0:00:00Time was when all AOL users were behind one big proxy.
0:00:04We have important follow up this week.
0:00:08First of all, if you got two t-shirts, that is fine.
0:00:12That was supposed to happen. What happened was the first t-shirt
0:00:16had some printing problems, mostly on the back, where
0:00:20the font wasn't rendered, so it like
0:00:24fell back to a default font and it printed our monospace code
0:00:28in a fixed width font.
0:00:29- Variable width font you mean.
0:00:31- Yes, sorry, thank you.
0:00:32I've missed you, John.
0:00:34And then--
0:00:35(laughing)
0:00:36- I was just picturing all the feedback
0:00:38if we just left that slide.
0:00:39- Thanks.
0:00:40So anyway, yeah, so the second one is
0:00:43it has the fixed font issue,
0:00:45'cause it also messed up all the spacing
0:00:47and everything, it was really weird looking before.
0:00:49So Teespring was kind enough to reprint all the shirts
0:00:52at no cost and send them to everybody.
0:00:55That was supposed to happen, so it was no mistake
0:00:57if you got a second one that's in fact it might be a mistake if you didn't and
0:01:01You don't have to return the other ones that you got or anything
0:01:04Just you know, keep them with teespring's compliments and we thank teespring for fixing the error so quickly and fully
0:01:11And the question is which shirt now is more valuable
0:01:14As we mentioned in the past shows about that the shirt being printed if the printing on the back messes up
0:01:19It's like the upside-down airplane stamps and now you have two shirts
0:01:22you have one where the printing on the back is totally messed up and it's like
0:01:27In a variable with font but the metrics of the letter spacing are like the metrics of a mod the mono space font
0:01:32Yeah, crazy amounts of space. It just looks terrible
0:01:35And then there's the one printed the way we intended which one of those shirts is better now because you could be like I've got
0:01:41One of the ATP shirts with the printing here, but everybody's got one with with the printing error at this point
0:01:45Anyone who's got any teachers, right?
0:01:47It's the same amount of both and it will always be the same amount of both because it's not like you can go order the
0:01:52shirt now and get the fixed one only. It's the same quantity of both shirts that will
0:01:57probably ever exist.
0:01:58Yeah, so next year we'll probably have a different shirt and we'll see how this turns
0:02:02out. But we've been fielding a lot of tweets and emails from people asking about the double
0:02:06shirts. Just keep them. And a lot of emails and tweets from people who said they got two
0:02:11shirts but did not notice any difference between them. And that was surprising to me for listeners
0:02:16of the show.
0:02:17Don't tell Teespring.
0:02:18(laughing)
0:02:20- Well, but there's definitely a difference.
0:02:21I feel like once we tell them,
0:02:22oh, there was a problem with the printing on the back,
0:02:24and they lay them both down and look at the two backs,
0:02:26there's a big difference between them.
0:02:28- Yeah, also the ATP badge on the front,
0:02:32on the new shirt is a little bit lighter in the shades
0:02:34because when you give somebody a color to print on a shirt,
0:02:38it has to go through color conversion
0:02:40and become a print color,
0:02:41and that entire world just sucks in every possible way.
0:02:45The entire world of color converting for print
0:02:47and trying to get colors to look right in print.
0:02:49It's just a terrible, terrible existence.
0:02:52And here's to Teespring for living in that world
0:02:55so that we all don't have to.
0:02:57- Yep, now that was very nice of them to write that wrong.
0:03:00And regardless of who was at fault,
0:03:02it sounds like it might have been a little bit
0:03:03of column A, a little bit of column B, but--
0:03:05- Oh no, Teespring was entirely at fault.
0:03:06That's not saying it was at fault.
0:03:08Because, I mean, so here's the thing.
0:03:10Like, I feel bad for them.
0:03:11It's good, Teespring has always been good to me
0:03:13and they've taken action to correct problems,
0:03:17but it's better if you don't have the problem to begin with.
0:03:19And I'm speaking mostly from Teespring's perspective,
0:03:21because from the customer's perspective,
0:03:22everybody got two shirts for the price of one.
0:03:25So it's great for customers, but for Teespring,
0:03:27like Marco said, it's like, you know,
0:03:28he uploaded the thing, it looked correct in the preview,
0:03:31and they printed a huge number of shirts.
0:03:33Like, no human looked at them to compare them
0:03:35to the preview on their website.
0:03:37Like, you figured you'd print one, look at it and say,
0:03:39"Yep, okay, print a thousand or so of those," right?
0:03:42So I feel like they need to amend their process,
0:03:45because they're a great company that they're eating
0:03:47that cost and doing it, but on the other hand,
0:03:49it's kind of their fault, and I'd feel like they would have
0:03:52processes in place to do a human sanity check
0:03:55of runs over a thousand shirts or something.
0:03:57- Well yeah, and in their defense,
0:04:00as soon as they became aware of the problem,
0:04:02they were in contact with me a lot,
0:04:04and I had talked to like three different people there,
0:04:06and everyone was trying to resolve the thing,
0:04:08they wanted me to send them the original file
0:04:09that caused the error so they could fix it,
0:04:11and they told me they're changing all these policies,
0:04:13So I think it scared them enough and probably caused
0:04:16them to lose enough money that they made some changes
0:04:20as a result.
0:04:21I mean, they bent over backwards for my hypercritical shirts
0:04:23as well.
0:04:24They've definitely been--
0:04:25I feel like they have that part of the business down
0:04:27where you're responsive to customers
0:04:28and do the right thing.
0:04:29They've just got to work on the other part of the business
0:04:31where you don't make mistakes to begin with.
0:04:33And I mean, if I wanted to dink Marco for anything,
0:04:35I assumed you were uploading outlines.
0:04:36If I had known you were uploading text,
0:04:38I would have advised you to upload outlines.
0:04:40But--
0:04:40In my defense, yeah.
0:04:41So the issue was they recommend you upload an EPS.
0:04:44Okay, and I don't know anything about this stuff.
0:04:46This was one of the first times I'd ever used Illustrator
0:04:48was to do this.
0:04:49And I uploaded the EPS and I checked
0:04:52that it had the embedded font.
0:04:54And I didn't convert to outlines.
0:04:56I didn't know that was a thing that you could or should do.
0:04:58So I didn't convert to outlines.
0:04:59I just uploaded the EPS with the embedded copy of the font.
0:05:03And every designer, once we had the problem
0:05:06and I mentioned this, every designer was like,
0:05:07"Oh no, you never do that
0:05:09"because printers so often screw up."
0:05:10"Oh, I didn't know that.
0:05:11"I didn't have the experience to know that."
0:05:12And so I thought, I put the embedded font, it's fine, right?
0:05:16And then the bigger problem, I think,
0:05:18was that in their image preview on the site,
0:05:22it rendered it correctly because the thing
0:05:25that generates the image preview has a different rasterizer
0:05:29than the thing that actually prints onto the shirts.
0:05:31And so that's kind of a problem.
0:05:33- Yeah, and that's why it's ultimately Teespring's fault.
0:05:36Marco is the inexperienced of not converting to Outline
0:05:38because he hadn't been using Illustrator since Illustrator 88
0:05:42on his black and white Mac and comparing things to outlines.
0:05:45But the preview shows one thing, and you
0:05:48get something else printed.
0:05:50That's the whole basis of the site.
0:05:51It's like you click these buttons, you see a picture,
0:05:53you say, yes, I want that picture to become a real thing.
0:05:55You click some more buttons, and then a real shirt
0:05:58shows up at your house.
0:05:59Right.
0:05:59And in their defense, one of the things they asked me for
0:06:02was a copy of the original file, because they
0:06:04said their rasterizer should have used the embedded font.
0:06:07that was not intended behavior that it didn't,
0:06:09and they didn't want to require everyone to use outlines
0:06:11'cause Teespring's used by a lot of amateurs.
0:06:14It's not always professional designers using it.
0:06:16It's oftentimes like some group making shirts
0:06:20to raise money for their youth group or something.
0:06:22And so they want it to work with people
0:06:26who are not Illustrator experts.
0:06:28So they, anyway, they resolved it well,
0:06:30so I'm happy with them.
0:06:31Anyway, let's move on.
0:06:33We have a lot of feedback.
0:06:34Our feedback is like 15 pages long in our document.
0:06:37What is all this?
0:06:38I know.
0:06:39I think it's mostly John because I certainly didn't do it, but another really quick one.
0:06:43We were all obviously in San Francisco last week for WWDC and I just wanted to quickly
0:06:49say thank you to everyone who said hi to us, to everyone that purchased and then wore a
0:06:56shirt, to anyone who went to the talk show and to Gruber for having us all on the talk
0:07:01show.
0:07:02I had a really fantastic week.
0:07:03I think I speak for the two of you guys as well in saying so and so again anyone who
0:07:08Spent any amount of time with us even if it was just to say hey
0:07:11Thank thank you for that and I have some more follow-up on the talk show
0:07:16Oh, and it goes in addition to saying yeah, I agree. That was awesome. Thank you
0:07:20You know the the the the ditto of what Casey you said?
0:07:22I was completely wrong about how cloud kit limits work and I I
0:07:28Definitely said the wrong thing on the talk show and I think I even said the wrong thing on our show last week
0:07:33where the CloudKit limits are raised per user by something like 1 meg of database use, 100
0:07:41megs of assets use, but each user is not limited to that 1 meg and that 100 megs.
0:07:47That simply, every user adds that amount to your total pool, and the resources are pooled
0:07:52between everybody.
0:07:53So that does dramatically change things for how you can use CloudKit and whether you can
0:07:59rely on it being sufficient for you or not.
0:08:02It still leaves a few questions, like we still don't really know what happens when you hit
0:08:08that limit, and anything involving like, you know, what happens if one user is a complete
0:08:17outlier and uses like a gig of the database somehow because they have some script going
0:08:22that runs awry or something, you know, like how do you solve issues like that with it?
0:08:26So there's still some issues, but it isn't nearly as scary as I assumed it was because
0:08:31the resources are pooled by that amount, not limited per user.
0:08:35I'm not sure that clarification is important, but I'm not sure it changes it entirely.
0:08:41We were talking about the example of "Could you do Instagram on this?"
0:08:46Even though users will have varying amounts, if it's only 100 megs of blob storage per
0:08:51user, any user who uses Instagram will blow through that in a year if they're regular
0:08:56users.
0:08:57It's like your average user will blow through that.
0:08:59It opens it up a little bit to more variability.
0:09:03If you think most of your users are gonna use like one meg
0:09:05and a couple of people are gonna use like 500 megs,
0:09:07then yeah, having it add 100 megs to the pool
0:09:11for each user for blob storage is good.
0:09:14But anything that's involving serious amounts of data,
0:09:16you immediately get to that question,
0:09:18all right, well, if I start my own little Instagram,
0:09:20after a year, everybody's gonna have
0:09:22more than 100 megs of photos, right?
0:09:23So then what happens?
0:09:25- Right, but the instance I gave on the talk show,
0:09:28which was, could they use this for Vesper?
0:09:30You know, Vesper is a note-taking app
0:09:31that supports image blob attachments.
0:09:34But most people don't use a lot of images,
0:09:36most people just use it for text,
0:09:37and most people would have a hard time
0:09:39making a megabyte of text notes,
0:09:41unless they used it very, very heavily.
0:09:42But you know, so in Vesper's case,
0:09:44it might be a bad idea to say,
0:09:47you can only have up to a megabyte of text notes,
0:09:50but I bet their average is so far below a megabyte
0:09:54that they would be okay to use it if they wanted to.
0:09:57I would pull stats from all active users
0:09:59before I committed to that, you know what I mean?
0:10:01Like, see what the average, find out,
0:10:03you can find out what the average is,
0:10:05like make sure, you know, whatever your user data
0:10:07collection agreement allows for this or whatever,
0:10:09and then just see what the average size is,
0:10:10because who knows what people are doing with Vesper,
0:10:13you know, like maybe people are using it
0:10:14as a photo collecting app for all we know.
0:10:17- One of the discussions they were having
0:10:19before they launched the sync service was,
0:10:22you know, like they don't actually know,
0:10:24'cause you know, before there was a sync service
0:10:25a few weeks ago, they didn't actually know
0:10:27what the average usage was of these things.
0:10:29How much people actually, how many pictures,
0:10:31'cause you know, hosting pictures is obviously
0:10:33a lot more data than hosting text,
0:10:35and they're like, well how many pictures
0:10:36do people take with a Vesper?
0:10:37Are there a lot of image notes?
0:10:39Are the images very large?
0:10:40Are there outliers that have just tons and tons and tons
0:10:43of image notes?
0:10:44And you don't know that.
0:10:46I'm facing this with Overcast now.
0:10:47I'm actually getting reasonably close to launch now,
0:10:50and I have no idea what to expect on the server side,
0:10:53and therefore the cost side.
0:10:55It's very hard to predict these things.
0:10:57That's one of the reasons why CloudKit is very attractive
0:11:00to a lot of people because if you have this rockin' lunch
0:11:05where you get way more people than you thought you would,
0:11:09your costs are not going to skyrocket,
0:11:12well, unless you hit one of those master limits
0:11:16that's really, really high,
0:11:17but I think that would be quite difficult.
0:11:21the unpredictability of your initial cost
0:11:24and initial server needs is kind of removed
0:11:27as a stress and pain and possible business model pain point.
0:11:31So it is a very attractive option
0:11:34and I think a lot of people are gonna use it.
0:11:37- I hope somebody does so that we can see
0:11:39if things have really improved
0:11:41because I can think back to when you mentioned
0:11:43if you have a really big launch,
0:11:44you'll be happy you did this.
0:11:45- Letterpress?
0:11:46- Yeah, letterpress.
0:11:48What's the first really popular app
0:11:50to use this Apple-provided cloud service.
0:11:52And in the case of Game Center, it was letterpress,
0:11:55it was very popular, and Game Center fell over
0:11:58and cried like a little baby.
0:12:00Well, apparently, Apple's new Photos app and the Photos Sync
0:12:04service is supposedly all built on CloudKit.
0:12:07It's the same thing.
0:12:09And who knows, they probably have some kind of reserve
0:12:11capacity maybe, but I don't know.
0:12:13Supposedly, that is what they are doing.
0:12:16So in other news, it is currently 9/15 and I was trying to use my Showbot and Marco tried
0:12:26to tell me…
0:12:27It broke already.
0:12:28Hold on.
0:12:29Marco tried to tell me when I was writing the Showbot a couple of weeks ago that people
0:12:35– these are my words, not Marco's – that people are jerks and they're going to do
0:12:39whatever they can to mess with the Showbot.
0:12:41And I said, "No, no, it'll be fine.
0:12:44Our listeners are great.
0:12:46They're awesome.
0:12:47And all of a sudden while you were talking, I look at the Showbot, which is all run kind
0:12:52of real-time using WebSockets, and next thing I know I see that the "Does Casey Showbot
0:12:59Actually Work?"
0:13:00title just skyrocketing in votes.
0:13:03And so someone apparently has decided to make Web API requests or WebSocket requests to
0:13:12add a vote to that particular item and then eventually crash the showbot.
0:13:17They're not being jerks, they're being good testers.
0:13:19Yeah, maybe. But anyway, so the point is that it lasted 15 minutes and that is how long
0:13:26the chat room can handle a new toy to play with and then subsequently break.
0:13:33You're gonna be a good father.
0:13:34Have I mentioned that your showbot has never worked for me?
0:13:38I mean it's never worked.
0:13:39It is. Remember, I tried to use it once from work, and I said, "Oh, maybe it's not working
0:13:42because of a firewall, because of some weird WebSocket thing," and I've tried it from home,
0:13:46and all I ever see is the word "connecting." That's all I've ever seen of your Showbot.
0:13:49Well, if you want, you can see that now.
0:13:50Oh, shut up. I just restarted.
0:13:53I know. And I'm looking at it now, and it says "connecting." So, I'm, you know, "Marko's
0:13:59crappy PHP thing 1, Casey's Node Showbot 0."
0:14:03Well, that's what I get for trying to do something fancy.
0:14:05his is AJAX-y. It's even better, it's WebSockets. He leapt right past AJAX.
0:14:10He went too far. Oh, wait, something happened. Now it says titles. No, something's happening.
0:14:14So that was like a seven-minute load time.
0:14:17If you remember, Casey, what I also told you is, you know, it would be nice if it had some
0:14:21kind of persistent storage. That way, if it crashes, you don't lose all the titles that
0:14:25have been suggested up until that point.
0:14:27I know, I know. The problem is…
0:14:28So it would be nice if it could write it out to a file every few seconds.
0:14:31Well, but that's the thing. It's all kidding aside, I did look into this, and the problem
0:14:34is because this is hosted on Heroku, because I generally like Heroku, the file system is
0:14:40ephemeral. And so even if I dump something to file, then if I do anything, that file
0:14:46will go away. Like if I restart the dyno like I just did, the file will go away.
0:14:50Well, I should just make a web request to someone who's running a real web server.
0:14:55I was waiting for it.
0:14:58You know, I hate to tell you Casey, but my servers can save files. It's this crazy
0:15:02I know it's bleeding edge brand new technology,
0:15:05but my servers are actually able to save data to disk.
0:15:08- Well, and that's the thing, is what I need to do
0:15:09is, as people are recommending in the chat,
0:15:11I need to use Postgres or some other SQL
0:15:13or something like that.
0:15:15- You don't need to use Postgres for show titles,
0:15:17for crying out loud.
0:15:18Make a file with numbers in it.
0:15:20- That's why I didn't!
0:15:21That's why I didn't.
0:15:22But apparently Heroku's file system is all ephemeral,
0:15:25or maybe it isn't, and I just don't realize it.
0:15:27But the only reason I was supposed to,
0:15:28or that was trying to bring this up,
0:15:30was to point out that it took virtually no time for the chat room to just completely tear apart my
0:15:36showbot. Now they're putting in script tags, putting in long titles.
0:15:41Welcome to the web, Casey.
0:15:42Have you ever used a computer?
0:15:44Oh my god, this is why you a**holes don't have nice things. This is ridiculous.
0:15:48I quit. I quit the show and I quit you all. Well, not you two, everyone else.
0:15:53I love that you were so naive that you didn't think this would happen.
0:15:56You're such a nice person, Casey. You really are.
0:15:59I had faith in humanity and God how wrong I was.
0:16:02I'm sorry.
0:16:03Anyway, we can carry on.
0:16:05I'm just going to ignore my own creation, whatever, you big jerks.
0:16:10The three of us are cool.
0:16:11It's everyone else I don't like.
0:16:14Anyway, moving on.
0:16:16All right, so we have some follow-up.
0:16:18Next bit of follow-up.
0:16:19This is after WWDC, a bunch of people tweeted this at me and I thought it was clever.
0:16:23We didn't get to it in the actual WWDC show.
0:16:27And I haven't actually looked into this because I have not seen any of the sessions related
0:16:30to this because they're mostly iOS related and everything, but in the keynote they mentioned
0:16:35bundles.
0:16:36You can sell a bunch of apps on the App Store together for one price.
0:16:39And apparently, kind of like in iTunes where there's the "complete this album" button where
0:16:43you buy the album minus the cost of the songs you already bought in the album, there's the
0:16:50"complete this bundle" thing on the App Store—I'm assuming there is because these people were
0:16:54were telling me there was, where if you bought one app in a two app bundle, you could complete
0:16:58this bundle by simply paying the difference for the second app. And people were proposing
0:17:03this as a terrible confusing way to do upgrade pricing. Because what you would do is when
0:17:09you have a new version of your app, you keep the first version of the app on the store,
0:17:12you introduce the new version at whatever price you want to sell to new users. And then
0:17:16you make a bundle that includes the old version and the new version for less than the sum
0:17:20of their prices, which allows people who already own the old version to complete this bundle,
0:17:25effectively giving them an upgrade price. Which, again, like I said, I think that is
0:17:28terrible and confusing and not obvious, but it is a clever hack of the rules as presented
0:17:34to me by these people who sent me this information. Do either of you know if that stuff is accurate
0:17:38about "Complete this Bundle"?
0:17:39I do not.
0:17:41Are there any bundles actually in the store yet that we could even see? I don't think
0:17:43there are. I don't think you can make them yet.
0:17:45If this is all true and it actually works like this, people will do this for their upgrades
0:17:50for upgrade pricing and it will be confusing to users.
0:17:53And so that's a shame.
0:17:55Imagine people on their websites trying to tell people like, "If you want upgrade pricing,
0:18:00go get the bundle, but do complete this bundle."
0:18:02And ugh, I don't know.
0:18:05This is like, if this loophole exists, Apple needs to close it, not because it's terrible
0:18:09to allow upgrade pricing, but because it's so confusing and you know developers will
0:18:12jump on it in a second, everyone will have these stupid instructions on their website
0:18:16telling people how to get upgrade pricing by buying a bundle, which is not obvious.
0:18:19Yeah, well also, I mean, the biggest thing that I think would blow a hole in this is,
0:18:24do you have to have all the apps that are in the bundle still in the app store by themselves?
0:18:29Because if you do, that means you have to have your old version still for sale while
0:18:33your new version is for sale, and that's terrible.
0:18:35Well, so the idea, I mean, again, the terrible proposed idea is you keep the old one in the
0:18:40store for a limited time because the upgrade pricing would be some window of
0:18:44like a couple months and you raise the individual price of the like the
0:18:47standalone old version to something crazy that no one would accidentally buy
0:18:50of course you know that's like you hope no more actually buy until someone
0:18:54actually buys your you know 999 dollar app and it's pissed off at you or
0:18:58whatever but that all this is just like a terrible workaround to get into a
0:19:02loophole to give your existing customers a cheaper price for your new app but it
0:19:06has so many bad side effects they just need they need to close this whole and I
0:19:09I don't know how they will close it,
0:19:10because if they have a complete this bundle thing,
0:19:13I don't know how you stop this from happening.
0:19:16- Yeah, I think it's just one of those things,
0:19:17like developers are, they're so desperate to,
0:19:20they, we, are so desperate to get ongoing revenue,
0:19:25because you know what happens in the app store,
0:19:26when you have a paid app, this is what always happens,
0:19:28you launch and you get this nice big spike of sales,
0:19:31but then it starts dropping,
0:19:32and sometimes that drop can be pretty steep.
0:19:35So eventually, you know, you start making not enough money
0:19:38from your current version and you're like,
0:19:39okay, well now I wanna work on this new version
0:19:42or we have been working on this new version,
0:19:43I gotta release it, gotta make more money from this.
0:19:47Now, in the olden days, you release a new version
0:19:50and charge an upgrade price,
0:19:51because the full price was generally high enough,
0:19:55you know, if you're charging 100 bucks
0:19:57for the full price of your app,
0:19:59and then you release a new version,
0:20:00your existing customers would like it a lot
0:20:02if you gave them the new version for maybe 50 bucks
0:20:04or 40 bucks or whatever.
0:20:05So the upgrade discount thing happened.
0:20:07Well now in the iOS app store,
0:20:11there's pretty much no good way to do it,
0:20:13or the Mac app store,
0:20:14there's pretty much no good way to do that.
0:20:15And developers are always looking for a way
0:20:18to get around this and to do this,
0:20:20but the reality is all these things are terrible hacks.
0:20:24And they will all anger some portion of your customers
0:20:28to some degree no matter how you do them.
0:20:30And or cause you lots of support costs.
0:20:34And so it just, it never, there is no good solution to this.
0:20:38The only solution to this is what Apple's doing
0:20:42with their apps in the App Store.
0:20:43The few Apple apps that they still charge money for
0:20:46in the App Store, which that number keeps going down,
0:20:48but the few apps, like the Pro apps, they charge money for,
0:20:52you know, Logic, Aperture, stuff like that, Final Cut,
0:20:55they just, they drop all the prices down
0:20:57to a fraction of what they used to be.
0:20:58You know, these things used to be like $300, $600, $1,000.
0:21:02Now, things that were $1,000 are now $300,
0:21:06things that were $300 are now like 70 bucks,
0:21:09Logic is only 200.
0:21:11They dropped all their prices,
0:21:12and then when a new version comes out,
0:21:14it's just like Apple hardware.
0:21:16The new version costs the same thing as the old version.
0:21:18If you bought the old version, too bad.
0:21:19You want the new one, pay full price.
0:21:21And that's a little more palatable now than it used to be
0:21:24because the prices have gotten lower.
0:21:26It still kinda sucks, but in a lot of ways,
0:21:29it's quote, fair.
0:21:31It's also, from Apple's point of view,
0:21:32it's also very, very simple.
0:21:34The new version of the app is a brand new standalone app.
0:21:38The old version is removed from the store,
0:21:40so you can only buy the new one.
0:21:41And upgrades are, you know, well,
0:21:44you're paying less than you used to pay, be happy.
0:21:47And so that same model applies to iOS,
0:21:50but the prices of course are even lower.
0:21:52Instead of $100, you're paying $1 or $5 at most.
0:21:55You know, almost no one's paying over $5 on iOS
0:21:58for anything really.
0:22:00"If you buy Tweetbot one for three bucks
0:22:04"and then next week, Tweetbot two comes out
0:22:06"and it's another three bucks, too bad."
0:22:09Like that's the attitude that we have to have.
0:22:12That's their only choice really.
0:22:13That's what Apple has done with their stuff.
0:22:15They're leading the way on that
0:22:16and I think people are pretty much used to it.
0:22:19I mean people will complain no matter what you do
0:22:20if you charge money.
0:22:21There's always gonna be people who complain
0:22:22but I don't think you'd have fewer people complaining
0:22:26if you had upgrade pricing.
0:22:28And so the reality is this is the world we live in now.
0:22:30This is, you know, Apple has been very clear that
0:22:35if you want to do some kind of upgrade pricing scheme,
0:22:37figure out a way to make an in-app purchase.
0:22:38You know, the in-app purchase is the way that you
0:22:41add features to an existing app
0:22:42and try to get more money from them.
0:22:44That's it.
0:22:46- So the chat room has come through
0:22:47and linked us to the documentation for the app bundles
0:22:51and two relevant rules from this page.
0:22:53From Apple, app contains in a bundle must be available
0:22:56for sale on their own as well,
0:22:57so you do have to keep that other older app for sale in the store.
0:23:01And app bundles also support Complete My Bundle.
0:23:04Complete My Bundle provides customers who previously purchased one or more of the apps
0:23:07included within the bundle an additional discount on the app bundle.
0:23:10So I don't know if it's a straight subtraction of price or whatever, but...
0:23:13Perfect.
0:23:14So you can do this, but it's a terrible idea, too.
0:23:15Yeah, and I assume people will do it, and I'm not sure how Apple will react to it.
0:23:20Because if they just sort of shrug and go, "Well, they're within the rules we defined,"
0:23:25I expect there to be some confusion and sadness.
0:23:27but it's the App Store.
0:23:29- If you have both versions of your app in the store
0:23:31at the same time and they're both paid apps,
0:23:33you're gonna get so many angry customers,
0:23:35so many angry support emails, so many one-star reviews.
0:23:38I think that problem will be self-correcting.
0:23:40It's a terrible, terrible idea to have both versions
0:23:43in the store at the same time
0:23:44because people will accidentally buy the old one
0:23:46and then be very angry that you spent money
0:23:48on an obsolete app that doesn't entitle them to much
0:23:51or any of a discount on the new one in total.
0:23:53And yeah, it's--
0:23:55- Although, I mean, there's the whole thing
0:23:56cranking the price up on the old one and then just refunding anyone who
0:23:59accidentally buys it and eating 30% of that. But you can't refund them. Apple has to
0:24:03refund. That's the thing. Like you as the developer, you can't just push a refund
0:24:06button when they email you and say, "Oh, sorry, I corrected that for you. You can't, you
0:24:08have no control over that." It's, this is why it's a terrible idea. Developers,
0:24:12please do not do this. It is, you will regret it. Your customers will be upset.
0:24:16It is, it is just a very, very bad idea. I wonder if the people who are most
0:24:21likely to do this are the very few people on the App Store who still have
0:24:25expensive apps like over 50 bucks and they want to offer upgrade pricing because like
0:24:29you said upgrade pricing is pointless when you're selling $3 apps right but if it's like
0:24:34$50 $100 are there any of those left I don't even know used to be that Apple was close
0:24:38to that range but now not really anymore these days although was aperture like 80 or something
0:24:43yep anyway Apple stop playing the game the Apple service home I'm playing it so I wonder
0:24:46if there's someone out there with like some specialty CAD application that wants to offer
0:24:50upgrade pricing and tries this and then we can wait for their blog post where they cry
0:24:54about their customers getting angry at them or people being confused.
0:24:58Yeah, I could see, you know, obviously the higher the priced app, the more sense it might
0:25:03make to try a scheme like this, but I just think it's a terrible idea from the start.
0:25:08And speaking of looking at web pages at developer.apple.com and reading about them on the air, there was
0:25:14a lot of confusion during the week about what the hell was the NDA situation for WWDC, because
0:25:20all of us were at the beginning of every session they had the little announcer person come on and say
0:25:25reminder everything under the in the session is NDA and blah blah blah and like you know so
0:25:30it the boilerplate text and speech that we encountered at wwc was the same as every year
0:25:34which is basically the keynote is public it's streamed to the world all the sessions are under
0:25:38NDA and they are but the content of that NDA according to various blog posts included this
0:25:43new clause that said oh by the way you're allowed to talk about any technical information you see
0:25:47in these things you just can't like post screenshots copy and paste text from slides
0:25:51or distribute the software or review products or something to that effect but i'm not a lawyer i
0:25:57didn't know what that text meant so we've all been very cautious about it but here i think is the
0:26:00kicker after coming home from wwc i think we all realize that anybody and in any web browser can
0:26:08go to apple's developer website without having an account of any kind without signing anybody
0:26:12agreeing to anything and simply play videos from WWDC. You can watch videos of all the sessions of
0:26:18WWDC this year for free without signing any agreement with Apple. Which means basically
0:26:23that anything contained in those videos we're allowed to talk about because anybody can see
0:26:27them because it's essentially public information. I know enough about Apple's NDAs to know that if
0:26:30it's public information you can talk about it. So that is a relief in one respect and that we don't
0:26:35have to tiptoe around this stuff because if it was in a WWDC session we can talk about it because you
0:26:39You can just go watch the video right now and on the other hand what it means is that?
0:26:42anybody who cares can sit there watch every video from WBC and then we'll have no reason to read my os10 review because
0:26:49Everything everything in those videos you will know more than you're going to learn from my review because all I do is summarize
0:26:55WBC but no one wants to watch all those videos
0:26:58So you're probably read it anyway because as long as my review is it is still way shorter than watching everybody from WBC
0:27:03Yeah, I think you'll be alright
0:27:05Anyway, our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor.
0:27:10It is Automattic.
0:27:12This is a relatively new product that actually got the domain name, Automattic.com.
0:27:16Even spelled the normal way, not like the WordPress way.
0:27:18It's spelled the actual way that you spell the word "Automatic."
0:27:22Automattic is your smart driving assistant for your smartphone.
0:27:26So if you go to Automattic.com, you can see this thing.
0:27:29We talked about this in neutral, in I think the second to last episode, or the third to
0:27:32last episode of neutral.
0:27:33We actually talked about this, and we are probably irresponsible enough drivers, well
0:27:38Casey and I are at least, that this would have probably some bad news for us.
0:27:43Because here's what it does.
0:27:44So this plugs in, they have this little, I think it's a Bluetooth dongle, but they
0:27:48have a little dongle that plugs into the OBD, which one's the wrapper, which one's the
0:27:53port?
0:27:54Oh, on board data, OBD-C, right?
0:27:57OBD-2.
0:27:58Oh yeah, sorry, yes, yes, yes.
0:28:01It's that port in your car that it's usually in the driver's foot well and it's what they
0:28:06plug the diagnostic thing into when you go get service.
0:28:10They have a little dongle that plugs into that and then that can connect to an app on
0:28:12your phone that they have.
0:28:15This diagnostic port in almost any modern car can dump out tons of useful information
0:28:19from the engine, like what kind of gas mileage you're getting, what the engine is doing,
0:28:23what kind of condition the engine is in, if there's any problems with the engine.
0:28:27When the check engine light comes on, what that really means is there is an error.
0:28:32It's just a Boolean.
0:28:33Like, there is something in your car reporting an error code.
0:28:37This thing can actually tell you what those codes mean.
0:28:40It can decode them from almost all popular car types.
0:28:42You can go on their website and learn more about which ones are supported and everything,
0:28:45but it's great.
0:28:46So then it can even tell you how you've been doing on your gas mileage.
0:28:50You can see all these pretty graphs and averages, and you can kind of compete with yourself.
0:28:56You can see how you've been doing,
0:28:57how much fuel is costing around your area,
0:28:59and how much your driving style is helping
0:29:01or hurting your fuel cost goals.
0:29:03It can also remember where you parked.
0:29:06And you can locate your car on a nice little map,
0:29:08and look at their app.
0:29:09It's all very Apple design-y.
0:29:12It's a very well-made app.
0:29:14Right now it is iPhone only.
0:29:15It is coming soon to Android.
0:29:18Oh, one more little benefit,
0:29:19well, big benefit potentially.
0:29:22If you are in a crash, in a serious crash,
0:29:25They can actually automatically detect that from the OBD port.
0:29:31And they can notify local authorities automatically
0:29:35if you're in a crash, so this thing could really help you out.
0:29:37Hopefully you won't need that feature, but if you do,
0:29:40you might be glad you have it.
0:29:41So anyway, iPhone only coming soon to Android.
0:29:43This ships in only two business days.
0:29:45And there's a 45-day return policy.
0:29:47So just get it.
0:29:48Try it out.
0:29:48See if you like it.
0:29:49I bet you will.
0:29:50There's free shipping.
0:29:51Anyway, go to automatic.com/ATP.
0:29:55Normally, it's $99.95.
0:29:57And there's, by the way, no subscription fees,
0:29:58nothing per month for that service.
0:30:00You just buy the thing and that's it.
0:30:02No subscription fees.
0:30:03So $100 normally, you can get 20% off.
0:30:06Get this thing for just $80 at automatic.com/ATP.
0:30:10Thanks a lot to Automatic for sponsoring our show.
0:30:13When we talked about this on "Neutral," it was sort of
0:30:15in the context of car manufacturers should be ashamed
0:30:19of themselves, that they're not already doing this.
0:30:21right, but now here we are a year or two later, whatever it's been and
0:30:25That's the new status quo with Apple doing carplay
0:30:29It's like give up on car makers trying to do something Apple's just like look just let us take over your screen
0:30:34We will project a UI onto it from our device and it's like sort of
0:30:38externalizing the
0:30:39Technology part into a part that you upgrade faster than you upgrade your car and never relying on the kind of manufacturers do anything
0:30:45So it's like, you know with automatic there's this port it has information car manufacturers have been really slow
0:30:51to put that information to use, especially in non-high-end cars, but they all have this
0:30:57port, so why don't we sell this thing that people can buy, stick in there and use in
0:31:00conjunction with their smartphone or whatever to sort of add technology to their otherwise
0:31:06inexpensive and woefully under-technologicalified, that's not a word, but sounds good, car.
0:31:13Now it is.
0:31:14So, one more thing on the WWC NDA stuff. As people have noted, if you go to the video
0:31:20page which we will put in the show notes for anyone who wants to watch WWDC videos.
0:31:24The ones that they pretty much never release on video in my recollection are the lunchtime
0:31:29sessions, which are not technical sessions presented by Apple, but Apple invites in guest
0:31:33speakers from various places.
0:31:36A couple years ago Pixar did it, J.J. Abrams was there one year.
0:31:39This year the lunch session that I went to was presented by someone who works for Lucasfilm
0:31:44on the Star Wars franchise, and he was talking about the new animated show that he's working
0:31:49on but kind of did a big tour of the Star Wars universe and his history with it, those
0:31:56you're not going to be able to find.
0:31:58And it's not because I don't think there's any NDA type things, it's just that I think
0:32:01their deal with the people who want to come in and speak is, "We're not going to film
0:32:04you, we're not going to release your film, just come and talk to the people who are attending
0:32:07our conference as a nice thing to do."
0:32:09And that's probably an easier sell than, "Hey, famous person, come here and we'll film you,
0:32:13and then we'll sell access to your video or release it for free."
0:32:16So you won't find the Star Wars session, which is the one most nerds are interested in this
0:32:20year.
0:32:21I was there, and it was good, and it was fun, and it's a shame you can't see it, but oh
0:32:25well.
0:32:26All right, so we have a mountain more follow-up to get through.
0:32:29This might be a hypercritical-style 80% follow-up episode.
0:32:32Geez.
0:32:33Well, I was going to say we could just do this next item and then leave the rev, because
0:32:37there's one item on cloud and then two items on medical stuff that I think maybe we mentioned
0:32:42in the previous episode.
0:32:43I just wanted to read this Apple and cloud feedback because it was the first time that
0:32:47I had heard this information, although I think one of you two had alluded to it before.
0:32:52This is from anonymous source, who knows if it's real, whatever, anyway.
0:32:58Typical caveats about feedback, do not take this as gospel, but here's what this person
0:33:02said in regards to Apple and the cloud.
0:33:05They said, "iTunes, iCloud, and the majority of server-based interfacing are handled by
0:33:09a huge division of Apple that acts almost like its own company due to sheer size.
0:33:13They employ mostly contractors, including offshore.
0:33:15From my experience, they were the slowest responding division by far and seemed to be
0:33:19completely locked in politics."
0:33:21This is like the scenario that we imagined thinking about Apple's cloud stuff.
0:33:26It seems like the people who do that aren't as good as the people who do the other stuff.
0:33:30Wait, hold on.
0:33:31I didn't say they weren't as good.
0:33:32I said they seem like they're not getting the resources or the priority that they need
0:33:36to be good.
0:33:37Well, so here's the next bit of his.
0:33:39software developer outside the division who needed to work with them in parallel to build something,
0:33:43it's a nightmare. Imagine submitting a request to the NSA to give you information and receiving
0:33:47a piece of paper saying they can't due to technical reasons six months later.
0:33:51It's not just that they're under-resourced, it's that they seem to be not as responsive.
0:33:58They're not working on the same team. Within Apple, you imagine, "All right, we've got to
0:34:02get the new iPhone out, and the OS needs to be done, and whatever frameworks for these new
0:34:06new features need to be on there,
0:34:08and the hardware design,
0:34:09like it's all, everyone's working together
0:34:11to just get this job done.
0:34:12And then there's this other entity far away,
0:34:14disconnected with a huge latency,
0:34:16where every time you have to deal with them,
0:34:17it's like a big turnaround time,
0:34:19and it seems like they're not on the same page as you.
0:34:20Is it just because they're under resources?
0:34:22Is it just because they're remote?
0:34:23I don't know, but this, you could,
0:34:25if this is true, this would explain
0:34:27whether Cloud stuff has such problems,
0:34:28because it's almost like it's not Apple doing it.
0:34:31It's like this other entity that's not,
0:34:34that's not running the same race with them.
0:34:35It's not sort of together on producing this big thing,
0:34:38but outsourcing, as the Spolsky thinks,
0:34:42don't outsource your core competency.
0:34:43If cloud is an Apple's core competency at this point,
0:34:46then what is?
0:34:47Like, they need to bring that back in
0:34:49if it really is outsourced like this,
0:34:50'cause if this is true,
0:34:52it is very depressing and a bad situation.
0:34:54- It's almost as if they need increased collaboration.
0:34:58- Now, that was just increased collaboration
0:34:59amongst the hardware and software guys
0:35:01to stop them from fighting.
0:35:02Those are the people who already were working
0:35:03pretty well together.
0:35:04this is, who knows what this is.
0:35:05So again, I don't know if any of this is true.
0:35:08Anonymous sources, who knows, but if it is true,
0:35:11it confirms my worst fears and presumably it is changing.
0:35:15Like the CloudKit stuff would indicate a change
0:35:17in that direction because it sure seems like, you know,
0:35:20that Apple is dogfooding its own stuff
0:35:22and to a degree that they hadn't before
0:35:25and that CloudKit looks like a much more sane API
0:35:29than the previous ones, much more like the APIs
0:35:31that everyone was building for themselves.
0:35:33So things are looking up in this area.
0:35:35This is a sort of a look backward
0:35:37on how things might have been if this is all accurate.
0:35:39- Yeah, and that does corroborate what I had heard,
0:35:43although that's more detailed than I had heard,
0:35:45but also I heard from some, so we had somebody else,
0:35:48I don't know if it was the same person or not,
0:35:49or maybe it was a random conversation I had somewhere,
0:35:51but somebody else said that this actually was
0:35:54like actively changing and so like Federighi
0:35:58was now able to like kind of push against that
0:36:01to some degree and get stuff moving
0:36:04and that apparently changes were happening.
0:36:05And that's all that we know really,
0:36:08that we don't even really know that.
0:36:10But it basically sounds like it has been bad
0:36:15and it is still a little bit bad but is making progress.
0:36:19And I think what Apple is showing, what they're announcing,
0:36:22and even just how their stuff is performing recently,
0:36:25I think the results seem to be bearing that out.
0:36:29That seems like a plausible explanation
0:36:31of what we're seeing.
0:36:32Anyway, before we move on to the official topics,
0:36:35let me get one more sponsorship out of the way,
0:36:36because we were a little late to the first one.
0:36:39Our second sponsor this week is lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A dot com.
0:36:44lynda.com helps you learn and keep up to date
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0:36:57you can create UI, you can get design tips,
0:37:00You can get your first code up and running
0:37:02with Objective-C or probably even Swift pretty soon.
0:37:05I imagine they're working on that very quickly.
0:37:06They're usually very quick to put up new stuff
0:37:08when new stuff comes out.
0:37:09You can even use lynda.com to learn new applications
0:37:12for new creative endeavors, like if you wanna learn
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0:37:34They work directly with software companies,
0:37:35so that way, when a new version of Photoshop comes out,
0:37:38they can have a tutorial on day one.
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0:37:42Really fantastic.
0:37:43Now, lynda.com, this is the best part, I think.
0:37:46You get all this,
0:37:47you can have access to their entire library.
0:37:49It isn't per video.
0:37:51You pay $25 per month, and that's a flat fee.
0:37:55You get unlimited access to everything
0:37:57for 25 bucks a month.
0:37:58So that kind of removes the pressure in your head.
0:38:01You're like, well, do I really wanna learn about this thing
0:38:04for another $3?
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0:38:0725 bucks a month gets you unlimited access
0:38:09to their entire catalog.
0:38:11So browse around.
0:38:11You might find something that you didn't think
0:38:14you'd want to be interested in,
0:38:15but watch a few minutes of it and see.
0:38:17And then you might be like,
0:38:18oh, I always assumed that would be harder.
0:38:20Or, oh, that's how you can do this cool thing.
0:38:22I never knew that.
0:38:23So anyway, go to lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.
0:38:27slash ATP, and you can get a free seven day trial.
0:38:32Go check it out, see for yourself.
0:38:34We've all, all three of us have watched stuff on there.
0:38:36I've learned a lot from their stuff,
0:38:38especially with some of the podcast production stuff
0:38:39that I've done, and chances are I'll probably go on there
0:38:42to learn Swift or JSON or, sorry, Node or all sorts of stuff.
0:38:45They have all sorts of language courses.
0:38:47You can even learn PHP if you're the only person
0:38:49on Earth who doesn't know it yet, John,
0:38:52and you can learn all sorts of new stuff there.
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0:38:57I mean, they have this crazy list of stuff.
0:38:59Go check it out.
0:39:00These are nicely produced professional video tutorials.
0:39:03Go to L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.
0:39:07That is Linda dot com with a Y.
0:39:09Linda dot com slash ATP.
0:39:11Thanks a lot to Linda for sponsoring our show once again.
0:39:14- Pretty sure I've written more PHP than Casey.
0:39:16- That's possible but not necessarily true.
0:39:20When Aaron and I got engaged,
0:39:24I had an old ThinkPad running some flavor of Ubuntu and I wrote our wedding website
0:39:34in PHP and this was actually my first exposure to databases because I had always been writing
0:39:39client-side apps.
0:39:41And so I wrote a wedding website which allowed you to RSVP online and I was extremely proud
0:39:48of myself.
0:39:49That was all PHP.
0:39:50And I thought that went really well until my friend who had an apostrophe in his surname
0:39:57went to register and all of a sudden everything took a turn because I didn't properly escape
0:40:02everything.
0:40:03But like I said, it was my first experience and that went pretty well.
0:40:06And we didn't have to use the "not" in order to do that because, I don't know,
0:40:11everyone used the "not" at that point and I didn't want to.
0:40:14So.
0:40:15JAYLEE STIFFER You really wanted to show Erin right up front
0:40:17what she was getting into.
0:40:18Basically, yes.
0:40:20- Yeah.
0:40:20- And she's still here.
0:40:21- That's good, yeah.
0:40:23You found the right one.
0:40:24- So anyway, what are we talking about tonight?
0:40:27- Talking about Marco's Mac Pro woes.
0:40:29- Oh yes, how could I forget?
0:40:31So--
0:40:32- That was fun, yeah.
0:40:33- So what happened?
0:40:34- I woke up to a computer that was showing
0:40:37signs of disk failure.
0:40:39Basically it had totally locked up.
0:40:42Like you could still move the mouse and everything.
0:40:43You could still like launch bar.
0:40:45You could still invoke commands and click on stuff
0:40:48and move stuff, but anything that would cause a disk access
0:40:51would just freeze whatever you were using.
0:40:54And so I tried, like I couldn't even launch console,
0:40:58like I tried to launch a console app
0:41:00to see if it was showing me anything useful,
0:41:02and I couldn't even do that
0:41:02because that would require reading from the disk.
0:41:05So I thought, oh crap, my SSD is dead.
0:41:08And I rebooted and rebooted and rebooted
0:41:13and could never get past the gray spinner.
0:41:16in verbose mode it would stop at the,
0:41:19how do you pronounce the FSCK, Disc Command Checking thing?
0:41:22- Just spell it out, it's fine.
0:41:23- Anyway, it wouldn't get,
0:41:25it was doing that and would never finish it.
0:41:27I gave it lots of time, I gave it an hour to see,
0:41:30like is it taking a while to finish?
0:41:32No, it wasn't, it was just stuck.
0:41:35And you know, I restored it from a super duper clone,
0:41:39which is by far the fastest recovery method.
0:41:42And so I did that and it was fine,
0:41:45and so I'm fine, I'm back up now and everything's fine.
0:41:48It seems, oh, and for whatever it's worth,
0:41:52while it was in the unbootable state,
0:41:55I booted from the clone and ran Disk Utility
0:41:58against the damaged disk.
0:42:00It appeared to have no errors.
0:42:02I did the whole repair, verify everything.
0:42:04It reported nothing wrong.
0:42:07In conclusion, it appears as though
0:42:09this was almost certainly a file system related problem.
0:42:14You know, I don't know.
0:42:15Anyway, this is boring, but I had an issue that caused
0:42:18enough disk corruption to make the disk unbootable,
0:42:21and it seems to have been related to the file system
0:42:25I was using, which was HFS+.
0:42:28- Ding! - Yep.
0:42:29That's it.
0:42:31- We're doing the verbal sound effects now.
0:42:33- Yeah, well, I don't have one of those crazy sound boards,
0:42:36like on Bionic, where I can just hit a button.
0:42:38(laughing)
0:42:39I love Bionic.
0:42:40Bionic is--
0:42:42- Oh, it's so good, but I couldn't even tell you why.
0:42:45It's just so good.
0:42:46- It's so bad that it's so good, and they know it.
0:42:49That's the, like, it's the show that,
0:42:52it's like, it's like Milton, the guy from Office Space,
0:42:56like, you know, it's like, you know,
0:42:57the show got fired six years ago and no one told them,
0:43:01and they just keep going in every day.
0:43:03It's just this ongoing piece of performance art.
0:43:06(laughing)
0:43:07Between two people who are very funny together
0:43:11and just have nothing to talk about
0:43:13because the show is like totally off the rails.
0:43:16- Oh, it's so wonderful.
0:43:17- And it is comical, like it is such good humor
0:43:21and the funniest part is you're sitting there listening
0:43:24and thinking, why am I still listening to this?
0:43:26And they're sitting there producing it saying,
0:43:28why are we still producing this?
0:43:29And yet it works, I don't know why it works,
0:43:32but it does work and it's hilarious and I really enjoy it.
0:43:35- Oh, I agree.
0:43:36- I hope they didn't pay for that spot
0:43:37because I'm not sure you're really selling it there.
0:43:39(laughing)
0:43:40"Why am I still listening to this?" says Marco Armond.
0:43:43- No, nobody should be listening to it,
0:43:45but I listen to it and I love it.
0:43:46- Oh, I completely agree with everything you just said.
0:43:48It's so good.
0:43:49- And I think they would agree with me.
0:43:50I think they would say don't listen to it.
0:43:52- Oh, it's so wonderful because it really has got,
0:43:54it's like the entire show,
0:43:55like if you think "Back to Work" is a show of in-jokes,
0:43:58you have no idea because Bionic is one entire show
0:44:02made of nothing but in-jokes.
0:44:04It's ridiculous and it's wonderful in every possible way.
0:44:07- Yeah, it is really quite good.
0:44:10Anyway, I forgot we were even talking about that.
0:44:15How did we even get there?
0:44:16- Ding soundboard, HFS Plus.
0:44:18- Nice, right, okay.
0:44:19- There you go.
0:44:20- Anyway.
0:44:21- So I put the link of the show notes to this article
0:44:23that a bazillion people have sent me on Twitter
0:44:25from this person complaining about HFS Plus
0:44:27because they had a bunch of photos
0:44:30and it was something like 15,000 photos
0:44:33stored over six years and he ran some checksums to compare.
0:44:37I guess he had valid checksums someplace
0:44:39compared it to the the file store in hms plus and he lost 28 files over six years and these are images
0:44:45and some of them some of these like jpegs would half load some of them would load completely again
0:44:49this is what we're talking about uh bit rot you know that digital storage is not forever uh errors
0:44:56will be introduced and if they're introduced in your images uh you may lose some or all of
0:45:01individual pictures like if the error is towards the end maybe you'll be able to see most of the
0:45:05picture for the errors in the middle you go see the top half of the picture maybe there's some
0:45:08clever thing they could recover from those. Maybe the whole file is host and you just get a bunch of
0:45:11static or garbage. But anyway, that's a shame if that's the only copy of the picture you had.
0:45:15And this article talks about HFS+ and how it's old and how it's crappy and so on and so forth.
0:45:19And a lot of people sent me this thing going, "See, you're always talking about the HFS+ right?
0:45:22Look at this poor guy. He's backing you up saying HFS+ is crappy." And I didn't respond to most of
0:45:29these people and I didn't really tweet out the link to the article because this article is not
0:45:33really about HFS+ being crappy. I already wrote a bit about HFS+ being crappy in one of my reviews,
0:45:38that is linked to in this article at the end in an addendum.
0:45:43HFS+ is crappy, and it does corrupt itself.
0:45:46And I'm not even sure that's what happened to Marco's thing, because
0:45:49Disk Utility said everything was okay, so HFS+ probably didn't
0:45:52corrupt its metadata structure. It probably does think it's keeping track of everything.
0:45:57But bitrot is something that is sort of a separate issue, where
0:46:02when data goes bad on disk, the metadata keeping track of where that data is
0:46:07could be perfectly valid. Like, HFS+ has not corrupted itself, it knows where all of your
0:46:11data is for every single file, it's just that that data itself is garbage. And HFS+ does
0:46:16not care what the content of that data is, it just needs to keep track of it and remember
0:46:20where it is and how much is available free and how much is occupied and where each piece
0:46:25of individual files are and what order they go in. And HFS+ does fail in many respects
0:46:31in doing that job, and that is one of my complaints about HFS+. But the second complaint about
0:46:35and all sort of file systems that predate the ZFS dawning of reliability, of getting
0:46:43religion about reliability, they don't care what your data is either.
0:46:46They just cross their fingers and hope that the disk storage system is reliable.
0:46:49And ZFS was the first popular file system to get serious about saying that we're going
0:46:56to take responsibility for keeping track of whether the stuff you wrote to disk is what
0:47:02is still there.
0:47:03do that with checksums, not just checksums on the metadata,
0:47:05but also checksums on the data itself,
0:47:07which is computationally expensive and takes memory
0:47:09and has all these other limits.
0:47:11But ZFS would be able to detect errors
0:47:12in the storage system.
0:47:13Sometimes there are errors in the hard drive,
0:47:15sometimes there are errors in the disk controller,
0:47:16sometimes there are errors in the driver stack
0:47:19and in the operating system.
0:47:21No matter where the source of the error is,
0:47:22ZFS's thing was like end-to-end data protection,
0:47:25where if we write data and then later on go to read it,
0:47:29and if what we read is not what we wrote originally,
0:47:31we will tell you that there's a problem.
0:47:34That doesn't save your data, it's still garbage,
0:47:36but then you can, if you have the ability
0:47:37to detect when something went wrong,
0:47:39if you're using any form of redundant storage,
0:47:41which the EFS offered itself,
0:47:42where it could store your data twice on disk
0:47:44or three times on disk, you could use a multi-disk scenario,
0:47:47you could have backups, so on and so forth,
0:47:49the key is having the file system let you know immediately,
0:47:51oh, this data is bad,
0:47:54but I know I have another copy of this data over there,
0:47:56and I can tell if that data is good,
0:47:58so I don't just have to guess,
0:47:59like, oh, this one is bad, that other one must be good.
0:48:01I can also check that one.
0:48:02Oh, that data is good.
0:48:02Let me write it back on top of this one.
0:48:04Let me, you know, it could, you know,
0:48:06sort of the self healing file system.
0:48:08Not knowing whether your data is bad,
0:48:10like this person manually made a bunch of checksums
0:48:11or whatever, and then compared them.
0:48:13If you don't know your data is bad,
0:48:15you won't find out that your data is hosed
0:48:17until that corrupt data has like spread
0:48:19to all of your backups.
0:48:20It's been pushed to your cloud backup.
0:48:22It's all, it's, you know,
0:48:23your last three months worth of backups
0:48:24have long since been overwritten.
0:48:25And all you have is the corrupt data
0:48:27because you don't have your data going back
0:48:29to the beginning of time.
0:48:30have is multiple copies of your corrupt data. And you won't know that again until like you're
0:48:34trying to get out pictures for someone's high school graduation and you want a baby picture
0:48:37and you realize the baby picture you wanted is corrupt. If you had a file system that
0:48:43had end-to-end data integrity, the file system could have notified you of that immediately
0:48:48when it happened and could have potentially repaired it from a good copy. So that's I
0:48:53think what this article is really complaining about, that all file systems are not like
0:48:58ZFS and offer data integrity guarantees and not so much that oh yeah HFS is
0:49:03crappy because it loses track of where your data is which does happen
0:49:06and people do tweet about that all the time but that's not really what this
0:49:09article is about. We are sponsored this week by Backblaze. Our friends at
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0:49:35and either way, regardless of what I thought,
0:49:37I had to wipe it and start fresh,
0:49:40I was never nervous that I was going to lose data
0:49:42because I know that yes, I have my time machine here.
0:49:46I also have my super duper clone here,
0:49:48which is what gave me a very fast recovery today.
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0:49:53Backblaze would have my data also.
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0:50:06and they actually bought me an $11 tea,
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0:50:09'cause nothing at Semivar tea lounge or whatever is cheap.
0:50:12It was quite good though.
0:50:14Also quite large.
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0:50:16that size of what they serve there.
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0:50:20for one person anyway.
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0:51:00It was last backed up at this time.
0:51:02They'll send you an alert
0:51:03if they haven't heard from your computer in a while.
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0:52:14Just go to backblaze.com/atp.
0:52:17Thank you very much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show
0:52:19once again and for buying me tea last week.
0:52:22- Okay, so let's talk about metal
0:52:24and I do not mean the flavor of music.
0:52:27So I am not at all qualified to talk about
0:52:30any 3D programming, anything,
0:52:31because I've never really done it.
0:52:32And Marco, I don't believe you have either.
0:52:35- That is not true.
0:52:36- Oh, really?
0:52:37- I am slightly,
0:52:39slightly a hair above completely unqualified.
0:52:43- Excellent.
0:52:43because I, in college, I tried writing a 3D version
0:52:48of Scorched Earth, and I tried it in like three
0:52:51different languages using at least two different
0:52:54graphics APIs, using DirectX first, then OpenGL,
0:52:57and then something else using OpenGL.
0:52:59It was basically, it was my way of fooling around
0:53:02with various 3D stuff that I was learning in college,
0:53:04and then I kinda used my most recent version of that
0:53:07as a demo to get myself my first job,
0:53:10and then I never looked at 3D programming again.
0:53:11So I know enough, I know very basics of 3D programming
0:53:16as it stood in 2003 and 2004.
0:53:19So it's probably completely useless by today's standards.
0:53:22And I would never consider myself
0:53:24a knowledgeable programmer at all.
0:53:26However, I at least know like the kinds of things
0:53:29that low-level graphic APIs do.
0:53:31- Right, so John, why don't you tell us about M
0:53:35- I don't know why you think I know any more about,
0:53:37I mean, I've done about the same amount of 3D programming
0:53:39Marco like demo apps on the SGIs in college, you know, where you just get something up
0:53:44on the screen and maybe move it around and you're like, "Well, that was really hard.
0:53:46I'm not doing this anymore," because it's super hard to get anything impressive up on
0:53:51the screen, especially back then. But I mean, that—
0:53:53I mean, really, if you want to know about Metal as an API, just start listening to debug,
0:53:57and eventually Guy English will say enough things, because he actually is qualified to
0:54:01know, and, like, because he's actually a real game programmer. So listen to what he says
0:54:06about Metal, and you'll learn more about it from him than from us.
0:54:11But the executive summary is what's important. I mean, we're going to talk about it from
0:54:14a business perspective, but it's like, so OpenGL and OpenGL ES is what Apple was using
0:54:19previously. These are open standards that are in theory not controlled by any one company.
0:54:23There's a consortium, blah, blah, blah. These are very old standards that have evolved
0:54:26over the years. When these standards were created, the current crop of 3D hardware,
0:54:32current GPUs did not exist in this form. And so the API, even though it has evolved over
0:54:37the years, it's had to maintain backward compatibility, it is not well suited to current hardware.
0:54:45Not just in the particular details, because a lot of that is handled by a driver, but
0:54:48just in terms of the programming model. Like, what do you do? You issue a series of function
0:54:52calls that set things up and then cause them to be drawn. And the sequence of events that
0:54:58presented through an OpenGL API have almost no bearing on what's actually happening with
0:55:02the hardware in terms of when does something happen, when do commands get sent to the GPU,
0:55:07when do the things that are going to be drawn get sent to the GPU's memory, how do things get
0:55:12written back, how does that affect this? A lot of that happens in the driver, but that's just
0:55:15another level of indirection, so you're there doing things step by step in your program,
0:55:20and there's this whole other program going on behind the scenes to manage that stuff to say,
0:55:24"All right, when should I ship this stuff off to the GPU so it's available in time?
0:55:28oh wait, the program just read something back from the GPU.
0:55:30Actually, we have to stall and read that back from the GPU.
0:55:33So previously, the GPU was two frames ahead of the CPU,
0:55:35but now the CPU wants to read that data back,
0:55:37so we have to wait for it to catch up and resynchronize.
0:55:39There's latency between the GPU and the CPU,
0:55:42but if you don't accept that latency,
0:55:44you might not be completely utilizing the GPU.
0:55:46And all sorts of details that come from the mismatch
0:55:49between this relatively high-level API
0:55:52that does not acknowledge the existence of the GPU
0:55:55in its current form,
0:55:56and what's actually going on behind the scenes.
0:55:57So that requires game programmers to do all sorts of voodoo stuff where they're like,
0:56:02"Well, I know if I do these sequence of events and do this little thing here, it will force
0:56:06these things to all be uploaded to the GPU.
0:56:08And I know if I do this, my shaders will be compiled and we'll be ready for me."
0:56:13That's another thing with OpenGL.
0:56:14There's OpenGL shader language, and that's sort of a high-level language, but it has
0:56:18to be compiled for the individual GPU.
0:56:20And whether that happens at the time your program runs or at the time it draws a frame
0:56:25or you want your shadies to be precompiled,
0:56:27and DirectX has this method where they precompile them down to sort of a,
0:56:31not bytecode, but more compact form,
0:56:33and then Apple's drivers had to use LLVM for that back in the day.
0:56:36Anyway, it's an extremely complicated world,
0:56:39and what developers who do 3D programming wanted to do is say,
0:56:43"This is way too complicated.
0:56:44I can't keep track of all the different machines
0:56:46and the Rube Goldberg device that causes graphics to go up on the screen."
0:56:50If you just gave me a programming model
0:56:53that was a closer match to the way things actually happen, it would be a lot easier
0:56:57to get something that performs well on a wide range of hardware. Metal is an interesting
0:57:03entry into that field because, first of all, Metal right now only works on iOS and only works on the
0:57:08A7. So certainly it's not helping people deploy their, you know, write code that's going to work
0:57:15on a wide variety of platforms or a wide variety of hardware. Going forward, I'm sure they will
0:57:19expand support for it, I'm sure it supports the A8 now and all that other good stuff,
0:57:23and who knows what it'll support in the future,
0:57:25but for now it's very narrowly constrained.
0:57:27But the programming model of Metal
0:57:29does fit closer to the way things work.
0:57:31It shows you, here's a command buffer,
0:57:34batch your commands up, batch your things up,
0:57:37ship them off to the GPU in the correct order.
0:57:40Like we're exposing all these things
0:57:41that were previously happening in the driver
0:57:43that were completely opaque to you,
0:57:44we expose them as objects,
0:57:45and you have a programming language
0:57:47that lets you construct them, package them up,
0:57:49send them off, you know,
0:57:51and it's much cleaner than OpenGL,
0:57:53and it's a great fit for the way modern GPUs work today.
0:57:57And the reason Apple thinks this is something
0:58:00that's going to help people is not because they think
0:58:02people are going to write their programs in Metal
0:58:04and target only A7 devices or greater,
0:58:06but because the people who make the game engines,
0:58:09which they had all on the stage during the keynote,
0:58:11that's why they had Epic up there with their Unreal engine,
0:58:13and they showed Unity and all the other game engines
0:58:16out there whose names I can't remember,
0:58:18like the big four engine makers for 3D engines.
0:58:21That's what most game makers use
0:58:23because writing a 3D engine is super hard.
0:58:25Well, if the engine middleware makers
0:58:30make sure their engines are able to run with metal
0:58:32when they're running on the A7, then anyone
0:58:35who develops a game on top of that engine gets the advantage of,
0:58:38oh, if you play my game on an A7, I'll get better performance.
0:58:42So it's an interesting move by Apple
0:58:44to sort of try to get away from OpenGL
0:58:47and take control of their own destiny with a more modern API.
0:58:50And it's also interesting that they didn't choose
0:58:52do what Microsoft did, which is Microsoft wanted to compete with OpenGL years and years
0:58:55ago and they made DirectX, which learned from OpenGL's mistakes and was more modern, but
0:59:00is not that new.
0:59:01I mean, Metal is much newer than OpenGL.
0:59:03And of course AMD has Mantle, which is a similar type of thing to Metal.
0:59:07As far as I'm aware, I have not read a lot about Mantle, but sort of closer to the Metal,
0:59:12which is I'm assuming where Apple got its name.
0:59:14Mantle isn't closer to the Metal API.
0:59:17It's one of the few areas in computing where the APIs are actually getting not so much
0:59:22lower level, but exposing more of the foibles of the hardware rather than going the other
0:59:28direction rather than abstracting it all.
0:59:30Because OpenGL is more distant from the hardware than either Mantle or Metal or probably DirectX
0:59:37for that matter.
0:59:38So that's the situation with Metal, that's what Apple is doing, and when Apple announced
0:59:41Metal in the keynote I tweeted something to the effect of, "So is Apple going to make
0:59:46a game console or what? Because they just made their own sort of low-level game console-y
0:59:52type 3D API. They've got a little box that you connect to a TV. They've got controller
0:59:58support APIs built into iOS. Everyone keeps expecting them to offer some way to put apps
1:00:03on the Apple TV. What's the deal here? Are they going to make one? Are they not going
1:00:08to make one? Are they just going to dance around this until they have all the pieces
1:00:10but then just refuse to do anything? Kind of like they did with eBooks for years and
1:00:13years where they had all the pieces in place to be the world's dominant ebook maker and
1:00:17then just let Amazon do it because they couldn't be bothered. And this comes up because there
1:00:22was a strategic repost today that says Apple TV might disrupt Microsoft and Sony that talks
1:00:29about the same issue. Have you guys read this?
1:00:31Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, it's definitely true. One of Ben's main arguments
1:00:37there is that the official high profile game consoles out there are these very high end,
1:00:46hot, expensive devices and that it is necessarily keeping them high end because there are these
1:00:53$400 boxes that it kind of locks out casual gamers who it's just not worth them spending
1:01:01$400 on this box. Meanwhile, so many people are now getting things like the Apple TV or
1:01:07Roku or the new Amazon fiery box, whatever it is, that, well, Merlin says it's good.
1:01:14Anyway, so many people are getting these little cheap boxes that can stream video or watch
1:01:19Netflix or whatever and that model, like that market, is probably very likely to disrupt
1:01:27the gaming market at some point soon. That's kind of the gist, right?
1:01:31I mean, basically.
1:01:32I mean, I think if you look at Metal, I mean, Metal is really interesting just because,
1:01:37you know, "Oh, look, it's a new level API that is a lot faster." But it's worth
1:01:41asking why they made Metal. You know, why did Apple put so much effort into something
1:01:48that is entirely about games? Because Apple historically has, hell, we were talking about
1:01:54this a couple of weeks ago, how Apple just doesn't really seem to care about games.
1:01:58Obviously they do. Obviously we were at least partially wrong on that.
1:02:01I don't think it's entirely about games, though.
1:02:04Well--
1:02:05Because, I mean, think about--
1:02:07the games is one big aspect of it, definitely.
1:02:10But their whole UI uses OpenGL.
1:02:12And viewed through the lens of iOS,
1:02:17Metal starts to look more like a battery saving feature, where
1:02:20they can more efficiently use the GPU with more precision,
1:02:22exactly doling out the commands to it in the right order,
1:02:26and having 10 times faster draw call performance,
1:02:30and all these things.
1:02:31That makes their UI snappier and has a potential battery savings
1:02:36because you're spending less time flogging the GPU
1:02:38to get your stuff done.
1:02:39And their whole UI is basically-- it's not a 3D game,
1:02:42but it's all OpenGL on iOS and on the Mac, for that matter,
1:02:46these days.
1:02:47So there is a platform benefit to it,
1:02:50even if no game maker ever used it.
1:02:52I don't think they would have gone through the effort
1:02:53if no game maker used it.
1:02:55And clearly, game makers like Metal
1:02:58because all the big engines are saying,
1:03:00yes we're going to support it. And I don't think Apple had to twist their arms because
1:03:03this is what game makers want. They want their games to go faster. They don't like fighting
1:03:06with OpenGL ES, trying to figure out what weird incantations they have to do to get
1:03:10good performance. And game makers want good battery life too. They don't want people
1:03:14to play a game and have it destroy your phone's battery.
1:03:16That's fair. And I also think it's very obvious that there are a number of major strategic
1:03:22benefits here. Obviously a lot of people are saying, "Oh well, this will encourage
1:03:26people to write games only for iOS. And I think the number of people who will make that
1:03:32decision based on Metal is probably very, very small because most people aren't writing
1:03:36this low-level code. I mean, as you see, the people who make the engines, they're writing
1:03:41code at this level, and they're possibly investing into making Metal ports for their
1:03:46engines that will, you know, they're not going to stop making OpenGL versions. You
1:03:50know, they're still going to, like, the big engines out there that everyone licenses
1:03:53or uses, they're still going to have OpenGL versions so they can keep running on Android
1:03:56and everything else. They're not going to just stop doing that. But it will reinforce
1:04:02the pretty frequent idea that games, while they might run on Android stuff, they usually
1:04:10run better on iOS. And it's usually because most Android stuff out there has a pretty
1:04:14wide range of GPUs and GPU power. And some of the cheap Android stuff, like some of the
1:04:19cheap Android tablets, historically have had very weak GPU power compared to comparable
1:04:24iOS devices, partially at a cost,
1:04:26partially out of other concerns, who knows,
1:04:28but for whatever reason,
1:04:29Android GPUs have historically sucked.
1:04:32And yes, I know there are some devices that have good ones,
1:04:34but I think the average is pretty bad
1:04:36for what's actually sold.
1:04:37♪ It's not a toxic health stew ♪
1:04:40♪ Toxic health stew ♪
1:04:41And I think this is a way for Apple to keep that lead going
1:04:45for a while longer, you know,
1:04:46like as the Android stuff gets better hardware
1:04:48and starts catching up,
1:04:50I think this is a way to just be like,
1:04:52all right, let's keep that lead going.
1:04:53but ultimately I think this does,
1:04:56they were very specific that this is for the A7.
1:04:59- Well, and for the A8, you assume,
1:05:01I mean, like obviously.
1:05:03But yeah, like, I mean, it's a total Apple thing to do.
1:05:06What other company could even, you know,
1:05:09could feasibly do this?
1:05:10Because Apple has such a limited line
1:05:12and is so relentless about moving things forward
1:05:16and doesn't really care that this API
1:05:18doesn't apply to their old things,
1:05:19it's going to apply to all of their iOS devices
1:05:21from this time forward, assuming the iPod Touch gets the A7 this year.
1:05:25Oh yeah, the iPod Touch exists. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the fact that this is A7 only,
1:05:32or A7 and above only, probably signifies that if Apple's going to enter the game market,
1:05:38the way they're going to do it is by waiting until there's an A7 in the Apple TV, and then
1:05:42they're like, "All right, hey, now we have this thing, start making games for it." And
1:05:47I think we're waiting until that becomes economical.
1:05:50And I think that's why we don't have an Apple TV SDK yet.
1:05:53I think that's why the Apple TV hardware has done
1:05:56very little in the last few years,
1:05:57like has moved forward very little.
1:05:58I think they're just waiting for economics
1:06:00until they can combine this thing.
1:06:03Keep the same price point, 100 bucks,
1:06:04maybe even drop it by 20, 30 bucks,
1:06:06but probably keep it at 100 bucks
1:06:09and eventually put an A7 in there.
1:06:11And that, heck, that might be this fall.
1:06:14It would be a little aggressive,
1:06:15but they could probably do it if they wanted to.
1:06:17I think there's a very good chance of that happening
1:06:19and of that happening soon.
1:06:21That might even be the big fall thing is,
1:06:24hey, you guys are all talking about wearables
1:06:26that nobody wants.
1:06:27We kind of made a game system that's gonna kick butt
1:06:29in the market because we're gonna sell a ton of them anyway
1:06:32and then you can start making games for it
1:06:33using all of our existing infrastructure, using Metal,
1:06:36and here's a new controller
1:06:37so the controlling doesn't suck and that's it.
1:06:39I mean, that would be a pretty amazing fall.
1:06:42- Like I said during the V
1:06:42Like I said during the W3C keynote,
1:06:44Apple has all the pieces to make a run
1:06:48of this exact strategy.
1:06:49An inexpensive box with pretty good 3D performance.
1:06:53They've got their own chip, they've got their own GPU,
1:06:57they've got their own OS,
1:06:59they've got now a low level console style API
1:07:01for doing 3D and taking advantage of that hardware.
1:07:05They've got the API for controller support.
1:07:08All the pieces are there.
1:07:10Unfortunately, all those pieces, the technology pieces,
1:07:13are not the hard part of being successful
1:07:15in the game console business.
1:07:17Just ask Microsoft.
1:07:18Getting the technology right is good,
1:07:21but I don't think it's even necessary.
1:07:23It's not like a necessary but sufficient thing.
1:07:25I don't think it's even necessary to get the tech right.
1:07:27The Wii's technology was disgusting,
1:07:29and they were successful in the market, right?
1:07:31So the hard part of being successful in the game market
1:07:34is how do you get people who spend money on games
1:07:39to buy your thing?
1:07:40And the answer to that would be like,
1:07:41oh, they'll buy it because it's like,
1:07:43you know, it's a great TV puck to watch Netflix on
1:07:45and whatever, and it's cheap,
1:07:47so that'll get people to buy things.
1:07:48And then how do you get game developers
1:07:51to develop good games for your platform?
1:07:53And just ask the Ouya people how easy that is to do.
1:07:56It is really, really hard,
1:07:58and probably costs potentially billions of dollars
1:08:01if you want to make a run at this market
1:08:04and get all those people who are currently buying
1:08:06$60 games for their PS4s.
1:08:08and like we've talked about before,
1:08:09the next generation of consoles was announced,
1:08:11the question was, is there still a place in the market
1:08:13for big expensive devices that play mostly or only games?
1:08:17The answer is yes, people love the PS4,
1:08:20it is selling pretty well,
1:08:21certainly well enough to make Sony happy.
1:08:23Microsoft's console is selling pretty well as well,
1:08:25no one wants the Wii U because it's crappy.
1:08:27Maybe their, you know, E3 was this past week,
1:08:31so maybe Nintendo's fortunes will rise next year,
1:08:34we don't know.
1:08:35But this generation of consoles, I would say,
1:08:37is a success. And when this generation ends, the next generation will ask the same question again.
1:08:42Does anyone want these stupid $400 boxes? Do people want to pay $60 per game? That question
1:08:46will be asked again. But for this generation, it's true. If no one wants those boxes, and there's not
1:08:53enough people out there to sustain that, the potential for the entire gaming market to switch
1:08:58to $99 pucks, I think most gamers would consider that kind of a bad situation. And the question is,
1:09:04Sorry, well if there's so few of those people it doesn't matter what they think they'll be sad, but oh well who cares
1:09:09It's like the command line people being sad when the GUI came and took over everything and they just went and played with Linux and no
1:09:14One cared about them anymore
1:09:16I don't think that scenario is likely though even though these so-called core gamers
1:09:21And I hate that term because it makes no sense, but the so-called core gamers even though they are not the majority
1:09:25They sure as hell spend a lot of money
1:09:28When when when a game as someone just been the chat room in the game like Grand Theft Auto 5 comes out and makes a hoe
1:09:33billion dollars, casual gamers are not buying that, right? Hardcore gamers are
1:09:38paying $60 a pot for these games, they're doing it willingly, they're happy with
1:09:42the results, and they pump a huge amount of money into the ecosystem. And it's not
1:09:46like just a few whales like on Candy Crush where most of the money is made
1:09:48off of these poor addicted small group of people when everyone else just kind
1:09:52of uses it for a little while or whatever. Everybody pays $60 to get
1:09:56grant that thought of. And those people are still willing to do it. And that I
1:10:01I think is the business that Apple would have a seriously hard time getting into, because
1:10:05as we've discussed previously, it doesn't seem like Apple's that into games. If you're
1:10:09not that into games, there's no way you're going to do what it takes to woo the good
1:10:13developers. Plus, they would have to have some IP of their own, like Microsoft said
1:10:16Halo and Sony's got its own first-party games, Nintendo's got Mario and Donkey Kong and all
1:10:22that stuff. I don't think Apple can be a player in that market.
1:10:25Well, I don't think Apple wants to be a player in that market.
1:10:28Well, that was the question like and then I said to Ben Thompson is like
1:10:31That's the things that they have are the technical ingredients to be a player in that market
1:10:36But it sure seems like Apple doesn't want that market
1:10:38Why would you want to be part of what by all accounts is a declining market?
1:10:42Despite the fact that is clearly feasible now and makes tons of money
1:10:46Why would Apple want in on that market?
1:10:48Is that a market that's taking off like a rocket ship to the Sun and is gonna be super awesome for years to come?
1:10:54Doesn't seem like it right now. So why would Apple be saying we really need to get in on this market
1:10:59We really need to make a device that's competitive with the ps5 and the Xbox whatever the hell they're gonna call it
1:11:04I don't see Apple thinking that that is a good thing to do regardless of whether they could do it
1:11:09Yeah, but that wasn't that wasn't Ben's point though was it I thought Ben's point was more to grab the portion of the market
1:11:16That's more like Marco and I where we don't really take games too seriously
1:11:20But we do enjoy it and hey man if we've already got this Apple TV box sitting
1:11:26Oh, well, I mean presumably a new one. You know I just bought this Apple TV
1:11:29Oh, you know I guess it plays games
1:11:31Maybe I should give that a shot and see if that's any good and yes, they may have this white this world-class
1:11:37Okay, that might be a stretch, but they may have this really really great hardware and really really great tool chain
1:11:43But that's kind of ancillary to the thought that here's a low-cost box
1:11:48that makes for really easy consumption.
1:11:52And I think that was more Ben's point.
1:11:55- Yeah, but Apple already has that market.
1:11:56It's called the iPhone.
1:11:58- You know, if you look at what the existing game consoles
1:12:00do, and you look at the direction they are going,
1:12:03they have all decided, even the previous generation,
1:12:06I mean, not the PS2, but the PS3, the Xbox 360,
1:12:11and the Wii, the first Wii, they all started adding
1:12:15all these media center features.
1:12:16Once streaming Netflix became a thing
1:12:18and all these streaming video sites,
1:12:21that all happened in the last generation of consoles.
1:12:24And they all added these features
1:12:25and they all took advantage of that.
1:12:26And they all, with their current generation,
1:12:28the new generation, with the exception of the Wii U,
1:12:31which didn't really do this kind of stuff,
1:12:33but the other ones moved much further
1:12:36towards that media center role.
1:12:39'Cause you know, people who buy these things,
1:12:41if you have very little interest in playing games,
1:12:44you're probably not buying an Xbox One, the new Xbox One stupid name, or the PS4. You're
1:12:51probably not going to think that's worth it, which is what Ben's article says. This
1:12:56must be really frustrating because Ben's in the chat room listening to us mangle his
1:12:58article but, sorry Ben, but you know if you aren't that into games you're not buying
1:13:05those things period. Like you're not going to be getting those unless maybe your kids
1:13:09want one so you get it for your kids but you're probably, as the parent, you're probably
1:13:12not gonna use that yourself very much if you can help it. There's this whole other market
1:13:18of people like me and Casey, people who primarily want it for its media functions and if it
1:13:25can also play games, great. But we weren't going out there and spending 60 bucks to buy
1:13:29GTA 6. Like that was not us. That was possibly never us. It's definitely not us now and
1:13:37there's a lot of us like this. And I think the game console makers realize that they're
1:13:42market is declining because they're trying to be this media boxes also.
1:13:46They're trying to push in this direction.
1:13:48Apple already has a very successful little media box people buy and put on their TVs
1:13:53and Apple is going to approach it from the other way.
1:13:56The same way the Amazon Firebox is doing it.
1:14:01Here's a mid-powered cheap box that you can plug into your TV.
1:14:05Here's a game controller for it and an app store where you can spend $3 to buy a game
1:14:09for it if you want to.
1:14:10and it's not gonna be a AAA awesome world-class game
1:14:15with a $50 million budget, it's gonna be Flappy Bird 3.
1:14:18And you're gonna like it and that's it.
1:14:20And it's a totally different market.
1:14:23- Apple TV will add games the same way
1:14:25that the other consoles added TV features.
1:14:27They'll add it because it's right there,
1:14:29you might as well do it, you have the hardware available,
1:14:32but people are not buying a PlayStation
1:14:34so they can watch TV shows and people are not gonna buy
1:14:37the Apple thing to play games unless Apple gets serious
1:14:39about games, because what Apple will be competing with is the $99 box from PlayStation, which
1:14:45they've had out for a while in Europe and they just renamed and are introducing the
1:14:49US as PlayStation TV.
1:14:52Why would you buy the $99 box from PlayStation that streams Netflix and does whatever the
1:14:56hell they're going to do, you know, like does all the same things that these little TV-connected
1:14:59pucks do?
1:15:00Why would you buy the PlayStation 1 and not the Amazon one?
1:15:02Why would you buy the Amazon one and not the Apple one?
1:15:04Well, if you care anything about games, of course you're going to buy the PlayStation
1:15:07because they have that thing where you can play old PS3 games on it with a streaming service,
1:15:11it plays Vita games natively, it's always going to have the better games. But if you don't care
1:15:16about games, you'll buy the Amazon Fire TV and play Angry Birds, or you'll buy the Apple one
1:15:20and play whatever iOS games are ported to it. That bifurcation in the market already exists,
1:15:25and everyone thought the iOS app store was going to totally disrupt the gaming space,
1:15:29and in many respects it did in terms of what kinds of games most people play,
1:15:34But it didn't disrupt it to the degree that the home console business became unviable.
1:15:39And so if that split just continues on the television, I think that you'll still end up
1:15:44with the same split scenario where you have the core gamer market and the casual gamer market.
1:15:48And I don't think anyone will buy the Apple Puck to play games on if the PlayStation Puck exists,
1:15:54or the Microsoft Puck, or whatever. It's going to be the same thing in the Puck Wars on the TV,
1:15:58where it's just which one you want depends on what you care about more.
1:16:02the way you win in the game space is not having the tech and not having the APIs,
1:16:05not having the price point, you gotta have the games.
1:16:08And Apple has certain kinds of games that they have locked up.
1:16:11Like, you know, the iOS-style games, they have them first, they have them best,
1:16:15they run the best there, but they don't have the kinds of games that people tend to sit in front
1:16:19of a TV and play. And I'm not sure that the casual type of games that Apple is dominant on,
1:16:24if ported to the television, if that's the type of thing that people will sit in front of the TV
1:16:28and play on a couch. I think once they sit on a couch and are going to play games in that context,
1:16:32they would prefer to get the PlayStation puck for a similar price and play those games.
1:16:38You're coming at this all wrong because you're coming at this from the perspective of a gamer,
1:16:42and I don't think that's what Ben is trying to portray. He's trying to say it's a more
1:16:46opportunistic attention grab based on the fact that Marco and I both have these brand new Apple
1:16:52TVs, and you know what? I wouldn't mind playing an okay game every once in a while. I don't give
1:16:57crap about Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or any or what have you I just want
1:17:01to occasionally sit down and blow some crap up and for that this phantom Apple
1:17:06TV is perfect. We're gonna make our buying decisions not not based on which
1:17:12of these pucks has the games we want we're gonna make it based on other
1:17:15factors like if we if we use if we have Amazon Prime and this fire TV is really
1:17:21cheap and comes with this this video streaming service that we're already
1:17:23paying for with Prime is like well might as well get that if we if we if we buy a
1:17:27a lot of stuff on iTunes, if we buy a lot of movies and TV shows on iTunes, we're
1:17:31going to buy the Apple TV puck because the PlayStation puck can't play those videos.
1:17:34And so it's like, if we're going to buy a puck anyway, you know, if we only want
1:17:39to have one or if we only can afford one, then the other factors that go into these
1:17:44various media ecosystems that these things are made to play are going to play a big role
1:17:49in that decision. And so you're going to have Amazon customers buying the Amazon one
1:17:52and iTunes customers buying the Apple one.
1:17:54Well, that's what I said before, that if you're choosing based on games, you're going to choose the Sony one,
1:17:59but if you're not choosing based on games, you'll choose the Amazon one or the Apple one.
1:18:02But the whole, the premise of this article is how Apple might disrupt Microsoft and Sony.
1:18:06And it's not disrupting Microsoft and Sony if people are not changing their purchase decisions.
1:18:09If you were going to always buy an Apple TV and now games are just a bonus,
1:18:12you are not, you know, disrupting Microsoft or Sony unless you were previously going to buy a PS5 or an Xbox, whatever,
1:18:19and you decide, you know what, instead, I'm going to buy the Apple thing because that's good enough,
1:18:22or I'm going to buy the Sony puck because that's good enough. To disrupt the market you have to basically take your low-end thing and
1:18:28buy that instead of the high-end thing
1:18:31and you have to eat your way up the chain. And I'm saying eating your way up the chain at a certain point you cannot
1:18:36eat up any higher because you just don't have the games. And it's not saying Apple could not do this,
1:18:41I'm saying the hard part is not the technology,
1:18:44the hard part is getting the games to consume up in the higher end. And again people thought this was gonna happen in the
1:18:49the mobile game space like oh you think these mobile games are crappy and casual but soon they're gonna just destroy the entire market and
1:18:55No one's gonna be able to like low-end disruption you you poo-poo these games
1:18:58You think Angry Birds is stupid and no one should play that and Candy Crush is dumb
1:19:01But you just wait in five years there won't even be a high-end market because low-end disruption will destroy them
1:19:05That has not yet happened. It doesn't seem like it's happening
1:19:08I think you cannot you cannot disrupt the big players in the game market without having really good games
1:19:15And I don't think it doesn't mean they have to be as high-tech or whatever
1:19:18you just have to have the really good games.
1:19:19And thus far, Apple has not shown that it's willing
1:19:22to do what it takes to get the really good games
1:19:24to stop people from saying, you know what,
1:19:26I was gonna buy a PS5, but I don't need it anymore.
1:19:28All my gaming needs are now met by this Apple device.
1:19:31- I get your point.
1:19:32Your point is correct that Apple will not take over
1:19:35the high end, but I think Apple or boxes like this,
1:19:40if Amazon continues their effort,
1:19:42if it actually succeeds with games,
1:19:44I think the big risk here is not that these media companies
1:19:47you're gonna take over the high end of gaming,
1:19:49it's that they're going to be good enough
1:19:51and with such a massive price advantage,
1:19:54I mean you see this all the time,
1:19:55this is a classic disruption.
1:19:56- Well, I was just saying,
1:19:57there would be no more high end,
1:19:58that's low end disruption.
1:19:59There is no, the high end is not viable,
1:20:01then no one can be a high end.
1:20:02They don't have to take over the high end,
1:20:03then no one can be the high end 'cause it's not viable.
1:20:04But that's what I'm saying.
1:20:06If this was gonna happen,
1:20:07I would think we'd be seeing it happen already.
1:20:09Like, that there is no more room for high end.
1:20:13The $60 games are not a thing.
1:20:15Apple doesn't have to get those customers,
1:20:17just have to starve the companies that make them to death to say you can keep
1:20:20trying to do that but we're gonna make your business unviable and then we're
1:20:22all that's left in the end and I don't think that can happen because I think
1:20:26enough people want really good games the kind of which Apple has thus far shown
1:20:31it is not willing or able to get made for its platform maybe anyway the one
1:20:39thing Apple has going for it is that in the realm of TV connected pucks Apple
1:20:45Apple has a good store, Amazon has a pretty good store.
1:20:49The game console makers are not that great about having nice, convenient app stores that
1:20:54regular people can use that don't suck, that don't have your credit cards stolen from them,
1:20:57speaking of Sony.
1:20:59Microsoft may be doing a little bit better.
1:21:02The one advantage that Apple has is they have experience in selling you $3 things electronically,
1:21:09and people are familiar with their stores, and if they can leverage their iOS advantage
1:21:13that you can say, oh, you buy it here and you can play it on your TV as well and all
1:21:16these other things like that.
1:21:17That is an advantage they have in the gaming space for casual gaming, but the way I see
1:21:21it playing out, unless something changes seriously, is that your TV will become just like every
1:21:27other part of the current market where there's a split between the people who want the big
1:21:33expensive thing and buy $60 games and the people who want everything else.
1:21:36And the ratios, I imagine, would be similar there.
1:21:39And I do think it's a declining market.
1:21:40I think the people who want $60 games is declining, it's just not declining so precipitously that
1:21:45I'm willing to say that Apple or Microsoft, or Sony for that matter, are poised to disrupt
1:21:51the high-end gaming market by making it unviable.
1:21:55Sony clearly is hedging its bets with its little TV puck thing, saying, "Well, if it's
1:21:58going to happen, we should do it to ourselves, and they'll sell this puck and they'll see
1:22:01how it sells, and if it starts to catch on, I'm sure Sony has no problem redirecting their
1:22:05attention in the next generation to puck-like devices."
1:22:08I don't know if Microsoft's planning to have a puck, but it wouldn't surprise me.
1:22:11So everyone is kind of hedging their bets, but I think the success of the PS4 and Xbox
1:22:15One are making people say, "Alright, we've got one more generation breathing room.
1:22:18Let's start planning our next gen and see how things shake out."
1:22:22So thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Automatic, Lynda.com, and Backblaze.
1:22:30And we will see you next week.
1:22:32Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin
1:22:39'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:22:45John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:22:50'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:22:56And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:23:01And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:23:09So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:23:14Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-Uza
1:23:21It's accidental (It's accidental)
1:23:24They didn't mean to (accidental)
1:23:29Tech, podcast, so long
1:23:34We have a special guest tonight. It is my wonderful wife, Tiff.
1:23:38And because Tiff actually did my homework for me.
1:23:42Oh, that's right!
1:23:44Tiff has played Journey. After years of listening to John tell us about Journey and why we should all be playing Journey,
1:23:53Tiff actually played it because John discovered while talking to Tiff at WVDC this week that she is a gamer.
1:24:00that I have apparently hidden this fact from all of you guys until this point,
1:24:04but she is a gamer sometimes and she's actually better than me at almost
1:24:11every game that we've both played. And anyway, so she did my homework for me and
1:24:15here she is. Hey, what's going on? Lay it on me, Tiff. All right, well, wait, now
1:24:22before you do anything, if I hypothetically did eventually want to
1:24:25play this game, is this gonna spoil everything? Yeah, you should probably
1:24:28leave. And neither should Mark over that. Did he watch you play? He watched me play enough that he
1:24:32knows what's going on because he's never going to play. I know him. He's so terrible. Yeah, I'm
1:24:36never going to play either. I don't have a PlayStation, so I'm never going to play.
1:24:39Casey, you should not listen. I'm telling you you should go away and come back later.
1:24:43Yeah, where's that big spoiler bell? Do you really want me to not listen?
1:24:47Because the likelihood of me playing is- The spoiler bell. Jason Snell is crying
1:24:49somewhere. It's a spoiler horn, isn't it? Do you really want me to go away?
1:24:55Yes, you should. You played Monument Valley. You could potentially play this. I think you
1:24:59should go away and come back. Well, just to be clear, I cannot play this game until somebody...
1:25:05You'll be able to play it on your $99 PlayStation puck in about a year or so.
1:25:09All right. I'm going to take my headphones off and just watch the chat ruin everything for me.
1:25:13It's just going to be you and me, John. Yay!
1:25:15That's all we need. We don't need those jokers.
1:25:17Wow! Zing! All right, I'm taking my headphones off.
1:25:21Bye. Is he gone?
1:25:24Yes, we're safe.
1:25:25Okay.
1:25:26So, where should I start?
1:25:28I guess at the beginning.
1:25:29I've done all my homework.
1:25:30I played the game now four times, and I listened to The Incomparable, and I read your article.
1:25:37So, homework done.
1:25:39So you tweeted after you played with an emoji.
1:25:41I'm not emoji-convercent enough to know what you meant by that emoji, but it was like the
1:25:48biting down teeth kind of like...
1:25:50What it made it seem like is that you did not like this game when you first played it.
1:25:53Well, the first time I played it without anything, just sitting down playing it, knowing nothing.
1:25:59I didn't like it.
1:26:00All right. So, so explain that.
1:26:01Well, I thought, first of all, so spoiler bell, I thought like the people who I was
1:26:06with were AI. So I was like, Oh, this is just stupid. This person just walking around with
1:26:11me. I'm just doubled. And then I felt like it was a game that like you got siphoned through.
1:26:16See that is super interesting because that's why I don't want people to know. Like I told
1:26:21Marco to make sure that the PlayStation was connected to the network but not to tell you that it was a network game because I
1:26:25Don't want people to know that the people are real people and it's interesting to see
1:26:28Some people play the game and immediately realize those are other people some people play the entire game and just assume their AI the entire
1:26:35Game right and that's what I assumed and then because there's a really no like challenge
1:26:39You just kind of like ooze through this world and you do some things and you know certain things will attack you
1:26:45But there are no real quads like no consequences for it. So I
1:26:50Just like this is just boring. See here's what I was hoping. I was hoping that as a gamer you would
1:26:57Realize when the people are interacting with you that they couldn't possibly be AI because they exhibit behaviors in no way
1:27:03I could possibly exhibit well
1:27:04Maybe like the people that I played with were just kind of like helping me like jump and walking around with me
1:27:09They weren't doing anything extraordinary
1:27:11but the
1:27:12after I listened to the incomparable and then realized that they were real people and then I started getting into like everything that you
1:27:18guys were talking about on that episode about why it was a beautiful game and why it was
1:27:22good and why it was fun and the whole the article that you wrote about people being
1:27:26nice to each other and all that that made me want to play the game again. So when I
1:27:30played it the second time, I really felt like I got it, you know, because then I was also
1:27:35playing with someone who was like showing me where things were so I can get my scarf
1:27:40really long. So that was fun. So I was like following him around. And so I felt like that
1:27:45was I guess more of the right way to play the game.
1:27:49Yeah, you only get one chance to play it for the first time, which is kind of a bummer.
1:27:52And like I said, I think I said on the incomparable, I feel lucky that my first playthrough was
1:27:56so perfect in the way that it was. The other thing I was hoping you as a gamer who like
1:28:00plays things on hard mode was that you wouldn't, that you wouldn't like realize that there
1:28:06are no consequences for failure because you wouldn't fail like that you wouldn't be attacked
1:28:10by those things and have your scarf being eaten and realize, oh, no matter how many
1:28:14times attack I never died as my scarf get shorter until a certain point I don't actually
1:28:18die as I said in the incomparable the great thing about the game is it doesn't tell you
1:28:23what the consequences are so you don't you don't have a health meter you don't know what
1:28:26it takes for you to die or if you can die it also so if you're in a particular mindset
1:28:30you might be like I don't know what's going to happen here I have nothing to fall back
1:28:33on I can't look at my number of hearts up on the screen and know that I'm okay if I
1:28:36get hit once for all I know it's single hit death and I don't want to die because I'm
1:28:40in the middle of this experience with this other person, or even depending on what kind
1:28:44of gamer you are, even if you assume it's an AI, I'm the type of person who could find
1:28:48themselves getting attached to an AI. Like if there was just a really good AI in a game
1:28:52and I felt like protective of it or attached to it as a companion, I would be sad if it
1:28:57died or like in my journey experience when I was playing with that person, even though
1:29:01I realized it was a person, even if it was AI, I would feel like they let them down by
1:29:04like when you're hiding in those little, in the little pieces in the snowy part and someone
1:29:08pokes out and like, oh, now you're both screwed because you made a mistake. And I just felt
1:29:12terrible that I did that to that person. It was like attention for the rest of the game
1:29:16that I had let this person down, you know? Yeah. I mean, I totally get that. And I especially
1:29:20felt that the second time through, like I was really upset when I lost my, my companion
1:29:25the second time I played it. Cause he was helping me do all this stuff and we got separated
1:29:29avarice, you know, one part with the dragon and I was really upset and I was like waiting
1:29:33for him and like singing my little song in the dark, like at the end, like waiting and
1:29:37he wasn't showing up. And then I ended up in the next level with some little tiny short
1:29:43scarf noob jumping up and down. And I'm like, "Oh, that was me yesterday." And he was singing
1:29:47and yelling and jumping. And I'm like, "I can't help you. I don't know what I'm doing
1:29:50either." So I just left him in the dust and I kept on going. And then my long scarf friend
1:29:54showed up again. And so I was like, "We rejoice and sang little songs together." And so that
1:29:58was really great. But that was, again, my second experience when I knew it was a real
1:30:03And then but the first time I played through right at the end, the when you're going up
1:30:09the tower, the snow tower, my like little buddy who I was with, who I thought was an
1:30:13AI like froze to death, he just like sat down and was like shivering and not moving. And
1:30:18I was like singing Adam and nothing was happening. So I just went on alone. And when I was the
1:30:23first time I thought like, Okay, so I had a companion through the middle of the game,
1:30:27I didn't have one in the beginning. And then he kind of like froze to death at the end.
1:30:31So I had to like do the end alone.
1:30:33I'm like, oh, okay, I guess this is just the time that I don't have a double of me that
1:30:37I go up with.
1:30:38So it was definitely the first time around wasn't as fun as the second time.
1:30:44What I told my wife when she was asking that I said that I thought you didn't like the
1:30:47game and she was asking why I said my theory was that since you are a gamer, that I didn't
1:30:53know that you had the did that you thought it was an AI the whole time.
1:30:56But this fits is that if you feel like you're playing a game, the whole time you're playing
1:31:01this game, and this would fit for somebody who plays games on hard because you want a
1:31:04challenge.
1:31:05If you were always in the headspace of "I am playing a game," it's kind of like if you
1:31:09watch a movie and you're always in the headspace of "I am watching a movie."
1:31:12The movies that get you, you forget you're watching a movie and you feel like you're
1:31:15experiencing what you're experiencing.
1:31:18Journey relies entirely on that happening, because not every game does.
1:31:21If you're playing a first-person shooter in super hard mode, you could feel like you're
1:31:24playing a game the whole time and it's totally satisfying.
1:31:26Oh yeah, you have to be engaged.
1:31:28thing about Journey was that I felt like when sometimes you're going through some of the areas,
1:31:32I felt like I could just let go of my controller and it would just go there for me. You know,
1:31:36like I was just being funneled through the game. Well, yeah, like it is you can't feel like you're
1:31:41playing a game. Like because yes, if you think about it for two seconds, you realize, oh,
1:31:43this section is on rails, I can let go. But it's like, you know, you can't think that way. You have
1:31:49to think I am here, this is happening to me and why would I ever want to let go. So for the
1:31:53sections where you're sort of surfing down the hill and stuff, the reason I found those levels
1:31:57so amazing is because like early in the game you realize you can slide and it's just it's just like there's no point there
1:32:03There's no you're not you don't get extra points for going through the little stanchions
1:32:08You know the little gates that you can go that's that's not there like oh you have to do that in your extra bonus
1:32:12No, it's all about just having fun
1:32:14You have to feel like you're there and enjoying the little sort of
1:32:16Dolphin things diving through the sand and going the why because do you get some reward when you jump on their heads?
1:32:22No, you jump in their heads because it's fun and you really have to just feel like you're there
1:32:25And if the entire time you feel like you're playing a game, then it's like well this game is not challenging
1:32:29This game is not interesting this game doesn't offer me anything doesn't offer me
1:32:33Extra power-up extra weapons all the type of things that you would you know in a game in a game where you can be okay?
1:32:38feeling like you're playing a game you have to
1:32:40Not feel like you're playing a game for this and feel like you're having experience and realizing there are other people probably helps you with
1:32:45That because then it's like oh
1:32:46I'm not playing a game in the same way that suddenly you feel like you know you ever see people like texting walking down the street
1:32:52And the expressions on their face are you know?
1:32:54angry or joyful. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're holy, they're going through all the emotions of
1:32:59what's happening, but nothing's happening to them, really. And what they're using is an app that has
1:33:03a text box and a bunch of little text box over and over and over, but their experience is like,
1:33:08oh, no, no, they're connected to the person on the other end of this. Like, and Journey does that
1:33:12with significantly better graphics than the messages app on iOS, right? And can elicit the
1:33:16same type of emotions because like I said in the article, they shave off every possible way that
1:33:21person can be a jerk to you and all that's left is the good and in general people are
1:33:25good to each other. And even if they try to be a jerk, it just comes off as like, you
1:33:29know, craziness or disinterest, like they can't do anything to harm you. So it's like
1:33:32a relentlessly positive experience.
1:33:34With it with that whole argument, though, that's exactly why I disagree with you that
1:33:37when you first play the game that someone should know that you're playing with other
1:33:41people because the game was infinitely more enjoyable for me when I realized that it was
1:33:46just another person with me, instead of just an AI. And so I didn't enjoy the game when
1:33:51I thought it was AI, but I love the game after I found out it was a real person. And I've
1:33:56gone back twice now and played it once I played under Marco's name and I had to go get my
1:33:59own name so I can get my own scarf stuff. And I didn't have Tumblr more. What was it?
1:34:04In the paper Marco. They're like, you played with instapaper Marco. It's like, no, you
1:34:09played with Tiff Arman, whoever I am. I don't know. But like, that's, you know, that that
1:34:15whole experience of with other people made it so much better. And I would have never
1:34:20played the game again, if it was anything like the first time I played it.
1:34:23I was hoping that you would not know that think they're AI initially, but fine, but
1:34:28figure it out after like five minutes, because that realization that it's another person
1:34:32is a fun realization. Because, you know, again, if you don't like that, that's the common
1:34:37experiences. If they don't know it's AI, they initially think it is AI, but then figure
1:34:40out that it's not
1:34:41the it's kind of like the reverse Blair Witch Project. Like if you see the movie, and then
1:34:45you and you think it's real, it's great the first time you see it, and then you realize
1:34:49it's not real and it sucks. It's the worst movie ever. So journey is reverse Blair Witch Project.
1:34:55Yeah. People do go back and play journey. I mean, do you have your white robe yet? Are you
1:34:59on the path to get that? Well, no, because now I've got cheated out of a, out of an entire
1:35:03playthrough because I played on Marco's account. And so then I had to create my own account.
1:35:08And so I only have two play throughs on mine. Although I found like this crazy shortcut where
1:35:14you can like jump to any level. And I accidentally did that tonight. And all of a sudden I skipped
1:35:17half the game and I was like, well, yeah, that's the hub. That's the hub level you you
1:35:21want to get the white, right? The white robe is the one thing that is game like in this
1:35:25and it's to reward multiple playthroughs. You don't have to play a certain number of
1:35:28times although there is something that happens as you play a multiple number of times but
1:35:31you can play through once and have the white robe. Well, your robe gets all like in much
1:35:34more intricate on the bottom. So right now I have like a whole bunch of intricate orange
1:35:38bits. Yeah, and that keeps going until it reaches like it fills up entirely but the
1:35:42white robe is not dependent on that filling up you could fill up that entire thing and
1:35:46still want to have a white robe and you could do one play through and get the white robe.
1:35:49Yeah, I still got to find all the little symbols everywhere because yeah, I think I could do
1:35:53much better. And there's not much you know, this that's the only collectible in the game
1:35:57is little symbols and like I said in the article like when you get the symbol and you're playing
1:36:00with someone else they get it too. You don't steal it from them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think
1:36:04that that's great because then you can do that's what the one part of the second time
1:36:06I played through the person was showing me where everything was and helping me get them
1:36:10so we like both had the same length scarf and that was just fantastic and just tonight
1:36:14I found like a little new person and I was like, come with me.
1:36:17I know where these things are.
1:36:18Yeah.
1:36:18And then once you, once you have those long scarves, like when you get into
1:36:21the levels that have danger, then it's like, I mean, even though the stakes
1:36:24are like, like you said, you can't die.
1:36:25You don't want to lose your scarf.
1:36:26Right.
1:36:27Yeah.
1:36:27And you don't want your new, you want to protect your new person.
1:36:29If there's someone new with you, or if you have a long scarf yourself,
1:36:31you're like, look, I, I worked for the earlier part of this game to get this.
1:36:34I don't want it to be taken from me.
1:36:36And then, so exactly.
1:36:37So what do you think of the ending part where you're in the snow and going up
1:36:40the mountain and everything and how that ends is that I thought I died. I was like, No,
1:36:44I thought I don't know. I thought I failed the first time I played I was I was alone.
1:36:49And it was cold and windy. And like, no, I'm like, that's it. It's over. I need to do something
1:36:54again. I need to go back and do it again. But then you know, I started flying and I'm
1:36:57such a spaz sometimes and you know, when you go up after you die in the snow and or whatever
1:37:03happens to you in the snow and you go up to the mountain, I crash right into the side
1:37:08of the mountain, I'm stuck under the mountain and I'm jumping. Oh, it was horrible. I'm
1:37:12like, this is supposed to be my moment. And I'm like, I'm all caught underneath the mountain.
1:37:17So the for the story part of the game, were you? Were you on board with that? Were you
1:37:21paying attention to the cutscenes and the first or second playthrough and like deciphering
1:37:25the story and then you know, connecting it to the ending?
1:37:27Oh, yeah, definitely. And like how all the little markers are all really graves and you
1:37:32know, all this stuff and I liked how just like we talked about in the incomparable where
1:37:36know, you when you have a companion with you, it shows it on the wall that there's someone
1:37:40else with you or you're alone in certain parts. And yeah, I thought it was I thought it was
1:37:45a really nice story that it was simple. It was uplifting, you know, like it, it moved
1:37:49you along and I liked it a lot. Yeah. For my one playthrough that you know, you only
1:37:55have one chance to make the first playthrough. I'm so happy that I happened to that I played
1:37:59alone in the beginning to get the feel of the game and then found someone that had a
1:38:02sort of experience with them in which I disappointed them but that we did end up going through
1:38:06the light together in the end. You know, where like you get up to that final sort of snowy
1:38:10part where it's quiet and your scarf is gone and the light is right there, the thing you've
1:38:15been trying to get through the whole time. Oh, so you had someone going with you? I like
1:38:18keep waiting at the time. I waited at the top the last game and... Yeah, that's the
1:38:22thing. Waiting at the top, you're like, "Is that person going to come?" Nobody showed
1:38:26up! I was like, "Beep, beep!" Like, you know, beeping my little... And no one's coming,
1:38:30because I keep crashing into the mountain when I get up there, so I'm always behind.
1:38:33Yeah, I've waited at the top several times for people.
1:38:37Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't.
1:38:38But the first time we kind of like—I mean, the first time, you know, you don't know
1:38:41what's going to happen in that snowy thing.
1:38:42And I was with the person going up the snowy thing, and we both pitch over into the snow.
1:38:46I thought, like you, that that's the end of the game, because, like, you know, I mean,
1:38:49I don't know if you saw the ending of The Sopranos, but all sorts of things.
1:38:52And that's one way it could end.
1:38:55But that wasn't the end.
1:38:56Like, you know, you were in—you end up in that other place, and for me it was with that
1:39:02of the person and we sort of swoop to the top of that mountain together joyously, not
1:39:07crashing to the side of the mountain, luckily.
1:39:08Yeah, because I listened to you and you were saying that, "Oh, this is your freedom moment,"
1:39:13and you get to play around. And I'm there crashing to the side of the mountain, stuck
1:39:17underneath this snowy bank, and I'm walking. I'm like, "This is so pathetic. Everyone
1:39:21else is flying. It's like happy music, and the scarves are everywhere, and the friendly
1:39:26little carpet dogs are like woof woof woof," and everything's happening, and I'm stuck
1:39:30under this mountain. I'm like, what kind of a hell gamer am I? It's just terrible.
1:39:34The carpet dogs. I always call them dolphins, but since you have hops around, I can see
1:39:39how they might look like carpet dogs to you. Yeah, well, they're all loyal and they come
1:39:42by, especially that sad one in the snow. Oh, it kills me. So sad. It's like, "I'm so cold
1:39:47and you can't take it with you." Yeah. Terrible. Well, so I'm sad that your first playthrough
1:39:52wasn't everything that it could be, but like you can't control. Well, I guess I wanted
1:39:55it to be so much because you're like, "It's going to be so good." And you know, I had
1:39:59all these expectations. And I'm like, Really? John likes this game. It's just kind of like
1:40:02a funnel game. That's what I call them. They just you just want to let go of the controller
1:40:05and let it happen to you. And you're like, this is right, but you need to be engaged
1:40:09to not like you need to not be thinking that's a possibility because there is no controller.
1:40:12What do you mean to control you're walking through a desert? There's no controller like
1:40:14you need to get into that headspace. Yeah, appreciate it. But I'm glad you haven't said
1:40:18and that's why I said like in the episode, it was titled one of our past atps was a journey
1:40:22would be wasted on Marco or something like that. Oh, yeah, he would just be like, this
1:40:26was why did I just do this? He's like, he would be like, Why did I just play this game?
1:40:30Because he would never get into that headspace like it like, you know, you're getting into
1:40:32it on second playthroughs and now you're having like the actual experience of the game or
1:40:35whatever you have to you have to be there in the game and you have to like be absorbed
1:40:41in the story and be appreciative of a pretty desert and a cute little frozen cloth thing
1:40:46and the scary dragons and like, if you're never going to get into that space and you're
1:40:50always just think I'm sitting on a couch holding a controller, you'll never enjoy the game.
1:40:54Yeah. And you know, honestly that I would have been, I would have just stopped right there if
1:40:57it were my first playthrough and that's what then, but I did all my homework. I, you know,
1:41:02listened to the uncomfortable. I read your article and that, that sucked me back in. So
1:41:05it ends up, uh, I really do like the game. So what are we playing next? Huh?
1:41:10Yeah. I was super sad when, when it seemed like you didn't like it, because I'm like,
1:41:13Oh, all these other recommendations I had for her now, I'm not even going to give them because
1:41:17if she didn't like, if she didn't like journey, it's clear, it's clear our taste in games differs.
1:41:21No, it's like, you know, some people don't like the same type of games and you're unlike Marco
1:41:25It's totally clear that you're a gamer
1:41:26But maybe you just don't like the same type of games that I do or you know
1:41:28Like if you're gonna recommend a movie to someone you recommend like a Fellini movie and they hate it
1:41:32It's like well you I guess we like different kinds of movies. It's not necessarily a bad movie
1:41:36But if you came around on journey, I can continue
1:41:38Your list of games that you can play I do I can be I can be very open-minded with most games
1:41:44Like I just been I just finished limbo because now I'm all in a gaming mood and then I can go like, you know
1:41:49to the shoot 'em up Halo, you know, all that Half-Life kind of stuff game. So I'm pretty versatile.
1:41:55So what are you in the mood for? Are you in the mood for a game that is more kind of like,
1:41:59not too hard, not too challenging, all about atmosphere and relationships?
1:42:03Well, definitely games I could play during nap time. That's good.
1:42:06Because two ways to go on this, like my traditional thing is if you have a PlayStation
1:42:123, you need to play Eco, Shadow of the Colossus and Journey and The Last of Us. And The Last of
1:42:19of us is the most traditional game, straight up AAA game with shooting things and zombies
1:42:24and everything you're thinking of, but it's like a very well done one of those games that
1:42:28is one of the few, as I usually don't like games like that. So that if you're in the
1:42:31mood for that type of game, that is the one to get it will satisfy you on all the levels
1:42:35that those type of games satisfy people if you're into that.
1:42:38Yeah, that sounds good. Someone write that down.
1:42:40And then if, if you get through that, maybe you will have like had enough junk food that
1:42:45you'll be in the mood for eco and shadow of the colossus. Shadow of the colossus is...
1:42:49Oh, I already played walking dead chat room. Uh, you didn't though. Did we talk about this?
1:42:53No. Oh no, no, not walking dead. No, no. The other two zombie ones. Yeah, I recommend it.
1:42:57I recommended walking dead. You can play that on your Mac, but I don't, I need to see what
1:43:01your taste is like more. So we see, we've gotten one end of the spectrum, which is journey.
1:43:05Last of Us is pretty much on the other end of the spectrum. It's not, I guess grand theft
1:43:08auto would be the other end of the spectrum, but no, no, I played that one too. So right.
1:43:12But last of us is more serious. You'll see that all my games are like put it this way
1:43:16I like one hour dramas on TV the games I recommend are all the type of games
1:43:21You'd see recommended by someone who watches one hour dramas on TV
1:43:23well, that's pretty much what we watch so I think that would totally work although I did watch the
1:43:27Like a preview gameplay of Ico eco. Yeah. Yeah. It was very like Zelda II right Zelda esque
1:43:35It's nothing like Zelda in gameplay
1:43:37That's what it looked like.
1:43:38It looks like it, but it is like Journey in that you have to be there, otherwise you
1:43:43feel like, "This game is not hard.
1:43:45There are no exciting power-ups.
1:43:47There's no level meter.
1:43:48I'm not leveling this."
1:43:51All those things that you're complaining about, you would have exactly the same complaints
1:43:53about Ico.
1:43:54But I think it's like Journey.
1:43:56Before Journey, it was my go-to games as art, PlayStation 3 type game.
1:44:00It is considerably longer than Journey.
1:44:02It's like 11 hours.
1:44:03It is a little bit harder in terms of puzzles, and if you have a low tolerance for puzzles,
1:44:06You might find it frustrating or annoying, but I really love it.
1:44:09And then Shadow of the Colossus is like an in-between stage where Shadow of the Colossus
1:44:12is actually pretty darn hard and to the point where I'm not sure that you would actually
1:44:16finish the game because you'd be like, "You know what?
1:44:18I've seen what this game--"
1:44:19Oh, now that's a challenge.
1:44:20"I see what this game has to offer.
1:44:21I see how it's going to go, and I don't want to grind through it," especially if you hate
1:44:25the PlayStation controller like I hate it.
1:44:27Yeah, it's not the best controller.
1:44:28Yeah, but it has the same mood as Ico.
1:44:31It's from the same developer, and it's sort of all of a piece.
1:44:35So I would say go to Last of Us next because that is very straight ahead and I think one
1:44:40of the best games for the PlayStation 3 for people like traditional games.
1:44:43And if you make it through that, that should be like what, 16, 20 hours, something like
1:44:47that.
1:44:49Then we'll revisit the RDR games.
1:44:50Excellent.
1:44:51Well, Adam's been taking two to three hour naps, so that plus some evenings I think I
1:44:56can plow through it.
1:44:58So we'll see.
1:44:59That sounds great and we'll have you back on to hear.
1:45:01Maybe Marco is just a lost cause.
1:45:04Maybe Marco can play Last of Us with you or watch you play because he's a spaz, but who
1:45:08knows.
1:45:09Well, he walks by while he's getting coffee and will check out my video game and be like,
1:45:12"Oh, what's happening here?"
1:45:13And then he'll make some Snyder mark about it and be like, "Duh duh duh duh duh."
1:45:16And then he'll go sit in his chair and bang on his keyboard without him.
1:45:19Yeah, exactly.
1:45:20He'll put on his fish and he'll disappear to the world and that'll be it.
1:45:24He's missing out.
1:45:25All right, poor Casey is out there.
1:45:27How do we get him back?
1:45:28I can tell him to come back.
1:45:29All right, do we?
1:45:30Should I put Marco back?
1:45:31to me about journey. Sure, anytime. Anytime you want to kick Marco off the show you can come on.
1:45:37Oh excellent. Hear that? You're out. I'm in. All right, bye John. Bye Tiff. All right. Hi, hello.
1:45:47Yeah, as we said at WWDC, what we learned from WWDC is that in the Marco Tiff marriage,
1:45:57Marco is my wife and Tiff is me.
1:46:00Pretty much.
1:46:00- Can we just get a clip, a sound clip
1:46:04of you saying Marco is my wife?
1:46:06That's all we need.
1:46:07[ Silence ]