it’ll be a compromise. So on the Thursdays, I’m busy, I just need to do a better job of planning. And I’ll try to get you at one point in time and it still exists at the other side of it. I actually have a calendar out there that you can follow now I never populate it. So maybe it’s time that I do Mike and it start getting maybe a little more advanced planning going, you know, so it’ll be most Thursdays and if I have a if I have an issue, I’ll move it to Wednesday, and I think we’ll be fine. So we got some Wednesdays and some Thursdays coming up and that will be the solution. Duane Robinson is joining us he’s back to really talk about what he intends. did talk about Dwayne we had you on it was not long ago, maybe
Dewain Robinson [7:05]
North 3424 was that
Jim Collison [7:09]
one we is that though that’s the last time we had john for 24. So six weeks ago or so? Yeah. should have waited a few more weeks to get for 34. Shouldn’t we have I should have planned that alone?
Dewain Robinson [7:18]
I think we should just skip the numbers right on, because, I mean, who’s counting where we are?
Jim Collison [7:25]
What happened to 32? And 33? I don’t know where those episodes Dwayne, welcome back.
Dewain Robinson [7:32]
Yeah, it’s good to be back.
Jim Collison [7:33]
Good. Good to have you. We um, let’s kick it off. In not get distracted with I mean, it’s already probably taken me 10 minutes to get into the show. So but that’s what we do here. You had intended to talk about some true home gadget stuff. Last time you were here. You have been working with the Euro pro in working in mesh and talk a little bit about your experience with that.
Dewain Robinson [7:57]
Yeah, so I actually implemented in multiple iroh systems now, since I made my decision to go so the what I got interested in is if you guys recall, I was big into the loz Iris thing. I think everyone loves me for that. Yeah, yeah.
Mike Wieger [8:18]
You did a really good like I think refund or buybacks essentially. Right, wasn’t it? That was the big thing that the walkthrough on
Dewain Robinson [8:26]
yeah cuz I like it’s not like some of the stuff that Dave McCabe is recommended that just went
Dewain Robinson [8:33]
right you’re
Jim Collison [8:33]
not you’re not hammering on the K bar yeah
Dewain Robinson [8:36]
oh I know he’s not here to defend himself
Jim Collison [8:39]
I think he’s a listener though I think he’s a listener
Dewain Robinson [8:41]
I think he is I think he is a day Yeah, there’s been a couple of things that we’ve all said hey, this would be good and and then it kind of blew up but if you were an Irish person, then you then you probably got handled pretty nicely on the backside of it. Then and most people will remember that I switched over and I see said, Okay, I’m going to go into the virtual assistant space and look for things that I know will interoperate nicely together. So I started looking at the assets between Google and the assets of Amazon to pick which evil I wanted to go with. And I chose the Amazon evil over the Google legal evil. So I chose the Euro products because they’re owned by Amazon. And my intention was I want all my home stuff to work together because I’m, if you recall, I moved from Iris to ring when I did that, and moved over to the echo with the, with the home hub in it and everything and so like heroes are in that same thing. So I was, I believe, I believe that eventually Amazon will kind of bring these products together and you might end up with a mesh built into a speaker and stuff like that, right. So what so I went ahead and I’m I’ve done that and I actually bought the pro system. And there’s some good benefits to the Pro. And then there’s the standard system. The pros like the little rectangles, I was looking around to see if I saw the box. But he was got like three different systems that you can get. If you want multiple points. There’s one that’s like a little hub that’s basically zero Pro, one Pro, and then it has like little things you plug into the power outlet. And then there’s two of those that come in the box. I don’t have any experience with those. But I will say those don’t. Depending on your home, I would look at that one is probably the least likely to purchase the medium sized one which is like it looks like a little like a little box but it’s it’s smaller, but it sits higher. That euro pros are about, you know, institute that they’re not real, real thick. These others are really tall and they’re mostly Made for homes and I think they’re targeted like 2000 square feet type of homes, or the hero pro system, I think is a 3000 square foot type of approach. So I, the main thing, the reason I got pro was because it also has Ethernet ports and can do backhauling over over Ethernet. And if you’re familiar with this, it’s that all of them use a back channel connection between the endpoints, there you go. And the back channel import that you have is how the different mesh endpoints are communicating with each other, and how they are sending the information around on like their connection back. And so you what you can do is separate the data connection to your to your back end network. So back to your router and all and then you have that you optimize the clients connectivity speed. So almost sort of like a router more, I guess, maybe more like a bridge in a way. And so, but then they also handle handling like offloading to each other. And being able to balance the thing I didn’t know I was going to get when I did this is I also didn’t know that it automatically
Dewain Robinson [12:24]
it automatically handles the frequency direction for you as well. So like if you get just a standard router, it’s going to say 2.4 gigahertz network and a five gigahertz all of that is all on the euros in it, all you get is one SSID and whatever is the optimal for that device, it puts it on the proper channel and then it moves it based around load and load balances them across it based upon signal as well. So you So in the end, it actually does really well. The other thing that was cool about it was that you get the mobile application and they just refresh the mobile application since our last show. So even at that show, we didn’t, I wouldn’t have known about that. But it’s really, really nice to have that I found that I’ve only found in one little minor issue and that is if you get some devices that are really old or don’t support, like certain levels of security on for Wi Fi, you it will not support those. So you you’ll have like a really rare situation like some little Chinese box for the LEDs on the back of my TV, for example, may not support the Wi Fi security requirements of a new era. And and you can’t turn it down You can’t say I want it less secure. So so it’s it’s I guess it’s kind of good and bad depending on who you are. But like you said, that one’s okay. So see this one saying 6000 square foot home. So so this is what I have And the way the other cool thing is on the back of them, I don’t know if if you have a if you can find a picture of it, but there’s two Ethernet ports. And there is no such thing as one is the primary or anything, whatever is the first one you provision and you plug into your router becomes the primary. And there’s the one I was talking about before the one he wrote Pro with two beacons, beacons. So you can kind of look at that it’s like a 5500, square foot home and everything. And then there’s one other version, that’s not the pro that that they offer as well. But the thing is, is that on the back of it with the two connections, if you don’t use you can use the connections for connecting into a router for the, you know, to plug it in for you to go back channel. But you can also do a lot of other things with like you can there’s the other one sitting on the table right there. So they have a system of three of those and I think that one’s only like 2000 square feet. So what’s cool is those those connections on that back you You can also use them to be a bridge. So with those things connecting, let’s say that you have a Wi Fi connection and a location in your house that has no cat five, you can put an arrow pro at that endpoint. And then the Ethernet ports on the back of it, you can use that to plug in a hub or something and turn into wired connections and it will use the back channel hauling of the Wi Fi because it has the channel that you have clients connect to. And then it has the channel that you have that talks between them and back to the router. So that’s the cool thing about them is because is the bandwidth between them and each of them have their own channel back to your router. So what you end up with is you don’t still bandwidth for rebroadcasting and things of that nature. So So the same thing would happen if you plug a hub in. You don’t actually use the Wi Fi at all. You just use the back channel to get back and you can choose you can like in my house. Two of them that are plugged into Ethernet and the backhaul is being done that way. And then I have one upstairs, that there wasn’t an Ethernet connection. So it’s doing Wi Fi back channel. And so all of that kind of worked out really well for me. And I would say that, you know, in general it was I was happy enough that I went and I got the other euro system for my father for Christmas. With his I actually was able to put two in his house and put one right on the edge. And he’s got a shop that’s way up on a hill. And what I ended up doing is I put one in a shop and use the back channel to be able to handle all this. And then the cool part of it. Yeah, there you go. There’s the backup one so you can see it’s just two ports and they’re not labeled because you can use them for whatever you want. It doesn’t matter.
Dewain Robinson [16:47]
But the thing with with the setup I had is I actually put in my my parents are getting older my dad likes to go work in a shop up the hill and my mom doesn’t want to walk up there. So what I did is put in an Echo Dot dot Up in the shop and I put another echo speaker in their their kitchen. And now my mom can drop in and talk to my dad all the way up in the shop but they didn’t have the Wi Fi coverage to be able to pull that off. And so so that was a really a really cool purchase. Their parents didn’t really think it was that cool until until I set it up and then they were like, Oh my god, this is really cool. And then I also taught my dad a little secret because they don’t have a lot of bandwidth and he all his TVs and like the cord cutter thing. I showed him that now with the combination of that and it’s a it’s a an E ro pro and again, all my Amazon and so you can say you know, Lady a turn on or turn off the guest Wi Fi. So now my dad can turn on or off people who are coming over so if the TV starts not streaming good enough, he can just turn off the guest Wi Fi and kick everybody else off. That are his guests so that he gets his TV’s not interrupted which is a very important thing for my Father.
Jim Collison [18:01]
Well, we see understand,
Mike Wieger [18:03]
right? Yeah, it’s a dad thing.
Dewain Robinson [18:06]
Yeah. And I have a prediction. Are you ready for my prediction far away?
Dewain Robinson [18:10]
My prediction is that eco B will be purchased by Amazon. Oh, that is my prediction. And so that’s why I shifted over to eco v. For my thermostats, I had the go controls, which were the dumbest thermostats, you can give it like z wave ones on the market when I moved into the house. That’s what I put in. And they’re good and they’re fine. But they there’s, they’re kind of dumb. I mean, if you can turn the temperature up and down, up and down, and then but the Eco bees have here, I just happen to have one of these sitting right here. They have these little sensors that are smart sensors, and they tell motion and they also tell the temperature and they go back in and so now Do they tell you like, okay, all my food on this floor? Does it have what is the temperature in this floor? But those things tell the humidity. They also say whether or not that room is occupied or not. And so they use that algorithm to determine what is the temperature that should be set based around occupancy in conjunction with remote sensors and humidity. So it actually works out really, really well. Now those have lady a built into them as well, the ones I have, and I will tell you, in some ways, I wish there was a way you could turn off the speaker component of that and not have it shine a big red light. Like if you have an echo, you know what I mean? I have one back over here, but you can’t see it, but it because I’ve muted the speaker. It’s got this big red light on it. So on the ego V on the top of it, it has it’ll do a blue light, a yellow light or red light And the reason they’re doing that is because that that’s got lady a built in. So those are the notifications and everything. But what I found is because I have dots all over the house and they sound a lot better, and I like them better, I don’t really want to use the ecobee component for for lady so but I will say if you that’s mainly I wouldn’t have bought the box, I really wouldn’t have bought the dots if I had those before. Because this the mics on them are amazing. The sound quality, you can stream audio, you can stream Spotify to them if you want. And those are those little tiny ones. No, no, I’m on when you were on the website. You can see the picture of the thermostat itself. Yeah, thermostat has it though. Gotcha.
Jim Collison [20:45]
Gotcha.
Dewain Robinson [20:46]
Okay. And it but the mobile application for it is really nice. Yeah. So that that thing right there that hangs on the wall, right? Um, but then that is from the app, you connect those sensors like I had the So its additional sensors associated to that. And so I have one on the bottom floor and one on the top floor. Yeah.
Jim Collison [21:06]
And the sensors are just temperature and humidity. They’re not listening motion, motion and motion, but they’re not listening. They don’t have microphones on them.
Dewain Robinson [21:14]
Okay, now they are, they’re simply just additional sensors. And I will say that the experience of adding those was really stupid simple. Like they did a really good job at onboarding people. And the price that I think they’re around 249 I saw them on sell for 199 at one point, I think around Christmas, they were 199 bucks for them. I will say I really would recommend this. Like if you’re if you’re looking for an alternative to a nest, this is this is nice. And not only that, it also, I don’t know, there might be pictures of this on the site, but they also it also has the weather like it actually has a visual where you can check the weather on on the display and it takes the weather into consideration. So if it’s 95 degrees outside and you’re trying to cool it, it can preemptively based upon the weather, be able to go ahead and say, Oh, it’s gonna get hot today. So it’ll like know to be a little more aggressive on the cooling. So it’s just really kind of cool the way that they’ve done it. They it’s, it’s really takes it, I would say that what we’re running into is there’s going to be the difference between like the Go Control was a dumb thermostat. And this is a smart thermostat. And, and it just, I have noticed that the temperature seems to be better and more stable in my house since I did it. And I also feel like I’ve seen a little bit of reduction in the power bill. Part of that is difficult for me to judge because it depends on how much I drive the Tesla. So but I would say that I do feel like I’ve seen a little bit of a reduction and when I’m saying that, like, you know, no more than five bucks right? type of thing.
Mike Wieger [23:01]
Yeah, and I’ll second that we have the Ico been, it’s probably one of my favorite additions we’ve made to our home. And we actually saw a pretty drastic change and all but I think the drastic change for me was I, with my really dumb thermostat that was there before they came with the house. I wasn’t taking the time to program that thing to turn on and off when we’re there and change all the temperatures. So for me, it’s the convenience of having the schedule. And then hey, we hit the road for a road trip and I forgot to set the thermostat just without the app go into vacation mode, and you’ve saved power for the entire weekend. We’ve so we’ve seen a pretty drastic decrease and also because for our home, we have a definite hot and cold spots. So we have three of those sensors in our house and I think it does a much better job of only focusing on the areas that I want to focus on. And because we have a cold zone and it doesn’t need to worry that that needs to heat up as much during the day so I haven’t ignore that sensor only looking at sensor at night when someone’s there. Yeah, I love that song. Anywhere. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker [24:04]
yeah. No, you know,
Mike Wieger [24:06]
I almost like it. I just love it. I actually though I can’t refuse that you do the same thing I mute my ego be because she’s such as such a sensitive mic. And I have Amazon devices all over the house that she picks up when I don’t want her to. She’s in a hallway. And like, I’m not I’m not there. I’m in the living room and you’re around the corner and she’s picking up before the one in the kitchen. No, so I have her muted. I’d say 99% of the time.
Dewain Robinson [24:29]
Yeah, no, that’s I did the same. I had to go through them all and mute them because even when people were in the different room, and they would say something like if you wanted to play music, it was so sensitive that you would actually pick it up and start playing in the hallway.
Mike Wieger [24:43]
Actually, to be honest, because she got it right and she’s really far away. I’m like, actually that works better almost than the actual Amazon devices too.
Dewain Robinson [24:49]
Well, and on the Amazon devices, if you have kids and they start you know, Amazon device will link to an account and then when you link it to an account the music That account is associated to that. So, so the problem I was running into, and this is I wish they would fix this is that if you have a child, you can’t link a child account to a Spotify account, you can only do that with an adult account. So, my issue was that my kids were using my Spotify account on their echoes. So I ended up having to make them adult accounts for their echoes to link to their Spotify accounts. So because what was going on is a couple of weird things were happening in the EOB world, they would say something because now there’s is on a different account. So their their echo is on a different account. So they would say, you know, Hey, lady a play something. But the thermostats out in the hall right outside of their bedrooms, and I would come upstairs and music would just be randomly playing out of both of them because it didn’t figure out which one they were really talking to. And then the other thing that was really irritating was Spotify has this ability to say I want to remote control a speaker through the mobile application. And so they would start saying play music, it would be doing it on my Spotify account and I would be riding in a car, listening to music. And next thing I know I’m getting, you know, let it go playing from Disney princesses. And I’m going no, I play Metallica. And then we’re like fighting back and forth, trying to get that control. And if many people have followed me too much, you’ll know that I also DJ. So this happened to me while I was DJing and event why it’s because I was using the app to control remotely switching the music and going into the playlist where I didn’t have to stand by the music system. I could just take my phone out and go Okay, that playlist I mean, I’m going to jump into the song. I can control it remotely while walking around the event. So it’s just one of those other Yeah, there’s the weather output. So see that I really think this thing is a really good I don’t know if I can recommend the light versions. But I would say the one that I got as the only one I can speak to. And I I will say that is is really nice. I will also add that he could be institute a whole lot better of branding has two versions of their devices because they’d have no consistency on the name. So finding out what is the latest one. Just go to their website, try to buy one. And the most expensive one is the latest one. Yeah, is the only way I can explain it and you have to copy and paste the name of what that people said what they call it, if you’re going to go hunt it down, and it’s really, that’s that’s the only negative I have with it. It was kind of difficult to get that done. So, so that’s kind of what I’ve been doing with the home automation and the home stuff I haven’t I mean I have also added
Dewain Robinson [28:03]
this nest thing to my
Jim Collison [28:08]
what is what is that nest thing for the audio listeners? Oh,
Dewain Robinson [28:12]
okay. Your nest Mini. Yeah. So what happened is my family my dad got one of these for free because he uses what is the Google phi and they so they sent him one of these for free. And then he got it and he doesn’t know what to he doesn’t know the difference and I wanted them to be on the Amazon offering because that’s what me and Tamar my wife’s family and everybody we’re all on on that ecosystem and that allows things like drop in across and things like that. So I wanted to keep them in that Not to mention if if your parents or anything like my parents, troubleshooting, I need them to be on the same stuff I’m on so that I can make it easy. For them, so so I made a deal that I would take this because I need one for work for just testing. And I don’t know it. Yeah.
Jim Collison [29:11]
Well, and Tony says, Tony says he just took down to to your point Dwayne. I he says he just took down to today and white with nest and I asked him why. And he said, kind of what you said scheduling wasn’t reliable for him, although, most importantly had nest in our beach house this fall and wife he said switch over. So you know, if you’re a promoter system, right? Yeah, yeah, I think either one really is gonna Yeah, it’s probably
Mike Wieger [29:36]
no more in the scheduling not being reliable. The I mean I have it is you have to be aware of the setting that if you have it, like they’ll follow me mode, or any of the sensors you walk by, if you hadn’t No way. So like I have mine scheduled eight to five in a way mode. If I come home from lunch, and I walk through the house, it’s going to switch back into home mode. And now it’ll it’ll switch back when I leave. After I’ve been gone for a certain period of time, so I did notice that and so I actually have to, I do come home from lunch every once in a while. So I either have to remember to kind of not walk by that sensor or to go cancel out, it’s automatic home. But that feature, I like it better than I dislike it because there are times where your hand is not paying attention to that kind of stuff, my wife, and so she’ll come home during an odd time. And I do want the house to heat back up. If it notices someone’s actually in the house during and it’s in a way mode, hey, kick back over to my regular schedule that I would want. So there are a few settings there. But other than that my scheduling has been rock solid for for what I needed to do. And I do like how four different schedules, you can tell it to the only pick up from certain sensors. At night, I only pick up from the bedroom sensors. I don’t care about the living room. And during the day. I don’t care about the bedrooms because no one’s ever is in there. So we just focused on the living room. So the scheduling, I haven’t an issue with it was just getting used to the fact that the motion sensors will trip it into going back into home mode.
Dewain Robinson [30:58]
Yeah, and that’s a I was looking for the name of this thing because they, they push it pretty hard and their application, it’s all on email, it says that it’s called echo plus Oh, and the follow me is a function of the echo plus type of thing. So, and it was echo plus, yeah, Echo plus co with a plus mark. Okay, and eco plus Okay, yeah, eco plus like okay, like this right here. That little setting is held think
Mike Wieger [31:31]
I’ve even open up the app in a long time. I don’t think I’ve seen
Dewain Robinson [31:33]
that it’s a new thing. Like they used to be the follow me and then it looks like they did it. Okay. And and so I think in general, just Yeah, they they like to push the fact that they want you to get those smart sensors and they want the smart sensors to control it. And when you fight that Smart Sensor control, they like in your case, like what you’re saying is I only wanted to get from these particular sensors and then theory to them, they’re like, Oh, well, you’re in the bedroom, so therefore it should go off. Yeah, but I’m not necessarily running around in the middle of the night. So that’s where you would have to augment it with the schedule stuff. But I think in general, it’s, you know, like, like you said, I think it’s pick your poison. Like if you’re if you’re used to nest, then you’ll probably not like eco be as much. If you’re used to eco be, you’re probably not going to like nest as much. And then if you are in the the G ecosystem, then you’re going to probably want to go nest if you want to go on the Amazon side. Again, my theory is they’re going to buy you coffee, because you already have Alexa being and Sir, I’m sorry, Lady a being inserted into into them. And this is a portfolio thing that they’re missing and they have a strong history of buying companies like this. So I think it’s just a matter of time because I just don’t see them. Trying to be themselves I think they’ll just acquire at this point. So, but
Jim Collison [33:06]
I think what Tony did in the chat room, so he had a sequential temp drop during the night was waking up hot IRS did it flawlessly. He’ll be good. Not so. Yeah, yeah. Well, everybody’s situations a little bit different. I mean, that’s the good news is, is that we’re, we’re in an ecosystem or Weren’t we have ecosystems available? Where it all hasn’t consolidated to one? Yeah, you know, we’ve still got some options available in this area. And,
Dewain Robinson [33:34]
and I think, and I think on that particular one, I have the exact same scenario happen. And I’m going to take what Mike said to heart, because I’m pretty sure that that is them with those smart sensors. And so I’m going to try what you what you said Mike will report back on the next time around. Yeah, let you guys know if that addresses some of the temp the temps. I believe this is part of their eco settings where it’s trying to save you money. And I do notice that if I turned I had actually helped me by turning down some of that ecos stuff because they by default they turn it pretty high up to try to save you money and everything. But what I I’m a creature of comfort I just want to be comfortable. So as I I turned it down to minimum, and then I noticed that I don’t have the problem that Anthony’s talking about but as much anymore but I still I still get that occasionally. And so I’m going to go play with that now.
Mike Wieger [34:34]
Yeah, yeah, I have to follow me mode turn completely off the mic. I know what I want. And the only thing that it does is just the only thing I let it do is kick into a way mode if you don’t notice any motion for a while. And I like that and then obviously it still does kick on me but everything else. Everything else I did manual it took a little bit. Yeah, exactly. I
Dewain Robinson [34:54]
know what I want.
Mike Wieger [34:57]
In the house if my wife walks past that thermostat at night and it doesn’t say the temperature she wants it to say. That’s the problem. So I, I yeah, yeah, like show off it was no no, we have it like I need the boys room needs to be at 70 right minimum because boys room gets really cold they could they can drop down like 66. So piece of black tape and put over
Dewain Robinson [35:17]
it, you’ll never even know the difference. Well,
Mike Wieger [35:19]
then instead of just showing the boys instead of just having that sensor on a night, I just added our room sensor to what averages the two. Well, so Aria 73 there and 67 it says 70 and she doesn’t listen to this stuff. She no okay. Oh, yeah.
Dewain Robinson [35:34]
Oh my god, she’s over there. She’s screw with the thermostat right now.
Mike Wieger [35:37]
I gotta go
Jim Collison [35:38]
see your phone. Just check your phone. You could you could probably spoof it with your phone.
Dewain Robinson [35:43]
Right. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So So I think we also were talking about I know that we started that’s kind of what’s been going on home gadgets. And then I think we were saying that we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the travel guys Because I know I travel a lot, like there’s a level in delta that people don’t even know exist unless you’re like really into delta skymiles like there’s a thing called 360. And so I’m like this past year I hit three times what you have to get to hit diamond on delta. So that they give you an idea of how much and I didn’t travel for the last two months of the year by the way, not really like maybe a couple little quick trips but
Mike Wieger [36:30]
you’re doing a lot of trips overseas, right? I mean, mainly you’re not doing
Dewain Robinson [36:34]
yeah and the beginning of the year last year, I was going every other week to Germany right and and that that’s where you rack up a ton of it or and I had to go to Shanghai and China and stuff and so those type of things really jumped them pretty quick. But when with that kind of travel you start to get into Okay, well what are the things that I want any become A lot more cognizant of different things around you like that you want to bring with you. And especially like I call it laptop diet, or laptop back diet occasionally, that I have to just purge. And so I started going on this thing where toward the end of the year, I’m jumping on just this week as a perfect example. So I left out on Monday night to go to Seattle, which is a cross country trip for me, right? And then I’m already back home and was home all day today. So I was there for two days. Right? And and it’s not uncommon. I need to go out there for like some sort of briefing and then come come back and you know, spend two days out there and then come on home. And so what trips like that, I started noticing that it was just too much like I was carrying too much heavy stuff. And if you do international too much, you really start to go Hey, well how can I cut down down. And one of the main things I started on is a my mind New Year’s resolution,
Unknown Speaker [38:09]
which is, it’s called USBC.
Dewain Robinson [38:13]
So I said, I really am sick of carrying 400 chargers with me over all these devices and everything. And especially if you’re going international, it’s a real pain, because then you’re having to have, you know, the adapter to the adapter to the adapter and it’s just, it’s a huge pain in the butt. So I figured what I would kind of go over is I found a few things that I thought were really cool that other people might like, and some of them actually evolved since our last last show. So from 424 to 431. I’ve actually added something that I think will be really good. Now the first thing I do is if you don’t know much about a lot of traffic on a plane, the most important thing in the world is headphones. It is the most important thing. And a lot of people have been jumping on the bandwagon of going with these Apple air pods, and then air pod pros and all this type of stuff. And I have a distinct problem with air pods like my kids have air pods. And I mean, yeah, it’s and I’m not the sound quality guy that’s going to go is just not that it’s it’s the fact that they’re a premium cost. However, they are not usable when I switched to an end, like I have an Android tablet with me that I’m using or something and and we’ll talk more about the Android tablet thing, we kind of start talking about x cloud. And so I’m not convinced that I’m always going to be on an Apple iOS device, and I need things that work across all the devices that I have. Or even be able to pair to two devices at the same time and things like that. So I’m a little particular about that. And so what I ended up getting and I get you just showed a link to it was a thing called the jabber, elite active 65 T’s. Now, this specifically is made and that has the ability for you to like run and it’s got in our sweat proof and all this stuff. The reason I like the jabber, jabber ones is because they do a really good job at call management and being able to take cell phone calls and stuff. So if I’m walking around airport, I like this they have here like where you can hear through if you want or you can turn that off. They’re really good at sound isolation, they’re not noise cancelling. And so I had these and I had the blue ones. And I would say that these are amazing. For what you’re getting. They’re not as expensive Some of the others that are on the market, but I’m going to tell you to navigate on this you can click on headsets and you can see the one that I’m going to say just dethrone this. Now these charged with micro SD connection, and you can see it’s 15 hours of battery life that’s inside of those. And, and that’s including the case the charging case. So if I’m going to fly from across the country, it can take about four and a half hours. If you add how long I’m sitting on the plane, I probably need somewhere around six or so hours of battery life or I’m going to have to take them out and pop them off. So they have a new thing they just released which is the elite 75 T. These have 28 hours of battery life in the when you have the charger charging thing, and I’m gonna actually open up these athletes The active
Jim Collison [42:00]
75 T or just the straight Sony photo to just the straight the okay.
Dewain Robinson [42:05]
They’re specifically called the elite 75 t that’s them. Okay so you can see 28 hours versus 15 right there USBC and in the way that they work, they are basically about the same weight as the others. Now here is the case to the 70. The 65 guy and if you can kind of see that and then when you want to open it, it’s got like a little push thing. And then they’re there inside there. Okay and they said at the top, now, that’s great. This is the 28 hour version, smaller with USBC support, and the headset is getting they say seven and a half I just used them and then my plane got delayed on this last trip. I’m getting more, I’m getting more than the seven and a half on it. And not only that, instead of having to push on it, it’s all magnetic and everything so they open really nice. It’s got that nice feel to them. But there’s one other thing I actually didn’t everyone just thought that the difference between them would be the battery life. They are not heavier, I can’t tell a difference between them. I actually feel like they feel more comfortable in my year than the than the 65. They’re 10 bucks more as you can see for them, and you can get them in just normal colors. Now they’re not I don’t believe that they are sweat proof. So I want to make sure that that’s clear. But the base response on these things are sick. I mean, I have not heard a set of headphones, outside of a Bose over the air, quiet comfort or something like that. That will even compare. I mean like if you’re listening thing to it and you’ve got something with some base response you almost feel like you guys know what I mean when you hear bass and you feel like you can feel it. Yeah it i don’t know how i i don’t know how to explain it other than it feels like you can feel it. And and these things I honestly had no intention for anything other than I just wanted a USBC fruition of what I already had to reduce the charger and it may be one of the best purchases I’ve made in a very long time. And I mean and I just can’t recommend these enough like they are absolutely amazing earphones and I mean even the box is smaller but i would i would say definitely go out for for these it’s worth the $10 I was not even a question in my mind they should have discontinued the 65 T’s because they’re just so much better. It’s like a light year. The price will drop yet well. And it does it says And I will tell you on the call quality is is better as well. Well, because I’ve already had people talking to me and they’re they can’t even tell him as at an airport when I’m wearing them. Which is a good thing. I know I do still carry the over the ear headphones, although the Bose quiet comforts and I’m looking at the new version with USBC support my boss has those. We were looking at them those are a lot lighter. But the carrying case is is wider but thinner. And I’m worried that that’s gonna fit in my bag a little weird, so I don’t know we’ll stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll probably end up getting them because I’m a if I’m nothing more than a pain in the butt. I buy too much crap. Alright,
Jim Collison [45:44]
so doing the so it’s interesting. So the 65 are our water and dust proof so to speak. Right so the actives yeah the the 65 the elite 65 T’s and both the 65 T’s and the active 65 T’s are both well resistant. But when you get over to the 75 line, they don’t have to get the active version to get the waterproof. Yeah. 75 to just a straight 75 T’s don’t don’t offer. Well, I guess they do say dust and water protection. So I guess that’s the same thing, I guess. Yeah.
Dewain Robinson [46:15]
And you just need to know if it’s worth it too, because I wouldn’t, I don’t think you’re going to find a difference in the sound quality between the two. It’s what the difference between the two that I have because I have the active in the non actives. And I like the 65 or actors. Those were their rubbery to the feel where the others are more just plasticky and I think that’s really the main difference between them is just the material they’re made out of to do like
Dewain Robinson [46:45]
to not allow sweat to come in. So
Jim Collison [46:48]
Mike, you know your air pod guy and you really like yours apples continue to go with the kind of the stick out of the year model. I’m seeing everyone else including Microsoft Go kind of with the with the coin model right where they’re just trying to make it that the size you know that the basically the recess in your ear any thoughts from you on does it matter to you that that thing’s hanging down and we’re supposed to maybe maybe being a little more discreet in the certainly from what Dwayne is saying call it doesn’t it doesn’t have effect on on on the reception on the call
Mike Wieger [47:26]
that without him and my only concern is that I it just it surprises me that they can if you don’t have the stem and especially Dwayne when you said they can’t tell you’re in an airport. I I’m baffled by the technology that it can drown out everything in all sudden almost like foot like form a cone right where it’s only picking up that sound relatively alarming. That would have been my only concern. The AirPods for me just being in the apple ecosystem. I’m not on Android. I don’t use any Android products and it works pretty well for me. I am disappointed. I do have the pros now. I’m disappointed they didn’t go USBC on the case but Right now well i think i think the reason is for right now, everyone’s phone they have not gone to USBC on the phone they have on their iPad they have not on the phone yet it’s still lightning, that’ll be next year. And so I think their thought is if when people are using these with their phone that would make an apple user and iPhone user have to carry two different chords but whereas now I can carry one so I think next year when they switch all over to USBC I’ll be a little mad because I’m actually due for an upgrade of my phone probably next year maybe the year after. And so I what they’ve done though they did this last time they sell the another case to you like this last time for the original AirPods it was the wireless charging case was like an extra 60 bucks. So I mean, I think they work well. I have been extremely impressed with the air pod pros, the regular air pods while I liked them and they were convenient they were nothing to write home about I would never have said you know, I would have said if you if you got the money and you want to spend them on them. Go for it. But the air pod pros are the first ones where I’ve actually said I would recommend these two people They’re a good set the transparency mode, easily switching from transparency where it’s using the microphone and boosting your outside world. Even while having a tight seal. really makes a difference I that’s the mode I’m always in. I rarely turn on noise cancelling mode because usually I still want to have people here and it eliminates that kind of almost like you kind of like pop your jaw a little bit because you because that that that seal that it’s in the ear so transparency mode really helps that that has that mode really has made those something that I keep it at work almost all day because I can still hear I can switch over noise cancelling if I do want to just really focus but I rarely do they work pretty well. Again, it’s just going to be the charging cable in a year that I’m gonna say come on Apple, you should have gone USBC on the phone this year and the case you went with it on the iPad and on a computer right like they the weird part to this to me is Apple has been the companies like get rid of the headphone jack, go to all US PC on the laptop. There is no other port on their laptops. sighs USBC and so then they went yeah so then they went on the iPad. I’m just shocked they haven’t brought it to the to the iPhone yet but for right now I’m going to be glad because I have these lightning cables everywhere in my home and my office I have like three in the car they are scattered around the house. So I’ll be making a bulk Amazon purchase once I upgrade my phone.
Dewain Robinson [50:21]
Yes you will. And it and then it’s going to irritate you that anything that’s not USBC is just yeah right take your iPhone 11 Pro. And this is the most annoying thing because I have an iPad Pro. I have a MacBook Pro 16 inch I have the new one. And I have this and the only device that I have that I have to carry a special k well for this stupid phone is so annoying to me. And and it’s also because I keep an extra so that I can plug it into the car like a rental car. So I wanted to charge with and one I had to plug in a real car and guess what what is the case Look like that I use for this that comes with the phone. Okay, it comes with the phone What is it? What does it do? It’s lightning to USB See? into a USBC 18 white brick, guess what the one you need for a car usba what? So you have to say I have to carry not one but two lightning cables just to bless Apple with my phone decision which next year? Yeah, so but that’s okay. Because the other thing is, is that if you are thinking like surface line, right? Surface duo is going to be something where I’m not necessarily thinking I’m going to be on the Apple phone by the end of the 2020. Right. So I’m preparing myself for that situation. Pretty much and just for what else is in the in the bag for like a big trip. Right now. I’m traveling With I’ve got an i nine MacBook Pro 16 inch because I have to run some emulators that have to run on Mac OS or and I run Windows as well on it and because that device has a 97 watt charger USBC it won’t pop a plane circuit where my primary laptop that I if I’m going to travel and I need to get a lot like I’m I need power that the machine I’m carrying for that is I now have a razor blade 15 advanced with the 2070 the R R TX Is that correct? r tx 2070 Yeah, Nvidia graphics card 240 hertz screen, I upgraded it to 32 gigs of RAM and I’m going to put a two terabyte SSD in it. Do some pretty good gaming on that thing. And not only that I have the USBC docking station for it with a 1080 GTX 1080 which is you know, I’m Sell the mic so I can go get a more aggressive graphics card. So So I would say like, I will tell you if you’re looking for a laptop. Oh, man, that thing’s good. It’s the same weight as my MacBook Pro 16. And I’m just telling you this thing is a beast of a computer. That’s actually what i’m talking to through to you guys right now. But remember, we were talking about light and way lightweight, and I kind of alluded to some surface stuff. Then I did make a purchase. Because I wanted something that I could basically throw in a bag, go on a two day to day work thing and not worry about other things. Just take it and that is I went and bought a Surface Pro x. Oh, and I’m and I have the one with I have the face with the pin and
Mike Wieger [53:59]
you’re gonna put that Service Chad Jim.
Jim Collison [54:03]
So that was the chat for for a sir.
Mike Wieger [54:07]
I know.
Dewain Robinson [54:09]
So I will quantify which one I have because people ask that question. I have the 16 gigabytes of memory. And I have the, I think the 256 gig SSD and this one so it’s not a cheap one. I The good thing is my iPad Pro has an LTE Sim, I have the LTE version, and I can interchange between the two of them the LTE coverage and this thing works with LTE with no problem. It’ll you can even say well, you know, even if the network starts getting a little sketchy on Wi Fi flip over to LTE or and things like that. So it’s got a lot of control on how you’re going to do that. And there’s been a lot People talking about this device and you get very mixed answers on what people think about it. Because if you’re not familiar, this is the arm based version, it’s got that the Sq processor which is basically equivalent to performance of I think an iPhone five, so it’s a three gigahertz processor in it. And it’s the one where we basically the and I say we because if you didn’t know I worked for Microsoft. We boosted the wattage into the processor. I think it’s like seven watts or something like that. So it’s actually over a like basically turning up the wattage in order to be able to get a faster chip so you’re sacrificing a little bit of of like battery life in order to do it. I don’t really think people were thinking because they said it was gonna be armed. They were like, oh this thing supposed to have 20 something hours of battery life. It doesn’t have 20 something hours of battery life and Depending on what you do with it, you will get very different results on your battery life. So if you’re running a lot of non arm compiled process processing where it has to run an emulation, you will find that it will get way worse battery life. And we’ve now since released edge chromium and edge chromium there is an arm based version. So if you get this if you get a Surface Pro X, do not whatever you do run Google Chrome do not it will eat the battery life on this thing you need to go ahead and make the move over to edge chromium all your stuffs should work as far as extensions and stuff like that. But the but because it actually is compiled for an arm, we’re talking it will double your battery life between the two and the performance will be at least two x off of it. So yeah There’s a big difference in an arm compile and a non arm compiler. Now, I can tell you, I can run Visual Studio code on it. I’m running a full Office suite and all that. And so what I run into is people want to compare this thing to other things. And it is not something to be compared to it, you have to have the right use case for it. And if you have the right use case, it’s amazing because it’s so light and it’s so easy to carry. And, and it’s USB see
Dewain Robinson [57:30]
two USB ports. And I mean, you can use the quick charger that comes from from us on it. But the other thing is that the quick access to the back where you have like the SSD and everything is all are back here. You really can’t see it from here because it’s all black. But there’s a little tray back here and it’s magnetic, so it’s really easy to switch out the LTE connection. So I switch it out all the time if I’m going to use it, and I just want to just take this then I’ll take it and you can put your You put on Netflix on it, and you want to download to your Netflix and stuff you can watch it Maverick the screen on this is actually better than the iPad Pro, in my opinion. And the battery life, even if you’re running emulation mode, I’m, I would say I could easily get seven hours. And my iPad Pro only gets about seven if I’m really using it to like watch movies and do stuff. And so what I would say is it’s an alternative to an iPad Pro for somebody who travels for business and wants full Office Suite because the the outlook that runs on this sucker compared to the outlook that runs on an iPad Pro is not even comparable, the typing experience is not even comparable. But is it you know, am I going to be able to do the Hulu or read an E reader or whatever type of thing. It’s not made for that. So don’t compare it to that and don’t look at it from benchmarking. It’s not a gaming PC. It’s not a you know, it’s not even an Ultrabook So you kind of have to look at it for what it is and if you like what it is then you end up loving it and so that’s why everybody is very up and down on this thing because if you kind of go okay I’m gonna work on it and I understand what I’m dealing with you don’t run into that like I had some some body that I don’t reply to. Too reviews or videos or anything I watch a lot of it but I don’t actually reply to a ton of that stuff. I don’t know I just don’t like to do that. But I will go ahead and call out in gadget was the dumbest review of that device I’ve ever seen in my life. They literally say well, I tried I downloaded the 64 bit version of slack and tried to install it and it failed. Well, that’s just you’re being dumb. I you know, I went and downloaded the executable for for Outlook, and tried to install full desktop outlook on my iPad Pro and it failed. Well, no crap. It’s not made for So, so I mean, if you’re if you’re going to do you know, if you’re going to really look at it and you like it, the reason you pay the premium is going to be ultra light beyond that cutting edge beyond arm really won’t LTE in it. And you just want a lightweight package that can also act as an iPad Pro. Well, it’s literally becoming an iPad Pro in a PC.
Mike Wieger [1:00:21]
And someone who like like you just mentioned someone who knows what they’re doing when they get into it. Right? This isn’t the device like Engadget was probably going at it probably more from her perspective of this isn’t what you get your grandma to surf around on and to have is her computer because you know, the installation, you got to know what you’re installing which versions what to run on it. So probably a little bit more of a techie person, maybe not more of an average guy device. Is that. Is that fair?
Dewain Robinson [1:00:48]
It’s a good SEO device.
Mike Wieger [1:00:52]
Okay, so who has a tech team who sets it up for him? It doesn’t let him do it. He installs right now
Dewain Robinson [1:00:57]
because if you want to install something on Like, you’re not going to most of the stuff you would install, you know, you install from the you can install from the store, if you want to install a, you know, a normal Windows app, you can you just can’t install the 64 bit versions. But you know, if you’re going to install an app on your machine, you’re always going to get asked 6432. I mean, you’ll get that as long as you understand that you need to install 32 bit versions of applications, where you get into weirdness is going to be when you find something like that application that runs with your printer. The complete no value add thing. those type of things are a little weird. Um, so I would, I would agree with you. I think it’s more towards somebody who is capable the techie thing, or someone who just doesn’t care and has it has somebody that takes care of that for him. Yeah. But as you’ll see, applications get compiled for arm. I don’t think you need to redesign your application. It’s not like oh, I need you to go build an application that works on an iPad. It’s you just need to take your Windows application and run it through a compiler to compile it for an arm chipset. And if you do it, we’re talking massive battery life at that point. I’m not kidding you that I can go all day and go two days with that sucker. You know, but you, if the problem is you’re going to run those 32 bed outs, and then the battery sucks down. And yeah, so which, you know, we,
Mike Wieger [1:02:23]
I make a comment about that about making that more of a techie feature. But then on the Mac side, you’ve got Catalina that came out, and they went all 64. You can’t run any 32 bit apps. And everyone, the average person didn’t know what that meant. And all of a sudden, their printer software is not working, their scanners aren’t working. I have this app, it’s not working. And they’re like in total shock. Talk about something that was not user friendly for a majority of the Apple users. You know what? I mentioned this to someone at work and their first response was, Wait, is that one my first off, we’re coming back, I have no to figure it out. And they had they still, like they updated however long ago, and they’ve just written off that printer is Yeah, I just wanna I don’t know. Yeah, I was working and now it’s not.
Dewain Robinson [1:03:08]
Well, let me tell you Catalina is I’m gonna make a little bold statement here. Catalina is the VISTA of Apple OS because yes, it is atrocious. I have been using Mac OS for a long time, guys. I mean a long time because I’m old enough my third Mac, right because I have to run it for work. I have to test things like we have stuff that has to run on the Mac. And I have become like the guinea pig guy that I have a Mac on my left and I have my PC on my right. And I bounced between them all the time. So I tried to force myself to use the Mac. And when we went to Catalina man ething asked me all the freaking time like do you want to approve or denied you want to approve and deny Oh, wait a minute, you need to go into the privacy settings and click the click the lock and then whenever you click the lock, you got to go find the subsetting in order to Be able to check off the left this application do this. I mean, try using teams on Catalina. Holy crap, man, you want to share your screen? How many? You gotta go like 15 settings to set in that crap and I’m like no and the thing stability is insane like this 16 inch MacBook Pro I can open it up and sometimes the graphics card is so jacked up with the drivers that the colors are all like super contrast and there’s nothing you can do about it like you just had to shut it and maybe if you shut it and reopen it it’ll I’m telling you, it is atrocious. It is the worst operating system ever made by Apple. Well, I agree I have a lot of those same issues with especially with the approvals I get you’re trying to make it secure. But no one has said Oh, good thing you had as pop up I’m not gonna install this app. Look whenever has has has said that right? Everyone? Okay, I’ll follow the 10 steps the way we do. But the one thing is one thing I like about what they did I think this is a good prep for future o S is like, for example, going a PFS, and now they’ve split out the data volume from the system volume, right? Like those are smart moves that have caused a lot of anger, especially for like backup software and stuff because it’s the first iteration. Very smart move security wise. It’s the same growing pain we had invista.
Mike Wieger [1:05:23]
Exact same problem. I think it’s a very good correlation between the two. Because I think I don’t I wasn’t around with Windows. But it seems to me like VISTA had was the start of a lot of good ideas. But when you first implement them, it was a terrible implementation of it. It took maybe the next one in the next OS to kind of learn from what they did, but still, I think there are things in Catalina that they did right. But I agree the the interaction from the user interface has not been anything like it has in the past.
Dewain Robinson [1:05:51]
Yeah. I just I would Oh my God, I maybe I can send panelists a little behind the scenes thing. Hey, can we do a piece PC versus Mac where we make fun of them approving and denying and Catalina vs. Windows 10 is Windows 10 is kind of, we kind of figured it out and then the windows 10 you still get that as allows and stuff but it’s nowhere near as obtrusive. And I tell you that that’s just the problem on the apple side is they knew they had to grow up and get secure. And now what you’re finding is that it’s not so easy now, they’re my brother and from Cupertino. But getting it what I will tell you is that we also said in the travel stuff, I told you guys that there was a thing that was the most important thing and that was that. The headphones the second most important thing is this. It’s the battery pack, the travel battery pack, and I got a link and you can click it if you want gentlemen which is this is the raphe power 10,000 milliamp when I was going to talk to you guys about this. I just bought it. I can tell you now I’ve actually had it for a while this thing is great. It’s 2699 and it it has a full 18 watt power distribution. If you don’t know what that means it means it will charge your iPhone as fast as the fast charger on your that you have and it’s a 10,000 milliamp it also means that it will power other things that you like you can actually plug it into an iPad Pro and charge an iPad Pro fully so anything that uses an apple 18 watt power supply or supports that this thing is going to drive it so if you want to fast charge something you need this I found that I had these big huge Hawking bricks and things like like this one that’s huge. And while that was great, what you really want is a 10,000 milliamp and then what you also want is you want it to be able to distribute 18 watts but the other thing is it fast charges itself. So when you plug it in to charge it it is fast. So we If you look, I would tell you one thing, keep an eye on these battery packs because I got burned. I bought like a whole bunch of them. And what you’ll find is that the one certain ones and it not necessarily is even the even the price, you can’t just go off a price but you need to take a look and say, What is the power input wattage and what is the power output wattage to make sure that you get one that is really solid. And this one I found when I did the research for it and knew how I had been messed up from all the others. I found that this one is really good. And for 26 bucks. I mean it’s a no brainer. So if you haven’t if you don’t have one, pretty light Yeah, yeah, it’s a 10,000. So it’s not real heavy at all. So I can keep that in my bag. And it’s nice because you can throw it in your back pocket. No. Now I do not like the concept of I have a wireless charging power brick. The problem is is it takes too long. If I’m using a power bracket means I need to recover from battery quick and so I don’t want Carry it any longer than I have to say one of those power bricks with the wireless charging, I just don’t care for them so much. So
Jim Collison [1:09:09]
there’s your monster brick right there the 3200 or 32,000.
Dewain Robinson [1:09:13]
Yes, but look at this. So see I wouldn’t buy this one six amp output.
Dewain Robinson [1:09:18]
So for the 18 Is that what you said eta you really want the 18 and so you’ll find that there might even be a newer version. So if you scroll back up Look, it says there’s a new version of this. It’s right. And I guarantee you click on that and it’s going to be an 18 water I bet you 65 watt so that we can actually put 65 watts so that would be a kick bought one. And if you notice it’s even got a power adapter on the on the side of it so that one will actually let you plug in your laptop and charge it. If you if you have a 65 watt power adapter of which did I mentioned the Surface Pro x is a 65 watt charger to be able to quit your argit so you don’t need 65 watts to run it. But you could take this one and you could actually quick charge any of the surface products. So that’s actually pretty cool. That’s not a bad little, little boy right there.
Jim Collison [1:10:13]
I mean, look, it’s a big brick. And it’s 80 bucks. Right. So
Dewain Robinson [1:10:19]
yeah, I mean, I have one that is I could get it. It’s it. I am Muto when this is actually a 30,000 amp and it it has high output. But the problem I have with that is it’s still actually it’s not great. Unless input I’m sorry, output. It’s okay. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s way too heavy and not to mention if you go to China, and you’ll have to stand and talk to somebody for like hours, because you are only supposed to be able to travel with 26,400 milliamp battery or something like that. And if you carry that sucker into China and you try to bring it back, they’ll let you go in perfectly fine, but once you fact they’re like, No, it’s too big. Like, what I’m taking it out of your country, not in and they’ll have like 15 people stand around and chat for like holding it and inspecting it, and then they’ll just hand it back to you and say, you go now just be aware, don’t travel to China with anything over 26,000 milliamp, so do a 20 or 22 just to be safe because they do inspect that.
Unknown Speaker [1:11:31]
All right,
Jim Collison [1:11:33]
x cloud, okay, we’re gonna have to make this fast because we’re running or we’re gonna run short on time.
Dewain Robinson [1:11:38]
Yes, I’m going to tell you one last thing here is if you are looking for something to do X cloud on I highly recommend that you go with the Samsung Galaxy Tab five. What is it called a tab five E. This thing if you can get like a little keyboard thing for it. It is not really expensive. It is wonderful to play games on. You get this with a, a Bluetooth controller. And if you don’t know the difference between an Xbox controller that supports Bluetooth and one that does not. The way to tell the difference is that there is is the where the shiny part is on the top. If the shiny part goes around the Xbox logo, then that is not a Bluetooth aware controller. And I had them out for you guys to see the difference between that and that one here. So is this one. Okay, so let’s look at yours. That one is not a Bluetooth.
Mike Wieger [1:12:39]
That’s what I figured now. Okay,
Dewain Robinson [1:12:40]
so the Bluetooth one will be shiny across the top of it. And this is going to be important if anybody is using Xbox stuff.
Jim Collison [1:12:50]
So no, no here, right? Oh, that one.
Dewain Robinson [1:12:53]
That one is Bluetooth, Bluetooth, no shiny. So notice that the shiny goes across the top. It doesn’t come down. Around the Xbox logo and the Xbox button. So cjm how my top that all shiny black plastic goes all the way down. Oh, I gotcha.
Jim Collison [1:13:09]
I gotcha. This little, this little bit right here.
Mike Wieger [1:13:13]
This one this one’s kind of a This one’s confusing, but it’s the elite.
Dewain Robinson [1:13:16]
I don’t know if the elite that’s the original elite, right? I don’t know on that one, I would have to research it. But originally to look at the boxes, whenever I look back here, guys, like ego be I have to see what we’re version because all my tech boxes are, right. So So the key thing is be aware because I they just released this in public preview from what I hear. So there’s people who are really starting to get access to x cloud. I would you can do it on your phone. However, that tablet I showed you, they’re not really expensive. They aren’t LTE, but but they’re on Wi Fi. And so if you’re looking for a good travel, tablet to play, the apps and everything that run on it, these things are really really good. So I would say this is equivalent to an iPad. Like a higher end iPad not a pro. But they are really good tablets. They’re not stupid expensive and you can get it with a tablet and the keyboard if you click that little button, well how much is the price point on tablet plus keyboard there?
Jim Collison [1:14:20]
Let’s click on it right there it is 527
Dewain Robinson [1:14:25]
Oh no, you can get keyboard cheaper now okay. So but the thing is is that with it, you can get the Wi Fi it looks like they are going to sell it they may have an LTE version that’s come out sense. Know that x color run over either and I’ve had access to it for a bit I will tell you it is shockingly good. But what you’re going to need is you’re going to the best thing is is a tablet like that, especially because they support this tablet supports the ability to to cast out to just about any TV so if you’re in a hotel And you want to cast out. But also be aware that you don’t have to have a ton of power, like the processing is not done on the device. I know people who’ve been running on really slow old phones to test and so you’re not gonna have a problem with the performance from the tablet itself. But what I love about it is that the screen is a good widescreen aspect ratio, and it’s it’s a good quality Samsung screen, then the product itself really good like it’s got a touch. It’s got a fingerprint reader sensor built right into the power button and everything and it’s actually way thinner than an iPad. So if you’re looking for something good if you put it on the keypad, keypad stand, it’s kind of nice because you can make it stand up and things like that. But if you you know, are looking for a good device for x cloud, I would highly recommend looking at that and make sure you’ve got that Bluetooth compatible controller. I think you can get one for about 39 bucks if you’re looking for one and just make sure you have a spare one laying around because I, I don’t like trying to pair it back and forth. Like, I just bought a dedicated one and said, I’ll throw that in my bag whenever I want to take it. And the games are, you know, perfectly fine. And you can get that little clip, if you want the clip. I haven’t played with the clip at this point, but it is it is weird to be playing on it on one of these things, because you’re not used to you’re actually kind of shocked at how good it is. I would say that the shooters are a little and the original beta of it. It was a little bit laggy and the fact that you can tell. But I’ve seen vast improvement as it’s been in the then evolving on that. So I think we’re going to we’re going to be in a fine place. But you know, having played stadia, but I can say that this is actually a really awesome thing.
Unknown Speaker [1:16:57]
Mike, any temptations on that.
Unknown Speaker [1:17:00]
renewed gaming You’re doing
Mike Wieger [1:17:03]
well yeah cuz written you know last week was one of my first time i’ve delved into PC gaming and I’ve really been enjoying it more than I thought I would I have been a controller player console player my entire life never game on a computer. And I’m kind of liking the compatibility with certain stuff I’m liking be able to stream. So I’ve been running Windows stream labs OBS has been great. But yeah, on the mobile side for sure. I wish as soon as it comes out, if it does ever come out for iPhone, I’ll be all over and I do not have any Android, tablet phones, anything to run it on. So just not able to test out the moment but but yeah, like that. And there’s a lot of other companies too. They’re kind of coming out with this sort of stuff. But x cloud to me, it’s just it’s my native platform. I’m an Xbox user already. And you know, for the first time last night, just something super simple, but I was playing Rocket League on my computer, and I totally forgot, hey, I’m on a Windows machine. I can just plug in my Xbox controller to my computer and I was I want to play with the controller sitting here at the computer. So it’s kind of a renewed love for me now, right? I it’s been a lot of fun, just kind of dive back in and play play some games that I wasn’t able to.
Dewain Robinson [1:18:12]
So in the after show we’ll talk about the the VR. How about Sure. Yeah.
Mike Wieger [1:18:18]
Yeah. Did you want to hear about that? Sounds good.
Jim Collison [1:18:20]
Sounds good. Well, Mike, you’re keep we’re keeping kind of tracking your build in the discord group, right?
Mike Wieger [1:18:25]
Yeah, we will. Yeah, hardware. Another update because they were all laughing at me. I was on Twitch last night. And I was talking to them and they’re like, so Wait, is this an entirely different computer than you had last week when you said you had a friend inside but I’m like, yeah, new case. New motherboard. new EP new new Ram.
Jim Collison [1:18:41]
injected here is the really rubbish.
Mike Wieger [1:18:43]
The same the entire computer actually the guts are you can see it. the guts of that. That’s the motherboard out there from that Dell. Already. That show is already worthless. Last week’s show. They said Would it be lovely words? You got rid of that stuff? No, it was a great learning process. I learned So much of what I needed to do. But yes, we are keeping track of that that discord, usually in the gaming tab, sometimes the hardware so if you guys are interested in following that story, I’ll give you guys the update there.
Jim Collison [1:19:10]
Okay, sounds good. Well, Dwayne, I’ll hang around for some post show. We’ll talk a little, little VR. When we go in there. A couple reminders. Before we go on. We want to thank you, the financial supporters of this show, do it through Patreon. Each and every month. It’s just awesome. You guys are rock solid and consistent. If you want to join us, we got some $5 month plans. If you want to go out there for a month or whatever, whatever you want to do no pressure, I don’t care. No, there’s no support shaming here. You can do whatever you want. The average guy.tv slash Patreon will get you there if you want to do that as well just know that helps pay for the app and some other stuff that we do here. Michael mentioned about joining the discord group. You can get that done as well. If you want to contact me send me an email Jim at the average guy.tv I do like your emails. Neil, who we read last week, I think on the show responded back and said thanks. I’d actually didn’t expect to get that Read on the show. If it’s super interesting, chances are we’re going to read it so join us that way Jim at the average guy TV if you want to send in your stuff, maybe you don’t want to do social or discord or Facebook at all. That’s okay. Just send me an email. Love to have that as well. Hey, do me a favor, subscribe on YouTube. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, just click the subscribe button. I guess it’s down there or there. And apparently that means something. So subscribe. So you know when I publish things that are new, you can go out there most of the time. I think it’s more fun to watch us than it is to listen to it, but I know many of you listen to it. And that’s that’s okay. as well. Just a reminder, the average cable TV platform both web and media hosting powered by Maple Grove partners, secure reliable high speed hosting from people that you know and trust and of course, that’s Christian Munch upgrades going in over there and he’s doing a bang up job plans start as little as 10 bucks a month for for some pretty great hosting and he does a lot of custom stuff as well. Check out Maple Grove partners.com. And then don’t forget to download the app. just reached out to him for a support ticket. I actually wanted to switch up the domain I was using it just super easy. I logged in Maple Grove did a ticket. Hey, can we switch the domain over? Is that something you can do pretty easily? Yep. When you want an effective, and he responded within, I’d say about five minutes. He wants to me. And I mean, this guy’s got I mean, he’s not his like full time full time job and respond within five minutes. Yeah. When do you want effective? And he just doesn’t like us. Super responsive support. Great service over there. Yeah. So check it out. Make Maple Grove partners.com. Mike recommends it. We are live and we’re staying on Thursdays we’re live 8pm Central nine Eastern except those Thursdays where I have things going on. So I don’t know. I just didn’t think of that to begin with. But we are hopefully hopefully I didn’t scare you. We are live every Thursday 8pm Central nine Eastern because it would have been weird to say every Wednesday I just I’m not. That’s like cheating on the day. Like I just I was afraid to say every Wednesday because for 10 years. I said Every Thursday, so we’re staying Thursdays. There’ll be some Wednesdays. Follow me on Twitter. If you want to know, I’ll try to I’m not very good at that. But if you want to know, we’ll try and tweet it out that way. And we’ll be back next week. I’m trying to think here. If you’re listening live, stick around for the post show. Next week, just to give you a little heads up, I should have had this ready, but I did it. But I’m sure it’s going to be pretty good. Oh, actually, next week, we’re off Mike. So you get it. You get a you want to go? You want to go Wednesday with me next week? I believe that works. Can you do that? I think we actually I think I actually asked you that question already. And I think you said yes. Yeah. So good. So next week, lots of things going on. So next week will be Wednesday, the 30th. And if you want to join us out here on Wednesday at nine. Yeah. Is it the 29th or the
Mike Wieger [1:22:51]
30th is a Thursday, okay, Wednesday to the 29th.
Jim Collison [1:22:54]
So January 29. Next week, Wednesday will be live out here just because I’ve got something going on Thursday. So we’ll test that That you can join us here next week if you’re listening live stick around with that will say goodnight
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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