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ATP

142: Hateful Game of Frogger

 

00:00:00   I'm running. I'm almost at the bottom of my window with slack. You know the little like the column of icons

00:00:04   I'm pretty much almost full like all the different slacks. You're on. Yeah, my god. I'm in three destiny slacks alone

00:00:11   Just for destiny even before you drove like podcast tech friend my work has one now

00:00:18   I think my work has multiple ones are only in one of them

00:00:20   Slack proliferation is a thing so you aren't in all the ones for work, but you are in multiple destiny slacks. Yep

00:00:28   I'm not on all the Destiny's lacks that exist. I'm just yeah people can get their acts together with their destiny's likes

00:00:33   All right, so we want to actually talk about something that's relevant tonight. Do we ever really not really what is relevant? Yeah

00:00:42   Important follow-up. That's not really follow-up. I guess we could even call it follow out

00:00:46   You have a new show. No we couldn't

00:00:48   Yeah, yeah, I started a new developer podcast with our friend underscore David Smith

00:00:55   who is the app developer and podcast indexer extraordinaire.

00:01:00   He and I talked about it last summer at WBC,

00:01:02   well this summer at WBC,

00:01:04   talked about doing it and then just, you know,

00:01:06   life got in the way for both of us

00:01:07   and now we finally got it together and are doing it

00:01:10   and we published our first episode today.

00:01:12   So, so far it's doing well.

00:01:14   Check it out, it's called Under the Radar

00:01:16   and it's basically, you know,

00:01:18   he had his show Developing Perspective

00:01:21   and he has now basically ended it to do this.

00:01:24   this is kind of the successor to that.

00:01:26   I, back in the day, did build and analyze,

00:01:28   and so this is kind of the combination of those two shows.

00:01:30   It is kind of like the successor to build and analyze

00:01:33   and developing perspective.

00:01:35   It's really a developer-focused show.

00:01:37   Like this show is kind of more general Apple tech world.

00:01:40   That show is really developers,

00:01:43   and it's limited to only 30 minutes,

00:01:45   so it's a quick, you know, 30 minutes a week,

00:01:47   so it's not too time-costly to subscribe,

00:01:50   so go check it out.

00:01:51   - That's excellent.

00:01:53   - It's for developers, developers, developers.

00:01:56   So at this point, it is unequivocal

00:01:58   that all of us have shows on Relay FM.

00:02:02   I mean, I know you had Top Four before this,

00:02:05   and so this is, at what point do we join Relay?

00:02:09   I mean, at this point, we're pretty much there.

00:02:12   - People have asked.

00:02:13   (laughing)

00:02:15   Honestly, it's worth talking about briefly

00:02:16   if anybody actually cares about the answer.

00:02:18   The answer basically is that we didn't start on Relay,

00:02:20   and there's not really, as much as we love Relay,

00:02:24   we don't really have a lot of reason to move ATP there

00:02:27   because it's already going on its own,

00:02:29   it's already independent, we already have our own ad sales

00:02:31   and hosting and everything set up already.

00:02:33   So there's just not much reason to move it in.

00:02:35   But starting a new show, David and I,

00:02:38   we didn't even question, of course we're gonna start

00:02:40   on Relay just because, you know, there's,

00:02:42   and I've talked about podcast networks before

00:02:44   and I've been against them in certain ways

00:02:45   and for them in certain others.

00:02:47   And the reality is a podcast network is a trade-off.

00:02:50   You lose control, you lose some of the money,

00:02:53   and you lose some of the branding.

00:02:54   But what you get is you have to do a lot less work

00:02:57   to make the shows.

00:02:58   And so depending on what you need the show to do

00:03:00   and what your priorities are and how much time you have,

00:03:04   that can determine kind of where you fall on that.

00:03:07   And so for this new show, given where we were,

00:03:10   we decided a network was the right move

00:03:12   for our needs right now.

00:03:14   - That makes sense.

00:03:15   And folks at Relay are really awesome.

00:03:17   And they're all good friends of ours,

00:03:19   and we really enjoy them.

00:03:20   So, yep, I mean, I think if ATP were to start tomorrow,

00:03:23   it probably would be on relay,

00:03:24   but at this point, don't fix what ain't broke.

00:03:27   So. - Yep.

00:03:28   - All right, so now that we're done with follow out,

00:03:30   asterisk not Syracuse approved, let's do some follow up.

00:03:34   Somebody wrote in dusto, that's gotta be pronounced wrong

00:03:39   'cause there's a fancy strike through the O.

00:03:41   Masterson wrote into us-- - It's dust zero.

00:03:44   - Dust zero, that's true.

00:03:46   That is actually how I write zeros.

00:03:47   Anyways, this individual said,

00:03:49   Another thing about the Facebook app thing, it auto-plays videos in your timeline and

00:03:53   even muted videos take over iOS's audio.

00:03:56   This is, if you remember, because Facebook claims that "Oh, it was just an accidental

00:04:01   bug that we had videos that played and never released the audio session and that's why

00:04:07   we were backgrounded for forever."

00:04:10   That still strikes me as a little weird and a little aggressive for them to auto-play

00:04:14   videos.

00:04:15   But, I don't know, it seems like everyone's kind of starting to believe that this is really

00:04:19   They're ineptitude and not nefarious actions. Is that what the going theory is now?

00:04:23   Well the fact that they autoplay that was brought up by a couple people

00:04:25   I just put this one in there because like like hey

00:04:28   I didn't watch a video on the Facebook app, and it's still eating my battery

00:04:31   Well, you didn't probably watch a video as in intentionally tap on a little play button

00:04:36   But if you just launch Facebook apparently and scroll through your timeline

00:04:39   It you know it considers it will start playing it it will grab the audio session even if I guess even if you just scroll past

00:04:45   It or whatever so a lot of people are sort of

00:04:48   unknowingly

00:04:50   Implicitly playing videos merely by launching the app and scrolling through a timeline which would further explain why?

00:04:55   You know that this audio session bug thing is biting lots of people even people who don't have any recollection ever watching a video

00:05:03   It makes sense

00:05:05   All right Jeff Strobel wrote in and told us that he knows how to have spotlight index his Synology

00:05:12   1815 plus which one I don't remember which one of us was talking about that because it wasn't me

00:05:16   - I was, yeah, 'cause I was saying how one of the reasons

00:05:18   why I like direct attached or iSCSI

00:05:21   over regular network shares is that regular network shares

00:05:24   don't have the spotlight integration,

00:05:27   they don't have system integration,

00:05:28   and I just hate how slow it is to connect to

00:05:31   and browse network shares still in 2015,

00:05:33   even over wired gigabit networks.

00:05:36   - Fair enough, so Jeff has the appropriate commands

00:05:40   that are sitting in our show notes,

00:05:42   which are not helpful to the listeners,

00:05:43   and reading this out will also be not helpful,

00:05:45   So we will link to something, some way, somehow,

00:05:48   that explains this.

00:05:50   - Extax exchange question that answers this.

00:05:51   I remember doing it back when the spotlight

00:05:53   was first introduced, like one of the bragging rights is,

00:05:54   oh, we'll even index your network.

00:05:56   This was back in the AFP days.

00:05:58   We'll even index your network shares.

00:06:01   I don't know what the status of that is,

00:06:03   like if it doesn't do it by default anymore or whatever,

00:06:05   but it's bottom line is this command line tools,

00:06:07   but you can force it to.

00:06:08   It's the MD util command line

00:06:09   and the MD import command line.

00:06:11   If you just read the man pages for them,

00:06:12   you can figure it out.

00:06:13   to put a link to the Stack Exchange question

00:06:16   in the show notes so you can follow through it

00:06:18   and figure out how to enable it yourself.

00:06:21   I don't know what it will be like.

00:06:22   I'm not even sure how it keeps track

00:06:24   of what has been updated there.

00:06:25   Does it periodically rescan the whole drive?

00:06:27   Anyway, maybe you just have to run it on a schedule

00:06:31   to rescan the drive, but if this is something you wanna do,

00:06:35   you can try it.

00:06:36   - Excellent.

00:06:37   All right, and Rich Knight wrote in

00:06:40   to ask us some questions about Google and Stitcher.

00:06:45   He says, it seems that the biggest issue that you guys

00:06:47   have with these apps-- applies equally to Google and Stitcher--

00:06:50   is that they re-host your files.

00:06:51   That impacts your stats, and you lose control over quality,

00:06:54   making changes, et cetera.

00:06:56   My question is, why do they bother?

00:06:58   Let's imagine Google built the exact same app

00:07:00   but without re-hosting.

00:07:01   If they want to inject ads at the beginning or at the end,

00:07:03   they can still do it client-side.

00:07:04   They could still build interesting things

00:07:06   like full-text search that John had mentioned by simply

00:07:09   downloading your file once to index it, it wouldn't tick off the publishers who would

00:07:14   still have control over their files and download stats, bandwidth costs shift back to the publishers,

00:07:19   et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is all good for them. So what's the big benefit

00:07:24   of rehosting in the first place?

00:07:25   So, this is, again, the podcast thing specifically, Google's podcast thing with Google Play Music

00:07:31   they announced and Stitcher, the podcast thing, rehosting people's podcast files before serving

00:07:35   them and then therefore requiring publisher approval and denying publisher stats and everything

00:07:39   else. The main benefits are really, it comes down to control and consistency. If you rehost

00:07:47   the files yourself as the intermediary service provider, you can first of all, you can guarantee

00:07:51   that they will be there and they will load quickly. Because if you just rely, you know,

00:07:56   Overcast doesn't work the way, Overcast and most podcast apps, just, they just, they get

00:08:00   the files directly from the publisher's server, which could be a terrible little web hosting

00:08:05   it could be a nice CDN, it could be something very far away

00:08:08   or very geographically close.

00:08:10   And there's wide variety in transfer speeds,

00:08:13   download speeds for podcast files

00:08:15   that just come directly from publishers.

00:08:16   So if you're running a service like Google Play Music

00:08:18   or Stitcher, you want like some kind of big,

00:08:20   integrated experience, you don't want to take the risk

00:08:23   of wondering whether someone else's server

00:08:26   will actually be able to serve you the file

00:08:27   at the moment that that user requests it.

00:08:30   So that's the biggest reason,

00:08:31   and you don't know how quickly they will serve it too.

00:08:33   So that's the biggest reason why they want to do this.

00:08:36   There's also, you know, there's other additional things

00:08:38   you can do, for instance, like, you know,

00:08:41   Rich mentioned that Google is most certainly

00:08:44   gonna do the transcription thing,

00:08:45   that it does YouTube videos for search,

00:08:47   and you could indeed fetch the file once,

00:08:50   you know, transcribe it, and then continue to send people

00:08:54   to the original to download it,

00:08:55   but then you have to like manage,

00:08:57   do I still have the most up-to-date copy?

00:08:58   You have to pull it periodically to make sure

00:09:00   you still have the most up-to-date copy,

00:09:02   then you have to update it if it's changed,

00:09:03   You never quite can be sure necessarily

00:09:05   if the people are gonna get the exact version you got.

00:09:08   Additionally, and this is actually one thing

00:09:09   that might be a problem for Play Music,

00:09:12   one thing that's really taking off big time

00:09:15   in big podcasting, in the big,

00:09:17   like the public radio kind of shows,

00:09:19   the big name shows that they get lots of downloads and stuff,

00:09:22   is the dynamic ad insertion,

00:09:24   where every copy of the file they serve

00:09:27   has a different set of ads in it.

00:09:29   And the idea here is they wanna capture,

00:09:32   So suppose they sell an ad for a certain number of downloads.

00:09:37   They wanna make sure that once those downloads have happened

00:09:40   they can put a different ad in there

00:09:41   that they've sold separately.

00:09:43   And for lots of reasons, I honestly don't think

00:09:45   this is a very good idea, but regardless of what I think,

00:09:48   people are doing it.

00:09:49   This is where a lot of the market is moving.

00:09:52   And so if you make some secret requests to the same file

00:09:55   on some of these big networks,

00:09:56   you will get actually different copies of the file

00:09:59   with different ads that might even be

00:10:00   slightly different lengths.

00:10:01   So you can't even link to a timestamp

00:10:03   in the middle of the file

00:10:04   because it might be a different timestamp

00:10:06   depending on who downloads it.

00:10:07   Anyway, all of that is kind of messed up

00:10:10   by systems like this that cache the file and everything,

00:10:11   but it also kind of throws a wrench

00:10:13   in anything like Overcast that assumes

00:10:16   that the file will be generally the same

00:10:18   if you go to fetch it a second time.

00:10:20   So there's justification on both sides

00:10:23   for why you would rehost the files as a service provider

00:10:26   versus why you would want to pass them through.

00:10:28   Neither side is perfect.

00:10:31   As a publisher, I greatly prefer that they pass them through

00:10:35   to us, but that is not necessarily their goal.

00:10:40   - Yeah, that makes sense.

00:10:41   - Speaking of ad insertion, have you heard about people

00:10:43   who put different ads into their archive shows?

00:10:47   They'll put their archive shows up,

00:10:48   and then a year later they'll go through

00:10:50   and change all the ads in the year-old shows?

00:10:52   - It's exactly the same platform, yeah,

00:10:53   exactly the same thing, and that's one of the ways

00:10:56   they can justify it.

00:10:57   We don't really do a lot of archive downloads

00:11:00   because we are a topical news show most of the time.

00:11:03   But there's a lot of shows out there,

00:11:06   kind of like the magazine style,

00:11:07   like human interest kind of shows,

00:11:08   that are fairly timeless.

00:11:09   And so those shows tend to get way more archive downloads

00:11:14   than a show like ours.

00:11:16   Sometimes those are even the majority of their downloads

00:11:18   for certain kinds of shows.

00:11:20   So they have different needs really.

00:11:22   If they tell an advertiser,

00:11:24   you know, we generally get this number of downloads,

00:11:26   you want to sponsor episode 200 or whatever,

00:11:29   and then episode 200 ends up in the archives getting five times as many downloads as usual

00:11:34   because it has longevity there, then those publishers want to get more value out of that.

00:11:40   I honestly think this is a bad idea because I think that those surpluses that happen here

00:11:45   and there are actually already priced in to the premium CPM rate that we are able to get

00:11:51   as podcasters compared to other media. So I think this is actually a terrible idea that

00:11:56   surplus has already been priced in and that we are actually eroding that by doing systems

00:12:00   like this. And therefore, I think it will almost certainly result in a noticeable drop

00:12:06   in podcast ad CPMs. But that's just me.

00:12:09   I think about people listening to old episodes of Hypercritical and I wonder like, are some

00:12:13   of those companies that we had at adforce still in business? Eventually that's going

00:12:17   to be the thing.

00:12:18   Right. And they aren't always. There's obviously like, there is an argument to be made that

00:12:23   you should be kind of re-monetizing,

00:12:26   ugh, that sounds terrible,

00:12:27   re-monetizing these old episodes

00:12:29   after a certain number of views

00:12:31   or after a certain amount of time.

00:12:32   You can make that argument,

00:12:34   but I think it will have negative effects

00:12:36   that I'm not sure people are fully thinking through.

00:12:39   But it doesn't really matter

00:12:41   because if enough of the market does this,

00:12:43   it will erode the CPMs anyway,

00:12:45   and so even if you aren't doing it,

00:12:47   it will be affecting you, so you might as well do it.

00:12:50   - Yeah, I like the idea of like,

00:12:52   when you watch old television programs,

00:12:53   like the most fun is watching the period appropriate ads

00:12:57   that run on them.

00:12:58   (laughing)

00:12:58   But yeah, eventually people are gonna be going back,

00:13:00   "Oh, remember Squarespace?"

00:13:02   Yeah.

00:13:03   - Gosh, that would be crazy.

00:13:05   All right, any other follow up that we need to talk about?

00:13:09   Jon, do you have any other follow out

00:13:10   that you would like to cover?

00:13:12   - Don't even know what you're talking about.

00:13:14   (laughing)

00:13:15   - Marco, why don't you save me

00:13:16   and tell me about something that's awesome.

00:13:18   - Well, we're back to Jon,

00:13:19   because our first sponsor this week

00:13:20   is Cards Against Humanity, and rather than doing a sponsor read, they asked Jon to review

00:13:25   another toaster oven.

00:13:27   [Toster Oven Theme]

00:13:37   So Jon, what is this week's toaster oven?

00:13:40   This toaster oven is, this week's toaster is something. This is the... I think nostalgia

00:13:46   is actually the name brand, but anyway, it's the Nostalgia Electrics BSET 300, the retro red

00:13:53   variant. Three-in-one breakfast station. Before I continue with this, I'm going to put the link

00:13:58   in the show notes or in the chat room. You two should look at it so I don't have to try to paint

00:14:03   you a word picture of this monstrosity. Holy mother. All right. Oh my. Oh my God. What is that?

00:14:10   Amazing. All right. Hold on. Yeah, if you are, if you're listening to this and you are not driving

00:14:16   or not in a situation where you will put people in danger by taking a moment to look at this picture,

00:14:21   then please take a moment to look at this picture because this is amazing.

00:14:24   Oh my god.

00:14:25   So it's like, it's like a toaster oven and it's red. I like the idea of these things being

00:14:31   interesting colors because they're boring when they're gray or black. So this one is a nice

00:14:34   kind of fire engine red. The toaster oven part of this thing is actually pretty small. They show two

00:14:40   slices of bread in it that's kind of optimistic again miniature bread for the pictures but that's

00:14:44   not all there is to this thing because the toaster oven part is in like the right side of the thing

00:14:52   above the toaster oven is a non-stick griddle or what they call a non-stick griddle i'll get to

00:14:58   that in a little bit uh in the picture they show eggs cooking on it and sausage cooking on it

00:15:03   to the left of the toaster oven again this is all one unit these are not three separate things it's

00:15:07   It's just like a Steve Jobs iPhone

00:15:09   Is a coffee maker like a filter drip coffee maker with a little coffee thing ahead

00:15:17   So in the same appliance, yes, the idea is that in this one thing you can toast your bread make your coffee

00:15:23   Cook your eggs and your sausages. That's why it is a three-in-one breakfast station

00:15:27   The first thing to point out about this is when you look at the picture

00:15:33   You it looks crazy, but there's I know they put things in the picture like the miniature bread and the eggs and the sausage

00:15:40   But there's really no sense of scale here

00:15:42   If you think that coffee that drip coffee mug

00:15:45   It looks like you know a typical like you know 80s kind of office drip coffee thing before everyone had the K cups and everything

00:15:50   It is not a full-size thing. It's like a doll's

00:15:53   Coffee thing that that container holds maybe like a cup and a half two cups of hot water or coffee in it

00:16:02   It is not a full-size thing so it's very and I guess this is good because if it was a full-size coffee maker the thing

00:16:07   Would be huge right and same thing with the griddle all very small so it's strange

00:16:11   And it's like maybe if you live alone

00:16:13   And you just want to make yourself coffee and you want to make yourself drip coffee with like little filters and everything

00:16:19   That's what you can do with this thing here so the controls

00:16:22   It's got if with all this functionality. This is the one toaster that said you know what we don't need three knobs two knobs

00:16:26   It's funny

00:16:28   Switch on the bottom and the switch on the bottom

00:16:30   It's like a toggle switch and that just turns the coffee thing on or off

00:16:34   It's like basically do you want me to heat up the heating element that heats the water for the coffee or do you not?

00:16:38   So that's independent

00:16:40   The top dial is a thing that lets you turn on and off the elements

00:16:44   The thing's got four guarded elements two on the bottom two on the top

00:16:47   You can say only bottom only top or top and bottom or off

00:16:51   Those are your settings there and then the the second knob is temperature

00:16:56   And the temperature knob is fairly hilarious if you can zoom in on the Amazon thing you can see that

00:17:01   The light medium and dark settings for toast are

00:17:04   Within like three degrees of each other on the dial like the whole rest of my dial is for all this stuff

00:17:09   But like and this is not an accurate dial like if this was a surgical instrument

00:17:13   Maybe you could say am I between medium and dark?

00:17:16   There's so much slop on the dial like the three dots are within the margin of error of

00:17:20   Like the slop on the dial

00:17:22   alright

00:17:24   But here's the biggest problem with this device and I actually I don't drink coffee so I just made hot water

00:17:28   Well, what am I gonna do I don't want I'm dirty up with the filters and everything but

00:17:34   the idea behind this seems to be that

00:17:38   rather than you know for space savings and

00:17:41   To have like all your stuff happening in one spot if you have it like a small kitchen or you just want to do like

00:17:45   Why waste all this space, you know, you can do this thing, right?

00:17:47   There's a lot of problems that theory first is

00:17:50   There's not a lot of room on top of a toaster depending how low your cabinets are the distance from the top of this toaster to

00:17:54   The bottom of your cabinets may not be that big and you really don't want anything that's gonna put off steam or like

00:18:00   Spatter from from sausages or it really just like there's a reason they have vents on top of your cooking services

00:18:07   You don't want there to be like a an 8-inch or a 1-foot gap between your cooking sausages in the bottom of your counters

00:18:13   who's gonna coat them with grease, but it turns out that's not that big of a problem because

00:18:17   The way this thing's works is like there's no separate control

00:18:21   You just pick like which elements do you want to turn on?

00:18:23   So if you want all the elements on the top and the bottom ones and you turn the dial turn it on

00:18:27   Those four heat elements that's it except for the coffee thing and they have to fulfill the job of toasting the bread and also

00:18:35   Heating the griddle on top. They're not up to that task Wow, you blow a fuse. No, they didn't blow a fuse

00:18:41   They're just not up to the task

00:18:42   Basically my bread that I put in to get toast out came out as baked bread because it's just too

00:18:48   slow and it just slowly heats and dries and heats and dries the bread and eventually kind of sort of browns it and by the time

00:18:54   You get them out there like little bricks

00:18:56   Like it's not it's not a good toaster takes a really long time and they don't they don't toast you want them to be toasted

00:19:02   And crispy on the outside but not like totally dehydrated, right?

00:19:05   And the second problem is the only things that are heating the griddle part are the top two elements and they're not enough

00:19:11   They just you know, the instruction guys like oh you should preheat it for five minutes, right?

00:19:15   I don't want to preheat if I'm doing that I'm losing the whole convenience thing

00:19:17   So I cooked an egg on top of this thing and it was the worst like it just did not get hot enough to really

00:19:22   cook the egg and by the way the surface on top of this is like

00:19:25   Pillowed like a pillowed quilt, you know like a bunch of little rounded rectangle lumps all over it

00:19:30   I don't understand what the pillowing is there for all it does is make it more likely that your egg is gonna stick because it

00:19:34   Has more sort of nooks and crannies to go into maybe it's for the grease from your sausages to drain out or something

00:19:40   Anyway, terrible for cooking eggs. Just does not get hot enough fast enough. Doesn't get hot enough period.

00:19:45   And I don't see any extra convenience. And the coffee maker thing is totally disconnected from the toaster and the griddle.

00:19:51   It might as well be separate because it's just like, well, this is a very small low-capacity thing that heats hot water for drip coffee.

00:19:56   So just like the thing that was a slot toaster in the toaster oven, this multi-function device does none of its functions well.

00:20:05   Maybe I'm gonna say maybe it does the coffee thing well, maybe it is a sink good single serving drip coffee thing

00:20:09   But I really doubt it

00:20:11   All I can say is that it does boil the water in a reasonably timely fashion because hey

00:20:14   It's only boiling like one cup of water probably isn't boiling good and it did well

00:20:18   Yeah, probably not and it did it didn't blow a circuit or anything, but it really should have because if you

00:20:23   It just was not getting hot enough the top of if you're wondering how the hell you wash this thing the griddle top thing comes

00:20:30   Right off which seems weird to me because if you take it off and turn the toaster and you've got hot heating elements on it

00:20:34   opens the air. Anyway, it comes off and you can clean it easily. That's about the only

00:20:38   good thing I can say about this. The door, the other thing I say about it is that it's

00:20:42   cute. Like this is a cute nostalgia thing, the fact that it's red and it looks kind of

00:20:46   like, I don't know, I thought it was this was a cute appliance. So it would look good

00:20:49   in the background of a movie or sitcom, but don't actually use it to heat up any of your

00:20:54   food to make it better to eat. I cannot recommend.

00:20:59   Even at its bargain price for three different appliances, the combination of only $70 doesn't

00:21:04   seem that ridiculous.

00:21:05   Well, it's just that I wouldn't spend $70 on this because you don't, you can get a good

00:21:10   toaster for less money than that.

00:21:12   This is not a good toaster.

00:21:13   It's not good at anything.

00:21:14   So I don't, I don't, if I had this in my house, I don't know what I would use it for.

00:21:17   I would use it for nothing.

00:21:19   If I paid you $70 to keep it on your counter, would you?

00:21:22   No, I don't have that kind of counter space.

00:21:24   Oh, I forgot to mention, there's also a lid that goes on the griddle thing on the top.

00:21:30   And I only can only assume that's like, look, we know this thing doesn't get hot enough,

00:21:33   But if you put the lid on it will steam your eggs at least and they'll actually kind of

00:21:36   cook.

00:21:37   Awesome.

00:21:38   So, my final question on this is that this is from this brand called Nostalgia Electronics

00:21:46   and they appear to have a whole different line of things but was this kind of thing

00:21:51   ever a thing that people use?

00:21:53   Like it kind of implies that this is an old appliance that they're bringing back, hence

00:21:58   nostalgia.

00:21:59   But was this kind of appliance ever really used by anybody ever?

00:22:02   I think I assumed the the nostalgia brand is only loosely connected with the theme of actual nostalgia

00:22:09   And I would be guessing based on the appearance that just the idea is

00:22:12   Make it look like appliances look to them. Not that there was a specific appliance like this

00:22:17   And it does like with the script lettering and the the red metal and everything

00:22:21   It does look like a little bit of a throwback

00:22:23   But it's big plastic thing on top of the coffee maker that doesn't quite look right, but it does kind of fit in with the

00:22:28   sort of 50s 60s

00:22:31   Sci-fi like the kitchen of the future automation and you know

00:22:34   It does fit in even if they never made one of these things it totally fits with that theme

00:22:38   Especially with the the fact that it doesn't work with a damn just like every one of the kitchen of the future things

00:22:44   They made up in the 50s and 60s

00:22:46   They should have just called it sad electrics because I think like there is no way to use this and not be sad somehow

00:22:53   either either just you're using it because

00:22:56   your life situation somehow led you to buy and own one of these things or

00:23:01   You are sad because its performance is so bad that you are sitting there eating your baked bread and undercooked sausage

00:23:08   And just makes you sad people in the chat room are posting the positive and negative Amazon reviews

00:23:12   I can't believe there are positive ones. They must be like

00:23:15   Manufacture, I just cannot believe anyone would find any part of the satisfactory except like I said, maybe I

00:23:21   I wanted a drip coffee maker that only made enough coffee for one and a half people and finally I found one.

00:23:26   Yeah, you know a Keurig isn't sufficient. They really want that drip coffee.

00:23:29   Yikes. Well, I did not know what toaster this was gonna be before the show started and I am glad I didn't because that is magnificent.

00:23:39   Oh, yeah, and before we wrap up the toaster things, two things in this. One,

00:23:43   I finally, people have been asking me and have been asking for this entire run of ads,

00:23:48   What do I do with all the old toasters old toasters and my answer for a long time had been nothing

00:23:53   We don't have any plans to do anything with the old toasters

00:23:56   Eventually got to the point where I had just too many gigantic toaster boxes of mass

00:24:00   I needed them to go away. And so now the toasters have gone away

00:24:03   I don't know where they went but a nice person came to my house and took

00:24:07   ten toasters

00:24:09   Jammed into a giant truck and took them away from my house. So they're gone

00:24:13   I no longer have them when I was taking these ten toasters and sending them away

00:24:17   way, I found this box unopened. I hadn't realized that it had an extra unopened box. This is

00:24:23   like finding the strange treasure, like, "Wait a second, this one's still sealed up. Did

00:24:28   I never open this one?" And I opened it, and this is the unholy thing that came out. So

00:24:31   I don't even know when I got this toaster. Maybe it got filed away with the rest of the

00:24:36   toasters, like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom.

00:24:39   Jesus. At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which does not have an Indiana Jones prefix.

00:24:42   See what you've done to me, Steam's, before?

00:24:44   Now by any chance, did you have a coffee maker box near them?

00:24:48   I'm thinking maybe there was some hanky panky going on and this came out.

00:24:51   Wow.

00:24:52   Yeah.

00:24:52   Anyway, so this is the second to last toaster of this run.

00:24:55   We've got one more left this year, I think.

00:24:57   So, and I'll have to get rid of these toasters anyway.

00:25:00   So that's where they go.

00:25:01   They go away from my house so I can fit my car in the driveway.

00:25:04   [Music]

00:25:11   [Music]

00:25:15   I don't even know where to go from here.

00:25:17   Well, thanks to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring our show once again.

00:25:22   Wow. Should we just end here? I mean, we have other things to talk about. We have other sponsors, but where do we go?

00:25:27   I mean, it's all going to go downhill from here. How do we top that?

00:25:30   What can we really do?

00:25:31   Oh my goodness.

00:25:33   All right, so we do have things to talk about.

00:25:36   And most specifically, we have some Apple TV things to talk about.

00:25:40   And I don't know how much I can contribute to this because I'm holding strong and not

00:25:43   buying the Apple TV that I'm sure I'm going to buy sometime between now and Christmas.

00:25:47   You didn't even order it?

00:25:48   I thought you would find out you would have surely ordered it at least.

00:25:50   No, I think I'm going to try to hold out for a Christmas/Hanukkah gift, but we'll see how

00:25:54   it goes.

00:25:55   And the Plex app is out, right?

00:25:56   Yes.

00:25:57   out, which is why I am not really holding too strong on this. And I've heard it's really

00:26:03   good, which is not helping me.

00:26:05   - Keep in mind also that the way Apple's product release cycle and pricing works is that you're

00:26:12   not gaining anything by waiting. If you're gonna buy this model of Apple TV ever, you

00:26:17   should buy it now.

00:26:18   - Yeah, you're right. But I mean, I don't know, I figured, like I said, it's holiday

00:26:22   time coming up, and this is the sort of thing that I do kind of want, but I really don't

00:26:26   feel like spending money on, in part because I really don't want to mess with my audio

00:26:30   setup that we went through last week, and yes, there are options like the little kooky

00:26:34   box that we found last week, but I don't want to mess with my setup.

00:26:38   A lot of people, maybe this is completely reasonable, and I'm a weirdo, but a lot of

00:26:42   people wrote to me via Twitter and were like, "Dude, just leave your old Apple TV exactly

00:26:45   where it is."

00:26:46   I'm like, "Well, I don't have to do that, man."

00:26:49   Like I—

00:26:50   Then just say the thing where you can use your old Apple TV as an AirPlay speaker for

00:26:54   your new one.

00:26:55   That's exactly what they're saying.

00:26:56   like, "Why? That seems so crazy to me that that's the best course of action, is to leave this old

00:27:02   Apple TV that I really will almost never use anymore. Leave that plugged in because that's

00:27:07   the best scenario." I'm not saying it's unreasonable for Apple to take away my optical connection,

00:27:13   which is the thing that I'm all upset about. They probably did the right thing here. It's probably

00:27:18   silly to leave that optical connection on the new Apple TV, and that's why they pulled it.

00:27:22   So I'm not, I hope I don't sound like one of those people that's like,

00:27:25   "Oh, well they changed that one thing I needed and they're wrong!"

00:27:28   No, they're not wrong. They're right. I'm the one that's crazy.

00:27:31   But I'm crazy and I like having my optical connections.

00:27:33   So, in any case, I'm sure I will get an Apple TV. I'm sure it will be in 2015.

00:27:37   And we'll see if I end up paying for it myself or just getting it as a gift.

00:27:41   Ah, you gotta stand strong with the Sony Philips digital interface.

00:27:44   Exactly. Is that what SPDIF?

00:27:47   Yeah.

00:27:48   Yeah. I didn't know that's what it stood for.

00:27:49   You ever see it written "S/PDIF"?

00:27:51   Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Sony/Philips Digital Interface.

00:27:55   I did not know that was the acronym there.

00:27:58   Yeah, because Sony and Phillips, they work together on all sorts, like the CD and all

00:28:01   sorts of like digital audio stuff, and so they standardized this thing forever ago.

00:28:04   It's really old. And yeah, so Sony/Philips Digital Interface.

00:28:09   Today I learned. Anyway, so what do we have to talk about with this, or what do you guys

00:28:13   have to talk about with this?

00:28:15   I got my Apple TV today, actually. So I unpacked it and set it up in a bit of a hurry before

00:28:20   the show. But, and I also had seen it in the Apple store before that, so I actually have

00:28:23   some real world experience with this thing. And I have to say, after reading everybody's

00:28:27   stories and listening to what they had to say about the Apple TV, specifically the setup

00:28:32   experience, I was prepared for the worst. Like, I was prepared for like, Wii to Wii

00:28:36   U migration level of nightmare setup. So one of the things this thing does, I don't know

00:28:42   if the old one did it as well, I don't remember, is when you take it out of the box and plug

00:28:45   it in, it wants you to bring your iPhone near it and make sure Bluetooth is on on your iPhone

00:28:51   and just hold it near the thing and it will sort of figure out what Wi-Fi network your

00:28:55   phone is on and connect to the same Wi-Fi network and use the same password and all

00:28:59   that other stuff so the Apple TV can get on the same network.

00:29:03   And that part worked for me.

00:29:04   I plugged the Apple TV in, I brought my phone over to it, I unlocked my phone, waited a

00:29:09   couple seconds, tapped a little dialog box on the phone and it found my network, which

00:29:13   doesn't really matter because I hadn't plugged into ethernet anyway so it seemed like kind

00:29:16   of a waste but anyway that part worked and then I at some point I signed in with my Apple

00:29:23   ID password and I had to use the terrible keyboard that everybody hates which is not

00:29:27   so much a keyboard as a key line because it's got A through Z in a single horizontal strip

00:29:36   and there's another row of punctuation another row with switch to capital or lowercase and

00:29:39   by the way if you hold down the button on their mode you can get capital letters without

00:29:42   having to switch from capital to lowercase.

00:29:45   That is very painful to use.

00:29:46   I'm not entirely sure, but it's more painful than the old way where you had to hit, like,

00:29:50   because you have a swipey pad, you can swipe quickly from left to the right and skip multiple

00:29:54   letters.

00:29:55   Instead of having to go A, B, C, D, E, F, like you can go swipe once and go all the

00:29:59   way up to like J or R or whatever.

00:30:02   So I don't, I think the touch pad is useful for that.

00:30:05   I don't understand why they made it a strip.

00:30:07   It's not like there's not enough room on a screen.

00:30:08   They got the whole rest of the screen there.

00:30:10   Maybe with the rest of the UI and apps it was better that way.

00:30:12   Anyway, because I only had to enter my Apple ID, well I had to enter it a couple of times,

00:30:17   but not an obscene number of times.

00:30:19   It didn't seem that ridiculous to me.

00:30:22   So I entered my Apple ID, I went to Netflix, I had to sign in with my Netflix ID.

00:30:26   It's kind of a shame that it couldn't get all this information from the previous Apple

00:30:28   ID or from iCloud Keychain or from any other place that in the Apple ecosystem that it

00:30:32   supposedly has secure storage of username and password.

00:30:34   This seems like is the main thing people were complaining about.

00:30:36   I got asked about their passwords too often.

00:30:39   The passwords are hard to enter.

00:30:40   And if you haven't read these articles,

00:30:42   you may be wondering,

00:30:43   "Why don't they just use the iOS remote app?"

00:30:45   That doesn't work.

00:30:46   The iOS remote app does not work with the new Apple TV.

00:30:48   Does it not work yet?

00:30:49   Are they gonna make it work?

00:30:50   I don't know.

00:30:51   It doesn't work now.

00:30:52   So it doesn't help you

00:30:53   if you're setting up your Apple TV now.

00:30:55   And that's a legit complaint.

00:30:56   It's a regression from the old version of the product.

00:31:00   It's a pain to use any kind of onscreen keyboard.

00:31:03   and the onscreen keyboard they have seems pretty stupid.

00:31:07   I find with the little swipey remote,

00:31:09   it's hard for me to swipe up and down.

00:31:11   I don't know why it's not registering.

00:31:13   It just, it takes it as if I'm going across,

00:31:14   like when I want to swipe down to the next row of things

00:31:16   or something for the punctuation, it just doesn't, you know,

00:31:19   it feels like it's stuck a lot.

00:31:21   You can also, by the way, if you have the new Apple TV,

00:31:24   you can tap on it like it's a D pad,

00:31:26   not press it all the way down so it physically clicks,

00:31:28   but just tap, like touch the surface

00:31:30   as if it's a virtual D pad.

00:31:32   and that works as well in most places in the Apple TV.

00:31:35   There's a little bit of a learning curve,

00:31:36   I feel like, with the Apple TV.

00:31:37   I spent a while with the remote

00:31:38   and tried to discover all the possible combinations

00:31:41   where you click on the left side of the remote

00:31:44   and click on the right side,

00:31:45   tap on the left, tap on the right,

00:31:46   swipe up, swipe down, swipe from the top,

00:31:48   swipe from the bottom.

00:31:49   A surprising number of interesting inputs,

00:31:52   all hampered by the fact that remote is really too small

00:31:55   and awkwardly shaped

00:31:56   and not the best thing in the world to hold onto.

00:31:59   All this is to say that my setup experience wasn't that bad

00:32:02   And I was mostly pleasantly surprised by the variety of ways

00:32:06   that you can interface with this thing, the speed it felt faster

00:32:10   to me to navigate around than my old Apple TV.

00:32:12   That could just be because it didn't have to use IR,

00:32:14   and Bluetooth has less latency than that.

00:32:16   It could just be because it's a much faster CPU or whatever.

00:32:19   But it felt pretty good to me.

00:32:21   Maybe I was primed to--

00:32:24   with all the bad reviews, I was expecting the worst.

00:32:26   But I got to say, I would much rather

00:32:28   have this than my previous Apple TV any day of the week?

00:32:32   - Well, that's a much more positive review

00:32:34   than a lot of what I've heard.

00:32:36   I haven't read any to my recollection,

00:32:38   but I listened to this week's talk show

00:32:41   with Jon and Guy English, and they seemed like,

00:32:45   eh, it's good, but it's got a lot of problems.

00:32:48   This week's upgrade with Jason Snell

00:32:52   and Mike Hurley and Joe Steele,

00:32:55   They were in various levels of frustrated to furious, I'd say.

00:33:00   And I don't know, just looking at it

00:33:03   from an outsider's point of view,

00:33:05   in the sense that I don't have one,

00:33:07   I haven't done hours of research

00:33:09   into the specifics of what it offers,

00:33:10   because really the only thing I care about

00:33:12   for the most part is Plex.

00:33:13   I just feel like I saw an inordinate amount

00:33:18   of grumbling on Twitter.

00:33:19   And it seemed like everyone,

00:33:22   everyone was really, really grumbly about it.

00:33:24   And maybe that's my own biases that are surfacing, and maybe it's not that bad.

00:33:29   But you know, Jesse Charr earlier today was saying that it's really a great device and

00:33:33   everyone's just being a bunch of curmudgeons, and that very well could be.

00:33:37   But I don't know, from the outside, it seemed like with the watch release, everyone was

00:33:41   like, "Hey, this is cool.

00:33:42   You know, it's got some issues, but it's cool."

00:33:43   And with this, it seemed like, "Oh, man, this is nothing but issues," to almost everyone.

00:33:48   Well, I wouldn't say that.

00:33:49   I mean, this is different.

00:33:52   So we've all, many of us, people who have been fans of the Apple TV so far, we've been

00:33:57   using the Apple TV for years and it's been pretty much the same.

00:34:02   Most of it has not really changed much, at least since the introduction of the second

00:34:05   gen one and a lot of it even from before that.

00:34:08   It's been really the solid thing and for me, the Apple TV is by far the most common device

00:34:16   that we use for the TV.

00:34:18   It is our TV, you know, because we don't have cable

00:34:21   or cable cutters or those annoying people.

00:34:23   We don't, like, the Apple TV is our everything.

00:34:25   Like, I have an Amazon Fire TV on the front TV

00:34:29   and I have a Roku on the back TV

00:34:30   and we never actually switch to those

00:34:33   for almost any purpose, except the Amazon one

00:34:35   we'll switch to to use Plex so far,

00:34:37   although now we won't need to do that anymore.

00:34:39   But the fact is it's different.

00:34:40   You know, the remote, I think, has some issues.

00:34:43   It is unquestionably more capable in general.

00:34:47   it can do more things.

00:34:49   And some of the big ones obviously are Siri

00:34:51   and the volume control.

00:34:52   But it also, you know, it has accelerometers,

00:34:55   it has the touch pad, which can be, you know,

00:34:57   more different levels of input and more different kinds

00:35:01   or directions of input than just a regular D-pad could be.

00:35:05   But I do feel like, in my opinion,

00:35:07   it is a step back from a D-pad in general usability

00:35:12   of the things we've used the TV for so far.

00:35:16   So who knows where the apps and stuff will go in the future?

00:35:20   We don't really know that yet, time will tell,

00:35:22   whether apps really take advantage of it being a touchpad

00:35:24   and not just a directional control.

00:35:26   But today, using the Apple TV

00:35:29   the way you've always used it before,

00:35:31   it feels very imprecise.

00:35:33   And one of the problems with the key line, text input,

00:35:37   is when you're typing these on this keyboard,

00:35:41   there's a high cost to mistyping anything,

00:35:44   because you have to like, you know,

00:35:45   then go find the delete key or if you hold it down,

00:35:48   there's one on the hold down menu,

00:35:49   but it's kind of hard to do,

00:35:51   especially if you're new to the control.

00:35:53   So you need to be very precise on that keyboard

00:35:55   because the cost of making an error is annoying.

00:36:00   But that's the first thing you really need to do

00:36:03   when setting this up is type in your password a few times,

00:36:06   and that is the time when you have the least experience

00:36:08   with the new remote.

00:36:09   So your very first interaction with this thing

00:36:12   is set up to make you basically hate the remote

00:36:15   and hate inputting text into it.

00:36:16   And who knows what they could have done to fix that.

00:36:19   I think obviously better integration with an iPhone

00:36:22   to let you use the iPhone keyboard

00:36:24   like the old remote app did would have been nice.

00:36:27   I hope they do something like that in the future.

00:36:29   It's not there now and that is unfortunate.

00:36:31   But for me so far, when you pick up the remote,

00:36:36   let's say the remote falls on the couch, you pick it up.

00:36:38   It is incredibly hard to pick it up

00:36:41   without accidentally seeking the video that you're in.

00:36:44   Because you pick it up and if your finger brushes

00:36:47   that touch pad area at all,

00:36:49   you seek the video that you're watching.

00:36:51   And so there's little issues like that

00:36:53   of accidental input, there's issues with the key line

00:36:57   and navigation of just imprecision because it's a touch pad.

00:37:00   Honestly, if they made this remote

00:37:03   with a regular up, down, left, right, D-pad kind of buttons

00:37:07   like the old one as an option in that top area

00:37:09   instead of the touch pad, I would choose that option,

00:37:12   no question.

00:37:13   And maybe, again, maybe in the future,

00:37:15   if apps start really needing the touch pad

00:37:16   and taking good advantage of it, that might change.

00:37:18   But right now, I think everything with the new remote

00:37:22   that you think of as things you do on an Apple TV,

00:37:25   things like navigating, things like Netflix and iTunes

00:37:28   and everything, those kind of things, in my opinion,

00:37:30   are made worse by the touch pad, not better.

00:37:33   - Have you tried to use your old Apple TV remotes

00:37:36   with the new Apple TV?

00:37:38   because my understanding is it does have an IR receiver

00:37:40   and that does work.

00:37:41   - Yeah, you can, yeah.

00:37:42   And which is nice, 'cause we have a universal

00:37:44   Logitech Harmony thing, and so that can control it also,

00:37:47   'cause it'll accept the old kind of input

00:37:50   from all the older modes.

00:37:51   So that's nice.

00:37:51   But then you don't have things like Siri.

00:37:54   So you kinda miss out on some of the new features.

00:37:56   So again, time will tell how this all shakes out.

00:37:59   Chances are, we're probably all gonna get used to it,

00:38:02   and it'll probably blow over.

00:38:03   But I don't think that takes away from

00:38:06   that there are downsides.

00:38:08   It's very similar in so many ways,

00:38:10   very similar to the Force Touch trackpad,

00:38:12   which I finally got to try the full size one yesterday

00:38:15   in the Apple store.

00:38:16   And it actually was not as bad as I expected

00:38:17   and neither was the keyboard.

00:38:19   I actually like the keyboard better than the trackpad.

00:38:21   And if that's the future keyboard of Apple laptops,

00:38:23   which I assume it will be, then that's not that bad.

00:38:26   And the trackpad though, like all the Force Touch stuff,

00:38:28   it's always like almost good enough,

00:38:31   but in my opinion, as I've said many times before,

00:38:33   it's not quite there.

00:38:34   So it is kind of a step backwards in reliability

00:38:37   and precision and I think the touch feel sucks

00:38:39   on the Force Touch trackpad and the full size one,

00:38:41   no different, I tried all the different settings

00:38:42   in the Apple store, it feels, in my opinion,

00:38:45   the click feels awful on it, even worse than laptops,

00:38:47   I think, it's a terrible feeling click.

00:38:50   But they've made this thing thinner, more advanced,

00:38:53   more complicated and they've achieved something

00:38:55   that is almost as good as the old one.

00:38:57   I think that's probably what's going to happen

00:38:59   with the touchpad remote is that they've added

00:39:02   all these capabilities by making it a touchpad,

00:39:05   even though it isn't Force Touch,

00:39:06   I don't want to compute those two, but they've added all these capabilities by making it,

00:39:10   you know, a touchpad instead of just up, down, left, right buttons. But the basics of like

00:39:16   you're operating this thing imprecisely, often in the dark, often without looking at it,

00:39:22   it's less reliable. And that I think is always going to have a baseline level of slight frustration

00:39:28   for a lot of people and more frustration for geeks like me who are very picky about such

00:39:33   things, even though it will offer us more capabilities.

00:39:36   On the previous shows, I complained about all the things that are still wrong with this

00:39:39   remote before I had laid eyes on it or before I had touched it.

00:39:42   That's all still true.

00:39:43   It shouldn't be shaped the way it is.

00:39:44   It's way too small.

00:39:46   It's not made for it to be easy to grip.

00:39:48   Marco talked about accidentally touching the touchpad.

00:39:52   It's symmetrical, more or less.

00:39:54   It's symmetrical, you know, but the buttons are kind of in the middle, so you can't even

00:39:58   feel your way to which way is the right way to pick it up.

00:40:01   If you try to feel which side is right by perhaps feeling the different texture of the touchpad and the other thing

00:40:06   If you happen to feel around and it's a touchpad side. Yeah, you're gonna move the video all that stuff is stupid

00:40:11   It shouldn't be shaped like this. It should be bigger

00:40:12   It should be something that acknowledges that people are going to grab it with their hands

00:40:16   The buttons should be different sizes and shapes and textures and positions and all that is true

00:40:21   But specifically on the issue of of the touchpad versus the d-pad thing

00:40:25   Like I said, I have trouble

00:40:27   I don't understand why this is maybe it's just because of the way i'm moving my thumb

00:40:30   I have trouble doing up down left and right I can mostly get it to do it every time but up down

00:40:33   I have a little bit trouble

00:40:34   But here's the here's the reason I think it's better than a d-pad are better than the previous Apple remote

00:40:39   Let's say first thing the previous Apple remote did not have a d-pad in the Nintendo sense

00:40:43   It had a circle and I hated that damn circle because I could never feel my way

00:40:48   Towards what was exactly up and left and down right and yeah, so you're like well you're feeling the edges of the remotes

00:40:52   Don't you know that left is perpendicular to the left edge and right is you know like?

00:40:57   Very often it just didn't feel secure to me as an actual d-pad. The actual d-pad that's a cross shaped piece of plastic

00:41:03   You can feel where the left where the right as long as you make the d-pad big enough

00:41:06   Not like the stupid tiny one on the GameCube controller, which was impossible to tell which direction you're pressing

00:41:11   Even though it was a cross. Anyway, I didn't like that circle, but setting that aside

00:41:15   Even if you're comparing it to a full-size good d-pad

00:41:19   The most important thing this this touchpad has despite the fact that the remote is the wrong shape despite the fact that it's kind of

00:41:24   hard to reach to the touchpad area over all the buttons and everything and safely get

00:41:29   to it without accidentally swiping when you pick it up.

00:41:32   The most important thing it has is, gets you out of the nightmare realm of controlling

00:41:39   anything on your television, which used to be right up on Apple TV and on your actual

00:41:44   television and I've never used the Roku remotes or anything like that so I don't know what

00:41:47   they're like, but for the longest time doing anything on your television, all you had was

00:41:51   button presses.

00:41:52   So anytime you were faced with anything

00:41:55   that had a lot of stuff on the screen

00:41:56   and you wanted to go through it,

00:41:58   but you wanted to be able to select

00:41:59   any one of those things,

00:42:00   whether it's letters in the alphabet,

00:42:02   list items in a big list or anything like that,

00:42:04   you had to go next, next, next, next, next,

00:42:06   right, right, up, up, down, down, left, left

00:42:08   for you to do the contra code

00:42:09   to try to get to the thing that you want on your screen.

00:42:12   You never had a way to go more than one thing.

00:42:15   And so, yeah, on the TiVo, they did some other things

00:42:18   like, hey, on this menu, it's such a pain to go

00:42:20   through the whole list, use channel up and channel down

00:42:22   to go a page at a time, but even that was like discrete.

00:42:24   It's discrete versus continuous.

00:42:26   Having a touch pad and adding a little bit of momentum

00:42:29   is incredibly freeing because if you see something

00:42:32   that's at the very top or the very left or the very right,

00:42:34   you can flick over to it and yeah,

00:42:35   it's not gonna be precise, but it's so much better

00:42:38   than having to go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

00:42:41   one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five,

00:42:42   six, seven, mentally, even if not speed wise,

00:42:45   even if you were stop watching me

00:42:46   and it was actually slower, mentally speaking,

00:42:49   it feels better to me not to be stuck in this like,

00:42:52   hateful game of Frogger or Crossy Road where you can always go hop, hop, hop, hop, hop.

00:42:56   Now, the touchpad they chose to do it on, the shape of the touchpad, the fact that it like bends down,

00:43:01   the fact that the whole top of the remote is made of glass,

00:43:03   the feel of the physical click and everything, all that is bad.

00:43:06   Like, but I'm here to defend the concept of finally divorcing the television from a discrete single step

00:43:14   or a single page at a time interface because you finally have more than just buttons.

00:43:18   And the sort of advanced things that I was talking about, Marco you should try this,

00:43:22   it doesn't help with the accidental swiping for scrubbing because that's all terrible, but

00:43:25   use it like a d-pad. Don't try to do the swiping. Eventually

00:43:29   I gave up on getting my thumb to correctly swipe up and down to get the

00:43:32   ability to register it. Just use it as if it's a d-pad.

00:43:35   I like it because you don't have to press all the way down because I really don't like that click, like trying to play

00:43:40   Crossy Road, speaking of on the thing, or Alto's Adventure. I didn't like having to press down and already click.

00:43:45   I wish these game developers had accepted a tap instead of a click because I don't like hearing click click click click click

00:43:50   It's pretty noisy and it doesn't feel good doesn't feel good as a game controller at all

00:43:54   It feels laggy and it doesn't you know, I don't like it. But anyway, uh,

00:43:57   Just touch the touchpad on the left go left touch the touchpad on the right to go right touch the top of the touchpad

00:44:02   To go up touch the bottom of the touchpad to go down. Don't click it. Just touch it

00:44:06   If you if you want to go I rather go right right right down down down

00:44:12   You can do that much faster if you don't have to actually physically depress a button

00:44:15   so I

00:44:17   Am pro having something I can swipe to navigate and I am pro having something that registers my touch to do interesting things

00:44:25   The particular implementation on this remote is not ideal, but I would still rather use this remote than the old one

00:44:32   it's not a humongous win, but it's a big enough win that I would never like because you know, I still have my

00:44:37   Regular Apple TV remote with the circle on it, which I never use

00:44:41   I would never swap that for this one and I probably wouldn't swap

00:44:45   The Tivo remote that I was using with my old Apple TV with this one because I you know like Marco said you're missing a Siri

00:44:51   button but even just I just I just enjoy not being in the business of hitting a button repeatedly to go an

00:44:57   integer number of screen items away from where I was I

00:45:01   Can't wait for all the tweets and emails you get about the Konami code being referred to as the contra code

00:45:08   No, that's a valid alternate name for it and the oh, yeah

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00:47:38   - All right.

00:47:40   So any other thoughts on the Apple TV?

00:47:42   - I do have more.

00:47:43   So many thoughts from just an hour of using this thing.

00:47:46   - I am surprised.

00:47:47   - A lot of people have asked me about the video scrubbing.

00:47:50   I've talked about my anger with how video scrubbing works

00:47:53   in most television attached devices.

00:47:56   And these days, also with many things

00:47:58   that are in web pages or on iPhones.

00:48:02   And I have heard a lot of good reports about the Apple TV

00:48:04   and I'm happy to say they all seem to be true.

00:48:07   This does scrubbing exactly the way I always wanted it

00:48:10   to be done.

00:48:11   And this is another instance where the little swipey pad

00:48:13   comes in handy.

00:48:14   One of the worst things about video scrubbing

00:48:17   with if you just have buttons is,

00:48:19   if you go to the end of the movie and you're like,

00:48:23   what was that scene in the middle?

00:48:24   I wanna look at that thing again.

00:48:25   All you can do is perhaps press the rewind button

00:48:29   multiple times to go like 1x speed 10x speed 20x speed and then it's going

00:48:33   really fast then you have to hit the pause button so you don't overshoot it

00:48:36   or you try to slow it down like it's difficult to drive the little the play

00:48:41   head in that way with it with a series of buttons and the other difficulty I

00:48:45   was complained about is if you want to go to the middle of the thing or jump

00:48:49   back half an hour or something like that very often attempting to navigate at all

00:48:54   just causes the whole thing to freeze and essentially do the television app

00:48:57   equivalent of beach ball where it's trying to load the video or the

00:49:01   thumbnail or wants to show you a frame of video and you're like just go to 30

00:49:04   minutes in you feel like you wish you could have someplace where you could

00:49:07   just type three zero colon zero zero go through that offset now don't do

00:49:11   anything else don't try to show me the video sliding past I don't care what you

00:49:14   do I just want you to move that little playhead to 30 minutes and the Apple TV

00:49:20   at least playing like all the things that I tried mostly like television

00:49:23   shows and movies from iTunes maybe it's up to other apps to do the same thing I

00:49:26   I think I tried HBO and Showtime and Netflix as well,

00:49:29   and they seem to do similarly well.

00:49:30   But anyway, certainly for the Apple things,

00:49:33   while you're playing, as Marco found out,

00:49:35   if you swipe the little touch pad, it moves the play head,

00:49:39   and it moves the play head no matter what immediately.

00:49:42   If it has video to show you,

00:49:44   it will change the little thumbnails and stuff.

00:49:46   If it doesn't have video to show you,

00:49:47   the thumbnail will be whatever the last frame was,

00:49:49   but it moves the play head.

00:49:51   It does not wait.

00:49:52   It does not beach ball.

00:49:53   It just goes where you want it.

00:49:54   It shows you the time offset,

00:49:56   and it is glorious.

00:49:57   It's like finally, finally they understood

00:49:59   that that is the most important thing.

00:50:01   All the other stuff I don't care.

00:50:02   Like if you can do it, fine.

00:50:03   Because I did, I loaded like an episode of Legend of Korra

00:50:06   or something to get all the, you know, a small episode.

00:50:08   So it had all the things.

00:50:09   It will show you live thumbnails as you scrub around

00:50:11   if it can, but if it can't,

00:50:12   it always prioritizes moving the thumbnail.

00:50:15   And then when you hit the button to play from that position,

00:50:17   maybe it takes a little while for it to get the video

00:50:18   and start playing into that position.

00:50:20   It's fine, whatever.

00:50:21   When you're watching, you can tap the,

00:50:25   you can click the left side of the touch pad.

00:50:28   This is another good UI type thing.

00:50:29   If you rest your thumb on the left side of the touch pad,

00:50:31   it puts a little 10 second rewind icon on the screen,

00:50:35   letting you know, hey, if you were to press here,

00:50:38   it would go back 10 seconds.

00:50:39   You haven't actually done the back 10 seconds yet,

00:50:40   but it's telling you.

00:50:41   And same thing if you would just lay your thumb

00:50:42   on the right side of the touch pad,

00:50:44   it says that you can go forward 30.

00:50:45   I wish those numbers were adjustable.

00:50:46   I'm not sure if they are.

00:50:47   But anyway, if you tap those buttons,

00:50:49   you can go forward and back 30 seconds.

00:50:50   Of course, we've all seen the cool Siri demos

00:50:52   of what did he say?

00:50:53   and then it goes back some amount of seconds,

00:50:56   turns on subtitles, shows you what you just saw,

00:50:59   and then turns the subtitles off automatically,

00:51:01   which I think is a very clever feature.

00:51:02   The only difficulty of it is

00:51:04   if you miss an entire conversation.

00:51:06   I don't know how it picks how far to go back.

00:51:07   I don't know how it picks when to turn the subtitles off.

00:51:10   They had to make a compromise there.

00:51:11   It seems like a reasonable compromise, but anyway.

00:51:14   You can swipe down from the top to pull the menu item down

00:51:17   to turn on and off the subtitles.

00:51:18   Another thing that was a little bit annoying to do

00:51:19   if you didn't know the secret shortcuts

00:51:20   with the old Apple TV.

00:51:23   You can fast forward and rewind scan.

00:51:25   It's still not as capable at fast forward rewind scanning

00:51:28   as like a PlayStation 3 is where you have from like 1.5X

00:51:32   with pitch adjusted audio still playing

00:51:34   to all up to like 120X.

00:51:36   The reason the PlayStation 3 needs 120X

00:51:38   is because it doesn't have flicks scrubbing

00:51:40   through the whole thing.

00:51:41   That's not a problem on the Apple TV.

00:51:43   I can go right to the middle of something

00:51:44   or right to the end or right to three quarters through

00:51:46   very easily.

00:51:47   Whereas on the PlayStation, I would have to go to 120X mode

00:51:50   and move over to it or whatever.

00:51:51   But anyway, big thumbs up on the video scrubbing.

00:51:54   They finally did it right as far as I can tell.

00:51:57   If applications do it wrong, I will at least know

00:51:59   that it is not the fault of the hardware or the OS.

00:52:02   It's only the fault of the people

00:52:03   implementing those applications,

00:52:04   not doing it the way Apple does it.

00:52:07   - I'm impressed.

00:52:08   I really thought you were gonna find something

00:52:10   to dislike about this, but sounds like we're good to go.

00:52:13   That's excellent.

00:52:14   - No, I mean, really, I've heard only,

00:52:16   I haven't done much video scrubbing with it myself

00:52:18   'cause I'm not much of a scrubber, I guess.

00:52:21   But I've heard only great things about it from people who care more about these things

00:52:25   or use it more than I do, like Jon. I mean, I think that is one thing. Almost everybody

00:52:30   has agreed that the setup process can be very bumpy with the number of times you have to

00:52:35   enter passwords on that terrible key line. But almost everyone also agrees that the video

00:52:40   seeking behavior and that whole engine that is in there is incredibly good. And also,

00:52:46   I mean this is just good hardware.

00:52:49   You know this has the A8, it has two gigs of RAM,

00:52:52   it's fast.

00:52:53   I am optimistic for the future of this platform

00:52:57   just because of what everyone else is going to do with it.

00:52:59   You know what Apple does with it is still a big question mark

00:53:02   and Apple's stuff recently has been inconsistent I would say.

00:53:06   You know like some stuff they nail pretty well,

00:53:08   some stuff is pretty half baked even well after launch.

00:53:13   So Apple stuff I think will be less consistent

00:53:15   But third party stuff, I think there's a lot here to do.

00:53:20   There's a lot of hardware to use.

00:53:22   And we'll talk about gaming in a sec,

00:53:24   maybe after the next sponsor break,

00:53:25   'cause there's lots to talk about here.

00:53:27   But I do think there's a lot of potential here

00:53:29   for developers.

00:53:30   I mean, I did start, I don't know if I'm gonna actually

00:53:33   finish and release such a thing,

00:53:35   but I did actually start porting Overcast to it,

00:53:38   just to see how much work will this take?

00:53:41   Do I have to really make a lot of special cases?

00:53:43   Is it going to need a whole lot of work to do,

00:53:46   or will it need relatively little?

00:53:48   And so I've been playing with the SDK,

00:53:49   I'm playing with the hardware a little bit,

00:53:50   and it is really, really nice.

00:53:54   Like, interface challenges are gonna certainly be there,

00:53:58   but it is really nice to develop for

00:54:01   because it is basically iOS minus some stuff.

00:54:05   But it is very, most of iOS is there,

00:54:08   and the hardware is very capable,

00:54:10   and this is the baseline.

00:54:12   In five years from now, developers will be complaining

00:54:15   they have to go all the way back and support the A8.

00:54:18   But right now, a new hardware line where the A8

00:54:21   is the minimum is pretty nice.

00:54:24   And also, it has AC power.

00:54:27   So you can be as power inefficient as you want.

00:54:30   So you can do things that really crank that CPU hard.

00:54:33   So it is gonna be a really, really nice developer platform.

00:54:38   I do have concerns about whether it will be worth

00:54:41   developers doing a lot for it so soon.

00:54:45   And that I think remains to be seen.

00:54:48   - Yeah, the app, I went to the app store first thing,

00:54:49   I was surprised when you load the thing up,

00:54:52   like it looks empty, like where are all the icons,

00:54:53   because the old Apple TV, it would just start off

00:54:56   with like tons of icons on your screen,

00:54:57   and new icons would appear, whether you wanted them or not,

00:54:59   you'd have to turn on like the, whatever the parental

00:55:02   controls to make them disappear and stuff.

00:55:04   This thing comes out and there's the Apple icons

00:55:06   for the Apple stuff, and settings and search, and that's it.

00:55:10   So immediately the first stop is always,

00:55:11   oh, I gotta go with Netflix, HBO, Showtime,

00:55:15   all the other different apps that I did.

00:55:16   And I went in to get those and I don't know

00:55:20   if this was just the top list or whatever,

00:55:22   but on the first screen or screen or two in the App Store

00:55:27   was all the things I wanted.

00:55:28   I got Alto's Adventure, Crossy Road, Netflix, HBO,

00:55:33   Showtime, FX, USA, ABC, NBC, CBS, they're all there.

00:55:40   To restore my Apple TV to its previous level of functionality,

00:55:43   including only the apps that I actually use

00:55:45   or that the kids use, was pretty easy to do.

00:55:48   When I went to download this,

00:55:49   I think this is the second time it asked me

00:55:50   for my Apple ID password, and I entered it in once,

00:55:53   and it asked me, "Do you want to have to enter that?

00:55:56   "Do you wanna have to enter this

00:55:57   "every time you make a purchase?"

00:55:59   And I said no, because I really don't wanna enter it

00:56:02   every time I make a purchase.

00:56:03   - I accidentally clicked the yes on that,

00:56:05   because I just misused the trackpad.

00:56:08   It was another one of my many errors.

00:56:10   So then I had to go dig around in settings, enter it again.

00:56:13   - Yeah, and I'm a little bit wary about that

00:56:15   because I mean, really it should have integration

00:56:17   with touch ID, really the remote should have

00:56:18   a touch ID sensor on it.

00:56:19   There's so many gimmies here.

00:56:20   That's by the way, with the negativity about this,

00:56:23   all the people complaining about the setup process,

00:56:25   they're right, it's bad.

00:56:26   And it's like, it feels like an unforced error.

00:56:28   It was like, come on Apple, you know how to do this.

00:56:30   This is not your first Apple TV.

00:56:32   You have name brand technologies across your whole product

00:56:35   line that solve all of these problems.

00:56:37   You had an existing iOS app that worked with the old one that gave you a keyboard.

00:56:40   You've got Touch ID, you've got iCloud Keychain, you've got iCloud Photo Library, you've got

00:56:45   all these things, they're all just sitting there.

00:56:49   That's why it feels so bad.

00:56:50   It's like this setup experience is worse than the Apple norm for what seems like no good

00:56:55   reasons.

00:56:56   Theories I've heard, I think Jason Snell feel this theory, that the Apple TV was actually

00:56:59   done a long time ago and wasn't launched because they were waiting for the content deals and

00:57:03   eventually they said, "Well, content deal,

00:57:05   schmontent deal, we're shipping it."

00:57:07   And so that's why it doesn't have support for technologies

00:57:11   and things that are old hat as far as we're concerned,

00:57:13   but they weren't old hat when this work was actually done

00:57:15   on the Apple TV team.

00:57:16   And that the Apple TV team was more or less disbanded

00:57:18   and sent to do other things while the Apple TV

00:57:20   just stood there.

00:57:20   I don't know if there's any truth behind that,

00:57:22   but that's what it feels like.

00:57:24   So that's why people are complaining

00:57:25   because it can be really bad like it was for Jason,

00:57:27   where he's got to accept the 10 new terms and conditions

00:57:29   and he's got to do that on his Mac

00:57:30   and you're entering your stupid long password

00:57:32   million times with that terrible keyboard and the whole time you're just

00:57:35   grumbling why don't you use the iOS app that is all terrible and that's

00:57:38   definitely worthy of complaining about but if you power through that crap kind

00:57:42   of like I power through that stuff with my Wii U to Wii transfer experience you

00:57:48   come out the other side you're left with a product that I think is clearly better

00:57:52   than the old Apple TV in many many ways and that shows promise and like and the

00:57:57   promise is frustrating to like talk about I love the fact that there's a

00:58:00   touchpad on the remote, I hate pretty much everything else about the remote.

00:58:02   Like I would like a good remote with a touchpad.

00:58:04   And one other thing I would throw in with a touchpad on the remote, when you go to the

00:58:09   app switcher, which by the way, people might not know it's there, you double tap the home

00:58:13   button, which looks like a big picture of a TV on your remote, it will bring up an iOS-like

00:58:17   app switcher that shows all your apps, kind of like the old style app switcher, the iOS

00:58:21   8 app switcher, shows each screen next to each other.

00:58:24   When you go between them, you have to basically do the equivalent of a D-pad input, swipe,

00:58:29   or tap tap, I would love it if I could touch my thumb

00:58:33   to the touch pad and as I move my thumb,

00:58:37   the things move on the screen tracking my thumb.

00:58:39   You know what I mean?

00:58:39   Like in other words, more like an iOS scrolling type thing

00:58:42   where yeah, you can flick, but if you flick,

00:58:43   you're flicking like you're flicking the screen in iOS,

00:58:45   as opposed to what this thing looks like it's doing is,

00:58:48   I'm waiting to get a gesture that I interpret as go left one

00:58:52   and it's not quite bad.

00:58:53   You can swipe past more than one at a time, I think,

00:58:55   but anyway, it just feels a little bit off to me.

00:58:58   A lot of that is because the touchpad is too darn small.

00:59:01   But anyway, yeah, a lot of negativity

00:59:03   about the setup process, all of which I agree with,

00:59:05   all of which should be complained about,

00:59:06   and all of which were just really angry at Apple

00:59:08   because they just seem like unforced errors.

00:59:11   - Yeah, I mean, once you have it set up,

00:59:13   it seems like a pretty nice device.

00:59:14   But again, we're all hitting this right now,

00:59:16   and there's gonna be a lot of people

00:59:18   who are hitting this this holiday season

00:59:20   as they get their first new Apple TV,

00:59:22   possibly their first Apple TV ever.

00:59:24   And I do think that it seems like they rushed it out

00:59:29   to make this holiday season,

00:59:32   but it doesn't seem like it's ready.

00:59:33   There's so many little exceptions.

00:59:35   It really does seem like it could have used

00:59:37   six more months of polish.

00:59:38   - It's not like the features that are there aren't polished,

00:59:43   they just aren't there.

00:59:44   Why the hell can I not enter text on my phone?

00:59:47   That's not a polish issue.

00:59:48   That's just a plain feature thing.

00:59:51   And maybe the other things you could say as polished

00:59:53   like oh, because Apple recently updated the terms and conditions for the App Store.

00:59:58   If you haven't agreed to those or if your credit card is expired or you have to enter

01:00:02   your credit card code again or anything involving purchasing from Apple that is messed up, the

01:00:09   television doesn't have a way for you to fix that apparently.

01:00:12   You have to go back to your Mac and try to do it in iTunes which feels really weird.

01:00:17   Kind of the same thing with, this is not Apple's fault entirely, but like activating the HBO

01:00:22   Go app if you're a subscriber to HBO like I am they all have a thing that says like oh go to your web browser

01:00:26   and go to HBO go comm slash activate and enter the six letter code and

01:00:31   You try to and you go to the HBO go website and wants you to log in with your cable providers

01:00:35   Login credentials and it pops up a little iframe and now you have the Verizon iframed inside HBO go

01:00:41   which is all to try to get your Apple TV to work and

01:00:44   That is all gross and is gonna confuse many a person on Christmas morning or whenever during the holidays

01:00:51   There's only so much Apple can do to fix that, but surely Apple can fix the equivalent of

01:00:56   those experiences in its own ecosystem.

01:00:59   And so that maybe is an area of polish.

01:01:01   But yeah, just like I felt like if the story of them having it done and then disbanding

01:01:07   the team and waiting for content deals, if that's even remotely true, that's silly because

01:01:12   they just should have left those people on it and said, "Just maintain this and keep

01:01:16   pace."

01:01:17   And so when we introduce a new technology or a new thing, make sure it's integrated.

01:01:21   And by the way, while you're there,

01:01:22   find those corner cases for the people

01:01:23   who haven't agreed to the new iTunes terms

01:01:25   and you can just put a UI for that in the thing or whatever.

01:01:29   - I mean, if I had to guess,

01:01:30   I'm guessing that the biggest reason why this,

01:01:33   why there's so many rough edges

01:01:34   around entering your password, logging into the store,

01:01:37   different store issues,

01:01:39   is because this crosses departments within Apple.

01:01:42   This goes from the engineering department

01:01:45   into the ediQ-led store infrastructure area, right?

01:01:49   And so like that, crossing those lines

01:01:52   has always been very messy in the products.

01:01:55   That's always where people hit a lot of issues

01:01:57   and errors and bad user experiences.

01:02:00   And I've heard so many things from various people

01:02:03   inside and outside of Apple, some of which conflict,

01:02:06   but most of which tend to agree,

01:02:09   anytime the other teams need something from the store team,

01:02:14   it's hard to get, or it's a problem in some way,

01:02:16   or it takes too long, or something.

01:02:18   there seems to be a lot of friction there.

01:02:20   And I don't know whose fault it is,

01:02:21   it doesn't really matter.

01:02:22   The result is that when the products reach us,

01:02:26   the consumers, we see that friction.

01:02:28   In the same way that like, as Microsoft was so famous

01:02:31   for infighting back in the day,

01:02:32   I don't know how bad it is now,

01:02:34   but back in the day they were famous for it,

01:02:35   like between Windows and Office,

01:02:36   and a lot of times those infights

01:02:39   would affect customers negatively,

01:02:41   and really affect the whole company negatively as a result.

01:02:44   We see that in Apple in the way that the software products

01:02:48   have to interact with the store backend

01:02:50   and anything that uses the store backend.

01:02:52   And again, who knows?

01:02:54   I'm sure there are lots of smart people working on that,

01:02:56   but whatever the cause,

01:02:57   things that need to interact with that

01:03:00   tend to work worse than the rest of the stack.

01:03:02   And the Apple TV as a product

01:03:05   depends so heavily on the store backend

01:03:09   that I think that is really causing a lot of this friction.

01:03:13   And there might be tons of well-meaning teams

01:03:16   and people inside of Apple who are trying to fix this,

01:03:18   but even simply through the way these teams are organized

01:03:21   and divided between each other,

01:03:23   it just might be really hard to do

01:03:24   and just therefore just doesn't happen,

01:03:26   or doesn't happen well enough in practice.

01:03:29   - Yeah, it's not all aspects of the store either.

01:03:30   It just seems to be the things that have to do

01:03:32   with account management.

01:03:33   So for example, once I entered my password

01:03:35   and I was downloading all those apps,

01:03:37   when I tapped them a little install or get icon,

01:03:40   I don't know why sometimes it said install,

01:03:41   sometimes it said get or whatever.

01:03:42   Anyway, they downloaded really fast.

01:03:45   I was just basically going through tap, tap, tap,

01:03:47   like it felt fast.

01:03:49   A little circle progress indicator filled really fast

01:03:52   and all of them, maybe they're all tiny apps

01:03:53   'cause they're all TVML and they're just tiny little,

01:03:55   but everything about that felt fast.

01:03:58   And yet when you had to deal with anything having to do

01:04:00   with, hey, am I signed into my account?

01:04:02   Have I done any sort of administrative bookkeeping stuff

01:04:04   related to my account?

01:04:05   Do I need to enter the little three digit code

01:04:07   from the back of my credit card again?

01:04:09   Is there a UI to do that in here?

01:04:10   All that just felt like it was lacking

01:04:12   and they just punted that and said,

01:04:13   "Well, there's 17 other ways for you to do that.

01:04:15   You can't do that on your Apple TV.

01:04:17   We're just going to throw up something in front of your face that says, 'Go do this

01:04:19   someplace else and then come back here and everything will work.'"

01:04:23   And even with the weird sign and stuff, like going to the HBO thing and signing in through

01:04:26   Verizon and all that other stuff, it's like, "Okay, well, your device is activated now.

01:04:32   Go back to your TV and it should be activated."

01:04:35   And I always walk into the next room to go back to my TV dreading the fact that I'm going

01:04:38   to look at the TV and it's just going to be sitting there saying, "Please sign it."

01:04:41   know, like, the dots won't connect.

01:04:44   If that happens, like, what the hell do you do?

01:04:46   You just go back and try it again.

01:04:47   But every time I did it, it actually worked.

01:04:48   And maybe I just lucked out on it.

01:04:50   But that is not a seamless experience.

01:04:53   Dealing with Apple's own store is still

01:04:54   not a seamless experience.

01:04:55   But some aspects of it are good.

01:04:57   The video downloads fast.

01:04:58   The apps download fast.

01:04:59   The apps launch fast.

01:05:01   This thing feels faster than Mytivo,

01:05:03   which is ridiculous, considering Mytivo costs, like,

01:05:05   five times as much, literally, than this.

01:05:07   But it feels faster.

01:05:08   And everything about it, like, I

01:05:11   I can kind of tell that it has two gigs of RAM because I went to the AppSwitcher and

01:05:14   I went back to a game that I had played like a half an hour ago and the game was still

01:05:17   in memory sitting on the place where I left off.

01:05:21   That is a sort of premium quality TV box experience.

01:05:26   So it felt good.

01:05:27   But yeah, it's just embarrassing.

01:05:29   The setup stuff is just embarrassing.

01:05:30   And I still think the remote is kind of embarrassing because I can't imagine, like, maybe people

01:05:37   will eventually come to appreciate what I was just describing, the swipiness versus the tapping,

01:05:41   but that may be more of just a personal thing where I hate waiting for the machine to do

01:05:46   anything and I hate the fact that I have to, I know I'm going to have to depress and release

01:05:51   this little rubberized button to operate a mechanical switch seven times to get to the

01:05:55   seventh item. That probably doesn't annoy other people as much as it annoys me, and in fact,

01:05:59   other people probably feel more comfortable feeling that physical click seven times to get

01:06:03   get from place to place.

01:06:04   So I don't think they're gonna pick up on those.

01:06:07   You know, the things that appeal to me about the remote

01:06:09   may not be the things that appeal to other people

01:06:10   and everything else about the remote is just terrible,

01:06:13   as discussed in previous shows.

01:06:14   It's just too small, it's the wrong shape,

01:06:16   it doesn't feel good, it doesn't look good,

01:06:18   it doesn't light up, it's not easy to find,

01:06:20   it falls down couch cushions.

01:06:21   If you dig for it, you're gonna accidentally

01:06:22   scrub your video and be pissed off.

01:06:24   Yeah.

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01:08:29   So let's talk about Apple TV gaming.

01:08:32   - Okay.

01:08:35   - Wow, that was a long pause.

01:08:37   So Jon, I'm assuming that your gaming experience

01:08:39   has been limited in the short time you've had it.

01:08:41   - Well, here's what I played.

01:08:42   I played Crossy Road, but also Adventure.

01:08:44   Two games that I was already familiar with.

01:08:46   I thought Crossy Road was,

01:08:48   well I thought also Adventure was the best test

01:08:51   because it only has one button modulo

01:08:53   the wingsuit activation and some other stuff,

01:08:55   But for the most part you're you're just tapping a button and and that's that's why I said before that I think that the

01:09:02   The remote isn't like that the touchpad that you press it

01:09:07   Actually, the touchpad actually bends like it bends the tip of it goes down

01:09:11   That's not a good button

01:09:13   Like if that's gonna be the main button you press like to start doing a flip or jump or whatever in alto's adventure

01:09:18   It just doesn't feel good as a button. It does not feel like a controller button. It is I mean, it's big

01:09:24   It's easy to find it's not like you know, it's good to be the primary button. It's just doesn't feel good

01:09:28   It's a pretty loud click. It feels more like I don't know what it feels like

01:09:33   Maybe maybe clicking a mouse button. It's as if

01:09:36   Every time you want to make Mario jump you click an old-style mouse button

01:09:41   It's just doesn't it doesn't feel like an a button essentially, right?

01:09:44   Yeah, and this this this seems like a lot of travel on it and just it feels kind of like there's a little bit of

01:09:49   Lag I know that probably isn't lag. I don't know what I'm feeling

01:09:52   Maybe I'm feeling like the fact that my thumb has to go through a lot of travel. I don't know

01:09:56   I've I've spent a lot of time using all sorts of controllers

01:09:59   This a doesn't feel like a controller and B doesn't feel good. We're just kind of a shame

01:10:03   That's why I was wishing like if they just did tap or whatever cross your road

01:10:08   Similar cross your road. I feel like is a little bit better because it's kind of more deliberate

01:10:12   I guess where you're going hop hop hop, but even that

01:10:15   And then cross road of course

01:10:16   You have to do the side swipe on the up swipe to do the directional changes

01:10:19   I found that the directional change is frustratingly inaccurate in the iOS games where you're swiping on the screen

01:10:24   I don't know if it's because I'm trying to it's kind of like playing Zaxxon

01:10:28   You guys don't remember that but sort of isometric view of a game where I could never quite my my hand eye

01:10:35   Coordination connection could never quite get on the same page in terms of okay

01:10:39   So am I am I pressing up to the left like northwest?

01:10:44   To try to make my Zaxxon shift go left in ship space or am I pressing?

01:10:50   Directly west like is it is it relative or absolute control from the perspective of the ship or from the perspective?

01:10:56   I'm looking at the screen. It's very often in crossy road

01:10:58   I will swipe what looks like left along the ground, but it wants me to swipe left with respect to the screen anyway

01:11:05   Those problems seemed lessened somewhat by using the swipey remote for the television

01:11:10   I don't know why I did like on my first couple runs on Crossy Road. I hadn't played in a very long time

01:11:15   I did really well with the television. So I guess the control scheme is pretty okay for that

01:11:19   But the button is still pretty terrible performance wise it performs like an a8 so, you know, and those games are not challenging

01:11:24   The games launch fast

01:11:26   They they launched faster on a lot of our iOS devices because I don't have many iOS devices that are as fast as an aid

01:11:31   in the house

01:11:32   I

01:11:33   Can't imagine playing a quote-unquote real console game with that remote

01:11:38   I don't even like playing with it with the Wii remote sideways and that has a real d-pad on it. So

01:11:44   I don't know

01:11:46   Gaming wise the kids seem interested in it because they play a lot of iOS games

01:11:50   They're excited to play them on TV. We play two-player crossy road and that was a little fun twist as well

01:11:54   I don't know if I'll do a lot of gaming on it

01:11:57   I guess it depends on what games come out

01:11:59   But I know I would be more inclined to to take it seriously as a gaming device for my gaming needs

01:12:06   If it had what we know marker already bought which is a third-party control that looks like a console controller

01:12:12   Yeah, so about that controller. I haven't used it yet

01:12:15   It's it's it's charging up on my desk, and I'm probably gonna try it out tomorrow night

01:12:19   But it feels you know it's 50 bucks

01:12:22   Which I guess is in the round I mean what is like a ps4 controller costs like 40

01:12:27   They're more expensive than you think right 50 bucks is is reasonable a reasonable price

01:12:32   Is this what you should say what make and model this is it's the steel case nimbus

01:12:36   Which is this the only one so far? I think it might be you can use any

01:12:39   I think you use any made for iPhone controller with it. Okay. So anyway, it's not a great feeling controller

01:12:45   I will see how it goes in practice

01:12:47   But just like pushing the buttons just without it being plugged into anything

01:12:51   The d-pad does not feel very good. The buttons don't feel very good. It feels

01:12:55   Kind of like, you know like back in the day

01:12:58   I don't know

01:12:59   I don't know what the current market for these things would be but back when I had a Sega Genesis growing up

01:13:04   You'd occasionally be at a friend's house where they didn't want to spend the full $12 to get the the name-brand

01:13:11   Sega controller as their player 2 controller

01:13:15   So you'd be player 2 and you'd have like the like not the $12 nice one

01:13:20   But the $7 crappy one and it was like a third-party

01:13:23   Kind of cheap knockoff that tried to be as good as the as the real Sega one

01:13:28   but never was. This feels like one of those. Like compared to the other, compared to like

01:13:34   you know real Sony or Microsoft controllers or Nintendo controllers that are actually

01:13:38   like good, this just feels like a third party knock off kind of controller. It doesn't,

01:13:43   it doesn't feel like terrible, it just doesn't feel good. So all that aside, and there was

01:13:50   a great article that I put this link in the show notes that I wanted to bring up, there

01:13:52   was a great article on Polygon today I think that came out that was all about like you

01:13:57   know, like what are the best games on Apple TV and it talks about like you know how many

01:14:01   of them actually change noticeably if you're using this controller versus just using the

01:14:06   Siri remote. And like Rayman, like it becomes, like a lot of these games like in Rayman they

01:14:12   give the case where apparently normally if you just use the Apple TV remote the player

01:14:17   kind of just runs at a fixed speed and you're just controlling jumping and stuff and if

01:14:22   plug in a controller, then you have full control over the player. So it's like, the games change

01:14:28   in pretty substantial ways if you use one of these controllers. But in general, I think

01:14:34   there's going to be two main problems that this faces. Number one, these aren't going

01:14:39   to be AAA quality games, just because the economics are not going to work out for people

01:14:45   for a while, if ever.

01:14:46   Well, they could be shovelware. Rayman, you talked about, I'm pretty sure, is shovelware.

01:14:50   that is that is a high profile multi platform console game that they ported to iOS and now

01:14:56   Apple TV if it's the game it's Rayman Legends right?

01:14:58   It's Rayman something I don't know I haven't played it yet but it doesn't matter so there's

01:15:02   there's going to be obviously a lot of shovelware from from iPad and iPhone games of course

01:15:07   because it's easy but yeah so there's going to be issues of like you know the games aren't

01:15:12   going to be that great from from just like the the budget perspective because they're

01:15:17   they're not going to be able to make that much money.

01:15:19   Compared to selling it for 60 bucks on a console,

01:15:22   they're not going to make as much money on this device

01:15:25   that you're lucky if you can get 10 bucks up front

01:15:28   for a game or do some kind of terrible in-app purchase scheme

01:15:31   and the installed base for the Apple TV is going to be

01:15:33   smaller than the game consoles for a while.

01:15:36   Probably in the long term it'll eventually surpass them

01:15:39   but for at least a few years it's probably

01:15:41   going to be smaller.

01:15:42   So we'll see what happens there.

01:15:44   To me, I think what we're gonna see here,

01:15:47   I think it's kind of like YouTube versus HBO of games,

01:15:52   if that makes some sense.

01:15:54   The big budget AAA games, that's like the HBO

01:15:57   in this analogy, those are gonna go to the consoles

01:15:59   and the PCs, because that's where they can charge

01:16:01   the most money and really reach the most hardcore enthusiasts

01:16:04   who are willing to pay a premium to play those games

01:16:06   and to really get into them and to appeal to game

01:16:08   enthusiasts and everything.

01:16:09   Whereas YouTube is kinda like, well, anybody can throw

01:16:12   some stuff up here and most of it's gonna be garbage

01:16:14   some of it's gonna be good.

01:16:15   That I think is gonna be more like

01:16:17   what the Apple TV gaming scene becomes,

01:16:19   where it's gonna be a lot of garbage, some good stuff.

01:16:22   It's probably never gonna be the quality

01:16:24   that you'd get out of a AAA studio,

01:16:26   AAA release on a console,

01:16:28   but there's gonna be a lot more stuff,

01:16:31   and it's a lot more casual, and the bar's a lot lower.

01:16:34   And because programming for iOS is easy,

01:16:35   and distribution, despite all of our complaints

01:16:37   in the App Store, is still way easier

01:16:39   than trying to ship a console game.

01:16:41   So I think it's gonna be more like that,

01:16:44   And that isn't necessarily a bad thing,

01:16:46   but it's just different.

01:16:47   This is never going to be a competitive gaming console

01:16:51   in what we think of as a gaming console.

01:16:53   But it might be a thing that people play games on,

01:16:57   if that makes sense.

01:16:59   - Yeah, real-time follow-up.

01:17:00   Apparently Rayman Legends is not on iOS.

01:17:02   It's called Rayman Adventures.

01:17:03   I'm not sure how much it shares,

01:17:04   but Rayman Legends is on PlayStation 3 and 4

01:17:08   and Wii U and 360 and Xbox One and the Vita and Windows,

01:17:11   but not on iOS.

01:17:13   So I have some hope for the people who are good at making iOS games will become good

01:17:20   at making Apple TV games.

01:17:22   I'm really disappointed about the rules surrounding controllers.

01:17:25   I'm disappointed Apple doesn't make a first-party controller.

01:17:27   What you said about third-party controllers is still entirely true with the one possible

01:17:31   exception of controllers made for esports, which cost more and are presumably higher

01:17:37   quality and better feeling.

01:17:39   But the consumer third-party controllers, always gross.

01:17:42   Like even as recently as, I think the last one I actually bought was maybe for the GameCube,

01:17:48   but I always play with them in stores, you would think, "How can it be that much worse?"

01:17:51   Like it's just, it's a pad with buttons, and if you look at pictures of them, you're like,

01:17:54   "Actually, the third-party ones look better."

01:17:56   Like they're better suited to my hands, they're a different shape, I like what they did with

01:18:00   the controls, and then you just press the buttons, and you're like, "What have you guys

01:18:03   done?

01:18:04   What did you do?

01:18:05   It's just a button.

01:18:06   How can you screw it up?

01:18:07   Why does it feel so different or bad?"

01:18:09   Right, like a Super Nintendo controller would feel better than this.

01:18:11   Yeah, and I don't know what magic first-party controllers have or just, you know,

01:18:16   you could say it's just that you're used to the first-party controller.

01:18:19   You get the thing, you use the player one controller for a long time,

01:18:21   then you cheap out and you get a third-party one and it feels different and you don't like it.

01:18:25   But there is no first-party controller with the Apple TV. There's just that silly remote.

01:18:29   So it's not like you're comparing the Nimbus Steelcase thing to Apple's first-party control that feels really good.

01:18:34   You're comparing it to nothing and you still find it doesn't, you know, feel good to your hands.

01:18:38   So I totally believe that I don't know what it is that makes first party controllers so much better

01:18:44   Although I have to say that I'm still you know

01:18:46   I've I've been playing destiny in my ps4 controller for a long time and

01:18:50   The l2 and r2 trigger squeak when I hold them down and it bothers me a little bit

01:18:55   Have I destroyed it by playing 500 hours of destiny? Maybe I don't feel like I'm being that rough on the thing

01:19:01   I just feel like it's not up to Nintendo's quality standard

01:19:03   I guess the GameCube triggers did squeak a little bit too, but compared to the Wii U pro controller

01:19:08   which feels as solid as a rock even though the thumbsticks are in the wrong place.

01:19:12   Anyway, I may be interested enough to buy a real controller for my Apple TV depending

01:19:19   on how much my kids get into playing it and how much I get into playing it, but your view

01:19:25   so far of the Steelcase Nimbus is not making me run out and buy that particular model,

01:19:29   so maybe I'll just wait.

01:19:30   I mean, honestly, I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of these.

01:19:32   I honestly wouldn't.

01:19:33   I don't think the market can really support a lot of them.

01:19:37   I think it can support one to two, really.

01:19:40   And only because, like, if this wasn't sold

01:19:42   in the Apple store, I wouldn't have even considered it.

01:19:45   But I was there to get a second Apple TV

01:19:47   because I wanted one for my desk to develop on

01:19:51   so I can use the nice remote

01:19:53   and not have to use the terrible simulator remote.

01:19:56   So I wanted, so anyway, I was there

01:19:57   and I got one kind of impulse buying.

01:19:59   But if they weren't in the store, I don't think,

01:20:01   I don't think I would have gotten one.

01:20:03   - Apple could be doing the wait and see thing too.

01:20:05   Like hey if people really start making console quality games

01:20:08   There's no reason the Apple can't make a first-party controller and ship it with the next Apple TV other than the fact that it will destroy

01:20:13   You know the poor people who design the packaging they'd be like I have to put this in the box

01:20:18   It destroys my whole box design

01:20:20   It's supposed to be a cute little Apple TV and have this little cubby with the remote and

01:20:23   And the wire and everything fits so neatly and now you got to give me this control

01:20:26   It's bigger that entire box combined. I gotta find someplace to put this

01:20:29   It just seems like a shame like that

01:20:31   part of me thinks is like half the reason they don't want to sell a controller is because it necessarily would have to be so

01:20:36   much larger and

01:20:37   Everything about all their packaging their products is like how small can we make the box?

01:20:40   How many of these can we fit in a shipping container?

01:20:42   How little waste can we make environmentally speaking?

01:20:45   And there's just no getting around the fact that if you want something for adults to hold with two hands

01:20:49   It has to be a certain size and you have to make a bigger box

01:20:52   No, honestly, I think that that is probably a really big part of the reason why they don't make one

01:20:58   They seem to do a lot like I think this is kind of like what I mentioned last week about how I feel like

01:21:04   Johnny Ives influence is slightly too strong in the organization. There used to be some some adjustment there

01:21:10   I feel like the the influence of

01:21:13   Packaging size is so strong right now that they do things like that that like it's optimizing for the size of the box

01:21:22   when it actually has

01:21:25   noticeable ramifications on the product.

01:21:27   So there's some things that they could use,

01:21:29   I think some rebalancing, but regardless, yeah,

01:21:32   I wouldn't expect Apple to make a game controller

01:21:34   that's any good, even if they did make one for themselves,

01:21:36   because for all the same reasons,

01:21:39   everything that is making Apple's products compelling

01:21:43   and good today, hardware wise,

01:21:46   of like making these like thin, sleek things that are,

01:21:49   by the way, did I mention thin?

01:21:50   By the way, it's really thin.

01:21:51   What is required to make a good game controller

01:21:54   goes totally against Apple's hardware design

01:21:58   in recent years.

01:21:59   Like, I don't think they are capable

01:22:01   of shipping one that is good.

01:22:03   They would never get out the door.

01:22:05   - Yeah, because it's the same reason, you know,

01:22:07   the remote is the best example.

01:22:08   If they could make a good controller,

01:22:10   they would have made a good remote.

01:22:11   - Exactly. - It just doesn't,

01:22:13   and I kind of, like, packaging is kind of silly

01:22:15   because there are, like, legit reasons

01:22:16   for the packaging to, you know,

01:22:17   to make a minimal packaging.

01:22:18   Regardless of the size of the product,

01:22:19   you do want to make minimal packaging for economics

01:22:21   and for environmental reasons,

01:22:22   both of which are good to go.

01:22:24   But you just look at the Apple TV

01:22:28   and the size of the remote, and you have to think,

01:22:30   these two were designed as a pair,

01:22:32   and they are in scale with each other.

01:22:34   And it's ignoring the fact that human beings

01:22:36   are not in scale with the Apple TV.

01:22:38   I don't care how big the puck is.

01:22:39   Don't size the remote based on the size of the puck.

01:22:42   Size it based on hands.

01:22:44   Shape it and size it based on hands.

01:22:46   And there's not too many things that Apple makes

01:22:48   that you grip in that way.

01:22:51   Like obviously the phones and the pads and stuff,

01:22:53   they just, they want to be like, you know,

01:22:55   as thin as possible until they're, you know,

01:22:58   until it becomes a non-issue and you're holding like a,

01:23:01   a completely clear piece of Lexan that weighs almost nothing

01:23:04   that magically has an image of here on the screen.

01:23:05   Apple would be all for that, right?

01:23:07   But they make keyboards that you touch

01:23:08   and those they've been trying to shrink down,

01:23:10   but at least the key cap,

01:23:11   key cap is still full size.

01:23:12   They make the sushi mouse, which you touch,

01:23:14   but in a weird way.

01:23:16   And maybe if you hold it that way, it's good.

01:23:17   But if you don't hold it that way, tough luck.

01:23:19   I still like it.

01:23:20   - Yeah, me too.

01:23:20   don't, I mean, it's fine, like if you use it that way,

01:23:22   but they don't make many things that you kind of grip

01:23:26   and hold and use in the same way that you would grip

01:23:28   and hold a remote or a game controller,

01:23:31   because there's nothing on the remote or the game controller

01:23:34   that you look at, the Wii U game pad aside.

01:23:37   It's purely a thing that you hold with buttons on it

01:23:39   that you're not staring at when you use.

01:23:40   So it has to be sort of tactile and you have to be able

01:23:44   to tell which way is what way and where the buttons are.

01:23:48   and yeah, there's not much like that that they make.

01:23:51   And their aesthetic doesn't lend itself well to that

01:23:54   because the negative space formed

01:23:56   by the gripping human hand is ugly.

01:23:59   And there's no getting around that.

01:24:01   - Ergonomics are ugly.

01:24:03   Things that are well designed ergonomically

01:24:04   are not gonna be as visually attractive

01:24:07   as a thin bar of soap remote that they can make,

01:24:11   but it might not work as well.

01:24:13   But they are willing to make that trade-off.

01:24:15   - Specifically things that you grip,

01:24:16   because like grip in this type of way,

01:24:18   because you can make a very ergonomic

01:24:20   and beautiful door handle, right?

01:24:24   Or a lever or shift knob in a car or steering wheel

01:24:29   or anything like that.

01:24:31   Those can be both beautiful and ergonomic,

01:24:33   but once you're wrapping your hand entirely around something

01:24:37   like a controller that you're gripping with two hands

01:24:39   or remote that you're gripping entirely with one hand,

01:24:41   then you're just all around the thing.

01:24:43   And it's like, you can't get around the fact

01:24:44   that hands don't wanna go around a rectangular solid.

01:24:48   They don't want, and it's hard,

01:24:49   if it's a little tiny sliver of a thing,

01:24:51   it's hard to kind of grip that at the same time

01:24:53   as manipulating the top surface.

01:24:54   What are you even holding onto?

01:24:55   The little edges of the thing?

01:24:58   Yeah, I feel like the people from OXO

01:25:00   need to parachute into the industrial design headquarters

01:25:03   at Apple and go, "All right, guys, listen.

01:25:05   Everybody on the floor, just strap them to their chairs

01:25:09   and just go over," although OXO discontinued

01:25:12   the good cheese grater too,

01:25:13   so maybe they're losing their way as well.

01:25:15   (laughing)

01:25:16   - So going back a sec, so I said that there were

01:25:19   two challenges that I see for Apple TV games

01:25:21   and I only named one.

01:25:22   The other big one is, it's what I always say,

01:25:25   never go against the smartphone.

01:25:28   All the Apple TV games so far, again,

01:25:31   I assume this will change, hopefully quickly,

01:25:34   and hopefully to such a degree that this statement

01:25:36   sounds ridiculous in retrospect,

01:25:38   but so far, I haven't seen anything on the Apple TV

01:25:41   game wise that was substantially better than just running that same game on an iPhone or

01:25:48   an iPad. That's going to be a problem for a lot of games. Everyone who's been developing

01:25:53   iOS games so far, mobile games so far, has been doing it on these platforms where certain

01:25:59   things apply, we know all these SDKs and everything. People who are making games that can be played

01:26:05   nicely on a TV with a controller have not really been in this business because this

01:26:09   has not really allowed them to thrive. So we need to either attract those kind of games

01:26:16   into the business or we need to have our game developers start making games that actually

01:26:21   make sense on TVs more than they make sense on just running it on an iPad or an iPhone.

01:26:26   I wouldn't say they're not substantially, but it all depends on how you qualify substantially

01:26:29   because I think even these two games that are totally iOS games like, you know, Altos

01:26:33   Adventure and Crossy Road, both designed with the control scheme of a smartphone or a touchscreen

01:26:39   in mind. Alto is like, "How can I make a fun game with very minimal controls?" Most of

01:26:43   the time you just tap anywhere on the screen. Same thing with Crossy Road. Mostly you just

01:26:47   tap anywhere with a little bit of swipes. They're totally designed for the very limited,

01:26:51   very primitive input, input precision and style of a touchscreen device. But I think

01:26:59   both of those games benefit enormously from being on the TV screen. For the first reason,

01:27:04   that your hands aren't blocking any part of the screen, which is, for console gamers,

01:27:08   of the thing that annoys about iOS games is that if it doesn't have an interface that

01:27:12   totally demands touch like flight control where it's like okay that's not working anywhere

01:27:16   else you know it's got to be a finger or a mouse and the finger kind of makes it more

01:27:20   fun but those type of games I like not having my hand blocking the screen.

01:27:24   The reason I always play Alto on my iPad is I don't like how much of the screen my two

01:27:29   thumbs potentially block when playing Alto on my iPhone 6 or even worse on a 4 inch iOS

01:27:34   device.

01:27:35   seeing the whole screen. Games that look good, and I think Alto does look pretty good, or

01:27:40   even Crossy Road, they look really good on a big TV. Big, bright, beautiful colors, again

01:27:45   none of it blocked by your fingers. I think that is a big enough win that I like. If I

01:27:51   was going for a high score in Crossy Road or Alto, I would now do it on my television.

01:27:56   Like I would not try to do it on my iPad or on my iPhone, because I feel like I would

01:28:01   do better, it's like it's better suited

01:28:03   to even this really super simple kind of game.

01:28:05   It's not like I'm saying, well,

01:28:06   it's a game that takes full advantage of a controller

01:28:08   and you couldn't play it at all on an iOS device.

01:28:12   I think that's a win.

01:28:12   Now, is that a big enough win that people care?

01:28:15   They're like, "Oh, Crossy Road have already got them my phone."

01:28:17   Probably not, because from what I've seen with my kids,

01:28:20   they're fine playing, like, they experienced those games

01:28:23   for the first time on their iOS devices,

01:28:25   they're fine playing them there.

01:28:26   I don't think they would feel the same way I do

01:28:29   about getting my fingers the hell away from the screen

01:28:31   so I can see what's going on.

01:28:33   But we'll see.

01:28:34   My son is now-- he downloaded some first person shooter

01:28:37   for iOS.

01:28:37   And I'm like, oh, what?

01:28:39   For a phone-sized device?

01:28:40   Who in the world is trying to play a first person

01:28:42   shooter on a phone screen?

01:28:43   Well, he's doing it.

01:28:45   He seems to be enjoying it.

01:28:46   It's not like he doesn't know the other experience.

01:28:48   He plays Minecraft on the Mac.

01:28:51   So we've got the mouse and keyboard controls there.

01:28:53   He plays Destiny on the PS4 so he

01:28:56   knows what it's like for console control.

01:28:57   And here he is, tilting the thing

01:28:59   and shoving his little fingers into different parts

01:29:02   of the screen to try and make the guy walk forward

01:29:03   and jump and shoot and I'm like,

01:29:05   oh, that's no way to live, but he seems fine with it.

01:29:07   So you may be right, the market as a whole

01:29:10   is not going to see a significant differentiator

01:29:13   for these same games on the television,

01:29:15   but I certainly do.

01:29:16   So at least maybe for old people who know what it's like

01:29:19   to be able to see the whole screen, there is an upside.

01:29:21   - The other thing too is like TV screens are way worse

01:29:26   than modern smartphone and tablet screens.

01:29:28   the graphics that you see on TV, the resolution, anything involving text, and I totally agree

01:29:33   with Joe Steele on upgrade this past week about how there's so many blurs that use these

01:29:40   gradients between colors and you see noticeable banding on my TV and probably many TVs to

01:29:45   the point where it doesn't seem like this interface was designed for TVs.

01:29:48   You guys gotta get better TVs.

01:29:52   So like in many ways gaming, when you're used to gaming on iOS, gaming on a TV again is

01:30:00   a step down in many ways.

01:30:02   And I totally agree, there are so many kinds of games where a controller with real D-pad

01:30:07   and real buttons or real analog sticks, whatever your case may be, a controller with physical

01:30:12   buttons is so much better than touch controls for so many kinds of games.

01:30:17   Not all, but so many kinds of games.

01:30:20   And yet, playing games on a TV, once you are used to casual gaming on iOS devices, it really

01:30:27   does feel like a big step backwards.

01:30:30   Another type of game, like this is one of the games that was in the top, presented to

01:30:34   me on the first screen of apps and I almost bought it, is a game that I never bought on

01:30:39   iOS because I looked at the game and I'm like, "Oh, well that's a console game.

01:30:42   There's no way I'd want to play that on an iOS device.

01:30:44   What is it called?

01:30:45   Someone in the chat room will tell me.

01:30:46   Oceanhorn or something like that?"

01:30:48   It's a Zelda clone, basically.

01:30:49   It's a, it's Zelda, but not without Zelda IP.

01:30:54   And that's a traditional console game.

01:30:57   Yeah, the chatroom says Oceanhorn.

01:30:59   You run around and you do Zelda-like things with a character who is totally not named

01:31:03   Link, and I assume there's a princess who is not named Zelda.

01:31:06   And beautiful graphics, and it looks nice, but I'm like, I don't want to play that kind

01:31:10   of, again, maybe it's because I'm old, I don't want to play that kind of game on a console,

01:31:15   or on a phone or an iPad.

01:31:18   I want to play that on my television holding a controller, and because I can't do that

01:31:21   I'm never going to buy it.

01:31:22   Now when I saw it come up on my Apple TV screen I'm like, "You know what?

01:31:25   Maybe I would play that."

01:31:28   Maybe it's just, again, the context that I feel like certain types of games that you're

01:31:32   going to spend hours and hours going on a quest and a game with continuity and saves

01:31:36   and adventure and inventory, that I would just rather do that on a television.

01:31:40   I don't know if that's the common case for people who grew up with iOS devices.

01:31:47   I definitely felt that when I saw that icon that same game that I know is a quality game that I've seen lots of things

01:31:51   about that I would never in a million years would buy and play on my

01:31:54   iPad or iPhone I was tempted to buy

01:31:58   on the television I

01:32:01   Just think it also one thing that this would be awesome for that would make my gamepad purchase worthwhile is if good emulators exist

01:32:08   Like for old, you know NES Genesis. We haven't had a good NES or MAME

01:32:12   Breach in the App Store in a while

01:32:16   Yeah, there was that one like there was there was some somebody open-sourced one back when the dev kits first shipped out

01:32:21   And I have a bookmarked somewhere in one of my many tabs in my many Chrome windows John

01:32:26   No, just kidding. I think I'm pinboard somewhere anyway

01:32:30   So I wanted to try to run that because this really could be a really nice

01:32:34   emulator machine but

01:32:37   Getting the software on there through the App Store stuff is probably gonna be a problem

01:32:41   Yeah, I think my last NES emulator probably crashes on launch now in iOS 9 which is kind of a shame

01:32:46   My main one might still run

01:32:48   I don't but in the early days of the App Store for people who weren't around back then very frequently

01:32:52   Someone would manage to get some kind of game emulator onto the App Store briefly before Apple would pull it

01:32:58   So if you purchased and downloaded it during that window of time

01:33:01   Apple wouldn't remove it from your device, even though it's gone from the store

01:33:05   So a lot of us have these emulators from like the iOS 3 or 4 days still sitting around

01:33:10   Of course they're not maintained and the developer can't release updates so eventually a lot

01:33:13   of them just start crashing on launch and don't work, but some of them still do.

01:33:16   >> Real time follow up, thanks to Jelly Bean Soup, which sounds disgusting, in the chat.

01:33:22   I know that--

01:33:23   >> You're one to talk Mike and Ike man.

01:33:24   [ Laughter ]

01:33:25   >> The emulator that I was referring to for Apple TV is called Provenance and so we'll

01:33:30   link that in the show notes.

01:33:32   I will try it.

01:33:33   I have like a DVD R, a DVD, sorry, a DVD Plus R disc with like the entire Nintendo and Genesis

01:33:43   catalogs on it and ROMs, but who knows. I got to take this out. Because yeah, that could

01:33:48   be really cool and that could be like a fun thing to do with my kid who's now like getting

01:33:51   into games, you know, because he's almost four. So yeah, that could be fun. And if that

01:33:58   does work well, then I will not regret the purchase of this controller at all.

01:34:01   So one final thing on Apple TV

01:34:03   And you'll notice if you've seen any of the screenshots the old Apple TV appearance was basically a black background

01:34:10   With light colored things on a lot of the icons were also kind of dark

01:34:14   But anyway, the background of the whole thing was black. I

01:34:17   Like that for a lot of reasons. I don't like bright white screens in my face

01:34:22   but also because I have a plasma television that does not like to show a full white screen and

01:34:28   Also because I have a plasma television with various regions of the screen with

01:34:32   Burn-in and other image retention artifacts on it from the kids watching Cartoon Network and the stupid CN logo burning into the side and

01:34:38   The destiny had burning into the left and so on and so forth

01:34:41   Obviously, this is a problem only for me and the seven other people who still on plasmas

01:34:45   But I bet if you own a plasma and I've heard from a couple people already have done this and you think you don't have

01:34:52   any image retention

01:34:53   launching

01:34:54   something like say

01:34:56   Kratzi wrote and having a big giant uniform

01:34:58   Teal background when the hipster whale comes up you will notice hey, wait a second that big giant teal background is not uniform

01:35:05   I can see the logo of the channel. I watch all the time in the corner

01:35:08   Well, I didn't know that was there before and same thing with the menu screens where it's like you just have this big sea of

01:35:13   Icons on a big it's not pure white but on a big light colored background that's supposed to be uniform

01:35:19   But then you start seeing the little little things burned in that makes me feel sad

01:35:23   I don't think it's a reason for Apple not to do it except the only argument for Apple to go back to a black background

01:35:28   Is just in general staring at a television with the white background is not fun on your eyeballs

01:35:33   Especially if you have if you don't have a plasma you have an LED backlit LCD

01:35:38   Those can go really bright and having a full bright screen even if the room is not dark having a full white screen with icons

01:35:44   On it not great for television

01:35:46   so I wish both for selfish reasons and a few minor practical reasons that they would tone it down a little bit and

01:35:51   and go back to black background with light icons on it instead of the other way around it.

01:35:57   And it also kind of feels more TV-ish. I think Plex's UI is like that. Casey can tell me if I'm wrong.

01:36:01   Well, Plex's UI in general tends to be... I don't know. It is TV-ish, but I've not seen it on the new

01:36:09   Apple TV. I'm not even using new Apple TV yet, so it beats me in that capacity. So you think that it's

01:36:15   conceivable that that would also be a light background with dark text on it instead of

01:36:19   what I'm used to seeing which is black background with light text?

01:36:21   Ah, the pictures I've seen, I thought it looked very much like the home screen of the

01:36:26   Apple TV in that it was like a very gray background with like white-ish text on it.

01:36:31   But yeah, well they're using a lot of the layout templates that you get from TVML.

01:36:35   So it does appear that it's going to be like a general light theme. And I'm with you, John.

01:36:39   Honestly, I didn't realize, like I'd forgotten what this looked like in the event. So like when

01:36:45   When I got it, I plugged it in, I'm like,

01:36:46   "Oh, everything is really bright."

01:36:48   And I also have a plasma, even though it's an ancient one,

01:36:50   but I admit I would prefer a dark theme for TV stuff.

01:36:55   It just kind of feels like that is the color scheme for TV

01:37:01   is black with color where necessary,

01:37:04   rather than what we have with this,

01:37:06   which is just everything is just bright

01:37:08   and full of banded gradients all over the place.

01:37:11   - Well, they do vibrancy too.

01:37:12   That's the thing I actually do think kind of works.

01:37:14   They do a vibrancy effect where like the new app fades to the foreground or sometimes when you're on like a setting screen

01:37:20   You can see behind it this sort of mmm

01:37:22   Like you can't an iOS where they put a sheet up over it and you really can't see through it

01:37:25   But there's kind of these weird colored blobs. It's not straight trans

01:37:25   but there's kind of these weird colored blobs.

01:37:27   It's not straight translucent, it's vibrancy.

01:37:29   Like it's that effect that you've seen everyone else

01:37:30   they do on the television.

01:37:31   And that I don't mind so much

01:37:33   because it does tend to be darker at least,

01:37:36   but it's a thing that it's covering up.

01:37:40   Having a darker gray thing over some icons looks okay,

01:37:42   but when it slides away again and you're like,

01:37:45   light gray icons on light gray or white,

01:37:48   it just doesn't feel right to me.

01:37:51   - Yeah, well, there's different vibrancy modes.

01:37:53   One of them is super light

01:37:55   and one of them is middle, one of them is dark.

01:37:57   So it's really up to developers to choose,

01:37:59   but I think by default, and kind of like the norm

01:38:03   on the platform is going to be things that are fairly light.

01:38:06   And I agree with you, that's probably a mistake.

01:38:09   - But, and so you can look at the screenshots

01:38:11   of the Plex app that we'll put in the show notes.

01:38:13   It looks like it does the vibrancy thing,

01:38:15   and like for example, they're showing a thing

01:38:17   from Louie here, is this the Plex app

01:38:19   or is this everything else?

01:38:20   - Yeah, that's the Louie app.

01:38:22   Again, it's using all the built-in templates from TVML.

01:38:24   Oh yeah, anyway, since Louis has a picture of Louis CK

01:38:29   with like a blue sky and some clouds,

01:38:30   the whole background of the page is kind of like a blurred,

01:38:35   smeared version of the, you know,

01:38:38   it does auto color theming, right?

01:38:40   Like Breaking Bad is like greenish gray,

01:38:43   and so the whole background is greenish gray.

01:38:45   And that, yeah, Apple Music does similar things.

01:38:47   Like Apple's been doing this for a long time,

01:38:49   trying to sort of have algorithmically generated

01:38:53   color schemes that match the thing you're seeing

01:38:55   but still find a way to make the text legible on it.

01:38:58   It is very difficult to do

01:38:59   and they seem super determined to be able to do it.

01:39:02   And I think they do a pretty good job here.

01:39:05   I like the fact that every one of these screens

01:39:07   isn't completely black with white text on it

01:39:09   like it used to be on the old Apple TV.

01:39:10   Sometimes you get a bum color scheme,

01:39:12   sometimes things are hard to read.

01:39:14   So maybe you could say,

01:39:15   "Hey, Apple, like just pick one theme that looks nice

01:39:18   that you can read text on."

01:39:19   But I am not as vehemently anti vibrancy

01:39:23   as some other people.

01:39:24   I think they go too far with it.

01:39:26   I think it's a little bit silly,

01:39:27   but for a television interface,

01:39:29   I think this gives Apple a branding

01:39:30   because they're the only company

01:39:32   that's gonna go through these kinds of pains

01:39:34   to stick to this, what seems like a very stupid idea

01:39:38   for how to color theme things algorithmically.

01:39:40   And they're just gonna keep working at it

01:39:41   until they get it to work and they've done it

01:39:44   and it makes it look different than everything else.

01:39:46   It's when you go all the way back to the menu screen

01:39:47   where it's like, well, now you're at the bottom

01:39:49   and all there is is a very light gray background

01:39:51   some drop shadows on it. That still feels wrong.

01:39:54   All right, I think we're good.

01:39:57   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harry's, Cars Against Humanity, and Backblaze.

01:40:02   And we will see you next week.

01:40:04   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:40:11   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:40:16   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:40:22   'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:40:27   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:40:32   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:40:41   So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:40:46   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:40:53   It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:40:56   They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:41:01   ♫ Tech podcast so long

01:41:04   - When you get your Apple TV,

01:41:08   you will have things to talk about too.

01:41:09   - Well honestly Casey, now you have to get one

01:41:12   so you can tell us about Plex on it.

01:41:14   - I've learned enough about myself to know

01:41:15   that I'm going to get one.

01:41:17   It's just a matter of will I hold out

01:41:19   for the holidays or not.

01:41:20   And I don't know, I probably,

01:41:23   this optical thing is really chapping my ass.

01:41:26   And it's stupid, like conceptually I know it's stupid

01:41:29   and I know it's not that big a deal

01:41:31   and I can get over it, but it's really--

01:41:32   - Just get one of those $30 boxes.

01:41:34   It's not worth this fretting.

01:41:35   The $30 box might break, but it might not.

01:41:38   If it breaks, so what?

01:41:39   Return it, get a different one.

01:41:40   If it doesn't break, problem solved.

01:41:42   - You can get two of them

01:41:43   for the cost of the game controller.

01:41:44   - Yeah, that's true.

01:41:46   It's all, I know I'm being crazy, like I said earlier.

01:41:48   There's no doubt in my mind this is a Casey issue

01:41:50   and I'm just being weird, but I don't know,

01:41:51   it really grinds my gears that that's the way that that is.

01:41:55   - Shouldn't bother you that much,

01:41:57   'cause like you said, it makes total sense

01:41:58   to drop that optical.

01:41:59   - Oh, it does. - Who doesn't use optical

01:42:00   anymore, you just need to get a new receiver.

01:42:02   And you don't have the same excuse that Marco does

01:42:04   where you're not allowed to get one

01:42:05   that's above a certain height.

01:42:05   - So interesting follow up about that by the way.

01:42:08   It turns out, so to recap, my issue that I brought up

01:42:13   last time was that I really want dynamic range compression

01:42:17   in my audio for my TV, but due to household balance issues,

01:42:22   I'm not allowed to have a big receiver that does not fit

01:42:27   in this really, really narrow spot in our TV stand.

01:42:32   And I have not found any receiver

01:42:34   that is short enough height-wise to actually fit in here,

01:42:37   even the Marantz Slimline ones,

01:42:39   which are almost there but not quite.

01:42:41   And then I also, later on, asked what the heck

01:42:45   a soundbar was, 'cause I keep seeing soundbars everywhere

01:42:48   and they seem to be the new cool thing,

01:42:49   and I wondered what the heck is a soundbar,

01:42:51   why do people keep buying what appears to be

01:42:53   a big row of tiny little speakers.

01:42:56   and turns out the answer to what I want

01:43:00   probably is a soundbar.

01:43:03   Because many of them include range compression

01:43:06   as a feature of the soundbar,

01:43:09   which is a wide, skinny speaker that can fit

01:43:14   pretty much anywhere in the kind of shaped shelf

01:43:17   that I have our TV on.

01:43:19   - Like we said, everything comes with it.

01:43:20   The Apple TV comes with it, everything has it.

01:43:22   Everything except for your television

01:43:23   and your current speakers.

01:43:24   - Right, and so it turns out the Apple TV does in fact

01:43:27   have built in range compression,

01:43:28   so that is also going to be something

01:43:31   that will be a possible answer.

01:43:33   But I'm actually a very kind manufacturer

01:43:37   of audio equipment has actually sent me a sound bar

01:43:40   to test that arrived today.

01:43:42   I haven't had time to hook it up yet.

01:43:44   - I don't know if you're gonna like it,

01:43:45   'cause like I said, it does sound different than stereo.

01:43:47   And it's trying to find a middle ground.

01:43:50   It's not gonna sound like stereo, but better sounding.

01:43:54   it's gonna sound different because it's trying to say,

01:43:57   trying to be like, it's just like a 5.1 system,

01:43:59   so it's gonna do crap by bouncing sound around your room

01:44:02   that you may find weird.

01:44:03   So it'll be interesting to see how you,

01:44:06   how this, if it actually is pleasing enough

01:44:08   for you to keep using it, or if you say,

01:44:10   you know what, that's just too weird,

01:44:11   I'd rather have either just plain stereo

01:44:13   or 5.1 than this thing.

01:44:15   - Yeah, and I have to look at the same,

01:44:17   there's probably like different modes and like settings

01:44:21   of like, if I can like tell it to just try to make it sound

01:44:25   2D and like to not boost up the depth simulation as much,

01:44:29   maybe it won't sound weird, I don't know.

01:44:31   I'll let you know how it goes.

01:44:33   - Yeah, well that's the other thing with the surround systems

01:44:35   is one of the reasons that people tend not to like them

01:44:38   is pretty much every receiver comes with like

01:44:40   all these weird modes like pretend you're in an opera hall

01:44:44   or you're in a stadium or you're like,

01:44:46   just do not ever use any of those.

01:44:47   They're pointless, I don't know, I guess they're there

01:44:50   to wow people in showrooms or something,

01:44:52   pretend they don't exist.

01:44:53   And so with the soundbar, I think what you're probably

01:44:56   gonna end up wanting is, please just play the center channel

01:44:58   out of your center speakers, the right out of there,

01:45:00   the left out of there, and just have it go straight.

01:45:03   But even that can sound weird if the speakers

01:45:05   are angled behind the grill in weird ways,

01:45:07   because a lot of the time they try to bounce

01:45:09   the back channels off of the side wall and the back wall,

01:45:11   the kind of, you know what I mean?

01:45:12   - Yep.

01:45:13   - And if they're in an angle like that,

01:45:14   they're never gonna be going right at you.

01:45:16   Like I feel like, like I was saying before,

01:45:18   don't run a 5.1 mix out of less than 5.1 speakers

01:45:22   because some sounds are only on a certain channel

01:45:24   and you will literally not hear them.

01:45:26   And so you won't understand what someone is replying to.

01:45:28   It's like you're not hearing the whole movie.

01:45:29   So you have to play those speakers,

01:45:31   but you just want them to play, like,

01:45:34   just play the sound, like,

01:45:35   if they could reroute them to the left or the right channel

01:45:38   or just play the sound straight at me.

01:45:39   'Cause I'm not interested in feeling like I'm surrounded.

01:45:42   I just want all of the sound coming straight from me.

01:45:45   Anyway, well, I can't wait to hear your review

01:45:47   the soundbar. Thanks. Does it even fit though? That's another thing. I would

01:45:52   love for you to unpack this thing and realize it doesn't fit either. I measured

01:45:56   and it should fit but yeah should is different from does in practice we'll see.

01:46:02   And FYI I have my car back for a week until it goes into the body shop.

01:46:08   Wait, why does it need to go to the body shop? So the area in which my house is and in

01:46:13   between my house and work, there's a landfill. Don't be creepy. And one of the main access

01:46:20   roads to the landfill is one of the roads I drive on.

01:46:24   There's probably more than one landfill in Virginia, Casey.

01:46:27   Well, in the Richmond area, I genuinely don't know how many there are that are accessible

01:46:31   to the public. So what happens is people who perhaps live in like extraordinarily rural

01:46:37   sections of this area, which there are some, but they're relatively far out. Or if you

01:46:42   just don't feel like paying for trash service, you can bring your trash to the landfill and

01:46:48   you can dump it yourself.

01:46:49   Well, the problem is nobody actually secures their trash as they're driving up this main

01:46:53   access road.

01:46:55   And one day I was driving to work and apparently was daydreaming.

01:46:58   I wasn't on my phone, hand on heart.

01:47:00   I wasn't on my phone, I wasn't fiddling with the radio, I was just apparently not paying

01:47:03   enough attention to the road.

01:47:05   And I must have clipped like a piece of wood or something and I heard this tremendous like

01:47:09   crash or bang or something. And I discovered a day or two later, because I went looking

01:47:16   around the car and didn't see anything, and I discovered a day or two later that I had

01:47:19   apparently kicked it up with my rear passenger tire and it impacted on the fender, like on

01:47:27   the very edge of the fender. And so there's like this really bad impact on the fender.

01:47:33   So it's going into the body shop next week for apparently a week's worth of body repair

01:47:38   just for that one fender issue to the tune of $1,000 that thankfully insurance has already

01:47:42   paid for. But yeah.

01:47:44   Yikes.

01:47:45   Yeah, and then you have had some car problems as well I hear.

01:47:49   Yes. So fortunately I have an appointment to go get my snow tires installed and get

01:47:54   whatever BS I'm supposed to get at this mileage next week already. But so yesterday my trunk

01:48:04   stopped opening. So I don't have a trunk for the time being.

01:48:10   Well just use your fr- oh wait never mind. There is literally no way to open it. So it's

01:48:14   one of those, it's one of those electric lifting trunk gate things. So it, it, there is no

01:48:22   mechanical way to open the trunk. You have to, it has to invoke the electric motor that

01:48:26   controls it somehow. And there's like three different ways to do it. You can do it on

01:48:30   the key fob, you can grip the button that's under the trunk lid, like where anyone else

01:48:35   would have put a latch, there's a button there that you just push and it opens, or there's

01:48:40   a button in the driver's side footwell. None of those work. You just pull them and it just

01:48:45   does nothing. And I don't think you can get to it from the cabin, because I think the

01:48:50   whole point of those various locks that are on the fold-down seats in the back, I think

01:48:54   the whole point is that you aren't supposed to have access to the trunk without going

01:48:57   through the trunk. Well, if it was mechanical in mechanical cars, you have a key thing very

01:49:02   often in the backseat, so you put the key, actual physical key, which you do you even

01:49:06   have a physical key? Oh, you know, yeah, it's buried in the key fob. I think I actually

01:49:09   might have one of those little key slots in like the ski pass-through. Yeah, exactly.

01:49:14   And then if you get to that, what you can do is get to the one that they have to put

01:49:18   in there probably by law for like if you get trapped in the trunk, you have a way to get

01:49:21   out. You know that little thing? Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, little pull handle thing? Yeah,

01:49:25   So if you send Adam in, send him in through the ski thing

01:49:28   and say, OK, Adam, pull the little red handle.

01:49:30   He says, Daddy, I'm scared.

01:49:32   And then you say, just pull it.

01:49:33   Anyway, eventually, you'll open up the trunk.

01:49:36   But I think the first car I ever saw that did this was AgriCL.

01:49:41   I remember looking at it and noticing

01:49:43   that the trunk lid had no place to put a key in

01:49:47   and no handles whatsoever on it.

01:49:49   Like, I think they did it for aesthetics,

01:49:51   like, oh, it looks so smooth and sleek just

01:49:52   to have this trunk thing that comes down.

01:49:54   you don't have any of these silly key openings or handles or whatever.

01:49:58   I assume it was still mechanical and you'd pull the little thingy in the driver's footwell

01:50:03   or whatever, but what I thought was, well that's stupid, it's like a Johnny Ive type

01:50:09   move.

01:50:10   Purely for aesthetics you don't provide a mechanical latch or a place to stick your

01:50:13   key in.

01:50:14   Margaux's thing is more like we want little tiny electric motors and circuits that will

01:50:19   fail because apparently electronics and cars are an impossibility instead of having a latch.

01:50:24   But on your car, there's a place, like you said, that would be where you would put the

01:50:27   latch.

01:50:28   You wouldn't see it, it would be fine, it would work, but they say, "You know what?

01:50:31   No.

01:50:32   All motors."

01:50:33   And if the motors fail, just forget about whatever's in the trunk.

01:50:35   And this is one thing, like, so I got the electric trunk because it was part of a package

01:50:40   and I kind of had to get it if I wanted a bunch of other cool stuff.

01:50:44   Since the beginning of having this, I have said, "This is stupid," and I would prefer

01:50:48   the car to not have this if given the option to just delete that.

01:50:52   everything about an electric trunk is worse than a manual trunk. There is

01:50:56   literally nothing, there is no benefit. So first of all it has like the the cool

01:51:00   feature where you can just wave your foot under the bumper and the trunk opens.

01:51:04   Yeah, you know how often that works? Yeah, you're just standing there doing the BMW dance.

01:51:08   Waving your foot, yeah, waving your foot under the bumper and cursing at your

01:51:12   trunk because it's not opening. Like that's the kind of thing you try like

01:51:15   twice maybe and they're like, "Alright, I'm never doing this again." So that's problem number one.

01:51:19   like those things just don't work.

01:51:21   They work frequently enough that you can tell it's not broken,

01:51:24   but infrequently enough that you never want to do it.

01:51:27   So that's problem number one.

01:51:28   Problem number two is that the electric,

01:51:31   whatever mechanism raises and lowers this,

01:51:35   is kind of permanently engaged so that if you want

01:51:39   to like manually close the trunk,

01:51:41   there's so much resistance you actually kind of can't do it,

01:51:44   or you have to push really hard and it goes really slowly.

01:51:47   It isn't like a bike gear where it just disengages

01:51:51   when it's not applying pressure.

01:51:53   It is just always engaged.

01:51:54   You're pushing down really hard to try to manage closes

01:51:57   if you ever need to.

01:51:58   That's no good.

01:51:59   So you kinda always have to use the motor,

01:52:01   which is probably my problem right now.

01:52:03   The reason I can't open it was something has failed

01:52:05   and there is no manual way to open it.

01:52:07   So there's also no manual way to close it.

01:52:10   So that's annoying.

01:52:12   And it's slow.

01:52:14   If you have a regular trunk lid,

01:52:16   regular mechanical trunk lid, you can close it and open it way faster than the people

01:52:22   with these stupid electric ones like me.

01:52:23   That's the one advantage of it is that you can't slam your hand in the electric one because

01:52:27   it goes so damn slow and presumably has a back-off thing that if your hand was stuck

01:52:30   in it would be like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm getting too much resistance."

01:52:32   That's true, it does, but I mean, I've been driving a long time, I've never had that happen.

01:52:38   Have you ever had that happen?

01:52:39   The only place, well, it's for like little kids, they get in their hands caught and stuff,

01:52:43   The only place electric thing makes any kind of sense is for minivans where very often

01:52:50   the lift gate in the back is so high that short people can't even reach it to close

01:52:54   it.

01:52:55   And if you can reach it, it's sometimes difficult to get enough weight or leverage if you are

01:52:59   a smaller, lightweight person.

01:53:00   To pull that giant lid all the way down, that's – and it's the same thing on minivans

01:53:05   with the sliding doors with kids getting in and out of it is a big, you know, getting

01:53:08   your hand caught threat.

01:53:10   So those are electric as well because it may be hard for a kid to pull that big heavy door

01:53:15   closed and it's very easy for people to get their hands caught because kids are stupid

01:53:19   and fight around doors and shove their hands in gaps to try to stop doors or whatever.

01:53:24   And the electric one solves that problem and those things.

01:53:26   And the final reason that it makes sense for minivans is a lot more minivans are sold than

01:53:31   BMW M5s.

01:53:34   And any type of thing like this, any kind of car related technology, we talked about

01:53:39   this with the Tesla Model X gullwing door things or whatever, you do not want this feature

01:53:46   to only be on a low volume car.

01:53:48   You want this to be the 900th iteration of this feature that sells thousands and thousands

01:53:53   of copies every single year so they can get the kinks worked out of it.

01:53:58   Regular trunk lids that they put on like a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry or a Toyota

01:54:04   Corolla, you can be damn sure that if there's anything wrong with that trunk closing mechanism

01:54:09   the next revision of the Camry, they will work on it and you repeat that process for

01:54:12   15-20 years, they pretty much have the stupid welded gooseneck manual trunk lid things and

01:54:17   latch down to that point.

01:54:20   How many, I think the electric closing thing in your BMW F5 trunk lid is probably a beautiful

01:54:25   bespoke mechanism made only for this year's M5 and the total number of electric closing

01:54:31   BMW trunk lids sold in the history of BMW is probably less than the number of Camry's

01:54:35   sold this year.

01:54:36   Bruce S. in the chat pointed something out to me, or to us, which got me thinking. And

01:54:41   so a little bit of real-time follow-up. There, well let me start by reading page 39 of your

01:54:46   owner's manual.

01:54:47   [laughter]

01:54:48   A manual operation...

01:54:49   This makes one of us who has read it, by the way.

01:54:51   I'm sure. In fact, I think I cracked the soap, the PDF version, open before we went to Germany,

01:54:55   just because I'm that much of a nerd. But anyway...

01:54:57   You did.

01:54:58   A manual operation. In the event of an electrical fault, manually operate the unlocked trunk

01:55:02   lid slowly and smoothly. To close it completely, push the trunk lid down lightly. It is closed

01:55:08   automatically. What? What does that even mean?

01:55:12   That kind of makes it sound like if it's stuck open, you can close it carefully.

01:55:16   Very weird. Anyway, but to continue on, the thing that Bruce S. brought up, which I had

01:55:20   forgotten about, in my glove box, but apparently in your center armrest, there is actually

01:55:26   a segregated lock switch specifically for the trunk.

01:55:31   So you might want to run to your car,

01:55:34   feel free to do that now if you'd like, we'll hold on.

01:55:37   Run to the car and just double check

01:55:38   that this switch is flicked the appropriate direction.

01:55:42   - I might actually.

01:55:43   Do you actually want me to do this and wait here?

01:55:46   - Below, before you go,

01:55:47   let me just send you a screenshot of the relevant portion

01:55:49   'cause I wanna make sure you see what I'm talking about.

01:55:51   Now I'm not gonna be able to put this in the chat room

01:55:53   'cause I don't use like dropler or anything like that,

01:55:55   but I'll put it in our little robot here.

01:55:56   - He's got a little GoPro on his head

01:55:58   so we can see the Marco cam as he goes.

01:56:00   (laughing)

01:56:02   - That's right.

01:56:03   - I think I've seen that.

01:56:03   All right, let me try it.

01:56:04   Hold on, I'll be right back.

01:56:05   What kind of person doesn't read the manual for their car?

01:56:09   - Who knows?

01:56:10   Oh my God, thank you.

01:56:11   I don't get it.

01:56:12   - 'Cause you'll never discover,

01:56:13   the UI is so bad, you'll never discover,

01:56:15   oh, if you press and hold this button,

01:56:16   it does some feature that you always wanted on your car.

01:56:18   I guess it's better be easier with on-screen controls.

01:56:20   I found with my Accord, even for as terrible

01:56:22   as the infotainment system is,

01:56:24   At the very least, it was menus.

01:56:25   So I could find, oh, there is an option

01:56:27   to make it so you only have to press the remote once

01:56:29   to lock all four doors instead of having to do it twice

01:56:31   or whatever. - Right, right.

01:56:32   - Or unlock all four doors instead of having to do it twice.

01:56:35   - I'm with you, though.

01:56:35   I've read my manual at least once cover to cover.

01:56:38   - Yeah.

01:56:39   And you can just see the hilarious things

01:56:40   that they tell you about engine break-in and stuff.

01:56:42   Like seriously, that's never gonna happen.

01:56:43   - Any car I've owned, if memory serves,

01:56:46   they're like, "Do not engine break.

01:56:48   "That's what the brakes are for."

01:56:49   And I always engine break.

01:56:50   - No, I mean break-in, not--

01:56:51   - Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:56:53   You don't, did your manual say no engine braking?

01:56:55   I still do it.

01:56:56   They do it because, I always felt like

01:56:58   they're telling you to do it because they want you

01:56:59   to go through your brake pads faster.

01:57:00   I'm like, no.

01:57:01   - Well, and I think the thing is,

01:57:02   if you're gonna find, if you're gonna put pressure

01:57:04   on anything, why not put pressure on the thing

01:57:06   that's easier to replace, right?

01:57:07   But with that said, I still engine brake constantly.

01:57:10   - Well, it's a calculus.

01:57:11   You put pressure on the engine if you're leasing.

01:57:14   (laughing)

01:57:15   - But no, like, the pressure on the engine,

01:57:16   maybe it's for finicky, more finicky cars,

01:57:20   But I keep my cars for 10 years plus,

01:57:23   engine break all the time, all the manual,

01:57:26   never any engine problems that could conceivably

01:57:29   be attributed to engine breaking,

01:57:30   unless engine breaking causes my radiators

01:57:32   to rust out and my water pump to die,

01:57:35   which always happens around 60,000 miles.

01:57:37   But I feel like what's gonna happen?

01:57:39   Your head gasses gonna blow?

01:57:40   Like what are they afraid?

01:57:41   Is it gonna mess with the valve train?

01:57:42   - Oh, I'm with you.

01:57:43   Well, my valve train is now brand new.

01:57:44   I'm with you.

01:57:45   Oh, by the way, apparently this is actually fun

01:57:47   and I wanna get to what Marco discovered.

01:57:49   But when they did my valve train, they said that,

01:57:52   I should get the sheet out, it doesn't matter,

01:57:54   but suffice to say, when they were pulling the injectors,

01:57:57   which apparently was part of this process,

01:57:59   they had to apply too much torque to get the injectors out.

01:58:04   - Yeah, I saw that.

01:58:04   That's just fancy language for them,

01:58:06   that they broke something.

01:58:07   (laughing)

01:58:08   That's all they're saying.

01:58:09   They were trying to pull something out, it's hard to do,

01:58:11   and it goes, and then, well, you broke it.

01:58:13   - Well, you very well could be right.

01:58:15   But according to the service advisor,

01:58:17   who I do actually trust, they apparently pitched

01:58:20   all six injectors and gave me new ones,

01:58:22   which I thought was interesting.

01:58:23   Anyway, Marco, what did you discover?

01:58:25   - It was locked.

01:58:28   (laughing)

01:58:31   - No, this is annoying because you're the one

01:58:32   that's going to do this edit,

01:58:33   and no one will ever hear this.

01:58:35   So live listeners, this is a pact between all of us,

01:58:38   that you can remind Marco any time you want.

01:58:42   - That he doesn't know how to work his own car

01:58:43   'cause he didn't read the manual.

01:58:44   - Yep.

01:58:45   - It's the manual.

01:58:47   - Both of us.

01:58:48   - I was just discussing that while you were gone,

01:58:49   I always do, because otherwise,

01:58:51   I was saying to Casey,

01:58:52   otherwise you don't find these obscure features in your car

01:58:56   because the UI is so bad you would never guess

01:58:58   that you have to press this button or hold this button

01:59:00   or whatever activates this thing.

01:59:02   Better with on-screen controls 'cause you can read stuff,

01:59:04   but if you don't read the manual,

01:59:05   you just won't know how your car works.

01:59:07   You won't know where all these little things are.

01:59:09   - I certainly, I mean,

01:59:10   it was right in the center armrest thing,

01:59:12   which I have, there's like change in there,

01:59:15   there's a tin of Altoids, there's an iPhone battery.

01:59:17   - Well, so who's going in there?

01:59:19   Did you basically accidentally bump it

01:59:20   with your tin of Altoids or whatever?

01:59:22   - That is most likely what happened, yeah.

01:59:24   I mean, I don't know, but that is most likely

01:59:27   accidental bumping of the switch which is right in there.

01:59:29   - We saved you an embarrassing trip to the dealer.

01:59:32   - Yeah, well, it was a combination of us and Bruce S.,

01:59:34   actually, because I'd forgotten about that.

01:59:36   And as soon as Bruce S. said,

01:59:37   "Oh, that thing in the glove box,"

01:59:38   I was like, "Yes, that's right, I completely forgot."

01:59:41   And then that--

01:59:42   - I think the last time we were looking in the manual,

01:59:43   Marco was to try to find his battery.

01:59:45   Another thing--

01:59:46   (laughing)

01:59:48   - I have no idea where the battery is.

01:59:49   - Other people are reading Marco's car's manual,

01:59:51   but him not so much.

01:59:53   - Well, clearly I don't need to.

01:59:54   - Yeah, he's crowd sourced it.

01:59:56   [door closes]