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190: The Girl Who Never Came Over

 

00:00:00   Oh, John's here.

00:00:01   I missed the beginning of the story.

00:00:02   It was really funny. You missed it.

00:00:04   Yeah, it was the funniest thing ever, and you missed it because your Skype isn't updated.

00:00:08   I'm told from half of the internet—I've measured it, it is exactly half—that there is

00:00:17   a reduced motion option in Beta 2. Not only is there a reduced option in Beta 2,

00:00:26   I'm told it works. I'm told it works the way John wants it to work. So if you'll follow along, I have

00:00:31   a little bit of cash. I will...

00:00:34   Didn't you bet like one or five dollars?

00:00:36   One dollar. So here, this is my one dollar. And now, listeners, I will take this box

00:00:43   of envelopes and I will extract... That was not nearly as loud as I hoped it would be.

00:00:49   I will extract one envelope and I will place this dollar in said envelope.

00:00:53   [laughter]

00:00:56   And I will address it to Mr. John Siracusa, Payne in my hindquarters, 123 Main Street,

00:01:02   somewhere outside Boston, Massachusetts.

00:01:05   And I will send it along.

00:01:06   That'll work.

00:01:07   Because, John, you are correct.

00:01:09   In our gentleman's bet, where we bet one American dollar, you have proved victorious, and from

00:01:15   everything I am told—I have not witnessed this myself, so I'm going on faith—but

00:01:18   I am told that your reduced motion plus super ridiculous motion and messages is a thing.

00:01:26   So congratulations, sir.

00:01:27   I was going to say you could wait until it ships, because who knows?

00:01:29   They could pull it before the update.

00:01:31   Eh, that's true.

00:01:32   But yeah, I'm going to say most likely, like, if they've got this far, even if they

00:01:36   don't ship it in this update, it'll be in the next one or the one after.

00:01:39   Indeed.

00:01:40   Yeah, I'm kind of trying not to let this newfound power go to my head, but I always

00:01:45   like that I should perhaps exercise the magic, the magical phrasing. If I can remember the

00:01:52   magic words that I said, I should try something like, you know, talking about how they haven't

00:01:56   updated the Mac Pro in a really long time and say, "This cannot stand!" and then see

00:02:00   what happens.

00:02:01   But...

00:02:02   John, I'll bet you a dollar they don't update the Mac Pro next week.

00:02:05   No, no, I think, I don't think it was the betting. I think it was the indignity. And

00:02:11   I think I said this cannot stand. I seem to recall saying something incredibly pompous like that.

00:02:17   You know, the funny—all kidding aside—the funny thing about this whole argument was I listened to

00:02:24   the last, I don't know, 15 episodes of Reconcilable Differences where you talked about this,

00:02:28   and listening to you and Merlin talk about it, I actually think I was on your side. And I don't

00:02:34   know what was so different about the way you described it then and the way you described it

00:02:37   now or you know when on this show I don't know if I was in a punch

00:02:41   play Marco he's an instigator I think I was instigating more than him on this

00:02:45   one although you are correct Marco is in fact an instigator but anyway in my

00:02:48   defense I I was kind of not arguing against John's position of like wanting

00:02:53   this wanting this feature really I was I was more kind of exploring and poking

00:02:58   and be like hey you know why do you think that an instigator does poking

00:03:02   - Well, but it wasn't like an inflammatory matter.

00:03:06   I mean, like to me, I view almost every one of these

00:03:10   little accessibility additions that were added

00:03:12   like post iOS 7, I view almost all of them

00:03:15   as just design failures.

00:03:17   'Cause like if the system wasn't so incredibly heavy

00:03:20   with unnecessary motion animations,

00:03:22   this option wouldn't need to be there,

00:03:23   just like it wasn't before iOS 7.

00:03:25   Nobody was complaining about motion sickness before iOS 7.

00:03:28   And then that came out and rather than fix the design,

00:03:32   they have to add these options.

00:03:33   Just like the text was too thin,

00:03:35   and rather than fix the text,

00:03:36   they just made a bold text option.

00:03:38   Buttons didn't like buttons anymore,

00:03:39   and rather than make buttons look like buttons again,

00:03:41   they just made an option.

00:03:42   So these are all kind of just papering over design flaws,

00:03:46   really, or poor design choices.

00:03:49   So I'm with you in the sense that,

00:03:51   A, obviously anybody who needs these

00:03:53   for what most people would consider an accessibility reason,

00:03:57   that's kind of a broad definition,

00:03:59   but more power to you.

00:04:00   it's great that we had these options,

00:04:02   but B, I think we shouldn't even need these options

00:04:06   'cause the system should be designed in a way

00:04:08   to be more inclusive and usable to begin with.

00:04:10   And the fact that it keeps going away from that

00:04:13   is kind of a design flaw, in my opinion.

00:04:16   - But yeah, it was funny listening

00:04:17   to "Reconsolable Differences" 'cause I had been

00:04:18   a couple episodes behind when you and I

00:04:22   were getting into it, Jon, and then I caught up

00:04:26   and I was listening to you on rec diffs

00:04:28   and I was like, wow, actually that makes a lot more sense.

00:04:30   And I wish I could, I should have taken notes or something and tried to pinpoint what about

00:04:34   your description made more sense to me then.

00:04:37   But I remember leaving that thinking, "Wow, I think I'm on his side.

00:04:41   That's weird."

00:04:42   You're succumbing to peer pressure because I had someone on the show who agreed with

00:04:45   me.

00:04:46   So you heard two people who believe the same way.

00:04:47   And you're like, "Well, the crowd is doing it.

00:04:49   I'm swayed by this."

00:04:50   And we recorded that first.

00:04:52   That was the—

00:04:53   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:54   —that was Merlin pointed out this week.

00:04:55   That was the first episode.

00:04:56   And then I talked about it on ATP.

00:04:57   It's just because of the release schedules are different.

00:04:58   So I think I was also less worked up with it.

00:05:00   But in general, on our show, when YouTube both not only disagreed with me, but seemed

00:05:05   to think what I was saying was ridiculous.

00:05:07   I couldn't believe that you didn't see how this was like just an incredible gap, like

00:05:12   this cannot stand.

00:05:14   I said it and I'll say it again.

00:05:15   Like it just seemed like a thing.

00:05:17   That's why I was willing to do the $1 bet.

00:05:18   I mean, you know me, I'm not a big like gambler, right?

00:05:23   It seemed like, you know, first of all, $1 is not that big a deal, but it was just like

00:05:27   Like they just have to change it, they just have to.

00:05:30   It's not just like, well maybe it just seemed like it had to be done.

00:05:33   And they're doing it so good.

00:05:35   And I wish I had the beta now, but not enough to actually install a beta.

00:05:38   So hopefully the point release will be out soon.

00:05:41   And I've been using my phone with reduced motion still off.

00:05:44   Every time I want to send an effect, I go to settings, turn it back on, send the effect,

00:05:48   turn it off.

00:05:49   Wow.

00:05:50   All right, so John, tell me about Compubler.

00:05:52   This is one more data point in the ongoing discussion of the iPhone 7 Plus's

00:05:59   fake background blur thing that it does. Last show we talked about the confirmation that it was not

00:06:07   taking like a fuzzy picture from one camera and combining it with another one but was

00:06:11   instead taking the background, finding it, and then blurring it with a particular algorithm.

00:06:16   And we're talking about how that didn't quite look like the same way an optical blur looks,

00:06:21   but most people can be able to tell and blah blah blah. Anyway, a couple people wrote in with a blog

00:06:27   post exploring the various ways you can blur things to try to make them look like an out-of-focus

00:06:32   picture from a lens. So we'll link to that blog post. I think that's Stu, how do you pronounce his

00:06:38   last name? Mashaewicz? Yeah, I think so. He's a filmmaker and a photographer, so he knows some

00:06:44   stuff about this. And we had someone named Ben Gunzberger write in to say that he has worked on

00:06:51   tools that do this for computer animation like that make the blur the background that wasn't

00:06:55   actually blurred in the camera but they want to make it look like it was and he says that to do

00:06:59   it properly is very CPU intensive they have situations where they take multiple minutes

00:07:04   per frame to calculate the blur so obviously that's a non-starter if it takes multiple minutes on what

00:07:08   i assume is pretty beefy hardware in the visual effects world to do the blur the quote unquote

00:07:12   right way if apple's got to do it and they do it in real time right don't you get like a preview of

00:07:17   the blur in the camera thing. So anyway, multiple minutes per frame is not going to happen there. So

00:07:23   Apple may be currently constrained not only by the fact that they're faking it, but by the fact they

00:07:27   have to fake it and do it in real time. I mean the the uh the A10 is fast but it's not fast enough

00:07:33   to take an operation that takes multiple minutes. Never mind it's also multiple minutes on uh well

00:07:37   I don't know what the resolution is but how many megapixels is the uh 12 to 7 camera? 8? 12? 12.

00:07:44   Yeah, that's is that higher res than the like 4k film probably higher than 2k right? It's higher than 4k. No

00:07:50   Yeah, 4k is just over eight megapixels

00:07:53   Anyway, the whole point is that doing it faking it the right way is is expensive

00:07:59   So that would explain a little bit of the crappiness also some more

00:08:02   Funny pictures of the blur messing up were posted at various places wasn't it somewhere in the slack where you saw a picture of a person?

00:08:09   Shot from like the knees up standing in front of something with his arms at his side

00:08:14   and the background was blurred, but the gap between his arms and his body, the camera just didn't find.

00:08:19   And so the background was pin sharp, and when you look between his arms and his body,

00:08:23   but the whole rest of the background was blurred, it looks really weird.

00:08:26   Yeah, that was Stephen Hackett, wasn't it?

00:08:27   It was his brother, and yeah, imagine your arms are at your side, but there's a gap between your arms and your body.

00:08:33   And at a glance, especially not like blown up full size, I didn't notice a thing wrong with it.

00:08:39   But then as I looked closer, and I think because somebody pointed it out,

00:08:43   It turns out that, like John said, the area between his brother's arm and his torso was super sharp,

00:08:51   whereas all the area around his brother was blurred like you would have expected.

00:08:57   So, it was kind of funny to see, and I mean this is to be expected, and to be fair, it's portrait mode, not entire body mode.

00:09:05   And so, you know, it's not really being used as designed, but it was still a funny thing to see,

00:09:10   and a great example of where it kind of falls on its face today anyway.

00:09:14   All right, moving on.

00:09:17   Let's talk about the ceramic iPhone 8.

00:09:20   There's been a, maybe not in the last week or two, but right when the Apple Watch Edition

00:09:26   came out, there was a lot of talk of, "Well, if this works for a watch, why wouldn't this

00:09:32   work for a phone?"

00:09:34   And I think there's a lot of different conversations about this and a lot of different ways this

00:09:37   can go.

00:09:38   I for one am very concerned about dropability.

00:09:42   Not to say these phones are terribly droppable as it is,

00:09:44   but you know, would a ceramic case shatter?

00:09:47   How would that work?

00:09:48   So where do we see this going

00:09:51   for a potential ceramic iPhone 8?

00:09:53   - Well, I mean, it depends.

00:09:55   You know, some of the possible reasons

00:09:58   why they would do this.

00:09:59   There was this one big Quora post

00:10:01   that I think kind of got this started

00:10:03   or from somebody who knows about material sciences

00:10:05   much more than we do,

00:10:06   so forgive me for the details here.

00:10:08   I mean, ceramic, it has a lot of advantages over aluminum.

00:10:11   One of them is that it's radio transparent,

00:10:13   so that gets rid of a lot of antenna problems.

00:10:16   It's also, it's incredibly, you know,

00:10:18   the kinds of ceramics that you'd use in a phone,

00:10:21   it can be incredibly scratch resistant and fairly strong.

00:10:25   You can shatter it.

00:10:27   It's kinda like Sapphire.

00:10:28   Like, you can shatter it with a very strong impact,

00:10:31   but it takes a pretty strong impact to do that.

00:10:34   and anything less than that is basically invulnerable too.

00:10:36   Ceramic can be very, very tough.

00:10:38   And you can mold it in different shapes and everything.

00:10:42   There's lots of manufacturing details

00:10:44   of how you would do it,

00:10:44   and Apple has some interesting patents in that area,

00:10:46   but that they appear to not have really used

00:10:48   for anything yet.

00:10:49   They probably could do it.

00:10:51   I don't think any of us know enough about manufacturing

00:10:53   to know any of the details beyond that

00:10:54   of that they could do it.

00:10:56   For durability though,

00:10:57   we also heard a rumor recently

00:10:59   that they're going back to the steel band

00:11:02   around the outside design,

00:11:04   like what we had with the 4 and 4S.

00:11:05   You know, they'd have glass on both sides.

00:11:07   Glass has many of those same properties as ceramic,

00:11:09   as you know, you can make it radio transparent,

00:11:11   and you can make it glossy,

00:11:12   and you can make it pretty scratch resistant.

00:11:14   Obviously there's some durability questions there.

00:11:18   But I don't, I mean, I think Apple's solution right now

00:11:22   to phone durability to impacts, to drops and everything,

00:11:25   I think their solution right now is cases and AppleCare.

00:11:28   Like that's basically it.

00:11:30   It's like try not to drop your phone.

00:11:31   If you're the kind of person

00:11:32   who drops your phone frequently,

00:11:33   get a really strong case for it.

00:11:35   And if you break it, hopefully you bought AppleCare,

00:11:37   'cause we're gonna make that easy for you.

00:11:39   So I'm honestly not sure that they really need

00:11:42   to do that much more work in the durability department

00:11:45   if it's going to make the phone hard to manufacture

00:11:48   or less desirable or ugly or grows from plastic-y.

00:11:52   I don't know, do you think cases in AppleCare are enough?

00:11:56   - It's a hack.

00:11:57   - I think they do need to work on durability.

00:11:59   It's just like you said, they're not willing

00:12:02   to make the compromises that would require.

00:12:03   I mean, they can make the phone incredibly durable.

00:12:05   They just made the whole freaking thing out of plastic,

00:12:07   but plastic feels gross as a screen.

00:12:09   Like we all want to move our hands across a glass screen

00:12:12   because it feels better.

00:12:13   And so they keep trying to make the glass tougher,

00:12:15   but there's only so much they can do.

00:12:16   And they spent a long time moving away from glass.

00:12:21   Like they did the 4 and the 4S, and they're like,

00:12:23   we're taking a break from that for a while

00:12:24   because the 4 and the 4S had two sides that could break.

00:12:27   The screen could break on the front and the back,

00:12:29   you know, and two parts that could shatter.

00:12:31   at least when it was all the aluminum designs, the 5, the 5s, the 6s, and the 7, that's a

00:12:35   lot of phones, the front could shatter, backs never shattered.

00:12:39   Bent a little sometimes, didn't shatter.

00:12:41   Scratch, didn't shatter.

00:12:42   So the rumor for the next iPhone is it's going to be all glass.

00:12:46   As you said, have they worked on the shattering thing?

00:12:49   Do they have stronger, more shatter resistant glass?

00:12:53   I'm not sure.

00:12:54   One other property of glass that's potentially problematic is that it's not a particularly

00:12:59   good conductor of heat compared to say aluminum and so you've got a hot little

00:13:04   system on a chip in there you have to get the heat out somewhere maybe it'll

00:13:08   be radiating out of the the steel bands or something I don't know but it's

00:13:12   tougher for it to go through glass than it is an aluminum back the ceramics we're

00:13:16   talking about for the iPhones that's why it's difficult to talk about this and

00:13:19   you can read that quora post if we can find a link for it what do you mean by

00:13:23   ceramic ceramic is not just one thing especially with all of Apple's patents

00:13:26   with like, well, ceramic mixed with a bunch of other stuff

00:13:29   with like fibers between it or reinforcing materials

00:13:32   or polymers or laminates or other things

00:13:34   to try to make it not be quite so much like ceramic

00:13:37   because ceramic has, I think the main problem ceramic has

00:13:40   is that it is heavy if you make it thick enough to be sturdy.

00:13:43   If you make it light, then it's thin

00:13:45   and it has, like glass, catastrophic failure mode.

00:13:48   Really good, right up to the point

00:13:50   where it totally goes kablooey.

00:13:52   Anyway, we see the watch,

00:13:54   We see that they've done the watch in ceramic.

00:13:57   The watch is an easier situation

00:13:59   because people aren't dropping their watches

00:14:01   for the most part, but they are banging them into things,

00:14:04   but it's smaller and it's able to be more sturdy

00:14:06   'cause it doesn't have any long continuous flat areas

00:14:08   like the back of the phone.

00:14:09   Anyway, I think a ceramic iPhone is totally plausible

00:14:14   that as a thing that Apple will experiment with.

00:14:18   I don't know if they're gonna get it to the point

00:14:20   where they can ship something.

00:14:23   There are so many material choices.

00:14:24   Remember, we heard all the rumors about carbon fiber

00:14:26   for so many years, both about Macs and about iOS devices?

00:14:29   - Oh yeah.

00:14:30   - I think that's another situation where,

00:14:31   oh, carbon fiber is even better than plastic.

00:14:36   Very light, very strong.

00:14:37   Its failure modes are probably not as good as aluminum,

00:14:42   but not as bad as ceramic or glass.

00:14:44   But I think a lot of these decisions come down to

00:14:46   how much does it cost to manufacture this?

00:14:48   Can we manufacture it consistently?

00:14:50   And how ugly is it?

00:14:52   'Cause again, I think like what's stopping Apple

00:14:55   from making the back of all their phones plastic?

00:14:58   It's like, it's not gonna say stubbornness,

00:15:01   but it's a desire not to ship a product

00:15:04   that has plastic on the back because it's seen as

00:15:06   and feels to be, you know,

00:15:08   because it has so much plastic back phone,

00:15:10   radio transparent, maybe not good for you conduction.

00:15:12   All right, very light, very sturdy,

00:15:15   really good failure modes, right?

00:15:17   Maybe a little bit scratchy,

00:15:18   but like talk to someone who has a 5C.

00:15:21   I think it holds up pretty well.

00:15:22   It's just not as sort of premium an experience

00:15:25   as glass or aluminum or ceramic would be.

00:15:29   And so I think they just keep looking for new materials,

00:15:31   looking for different materials.

00:15:32   The same reason you got glasses on the front.

00:15:33   Can we put plastic on the front?

00:15:35   Sure, it'd be so sturdy.

00:15:36   Can you imagine a completely plastic screen,

00:15:38   iPhone with plastic on the back,

00:15:40   lightweight, sturdy, drop it, no problem,

00:15:43   but it would not feel like an iPhone.

00:15:45   So that's their struggle.

00:15:47   So I'm gonna look out for ceramic,

00:15:48   but I'm pretty sure the next one's that,

00:15:51   I buy all the glass rumors just because the 4 and the 4S design was the one they wanted

00:15:55   to make, or at least the one that, I don't know if Johnny specifically, but it was one

00:15:59   of the early designs for like, that's what the first iPhone was supposed to be and they

00:16:02   couldn't pull it off.

00:16:03   And it took them a really long time until they could pull it off.

00:16:05   Then they did pull it off and everyone dropped their phones and they shattered front and

00:16:07   back and they said, all right, let's take a break.

00:16:10   Let's take a break from that.

00:16:12   Take another run at it.

00:16:13   And how many years was it?

00:16:14   I counted it off before.

00:16:15   Five, five S, six, six, seven, five years they waited.

00:16:18   So now after five years of non-glass ones,

00:16:20   they're gonna try it again and I'm ready to see

00:16:22   how much they've improved it.

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00:18:33   (upbeat music)

00:18:36   - One more thing on the ceramic phone

00:18:39   before we start talking about it.

00:18:40   Casey's internet woes.

00:18:41   Help person in the chat room has posted a link to the little booklet that comes if you buy the ceramic Apple watch edition

00:18:49   That talks about their process

00:18:51   I'm I'm not following all of it because I'm trying to read it here on the air

00:18:55   but it seems like it describes the process whereby they

00:18:57   Take a ceramic thing and bake it and then machine it after it's baked to make it into the watch

00:19:03   Case thing. I don't know

00:19:05   We'll put a link in the channel as people can read it and see for themselves

00:19:07   but there is a reference to baking it and how much it shrinks during baking and then the reference to machining and polishing and so anyway

00:19:13   this watch for all the people who are true believers in the

00:19:17   Future ceramic iPhone rumor this watch looks to all the world like the original MacBook Air

00:19:22   Which was the trial run of the unibody construction that would eventually go across the entire product line

00:19:26   so if this watch thing works out and

00:19:29   They master this process by selling a small number of these very expensive watches to people

00:19:35   Then maybe it will be for the follow-up phone after the all glass one

00:19:39   But you know if this is their trial run it's too late for this to be the manufacturing technique

00:19:43   tapped for next year's iPhone which

00:19:46   Already has to be much farther along well and also like

00:19:50   manufacturing a this one

00:19:53   fairly high-end fairly you know small market Apple watch model out of this material is

00:20:01   incredibly different from making the back of every iPhone with it like this the difference in scale there is immense like I don't even think

00:20:08   This is a good enough test

00:20:08   I think they'd have to make all the Apple watches out of ceramic to have it be even close to the right kind of test

00:20:13   But obviously not gonna do that yet, so we'll see

00:20:16   You know also building off of this I saw a video that was linked to by a friend of the show Ryan Jones

00:20:23   that is

00:20:26   entitled the iPhone 7 I've been waiting for in the whole video is two and a half minutes and

00:20:31   If you want to see it in its full glory just pause us for two and a half minutes and go watch

00:20:36   You don't need audio on the on the video there if you're listening to me now presumably that's not a problem

00:20:40   So what happens is this this person takes an iPhone 7 and like saws off all the sides of it such that they're all flat

00:20:48   Instead of rounded and then sands them down and whatever I want this

00:20:52   I want this a lot because this matte black iPhone 7 that I have I love it

00:20:57   I really, really do. The more I use it, the more I like it. And I think aesthetically,

00:21:01   it's my favorite iPhone yet, but this thing is a darn bar of soap. And I would love, I

00:21:06   mean, obviously I've never handled this particular gentleman's phone, but it stands to reason

00:21:12   it would be much easier to grip with the flat sides. I would love to have an iPhone like

00:21:17   this, but in black, not silver. So yeah, I want this, please. Can I have one?

00:21:23   I think you only want it because you haven't seen it up close.

00:21:26   - Yeah, if you notice the video was kind of quick

00:21:28   to show the phone once it was all done.

00:21:30   - Yeah, it's a mess, it's gotta be a mess.

00:21:32   'Cause this is not a precision operation,

00:21:34   it's just gotta look like a phone

00:21:35   that has been just messed up.

00:21:38   - Yeah, it didn't look good if you tried to look closely.

00:21:41   (laughing)

00:21:42   The shape looked good, but the finish did not.

00:21:44   - Right, that's the thing.

00:21:45   Like if this was officially done,

00:21:47   I think it would be pretty impressive, so.

00:21:48   - Oh yeah.

00:21:49   - I think that would be neat.

00:21:51   - All right, so I've talked to my phone

00:21:54   many past episodes and my wife's going on a cruise, a Mediterranean cruise, and she

00:22:01   was going to bring the fancy camera and rented lenses and we talked all about that. Anyway,

00:22:04   she went, she's back, she brought the camera back in one piece, did not drop it into the

00:22:08   ocean, took a bunch of pictures with it, and when I was going through her pictures, getting

00:22:12   them sorted into the photos library, after her return, I noticed a bunch of them and

00:22:17   she noticed too, she said, "Just wait, there's something in a bunch of the pictures, you'll

00:22:21   see it soon, a dark line that appears in a bunch of pictures and the line kind of looks

00:22:29   semi-circular so I'm like is that like a shadow of a lens or something but then I noticed

00:22:34   some other ones the line is not perfectly curved like a circle sometimes it changes

00:22:40   the angle and I'm like well okay a lens aberration wouldn't do that because the lenses are all

00:22:44   round or you know spherical they're not they're not oddly shaped like that and then sometimes

00:22:48   it would curve in the opposite direction and it would move around.

00:22:51   And so I posted on Twitter, "Can anyone tell me what's causing the vertical curve shadow

00:22:55   lines in these pictures?" and posted a bunch of sample pictures.

00:22:58   And then everyone commented about where the pictures are from and whether they've been

00:23:01   there or not.

00:23:02   But in addition to that, a bunch of people did have guesses as to what it might be.

00:23:11   My guess was that it was maybe something on the lens because it was in so many pictures

00:23:15   in so many different environments.

00:23:16   I didn't think it was what it looks like, which is a hair in front of the lens or something,

00:23:20   because you know, your hair is under control. It wouldn't constantly be in front of the lens.

00:23:23   The lens was zoom lens, it was pretty far away. I inspected the lenses and there was nothing on them.

00:23:29   I knew there was stuff on my sensor. I could see there, like you can see in the same pictures,

00:23:35   some dots and I could see on the sensor there was some dust that I needed to get rid of,

00:23:39   but I'm like, what the hell is this line? And a lot of people have theories and one theory was

00:23:44   was

00:24:03   it snags or otherwise grabs the hair in the channel

00:24:06   and briefly flicks it in front of the sensor

00:24:08   as it moves up and down.

00:24:10   And it appears, and it only appears in pictures

00:24:13   with a very small aperture,

00:24:14   because with wide aperture,

00:24:15   light's coming in from too many angles

00:24:16   and it just illuminates all behind it, you don't see it.

00:24:18   So you see it in pictures of the sky

00:24:21   or another thing with lots of light

00:24:23   where the aperture has to squeeze down really small.

00:24:25   And then most of the incident light rays

00:24:27   are traveling in the same direction.

00:24:28   Then you get a shadow, this one little hair.

00:24:30   And the way I found it, after having this theory,

00:24:32   looked in the channel and way down in the corner of the channel just kind of peeking

00:24:38   out like on an angle like cutting off the corner of like the edge, you know, here's

00:24:42   the channel, here's the bottom, was little tiny hair and so I went in there super duper

00:24:46   carefully with a pair of tweezers and pulled it out and it was about like a centimeter

00:24:51   and a half long, very fine, non-human, doesn't look like a human hair, looks like a hair

00:24:57   from like a rabbit or a squirrel or something, really small and I got that out of there.

00:25:02   So I was like, thank God because so many other theories are like, oh, there's something wrong

00:25:05   with your shutter and it's dragging something on the thing or whatever, or you just have

00:25:09   to bring your camera back.

00:25:10   I was so happy to be able to actually extract a hair.

00:25:12   I'm like, yes, this is the thing.

00:25:15   And then, you know, of course I had to go through the rest of the process to get rid

00:25:19   of the dust.

00:25:20   So I brought one of those sensor cleaning kits.

00:25:21   And the way you do this is you take a picture of a blue sky and intentionally crank the

00:25:26   aperture down to a very tiny opening.

00:25:28   Or you can just put an auto if the sky is bright enough.

00:25:31   Then you take a picture of what you think is blank blue sky, then you bring it back

00:25:34   into your favorite photo application and you fiddle with the contrast and see if you can

00:25:37   see anything that looks like a dot.

00:25:40   And if you do see something like that, there's still dust on it.

00:25:43   And so I use the sensor cleaning kit, which is a little scary.

00:25:45   You know, like people say, "Oh, you can damage your sensor, be super careful."

00:25:49   But like I bought a thing specifically for that purpose.

00:25:52   The big like square on a stick kind of thing?

00:25:54   Yeah, there's like disposable single-use swabs.

00:25:57   Yep, yep.

00:25:58   specifically sized for the sensor, so you just one swipe only and then you throw the

00:26:02   thing in the garbage which is incredibly wasteful but whatever.

00:26:04   Yep.

00:26:05   And you have to use two of them, one with the little spritz of the stuff on it and one

00:26:07   without the spritz of the stuff.

00:26:09   Anyway, and a little blower to get most of it.

00:26:10   I hope to just use the blower because I didn't want to touch it at all.

00:26:12   Yeah, a little rocket blower.

00:26:13   I hope to just use the blower to get all this stuff.

00:26:14   Yeah.

00:26:15   But the blower didn't dislodge a couple of stubborn things so I used the thing, took

00:26:20   a bunch of pictures of the sky, now my sensor is clean.

00:26:22   all of which made me think that camera manufacturers could really really help

00:26:28   with this problem by just putting something, I mean I've never had a DSLR

00:26:32   but I assume that the mirror doesn't actually seal up and I know it covers

00:26:36   the sensor but doesn't actually like cover it as in keep dust out right? No.

00:26:39   Alright so A they should and B mirrorless cameras should have a little

00:26:46   door kind of like the shutter but not the shutter that closes before you can

00:26:49   take the lens off. Like why not do that? You know, I mean you'd still have to

00:26:53   clean the sensor sometimes. You still have to have a mechanism like you do on

00:26:56   an SLR to flip the lens up so you can clean the sensor, right? But why

00:27:00   expose it to the air at all when you're changing lenses? Just put it, maybe

00:27:04   there's not enough room for a door or whatever, not the shutter, the shutter is

00:27:07   the shutter, fine, I understand it has to be high speed and fancy and so on and so

00:27:10   forth. There's a plain old boring reasonably sealed door that closes and

00:27:14   covers the sensor when you change lenses. That would be a good idea camera

00:27:18   manufacturers. Anyway, moral of the story is I did not correctly convey to my wife exactly

00:27:27   how careful you have to be when changing lenses. Not that she even changed them. She just changed

00:27:32   it once. And all it takes is once for a little dust. But every time I did it on my Long Island

00:27:37   vacation it was like the lens can only be off the camera for the shortest possible time.

00:27:42   I'd have it staged and set up and never pointed upwards and just like, "Lens off. Cap on the

00:27:47   capability, you know, it was like trying to diffuse a bomb and again, never do it in a still

00:27:53   environment with still air, never point the lenses or the camera, like just, it's, you know, it's

00:28:00   nerve wracking. And, you know, she spent a lot of time on her vacation with this hair traveling up

00:28:06   and down the channel on the shutter, which is kind of disappointing. It's, I mean, it didn't ruin all

00:28:11   her pictures, but enough of them have a big dark line in them that's kind of disappointing. Luckily,

00:28:17   almost everything indoors doesn't have this problem because the the aperture is too big.

00:28:20   That stinks. I'm sorry to hear that. But what a weird problem. And you know, I don't have the

00:28:25   person's name handy, but and gosh, I only know this is true or not, but I'm taking them at face

00:28:29   value. Somebody told me that the Micro Four Thirds cameras, which is what I have, they all have

00:28:34   optical image stabilization or a lot of them, if not all of them, on the body rather than in the

00:28:39   lens. And they were saying that this person was saying that when you turn the camera on, it will

00:28:45   will actually use the OIS to shake off any dust

00:28:49   that might be on the lens.

00:28:50   I have no idea if that's true or not,

00:28:51   but what a cool idea, even if it isn't true.

00:28:53   - It's a pretty common feature.

00:28:55   It doesn't actually work perfectly, but like our--

00:28:58   - Exactly. - Yeah, like the 5D Mark IIs

00:29:00   that we had, it didn't have stabilization,

00:29:01   but it just had some kind of sensor vibrator thing

00:29:03   that would try to buzz off the dust

00:29:05   every time you turn the camera off.

00:29:06   And so to have that just constantly going,

00:29:08   like every time the camera turns off,

00:29:10   we did occasionally have to blow something off the sensor

00:29:13   with the 5Ds, but very rarely.

00:29:15   I think in the eight years we used them,

00:29:18   I think maybe three or four times total.

00:29:22   Whereas with my Sony, when I got it last year,

00:29:25   literally the first week I had it, I got dust on the sensor.

00:29:28   And similar story, just less severe.

00:29:30   It was last year we were at the beach house.

00:29:33   Lots of my pictures had this one big spot,

00:29:35   and eventually I took the lens off

00:29:36   and spotted it on the lens, on the sensor.

00:29:38   I was on vacation, so I couldn't really,

00:29:40   I didn't have any of the cleaning things,

00:29:41   so I just kind of tolerated it and just edited it out.

00:29:44   It wasn't too bad to edit out of everything.

00:29:47   But yeah, the camera was like a week old.

00:29:49   (laughing)

00:29:50   It happened immediately.

00:29:52   And yeah, you don't realize how good

00:29:54   those automatically vibrate the sensor things are

00:29:57   until you have a camera that doesn't do it

00:29:59   or doesn't have it.

00:30:00   But the Sony's, it has that feature,

00:30:02   but it doesn't do it every time.

00:30:04   It does it only on demand, and it only partially works.

00:30:07   But I don't know.

00:30:08   - I think that feature could help a little bit,

00:30:10   But in my case, first of all, it wouldn't have gotten the hair, because the hair is

00:30:13   not even on the sensor.

00:30:14   So you should make the sensor all you want.

00:30:15   It's not going to help.

00:30:16   That would have been there.

00:30:17   And for the dust, the pieces that I had to eventually use the mechanical method of actually

00:30:23   swabbing them off, the blower, the little, you know, hurricane blower, you know, shoots

00:30:29   a very concentrated thing, that couldn't even remove them.

00:30:31   Like, they were on there good.

00:30:33   It wasn't just like instant little dust that happened to float it on there.

00:30:35   They were so wedged on there that very forcible,

00:30:40   very concentrated stream of air could not dislodge them.

00:30:42   They actually had to swipe them away.

00:30:44   So I have a little faith in a sensor shake

00:30:46   would have shaken them off too.

00:30:48   But again, a door with some kind of reasonable ceiling

00:30:52   better than nothing would go a long way

00:30:55   towards making changing lenses less nerve wracking.

00:30:58   - Yeah, I do it the same way you do it.

00:30:59   I'm sure Marco is the same as well

00:31:00   where everything is staged, ready to go.

00:31:02   The camera's always upside down.

00:31:04   I'm not as intent on it being still air, but you know, we do what we can.

00:31:08   Um, and the whole thought of this happening to me is terrifying.

00:31:12   So I'm very impressed.

00:31:14   You were able to get this done without destroying the lens or the, the sensor,

00:31:17   which is what I surely somehow would have done knowing the I'd poured

00:31:21   water on it somehow by accident.

00:31:23   I don't know how you could like people say, oh, it's so

00:31:24   delicate.

00:31:25   You have to be careful.

00:31:25   Like it looks pretty sturdy down there.

00:31:27   I mean, you're swapping it.

00:31:28   It, when I swabbed across it, it felt like a smooth surface, but the

00:31:33   swab it's not like it has little snake like I don't understand how you go about

00:31:36   breaking it I suppose you could scratch it in some way but only thing I'm

00:31:39   touching it with these microfiber swabby things that I assume are safe and yeah I

00:31:45   hope you don't have to do that again but like taking pictures of an empty blue

00:31:48   sky and checking for any little splotches on it you'll see them like you

00:31:53   don't have to be an expert to be especially if you start filling with a

00:31:55   contrast control you will find the spots that are there because I swabbed it and I

00:31:59   I could see where the spot used to be.

00:32:02   It was still a little, you know,

00:32:03   I had actually removed the material.

00:32:05   I couldn't see it with my eyeballs anymore,

00:32:07   but on the sensor, I could see a little spot

00:32:08   and that's when I had to use like the cleaning stuff.

00:32:11   And then that got rid of it for good.

00:32:12   And now I'm just messing with the controls,

00:32:14   trying to find any little speck.

00:32:16   And now it's like, oh, that's JPEG compression.

00:32:17   Nevermind, I should do RAWs, I guess.

00:32:19   But anyway, I'm pretty sure I didn't destroy my camera.

00:32:21   Still seems to work.

00:32:23   No more hair, no more spots.

00:32:24   - All right, so I have a brief tale of woe

00:32:28   and a plea for help.

00:32:30   On my work computer, I typically use a pair of headphones,

00:32:35   Bluetooth headphones I bought literally five years ago.

00:32:39   I bought it--

00:32:40   - And they're perfect in every way, as we've always heard.

00:32:43   - Yeah, about that.

00:32:44   So I bought them on August 15, 2011.

00:32:47   And they're Arctic Sound P311s.

00:32:50   I've espoused them numerous times

00:32:51   because while they are not perfect,

00:32:53   they accomplish everything satisfactorily

00:32:57   in a satisfactory way.

00:32:58   So they are sufficient.

00:33:01   How much horsepower does a Rolls-Royce have?

00:33:03   Sufficient amounts of horsepower.

00:33:05   I upgraded to Sierra on my work Mac,

00:33:09   and suddenly they are not sufficient anymore.

00:33:14   For whatever reason, and I don't know why,

00:33:17   they sound like hugely, hugely, hugely compressed.

00:33:22   And I ran into this once years ago,

00:33:26   And it ended up that there was like a bit value or something like that that you could

00:33:29   change in the Bluetooth Explorer app, which you have to get via Xcode tools now.

00:33:35   And that fixed my problem.

00:33:36   Like years ago, I'd noticed that when this first happened, the symbols were terrible

00:33:41   and super compressed, and it was just awful, and I was able to fix it.

00:33:44   Tried doing the same thing this time, and it didn't make a difference.

00:33:50   So I unpair/repair.

00:33:51   I've done all sorts of things.

00:33:53   I haven't tried again after having cleared my PRAM just for grins and giggles.

00:33:59   I've done everything except that, and I thought, well, maybe just something weird is going

00:34:03   on.

00:34:04   They're ancient headphones at this point.

00:34:07   Let me just get a new set.

00:34:08   So I got the equivalent set that's newer.

00:34:11   And so they came in today, and they're also Arctic Sound, but these are P253, and we will

00:34:17   have links to these in the show notes.

00:34:20   And good news, bad news.

00:34:21   Good news is they sound great.

00:34:22   well, as great as a $30 set of Bluetooth headphones can sound,

00:34:27   but every time there's any audio playing of any sort,

00:34:32   the right channel has a buzzing in them,

00:34:35   which in the span of about 45 seconds

00:34:38   drove me absolutely crazy.

00:34:40   - It took that long?

00:34:42   - Yeah.

00:34:42   - How did this review possibly start out in any positive way?

00:34:45   - So I'm returning these headphones,

00:34:48   because did you know, like hand on heart,

00:34:49   I did not know this,

00:34:51   For some, if not all things,

00:34:52   you could return it to Amazon for free.

00:34:54   - Yeah, usually you have to return shipping.

00:34:57   They'll leave you like six bucks

00:34:58   from your return or something.

00:35:01   - Oh, is that what it does?

00:35:02   Okay, 'cause according to them,

00:35:03   they were like, "Here's your shipping label."

00:35:04   And I didn't cross compare how much the cost of the item was

00:35:09   versus how much they were saying they were gonna refund me,

00:35:11   so maybe that's what it is.

00:35:12   But anyway.

00:35:13   - No, it's super awesome.

00:35:14   If you ever have to return it to Amazon,

00:35:15   they make it incredibly easy on you.

00:35:17   - Yeah, so I am going to return them,

00:35:20   But here's my predicament.

00:35:22   I want, for better or worse, Bluetooth headphones.

00:35:26   I understand that not everyone wants them.

00:35:29   I do.

00:35:29   I prefer Bluetooth headphones.

00:35:31   And I think the reason I prefer them is because convenience is a bigger priority to me than

00:35:36   perfect sound fidelity.

00:35:38   Well then in that case, just wait for the AirPods.

00:35:40   Well, so here's the thing.

00:35:43   I agree that that's probably going to be the best answer, but they supposedly only run

00:35:47   for five hours before they need a charge.

00:35:49   and I know that it will charge quickly, but I typically sit at my desk, meetings aside, for eight to eight and a half hours in a day.

00:35:56   These ancient headphones with their five-year-old battery that I loved so much

00:36:01   used to go like two, two and a half days between charges easily and with meetings during the day and whatnot,

00:36:08   so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but you get my point.

00:36:11   I think the answer is going to be get AirPods.

00:36:14   But is there any and this is kind of rhetorical kind of not especially for you Marco

00:36:20   Is there any set of Bluetooth headphones that whether or not they are?

00:36:25   Perfect audio fidelity because again, I don't care for Marco's purposes

00:36:30   Let's just assume I never listen to music on them, which is a complete and utter lie

00:36:34   But let's just for your purposes if you are satisfied with podcast fidelity

00:36:39   that will probably be sufficient for my music fidelity for this use case.

00:36:44   Are there any headphones, Bluetooth headphones, that have batteries that last about 10 hours,

00:36:49   let's say, that don't suck?

00:36:52   And here's the kicker though, that have a bar that goes behind the back of your neck

00:36:59   rather than over your head.

00:37:01   Why, ladies and gentlemen?

00:37:02   Because I am weird, and my hair kind of sticks up a little bit and poofs.

00:37:07   And if I put a bar across the top of my head for eight hours, it'll have that imprint in

00:37:15   my head always, which is not advisable.

00:37:18   So...

00:37:19   Why, ladies and gentlemen, you could have just said vanity.

00:37:22   Yes.

00:37:23   Yes, actually, that was an easier summary.

00:37:25   Why?

00:37:26   You don't want to mess up your hair.

00:37:27   That's why.

00:37:28   Right.

00:37:29   It's a hand on heart, no argument, absolutely, absolutely true.

00:37:32   There are some advantages to baldness.

00:37:34   Anyway...

00:37:35   [laughter]

00:37:36   So I'm making fun of myself, but I really honestly am asking, and maybe we don't answer it during the show, but I

00:37:42   don't have anything against earbuds,

00:37:46   but I'd rather have an over ear or like the the ones that I had kind of dangled on your ear,

00:37:52   which I understand makes most people crazy. But for me, I like it. It works for me.

00:37:57   So is--and we'll put the links to the ones I'm talking about in the show notes--

00:38:00   is there any set of Bluetooth headphones that's even vaguely like this?

00:38:05   That is not a total piece of garbage that I would not have to charge in the middle of the day.

00:38:11   If I have to charge them every night, fine, no big deal.

00:38:13   But I don't have to charge in the middle of the day.

00:38:15   I think, Marco, you're absolutely right.

00:38:17   What's going to end up happening is I'm going to spend way more money than I want to,

00:38:19   and I'm going to get the EarPods, and I'll probably love them, and it'll probably be fine,

00:38:22   and I'll put them in the little Tic Tac case during meetings, and I'll never know the difference.

00:38:26   I suspect that's going to be the winner.

00:38:28   But is there any other option, preferably not Buds,

00:38:33   but, Buds, I would maybe entertain.

00:38:35   Is there anything else that you can think of

00:38:37   that doesn't go over the head?

00:38:39   - So, I'm going to fill you with hope,

00:38:41   but ultimately provide no value whatsoever.

00:38:44   (laughing)

00:38:47   So, the problem, and this is honestly,

00:38:49   I've been considering just stopping reviewing headphones.

00:38:52   - Oh no, because I want you to review

00:38:54   the Bluetooth headphones now that

00:38:55   Bluetooth is in vogue-ish, kind of.

00:38:57   - Here's the thing.

00:38:58   So, basically, like, you know, right now,

00:39:00   everyone keeps asking me, you know,

00:39:01   what they should get for Bluetooth and everything.

00:39:03   And with Bluetooth, there are so,

00:39:05   I mean, the headphone market has grown a lot

00:39:07   in the last couple years since I started my big review.

00:39:10   There's so many models now,

00:39:13   and people have so many different needs.

00:39:15   And the fact is, it takes a lot of time and a lot of money

00:39:20   to buy or somehow acquire all these headphones

00:39:24   and test them properly in a useful way.

00:39:27   That's why when the Wirecutter does it,

00:39:29   they have a whole team of people doing it,

00:39:31   and it takes a long time, and that's like,

00:39:32   their full-time job is to work on stuff like this.

00:39:34   And also, the headphone market has gotten,

00:39:38   basically like, as Beats came around a few years ago,

00:39:43   a lot of people took notice of,

00:39:44   here's a place we can make a lot of money.

00:39:47   So now there are tons of headphone brands

00:39:50   and tons of like, allegedly awesome new headphones

00:39:54   coming out on the market all the time.

00:39:56   And many of them are very expensive.

00:39:58   Many of them are like, you know, $400 and up.

00:40:01   basically, which is, you know, for an audio file,

00:40:04   that's kind of normal, but for a regular person,

00:40:06   it's a very expensive pair of headphones.

00:40:08   So, there are so many now that almost nobody,

00:40:13   including the Wirecutter, actually reviews

00:40:16   a meaningful number of them to be able to give you

00:40:19   a useful blanket recommendation.

00:40:21   Like, if you read the Wirecutter, they always go through,

00:40:24   and one of the things they'll spend a few paragraphs doing

00:40:26   is saying, like, here's the ones we tested,

00:40:28   and here's a whole bunch we didn't even test

00:40:30   because the reviews didn't look good on Amazon

00:40:32   or whatever other reasons they have.

00:40:34   'Cause you basically have to rule out large swaths

00:40:37   of what's out there just to have a possible number to review.

00:40:42   And with Bluetooth, everything is even worse now

00:40:44   because now there's even more factors that matter

00:40:47   that before you didn't have to worry about as much.

00:40:49   Things like latency, whether you compare it

00:40:53   to multiple devices or not,

00:40:55   whether it has decent reception to the phone,

00:40:57   whether it supports all these different codecs

00:40:58   that are now out there.

00:41:00   And then the useful things like how you control,

00:41:03   whether there's buttons on it

00:41:04   or some kind of touch gesture controls

00:41:06   to control pausing and volume and stuff.

00:41:08   It is so complicated now.

00:41:10   There are so many models from $30 to $1,000.

00:41:15   No reviewer can meaningfully try a good number.

00:41:18   So here's what's going to happen now.

00:41:20   Right now, as I speak, as people listen to this,

00:41:22   they are writing you emails telling you what they bought

00:41:26   and saying these are the best.

00:41:28   But all they can tell you is that's what they bought

00:41:30   'cause they probably have tried between zero

00:41:32   and five other pairs out of a market

00:41:33   with like hundreds of entries.

00:41:35   There's really nothing that most people can tell you

00:41:37   that will be very helpful.

00:41:39   Even on Amazon, half the reviews on Amazon these days

00:41:42   are fake, they're paid, they're fraud.

00:41:45   It's so hard to find good information

00:41:47   about this kind of stuff.

00:41:47   So basically, how did you find the ones you have now?

00:41:51   Was it just browse online a bit,

00:41:52   look at some reviews and just buy 'em?

00:41:54   - Yeah, pretty much.

00:41:55   - That's what you're gonna have to do again.

00:41:57   When you're buying headphones, that's basically,

00:41:59   And not to mention, even if you found a place

00:42:02   that reviewed a bunch of headphones

00:42:03   in a way that was useful to you,

00:42:05   people have such wildly different taste in headphones.

00:42:08   People have very different preferences.

00:42:10   Like the whole list that I made disagreed substantially

00:42:13   a lot of times with the wire cutter and places like that.

00:42:17   There are a few big headphone reviewers out there

00:42:19   in the world that I disagree strongly with

00:42:21   and some that I agree strongly with

00:42:22   and you just kind of never know

00:42:23   like what you're gonna find out there

00:42:24   'cause it's so subjective.

00:42:26   Like there is no, like people always think

00:42:29   that there's like some ideal of how headphones should sound,

00:42:32   but there isn't one that everyone agrees on.

00:42:34   There's a whole bunch of argument about that,

00:42:36   but basically there is no such thing as like

00:42:38   the best way a headphone should sound.

00:42:41   That's widely agreed upon.

00:42:42   Basically, no one's gonna tell you anything

00:42:45   that is going to be more useful than what you're gonna find

00:42:47   by just searching places like Amazon,

00:42:49   reading a few user reviews, and just picking one.

00:42:51   And if it sucks, return it.

00:42:53   Otherwise, keep it until it dies.

00:42:55   So all that being said, this is probably a bad time

00:42:59   to invest in a pair of Bluetooth headphones

00:43:01   because the AirPods aren't out yet

00:43:03   and even though I expect them to sound really mediocre

00:43:07   at best because Apple has not made a pair of headphones

00:43:11   that sounds good, including all the ones by Beats,

00:43:14   they have not made one that sounds good.

00:43:17   They can achieve practical, they can achieve good enough

00:43:21   for many people or for many roles.

00:43:23   As I mentioned, I listen on my pair of Bluetooth Sennheiser

00:43:28   PX210BTs that sound horrible.

00:43:31   They have the worst sound in the world,

00:43:32   but I listen on them because they're incredibly practical.

00:43:35   That I think is going to be the appeal of AirPods,

00:43:38   that they are going to be incredibly practical

00:43:41   and nice to use.

00:43:42   Although I do have a very strong concern

00:43:46   about the real world annoyance of not being able to have

00:43:51   clicker and volume controls on them,

00:43:52   as we discussed previously.

00:43:54   Like to only have Siri or to only be able to map

00:43:57   the tap on the thing to like play pause

00:43:59   at no other commands, that I think is going to be annoying.

00:44:03   But that being said, I think in all other ways,

00:44:07   AirPods are probably gonna be pretty great

00:44:09   if what you're valuing is convenience over sound quality.

00:44:13   - Which all jokes aside,

00:44:15   that is absolutely what I am valuing.

00:44:17   For this use case, I would much rather have convenience

00:44:20   over sound quality.

00:44:21   Now I have a really great set of Bear Dynamics

00:44:24   that I'm listening to right now.

00:44:25   I have a really great set of open-air Sennheisers

00:44:27   that admittedly are ancient, but still sound phenomenal.

00:44:30   - They're still great. - And I have a set

00:44:31   of Ultimate Ears in-ear earbuds that also sound great.

00:44:35   So I understand what good headphones sound like.

00:44:39   I get it.

00:44:40   It's just for me, this is not a time where I am worrying

00:44:43   about perfect audio fidelity.

00:44:45   And I think, to your point, Marco,

00:44:48   the answer's either going to be the Beats X,

00:44:50   which is the kind of sporty ones, that it's two earbuds tied together by a loop that goes

00:44:56   behind your neck, which is 150 bucks, or more likely, if I'm already in for 150, well crap,

00:45:02   why not do 160, 170, whatever it is, for the AirPods.

00:45:06   And I suspect that even though I am sitting here telling you, "Oh, I'm worried about making

00:45:10   it a whole day at work," I have enough meetings and general mucking about talking to people

00:45:15   during the day that I'm sure I can get through the day with just a little bit of charging

00:45:20   in the case here and there. And Matt Bischoff in the chat had asked me, "Well, don't you go to lunch

00:45:24   at any point?" And sometimes yes, but oftentimes I just bring a sandwich and just eat at my desk.

00:45:29   And so that's not, it's not, there's no guaranteed time when I'm going to get up and be able to

00:45:34   charge, but I suspect that I will be able to make it work with AirPods. And for convenience,

00:45:40   that's probably the best option that I have. But internet, if you have a really good idea,

00:45:48   Preferably on or over ear preferably that doesn't go over the top of your head because you're a vain petty idiot

00:45:54   Let me know that would be useful morning air pods and afternoon air pods there you go

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00:48:09   (upbeat music)

00:48:12   So Google had an event. They announced the Google Pixel phones. There's a Pixel

00:48:18   and Pixel XL, I believe it is, which are effectively the equivalent of the iPhone

00:48:23   7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The phones look good, I guess. I mean, they look kind of iPhone-ish.

00:48:29   They look kind of like somebody described the way an iPhone 6 looks, like,

00:48:34   over the phone to someone else, and then this is what came out. Yeah, that's a

00:48:40   relatively fair characterization. I think they look very fairly iPhone-ish,

00:48:45   but the one thing I will say is the back of them, oh does that look rough? Because

00:48:51   there's like some areas that looks like it's plastic, some that looks like it's

00:48:54   glass, and it's just woof, no thank you. But generally speaking, outside of that,

00:49:00   they seem like they're good devices. There's no camera bump, which they made a

00:49:04   snarky comment about, and I don't really blame them because the camera bump kind

00:49:07   of stinks. Well I mean to be fair like they can't be making snarky remarks

00:49:12   about good design when they're presenting that as their phone. Well I

00:49:16   don't think the design is bad with the exception of the back but I mean

00:49:21   whatever. It does have a headphone jack which that of course they were super

00:49:25   snarky about which I'm not surprised but kind of disappointed because it would be

00:49:28   really neat if there was a unified front on this issue but whatever. No optical

00:49:34   no physical optical image stabilization,

00:49:37   which I thought there was when I was watching the keynote,

00:49:40   but it turns out there was not.

00:49:42   It's all in software, which on the one side,

00:49:44   I'm like, "Ha, like they'll get that right."

00:49:46   But then again, I've seen the Google app

00:49:49   that does the live, what is it,

00:49:51   motion stills, I think they call it?

00:49:52   - Yeah.

00:49:53   - Which is the live photo stabilization thing,

00:49:55   and by God, that's the work of magic.

00:49:58   So it's possible they'll get that right.

00:50:02   Overall, I mean, it looks like it's decent hardware, all told.

00:50:07   The presentation was OK.

00:50:11   It was Apple-ish in some good ways and some bad ways.

00:50:15   Way better than Apple in terms of diversity,

00:50:17   I do want to call that out.

00:50:18   I think they did a much better job with that.

00:50:21   That being said, the presenters were kind of OK.

00:50:24   I mean, I don't think any of them were great.

00:50:27   I mean, not that every Apple presenter is amazing,

00:50:30   But I think by and large, Apple presenters do a pretty darn good job.

00:50:34   And even some first-time presenters like Boseman St. John did an amazing job.

00:50:38   So there is a high bar in that regard.

00:50:41   But all in all, this isn't bad.

00:50:43   The back is no good.

00:50:45   The name of the colors, there's very silver, quite black, and really blue.

00:50:51   Seriously?

00:50:52   Whatever.

00:50:53   Yeah, I can't even.

00:50:57   The prices are the same as equivalent iPhones, which is cool.

00:51:02   I mean, I guess that means that that's apparently the price to hit.

00:51:05   They only come in 32 gigs and 128 gigs.

00:51:08   There's no 256 gig option like you can find on an iPhone.

00:51:14   It's pre-orderable now.

00:51:15   I think it ships in a couple of weeks.

00:51:17   It looks good.

00:51:19   But the thing that was most impressive to me about the entire presentation, which is

00:51:23   both good and bad, was any Google Photos user,

00:51:28   which is presumably anyone who will have this phone,

00:51:30   gets free unlimited storage for all the photos and video

00:51:34   that come off of their Pixel phone.

00:51:37   And as someone who is a devout Google Photos user,

00:51:40   that is amazing, and I am super duper jealous.

00:51:44   - We haven't yet seen why we need to care

00:51:48   about Google's phone releases.

00:51:50   Because they've made phones for a while

00:51:52   under the Nexus brand, and we haven't needed to care about those yet, because historically

00:51:57   they've been pretty rough with any kind of retail presence, any kind of deals with the

00:52:02   carriers to get their phones promoted and into stores and everything. It's been not

00:52:07   one of their strong points. You know, the Android marketplace has really just been,

00:52:11   for the most part, the Samsung marketplace in recent years. The timing of this is interesting,

00:52:15   with Samsung having a pretty bad time right now

00:52:19   with this Note 7 disaster, and Google coming in,

00:52:23   "Hey, we have an alternative for you

00:52:25   "if you wanna keep with Android."

00:52:26   And maybe going to the carriers now and saying,

00:52:29   "Hey, you can integrate with us now,

00:52:30   "we'll put all your bloatware crap on there."

00:52:31   I saw a story earlier that's saying they're doing that.

00:52:34   So the timing is opportune for Google

00:52:37   to take back some of the Android inertia

00:52:40   from Samsung a little bit, but I do think

00:52:43   we still have not seen Google really show the world yet

00:52:47   that their first party hardware products

00:52:51   can actually get any traction in retail

00:52:53   and in the marketplace.

00:52:54   So if they do, then great.

00:52:57   Then we have another strong competitor,

00:52:59   the industry will be better off,

00:53:00   customers will be better off,

00:53:02   but I just don't see why we need to care about this yet,

00:53:06   because based on their past,

00:53:09   the chances of this really taking off,

00:53:11   I don't think are guaranteed.

00:53:14   - Well, I think for the first time they have

00:53:16   a couple of pitches and an ad campaign

00:53:18   that have a chance of resonating with iOS users.

00:53:23   We mentioned on a couple of shows ago

00:53:24   the whole thing of like making fun of the iPhone

00:53:26   where you take a picture and it shows you're out of storage

00:53:28   touting the whole, you know, Google,

00:53:30   we take your pictures and throw them up to the cloud

00:53:32   and our crap actually works type of angle.

00:53:35   And then this is just one step further along

00:53:37   the same lines for saying, you get this phone,

00:53:39   not only does our stuff work to put your stuff in the cloud,

00:53:43   but we don't charge you some big monthly fee for your storage.

00:53:47   Get this phone.

00:53:48   Don't worry about storage anymore.

00:53:50   Really don't worry about it.

00:53:51   You have unlimited storage in our cloud,

00:53:53   and so on and so forth.

00:53:53   And there's an article on The Verge talking about this,

00:53:57   saying, see, Apple, see what you have to do.

00:53:59   Why don't you give people cloud storage

00:54:01   equal to the size of their phone,

00:54:02   which was the other thing we used to talk about.

00:54:03   Why doesn't Apple just do this?

00:54:05   And I mean, the answer is obvious,

00:54:06   because Google monetizes the stuff

00:54:09   that you upload into the cloud.

00:54:10   Google anonymizes and looks at your crap

00:54:14   and uses it for machine learning or advertising,

00:54:17   but they're not as privacy focused as Apple is.

00:54:21   - Well, but that's, see that's kind of a bad example though,

00:54:23   because people say like, Google can afford to do this

00:54:26   because they're making money off your privacy.

00:54:28   Apple can't do this.

00:54:30   But that's not true.

00:54:31   Apple makes money too.

00:54:31   They make tons of money off the hardware.

00:54:33   I would bet Apple's making more per phone than Google will.

00:54:37   - Yeah, I know, but it's the same business though.

00:54:38   They're both, like you can say which company

00:54:41   is able to make more money off things,

00:54:43   but in the end, there's Apple to Apple.

00:54:46   They're both making phones somehow.

00:54:48   They're both making the operating system somehow.

00:54:51   They're both running the cloud services,

00:54:52   stores your photos somehow, right?

00:54:54   And if Apple's able to make more money on hardware

00:54:57   and less money on services and Google's reverse,

00:54:59   that's all well and good,

00:55:00   but Google has one big thing that Apple doesn't have,

00:55:03   that there's no apples to apples comparison for,

00:55:05   which is we have a search engine

00:55:07   that brings us huge amounts of money through advertising

00:55:10   and huge amounts of data to feed into our analytical engine

00:55:14   to figure out like, you know,

00:55:15   anything you can imagine wanting to do

00:55:17   with machine learning,

00:55:18   Google has so many inputs into that system

00:55:22   that Apple has no, you know, no comparison to.

00:55:25   Even if Apple wanted to do everything that Google does

00:55:27   in terms of monetizing your data,

00:55:29   they can't because they don't have

00:55:31   as much input into the system.

00:55:33   It's not as valuable to them.

00:55:34   So what, we have your pictures.

00:55:35   What can we do with that?

00:55:36   Well, you can use it to feed your engines

00:55:38   to figure out how to sell search ads.

00:55:39   What do you mean search ads?

00:55:40   We don't have a search engine, right?

00:55:41   So Google still has that big strength

00:55:43   in terms of monetizing your stuff.

00:55:45   And you're right that you're saying,

00:55:46   well, Apple's got a lot of money in the bank.

00:55:48   Apple could get free, unlimited cloud and video storage

00:55:51   to all of its customers for the next 150 years

00:55:54   and only cut like a tiny sliver off

00:55:57   the mountain of cash they have, right?

00:55:59   That is all true.

00:56:00   - No, no, I'm not even talking about like cash,

00:56:02   like cash reserves.

00:56:03   - I know, using the profit margins on the hardware, right?

00:56:05   They make more money on the hardware than Google does.

00:56:06   - Right, like the Google model is,

00:56:09   we're gonna somehow get you this phone

00:56:11   and then we're gonna make money on you over time

00:56:13   as you use our stuff with ads.

00:56:15   Apple model is, we're gonna make money

00:56:17   on this phone up front.

00:56:18   And by the way, they're still gonna make money off everybody

00:56:20   with their 30% cut from the App Store and everything else,

00:56:23   but you know, even if they only make money

00:56:26   from the phone hardware from somebody,

00:56:28   and then after that point,

00:56:30   that person is just a cost center

00:56:32   as they get all their iCloud stuff hosted for free

00:56:34   or whatever else if they launch a plan like this,

00:56:36   you're still making money somewhere

00:56:38   and there's plenty of profit on a phone

00:56:40   that's priced the way these phones are priced,

00:56:42   they could, if they wanted to,

00:56:45   just give people cloud storage

00:56:47   in a way that would probably not have

00:56:50   that significant of an impact on their margins.

00:56:52   They just don't do it because they like making

00:56:55   that extra little five bucks a month

00:56:57   from the very small number of people

00:56:58   who are gonna buy iCloud storage or whatever,

00:57:00   But it's setting aside how you pay for it

00:57:03   because again, both companies can pay for it

00:57:06   in their own ways.

00:57:08   Apple doesn't have to become this crazy ad company

00:57:10   that invades all your privacy

00:57:12   to have enough profit margin on an iPhone

00:57:13   to host your photos for a couple years.

00:57:15   Google does that anyway,

00:57:16   but even if they're selling their hardware now,

00:57:19   even they don't need to necessarily do that

00:57:20   if they didn't want to.

00:57:22   So assuming both companies have ways to pay for it

00:57:25   because they both do without changing their business models,

00:57:27   they both have ways to pay for it,

00:57:29   then I think Google's approach of giving you more of that

00:57:32   like hosting, that is a much more customer-friendly approach.

00:57:37   It is a much more likely approach to succeed

00:57:41   in terms of getting people to use all these photo uploads,

00:57:43   getting people to actually have their photos

00:57:46   backed up to the cloud somehow.

00:57:47   And I wish Apple would do it.

00:57:49   That being said, that isn't today's Apple style.

00:57:52   That's not like a Tim Cook or even a Steve Jobs Apple style.

00:57:56   I don't see them doing that anytime

00:57:58   for the foreseeable future.

00:57:59   But I think that's a shame, because I think

00:58:01   not only could they afford to do it

00:58:02   without becoming a privacy invasive company,

00:58:04   just using the margins they already have,

00:58:06   but I think it makes for a way better customer experience

00:58:10   to just know that whatever photos you take on your phone,

00:58:12   they're just backed up.

00:58:13   Because storage is really, really cheap these days,

00:58:16   especially at the kind of scale that Apple and Google

00:58:18   are working out with their data centers and everything

00:58:20   and their web services contracts.

00:58:21   So it's not like they can't afford it,

00:58:23   it's not like it's even a big cost.

00:58:24   It's just Apple is using that additional photo storage

00:58:28   as a potential center for profit from service revenue.

00:58:32   And Google is saying, for these people who buy our phone,

00:58:35   we're just not gonna have that as a way to make money.

00:58:38   We're gonna do it some other way.

00:58:38   And it's a difference of opinion,

00:58:42   of what is a reasonable place to make money from people,

00:58:45   where do you want to nickel and dime them,

00:58:46   versus give them a bunch of stuff for free.

00:58:48   And again, both companies can do this,

00:58:50   but only one of them is doing it.

00:58:53   - Well, Apple has been breaking down its margins.

00:58:58   out services separately. So if Apple was to do this, it would take the one part of

00:59:03   their business that they keep using to try to distract you from the fact that

00:59:06   their phone business isn't growing like it used to. The services part, hey look at

00:59:10   our year-over-year service growth, and it will take a bite out of it. And even

00:59:14   though you say, oh well they'll just pay for that with the hardware margins. The

00:59:18   way that becomes visible in an earnings call is service revenue was up you know

00:59:22   40% year-over-year but oh now we did this free storage for everyone plan and

00:59:26   and service revenue is only up 5% this year, or it's down 5%, or something like that. And it's

00:59:31   like, "Oh, that was supposed to be the bright spot in your earnings call because your other

00:59:35   businesses are stagnant or not growing as fast as they used to be." And now even your services

00:59:40   want us taking a hit. That would not be good because like, you know, it's like, "Oh, well,

00:59:45   the same thing with the cash. We just said, 'Oh, we're giving away storage and the way we're going

00:59:48   to pay for it is we're just going to burn cash to do it.'" Like, these are all things that are

00:59:53   possible numerically but don't look good to the outside world of like do you have

00:59:58   a sustainable business whereas Google you know all of its cost centers are

01:00:03   running all that stuff it's like it's all under the same umbrella of get more

01:00:07   people get more of those people's information that feeds the beast that

01:00:10   you know that we make money off of and the complaint about Google is you're not

01:00:13   making enough money off of your users you have so many users you have all this

01:00:16   data Apple makes so much more money off of every one of its users than you do

01:00:20   you need to find a way to monetize them better.

01:00:22   And that's a persistent complaint about Google,

01:00:26   but this is just more of the same with them.

01:00:28   I was saying, okay, well, we heard your complaint,

01:00:29   but we're gonna keep doing that thing we do,

01:00:31   which would be try to get everyone's data

01:00:32   as much as possible and getting to use all our services.

01:00:35   And the more data we have and the more users we have,

01:00:37   the more money we make,

01:00:38   even if our margins aren't that big.

01:00:40   And in theory, like Casey said,

01:00:43   these phones are the same price as iPhones.

01:00:46   They're made of the same materials.

01:00:47   They're, you know, like they're probably cheaper,

01:00:50   materials in the grand scheme of things,

01:00:51   'cause Google is not as obsessive about manufacturing

01:00:54   and tolerances, and they didn't have to design

01:00:56   their own chips, they're buying it off the shelf

01:00:57   from Qualcomm, which means they have to pay

01:00:58   Qualcomm a margin, but on the other hand,

01:01:00   they didn't have to pay for all the R&D

01:01:01   to develop the chip and the, you know, anyway,

01:01:04   in theory, Google could be making similar margins to Apple,

01:01:07   they're just not as good at this business.

01:01:09   They don't make enough phones, they're not as good

01:01:11   at it as Apple, so they don't make as big a margins.

01:01:13   And similarly, for the server-side component,

01:01:16   Apple's not as good at Google as this.

01:01:17   I'm sure Apple's stuff costs more to them,

01:01:20   because they're not as good at doing service-sized stuff.

01:01:22   It's less reliable, less performant, less scalable,

01:01:25   and it probably costs Apple more than it costs Google

01:01:27   because Google is really good at this stuff

01:01:28   and has a much bigger scale.

01:01:30   And they have a much bigger scale

01:01:31   because they don't just run a service

01:01:33   that stores people's photos.

01:01:34   They run the world's biggest search engine

01:01:35   and tons of other crap,

01:01:37   and they have a lot of servers and a lot of storage

01:01:38   and a lot of in-house hardware and software

01:01:41   and know-how to make this work.

01:01:44   So this is definitely asymmetrical warfare here,

01:01:47   and anything having to do with cloud services,

01:01:49   Google is just so much better at than Apple.

01:01:51   This is a perfect move.

01:01:52   This is, I mean, when I started this thing,

01:01:53   this is a perfect move to try to actually get people

01:01:57   who were iPhone users to look at the other side

01:02:00   of the fence.

01:02:00   It's not even so much like, oh, don't buy a Samsung,

01:02:04   'cause they catch on fire, buy our phones.

01:02:06   It's like, what about iOS people?

01:02:08   All those things that you hate at iOS,

01:02:10   those are the things we're great about.

01:02:12   And of course, they're not gonna talk in the commercials

01:02:13   about the things that Apple is better at,

01:02:14   but like, we'll give you cloud storage,

01:02:17   ours will work, ours will be fast,

01:02:18   and arts will be free.

01:02:20   And I honestly think that A, Apple should respond,

01:02:23   but B, Apple doesn't have a really good way to respond.

01:02:26   Like, again, if they just did it and say,

01:02:27   we're paying for it out of our hardware margins,

01:02:29   that would be good for consumers,

01:02:31   but that would be bad for Apple.

01:02:34   Like, those would be some tough earning calls.

01:02:36   - Would it?

01:02:37   What do you think is worse for Apple?

01:02:39   Losing a potential iPhone customer to the Google phone

01:02:42   or paying for that customer's photo storage?

01:02:44   Like, they make way more money selling another iPhone

01:02:47   than they do selling a couple of iCloud storage accounts

01:02:50   for somebody for a couple of years.

01:02:51   Like, if they offered unlimited storage for photos

01:02:54   and videos just like Google does,

01:02:56   that would remove one of the Google Pixel's

01:02:58   largest selling points.

01:02:59   It would just totally evaporate.

01:03:01   I bet right now Apple probably thinks,

01:03:03   like I said at the beginning of this segment,

01:03:05   that Google's first party hardware

01:03:07   has never gone anywhere really,

01:03:08   so we probably don't have to worry about it, right?

01:03:10   But what if it does?

01:03:12   - Well, I don't think these are gonna,

01:03:14   again, it's a trailing indicator.

01:03:15   You have to wait to see, oh, are we actually losing customers

01:03:18   because of this thing?

01:03:19   Or is it just a thing that makes people look elsewhere,

01:03:21   but they never actually switch because they're

01:03:23   too trapped into the Apple ecosystem or whatever?

01:03:25   If Apple was to offer this immediately, rather than just,

01:03:29   say, just lowering the prices, which they've done already

01:03:31   a couple of times, offer free for everything,

01:03:35   that would be seen as like, why are you reacting to this?

01:03:38   Why are you reacting to a phone that

01:03:40   sells in such small volumes?

01:03:41   Why do you even care about the phone?

01:03:42   Do you really think it's going to pull away customers?

01:03:44   wait until it actually does start to pull away customers

01:03:46   and then react to it,

01:03:48   rather than giving away a bunch of money, right?

01:03:51   From the services division that is your growth darling

01:03:54   in the absence of anything else.

01:03:55   We've talked about storage sizes for phones

01:03:59   and storage sizes for cloud

01:04:00   and how Apple has not historically

01:04:02   been very competitive there

01:04:03   and they've been adjusting their prices

01:04:04   to try to be more competitive.

01:04:06   Google is doing the thing that Google is able to do.

01:04:09   Enough about how much your storage tiers cost,

01:04:11   enough about Dropbox costs this much

01:04:12   and iCloud drive costs that much,

01:04:14   and you have to pay for this, and your photos don't count,

01:04:16   but then your iCloud backups count, enough of that.

01:04:19   Everything free for everybody.

01:04:20   Like they're, they're saving beyond a back place

01:04:22   where it's $5 unlimited.

01:04:23   They're just like everything unlimited free, because,

01:04:25   and I feel like Google,

01:04:27   the reason Google is offering it on these phones

01:04:29   is because they are selling them for iPhone prices.

01:04:31   I think a lot of the storage is being subsidized

01:04:34   by the fact that you bought this really expensive phone.

01:04:36   You know, as far as I'm aware,

01:04:38   this deal is not being offered generically

01:04:41   on the cheapest Android phone you can find,

01:04:44   you have to buy the Pixel, right?

01:04:46   - Yeah, it isn't any Android phone,

01:04:48   it's specifically the Pixel phones.

01:04:50   - Right, which is a super expensive phone,

01:04:51   so I think Google is actually funding this

01:04:54   with a little bit of the margins from,

01:04:56   and granted, probably not as high as Apple,

01:04:57   but a little bit of the margins

01:04:58   from this very expensive phone.

01:04:59   And as we've all learned painfully, unlimited,

01:05:03   I mean, it's unlimited as long as it's unlimited

01:05:05   until it's not unlimited anymore,

01:05:06   usually by terms in the contract that say

01:05:09   we can end this deal at any time or the company going out of business as in picture life or

01:05:14   the one whose name I've already forgotten. Everpix. Everpix, yeah, it wasn't very ever,

01:05:19   was it? No. I don't think people really care about like, you know, "Oh, it's not really

01:05:25   unlimited." Like, get while the getting's good. Like, by all means, you know, if anyone

01:05:29   offers this, I'm not going to turn up my nose at it and say, "Oh, I don't want it on your

01:05:33   limited storage because I know it's not unlimited forever." Who cares? If it's not limited for

01:05:36   a year, it's worthwhile. If it's not limited for two years or three years, you just take

01:05:39   while you can get it. Don't be like, "I refuse to commit to this free product unless I'm guaranteed

01:05:44   that it will outlast me and my descendants." Like, whatever. Just, you know, nothing is forever.

01:05:50   Just take the deal. Anyway, I'm not sure Apple will react to this. Apple needs to get better

01:06:00   at doing cloud services. They need to have their photo storage work better. In theory,

01:06:04   iCloud Photo Library, with plenty of room, should do all the things that Google Photos does,

01:06:08   but it doesn't and people are frustrated by it. So they need to get better at it, they need to be able to do it cheaper,

01:06:12   they need to adjust their pricing because whether Google sells a lot of these phones or not,

01:06:16   they are, you know, they're moving the market. They're saying this is the new bar.

01:06:21   If you can't meet this bar, you will forever be seen as more competitive than if I just bought a Google Pixel,

01:06:26   or more expensive than if I just bought a Google Pixel.

01:06:28   So does Apple lower their prices? Do they go free?

01:06:31   History has shown that it will take Apple a long time

01:06:35   to be able to

01:06:37   go free on its storage, considering how long it's taken them to offer new storage tiers and to lower

01:06:43   their prices. They seem pretty stubborn about that. Can we all blame us on that? You again?

01:06:47   Sure. Why not? Let's do that. It's fun pastime. Either way, this is this, in theory, this phone

01:06:56   is hitting Apple where it hurts. And hopefully someone at Apple is paying attention.

01:07:01   - Yeah. I also love that they mentioned during the keynote and it's on the site,

01:07:06   if you scroll down a ways, about halfway down the page, that they include a section that's

01:07:12   "Switch in three simple steps. Connect, sign in, and transfer. Connect to your old iPhone or Android

01:07:17   device, or connect your old iPhone or Android device to your new Pixel with the quick switch

01:07:21   adapter," which apparently is USB-B, whatever the normal USB receptacle is, to USB-C, which is what

01:07:28   the phone uses. "Sign into your Google account on your Pixel or create a new one and then transfer.

01:07:33   Choose what you want to move, like contacts, calendar events,

01:07:36   photos, videos, music, SMS messages, iMessages--

01:07:39   I'm not really sure how that's working-- and more.

01:07:41   Then sit back and let the Pixel do the work.

01:07:42   And there's little adapters in every single box.

01:07:44   So they're getting aggressive.

01:07:46   And I think that's good.

01:07:48   And I think it was Stephen Hackett, amongst others,

01:07:50   that said, this is healthy for both companies.

01:07:52   When Apple is doing well-- which hopefully they are.

01:07:56   I mean, I guess it depends on when you ask us.

01:07:58   And if Google's doing well, then that's a good thing,

01:08:02   because this competition makes both of our products better.

01:08:06   But I'm curious to see if this really sells in any volume.

01:08:09   I can tell you that of the four developers on the Android team--

01:08:13   five developers on the Android team at my office,

01:08:15   two of them bought the phone while they were in the keynote,

01:08:18   or while we were watching the keynote, which, by the way,

01:08:21   was at like 1230, 1 o'clock in the afternoon.

01:08:25   They sat there and mashed on the refresh button

01:08:28   for like a minute and a half.

01:08:29   I was super jealous.

01:08:31   And yes, I tweeted about this.

01:08:32   And yes, most people were like,

01:08:34   "Oh yeah, well, you know,

01:08:35   they have five people buying these phones."

01:08:36   Well, I don't care.

01:08:37   It's still not in the middle of the night.

01:08:40   And so I'm very jealous of that.

01:08:42   But we'll see.

01:08:42   I'm anxious to see these devices

01:08:44   when they come in to my coworkers

01:08:45   so I can see what I think of them.

01:08:47   But I'm cautiously optimistic.

01:08:52   Like this isn't a phone for me,

01:08:53   but it could be if I wanted to jump

01:08:56   to the other side of the fence.

01:08:58   - Yeah, one more thing on the Pixel.

01:09:01   I didn't see the entire video presentation

01:09:03   where I saw parts of it.

01:09:04   And one part that I was particularly interested in

01:09:05   is the daydream VR thing that they're doing.

01:09:09   Another one of these situations where you take your phone

01:09:12   and you shove it into a headset

01:09:13   and then half the phone screen shows

01:09:15   what your left eye is supposed to see

01:09:16   and half the phone screen shows

01:09:17   what your right eye is supposed to see.

01:09:18   You wear a pair of goggles that makes that all focus

01:09:21   and work out reasonably well.

01:09:23   And you try to have a little miniature

01:09:25   portable VR experience.

01:09:26   Which is, boy, it's something considering, you know,

01:09:30   No serious VR development involves Macs in any way,

01:09:34   and yet we're able to do it on these crappy phones

01:09:36   that are not as powerful as Apple's.

01:09:38   Obviously, the VR experience compared to a PC

01:09:41   is very different on a phone.

01:09:42   You are not gonna have the same type of thing you have

01:09:44   on HTC, Vive, or Vive, depending on how you wanna say it,

01:09:48   or Oculus Rift, or even the PS4 VR.

01:09:52   But this is the thing they're doing,

01:09:55   and I think the most interesting part of this

01:09:58   is their headset, which there have been a lot of these headsets, including like the

01:10:01   Google cardboard thing, which is the most primitive, but this is another set of goggles

01:10:05   that you strap to your head that you shove your phone into. And they spent a while trying

01:10:09   to talk about the design of it, like the external design. They've made it out of fabric. I don't

01:10:15   think they mentioned this specifically. They mostly just said, "Oh, what do we wear on

01:10:18   our bodies?" Well, we wear soft things and fabrics, right? So instead of making it out

01:10:22   of shiny black plastic so you look all nerdy, you know, how are you going to make a VR headset

01:10:27   not look nerdy. We made it out of fabric because that's what you wear. And when I look at it,

01:10:30   I always thought of those sleep masks, you know, if you put like those, one of those

01:10:34   things to help you sleep at night, it's not made out of like velvety material, but it's

01:10:37   just made of fabric. It looks like a sleep mask, but I think this is a smart thing to

01:10:42   do. And I think other VR goggle vendors should take note. You don't have to always look like

01:10:49   a giant robot when you wear the thing. It doesn't have to be all angles and hard shiny

01:10:54   plastic doesn't have to look like one of those droid ads you know those original

01:10:57   droid ads where everything is a transformer you are putting it on your

01:11:01   body and around your head and why not make it something soft and comfortable

01:11:04   it's not like for example headphones they're not made out of pointy angular

01:11:09   plastic unless maybe they're made by Sony so are you right like the ear cup

01:11:14   if they have they have patty things on the ears like a squishy things because

01:11:17   they go on your head and you don't want something it's not squishy so these

01:11:20   goggles granted the the outside of it doesn't touch you but they're trying to

01:11:23   they're trying to convey like these are squishy and comfortable and not like

01:11:29   welding a laptop to your forehead right and I think that's a really good idea

01:11:34   and this type of casual VR where it's like low resolution low frame rate

01:11:38   probably not even that good right it's I think this is a good place to get a

01:11:44   foothold into the idea of like a few people will try it cuz hey everyone's

01:11:48   got a phone and you know these guys probably cost too much but you know

01:11:51   people who are interested, who wouldn't buy a full-fledged gaming PC in the whole setup

01:11:55   and the whole gear, will buy maybe this thing that you shove your phone into and try it

01:12:00   out and have a pleasant experience and start to associate Google with VR or whatever.

01:12:05   I don't give this thing great hopes of doing anything, especially since who's going to

01:12:10   develop software for this thing?

01:12:13   It's a market within a market within a market?

01:12:14   I don't know.

01:12:16   But as someone who still has yet to even try VR, I find it intriguing that Google is plowing

01:12:22   bravely forward with some interesting ideas, whereas Google, Apple is still sitting this

01:12:27   one out and Tim Cook is talking about augmented reality rather than VR.

01:12:32   All the while leaving its own customers without either one of those things, except for that

01:12:37   app that you hold up and translate signs in is really cool.

01:12:39   But anyway, I think these goggles are neat.

01:12:42   I have no idea how good they actually are,

01:12:44   but I'm encouraged by the steady advancement

01:12:47   in the world of VR.

01:12:48   - So if they're anything like Google Cardboard,

01:12:51   which it looks like they're very, very similar actually,

01:12:54   you should not try them.

01:12:55   - All right, 'cause low resolution and motion sickness?

01:12:57   - Yeah, I got to try one of those actually twice now,

01:13:01   and wow, not good.

01:13:06   I mean, well, I also got to try a Vive,

01:13:09   and that was substantially better

01:13:14   for motion sickness purposes.

01:13:15   - It better be for like the tremendous extra cost

01:13:18   that that is.

01:13:19   - Yeah.

01:13:20   - Just need a gaming PC and this and a room

01:13:22   and these things you can hold and walk around in, yeah.

01:13:24   - No, I mean the problem with the Vive

01:13:26   is that you just have wires everywhere.

01:13:27   It's just wires as far as I can see.

01:13:29   Tripping over wires, having to move the wires.

01:13:31   It's kind of unfortunate, but I'm sure over time

01:13:34   we will work these things out.

01:13:36   - I'm thinking even for these headphones,

01:13:37   even if you just use them to watch video,

01:13:39   which sounds like, why would I ever do that?

01:13:40   Why wouldn't I just hold my phone in front of my face?

01:13:43   Like, this is generation zero type products here.

01:13:47   It's gonna get better, the resolution will get better.

01:13:50   Eventually a phone will have enough power

01:13:51   to not be embarrassing in VR.

01:13:53   I'm not looking on this as like, wow, this is a game changer.

01:13:58   I'm looking on this as this could potentially be a way

01:14:03   many years down the line,

01:14:04   an accepted way to just veg out and watch some video

01:14:09   or play some casual games, not like "I'm in a full immersive VR experience and I feel like I'm really there!"

01:14:14   Maybe that's gonna be longer or still require a gaming PC or whatever, but...

01:14:18   Um...

01:14:20   I don't know, it just seems like...

01:14:22   I guess I'm gonna say "Why doesn't Apple do this?" You know why Apple doesn't do it.

01:14:25   They're not gonna release a half-assed product like this and say "Well, it's kinda neat, why don't you try it guys, tell us what you think," right?

01:14:30   That's not gonna happen.

01:14:31   Um...

01:14:32   But...

01:14:33   If...

01:14:34   Apple doesn't...

01:14:36   figure out what his play is here soon,

01:14:38   it's just gonna pass them by.

01:14:39   It's kind of like Microsoft trying to figure out

01:14:40   what its play was in the world of mobile

01:14:42   and then just everyone else went out ahead of them.

01:14:44   They said, "Wait up!"

01:14:45   And they never did catch up.

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01:16:07   - I don't have an Amazon Echo Alexa,

01:16:16   whatever it's called, thing.

01:16:18   Friend of the show, iMike, just got one

01:16:19   and he is pretty much in love with it.

01:16:22   Marco, you guys have at least one, at last I heard,

01:16:25   and it's last I heard you guys really like it.

01:16:28   I grew up with a dad who was big into home automation

01:16:33   in the late 90s, which is to say controlling your lights

01:16:36   from all over the place.

01:16:38   This was X10 at the time,

01:16:39   which was a home automation protocol.

01:16:41   I actually put an X10 receiver in my dorm room

01:16:45   and had rope lights wired to it.

01:16:47   And I even had a movie mode that I set up.

01:16:49   No, no, it gets better.

01:16:50   I even had a movie mode set up,

01:16:51   so it would like dim the rope lights

01:16:53   and turn on the TV and whatnot,

01:16:54   which would have been awesome for the girl

01:16:56   that never ever came over.

01:16:58   - This is worse than my car pewter.

01:17:00   - Yeah, it's pretty bad.

01:17:01   - 'Cause that's what girls are impressed by.

01:17:03   Automatically controlled lights, they're just like,

01:17:05   this is the man for me.

01:17:07   - Right? - Oh my God.

01:17:08   - I mean, how can you go wrong?

01:17:09   It's perfect.

01:17:10   No, but anyway, I like the idea of home automation,

01:17:15   although I've only barely dipped my toes into it.

01:17:19   And like I said, I don't have any of these

01:17:21   like automated assistant things outside of Siri

01:17:23   when she decides to work properly.

01:17:25   So I am not that jazzed by Google Home.

01:17:30   I'm not that jazzed by Alexa.

01:17:32   I'm not that jazzed by these rumors about Apple's home

01:17:36   automation hub.

01:17:37   I suspect that most of that is my own ignorance.

01:17:40   And once I see a really nice setup, or once I see one of

01:17:44   these things in use, then the light bulb will go off and I'll

01:17:47   say, by god, I need this in my life.

01:17:48   But I guess, do either of you care about these home

01:17:52   automation hub rumors?

01:17:54   Like, is this interesting to you?

01:17:55   What are you looking for from this?

01:17:57   What do you think?

01:17:58   I care about the actual announced one.

01:18:00   I know that you're reading the next item and the things about this, the home automation

01:18:03   hub remote from Apple, but Google is following through on its original announcement of this

01:18:07   whatever Google Home little weebl thing that they'll sell you, which looks like a squat

01:18:11   little counterpart to the tube-shaped thing that keeps calling to the whales in Star Trek

01:18:18   4 that Amazon makes.

01:18:22   And the reason I didn't buy Echo, I know a lot of people with Echo, I've tried them,

01:18:26   like I understand the value proposition there, but I never quite wanted to get one, mostly

01:18:29   because I figured, well, you know, that's fine and all, but Amazon is not really that

01:18:35   good at this type of stuff.

01:18:36   I mean, they're not bad, but it's not really their strength.

01:18:40   So let me wait until see what Apple or Google have.

01:18:43   And the knock against Amazon is like, oh, you can get all these skills and they're good

01:18:47   at integrating with third parties, but it's so specific and it's so primitive and it's

01:18:50   It's like you gotta know what you can have it do and you gotta know the specific skills

01:18:55   and it's very fixed, whereas Apple is always tagging with Siri, "Oh, we're intelligent

01:18:59   machine learning, we'll figure out what you mean" or whatever, but of course we know when

01:19:02   you actually use Siri it's embarrassingly bad a lot of the time.

01:19:06   Google, when I think of the company that I can just sort of throw words at, written or

01:19:12   otherwise and have it do what I mean, is the best at that.

01:19:16   Very often I want to do something and you can try it in Siri and you can try asking

01:19:20   Amazon Echo about it and you can try whatever things you have to think of to find something,

01:19:26   but very often the answer is write your actual question into a text box on Google.com.

01:19:32   Like don't overthink it, don't try to write it into query language, just do the simplest

01:19:37   thing.

01:19:38   One of my favorite activities is like in chat rooms and stuff like that where someone will

01:19:40   ask, sometimes even a fairly technical person, "How do you do the blah blah blah blah blah

01:19:45   blah blah blah?"

01:19:46   Like ask some very complicated, involved question.

01:19:48   And then they'll say, "I tried googling, but I couldn't find anything."

01:19:52   Then what you do is you take their original question that they typed to you in the message,

01:19:56   you copy it, you paste it into the Google search box, and the number one hit is the

01:19:59   thing they were looking for.

01:20:00   Because what they were doing is thinking like a programmer and going like, you know, whatever

01:20:04   it is, like, node file sync not working, like, they're just typing, they're using a query

01:20:12   engine whereas the sentence that they just sent you gets them the number one hit because

01:20:16   that's what people put into Google.

01:20:18   So when I think about, is there some cylinder in my house that I can talk into the air and

01:20:21   have the cylinder do what I want?

01:20:23   I think the highest chance of it understanding what I mean and doing something useful is

01:20:28   for that cylinder to be made by and connected to everything having to do with Google.

01:20:32   So when they announce the home thing, I'm like, that's the first thing I think I might

01:20:36   buy to try because I'm assuming it will be better than the Amazon Echo.

01:20:42   Better at like, you know, understanding what I mean and doing useful things.

01:20:46   Maybe not better audio-wise or whatever, maybe Amazon I/O would be better at ordering paper

01:20:50   towels than the Google thing is, but maybe the Google thing would be better at answering

01:20:54   complicated questions.

01:20:56   Or maybe the Google thing would be better about projecting things on my TV if I buy

01:21:00   a little dinky Chromecast and shove it into one of my side HDMI ports that I'm not currently

01:21:03   using, right?

01:21:06   Versus Amazon trying to integrate with their Fire puck and all that other stuff.

01:21:10   Anyway, and Apple just continuing to be a non-combatant in this entire market despite

01:21:14   the rumors.

01:21:15   I am very interested in this home device. The only caveat for most people that I don't really mind

01:21:19   that much is yes, of course, everything that I say will be uploaded to Google and all my

01:21:23   information will belong to Google, but I already have all my mail on Google. I'm willing to give

01:21:26   Google this information in exchange for extra convenience in my life. I'm willing to give this

01:21:31   a try. So I think I might actually get one of these. I'm very curious to hear what you think

01:21:37   of it when that comes in. I don't know. I'm not sure what I would pick between Amazon and,

01:21:42   theoretically Apple and Google, but I mean my mail is Google Apps, my photos are in Google,

01:21:49   my music is Spotify, which I'm sure will not jive well with Apple stuff. Jive well, whatever

01:21:56   the word is I'm looking for. I don't know, we'll see. Marco, what's your intention, just

01:22:01   going all in on Amazon?

01:22:02   Well, I mean, I'm not really committed. You know, we have the Echo in the kitchen. It's

01:22:08   It's good at a lot of things.

01:22:10   A lot of times I will ask it a question

01:22:13   that I don't think it'll answer just to see like,

01:22:15   you know, can it do this, can it find this information?

01:22:17   And a lot of times it does.

01:22:19   And if I ask Siri the same question,

01:22:21   I get, I can search the web for, you know,

01:22:23   so I get a useless answer from Siri

01:22:26   for many of these same questions.

01:22:27   But a lot of people have said the opposite.

01:22:29   You know, a lot of people have the opposite reaction

01:22:31   where like the things they ask Siri work out well

01:22:33   and the things they ask the Amazon Assistant don't.

01:22:36   It's not really consistent between

01:22:38   or the other, whether you can say like this one is

01:22:40   universally the best one or this one is universally not.

01:22:43   It really depends on how you're using it,

01:22:44   what you're using it for,

01:22:45   how it integrates with various things.

01:22:47   I will say though that this is the kind of problem

01:22:51   that I don't expect Apple's product to be very good at.

01:22:54   To make a product like this really good,

01:22:56   you need incredibly strong AI skills,

01:22:59   you need a huge data set to be developing that from,

01:23:02   you need constant updates, constant add-ons

01:23:06   and new abilities and refinements to that data set.

01:23:09   So you basically need a really massive,

01:23:11   solid AI web service behind it.

01:23:13   Apple's not good at those things.

01:23:14   Apple can do big web services,

01:23:16   they can do minor AI things,

01:23:18   but they so far are still not good

01:23:21   at large scale advanced AI service kind of things.

01:23:24   And then secondarily, you need the ability

01:23:27   to really be able to connect to lots of different things.

01:23:30   This is where the Echo does really well.

01:23:32   They have tons of integrations with all sorts of services,

01:23:36   hardware, developer stuff through their API, tons of integrations. For Apple to do that,

01:23:42   they would basically have to relax the requirements for HomeKit and they would have to really

01:23:46   be a lot more open and permissive with developers than they are now and do things like open

01:23:51   up the Siri API much further than it is right now. And I just don't see them doing that.

01:23:57   So they could prove me wrong, who knows, but if I look at what these companies are good

01:24:01   at now and the way they seem to be going, I'm guessing Apple's version of this, if it

01:24:06   exists whenever it would ship, I'm guessing it's not going to be as good as the other

01:24:11   two. I think Amazon's going to own this market for the market share wise, but I think the

01:24:17   Google one's probably going to end up being the best one.

01:24:19   Well, the Google one could be cancelled. Like, then they have a previous one called OnHub

01:24:23   or something, and then they have it sphere-shaped entertainment thing that never went anywhere.

01:24:28   Google has tried many in-home products that have not gone anywhere.

01:24:32   Maybe this one will be a flop too, but what they have going for them, like you said, is

01:24:36   they have the back end.

01:24:37   Like when Apple does stuff with Siri, if they don't know exactly what to do, they're passing

01:24:43   it on to another service, whether it be Wolfram Alpha or Bing or Google.

01:24:47   That's not them.

01:24:48   They're like, "Well, we can't make heads or tails of this, so we're going to send it to

01:24:51   a different company that's good at this stuff, and maybe they can figure out what to do with

01:24:55   which is not really a strong move. The other factor about all these cylinders in your home

01:25:01   that you talk to that apparently from everyone who I've ever spoken to in my own personal experience

01:25:05   got right and that I can imagine both Apple and Google perhaps forgetting about is the Echo is

01:25:12   surprisingly good at hearing you and understanding what the hell you said. Now after that, maybe they

01:25:18   can't do anything with your words. Maybe they're bad. You know, they don't have good, you know,

01:25:21   you have to phrase things in a certain way,

01:25:23   whatever, forget about that.

01:25:24   But they're good at hearing you and getting your words.

01:25:27   And that is so important.

01:25:28   How often have we tried to speak into our phones

01:25:30   an inch from our face and how to get a word wrong?

01:25:32   Whereas Amazon Echo, again,

01:25:34   because probably because of constrained vocabulary,

01:25:36   like those phone trees that you do,

01:25:38   but also because they have tons of microphones

01:25:39   and good like noise cancellation and beamforming,

01:25:42   whatever the hell they're doing,

01:25:44   I think a lot of the time for that stupid cylinder

01:25:46   was spent figuring out how to hear people

01:25:48   separate their voice from the background noise

01:25:50   and understand what they said.

01:25:52   And that is incredibly important.

01:25:54   It's like responsiveness on the original iPhone.

01:25:56   It's like, oh yeah, and you can tap things

01:25:57   and they move around, it's fine.

01:25:58   It's like, yeah, but you don't understand.

01:25:59   The difference between you can tap things

01:26:01   and slide it around and it's fine,

01:26:02   and it really feels like it's sticking to my finger.

01:26:05   You may think you've checked the same check boxes.

01:26:07   Yep, we have a touchscreen.

01:26:08   Yep, you move things around by scrolling your finger.

01:26:10   Yep, you tap buttons.

01:26:12   It's not check boxes.

01:26:13   It's like, yes, you both do the same thing,

01:26:15   but this aspect of the product is so important

01:26:18   that you really have to get it right.

01:26:19   and Amazon has gotten it pretty right.

01:26:22   Like who hasn't been in a house with an Echo

01:26:25   and said something in a way that you think a human

01:26:27   wouldn't have been able to understand you.

01:26:28   You mumble it from a room away facing the wrong direction

01:26:31   and the Echo still tells you like what the score of a game is

01:26:33   or what the weather's gonna be.

01:26:34   And you're like, how the hell did it hear that?

01:26:36   Yeah, that's what you have to do with these things.

01:26:38   So I hope the cylinder, you know, the Google Home thing

01:26:41   does it as well.

01:26:42   And if Apple ever comes up with a product,

01:26:43   I hope they spend tons of time figuring out

01:26:46   how the heck to hear everybody and don't be like,

01:26:47   well, Johnny, I've said we don't have a lot of room

01:26:49   for the microphone so we can only have these two here.

01:26:51   - This is what I'm saying, like,

01:26:52   it is, if Apple really devoted,

01:26:55   like if they really set their minds to it,

01:26:56   if they really prioritize these services

01:26:58   and these product priorities and things,

01:27:01   they could probably make a pretty good one,

01:27:03   but I see this being like an accessory release.

01:27:06   I don't see Apple taking this very seriously

01:27:09   as a product category.

01:27:10   So what it's probably gonna end up being

01:27:13   is a relatively low priority,

01:27:15   relatively low effort product if it exists.

01:27:18   And because of that, it's gonna be like,

01:27:20   it's gonna have no meaningful service changes

01:27:23   behind it to Siri.

01:27:25   Siri's not gonna become an order of magnitude better

01:27:27   because of this product.

01:27:29   If they're gonna do that, they're gonna do it

01:27:30   for the phones, not for this.

01:27:31   And they've had lots of reasons to do that recently,

01:27:33   and they kind of haven't really done enough.

01:27:36   And this is probably gonna be a product

01:27:38   that's updated maybe every three years,

01:27:41   hardware-wise, two or three years.

01:27:43   - Like the Macs now.

01:27:44   - Basically on an Apple TV kind of schedule

01:27:47   Where Amazon Google would be updated in there's like every year or even more often. I mean Amazon is relentless every every 15 minutes

01:27:53   Yeah, speaking of Apple TV. That's a great example of a

01:27:57   Home device that people talk to granted they talking to the the remote and not the device and the rumors are that originally you were

01:28:03   Supposed to just talk to the Apple TV, but the remote came with better sound which kind of makes sense

01:28:07   And you got out of the remote or anyway

01:28:09   the experience of

01:28:11   Speaking to your Apple TV. This is exactly what I was saying like the phone trees. There's a fairly constrained vocabulary

01:28:17   mostly you could, you know,

01:28:18   you're mostly you're talking about video

01:28:20   that you wanna watch.

01:28:20   I mean, it's a little bit broader than that,

01:28:22   but if they wanted to constrain it, they could say,

01:28:24   look, we don't have to understand everything in the world.

01:28:27   We have a limited problem domain.

01:28:29   Let's use our machine learning

01:28:31   and the idea that we think they're gonna watch a video

01:28:33   and granted it's still a hard problem, right?

01:28:36   And try to figure out what they mean.

01:28:38   And if you've ever spoken to the remote of an Apple TV

01:28:41   and tried to say something reasonable to it,

01:28:44   you realize how badly the Apple TV falls down

01:28:46   basic functionality, you know, like trying to get it to, you know, start, you know, watch episode five

01:28:54   season two of some show or show me whatever and it's like, I'm sorry, I don't know any shows named

01:29:00   Orange is the New Black and like on the screen behind it is Orange the New Black floating, you

01:29:04   know what I mean? Like, we've all seen these Siri things like on the phone where it's great, makes

01:29:09   great for great screenshots where it's like, try, you know, I'm sorry, I can't watch the App Store,

01:29:14   Try looking for it in the app store.

01:29:15   Like we've all seen that screenshot and stuff.

01:29:17   Siri does weird stuff like that on the phone

01:29:19   and it's funny because you can see it,

01:29:20   but on the Apple TV, when it works,

01:29:22   you feel like this is amazing.

01:29:23   It's a little friend that I can talk to

01:29:24   who shows me the video I want.

01:29:26   And when it doesn't work, it's like,

01:29:27   what was wrong with that?

01:29:28   Especially since you see the text being translated,

01:29:31   you're like, it is understanding every word I'm saying

01:29:32   and there isn't really any ambiguity,

01:29:34   but sometimes it's like, I can't do that for you.

01:29:37   Is there something else I can help you with?

01:29:38   Like, no, just do the thing.

01:29:39   - Yeah, it's inconsistent.

01:29:41   - Incred, yeah, that's incredibly frustrating.

01:29:42   You don't know why it didn't do it. Did it fail on a server connection?

01:29:46   Or is it just confused about something or has it lost context and it's not really that responsive whereas again Amazon echo

01:29:51   Completely faceless no UI if it didn't work

01:29:54   There's nothing you can do to fix it and yet when you say things to it it in pretty short order

01:29:59   Does the thing that you said in a way that makes you think that's pretty neat and miraculous

01:30:03   And yeah, it falls down sometimes too

01:30:05   But that's why people are impressed by the cylinder because they you know, they thought the Amazon echo be funny gimmick

01:30:10   but it'll be like Siri where it only works half the time and I'll never use it.

01:30:13   But because it is responsive and hears you and generally does what you ask in a

01:30:18   timely fashion, people start to trust it and appreciate the fact that it does

01:30:22   work and Siri has not yet passed that bar. I don't think Siri or whatever

01:30:27   branding Apple wants to put into a thing that you can talk to in any of its

01:30:30   product has endeared itself to any way to the degree where they're like, "I am

01:30:36   much more interested in buying this product because it comes with Siri and I

01:30:38   I love Siri.

01:30:39   I just haven't seen that yet.

01:30:40   Whereas the stupid black plastic cylinder

01:30:43   has done that for Amazon.

01:30:44   - And the thing is, if you see over time,

01:30:47   what's changing in this market over time?

01:30:49   How's everyone getting better?

01:30:50   How's everything gonna develop?

01:30:51   Apple has had a very long time

01:30:54   to make Siri reliable and better.

01:30:56   And they have improved it over time,

01:30:58   but just not enough.

01:31:00   It is still very inconsistent.

01:31:03   And you can ask it the same question two days in a row,

01:31:06   and you'll get different answers,

01:31:07   or one of them will fail,

01:31:08   and the next day it'll succeed.

01:31:10   It is so inconsistent and it's very frustrating

01:31:12   when that happens to you.

01:31:14   With the Echo, I don't use it constantly all day every day,

01:31:18   but I use it, I tell it something every day.

01:31:21   Usually it's controlling lights around the house.

01:31:24   Every night when I go to bed,

01:31:25   I tell it to turn off everything.

01:31:27   It's usually stuff like that.

01:31:28   Occasionally music queries or timers,

01:31:30   tiff users turn off the time.

01:31:31   I think we've had it for something like

01:31:33   four or five months now.

01:31:35   I think in that entire time we've had one time

01:31:38   where it returns some kind of like server error response

01:31:41   basically, like I can't figure that out right now

01:31:42   or something like that.

01:31:43   One time that happened in months of using it.

01:31:47   With Siri that happens like every fourth or fifth time

01:31:50   for like if you use it infrequently like I do.

01:31:52   So where these things are going,

01:31:56   I can see the market playing out

01:31:58   in the most likely way already in my head.

01:32:00   Apple, if they enter it, they're gonna enter it with,

01:32:02   you know, again, some kind of like,

01:32:04   too infrequently updated, probably too expensive,

01:32:08   maybe too Johnny Ivey design-y product

01:32:10   that won't be very competitive in the marketplace

01:32:13   for things like capabilities, price, integrations,

01:32:16   and they'll have it backed by the Siri service,

01:32:18   which just won't be consistent enough,

01:32:20   it won't be solid enough, it won't be smart enough.

01:32:23   Then you'll have Google making theirs,

01:32:25   selling Google hardware the way they always sell it,

01:32:27   which is it's gonna have probably

01:32:28   the most amazing AI behind it,

01:32:30   the most amazing service behind it,

01:32:32   but they're gonna have major problems getting it in,

01:32:35   you know, getting it sold at retail, basically,

01:32:37   getting it really into people's hands.

01:32:38   They're gonna have major problems promoting it

01:32:40   and selling it and supporting it.

01:32:42   Amazon is gonna be relentless about pushing the crap

01:32:46   out of the Echo line of products on their front page,

01:32:49   all the holiday seasons, selling them relentlessly,

01:32:51   not selling Apple's thing, not selling Google's thing.

01:32:54   They're going to be relentless,

01:32:56   and they are a massive retailer,

01:32:58   and they have a huge head start with developers,

01:33:00   with users, with the public.

01:33:02   So I really think that Amazon's really gonna own this space

01:33:06   and Google's, again, Google I think is gonna have

01:33:08   what many geeks will consider the best product,

01:33:11   but it won't be the most successful.

01:33:12   I think the most successful is gonna be Amazon

01:33:14   by a long shot with this.

01:33:15   And Apple, if they enter this market at all,

01:33:18   they will enter it with something that I don't see

01:33:21   being very competitive really.

01:33:24   I think people will buy it, some people will buy it,

01:33:26   certainly, but I don't see it being nearly as good

01:33:29   as the other two.

01:33:30   I'm still waiting for the next minor advancement

01:33:34   in what people call machine learning,

01:33:36   which I don't like the sound of,

01:33:37   but I like it better than AI, which is ridiculous,

01:33:39   for the level of things that are going on here.

01:33:42   But just, you know, these things

01:33:44   are slightly context aware, but more of that.

01:33:46   Like very often I'll be driving in the car

01:33:47   and I'll hear my phone ding with a text message.

01:33:50   You can't read the text message in the car,

01:33:52   but I would like the phone to read me

01:33:54   what the text message is,

01:33:55   and there's probably some way to do that on the phone.

01:33:57   - There is.

01:33:58   - But I don't know the way,

01:33:59   And I know enough about Siri to know that if I don't know the way,

01:34:03   it will just be an exercise in frustration for me to try to guess.

01:34:06   What I'd like to say is, can you read me that text message that just came in?

01:34:09   But I know that won't work.

01:34:10   >> That's close.

01:34:11   It's close.

01:34:12   It's ahoy telephone, read my messages.

01:34:15   >> Right, but I don't know that.

01:34:16   And so I'm just like, if I just start this conversation with the phone,

01:34:20   it's going to try to do a Google search on having something to do with messages or

01:34:23   get confused.

01:34:23   This is based on my frustration with the one thing I try to use my,

01:34:27   Siri works for simple things.

01:34:28   But then what I, my stumbling block was,

01:34:31   I kept trying to use it to add items to lists and reminders.

01:34:34   And it was just frigging impossible

01:34:35   because it's confused about which list I'm trying to add it

01:34:37   to or whether it wants to create a list by that name.

01:34:39   It's like, oh God, you don't understand me.

01:34:41   You do not understand me.

01:34:42   Like just a human would get this

01:34:44   and it's not that complicated.

01:34:45   It's a limited domain.

01:34:46   I'm telling you about reminders and list items

01:34:48   and don't ask me to create a list.

01:34:50   I want it to say, no, no, no.

01:34:52   I know you misunderstood me the first time, but forget it.

01:34:54   I'm not trying to create a list.

01:34:55   Take that thing and put a reminder for it.

01:34:58   because anyway, it's very frustrating

01:35:00   and it makes me not want to use it

01:35:01   for things that it can probably already do

01:35:04   because I know that if I don't know how to do it,

01:35:06   there's no way I can have a conversation with it

01:35:09   and get it done.

01:35:10   Whereas I think Google is at the point now,

01:35:12   whereas in best case with this Google Home thing,

01:35:16   I could ask it to do something, I'm hoping,

01:35:19   and have it not understand what I mean,

01:35:21   but have us work out through a back and forth,

01:35:23   eventually come to an understanding

01:35:25   about what I want to happen where.

01:35:27   And that's like the next smaller step.

01:35:29   Again, limited vocabulary, simpler things that you can do,

01:35:31   but just limited context awareness to understand

01:35:35   that we're trying to accomplish a goal here

01:35:37   and to come closer to making it happen

01:35:40   without requiring the user to know things.

01:35:43   And that's just one more tiny baby step

01:35:45   in making something that I can do with my fingers

01:35:49   happen across the room with my voice.

01:35:51   We're not asking it to be my pal

01:35:53   or to be intelligent or any way

01:35:55   or to really do anything useful

01:35:56   other than let me do something I could do with a remote,

01:35:59   but without a remote control.

01:36:01   But even that step, no one has really gotten there.

01:36:04   Not Amazon, not Google, not Apple.

01:36:05   And I have hopes that Google will be the first one to do it.

01:36:09   - Thanks to our three sponsors this week,

01:36:11   Backblaze, Casper, and Betterment.

01:36:13   We will see you next week.

01:36:14   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:36:20   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:36:22   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:36:24   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:36:25   It was accidental John didn't do any research

01:36:30   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him 'Cause it was accidental

01:36:34   It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:36:42   And if you're into Twitter You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:36:52   So that's Casey Liszt, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, 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.

01:37:04   It's accidental.

01:37:06   It's accidental.

01:37:07   They didn't mean to.

01:37:10   Accidental.

01:37:11   Accidental.

01:37:12   Tech podcast.

01:37:14   So long.

01:37:17   At work, I have two, I think they're 1080 monitors.

01:37:20   They're Lenovo monitors.

01:37:21   They're really super shitty.

01:37:24   I have been begging for at least one 4K monitor.

01:37:29   Finally, I have won the fight.

01:37:33   The head of IT has said, "All right, we will get you the Dell 24 something something something

01:37:38   4K monitor."

01:37:39   I forget the exact model name.

01:37:40   But basically, this is the monitor that all the Mac users, all the Mac notebook users

01:37:44   have said, "This is the one to get if you want 4K, and the equivalent Dell is the one

01:37:48   you want to get if you want 5K."

01:37:50   The 5K one is $1,500.

01:37:52   The 4K one is like $400.

01:37:54   So we get it in, speaking of Amazon and things,

01:37:58   we get it in today.

01:37:59   I take down my two Lenovo's to put this at my desk.

01:38:02   I'm happy as a pig in shit.

01:38:04   I turn it on and it turns right back off.

01:38:06   So I unplug it, plug it back in, turn it on,

01:38:11   turns on, turns right back off.

01:38:13   It was DOA, sadness, so much sadness.

01:38:16   So that is also getting returned to Amazon,

01:38:18   although not by me 'cause I didn't pay for it.

01:38:20   But we do have an LG 4K monitor that's 27 inches that I think is too big for the DPI

01:38:27   that it is, but it's still super nice.

01:38:30   And by the way, did you guys know that you can only get a 30 hertz refresh rate on an

01:38:35   HDMI cable off a Mac laptop?

01:38:39   At any resolution or just at the 4K resolution?

01:38:41   At 4K, at 4K.

01:38:43   So how do you get the higher ones?

01:38:44   Is it just like through Thunderbolt/mini DisplayPort?

01:38:48   Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort.

01:38:49   Okay, yeah, don't connect don't connect monitors to computer with hdmi. That's the wrong tool for the job. Yeah, it just feels wrong

01:38:55   So why do you well no, but why i'm not mad about this, but out of curiosity, why do you say that?

01:39:00   That's a tv hdms for tv standard. It's not computer monitor thing that the connector is big

01:39:05   It's made for television resolutions. Whereas computers you always want to have a higher resolution than that if you possibly can

01:39:11   Uh, it's just not the right tool and you know and refresh rates. You just got you know, like television

01:39:17   does not come in at 120 hertz or even 60 in most cases.

01:39:22   So yeah, if you have an option, don't use it.

01:39:26   The only thing I have connected to HDMI is my gaming monitor, because that's what the

01:39:28   PlayStation puts out, and so I've got a monitor that takes that in because it's kind of like

01:39:31   a little miniature TV and I'm fine with it.

01:39:34   That's fair.

01:39:35   I had no idea that that was a thing until today when we connected this LG, which is

01:39:39   a very nice monitor.

01:39:40   I really, really like it.

01:39:41   Again, I think it's a few inches too big, but I like it all in all.

01:39:46   And actually we're ordering a like 22 or 24 inch 4K equivalent LG monitor to replace the

01:39:52   DOA Dell one.

01:39:54   You know if only Apple had an external monitor.

01:39:58   If only that would be amazing but no.

01:40:01   So anyway so I had no idea that you couldn't get 60 hertz off HDMI coming off a Mac laptop.

01:40:07   I think with the newer HDMI standards you can.

01:40:09   Again your timing here is terrible.

01:40:12   - It is very likely, I mean, you know, obviously,

01:40:15   don't believe it 'til we see it,

01:40:16   but I would say it is at least moderately likely

01:40:20   that we're gonna have new laptops with a new monitor

01:40:23   by the end of the month.

01:40:24   Now that being said, you probably can't drive it

01:40:26   with your current laptop.

01:40:28   - Well, yeah, you can if it has a graphics card

01:40:31   on the inside the monitor.

01:40:33   But I mean, we'll get that right after we get

01:40:35   to the USB hub, am I right?

01:40:37   - Are you really expecting a monitor?

01:40:38   Like, I don't even have that in my dimmest hopes.

01:40:40   I'm like, just feel like it's the freaking laptops, please.

01:40:43   Like that's it.

01:40:44   - I would guess that the 5K monitor

01:40:47   comes with the new laptops.

01:40:49   I don't think they're gonna wait for the Mac Pro.

01:40:50   - If there really is a 5K monitor without the Mac Pro,

01:40:54   it's like, I guess you can hook these up to your laptop.

01:40:57   - Do you think Apple gives a (beep)

01:40:58   about the Mac Pro anymore?

01:40:59   I think it's very clear they don't, right?

01:41:01   I mean, come on.

01:41:02   - It's just so absurd, so absurd.

01:41:04   - I am not particularly convinced

01:41:06   that we will get an external monitor this month.

01:41:09   However, if we do get it, I absolutely agree with Marco

01:41:13   that it will come with the laptops

01:41:14   and the Mac Pro will be a fart in the wind.

01:41:16   - I know, I'm just saying it's so weird.

01:41:21   I mean, I guess that they're selling the GPU

01:41:22   and it's like, "Oh, your wimpy laptop

01:41:24   "can't drive this mighty monitor,

01:41:25   "but it's got a GPU in it, so here's your solution."

01:41:28   - I mean, it's a little bit of a hack,

01:41:30   but I don't think it's weird to target the laptop

01:41:32   as the primary consumer for this monitor,

01:41:34   because nobody buys Mac Pros and those that did--

01:41:37   It's weird to hook up such a massive monitor

01:41:39   with such a high resolution to your laptop.

01:41:41   Like, I don't know.

01:41:42   - I don't know why you say that, because most people in,

01:41:45   I haven't used a desktop computer at work since 2008-ish,

01:41:50   seven-ish, something like that.

01:41:52   - Right, but do you need a 5K monitor, right?

01:41:55   It's so like a 4K, yeah, by all means.

01:41:57   Like that's kind of the standard fancy monitor

01:41:59   for your fancy laptop.

01:42:00   And the big thing in my office anyway is multiple monitors,

01:42:04   multiple smaller monitors, right?

01:42:07   But just one big massive one, especially since this monitor is probably going to cost more

01:42:11   than any of their laptops, the base price anyway, right?

01:42:14   It's the most expensive thing on your desk, not the computer, but the display.

01:42:17   It just seems like a display made for the highest of the high end, the most expensive,

01:42:22   the biggest single screen instead of two slightly smaller screens.

01:42:26   And that all says Mac Pro to me, but I'm old.

01:42:28   Well, I think that what you're not realizing is that, like my entire company, nobody has

01:42:33   a desktop.

01:42:34   Everyone has laptops, either Lenovo's.

01:42:36   Yeah, no, everyone has laptops in my work too.

01:42:38   I'm the only desktop company.

01:42:39   Except you.

01:42:40   Yeah, it was great.

01:42:42   My work was asking me about, I don't know, some of their terrible spyware stuff was not

01:42:48   correctly reporting back or whatever.

01:42:51   We have records that there is a Mac Mini with this serial number.

01:42:55   Do you happen to have that?

01:42:57   I'm like, "Mm, don't have a Mac Mini, but I'll check the serial number," and it was

01:43:02   the serial number of my gigantic cheese grater. So apparently someone came to my desk to catalog

01:43:06   this and to put the little stickers on it or whatever and wrote down my serial number

01:43:10   and decided that this thing the size of a refrigerator is a Mac Mini.

01:43:13   Nice.

01:43:14   That's what I'm saying. They don't even know what it is. They don't even know what this

01:43:17   is. They know it's a Mac because it's got a giant Apple logo on the side of it, but

01:43:20   they have no idea what the hell it is because everything else is laptops.

01:43:23   So the reason that this became relevant and the reason I was able to sell this to the

01:43:27   IT department was because on these 1080 monitors, if I try to use the iPhone

01:43:34   simulator full-size because it's all pixel doubled or whatever the term is,

01:43:38   you know, it's retina, I can see like half of it on screen. I actually sent the

01:43:42   IT guy a screenshot, admittedly it was of a plus, like a 6s+ simulator, and I could

01:43:48   see like the dock on my 1080 monitor and that was about it. It's gonna run a non-native

01:43:53   of res like those iPhone 6s users.

01:43:55   So I mean that's what I used to do, or well still do right now, is I would run it at like

01:44:00   half size or whatever.

01:44:01   But then what ended up happening was, especially when doing UI work, it was a total pain in

01:44:05   the butt because I would like drop the single pixel border between table view cells or things

01:44:12   along those lines.

01:44:13   And so I'm not even seeing like a terribly accurate representation of the screen.

01:44:17   And so that's why I said, "Hey listen, I'd really like to get a retina external monitor."

01:44:22   And eventually my complaining and moaning finally got heard/he didn't want to hear it

01:44:27   anymore.

01:44:28   And so that's when they ordered this Dell and unfortunately the thing was DOA.

01:44:32   But yeah, I mean, I would love to have like a couple of 22 to 24 inch 4K monitors.

01:44:41   And that's what I have now is a couple of 1080 monitors, but there's just not enough

01:44:45   resolution these days.

01:44:46   Do you have multi-monitor problems at your office? Is there like one person in the office

01:44:53   who has like six monitors?

01:44:56   No, but one of the reasons that I had to complain and moan a lot to get this monitor was because

01:45:02   the IT dude knew full well that once I get this new hotness, people will start smelling

01:45:08   blood in the water and everyone will start saying, "Well, I want that." And from his perspective,

01:45:13   it makes perfect sense that he needs to be able to justify this added expenditure over

01:45:17   the cost of a 1080 monitor.

01:45:19   And so now he's going to have these people coming out of the woodwork saying, "Oh, me

01:45:23   too, me too, me too."

01:45:25   And in reality, the only people it really makes sense for is designers, possibly, most

01:45:30   likely, and iOS developers.

01:45:32   And I was actually talking to one of our Android developers about all this and he was like,

01:45:36   "Yeah, I have no need for that whatsoever.

01:45:37   I'd like it, but I have no need for it."

01:45:40   crappy 17-inch non-retinodel monitors kind of litter our hallways. You step on them like

01:45:44   leaves in the fall just walking around the office. And so some people who like, it's

01:45:49   kind of like people who had, you know, materials were scarce during the Depression so they

01:45:53   become older and they just always save their cans or whatever, right? These people must

01:45:57   have lived through a monitor drought and so now they're in the land of a monitor plenty

01:46:02   and they just, they just scoop up greedily all the crappy 17-inch Dell monitors and put

01:46:07   them all on their desk. So I think the biggest one I've seen is someone who has an arrangement

01:46:12   of six. I think it's three over three.

01:46:14   Good grief.

01:46:15   Or maybe it's two, but you know. Anyway, crazy monitor arms with six. And these are six of

01:46:21   the worst monitors you've ever seen, right? These are not good monitors, not a good viewing

01:46:24   angle, but there are six of them. I think someone might have broken that record before

01:46:27   and had them in the more haphazard arrangement, but the six is the most impressive because

01:46:30   it kind of curves around. And the thing that holds the six monitors is incredibly impressive

01:46:37   I really I think it is three high that's why it looks you know because it's taller but

01:46:40   Who would like that's for a computer that you see in the movies who would actually want to look at?

01:46:45   six 17 inch Dell monitors craning your neck around and try it like especially since all these people use

01:46:51   light text on a dark background and the terminal windows with with a

01:46:54   Non IPS display with those viewing angles you can't read anything on those

01:46:59   I don't you know like you'd have to like get a stool and

01:47:02   You know get head-on to the upper left corner monitor to see anything on anyway

01:47:06   Those people like are punishing themselves like it's a reverse kind of like monitors monitors everywhere. I have so many monitors

01:47:12   I have to mark why I have three monitors. I'm a power user. I have four monitors

01:47:15   Well, I have you know it's just it's a it's an art crazy arms race doesn't make any sense to me

01:47:19   Here I am sitting with my single very small non-retina monitor, but I still think it looks better than those other things

01:47:26   They just need a JP setup, and they'll be good to go

01:47:29   That's a reference

01:47:31   And speaking of work hardware. I've now broken my second keyboard

01:47:35   I've been keeping track. This is a 2009 Mac Pro. I use the keyboard that came with it, which I like.

01:47:41   It's the current keyboard that I use at home as well. It's the Apple aluminum extended keyboard. I like it because it has low

01:47:45   key press

01:47:48   effort required. It's good for my RSI. I don't like the half-size function keys, but it has real arrow keys.

01:47:53   Anyway, I like this keyboard. I broke one of them

01:47:57   three or four years into it, got a new replacement. Today, D-key stopped working, which is a surprisingly commonly used key.

01:48:04   So for half the day today, I was copying and pasting a D

01:48:07   I'm right. I'm writing variable names, and I'm getting good at like ready like product PR. Oh

01:48:15   command V

01:48:17   UCT

01:48:19   That's how I spend my day, and I ordered a new keyboard

01:48:22   keyboard.

01:48:24   [ Silence ]