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320: Here Comes the Big But

 

00:00:00   I got the insurance, it's all set. I got the certificate of insurance today. I sent it to the venue. They said...

00:00:05   What are we insuring ourselves against? Like if our audience bursts into flames? I don't even understand.

00:00:10   That's basically it, yeah. Like any kind of... Like every event requires this kind of thing. Like the venue requires you to have a certain degree of liability insurance that way.

00:00:15   I understand. I was wondering like mechanically, is it like something that you bring, like we put our laptop on a table and it sets the theater on fire?

00:00:23   The exclusions are actually kind of entertaining. Here, let me see if I can take one up here.

00:00:27   Probably like an injury from spacecraft is excluded.

00:00:32   Well, no, there's like things we aren't allowed to do. So here, I'll let you know.

00:00:35   No open flames on stage.

00:00:39   Nuclear energy liability exclusion.

00:00:41   I'll leave my reactor at home.

00:00:43   We can't have athletic or sports activities as part of our show?

00:00:46   No fear of that.

00:00:50   Yeah.

00:00:51   They do not cover problems arising from fungi or bacteria?

00:00:53   Like no guarantees there.

00:00:58   Who knows what diseases Marco's going to bring from his... and Casey, both from your germy children.

00:01:01   Oh, thanks a lot.

00:01:06   We are not allowed to have pyrotechnics or fireworks.

00:01:07   That's going to rule out my Mac Pro celebration display.

00:01:10   We are not allowed to do inverted aerial maneuvers.

00:01:14   If we're upright, it's fine though.

00:01:19   This includes things such as ski jumps.

00:01:18   No matter who builds the ski jumping ramp and whether it happens with or without our permission or knowledge.

00:01:23   Someone has a ski jump ramp without our knowledge.

00:01:28   Exactly.

00:01:31   We can't use amusement devices.

00:01:32   This includes mechanical or non-mechanical rides, slides, water slides, moonwalk or moon bounce things.

00:01:34   So no bouncy houses on our stage.

00:01:41   No bungee equipment or any vertical device or equipment used for climbing.

00:01:43   So no climbing walls.

00:01:48   No trampolines.

00:01:50   We cannot have a trampoline on the stage.

00:01:52   We also cannot use propelled objects into a crowd or by the direction of participants.

00:01:55   So I guess no t-shirt cannons.

00:02:01   Oh yeah, no t-shirt cannons.

00:02:02   That's a bummer.

00:02:04   And my favorite one, grass skiing.

00:02:04   What?

00:02:08   I don't even know what that is.

00:02:08   That's where you do a big ski jump and it has like astroturf on it.

00:02:08   Really? Well we can't do that.

00:02:13   That's one that you ever see like where they, you know the big ski jump at the Olympics,

00:02:15   where they practice for that in the summer, there's no snow.

00:02:19   So they have these big long skied ramps that basically have artificial grass on them and it's kind of wet and you go down it with your skis.

00:02:22   Oh.

00:02:28   So if you were thinking of practicing your ski jumping on astroturf inside a theater, don't.

00:02:29   Yeah.

00:02:33   Oh wait, there's one more. There's a second page.

00:02:34   Rodeos.

00:02:36   We cannot have any rodeo activity including, but not limited to, bronco or bull riding, steer roping,

00:02:37   team roping, barrel racing or horseback riding.

00:02:42   They actually mean like real animals here.

00:02:45   So we can't hook any bulls.

00:02:48   All things considered, our show where we sit at a table behind microphones and don't do anything for the entire show is pretty good from an insurance perspective.

00:02:50   Yeah.

00:02:57   Describe your show.

00:02:58   Mostly about sitting.

00:02:59   Sitting fairly motionless.

00:03:01   Talking a little.

00:03:02   Talking to each other in a conversational tone.

00:03:04   That's it. That's the whole thing.

00:03:04   So a lot of people have been talking about the new AirPod case hinge and how it's obviously different.

00:03:09   And I have an old set of AirPods.

00:03:16   I have a new set of AirPods.

00:03:19   I can't tell the difference, but someone of the three of us has put in the show notes, "New AirPod case hinge is italicized.

00:03:21   Different."

00:03:28   So which one of you is that?

00:03:29   That was me. Last week you had an excuse because you said, "Well, I don't have the old case with me.

00:03:29   I just have the new one and I can't tell it looks the same."

00:03:34   Fine. But now you've seen both of them. How can you not tell the difference?

00:03:36   Well, now I have neither of them with me right this very second, but I can't tell the difference. I really can't.

00:03:39   I can tell the difference. I have mine now.

00:03:45   The difference is that, well, first of all, just looking at it, the new one is more of a matte finish.

00:03:48   Now, there are some people saying that's because the new one is like matte finish aluminum.

00:03:54   The old one was shiny stainless steel. I have no idea if the material is different or the same, but one is less shiny than the other.

00:03:59   Whatever. Fine.

00:04:04   Second, I fixed it toward the thing down and said it looks like it's actually a different part internally.

00:04:05   It actually looks beefier on the new ones.

00:04:10   They didn't say anything about the material.

00:04:13   But third, and most importantly, and this is one of those times where we should have some kind of like chapter skip or warning.

00:04:14   If you don't want to hear something potentially upsetting about your AirPod case, skip to the time stamp that someone will put in the chapter marker.

00:04:21   And you will be able to avoid this. Marco, in case you unfortunately have to hear this. Marco doesn't care because he doesn't have AirPods.

00:04:26   This was pointed out by someone in the chat, or no, maybe someone on Twitter who asked about it.

00:04:31   And I've confirmed it on mine, so there's at least two AirPods that are like this. I'm pretty sure all of them are.

00:04:36   If you look at your, and in case you can do this now, look at your AirPod hinge from the back and see how there is like the little rounded corner of things on either side.

00:04:41   And then there's a rectangle in the middle.

00:04:48   I mean, I don't have mine nearby, but I am envisioning that in my mind. Yes.

00:04:48   I do. Alright, you see the rectangle in the middle there?

00:04:53   Yeah.

00:04:56   Alright, there is like two vertical lines. There's the left edge of the rectangle and the right edge of the left angle.

00:04:57   One of those lines is probably thicker or darker than the other. Do you see that?

00:05:02   I see what you're talking about, but I don't see the difference.

00:05:08   Now here's the thing. The reason one line is probably darker than the other is because the new hinge...

00:05:12   Oh yeah, wait, you're right.

00:05:14   The new hinge has slightly more play in that little rectangle.

00:05:19   And you can see that by pressing the hinge sideways until it clicks back and forth.

00:05:23   Hear that?

00:05:31   Oh yeah.

00:05:33   They all do that. It moves a tiny, tiny bit and it makes a clicking noise.

00:05:35   And when you push it from side to side, you can see the gap get really skinny on one side and big on the other and push it back the other way.

00:05:40   Now it's skinny on that side and big on the other.

00:05:45   The old top did move a tiny bit, but it didn't make this satisfying and/or annoying clicking sound.

00:05:47   Wait, I have the old one. It's right here.

00:05:59   It's a small sound.

00:06:04   I would not suggest that you do this to your AirPods because that's probably not good for the hinge.

00:06:06   Some people may be annoyed knowing that this little bit of play exists.

00:06:11   Some people may be exhilarated by the idea of having a little fidget buddy.

00:06:16   I am kind of sad that I know it exists because now I find myself clicking it sometimes.

00:06:20   But anyway, just so you know, the new AirPods have more play in the hinge and it's a little bit weird and clicky.

00:06:25   Wait, hold on. I have dispatched an assistant to bring me AirPods.

00:06:31   Thank you, Aaron. I love you.

00:06:36   This is very important work.

00:06:40   This is good podcast material right here.

00:06:42   I do see that one is darker.

00:06:45   Oh, yep.

00:06:49   Now press it sideways and now watch the other one get darker.

00:06:50   Yes, I see what you're talking about.

00:06:53   Now let me look at the old ones.

00:06:54   I love the roof.

00:06:57   You can tell it's like, we're not actually talking about air power or anything.

00:06:57   All the news that actually happened that people wanted to talk about.

00:07:02   Yeah, you know, I would say that the twisting motion is equivalent between the two.

00:07:05   But yes, there's more lateral movement.

00:07:11   This is just purely side to side.

00:07:13   There's no twisting, there's no pressing down.

00:07:15   It is pressing totally to the left and totally to the right.

00:07:17   Now let me see.

00:07:19   Do I feel different clickiness though when I flip them closed?

00:07:20   I don't know anything about the opening and closing.

00:07:22   That felt the same to me.

00:07:27   It's just merely in the closed state there is slightly more play.

00:07:28   Yeah, I guess.

00:07:32   Yeah, I guess that's fair.

00:07:33   I can't say I would have noticed that previously.

00:07:34   And yeah, I do see what you're saying about the matte on the hinge.

00:07:37   It is more matte.

00:07:41   Yep, and it might be aluminum instead of stainless steel.

00:07:42   I can't tell.

00:07:44   Yeah, because the old ones, they look like a very shiny material.

00:07:45   I'm terrible with materials.

00:07:50   But this new one looks like the outside of a MacBook.

00:07:49   Yeah, presumably.

00:07:54   I think it thinks that the new one is machined,

00:07:56   whereas presumably the old one is forged.

00:07:59   So the new one is like a block of aluminum or whatever

00:08:01   machined into these little pieces that are fitted.

00:08:03   I don't know if that's true either.

00:08:05   There's just speculation.

00:08:06   Although now that I'm looking at the back of my AirPods,

00:08:07   I think I like having the indicator on the outside

00:08:10   because Qi charging, naturally.

00:08:14   Although I think from an aesthetic point of view,

00:08:14   it looked better on the inside.

00:08:19   Ooh, my word, the inside of my old ones is gross.

00:08:21   Anyway, the Oh My God button that's on the back,

00:08:24   I much prefer that being lower

00:08:30   because I have definitely caught myself mashing down on it

00:08:33   on the new ones and I'm just holding them.

00:08:36   And I'm afraid that I'm going to reset them

00:08:38   and then I'll have to sign out of iCloud.

00:08:40   Wait, what?

00:08:39   This should have been one of those Kickstarter fidget things.

00:08:44   It's just filled with, it's a busy box for grownups.

00:08:47   Anyway, this reminds me of a fun thing you can do with crowds

00:08:52   that I learned from Penny Arcade Expo,

00:08:55   which anyone who's been probably knows this.

00:08:58   If you have a gigantic room full of people,

00:09:00   like auditorium size, like thousands of people,

00:09:03   and especially if they're nerds,

00:09:06   and especially if much of them are guy nerds.

00:09:05   I know this doesn't seem like it should be gender,

00:09:10   but I feel like it is.

00:09:12   And you ask them all to crack their knuckles at the same time,

00:09:14   which cracking knuckles is,

00:09:19   I don't think it's a good thing to do

00:09:20   and I don't recommend it and I don't and can't do it.

00:09:22   But lots of people can and they're proud of it.

00:09:25   If you ask them to all do that at the same time,

00:09:27   it makes a sound that I guarantee

00:09:29   you've never heard before in your life.

00:09:30   It is a very, very upsetting sound.

00:09:30   - You're really not selling this experience.

00:09:35   - It's very upsetting.

00:09:37   Anyway, what I was thinking is if you had a WWDC-sized crowd

00:09:38   with people, all of them have the new AirPod case,

00:09:42   and you ask them to all do...

00:09:46   Ask them to do that at the same time,

00:09:50   it might make probably not as upsetting a sound,

00:09:52   but it could be surprisingly loud.

00:09:54   Oh my God.

00:09:57   - Gentlemen, I have to say that there are times

00:09:56   when I sit down to record this show

00:10:01   that I have a pretty solid feeling

00:10:03   for where this show is gonna go

00:10:05   and what we're gonna talk about.

00:10:06   And then there's days when I have no idea

00:10:08   how we ended up where we ended up.

00:10:11   This is one of those days.

00:10:14   - Yep.

00:10:16   - Oh my goodness.

00:10:16   All right, John, I assume this is you as well.

00:10:17   I will read to you and the listeners

00:10:20   what it says in the show notes.

00:10:22   "No iPad Maxi non-pro."

00:10:21   - That's it, that's all qualified, and we can move on.

00:10:26   Everyone knows what that means, right?

00:10:28   Didn't we cover that last week?

00:10:30   No, what we covered last week is that there is no Pro Mini,

00:10:31   but the reverse is also true, which my wife pointed out to me.

00:10:36   There is no non-Pro Maxi.

00:10:38   So it's just the final non-uniformity in the line.

00:10:41   - Okay, now I get it.

00:10:43   - No Pro Mini, no non-Pro Maxi.

00:10:44   Done, moving on.

00:10:46   - Okay.

00:10:47   - Oh my word.

00:10:46   Finally, in follow-up, some thoughts about G Suite.

00:10:51   So if you recall, last week I was really grumpy

00:10:54   because I couldn't use mail app or calendar app

00:10:57   or anything really on my Macs that interfaced

00:11:00   with my email account, which was what I called

00:11:04   Google Apps for Your Domain, which is now called G Suite.

00:11:07   John had been of the opinion that I am the only human

00:11:10   on the planet that has this particular setup,

00:11:13   so that's why nobody caught it.

00:11:12   I appreciate every one of the listeners who wrote in

00:11:17   to defend my honor.

00:11:20   It is rare that anyone will disagree with John

00:11:22   for any reason whatsoever, and I am deeply appreciative.

00:11:24   - I'm pretty sure I didn't say you're the only human.

00:11:27   I said most people don't do that.

00:11:30   I think that's true.

00:11:33   I think you're in the vast, vast minority,

00:11:34   a tiny number of people do this

00:11:36   compared to the people who use Gmail.

00:11:38   So that's what I said, and I stand by it.

00:11:39   But yes, other people do do it.

00:11:37   Of course they're gonna write in and say,

00:11:42   "Hey, I use G Suite too, and all universities use it,

00:11:43   and all businesses use it.

00:11:46   Fine, add 'em up."

00:11:47   Do you know how many users Gmail has?

00:11:48   Guess.

00:11:50   - A lot, I'm sure.

00:11:51   And I take your point.

00:11:52   - Is it more than 100,000?

00:11:53   - Yes.

00:11:55   - Is it more than a million?

00:11:55   - Yes.

00:11:57   - How many people use G Suite?

00:11:58   - How many students are there in the United States?

00:11:59   How many business people are there?

00:12:02   - That's a good interview question at Google.

00:12:03   How many students are there in the United States?

00:12:02   - Every university in the United States uses G Suite.

00:12:07   How many students are there?

00:12:09   - Oh, I don't have the faintest idea.

00:12:10   - There's over a billion Gmail users.

00:12:12   Most people do not use G Suite or Google for their domains.

00:12:13   My point stands.

00:12:16   - Ladies and gentlemen, if you've ever wondered

00:12:19   how you could be so lucky as to be on a podcast

00:12:21   with John Syracuse, ask yourself,

00:12:23   is that being lucky?

00:12:25   Is it really?

00:12:27   - Anyway, I'm saying, like, yes, lots of other people do it,

00:12:28   but my point was not that nobody did it

00:12:30   or that you were the only one.

00:12:27   It's just that it's rare, and that's how it could have got

00:12:33   through QA, because I'm sure they tested with Gmail,

00:12:35   but they probably didn't test with G Suite,

00:12:37   because it's so relatively rare.

00:12:38   Not that they're only 10 people, but that percentage-wise,

00:12:42   it's like 1% or 5%, so they test the 95% case,

00:12:44   because that's how testing works.

00:12:47   - Well, and even though I was expecting,

00:12:49   well, I shouldn't say I was expecting,

00:12:51   I was hoping for a mea culpa from John.

00:12:53   I'm not surprised I didn't get one,

00:12:52   but I owe Apple an apology, because somebody wrote in to say,

00:12:58   oh, maybe it's actually a Google problem,

00:13:04   and there's a link from Mac Observer

00:13:06   where they kind of go through this and say,

00:13:08   ah, Google's been twiddling with things behind the scenes.

00:13:10   It was probably Google's fault after all.

00:13:13   It just turns out that it was really poor timing.

00:13:15   I'd also like to call out Martin Steiger,

00:13:18   who pointed out to me, or, yeah,

00:13:17   it was he that pointed out to me that you could actually use Charles,

00:13:23   which if you're an iOS developer that does anything with the Internet,

00:13:26   which pretty much every iOS developer does,

00:13:30   Charles is a proxy that lets you deliberately do,

00:13:32   among other things, man-in-the-middle attacks.

00:13:35   And there was a workaround that I successfully used

00:13:36   by deliberately man-in-the-middling the request to Google

00:13:39   for, like, auth and stuff.

00:13:43   And it turns out Google just wasn't giving Apple

00:13:44   the stuff that Apple expected back,

00:13:43   so that could have been Google's fault.

00:13:49   It sounds like it was.

00:13:50   It could have been Apple's fault, which is what I assumed.

00:13:51   It sounds like it wasn't.

00:13:53   But anyway, you could man-in-the-middle this thing

00:13:54   and kind of rewrite the response

00:13:56   and convince Apple to do what you want to do,

00:13:59   which is what I did, and that was great,

00:14:01   but it turns out Google also fixed it as well.

00:14:03   - I'm picturing a man-in-the-middle as, like,

00:14:05   the guy who enters your Twitter conversation,

00:14:07   like, when you're talking to your friend on Twitter,

00:14:10   and some guy comes in and starts, like, complaining about something

00:14:10   that you said that, like, they were just butting in,

00:14:16   that to me is a man-in-the-middle attack.

00:14:19   Like, every time you say that, I'm just picturing, like,

00:14:21   some guy being like, "Uh, you know, actually, that's wrong.

00:14:23   You gotta, you know, you're misspelled this,

00:14:25   and this is insensitive," and it's like, "Oh, my God.

00:14:28   Just go away."

00:14:30   - Today, I posted a really stupid joke

00:14:31   that was regarding Whitespace and Swift, and the two,

00:14:34   or to the best of my recollection,

00:14:36   the two tweet replies I got to that were two people

00:14:42   either critiquing the code or telling me how wrong that was,

00:14:46   and I'm like, "Guys, guys," of course it was dudes,

00:14:50   "Guys, it's a joke. We don't need to critique this. It's a joke."

00:14:52   - I mean, do you honestly think Swift programmers

00:14:58   would have a sense of humor?

00:15:01   - That's unfair.

00:15:01   Unfair to Swift programmers at this point.

00:15:03   Swift programmers have a sense of humor.

00:15:00   - I mean, you don't think the language imparts on them

00:15:06   any kind of particular attitudes?

00:15:08   - No, it's the reverse. You're reversing cause and effect.

00:15:10   People with that attitude tend to like Swift.

00:15:12   It doesn't turn them that way.

00:15:14   Speaking of third-party services that are having trouble

00:15:16   integrating with Apple, but then they end up fixing something

00:15:19   on their end, and Apple stuff starts working again,

00:15:21   this week, briefly, the dashboard weather widget stopped working

00:15:24   because the Yahoo weather thing that it uses behind the scenes

00:15:25   moved or something, but Yahoo fixed it, and so now it's back.

00:15:31   So I had a brief moment where I had to download an alternate

00:15:34   weather widget into dashboard, which, yes, still exists,

00:15:36   but that time is over, and so we're back.

00:15:39   - I'm happy that your long national nightmare is over.

00:15:42   - Oh, it's just like the G Suite stuff.

00:15:44   Your email wasn't working for a little while,

00:15:46   and then Google fixed it, and now it's back,

00:15:47   and everyone's happy.

00:15:49   - But the difference is we all agree that there are two humans

00:15:50   that use dashboard, and there are more than two humans

00:15:50   that use G Suite.

00:15:56   - In my tweet, because I knew I'd get the reply guys saying,

00:15:57   "You're still using dashboard?"

00:16:00   That thing exists.

00:16:01   I did the self joke in the same tweet, in line, not in a second tweet,

00:16:02   saying, "Yes, I'm the one."

00:16:06   Yes, I still use dashboard, and yes, I'm the one, right?

00:16:07   And still, I couldn't stop them.

00:16:11   I got the reverse.

00:16:13   I got the double turns out.

00:16:15   I got the, "Actually, I use dashboard, and I know a lot of people who use it."

00:16:14   It's just like, "Oh my God."

00:16:20   And I still got the people saying, "Wait, dashboard still exists,

00:16:21   so there's no avoiding it."

00:16:24   It's fine. It's all in good fun.

00:16:25   I'm just happy to have my weather rigid back.

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00:18:21   So, speaking of AirPower and speaking of my sweet new Qi AirPods,

00:18:27   I would love to put them on my AirPower map, but I'll never be able to because it's canceled.

00:18:31   That makes me kind of excited. You know why, Casey? And I guess this is for Marco, too.

00:18:35   Why is that?

00:18:39   All three of us have what is potentially a collector's item,

00:18:40   an official Apple piece of hardware that on the outside of the box references a canceled product.

00:18:43   I don't have one.

00:18:48   Oh, I already threw that away.

00:18:49   You threw away the box? You're a monster.

00:18:46   I thought you said you had the AirPods.

00:18:52   I had the old AirPods.

00:18:54   I thought you had the new one.

00:18:55   Why did I get the new ones?

00:18:57   Oh, anyway, Casey and I had that box, and Casey foolishly threw it away.

00:18:58   I have it. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I do have it.

00:19:01   I mean, it's not that rare because they sold like 500,000 of these things in the first 24 hours or whatever,

00:19:04   but most people are going to throw out that box, but not me.

00:19:08   That's why I've still got my apology mouse box that says Macworld New York 2001 on the side.

00:19:11   It contains a basically mint condition apology mouse.

00:19:15   So we did get some interesting feedback with regard to AirPower.

00:19:21   Now, the person who sent this in conceded that this was like, "My friend's uncle, cousin's brother, sister's uncle's aunt's former roommate said."

00:19:26   But it was interesting nevertheless, and of course I'm also exaggerating a bit.

00:19:35   But this anonymous person wrote that Apple acquired Power by Proxy,

00:19:39   which was a New Zealand-based wireless charging company that designed wireless chargers for industrial applications.

00:19:41   Note that the deal was finalized in October of 2017, about a month after the AirPower announcement.

00:19:47   Power by Proxy, or PVP, had been approached by Apple to create a prototype wireless charger in a bid for a buyout.

00:19:52   They delivered an impressive product that Apple was happy with and triggered the announcement of AirPower in the acquisition.

00:19:58   Can we pause there for a second?

00:20:03   Yes, absolutely.

00:20:05   Just to take this in. The company wanted to be bought out by Apple and said, "We have this cool thing. You should acquire us," or whatever.

00:20:07   So they showed them a cool product, and then based on that and based on Apple's intent to purchase, Apple announced AirPower.

00:20:13   So they hadn't even acquired the company that they thought was basically going to give them AirPower, but they announced --

00:20:23   they hadn't finalized the acquisition, but they announced the product based on a demo that a product who wanted to be bought by Apple showed them.

00:20:29   So if you're thinking, "Well, they announced AirPower, but maybe it wasn't quite done yet,"

00:20:32   they announced it before they'd even bought the company that was supposedly bringing it into AirPower, if this is to be believed,

00:20:38   based on a demo of a thing that they showed them, which is kind of mind-boggling, because we were just assuming, like,

00:20:44   "Well, AirPower, they thought it was almost ready, and it would be ready in time," or whatever, and the team wasn't working on it.

00:20:49   Team? Those weren't even Apple employees at the time of the announcement. It was a whole other company.

00:20:54   It boggles my mind if this is true.

00:20:58   Yeah, and we don't know if this is true. We don't know. But I agree with you. That is something else.

00:20:58   So this anonymous person continues, "What Apple either failed to realize or had ignored was that the prototype was not anywhere near production-ready."

00:21:04   You don't say. "It was big, expensive, and somewhat unreliable.

00:21:10   PVP was not really a consumer product company and hadn't designed something ready to be rushed into production.

00:21:14   Complicating this, PVP was also responsible for designing the wireless charging hardware of the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil 2.

00:21:18   AirPower got sent back to the drawing board, and the iPad got assigned a higher priority.

00:21:24   This small company was now split between two very complex engineering challenges, and guess what?

00:21:26   AirPower suffered. So in summary, says the anonymous person, "The reason AirPower has taken so long to come out is because it was announced before Apple even owned the company behind it, or verified that the product met Apple product standards.

00:21:32   In the time since the announcement, the product was effectively restarted from scratch, and that's why it's taken so long to come out, and Apple's been so quiet about it."

00:21:44   This email was before they canceled it, by the way. It was just saying, "What's the deal? Why did it take so long? What about the restarts?" or whatever.

00:21:51   And I feel like the essential additional piece of information, which you probably could have found just by looking at Wikipedia or news stories, because everyone knew Power by Proxy and the acquisition, but I just had never seen the timelines laid out like this.

00:22:01   If you've ever been in a company that's trying to be acquired by another company, you know what that company will do to make itself seem attractive.

00:22:09   So I bet Power by Proxy was putting its best foot forward when it came to this awesome new charging mat where you could put your device anywhere and it would charge it.

00:22:17   It's going to make itself seem awesome, and to be fair to Power by Proxy, the fact that Apple acquired them and gave them the Pencil 2 and the iPad Pro charging, both of which seemed to be great, it's not like they didn't know what they were doing.

00:22:30   It seems like a good acquisition if they were assigned those two things. Those should have been higher priority than AirPower, and it seems like they did a good job with it.

00:22:37   It just turns out that the AirPower thing was not, I'm not going to say it was smoke and mirrors, it was an idea that seemed like it could be feasible, but it turned out not to be feasible.

00:22:48   Yeah, and this, again, we have no idea if this is true or not, but it's certainly very plausible given what we do know is true, given the things that happen publicly and looking at this company and stuff like that.

00:23:11   And it's what we all kind of already suspected, which is the only really crazy thing about this is that Apple preannounced it when they did, with apparently no need to do so.

00:23:23   Because in reality, we are all talking about this product way more over the past year and especially over the past week than we would have if they would have just released it.

00:23:33   If this was a real shipping, like shipped product, we would have probably talked about it for maybe 15 minutes on one episode of a show and been done with it.

00:23:42   And that would be it. Because Apple sells all sorts of boring accessories that we don't talk about. There's all these, like the various watch charging UFOs and stuff.

00:23:52   We just wouldn't even mention it, or we'd mention it very quickly, but this is so interesting, not because it's a charging mat and not because charging mats are that exciting, but because it was such a weird misstep in their PR strategy.

00:24:08   And it's so unlike them to announce things that are nowhere near shipping and that they haven't even proven will ship. And yeah, we can make jokes about how they just announced five services and none of them are really out yet.

00:24:22   But usually when it comes to hardware, they almost never announce things that far ahead.

00:24:28   And I think this is the first time hardware has ever been announced in the modern Apple era that ended up not happening, with the exception of maybe that 3 GHz G5.

00:24:39   It's interesting to see that modern Apple made this massive misstep. Why? What led to this? And I think another interesting angle to consider is it appears as though the cancellation was possibly very last minute.

00:25:00   Like, I don't think they planned, like, I don't think they decided to cancel AirPower two months ago. Like, I think it might have been more like two or three weeks ago that they actually made this decision.

00:25:13   Because that's why you have things like the AirPods packaging referencing AirPower. That's why you have various instruction manuals here and there referencing it.

00:25:23   You have, they apparently secured the trademark to it, like, last week or something, like, very recently.

00:25:30   So there's all sorts of signs that they didn't cancel this a while back and just take a while to admit it. I think they really canceled it very recently.

00:25:40   And possibly right before they expected to release it. And if so, that's also interesting. Like, there's a lot of wonderful ways we can speculate on, like, what could have happened there.

00:25:50   You know, why was this canceled? Was it, did they think they nailed it and they finally got it right and they were about to ship it and then, like, one of them caught fire or something? Who knows?

00:25:59   Right? But I find it just fascinating that this happened at all. And it's way more fascinating, like, speculating on the story and seeing what actually happened, I think is way more fascinating than a Qi charging mat would otherwise deserve.

00:26:15   But it's only interesting because of all the drama around it.

00:26:19   Well, speaking of the services stuff, I'm assuming this is true, but who knows? Like, historically, when stuff is late from Apple, it's almost always the software. I mean, that's just true in general.

00:26:30   Because hardware people are working in a more constrained, defined domain, constrained by the laws of physics. And, you know, it, now that I'm saying hardware is easier, but especially when it comes to, like, the, you know, silicon process, Shrink's just asked Intel about that.

00:26:47   But it is, it is more of a constrained domain than software. Software, you can do anything and it can lead you down weird paths. So usually when there's some hardware plus software product combined, the hardware is ready because the hardware people are better able to have predictable schedules and the software is late.

00:27:02   But in the case of Apple services, all their television services they announced on the 25th, I'm going to assume that all the software related to that will be ready before, possibly long before they decide to launch because what they're waiting for is, I mean, it's kind of the television equivalent of software. It's all TV shows.

00:27:22   You don't have to wait for them all to be done, but you want to have a good launch lineup and they take a long time and their, their sort of production is staggered and, you know, all that stuff.

00:27:32   So the apps might be all ready to go and the services and the server side might be, as far as Apple's concerned, all ready to go. But they said, actually, we're going to wait until these three shows have at least this many episodes out or whatever their rollout strategies or whatever.

00:27:45   And so I'm hoping that unlike AirPower, all of the parts of this that Apple makes themselves with, you know, software and traditional Apple technology will be, could actually have been done on the 25th and sitting there just waiting in the hopper, you know, on la-di-da.

00:28:01   We're just waiting for the, you know, the television shows to be done. And then when all the shows are ready, they're all out, which is another thing we don't know about their TV services, by the way.

00:28:10   Are they going to be like Netflix where they drop a whole season at once, in which case they have to wait for every episode of each show to be done? Or are they going to roll them out one at a time over a week? Or are they going to do some weird hybrid thing?

00:28:19   They didn't really talk much about that, but my guess is they're going to do the Netflix route and dump the whole season at lunch, which means they need every episode of the shows they want to launch with.

00:28:27   I think it's interesting, like Marco said, because it's a public flop and a misstep, but I don't know. I saw a lot of grumbling about how this wasn't announced prior to the AirPods with Qi charging going on sale.

00:28:41   And I guess if I bought the Qi case specifically because I knew I was going to buy a previously unannounced pricing AirPower mat, I guess I would be grumpy about it, but I don't know, man. I didn't really have any intention of buying an AirPower mat.

00:28:59   And I have a couple of, I think they're Mophie Qi chargers around the house, and I have been overjoyed by just dropping the little case on there when my phone isn't already there to just top them up from now and again and not have to worry about messing with the cable, which yeah, okay, this is the first of the first world problems. I'll be the first to tell you that.

00:29:19   Nevertheless, it is very convenient, and I don't think that this was a bait and switch, but oh man, was Twitter upset when this all happened that oh, what a bait and switch, that they should have told us in advance. I mean, I guess they should have told us in advance.

00:29:31   Yeah, that was a non-event. That was like three people being mad.

00:29:34   Well, I don't know. I saw some very grumbly people about it. There were some people that were very, very, very grumbly about it, and I agree that that's kind of a non-thing, but there was enough smoke there that I thought I should say that I don't really get it.

00:29:49   Wasn't that within the 14-day return window?

00:29:51   Yeah.

00:29:52   The timing wasn't ideal in that they announced there would be no AirPower mat after some people had made the decision of whether to get the cheap charging case for the new AirPods or not, but you know what? Honestly, you're talking about people who are buying a $200 product on day one, and they're mad they can't buy another probably $200 charging mat, a specific one that they can just buy a different charging mat instead now.

00:30:19   Because it's not like this is the only Qi charging mat that has ever been promised to exist. Turns out there's a bunch of them, and it's fine. That's why this is such a funny thing. This product category is already established and quite boring.

00:30:34   AirPower was announced so long ago, and it was announced with the first Qi charging iPhones, and iPhones weren't even the first Qi charging phones, and so even when the iPhones came out, what was it, almost two years ago now? Even when the first Qi iPhones came out, there were already a bunch of Qi products on the market that were pretty decent, and since then there are even more of them that are even cooler and even better.

00:30:58   Now almost all of us have tried Qi charging at some point, and we've decided whether it's right for us or not, and it's fine. It's boring, it's inefficient, we know how it fails and how it doesn't, and it's totally fine.

00:31:13   I don't think the cancellation of AirPower should really change anybody's plans, because if you don't have Qi yet, you probably don't need it, and if you really wanted it, there's a lot of other good options out there. It's fine.

00:31:30   One thing before we leave the topic of AirPower, the promise of the AirPower mat, while not groundbreaking or whatever, it does highlight, I feel like, a next reasonable step in the wireless charging mat thing, which is, it would be nice if you could have a mat where you could put the thing anywhere, because that opens the door to sort of larger mats without predefined spots for things that you really can, just a family can just chuck all their devices onto, right?

00:31:57   If that worked, that would be an improvement to the ecosystem of wireless charging mats. Couldn't get it to work with this particular approach of overlapping rings and yada yada, see Apple's patent. That's a shame, but I think that is a design goal worth pursuing for whatever the next standard is for wireless charging.

00:32:16   So I hope Apple doesn't give up on this entirely, and I think also the market is open for Apple to release boring Qi chargers, because why shouldn't Apple make some more money with nice accessories that match their devices and all that other stuff?

00:32:31   So I'm not entirely down on the idea of Apple building a wireless charging mat, and I kind of like the idea of AirPower. I didn't really like the shape, and I felt like I probably wouldn't have bought one no matter what, but I hope somebody somewhere continues to pursue this, because it seems like a good idea.

00:32:50   Oh, and if anyone wants an alternative, this is an unrequested spot for our friends at Studio Neat, and they are our friends, but I have the non-Qi version of their material dock, and it is lovely and wonderful.

00:33:06   At some point I will upgrade to the Qi version of their material dock, and so you can get just the Qi charger, you can get a Qi charger and a slot for your Apple Watch, and you can have a Qi charger, a slot for your Apple Watch, and a slot for your AirPods.

00:33:20   They are very, very nice, and the two guys that run Studio Neat are friends of ours, and they're good guys. So I definitely recommend the material dock if you're looking for something equivalent.

00:33:29   And finally, if you bought AirPods with a wireless charging case, and you regret it because now there's no AirPower, I bet you probably have pretty good resale value on those AirPods right now.

00:33:40   It seems to be a pretty popular product, people kind of like them, I bet you could sell it at cost even if you're outside the 14-day window, because you burned the 14-day window complaining about it on Twitter and forgot to actually return them.

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00:35:54   Thank you so much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

00:35:56   All right, Jon, tell me what Google Stadia is all about.

00:36:02   This was a couple weeks ago. This has been in the notes for a while. I really didn't want to talk about it, but it's now practically old news.

00:36:08   Like so many Google announcements, they have a big presentation and they tell the world about a thing.

00:36:13   And people talk about it for a bit, and then I guess we all just forget it exists because it didn't actually launch.

00:36:20   And then like I guess six months to eight months to 18 months later, it launches and no one cares. I don't know.

00:36:26   I'm not going to predict the success of this, but I do want to talk about the concept.

00:36:30   Google Stadia, which is a terrible name, is Google's attempt at a streaming video game service.

00:36:37   I don't know what the hell we want to call these things now, but there's been lots of things like this in the past.

00:36:41   I think in fact we've talked about it on this very show. Did we talk about OnLive a couple years ago?

00:36:45   Yeah, I think so.

00:36:47   That was one of them. Sony bought a company that does this and they use it to stream PlayStation 3 games.

00:36:55   Microsoft has one that they're in the process of working on and launching. There's been many attempts at this. Google is not the first one.

00:37:01   What it is is a way for people to play games without running that game on the hardware that's sitting in front of them.

00:37:07   So you do need some hardware in front of you. You need a screen, you need a controller.

00:37:10   The screen could be a TV, it could be a computer, a regular game controller, or it could be a mouse or keyboard or whatever.

00:37:19   But the point is that the actual game runs on a computer in a data center somewhere else.

00:37:26   That computer in the data center has a video card, has a CPU, the game is installed there.

00:37:32   That's where the game runs.

00:37:34   And your inputs to your controller, your keyboard, and your mouse get sent to that computer in the data center.

00:37:40   And then the image that is projected by the video card inside that computer gets sent over the network to you onto your television or whatever.

00:37:49   That's the dream of streaming gaming or whatever you want to call it, remote gaming.

00:37:54   And like I said, all the other services either have done this or do it right now.

00:37:59   I believe if you buy a PlayStation 3 game on your PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 can't play PlayStation 3 games.

00:38:04   The architectures aren't wildly different from each other.

00:38:07   And it doesn't try to emulate it.

00:38:09   I believe it runs that game on PlayStation 3 hardware in a data center somewhere and projects the image to you.

00:38:15   OnLive did the same thing. I forgot the NVIDIA, what the hell is it called?

00:38:19   NVIDIA games now. NVIDIA has a service that does this too.

00:38:23   I use it to play Destiny, the PC version of Destiny on my, quote unquote, on my iMac.

00:38:28   My iMac can't play Destiny. Destiny only runs in Windows on Windows PCs.

00:38:32   But I ran it onto Windows PC in some data center somewhere and NVIDIA's service projected it onto my iMac screen.

00:38:38   Why are there so many of these services? Why do they exist? Why is this a thing that anybody wants to do?

00:38:45   Because this approach looks amazing on paper for tons of reasons.

00:38:52   The first one that most people like is the computer in the data center that runs your game can be really awesome.

00:39:00   It can have the biggest, fastest, hottest video card. It can have a great CPU.

00:39:06   It can just be amazing. And you don't have to buy it.

00:39:10   Somebody else buys it and all you have to buy is something that has a screen and then whatever controller hardware, keyboard or mouse or whatever you want.

00:39:19   And then a network connection and a tiny little bit of software to make it all happen.

00:39:24   So that is cheap. You can build that into a television really easy. You can build it into a controller.

00:39:28   I think Stadia does that. I think you could like the controller itself has all the smarts it needs and it just needs like a screen to control and project on like a television or the Chromecast or whatever.

00:39:37   The hardware you need at home is like nothing by modern standards. You just need a good internet connection and all that stuff.

00:39:43   And then the hardware that runs the game can be shared kind of like ride sharing versus with a car in your driveway.

00:39:51   Your car is useless to everybody when it's just sitting in your driveway doing nothing.

00:39:54   But in the Stadia model, someone else could be driving your car when you're not using it.

00:39:58   So if you're not using your gaming PC, it just sits under your desk.

00:40:01   But in the Stadia model or any of those other things, if you're not using that PC in the data center, somebody else can be using it to play the game that they're playing.

00:40:08   So there's an economy of scale there. So it's not like they have to buy one PC for every user in Stadia.

00:40:13   Like they only need one PC for every simultaneous user, not every total user because half of them are sleeping or whatever.

00:40:19   There are other advantages that are more esoteric but are important to people who are into games.

00:40:24   If you have the game running on a bunch of things in a data center, it's kind of like a LAN party.

00:40:31   Marco remembers these lugging CRTs over to friends houses.

00:40:35   Oh yeah. Hey, me too.

00:40:36   And full towers.

00:40:37   All your computers are within feet of each other.

00:40:40   Ben never had the map installed.

00:40:42   They'll all have the map installed.

00:40:45   They're all running the same version of the game. They all have all the patches.

00:40:51   The latency between the different players in a massively multiplayer game would be phenomenally low because they're literally feet from each other inside a data center.

00:41:00   And they're all up to date and they all have the same version, they all have the same patch.

00:41:03   Additionally, all of the cheating things that are an epidemic on PC gaming become much harder.

00:41:09   Not impossible because nothing makes cheating impossible, but much harder to do when you don't get to...

00:41:15   Like when the game doesn't run on the hardware that you have access to.

00:41:18   The game runs on hardware in a data center and they can make sure that you aren't able to inject malware into there or whatever.

00:41:25   You could still, again, software being software, you could probably send some malicious thing that overflows some buffer

00:41:31   that gets the code to execute into your game thing and yada yada yada.

00:41:34   But it definitely makes cheating much, much harder.

00:41:37   So this seems like an amazing solution for tons of reasons.

00:41:41   It's cheaper for the players, there are economies of scales for the game makers, the gaming experience can be better.

00:41:47   Certain things are just not even possible.

00:41:49   You could have such massively multiplayer things because the latency is in single milliseconds or nanoseconds because you're all in the same data center.

00:41:56   You'd never get that with people spread all over the world.

00:41:59   And then here comes the big but.

00:42:01   But the computer is running in a data center far away from your house.

00:42:07   Which means that every time you press a button on your controller, that button press has to leave your house over your internet connection,

00:42:14   travel over whatever it's traveling over to get to that data center before it lands at the computer and says,

00:42:19   "Oh, they pressed the fire button, I guess I should fire."

00:42:22   And then when you do fire and the little blast comes out of your gun and that image gets rendered,

00:42:27   that image has to go back over that long wire, find its way back to your house and onto your screen.

00:42:31   And that can increase, introduce tremendous lag and to combat lag you can reduce quality and how things don't look as good

00:42:38   and that's why historically all these services that I've described have not been particularly successful.

00:42:43   The ones that play older games, it's like, "Well, I wouldn't be able to play the game at all and it's an older game and it always looked bad."

00:42:49   And people are willing to do some compromises and whatever.

00:42:52   But the benefits are so big, like the monetary benefits, the potential for market share are so big

00:43:03   because if you told people, "Hey, you can play PS4 games and just buy this $10 piece of hardware."

00:43:09   Everyone would have "have a PS4" if it cost $10 or way more people would have a PS4 if it cost $10 instead of $400.

00:43:16   Big benefits, but if you can't overcome those limitations of lag and everything, so far it hasn't passed that critical mass.

00:43:25   So there's a reason game consoles still sell in the millions and game PCs still sell because they provide the best experience

00:43:32   and thus far no streaming game service has gotten over that critical mass to say, "It's not as good as local, but it's good enough that most people say it's fine and want to do it."

00:43:43   Now I'm kind of fascinated by Stadia because Google, not that they are uniquely positioned to do this well, but they are well positioned to do this well.

00:43:54   Google is really good at server-side services, so I have no doubt that the stuff where they run all your games in their data centers will be good.

00:44:02   Google also is pretty good at getting network stuff closer to its users. They do that with their distributed DNS with the 888 and 8844 business or whatever.

00:44:14   They have the ability to put hardware closer to more people than a lot of other companies do because they are invested in having multiple data centers

00:44:25   and partnering with people who have edge proxies and having their own data networks and dark fiber. Amazon similarly is in a similar camp here, but there are very few companies in the world that actually own and control enough data center hardware and networking infrastructure to have a fighting chance to be better than just the average ISP thing.

00:44:46   Because a company like OnLive, there's only so much that they could do. For the most part, they are at the mercy of people's ISPs, which as we all know in the US anyway, suck terribly.

00:44:56   And if your entire service relies on that latency being good or that bandwidth being consistent or not having hiccups or whatever, and you don't really control that, you're just crossing your fingers that things are going to be good enough.

00:45:05   OnLive found out that no, whatever year they went out of business, it's not good enough yet. Are we there yet? Does Google have the fiber-optic connections between its data centers and edge proxies that are close to your house to sort of get from your house onto the really fast Google network and then stay there and bounce the things back around to make the latency acceptable?

00:45:30   Maybe, maybe not, but I think if Stadia doesn't do it and is another one of those Google flops that we don't end up hearing about, people are going to keep trying this.

00:45:41   They're going to keep trying this and it will eventually probably work because there's no reason it can't work acceptably for geographically local areas.

00:45:50   Like if you do the speed of light calculations or whatever, speed of photons and fiber-optic cable calculations, you can make it work acceptably for most kinds of games in reasonable geographic areas if you had an idealized network setup and reasonable software trickery.

00:46:09   I think we're getting close. I played Destiny over Nvidia service. It was not acceptable, but it was way closer than I thought it would be.

00:46:17   I thought it would just be horrendous, but it was to the point where I could play the game and get through levels and do stuff. It was just ugly and a little bit laggy, but it wasn't impossible to play.

00:46:29   It wasn't like, "Well, there's no point in even playing this. It's not even playable at all. I can't make any progress. It's like trying to play by mail or something."

00:46:36   It wasn't like that, but it still wasn't good enough to be acceptable to any reasonable amount of people.

00:46:41   But for other kinds of games, for maybe a more relaxed game that doesn't require twitch reflexes and minimal lag between input and appearing on the screen, Stadia could work.

00:46:53   I just don't think you can build a service on those types of games quite yet. I think you have to get over the threshold to be able to play the most popular genres of games on these platforms in an acceptable way.

00:47:02   So I'm not here to tell you that Stadia is going to be amazing or to sign its death warrant or whatever, but I am here to say that we all collectively, if we live long enough, are going to see company after company after company try this.

00:47:17   And I think eventually you're going to succeed because I think it's actually a good idea that just might not quite work yet.

00:47:22   I have no thoughts on this whatsoever.

00:47:26   I am so glad that Jon knows a lot about this and can talk about it because I'm glad we covered it on the show and I'm glad that I didn't have to say anything useful.

00:47:36   Would you guys sign up for a service like this if it worked to an acceptable level? Does it appeal to you, not having to buy a console or whatever thing you need to attach to your TV?

00:47:48   Yes, but I don't find myself longing to play console games really ever. And if I do, I'm going to play them on my Switch, which I have in my house.

00:47:59   But whatever your Switch costs, 20 bucks. I mean, maybe you don't care. And it could be way lighter because all it would be was like a screen and a controller.

00:48:09   It wouldn't need to have any hot little CPU in there. It wouldn't need to have any cartridge.

00:48:14   Yeah, I see your point. And actually one of the things I did think was very fascinating about the Stadia thing is that the controller, if I understand what little I know of it appropriately,

00:48:25   is that the controller, as you were saying earlier, actually connects to your home or apartment or whatever Wi-Fi.

00:48:31   And you may not need anything but the controller itself and I would presume a Chromecast hooked up to a TV, which you were kind of dancing around earlier.

00:48:40   But it is bananas to me that you wouldn't need the controller connected via Bluetooth to something. That's something connected to the internet. You know what I mean?

00:48:47   The internet is connected directly to the controller, which is just bananas.

00:48:52   I mean, if you had told, what was it, late middle school, early high school, me using Kali to find other people to play Quake with online or whatever it was, or Descent online,

00:49:02   and you told me, "Oh, you're not going to even need a computer for this. Your controller will hook up to the internet and then you'll have just a magical puck on the back of your TV that does the rest."

00:49:11   Like, it is unbelievable technology. And the fact that it even kind of works is mind-blowing. But I just don't care enough about console kind of games to really think that this is for me.

00:49:23   Marco, do you find this appealing?

00:49:26   Only in the sense that we do find ourselves in this household, usually for TIFF, occasionally buying a game console to play only a small number of games on for a podcast or something.

00:49:38   And so if this could help us not buy as many game consoles, then great. Ultimately, that's the only real use I can see for it.

00:49:48   I don't think people who really love console games want this trade-off. People who really love console games don't seem to have a problem buying consoles.

00:49:59   And I don't really think that all the latency potential and, more importantly, the potential for inconsistent levels of play, I don't think that's going to fly with those people.

00:50:14   And everyone else who's not super into console games, I don't think cares enough to even get this service. I don't know. I don't think it's going to do anything for me, ultimately, but maybe someone else will like it.

00:50:28   A good analogy for the trade-off, speaking of people who like consoles, I think is the move from plastic discs to downloadable.

00:50:35   That came with trade-offs too, because plastic discs you can resell, you can lend it to a friend, all sorts of things that if you'd been having the same discussion, you'd be like, "Yeah, downloadable games are probably fine, but given all the compromises that we know they're going to do, I think people would just prefer to get the plastic discs."

00:50:51   In the end, though, I think the last generation of console has shown that people basically just want to download them, and despite complaining all the way about all those things, "Oh, I can't resell my games, I can't lend them out to a friend, I have to worry about my disc space filling up," the convenience for it outweighs the benefits.

00:51:10   All the people who buy console games do it because it's the only way to have that kind of experience. If you got a Magic Stadia that gave you exactly the same experience, they would all use it, despite any other drawbacks, just to not have to pay the money and not to have the thing hooked up to their TV. It would be better.

00:51:26   And Casey, if you could tell your childhood self that it's all done from the controller, you'd be like, "Wow, that's amazing!" And you told them that a really good wireless controller can cost $150, they'd be like, "Oh, no, I'm sad." Wow. 150 space bucks, though.

00:51:42   Yeah, that's an eerily accurate impersonation. I'm very impressed.

00:51:57   I think people's chances have been better than any other company that has tried to do this. If they fail, it should tell everybody, "Let's wait five years before they finally try this again." If you get there first, I think the benefits are big, because I think there is a pretty big market of people like Mario.

00:52:15   People who don't buy consoles, like maybe there's one game I'd be interested in, but do I really want to spend $400 on a console? No, I probably don't. But if it really was $50 for a controller plus $10 for a Chromecast, or even no Chromecast, like if you just buy a modern television that has that built in, it's really just $50 for the controller, it starts to become like an impulse purchase.

00:52:34   And maybe you'll just try it and play a game, and maybe that'll be a gateway to getting into gaming, and then maybe you'll buy the $500 console the next year. I don't know. I see a lot of potential benefits, as do all these companies who keep trying this.

00:52:48   And the other one that I think most people aren't thinking of is because it's speculative, but I believe in the speculation. When you have all the gaming stuff in the data center and they're all nanoseconds away from each other, there are types of games that were previously impossible to do that become possible.

00:53:04   Like I mentioned, the massively multiplayer that's way more massive. Most of the problem with doing multiplayer games is keeping all the people in sync so they all agree about the state of the world and who actually shot who and so on and so forth. That's why, and they have client-side prediction.

00:53:19   It's like, "I haven't heard from the server in a while, but here on the client, I'm going to continue running the simulation as if what I think was happening on the server was happening, and if the server tells me I'm wrong later, I will back that out." Client-side prediction started in the Quake days, and it's a staple of modern multiplayer computing.

00:53:36   If it didn't exist, everybody's experience would be horrendous. But that means there's a limitation of you can't have 10,000 users all in the same instance running around because there's no way that they would be able to keep up with what's going on with all the other players at the same time with a reasonable frame rate.

00:53:51   Put that all in the data center, new kinds of games become possible, games that no one has ever played before because back when we were having LAN parties, multiplayer at all was an amazing thing, and there were no 10,000 players in the same instance type of game because you couldn't fit 10,000 PCs into your friend's den, right?

00:54:07   So there is a potential combination of someone gets a service right enough, and also they have a killer app that includes a genre game that has never been possible before, and that would be the perfect storm that would make a lot of money for whoever gets there first.

00:54:28   It could be an established player like Sony or Microsoft, it could be a new player like Google, probably won't be Apple because, come on. But I am actually looking forward to that sometime in my life because I see the benefits and I believe in it and I understand how all these companies can get invested.

00:54:42   And hey, that company that did it and got bought by Sony, they basically had a successful business on it. They built this product and got bought out by a big company and probably made lots of money, and Sony has a value add to their platform.

00:54:54   They didn't have a backward compatibility strategy for PS4, but they wanted to be able to continue to sell people PS3 games because there are some good ones, and they bought that company and found a way to do it.

00:55:03   And people mostly just, and I am assuming I am right here because I have never actually done this myself because I have an actual PS3, so I have never played them in emulation, but assuming I am right, there is a success story of moderate proportions for a company that did this.

00:55:16   So, good luck to Google.

00:55:19   We are sponsored this week by Away. For $20 off a suitcase, visit awaytravel.com/ATP and use promo code ATP during checkout.

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00:57:08   That's awaytravel.com/atp, promo code ATP for $20 off a suitcase.

00:57:13   Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show, because this season, everyone wants to get away.

00:57:18   [Music]

00:57:21   Steven Kim writes, "Hey, do you have any tips on booking a Disney World vacation?"

00:57:25   So, this is one of those things that everyone has their own secret sauce in order to plan the perfect Disney World vacation.

00:57:34   I, too, have my own secret sauce, which I will share with you. But, this is just the way I like to do it.

00:57:40   This will not work for everyone, and probably won't work for the rough draft of Disney World that some people on the West Coast call "Disneyland."

00:57:48   So, if you're going to the one true Disney experience, which is Disney World, then you probably want to consider a couple things.

00:57:55   First of all, you almost certainly want to stay somewhere on site, which is almost certainly going to be a whole pile more money.

00:58:02   But, if you stay on site, then you have the advantage of going to what Disney calls "extra magic hours,"

00:58:07   which means if you stay on site, they let you go into certain parks early, and they let you stay in certain parks late, which is very cool.

00:58:15   Something I've tried out this trip, because we are going to be going to Disney later this year, something I've tried out for the very first time,

00:58:24   and I cannot stress enough, I don't know how this is going to go for us, but we have booked using this service.

00:58:31   Disney seems to have acknowledged that we have a trip planned, but there's this thing called "David's Vacation Club Rentals,"

00:58:39   and there are other equivalents to it as well. This particular company happens to be Canadian, so that makes them more trustworthy in my book.

00:58:45   But, the idea is that Disney has its own timeshare thing, which is the Disney Vacation Club.

00:58:51   If you pay Disney a whole pile of money, upfront, and then a whole pile of money every year, then you can stay at Disney, I guess, for free or for cheap or something like that.

00:59:00   And I don't really understand how or why, but I guess maybe it's use it or lose it or something like that, but occasionally you'll be a Disney Vacation Club "owner,"

00:59:08   and you'll want to not use your points or what have you, your reservation for one year.

00:59:15   And in order to kind of get your money back, you can go to a third-party service, almost like an escrow or a matchmaker, that will say,

00:59:24   "Hey, you have points, and you don't want them. Casey wants to stay somewhere, but he doesn't belong and doesn't have any points. Let's meet in the middle, and I'll take a little cut from each of you."

00:59:36   And that's what we've done. So we booked something using David's Vacation Club Rentals.

00:59:40   We have paid about half of what it would cost to go directly to Disney to book the room that we've booked.

00:59:46   So in that sense, we're doing great. If we get to Disney World and they say, "Oh, we have no idea who you are or why you're here," then that's going to change real quick.

00:59:54   So hopefully it works out. Think happy thoughts.

00:59:57   The other thing I would say is that if you stay on site, you can use Disney's Magical Express, which is their fancy term for you put a special tag on your luggage when you leave your home airport,

01:00:08   and the next time you see that luggage is when Disney brings it into your hotel room.

01:00:12   You do not pick it up at the airport. You just trust that Disney will get it and put it in your room, which is amazing.

01:00:18   I definitely recommend that. I also do recommend the Disney Dining Plan. It is not the most cost-effective thing in the world.

01:00:25   When Aaron and I went last, we computed the equivalency, and it's the dining plan that we got, which is the middle-of-the-road standard dining plan.

01:00:33   We would have paid maybe a hint less if we just ala-carded everything.

01:00:38   But for us, I like the idea of not having to nickel and dime ourselves. "Do I really, really, really want that appetizer, or is it not worth the five bucks?"

01:00:45   And so the idea of the dining plan is you just pay for everything up front and not have to worry about it.

01:00:49   That is kind of—oh, and the other thing I would say—sorry, this is the final thought.

01:00:53   The way I like to plan each and every day is that I will decide where I want to have dinner, in what restaurant, in what Disney park that will be, and I will work backwards from there.

01:01:05   So as an example, I really love the 50s Primetime Cafe, which is in what I call MGM. I think it's actually called Hollywood Studios.

01:01:11   Maybe on Tuesday, I'm going to Hollywood Studios. Or I should say on Tuesday, I'm going to eat at the 50s Primetime Cafe.

01:01:19   That means I'm going to end my day at Hollywood Studios, so I will plan that afternoon being at Hollywood Studios.

01:01:26   And typically, I would do somewhere else in the morning, a different park in the morning, go back, maybe do a little siesta in the middle of the day for me and the kids, and then go to Hollywood Studios in the evening.

01:01:38   So that's many words to say. I like to start from dinner and work my way back, and that kind of works out well for me, and then obviously use FastPass and FastPass Plus wherever possible to pre-book things.

01:01:49   It's a lot, and I haven't been in a few years, but we're going this year, and I'm really excited because I'm of the opinion that Disney World is kind of like the geographic equivalent of Christmas, where it is possible to be in a bad mood at Christmas, but you've got to try real hard.

01:02:02   For me, and I'm expecting that John and/or Marco will argue with me momentarily, for me, it is hard for me to be in a bad mood at Disney. If I try hard enough, I can do it, but it's hard.

01:02:12   So that's kind of my quick and dirty. Steven, if you want more tips, then hopefully the listeners will send tweets to you and not me, but that's my two cents.

01:02:23   John, you are the only one that's been to Disney any time recently other than me. Any thoughts on that, or was that all Tina that did all the work there?

01:02:30   She did most of it, but we also actually did engage with one of those Disney planner people. Their whole job is to help people plan Disney vacations, which helped a lot.

01:02:43   My only tip, I've only been there three times in my life and only once as an adult, and my only tip is the tip I gave when I came back from the trip that I think worked out well for me, which is Disney vacations are ridiculously expensive.

01:02:56   Oh, yes.

01:02:58   Everything costs way more than you think it's going to, especially if you're there with kids because kids see things and they want a thing at the gift shop, or they want to do an activity.

01:03:10   There's all sorts of ways that you can imagine going to Disney and finding ways to save money by not doing the meal plan, not staying on site, not letting your kids have a thousand souvenirs, so on and so forth.

01:03:21   My plan going in, which I think worked out well, was to accept that this was going to be a very expensive vacation, to save money for 10 years before we went, and to say, "When I'm there, when I'm on the vacation, don't worry about it.

01:03:39   Don't look at the prices on things. Don't bargain with the kids about you can have one toy here or two toys there." Not to say that it's a free-for-all making of everything in the world, but essentially the default answer to everything was yes.

01:03:51   Because it's not like you go there all the time, and I didn't want the vacation to be a series of fights between parents and kids about what we should or shouldn't do, and I didn't want the parents to be fretting about, "Oh, do you want to go to this restaurant? Oh, this is expensive."

01:04:04   We did a bunch of stuff. We did the Kennedy Space Center we were in there. We did the thing that has Harry Potter Land Universal, whatever.

01:04:13   And we did Disney. We did all the things. I remember the first time this came to a test was when the kids wanted to have butter beer at Harry Potter Land, and people who haven't been to the Harry Potter thing.

01:04:26   If you went there without doing this mental prep that I said, and the kids were like, "Oh, I want to have a butter beer," you're like, "Okay, fine," or whatever, and you find out each one is $12.

01:04:36   Oh! That's the point where you're really testing, "I'm just going to say yes to everything. I'm not going to care that it's $12. I'm just going to say yes."

01:04:46   And that, I feel like, was the right move. This was the most expensive vacation we've ever been on, by far, but again, we did actually save money for a long time. We had a vacation fund and we were just filling it up and filling it up and filling it up.

01:04:59   And we did it at the one time when the kids were the right age to still appreciate Disneyland and everything. And it was, you know, I feel like it was a successful vacation. So try that.

01:05:11   Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more, that it is unreasonably, just ridiculously expensive. Just heinously expensive. And I can totally understand if, you know, whoever you are, if you decide, "Nah, there's no way it's worth that kind of money."

01:05:29   To me, I think it is. I mean, we honeymooned in Disney. I took Erin to Disney for her 30th birthday. I love Disney. It makes me genuinely very, very happy. If your math is different on that, that's fine. That's totally fine.

01:05:44   But what Jon said, could not agree more. It is going to be twice as expensive as you think it could ever possibly be. Just save and embrace it, which is exactly what we've done.

01:05:54   Yeah, because that can, I mean, it might not be worth it to people, and they might have better ways to spend the money. Find, you know, spend money in a different way. But if you're going to do it, like, it can, you know, you said it's hard to be in a bad mood, Disney, but you see families that are all in fights about stuff, or like kids are cranky about things, and you see adults who fret about them.

01:06:10   If you're the type of adult who's always, like, trying to find, like, "Oh, if we go this hour, we can get it cheaper," or "I don't want to pay for parking, so I don't want to go here," like, you know if it's the type of person who's always trying to find a way to save money, which is fine. Like, it's a good way to live. That's how you, you know, save money.

01:06:24   Especially, like I just said, if you're the type of person who saves money for literally 10 years for a Disney vacation, you're probably the type of person who doesn't want to pay $12 for that butter beer. Like, I understand where it's coming from, but, like, I feel like it will make your vacation less enjoyable if you're constantly thinking about that.

01:06:38   So you just have to, you just have to somehow let go of it for, like, for a couple of days, or however long your vacation is, for that period of time, just let it go. It's like a true vacation sense.

01:06:48   [music]

01:06:52   Andrew Wade writes, "Hey, what do you use for posting or sharing photos these days?" I feel like we get asked this question weekly because the answer changes weekly.

01:07:00   For me, when I'm sharing things privately to a group, it's iCloud, shared iCloud photo libraries. I might have that terminology wrong, but the thing where you can share an album with other people.

01:07:13   And that's what we've done. We have an album for the kids that we've shared with family and friends, and that's where we do kind of private sharing.

01:07:20   For public sharing, even though Facebook is just a total cesspool of a company, I still do love Instagram and use Instagram. And yes, I understand that that's hypocritical, but whatever.

01:07:31   Marco, I'm sorry we ignored you on that last question, but what do you use for posting and sharing photos these days?

01:07:37   I'm the same. I use Instagram for public sharing and iCloud photo library for private sharing.

01:07:44   John?

01:07:45   Maybe we haven't changed that much. I saw this question and I thought it was a good idea to check in because it is like the eternal problem.

01:07:50   I take pictures. I have people who want to see pictures, whether they be family or friends. How do I let them see them?

01:07:56   Thus far, my technique has been successful in that I've been able to get an iOS device or a macOS device into the hands of all the relatives who want to see the photos.

01:08:11   So I'm able to use Apple's iCloud shared photo stream things, which are mostly terrible. I don't like how they work. I don't like the interface to them.

01:08:21   I don't like setting them up. I don't like using the photos to deal with them. But it has the advantage that when I post pictures to it, I know all my relatives will get a notification on their Mac or iOS device that says, "Hey, new pictures," and they'll just poke at it with their finger or their mouse cursor, and they will be able to see pictures.

01:08:36   The reason I keep using it is because it is successful at getting photos in front of the eyeballs of the people I want to see it. That's all just private.

01:08:43   The only real downside is my brother uses the same thing. Not that he takes more pictures of his kids, but he publishes more pictures of his kids.

01:08:52   I'm not sure if you've encountered this, but the iCloud shared photo album things have a limit in the number of pictures you can have in them.

01:08:59   Once you hit that limit, all you can do is delete older photos from it. He starts a new one of those shared photo things every year.

01:09:06   Every year it's like, "2019 won, 2018 won." It's kind of silly. I wish it was just a never-ending stream, but it's not. So be aware of that.

01:09:15   For everything else, I don't really share photos in any other capacity. I do have an Instagram, and I post two pictures to it a year, three pictures to it a year.

01:09:25   But that's not really sharing. That's more like a hobby of, if I find a picture that I feel is Instagrammable, which is a very difficult to define thing that is totally personal to me,

01:09:36   I will do it. But otherwise, I don't really do any public sharing of photos.

01:09:41   I would like to add as well that with the iCloud photo libraries, so Aaron's entire family is on Android, and what we've done is we have enabled the thing where you can have a web presence, if you will, for your photo library.

01:09:59   So there is a very, very hard to guess web URL that is a version of our photo library.

01:10:05   And so what we've done is for Aaron's parents, we've put bookmarks on their computers, and every day or two, they'll wake up and go to their computers and check the photo library link and see if there's any new pictures.

01:10:17   It's not as nice as the iOS users, where it's actually beamed and there's a notification. It's beamed directly to your phone, there's a notification, et cetera.

01:10:24   But at least it still gives them the option. So you don't have to be all in on iOS, but what John described is way nicer.

01:10:31   All right, Jack Mordage writes, "Hey, when was the last time any of you launched disk utility and checked your boot drive health?

01:10:37   And also, does John miss the feeling of a recently defragmented disk? I didn't think that defragging happened on Mac OS ever. Is that not true?"

01:10:45   It certainly did. It was happening on your, it was happening, before APFS, it was happening on your Mac all the time, whether you liked it or not.

01:10:51   Oh, HFS Plus did it?

01:10:54   HFS Plus eventually added auto defragging, but there were actual utilities, like Norton Utilities, that would do non-auto defragging, and it was very satisfying to watch.

01:11:03   You know, I, maybe it was a placebo, but I remember not infrequently defragging my drive. This was early Windows, is that right, or was this DOS?

01:11:12   I don't, no, it was DOS. I don't remember. Whatever it was. It was a long time ago, and I remember defragment, defragmenting my drive, and it genuinely feeling snappier after the fact.

01:11:23   So if you're not familiar with what this is, when files are written to disk, or at least this is the way it was 15, 20 years ago, when files, more than that even, yikes, when files were written to disk, they tended to have little portions strewn all throughout the physical platter.

01:11:39   So literally, you know, if you were to map where these files physically sit on the drive, they are, they were often at the time strewn all over the place.

01:11:49   So if you were trying to read those files, you had to physically move objects in the real world. Now, granted, you had to move them very, very, very small amounts of space, but you still had to move things in order to get all the pieces of this file off the disk.

01:12:03   And what defragmenting did was, guess what, it moved all these files so that all the contiguous pieces were right next to each other.

01:12:09   And, again, maybe it was a placebo, but I remember thinking, holy smokes, this computer feels genuinely faster after having done this.

01:12:17   I don't know if that was the same way on the Mac. I don't remember if this was DOS, I think it was DOS, maybe it was Windows, but whatever it was, it made a big difference to me.

01:12:23   Did you have that experience, Marco, that it made a big difference?

01:12:25   You know, I thought it did, but I think it was probably mostly placebo. I mean, the reality is computers were so damn slow with everything back then that, like, you had enough time to think about whether it was making a difference or not.

01:12:41   And it was, I don't know, I would do it because I thought it was cool and you'd watch the little animation of all the blocks moving around and everything, but really I don't think it was making a noticeable difference.

01:12:55   Like, I'm sure if you benchmarked things, maybe you'd see a difference then, but, like, I don't think it was actually really noticeable in real world use.

01:13:04   I think it was noticeable up until the point, and maybe this was before your time even, when the connection between addressable location on disk and the physical location on disk got broken.

01:13:20   Way back in the early days, there was, like, whatever, cylinder and sector and all these things that actually mapped directly to the physical reality on a spinning platter and a little disk head, and as drive mechanisms evolved, that connection got severed.

01:13:34   And so there were sort of logical addresses that the drive decided how they physically mapped to the disk, and the OS and everything else involved couldn't really know the intimate details of the disk because the hard disk was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're speaking to me in the disk protocol, but, like, I'll hand it to you."

01:13:49   "But, like, I'll handle where the data goes. Like, I've got buffers here, I've got a little CPU, and I've got these platters, and I'm handling the storage."

01:13:58   In the same way that SSD is only less extreme, where things were abstracted.

01:14:03   So that really was the death knell for defraggers, because they would mostly defrag at the logical level, and you really had no idea whether they were contiguous at the physical level.

01:14:11   Probably they were, like, it was probably mostly straightforward, but once you broke the connection, it became tenuous.

01:14:17   I felt like I, anyway, back when the connection was very direct, I felt like I felt the difference when the disk was really shredded and didn't have a lot of free space.

01:14:26   Mostly just because for writing new data, it would have this big continuous free space where it could write it, and it wouldn't have to write it in a million places.

01:14:32   Like, you could literally hear the hard drive head. This is something most people, very young people listening to this program won't know.

01:14:38   How much of dealing with computers in the old days wasn't audio experience? You could hear how they were performing.

01:14:44   Like, you hear an internal combustion image, you also would know. How you could hear if an internal combustion engine is healthy, right?

01:14:50   How you could hear if it's misfiring, or if a belt drive is squeaky, or all sorts of things you could hear, and you would know the health.

01:14:58   So you'd hear the floppy drive grinding, you'd hear the hard disk heads moving, you'd know if your machine was swapping, like, before you even noticed it on the screen.

01:15:06   And you'd know if you launched a program and you heard that tickety tickety tickety, and you're like, "Wow, that is ticking way more frequently than I think it should launching this program."

01:15:14   And you defrag your disk and you launch the same application, it would be fewer ticks, and it would seem faster, and probably was measurably faster.

01:15:21   So in extreme cases, I think it definitely did help, but there was definitely the placebo effect, and honestly, I was mostly doing it to see the Norton defrag animation.

01:15:29   And it's still a thing that you need to do, like, why did they add an auto-defrag to HFS+, which is like, nobody runs those utilities except for computer nerds,

01:15:36   but if you allow your disk to get massively fragmented, it does eventually impact performance at the extremes, where everything is just Swiss cheese and the largest continuous block is like tiny little slivers, so if you write anything anywhere, it's spread all over the disk.

01:15:49   Luckily with SSDs, the connection between logical and physical storage is entirely broken, and there is no head-seeking around, even though there are still actual performance differences in reading from one place to another, because SSDs are broken up into banks that have different characteristics, yada yada yada.

01:16:05   It's not the type of thing that you can control from software with a defragging thing.

01:16:10   Anyway, the other part of this question was, when was the last time any of you launched a disk utility? You two want to answer that?

01:16:15   I don't think I have in at least a year or two, for anything other than like, formatting a USB key.

01:16:22   Yeah, certainly within the time I've owned this iMac Pro, I have not done it once.

01:16:26   Yeah, unsurprisingly, I have done it fairly recently. Remember that I'm sitting in front of a Mac now that runs HFS+ and not ABFS, because it's running El Capitan, because that's the newest OS it can run officially.

01:16:37   How amazing is it that we finally got your new file system and you haven't been able to run it yet?

01:16:43   And all of us now, everyone else in the world is running APFS, except you.

01:16:47   I've got it on the other computer, it's fine.

01:16:50   But yeah, it's, you know what I'm waiting for. Anyway, surprisingly, I do run it on my boot disk, but surprisingly the main thing I run it on and the most recent disk that I ran, I think last week, I run it on my local time machine backup.

01:17:05   Because it's really important to me that that not have HFS+ corruption, for obvious reasons. And yes, I have more than one time machine backup, but yada yada.

01:17:14   But boot drive, I think I ran it on this maybe last month. Time machine drive, I think I ran it last week.

01:17:21   I don't think I've run Disk Utility in recent memory on the APFS Max, mostly because I assume it's not necessary, but maybe I'm wrong, maybe I need to develop new habits there.

01:17:32   But any computer that runs HFS+, my habit is to run it on a fairly regular basis. And it does find problems and it does fix them, and I feel better about it.

01:17:41   Alright, thanks to our sponsors this week. Away, Molecule, and Fracture. And we will see you next week.

01:17:49   [music]

01:17:51   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:18:01   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

01:18:12   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM, and if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

01:18:30   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A, it's accidental. They didn't mean to, accidental, tech podcast so long.

01:18:50   Alright Marco, you probably got a little bit of feedback about your diet, cause I've seen some of it.

01:19:00   Oh my god, Marco I just want to preface this by saying that I'm not a diet expert, but.

01:19:02   Let me tell you exactly what you need to do.

01:19:04   Yeah, we heard from a lot of people, and I want to thank people, you know, most people were well-intentioned, and I did get a lot of good advice.

01:19:11   You know, last week I had mentioned that I had this high cholesterol result, and I had been doing basically almost a keto diet, and so I was cutting back on that.

01:19:20   And the doctor recommended a "100% plant-based diet", which the vegans immediately wrote in to tell me why that's not vegan.

01:19:28   So thank you, the vegans, for clarifying why they don't call it that.

01:19:32   Sorry vegans, we had a lot of things written to us, much of which conflicted, but everybody in the world wrote in to tell me that the link between cholesterol, diet, and health is way more complicated than we used to think.

01:19:50   And so therefore I should not draw major conclusions from one simple cholesterol test.

01:19:54   So I've done a lot of research and reading since then, I even got my Kindle out, and I've been reading books.

01:20:01   And it's crazy, right? And I think the best of what we know about food and health today has a few consistent themes that are pretty well supported by medical and scientific evidence.

01:20:15   So number one, eating a lot of carbohydrates is bad for us, especially in the forms of sugars or refined flours, which are basically sugars.

01:20:24   And that's what I was doing before the low-carb diet.

01:20:26   A year ago I was eating lots of pizza and stuff like that, so lots of carbs.

01:20:31   I made a dramatic change there and it worked very well for both me and my wife.

01:20:35   But we also know from modern science, and this is where I'm going to lose the keto people, that eating a ton of meat and dairy is also bad for us, just bad in different ways.

01:20:48   So setting aside the massive ethical and environmental costs of meat, which we really shouldn't be setting aside because they are truly massive, but setting aside those for now,

01:20:59   there is very strong evidence from many studies performed over decades that meat and dairy-heavy diets have their own significant risks and problems.

01:21:10   And that is what I've been doing recently. I've been doing way too much meat and cheese.

01:21:13   So the only kind of food that science and everybody can agree on that is good to eat a lot of is plants, and especially greens and vegetables, and especially in their whole and unprocessed state.

01:21:25   Now, we knew this already, and we've been eating tons of greens and vegetables even when we were doing the keto diet, which is why I usually didn't say we were doing keto per se,

01:21:34   because true keto dieters will even count the carbs in vegetables, and they will limit their intake of spinach and kale, and that's just stupid.

01:21:44   We decided that was stupid. We're not going to do that because that's stupid.

01:21:47   So anyway, sorry keto people. I'm going to anger everybody with this.

01:21:51   So the right approach for me, and I'm going to pull a case here and say, "This might be different for you. I'm just saying what's working for me.

01:22:00   Everyone can do their own thing because I'm not going to commit to this." Anyway, so the right approach for me doesn't need to be never eating meat or cheese or eggs again,

01:22:11   but we need to eat a lot less than we did before.

01:22:14   For instance, to give you some idea, instead of going to the barbecue restaurant twice a week and loading up on leftovers each time to eat over the following few days,

01:22:23   maybe I only go to the barbecue restaurant once a week or every two weeks, and maybe I only eat what I can eat there and not bring home leftovers.

01:22:31   Maybe instead of eating three scrambled eggs with meat and cheese every morning, I should only have two eggs without meat and cheese.

01:22:40   You know, like there's lots of room for reduction here.

01:22:43   On the barbecue place, you probably also don't want to do some reading on the cross-nut genetic effects of sort of carbonized blackened smoked meats. It's not a good story.

01:22:53   Yeah, I know. We were having large quantities of meat and cheese in almost every meal and also snacking on meat and cheese between almost every meal.

01:23:08   So it turns out that is too much. So goal number one here is a significant reduction in meat, cheese, and eggs,

01:23:18   but that isn't really very hard because we were really being excessive with those things before.

01:23:24   Now, I also feel horrible whenever I eat a carb-heavy meal these days.

01:23:32   So I don't think reintroducing grains, even whole grains, as the main source of the bulk that fills us up in our diet is a very good idea.

01:23:42   I think it is not wise to ignore the very strong signals that my body is sending on that.

01:23:47   So I think the best science and knowledge we have today shows that too much carb intake is generally worse for our health than meat and dairy intake.

01:23:57   Now, we were definitely going overboard with the meat and cheese before. So for the last week, we spent the first five days as 100% plant-based,

01:24:07   and we felt terrible, and there were lots of bad side effects to that that I don't want to get into on the show because that's what meat buttons are for.

01:24:15   And the last two days, we decided that was not working for us, and so we introduced small amounts of eggs and dairy.

01:24:23   We haven't reintroduced meat yet, but small amounts of eggs and dairy, simple things like we had two eggs for breakfast instead of having a pile of garbage for oatmeal or whatever.

01:24:32   Two eggs for breakfast, nice and easy, and a little sprinkle of cheddar cheese in my salad in the afternoon.

01:24:38   That level of introduction of these things. And we switched back to half and half for Tiff's Coffee instead of fake milk.

01:24:44   Even just having those changes, we feel way better than we did being full plant-based.

01:24:50   So I think we can find a really nice balance here. We are going to be relying much more heavily on greens and vegetables to be the bulk of what we're eating most of the time,

01:25:01   to be the things that mostly fill us up, because that's what we've been doing the last couple days has been great.

01:25:06   And we feel great without reintroducing a bunch of carbs and also while having a big reduction in meat and cheese.

01:25:15   Now, so I do think, you know, while we're not going to go 100% vegan or vegetarian or plant-based or whatever else,

01:25:23   I do think that most of the science does say the more plants you can eat and the less of everything else, the better.

01:25:28   It's well supported by decades of science and medicine and research and everything.

01:25:32   And I think that doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with low-carb principles, which I think now we know are generally a good idea.

01:25:40   And so that's what we're trying now, basically a hybrid of still being low-carb, not going too crazy overboard on meat and cheese,

01:25:49   and using plants for most of the food we eat. And so that's what we're doing now and I'll let you know how it goes.

01:25:55   Somebody pointed us to this article, and I don't remember who it was, I think it was somebody talking to you,

01:26:02   but they pointed us to an article from January of 2007 and it's in the New York Times, it's called "Unhappy Meals."

01:26:10   Oh, the Michael Pollan article. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, basically what we're switching to is the Michael Pollan diet,

01:26:16   which is the one where he summarizes his advice basically as "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

01:26:22   That's literally word for word the very first paragraph of this article.

01:26:27   And I've only read the first four or five paragraphs, but it literally, just like Marco says, begins "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

01:26:33   And it continues a little later, "I'll try to resist, but we'll go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice.

01:26:38   Like, a little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side dish than as a main,

01:26:42   and you're much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products.

01:26:45   That's what I mean by the recommendation of 'eat food.'"

01:26:47   And I don't know what it was about this, I don't recall having read this in the past, and even just the first couple of paragraphs of this,

01:26:54   I was like, "Huh. How did I not look at it this way in the past?"

01:26:59   How did you avoid this article for so many years is the big question.

01:27:02   Well, knowing my awful memory, I probably have read it 15 times and just don't recall it, but I do plan to read the whole thing.

01:27:09   Well, you should read it. Anybody who hasn't read it, you should read it. It's very long, but it's very good. It's worth reading.

01:27:14   And I think, you know, this article is now 12 years old, but I think everything we've learned since then has mostly supported it,

01:27:23   or entirely supported it. Like, it has aged very well.

01:27:26   I think the areas of research around low-carb diets, high-fat diets, have been more advanced since then,

01:27:34   but for the most part, it holds up pretty well, and there's a lot of good stuff in there.

01:27:40   The problem with a lot of this food science stuff is it does come and go in phases where one thing is bad and one thing is good.

01:27:46   I think the thing over my lifetime that has had the most consistent scientific evidence is the thing that nobody wants to talk about

01:27:52   because it is just depressing, which is basically setting aside diseases and things that will kill you like heart attacks or whatever.

01:28:02   If you're just concerned with what will make me live the longest, it's unfortunately calorie restriction.

01:28:09   Like, massive calorie restriction. If you want to make people or lab mice live for longer than their peers,

01:28:17   again, setting aside the normal disease that takes them all out in equal measure, calorie restriction.

01:28:23   Calorie restriction is not fun. I'm not talking about like, "Oh, I'll eat a little bit less."

01:28:27   I'm talking about calorie restriction where, not that you're starving to death, but maybe close,

01:28:32   and they always do those studies, and it's like, "We did this, and look, these mice live like 25% longer."

01:28:39   And everyone's like, "Okay, well, that's not actionable because no one wants to be hungry."

01:28:44   But you'll live longer. It's like, "Yeah, well, hunger. No, take a pass on the hunger."

01:28:49   So everyone's like, "Should I eat oat bran? Tell me about that."

01:28:52   I'm not into the whole being hungry all the time, and honestly, it's not good. You shouldn't do this.

01:28:56   I'm just saying from a scientific perspective, that has been very consistent.

01:28:59   The carbs versus plants versus all the other stuff, it's mostly been consistent.

01:29:04   Vegetarian, Marko's right, the plant-based things are mostly been good, but it depends on what you're looking at.

01:29:09   You're like, "Yeah, but if you're not growing your plants yourself, stuff it with pesticides,

01:29:12   and they're all going to kill you from cancer, so it doesn't matter how healthy you are."

01:29:16   It's very difficult with the food stuff to get an idea of so many different factors,

01:29:21   but the calorie restriction I always love because it's a trade-off that most humans aren't willing to make,

01:29:28   and honestly probably shouldn't be willing to make, because being hungry all the time

01:29:31   has such detrimental effects on your mental life that it doesn't really matter if you actually live longer.

01:29:39   I will say, on that topic, one of the books I've been reading is How Not to Die by Michael Greger,

01:29:46   and that's actually quite good.

01:29:48   Almost every chapter, it basically goes like, number one, How Not to Die from Heart Disease, chapter two,

01:29:53   How Not to Die from Cancer, and every chapter is how to greatly reduce your risk as much as possible,

01:29:59   and it's almost entirely about diet, and it's almost entirely basically saying 100% plant-based diet

01:30:05   is the way to go for everything, and there's parts of it that I think have been not disproven,

01:30:12   but could use a bit more commentary, and I don't agree with all of it,

01:30:17   but it's a good read to at least know what your risks are with certain things,

01:30:21   and I've also really enjoyed, in this week of research on this topic, on YouTube,

01:30:27   this guy named Ivor Cummins, who does, I'm not entirely sure what his medical credentials are,

01:30:36   I think he's just a nerd, but he does a lot of stuff about looking at studies scientifically

01:30:43   and what the actual risks are for heart disease and how pretty much it all comes down to insulin resistance

01:30:48   and problems that arise from that and everything, and so it's very good, and he does a number of things.

01:30:54   I don't think it's wise to follow any one person 100% to the letter in this area,

01:31:01   because as John said, everyone has different things, and these things change over time,

01:31:04   so it's worth looking at people who are looking at data and larger trends

01:31:09   and looking at science and things behind it and really why things work the way they do in our bodies

01:31:14   and our best knowledge at the time, and that's why I'm looking more at consistent themes

01:31:19   that all the best science seems to agree on, and it's basically like eating a lot of carbs is really bad for us,

01:31:28   and also there's a lot of risks involved in eating a lot of meat and cheese.

01:31:31   I think the carb one is going to turn around in like five to ten years.

01:31:34   That one feels like a cycle to me. The problem with this whole domain is success in this domain,

01:31:39   and we just mentioned it, success in this domain has a lot to do with what we would now consider meme-y-ness,

01:31:43   like the Michael Pollan thing, he's not super qualified to tell the world what to eat,

01:31:46   but he had a snappy, memorable slogan that has some reasonable foundation,

01:31:51   has a kernel of truth behind it, and that's the one we all remember.

01:31:54   It's marketing and sales, and with a good intent. Michael Pollan probably has a good intent, right?

01:31:59   But that's why we have all these other fads of like, "Oh, you can't eat eggs," or "You should eat all eggs."

01:32:05   If you had told people about keto 15, 20 years ago, they'd be like, "What? A diet where you just eat all that?"

01:32:12   It's the exact opposite of what they were telling everybody before. It was like, "Don't even eat egg whites.

01:32:17   Forget about the yolks. The yolks will kill you. Don't even have egg whites."

01:32:20   And then keto is like, "No, only eggs." It's like a total reversal.

01:32:25   And then carbs and gluten, I feel like that's going to go around in a cycle too.

01:32:29   There is a consistent theme under it all, but through that whole thing,

01:32:32   the people who are successful in the market of telling people what to eat are very often successful.

01:32:37   Even people like Michael Pollan are very often successful for reasons that have nothing to do with science.

01:32:41   So you really have to try to take the broad view and try to feel like,

01:32:45   "Well, all these people are trying to make money telling me how to live,

01:32:49   but I feel like the accumulation of evidence is probably leading in the direction of Marco's assessment of,

01:32:55   "Probably plants are good."

01:32:58   The Michael Pollan thing caught on because it's mean and because it agrees with a lot of the science,

01:33:03   but you can't really get hung up on the details.

01:33:06   You have to just be resigned to the fact that eventually there will be some study that says

01:33:10   when you eat an all-plant diet in the current agricultural system,

01:33:12   your chances of cancer grow up to a degree that negates the longevity effects of the plant-based diet.

01:33:17   You never know when that's lurking out there.

01:33:20   So I feel like you shouldn't ever feel like you have it figured out and shouldn't trace trends too much.

01:33:26   That's why the wussy moderation in all things diet is like.

01:33:32   It's like index funds, right? Don't pick individual stocks because you're going to mess it up.

01:33:38   You don't have enough information and it's too hard to know,

01:33:42   but in general, an index fund across all of them is probably going to be mostly okay.

01:33:46   That's why I tend not to like diets that 100% eliminate a certain kind of food

01:33:50   because it's the equivalent of picking individual stocks.

01:33:53   This may be a horrible analogy.

01:33:55   Well, it is. There's certain things like moderation in all things.

01:33:58   Really? How about heroin? Do you want some heroin?

01:34:01   In foods. Moderation in all kinds of foods.

01:34:04   It's eliminating like, "I don't eat any fish, I don't eat any meat, I don't eat any plants, I don't eat any vegetables."

01:34:09   You're really putting your chips down on a particular number on the roulette wheel instead of,

01:34:17   my analogies are falling apart. You know what I'm saying?

01:34:20   The reality is there are these few things that everyone seems to agree on.

01:34:26   Eating as many plants as you possibly can, especially when those plants are not grains and corn,

01:34:33   that's a really good idea most of the time.

01:34:35   I don't think any diet has really ever legitimately found that,

01:34:40   "Oh, you know what? It turns out we should eat less kale."

01:34:43   That has never happened. That will never happen.

01:34:45   Well, I was going to say, the pesticide and the agricultural practices are part of the wild card in that, right?

01:34:49   I don't think anyone's going to say that the vegetables are particularly bad,

01:34:52   although there are some that have weird chemicals that have different reactions

01:34:55   with different people's tolerances for them that can really mess you up.

01:34:58   But we don't grow our own vegetables.

01:35:01   Everything we grow is covered with pesticides, and those pesticides are "safe to use"

01:35:07   according to politicians that are massively lobbied by the companies that put the pesticides.

01:35:13   So there's always something lurking, right? It's like, "Yes, but…"

01:35:17   So that's why you feel like you really have to spread it around.

01:35:20   And same thing with the meat filled with antibiotics. Nothing is safe, right?

01:35:24   So you just try to spread the risk.

01:35:26   Yeah, that's actually pretty good advice.

01:35:30   And ultimately, humans are omnivores. We were made to do a lot of this stuff.

01:35:34   But I think what we found over and over again is that we were not made for the American diet.

01:35:38   You don't need to eliminate any of these things completely,

01:35:41   but the typical balance of the American diet is way out of whack for what our bodies really are.

01:35:47   It shouldn't be 90% corn syrup.

01:35:49   Yeah, right. The balance of what we eat is way, way off,

01:35:54   even though the individual components can be part of a regular diet.

01:35:59   Like a covered nutritious breakfast.

01:36:00   Exactly. All right, so I do want to move on, because I wanted to cover this last week and forgot.

01:36:05   I want to talk about Casey's app.

01:36:07   I want to talk about the business side of your app a little bit.

01:36:11   Yeah, let me set the stage a little bit.

01:36:14   So this app is in progress, and if all goes according to plan,

01:36:19   what it lets you do is crawl your contact list that's on your device.

01:36:23   And it will look at different data sources, such as Gravatar or maybe Twitter or something,

01:36:28   and try to say, "Hey, for the contact that I'm looking at, do they have an image on Gravatar or Twitter or what have you

01:36:35   that I can use to update that contact?"

01:36:39   So, as an example, Marco somehow, someway, I don't think has an image in my contact list,

01:36:45   but Marco has an image on Instagram, on Gravatar, on Facebook, on Twitter.

01:36:48   Well, maybe not on Facebook, but you get the point.

01:36:50   And so this app will look at one or more or all of those,

01:36:53   and it will try to grab a new image from Marco, and if I so choose, save it into my contacts list.

01:37:02   And so I have several different options that I've thought of as to how to monetize this.

01:37:07   And there's four that I'm thinking about that I can go through very, very quickly,

01:37:10   and then Marco and John, if you would like to choose your favorites, I'm all ears.

01:37:14   The one I think I'm most into is just paying once to unlock rights only.

01:37:19   So you can use the app to crawl your contact list and see the edits that would be made,

01:37:25   but no edits will be saved unless you give me your money.

01:37:29   The second option I thought was you could pay to unlock an individual data source.

01:37:34   So if I get to the point that I have Instagram, Gravatar, Facebook, Twitter, maybe something else entirely,

01:37:40   each one of those will be, I don't know, a dollar or two or something like that.

01:37:43   So I'll only look at Instagram if you give me money.

01:37:45   I'll only look at Gravatar if you give me more money, et cetera, et cetera.

01:37:49   Another option I came up with was you can have X updates for Y money.

01:37:53   So maybe you get 100 updates for a dollar or 200 updates for $2 or something like that.

01:37:58   And then the final most obvious answer, because this is what everyone is doing these days,

01:38:01   is a full-on subscription.

01:38:03   And that, I think, has some merit because this is the sort of app where as you accrue more contacts

01:38:09   and/or as your contacts choose to change their images, then new data could arrive.

01:38:14   But I'm not in love with the idea of doing a subscription because I think that comes with it.

01:38:21   Marco made some references to this, either in the show or perhaps just privately to me.

01:38:26   Going to subscription, I guess, has a lot of gotchas and other hoops you have to jump through

01:38:32   in order to make that possible from Apple's perspective.

01:38:35   And I'm not totally in love with that idea, but I don't know a lot about it,

01:38:39   and I don't really know what I don't know.

01:38:41   So those are the four options, pay once, pay to unlock a source, a consumable where it's, you know,

01:38:46   so many updates for so much money, or a subscription.

01:38:49   So that's where I'm thinking right now, Marco, which should I do?

01:38:53   There's only one answer. It's pay for rights. Then that's it.

01:38:56   It's a one-time payment, and you get as many rights from as many sources as you want for the rest of time.

01:39:02   No matter how much time it takes you, and I'm going to get to that next,

01:39:06   no matter how much time it takes you to do this app, no matter how much effort you put into this,

01:39:10   people are going to view this and perceive this as a pretty simple app.

01:39:15   Any kind of complex thing that is going to appear nickel and dimey, they're going to reject,

01:39:21   and you're not going to make anything from it.

01:39:25   Subscription, I think, as you mentioned, you know, subscriptions have certain requirements.

01:39:29   If you do them, you have things like you have to do certain types of different validations,

01:39:33   and you have to, like, check for renewals and cancellations,

01:39:36   and you have to have, like, a different kind of privacy policy.

01:39:40   You have to have terms of use. You have to have, you know, server-side stuff.

01:39:44   It's just like, subscriptions are kind of a mess.

01:39:46   Like, they're a lot of work to implement, and so for something that is relatively simple like this,

01:39:52   I don't think it makes any sense at all, but not to mention the value side to the user

01:39:56   that, like, they're not going to see a lot of ongoing value.

01:40:00   They're going to see, like, one time they do one big bulk import,

01:40:03   and for the most part, like, most people aren't adding a whole ton of new contacts all the time.

01:40:08   Like, I bet this is the kind of app where, like, people install it, they go through once,

01:40:13   they do all the import, they import all the photos, they say, "That looks good."

01:40:17   They hit buy to unlock the one time write permission thing,

01:40:20   and then they probably never launch it again, or they launch it maybe, like, once a year or something.

01:40:25   You know, it's not going to be, like, a regular thing, I think, for most people.

01:40:28   So, you know, simple in-app purchase.

01:40:31   The app is free to download, and there's one purchase that unlocks anything.

01:40:34   It unlocks everything, basically, and it's a one-time thing,

01:40:37   and you don't worry about ongoing revenue because most people aren't going to be ongoing users.

01:40:41   So that's the business model side of things.

01:40:44   Now, I want to mention, I heard you say on analog,

01:40:50   something like, you expect this to take, like, six months to make?

01:40:54   Well, I think I did say that, and there's a story behind that.

01:41:00   So I have something that's functionally most of the way there.

01:41:07   I haven't dealt with the IAP stuff yet. I've started to, but I haven't done a lot of it.

01:41:11   But in terms of crawling the sources that I plan to crawl on version one,

01:41:16   in terms of actually doing the updates, in terms of allowing the user to choose which updates to commit and which not,

01:41:22   and in the case of multiple options, you know, to choose which of the options they like the most,

01:41:27   all of that is done. So at a glance, the overwhelming majority of the work is done.

01:41:33   But I haven't done the IAP stuff yet, and it does scare me quite a bit.

01:41:37   Again, I've done some, but not a lot. And it's visually okay.

01:41:44   I wouldn't say it's actively gross, but I wouldn't say it looks great either.

01:41:49   And that's the thing that scares the poop out of me, is what to do to make it look better.

01:41:55   Because I am not a designer. I have plenty of critiques within me, but for me to generate something is very difficult.

01:42:03   I have no idea if this will make any money, so I'm not in love with the idea of paying a designer,

01:42:09   just because I don't know if I'll ever make that money back.

01:42:14   So I'm not really sure where to go from there. And that's what scares me about it, is if I even imply on a podcast,

01:42:22   "Oh, it'll be ready by this time," I'm going to end up blowing through it and past it.

01:42:27   And so that's what scares me. But if I didn't care about the look,

01:42:32   all I really need to do is fix up a few bugs and get IAP working, and then I could ship.

01:42:38   Which in a perfect world is a couple of weeks.

01:42:41   Good. So here's why you need to do that.

01:42:43   [laughs]

01:42:45   Because when you said six months, I laughed out loud.

01:42:48   And I thought, "Oh no, Casey, you are so misguided." But I'm glad to hear it.

01:42:52   So I don't think you need to be worried about the IAP stuff.

01:42:55   If you do the one-time, non-consumable, in-app purchase of the unlocked to the rights, that's the simplest way to do it.

01:43:03   You don't even need to do server-side validation, because you don't care if people pirate the in-app purchase. Who cares?

01:43:08   Like, you can do just local validation, do it as simple as possible, and be done with it.

01:43:12   Here's why you need to do this.

01:43:14   You need to get this app out there as quickly as possible, because I would estimate the total lifetime earnings that you will make from this app is likely to be probably $10,000 or less, and possibly as low as $2,000.

01:43:31   So because of that, you can't be spending six months on this.

01:43:36   Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

01:43:37   Like, if you want to get to the kind of place where Underscore is. Underscore has multiple apps. He launched way more apps in the early days to find what worked, and now has pared down to the ones, like, basically the hits and the ones that really work for him.

01:43:50   If you want to have this indie iOS income and indie iOS career, this one app by itself is not going to do that.

01:43:59   What you need to do is place a bunch of bets and see what pays, see what works, and see what you like doing, and see what you can do on an ongoing basis.

01:44:08   This is a good bet. This is one bet, though.

01:44:11   And so because you're probably going to make, you know, a few thousand dollars from it, total, ever, don't spend six months on it.

01:44:19   Don't even think you're going to spend six months on it, and budget the time you're spending on it now with that expectation that, you know what, this is not going to, like, make your life.

01:44:29   This app is going to be a really nice project that should take you, you know, as somebody who is experienced with iOS, you know, although you're less experienced, like, launching complete products from scratch, but you are very experienced with iOS.

01:44:42   Like, this should take you a month, maybe at most, and you'll make some money from it and then move on.

01:44:49   And so every decision you make about it, about what kind of purchase you want, what the business model is, how much time to invest on it, what features to do at all, that should all be informed by this, informed by the lens of, like, you're only ever going to make, like, five grand from this.

01:45:06   Budget accordingly.

01:45:08   Yeah, I think that's fair. So if I'm really, really honest in channeling analog here, the thing that scares me is people don't know if I'm a good or bad developer right now.

01:45:22   They may have opinions, but nobody really knows. I mean, FastText was effectively a career ago, and it was not great, but it was functional.

01:45:30   And the icon was not great, but it was there. But that was a long time ago, and I don't want to release something that all of a sudden everyone looks at and goes, "Whoa! This dude is a quack! He has no idea what he's doing."

01:45:46   And I think that's what scares me, particularly when it comes to user interface, because I feel like I can make something that functions mostly all right, and I think I have, but I guess maybe I'm too prideful, but I don't want to release something that people are looking at and saying, "Wow, that looks like crap."

01:46:07   And I don't want to be, I'm not embarrassed by it, but I don't want to be embarrassed by it. Does that make any sense at all?

01:46:16   No, completely. I totally understand. But keep in mind also that A, that kind of thinking, if left unchecked, will lead to you never shipping anything.

01:46:25   It's very true.

01:46:27   I mean, I'm not exactly going to make a video, just for myself. But B, most of the people who are going to eventually find and buy and use this app aren't going to know or care who you are.

01:46:41   If you do your job right, and you put this app on the App Store, and some people from our show and from your audience and stuff are going to find and buy this app, but if you do your job right and it gets out there on the store,

01:46:54   most of the people who buy it won't really care who you are as a developer or how good you are as a developer or anything like that.

01:47:03   So I think while that is a legitimate concern, I don't think you should let it paralyze you into raising the bar so high that you only release a new video every two years.

01:47:14   So wait, now I'm talking to myself.

01:47:17   No, I totally hear you. And actually, as it turns out, breaking news, remember I told you that I wasn't going to do very many more Casey on Cars? Well, I'm getting another car next week.

01:47:27   So, oops.

01:47:29   So that also is factoring slightly into the maybe not six months, but maybe six months estimate from before.

01:47:36   Now, I totally hear you. I think the other thing I've learned as I've gotten to be an old and curmudgeonly developer is that if I think I'm almost done, that means I'm a long, long, long way from done.

01:47:48   In fact, if I think I'm almost done, that means I'm further away from done than I've ever been before.

01:47:53   So I'm just scared that I'm going to uncover something that is going to make me go, "Holy crap."

01:47:58   Earlier today, I thought that this thing was already multithreaded and ready to rock, and then John and Mike convinced me, and I'm glad that they did, that I'm full of garbage.

01:48:08   And it wasn't multithreaded, although it is now.

01:48:11   But earlier today, I thought that was already a done deal, and it turns out it wasn't.

01:48:16   So I think when I said six months, a lot of that is hedging because I'm a podcaster and I'm, to some degree, a public personality, and there's some amount of self-brand on the line.

01:48:29   I think a lot of it was me just being an old man developer that knows that any estimate you have, double it and then add some.

01:48:36   And some of it is me just probably trying to work too much at this being utterly perfect when it really doesn't need to be, which is, I think, what you're saying in a roundabout way.

01:48:44   Right, because keep in mind, even in the most successful use case, if somebody buying this app, getting it, using it, paying for it, the total amount of time that the average user is going to spend in this app is what, like five minutes?

01:48:57   Yeah, hopefully.

01:48:58   Like, it doesn't need to be so insanely polished and everything because the reality is, this is a pretty simple utility that most people are going to use once and then never launch again. And that once is like five minutes at most.

01:49:16   So, again, just budget accordingly, set your expectations accordingly, like, this is a really good idea, but this should be idea one of four or five that you try over the next year.

01:49:32   Yeah, I hear you. And I think you're right. And it's just, I'm wrestling with, you know, if it was, it's hard not to sound self-involved when I say these things, but if it was me…

01:49:46   All three of us are self-involved, we're all okay with this, go ahead.

01:49:48   If it was the me circa fast text time, when nobody had a friggin' clue who I was, I might have already shipped a version by now, and John and Mike would be finding that it's not multi-threaded in the store version rather than the test flight version.

01:50:04   And I'm not saying that's a good thing necessarily, I'm just saying that I'm opinionated enough and I'm hypercritical enough, sorry John, that I can see the flaws in my own work product and I want to polish as many of them as I can, as well as I can, before it's released to the broader audience.

01:50:27   And I think that it would be very easy for me to do what you're saying Marco and just work on this literally for six months and never look back and then finally come up for air on the other end of it.

01:50:41   And if I'm honest, it's probably going to end up being, "Yeah, that looks nice and it works fine." Okay, what's next? Which is, again, exactly what you're saying Marco.

01:50:51   I don't know, John, you've been quiet, what do you think?

01:50:53   I agree pay once is the right way to go and I agree with Marco, you should just ship.

01:50:57   But given the potential small income from this thing, I don't think, it depends on what your strategy is. If your strategy is to go the underscore route then yeah, ship soon and then come up with the next day and so on and so forth.

01:51:10   But if your intent is for this to be kind of a background hobbyist thing to keep your skills sharp and maybe hone them, I don't think if you want this thing to take six months because you sporadically work on it and polish it to a degree that is out of proportion to the amount of money you spend, go for it.

01:51:25   And just consider it a sunk cost and a learning opportunity and make your next one the one that you ship in three weeks or whatever.

01:51:30   I don't know what your goal is with the effort, right? It really depends on what you want to get out of it. If you're trying to get income out of it, yeah, for sure, then don't spend six months on it.

01:51:42   But if you're viewing it as something else, a learning opportunity, trying to see if you like making iOS apps, just trying to keep your skills sharp to return to the marketplaces, so many different things that you could use this for, some of which actually do fit into a six month schedule.

01:51:57   Yeah, and I think half of me wants it to be the like underscore approach of throw it against the wall, see if it sticks, and half of me wants it to be, well, you know, I can see that this is version one, but version two could do this thing and version three could do that thing.

01:52:09   And I mean, you were telling me earlier, John, that like duplicate detection would be something interesting I could add in. And I mean, I've thought of the same thing, but I don't view that as V1 by any stretch of the imagination.

01:52:20   And so, I don't know, I guess I don't really know what to make of it. And I think my hope is if I put it out there, and if it gets some amount of traction, then I have no problem with dedicating myself to a degree to this.

01:52:38   You know, I'm not hell bent on the underscore approach, not to say that there's a problem with the underscore approach, it's just I don't have any other particularly great ideas in my back pocket at this time, but yeah, I just kind of want to ride this wave and see where it goes.

01:52:52   And my hope is, you know, I've hoped that I would get it done in a lot less than six months, in fact, in like one or two months, but I don't trust myself to actually execute on that.

01:53:08   Not from lack of trying, but just because, you know, the last 10% is 90% of the work, you know what I mean?

01:53:15   But what is your goal, though? Is your goal like, I want to eventually be making a substantial portion of income from the App Store, or is your goal, I want to keep my skills sharp if I have to reenter the marketplace?

01:53:26   What are your goals, plural possibly, and what is the balance of them?

01:53:30   I think my goal is that I would like to diversify my income and have a noticeable income stream from the App Store. Now, noticeable doesn't necessarily mean, you know, something as big as overcast, it can be something considerably smaller than that, but something where it's more than just pocket change.

01:53:50   And secondarily, yes, absolutely. I didn't really touch Xcode for the first two to three months, maybe even more of me being independent, and I think I kind of needed that break to just kind of chill out for a little bit and catch my breath after, what, 15 years of working, which I know to you, John, sounds absurd, but here's, you know, here we are.

01:54:10   But I do want to make sure that my skills are sharp, so if, you know, if you guys decide you can't talk to me anymore tomorrow or, you know, God forbid one of us gets hurt or something, that there's other income streams and other opportunities for income, because I could just go back to getting a regular job.

01:54:27   And it's not like, oh, yeah, like five years ago I used to know how to do that stuff, but now, I don't know, I know where Xcode can be found, that's enough to get me hired, right? You know, like, I don't want to put myself in that position either. I don't know if that really answers your question, but that's kind of-

01:54:42   It does, it does, and it answers it pretty well.

01:54:44   And I think more than anything it's keeping my skills sharp. You had asked, you know, what's the weight of this? I think more than anything it's keeping my skills sharp, but it's not just me goofing off and writing a tool for myself like my podcast editing tool is, like my picture, my photo management tool is.

01:55:00   That was stuff that I never really intended to release to anyone. This, from the get-go, once I proved the concept to myself, has been intended for release. So it's, I think it's useful to have something that I want to release to the broader world to keep my skills sharp enough that if I were to interview tomorrow, I can point to some- well, not tomorrow, but hopefully in less than six months I can point to an app in the App Store and say, I did that, start to finish, top to bottom.

01:55:29   [beeping]