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203: Screaming At Us From The Future

 

00:00:00   That's one of the amazing things about the making of Empire Strikes Back book.

00:00:03   The digital version has a bunch of audio clips of like people talking about stuff. I'm like,

00:00:07   "I'm glad somebody recorded these things," because here they are having actual conversations about

00:00:11   making this movie and then people have recollections like, "Oh, I talked to them about

00:00:14   this. Guess what? We've got audio too, you know? 15 minutes of audio about this one thing and it's

00:00:18   great to hear," even though the quality is terrible because it was the 80s. That's true of many things

00:00:22   in the 80s. But not Empire Strikes Back. That was in the 80s and it was great. Yeah, so were me and

00:00:27   - I'm being casey.

00:00:29   - So young, so young.

00:00:32   - I feel like I have spoken to Marco and John

00:00:36   both extremely recently and also not in weeks

00:00:39   because we saw each other three days ago, is that right?

00:00:42   - Something like that.

00:00:43   - And yet at the same time, we haven't had the opportunity

00:00:48   to really and truly nerd out for a couple of weeks now.

00:00:52   - I like how when we tried to talk about computer stuff,

00:00:53   we were all together like,

00:00:55   everyone else did not wanna hear it.

00:00:57   (laughing)

00:00:58   It was there, they're just like rolling their eyes

00:01:01   and trying to change a subject to anything else.

00:01:03   - Yeah, they effectively said with body language,

00:01:06   save it for the show.

00:01:07   And also happy birthday, John Siracusa.

00:01:10   - Hey, hey.

00:01:12   - It's a little bit late at this point.

00:01:13   It is four days ago now, but happy birthday.

00:01:16   You are the answer to, what is the actual phrasing?

00:01:20   The answer to life, the universe and everything?

00:01:22   - Yeah, pretty much.

00:01:23   - Fair enough, all right.

00:01:25   Do we have any pre-show banter?

00:01:26   We just want to go straight to follow up.

00:01:27   - I think that was the pre-show banter.

00:01:29   - Fair enough.

00:01:30   All right, let's talk about the naked robotic MacBook Pro,

00:01:33   Mr. Syracuse.

00:01:34   - This is the bestest thing ever.

00:01:38   - Was said with not an ounce of sarcasm.

00:01:40   - I think it is, I think it is pretty neat.

00:01:42   This, if someone had posted this as a joke

00:01:47   a couple weeks ago, I think we all would have had

00:01:49   a good laugh about it.

00:01:50   - Yep.

00:01:51   - The first time I saw this, I thought it was a joke.

00:01:53   And I was like, it's on April 1st.

00:01:55   I guess somebody just has a bad joke timing.

00:01:57   >> Yeah, but you know, this is apparently a real thing.

00:02:00   This is from OWC, our friends at OWC,

00:02:02   Otherworld Computing.

00:02:04   This is a product that you can't buy yet, right?

00:02:07   They've just sort of announced it and more details to follow.

00:02:11   You take your new slim four USB port,

00:02:16   a MacBook Pro that we've talked about at length on this show,

00:02:20   and you sit it on top of an aluminum rectangle

00:02:24   that's the exact size and shape as the bottom of the MacBook Pro, making your very slim

00:02:32   2016/2017 model MacBook Pro the thickness of a 2012 MacBook Pro.

00:02:39   And in the process, it gives you a bunch of extra ports on the side.

00:02:42   You get USB Type-A ports, you get Ethernet, you get an SD card slot, you get another USB-C.

00:02:48   As far as I can tell, you don't get any additional battery.

00:02:51   It does claim also 4TB of internal storage of some type.

00:02:55   And additional things to come.

00:02:57   They haven't revealed all the things it's going to do.

00:03:00   So right away I have some technical questions about this.

00:03:03   Oh yes.

00:03:04   My first, how does it work?

00:03:05   Because I expected it to plug into the USB-C ports on the side.

00:03:09   Because you know you can do that.

00:03:10   Like the Thunderbolt/USB-C ports.

00:03:12   You can plug, for example, a Thunderbolt 3 dock into there and on that dock you can have

00:03:17   an SD card port and USB ports and storage and you know you can you can do

00:03:21   all that we know you can do it but you have to plug into one of those ports and

00:03:25   the pictures they have show both sides of this thing with all four of the

00:03:30   Thunderbolt 3 ports on the side of this MacBook Pro completely open so that's

00:03:35   mysterious. No I don't think it's mysterious at all I mean I understand

00:03:39   what you're saying but I will bet you a gazillion dollars that if you're looking

00:03:44   at the images of the two sides. So they're showing the right hand side of it, but it's on the left

00:03:49   hand side of the image. And then the left hand side on the right hand side of the image. So the

00:03:53   right side of the dock where the SD card is, there's a USB-C port directly under one of the

00:04:01   four onboard USB-C ports. It's hard to paint a word picture about this, but anyway, I bet you

00:04:06   anything they're going to have one of those little stubby USB-C cables right there. It'll be like,

00:04:12   You remember the daughterboard video cards from PCs way back in the day?

00:04:16   Yeah.

00:04:16   You would go like VGA from your 2D card.

00:04:19   Jon doesn't remember.

00:04:20   Yeah, you go from VGA from your 2D card to your 3D card, and then VGA from your 3D card out to your monitor.

00:04:27   And they would have these little like stubby VGA cables. It was barbaric.

00:04:31   So I'm gonna make an even older reference.

00:04:33   Back in the Mac days when they had SCSI as their external connector for hard drives and such,

00:04:39   and you would buy hard drives that fit exactly underneath the classic Mac shape, so you'd

00:04:43   stack them and they would be exactly the size of the base of like a Mac Plus or a 512 or

00:04:50   whatever.

00:04:51   And since you would stack them, each one would be a different hard drive and you would need

00:04:53   to daisy chain them together.

00:04:55   In typical Scuzzy Passion, one would have a terminator and then you'd go from one to

00:04:58   the other.

00:04:59   They made C-shaped brackets.

00:05:00   They were not cables at all, but were exact brackets.

00:05:02   You know, a single manufacturer would sell them, like Jasmine or whatever, and they would

00:05:06   plug into the back and connect one drive to the one right above it exactly matching these

00:05:10   gigantic 50-pin SCSI connectors.

00:05:13   So not a cable at all, but a very stiff bracket-y type thing.

00:05:17   And I can imagine that as well, but they don't show it in the pictures.

00:05:20   Correct.

00:05:21   That is fair.

00:05:22   Well, and also, these pictures should be taken with a huge grain of salt, because they have

00:05:26   even stated these are renderings, these are not the final product.

00:05:28   And in fact, when I first looked at this page, maybe an hour before that MacRumors article

00:05:33   was posted, these exact pictures in this exact spot

00:05:37   on the official owcdigital.com/dec on that page,

00:05:42   these exact pictures, the two sides were a blank

00:05:44   except for one, the one single USB-C in port.

00:05:48   All, like the, oh, and the card reader was there,

00:05:50   but all the USB-A and the ethernet port you see right there

00:05:53   were not there like 12 hours ago.

00:05:54   So clearly, like, this is a work in progress.

00:05:58   Like, I learned more from the MacRumors post about it

00:06:00   than I did from their page.

00:06:02   So clearly this is still in the very early phases.

00:06:06   They said it will be available in 2017,

00:06:09   but I don't think they got more specific than that,

00:06:11   nor have they listed a price or anything.

00:06:13   But yeah, I mean, it's basically, yeah,

00:06:15   it's a docking station that happens to be the same shape

00:06:19   as the MacBook Pro, so you can sit it on top of it.

00:06:21   But when I first saw these pictures,

00:06:23   without seeing the MacRumors article,

00:06:24   when I first saw the pictures

00:06:26   and got almost no information,

00:06:28   I assumed that what they were doing

00:06:30   was basically offering a service

00:06:31   where you could send your map to them

00:06:32   and they would like unscrew the bottom of it

00:06:35   and replace, like, and kind of semi-permanently attach

00:06:38   this thing and if they were doing that,

00:06:41   then they could maybe do something like give a bigger

00:06:42   battery and use internal, whatever kind of internal

00:06:47   connections that are present, if any.

00:06:49   I honestly would be surprised if there are many, if any.

00:06:53   - Yeah, I was thinking where were they connected internally

00:06:55   but you can do a bigger battery with an external too

00:06:57   because remember that USB-C port is also the charging port

00:06:59   works like the smartphone iPhone case or whatever.

00:07:03   - Exactly, but anyway, that isn't what this is

00:07:06   as far as we can tell from the very little information

00:07:08   we have, but either way, so basically it sounds like

00:07:11   it almost certainly doesn't offer any additional

00:07:13   battery power, and that's the only real reason

00:07:15   I would see for wanting to have this tremendous

00:07:19   additional bulk added permanently to your MacBook.

00:07:22   - Well not yet, we don't know, because they say

00:07:24   more stuff is coming, and if you look at the stuff

00:07:25   that's in there, obviously there has to be more,

00:07:28   because the stuff they have in there would not

00:07:29   take up all that space.

00:07:30   So I guess it could just be filled with air,

00:07:32   but if you're gonna put a battery,

00:07:33   it's not like there's not room.

00:07:34   - They could put an optical drive.

00:07:35   No, I actually thought the same thing, believe it or not.

00:07:39   They could put a really good keyboard that you can't reach.

00:07:41   No, so I, you know, we'll see when this thing

00:07:44   actually provides a little more information

00:07:46   and when it actually launches,

00:07:47   but I don't think the market for this is gonna be very big.

00:07:50   I certainly won't use it.

00:07:54   No way you could make me use that,

00:07:56   because the fact is that the MacBook Pro, as it is,

00:08:01   is almost pretty good, and this pushes it so far

00:08:06   in the other direction that it's like, okay,

00:08:08   you've turned something that's almost pretty good,

00:08:11   but has mediocre battery life and a bad keyboard

00:08:14   into something that is still having mediocre battery life

00:08:18   and a bad keyboard that is just bigger and heavier

00:08:22   to add what is really a very small handful

00:08:25   of capabilities so far.

00:08:27   I don't see why people would want this, honestly,

00:08:31   but somebody might, I guess.

00:08:34   - Well, remember, Marco, that you cannot possibly

00:08:37   do any kind of work on a MacBook Pro

00:08:39   unless you have an SD card slot,

00:08:41   so if you wanted to do any kind of work on a MacBook Pro,

00:08:45   you must have this dock, otherwise it's impossible.

00:08:48   - No, and honestly, so in the massive span of time

00:08:53   since we've last spoken on this podcast,

00:08:55   I did, you know, we traveled upstate for parent Christmas

00:09:00   stuff and I had my laptop there and there was one point

00:09:05   in which I had brought some, every year we're making

00:09:08   Christmas video from the previous Christmases photos

00:09:11   and time lapse, Tiff does all the work,

00:09:13   she gets all the credit.

00:09:14   Anyway, I bring with me on my laptop copies of all the

00:09:17   so that way when we get there,

00:09:19   after you've shown it to everybody,

00:09:20   we can then give everybody their own copy.

00:09:22   - On the thumb drives that don't go into your computer?

00:09:24   - Yeah, so one of the film members has an iPad,

00:09:27   one has a laptop, and one has a thumb drive.

00:09:30   So this is like how you put the wolf on the boat,

00:09:32   and it's like this crazy thing,

00:09:34   it's like how do we--

00:09:35   - Don't put the wolf in with the chicken.

00:09:36   - Right, it's like how do we get these files

00:09:39   to these different things, right?

00:09:41   I'm sitting there on the couch with my new MacBook,

00:09:44   and first my father-in-law brings down

00:09:47   the Lightning card reader adapter with an SD card on it

00:09:51   that he uses in his iPad.

00:09:52   He's like, "Can you put it on here?"

00:09:54   And I look at the Lightning and I look at the SD card

00:09:56   and I'm like, "Nope." (laughs)

00:09:59   And then I get handed this USB key,

00:10:03   like this USB thumb drive thing.

00:10:05   No, I guess I gotta get a dongle for that.

00:10:08   Like I gotta go upstairs, get the dongle.

00:10:10   And it wasn't that I didn't own the dongle,

00:10:13   And it wasn't that I didn't even have the dongle

00:10:15   like technically with me on the trip,

00:10:17   but it was upstairs and I was downstairs

00:10:19   and I was on a soft couch and it was Christmas.

00:10:21   There's just gonna be so many of these times

00:10:24   with these new MacBook Pros where like,

00:10:26   even if it's a minor inconvenience,

00:10:29   it still makes you regret the limitations

00:10:32   of this computer in use, in practice.

00:10:35   I bet more often than Apple might have estimated

00:10:39   by whatever data they were using to make this decision

00:10:41   to omit all the useful stuff from this computer.

00:10:44   And there are so many things about it that are nice.

00:10:47   Like every year we go to the same place, my in-laws place,

00:10:50   and every year I have to plug in my laptop,

00:10:54   and every year I had this weird layout

00:10:58   where to reach the left side where the charging port was,

00:11:01   where MagSafe was, I had to kind of lean the laptop

00:11:03   in a strange way overnight when it's charging.

00:11:06   And this year I could use the other side,

00:11:07   which was really helpful, and there's gonna be times

00:11:09   like that where it's nice to have charging on either side.

00:11:11   Like, that would be great, right?

00:11:13   So, you know, it isn't all bad,

00:11:15   and it was also really nice to have this thing be lighter.

00:11:19   As I was carrying it around the house,

00:11:20   and you know, doing basic stuff,

00:11:23   like it was nice having it lighter.

00:11:25   So I appreciate those things,

00:11:27   and I appreciate some of the progress,

00:11:29   but boy, not having the SD card reader,

00:11:32   and at least one USB-A port,

00:11:35   has already bitten me.

00:11:37   Like, more than once, in these like little,

00:11:40   tiny like, you know, razor blade cut ways.

00:11:42   Like just, ah, I just, it doesn't leave me

00:11:45   with a good taste in my mouth about this laptop overall.

00:11:47   - So I think this product, however it turns out to be

00:11:50   in the market, reveals some interesting things

00:11:53   that we've talked about before,

00:11:54   but this is like a concrete version of it.

00:11:57   The first is this is an extreme case

00:11:59   of the naked robotic core thing applied to the Mac,

00:12:01   which we talked about before.

00:12:02   The idea that if you just provide the core amount

00:12:06   of functionality and let people add stuff on top of that

00:12:09   that they might want.

00:12:10   So with the iPhone it's like we give you the skinniest little metal thing that you want,

00:12:13   and if you want extra battery or you want more protection or you know you want a place

00:12:17   to put your credit cards or you want a rubbery outside or whatever it is that you want to

00:12:20   do to it, everyone else can bring to it whatever they want.

00:12:23   You want it to be a different color or a different texture or whatever, you can put that on,

00:12:27   but by making the smallest thing possible we let the people who want a really small

00:12:30   thing have a really small thing and people who want something different, everyone can

00:12:33   apply it.

00:12:34   Because if we made a choice and added the big battery, the people who wanted the skinnier

00:12:36   ones can have it and so on and so forth.

00:12:38   So this thing being the Naked Robotic MacBook Pro, if you want a bunch of ports, you can

00:12:43   slap it on the end.

00:12:45   And all the past times we've talked about this, it's like, yeah, but if you add it on

00:12:49   the outside, because you have to have, you know, phone, motherboard, battery, case, you

00:12:56   know, inner case, battery, outer case, like the extra layering, requiring them both to

00:13:01   be products in and of themselves, the case is a product and the phone is a product and

00:13:05   have their own walls and the combination of all the walls is your total thickness, it

00:13:09   makes them bigger than if you said if you just took that amount of battery that's in

00:13:12   this battery case and put it inside the phone it wouldn't be as thick.

00:13:15   So here we have a great example of that.

00:13:17   These ports that they're adding, if Apple had put these inside the MacBook Pro it would

00:13:21   be thicker, but it would not be this thick.

00:13:23   I mean you can look at it, they have the Ethernet port is stacked up with the USB-C ports above

00:13:27   it, like because they can't, they can't add, you know, they can't violate the integrity

00:13:31   of the case.

00:13:32   entire flat side thickness of the case. and then what they have left to put their ports

00:13:37   on is anything they can put below that.

00:13:39   they can't combine them.

00:13:40   so this does show a very graphic illustration of the highlight of the naked robotic core

00:13:46   strategy is that if you do add stuff it will always necessarily be bigger than if it was

00:13:50   built in.

00:13:51   and the second thing i think is that i don't know if this was just someone making an estimation

00:13:54   or if they say it in the copy as a real thing but i believe it.

00:13:57   saying this makes your 2016 / 2017 MacBook Pro the same thickness as the

00:14:04   2012 model but we all look at this and it looks like that that comic

00:14:07   illustration of the the power book g5 remember that oh yeah Photoshop it looks

00:14:13   like it's just comically thick like it's like the size of a dictionary or a phone

00:14:18   book I don't know if kids know what those are it's a really thick book it

00:14:22   looks it looks huge and yet this was the thickness of a product that Apple sold

00:14:27   Not too long ago 2012 MacBook Pro that people still have in like and often they say I'm sticking with my 2012 MacBook Pro

00:14:33   He's got all the ports. I want or whatever this I think illustrates what I always talked about

00:14:37   You know that a hypercritical post long ago about people complaining that the iMac was getting too skinny when they took away the optical drive

00:14:44   It made it super skinny. It's like who the hell needs a super skinny iMac. What's the point?

00:14:47   and I

00:14:49   Transferred over the iPhone to say look you have to go thinner year after year because even though from year to year

00:14:54   The the sacrifice doesn't make that much of a difference

00:14:57   You think oh what so it's a few millimeters thicker multiply that by year after year after year

00:15:01   And you will find yourself far from where you started so in 2012 them shaving no millimeter off

00:15:06   2013 and another millimeter off in 2014 another mill. It seems like what's the point you're just making my thing thinner in a way that

00:15:13   I can't even detect and I'm not getting any gains from it, but like you said Marco

00:15:16   You appreciate the the lightness

00:15:19   Even just compared to your previous model, which wasn't that old

00:15:23   Imagine that you know what it would be like if you upgraded from a 2012 model to this and here we have a

00:15:28   Rewind button to go back to what it was like in 2012 and now you can't go back now you say no, that's too far

00:15:33   I can't go back that far. I don't care how many ports you have. It is too big and it's too heavy

00:15:38   I know now that I know what's possible. I I can't go back to that again. So

00:15:43   There is something to be said for apples. We're relentless pursuit of thinness

00:15:47   I still don't think they've had any sort of inflection point like my the thing I always go back to is the

00:15:52   the credit card sized phone that just flutters to the ground and you don't have to worry about it cracking because no one worries about

00:15:57   Dropping their credit card on the ground and cracking it because it's so friggin thin. We haven't we haven't got there

00:16:02   we're not even close but

00:16:04   This this illustration and our general disgust with it this product and our disgust with how thick it is

00:16:09   Really hammers home that this thin this thing

00:16:12   Even though we complain about it

00:16:15   The upsides aren't just academic like once you become accustomed to it being that thin we want it to be that thin and also

00:16:22   maybe have an SD card slot, which by the way,

00:16:24   they could totally do because there's plenty of room.

00:16:26   Or add two millimeters, like we're willing to bargain

00:16:29   a millimeter or two, but none of us want to add

00:16:33   half an inch to this thing,

00:16:34   because we just can't go back to that.

00:16:35   - By the way, I can't let this go without pointing out

00:16:38   that this ancient, thick 2012 MacBook Pro

00:16:42   that they're comparing this to was sold

00:16:44   in the form of the 101 until like two months ago.

00:16:47   - Yeah, had an optical drive, plenty of room in there.

00:16:50   - Yeah, no, but I mean, you're right,

00:16:51   I love the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro.

00:16:53   The 15 inch Retina, it's so, so nice.

00:16:56   It's such an overall awesome machine.

00:16:58   But now that I've had this new one for one month,

00:17:01   the old one, which I still have in my closet

00:17:03   'cause I haven't sold it yet,

00:17:05   I look at it and I pick it up every so often

00:17:06   and it feels ancient.

00:17:09   And it feels like a big, heavy, awkward lunch tray.

00:17:12   Even though a month ago, I was like, this is fine.

00:17:15   This doesn't need to get any smaller.

00:17:17   Like it really is all about what you're accustomed to.

00:17:19   And as soon as you get accustomed to this new one,

00:17:21   even though the difference in weight and in thickness

00:17:25   is not tremendous, it is a savings that is noticeable.

00:17:30   And as soon as you start noticing it,

00:17:31   it's really hard to ever go back

00:17:33   and to have it feel normal.

00:17:35   I mean, heck, even the keyboard.

00:17:36   I hate the keyboard on the new one,

00:17:38   but when I use the keyboard on the old one,

00:17:39   I'm like, this is kinda mushy.

00:17:41   Like, I'm ruined, I'm completely ruined.

00:17:45   I still hate the new one, keyboard-wise,

00:17:47   but it's like, and honestly, I think I would hate

00:17:50   new keyboard a lot less if they would give me back the gaps above the left and

00:17:54   right arrow keys. That has bitten me more than any other thing about this

00:17:59   keyboard. Like the key switches I still don't like but I've gotten used to.

00:18:03   Escape I have mapped to caps lock and it was a very easy transition. The shaping

00:18:09   of those arrow keys and not having the little gaps above left and right the

00:18:12   way they have been for years, that keeps messing me up so much because I can no

00:18:17   longer orient myself on the arrow keys by feel reliably.

00:18:21   And this, as it turns out, this is something I need

00:18:24   quite frequently in use.

00:18:26   I didn't realize it until I used one of these things

00:18:28   for a while, but wow, that is a big change.

00:18:33   But yeah, when you go back to the old one,

00:18:35   it's like wow, I don't want, even though it is

00:18:38   in so many ways better, you use the quote mushy keyboard,

00:18:43   and you see the relatively tiny little,

00:18:46   quaint little track pad on there,

00:18:47   and you're like, wow, this is like using a PowerBook

00:18:49   by comparison.

00:18:50   The new thing really does feel so much newer

00:18:54   and more modern, even though in these fairly large ways

00:18:57   it is definitely worse.

00:18:59   - This is one of the dangers of using iOS

00:19:01   or growing up with iOS.

00:19:02   When I watch my son, he's mostly the one

00:19:05   who has to do school assignments,

00:19:06   like they use Google Docs and he writes school papers

00:19:08   and stuff in it, which is a pretty good system

00:19:10   in terms of letting teachers and peers comment on

00:19:15   and see their work.

00:19:15   Anyway, because he's a child of iOS and a child of the post-PC age, watching him try

00:19:22   to use a word processor on a Mac just makes me want to tear my hair out because all of

00:19:27   his cursor movement he does with the mouse.

00:19:30   And I'm like, "See these keys on the keyboard with the arrows on them?

00:19:34   I swear to you, they will move the insertion point one character easier than you, finding

00:19:38   where the mouse is, steering your –" because he's not good with the mouse either – "steering

00:19:42   your cursor over, moving it over two characters."

00:19:44   like, "Just use the mouse." You don't even say, like, "Option or Command arrows." "Just

00:19:48   plain use the arrow key." Like, it is so much faster. And "Forward Delete" and just, like,

00:19:52   these amazing technologies that, like, watching him try to do text editing, because all he's

00:19:56   ever used to is the terrible text editing on iOS, where you have to hold your stupid

00:19:59   finger down, you get that magnifying glass. That also makes me want to tear my hair out.

00:20:03   Even after I show him the arrow keys, it's not like he's like, "Thanks, Dad. That's a

00:20:06   revelation. I'm so much more efficient." He's like, "No, I'll go back to the mouse." So

00:20:10   painful. I don't know how kids these days. Someday they'll learn about arrow keys.

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00:21:34   On pros leaving the Mac,

00:21:36   apparently somebody has done a little bit of polling

00:21:38   and research about whether or not designers

00:21:43   would ever consider, motion designers specifically,

00:21:45   whatever that means.

00:21:46   Would you ever consider switching to a PC?

00:21:48   Yes, 42%, maybe 40%, no, 18%.

00:21:53   - I have to listen to just to reinforce the idea

00:21:55   I said last show that like professional users

00:21:58   whose job is to do like motion graphics,

00:21:59   they're not Mac users,

00:22:00   they're motion graphic designers, right?

00:22:02   This is what they do.

00:22:03   I think this means like motion and video, you know, like basically video effects or

00:22:07   transitions during the news or whatever.

00:22:09   I think that's what this means.

00:22:10   This is what this website is about.

00:22:11   It's called schoolofmotion.com.

00:22:13   So it's entirely a professional website for people who do this for a living.

00:22:17   It's not about Macs.

00:22:18   It's not about computers.

00:22:19   It's not about what tool you use to do for a living.

00:22:20   It's like I want to do this for a living and then they talk about the tools that they use.

00:22:23   So they want to get the job done.

00:22:26   They don't necessarily care about any particular one.

00:22:28   So the survey was would you consider switching to PC?

00:22:31   So it shows in general the bent of the side.

00:22:33   like, "Oh, we mostly use Macs to do this," and we talk about programs that are available

00:22:36   on the Mac to do it. Like Motion, I think it's still for sale. Anyway, would you consider

00:22:42   switching to UBC? 82% are either yes or maybe. Only 18% say no. Because the bottom line is,

00:22:49   it's like, "Well, if that's the way I have to go to do Motion graphics, I will do it."

00:22:54   Because they're not going to change their profession because the computer they like

00:22:58   doesn't let them do what they do, they're going to change platforms.

00:23:01   So you know, and again, like I said on the last show, it doesn't mean that every company

00:23:06   that tries to make that transition will be successful.

00:23:08   It's very disruptive to have to buy all new hardware and learn new programs and buy new

00:23:12   licenses and deal with file formats and legacy data and all that stuff.

00:23:18   But in general, if a company doesn't serve a professional market like that, the market

00:23:23   will switch very quickly because the market is not sentimental.

00:23:27   people may be sentimental, even whole companies can be sentimental, but the market in terms

00:23:31   of "I need a bunch of people to do job X for me with computers" is not sentimental,

00:23:35   and if you don't do the job, someone else will, and whatever tool gets the job done.

00:23:39   [Marty] All right, so the next item in the list scares me deeply.

00:23:44   [Joe] Me too.

00:23:45   [Marty] It says, it says "Casey and Marco's homework," and I think I can speak for Marco

00:23:50   in saying, well, maybe that I don't remember, that might be just me, but I can speak for

00:23:54   Marco in saying, "I didn't do my homework."

00:23:56   So what was I supposed to have been doing?

00:23:59   That could always speak for me, Casey.

00:24:00   Right, that part I was confident.

00:24:02   It was the remembering part I wasn't as sure about.

00:24:04   I also don't remember what the homework was.

00:24:06   I felt bad because I was listening back to the show.

00:24:09   Well, so people were tweeting at us,

00:24:11   like I can't wait to hear Casey and Marco and their homework.

00:24:13   And by that point, I had forgotten

00:24:16   what I had assigned to you for homework.

00:24:18   But I remember doing it, but I did it mostly as a joke

00:24:21   because we know that you guys don't do any homework.

00:24:23   So when I was listening back to the show, as I do,

00:24:25   I was reminded of what the homework was.

00:24:27   But listeners, maybe they're new listeners.

00:24:29   They somehow thought that you were gonna actually

00:24:31   do this homework, A, remember what the homework was.

00:24:33   (laughing)

00:24:34   And B, come to the show ready to have the homework was--

00:24:38   - That's very optimistic.

00:24:39   - Yeah, the homework was the idea of trying to say,

00:24:43   trying to figure out how you would distinguish

00:24:46   between a situation where the world is moving on from PCs

00:24:50   and we are just being left behind because we're dinosaurs,

00:24:53   or a situation where Apple is foolishly abandoning the Mac

00:24:56   market, even though the concept of a PC-style computer

00:25:01   has many, many years to go, and Apple is making a mistake.

00:25:04   And the idea from the perspective of someone

00:25:06   who loves a Mac, those can both look the same from the inside.

00:25:09   What might you look for?

00:25:11   What might you look for from the inside

00:25:13   to try to distinguish those two situations?

00:25:16   Is there something-- because they feel the same,

00:25:18   and they look the same, but is there some kind of thing

00:25:21   could look at to say, "Okay, well, if it was the case that we were being left behind as

00:25:25   dinosaurs, we would see this, but if it turns out that Apple's actually making a mistake,

00:25:28   we would see that instead. Is there anything we can look for to let us know which of those

00:25:33   two things are?" I couldn't think of anything on the show, and so I signed it as homework

00:25:37   and you two probably forgot about it, but I don't suppose you have any new interesting

00:25:40   thoughts on it now.

00:25:41   - Not really. I mean, I don't really care what the difference there is. I want what

00:25:45   I want, and if Apple's not going to provide it, I'm going to yell about it.

00:25:48   Yeah, no, I mean, that's true. I'm not saying you don't have to yell, I'm just saying, like,

00:25:51   I think it's interesting to, because I am interested in whether, it's the most difficult

00:25:56   to be objective about something that you care deeply about, but it makes you kind of an

00:26:03   enemy of progress if, you know, if the, whatever, the buggy whip sales or whatever, it's like,

00:26:10   you know, or as Casey was saying, the stick shift thing where if, you know, are you using

00:26:17   your influence to actually stop the future from coming or are you right and that's not

00:26:21   actually the future and really Apple's just doing something dumb. And I think it makes

00:26:24   a difference because I don't want to use all my power and influence and arguing skills

00:26:30   to try to hold back progress, right? So I would like to know if I am, you know, not

00:26:36   that I'm not going to be upset about it, but I would like to know if I am actually the

00:26:40   enemy of progress here by clinging to the idea of the personal computer, right? And

00:26:45   And so I'm interested in being able to determine what the situation is.

00:26:50   Now I feel like I'm not particularly strongly on either side of this, so I don't think this

00:26:56   is for me personally a situation and maybe Marco doesn't care, but I think it is a thing

00:27:02   worth considering for all, not just for silly New York and the Mac things, but for all things

00:27:07   of this type, especially as we get older.

00:27:10   Very often what you really don't want is for things to be different than you're used to.

00:27:14   It's very easy to decide that your desire to not have things change trumps everything

00:27:22   else.

00:27:23   And that's not, you know, I believe in progress and I constantly want to make sure that I

00:27:29   am not slowly shifting to the opposite side of progress because when you see that from

00:27:35   the outside, when you see somebody who is an obvious enemy of progress and doesn't realize

00:27:39   it, it's a pitiable situation and I never want to be in that situation.

00:27:42   - Well, I think it's somewhat useful to look around

00:27:47   and to see like, all right, I have these opinions

00:27:51   on how the types of work that I do,

00:27:54   the types of problems that I need to solve,

00:27:56   how these things should or need to be done.

00:27:58   Obviously, one of the biggest things you could say is,

00:28:01   well, look around at other people who have similar problems.

00:28:04   Are they insisting on the same requirements?

00:28:06   Are they doing things that way?

00:28:09   Or did they move to something else a long time ago

00:28:12   and you didn't, and they are now getting along just fine

00:28:15   without doing the same kinds of things that you wanna do,

00:28:19   but in the new quote progress way.

00:28:23   Obviously, it's hard to make this apply to everything,

00:28:26   and looking around, it's hard for people

00:28:29   to have a lot of good data on what a lot of people

00:28:32   are doing, 'cause mostly it's just anecdotal.

00:28:34   Well, I look around and I see the other people

00:28:36   in my office are doing this, or my parents are doing this,

00:28:39   or my kids are doing this, or whatever.

00:28:41   you could look at, or you have a few friends you can look at,

00:28:44   but most people have a pretty small sample group

00:28:46   they can draw from for that kind of analysis.

00:28:49   But I think sometimes that's enough.

00:28:51   I think if you can look around and you can see,

00:28:55   am I the last person doing this this way?

00:28:57   Then that's probably a sign

00:29:00   that you are on the wrong side of things.

00:29:02   But if there's still, if what you are defending

00:29:06   is still done by what seems like the majority of people

00:29:11   who do that kind of thing, then you might still be wrong.

00:29:15   Like you might be at the very beginning of a wave

00:29:17   and just everyone else hasn't realized it yet either,

00:29:20   but chances are you're probably at least a little bit right.

00:29:23   Chances are that you're probably on the right side of that,

00:29:26   at least for now.

00:29:27   It might be something that's really forward looking

00:29:29   that everyone's missing, but that doesn't happen very often.

00:29:33   Everyone thinks it happens a lot,

00:29:34   but it doesn't happen very often in reality.

00:29:37   - I was actually having an interesting conversation

00:29:40   with a friend of mine earlier tonight

00:29:42   about whether or not, well, he said to me something

00:29:47   I thought was very interesting.

00:29:50   And he said, the Mac, or not the Mac, excuse me,

00:29:53   desktop OSs are a solved problem.

00:29:56   And I think he was being a little bit,

00:29:59   I don't know if dramatic's the right word,

00:30:00   but he was kind of playing up his point of view

00:30:02   little bit, right, to make a point. But he was saying, you know, desktop OSes are a solved

00:30:07   problem. And at first I was like, what? No. God, no. What are you talking about? But as

00:30:14   I thought about it, I still disagree with him. And again, I think he was just making

00:30:18   the point to kind of play devil's advocate. But I understand where he's coming from in

00:30:23   that if you look at what do we want from a desktop OS? And he asked me that actually.

00:30:31   and what I said to him was,

00:30:32   I just want it not to be ignored, man.

00:30:34   Like, I just want progress.

00:30:36   But if you look at it, there's been progress.

00:30:39   Like, Siri doesn't really do anything for me on the desktop,

00:30:43   but that's progress, that's a big deal.

00:30:45   And that's just a single data point,

00:30:47   but it's an example of things that are happening.

00:30:50   Everyone has been moaning lately

00:30:53   about how Messages hasn't been touched on Sierra.

00:30:56   That's just not right.

00:30:57   Like, the rich previews, or however you phrase it,

00:31:00   where for example, you paste a link to a tweet

00:31:04   and you see the tweet in the messages window.

00:31:08   Like granted, I wish I had sticker support in Sierra.

00:31:11   Like I totally do.

00:31:13   I don't know that I would use it that often,

00:31:14   but I just wish I had the support for it, right?

00:31:16   But even something as arguably silly

00:31:21   as rich previews and messages

00:31:23   makes a world of difference and that's progress.

00:31:26   And so to me, I think just not even necessarily

00:31:30   bringing iOS into macOS, but just having that continued incremental improvement, that's

00:31:36   all I really want from a desktop OS right now.

00:31:39   And to that end, my friend was kind of right that in a large way, it's kind of a solved

00:31:45   problem.

00:31:46   Now, in the next breath, I'll tell you, well, is it really a solved problem?

00:31:47   Look at the touch bar.

00:31:48   This is a brand new paradigm that just came out.

00:31:50   We don't really know what we're doing with that.

00:31:51   So obviously, this is a very shaky argument.

00:31:54   But when you compare that to iOS, where there's plenty of work left to be done, certainly

00:32:01   iOS is in many ways the more interesting platform.

00:32:05   Now I'm not necessarily saying interesting to me.

00:32:07   I'm not saying interesting to everyone, because personally, I still like the Mac.

00:32:11   I still prefer the Mac.

00:32:12   We went over this either last episode or the episode before.

00:32:16   But there's a lot more progress to be made.

00:32:18   And I look at people like Ben Brooks, I look at Vitici, and I look at Mike Hurley, and

00:32:22   And I see them doing everything in their jobs, or nearly everything, on iOS devices, and

00:32:29   I come to kind of what Jon was saying a minute ago.

00:32:32   Am I the one that's telling everyone to get off their, get off my lawn?

00:32:35   Like am I the one that's really holding on to the past?

00:32:39   And I'm not saying that is the case, but I am definitely wondering.

00:32:42   And to more directly answer Jon's question, how do we know which one of these it is?

00:32:47   I'm not sure.

00:32:48   But right now I can tell you that it seems to me like there are some pretty direct ways

00:32:57   to accomplish things on the Mac.

00:33:01   And I can't think of a great example off the top of my head, but you can accomplish a lot

00:33:05   of things on the Mac directly, where in iOS you need to like daisy-chain seven different

00:33:10   apps to make the same operation happen.

00:33:14   And that doesn't mean that iOS is wrong, but to me, as long as that's still the case, as

00:33:19   long as you still have to write a custom workflow to get something to happen in the workflow

00:33:23   app, which by the way, is truly mind-boggling amazing, but as long as that's how you get

00:33:27   things done, like that is the official way to get things done on iOS, I don't think that

00:33:33   the Mac is dead quite yet.

00:33:35   And I'm not even talking about writing code or anything like that, I'm just talking about

00:33:39   general things that professionals do.

00:33:42   You can define professionals, professional podcasters, as professional project managers,

00:33:46   as CMOs, whatever Ben Brooks' title is, I don't even remember anymore.

00:33:50   But if they're jumping through hoops in order to get their work done, even if they don't

00:33:54   necessarily feel like it's jumping through hoops, it's still daisy-chaining a bunch of

00:33:58   different steps together.

00:33:59   As long as that's still a thing, I don't think the Mac is dead.

00:34:01   But when that stops being a thing, or it becomes even easier to kind of daisy-chain all these

00:34:06   things and you're out writing custom workflows because apps are supporting it, then I start

00:34:10   to wonder, "Ugh, maybe I'm the old man here after all."

00:34:14   - Well, this is why I think it's important

00:34:16   to really make these observational comparisons,

00:34:20   which I guess are called observations,

00:34:22   on people who do the same kind of work that you do, right?

00:34:26   Like, people you mentioned are podcasters and writers,

00:34:30   and the podcasters all still use Macs to podcast with,

00:34:35   not all podcasters, but the ones you mentioned,

00:34:38   and a writer can get away with using iOS only or primarily

00:34:43   a lot more easily than a programmer can today.

00:34:46   So I think once people, you and I, the three of us,

00:34:52   are all programmers, once a whole bunch of programmers

00:34:56   dump their PCs and Macs and do all of their work on iOS,

00:35:01   then I think we have to start looking, okay,

00:35:04   there's a thing here, we should consider this,

00:35:06   we should pay attention to this,

00:35:08   and maybe we are wrong at that point.

00:35:09   But until that happens, which might never come,

00:35:13   again, I wanna be very careful here in how I phrase this.

00:35:16   Like, you said, like, the Mac is dead,

00:35:20   and the Mac isn't dead until this happens.

00:35:22   And a lot of people, you know, you phrase these things

00:35:25   in a way that presents them as an inevitable future.

00:35:28   But I do wanna be clear here that when I talk about this,

00:35:31   I'm not necessarily considering this an inevitable future.

00:35:36   the future, I mean, obviously OS's eventually do die

00:35:40   and fall out of favor and fall out of use and maintenance,

00:35:43   but I am still not yet convinced

00:35:46   that the PC style operating system is destined

00:35:49   to be sidelined and killed in favor

00:35:53   of the mobile style operating system

00:35:55   within the foreseeable future.

00:35:57   Like, eventually on an infinite time scale it might happen,

00:35:59   but I don't see this as the obvious foretold future

00:36:04   that is certain to happen.

00:36:06   But anyway, I think you really have to just look at

00:36:09   people who do the kind of work you do.

00:36:11   And most of the people who are talking about

00:36:14   going iOS only or iOS being the inevitable future,

00:36:18   most of these people are writers and analysts

00:36:22   and executives, and that's fine,

00:36:25   and there's a lot of people who that will be fine for,

00:36:28   but if you start talking to people who do different

00:36:30   kinds of things with their computers,

00:36:32   including things that we all, that all three of us do,

00:36:35   then you start very quickly to hit limits of like,

00:36:37   oh well you kinda can't do that on iOS yet.

00:36:40   Or that's really difficult and clunky to do on iOS.

00:36:43   I don't think you can look at a bunch of people

00:36:45   who professionally write as their main job

00:36:49   and say like, well, they're all using an iPad,

00:36:52   so therefore I should be using an iPad.

00:36:54   You should be more concerned if people

00:36:57   who do the kinds of things you do,

00:36:59   like programming, if they switch.

00:37:01   and that's when you should pay attention.

00:37:03   - I largely agree with you, but I don't think it's fair

00:37:07   to classify Federico Mike and Ben Brooks

00:37:10   always simply writers.

00:37:11   I mean, I think they're doing--

00:37:12   - I didn't say simply.

00:37:13   That's important.

00:37:16   - Okay, well--

00:37:16   - It's a job that is very amenable to iOS primary

00:37:21   or iOS only work, and there are a lot of jobs

00:37:24   for which that's the case,

00:37:25   but there's a lot where it isn't also.

00:37:28   - Yeah, I guess my point is that I don't wanna paint

00:37:31   the image because I can hear Mike Hurley and Federico screaming at us from the future.

00:37:36   It's not that all they do is write. They're doing sometimes relatively intense spreadsheet

00:37:43   work. I mean, look at the quarterly earnings reports that Federico farts out in the span

00:37:48   of like four seconds because of all the workflows that he's built. And Mike and Steven Hackett

00:37:54   are, you know, billing or invoicing advertisers and doing all sorts of like traditional business-y

00:38:00   things. So I don't, I agree with you that it is mostly writer-like things on the surface,

00:38:08   but there's a lot more to it when you start digging in. But that doesn't negate your point

00:38:12   that these people, with the exception perhaps of Federico actually, these people are not

00:38:16   developers. They're not writing code, well except Federico, on their devices.

00:38:20   I mean Federico's an outlier in a lot of ways.

00:38:23   - Yeah, I agree, I agree.

00:38:25   But yeah, it's not the sort of thing that the three of us do

00:38:28   but I don't want to discount it in summary

00:38:30   as legitimate work that is more than just

00:38:34   writing prose on a piece of paper, that's all.

00:38:36   - Oh yeah, no, and I never said legitimate or simple.

00:38:38   Like I'm not saying these,

00:38:40   I'm not characterizing it this way.

00:38:42   It's just different software needs

00:38:44   and different things you need from your computing devices

00:38:46   and different levels of flexibility and access

00:38:50   to things like files and inter-program communication

00:38:54   and the integration of lots of things

00:38:56   within the same data set like what you need with programming

00:38:59   and like, you know, there are certain strengths

00:39:01   and weaknesses to both OS styles,

00:39:04   but again, you know, I think when people

00:39:07   who do the kinds of things you do are switching in mass,

00:39:10   that's when to pay attention.

00:39:11   Before that happens and unless that happens,

00:39:15   I don't think you need to be worried too much

00:39:18   that you are the dinosaur holding back progress.

00:39:20   Also, it's quite impressive that Jon thinks

00:39:22   that we can hold back progress.

00:39:24   - Well, no, I'm just saying, like,

00:39:25   what are you spending your time doing?

00:39:26   'Cause like I said, if you see somebody yelling against it,

00:39:28   even if they don't actually do anything,

00:39:31   it's not, it seems like they're wasting their time

00:39:34   and it's a sad situation where they don't realize

00:39:36   that the world is passing them by.

00:39:38   One more item on this that I think about

00:39:40   is sort of the second level version of checking yourself,

00:39:44   which is more focused on Apple, the company,

00:39:48   and less focused on whether what the future of computing is.

00:39:55   And that is the question of whether it's important for Apple to be in the personal computer market.

00:40:04   So even if you see everything that Marco said, like, OK, well, people doing these types of

00:40:08   jobs still need a PC or whatever.

00:40:10   Is it the best thing for the company called Apple?

00:40:14   Does it need to be in the PC market?

00:40:16   And that's where we talk about, "Oh, well they need the Macs to develop for iOS.

00:40:19   What if they have a development environment on iPads?

00:40:21   Well, it's not the same, blah, blah, blah.

00:40:22   Could you develop iOS applications on PCs?"

00:40:25   That's the next question is, even if you stipulate PCs aren't going away anytime soon, should

00:40:30   Apple continue to sell PCs?

00:40:32   Is the Mac only hanging around for old time's sake and tradition and affection, but it would

00:40:41   be better for the company to allow all the people who develop for iOS to do so on a platform

00:40:48   that someone else maintains and really in us arguing for Apple to say in the market

00:40:54   really we're just trying to like you know I mean we've made the argument times that

00:40:57   like that every every other alternative is worse so we would be sad but from the perspective

00:41:02   of Apple the company they may say yes every we agree every alternative is worse than the

00:41:07   But the Mac is no longer worth the money for us to invest in and rather than letting a limp along with us never updating

00:41:13   Our stuff and you being all mad about it

00:41:15   Why don't we just get out of that business the same way we get out of printers and Wi-Fi hubs and whatever the hell else?

00:41:20   They're not in and won't that be refreshing we can finally concentrate on the thing we do best

00:41:25   Which is the iPhone with some ancillary iOS type things and blah blah blah blah blah

00:41:30   I I think you know obviously I disagree with that or whatever

00:41:33   But that's, I still keep it in mind as the second possibility.

00:41:38   The first being that, you know, we're on the wrong side of history.

00:41:41   And the second is we're on the right side of history, but just because we love Apple

00:41:45   and just because it's the best, it would actually be better for the company Apple

00:41:49   to get out of this business so it could concentrate on the other stuff, which again,

00:41:53   I don't buy, but I still entertain that as a thought experiment that I revisit to make

00:41:58   sure that it's not the case, because that can sneak up on you too, where you're like,

00:42:01   You feel so strongly that you're right that like look everybody who is editing video is doing it on a big powerful personal computer

00:42:06   First of all, we just can't go away. I'm a video editor. I need to edit video

00:42:09   I look at all the other people who are adding video and no one's doing on an iPad clearly the PC is a thing and

00:42:14   Then to make the leap therefore Apple needs to make a new Mac Pro

00:42:17   Does Apple need to make a Mac Pro or do you just need to switch to Windows and be sad like, you know?

00:42:21   Because again pros will use whatever they have to use to get the job done and the more like an appliance

00:42:27   This is what's talking about when Marco was talking about like getting the surface studio

00:42:30   The more you use a computer like an appliance to get your job done as a professional the less tied you are

00:42:37   Effectively if not emotionally two of the particular platform are using so if you're just gonna be in Lightroom all day and the surface studio

00:42:43   Is the best you know?

00:42:45   Dedicated Lightroom appliance you go into the office sit down in front and all you do is Lightroom Lightroom Lightroom all day long

00:42:49   Maybe that is better than any solution Apple has to offer and maybe Apple staying in that business is just some sentimental thing that you

00:42:56   you care about, but realistically speaking,

00:42:58   we would all be much happier if Apple got out of it

00:43:00   and stopped making that line of computers entirely,

00:43:02   and you just sat down in front of your server studio

00:43:03   and gave that business to Microsoft,

00:43:05   some company that is actually interested in pursuing it.

00:43:08   - Yeah, well, as soon as Apple starts being managed

00:43:10   by the numbers that way, they're going to find themselves,

00:43:13   I think, in a very boring and slowly declining place,

00:43:18   whether the numbers suggest so or not.

00:43:20   That is a very, very fast way to become Microsoft

00:43:22   with under Steve Ballmer.

00:43:23   I'm telling, like that's, you know,

00:43:25   There was this wonderful Steve Jobs video

00:43:29   that floated around on Reddit a couple weeks ago

00:43:31   about how it takes like five years to realize

00:43:34   when the bit flips and you start making computers

00:43:38   just to make money and not to make better computers

00:43:40   or something like that.

00:43:41   I'm probably butchering it.

00:43:42   - He also said he would milk the Mac for all it's worth

00:43:44   and move on to the next big thing.

00:43:45   And guess what?

00:43:46   The Mac is not like an analogy.

00:43:48   He was talking about specifically the Mac.

00:43:50   The Mac we're talking about now.

00:43:51   Milk it for all it's worth and move on to the next thing.

00:43:52   And it's clear he thought the next thing

00:43:54   the iPhone and the iPad and it's pretty clear the next thing is the iPhone and iPad, but

00:43:58   we're still making Macs. So in some ways it would be like pursuing your passion, not continuing

00:44:02   to make the Mac just because you've always made it. If the company itself is enthusiastic

00:44:06   about iOS devices only, then continuing to make Macs in a disappointing way. You know,

00:44:12   it's not as if like, oh, well, you're just going to go if you're going to go by the numbers,

00:44:15   you're like, oh, I should go where the big business is. But maybe the passion is just

00:44:18   not in it anymore for the Macs. Maybe they see it as a declining business they're not

00:44:21   interested in and isn't it better for all of us to divorce this dysfunctional relationship,

00:44:27   stop making the Mac, force everybody to go to Windows or whatever, which will force more

00:44:31   money into that market that will hopefully motivate Microsoft to make the Surface Studio

00:44:35   better.

00:44:36   Again, I'm not recommending any of this.

00:44:37   These are all thought experiments and all things that I revisit.

00:44:40   I revisit and mostly reject, but if you never revisit them, they'll sneak up on you.

00:44:45   Well, but here's the problem with this thinking.

00:44:48   So you start running the company by the numbers

00:44:50   and you think, well, it'll be fine,

00:44:52   we'll let the Mac languish or we'll kill it

00:44:55   because it's not where we wanna go or whatever,

00:44:58   whatever the reason, doesn't matter.

00:45:00   - But it's not by the numbers

00:45:00   'cause they're not passionate about it.

00:45:01   It's the past and they're passionate about the future.

00:45:04   So they're running it by their passion.

00:45:05   They're not being a slave to the past.

00:45:07   They're saying what we're interested in is, I don't know,

00:45:09   maybe they're interested in AR or whatever,

00:45:11   but maybe they're not interested in the Mac anymore.

00:45:13   So I would say it's the opposite of running it by the numbers

00:45:15   because the numbers would tell you,

00:45:16   why throw away $22 billion business, right?

00:45:18   That's free money, why are you throwing that away?

00:45:20   You say, we're throwing it away

00:45:22   so we can concentrate more fully

00:45:23   on the thing that we really believe is the future,

00:45:25   which is the opposite of Steve Ballmer.

00:45:26   Steve Ballmer would keep the Mac going forever

00:45:29   and just do exactly what the customers wanted

00:45:30   forever and ever as the rest of the world moves on.

00:45:33   You know what I mean?

00:45:34   I feel like that's more of the Steve Ballmer way.

00:45:35   - You're right, Apple would definitely not

00:45:36   keep selling the same products forever.

00:45:38   - No, I mean, like in terms of like,

00:45:40   of trying to do what that market wants exactly.

00:45:43   Like they would be giving us Big Macs with lots of ports and, you know, constantly revising

00:45:47   them and just sat like making them satisfied in the way that like, you know, IBM mainframe

00:45:52   customers are satisfied.

00:45:53   The IBM will continue to make mainframes for its mainframe customers and give them exactly

00:45:57   what they want.

00:45:58   All the while, the whole rest of the world is moving on from mainframes.

00:46:01   But they don't know.

00:46:02   They're like, "It's fine.

00:46:03   They keep making us better and better mainframes and we love mainframes."

00:46:05   And they wake up one day and the entire world has moved on.

00:46:08   They're like, "Wait, there's only like 10 of us left?"

00:46:11   But we were so happy for all these years,

00:46:12   and we were happy to give IBM all this money,

00:46:14   and they kept making these awesome mainframes from us,

00:46:16   and the world has moved on past you, right?

00:46:18   So I feel like that's more of a Ballmer thing.

00:46:21   - Fair, but everything you're saying about the Mac,

00:46:26   what happens when they apply

00:46:28   that exact same logic to the iPhone?

00:46:31   - Well, they can.

00:46:33   I mean, if they're no longer passionate about the iPhone

00:46:36   and they think the next big thing is something else,

00:46:38   then they should, like, it's exactly the same thing

00:46:40   Steve Jobs saying like milk the Mac for all it's worth move on to the next big thing.

00:46:44   Eventually it's milk the iPhone for all it's worth move on to the next big thing because

00:46:47   if you don't someone else will. Like someone else will eat your lunch if you don't eat

00:46:50   you know cannibalizing your business. Apple is the one who cannibalized its own iPod sales.

00:46:55   Apple didn't cannibalize iPod sales. The sales curve for iPods would look like the same big

00:46:59   hump with spikes on it for the holidays. It would look exactly the same but someone else

00:47:03   would have replaced it. Whether it's Samsung or Microsoft or whoever would have won that

00:47:07   war, if Apple didn't cannibalize the iPod, someone else would. So it's not like Apple

00:47:10   banked the company on the iPod and said it's going to be iPod forever. Remember when people

00:47:14   were saying the iPod is going to dwarf the Mac and now Apple is just an iPod company

00:47:18   and the Apple store was the iPod store? Apple is the one who cannibalized the iPod. It turns

00:47:22   out the iPod arc was obviously shorter than we think the iPhone arc is going to be. The

00:47:26   iPhone arc could last our whole lives for all we know, or longer. But that's the challenge

00:47:32   of the innovator's dilemma and all that other crap. That's the challenge of business. And

00:47:36   The Mac in all of these graphs is this aberration that never goes up and never goes down, but

00:47:40   just keeps on trucking.

00:47:42   And I think there, you know, again, I'm not playing devil's advocate.

00:47:45   I'm just saying these are things that are worth thinking about.

00:47:48   I don't find them convincing.

00:47:49   If I had to make the argument, I would say Apple needs to continue making the Mac and

00:47:52   should do a much better job at it because the time has not come.

00:47:55   Because I mostly am on the same page as Marco.

00:47:59   Other people who are doing these tasks are not currently using anything that's not like

00:48:04   a PC.

00:48:05   PCs to do them. Like, they're not using Surface tablets, they're not using, at this point

00:48:09   they're still not using the Surface Studio, they're using PCs, whether they're Windows

00:48:13   PCs or Unix workstations running Maya or Macs, they're just not using iPads to do these jobs,

00:48:20   right? And that's, I think that is, you know, Marko didn't do his homework, but he came

00:48:24   up with a pretty reasonable last minute scribbling while the teachers come around and collecting

00:48:29   the papers. It's how I got through school. Yeah, I think that is a thing to look for.

00:48:34   You have to be careful because if you're just looking at the people who are like hanging

00:48:37   out in the same circles as you, then it's all like sort of self-selecting.

00:48:39   It's like, well, all my friends still use PCs, but maybe every kid graduating school

00:48:44   is doing, you know, like for example, digital video.

00:48:46   Like if every kid graduating film school is shooting digital video and editing digital

00:48:50   video and you're like, well, all my friends are still shooting on film, so film is never

00:48:53   going to die.

00:48:54   You're being blind.

00:48:55   You're missing it, right?

00:48:56   But I think in this case, for the jobs that we're talking about, certainly programming,

00:48:59   because I think we have a good view on that, not just for iOS and Mac programming, but

00:49:03   in all realms that serious programming is still done in PC style devices. Video editing

00:49:09   for the most part is still done in PC style devices, but you gotta watch the kids. Watch

00:49:12   the kids coming into film school. Are they editing their film school project on an iPad

00:49:18   or on a Surface Studio or on anything like that? That's sort of like the leading indicator

00:49:23   and that's the thing to watch for. I think right now the answer is that PC style computers

00:49:27   are still the thing to do. My big fear is that Apple decides that it's not worth them

00:49:31   being in the business. I don't particularly have a fear that in the near future the PC

00:49:36   style of computing is going to go away. I have a fear that the Apple personal computer,

00:49:41   meaning the Mac, is going to go away because Apple doesn't care about it or neglects it

00:49:45   to the point. And that's the worst case scenario where you still have to use a PC, but you

00:49:49   no longer get to choose the Mac because it's no longer any good for you.

00:49:53   That's when I switched to Linux.

00:49:55   (sighs)

00:49:56   - Gotta help us all.

00:49:57   Quick side note about that though, Jon.

00:50:00   I had some coworkers at the last gig

00:50:02   that did use Surface tablets to do their work,

00:50:06   like to write code, to do their work,

00:50:09   to do, that was their computer.

00:50:10   There were only a couple of them,

00:50:11   and I think by and large,

00:50:12   they kind of regretted their decision,

00:50:14   but in that sense, it is happening.

00:50:17   That is a thing that happens from time to time.

00:50:18   - Well, I think we call that,

00:50:19   I keep putting the Surface into it,

00:50:21   but I'm thinking more of like using the touch interface

00:50:23   to the Surface device, even more of the Surface Studio,

00:50:25   where you are touching the screen.

00:50:27   In many respects, the Surface Books and all that stuff,

00:50:30   they're just a convertible laptop.

00:50:31   Like it's muddled by the fact that Windows

00:50:34   is this unified platform.

00:50:36   But yeah, I have people at work who do programming stuff

00:50:38   on Surface too, but it's just a laptop at that point.

00:50:41   It's like a weird laptop with a bendy hinge,

00:50:44   and it's running Windows, and they're running terminal stuff

00:50:46   and they have a keyboard, and they have a trackpad

00:50:48   pointing device, and yeah, they also have a pen,

00:50:50   and yeah, it can kind of be a tablet,

00:50:51   But essentially they're using a laptop.

00:50:53   Like they have Windows with title bars and scroll bars.

00:50:57   Like it's confusing because of the way Microsoft has done

00:51:01   its unified OS strategy,

00:51:03   but I would still totally classify those as PC style

00:51:06   because it is very distinct from the iOS style.

00:51:08   Even when I see my daughter,

00:51:10   she's got like a keyboard, Logitech keyboard thing

00:51:12   for her iPad.

00:51:13   Even when she does form of laptop with her,

00:51:16   that's Wonder Twins for you.

00:51:17   You guys missed that show.

00:51:18   Anyway, when she makes a little laptop out of her iPad and her keyboard, it's still not

00:51:26   a laptop.

00:51:27   Yes, it looks like one.

00:51:28   Yes, there's a kind of a vertical-ish screen and a horizontal-ish keyboard, but there's

00:51:32   no pointer on her screen.

00:51:34   She's not using a trackpad.

00:51:35   There are no windows.

00:51:36   There are no scroll bars and scroll thumbs.

00:51:37   There's no menu bar along the top.

00:51:39   It is not a PC computing experience.

00:51:45   We live in a strange time.

00:51:46   We live in a strange transitional time,

00:51:47   but some things defy categorization,

00:51:50   but I think the salient points,

00:51:52   like what makes it a PC,

00:51:54   and what makes it a PC style computing environment,

00:51:57   are pretty clear.

00:51:58   For me, obviously it's all about Windows,

00:51:59   because what the hell,

00:52:01   imagine if the 28 inch Surface Studio did not have Windows,

00:52:06   like everything was full screen or split screen

00:52:09   like it does in the iPad.

00:52:10   We would say this is the biggest waste

00:52:12   of a 28 inch screen in the world,

00:52:14   unless you're only ever in one app

00:52:16   doing Lightroom all the time, then fine,

00:52:17   but for a general purpose computing device,

00:52:19   getting back to Marco's idea that you can do

00:52:21   more than one thing at a time,

00:52:22   a general purpose computing device

00:52:25   that can only show apps in full screen

00:52:26   on a 20-inch display is just a very wrong-headed idea,

00:52:30   and I would say that's not PC computing,

00:52:32   that's more like iOS.

00:52:33   - Here's a question.

00:52:34   In what product is Apple really stepping on the gas

00:52:40   and really firing on all cylinders?

00:52:42   - AirPods.

00:52:43   I know it's not a valid answer in this context,

00:52:46   but I cannot stop talking about how much I love my AirPods.

00:52:50   - I would say the iPhone.

00:52:51   I mean, I know, I think at last show,

00:52:53   I recently listened to it, so it's fresh in my mind,

00:52:55   and Marco said like, "Oh, the new iPhone 7,

00:52:58   "internally the changes aren't that big."

00:52:59   Like, look at the graphs, man.

00:53:00   Like, every part of this,

00:53:02   every part of this that can be better,

00:53:04   computing-wise and capacity-wise,

00:53:06   is better by leaps and bounds,

00:53:08   by like '90s-era PC leaps and bounds.

00:53:11   Like, it's not, the CPU is not just a little bit faster.

00:53:14   The GPU is not just a little bit faster.

00:53:16   The flash capacity is like the max is, you know,

00:53:19   isn't it double like you can only get 128 last year,

00:53:20   now you can get 256s.

00:53:22   It's fantastically better internal.

00:53:25   The only thing that's not better about it by,

00:53:30   oh, they're not standing on the gas,

00:53:31   it's like, oh, the case is the same shape.

00:53:33   And even there, they changed the surface

00:53:35   in such a way that Marco was saying

00:53:37   is his favorite product of last year,

00:53:39   because it made such a difference in day-to-day use.

00:53:43   So I still think iPhone is pedal to the metal,

00:53:46   and AirPods are part of that,

00:53:47   are part of their weird headphone thing,

00:53:49   which by the way has bitten me.

00:53:51   I don't have a USB-C laptop,

00:53:52   but I've been bitten by the headphones thing

00:53:54   like five times recently,

00:53:57   where I thought I had everything I needed

00:53:59   and was gonna plug a headphone in and realized,

00:54:02   even on the plane coming back,

00:54:03   I brought the adapter for me

00:54:04   to use my noise-canceling headphones,

00:54:05   but then my daughter wanted to use some headphones too

00:54:08   and plug in, it's like, oh, well, I only have one adapter.

00:54:10   (laughing)

00:54:11   Like you always think you have everything you need,

00:54:13   but here just use, oh, nevermind.

00:54:15   Or gone on a car trip and before,

00:54:18   and we're gonna plug, in my wife's old car,

00:54:21   she just had AUX in with like a headphone port,

00:54:23   and I brought my iPod with me, or my phone with me,

00:54:25   and we can listen to like the podcast

00:54:27   that I'm in the middle of,

00:54:28   and we get in the car and start driving away,

00:54:30   and I grab the little AUX cord from the center console

00:54:32   and pick it up and go, no.

00:54:33   There's no place I can plug that into my phone.

00:54:36   And of course I'm not carrying the adapter around with me.

00:54:39   So yeah, the struggle is real as they say.

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00:56:43   (upbeat music)

00:56:46   - All right, final bit of follow-up, speaking of cars.

00:56:49   - Still a follow-up.

00:56:51   - No, we're almost done.

00:56:52   Well, this is one of those episodes

00:56:53   where follow-up isn't exactly follow-up,

00:56:55   which is probably most episodes.

00:56:56   Anyway, Sam O'Balsamid, who is co-host

00:57:00   of the Wheel Bearings podcast, which,

00:57:02   if you ever wanted neutral, but with people

00:57:04   who actually knew what they were talking about,

00:57:06   you should look up Wheel Bearings.

00:57:07   It's pretty good. (laughing)

00:57:08   Anyway, he writes in to say,

00:57:10   "The 2016-2017 model year accords do indeed support

00:57:13   "both CarPlay and Android Auto, as do most new Hondas.

00:57:17   "The only Hondas that are still waiting

00:57:18   "for Android Auto and CarPlay update

00:57:19   "are the Fit and the HRV."

00:57:21   I'm not sure what that is.

00:57:22   I know the CRV, but not the HRV.

00:57:23   - You don't know what the HRV is?

00:57:25   Be glad it's terrible, but.

00:57:27   - Anyway, "The 2018 Odyssey is debuting

00:57:30   in a couple of weeks at the Detroit Auto Show. So that makes me think that Tina's car does

00:57:35   indeed have CarPlay, does it not?

00:57:39   So here's the question. I've never used CarPlay. I've seen pictures of it online, and I think

00:57:45   I've even seen screenshots of Marco's CarPlay stuff, and I've seen Marco's disembodied CarPlay

00:57:51   testing whatchapoos and things, right? But I don't know how CarPlay works. Do I have

00:57:56   to download an app onto my phone called CarPlay?

00:57:59   No.

00:58:00   - You think if I just plug a phone into my wife's car

00:58:03   with a wire, because we don't have the wireless version,

00:58:05   that something will happen on the screen

00:58:07   to indicate you are in CarPlay now?

00:58:10   - Apparently if you just plug it in,

00:58:12   there'll be one of those alerts, like a computer,

00:58:15   where it says, "Do you trust this car?"

00:58:16   Or something like that, and then magic happens.

00:58:19   Now, I've not witnessed this myself,

00:58:20   this is just real-time follow-up,

00:58:21   but that's what I'm being told.

00:58:23   - Do I trust this car?

00:58:25   - Yeah, last time Tina was saying

00:58:26   there was only uncertain trim levels.

00:58:28   Bottom line is this is like the Schrodinger's cat of CarPlay support.

00:58:31   Until I actually try it, her car both has CarPlay support and doesn't have CarPlay support.

00:58:37   But seriously, it had not occurred to me to think like, do I have to download an app,

00:58:42   and once I download the app do I do a thing, or is it just plugging it in?

00:58:45   And I think basically we've never actually plugged any of our iPhones into her car because

00:58:50   it's all been Bluetooth, so it could be that that's totally right as soon as I plug it

00:58:53   in.

00:58:54   Oh, Jon.

00:58:55   How do you not know this already?

00:58:56   That would be the first thing I tried.

00:58:58   - I've driven that car onto and off of the driveway

00:59:01   like twice, that's how far I've driven that car.

00:59:03   - Why don't you just go outside right now

00:59:05   and give it a shot?

00:59:06   I'm kind of not kidding.

00:59:08   I'm really not kidding.

00:59:09   - It won't take too long.

00:59:10   - Why don't you just go give it, it won't take too long,

00:59:11   it'll take just a minute.

00:59:13   - All right, I'll be back, hang on.

00:59:16   - So literally as I'm saying this,

00:59:18   Tina is sending me a text saying that it is not a thing.

00:59:22   Hold on.

00:59:25   - I'm looking up the HRV, it looks basically

00:59:28   like the Honda X1.

00:59:30   - Oh, okay.

00:59:31   Oh, standard on Accord EX, EXL, and Touring.

00:59:35   - Right, but I think she doesn't have the EX,

00:59:36   so I think it's optional for her trim.

00:59:38   Is it just not there, or was it optional?

00:59:40   'Cause that's what we don't know.

00:59:41   - That I don't know.

00:59:43   What is it, Honda USA?

00:59:45   I hate that whenever you go to like Honda or Audi

00:59:48   or whatever, it's the corporate,

00:59:49   this is the most American thing I think I've ever said.

00:59:51   But why does it not go,

00:59:53   Why does it not go directly to America?

00:59:56   - It's just like in the country list dropdowns,

00:59:58   why are we not the first sign listed?

00:59:59   Like I know alphabetically we're not.

01:00:00   - Exactly, this is barbaric.

01:00:02   - Do I really have to scroll through like,

01:00:03   how likely is it that I'm actually from like,

01:00:05   you know, any of these other places?

01:00:07   Like just put the US on top for all the stupid,

01:00:09   arrogant Americans and put everything else below it.

01:00:12   - I am fully behind this.

01:00:15   Tina's saying there was no option.

01:00:17   It's, she does not have an EX, it's a sports special.

01:00:20   It was not an option.

01:00:21   there's basically no options, period, anyway.

01:00:23   - Well, I guess Jon went outside in the cold

01:00:25   in the winter for no reason.

01:00:27   Oh well.

01:00:28   I'm sure he won't be mad.

01:00:29   (laughing)

01:00:31   - I'm now getting yelled at by Tina

01:00:33   that nobody wants to believe her.

01:00:35   I did believe you, Tina.

01:00:36   - We just wanted to send Jon outside.

01:00:37   - Oh, that too.

01:00:38   This is basically every conversation

01:00:39   I've had with Aron ever.

01:00:41   Aron tells me this is not a thing,

01:00:43   or this is a thing.

01:00:44   No, you've gotta be wrong.

01:00:46   Oh, turns out you're right.

01:00:47   (laughing)

01:00:48   every conversation I've ever had with Aaron.

01:00:51   - Yeah, I believe we have words for this.

01:00:53   One of the more charitable ones

01:00:54   is probably mansplaining.

01:00:56   - Oh, the magic of technology.

01:00:58   (laughing)

01:00:59   - All right, John.

01:01:00   - Here's what happened.

01:01:02   So I go to the car and I get all my stuff

01:01:04   and my cables and everything and I plug,

01:01:07   you know, the car turned on, I plug the thing in,

01:01:10   I wait to see something pop up on my phone screen,

01:01:13   nothing ever pops up, wait a couple seconds,

01:01:16   and I hear you two talking about what I'm doing right now.

01:01:20   Like talking about going to the car configurator,

01:01:23   the Honda website and stuff like that.

01:01:25   Because-- - Is it just Tina's phone

01:01:26   popped on Bluetooth? - Right, so Tina,

01:01:29   my wife is listening to the phone upstairs on Bluetooth

01:01:31   and the car is paired with her phone.

01:01:33   And so it start, for a second I'm like,

01:01:36   what in the world is going on?

01:01:38   - That is so amazing. - That's awesome.

01:01:39   Ah, the magic of Bluetooth.

01:01:41   Anyway, my result of the short experiment

01:01:43   was that plugging in the phone does nothing.

01:01:45   I was not prompted to do anything.

01:01:47   I couldn't find anything in any of the menus that mentioned CarPlay or anything about CarPlay.

01:01:51   I could connect my phone by Bluetooth, but that's not how CarPlay works.

01:01:53   It's not a Bluetooth audio thing.

01:01:56   So inconclusive results, but at the very least, merely plugging my phone in did nothing.

01:02:02   While you were gone, I'm pretty sure we found out that your wife was right the whole time,

01:02:05   and you didn't even need to go outside.

01:02:08   See, that's...

01:02:09   There you go.

01:02:11   Sam guy on the car podcast who knows something supposedly.

01:02:15   Your wife knows better.

01:02:16   I'm sure we'll get some feedback on this one.

01:02:18   Amazingly sometimes we don't know what we're talking about.

01:02:22   Really?

01:02:23   And this is why we used to do a car show kids.

01:02:27   People love when you don't know what you're talking about and you do a car podcast.

01:02:30   People really like that.

01:02:32   They think it's the best.

01:02:33   I reject this characterization.

01:02:34   I know a lot about cars.

01:02:35   I know a lot about what I was talking about.

01:02:37   You two keep saying that about yourselves, but I reject that.

01:02:40   Oh, God.

01:02:42   This episode is turning to be quite good.

01:02:46   I love how we just have no structure this week.

01:02:48   We did follow-up.

01:02:50   All those items were legit follow-up.

01:02:52   Mmm.

01:02:54   [laughter]

01:02:55   One of them was even homework.

01:02:57   Man, they went long. Sometimes follow-up goes long,

01:02:59   but that tends to happen after lots of stuff builds up

01:03:02   if we haven't recorded for a while.

01:03:04   The problematic part we have here is

01:03:07   as we transition to topics, go look what's lurking there.

01:03:10   The very first item, who put that in there?

01:03:13   Is that going to be Casey?

01:03:14   Did you put that in there?

01:03:15   Yes.

01:03:16   I don't think I want to talk about it, though.

01:03:17   Right.

01:03:18   It's just like, it's the same thing we've been talking about for the past month on the

01:03:19   show.

01:03:20   I don't feel like, is it, like, I read parts of that article.

01:03:23   It's gone.

01:03:24   It's gone.

01:03:25   Yeah, you deleted it, but, um.

01:03:26   Oh, God.

01:03:27   Here we go.

01:03:28   Is there anything in that article that is not something that we've already talked about?

01:03:31   That's my only question.

01:03:32   Yeah, probably not.

01:03:33   So the article in question, hopefully we'll cut this from the show, but the article in

01:03:36   question is, uh, yeah, Chuck Von Rosspatch, uh, I've probably

01:03:40   pronounced that wrong, I apologize, but anyway, his Apple 2016 year in review, which, TLDR,

01:03:47   some things suck, some things don't, but...

01:03:49   It's a great post.

01:03:50   It is good.

01:03:51   Yeah, I mean, it's good.

01:03:52   It's totally good.

01:03:53   You know, he's expressing, in a much more succinct way, his position on the same issues

01:03:59   that we had talked about.

01:04:00   Yeah, "susinct" is not necessarily the word I would use.

01:04:01   Well, it's more succinct than, like, hours and hours of audio, but, like, you know, we're

01:04:05   We're both, we're all Mac fans, and we're all kind of experiencing some dissatisfaction

01:04:10   with the treatment of the Mac, and we've talked about it at length, and this was his take

01:04:13   on it.

01:04:14   And it was good, and it was articulate, and it was an expression of his opinion and his

01:04:17   desires and his hopes and dreams, and it was a good post.

01:04:20   But for the purposes of discussion on the show, I'm wondering if it is bringing any

01:04:23   new angle that we haven't already given our opinions on umpteen times.

01:04:28   Yeah, and since we'll be asked about it, um, god, who was it that wrote this?

01:04:33   Hold on one second.

01:04:35   - Chris Adamson?

01:04:36   - Chris Adamson, yes.

01:04:37   Chris Adamson's post.

01:04:38   Yeah.

01:04:39   - Also very good, although I honestly,

01:04:43   I don't know if the Mac Pro was the best choice there,

01:04:45   but we're seeing now from a lot of people

01:04:47   saying similar things.

01:04:48   This is not a coincidence, this is not an accident,

01:04:50   this is not a trend or people being wrong.

01:04:54   This is like legitimately, Apple is causing concern

01:04:58   in many of its customers and many of its best,

01:05:01   biggest fans and longest time customers.

01:05:03   And so, I think if I can summarize in a very quick way,

01:05:08   or at least try to put a cap on this for now,

01:05:11   2017 is gonna be a very important year

01:05:14   for Apple to prove a lot of big things

01:05:17   to the market and to its customers.

01:05:20   Right now, there's a lot of things

01:05:23   where the answer from Apple so far

01:05:27   is either silence or just wait.

01:05:30   Wait 'til we see what we have next,

01:05:33   or something like that.

01:05:34   2017, a lot of this stuff is coming due.

01:05:37   Like if 2017 passes through the whole year

01:05:40   and there isn't a major new iPhone design

01:05:44   and there isn't some answer to the Mac Pro

01:05:48   and there isn't maybe better quarterly earnings,

01:05:51   these are some pretty big things.

01:05:54   There have been bad signs on these fronts

01:05:56   for the last year or so, but everyone's like,

01:05:59   oh, next year or soon or this is gonna be out soon

01:06:02   or this is gonna be fixed soon,

01:06:03   or the next iPhone's gonna be great,

01:06:04   or those quarterly earnings were an anomaly.

01:06:07   All those promises are gonna be due this year.

01:06:09   And a year from now,

01:06:12   when we're presumably still having this podcast

01:06:14   and still doing follow-up,

01:06:15   we will see, were all of our concerns unfounded?

01:06:19   How well are all these complaints gonna age?

01:06:24   Are we all wrong?

01:06:25   Is Apple about to release over the course of the next year

01:06:29   amazing things that are gonna blow our minds

01:06:31   and we're going to feel good about the Mac again,

01:06:35   and we're gonna feel good about Apple's prospects again,

01:06:37   and we're gonna feel good about the iPhone design again,

01:06:39   all this stuff, and their number's gonna go up,

01:06:41   and everyone on the market's gonna be happy.

01:06:43   Is that really gonna happen this year?

01:06:44   It might, we don't know yet.

01:06:46   We'll find out, and I really hope things go better,

01:06:48   because frankly, if they don't,

01:06:51   I'm gonna have to find other stuff to talk about,

01:06:52   because I'm tired of being sad all the time

01:06:54   about all the stuff I love.

01:06:56   - Wargrove in the chat room had a good turn of phrase,

01:06:59   which I'm going to slightly improve.

01:07:01   2017 year of Mac OS on the desktop.

01:07:04   Nice.

01:07:06   Pretty good, huh?

01:07:07   Nice.

01:07:08   Ooh.

01:07:09   So I know Marco wanted to put a capper on this,

01:07:12   but unfortunately the next item in the topic list

01:07:14   is the one tiny sliver of new angle on this, yes,

01:07:18   very old entire topic that I happened to--

01:07:22   that happened to occur to me and that I tweeted earlier today.

01:07:24   It was in response to Michael Sise.

01:07:26   He's had a series of articles on this whole same thing,

01:07:29   like so many other Mac bloggers,

01:07:30   and he's an old time Mac user,

01:07:32   and he's feeling all the same things.

01:07:34   And one of his posts was on finding an alternative

01:07:37   to what he calls Mac OS X.

01:07:40   But he's not on board with their naming, I guess.

01:07:43   And he links to Wesley Moore's post about this,

01:07:48   about trying to find,

01:07:49   I'm looking into different Linux distributions and stuff.

01:07:52   People are looking for alternatives for Mac OS X.

01:07:56   They're not looking for an escape patch,

01:07:58   but like at the very least,

01:08:00   trying to see what else is out there.

01:08:01   Like before I was happy using the Mac

01:08:04   and I wasn't even looking at all terms,

01:08:05   but now I'm starting to consider like,

01:08:06   hey, what else is out there?

01:08:07   How's Windows doing?

01:08:09   Is Linux any good?

01:08:10   Let me try a few different distributions, stuff like that.

01:08:13   And then Gruber also talked about it anyway.

01:08:15   So this Michael's slide post,

01:08:18   what I tweeted, I used the little quote tweet feature,

01:08:20   which I actually am starting to like

01:08:22   because it gives me room to actually write something

01:08:24   while also including their tweet.

01:08:25   - Welcome to like two years ago, Jon.

01:08:27   I know, I mean, my client has supported it,

01:08:30   the iOS version of Twitter, it's great,

01:08:31   it's totally up to date, but I'm still,

01:08:33   my habits are based on the old ways.

01:08:35   - Talk about like not knowing when to move on.

01:08:38   - No, I use it, but like my normal Twitter way

01:08:42   would be to like, I write a tweet

01:08:44   and then paste the last 20 characters,

01:08:46   be the shortened URL, right?

01:08:48   But by quoting, you get some characters back.

01:08:50   Anyway, what I tweeted was, "The last time Mac users

01:08:53   "were seriously passing around articles like this,"

01:08:55   articles like the one about finding alternatives,

01:08:57   was during the transition from macOS to Mac OS X.

01:09:00   And as I tweeted to someone else who had replied,

01:09:05   someone replied, "Oh, I can't wait for the million replies

01:09:08   that are gonna say, and now it's the transition

01:09:09   from macOS to iOS, ha ha ha."

01:09:11   Which yes, there were many of those replies,

01:09:13   but my commentary, follow up to this was,

01:09:18   analysis intentionally omitted.

01:09:21   A, because it's Twitter and you don't have room to do that.

01:09:24   And B, I like to just let this tweet lie

01:09:27   because it is like a Rorschach test.

01:09:30   The last time I saw articles about this

01:09:31   was the transition from macOS to macOS 10.

01:09:32   Half the people are gonna see that and say,

01:09:34   "Yeah, and weren't those dummies wrong

01:09:36   "because macOS 10 was awesome

01:09:37   "and all the people clinging to macOS

01:09:39   "were a bunch of chumps."

01:09:40   And the other half of the people are gonna say,

01:09:42   "Yeah, that's around the last time the Mac almost died

01:09:44   "and we came through it by the skin of our teeth

01:09:46   "by struggling mightily to get this next based OS

01:09:50   "up into ship shape so that it's satisfying to Mac users."

01:09:52   And then yet another group of people are gonna say,

01:09:55   yes, but a lot of people actually did leave the Mac then,

01:09:57   it's just that they were replaced by Unix nerds

01:09:59   and it all evened out or actually was a net win.

01:10:01   And so many different views on how the Mac OS X

01:10:04   transition went, you know, I'm fairly intimately familiar

01:10:07   with the Mac OS X transition,

01:10:08   so I know what I think about it,

01:10:10   but so many different people had different ideas

01:10:12   of like what it was like.

01:10:13   You guys didn't experience this,

01:10:14   you didn't experience the incredible turmoil.

01:10:17   Much worse, I'm gonna say much worse

01:10:19   than the current turmoil phrasing,

01:10:20   much much worse of a dying practically a dying company certainly a dying OS like

01:10:27   this is you know the in your parlance the windows 95 you know no memory

01:10:32   protection no preemptive multitasking like trying to get from that world into

01:10:37   a modern OS while trying to preserve something anything that was good about

01:10:40   the Mac it totally felt like Apple as a company could be dying which is not a

01:10:45   thing that we are currently worried about right now at all right and

01:10:48   And certainly that the Mac could be dying along with the company because even if they survive,

01:10:52   what comes out the other side of this thing will not be a Mac. It'll be some stupid Unix thing

01:10:57   with a terminal that won't be a Mac at all and everything is terrible. In the end, you know,

01:11:04   I think we successfully navigated that transition, but all of the participants, all the players were

01:11:10   there. There wasn't that much podcasting going on, but I can tell you that there were many,

01:11:14   many people who are from the old school Mac world complaining just like we've

01:11:21   been complaining on this podcast through every channel available to them. Again,

01:11:26   Twitter didn't exist either, but like Usenet, lots of arguing on Usenet. I

01:11:29   remember arguing with some person named Guy English, which totally sounds

01:11:32   like a made-up name, on Usenet about the merits of classic Mac OS versus

01:11:36   Next. I don't know who that guy was. On, you know, on the nascent web and on our

01:11:42   blogs and in person and in Mac user groups and the pages of magazines and

01:11:46   letters to editors about how the Mac was going. And the reason I reference that is

01:11:53   not because I think we're in the same situation again, I think that was a way

01:11:55   more dire situation which gives me some comfort because it's like I came through

01:11:59   that and we're nowhere near as bad as that is. But just to say that no one was

01:12:05   seriously circulating "check out these alternatives to Mac OS X" in the circles

01:12:11   among diehard Mac users.

01:12:13   Obviously there's always articles about like, hey, if you're thinking of using this, look

01:12:16   at this alternative, blah, blah, blah.

01:12:17   But within our sort of blogging and tweeting circles of all these people who have been

01:12:23   using Macs for years and love it, I hadn't seen an article like this in ages, let alone

01:12:28   a series of them.

01:12:30   To find one, I have to go back to the last time our little community was in turmoil,

01:12:36   and that was when people were like, oh, if they're going to do this to the Mac, I might

01:12:39   as well use Windows or I might as well try Linux or I'm gonna leave the Mac and

01:12:44   go to you know there was you know no one said they're gonna leave the Mac and go

01:12:47   to Palm OS because that wasn't you know anyway it gives me some historical

01:12:51   perspective but it also highlights the fact that even though the current

01:12:54   situation is not as bad as it was then is at least of the same type that these

01:13:01   kinds of articles are are in circulation and are of interest to everybody even if

01:13:08   you don't feel that way, even if you just want to read it so you can sneer at the people

01:13:12   who are, you know, claiming that the sky is falling or whatever. The fact is the articles

01:13:17   are being passed around and people are reading them, people are thinking about it, and that

01:13:20   hasn't happened in a long time. How long ago was the M

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01:15:31   [Music]

01:15:35   Since clearly the Mac is doomed and the future is not even iOS, it's voice, tell us about

01:15:40   your Google Home.

01:15:41   My Google Home, yeah, so I got a Google Home as a gift for my wife/gift for the family.

01:15:51   It's complicated by the fact that our photos are, you know, I signed up for Google Photos

01:15:57   using my one terabyte of Google.

01:15:58   Wait, can we back up for a second?

01:16:00   I heard from your wife that you got this Google Home

01:16:04   as a gift-- - I'm getting to that.

01:16:06   - As a gift to her and then paired it to your phone?

01:16:09   - I'm about to, and it's not paired to the phone,

01:16:12   I'm about to explain this, so.

01:16:13   - Did it say Homer on it, is that?

01:16:15   - It's obviously for the whole family

01:16:18   because it just sits in a room,

01:16:19   it's not like one of us has it on their desk

01:16:20   or something, right?

01:16:21   But one of the things that it can do for you

01:16:24   is you can ask it to display your photos on your TV,

01:16:27   So show me pictures of whoever on my Chromecast,

01:16:30   and it will do that.

01:16:31   I don't have Chromecast yet, but I plan to get one.

01:16:32   They're like 30 bucks or whatever.

01:16:33   It's not a big deal.

01:16:34   And I do have HDMI ports available on the side of my TV.

01:16:37   So I'm gonna do that.

01:16:39   But all of our Google Photos are associated

01:16:42   with my Google account, not hers.

01:16:44   Even though she has the photo library

01:16:48   on her 5K iMac under her account.

01:16:51   So she owns that.

01:16:52   But I mean, and this is actually a feature.

01:16:54   I like the fact that we can do this.

01:16:55   I had one terabyte of Google storage

01:16:57   that I use for other things.

01:16:58   And so when it came time to look into Google Photos,

01:17:01   I said, I can run the Google Photos thing

01:17:04   on your account on your 5K iMac,

01:17:06   but use it to upload all of your photos

01:17:08   from the family photo library

01:17:10   up to my Google account storage,

01:17:12   because I'm the one with one terabyte of storage.

01:17:15   And so I have all the Google Photos,

01:17:17   and you could only associate the Google Home

01:17:20   with one Google account.

01:17:22   I do, it's the first thing I searched by Googling,

01:17:25   because I saw how you set up like,

01:17:27   "Okay, now how do I add another account?"

01:17:28   Because you know in all the Google web properties,

01:17:29   you can be signed into mobile accounts

01:17:31   and switch among them and have, you know,

01:17:32   like I thought surely that's the thing,

01:17:34   but I immediately found out that Google Home

01:17:36   currently is limited to being connected

01:17:37   to one Google account.

01:17:38   So it is connected to my Google account.

01:17:40   And the reason it's connected to my Google account

01:17:42   is because I'm the one with all the photos.

01:17:45   And that's one of the few things

01:17:46   that this thing can do for me.

01:17:47   So that's limitation number one about this.

01:17:51   Limitation number two is,

01:17:53   I mean, it's a big number two.

01:17:55   We'll link in the show notes this article Dan Morin wrote

01:17:57   about these devices 'cause he's been an avid Amazon.

01:18:00   - I look forward to the summary of this

01:18:02   like on the book jacket.

01:18:02   Like John Siracusa calls Google home,

01:18:04   dot, dot, dot, a big number two.

01:18:06   - Yeah, well, the number two thing is that basically

01:18:10   Amazon Echo has a big lead and it does way more stuff.

01:18:13   It just does, especially in terms of home automation

01:18:15   as other things, it's been out longer,

01:18:18   it has more integrations.

01:18:19   And so if you're looking for something

01:18:23   you can take out of the box and hook up a bunch of,

01:18:25   50 different things too and make your own actions.

01:18:27   It feels like this is not that thing.

01:18:29   Someone asked me on Twitter,

01:18:31   if you had to do it over again,

01:18:32   would you still buy the Google Home?

01:18:34   And I'm like, how do you even know I have a Google Home?

01:18:35   And what are you talking about doing it over again?

01:18:36   I just got the Google Home.

01:18:38   Like, I don't know.

01:18:39   But the reason I got it,

01:18:41   and I think we've talked about this before

01:18:42   when I said I was interested to get it.

01:18:43   The reason I got it is because I believe in the promise.

01:18:46   I believe in the promise of Google Home as a product.

01:18:48   The actuality of Google Home as a product

01:18:49   is that it's nicer looking than the Echo

01:18:52   In some ways, it's better in terms of,

01:18:55   I think maybe the speaker is a little bit better

01:18:57   and it's smaller and it's a little bit more polished,

01:19:01   I think, but I'm totally buying it

01:19:03   because I believe that Google will eventually be better

01:19:07   at all the things that I care about,

01:19:09   which is understanding what I'm saying

01:19:10   and finding me useful information and answers.

01:19:13   And I do use Google Calendar.

01:19:14   We all use Google Calendar.

01:19:15   I use Google for my email.

01:19:16   We have all our photos on Google.

01:19:18   In theory, this has access to more of our stuff

01:19:20   than the Amazon Echo would.

01:19:22   And I subscribe to Google Play because I subscribe to Google Play family thing to get YouTube

01:19:25   Red or whatever.

01:19:26   So I can say things like, you know, I hate Ok Google but that's what it is instead of

01:19:31   Alexa.

01:19:32   I wish you could make that configure.

01:19:33   But I could say, "Ok Google, play some Christmas music."

01:19:34   And guess what?

01:19:35   It plays Christmas music because it has access to, you know, their streaming music service.

01:19:39   Whereas if you ask Amazon Echo to do the same thing, you could set something up to do it

01:19:43   or you can try to get it to play audio on another Bluetooth connected device and it

01:19:47   will play the audio that's on that device or whatever.

01:19:49   But anyway.

01:19:50   So far, mostly the children have been asking it to say things in foreign languages and

01:19:56   do unit conversions.

01:19:57   I did use it to set timers, but it is really limited.

01:20:03   One of the very first things I asked it to do was remind me in two hours to check on

01:20:07   the roast.

01:20:08   This was like on Christmas Day, right?

01:20:11   And it said, "I can't set up a reminder for you.

01:20:13   Sorry about that."

01:20:14   Something like that.

01:20:15   I'm like, "You can't set up reminders?

01:20:17   You don't need to do – this doesn't need to be a network integration.

01:20:19   do it right it can do timers set a timer for two hours for the roast okay I've

01:20:26   set a timer for two hours for the roast right but remind me in two hours it

01:20:29   knows that I want a reminder but I guess it classifies them in the same way that

01:20:33   Apple classifies reminders versus timers and it has no way to create a reminder

01:20:37   in the world of Google yet right so again I Google this and sit on a million

01:20:42   people saying yes it can't set reminders yet maybe it will be able to in the

01:20:45   future. So I really hope that they get cranking on the integrations and the

01:20:51   functionality. I am very impressed with its ability to understand my children's

01:20:55   poor diction as they yell over each other to try to get it to do things,

01:20:59   right? I'm impressed with its ability to understand me talking from other rooms

01:21:03   and mumbling and how responsive it is to asking you to set timers. It takes me

01:21:08   longer to figure out when I can start talking to Siri than it does to complete

01:21:13   the action on the Google Home, right?

01:21:15   Because that is an internal frustration to have the fanciest, fastest iPhone.

01:21:19   And half the time I'm like, "Is it okay for me to talk?

01:21:22   Do I have to wait for the boop boop?"

01:21:23   And then I start talking, then it goes boop boop, and then it doesn't understand me, and

01:21:26   I can't reset it, and I have to start all over.

01:21:29   I just want to be able to talk into the air.

01:21:30   You mentioned, Casey, before Siri and the Mac.

01:21:33   This is, I think, one of the things that both the Amazon Echo and the Google Home do so

01:21:38   much better than Siri and the Mac.

01:21:39   If Siri and the Mac really wants to be worth a damn,

01:21:41   it should be like those two devices where I can just say,

01:21:45   okay Mac, what's the weather like tomorrow?

01:21:47   No preamble, no pressing a key,

01:21:50   no making sure the Mac is ready before I talk,

01:21:52   just freaking say it.

01:21:53   'Cause if this little tiny $100 cylinder can do it,

01:21:56   this huge multi-thousand dollar computer

01:21:59   should be able to do that too.

01:22:00   Let alone the fact that there's no, hey Siri,

01:22:02   it's like, oh, you can hook up his Apple script

01:22:03   to make it so it recognizes when you say hey, no.

01:22:05   Like if the cylinders can do it,

01:22:07   a Mac has to be able to do it too.

01:22:09   Because as Marco well knows, that is the killer feature,

01:22:13   to be able to just rattle it off in the air

01:22:15   with no setup and no preamble

01:22:17   and no making sure everybody is ready

01:22:19   and it just friggin' does it.

01:22:20   And that's awesome, right?

01:22:22   I mean, that I think the most important feature

01:22:24   of all these cylinders is really good microphones

01:22:27   that can understand you from far away with background noise

01:22:30   and incredible responsiveness.

01:22:31   And iPhones don't have that

01:22:33   and Macs don't have that and it's a damn shame.

01:22:35   So anyway, Google Home, it shows promise.

01:22:39   For the things that it can do, it's very responsive.

01:22:42   I intentionally bought it because I believe in the promise of Google doing this type of

01:22:48   stuff really well.

01:22:49   And the things that it does do, it does do really well.

01:22:51   You can phrase your, even like Google search, you can phrase your unit conversions or questions

01:22:55   about the weather or follow-up questions in a fairly natural way, and it pretty much nails

01:22:59   it.

01:23:00   It just needs more features, so I'm patiently waiting for them to appear.

01:23:04   - Yeah, I gotta say, I mean, I have yet to see

01:23:06   the Google Home, but having had now quite a bit

01:23:10   of experience with the Amazon Echo,

01:23:13   these like home cylinders with voice stuff

01:23:15   that connect to simple things like timers

01:23:17   and weather and music services and home automation,

01:23:21   this is a real deal.

01:23:22   This category is really great, it's really fun,

01:23:26   and there is this pretty significant land grab

01:23:30   going on right now, mostly being won by Amazon.

01:23:33   I am honestly kind of concerned that Apple's not playing in this space yet.

01:23:36   And, you know, we've heard rumblings that they're working on it.

01:23:38   I really hope they get here soon because this is the time to get into this business.

01:23:43   So over Christmas we got my in-laws an Echo.

01:23:46   It was kind of funny, like, for the last, you know, five or six Christmases, we've

01:23:52   gotten people various Apple things, you know, like Apple TVs here and there and occasionally

01:23:58   iPads for like big gifts sometimes.

01:24:02   This year, nobody got anything by Apple.

01:24:05   This year was, Apple had nothing to do

01:24:07   with our holiday fun this year.

01:24:09   They were just, we were all using iPhones basically,

01:24:12   but there was no new stuff from Apple this year for us.

01:24:16   Granted, I know the AirPods are a big deal for a lot of people

01:24:18   but that wasn't, anyway, that wasn't for our holiday season.

01:24:21   Anyway, all the fun was playing with the Echo

01:24:25   and all the home automation,

01:24:27   I got a handful of the Belkin BMO outlets

01:24:30   and everything that you can switch with them.

01:24:32   And it's just like, this stuff,

01:24:34   this is where all the action's happening right now

01:24:36   in like cool, fun, new technology.

01:24:38   And yeah, it isn't like, you know, a massive business.

01:24:43   There's not a lot of profit to be made here.

01:24:44   I mean, Amazon's already selling the Echo for under 200 bucks

01:24:47   and the Dots are like 40 bucks.

01:24:50   And what's the Google Home, like 150 or something?

01:24:52   - I got it on sale.

01:24:53   It was one of the reasons I bought it.

01:24:54   I got it for like 110 or 120.

01:24:56   - Yeah, so like, you know, this is,

01:24:57   it's obviously gonna be like a low margin business

01:24:59   for probably forever.

01:25:00   And that's gonna be difficult for Apple

01:25:03   'cause I can't see Apple coming in at under 250 probably.

01:25:08   I mean look, the Apple TV is in a similar boat

01:25:10   where all the competitors are really cheap

01:25:12   and Apple TV is still very expensive compared to them.

01:25:15   So anyway, I worry about Apple and this business

01:25:17   because it's so cool, it's so much fun.

01:25:21   These devices are really, really awesome

01:25:23   but in order to be good, they require two things

01:25:27   Apple's not very good at, service consistency

01:25:29   and integrations with a whole bunch of other stuff.

01:25:31   I don't say that as a joke.

01:25:33   Siri, for all of its benefits and faults,

01:25:38   one thing it really isn't, even people who love Siri,

01:25:41   I think they would usually agree,

01:25:43   one thing it really isn't is consistent.

01:25:45   And the Echo is so incredibly rock solid.

01:25:50   So anyway, between Google and Amazon,

01:25:52   I really haven't read a single review of the Google Home

01:25:56   that makes me think anybody should buy over the Echo.

01:25:59   I honestly, like I, all the reviews seem to say like,

01:26:02   yeah, it's kind of the same thing, but worse.

01:26:04   Like I, what am I missing here?

01:26:07   - I mean, it is, I feel like it is better at,

01:26:10   all the same things that Google is good at,

01:26:11   that you can type things into Google search box

01:26:13   in lots of different ways

01:26:14   and it more or less figures out what you mean.

01:26:15   Like in the same way that, you know,

01:26:18   the difference between, we know when Google does that thing

01:26:20   where it puts like, it's like,

01:26:21   here are a bunch of search results and here are a bunch

01:26:23   of ads, but by the way, I'm pretty sure I know

01:26:25   you're getting at and here's a box at the top that shows like exactly what you're interested

01:26:29   like the score of a game or like the answer to the trivia question you were asking or whatever

01:26:34   before it even gets to the search results that type of stuff is more or less exposed in a spoken way

01:26:39   as opposed to like you know like what was it when dan morin and his review was talking about

01:26:43   doing the language translation uh the echo or elixir rather can do that as well but it displays

01:26:49   the results on your on your phone in the ios app it doesn't speak them back to you um so it's it's

01:26:55   It's like, it's basically all the things

01:26:56   that Google is good at.

01:26:57   If you're interested in controlling stuff in your home,

01:27:00   Echo has way more integrations.

01:27:02   If you're interested in buying things,

01:27:03   like forget it, that's Amazon's bread and butter.

01:27:05   You wanna buy things by talking, Amazon's got you covered.

01:27:08   I don't even know if you can do that at all on Google.

01:27:09   - Tell you what, by the way,

01:27:10   that sounds like a stupid thing until you do it.

01:27:13   - Oh, I'm sure you love it.

01:27:15   (laughing)

01:27:16   - Once you've given in to the Amazon way of life

01:27:21   and you start ordering everything from Amazon,

01:27:24   you can do things like say, name of thing,

01:27:27   reorder a fridge filter.

01:27:29   And it will go through your order history

01:27:31   and it will query it for the fridge filter

01:27:34   and it'll say, do you want me to add this thing?

01:27:37   It'll read out the name and it'll say,

01:27:38   here's how much it costs and here's,

01:27:40   it has four star reviews or whatever else

01:27:42   and it'll say, do you wanna buy it now?

01:27:44   And you can add it to your cart and just do it later.

01:27:46   You can add it to your shopping list

01:27:48   or you can just have it say yes

01:27:49   and place the order right then.

01:27:52   you can literally get rid of your like,

01:27:54   I ran out of this thing,

01:27:55   or I need another one of these things.

01:27:57   You can eliminate those problems

01:27:58   without ever touching a computer.

01:28:00   Oh, my fridge filter needs to be replaced.

01:28:01   All right, get a new fridge filter.

01:28:02   Two days later it just shows up.

01:28:04   It's kind of amazing.

01:28:05   I also, before we got this,

01:28:07   thought that was a ridiculous concept.

01:28:09   But once you do it once,

01:28:11   and you kind of break the seal almost,

01:28:15   you break hearts,

01:28:17   once you do it once, you're just like,

01:28:18   oh my God, this is kind of awesome.

01:28:21   Why have I not been doing this?

01:28:23   - I think we're kind of in an Apple Google situation,

01:28:26   like in the early days of the iPhone,

01:28:27   where it was like, oh, we have this nice sort of symbiosis

01:28:30   where Apple's gonna do this awesome hardware in the OS

01:28:33   and Google will do the cloud services,

01:28:35   like the maps and stuff,

01:28:36   and it's a marriage made in heaven, and then they split.

01:28:39   It seems like they're already split

01:28:40   because there are things that Amazon does better,

01:28:42   but there are also things that Google does better.

01:28:44   Like basically any kind of search or intelligence

01:28:48   or figuring out what you mean,

01:28:50   Amazon can do all those things mostly because they have integrations with Google or Google like services

01:28:54   But they don't do them themselves whereas buying things Amazon is totally like

01:28:58   It's all integrated with your Amazon account

01:29:00   It knows your order history can do all stuff like that

01:29:02   It it's too you would you would want a home automation thing that can do all of these things

01:29:07   Right and the same way of like I don't know as I'm probably has this because they have every service under the Sun

01:29:12   But Google has all my photos in Amazon doesn't have any my photos

01:29:15   I can't ask the echo to show photos of my son on the television, you know show photos of my son in 2015 on my Chromecast

01:29:22   I can't ask Amazon to do that

01:29:23   I mean I could maybe make a little skill or a program or a little app in there a little thing that make it do

01:29:28   But like but Google's got my stuff and in the same way Apple if they ever come up with one Apple's got a lot of

01:29:33   My stuff too. They've got also got my photos and you know

01:29:36   They have my reminders because I use reminders on my phone and they have my iMessages

01:29:39   but they don't have my calendar because Google has that and

01:29:42   So, you know in some respects

01:29:45   the best would be a

01:29:47   Cylinder that you talk to that doesn't have a horse in that race

01:29:52   But integrates with all of them sort of the cylinder equivalent of the omnivorous box

01:29:55   But of course that doesn't exist so instead we're we have to choose silos

01:29:58   The Apple silo has nothing except for a sort of cranky Siri that you can't really talk to and by the way if they ever

01:30:03   Did make a cylinder can you imagine that they made it respond to?

01:30:06   Ahoy telephone, which I'm not gonna say every device in your home would go off

01:30:11   and then maybe the cylinder would bloop later.

01:30:13   Like, they should just give these things

01:30:14   different names or whatever.

01:30:16   - Well, this is like, it actually is not

01:30:18   an easy problem to solve.

01:30:20   Like, when the Amazon set of products first came out,

01:30:24   if you had more than one, which they're so cheap,

01:30:28   and you kind of always want one nearby,

01:30:30   so I think a lot of people have or will have more than one,

01:30:34   which again, puts a problem on Apple's strategy

01:30:37   of probably a nicer, more expensive one.

01:30:40   Anyway, so when you have more than one,

01:30:42   if both of them are within earshot

01:30:45   when you say the trigger word,

01:30:47   originally they would just kind of

01:30:48   both operate independently.

01:30:50   Eventually in a software update,

01:30:51   which by the way I never even had to know about,

01:30:53   they just update themselves and don't even tell you,

01:30:55   they just update, it's amazing.

01:30:56   But in software update, eventually they added a thing

01:30:58   where you can give them both the same trigger word

01:31:00   and now whichever one heard you best

01:31:03   will handle the command.

01:31:04   I believe they're also wanting to work on things

01:31:09   like multi-room audio, similar to what Sonos does.

01:31:12   I think Google Home talked about something like that,

01:31:14   either they're doing it or they're going to do it.

01:31:16   Like, this is actually, it's going to ramp up quickly

01:31:19   into a category where like the minimum bar to entry

01:31:22   is actually, you know, non-trivial.

01:31:25   That's why I kind of, like for Apple's sake,

01:31:27   if they're going to play in this business at all,

01:31:29   I hope they get here soon, because there's a lot to do,

01:31:32   and the competitors are gonna keep raising that bar,

01:31:35   and Apple's just gonna be playing catch-up

01:31:36   if they really don't get here very, very soon.

01:31:39   - I feel like Amazon, even though they are the leader now,

01:31:42   is at quite a disadvantage, because both Google and Apple

01:31:45   have more of people's stuff than Amazon.

01:31:46   The only thing Amazon has for most people

01:31:49   is their purchase history and their purchases,

01:31:51   which is great for Amazon, because if they're trying

01:31:53   to find a way for you to order things by talking

01:31:54   and make money, that's fine.

01:31:56   But most people don't have all their family photos on there.

01:32:00   Most people don't have big video collections up on Amazon.

01:32:03   Most people don't have their calendars on Amazon,

01:32:05   or their reminders or their shopping list,

01:32:07   which even though it has these features,

01:32:08   like in other words, to win, like you said,

01:32:10   you have to have, it's an ecosystem play

01:32:12   and Apple has its ecosystem and Google has its,

01:32:15   and you can argue about whose is better or whatever,

01:32:17   but Amazon's is the least full featured of all of them.

01:32:20   Like, and Google, you know,

01:32:23   you have to actually integrate with them for you to win.

01:32:24   It doesn't help that Google like,

01:32:25   "Oh, Google has a calendar.

01:32:26   "If I can't do anything with the calendar,"

01:32:28   which you can, you can ask it about your day

01:32:30   and stuff like that.

01:32:31   Or Google has maps data and traffic data.

01:32:33   Like you need the integrations,

01:32:34   but it's easier to make those integrations

01:32:37   if Google actually gives a damn about this product

01:32:39   'cause that's Google's other weaknesses historically.

01:32:40   They're like, oh, we'll try this,

01:32:41   but maybe we're not that interested, whatever, right?

01:32:44   But it's easier for Google to do those integrations

01:32:46   than it is for Amazon to get people to use Amazon for email,

01:32:50   Amazon for calendars, Amazon for photo storage.

01:32:52   Like even if they offer these services,

01:32:53   even if they make all these services,

01:32:55   even if they make world-class versions of these servers

01:32:56   to match both Apple and Google's services,

01:32:58   then you have to get people to switch to them.

01:33:00   So there is a big disadvantage for them to ever be in the ballpark if this becomes an

01:33:07   ecosystem wide play.

01:33:09   I guess their ace in the hole is like, we don't have to have that ecosystem.

01:33:12   We will try to be as omnivorous as possible and give people a way to make those integrations.

01:33:18   So hey, buy the Amazon Echo.

01:33:19   If you have your reminders on Apple, we can integrate with them.

01:33:22   If you have your calendar on Google, we can integrate with them.

01:33:24   Like that's their out, but it's certainly easier for Apple and Google to integrate with

01:33:28   their own stuff.

01:33:30   It's just, you know, they're playing catch up.

01:33:32   And like in that article, the link in the show notes that we're reviewing them, it's

01:33:35   like, oh, Google, Amazon integrates with all of these.

01:33:38   Amazon integrates with all these home automation devices, and Google just integrates with these

01:33:42   three.

01:33:43   But every single other one that was listed has announced support for Google Home, right?

01:33:46   So it's not like Google is behind, but it's not like they're like Apple where they do

01:33:50   a single sign-on thing and then wait six months and say the same three pathetic companies

01:33:54   are the only ones we got for single sign-on.

01:33:56   Oops.

01:33:57   Like everybody has announced for Google Home.

01:33:58   That doesn't mean anything.

01:33:59   of people announced for HomeKit too.

01:34:00   - I know, but it's the question of whether

01:34:03   Google follows through on that.

01:34:04   And Google actually released a product.

01:34:08   They announced a product and they released it

01:34:10   and it works, which is way more than Apple has done.

01:34:12   So Apple is clearly in last place.

01:34:15   And I have some faith that Google Home

01:34:17   will have a more illustrious career in life

01:34:20   than did all the other like Google TV and weird stuff.

01:34:25   And just think about the Chromecast,

01:34:26   which seemed like this little tardy thing

01:34:27   that had no future.

01:34:29   but tons of people have Chromecast and love them.

01:34:31   And even though it's a very small, simple thing,

01:34:34   now you get Chromecast and Google Home.

01:34:36   Now you have two pieces and they kind of fit together.

01:34:38   And that Chromecast was already valuable,

01:34:40   suddenly becomes more valuable because you have Google Home.

01:34:42   This is like ecosystem 101.

01:34:44   So I do have some faith that Google understands

01:34:49   that they can be an R player here while Apple snoozes

01:34:53   and while Amazon takes all of Marco's money

01:34:57   every time he speaks.

01:34:58   (laughs)

01:34:59   $14 at a time for a fridge filter.

01:35:01   And the option, by the way, the Dan Moran option is,

01:35:05   these things are like 100 and something bucks.

01:35:06   There's no reason you can't have both of them.

01:35:08   They don't take up that much room.

01:35:09   Dan Moran's got two of them in his,

01:35:10   I think he's got like three of them in his house.

01:35:11   There's no reason you can't have all of them and say,

01:35:13   allow me to buy me toilet paper

01:35:15   and Google translate this phrase for me

01:35:16   or Google what's on my calendar today, right?

01:35:19   It's confusing to talking to multiple assistants,

01:35:20   but it's not that bad.

01:35:21   Like, it's not like you're making a $3,000 investment

01:35:24   in a computing platform.

01:35:25   You're just buying a little cylinder

01:35:27   plugging it into the wall somewhere.

01:35:28   So I'm actually considering that as well

01:35:31   to get both of them because they don't conflict, it's fine.

01:35:35   - How much the ecosystem matters

01:35:39   to which one succeeds or fails

01:35:40   or which ones succeed or fail,

01:35:42   I think also depends on what people

01:35:44   want these cylinders to do.

01:35:45   Like what is the role this is playing for you?

01:35:48   And you know, like your thing about like,

01:35:51   you asked the Google thing to show you pictures

01:35:54   from your Google photo stream of something on your TV.

01:35:57   I would never do that.

01:35:58   You were doing that.

01:35:59   And so, obviously, people are gonna have different needs

01:36:02   for this kind of thing.

01:36:03   But I think certain roles are gonna come out ahead.

01:36:06   One of the things, there was a rumor that came out

01:36:10   a couple of weeks ago about how maybe the next Echo

01:36:13   might be a tablet kind of thing

01:36:14   that's really made to be a kitchen appliance, really.

01:36:18   'Cause they found that so many people

01:36:20   put the Echo in their kitchens.

01:36:21   and turns out people really like using it

01:36:24   in the kitchen while cooking.

01:36:25   So it'd be nice to maybe have something like

01:36:27   a screen showing your timers,

01:36:30   'cause timers are a really popular thing,

01:36:32   as opposed to just like some kind of audio thing

01:36:36   we have now, or a screen to show a recipe

01:36:38   that you're cooking or whatever else.

01:36:40   So Amazon is finding their uses in the kitchen.

01:36:44   Google might find their uses in the living room.

01:36:46   Each one could find their own audience,

01:36:48   Or it might turn out that the things

01:36:51   that Google's optimizing for,

01:36:52   people actually just want to use their phones

01:36:54   to do those things, and no one's really gonna want

01:36:56   their cylinders to do that, and so Google might be

01:36:58   making a bad bet on that, and maybe people really want

01:37:01   just a kitchen cylinder that plays music

01:37:03   out of these things most of the time.

01:37:05   Maybe Amazon will win there, who knows?

01:37:07   I don't think it's a safe assumption to say that

01:37:10   the ecosystems that each of these companies have now

01:37:13   are a sure thing to guarantee their success

01:37:15   in this new area, because we might find

01:37:17   with this new area, that people will use it differently

01:37:19   than what we initially expect.

01:37:21   - Yeah, like what I was saying, it's a question

01:37:23   of whether it's easier to add integrations

01:37:25   or whether it's easier to add those ecosystems.

01:37:27   'Cause it's like having ownership of people's calendars

01:37:30   and their messages and their purchases,

01:37:32   like those are things like purchases, for example,

01:37:34   there's no way Apple and Google can get that.

01:37:37   They can't like, oh, we're gonna start

01:37:38   a competing retail business,

01:37:39   so we'll have a list of people's purchases too.

01:37:41   Nope, you won't.

01:37:41   And in the same way, Amazon can't say,

01:37:44   we're gonna start an email service

01:37:45   and it's gonna be as big as Gmail.

01:37:46   nope, it won't.

01:37:47   And we're gonna have a calendaring service

01:37:49   and it'll be as integrated into the iPhone

01:37:50   as Apple's calendar or with Android as cool as you won't.

01:37:53   Like, so the lines are kind of drawn along there.

01:37:57   And those things are not esoteric,

01:37:59   like photos, calendar, email address, messages, purchases.

01:38:04   Those are fundamental.

01:38:07   Those are fundamentally owned.

01:38:08   It's kind of like they have those squares

01:38:09   in the monopoly board, right?

01:38:11   And they're not going away.

01:38:13   It's just a question of how they're gonna be

01:38:16   divvy that between them. And the extras about the integrations, like with the Chromecast,

01:38:23   the example I gave of putting photos on my TV, this is the thing I do now, but I do it

01:38:26   the long, annoying manual way, which is always annoying. I use Apple TV to do it, I pull

01:38:30   up the photo library, half of the thumbnails don't show up, it's a terrible experience,

01:38:33   but like, it's a thing I want to do. And relatives are over, let's look at pictures. I have them

01:38:37   usually sorted into albums, or smart albums, or something like that. Let me see the picture

01:38:42   of my wife's trip, Mediterranean Cruise.

01:38:44   I have all those set up.

01:38:45   I already have the album.

01:38:47   Apple TV, because I'd use my photos in Apple Things,

01:38:49   has that stuff, and I just wanna see them.

01:38:53   And I have to use that terrible remote

01:38:55   and use a bunch of applications

01:38:58   to make sure her computer is on and awake,

01:39:00   and blah, blah, blah.

01:39:01   Whereas, if I could use a little Chromecast

01:39:03   that I don't have to think about in a little cylinder,

01:39:05   I don't have to think about it and just sit down

01:39:06   and say, "Show Mediterranean Cruise photos,"

01:39:09   and it knows from the GPS tags

01:39:11   the heck I'm talking about because it's Google and it's really smart and I didn't even have

01:39:14   to make an album, that's a better experience. But you can only do that if you know where to get the

01:39:20   photos from. And most people are not going to be sort of the self-hackers of like, "Well, my photos

01:39:24   are on a FreeNAS thing in the basement and I wrote a Linux server that pulls the thing." No one's

01:39:29   going to do that. You can with the Amazon Echo, you can do those integrations. And in the beginning,

01:39:33   it's impressive to create these Rube Goldberg machines. But I still feel like,

01:39:40   especially in the silo world that we're in, ownership of data dictates what kind of things

01:39:47   you can use it for. Like I said, in the same way that you cannot tell Google's thing to order your

01:39:51   new fridge things, Amazon owns that. There's nothing Google can really do about that. Amazon's

01:39:55   not going to be keen on letting Google integrate with its purchases in that way. So if that's one

01:40:00   of the things that you want to do, and I think it is a useful thing to do, the only choice you have

01:40:05   is the Amazon. That's why I think we may be trapped, not trapped, but like fated to

01:40:12   be talking to multiple semi-intelligent assistants, referring to them by name in

01:40:17   the same way that we go to multiple websites to do things. I go to Amazon

01:40:21   when I'm shopping, but I go to, you know, Gmail when I want to do my mail. I say

01:40:26   "I'll order me fridge filters" and I say "*BEEP* Google, do I have any appointments

01:40:32   tomorrow afternoon because Google has my calendar and Alexa has my purchases. and

01:40:36   again if these little cylinders like they're cheap now they're only going to

01:40:40   get cheaper if they're mostly network based stuff combined with really good

01:40:43   microphones and a tiny little low power CPU that's always listening and stuff I

01:40:47   think that is aside from any sort of global cooperation between these giant

01:40:53   companies which is not gonna happen talking to different things in our house

01:40:58   seems to me the most likely outcome of all this.

01:41:01   So I think we're all doomed to have multiple

01:41:04   increasingly non-cylindrical cylinders.

01:41:07   Like eventually there'll just be a bunch of tiny

01:41:08   little things that are dotted all over our house

01:41:10   and having multiple ones in them won't be a big deal.

01:41:13   - Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,

01:41:15   Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace.

01:41:18   And we will see you next week.

01:41:20   (upbeat music)

01:41:22   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:41:24   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:41:27   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:41:33   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:41:37   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:41:43   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:41:48   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:41:53   C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:42:01   N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:42:09   It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:42:12   They didn't mean to, accidental (Accidental)

01:42:17   Tech podcast, so long

01:42:22   (upbeat music)

01:42:23   We all saw each other earlier this week actually.

01:42:28   And Marco, this was your first probably

01:42:32   multi-hundred mile trip in the Tesla, is that right?

01:42:35   - That is right, it's the longest trip I've taken yet

01:42:37   and the first trip that required a supercharger

01:42:40   in the middle.

01:42:41   - So, how'd it go?

01:42:43   - Before I bought the Tesla, the prediction I had

01:42:48   was that this was gonna be a car that's really nice

01:42:51   and everyday use, to never have to go to a gas station,

01:42:54   and it's just gonna be a bit of a pain in the butt

01:42:56   when I go on long car trips,

01:42:57   'cause I'm gonna have these forced half hour

01:43:00   supercharger brakes every three to four hours,

01:43:05   and it's gonna be a pain in everything else.

01:43:07   But I figure that'll be like,

01:43:08   I will tolerate that inconvenience

01:43:10   for the awesomeness of the car in all other circumstances.

01:43:14   So this is the first trip where you actually had to realize

01:43:16   what it was like to rely on the supercharger network

01:43:19   for your range because every other,

01:43:21   I've gone to superchargers like twice in the past,

01:43:23   but it was kind of optional.

01:43:24   Like one time it was 'cause it was just pouring rain

01:43:26   and I was like, oh, I just need a break anyway.

01:43:28   I'm passing one, so let me just take a break here.

01:43:30   Go to a coffee shop or whatever.

01:43:32   Any other time it was more, again, like, you know,

01:43:35   similar, like not really necessary.

01:43:36   Just stop for a few minutes.

01:43:38   Anyway, this was the first time

01:43:39   where I had to really stop for like 30 minutes.

01:43:42   You know, we pull up, we find them.

01:43:43   It was the Delaware rest stop on 95

01:43:46   that, you know, everybody goes to.

01:43:49   and there was like 12 spots and half of them were open,

01:43:52   so it was fine, you know, pull up, plug in.

01:43:54   And we went in, we all went to the bathroom,

01:43:57   and we all got a quick little lunch

01:43:59   from the crappy food places they have

01:44:01   in this wonderful Delaware rest stop.

01:44:02   The food's the worst, but it's fine.

01:44:04   Just don't go to the Baja Fresh

01:44:06   because you think, oh, a Baja Fresh, that should be good,

01:44:09   'cause real Baja Fresh stores are good,

01:44:11   but this is a Baja Fresh Express.

01:44:13   And what that means is that it's a terrible,

01:44:16   terrible pile of garbage that has the Baja Fresh sign

01:44:19   above it, but that is not a real Baja Fresh.

01:44:23   You never, ever get that.

01:44:25   So, you know, we had lunch and everything,

01:44:26   and before I knew it, we were just doing a basic rest stop.

01:44:30   Before I knew it, my car was at like 98%,

01:44:33   and I was trying to rush out of there,

01:44:35   so I didn't hit 100 and start getting charged 40 cents

01:44:37   a minute for sitting there taking up a spot unnecessarily.

01:44:40   (laughs)

01:44:41   - Now, what were you at when you pulled in, just ballpark?

01:44:44   - Oh, I forget, somewhere around like 30 or something,

01:44:47   I don't know, something like that.

01:44:49   It was amazing, like, you know, charge up,

01:44:52   and so we were stopping anyway,

01:44:54   and if we were like one of those hardcore

01:44:58   long-distance drivers that like,

01:45:00   the total time it takes you to get where you're going

01:45:03   is very important to you,

01:45:04   and you don't like to stop at all,

01:45:07   then this is not the car for you.

01:45:08   But if you stop anyway, just like for basic comfort

01:45:12   to take a break. It's quite something else. On the way home, I had an even cooler experience.

01:45:18   I was really, I was a little bit sick and I was really tired. I could really, really

01:45:23   just use a break from driving. Like I was just very, I was unreasonably tired just because

01:45:27   of the, because I was just, I was sick and you know, anyway. Tiff and Adam went into

01:45:32   Starbucks to get some coffee and to give Adam a sandwich. I sat in the car, left the heat

01:45:39   on and left the heated seat on and just took a nap.

01:45:44   I leaned the seat back, I took like a 20 minute nap.

01:45:48   So here I was, I'm like, this is kind of amazing.

01:45:50   So my car is filling up with the fuel it needs for free while I sit in a heated, nicely heated

01:45:58   car with a nicely heated seat in the winter and take a nap.

01:46:03   I think this is like the best car for long road trip comfort I've ever seen.

01:46:10   Like again, I thought this was going to be some kind of big hassle on long trips, but

01:46:15   it's only a hassle if you want to get there in the smallest amount of time possible.

01:46:19   But if you are more leisurely like we always have been, and you like to stop for lunch,

01:46:24   or stop and take a break every so often, if that's your style of driving, this is the

01:46:29   the best, like it is so much the best

01:46:33   because it allows you to not only fill up for free

01:46:37   and it forces you to take these breaks at certain intervals

01:46:39   but like the process of filling up for free

01:46:42   is way nicer than stopping at a gas station.

01:46:45   Oh my god, so actually I really quite enjoyed it

01:46:48   and it was wonderful and I look forward

01:46:50   to future long trips where I have to use them.

01:46:52   - That's awesome, that's somewhat surprising

01:46:55   but super cool.

01:46:57   - Sounds like Tiff's new car is gonna have you

01:46:59   fewer miles on it than her old one.

01:47:01   (laughing)

01:47:03   - Truth.

01:47:04   - That'll be our beach house car.

01:47:06   - Yeah, that's the next bit of electric car anxiety

01:47:09   that you have to get over just by doing it

01:47:11   because you're like, oh, it'll be sitting there

01:47:12   and it'll be discharging and it shouldn't let it sit there

01:47:14   for a week, I bet that's not a problem either.

01:47:15   You gotta try it.

01:47:16   - Well, I remember I did the experiment.

01:47:18   I left my car unplugged here when we went there

01:47:20   to kind of try that and it ended up,

01:47:22   I think it loses like one or two percent a day

01:47:24   so it isn't that big of a deal.

01:47:25   But no, the bigger problem is I don't wanna

01:47:27   fill my trunk with sand.

01:47:28   Oh, jeez. Look, are you going to use your car or is it just a piece of art that you

01:47:35   look at? There are two things that are not allowed in my trunk, sand and glitter. You

01:47:39   can vacuum the sand up, I promise you. Yeah, you know what, I was told that about the glitter

01:47:43   in my trunk when we had a glitter heavy... No, glitter, but you can't get it out. Yeah,

01:47:47   exactly, yeah. But sand comes up? But sand you can. Do you have a trunk liner? I don't

01:47:51   think I've ever seen your trunk. What does that mean? It's covered in carpet, I don't

01:47:55   That's a no.

01:47:56   Right, so you can usually buy a little rubber thing that goes in there.

01:48:03   It's mostly for if some groceries bang together and spill and get sticky stuff or whatever.

01:48:08   Basically you don't ruin the carpet in your car.

01:48:09   But also, if it gets filled with sand, you can take that whole rubber thing out, turn

01:48:13   it upside down, dump all the sand back in, and put it in.

01:48:15   But even if you do it right on the carpet, I promise you, you can vacuum sand out of

01:48:19   carpeting in a car.

01:48:20   It will be fine.

01:48:21   And finally, sand in your car is a badge of honor if you are a beach person, which I know

01:48:25   that you are not, but we're converting you, right?

01:48:28   I am a beach town person.

01:48:31   I like the beach town, I like the beach environment, I like the beach mindset even, but I still

01:48:38   do not like sand.

01:48:39   That sand is, ugh, sand is a problem.

01:48:42   And I still, I don't see how glitter can be such the scourge of humanity that it is, and

01:48:49   Like, glitter ruined my 328.

01:48:51   Like, when I had that car, like, I got,

01:48:53   there was a, that Christmas, we brought my car upstate

01:48:58   and it was a year where the wrapping paper

01:49:01   that was in use that year contained glitter

01:49:03   and the ribbon all contained glitter.

01:49:04   And so my entire car filled with glitter,

01:49:07   it never, I could not get it all out of that car.

01:49:11   I eventually had to turn the car in

01:49:12   for the end of the lease, it was still there.

01:49:14   I turned in a glittery trunk.

01:49:15   I was not actually fined for that.

01:49:17   But they should have fined me for that.

01:49:19   Even I would have fined me for that.

01:49:21   - You need to nip that in the bud.

01:49:22   Like I'm familiar with this phenomenon.

01:49:23   Wrapping paper with glitter on the outside of it,

01:49:25   just say no, that cannot enter your house.

01:49:28   If someone else brings you a present with that on it,

01:49:30   you have to like isolate it like it's radioactive.

01:49:33   But by all means, when you're wrapping your own presents,

01:49:35   do not choose that paper with glitter on it.

01:49:37   That is a terrible mistake

01:49:39   that should just never be allowed to happen.

01:49:40   Setting aside cars, forget about cars,

01:49:42   but just in your own home,

01:49:44   that cannot be allowed to exist.

01:49:46   Well, that caused a rule to be enacted,

01:49:49   that no more glitter in my car ever,

01:49:51   and no glitter in any part of the house I care about,

01:49:54   which is basically the office and my car.

01:49:56   (laughs)

01:49:57   - But sand is not like that, I promise you.

01:49:59   - But sand is just dull glitter.

01:50:00   Like how is that not--

01:50:01   - No, it is not, it's very small rocks.

01:50:04   - How does that not work the same way?

01:50:06   - And what else floats in water?

01:50:08   - That's probably a reference that I'm not getting.

01:50:12   - It is.

01:50:13   - I can tell when you use your reference voice.

01:50:15   Yeah, you do have a reference voice.

01:50:17   Everybody else will get that.

01:50:19   I could have tried to do the accent.

01:50:21   Oh my goodness.

01:50:23   [BLANK_AUDIO]