0:00:00There might be some listeners out there who think perhaps this podcast has too much baseball content
0:00:05and should focus more on Apple. Now I have bad news for those people.
0:00:09- Sorry, non-sports fans. It's gotta be sports.
0:00:13- But I do think there are numerous, talking about the strategy and why Apple's even getting into,
0:00:21you know, what we're alluding to here for anybody who's been under a rock is Friday night baseball,
0:00:26which I guess is a new thing, right? It's not like Apple is taking over Friday night baseball from
0:00:33Amazon Prime. - From some other property, right.
0:00:36- Right, or like a traditional cable network like TBS has had Friday night baseball for the last 10
0:00:42years or something like that. It's sort of a new national franchise. And the basic idea
0:00:47is there are two games every Friday, like a seven-
0:00:51- What time of the day are they, though? - I think that they're always
0:00:56there's an East Coast seven o'clock in the evening game and then a West Coast seven o'clock in the
0:01:01evening game, which for me and you on the East Coast would be like 10 or 1030 or something like
0:01:08that. - Well, did you notice this?
0:01:10So it's Apple. Apple is California-based. I've always said they have a real California bias with
0:01:16things like Touch ID, where on the East Coast we wear gloves in the winter and suddenly you
0:01:20can't unlock your phone. Did you notice that they were promoting the game times in Pacific time?
0:01:24- Yes, I absolutely did. That is one of the- - Which is so, and that's strange to me because
0:01:29plenty of stuff is out of LA, TV-wise, movie-wise, obviously, but I think TV-wise too. But everything
0:01:34in my lifetime has always been seven o'clock Eastern, six o'clock Central, and you never see
0:01:41a Pacific time zone mentioned. So I think Apple's really, they're throwing their weight around there
0:01:46getting the Pacific time zone in there. - Yeah, I definitely think that whoever
0:01:50did it at Apple, whoever made that decision is a lifelong Californian.
0:01:55- West coaster, yeah. - Yeah, West coaster,
0:01:58and is sort of putting their thumb on the scale. And you know, all right, fair enough. You know,
0:02:02you're a California company. You want to make Pacific times primary and Eastern and, you know,
0:02:09poor mountain time. - Mountain time's the coolest one.
0:02:14That's got the best name. - It's by far the best name.
0:02:17- Central is boring. East is where the East, Pacific, all right, it's all right. But mountain
0:02:22time, that's good stuff. - Right, well, but nobody's ever
0:02:25going to, I don't think, I don't think there's ever going to be a company headquartered in, say,
0:02:32what's the biggest city in mountain zone? It's gotta be Denver.
0:02:34- It's gotta be Denver, I think. - I don't think anybody,
0:02:36even if they were headquartered in Denver, is going to broadcast there.
0:02:40- No, 'cause the math doesn't, you've got to subtract an hour for Pacific,
0:02:43you've got to add two hours for East Coast. No, it doesn't work.
0:02:46- Yeah. - It's too much of a mess.
0:02:47- But I did notice that. - Well, and the funny thing about it is that,
0:02:51then that means, so they're saying 4.10 PM is the first game, because 4.10 PM Pacific.
0:02:55- Yeah. - That's not really Friday night.
0:02:57- Right, that's Friday afternoon baseball. - That's Friday afternoon baseball.
0:03:00- This got announced a little late. So anyway, last week was the As We Record,
0:03:08and I believe this episode will definitely, since we're recording on Tuesday the 12th,
0:03:12we will, this show will be out before this week's edition of Friday Night Baseball.
0:03:15So, but we've, you know, we've got one week under our belts. I watched with great enthusiasm,
0:03:21just to see what it was like. I kind of like seeing a new broadcast like that anyway,
0:03:26you know, like I might, I would, maybe I wouldn't take such scrupulous notes if it were on Amazon,
0:03:32but I still would have tuned in. - Would have checked it out, sure.
0:03:34- Right. - Well, did you, so have you watched,
0:03:36I don't know, the past couple years there have been like YouTube broadcasts.
0:03:38- Mm-hmm. - I think Facebook had a broadcast
0:03:41at one point, I don't even, I've tuned into a little bit of these. I watch Red Sox games,
0:03:45I watch most of them, and then I watch national games sporadically until the playoffs. But yeah,
0:03:50I did the same thing you did. I tuned into this and sort of, I don't think we'd even talked about
0:03:54it beforehand, but I thought maybe it'd be something we'd talk about on the show, and now it is.
0:03:58- Well, it's, for those who aren't baseball fans, one of the weird things, and you and I
0:04:05have talked about this at great length, is, so, if you, baseball is a very long season, six months
0:04:12and 162 games in the regular season, which is a lot of, that's a lot of baseball, even if you're
0:04:18a fan. - It's a lot.
0:04:19- But that means that like your hometown network gets 100 and, maybe not 162 games,
0:04:27because when your team is on national TV, they don't broadcast it.
0:04:30- Right, it depends on, if you're a Yankees fan, if you're a Red Sox fan, you lose 10,
0:04:3520 games a year to ESPN, to Friday Night Baseball, to things like that, but yeah.
0:04:38- Right. - 140, 150 games for the
0:04:40hometown announcers. - Right, and if you're,
0:04:43you know, the Florida Marlins, well, you get closer to 162 games on your local affiliate.
0:04:50- Now, now, the Miami Marlins, Jon. - Oh, Miami Marlins, that's right,
0:04:54Miami Marlins. I don't expect to see, I don't know, I don't want to poke fun at the smaller
0:04:59market teams, but it's, you know, let's say 150 games. There are occasional, I guess it depends
0:05:05how much the network's bid for the games. So the Yankees-Red Sox game over the weekend,
0:05:11one of the games over the weekend was also on Fox. Did you notice that, or did you not even notice?
0:05:15- Oh, no, I didn't see that. That was like the Saturday game?
0:05:17- Yeah, I think the Saturday game, yeah, because Sunday night was on ESPN.
0:05:21- Sunday was ESPN. - So it's a good example. So
0:05:24Saturday afternoon, Fox had a national, Fox Sports Network had a national telecast of the Yankees-Red
0:05:31Sox game, but it wasn't exclusive, and so Yankees fans could watch on.
0:05:35- Right, because I still had my local, I assume you still had your local.
0:05:37- Right, but then Sunday night, for Sunday night baseball, which is an ESPN franchise and has been
0:05:44for quite a long time, that's an exclusive, and so the local networks didn't have it. But anyway,
0:05:50where I'm going with this, though, is that the local networks have so much more experience
0:05:54broadcasting these games, and they get really good at it, and they've got, you know, cameras,
0:06:00you know, and they just know how to do slow motion and when to expect there might be a close tag play
0:06:06at second base, get it, you know, make sure there's a high-speed slow-motion camera with a good angle.
0:06:11And then the playoffs start. - And it's the biggest,
0:06:14you know, shit sandwich. - It really is.
0:06:18- That your team makes the playoffs, and you're like, "This is great. They're gonna, they're gonna,
0:06:22you know, win the World Series, but now I gotta listen to these horrible announcers who don't know
0:06:26nearly as much as I, a fan who's watched all season, know." And the production, as you just
0:06:32said, they don't. It's strange to me because obviously ESPN, Fox, TBS, these are national
0:06:37companies with all kinds of money, but somehow they can't hire people who, I think you're right,
0:06:42I think it's just the experience of doing 150 games makes you better at it than someone who
0:06:47comes in to do a national broadcast for, you know, 10, 20 games every fall.
0:06:51- Yeah, and I don't know, you know, I don't tune in randomly. I mean, one thing is I subscribe to
0:06:57the MLB app. And I know, I think you and I have talked about this on the show, like baseball's TV
0:07:02rights are so complicated. They really are. - They're the worst. It's so bad.
0:07:07- But there's these local restrictions on the MLB app that are still in play. Here we are in 2022.
0:07:12I mean, and this has been, I think I've been subscribing. I don't remember when I didn't
0:07:17subscribe. I mean, I don't even know how long ago. - I know at least 10 years. I can remember
0:07:23being with you 10 years ago and you were watching the watching MLB TV.
0:07:26- Yeah, but I'm lucky because my favorite team, the Yankees, is out of market in Philadelphia.
0:07:32So I get to watch all of their games, except if they're playing the Phillies, which happens every
0:07:39couple of years due to the way interleague scheduling works. Then I can't because it's on
0:07:44my local TV and I have to watch the Phillies telecast on terrestrial TV or through some
0:07:51online service that shows you terrestrial TV uninterrupted. It's very strange. And then these
0:07:57local broadcast teams that spend 162 games following the team, then the playoffs start.
0:08:04If your team is lucky enough to get into the playoffs, then that's it. They're done. They
0:08:08don't get to broadcast anymore. - They don't get to do anything, yeah.
0:08:10- Which is kind of a shame. - It really is. Well, and I don't know,
0:08:14they often do pre-game stuff and post-game stuff, but it's not nearly as good. And I'm sure they're
0:08:21disappointed to not be able to do it. And as a fan, you're disappointed to not hear your team
0:08:26getting, you know, your announcing team. People always say, these announcers always say,
0:08:32"Thank you for letting us come into your home." And they really do. We listen to these people for,
0:08:36like you said, 150 games a year, two, three hours a game minimum. You're talking about hundreds of
0:08:40hours a year. It's honestly, it's even more than your podcast, you know, in terms of content,
0:08:45in terms of time, that you really do get to know these people.
0:08:48- Imagine if I had my podcast 162 times in the next six months, starting from now.
0:08:54- Yeah, just in half a year even. - In the next six months,
0:08:57there'll be 162 episodes and the average episode length will go up.
0:09:02- Well, it'll actually be higher, right? - Slightly higher. Yeah, it's a lot of talking.
0:09:06And I also think it's, you know, as somebody who feels mentally exhausted after doing my show,
0:09:14roughly three times a month, two hours-ish, two plus hours, I'm mentally exhausted at the end.
0:09:22And it's given me a tremendous appreciation for daily broadcasters, people who, I've been
0:09:29thinking more about it lately, just of all sorts. Somebody like a Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert
0:09:35or Seth Meyers who hosts four times, four nights a week, hour-long show. Talk radio,
0:09:40like AM talk radio, like the Rush Limbaugh style or sports talk, you know, there's all sorts of ways
0:09:48to do talk radio. But those hosts on talk radio do four hours in the afternoon every day.
0:09:54- I mean, it's real work. And you wouldn't necessarily think it just, oh, you're just
0:09:59sitting there talking. Like you said, it does get exhausting. I think of, I mean, he's retired now,
0:10:04but Vin Scully worked until he was how old? - Oh, he was like 82 something?
0:10:09- In his depth, I think older than that. I mean, towards the end, he was not doing a ton, but-
0:10:14- He wasn't doing road games for the Dodgers. - Right. Well, I mean, good for him. He earned
0:10:20that. That's pretty damn good. You know, a lot of respect for that. And he was great.
0:10:26- Well, for a small market team like the Dodgers, maybe. No, he was absolutely great. But yeah,
0:10:34it's just, you know, it's deep, deep appreciation for being able to hold people's interests and sort
0:10:40of hold their affection. I don't know. I mean, it's like, how can you not be, sometimes I wonder,
0:10:45how can people not be like sick of me by now? Like maybe you love talking about all these nerdy
0:10:51things like fonts and Apple computers and their operating systems and the company strategy and the
0:10:59occasional rant on baseball and an extended rant on the graphic design of the fonts in the Apple
0:11:07baseball thing. - Scorebug, sure. Yeah, which we're gonna get to. - This might all be things that are
0:11:11like, yes, this is why the talk show is my favorite podcast. But it's like, sometimes I just think,
0:11:16aren't you sick of me by now? I'm glad you're not. Whoever you are out there, I'm very, very glad
0:11:23that you're not. But it does occur. - You're gonna, next week, you're gonna see the listener
0:11:26numbers crater. Everyone's gonna be like, you know what? He's right. He's a smart guy and he's right
0:11:30and I'm sick of him. Let's go. Canceled. Deleted. Unsubscribed. - You know what's funny? Amy and I
0:11:36are going through old Seinfeld's Netflix, which I mostly haven't watched since it was like on
0:11:46prime time back in the mid to late '90s. - Not lately, but I've done Seinfeld reruns for years.
0:11:53That's a great background show. - It is, but I'm sort of watching them new. And for some reason,
0:11:59I don't know why. I think I started with season four. I could check somewhere. I wrote it, but
0:12:04I think I skipped seasons one to three for reasons I just don't know. I just saw an episode of season
0:12:10four and Netflix suggested it. I was like, yeah, I would like to, why don't we watch that before we
0:12:16go to bed? But there was an episode we just watched last night from season seven where George
0:12:22they're in the coffee shop and a couple comes over who'd been having troubles.
0:12:28And the gist of the plot is Jerry and Elaine are both interested in the people in this couple.
0:12:35And then they come over and say, hi. George comes and they introduce themselves. And the woman
0:12:41is a doctor and the man is a salesman of some site. And George says, a salesman. And he looks
0:12:47at the woman. He goes, you could have done so much better than him. And then she goes home and says
0:12:54she thought about it and thought, you know what? I think I could do better. And that's...
0:12:57But somehow she decides George is better because as I recall, he said,
0:13:02God bless you when she sneezed. - I forget. I don't know.
0:13:05I believe that's right. - But I might've just done that to myself.
0:13:10It's possible. - Just put the seed in listeners' heads.
0:13:15All I can tell you if you are out there and that thought is now bouncing around your head is there
0:13:19really are not very many podcasts out there. - No, there's nothing else to listen to. So
0:13:24don't bother looking elsewhere. - Don't look around.
0:13:27- You got to fill your time with something. It might as well be this because there's nothing else.
0:13:31That's a ringing endorsement, right? - Let me take a break here and thank our
0:13:35first sponsors. They're very good friends at Squarespace. It's the all-in-one platform for
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0:14:44they'll be there. It's amazing. What do you do? Where do you go to find out more?
0:14:47Go to squarespace.com/talkshow. Start right there. You get a free trial, 30 days,
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0:15:18you're a listener of the show. My thanks to Squarespace for their continuing support of the
0:15:22talk show. Speaking of sponsors and advertisers, that was one of the first things that kind of hit
0:15:26me about Apple's Friday night baseball telecast was I actually had the question before. I wasn't
0:15:32even sure if they were going to have regular commercials. They would have ads at all. Yeah.
0:15:35Right. Like what's Apple in this for? Right. Like why, you know, let's just big, big picture,
0:15:41broad strategy. Why did Apple pay Major League Baseball for the rights to do two national
0:15:47telecasts every Friday night for baseball season? I mean, the obvious answer they're doing the first,
0:15:53what did they say? The first half of the season is free. And then after that, you're going to have
0:15:56to be an Apple TV plus subscriber. So they want to juice their numbers. They want to get more
0:16:01subscribers and the rest of the service doesn't have ads. So it's very, it definitely is once you
0:16:06stop and think about it, if you watch baseball, yeah, of course there's ads. Every 10 minutes,
0:16:12there's a break for the half inning and you've got to fill that with something. But if you put
0:16:16this on, if HBO had baseball, would they put ads on? I don't know because they've never had it or
0:16:22Netflix. Right. And just by sheer coincidence, Ben Thompson had wrote last week and you know,
0:16:28the analysts have been chewing this around. Like it looks like, I don't want to get sidetracked
0:16:32talking about Netflix, but it looks like Netflix growth worldwide is slowing. And for the very good
0:16:39reason of... There's not too many more people left to capture. Right. Amongst people who have
0:16:46internet access and you know, eight to 10 bucks at least per month, they've got most of them
0:16:54subscribed. Which if you were a normal business, someone would think, well, that's an amazing
0:17:01business. But if you're a publicly held company... If you're publicly traded, then your growth is
0:17:05flat lined and your stock is almost worthless now. Right. And so where's the growth going to
0:17:10come from? It doesn't matter how big you already are and how sustainable it is and how loyal your
0:17:14customers are. Growth, growth, growth. And so people are talking about Netflix adding ads and
0:17:19Netflix has long said, we don't want to do ads. We don't want to have an ad based here, blah, blah,
0:17:24blah. I don't know. Maybe that's one of the reasons they don't have sports. It's a good
0:17:31question. Apple... I guess I wonder how much... I have no idea in terms of numbers, but how much
0:17:36money are they making on the ads? I mean, it's millions upon millions. Is it tens of millions?
0:17:42Is it hundreds of millions for the season? It would definitely be a lot of money to just be
0:17:45leaving on the table and I guess showing some Apple TV ads, but beyond that, and maybe some Mac
0:17:52ads, maybe some iPad ads. But it'd be a lot of money to be leaving on the table to not sell these
0:17:56ads because there's a ton of ad time during a baseball game. Well, that's... See, now that's one
0:18:00of the things that's fascinating about the differences between sports is that baseball
0:18:05has very natural ad time. In between half innings, one team, three outs, now you're half of the
0:18:12innings over. You have to switch sides. The catcher... More than any other sport. It's like
0:18:18clockwork that you're going to have these breaks. Right. The pitcher has to come out and start
0:18:22warming up to get ready to throw. You can't just come out and start throwing 100 miles an hour
0:18:26without a couple of warmups. Players have to get out to the outfield and warm up their arms a
0:18:31little. The catcher might have to put their equipment back on if they were just up or were
0:18:36ready to be up. You got about three minutes in there. If you go to a minor league game or a high
0:18:42school game, just go to a high school game that's not even on TV or televised other than parents
0:18:48holding their phones out to watch it. There's three minutes between innings where if you were
0:18:53broadcasting it, you might as well... Why not put ads? As opposed to the beauty... And again,
0:18:58I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I do have to admit every four years when I watch the World Cup,
0:19:02it's just lovely, absolutely lovely that when they start playing the half of a game of soccer,
0:19:10it just goes and goes and goes until the half is over and that's it. Well, or unless a player flops
0:19:16with a fake shin injury and then you just sit there and watch them. They just sit there and
0:19:21five minutes go by and they add on two minutes at the end. Right. Don't even get me started on
0:19:26soccer timekeeping, but I do agree that it's nice to just have a continuous flow of action.
0:19:31Yeah. If you and I ran FIFA, which we should because it's a corrupt organization,
0:19:37could use some outside blood, especially from two Americans who don't really know much about soccer.
0:19:42Who don't even really know the sport. But that's a stellar idea.
0:19:46We would have... The first change, I think you and I would agree, the first change we would institute
0:19:51is there would be a real clock that... Proper clock, yeah. And everyone from the fans in the
0:19:57stadiums to the coaches to the players could see how much time was left in the half. And if...
0:20:02Instead of just the one official who's got it in his head and eventually decides,
0:20:07"Yeah, I'm going to blow the whistle now it's over."
0:20:08And I know, don't yell at me soccer fans. I know that there's some sort of, you know,
0:20:15magic gift of a soccer referee's mind where they know not to just blow it mindlessly at
0:20:21this moment. Like, "Oh, wait till the ball goes out of bounds," or something like that,
0:20:25off the pitch, whatever they call it. Then blow the whistle and call the game over.
0:20:29Nonsense. You got to have a clock. But it is lovely that they don't have commercial breaks.
0:20:35They just don't. And so they've, you know, worked around it. Obviously, there's tons of money to be
0:20:40made worldwide in soccer television rights. But this is part... I've always heard,
0:20:45and I believe this is part of why it's not that popular in the US, is that you can't...
0:20:49You know, we've got Major League Soccer. We've got MLS. But it's not nationally broadcast
0:20:54because they can't put ads in it. At least not to the extent that you can with baseball, football,
0:20:59basketball, hockey. Right.
0:21:00One of my favorite stories about sports and TV is that basketball, traditionally, is a game of
0:21:07four quarters instead of two halves. And like the NBA still plays four quarters. High school, junior
0:21:13high, you know, at that level of play is still four quarters. But top level college basketball
0:21:19is two halves. And that change happened while I was... I don't even want to Wikipedia it. It was,
0:21:25like, I think sometime in the 80s. But I remember I was a fan of college basketball when they made
0:21:31the switch. And I was like, it seemed into... I was like, "Yeah, this will help the game flow more.
0:21:36Why the hell have all these buzzer beat... You know, why have four buzzer beater scenarios a
0:21:42game instead of just two?" This feels right for basketball. But then it turns out what they did
0:21:47is they really chopped each half. Instead of into two parts, they chopped them into three.
0:21:53And they put... They call them media time.
0:21:56Oh, that's right. There's the four-minute timeout, the eight-minute timeout.
0:21:59Yeah. And the 12-minute timeout. It's a 20-minute half. But there's these two periods where once you
0:22:05reach, like, a certain point on the clock, like, it might be like eight minutes into the game,
0:22:09the next time any break in the action happens, that's a media timeout. And what they mean by
0:22:14media is commercials. Well, is that... Are there only two? So it's 12 minutes and four minutes,
0:22:20I guess? Or 12 and eight. I forget. It doesn't matter. You know, and maybe they've tweaked them
0:22:25over the years. But I think that there's two, you know. But that's in addition to the fact that when
0:22:32the coaches call timeout because they want to, like, talk to their players or regroup or strategize
0:22:37or just give the guys a break, a full timeout is long enough to show commercials too. It's,
0:22:44you know, they've optimized for showing more commercials. And when you think about it,
0:22:49nobody would ever do that with a high school basketball game because there's no reason for it,
0:22:54right? It's the money. Baseball, it's a gift. And, you know, football, there's no doubt in my mind
0:23:00that the NFL, when you watch the NFL, there's no reason for the breaks to take as long as they do.
0:23:05Wow. And like, you know, you score a touchdown, break, extra point, break,
0:23:09kickoff, break. That's where it's really brutal is right after a score, right around a score.
0:23:15Right. You've gotten like seven seconds of clock action from the game,
0:23:19and then you've... But you've been able to show eight minutes of commercials.
0:23:23Well, there's a reason these networks and, you know, there's a reason Monday Night Football is
0:23:29a billion dollar franchise. I know you're not a golf fan, but do you ever watch the golf on TV?
0:23:36My dad used to watch it and I hated it because I was a kid and, you know,
0:23:40cartoons were on or whatever. So, no. How do the commercials work there?
0:23:44Well, they just show lots of commercials and they're from typically 51 weeks a year,
0:23:50or I guess they don't show golf 52 weeks a year, but all but one weekend a year,
0:23:55they're the exact type of companies that you would think sponsor golf.
0:24:00Game? Yeah, it's erectile dysfunction. It's life insurance. Life insurance, cars, you know,
0:24:06you name it. But the Masters, which just finished this last weekend, is a very strange and unusual
0:24:14golf tournament where it is run not by the PGA. It is not run by the network, CBS. It is run by
0:24:24the Augusta National Golf Club. They call all the shots. It's always been on CBS, but CBS does,
0:24:31I don't know how long their contracts run, but there have been weird situations over the years
0:24:36where there was a golf announcer, the one guy, his name is Gary something, and he was sort of
0:24:41like the funny golf announcer, which by the standards of comedy. Very bad, but by the
0:24:47standards of golf. Yeah, but he's also like if you tuned in for half an hour, you might listen to him
0:24:53and think, you know what, if I was going to grab a beer after this, he might be the guy. But he
0:24:57described one of their greens as being so fast. The Masters, when you putt, the greens are
0:25:04extremely, extremely fast. One golfer's described it as like putting on a windshield. Very, very
0:25:11fast. Well, he described it as having been bikini waxed. That was his quip on the air. Well-
0:25:18And got in trouble for this?
0:25:20They never announced the Masters again.
0:25:22Wow.
0:25:23And that wasn't CBS's decision. It was the Masters. But they also vastly undersell the ad
0:25:29inventory. This is where I'm going, is for years and years when I was a little kid, I think they
0:25:34only had two advertisers. I think it was, one of them was definitely Travelers, which I don't even
0:25:40think is a company anymore. I think it got bought by some other bank.
0:25:43By somebody else.
0:25:44But that red umbrella logo is etched in my mind. It was like, and so they'd only have like two
0:25:50sponsors for the whole weekend. It was Travelers Life Insurance and EF Hutton or something like
0:25:56that. And they just limit it to like, and now it's like three or four. I watched a little bit of the
0:26:02Masters over the weekend just to see some Tiger Woods. IBM has been involved now for quite a long
0:26:07time. IBM is one of their sponsors. Rolex is involved at some degree, but it's like just
0:26:12three or four companies like that. But here's the weird thing, because they have so few sponsors,
0:26:18they have way fewer breaks in the action.
0:26:20So they don't do as many breaks, yeah.
0:26:22Right. And they just, a lot of times, even when there's nothing to show,
0:26:27like golf has a lot of flexibility because there's just groups of golfers all over the golf course.
0:26:32All 18 holes are in use and you just cut between them, yeah.
0:26:35Yeah. But for the most part, they show the golfers who are in the lead or close to the lead,
0:26:41or they'll cut away.
0:26:43Or Tiger Woods.
0:26:44Or Tiger Woods, right. There's three groups of golfers. The ones who are in the lead are
0:26:50very close to the lead, and they tend to be playing at the back because they start those
0:26:54golfers last. Whoever's leading going into the last day is the last group to come through.
0:27:01And for the most part, nobody who's too far ahead of them generally scores so low on one day that
0:27:07they come into contention. But if they do, they'll just cut ahead to hear so-and-so who's shooting an
0:27:13unbelievable round today. And then they'll also cut away if somebody hits a hole-in-one or...
0:27:17Yeah, a great drive or something.
0:27:19Yeah, something amazing happens like that, or it knocks an 85-foot putt that goes left,
0:27:24then right, then drops right into the hole. Then they'll cut away to that. But for the most part,
0:27:29whenever the leaders hit their tee shot 300 yards away, now they've got minutes to go,
0:27:36then they can just say, "Here's the scoreboard. Cut to a commercial." Because you've got minutes
0:27:41before the leaders are going to do anything live.
0:27:43To get all the way to their ball, yeah.
0:27:44Right. But when you watch the Masters, it's way more soothing. For somebody who hates golf,
0:27:50they should record the Masters every year. And if they have trouble sleeping,
0:27:54they could just put it on. And it's so soothing. And if there's nothing going on and there's no
0:28:00golfers on hole 10 doing something interesting, they just play this soothing Masters music and
0:28:08just show beautiful footage of the golf course from a drone. It's really quite—when you're used
0:28:15to the way most sports are on TV, where it's as many commercials as they can possibly fit in,
0:28:20the fact that they just luxuriate in not showing you that.
0:28:24In some grass and yeah, right.
0:28:26I looked this up. Do you know what Tiger Woods—so he finished, I think, 47th?
0:28:32Yeah.
0:28:32Do you know what he made for that?
0:28:34No.
0:28:35I love this. Because if you finish a golf tournament, I think everybody gets some
0:28:39last place if you finish. I think it still might even be a thousand bucks, whatever it is.
0:28:44I believe he got $44,000, which is just such a hilarious number to me. It's a ton of money. It's
0:28:49a great amount of money. But it's Tiger Woods, who's worth, I assume, hundreds of millions of
0:28:54dollars, has sponsorships still that are worth millions, tens of millions of dollars. He played
0:29:00four rounds of golf and earned $44,000 last weekend.
0:29:03To finish third to last or something like that.
0:29:06To finish near the bottom.
0:29:07But I will say this. It was a pleasure to watch him play. That's after making the cut. In the
0:29:14first two rounds, there's way more golfers and you have to—the Masters is also unusual compared to
0:29:19other tournaments where they invite a lot of amateurs and stuff like that. But then the cut
0:29:25is extremely exclusive. Making the cut there is actually more—
0:29:30It's very difficult.
0:29:30Very difficult.
0:29:31And was he—I don't even know, you probably know—was he able to play as a former champion?
0:29:36Are they just always allowed?
0:29:38I forget how much—there are certain rules where, like, if you win any of the major tournaments—the
0:29:46U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship—you get an automatic invitation
0:29:52to the Masters. If you've previously won the Masters, I believe you have a lifetime
0:29:56invitation.
0:29:58Because he hasn't done anything, but then he just decided to roll into Augusta and
0:30:03play four rounds of golf.
0:30:04Right. But the U.S. Open, because it's truly an open championship, run by the United States
0:30:11Golf Association, and so any kind of organization like that has a rule book. And here's what you
0:30:16have to do to qualify for the U.S. Open. And you could just—it's like a computer algorithm. You
0:30:21can just check or X whether you qualify or not. The Masters, because the Augusta National Golf
0:30:27Club has the ultimate say, can just say, "Yeah, but we're also going to invite Jack Nicklaus."
0:30:31Even though he's 84, and obviously he isn't going to be competitive, but he gets to play
0:30:37if he wants.
0:30:37How did we get on golf? Let's talk baseball. Let's talk a different boring sport.
0:30:42So we were talking about the big question, is Apple even going to have ads on Friday
0:30:48Night Baseball, or will they only be for other Apple products? And it gets to the question of
0:30:52what's Apple's point here? Are they trying to make money with Friday Night Baseball?
0:30:56Directly.
0:30:58Right. Like, all right, Major League Baseball charged them—I have no idea what it would cost.
0:31:04We'll make up a number. They had to pay $500 million to have these games this year. That's
0:31:09probably high, but whatever. $500 million this year. Are they trying to sell $501 million worth
0:31:13of ads?
0:31:13Right.
0:31:14/subscriptions/rappleproducts/whatever.
0:31:15Right. So, yeah. So it would be—if they were purely in it to make a profit, it would be the
0:31:24number of ads that they sell and their share of those ads, which I don't think is 100% for
0:31:31reasons we'll get into.
0:31:32Yeah, right.
0:31:32The net additive number of TV+ paid subscribers—
0:31:38Subscribers.
0:31:38—who they think came because of the baseball, which they'll never know, right? And this isn't
0:31:44like, "Oh, Apple doesn't track people." It's like, "How could anybody know for sure?"
0:31:48No. You've heard about Ted Lasso, and you think, "Eh, maybe I'll check it out," and then you hear
0:31:52about baseball, and you say, "Well, I like baseball, too. Now there's two things that
0:31:55I'm interested in. I'll subscribe."
0:31:57But you could probably come close to at least a decent spitball guess by looking at people who
0:32:04didn't have a subscription that gave them—a paid subscription that gave them TV+ access,
0:32:11who did after April of 2022, and who watched some Friday night baseball, right?
0:32:20You know, that's the sort of tracking that I assume Apple does with TV+, right? That they
0:32:27would look at something—
0:32:27They can see what you're watching, yeah, sure.
0:32:29—right, I mean, because they know, you know, they make suggestions and stuff. Now,
0:32:33do they anonymize that and look at it in the aggregate? I presume they do. I mean,
0:32:37I—and I don't think that's contrary to their privacy argument, because they don't care about
0:32:43you, Paul Kofosis.
0:32:44What John is watching, yeah. They care about what 10,000 people are watching.
0:32:48Right, but they obviously try to, you know, look at who's watching which shows, and if
0:32:52nobody is watching Severance, which I hope is not true because I love that show, it's like my
0:32:57favorite new show, but like, if nobody watched it, it's like they're not going to renew it, right?
0:33:01Yep.
0:33:01Like, so there's some net additive number of subscribers that they will get out of this,
0:33:07and what else? How else could they make money? Oh, the promotional value that they get for free
0:33:13ads, you know, for their own Apple products, telling people to buy the new iPhone 13, which
0:33:18is now in green. They obviously advertised a lot of Apple TV shows. How else could they make money
0:33:26from this? I don't think they're going to make money, and I think they know that they're not.
0:33:29That's my guess is that they paid more for the rights. Obviously, the most
0:33:36broadcast companies that show sports do so to make money, right? Like, when CBS shows the Super Bowl,
0:33:46they do it in an NFL football every Sunday afternoon, and they pay the NFL billions of
0:33:52dollars per year for the rights to do it. So many people watch football that they think that they
0:33:58make money on that, right? That's what's so tricky if you're like a traditional company like NBC or
0:34:06CBS, and these streaming services like Amazon and Apple come in and might have different strategies
0:34:15and are just willing to write a check for a couple hundred million dollars for baseball rights,
0:34:19because that's just a, you know, what's like a huge deal to CBS Sports is like, eh, you know,
0:34:25pocket change to Tim Cook, right? I sort of think that the overall strategy is less about making
0:34:32money directly on Friday Night Baseball, but more just broadly trying to get more people to sign up
0:34:38for not just TV+ as a paid subscription, but any sort of Apple subscription that includes TV+,
0:34:46right? Okay. So they've got their bundles with fitness and...
0:34:50Right. The Apple One bundles, right? There's like Apple One and Apple One+ or something.
0:34:56You can always just add a plus.
0:34:58(laughs)
0:34:59Just throw a plus on there.
0:35:00But it's like you can still just pay for Apple Music, but it doesn't really make much sense.
0:35:05Maybe you just pay $9 a month or $10 a month for Apple Music and that's all you get. But they
0:35:11really want you to spend like 15 or 20 bucks a month and get Apple Music and TV+ and, you know,
0:35:16guess what? Some extra iCloud storage, blah, blah, blah. They just want more people to be on a tier
0:35:21like that. And I think that's my guess is that adding some sort of sports is a way to sort of
0:35:28expand that into new demographics. And, you know...
0:35:34Yeah, I think that makes sense. It's very strange because you mentioned that this was announced late.
0:35:38Baseball was potentially in a strike situation or a lockout rather, I should say, because it was the
0:35:44owners, not the players. But there was the potential that the season wasn't going to start
0:35:47on time and that it wasn't going to happen at all. So then, yeah, when Apple announced this,
0:35:51what, in March, I guess, right? They announced it in March and we said, "Well, if there's baseball,
0:35:56there will be baseball on Apple TV, but if there's not baseball, then there won't be."
0:35:59But they announced it like four weeks before they actually started doing it. And so it's been
0:36:05interesting to see that it wasn't something to anticipate for a long time. It was just,
0:36:09they announced it and then a few weeks later, there was.
0:36:12Right. And they didn't announce the production details and announcing team and stuff like that
0:36:17until the day before the game. Until like the day before, yeah.
0:36:20Yeah. And I'm fascinated by that too, because that's, in my opinion, extremely unusual. I
0:36:28can't recall that ever happening. What I think is most interesting about
0:36:30the production and everything is that the crews that they used are not anybody that
0:36:36you would have seen on ESPN, on TBS, and neither national broadcast. First of all,
0:36:41the number of women was phenomenal. They were, I think, in the booth. What did we have? Two women
0:36:46and one guy on both of them. Is that right? Or was there, it doesn't matter. There were at least
0:36:52three women in the booth that I can recall in my head out of six announcers, which is three more
0:36:57than pretty much ever before about five years ago when Jess Mendoza was on ESPN. And most broadcasts,
0:37:04national broadcasts, home broadcasts don't frequently have women. So it was very cool
0:37:10to see some diversity there. And then even the other announcers that they had were not,
0:37:14you know, they didn't bring in somebody from ESPN, Karl Ravitch or somebody like that,
0:37:19who's done this before. They brought in people who were more fresh voices, which I really liked.
0:37:23Yeah. Now I wonder how much of that was a deliberate strategy on Apple's part.
0:37:29I think the diversity clearly was deliberate. I mean, I think that they came into this thinking,
0:37:34"We're going to diversify, especially gender-wise." Because I think it's safe to say that racially
0:37:41commentators, at least in sports, have been racially diverse for a while. Play-by-play,
0:37:50not so much, which is weird. And I know if you're not a sports fan, you're like, "What the hell are
0:37:53you talking about?" And it's like, usually for any of these sports, basketball, baseball, hockey,
0:37:59football, there's... The play-by-play person is someone who went to broadcasting school.
0:38:04Right. And... And it is just a voice on the radio.
0:38:07Right. Well, even though you're watching on TV, but like you can...
0:38:10Or on TV, yeah. You can turn your back to the TV,
0:38:13though, and follow the game. Like, they're telling you, you know, "Here's the pitch. It's low and
0:38:20outside. That's ball three." And, you know, you're not even watching. You can hear them say this,
0:38:25and it's like, "Oh, it's a long drive to left field," and, you know, then tells you what
0:38:29happens. That's play-by-play. It's telling you what happens. And you can say, "Well, why is...
0:38:32I've thought about this over the years. Why do you even need that if it's television?" Like, is that...
0:38:36Here we are 60 years, 70 years into the TV era after radio.
0:38:42Right. And that is certainly a vestige of radio.
0:38:45Right. But I think it would drive people... I think there's a... I don't know. I think there's
0:38:50a reason that it works. And maybe it is just tradition, but it does work. But anyway, that
0:38:55role is, in my experience, watching nationally televised games, not as diverse. It's typically...
0:39:01No, it's a whole lot of white dudes.
0:39:02It's a whole lot of white dudes. So the racial diversity on play-by-play, not so great.
0:39:08Gender diversity on play-by-play, almost nonexistent. I think Apple, when they announced
0:39:12that Melanie Newman, who does... She calls games for the Baltimore Orioles, is their East Coast...
0:39:17I don't think they're announcing an East Coast crew and a West Coast crew, but I think that's
0:39:21obviously what's going to happen because if she's calling most games for the Orioles, she can't
0:39:26really zip across the country. But that's, you know, I think that was absolutely deliberate.
0:39:31Now, was it deliberate that they went for up-and-coming
0:39:34newer young... And they were all younger too.
0:39:38**BEN HONG:** Yeah, absolutely.
0:39:38**TK:** And that's, you know, for baseball, honestly, that's another angle of diversity.
0:39:44I would say it's the least important maybe of them, but it was a different group of faces
0:39:49than you typically see. You know, baseball is typically a bunch of 60-some-year-old
0:39:54white dudes talking about the game. This was different. But was it strategic that they
0:39:58didn't get big names, that they didn't go poaching for Karl Ravitch from ESPN or somebody else?
0:40:04**BEN HONG** Well, you had seen... Was this a tweet that you saw? I can't remember what you...
0:40:07**TK;** Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. I just added a note to make sure I put it in the
0:40:11show notes. But is it what you're going to say about...
0:40:13**BEN HONG** That you had seen that they were trying, at least had talked to Bill Simmons,
0:40:17who's a decently big name, formerly of ESPN. And I can't remember who the other name was,
0:40:21but another ESPN name. **TK;** Mena Kimes.
0:40:23**BEN HONG** That's right. So they had spoken to at least a couple bigger names and
0:40:28didn't get them to sign on whatever happened.
0:40:30**TK;** Yeah, I don't know. Apparently, the rumor from the New York Post media reporter was that
0:40:35neither Bill Simmons nor Mena Kimes had interest. I don't even know if Mena Kimes
0:40:39follows baseball. She's a top football, a pro football analyst, and she's terrific.
0:40:45She's really, really astute. But I don't know if she follows baseball. I don't know.
0:40:49**BEN HONG** So they did at least make an attempt at some bigger names,
0:40:54although those aren't necessarily big names that have done baseball broadcasts. But yeah,
0:40:58I really liked the crews that they had. Katie Nolan, I thought, was great on the second
0:41:03broadcast. And it really, to me, was where Apple stood out from a lot of the other broadcasts,
0:41:08because they all tend to sound the same, which is fine. But this, at least, I felt that there
0:41:14was a difference watching these games. And I think that's something that was a result of who
0:41:19Apple hired for these roles. **TK;** Yeah. One of the things that's
0:41:22been true for a long time, and who knows why, gender stuff can be so hard to explain,
0:41:31especially when it comes to the media. But for whatever reason, when the barrier broke,
0:41:39like when I was a little kid, there were no women broadcasting sports, period. Just none,
0:41:45or at least not nationally. And when they first sort of broke into it, it was always as the
0:41:50the sideline reporter, right? So you'd have two dudes in the booth, and then when there's
0:41:57like an injury—
0:41:58And then they call down to a woman on the field.
0:42:00Right. And then it became—I wouldn't say they're all women, but the sideline reporters
0:42:06are—like in the NFL, I think are majority women. It certainly seems like most of them
0:42:11are. And that's great that there's a role, but it's so weird that it's—instead of
0:42:16all of these jobs are open to the most talented broadcast, to the people who are the most
0:42:21engaging and have the most interesting stuff to say, which clearly would lead to the sort
0:42:27of diversity we're seeing with like Friday Night Baseball, right? There's absolutely
0:42:32no reason that there shouldn't be more than one or two women calling play-by-play on nationally
0:42:39televised sports in the United States. It's clearly out of whack. But it's so weird
0:42:47that the sideline reporters became like the designated role. Well, we'll definitely
0:42:50have a woman down there. I don't know how to explain it. But I guess it's—I don't
0:42:55know. It's almost like group think, right? Like, well, CBS put a woman in the job as
0:43:02sideline reporter, and people still watched football, so I guess—
0:43:05So I guess we can risk it?
0:43:07Yeah, I guess we can risk it. It's a very—you know, they love to look at all the stats and
0:43:13the ratings and demographics and stuff like that, but it is—there's a lot of risk
0:43:17adversity to the media business. So anyway, I thought the baseball broadcast was good.
0:43:22Well, what other details did you want to talk about? I want to talk about the graphics.
0:43:25Oh, Chris Young really cracks me up. That was the one that I sent you while we were
0:43:29watching it. So Chris Young was a player for—he was in the first broadcast, and he was a baseball
0:43:34player, retired now. Never a superstar, but I think he was decent. He played on the Yankees
0:43:38for a little while, and he played on the Red Sox for a little while. And as I was poking
0:43:43at his Wikipedia page, I saw this little explanation that he had claimed to have invented or at
0:43:51least popularized sign stealing in baseball via Apple Watch, which both the Red Sox have
0:43:58been accused of and the Yankees. So, you know, neither of our hands are clean on this. But
0:44:02I just love that Apple got the guy who at least claimed to have popularized using an
0:44:09Apple Watch to steal signs, and they got him on their very first broadcast with Friday
0:44:13Night Baseball. Did you think—it is funny. I don't know that they're going to talk
0:44:19about that incident. Probably that will not—I don't know if they've told them not to
0:44:24talk about it, but I bet that will not come up. But it is funny that of all people, the
0:44:30one player in all of Major League Baseball who, you know, he's not the only one who's
0:44:34been on the Yankees and Red Sox, but he was at the heart of the only micro scandal that
0:44:39involved an Apple product.
0:44:41Yeah. And they got him on the very first broadcast.
0:44:45There's a side note on technology. So for those who aren't baseball fans, baseball
0:44:49has—you're not allowed to have electronics. So, like, you can't—
0:44:54In the dugout, you can't have—well, you can have an iPad, but it can't be hooked
0:44:56up to the internet.
0:44:57Right. So that was a recent rule from a couple of years ago. They're like, "Okay, you
0:45:01can have an iPad, but it can't have any internet access." So you can't get—
0:45:06The reason to have it is they can look at, like, there are swings. They can look at how
0:45:10a pitcher throws and prepare for their next at bat. There's all sorts of reasons to use
0:45:14it. They don't have to be stealing signs or cheating, basically.
0:45:19Right. Whereas the NFL has embraced technology for decades, you know, and they've got coaches
0:45:25who are up in the booth, 300 seats above the field with binoculars and with TVs, and they
0:45:33can show the video. They can look at the video of the game and the last play, and you see
0:45:38the players down there with these Microsoft Surfaces through a sponsorship deal looking
0:45:42at live pictures from, like, the last time they were on the field, and here's how the
0:45:46team signed up. And they've got headsets, and the quarterbacks have, you know, headsets
0:45:51inside their helmets so the coaches can call plays, and they're talking to each other.
0:45:56Baseball, all of that stuff is illegal.
0:45:58Until?
0:45:59Until—
0:46:00This season.
0:46:01Right. So this season, they've added a thing, which you and I have talked about offline,
0:46:07which is Pitchcom, right?
0:46:09Pitchcom, yeah. And this is another thing. There was all this stuff that got introduced
0:46:14in the past couple weeks, it seems like, as a baseball fan. And this was another thing
0:46:19where it wasn't something that had been on my radar anyway, but suddenly is being used
0:46:24in Major League Baseball games for the pitcher and catcher and defense to communicate.
0:46:31I would say it sort of looks like—the catcher gets a thing that looks like a garage door
0:46:36opener. It's a little black piece of plastic with, like, a keypad with, I don't know, nine
0:46:41or ten buttons.
0:46:42Oh, I'd almost say, like, a video game controller, but yeah, like the pin pad outside of a garage
0:46:48door at least that has a bunch of buttons on it, yeah.
0:46:50Yeah, I guess a garage door opener typically only has, like, open and closed buttons or
0:46:54something like that. It's weird.
0:46:58It's a little more complex than that, but it's not super complex. I think you're right,
0:47:01it's about ten buttons. And so basically, the catcher's got this pad that they can have
0:47:06on their wrist, or they can—I've seen some guys wearing it, like, on their thigh, and
0:47:10they hit a button, and it says "fastball," and that plays in the pitcher's ear, it plays
0:47:16in an outfielder's ear if they're wearing the earpiece. And actually, this was an interesting
0:47:20fact was that it plays in the catcher's ear so that they can be sure that they hit the
0:47:24right button, which I guess it makes perfect sense, but it's not necessarily something
0:47:27you'd think of initially.
0:47:29And so previously, and still some teams have a system that's been around for, gotta be
0:47:34a hundred years, of just throwing down fingers to indicate what pitch they want to throw.
0:47:40And now there's this—now we've introduced technology in a way that makes it much more
0:47:44difficult for the other team to steal those signs and know what's coming.
0:47:48Right, and another thing for the people out there who aren't baseball fans, it is actually—I
0:47:57remember when I was a kid when I learned this, I was like, "That's amazing! I just thought
0:48:00the pitcher just got up there and threw whatever pitch they wanted and the catcher caught it."
0:48:03Because that's how we as kids play.
0:48:04That's how little it works.
0:48:05That's how we played. But at a professional level, they call the exact pitch not just
0:48:10like fastball, but like fastball outside or fastball inside, you know, location.
0:48:15And if they call it getting crossed up, like—because so the sign stealing is a huge part of the
0:48:20game, has been for, you know, well over a hundred years, and they'll mix up the signs.
0:48:27And so instead of three fingers on my right thigh and then two fingers on this thigh,
0:48:31and that means whatever, they mix up the signals.
0:48:35But if the pitcher and the catcher have the signals crossed up between them and the pitcher—
0:48:40Suddenly the pitcher's throwing a fastball when the catcher's expecting a curveball,
0:48:44and the ball's in his face before he realizes it.
0:48:46It's actually dangerous, right? Because it can like sail past—because it's a huge difference
0:48:51in speed, huge difference in where you expect the ball to wind up. You know, 20 to 25 miles
0:48:56an hour difference in speed sometimes, and it could just sail right over the catcher
0:49:01and hit the umpire right in the head or something like that.
0:49:03I was going to say, it's mostly dangerous for the umpires.
0:49:04Yeah, it is. That's like the worst is when they're expecting off speed, which means
0:49:09a slower, curvy, you know, like Frisbee-type pitch that's going to bend, and instead it's
0:49:14a 98-mile-an-hour fastball. It just sails right at the umpire.
0:49:17It just hits the umpire right in the face or something, yeah.
0:49:19Right, so it's dangerous. So the confirmation that the catcher hears, that's just good
0:49:23user interface design, right? It's like—
0:49:25Yeah, perhaps.
0:49:26But it's really interesting that they've added this technology this year, and it's—when
0:49:30I sent you the link, and I still think it cracks me up, it was—I know the date. It
0:49:34was exactly seven days ago. It was April 5th because I was like, "I've got to send
0:49:38this to Paul." And then right before—I even had it pasted into iMessage. I was ready
0:49:44to send it, and I thought, "Wait a minute. Is this a joke?"
0:49:46Is this an April Fool's joke?
0:49:47Is this an April Fool's joke? And I stumbled upon it. I knew it wasn't April 1st anymore,
0:49:51but I thought perhaps I've stumbled on an April 1st joke on MLB.com, and I've just
0:49:57seen it four days late, and Paul's going to laugh at me.
0:49:59Right.
0:50:00Because—
0:50:01But no, it's completely serious.
0:50:04But if you made up the joke, the keypad that they actually use would be a very good mockup
0:50:09for the joke.
0:50:10Absolutely. And, well, and also you would say that it was created by a company that
0:50:14does communication systems for magicians.
0:50:17And mentalists.
0:50:18And mentalists, right, which is the truth. This company, I assume a relatively small
0:50:24company, but they make communication systems that magicians and mentalists use and, you
0:50:29know, have to have some sort of wireless communication that most people can't detect, can't see.
0:50:34And that turns out, a whole lot of that translates to making a communication system that a pitcher
0:50:38and catcher use where you don't want the batter, who is three feet from the catcher,
0:50:43to be able to tell what you just did.
0:50:45Well, that's the part, too, that made me think it might be a joke, is that they're
0:50:48not—none of the players are actually wearing earpieces. They've got like a headband in
0:50:53the hat, so like—
0:50:54Is it bone conduction?
0:50:55Yeah, I think, but I would love to know the details of this. If anybody out there has
0:50:59like links to how it actually works, is it—I presume the only other option is bone conduction,
0:51:04but apparently it's good enough that they can hear it even over the crowd noise. But
0:51:08you don't see, like, you know, it would be funny, too, if like on Friday Night Baseball,
0:51:12it's like, well, can they wear an AirPod?
0:51:16Switch the headphone from whatever generic one to an AirPod.
0:51:19To a white AirPod, yeah. You don't see like an earpiece in there. It's apparently some
0:51:23apparatus that fits inside their caps, you know, like the pitcher's cap or the shortstop,
0:51:28whoever else has it, and they somehow hear this, right? Now, that sounds really cool,
0:51:33but that's apparently also how like the batter won't hear the catchers, even if like
0:51:38it's, you know, like you're in Tampa and it's a real quiet—
0:51:41It's real quiet.
0:51:42Real quiet. Watching the game, the batter isn't going to be able to hear curveball.
0:51:46Curveball.
0:51:47Oh, thank you. Because it's just bone conduction, but that's where—and then that's where
0:51:53the idea that it came from a company that made equipment for mentalists, right?
0:51:58Yep.
0:51:59Well, that's exactly what made me like convinced it was an April Fool's joke. It was like,
0:52:04"Ah."
0:52:05It definitely sounds like a joke when you put it that way, yeah. But at the same time,
0:52:08it makes perfect sense.
0:52:09And the worst part is baseball, I think of all the sports I follow, baseball is the one
0:52:13that to me seems most prone to April Fool's jackassery. There was famously—I think you're
0:52:20a bit young for this, but do you remember the George Plimpton story in—it was the
0:52:24back page column in Sports Illustrated?
0:52:26I don't. I'm familiar, but I don't know which story you're talking about. Go ahead.
0:52:31Oh, I got to get the player's name right because it was Plimpton Mets Prank. It was
0:52:37like sometime around like 1986, I'm thinking, and it was the back page column in Sports
0:52:43Illustrated and George Plimpton, well-regarded, very famous—I guess it wasn't even a back
0:52:48page column. It was a feature. I'm looking at it here. I'll get it in the show notes.
0:52:51The Curious Case of Sid Finch, and it was about this phenom in the Mets organization
0:52:56who liked to pitch barefoot and could throw 120 miles an hour. And it was an April Fool's
0:53:05gag. But people were very upset about it because Sports Illustrated didn't let—you had
0:53:09to kind of—and I think if you read closely, you'd catch on eventually. It'd be like,
0:53:14"Ah, this is the April 1st edition of Sports Illustrated. It's a gag."
0:53:17People were very upset about it. I remember—I don't know what year it was, but I remember
0:53:22watching ESPN, and April Fool's coincides with the start of baseball season.
0:53:28Very beginning of the season.
0:53:29Very beginning of the season. Usually the first games are like April 1st or 2nd or something
0:53:33like that. But I remember one time watching ESPN—had to be around the late '90s when
0:53:38I mentioned the name of the player—but they said, "It hasn't gotten a lot of hubbub
0:53:42during spring training, but Major League Baseball players are all very excited about the fact
0:53:47that this is the first year that they'll be allowed to use aluminum bats."
0:53:51And then they showed—because it's ESPN, they could do it—they showed some well-known
0:53:55major leaguers taking batting practice with aluminum bats and just drilling balls over
0:54:00the fence. And they're like, "There's some concern." The average line drive in
0:54:04Major League Baseball the last three seasons was 98 miles an hour off the bat or something
0:54:09like that. And they're like, "Most of these, even the shortstops now are getting
0:54:13upwards of 120 miles an hour off the bat." So there's some concern for pitchers'
0:54:17safety. And then they interviewed a pitcher who's like, "I hate this rule. This is
0:54:21the worst thing that's ever happened to baseball. Honestly, I'm terrified." And
0:54:24then they cut to Jose Canseco and Oakland A's legend—
0:54:29At his most roided-up state.
0:54:32Right. And he said that he honestly expected—this is where I realized this has got to be a gag.
0:54:36He was like, "I honestly expect that I think I could hit 100 home runs this year." At
0:54:41a time when the decades-long Babe Ruth record or—
0:54:46No, Roger Maris.
0:54:47Roger Maris was 61.
0:54:4861, yeah.
0:54:49Right. He was like, "I think I'll hit 100. If I stay healthy, I'll hit 100. No problem."
0:54:53And probably kill about 10, 12 pitchers too.
0:54:57Right. Anyway, so I was worried about it, but it's kind of interesting. I would love
0:55:03to hear it, right? I would love to hear what this bone conduction sounds like, but—
0:55:07Well, you watch the Sunday Night Game. They had the speaker. I just—
0:55:12Oh, I didn't hear it. I missed that part.
0:55:14Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's right. You were watching the terrible other broadcast part of the time.
0:55:18So they showed the transmitter—sorry, the receiver, and they had it play audio, but
0:55:25it played more like a normal speaker. So I'm not sure—I've got to look this up, because
0:55:29I've looked at this a little bit, but yeah, I'm not sure how the audio is being played.
0:55:33Bone conduction certainly makes sense, because then no one's going to be able to hear it
0:55:36except for you. But the way that they played it on air at least, it seemed like it was
0:55:40transmitting sound in a way that could be heard, so, you know, through the air. So I'm—I'll
0:55:45be interested to look this up when we're done.
0:55:47Well, I think—but I think that gets back to the fact that they started doing work for
0:55:51mentalists, right? Because if you went to see, like, a guy who claims that he can read
0:55:55minds or speak to the dead or something like that, you know, the things that mentalists
0:56:01do at a paid show, if you saw them with an earpiece, you'd be like, "What the hell's
0:56:05going on? He's got an earpiece." You know, I think that they, you know, hook it up so
0:56:08that it goes through their glasses or something like that so that it, you know, it's bone
0:56:12conduction. But—
0:56:13Yeah, no, so it definitely is bone conduction. So I'm not sure how they made that work on
0:56:17air, because as I said, they were playing the—they were using the pin pad and then
0:56:22making it say "curve ball," "fast ball," whatever.
0:56:25Well, I don't know. I mean, at some point it's, you know, as you might know, I don't
0:56:28know if you know anything about audio, but—
0:56:29A little bit.
0:56:30At some point it's just audio in a computer and it could go elsewhere, right? It could
0:56:36just go to—one of the receivers could be something that could just record the actual
0:56:41audio, you know, it doesn't have to be—doesn't mean every receiver has to be bone conduction.
0:56:45It has to be a bone conduction earpiece, yeah.
0:56:47Right.
0:56:48So yeah, maybe they had something else for demonstrating it.
0:56:50But anyway, technology and baseball. What else on the Friday night baseball? The graphics
0:56:55looked very appley. I think they were—
0:56:57Right, well, and I sent you one shot where it looked like they were showing some stat,
0:57:03they were showing, you know, the number of hits somebody got last year compared to other
0:57:06players or something. And it looked like a scrollable list. It looked like you could
0:57:10interact with it. Because I at least was watching on my Apple TV, and it looked exactly like
0:57:16every control on an Apple TV where you could scroll through the settings or whatever. And
0:57:19there was a little—you noted there was like a little, what looked like a disclosure triangle,
0:57:24which obviously doesn't do anything, but it was just—it was more of an asterisk.
0:57:27But yeah, I found the graphics a little—they looked nice enough, but I found them a little
0:57:32disconcerting because it looked like I could interact with them. And actually, honestly,
0:57:37there's not a reason why you couldn't interact with them. Apple certainly could, with an
0:57:41online-only broadcast, make it such that you could, on certain devices, interact and say,
0:57:46"Oh, tell me more about this stat," or whatever.
0:57:47Yeah.
0:57:48But that is not currently how it works.
0:57:49It was sort of the—you know, it's a variation of the uncanny valley. It's instantly recognizable
0:57:55as Apple-like. If this had been—if Amazon had won the bidding—
0:58:01And done this.
0:58:02And done this, it would have—and you would have known. It was like, "Wait, the license
0:58:07terms for the San Francisco font don't even allow that. You're not—and I know that's—I
0:58:11know that's San Francisco. You're not allowed to use it like that." It looked so instantly
0:58:16Apple-like. And for somebody who's attuned to fonts and Apple's UI styles, you know,
0:58:23who could have kept me away from this news, showed me the broadcast, and I would have
0:58:27instantly figured out, "Hey, Apple's doing baseball. This has got to be an Apple broadcast."
0:58:32But on the other hand, it is weird that within the confines of Apple's 2D fonts and colors
0:58:41and lots of black backgrounds with white text and the way that the highlight looked exactly
0:58:48like the selection highlight on the tvOS.
0:58:51Exactly.
0:58:52And even one out of Apple's, you know, the way that Apple has sort of gone in a similar
0:58:55direction with all their operating systems, but tvOS still sort of looks different. It
0:59:00looked like something I should be able to take my Apple TV remote and go up and down,
0:59:03you know? And you can't. But like you said, why not, right? That's actually very interesting
0:59:10to me is if Apple has more ambitious technical goals. And if this whole thing was sort of
0:59:16delayed until March because of the lockout, like, I honestly don't know what was allowed.
0:59:21I know the players and the teams were not allowed to interact at all. So like players
0:59:25weren't allowed to go to the team's health facilities just to like rehab an injury or
0:59:29something like that. They had to do it on their own. That's what lockout meant. But
0:59:32it seemed like other things were prevented too. So maybe this was all a bit rushed towards
0:59:36the end.
0:59:37But if you're showing it on a computing device, and that's all Apple is, right? They're
0:59:44not simulcasting it to any sort of terrestrial TV. Everything is either like an Apple TV
0:59:51or an iPhone or an iPad or you can watch on the web. But again, that's a computer. It
0:59:56could be all those graphics could be interactive.
0:59:59You could have way more interaction with it. Yeah. I mean, so you've used MLB TV in the
1:00:04MLB app. And that's got way more interactivity than just a traditional broadcast. You can
1:00:11change how it looks. You can pull up different stats. You can do all sorts of stuff. And
1:00:15yeah, there's no reason that Apple's broadcasts couldn't allow at least some of that.
1:00:19So I you know, what's the future hold for Apple TV with the Friday Night Baseball? I
1:00:23don't know. I kind of feel the other thing, you know, to wrap this segment up. Well, let
1:00:27me take a break because I have a little bit more to say about Apple TV. We'll get on
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1:03:2430 bucks off? What else was going on? So the other thing that I, we were talking about
1:03:28the commercials before, the thing that, this is the part that really, hmm, that makes me
1:03:33go, I wonder. It looked to me like the sponsors for Friday Night Baseball were largely the
1:03:39same as the ones that MLB tends to have on their own MLB network.
1:03:44They weren't prestige sponsors or anything like that.
1:03:46Right. It's the opposite, you know, and that's harkens back to my, hark's back, I forget,
1:03:50what do you say there, Paul? Hark's back or harkens back? I think it's...
1:03:53Let's go harkens.
1:03:54I think that they're both accepted. This is a little insight into me and Paul's friendship,
1:03:58because if I were writing and I haven't even spoken to Paul in a week or something like
1:04:03that, I'll just immediately, I message Paul with a question like that. He's on the copy
1:04:07desk at Daring Fireball, but I'll do that and then while I'm texting you, then I'll
1:04:11start looking it up in the dictionary app. But I always, I know...
1:04:15It looks like you're right. They're both, both acceptable.
1:04:18It hark's back to my discussion of the masters where I thought, and you know, I thought it
1:04:23was coincidental that it was Masters Weekend, the same weekend Apple was doing this, but
1:04:27I thought that maybe Apple will do something prestige like that and just sort of, instead
1:04:31of that bombastic in between innings, boom, boom, boom, you know, go to Chipotle, go to
1:04:38Subway, you know, gamble, gamble, gamble at BetMGM.
1:04:43Crypto, crypto, crypto.
1:04:44Right. Crypto, crypto, drink a beer and then go gamble some more. Maybe it'll be more sedate
1:04:49and cool. They could just show like those screensavers, like on Apple TV, you know.
1:04:53Oh God, that'd be amazing.
1:04:55Right. It's, you know...
1:04:56You're talking about the, the like ASMR quality of the, of golf. I would like to just, just
1:05:00give me those screensavers with a little bit of audio behind them.
1:05:03Right. And, and some scores from around the league at the bottom. Make sure people know
1:05:07they're still watching the baseball game. There's, they had all sorts of options, but
1:05:11really it just looked to me like a white label MLB network broadcast. It was obvious...
1:05:18They did not go that route. They did not go the route of fewer ads or nicer ads.
1:05:24Apple clearly hired all of the talent, right? The announcers, as we discussed, the announcers,
1:05:29the sideline reporters, the pregame hosts, you know, Apple hired those people. They work
1:05:34for Apple, but it seemed like the ads went through MLB network or else somehow Apple
1:05:39ended up selling the exact same style of ads. Is it distasteful? Is it, you know, like the
1:05:45whole legalized sports betting thing, like sports betting was like, I don't know, it
1:05:51was, it, it somehow fell for most of my life on the vice side of... Is this...
1:06:00Potential activities?
1:06:01Yeah, potential activities, right. And without getting into any kind of argument about drug
1:06:07policy at a legal level, why is it that alcohol has been legal? Well, not forever, but...
1:06:14There was a brief period. I don't know if people know.
1:06:18Since the 18th amendment was repealed with what, the 21st amendment? Yeah, 21st amendment.
1:06:25Isn't it funny too that that amendment didn't last long, but they were amending like gangbusters
1:06:29back then.
1:06:30We got two more in there in between. Yeah, exactly.
1:06:32They got two more in before they repealed it. But it's, you know, legal and it's been
1:06:36obviously as any... You don't have to be a sports fan to know that alcohol advertising
1:06:41has been a staple of sports commercials ever since it's, ever since TV sports have been
1:06:46a thing. But like, you know, marijuana has been illegal in the United States for, until
1:06:51very recently and still is regulated on a state by state level. I've never seen any
1:06:56kind of advertising for that. I wonder if it'll start. New Jersey, which is right across
1:07:00the river from me, is on the cusp. They've already voted to make recreational marijuana
1:07:05legal in New Jersey.
1:07:06Well, John, are you just talking about TV ads or any ads? Well, any ads, but TV ads...
1:07:12Oh, no, no, no. So, so yeah, here in Mass, it got legalized. I don't even know the timeline.
1:07:16It got legalized a while ago. It's taken some time. But if you drive down a highway, three
1:07:21quarters of the billboards will be dispensary ads. The sides of every trash can in the city
1:07:25are telling you about weed delivery. It's going to be huge. As soon as it's legal anywhere,
1:07:30the advertising will be huge. It just won't be on TV because that's federal, I think.
1:07:36The FCC won't allow that, I think.
1:07:38I think you're right. I do think you're right that they won't because it's still, even though
1:07:42a state like New Jersey or Nevada or California, Massachusetts might legalize it. Pennsylvania,
1:07:50it is legal for medical purposes only recently. I mean, I think within the last 18 months,
1:07:56two years, something like that. But now we have...
1:07:58But it's still federally...
1:08:00Illegal, right. And so I believe in every one of these states, all of the marijuana
1:08:07you buy, whether it's a medical thing or a recreational thing, has to be grown in the
1:08:11state because you can't legally...
1:08:12You can't take it over state lines.
1:08:14Even if you're going from one state where it's legal to another, it's all kind of bananas.
1:08:18But it falls on this spectrum of is this beneath us or our brand or not. And the gambling stuff
1:08:28was truly illegal everywhere but Nevada. Sports gambling has been illegal everywhere but Nevada
1:08:33until just a handful of years ago. But then once the dam breaks, it breaks everywhere
1:08:39because it's all of a sudden when Pennsylvania sees that Delaware is getting all of this
1:08:44tax money from...
1:08:45The tax money, absolutely.
1:08:47Right. And every single way that gambling has grown since I was a kid, I mean, it was
1:08:53a... I remember being like six years old or so when Atlantic City started opening their
1:08:59casinos and it seemed terribly exciting to me. It was like, "Wow, this is... Gambling
1:09:05looks like a lot of fun." It was a huge deal because it was the first place where there
1:09:09was any gambling outside Nevada, except horse racing, which has always been oddly legal
1:09:14everywhere even though you're allowed to bet on the horses. But then the horse tracks around
1:09:19here state by state started adding slot machines. And once one state did it and they saw how
1:09:25much money was coming in and how people stopped going to Philadelphia Park to watch horse
1:09:30tracks, they'd go to Delaware because then they could play slot machines. Well, guess
1:09:33what? They added slot machines in Philadelphia. So anyway...
1:09:36So that's interesting to me though because you're a little older than I am. And so in
1:09:40my mind, it was always Vegas and Atlantic City and that was it. There was nothing else.
1:09:45And then yeah, in the past, I don't know, 20 years or so is where, as you said, the dam broke and all these
1:09:49states started allowing all sorts of gambling. But that's funny that for you, it was just
1:09:53Nevada. And for me, it was just Nevada and Atlantic City. And then now, you know, anyone
1:09:58born in the past 30 years, it's just everywhere.
1:10:01Right. Well, and then in the in-between time when they legalized it, there were a couple
1:10:05of... for whatever, I guess, some kind of exception to federal laws where Indian reservations
1:10:11were...
1:10:12Could have gambling.
1:10:13And then did build them. And they're a huge, huge deal in between... on the, as we call
1:10:19it, the Northeast Corridor between Foxwoods up by you...
1:10:23Foxwoods, Mohegan Sun.
1:10:24Mohegan Sun in between New York and Boston in particular. There's some Indian land and
1:10:30they built these casinos that were untapped because people no longer had to drive all
1:10:34the way to Atlantic City, which, you know, for Boston, you know, that's...
1:10:37Quite a trek.
1:10:38Well, you might as well just fly... at that point, you might as well fly to Vegas, right?
1:10:42Which is, you know, how trouble starts.
1:10:44But anyway, the whole Apple pregame show was sponsored by BetMGM, which is... I actually
1:10:51have an account at BetMGM. I pass no judgment. I enjoy sports gambling. Somehow they've managed,
1:10:57even though it's like state by state, that the MGM thing is tied into the MGM resorts.
1:11:02So like, I can use my same account that I have from actual casinos in Las Vegas. It's
1:11:09the same MGM account. It's a pretty good sports app, you know, for betting on football and
1:11:14baseball and stuff. But, you know, am I surprised that Apple took them on as a sponsor? A little
1:11:19bit, you know?
1:11:20Yeah, it definitely... you know, we said it earlier, but if Apple had done this and shown
1:11:24no ads or only ads for Apple stuff, I would not have been at all surprised by that.
1:11:29Right.
1:11:30You know, it would have been different. It would have been unusual, but I would have
1:11:33said, "Well, that's why it's on this premium, you know, network," or whatever we want to
1:11:37call it, premium service. And they want to show off their technology, they want to show
1:11:40off their subscription services, and they don't need to share it with anybody else.
1:11:44They certainly don't need the money from this. Early on, we were saying, "How much money
1:11:47would they be leaving on the table?" Whatever it is, they don't need it, you know, with
1:11:51hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. They could take this as a loss leader and
1:11:55just say, "Yep, we're presenting baseball, and there's not going to be a lot of ads,
1:11:58and it's going to be a much more enjoyable experience." And the same way that, you know,
1:12:02when they show a movie on Apple TV+, you're not getting ads in the middle of that.
1:12:06Right.
1:12:07So, they're not going that route so far, at least. I'll be interested to see when it is
1:12:09no longer free. When it is—so the first half of the season is free to anybody, you
1:12:14don't need a subscription to tune in. And the second half is when they're going to say,
1:12:18"Okay, you need an Apple TV+ subscription." I wonder if it'll be any different at that
1:12:22point.
1:12:23Have they officially announced that? I think that they've—
1:12:26I thought so.
1:12:27I think they've left that open. I think what they've said is, "Here's the schedule for
1:12:31the first half, and the first half of the season, here's the whole schedule, and all
1:12:38of these games will be available free for anybody who wants to watch." And they have
1:12:42an instruction page so that you can figure out how to watch. Like, even if you're on
1:12:46a Windows computer, you can go to tv.apple.com, and you don't have an Apple ID yet, but you
1:12:52just—you've got to watch the California Angels, or the Anaheim Angels. What do they
1:12:57call it now? Los Angeles Angels?
1:12:58Los—are they still the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim?
1:13:01Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. But, you know, if your favorite team is on, and this is the
1:13:05thing that's going to get you into TV, you can do it without—even without owning an
1:13:08Apple product, but they'll, you know—but I don't think they've said that you'll have
1:13:11to pay for the second half. I think it's just—they just haven't answered the question. And I
1:13:15think people are assuming that—
1:13:16Okay, so they've—all they've said is that the first half is free, and now we're getting—we're
1:13:21leaping to the conclusion that the second half won't be.
1:13:23And that is a very Apple-like strategy of, "We just won't, you know, don't say, 'Let's
1:13:29see. Let's see, and we'll make up our mind later.'" Right? I mean, they didn't even announce
1:13:33WWDC until, like, three days ago, right? It's, you know, they—why do they always announce
1:13:38WWDC so bizarrely late, compared to every other developer conference from a comparable company?
1:13:46Which the year before tells you when it's going to be.
1:13:48Right! Every—you know, like, at Macworld, you'd be leaving Macworld Expo, and they'd
1:13:52be—
1:13:53Yup.
1:13:54They'd—you could not leave without three different people giving you a sign-up sheet
1:13:57for next year's Macworld Expo, which will be January—
1:14:00On these specific dates, yeah.
1:14:01Right. These dates, here at Moscone in San Francisco, blah, blah, blah. You know, Java
1:14:06World, whatever. I don't even know what the hell else. Oracle World? I don't know. I guess
1:14:10that's the same as Java World now. But Salesforce—Salesforce has a big conference every year. You know, they
1:14:16probably have the dates for three years of them out in advance.
1:14:19All right. Well, so I'm looking at this—at the PR, and it says, "And for a limited time,
1:14:23without the need for a subscription."
1:14:24Hmm. Yeah.
1:14:25So the app—that's the Apple press release. So they're definitely implying—but, you
1:14:29know, a limited time could be who knows how long. We've all got a limited time on this
1:14:33earth.
1:14:34Right. Well, and like I said, presumably, my guess is that the number one reason Apple
1:14:38is even getting into this at all is just to sort of increase the surface area of the number
1:14:46of people who would subscribe to TV Plus. I mean, ultimately, I think they want people
1:14:50to subscribe to TV Plus. And if the most interesting thing to a certain demographic is Friday Night
1:14:57Baseball, well, then they're not going to keep it free forever. Right? It's, you know,
1:15:01it's the same way. You know, and they have, you know, they're expanding the type of shows
1:15:05they have. You know, like now they have a talk show with Jon Stewart, and, you know,
1:15:09they didn't make that free just to get the Jon Stewart fans who might be, you know, I
1:15:13would presume, you know, they marginally increase the number of people who might be interested.
1:15:18There might be a ton of people out there who do not like watching prestige drama TV, like
1:15:24The Morning Show and Severance and, you know, all the other shows that typical Apple TV
1:15:31Plus shows. They don't like stuff like that, but they love Jon Stewart. Right? Well, then,
1:15:37you know, that now they've...
1:15:38A box a month and you can see it.
1:15:39Right. And you get all this other stuff and you might like some of it. So I presume that
1:15:43you're right. I would guess that the second half of the season will be you require a paid
1:15:47account or, you know, maybe they'll have a deal where you can still get a 30-day free
1:15:53sign up. I don't know. They'll do something, but that's in there. I am a little surprised
1:15:57about the advertising now because one of my favorite little details is the family and
1:16:04I, as you know, on occasion we go on, we've been on the cruise vacations and we've been
1:16:09on the Royal Caribbean cruises, which are a very traditional... It's exactly what you
1:16:14think. If you've never been on a cruise, Royal Caribbean cruise is exactly what you think
1:16:18cruise is like.
1:16:19And then everyone gets sick is what you're telling me.
1:16:21No, nobody gets.
1:16:22Because that's what I've never been on a cruise. And I assume that as soon as you get on, you
1:16:26get norovirus if you're lucky. And if you're unlucky, you get COVID.
1:16:32I have never, never gotten ill on a cruise ship. I will say this. It's a total aside,
1:16:37but I've never gotten sick by going to a conference. I know people used to say they'd go to Macworld
1:16:41and come home and everybody always got some kind of Macworld flu because of people coming
1:16:46together. And it's not like I have a particularly hearty never get a cold or flu immune system,
1:16:52but I never came home from a conference. All the times I've been to WWDC or Macworld or
1:16:56any of those things, I never came back and got sick. But maybe it's just stupid luck.
1:17:01Maybe because I, unlike my gags on previous years on this show, I actually do wash my
1:17:05hands when I'm in public as often. Let's be double sure here. I don't know what you're
1:17:12supposed to sing. Happy Birthday or something like that.
1:17:1520 seconds. The watch does it for you now.
1:17:18I don't like that. I get too many false positives. It's too stupid. It's a nice idea, but it
1:17:26doesn't work for me. We've been on the Disney cruises and it's a lot of fun. And even when
1:17:32our son got older and it wasn't, you know, it's really, really, I would recommend it
1:17:36to anybody with little kids who are into Disney. It's a terrific family place where the adults
1:17:40can get some time away from the kids and the kids can go to a supervised thing that they
1:17:44will love and they won't feel like they'll be begging to go to the kids club or whatever
1:17:49they call it. They want to get away from you when they're young. But we've been, it's a
1:17:53nice cruise and it's a nice vacation, a nice way to see different islands in the Caribbean.
1:17:57But the most distinctive thing, at least from my mind as a degenerate gambler, of Disney
1:18:03cruises versus every other cruise line in the world is they don't have casinos on the
1:18:08ships. And the casinos on all the cruise ships operate once they're in international waters
1:18:13so that there's, well, and it's for tax purposes and regular tours. So gambling is, casino
1:18:21gambling is illegal in Bermuda and we've gone on a couple of cruises to Bermuda with our
1:18:27extended families, parents and my sister and her family and stuff like that. But Bermuda,
1:18:34there are no casinos on the land in Bermuda, so once the ship is docked, the casino has
1:18:38to close anyway. But I think they close, even if they land at an island where there are
1:18:43casinos, they still close the casinos on the ship because they don't want to pay taxes
1:18:46to the country where they're docked. And I think the logic behind why does every cruise
1:18:52ship have a casino is why not, right?
1:18:56That's a terrible answer, but it also makes perfect sense, yes.
1:19:00Right? But Disney does not. They have no casinos on their ships, even though there's no legal
1:19:05reason. And again, like Apple, nobody from Disney is going to come out and explain that
1:19:09we think gambling is a filthy vice and we don't want to be associated with it. But Disney's
1:19:15got a funny brand, you know?
1:19:18Well, it's exactly like the Intel Inside stickers until a year and a half ago, two years ago.
1:19:23But you know, when Apple switched to Intel and they were asked, you know, are you going
1:19:26to put the Intel Inside sticker on there and collect whatever dollar you get for every
1:19:31machine you sell? And Apple certainly didn't do that because it wasn't their brand to do
1:19:35that.
1:19:36Well, you remember though, that's one of my all-time favorite moments of my career. I
1:19:40was in...
1:19:41Were you at the press conference when that was first?
1:19:43At the press conference for... I forget. It was a weird... I forget why though. It was
1:19:49at Apple's town hall, which was famously small, very cozy at the old Infinite Loop campus.
1:19:56I forget what the... If it was in Tennegate and they just happened to take questions on
1:20:01other subjects, would that have... No, because that would have been too early.
1:20:03No, it's too late. It's got to be earlier than that. Were they introducing a new machine,
1:20:08one of the first Intel machines or something?
1:20:09I don't know. I don't know what... I'd have to look... I'll have to put it in the show
1:20:12notes and look it up. But it was after... As they were want to do at the time, which
1:20:17was wonderful, but also makes me feel ancient. Because imagine if Apple did this now, if
1:20:24they came to the end of an event and then they said...
1:20:27And did a Q&A?
1:20:28Yeah, and they said, "Hey, we're going to take some questions from the media and take
1:20:31a minute, set up some stools, get some water for whoever's going to... Tim Cook and Jaws
1:20:36and Federighi, whoever else is going to answer some questions, and then just take 10 minutes
1:20:40of questions from the press right there on stage." I would love it. I thought it was
1:20:45great. But anyway, the guy asked about the Intel stickers and everybody laughed in the
1:20:51audience. And I forget the guy who asked it, but he was more... I remember looking him
1:20:57up and it was a legit question from his perspective. He wasn't like an app...
1:21:01Right. It's a business question as opposed to an Apple... Someone who covers Apple thinking
1:21:06about this.
1:21:07It was the equivalent... I don't think he was. Maybe he was from PC Magazine or Tom's
1:21:11Hardware, but somebody who at the time covered the whole spectrum of the technology industry.
1:21:16But everybody in the hall laughed and giggled a little, but Jobs had the perfect answer.
1:21:21He said, "We like our own stickers." Which was a great answer because it was funny. It
1:21:27made him feel better for asking. He got a clever answer because of his question. It
1:21:33deflated the fact that some of us in the audience had chuckled at his question. It made the
1:21:38whole thing funny. It leavened it up. But he also didn't throw Intel under the bus,
1:21:43their new partner who they'd just done it. It was absolutely perfect. Steve Jobs at his
1:21:48best.
1:21:49But anyway, Disney doesn't do casinos. And I wondered, would Apple not do gambling? Well,
1:21:54no, they do gambling. Now, of course, they have the gambling apps in the App Store, but
1:21:59that's different. They have all sorts of stuff in the App Store that they may not take
1:22:03ads for. But sports gambling has just sort of rocketed from completely, literally illegal
1:22:12to just perfectly as acceptable as selling beer within the course of a year.
1:22:20Strange times. Well, and you're right, it is within the past. Is it a year? It's a year
1:22:25or two. And it certainly coincides with a whole lot of people just sitting in their
1:22:28homes and not having anything else to do.
1:22:30Yeah. Well, there's a lot of speculation that it's been bad timing, that it's actually
1:22:36been sort of a bad time for sports gambling to sort of get legalized nationwide because
1:22:41people have time on their hands.
1:22:42Really?
1:22:43Yeah, but I...
1:22:44Oh, and they're doing other things than that?
1:22:46I think that's overblown. I think people who have gambling problems, it's a bad idea in
1:22:51general. And it's certainly for people who have any kind of... If you have an alcohol
1:22:57addiction problem, it probably was good when alcohol was prohibited. It's just that it
1:23:03wasn't, you know...
1:23:04Making it harder, at least, yeah.
1:23:05Right. For people who have a gambling addiction, it can't be good that it's legal in any way,
1:23:10anywhere at any time, let alone making it so that you can do it from your phone anytime
1:23:15you're within state...
1:23:16A couple taps, yeah.
1:23:18State borders. Yeah, it's probably bad. But that's, you know, that's a discussion for
1:23:23another show.
1:23:24Let's talk about AudioHijack 4. I would say it's safe to say that AudioHijack is Rogue
1:23:28Amoeba's flagship app.
1:23:30That's the term I've always used because we've had other products that have been more popular
1:23:35in terms of users or revenue over time. But AudioHijack, we've had for almost 20 years
1:23:41now, and it has been consistently popular for that 20 years and more and more popular
1:23:45in recent years.
1:23:47Flagship is the term that I always use.
1:23:48Yeah, but that's, you know, that's sort of fascinating. And I know there are certainly
1:23:53other Mac apps. The Mac is an established platform, let's say. You know, there are certainly
1:23:58a lot of apps that are older than 20 years. There's the BB edits and...
1:24:02BB edit is the obvious one that comes to mind, yeah.
1:24:04Photoshop and Illustrator and, you know, the list goes on. Graphic converter, if you want
1:24:09to go it purely in the...
1:24:11I think my beloved Keyboard Maestro, it was in different hands at the time, but I believe
1:24:15it... I think Keyboard Maestro goes back to the classic Mac OS.
1:24:18Pretty sure, yeah.
1:24:19You know, but 20 years, it's a long time. But it's just kind of fascinating that something
1:24:25that was a good enough idea 20 years ago and then well-executed enough that, you know,
1:24:31could become the flagship app of an indie software company like Rogue Amoeba is more
1:24:36popular now, right? Because the world has changed, right? It's, you know, there's all
1:24:41sorts of ideas that might have been great 20 years ago that aren't great anymore, and
1:24:45you can't predict that. And if you, you know, tried to predict right now what's a great
1:24:49new app to make, but I want to make sure this thing is more popular than ever in the year
1:24:552042. I want it to be more popular than now. Good luck. You know, that's just good luck,
1:25:01don't you think? I mean, you know, it's...
1:25:03Oh, absolutely. I mean, the biggest thing for us... So Audio Hijack, when we first created
1:25:09it was designed to... The example I always use is record real player streams, because
1:25:14it really dates me and makes me sound old and makes the product sound old. Because real
1:25:18player streams don't even exist anymore, and, you know, it predates podcasts. So it's something
1:25:24where the initial idea was... is not something that it's used for ever at this point. But
1:25:30the general idea of recording audio is something we've been doing for decades. And the biggest
1:25:36stroke of fortune that we had was the rise of things exactly like this, podcasts, because
1:25:42there aren't that many people making podcasts compared to people listening to podcasts.
1:25:46So something like Overcast, where, you know, you're listening to podcasts, that has a much
1:25:49wider audience. But people that are making podcasts like you are making money from making
1:25:55podcasts, a whole lot of them, selling ads, having subscriptions, and making a tool that
1:26:00helps them do that is something where there actually is a market for it. And as podcasts
1:26:04have become so mainstream, it's been... that's really... that's the number one reason why
1:26:09it's more popular now than it was 20 years ago, is because there's this new thing that
1:26:13didn't even exist until 2006, 2005, you know, a few years into the product.
1:26:18I know we've talked about Audio Hijack before, but I don't assume that everybody listening
1:26:23has keenly remembers your March 2019 appearance on the show when we might last have spoken
1:26:29about it. But I'm going to take a stab at describing, for people who aren't familiar
1:26:35with Audio Hijack, but it's a utility for the Mac and only the Mac. It is not for iOS
1:26:41and it is not available on Windows or Linux or TiVo, or I don't know where else it could
1:26:48run. But it's a Mac utility and you install it and then you can assign sources, which
1:26:54could be something you think obviously a microphone, duh, but you could just assign application
1:26:59as an input source and say, "I would like to record the audio from Safari and whatever
1:27:06Safari is playing," like if it were a real player stream or something else that through
1:27:14whatever JavaScript chicanery they've tried to keep you from just being able to download
1:27:20it and listen not live, right, you know, like you should be able to do with a computer,
1:27:24you could just pump that in as an input stream and then do all sorts of stuff. To do all
1:27:30sorts of stuff here is where I'm skipping.
1:27:34Keeping it simple.
1:27:35It's a lot of dot, dot, dot. It's like the equivalent of saying with BB Edit, you can
1:27:39do stuff to the text and then output it to audio that you can save as a file on your
1:27:46computer.
1:27:47Yeah, I mean, so the three word summary of the app is record any audio. And that's served
1:27:53us pretty well, but as you said, there's a whole lot of depth in terms of things that
1:27:57you can do beyond just making a recording and a whole lot of reasons why you would make
1:28:01a recording.
1:28:02The big difference I see as we look at this 20 year mark is, you know, we're joking about
1:28:07real player, but it is true. We've got listeners who don't remember real player.
1:28:11Oh, I'm sure.
1:28:12Well, one of Jonas's high school friends is a listener of the show. It just blows me away
1:28:17because I just assumed that, come on, I don't know. I'd like to think I'm not too middle
1:28:23aged, but it's like I kind of worry that I've lost the idea that I'm going to get the teens,
1:28:28that some computer enthusiast teens who listen not because that's their pal's dad, but just
1:28:34like stumbled upon the show. Somebody like that, they don't remember real player. You
1:28:38know, it was kind of bananas. Real player was what, Flash? Was it Flash or was it their
1:28:42own? It was like their own.
1:28:44I think it was their own.
1:28:45Yeah.
1:28:46It was garbage is what it was.
1:28:47Yeah.
1:28:48It was very bad, but it was the option for streaming audio at the time. Besides, I don't
1:28:52even know, I don't even know which came first, but there was also Windows Media audio.
1:28:55Right.
1:28:56Which also isn't in use anymore.
1:28:57Right, and QuickTime audio. But the idea back in those days was that web browser plugins
1:29:04are fundamentally hugely different from today's extensions, where today's extensions for browsers
1:29:10are all built using web technology. The extensions themselves are programmed in JavaScript, and
1:29:16if they have a presentation layer, it's HTML and CSS. Whereas plugins were like binaries.
1:29:23It was like running a separate application just inside the web browser.
1:29:26Just inside the web browser. And, you know, real player was one of them. It was a thing.
1:29:33And they were ahead of their time in terms of anticipating the market of people would
1:29:37love to listen to audio. I mean, you could listen to...
1:29:39To stream audio from concerts and...
1:29:41Ball games? I remember listening to baseball games. But, you know, the internet at the
1:29:45time was a little bit slower.
1:29:48Just a little bit.
1:29:49So they were like, I don't know, like 64 kilobits per second, probably less, probably like,
1:29:53I don't know, super staticky. It was like listening to ham radio in 1980. It was very
1:29:59low quality, but it was stuff you couldn't listen to otherwise, you know.
1:30:04Any other way, absolutely.
1:30:05Right. And radio stations would have like a little, you know, they'd say like, "Go to
1:30:10our website and you can listen to our real player stream." And if you wanted to listen
1:30:14to your hometown radio station in Philadelphia while you were in San Francisco, you could
1:30:19do it over the internet. That seemed amazing.
1:30:22It was amazing. And yeah, I mean, we're denigrating real player. It wasn't that bad. It was not
1:30:26great technology, but what it enabled was very cool. And yeah, it certainly was, as
1:30:32you said, I think it was ahead of its time because it's sort of, I always think of this
1:30:36about the Newton, you know, the network wasn't really ready for what they were doing in those
1:30:41cases.
1:30:42Oh, absolutely. Oh, I think so too. I've always said that, that to me, the biggest problem
1:30:46with the Newton and even the Palm Pilot, you know, like the Newton had to...
1:30:49Yeah, absolutely.
1:30:50It was too big, too expensive, and there was no wireless networking. The Wi-Fi didn't even
1:30:55exist yet. So the Palm Pilot solved two of the problems. It was a much more reasonable
1:31:00size. You could definitely carry it in a pocket and it was cheaper. It was like 400 bucks
1:31:04instead of a thousand. So there's one reason why Palm was successful. Palm Pilot was successful
1:31:10and Newton wasn't. But ultimately, the Palm Pilot kind of fizzled out because it didn't
1:31:15have wireless networking either. And really the whole point of carrying a pocket computer
1:31:20around we've now realized is to...
1:31:21Just be on the internet.
1:31:22...get on the internet. But that 20 years ago, "Let's make a record audio anywhere Mac
1:31:28utility," the idea primarily was, "Let's record audio from known sources out there," you know?
1:31:36Yeah, that was certainly like one of the biggest uses. Another one that was sort of funny was
1:31:40adding an equalizer to DVDs. So a DVD player on the Mac didn't have an EQ. And people were
1:31:47watching movies and they said, "Oh, I want to tweak the audio on this." And so yeah,
1:31:51basically the original use cases... If I looked back at our original press release, I could
1:31:56probably tick off all the original use cases and say, "Yep, no one's doing that anymore.
1:31:59No one's doing that anymore." So yeah, we're definitely a little bit fortunate to have
1:32:03found new ways to angle this and to focus on.
1:32:07Yeah, but that is a good point though, that Audio Hijack doesn't just save to a file.
1:32:10You can just pipe it through live and apply filters and just have it come through... Just
1:32:17listen to it live, but have it filtered or pumped through Audio Hijack for some kind
1:32:21of processing type thing. Or have it saved to a file at the same time or something.
1:32:26Yep.
1:32:27But you could listen to it. The big difference, like you said, clearly now, especially greatly...
1:32:33I'm not even going to say exacerbated by COVID, but accelerated by COVID. Because I think
1:32:39the move to more people working at home was already underway and COVID just...
1:32:44Oh, but definitely accelerated. I mean...
1:32:46Yeah. But...
1:32:47From zero to 100.
1:32:48But I don't think it's going to go back, right? Like, I think even as people now, literally
1:32:52as we speak, are returning to offices and stuff like that, like the need and acceptance
1:32:57for... Well, Paul always works from home Thursdays and Fridays anyway, so any kind of meeting
1:33:03on Thursday or Friday, you're going to jump on. The meeting is going to be on Zoom or
1:33:07whatever anyway, even if some of the people are in an office together. It's just way
1:33:11more accepted and accelerated. And I think we would have gotten... Where we'll wind
1:33:15up when, you know, knock on wood, COVID is in the wide rear view mirror overall, is where
1:33:24we would have wound up anyway. It's just going to happen many, many years faster. But
1:33:28long story short, people are making their own audio now and have things they want to
1:33:33do and filter and make sound better about it.
1:33:36Yeah. I mean, so I mentioned podcasts. Even before that, having the iPod, that was...
1:33:43The iPod debuted in 2001 and a year later is when we first released Audio Hijack and
1:33:47people were recording stuff to put on their iPod. So, you know, prior to that, you had
1:33:51a portable disc player, CD player, disc man, you had a walkman, a tape player, but you
1:33:56didn't really have a computer-based device. So the iPod was the first big thing for us.
1:34:01Podcasting was the second big thing for us. And in terms of Audio Hijack, at least, yeah,
1:34:04having people working from home in March of 2020, even before the pandemic had affected
1:34:11me personally, you know, before stores were shutting down or businesses were shutting
1:34:15down temporarily, we saw a sales spike and we honestly did not know what was happening.
1:34:21We saw such an extreme sales spike of Audio Hijack and another one of our tools, Loopback,
1:34:26which lets you route audio around your computer. And it took us a little while talking to users
1:34:31who contacted us and said, "Oh, I'm trying to do whatever." It took us a little while
1:34:35to understand, "Oh, all of these people are suddenly working remotely and these tools
1:34:40are helping them do that." And it was really... It was a very strange thing initially to just
1:34:45see this huge sales spike totally unrelated to, you know, we just released Audio Hijack
1:34:49where we see a sales spike based on that because people are talking about it, people are linking
1:34:52to it. That's great. But to see a sales spike come out of nowhere was very odd. And then
1:34:58to realize that it was associated with this horrible event that was affecting everything
1:35:03was... It's still difficult to... I've yet to figure out how to talk about this because
1:35:07obviously it's nice to make more money, but it's not nice for it to be on the backs of
1:35:12literally hundreds of thousands, millions of people dying and businesses going out of
1:35:17business because they can't sustain themselves. And, you know, it's not nice for it to be
1:35:21on the back of a global pandemic. So I'd rather have made less money and not had the global
1:35:25pandemic, but, you know, it was really nice to be able to help a whole lot of people with
1:35:30these products to do things that they suddenly needed to do and that they didn't realize
1:35:34they would need to do. It was very gratifying. It's a small thing, obviously. We didn't create
1:35:38the vaccines that are saving people's lives, but making it more possible for people to
1:35:42work from home and therefore not have to go out and therefore not spread the virus was
1:35:47a small contribution to make things a little bit better, at least.
1:35:49What is the saying? Fortune benefits the prepared?
1:35:54Fortune favors the bold is one of them, but I don't even know if this was bold. This was
1:35:57more luck, like you said.
1:35:59But yeah, it's funny. For as many businesses that suffered terribly during their, especially
1:36:062020 in the pandemic, there were others that did well. And it's funny to think of you guys
1:36:12being there with people who sell yeast to bake your own bread at home. And it's like
1:36:22if you have a small company with seven employees and all you do is sell stuff to help people
1:36:27make better bread at home, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to your
1:36:32business and all of a sudden you can't keep the stuff in stock.
1:36:36That was the thing. Yeah. I mean, you're mentioning a particular case where, what is it, King
1:36:40Arthur Flour is a small company and they suddenly needed a hundred times as much capacity as
1:36:45they had. And they were selling like only 40 pound bags of flour because that's all
1:36:49they could manage, even though most people wanted five or 10 pounds, whatever. We had
1:36:52a similar issue where we had this sales spike and we had a usage spike. And we fortunately
1:36:58were able to bring on an experienced support technician who previously had worked at the
1:37:02Omni group, an old friend of ours named Brian Covey, was able to come in and work for a
1:37:06few months to do support for us. It was something where we suddenly had this spike in support
1:37:12cases just from having so many more users. And it's difficult to plan for that. It's
1:37:19certainly, you don't want to have that capacity all the time on the off chance that you'll
1:37:23suddenly have a huge usage spike. And all sorts of businesses, it's a good problem to
1:37:28have obviously, but it is still a problem you have to solve to figure out how to deal
1:37:31with suddenly having twice as many or five times as many or 10 times as many people using
1:37:36your product or purchasing your product or whatever.
1:37:38Craig: In some ways, I know that I'm entering into Ben Thompson territory here by bringing
1:37:42up marginal costs, but it is sort of the magic of software is that there's no marginal costs.
1:37:48So like...
1:37:49David: It's a lot lower at least.
1:37:50Craig; Well, it's, you know, you do pay more for some things as sales go up, but it's all
1:37:56commensurate as opposed to... You don't want to be Peloton, right? Where Peloton saw this
1:38:02huge spike in people buying their bikes and treadmills and because they couldn't go to
1:38:07the gym and Peloton thought it was a flash forwarding to the future, the acceleration
1:38:14of a trend and Peloton thought the whole world is going to stop going to the gym anyway because
1:38:20riding your beautiful Peloton at home is so much better. So let's build a $600 million
1:38:27factory here in the United States. Let's buy this, get as many of these bikes made. And
1:38:31then it turned out that, no, it was, you know, a one-time spike from the one-time pandemic.
1:38:37And then they have all these bikes on their hands and a factory that they'd broken ground
1:38:42on that they actually don't need and it's a mess. You know, you make a guess, you go
1:38:46with it. And I, you know, we can laugh at their plight, but I sort of admire the fact
1:38:51that they were true believers in the product.
1:38:52David; They went for it, absolutely.
1:38:53Craig; Right. And thought that this isn't just a one-time spike. This is going to open
1:38:57the doors and now everybody's going to buy a Peloton. You don't have to print up. It's
1:39:00not 30 years ago where you're printing CDs.
1:39:03David; No, no. Yeah, no. So, yeah, to your point, when, I don't even know the numbers,
1:39:09but let's just say three times as many people downloaded the software. We didn't notice
1:39:12that. The one thing we noticed was support requests just because if one in a hundred
1:39:17people need support and if there's suddenly three times as many people, then you have
1:39:22more support requests. So that was for us the sort of growing pain. But yeah, it was
1:39:28very easy to deal with most of it and a lot of it just didn't get noticed at all, like
1:39:32things like downloads.
1:39:33Craig; Yeah. Let's take a break here and thank our next sponsor. I'm very, very excited.
1:39:37First-time sponsor and they're celebrating a special anniversary. It's Get Drafts. That's
1:39:43Drafts the app from Agile Tortoise.
1:39:46David; Oh, is that their 10th anniversary? Do I have that right?
1:39:49Craig; That is correct. It is the 10th anniversary of the productivity app Drafts. You can, I'll
1:39:55just tell you the URL right now. It's getdrafts.com. They're running a discount offer. Look, I
1:40:00could tell you in two words, Drafts is a notes app, but Drafts is so much more than a notes
1:40:06app. And trust me, I know notes apps. Drafts and Drafts is very different than the notes
1:40:10app I made, but that's what makes it so interesting. It is a very different approach to using your
1:40:15iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. It is very, very much an Apple ecosystem app. If there
1:40:22were a sensible reason to have Drafts on tvOS, I guarantee you they would have it. But there's
1:40:28not, so there isn't. But your watch, iOS, and Mac, definitely. It's a low-friction way to
1:40:33capture your thoughts. By default, Drafts launches ready to type. So, as soon as you
1:40:39launch Drafts, by default, it's just ready there with a new note. So, just something
1:40:43you want to dash down, just a couple of words, a thought, something to buy, whatever, and
1:40:47you don't want to lose it, open Drafts, start typing, put the phone back in your pocket
1:40:52or your purse or wherever, and there it is, a new Draft ready for you. No more fumbling
1:40:57around to find the right app or find the folder where you want to put it. You just make the
1:41:01new thing, and then you can deal with it later, and you can tag it later or something like
1:41:06that or process it. Once you've created your text, they're a customizable editor, which
1:41:11has terrific, by the way, I will say, markdown support, syntax coloring, all sorts of keyboard
1:41:16shortcuts that are totally customizable for adding markdown links or italics or something
1:41:22like that. This is not one of those things where it's like there was, here's how Drafts
1:41:26works, and then they realized markdown got popular and sort of tacked it on. This was
1:41:30sort of as close to built with markdown in mind as I could imagine. And if you don't
1:41:37use markdown, you don't have to. It's not like everything is marked down. There are
1:41:40all sorts of different types that notes can be, but if you do use markdown, man, it is
1:41:45a terrific app for that. You could just do all sorts of things. They have so many actions.
1:41:49You get actions for sending emails, for sending messages, for tweeting right from Drafts.
1:41:54You can create lists in the Reminders app, the system-level Reminders app, right from
1:41:59your Drafts based on the content of the Drafts. And you can extend Drafts with ready-to-use
1:42:04actions from the Drafts directory on the website where you just say, "Oh, I need something
1:42:10to do that," like integration with WordPress or something like that. Download the action
1:42:14right from the website. It opens right in Drafts on your device. It'll sync to your
1:42:19other devices over iCloud so that the same extensions you have on one device work elsewhere.
1:42:26And you could just build your own, and it's terrifically well-documented, just a terrific
1:42:32user manual. The scripting interface for creating your own extensions is absolutely perfectly
1:42:38documented. I use it all the time. And every time I'm... I don't write tons of my own
1:42:44extensions and stuff for Drafts or modify the ones that are there, but then when I want
1:42:47to, it's like anything I want to look up, it's right there. It tells me how to do it.
1:42:51Oh, easy change. Do that. Boom. Done. April 2022, this month, marks the 10th anniversary
1:42:57of the Drafts original release in the App Store. And to celebrate it, Agile Tortoise
1:43:01is offering new users a full year of Drafts Pro for just $4.99. $4.99, that is an unbelievable
1:43:10deal. Act fast. It is only good through the end of April. That's why I wanted to make
1:43:16sure they got into this first episode of April here. Let this offer get... have it rattling
1:43:21around in your head for as long as possible because you don't want to miss out on it.
1:43:25Just one penny under five bucks and you get a full year of Drafts Pro. You can start using
1:43:30Drafts completely free of charge. Go to getdrafts.com/thetalkshow. Automation support, shortcuts, scripting,
1:43:46downloadable actions that you don't have to write or modify at all, themes, syntax definitions,
1:43:51all that stuff. It's so, so great. It's just a terrific, terrific software. Exemplifies
1:43:57terrific Apple platform software. So my thanks to Drafts. getdrafts.com/thetalkshow. Now,
1:44:04that's a perfect segue back to you, Paul, talking about Audio Hijack 4 because one of
1:44:10the most intriguing new features to me is the new... what are you calling it? Scripting,
1:44:15automation?
1:44:16Scripting, automation. It's a little bit of both, yeah.
1:44:19It's such a wonderful similarities to Drafts and being well-documented and it's supported
1:44:26right within the app itself. So it's not just... not that there's anything wrong with just
1:44:31saying, "Oh, there's a folder," and you put your scripts in the folder and then they show
1:44:35up in this menu. That's a good way if you just want to populate a menu of scripts in
1:44:40a scriptable app. But it's like the actions in Audio Hijack, they're just like the actions
1:44:46that are built into the app. And you guys added... so a whole scripting interface is
1:44:53new in Audio Hijack. And also, like Drafts, it's using JavaScript. And I'm just curious
1:44:59what the thinking was there. It's a custom... not custom, but it's not based on the JavaScript
1:45:07for automation that's related to AppleScript.
1:45:10No. So, I mean, you are someone who... did you ever really write in AppleScript?
1:45:16Yes, I have written... I have probably written as much AppleScript as anybody who's never
1:45:21been paid to write AppleScript.
1:45:23Okay, okay. So you're familiar with AppleScript, obviously, as am I. But then you know, you
1:45:29certainly know, and I think probably a lot of listeners know, Apple doesn't seem to care
1:45:32about AppleScript and hasn't seemed to care about AppleScript for... at least five years,
1:45:38if not longer. So Audio Hijack... is that an understatement?
1:45:42That might be the funniest thing any guest on this show has ever said.
1:45:47It's a little bit of an understatement?
1:45:49I would say it's an understatement.
1:45:51I would say that AppleScript has existed in the weirdest...
1:45:54So odd.
1:45:56...no man's land in Apple technologies of all... I forget who was on recently. I don't
1:46:00want to interrupt you because I want you to go back to the thinking behind what you're
1:46:03doing. But I will just say this. On a recent show, I remember saying with somebody, if
1:46:07you went back to 1994, 1995, I think AppleScript came out in 1993. Two years in, a lot of apps
1:46:14adopted it. The need for sort of inter-application scripting was out. But by 1995, people sort
1:46:20of... people who were into it and Mac users sort of had the... you know, we could see
1:46:24what AppleScript was going to be, and it's like what was good about it and what was bad
1:46:29about it.
1:46:31If you looked around, like, by 1996, when Apple announced the deal with Next, and they
1:46:36said, "We're buying this company to have, you know, use their operating system as the
1:46:40future of the Mac and Apple technology." If you looked around at what technologies were
1:46:47in macOS at the time and said, "What do you think will still be here in 25 years?" I don't
1:46:56know where AppleScript would have been on the list, but I'll tell you, it would be very,
1:47:01very close to the bottom, in my opinion. Both... not because I hate... I don't hate it. I use
1:47:06it. I like it. But it was weird. It certainly seemed... it did not seem like it was long
1:47:11for the world then, when it was three years old. And yet here we are, and it might be the
1:47:17only thing left from macOS at the time.
1:47:22It's a very strange no-persons land where it is, where it's too essential to too many
1:47:28pro users' workflows to just get rid of, but yet they've... like you said five years, but
1:47:35they just haven't really had great enthusiasm for it at any point in the post-next reunification
1:47:44era. There's never been a time where Apple is really, really gung-ho about AppleScript
1:47:48since Steve Jobs and NeXT came back to the company, but yet they never took it away.
1:47:53Well, like you said, it had grown so essential for so many things that most users don't ever
1:47:58notice it. And then the pro users who have these workflows that rely on AppleScripting
1:48:05don't want it to go away. So that explains why it never went away. But the thing that
1:48:10I think a lot of people were frustrated by is just that it was never updated, it was
1:48:14never improved, it never got any better, probably since the '90s.
1:48:18But so, yeah, so when we looked at scripting, AudioHijack 3 came out seven years ago in
1:48:242015, and that was sort of a sequel to multiple AudioHijack products before it. And one of
1:48:30those was AudioHijack Pro 2, which had a little bit of scripting built into it, and AudioHijack
1:48:353 did not have any scripting built into it. And so one of the things we heard was from
1:48:40the types of users that we just talked about who would be upset about losing their workflows.
1:48:44And people said, "I want to be able to script, I want to be able to automate some things."
1:48:48And obviously it took us quite a while to do that in the new AudioHijack 4 seven years
1:48:53later. But it was something where, at the time, in 2015, 2016, there wasn't a good way
1:48:58to do that. There wasn't an obvious, "This is the way to do it, and it's going to work,
1:49:03and it's going to continue to work and be improved as time moves on." The way to do
1:49:07it would have been AppleScript, and that's certainly what we had used in the past. But
1:49:11that wasn't something that—it was pretty clear at that point that it was—I don't
1:49:15even know what—it's not a dead end, but it's not growing, it's not getting any love,
1:49:20it's not getting any attention. So we weren't terribly interested to do anything with AppleScript.
1:49:25And we had looked at JavaScript, and that was what we felt was the best way to do this.
1:49:32And in the years since then, you know, JavaScript has only become more and more popular, more
1:49:36and more essential on the web. So there are a ton of JavaScript programmers out there,
1:49:40a ton of JavaScript tutorials and resources. I don't know if you went to Apple and said—if
1:49:47you went to, you know, DubDub a few years ago and went to the labs and said, "I want
1:49:51to do scripting in my application, how should I do it?" I don't even know if they would
1:49:54have told you, "Oh yeah, AppleScript, that's the technology to deal with." And if they
1:49:58would have, they were lying, they weren't being honest with you or themselves.
1:50:02You know, it's just sort of interesting the way it petered out. Not petered out, but the
1:50:09way we wound up here, where the idea back in the day in the '90s when AppleScript was
1:50:15new, and what I like to call—I know consistency gets misused as a word, that, you know, one
1:50:22of the hallmarks of the Mac compared to Windows or other operating systems, if you go back
1:50:28far enough, you know, when there were more competing PC operating systems, was consistency
1:50:34between apps that, you know—
1:50:35David Schiessl and that, you know, it's file, edit, view, you know, and it's like, "Which
1:50:43app am I talking about?" That's the menu bar for almost all the apps, right? And that
1:50:47consistency was good for users, and that AppleScript and OSA scripting, where it was supposed to
1:50:55be this sort of foundational layer object—I forget what OSA stands for, but—the idea
1:51:01was that there'd be this fundamental scripting layer, and if your app adopted it, then the
1:51:07user could use any OSA scripting language they wanted to. But it turns out the only
1:51:13one that's ever really stuck is AppleScript, but there were ideas that there'd be one
1:51:17that's more like a JavaScript language, you know, right? I mean, and again, I don't
1:51:22want to go on a rant about scripting languages, but even if you're not someone who's ever
1:51:26written a script yourself, you could look at AppleScript and see, "Oh, this is a programming
1:51:30language that's supposed to look like English prose." Tell application, and you have all
1:51:36these spaces, you know, like writing a real language, whereas most computer programming
1:51:41languages don't let you use spaces between the terms.
1:51:44Right. No, I mean, certainly the original idea was, or at least part of the original
1:51:49idea was something you could read and anybody could look at and pick up and understand.
1:51:53Right, but that somebody, you know, there'd be—
1:51:55But somehow that never took off.
1:51:56Right, but then there'd be another language that would be—and right now there is, it's
1:52:01officially supported in macOS, it's the JavaScript for Automation something, so you
1:52:06can go to the script editor app and write an app to drive an AppleScriptable application
1:52:13and write it in JavaScript instead of AppleScript, and it's the app's perspective, it all
1:52:18compiles to the same OSA objects and the app just gets that support for free, sort of,
1:52:26but it's weird, you look at the JavaScript syntax when you're doing that and it's
1:52:31like translating through another language, it always reads wrong, it doesn't look like
1:52:38the way anybody would write a real JavaScript API today, it looks like JavaScript mimicking
1:52:44the weird idiosyncrasies of the AppleScript language.
1:52:47Of AppleScript, yeah.
1:52:48Right, and it's like—so like in the alternate world where seven years ago, Rogue Amoeba
1:52:55said, "Well, we may not love AppleScript, but that's the Mac scripting thing, that's
1:52:59what we should do," and there's an Audio Hijack 4 that supports AppleScript to do all
1:53:04the same things, but you could also use JavaScript in the script editor to do it.
1:53:09The scripts you would write to perform the same task look totally different in you—
1:53:14Would be very different.
1:53:15Yeah, and the ones that you guys have come up with, with an API native, not just to JavaScript
1:53:21but to sort of modern JavaScript, right?
1:53:24Like I was looking around the documentation and it's like, yeah, this looks like, you
1:53:28know, the JavaScript APIs I've seen for apps like Drafts and there's, you know, a
1:53:33couple others.
1:53:34And on iOS, it's interesting because Apple has—I don't know if you've heard this,
1:53:38but Apple has some strict rules about the App Store.
1:53:41Yeah, I've heard tell, yes.
1:53:45One of them is—and this seems to be like a gray zone where they're making more and
1:53:50more exceptions, but you're not supposed to have your own scripting engine in your
1:53:56app, and maybe they've even lessened the official guideline, I forget.
1:53:59But for a while, you couldn't make a native iOS app with a scripting language because
1:54:05they didn't want to open up the back door to, well, God only knows what the app will
1:54:10do once it's running your Lua scripts or something like that, or, you know, insert
1:54:14your whatever language it could be.
1:54:16But we'll let you use WebKit's JavaScript engine because we know what that can do and
1:54:22that's—we feel that's safe.
1:54:23It's not exposing security vulnerabilities to buffer overflows because it's our JavaScript
1:54:28engine.
1:54:29So on iOS, there have been, for, you know, 10-plus years, apps that have added scripting
1:54:35or scripting-like things, but always using JavaScript, not just because JavaScript is
1:54:40popular period, but because it was sort of the only officially sanctioned way to do it
1:54:44on iOS.
1:54:45Even though I know there's tons of exceptions now and there's apps that let you do stuff
1:54:48with Python and there are, in fact, apps that let you program script, write little scripts
1:54:53with the Lua and I'm sure dozens of other languages.
1:54:57But you guys didn't have to pick JavaScript, though, because of iOS or App Store restrictions
1:55:02because—
1:55:03No.
1:55:04Audio Hijack is Mac only and, in fact, is not just Mac only but is no longer in the
1:55:09App Store.
1:55:10Well, so Audio Hijack has never been in the App Store.
1:55:13Yeah, Piazzo, our little brother to Audio Hijack, was previously in the App Store.
1:55:17Yeah, so we didn't have to worry about any of those restrictions, but a whole lot of
1:55:22that still influenced us because, yeah, if you've got a decade worth of JavaScript programming
1:55:27going on on iOS, people are going to know how to do these things and the people using
1:55:32an iPhone and a Mac are more likely to have that experience and just to be able to make
1:55:37this work.
1:55:38So, yeah, it was something where the timing—over time, it became clear that this was the best
1:55:44way for us to do this and so far, you know, this has only been out for, what are we, two
1:55:49weeks?
1:55:50But, you know, we've seen a whole lot of uptake from people who are interested to automate
1:55:53various parts of their workflows.
1:55:55And the other thing from iOS that we haven't even touched on is shortcuts.
1:55:59Shortcuts iOS originally workflow, but, you know, shortcuts on iOS that have been there
1:56:04for a couple years and then on macOS 12, having shortcuts be part of the Mac.
1:56:09That was another part of the automation that we implemented in Audio Hijack 4 was that
1:56:13we have a couple shortcuts that you can use and then you can tie in all different sorts
1:56:17of ways, not just dealing with JavaScript, but our good friend Jason Snell has had a
1:56:20couple posts on doing things with shortcuts and using like a stream deck, a hardware device
1:56:26that can run a shortcut and trigger, you know, start a session running and start a recording
1:56:31and basically just making it possible to—anything that is possible with the scripting that we've
1:56:37implemented and with the shortcuts, it was already possible.
1:56:40It's just making it a whole lot easier and it's making it a whole lot simpler to integrate
1:56:44into things that you're already doing, such that, you know, it can be one click instead
1:56:48of needing to do it all manually.
1:56:50And that's—it's something where we've—for years, we've done various types of scripting
1:56:55and early on we were doing Apple scripting stuff and we always sort of layered it on
1:57:00top of the application.
1:57:01And it was—that was sort of what made sense was because most users weren't using scripting,
1:57:06but those who were really loved it and they appreciated it and then, you know, it's the
1:57:10sort of thing people talk about.
1:57:12And ideally, in an ideal world, you've got an application that's scriptable and people
1:57:15are sharing scripts and you get a whole community around that.
1:57:18I don't know that—we've yet to have an application like that.
1:57:21Audio Hijack 4 is potentially, you know, a little more headed that way in terms of podcasters
1:57:26who are doing similar things.
1:57:28But yeah, it's something where, for us, scripting has sort of evolved over time from—early
1:57:33on, it was something we did because of AppleScript and that was just, you know, a good Mac app
1:57:37had AppleScript support.
1:57:39And then over time, that no longer was true.
1:57:41But people still want to have that automation and this is sort of the best way to do it
1:57:45right now.
1:57:46Yeah, I think it's fascinating and it spans this—these different eras of personal computing
1:57:53in a way, especially a company like Apple, which has always tried to be democratizing
1:57:58in terms of its ability to let people who—you know, the computer for the rest of us.
1:58:04What was—who were the rest of us?
1:58:06Well, the people who didn't understand what the computers before—how they worked.
1:58:09What the early '80s and late '70s computers required you to know.
1:58:13Right.
1:58:14I don't know what I would do with this thing and I don't know how to do the things I might
1:58:18think I might want to do with it.
1:58:19You know, make it easier to understand and democratize computing and let you be creative
1:58:25with it.
1:58:26And one of those things that's gone by the wayside, I think it was a noble idea.
1:58:30I think it made intuitive sense.
1:58:31I actually, at the time, like when AppleScript came out, believed that this might be the
1:58:36way of the future, that an English-like programming language might be just what the doctor ordered
1:58:42to get a wider audience.
1:58:45People like me and you, Paul, you know, who are program-ery, you know, and kind of understand
1:58:51computers but really should not be writing, you know, objectives here, Swift-like.
1:58:55It's just, you know, it's different.
1:58:58We have much smarter people working at Rogamiba than I am to deal with that.
1:59:02Yeah.
1:59:03Way fast people who could do, you know, and it's like, "What?
1:59:05How did you do this in a day?"
1:59:06And it's like, "Oh, you know, I'm a good programmer."
1:59:09And it's like, "Wow."
1:59:10But I just thought that was the way of the future and that, you know, that the problem
1:59:13with computer programming that was—the idea was, well, maybe just this bizarre mathematical-like
1:59:20notation is turning a huge segment off.
1:59:24And, you know, because that's what most programming languages are like.
1:59:27They more resemble algebra and make it more like prose, and it might open the doors to
1:59:33more people.
1:59:34And HyperCard was obviously exactly along the same lines of that.
1:59:37But at the time, Apple, you know, as opposed to today's Apple, where they're pretty
1:59:41good about reusing stuff when they can, like shortcuts being on all platforms now, you
1:59:46know, HyperTalk, the programming language of HyperCard was very similar to AppleScript
1:59:52but completely incompatible.
1:59:54And yet a totally different thing.
1:59:56Right.
1:59:57But also more popular, and I think it was a better take at that idea.
2:00:00But it turns out that whole English-like programming language thing truly did peter out.
2:00:07And I think rightly so.
2:00:08I don't think that was the problem.
2:00:09I don't think that's the thing that was keeping people from scripting.
2:00:12But the idea was if you make it like that, more people will do it.
2:00:15And then I think people got turned off from—including Apple—from emphasizing scriptability, and
2:00:21it's like, "Ah, we tried that.
2:00:23We spent all this time.
2:00:24It's a lot of work."
2:00:25Right?
2:00:26I mean, I'm sure you'll agree.
2:00:27It's adding a rich scripting system to an app is a lot of engineering work and design
2:00:34work.
2:00:35Right?
2:00:36It is—because it has to be—if you want it to be good, you know, it's really hard
2:00:40work designing APIs and anticipating things that people might want to do.
2:00:47It's a lot of work.
2:00:48And then I think the argument is—and we know that almost none of our users are going
2:00:52to write scripts, so why should we do it this way?
2:00:54Right.
2:00:55It's a tiny percentage of—so even if you're the biggest application in the world, it's
2:00:58going to be 1, 2, 5 percent of your users that are actively creating scripts for it.
2:01:03Right.
2:01:04And my counterargument to that is that it's the—you know, I don't know that anything
2:01:10exemplifies it better than the browser extension market, right?
2:01:14Like browser extensions are probably almost as mainstream as apps for mobile phones, right?
2:01:22It's lots and lots of very typical people have browser extensions.
2:01:26Yeah, Capital One is—Capital One has ads asking you to install their browser extension
2:01:31running on TV.
2:01:32So people certainly understand what a browser extension is at a great—to a great level,
2:01:37yeah.
2:01:38Right.
2:01:39And really, you know, like I said earlier, browser extensions are really just a scripting
2:01:43interface for browsers.
2:01:45It's scripting.
2:01:46You're writing in JavaScript and you're doing these things, you know, it could just
2:01:49be a little tiny tweak, just a way to, you know, hook up your Capital One account to
2:01:54whatever the hell they're doing.
2:01:55Showing discounts or something, yeah.
2:01:57Yeah, probably.
2:01:58Something scammy like that, spying on you.
2:01:59That's probably what all these extensions are doing, is spying on you.
2:02:03But it's a small number of people create them, and a larger number of people can then
2:02:08share—take that work that was shared and install it and use these things that, you
2:02:13know, maybe wouldn't make sense for Rogue Amoeba to build in because there's still
2:02:17too few people, but the people who need that, oh my god, like being able to press one button
2:02:22on my Steam Deck and have it, you know, trigger an action in Audio Hijack 4 while I'm recording
2:02:29a podcast or something like that, that's exactly what I needed.
2:02:32I never would have thought to do it.
2:02:33Thank you, Jason Snell, for sharing it.
2:02:35Or it could be that so many people are using a handful of extensions for Audio Hijack 4
2:02:42that by the time Audio Hijack 4.1 or 4.5 comes out, you could build some of those features
2:02:49in.
2:02:50You could Sherlock them.
2:02:51Yeah, I mean, well, so we're not expecting anyone to try and sell anything.
2:02:56Right, right.
2:02:57So yeah, if something happens where we see, oh, you know what, that should be a first-party
2:03:01feature, that should be built in, I don't think we'll be hurting anybody with that,
2:03:04and hopefully it would be helping more people do it.
2:03:06But yeah, it's something where, so when we created the API for this, we sort of intentionally,
2:03:11you know, we had a beta test and showed this to a lot of people who would be using it,
2:03:15but we intentionally said, this is a skeleton, and we want to see what people build on it
2:03:21and then potentially add to that API.
2:03:24But the 4.0.0 API that we just released, we don't view as final because we don't know
2:03:31exactly what people are going to do with it and how we can make it better.
2:03:36And there's two things we can do there.
2:03:37You were talking about anticipating what people might do, and obviously we had to do some
2:03:40of that to create the basics of the API.
2:03:44But over time, we're going to watch and see, okay, people are looking to automate something
2:03:48that is not currently possible to automate, we should add that.
2:03:52And then people are using this script all over the place, that should just be a feature
2:03:57in the application, and you shouldn't need a script to do it at all.
2:03:59And at this point, the app is fairly mature, you know, it's been around for 20 years, so
2:04:03I don't know that there's a ton of things that we're going to discover that way, but
2:04:06there's at least the possibility that we'll see people doing things that, oh, you know
2:04:09what, that's something we wouldn't have thought of ourselves, but it's worth including in
2:04:13the application and you won't need scripting for that.
2:04:16And that has value, even, you know, all that scripting work can help guide that development.
2:04:21It doesn't just have to be about the ultimate scripts that people are making with it.
2:04:25Yeah, and not to keep going back to drafts, but, you know, drafts implements a bunch of
2:04:30the built-in features of the notes editor in its own extensions, you know, and it's
2:04:37in addition to, I think, making life easier for Greg Pierce, the developer and designer
2:04:42of drafts at Agile Tortoise, you know, because he can just write this quick thing in JavaScript.
2:04:46I know firsthand, because I've written to him and he said, well, you know, that's a
2:04:50great idea for a feature request, but also here, I've attached this action, you can just
2:04:54add this to drafts.
2:04:55It just does it already.
2:04:56Yeah, it just does it already.
2:04:57And I was like, oh, well, I guess I should have thought of that myself and I could have
2:05:01done that.
2:05:02And then I look at the syntax, I'm like, oh yeah, I figured that, that makes a lot of
2:05:05sense.
2:05:06But that's happened to me and, you know, it's a cool thing, but I don't know, I was very
2:05:10excited to see it.
2:05:11I'm always excited to see it.
2:05:12But the other thing about AppleScript compared to today, and I feel like I have so many complaints
2:05:17about shortcuts, but I'm so happy overall.
2:05:20And it's like the note...
2:05:21That it exists at all.
2:05:22Now that it's on the Mac, but I think adding it to the Mac has really, to my view, I don't
2:05:28think it's my personal bias as if someone, an Apple user whose favorite platform is and
2:05:33likely will always remain the Mac.
2:05:35I don't think it's that bias.
2:05:37I think it's real that shortcuts, enthusiasm, nerd universe wide skyrocketed over the last
2:05:47year now that it's on the Mac.
2:05:48Once it came to the Mac.
2:05:49Yep.
2:05:50And it includes apps like yours, right?
2:05:53Which are only on the Mac.
2:05:55And that's, it's interesting to me, but to me, the thing that's clear is that there's
2:06:01sort of like inter, is that right?
2:06:04Inter application.
2:06:06So having one application control another and maybe, you know, involve three or four
2:06:11applications in the whole thing.
2:06:13Like you're getting text out of BB edit and, or text out of drafts to put into a BB edit
2:06:20document and also somehow getting audio out of audio hijack.
2:06:27And you've got this whole thing, we'll work together.
2:06:28You could use shortcuts as the sort of framework for talking to all of these apps that support
2:06:35shortcuts.
2:06:36But then within each app, they can do whatever makes the most sense for them.
2:06:42You know, like a custom JavaScript API just for audio hijack that is meant for it.
2:06:47And it sounds like that's more complicated because Apple script was supposed to be both
2:06:52things.
2:06:53It is both things, right?
2:06:54But it's like, all I want to do is do a 10 step process in BB edit.
2:07:00You could do the whole thing in Apple script and the only app the script ever talks to
2:07:04is BB edit.
2:07:05But Apple script was also the cross platform thing or cross application thing.
2:07:10Cross application.
2:07:11Cross application.
2:07:12But the thing that made that so frustrating is that no two applications had the same style
2:07:18of dictionaries, right, for Apple script.
2:07:20So it didn't work that well.
2:07:21No, it was like talking a completely different dialect of the programming language once you
2:07:28were inside the tell application, whatever that Mac app's name is.
2:07:34Once you're telling that application, you're using that app's dictionary.
2:07:39And it might as well have been a different, effectively it's a different API.
2:07:45We called them dictionaries, but it's like each app had its own API for scripting anyway.
2:07:50So the fact that they were all glued together at the Apple script layer really wasn't more
2:07:56convenient.
2:07:57In fact, it was more confusing because there'd be things that looked like they were the same
2:08:00but were different.
2:08:01Whereas, okay, I'm just using shortcuts to talk to three different apps.
2:08:05But then within that app, I'm telling Audio Hijack to fire off an extension or an action
2:08:09or something like that.
2:08:11And I can just write all that in JavaScript right there in Audio Hijack.
2:08:15I think that's actually, it's both the, it seems to be the way the whole platforms, plural,
2:08:21have gone.
2:08:22But I actually think it makes more sense that way.
2:08:26I mean, it's certainly, the proof is in the pudding.
2:08:29And we're seeing a whole lot more uptake with this than we ever did with cross application
2:08:33Apple scripting.
2:08:34So yeah, I think it's, I don't know that you'd sit down and you'd say, yes, this is how it
2:08:38should work, but it does work.
2:08:41And it is why we have shortcuts support and didn't have things like Apple script support
2:08:46for many years.
2:08:47So yeah, it's been interesting to see.
2:08:50I was talking to somebody about the shortcuts app.
2:08:52I was talking with you about it, but I was talking with somebody else about it.
2:08:54And I was saying that the only thing worse than the shortcuts app on the Mac would be
2:08:58not having the shortcuts app on the Mac.
2:09:01It's a very bad application.
2:09:03It needs a lot of work and hopefully I think it's popular enough that it will get some
2:09:06work, but the fact that it enables so much to be done makes it possible to overlook or
2:09:12to look past, I should say, all of its flaws or most of its flaws anyway.
2:09:17And you know, sort of put up with it because it exists, it's possible to do so many things.
2:09:22And even though it's a crummy app, the output of it is still useful and still functional.
2:09:27So it's this bizarre, you and I were talking about catalyst apps in general, and it's this
2:09:32bizarre, not very good app on the Mac, but it's better than the app not existing on the
2:09:37Mac.
2:09:38Yeah, I don't think it's catalyst though.
2:09:39I think it's SwiftUI, which is even, I think, which is why it's even worse because there's
2:09:45just certain things that even catalyst would get right, but that SwiftUI didn't even support
2:09:51intuitively.
2:09:52I haven't drilled down on it too much.
2:09:55I've just had to poke at it and said, "This is not a Mac."
2:09:58One of my favorite examples, it's just the smallest thing, but if you prompt the user
2:10:01for text, and it shows, it doesn't matter if you're on iOS or the Mac, it shows a little
2:10:06dialog box, and you can type some text, and then there's like a cancel button to cancel
2:10:12it or an okay button to go on to the next step, passing the text you entered to the
2:10:18next step of your shortcut.
2:10:20On the Mac, when you hit the, on iOS, there is no hardware return key, right?
2:10:27You have to, if you hit a return, you can just enter a new line of text within the field,
2:10:31and you'd always have to hit, you're right there on screen anyway, you just hit the okay
2:10:34button to make it go away.
2:10:37On the Mac, what happens if you want to dismiss it with the keyboard?
2:10:43And the button is blue, right?
2:10:44It says okay or done or something, you know.
2:10:46It says done.
2:10:47Done.
2:10:48And the return button doesn't do that because instead they want to allow you, which is reasonable,
2:10:55to enter multi lines of text, multiple lines of text, right in the text field.
2:10:59Return is used in the text field to just give you a new line.
2:11:02Right.
2:11:03There's a standard for this.
2:11:04It's been around forever.
2:11:06It is command return.
2:11:09Because option return always enters a return.
2:11:11Option is, you can't, you shouldn't use option for it because option would enter a return
2:11:16in a dialogue.
2:11:17Even if it didn't support.
2:11:18Right.
2:11:19Even if the return, if the plain unmodified return key activated the done button, then
2:11:24option return is how you literally enter a new line.
2:11:27But shortcuts until like three weeks ago or a month ago used FN return.
2:11:36And I always...
2:11:37They just made it up.
2:11:38They just picked a new one.
2:11:39They just picked a new one.
2:11:41And it's not even on most keyboards unless they're Apple branded, right?
2:11:46So if you use any third party USB keyboard, which again is not a thing on iOS, but you
2:11:51know, it's clearly a thing that many keyboard enthusiasts are involved with on Mac.
2:11:55You may not even have an FN key.
2:11:58I'm reminded...
2:11:59I got to tell this story.
2:12:00I know we're going a little long, but several years ago, our good friend Brent Simmons was
2:12:06here in Philadelphia and we took him to eat and Jonas was younger, much younger at the
2:12:10time.
2:12:11And across the street from the restaurant where we went to with Brent, it was me and
2:12:15my wife and young Jonas and Brent.
2:12:17We went to a Del Frisco steakhouse down on Chestnut Street.
2:12:20Across the street was a Wendy's.
2:12:22But the Wendy's, the sign was not fully functional.
2:12:26And so instead of saying Wendy's old fashioned hamburgers, literally the part of the sign
2:12:32that was out, the neon or whatever it was made of, was the Ashend, Asha.
2:12:38So it literally looked like Wendy's Old F'n hamburgers.
2:12:43And Brent pointed it out to like 11 year old Jonas or 10 year old Jonas.
2:12:48And of course, Jonas, well, I think Jonas would still enjoy that very much.
2:12:53But it became, it's a family joke now and that Brent Simmons is part of our extended
2:12:58family enjoyed Wendy's Old F'n hamburgers.
2:13:01But now I always think of it when it comes to the FN key on Apple keyboards.
2:13:08And I thought that there was no better use of it than when shortcuts made you use FN
2:13:14return.
2:13:15Use the FN return key.
2:13:17Right.
2:13:18But now wait, you said three or four weeks ago, did they change this?
2:13:21Yes, in the Mac OS 12.3 update.
2:13:24And I, in fact, highlighted it on Daring Fire, probably one of the least popular.
2:13:29That's right.
2:13:30That's right.
2:13:31I highlighted it because I was personally so happy about it.
2:13:33Because it's not just that the, to me, I was so happy about it, not because of the bug
2:13:39itself irritated me.
2:13:41It's that they're clearly Mac-ifying shortcuts, right?
2:13:46Right, they're making it more like a Mac app.
2:13:49Right.
2:13:50And it makes me very happy.
2:13:51I can't help but think there's always a chicken and an egg problem with automation
2:13:55in general, where, like I said, like you get like a product manager hat on yourself and
2:14:00you can make an argument, this isn't worth the engineering time.
2:14:04We have features to add that 90% of our users will use or 60% of users want this.
2:14:09Anything more than like one or 2% will use.
2:14:12Right.
2:14:13It's like, well, but if you don't have it, how do you know how many people would
2:14:17actually use the scripts from others, right?
2:14:21And I think the future of Apple automation post-AppleScript, you know, and part of the
2:14:28whole thing with AppleScript is it never made it to iOS for good reason, I think, but it
2:14:33was not replaced until shortcuts came about.
2:14:36Right.
2:14:37So there was a long stretch where there was literally no user level automation built into
2:14:43iOS at all, despite the fact that it was the most popular platform that Apple has ever
2:14:48made and arguably the single most popular personal computing platform any company has
2:14:52ever made in the history of computers.
2:14:54No automation, which seemed, you know, criminal, right?
2:14:58Like is it what?
2:14:59Absolutely.
2:15:00You know, that's sort of what computers are for.
2:15:02And it just, I feel like that chicken and egg problem, if shortcuts, would it have been
2:15:09my preference?
2:15:10No, probably not.
2:15:11But I'm just so happy that it's something.
2:15:14And now that they've done it and brought it to the Mac, and I think it's the enthusiastic
2:15:19response is so strong that Apple clearly must see that.
2:15:22And if there was any doubts within Apple about how much to devote to it, I would hope that
2:15:28that's been erased and that the pro, "Hey, we should fully embrace shortcuts and cross
2:15:35application, cross platform shortcuts as best and fully as we can."
2:15:43I would have to think they're on board with that now.
2:15:45And that to me is very exciting.
2:15:47And the FN return key, to me, exemplifies the optimistic, sunny future of automation
2:15:55on Apple's platforms.
2:15:56Well, fingers crossed.
2:15:57All right, let me take a break here.
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2:17:35Anything else you want to talk about with Audio Hijack?
2:17:37Any other interesting tidbits about version 4, the sort of thing that you couldn't really
2:17:41emphasize on the web page or on the email to users telling them about it, but that you
2:17:46would love to talk about on a second hour of a podcast like this?
2:17:50Oh, wow.
2:17:52I was not prepared for that question.
2:17:54I mean, we just spent so much time on so many little parts of this, but yeah, in the past
2:18:00month I've been focused on the things that I can tout.
2:18:04Yeah, I don't know.
2:18:05I just—people should come check it out, and if they need to do anything with audio
2:18:10on their computer, then it's the application to do it.
2:18:13Yeah, I don't know.
2:18:14The scripting stuff has been really interesting just to see what people are doing with it,
2:18:18and I'm hoping to see more in the next few months of it being out there and, as I said
2:18:25earlier, just sort of see how that guides our development with it.
2:18:27Yeah, I don't know.
2:18:28I'm sure there's a ton of stuff in there.
2:18:30You know, when I wrote up our blog post and our press release and everything, and I was
2:18:34going through our change log, and there were over a hundred different notable bullet points,
2:18:39so that was fun that there was just this huge round number of stuff that we've done.
2:18:43When usually an update, even a major upgrade can be as little as ten or twenty major things,
2:18:49this was—we got over a hundred, so there's a ton of them, but I'd say just reading the
2:18:54release notes is really the way to go.
2:18:55I know you're a big fan of quality release notes like Barebones always has, and I strive
2:19:01to at least have readable and useful release notes in there.
2:19:05I love reading release notes.
2:19:06I know most people don't, but again, it's another one of those things like scripting
2:19:10support.
2:19:11Like sure, most of your users aren't going to read the whole list, but the ones who do
2:19:15are really going to appreciate it, just along the lines of the way—I know you agree, I
2:19:22know you and I have spoken about this, but writing clarifies your thinking, and sometimes
2:19:27I—
2:19:28Oh, absolutely.
2:19:29I just don't know what I think about something until I actually write about it, because it's—and
2:19:33I might think I do, but until I actually start writing about it, I realize, "Ah, you know
2:19:38what, I kind of have a dot dot dot, a yada yada yada in there that I've never really
2:19:41thought through, and that's actually—oh, that's pretty tricky."
2:19:44I feel like copiously documenting your software's changes is clarifying.
2:19:50Well, and that's one of the first things I do, especially for a major upgrade, is I'll
2:19:55run through the changelog and work that out, and then I've got, in this case, over a hundred
2:19:59different things that I'm looking at, and I say, "Okay, so which of these do we think
2:20:04are the most important, and which of these do we think are the most interesting to talk
2:20:07about?"
2:20:08And as you said, it clarifies sort of how to market things and how we're going to—what
2:20:12we're going to focus on and put in front of users.
2:20:14Do you think it's—is it tricky at this point, 20 years in, to balance the—how do
2:20:20we please our existing users and get them to pay for an upgrade and keep them as happy
2:20:25users versus how do we expand to new users?
2:20:28And like you said, there's obviously a lot of new users out there for an app that has
2:20:33the capabilities that Audio Hijack does.
2:20:35I mean, it's not something where we ever—well, I shouldn't say that.
2:20:38We don't usually look at a feature and say, "Oh, this will bring in a new group," or
2:20:41"This will please the existing group."
2:20:43I would say mostly when we—once we've implemented something, we either assume that
2:20:49it's sort of done, or we hear from people and we say, "Okay, we need to improve that."
2:20:53So, you know, something like scripting was—that was something where we heard from users of
2:20:57version 3, and they said, "Oh," a lot of people said, "Oh, I want to use that.
2:21:00I want to have scripting.
2:21:01I want to have automation."
2:21:03And that's something that we think, "Okay, that'll sell upgrades."
2:21:06People will say, "Okay, I want that for the new—so I'll purchase the upgrade."
2:21:09I don't tend to think about how do we sell upgrades to people because we don't sell
2:21:14a lot of upgrades.
2:21:15We've only had—I'd have to do the math now—but over 20 years, we've had maybe
2:21:1910 paid upgrades.
2:21:21It might even be fewer than that.
2:21:23We're focused on selling to new users all the time and assuming that the existing users
2:21:28are satisfied and that when there is a new version that they will come along to it because
2:21:32eventually we're going to drop the old version.
2:21:35We don't do that quickly.
2:21:36We make them last a lot longer than some products do.
2:21:39But we don't really optimize for, "Oh, we need to make people purchase the new version."
2:21:44We just try and make it as good as possible.
2:21:46And then I think for the most part, people say, "Okay, yep, I've used this."
2:21:49If somebody bought AudioHijack in 2015, they have had seven years' worth of free updates
2:21:54and a $29 upgrade hopefully looks like a pretty good deal at that point.
2:21:58It's honestly, when I put it that way, it sounds awfully inexpensive to the point where
2:22:03hopefully a lot of people do say, "Oh, I saw there was an upgrade.
2:22:06I got it immediately without even looking at it."
2:22:08So that's one where I obviously don't need to sell people on it.
2:22:11No, and I think that all of Rogue Amoeba's apps have always done such a good—you guys
2:22:19have done such a good job culling them over the years to keep them looking fresh, new,
2:22:26up to date.
2:22:27I mean, I could go on and on about the user interface design of all of your apps, but
2:22:33I just love the balance between, "Oh, this is obviously a very Mac-like Mac app that
2:22:40is up to date and sort of customizes things in a way for branding, like you've got distinct
2:22:46colors, but all the controls look like real Mac controls."
2:22:50And if anything, whenever they deviate from the system standard ones, they look better,
2:22:54right?
2:22:55Which is—
2:22:56That's what I do.
2:22:57It's, you know, it's an exquisite attention to detail.
2:23:00You know, and then like I know it's not just because I'm your friend and it's
2:23:04not just because, "Oh, it's John Gruber of Daring Fireball," but it's like I can
2:23:08tell you about a straight apostrophe in the first—
2:23:12As you did.
2:23:13—at the first run screen, and it's like I could see how this sneaks past them.
2:23:16The first run screen often has little things like that because you don't see it as much
2:23:20because if you're testing it, you've got to like wipe all your preferences and then
2:23:25relaunch the app to get the first run experience.
2:23:27And I'm sure you do look at it, but it's, you know, it's a more likely place for
2:23:31something like that.
2:23:32I tell you there's a straight apostrophe.
2:23:33I know it's going to get fixed.
2:23:35It is.
2:23:36It did.
2:23:37And I have the release notes for version 4.0.1, and let me pull it up right here.
2:23:43I said, "Fussy typography improvements have been made to the release notes window,"
2:23:47which you might be looking at right now, which you would be.
2:23:49And that was, you know, I didn't mention you by name, but that was a result of you
2:23:53DMing me or iMessaging me and me saying, "Yep, you're right.
2:23:57That's not right, and we're going to fix it."
2:23:59I actually like it when something like that that I've reported to, whether it's you
2:24:05or to Rich at Barebones or any of the other apps I use where I know the developers,
2:24:10I like it when they don't thank me in the release notes because I know.
2:24:13I know that it was me.
2:24:14Right, right.
2:24:15You know fussy typography improvements is for you.
2:24:17Yeah, I didn't even have to keep reading.
2:24:18I know we've got a lot of it.
2:24:19But briefly, briefly look ahead to WWDC, which was announced last week.
2:24:24Yeah, in between my last episode from March and this episode, WWDC was announced sort of, right?
2:24:31I mean, they announced the dates.
2:24:32They announced that there's going to be this weird watch party in person, but not an actual
2:24:37in-person dub-dub.
2:24:39Right.
2:24:40So it's a weird thing right now.
2:24:41And you know, I say this living as somebody living in Philadelphia, the first city in
2:24:50the country to go back to a mandatory indoor mask mandate, which again, I could do a whole
2:24:55two-hour podcast ranting about.
2:24:57I think it's both a policy mistake and a political mistake that is going to be grossly,
2:25:02it is already grossly unpopular.
2:25:04I think it makes no sense.
2:25:06You know, everybody jokes about it, but it's no joke that you go into a restaurant and
2:25:12you have to wear a mask until they take you to your table, and then you take off your
2:25:15mask to eat and drink your beverages.
2:25:19And then you go out and you put your mask on when you get to the door.
2:25:22Put your mask on to walk the 10 feet back out the door.
2:25:25And this suppresses an airborne respiratory virus.
2:25:28How?
2:25:29I mean, but anyway, you know, I realize COVID is not over.
2:25:33And here in Philadelphia, we're putting our masks back on.
2:25:36But oddly enough, even though they announced the return of a mask mandate, which is...
2:25:39It's for a week from now.
2:25:40A week from now.
2:25:42I love that.
2:25:43That's my favorite part, because we did the same thing in Boston.
2:25:45We had a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate that took effect farther in the future.
2:25:50And if it's important, let's just do it right now.
2:25:54And not, you know, nobody needs to go to jail if they don't have their vaccine yet.
2:25:57But you know, you say, "Okay, well, it's time to do it."
2:26:00You don't need a whole month to implement it.
2:26:02On the one hand, it exasperates me, because it's like, obviously, this isn't an emergency if you're giving us a week.
2:26:09But on the other hand, I'm glad, because I'm going to go out and buy as much stuff as I can.
2:26:13And then never go out for the next month?
2:26:16Yeah. So it's like, I guess we'll go out to eat a couple times this weekend and, you know, live it up without our masks until next week when this week's emergency measure takes effect.
2:26:24But I realize, though, from a WWDC planning perspective, no matter how solid one feels about COVID being at a manageable place overall,
2:26:39I don't think the traditional in-person WWDC could possibly have been planned for June.
2:26:47We just don't know.
2:26:49Of all the things you could do, packing 5,000, I guess counting the Apple employees, 7,000 people into a convention hall is, you know, among the least recommendable.
2:27:01It's not a great idea, yeah.
2:27:03But, you know, I say this knowing that, you know, the NBA playoffs have started and, you know, there's 30,000 people going to these basketball games and arenas.
2:27:11So the 7,000 people at WWDC is, you know, a third the size of that.
2:27:15I'm just saying if you could do your convention, you can't really play basketball otherwise.
2:27:20I mean, I guess they did during the lockdown, but it was no fun.
2:27:25You could see why sporting events are back.
2:27:27It would have been very surprising to me if they had announced last week WWDC is back and it's exactly like it used to be before COVID.
2:27:34Right.
2:27:35That would have been pretty surprising.
2:27:36And I think ill-advised.
2:27:38But some conferences, there have been some conferences, have there not?
2:27:41Oh, yeah, definitely.
2:27:42Vegas is back full swing.
2:27:43You know, I was just some random thing about, just a random story outside my usual wheelhouse, but about like car dealers and, you know, a big car dealer conference in Vegas and all sorts of places are having conferences.
2:27:57It's a weird mix of people who don't even realize how much a lot of the world has gone back to normal and people who would be flabbergasted if Apple said we're going to have 5,000 attendees.
2:28:08Horrified if they had at all a normal dub-dub, yeah.
2:28:11Right.
2:28:12Well, so they did this weird hybrid though, or it sounds like they're doing this weird hybrid where it's unclear, although I think if you read it properly you can tell that on day one they're going to have an event where you can go and watch, but it sounds like it's going to be videos.
2:28:29So it doesn't sound like anything will be live in front of you.
2:28:32So you can go and watch the keynote almost like going to a movie theater.
2:28:36Right.
2:28:37But they haven't even said where it is, right?
2:28:39And again, I think this is typical Apple, well, we can hedge our bets on this, so why not? We'll just tell people as late as possible.
2:28:46Right, keep the flexibility, yeah.
2:28:47But is it going to be outdoors on a lawn?
2:28:50I would bet.
2:28:51I mean, it doesn't make any sense to pack people in to watch a video but not pack them in to see sessions.
2:28:57Right.
2:28:58Yeah, I don't get it.
2:29:00I know some people wear masks outdoors, it's widely accepted though that COVID doesn't really transmit very much outdoors if at all.
2:29:09So certainly it's safer, you know, whether to meet any particular person's definition of safe enough, you know, that's up to that person, but clearly outdoors would be safer than indoors.
2:29:22But no details, they accept that they said seating will be limited.
2:29:25Could be something where they're going to have events all over the world, you know? I don't know.
2:29:29You know, or at least several locations around the world, not just somewhere in California, and would it be?
2:29:35Oh, that's interesting.
2:29:36Right? Where and where would it be in California? Like, I was thinking like San Jose, but why would they even have it in San Jose if they're not at the convention center?
2:29:47No, my thought was outdoors in the middle of Apple Park, you know, you can set up a big video screen as long as, it doesn't rain a lot there.
2:29:55You mean inside the ring?
2:29:57Yeah.
2:29:58I don't think they want to ever let outsiders in there.
2:30:00Okay. Well, I mean, that's where they've had like concerts, Apple employees.
2:30:04Yeah, Apple employees. I don't know exactly what level of it is security and what level of it is something else.
2:30:13Psychological or whatever.
2:30:15But you've never been there, but there is...
2:30:17I haven't.
2:30:18The old visitor center at Infinite Loop was, Infinite Loop was not very Apple-like architecture-wise, or it is not. I know that it's still stuffed to the gills with people who work there because there are so many employees.
2:30:32But like the company store, it's just in one of the buildings. You just park where employees park and you just walk right into, you know, the new Apple Park.
2:30:44The ring building and the Steve Jobs Theater are across the road from the visitor center.
2:30:49And the visitor center has its own parking lot, and that is where the media park for an event, but then they have...
2:30:55You could see how unusual it is that those of us parking at the visitor center for an event are being escorted over here, across this street, up this walkway to get to the Steve Jobs Theater.
2:31:10I mean, they could do it at the Steve Jobs Theater. The Steve Jobs Theater is sort of meant for that, but it really doesn't seat many people at all.
2:31:18I mean, it's certainly bigger than the town hall we mentioned before, but it's just a couple hundred. That doesn't really make sense. And it's indoors.
2:31:24But there's no way to get to that center courtyard of the ring without going through a place that I don't think was ever meant to take any visitors at all.
2:31:35It just isn't set up for that, so I don't think so.
2:31:38I mean, if you could teleport them there, it's certainly enough space. And they've had, like you said, they've had concerts and stuff like that, but it won't be there.
2:31:46Well, so here's my question for you. If it is only in California, will you go to that if there's a press portion of it?
2:31:53I don't know. And I will say, I guess I can say, because there's nothing under NDA, because I haven't heard anything from anybody at Apple, whether there is a press thing.
2:32:02Or if it is from the media's perspective, it'll be exactly like the last two, where you just watch wherever you watch remotely, and all of our post-event media briefings are conducted via WebEx and stuff like that.
2:32:16I don't know. I guess if it's in person for the media, I would like to go. I mean, I'm ready to go back.
2:32:23Makes a lot more sense. I've talked with other developers and things, and there's not a lot of enthusiasm that I've seen to go to this watch party as a developer, because it's a trip to California, which from the East Coast is a trek.
2:32:37And it doesn't sound like, we'll see what Apple announces, but it doesn't sound like there's going to be a lot to it, as opposed to a week of sessions and after-work things that the conference usually is or formerly has been.
2:32:51Yeah, my guess is it's just the Monday stuff, which would be the morning keynote, then the afternoon State of the Union keynote with the technical details.
2:32:58That's all they've announced, yeah.
2:32:59And then maybe they'll have the Apple Design Awards, you know, and let you watch them. I mean, they move Apple Design Awards all over the place on the schedule, but it would certainly slot right in as something to do as the third thing of the Monday.
2:33:14Of the day.
2:33:15You know, and then Tuesday through Friday are when the regular sessions come out, and they're all just like the last two years, just online. They were pre-recorded.
2:33:26Probably, you know, there are probably people listening to this podcast this week who are hard at work on their WWDC presentations and Cupertino, you know.
2:33:35That's my guess. I don't know. The only other thing I could think of other than the keynote, the State of the Union, would be the Apple Design Awards.
2:33:41Or some other special thing, you know, maybe they would have a band come, and Simulcan's a band? I don't know.
2:33:48But yeah, it sounds like it makes a lot more sense. If there's an in-person press thing, that makes sense to go to.
2:33:53But if there's an in-person, if all the in-person developer portion is watching a couple videos, and even if there's a band or something, it to me is not worth a trip across the country.
2:34:03I think they'll get a whole lot of people from California attending that, and not from very far away beyond that.
2:34:09Now, correction here. I'm getting a piece on my earpiece. I actually loaded up their website, and I'm glad I did.
2:34:16It does say here on the website, go to Apple.com/WWDC. It forwards you to the developer/WWDC 22 page.
2:34:25But, no, you were right, Paul. I owe you a being right point. In addition to the online conference, Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6th.
2:34:36Okay. To watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, along with the online community.
2:34:42So they're saying keynote, State of the Union, and it will be somewhere at Apple Park. Maybe there's some kind of walkway. They will get people into the ring. I don't know.
2:34:50Can they do stairs, like, up and over?
2:34:53Maybe, but it's—
2:34:54No, no, no. It's four stories tall. I don't think that's how they'll do it.
2:35:00I don't know. I'm very intrigued now, now that I think about it, where they're going to do it. If there's some way they can create a walkthrough through the ring.
2:35:10But I don't even know where the people would park, though, because I think it's actually quite a haul from the visitor center.
2:35:16And the visitor center, I don't think, is meant to have that many people park. You know, like, I certainly don't think 4,000 people.
2:35:25Well, it's certainly unclear what sort of numbers we're talking about. I think it says space is limited, details, blah, blah, blah. But if there's 1,000 people, that's a number that makes sense to me.
2:35:37But even that, it sounds like, would be potentially too many for a lot of this, for the infrastructure.
2:35:43Right. I mean, honest to God, I don't want to harp on parking too much, but it's not like—all right, San Francisco, when it was at Moscone, there were dozens and dozens of hotels within walking distance of Moscone, because it's downtown San Francisco.
2:35:59It literally, the area is built up, you know, around the convention center, or they put the convention center there because the hotels were already there.
2:36:06San Jose, not as many hotels.
2:36:12But still a city.
2:36:13Still a city. The same great prices for hotels.
2:36:19And what should we say about the quality of the hotels by comparison?
2:36:23Mustier.
2:36:27Danker.
2:36:28Danker. More employees enjoying their first day on the job.
2:36:33Than anywhere I've ever been.
2:36:35You know, but you still get those great $500 a night prices for a mid-priced two-queen room. You can't beat it, really.
2:36:42But still, wherever you stayed in San Jose, you could walk to the, whatever the name of the convention center is there.
2:36:49I had a broken foot and I did it.
2:36:50Yes, you did. That is actually true. Although you kind of wheeled yourself.
2:36:53No, no, I was hobbling. I had the peg leg.
2:36:55Oh, that's right, the peg leg. Yeah, that's right. Good times.
2:36:59Yeah, the best. But yeah, it was doable because it was in a city and it worked.
2:37:04I've never tried it. I mean, I've been to multiple events at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, but it's nowhere near any hotels that I'm aware of.
2:37:13I mean, certainly not walking distance. I mean, there are, there was a weird hotel in Cupertino that you can definitely walk, easily walk to Infinite Loop, but it's miles away from Apple Park.
2:37:25And I don't know. And it's like, so how many, you know, if you're not local, how do you get there? You don't have to rent a car, you could take an Uber, but how many thousands of people can show up in an Uber on the same morning?
2:37:38You know? And it's like, you know, I don't know. I don't know what that's going to be like. It's going to be, they must have something in mind.
2:37:44They must have something planned. I mean, shuttle buses, something, but yeah, that's interesting to think about. It's not something that I had thought about as far as just sort of the security of the campus and not necessarily wanting people to park in their, in the employee parking lot, which has an employee parking garage, which has thousands of spaces or anything like that.
2:38:01It feels, when I've been there, it feels like, in fact, at one time they had an event that I was at where they did have a certain fitness component and I, like, I've been to their, their fitness center for, for employees because they've, they've used it to demo stuff.
2:38:19It's far enough from the Steve Jobs theater that they, they had, like, golf carts to take people. No, they really did. And I think that, and I think I tried, I wanted to turn it down and they're like, no, no, you got, you got to take a golf cart.
2:38:31You got to take the cart.
2:38:32You got to take the cart. And they golf cart you around in it, you know?
2:38:36You or I, you know, when your, your foot isn't broken, you would easily walk it, you know, it's like walking a couple holes of a golf course or something, but it's, it's certainly not walkable for everybody of all ages and, you know, state of their broken foot.
2:38:51You know, there's all sorts of reasons. It's, it's not close though. The visitor center is close-ish to the Steve Jobs theater, but the Steve Jobs theater is not that close to the ring and that's just the outside of the ring.
2:39:03You know, it's, it,
2:39:05so I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. Although there is a lot of green space in between. Maybe that's where they'll put something. Outside the ring, but in the big green space that's in between, who knows?
2:39:18But then that raises the question.
2:39:19Well, we'll see in what, two months?
2:39:20Yeah.
2:39:21Well, and it raises the question of, are they also, are they going to have media on site for the keynote? Which I believe they will be willing to wait until the end of May.
2:39:32Like a week before it.
2:39:33Right.
2:39:34Right. Right. And just, you know, and because what do they care if some people have to fly from
2:39:41London or Europe or way further away than I do, they'll fill up the room, that's for sure.
2:39:49You'll get there or you won't, and yeah, exactly. I mean, even for developers, as you alluded to
2:39:55earlier, they've never announced this a year in advance or six months in advance. It's two or
2:40:00three months heads up to try and book a room in San Jose and get flights and everything. So yeah,
2:40:05so if the developers aren't getting much heads up, the media certainly is not going to get any.
2:40:10You and I, how many years have you and I spent bargain hunting hotels based on guest WWDC days?
2:40:17Oh God. Yeah, from when it was in San Francisco, we could see the calendar of the Moscone Center
2:40:24and see, okay, that week is blocked off and this hotel reservation is cancelable,
2:40:29so I'll book one that week. I mean, reading tea leaves to go to a conference is ridiculous,
2:40:34but that's what we were reduced to. Yeah, and I would buy Southwest airline tickets
2:40:41because they're fully refundable. I forget if you get your money back or just credit,
2:40:46but I knew I'd fly somewhere else and I wouldn't be paying any kind of fee on the airline tickets.
2:40:51That was a nightmare. But anyway, I'm sure I'll find out. What is it? June 6th? I'll probably find
2:40:55out. June 6th. So by June 4th, you'll definitely know if you're going out there. Well, that's
2:41:00the ultimate was the—and again, I think it might have—no, it wasn't Antennagate, but Antennagate
2:41:06was when I had my crowning moment and asked Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller and Tim Cook and Big Bob
2:41:12whether they used the bumper case on their iPhone 4, and all four of them took out their phones and
2:41:19showed that they just keep them in their pocket without a case. No case whatsoever. Yeah, and
2:41:23we're making phone calls just fine. But that was my—number one, it's not because I'm shy,
2:41:28it's because they don't take questions anymore. I've always got a question that I would ask if
2:41:32they took them, but that was my question. But I made the Antennagate press conference.
2:41:39I had a phone call from Apple PR around three in the afternoon, Philly time. Can you get here
2:41:44tomorrow morning? And I may only be slightly exaggerating, but it was definitely like a
2:41:51Thursday afternoon. And money was—you know, the revenue at Daring Fireball was not what it is
2:41:58today. It was theoretically possible that I could get a flight, but it would be out of the budget.
2:42:04But I got like a United flight at 420. I was like, "Hey, Amy, I'm going to California."
2:42:10I gotta go to the airport. Yeah, she's like, "When?" And I'm like, "Oh, no, now. I'm packing."
2:42:14She's like, "What are you talking about?" And I'm like, "Oh, my God, it's the antenna thing."
2:42:18You know, there we go. But no, it was like, I would say, 18 hours of notice. But now that was
2:42:25an emergency press conference. I don't know. Like you said, I'm sure they'll give me at least two
2:42:30days for WWDC. I thank you for your time. This is long, but we did have four sponsors, so it kind of
2:42:34made it worthwhile for everybody. Everybody should absolutely check out Audio Hijack 4. It is at the
2:42:40Rogue Amoeba website. Do you play the Wordle? I do. Has Rogue come up yet? I think Rogue
2:42:48will be one of those words of the day that's going to trip people up. Yeah, no A, no E, no N, no S.
2:42:55Yeah, that's a tricky one. No, it's got an E. Rogue? Oh, you're right. I was running through the
2:43:01most common letters in my head. All right, so no N, no S, no—yeah, I don't know. I think people
2:43:05would get that. But wait, let me—I've probably done this on the show before, but we've got,
2:43:10because no one can spell "rogue," as I even just demonstrated, and no one can spell "amoeba,"
2:43:14we've got—the website to go to is just macaudio.com. Oh! So yeah, a few years ago,
2:43:20we snapped that up when it became available, and basically use it for nothing but podcasts,
2:43:26because everyone—if you can't spell macaudio.com, then I don't know, we can't help you.
2:43:31I've got to say that Rogue Amoeba definitely has the highest vowel-to-consonant ratio of any
2:43:37company in the indie Mac space. Ooh, yeah, probably. That's probably right. Pretty high.
2:43:43It'd have to be like AAA—AAA-adieu to beat it. All right, so macaudio.com, and it'll just,
2:43:52what, redirect people? It just takes you to rogueamoeba.com. If you want to try and spell
2:43:56rogueamoeba.com, you can, but Amoeba has multiple valid spellings, and we don't own all of them,
2:44:01and everyone spells the word "rogue" as "rouge," so—
2:44:04Oh, yeah. Macaudio.com. Yeah. Yeah, the U's in there somewhere, the G's in the middle,
2:44:10just figure it out. Yeah, so you don't have rouge—do you have rouge amoeba?
2:44:15We have rouge amoeba, we have—I forget if we have one of the other spellings of amoeba, but
2:44:19Google makes this, you know, web searching, duck, duck, go, whatever. Search engines make this
2:44:25unnecessary, except in a case like a podcast, where, you know, someone might just type it in
2:44:30and totally muff it. And my thanks also, in addition to you, for your time and your
2:44:35keen observations on this. I'll thank all of the sponsors of this episode. We had Squarespace,
2:44:39where you can make your next move with a new website. Trade Coffee, incredible coffee
2:44:44delivered fresh from the best roasters in the nation right to your home. Drafts at getdrafts.com,
2:44:50the great iOS, macOS, watchOS note-taking app that is celebrating 10 years, which is just terrific.
2:44:59Call us back when you get to 20, though, Drafts, you know.
2:45:01That's right.
2:45:022020 is a landmark. And last but not least, Memberful, where you can monetize your passions
2:45:08with the membership. Thank you, Paul.