0:00:00Alright, so last episode I mentioned that at my alma mater, which is Virginia Tech,
0:00:08they have been requiring tablets for a while.
0:00:11And when I say tablets, I don't mean iPads.
0:00:13I mean honest to God, those awful Microsoft quasi-computers, not the Surface, like the
0:00:19real old Microsoft tablets.
0:00:21And so I got some feedback.
0:00:23I got some from a just graduated or recently graduated student, Alan Fuller, and I got
0:00:28some from somebody who is associated with the teaching part of the college, Joseph G.
0:00:34I'm going to read you a very small excerpt of what Joseph said. He said, "I teach electrical
0:00:38engineering and I can tell you that most of the students here hate those required tablet
0:00:44PCs, that they are all required to buy, more expensive and less capable. The purpose is
0:00:48for everything to be submitted electronically, but it fails so spectacularly at this that
0:00:53I just have them print everything and submit hard copies.
0:00:57I suspect half of them are browsing Facebook during class anyway.
0:01:00And I thought that was kind of interesting and different that here it is that the school,
0:01:06if you ask me, was trying to be progressive and say, "Oh, let's do this wild thing
0:01:10with these tablets, and as it turns out, apparently everyone hates them anyway."
0:01:13Which is of no great surprise, but I thought it was interesting.
0:01:16I think it's interesting too.
0:01:19I think we are all, especially John, we are all old enough that we didn't really have
0:01:26computers really that prevalent in classrooms when we were in college, and certainly, you
0:01:31know, high school. I don't know if they do that in high school yet, but, you know,
0:01:33we didn't have...
0:01:34They do.
0:01:35Like, not everybody was having laptops on their desk in college when we were there.
0:01:39Is that fair for you also, Casey? I know it's fair for John, because he's like 50.
0:01:42Well, wow. We did not have laptops in high school when I was in high school. However,
0:01:48The school in which my wife teaches actually made national news many, many years ago because—well,
0:01:53like 10 years ago—because they used to have—what did you call the MacBooks before they were—iBooks.
0:02:00They used to have iBooks and they sold them for $50 a pop after they'd been used by
0:02:04like middle schoolers for a couple years.
0:02:06And they sold them at the Richmond International Raceway, the NASCAR track.
0:02:09And apparently there were like stampedes in order to get these 50—
0:02:12Oh, I remember that.
0:02:13Yeah, that's the school district in which Aaron teaches.
0:02:16That's awesome.
0:02:17How about that?
0:02:18To this day, they have really crummy Dells that all the kids get issued, and from what
0:02:22I understand, it's a double-edged sword.
0:02:24I can't imagine paying attention to school at all if I was in high school with a laptop,
0:02:30with an Internet connection.
0:02:31Even without an Internet connection, why would you ever pay attention to class?
0:02:39In my senior year of college, we had one class that was in a brand new lab with all these
0:02:44Linux desktops.
0:02:47I spent so much time playing same gnome
0:02:50and browsing the internet and not at all paying attention
0:02:53to what was being said in the class.
0:02:54And I was lucky that even being a computer science student,
0:02:59most of the classrooms didn't have computers in them.
0:03:01They just were like regular classrooms with desks
0:03:02and you would take notes if you were a good student
0:03:05or you would stare at the wall like me.
0:03:07And the idea of like having those,
0:03:10I would not have the self-control and I would imagine,
0:03:13in fact, I know I didn't,
0:03:15when I had that opportunity senior year,
0:03:16didn't have that self-control. And I looked around the room and no one else did either.
0:03:22And I have to imagine that's probably going to be a pretty common problem as computers
0:03:27infiltrate and become—they probably already are—everyday items now in college classrooms.
0:03:33Well, you know, the problem with the Virginia Tech thing is it's like the Minitel effect,
0:03:37where a school thinks, "All right, technology, this is the next big thing." And the mistake
0:03:42they make is saying, "Not just that we're going to require everyone to have a computer,
0:03:45or this year we'll require everyone to have this computer,
0:03:47but they think that they're gonna do it
0:03:50like they do with desks.
0:03:51We've decided that this is the best desk for our school
0:03:53and it's got this chair and this height
0:03:55and has this place for your books
0:03:57and we're gonna order 500 of them,
0:03:58we're gonna use them for the next 20 years.
0:04:00And so they decided that whatever,
0:04:02this little flippy round screen tablet PC thing,
0:04:04that's the future and they just went with it
0:04:07and they expect it to be standardized going forward.
0:04:09And that stuff is obsolete before it even arrives
0:04:12at the school due to the delays
0:04:13in purchase orders and everything.
0:04:15And after they realize that they made-- or after everyone--
0:04:18after all the students realize that they made a terrible mistake,
0:04:21you know, oh, this is terrible.
0:04:23Don't do this.
0:04:24It doesn't work.
0:04:24It doesn't make our lives easier.
0:04:25These are crappy computers.
0:04:27They don't say, oh, yeah, no, we got to stop that.
0:04:29And they just keep going with it.
0:04:31Oh, we'll get the new version of that tablet PC.
0:04:33So it's a whole combination of ailments of not refusing
0:04:36to admit your mistakes and not realizing that standardizing to that degree
0:04:40is always going to come back and bite you.
0:04:41And the Minitel was this computer they had in France.
0:04:44I don't know.
0:04:44someone in the chat room can look it up on Wikipedia and tell us more about it.
0:04:47Nice.
0:04:48But for a long time, it was good.
0:04:50And then everyone in France could get a mini-tell and get onto this little network and do interesting
0:04:56things and you don't have this in your other countries.
0:04:57But it's bad in that it lasted forever and it was just an embarrassment and a joke.
0:05:01Obviously, the government doing it is the worst case scenario in terms of standardizing
0:05:05universally and being out of date and taking forever to arrive and not being able to fix
0:05:10mistakes.
0:05:11But a university is a nice step down from that.
0:05:13Well, to be fair, Virginia Tech only mandated tablets for the engineers, and they've been
0:05:19mandating computers in general for incoming students for something like 20 or 30 years.
0:05:24I think it was like mid-80s that they started mandating that all the students would have
0:05:29to have computers.
0:05:31But I agree with you, John, that it's, I think, them saying, "Ooh, this tablet thing, this
0:05:34is progressive and exciting, and we're a progressive school," and it ends up biting them in the
0:05:39in the butt and nobody has got the confidence to hit the brakes and say, "Man, maybe this
0:05:44is bad." And also consider that these aren't purchased by the school. These aren't issued
0:05:48by the school. These are—everyone has to buy their own machine.
0:05:52Yeah, well, they take so much money from you anyway. Who cares?
0:05:54That's true.
0:05:55It's kind of insulting, though, at that point.
0:05:56Yeah, it feels bad, but it also feels bad buying hundreds of dollars worth of stupid
0:06:00books every semester, too.
0:06:01That's true.
0:06:02I don't know. Do kids still buy books? We used to buy books.
0:06:04Oh, yeah. And they still pull all the same crap with, like—
0:06:07Used books.
0:06:08like, you have to buy the professor's own book, and then you have to buy the spiral-bound
0:06:14Xerox piles that are some other thing. And then of course, they have the used book ordeal,
0:06:20which there's no better word for it. It's just a giant scam.
0:06:25I wonder, this has been a big problem that's probably beyond the scope of this show, but
0:06:35There's a problem now with college being worth it or not.
0:06:40I don't know how much this has been a problem in the past, but it seems like a combination
0:06:45of surprisingly dramatically increasing tuition in the last decade or so, and then the economy
0:06:54being so terrible for jobs, seems like college is actually becoming a worse and worse deal
0:06:59for students.
0:07:00Again, this is probably way beyond the scope of this show, but all these things add up
0:07:05and you've got to figure, especially in our industry, where so many people get by just
0:07:10fine without a college degree.
0:07:13It doesn't really help when you're starting out, but you can make it work.
0:07:18Private colleges probably, state schools I think, even though funding is being massively
0:07:22slashed for them, I think still, net-net, I would say you're better off going through
0:07:28the cheapest possible state school that you can get into than not, because your student
0:07:32debt won't be astronomical like it'll be if you go to some place that costs you 60 grand
0:07:36a year or something. You know what I mean?
0:07:38And plus, if your boss is somebody like me who was pretty much a slacker and just barely
0:07:43got through school, I don't really care what school you went to. If I'm reviewing your
0:07:48resume, whatever school you went to, I probably haven't heard of it no matter how good it
0:07:53was. So I don't know, I don't care. I have to imagine that's probably true of many of
0:07:57like mid-level and high-level bosses and tech companies, especially smaller companies run
0:08:01by younger people, I have to imagine that many of them are being run by slackers.
0:08:05Once you get to a certain size, though, they do the stupid filtering of like they just
0:08:08want a degree for you. The first level HR pass is just filtering anybody who doesn't
0:08:13have a degree in something vaguely related. And that's stupid, and you could say that's
0:08:18not the way you should run a company, but once companies reach a certain size, they
0:08:21start doing stupid things, and that's one of them.
0:08:24Yeah, I guess, well, all this is probably true in most tech jobs.
0:08:27If you have to, if you want a job at a place that has an HR department, you're better off
0:08:33making something that they can buy the company.
0:08:35You have a better chance of them buying your startup than you do of getting through the
0:08:40HR department's automatic filters and all the keyword filtering and the recruiters and
0:08:44all that crap.
0:08:45Well, I mean, most people don't, that's the thing, most people don't go through that gauntlet.
0:08:49Most people get into companies like that because they know someone who's there, or someone
0:08:56inside the company starts to know them online, even if they just follow them on Twitter or
0:09:01something, and you bypass some or all of that idiotic process by someone inside the company
0:09:06going, "Yeah, no, no, just bring him in.
0:09:08We actually want to interview him."
0:09:09And that short-circuits the idiocy, you know what I mean?
0:09:12And that's how people get hired, the referrals, friends, stuff like that, and those type of
0:09:16things.
0:09:17I don't think I've ever gotten a job by just going through the front door.
0:09:23Maybe once in my life I get a job by just going through the front door, and every other
0:09:26time it's like you know someone inside the company or you get to know someone inside
0:09:31the company, you know someone who knows someone, and then you bypass all of that BS, and that's
0:09:35how you get your interview, instead of having to jump through the stupid hurdles and pass
0:09:39keyword filters and all that stuff.
0:09:42How I got my job, which became Tumblr, was exactly just applying.
0:09:49David posted a Craigslist ad looking for programmers, and I responded.
0:09:53And that's how I got that job.
0:09:56Well, see, I don't think I've ever gotten a job that way.
0:09:58And by the way, real-time follow-up as per Twitter, not the chat room.
0:10:01I'm disappointed in the jackals.
0:10:03Useless chat room.
0:10:04I know, seriously.
0:10:05Can we call them jackals? Because this isn't 5x5.
0:10:07We should have our own term.
0:10:08Heathens.
0:10:09Heathens?
0:10:10people jackals either and I won't call these people jackals either. It's disrespectful.
0:10:13These awesome friends in the chat room let us down already. But Jason Deering in Twitter
0:10:19said I was a freshman in '97, it wasn't mandated then, it was recommended and so I quickly
0:10:24looked and according to Tech it wasn't until '98. Since '98 each coming undergraduate
0:10:29student had been required to own a personal computer, blah blah blah. So real time follow
0:10:33up. But no, I've never gotten a job, to my knowledge, to my recollection I've never gotten
0:10:37a job just by cold calling someone. It's always been a friend of a friend or something
0:10:40along those lines that has got me in the door. So I'm a little surprised, Marco, that—and
0:10:45I think I knew that story, but I'm a little surprised that's how you ended up at Davidville.
0:10:48Well, that was a fluke. I mean, my first job, even that—like, my first job out of college
0:10:52at Vivissimo, even that was a friend already worked there and got me an interview. Like,
0:10:57it was—like, it's so much more important with who you know. The Davidville that became
0:11:03Tumblr job, that was a fluke. I mean, that doesn't really ever happen. That was totally
0:11:07a fluke.
0:11:08I don't think he had an HR department that you were bypassing either.
0:11:11Not at all. Exactly. I mean, that's like, he emailed, you know, I emailed from the ad,
0:11:16he requested a code sample, I showed him some PHP code I had written, that exactly he was
0:11:20looking for, and that was it. And then he mailed me two books on Ruby on Rails and said,
0:11:25"You start in a few weeks, get up to speed on this stuff." And that was it. But I think
0:11:30one of the reasons that worked, one of the reasons that that was a totally lucky break
0:11:33for me, is that he didn't really know what he was doing. So he didn't know that you're
0:11:39supposed to go through all these crazy process and filtering and collect a billion resumes,
0:11:45all that stuff that everyone else does because they know that's how it's done. David didn't
0:11:49know that. He was a young kid when he hired me. I didn't know that really, but I had
0:11:54to tell him about things like holidays. He really didn't know about how things were
0:11:59are done in the pro-work world because he was never really in it except working for
0:12:04himself by himself.
0:12:06So that was a lucky break.
0:12:09But I think if you don't have a college degree or if you have a crappy college degree
0:12:14or if you have—I think my final GPA was something like a 2.3 or something.
0:12:18It was a terrible GPA.
0:12:20If you have a terrible GPA like me, I think you have a way better chance of getting into
0:12:25companies like that that are being run by basically inexperienced young people, or companies
0:12:32who are just so desperate that they just need anybody who walks in the door, but you don't
0:12:36usually want those jobs. But the companies that are run by young people, like the startups,
0:12:42and consultancies often, and everything like that, I feel like it's so much easier to get
0:12:44a job there because you're more likely to run into somebody like David who doesn't really
0:12:50know how things are supposed to be done in the ways that would rule you out.
0:12:54All right, so what else
0:12:58are we talking about? Anyway, this would be a good time to break
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0:15:01Absolutely. Did you ever see an email denial of service attack? I saw one of those recently.
0:15:06No, that's pretty crazy. I've always honestly, I don't host my own email because hosting
0:15:10email as MailRoute knows and as they solve for a lot of people, hosting email is such
0:15:18a pain. Because you can set it up and you think it's working. But once you start getting
0:15:23into the complexities of things like spam filtering, being blacklisted or blackholed
0:15:28or whatever it is, gray listing, all the crazy complexity that we've added to our mail infrastructure
0:15:34to, usually in response to spam or security problems. It makes hosting your own and getting
0:15:40your own mail delivered to other people reliably so difficult.
0:15:43Yeah, the graph I recently saw was showing a number of incoming mails per day, and it
0:15:48was labeled with one color for spam and one color for good mail. And you see mostly it's
0:15:54like 50/50 ratio good mail spam. But those were tiny little slivers, like two pixels
0:15:59high. And then in the middle of the graph were two gigantic towers that were the height
0:16:03of the screen, there were all the color of spam with a little tiny frosting on the top
0:16:07of regular mail.
0:16:08And over the course of two days, the spam volume went up by 10,000x and then went back
0:16:12down again.
0:16:13And it's like, is that like a bot gone wild or a coordinated attack?
0:16:18That's the type of 10x, 100x, 1,000x volume that you just may, "Oh, guess what?
0:16:22Today, your mail server is getting a bazillion spams.
0:16:25You don't know why.
0:16:26You can't control it."
0:16:27Yeah, not good.
0:16:28Yeah, that's crazy.
0:16:29- Yeah, I mean, generally, the best wisdom I can tell
0:16:31the audience is don't host your own mail if you can help it,
0:16:35because hosting your mail sucks.
0:16:36And this isn't even part of the Mailerite ad,
0:16:38even they will help quite a bit in this regard.
0:16:41This isn't even, you know, if you choose to use Mailerite
0:16:44or not, that's up to you, I think it's a cool service.
0:16:46But whether or not you do that, do not host your own mail.
0:16:49That is, it is such a world of hurt to use a Steve Jobs,
0:16:53or a bag of hurt, what was the Blu-ray?
0:16:54Bag of hurt? - It's a bag of hurt.
0:16:56- Yeah, it's such a bag of hurt.
0:16:57You know, not to get all sad for a moment, but I really do miss Steve Jobs at times like
0:17:06when the Galaxy S4 comes out and it has an easy mode.
0:17:11You know, I would love to know…
0:17:12Tim's sharing.
0:17:13We'll take a dig at that too.
0:17:14Don't worry.
0:17:15You know, because Steve was always so good about these little quips that he would leak
0:17:20in an email or a comment somewhere or on the earnings call or something.
0:17:25would ask me about some competitor's stupid thing, and he would just tear them apart in
0:17:29like seven words. And I really do miss, like, what would he have to say about, especially,
0:17:36what would he have to say about Google Glass? I mean, that's...
0:17:39Well, the big thing about Steve Jobs is it's twofold. One, he was a person that a lot of
0:17:44people admired, and two, Apple as a company was and still is not the kind of company to
0:17:49have like, "Oh, you could just call them up and get some random obnoxious quote from some
0:17:53random VP. They're very controlled about their messaging. So you always want to hear what an
0:17:58admired person has to say about any topic, right? So that's one reason we're hanging on his
0:18:01paperwork. And the second thing is, he was the only person in the entire organization
0:18:05who had the authority to make stupid-ass comments. You could not get... You couldn't get... You
0:18:10couldn't call Apple and say, "Can you tell us what you guys think of this?" You're never going to get
0:18:13anyone on the phone. No one will ever give you a line. But if you're talking to Steve Jobs,
0:18:17you never know who's going to stop him. And most of the time, he was very controlled and didn't
0:18:20say a thing, but occasionally you'd push that one button and he'd be like, "You know what?
0:18:24That thing is a piece of crap. Let me tell you why." And you're like, "Ooh, this is the
0:18:27stuff." Because you could never get that any other way. Now it's like Phil Schiller's going
0:18:32to come up and make a quip about easy mode or whatever thing that they're going to be
0:18:36showing for iOS 7 or new iPhones. They'll make an off-handed quip about something else,
0:18:41but when the press gets him after the fact, he's just going to repeat his talking points.
0:18:46He's not going to go off on a three-second diatribe about, you know, like the bag of
0:18:50hurt thing, that's not like a rehearsed talking point.
0:18:52That was like, someone asked him about Blu-ray, and he said, "You know what?
0:18:56That stuff is crap."
0:18:57And if that wasn't in the talking points, it's not going to come out of Tim Cook's
0:19:01mouth or Phil Schiller's mouth.
0:19:03He was the best when he fired from the hip, and he did it rarely, but when he did it,
0:19:06it was fantastic.
0:19:07See, I think a lot, like, I bet he had that phrase "bag of hurt" turning over in his
0:19:11head for weeks or months, and he was just waiting for a time to use it.
0:19:15I bet he had a nice arsenal of what he thinks about X, and we usually just didn't hear it.
0:19:21Yeah, they're discussed internally. Anyone who's had these conversations with them internally is
0:19:26going to be like, "Oh, he's giving greatest hits of the rants we've all had internally."
0:19:30But normally that stuff would just stay inside the company, but he was the one guy who could
0:19:34let it out when he felt like it, just for the hell of it. I always wonder how much stuff he does
0:19:39ad-libbing like that. One of the ones that comes to mind—I really hope someone writes a tell-all
0:19:44book about this stuff was back when he introduced the G5 and I think he said, "And they're
0:19:49going to be at 3 GHz in a year." Someone in the chat room can correct me on the timelines,
0:19:53right? And it's like, "Did someone from IBM tell him that?" He'd go, "You know what? Screw
0:19:57them. They better be at 3 GHz within a year, and I'm just going to say they're going to
0:20:00be, and if they're not, I'm going to blame them later." And everyone else would be like,
0:20:04"Well, what are you going to do?" Steve Jobs says whatever he wants.
0:20:09Alright, speaking of Apple, you want to discuss this WWDC situation?
0:20:15I mean, unfortunately, it's only going to be relevant mostly to our live listeners,
0:20:19of which there are now approximately 220, which is kind of crazy to think about.
0:20:25But it'll only probably be relevant to them, because by the time this comes out, of course,
0:20:29it will be...
0:20:30We're going to release this probably on Friday, so we will already have or not have our tickets.
0:20:35Well, we should confidently predict what's going to happen so people can laugh at us
0:20:39in retrospect when they find out what actually did happen to us.
0:20:42That's a fair point.
0:20:43So I will confidently predict that I will try my darndest to get a ticket, fail, and
0:20:49then go fetal for the rest of the week and weekend, crying miserably about how I didn't
0:20:53get a ticket.
0:20:54I still feel like I'm going to be able to get one.
0:20:55Like, what was it, two hours last year or something?
0:20:57If we're all there, you know, and Marco is starting to get on board with Marco's optimistic
0:21:02prediction is like, "Look, they use it for iPhone orders. Way more people want an iPhone
0:21:05than want to go to the WRC." There are many assumptions in that statement, one of which
0:21:10is that this is the same system as used as iPhones, which I don't necessarily believe.
0:21:14But hey, it could happen. The servers could stay up. And if they do, presumably everyone
0:21:19who's there, sitting there, at 1 p.m., going click, click, click. Don't you think all those
0:21:23people are going to get tickets? I hope so.
0:21:25Yeah, but the problem is, I believe—I don't remember the gentleman's name, and I couldn't
0:21:29pronounce it even if I remembered it. But the guy who did the WWDC alerts that you could
0:21:35jump the line if you paid money.
0:21:37Oh, that poor guy. Or all those poor people.
0:21:40Yes. Well, beside that, I believe—
0:21:42I don't feel sorry for the guy at all. I think he made out quite nicely, and this is
0:21:45probably the last year he ever will.
0:21:47Well, that's true.
0:21:48Well, he's refunding everyone's money, I assume.
0:21:49I don't know. And I wouldn't—wow. Email John. But no, anyway. Crap, I totally lost
0:21:57my train of thought. And now we're doing it live!
0:21:59Well, you know, and I would imagine that...
0:22:02I mean, so what Apple did today, to recap for people listening in the far future,
0:22:06is for, I believe, the first time ever, because it's only been necessary for the last,
0:22:11I don't know, five years or so, but for the first time,
0:22:14Apple announced WWDC
0:22:17and its dates and its availability before the tickets were actually
0:22:20available to buy.
0:22:22And so they've said basically, "Buy the tickets tomorrow at this time."
0:22:25And so it solves a lot of problems.
0:22:28In previous years, like last year,
0:22:31two years ago tickets sold out in about 12 hours.
0:22:33Last year tickets sold out in about two hours.
0:22:36And last year, the best time to release a press release
0:22:44in the PR industry is about 8.30 in the morning.
0:22:48So Apple tends to ship out all their press releases
0:22:52and their new product announcements,
0:22:54and they tend to lift embargoes at like 8.31 a.m.
0:22:58And generally you want to do this,
0:23:02not on Monday if you can help it,
0:23:03'cause there's a lot of competition
0:23:04from things that built up over the weekend
0:23:06on Monday for coverage,
0:23:07so you don't want to compete with that.
0:23:08You also want to do it on Friday,
0:23:09because on Friday you're about to enter the weekend,
0:23:12a lot of people aren't paying attention,
0:23:14and there's not going to be a lot of time
0:23:15to announce for people to write up reactions,
0:23:19and they're going to have the weekend
0:23:20and then they'll forget about it.
0:23:22So generally you want to do it early in the week but not Monday.
0:23:25So things are usually announced on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
0:23:29And so it was pretty easy to predict that the announcement of this conference was probably
0:23:35going to happen again, just like it did the year before, probably going to happen again
0:23:39at a few minutes after 8.30 in the morning on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
0:23:44And sure enough it did.
0:23:45And it did it right after the day after the earnings call.
0:23:48And there's, I don't know the details of this.
0:23:51There's the SEC Quiet Period Guidelines, and I'm not qualified, and neither are you guys
0:23:58as far as I know, none of us are qualified to talk about whether Apple is required to
0:24:04stay silent, but it sounds like they're not.
0:24:06They're not required.
0:24:07Right.
0:24:08It's not even an SEC thing, it's just something that people do.
0:24:10It's like a guideline or a practice.
0:24:12Yeah, it's a de facto thing as far as I know.
0:24:14I don't even think the SEC recommends, it's just what everybody does, and once everybody
0:24:18does it by not doing it, you would stick out, but I don't think the SEC tells you that you
0:24:22should or even recommends that you do.
0:24:24Well, but it's kind of, it's almost requisite.
0:24:27You're right.
0:24:28It's not required, but it's almost requisite.
0:24:29My dad actually works for investor relations for a really, really big company.
0:24:33So he's qualified to talk about that.
0:24:35So he would be qualified, and he's been doing this for many, many years, including the time
0:24:39I lived with him when I was in high school and whatnot.
0:24:43My understanding is that if you say anything shortly before an earnings announcement, it
0:24:49could reasonably be construed to affect the result of those earnings.
0:24:54And so that would be releasing insider information before the company has released their earnings.
0:25:01And thus, the logical thing to do is for all these companies to just shut the crap up for
0:25:07like two or three weeks.
0:25:08I don't remember how long it is, but some duration of time right before earnings.
0:25:12So this way there are no slip ups.
0:25:14And so to your point, Marco, it seems reasonable
0:25:16that even though WWDC on the surface doesn't seem
0:25:20like it would affect the stock price or anything like that,
0:25:22for the last couple of years it's been announced
0:25:24the day after their earnings announcement.
0:25:26- Right, and so it was fairly easy to predict
0:25:29that the announcement was going to happen this morning.
0:25:33But nobody was predicting, and I heard a few rumors,
0:25:37and I think a few other people did too,
0:25:38but nobody was really predicting that this would happen
0:25:41where the announcement was indeed at a predicted time,
0:25:44but the on-sale date of the tickets is gonna be tomorrow.
0:25:47And it solves a lot of problems.
0:25:48One of the problems with last year's
0:25:50that people complain about a lot
0:25:52is because it was 8.30 in the morning Eastern,
0:25:55it really screwed the Pacific Coast
0:25:57because by the time they all woke up, it was sold out.
0:26:02So it was kinda rough on people in the Pacific time zone.
0:26:06And then of course, all time is around the world too.
0:26:09If 830 a.m. Eastern, because GMT minus five is in the middle of the night for you and
0:26:15your time zone, you're kind of screwed.
0:26:18So this was a really good way to do it, I think.
0:26:21People were speculating maybe they would have a lottery in place.
0:26:24I'm actually very glad they don't have that because I know I would lose it because
0:26:27I always lose drawings and raffles and things.
0:26:29You and me both.
0:26:31Yeah.
0:26:32So, you know, I'm glad there's not a lottery thing, or at least they aren't all lottery
0:26:38sales, but... Well, you're glad now. Will you be glad?
0:26:42Right. A lottery is terrible because you want some
0:26:46system that is... You don't want it to be random. You want some system that has some
0:26:51kind of merit-based selection process, even if that merit is, who wants it the most? Who
0:26:57is willing to wake up in the middle of the night? Who is willing to set up little things
0:27:01to monitor? Maybe that's not the best way to do it, but that's the way anything in life
0:27:06Who wants it the most? And if those people get it first and you're gonna go play in No Fara,
0:27:09I don't want to stay up in the middle of the night. Well, I guess you don't want it as much as that other person wants to go there.
0:27:13You know what I mean? And like that is so much better than random because then you and your friends can band together and
0:27:18be idiots and stay up in the middle of the night on the other side of the world and get tickets and you can all go
0:27:23together. Whereas if it's a lottery, maybe you get to go, but your two friends don't and then you have a worse experience
0:27:27and it's just stupid. Right. So we don't know yet. You know, we will know in less than 24 hours
0:27:33whether the three of us are going or not or whether some subset of us are going.
0:27:37But the problem is, the old system, it gave more room for people who really, really cared
0:27:45about it to have an advantage because we would be predicting the times and we would be waking
0:27:49up early every day in April, basically.
0:27:54We would be the ones setting up monitoring systems and hammering the page to see when
0:27:59it changes.
0:28:00So certainly now what they've done is made it so that you don't have to be paying that
0:28:06much attention to have a chance at it.
0:28:08So it is more fair in the sense that it will give way more people who are interested in
0:28:14going a chance at getting tickets, but at the expense of crazy nerds like us who—oh,
0:28:19wait, somebody yelled at us.
0:28:20We're not supposed to say nerds.
0:28:21Crazy geeks like us who really want it badly.
0:28:24Wait, somebody yelled at us?
0:28:25Yeah, some guy on Twitter.
0:28:26I don't know.
0:28:27I don't agree with him, but okay.
0:28:28We're going to keep saying nerds.
0:28:30Okay, so I think you're qualified to set the word on that.
0:28:35So anyway, nerds like us are now at a slight disadvantage that there's going to be way
0:28:40more competition from people who care a little bit less about it or who would have otherwise
0:28:46been awake at that time anyway.
0:28:49The only reason it's slightly worse for us is that it brought a few more people into
0:28:55the fold. People who really do want to go, but their alerting thing didn't work, or they were
0:29:01asleep but they didn't hear their phone go off. Those people who kind of unfairly got screwed
0:29:06last year, they are now competing with us. But I think that's reasonable.
0:29:10It's more than that though, because when I went two years ago, when I went in 2011,
0:29:15my then employer, who I don't work for anymore, my then employer was probably going to fund my trip.
0:29:25And when the tickets went on sale, I needed to go get final approval.
0:29:29Marco, you've spoken about this at some point or another in the past.
0:29:32I needed to go get final approval from my boss in order to spend a whole bunch of money
0:29:35and get it reimbursed.
0:29:37And now, all those people who are in that situation, they've done that today.
0:29:43So and the point I was going to make earlier when I lost my train of thought is, I thought
0:29:47that the gentleman who did the pay to jump the line alert system said he had like 20,000
0:29:52people in his alert queue and there is something to the order of from our
0:29:57friends in the chat room 5,000 tickets that you can buy and so even if even if
0:30:02it's the same system that handles millions of iPhone orders when they are
0:30:06brand new you're still talking about a whole crud load of people trying to vie
0:30:12for 5,000 seats and that's just I'm really scared that's not gonna end well
0:30:16for me yeah that's actually that's a bigger ratio than I would have expected
0:30:19because you got to figure like not everybody who wants to buy a ticket even
0:30:22sign up for that service, you know, there's probably some percentage of them who did,
0:30:27but I don't know.
0:30:28Well, the good thing is that this year, Apple says they're going to release the videos during
0:30:32the conference, so they won't be live streamed, I assume, but like maybe you can figure it
0:30:36like the day after or something.
0:30:39And also, they don't do the idiotic thing where the only people who get the videos were
0:30:43the people who actually attended WODC, which was incredibly stupid.
0:30:46So now, if you were just a paid developer, they just say a registered developer, I assume
0:30:50they need to pay developer free their iOS or the Mac and you want to see WWC sessions,
0:30:57I assume that while WWC is going on, during that week they will slowly be doling out downloads
0:31:02on the same way they always do on the iTunes, you know, what is it?
0:31:06It's not iTunes University, but anyway, the place where you can download videos through
0:31:10iTunes of WWC only they'll come out as WWC happens instead of having to wait a week or
0:31:16two weeks, which even a week or two week isn't a big deal, but like this takes some of the
0:31:19this thing out and hopefully will discourage people.
0:31:21I try to discourage people on Twitter.
0:31:23Discourage people from, it's expensive.
0:31:24You have to, you know, if you don't live in the area,
0:31:27you have to, you know, buy a hotel for a week
0:31:30and you have to buy the ticket, which is not cheap.
0:31:32- Oh yeah, it ends up being like $3,000.
0:31:34- It's a lot of money, so stay home.
0:31:36And you get almost all of the experience from home.
0:31:40I just watched the videos.
0:31:41And that, like, if I don't get a ticket,
0:31:43it's not gonna be the end of the world for me
0:31:44because that will be what I do.
0:31:47I may still have to take a week off from work,
0:31:48but that's--
0:31:50- So you would take a week off of work
0:31:52to sit in your house and watch these videos?
0:31:54- Yeah, and the thing about that is
0:31:56you would think that that would work out fine,
0:31:58but the main problem is that the videos
0:32:00would end up being released, well I don't know,
0:32:02I don't know what kind of lag they are,
0:32:03but the amount of time I can dedicate
0:32:05to watch WWDC videos is much smaller
0:32:07'cause you gotta get kids out of the house in the morning
0:32:09and the kids come home from school.
0:32:10I mean, it's like when you're at WWDC,
0:32:12you can just dedicate your heads down
0:32:14whole life to just WWDC.
0:32:17I mean, so far, every year that I've gone,
0:32:19I've gone for I think four years now, something like that,
0:32:22every year there have been a few sessions
0:32:23where they were double booked
0:32:25against something else I wanted to go to,
0:32:26so I made a note and I told myself,
0:32:28I'm gonna go and watch this video when it comes out
0:32:30of this other one that I'm not gonna see now.
0:32:32- Yeah, and did you ever actually do that?
0:32:33- I never do. (laughs)
0:32:34- Yeah, exactly.
0:32:35- I think I might have watched two or three videos
0:32:37after the fact total, and usually that was only
0:32:39because I was about to or already coding against some API
0:32:43that the videos were about,
0:32:44and I wanted to look something up
0:32:46or go back to a video of a session I already did see live
0:32:49to remember like, "Oh yeah, how did they do this one thing?"
0:32:52Like the scroll view session, I always go back to that
0:32:54'cause it's full of crazy good stuff.
0:32:55And there's times where I'll go back for reference purposes,
0:33:00but I'm never gonna make two hours and sit down
0:33:03and watch a couple of these things.
0:33:05- I've got the WWDC 2003 DVD set to my right.
0:33:10I kept it because it came in a metal box.
0:33:12I don't know if people remember that.
0:33:13And the first WWDC I went to was two years ago.
0:33:15So I was never actually able to go, but I either knew people who went or knew people
0:33:19who could have gone but got the DVD set and set as part of the...
0:33:22Do you remember, Marco, where you...
0:33:24I guess you probably weren't around when they had the...
0:33:26I'm gonna get the name wrong.
0:33:27I think it was...
0:33:28There was different ADC levels.
0:33:30It was select and premiere.
0:33:31Yeah.
0:33:32I came in right as that was about to end, so I did see it, and it was like 500, 1,000,
0:33:38and 3,000, something like that.
0:33:40I think it was just...
0:33:42Select was 500 and premiere.
0:33:43I think it was premiere.
0:33:44the chat room and correct me. And that was like four digits. I don't remember what it
0:33:48was. But what you got was like one WWDC ticket and you got the DVDs and you got like, it
0:33:52was, you got lots of stuff. And so anyway, I got, I got new DVDs.
0:33:56And you got a big hardware discount. And yeah, I know. And a big, that's the whole reason
0:34:00we used to do these things, friends and I.
0:34:02Right, because you'd get like 400 bucks off.
0:34:03Yeah, we'd go in together and have a bunch of different hardware discounts. And that
0:34:06was the way I bought all our Macs was the hardware discounts. But anyway, I had that
0:34:10DVD set and that was back in the days when I would get those DVD sets and I would watch
0:34:14single session, or just every single one. I go through them in order. And these days,
0:34:20when I actually attend, I don't obviously do that because a lot of them I was there
0:34:23for so I don't have to watch them again. But I will go back and look at the ones that I
0:34:26didn't see. The only thing I'll start skipping now is like, now that it's like, there's a
0:34:31track on like web development. Well, I did watch a couple of those from last year, but
0:34:34I'm not going to watch those. And even some of the iOS ones I'll skip because I'm mostly
0:34:38in there for the Mac OS X stuff. But it used to be when it was just Mac and there wasn't
0:34:41like a track about how to do CSS or high DPI images or other esoteric things that may not
0:34:49really be in Apple's wheelhouse and you could just learn about it or may have already learned
0:34:52about it otherwise. I would just watch every single session. And that sounds boring, but
0:34:57I find maybe as I'm getting older, I have less time from that because the kids take
0:35:02a lot of time and everything, but that's the way I would consume things. When I was getting
0:35:07into a hobby or something, I would read everything there was to read about that hobby. When I
0:35:10learning UNIX, I just bought O'Reilly books and just read them from cover to cover.
0:35:15And today you read toaster manuals of toasters you don't own.
0:35:19Those are much shorter. I read UNIX power tools twice. I remember getting the end of
0:35:22that and going back to the beginning and reading through it again. That's not a small book.
0:35:26Well, but you make an interesting point, Marco, and I know you said that jokingly, but I really
0:35:30shouldn't say this on the show. Well, actually, it will come out after the fact, so it doesn't
0:35:33matter. But part of the draw of WWDC is the experiences you have outside of the sessions,
0:35:39and the sessions are unbelievable. In my two years of going to WWDC, I've only skipped
0:35:43three or four sessions, or three or four slots, I guess I should say. And some of the best
0:35:48experiences I've had, though, are networking with people. Like, for example, I met David
0:35:51Smith there, and David just pointed out in the chat room that the gentleman whose first
0:35:58name, I don't know how to pronounce, but his surname is Prendeville, who ran the WWDC
0:36:03alert thing. Apparently he only had 600 subscribers, which is a lot better than the 20,000 I apparently
0:36:10invented out of thin air. So thank you, David.
0:36:12Oh, good. That's way more encouraging.
0:36:14Yeah, maybe the doomsday scenario wasn't quite so bad.
0:36:16But I remember, I think that 20,000 number, I remember last year when, I don't know if
0:36:20they did, did the WWDC Alerts Twitter thing?
0:36:23It was oversubscribed.
0:36:24Yeah, that, the WWDC Alerts Twitter thing had something like 20,000. I forget the exact
0:36:30number, but it was in that range.
0:36:32And so--
0:36:33I thought it was 8,000.
0:36:34I was having good memories.
0:36:35Yeah, 8,000.
0:36:36Maybe.
0:36:37It was more than the tickets that were available.
0:36:39Yeah.
0:36:40I think last year they sold something like 5,500 tickets.
0:36:43And they've been at that number pretty comfortably
0:36:46or near that number pretty comfortably for enough time
0:36:48that we can be pretty sure that that's roughly what they
0:36:50think the maximum should be.
0:36:52And certainly going there for the last few years,
0:36:55few years, you can see in Moscone it is packed full.
0:37:00And it is so hard, it's just line after line after line.
0:37:03You get out of a session, if you want to get a popular
0:37:06session, if you want to get in there even,
0:37:09you have to get there like a half hour before it starts
0:37:11and stand in some long line.
0:37:13- Which means you've skipped the session before.
0:37:15- Right, I mean it's really quite difficult to maneuver
0:37:19around the conference with the number they have now.
0:37:22They certainly can't sell more tickets
0:37:23and keep it in that venue.
0:37:24It's still not the PAX level of waiting, because I find that you don't usually have to actually
0:37:30skip the previous session. You'll just get a crappier seat. Whereas with PAX, you have
0:37:34to skip the previous two sessions to get in line. The only thing you have to skip sessions
0:37:38for, I think, is if you want to get into the lunch session, like the JJ Abrams one, I was
0:37:41in line for that for like an hour and a half.
0:37:43Right. See, I always miss the crazy good Friday lunch session, because I always have to fly
0:37:47out at like 1 p.m.
0:37:48Yep. Same here.
0:37:49Well, why do you do that to yourself? I book my tickets. I hate traveling, so I need an
0:37:54entire day to prepare my mind and body for travel.
0:37:57So you stay on the Friday night?
0:37:59Yes, no, always.
0:38:00Oh, see, I don't want to stay the extra night, and I, for the love of all that's
0:38:03good and holy, I do not want to do a red eye.
0:38:05Yeah, I don't want to do a red eye.
0:38:06No, I never do a red eye, but I want all my flights to be at noon.
0:38:13That's the way—it's not always possible, but that's what I'm shooting for.
0:38:15The entire day is just dedicated to travel, and I don't want to wake up early in the
0:38:19morning.
0:38:20So, David Smith just put in the chat room, "God, he's my best friend."
0:38:24just said that the original WWDC Alerts, this is the unpaid completely free one, was around
0:38:31$9,000.
0:38:32Look at that, I win.
0:38:33That's actually pretty promising.
0:38:34The showcase showdown.
0:38:35Without going over.
0:38:36Does that mean you win both of the showcases then?
0:38:40No, it wasn't within $100.
0:38:41Oh, darn.
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0:42:37a_t_p_
0:42:40so before we leave the uh... w_w_t_c_ topic uh... are either of you two
0:42:44gentleman going to go if you don't get a ticket like john you said
0:42:48in all likelihood you'll probably take off the time but you'll probably stay at
0:42:52home yeah i can't i can't uh...
0:42:54justify going if I don't, because what would I do for the week?
0:42:57Like, although, like you said, that like one of the reasons that I am actually
0:43:01going is that I do have interactions with people outside the sessions, but it's
0:43:04mostly so that I can have like dedicated time where there's no distractions and
0:43:12no other demands on my time.
0:43:13I'm just there to attend sessions.
0:43:15And secondarily, and a close second is if after a session is over, I just need one
0:43:21thing clarified and it's not clear from the notes, the guy who gave the
0:43:24presentation is at the front of the room and I can go ask him.
0:43:27And then third is the thing that everyone says, "Oh, all the people you meet outside,"
0:43:31and everything like that.
0:43:32And that's definitely true as well, but for business purposes, I guess, for research purposes,
0:43:39it depends on who I'm meeting with, I guess.
0:43:41If I'm meeting with big fancy people in super secret, then yeah, I get a lot of value out
0:43:47of those meetings, but I can't bank on that.
0:43:48I can't guarantee that I'm going to have a private meeting with Tim Cook when I'm there.
0:43:52So I wouldn't go there with no ticket hoping that I'll just happen to catch Craig Federighi
0:44:00on the steps of Moscone and Ben Dizier for 15 minutes because that's probably not going
0:44:05to happen.
0:44:07And more importantly, how could I justify it as a business expense for the purpose of
0:44:13writing my review if I don't even have a ticket?
0:44:14So that's kind of bogus.
0:44:15So yeah, if I don't get a ticket and if I can't finagle a ticket through whatever crazy
0:44:21please somebody out there from Apple, help me, love me" type of system, then I'll
0:44:25just stay at home and watch the videos.
0:44:26Yeah, I don't know what I would do.
0:44:29Hopefully we won't have to think about this because we'll get tickets, but if I don't
0:44:35get a ticket, I might still...
0:44:38I would have a higher chance of going based on what you just said.
0:44:42I would be more likely to go than you, but I still wouldn't say right now, "Yes, I'm
0:44:47definitely going."
0:44:48I have a hotel reservation because it's totally refundable, but I haven't booked a plane yet
0:44:54because I'm not going to book a flight.
0:44:56I'll pay the extra couple hundred bucks, whatever the price is raised to tomorrow, if I get
0:45:00the ticket, rather than buy the plane ticket today on the off chance I don't get a ticket
0:45:05tomorrow.
0:45:06Yeah, we should tell everyone about that because I think that was a good three-way triumph
0:45:09of all of us having the wherewithal and guts to actually buy our hotel tickets, what, a
0:45:15month ahead of time?
0:45:16Yeah, we bought it in March.
0:45:17Yeah, and I forgot who initiated that, but like you always hear like, you can
0:45:22always look at the schedule and ballpark and you kind of know, yeah, it's probably
0:45:25going to be like this week, like every year that's been the case where you could
0:45:28look at that, but it's one thing to look at the schedule and know that it's another
0:45:32thing to actually pull the trigger and get the tickets.
0:45:33But like, I forget who pointed out, but like, you know, hotel tickets are
0:45:37refundable 24 hours ahead of time.
0:45:38So there's no risk in doing it, except if it's some sort of hotel that has an
0:45:42annoying website that makes refunds annoying, or you don't have any confidence
0:45:46they're going to correctly process it and they're going to charge you anyway even though
0:45:48you don't show up right. So if you have a good hotel with a reasonable website, it's
0:45:52worth doing. So hey, we had our hotel reservations a month in advance and they were actually
0:45:58cheaper than even the Apple special where we're reserving a block of room for you rates
0:46:03for the same place.
0:46:04Right. Well, and so to answer the question I asked of the two of you, I don't know what
0:46:09I'm going to do if and when I don't get a ticket. I've already established I'll go fetal
0:46:13for about three or four days. But a part of me thinks it's worth going to network. It's
0:46:18worth going to see people, to see the David Smiths and the Jim Dalrymples of the world,
0:46:24and certainly to see Marco or John or whoever is out there. But I don't know if I would
0:46:31go for the whole week. Our good friend David Smith, friend of the show David Smith, has
0:46:34said he's going, and I believe he's intending to go for the whole week. I don't know what
0:46:39I'm going to do. And I'm such a wimp and so indecisive, I can't figure out what I'm going
0:46:44to do. But maybe Marco and I, maybe we'll commiserate, maybe we'll celebrate. I don't
0:46:48know.
0:46:49What would you do though? I guess the only advantage is that you could stay out all night,
0:46:53which is not my thing anyway, but if it's your thing, you can do that and then sleep
0:46:56during the day instead of having to get a present. But even then, I guess if you just
0:47:00want to go and socialize with people. You wouldn't be getting much done from a business
0:47:08perspective, unless you're going there to try to like, "I need a partner for my new venture," or,
0:47:12"I'm trying to recruit a designer to help me and I want to talk to people and meet people," maybe,
0:47:17I don't know. I guess I am the wrong person to ask about what kind of business value you can get at
0:47:22social interactions. But unless you have money falling out of your ears and you don't have any,
0:47:29because that's a week of vacation time if you have a job and this is not part of your job,
0:47:35What else could you use that week for? What else could you use that thousands, really thousands of
0:47:39dollars for? It's a tough call. You're absolutely right. But now this isn't an oranges to oranges
0:47:46comparison, but if I wasn't at WWDC, what was it, 2011, then firstly, I wouldn't have met you.
0:47:52And secondly, I wouldn't have been there with Marco and Merlin and a friend of mine, Eric
0:47:57Schurter, to buy you a toaster. So there's something to be said for these social interactions.
0:48:02It's clearly important. That was one day though. I know a lot of people who aren't,
0:48:05If they say, "If I don't get tickets, I'll go, but not for the whole week."
0:48:08That makes sense to me, because you want to be there for the keynote excitement and the
0:48:11few.
0:48:12Maybe you'll arrange with people, like, "Oh, we should go out tonight, and then the other
0:48:16group of friends should go out the next night."
0:48:18Then you see the few people you're going to see, and then you're out of there.
0:48:21That's why I'm saying maybe I wouldn't go for a whole week, and I'm making this up.
0:48:25Maybe I'd go arrive Sunday, stay there Monday, Tuesday, and fly back Wednesday or something
0:48:30like that.
0:48:31I'm tired just thinking about W
0:48:35Introvert versus extrovert. Does the thought of seeing all these wonderful people who you love
0:48:41make you feel exhausted? You may be an introvert. Oh, I'm excited. I really hope... Because,
0:48:46the more I think about it, the more I think, if I didn't have a ticket, I would probably still go.
0:48:53But I think it would suck. Because most conferences, like South by Southwest is a joke.
0:49:00The sessions in South by Southwest are terrible.
0:49:03They're mostly panels where people just read Twitter
0:49:06and BS their way through.
0:49:08As an audience member, it's pretty hard.
0:49:11It's pretty unusual to be in a South by Southwest session that
0:49:14was worth your time.
0:49:16They do exist, but they're certainly the minority.
0:49:20But that conference is all about drinking and partying
0:49:22and socializing.
0:49:23And so if you're going to South by Southwest without a ticket,
0:49:27you'll still get almost all of the value of that conference.
0:49:30But WWDC, for me at least, is not that way.
0:49:35I mean, it does have drinking and partying,
0:49:37but for me, the great value of that conference
0:49:41is the sessions and even the socializing
0:49:43that happens in Moscone.
0:49:46I get usually-- - Yeah, that's a good point.
0:49:48- Usually I get more socializing done
0:49:50in the chair areas of Moscone between sessions
0:49:54or if there's one schedule gap
0:49:56where nothing's really that great,
0:49:57I'll go sit down and answer email and stuff
0:49:59and talk to people there.
0:50:00- And you wanna know why?
0:50:01Because you can actually hear people.
0:50:03- Right, exactly.
0:50:04The social environment of yelling at a bar
0:50:09while everyone's drunk is really not that great.
0:50:12- You're not gonna get the best development advice
0:50:13from your favorite developer
0:50:14when he's had three drinks in him.
0:50:16- Like it's fun. - Maybe you'll get
0:50:17the best juicy tips and rumors
0:50:19and you'll have the best trash talking,
0:50:20but that's the thing.
0:50:21If you come out of a session,
0:50:23some session that is about scroll views and something, and you're sitting next to someone
0:50:27who you want to talk to, or you see someone in three rows away, when you come out of the
0:50:31session, that's the perfect opportunity to discuss scroll view performance with a developer
0:50:37who you're lucky enough to meet in real life, because that's in the front of their mind.
0:50:41Whereas if you come up to them in a bar later and want to discuss scroll view performance,
0:50:43they're going to be like, "It's not the time for that now."
0:50:46Right, exactly.
0:50:47It's the time for beer.
0:50:48Yeah, and trash talking whoever you want to trash talk at that time and doing you know complaining about Apple or you know
0:50:54App review or whatever all the other there's plenty of other things you can do as well
0:50:58But there is something to be said for like it's like an academic type
0:51:01Context where you're learning about your craft and your business and that's valuable and like, you know
0:51:06I'm a lot of people ask me like why I go because I'm not developing an application but you know
0:51:11I'd go for my review obviously
0:51:12But if if you're actually making an application I meet so many developers both iOS and the Mac who were like
0:51:18this one session has made this entire thing worth it for me because now, oh my god,
0:51:22I can't wait to grab my laptop, run back down to a chair, and
0:51:26implement this thing that they just showed because it's gonna make my life so much easier and I never realized that it was
0:51:30so much better way to do this, you know what I mean?
0:51:33And as long as it's not an iCloud session, that usually turns out pretty well for that developer.
0:51:36All right, so I'm sorry, I prolonged the WWDC talk for a long time.
0:51:42I feel like we're probably good here.
0:51:44And so you'll see via Twitter whether or not any of the three of us got tickets.
0:51:49And I'm sure if, if I don't, I'll be complaining and moaning like a,
0:51:53like a baby for weeks.
0:51:55So let's hope, let's hope for the good of all of the nation and the
0:51:59world that I actually scored.
0:52:01So if we don't get tickets, Casey, we'll just sit in a Google
0:52:03hangout together and stare at quick time videos synchronized.
0:52:06You might be joking.
0:52:08I'm all in.
0:52:08It's like that scene when Harry Met Sally, we'll have the split screen.
0:52:11and we'll both watch the same session at the same time
0:52:14while laying in bed.
0:52:15- Again, you think, you might be joking,
0:52:17but I'm not, I'm there.
0:52:18- The funny thing is it would actually be fairly productive
0:52:20of us to just like arrange like an East Coast meetup
0:52:24for like one week in August,
0:52:26where we all just get together
0:52:28and watch the videos back to back.
0:52:30- That's true.
0:52:31- Well, we'll go to the Arment compound.
0:52:32- There you go.
0:52:34- That's true.
0:52:35- We can stay in the guest houses, right, Mark?
0:52:37- Oh yeah, yeah, on the estate.
0:52:40- Yeah, something like that.
0:52:41The crummy thing is, it's actually, Marco is in the middle of the three of us, but what
0:52:45are you, like two or three hours from John and eight from me?
0:52:48Six or eight from me?
0:52:49Yeah, the middle is generous.
0:52:50I'm way closer to John than you.
0:52:51Oh, well.
0:52:52That's your fault.
0:52:53I'm living down there.
0:52:54Yeah, but you have 70 mile per hour speed limit roads in your state, so.
0:52:57No, I think that's just west, right?
0:52:59No, no.
0:53:00It's here too.
0:53:01In full Virginia?
0:53:02Excuse me, except...
0:53:03Real Virginia?
0:53:04In the real Virginia.
0:53:05Email Marco.
0:53:06But also consider that we're out of state.
0:53:07Do you think anybody in West Virginia is listening to this podcast right now?
0:53:11Probably not.
0:53:12Let's be realistic here.
0:53:14But also consider we are not a state, we're Commonwealth.
0:53:16I believe like Massachusetts, if I'm not mistaken.
0:53:18Yes.
0:53:19I don't get it.
0:53:20I don't know what the difference is either.
0:53:21Neither do I.
0:53:22It's just so the residents can say that to people.
0:53:24Seriously, so we can be obnoxious like that.
0:53:26Exactly.
0:53:27We're like the hipsters of, I don't know.
0:53:29You and your states.
0:53:31We were commonwealths before we were even states.
0:53:33Anyway, all right, what else did we talk about tonight?
0:53:36Or are we done?
0:53:37- Well, I think we can do another 15 minutes or so
0:53:39if you want.
0:53:40Do you think--
0:53:41- Do you wanna talk about earnings
0:53:42or do you wanna talk about something else?
0:53:43- I think the earnings thing has a couple
0:53:45of interesting things about it, but not a whole lot.
0:53:48First of all, I'm glad that the stock price
0:53:51didn't totally just plummet.
0:53:54It seems to have stayed roughly the same,
0:53:56which is itself an embarrassing level,
0:53:58but I was expecting doom here
0:54:00because we've talked about in the past,
0:54:02and I've blogged a lot about how I think
0:54:05Apple is kind of stuck in this rush of extremely negative momentum in the public eye, and especially
0:54:13in the press. But I hear it from regular people too, so it's certainly getting out there.
0:54:20And I have to think, people are going to be crapping on Apple publicly and expressing
0:54:29doom and pessimism about the company and its products and its future. I was thinking that
0:54:34that would be like a year or two long cycle.
0:54:37And I was thinking also,
0:54:39and this is not investment advice
0:54:41'cause none of us are qualified,
0:54:42but one of the reasons why I sold all my Apple shares
0:54:46back whenever it was, January, February,
0:54:48I sold them at like 460 something.
0:54:51And one of the reasons why,
0:54:53oh, it was like soon after the holiday earnings call
0:54:56and the stock took a dive on that call
0:54:59and I realized holiday earnings are great usually,
0:55:03And they were, you know, it's always the highest quarter
0:55:05of the year, and so I figure that's probably the best news
0:55:10they're going to announce for a long time,
0:55:12possibly the whole year, at least as far as the market
0:55:15is concerned, and so I figure if the stock took a dive
0:55:18on what was probably their best news day of the year,
0:55:21I don't think I wanna hold it for the rest of the year.
0:55:24And so far that's proven to be fairly good,
0:55:27a fairly good theory, it's panned out,
0:55:28but you know, with this, I was thinking like,
0:55:31quarter after holiday earnings is always kind of soft. And we've been hearing all these
0:55:37rumors about how they were having way lower demand than expected, and they were possibly
0:55:43having like oversupply of components. And I mean, it sounded bad, like, leading up to
0:55:49this. The rumors were pretty bad. And then they released the earnings, and they're actually
0:55:53pretty decent. And, you know, it's not like the holiday quarter, but they beat their own
0:55:58own guidance, as they usually do, and even Wall Street didn't seem disappointed by
0:56:03it.
0:56:04Well, this was supposed to be the different quarter where they were saying, "We're
0:56:07not going to give you the guidance that we're guaranteed to be. This time we're giving
0:56:10you a range and we say we're going to fall within that range."
0:56:12And they felt just above it, right?
0:56:14Yeah, right. And the fact that they were still out of that range would be making me think
0:56:17if I was an analyst, like, "All right, we're on to your game now. You still gave us an
0:56:22estimate that you knew you could beat, but like, oh, it could be that they just had better
0:56:25things happen. But it was just kind of like a wash. But the thing about that idea that
0:56:31Apple is like doom and gloom about Apple, I feel like the entire industry in some respects
0:56:36is in not so much doom and gloom or a death spiral, but like in a holding pattern. Because
0:56:40we notice Apple in these things. But take a look at, have you ever been reading the
0:56:43Samsung Galaxy S4 reviews? Yeah, they're really mediocre.
0:56:46Right. And so the same, the attitude is basically from consumers and from the market, who cares
0:56:51about the market. But from consumers, like what have you done for me lately?
0:56:54Exactly.
0:56:55iPhone, iPad, and even Samsung, the shining star.
0:56:57Uh-oh, Apple's in the doldrums.
0:56:58Samsung's, "No, the same thing with Samsung.
0:57:00What have you done for me lately?"
0:57:01Samsung, "Is the Galaxy S3, the Galaxy S4, is the S4 so much better than the S3?"
0:57:08And they're like, "Oh, I guess it's another Samsung Galaxy phone, and it's got a bunch
0:57:12of things in it, but they're not all that awesome."
0:57:14And we're all in a holding pattern, because everyone's waiting for, "Okay, what's the
0:57:18next big thing?"
0:57:19That's why everyone keeps talking about stupid iWatch, because everyone has to have something
0:57:22to be talking about. And I feel like the entire tech industry is in that holding pattern to say,
0:57:28"What's going to be the next breakout thing?" Even if the next breakout thing is, "Oh my God,
0:57:31iPad sales are doing a hockey stick and they're going out of control, and so many people are
0:57:36excited about Apple again, and it's in the news again." Right? That could be it too. But everybody
0:57:40is in it. There's no company that's like, "Well, Apple's just kind of boring and not really growing
0:57:45like it used to, but Samsung has got an excit..." No, Samsung's just got another phone. And so,
0:57:49So Apple's going to have another phone, and Samsung's going to have another phone.
0:57:52Do you think Samsung's going to come out with its Galaxy Watch?
0:57:56Is that going to be the exciting thing?
0:57:57So everybody is just kind of like, "All right."
0:57:59And now, yeah, Apple was ridiculously punished for burning so brightly before, and now it's
0:58:05like, "All right, well, you'll be punished by the market, and you have to go into the
0:58:08corner and stay there," right?
0:58:10But it's not as if there is someone else sweeping past them to be the new darling of the industry
0:58:14that everyone is pinning their hopes and dreams on, whose stock price is going up 500x over
0:58:19course of two years. There is no equivalent to that. So everyone is just kind of sitting there,
0:58:24cross-armed, saying, "All right, what have you done for me lately?" And it could be true that
0:58:27this entire year goes by and no one does anything for those customers with their hands folded.
0:58:32But I haven't listened to the audio of the earning call yet, but I read some transcripts,
0:58:35and I think Tim Cook was making some faints in that direction of like,
0:58:39"We might have some entering new categories, and we're not going to give you any timelines."
0:58:44Well, he did give a timeline. He basically said, I mean, in a different comment, what
0:58:49he basically said was, "We're going to be releasing new stuff this fall and next year."
0:58:55So the implication was, "Don't expect much between now and this fall."
0:58:59Well, I mean, he wouldn't even get pinned down on that, too, but all he would say is,
0:59:02"We will have new stuff in the fall." Of course they'll have new stuff in the fall.
0:59:04I mean, like, obviously. And if he's not going to be any more specific than new stuff, it
0:59:08could be like, "Oh, we revved the MacBooks."
0:59:11But he was firm enough on that though that I think what that means is
0:59:14all those rumors about there being an iPhone 5s in the spring, that's all crap.
0:59:18You know, that's probably not going to happen.
0:59:20I think his comments made it very clear. And I think Gruber said too, it was kind of
0:59:25like
0:59:26setting expectations for
0:59:28what's going to be announced between now and WWDC. Like, don't expect a whole
0:59:32lot.
0:59:33And what was interesting also is that
0:59:35the press release this morning
0:59:37for WWDC
0:59:38confirmed with a quote from Phil that
0:59:42at WWDC we will have new versions of iOS and MacOS in developers hands.
0:59:48So that's... he came out right out and said that.
0:59:51So we're going to see 10.9. Well, did anyone doubt that? Well, we've heard rumors.
0:59:56We've heard rumors that 10.9 was being delayed.
0:59:58Oh, it is being delayed, but you're going to have some version of it.
1:00:02It's not going to be GM. If it's GM, screw it.
1:00:07And to be like, oh, when iOS 5 was released at WWDC and the thing didn't work that well.
1:00:11Right.
1:00:12So it wasn't, you know, and that's the one I put on my phone.
1:00:15Yeah.
1:00:15Yeah.
1:00:16No, so Google will never let me forget that.
1:00:19Oh, I think I also put iOS 5 on my phone.
1:00:23It was a big mistake.
1:00:24So if 10.9, if 10.9 is GM at WWDC and you don't get a ticket, John, and I don't get a
1:00:30ticket, does that mean we don't hang out in a, we don't get on a Google hangout together
1:00:34because we're going to be too busy.
1:00:35Oh yeah.
1:00:36No, I would still have to watch all the video.
1:00:40I don't even know what the hell I'd do.
1:00:43That's the problem.
1:00:44If that happened, all the real tech sites with the people who write every day as their
1:00:49job would have 10-9 reviews up in a day or two, and I would not.
1:00:55It would be months and months, and it wouldn't be...
1:00:59For me taking three months to write something, it isn't three months better than someone
1:01:04who wrote theirs in two days.
1:01:05It's just not.
1:01:06So that's all fine if I take my three months before the release date and all the reviews
1:01:10arrive on the release date.
1:01:11You don't care how long it took me, right?
1:01:12But I don't think I'm going to want to wait for the amount of time it would take me to
1:01:15write.
1:01:16Oh, you sell yourself short.
1:01:17I wonder how long I'll be able to spend on my review of your review.
1:01:21Should I write a review of your review of his review?
1:01:23I think that might have been my highest traffic post of 2012.
1:01:27Yeah, you were riding my coattails, I know.
1:01:30Yeah, I was, obviously.
1:01:31And now you have like, you don't have more Google juice than my actual review, but you're
1:01:36hit number two. Yeah, exactly. They were just like, of all the many people linked to it,
1:01:41you are the second hit. Wait, I am really? Yeah, I think so. Just Google for Syracuse
1:01:44Mountain Lion, you'll... Oh, that's hilarious. That's fantastic. You were the number one
1:01:50hit for a while, I think. Sorry. How mad did that make you, John Syracuse? You must have
1:01:55been... I don't think people had trouble finding... It was in the title. Was it? Or no, but no,
1:01:59yours was in the title too. Oh, no, well, kind of. No, my name's not in the title. No,
1:02:03your name is not in the title.
1:02:05Well, I guess if you did R's Technica Mountain Lion,
1:02:07you wouldn't be as highly ranked.
1:02:09Well, that's hilarious.
1:02:10Rest assured that people are not having trouble finding my review.
1:02:12Oh, goodness.
1:02:14Yeah.
1:02:15That's fantastic.
1:02:16All right, so anything else about earnings, or is that basically it?
1:02:18I think, well, and it's worth thinking about, too,
1:02:20like, you know, people who were expecting things earlier than that,
1:02:23like new laptops or anything, look at Intel's roadmap
1:02:27for what they would put into laptops or Mac Pros or iMacs,
1:02:31And it looks like everything's basically waiting on Haswell right now.
1:02:34But as far as I know, Haswell's not really coming out until third quarter, right?
1:02:38Well, I mean, you know the Apple Intel magic of them getting stuff, like, not even ahead so much,
1:02:44just like the first day of the quarter they could have it.
1:02:48Like, "Well, it's not really ahead of schedule. It's exactly what we said it would be."
1:02:51But we've given Apple preferential treatment, and they were able to arrange it so they can have their stuff out
1:02:55exactly as the stuff arrives.
1:02:57And the Zeons are still--it's the Ivy Bridge Zeons, right? It's not even, you know, Haswell?
1:03:00Yeah, right now we're still the the current the the e5 series and the e3 series is sandy bridge EP, but then they
1:03:07There's an e3 v2 line, which I just find out when I was looking at servers a couple days ago. I totally missed this
1:03:14It's basically the ivy bridge EP
1:03:17Version, but it's just single processor. There's no there's no dual processor version
1:03:21So there's no e5 line as far as I could tell I'll put that in the X right? Yeah, right. Yeah
1:03:25Well, honestly, my favorite CPU right now for servers, the best bang for buck that I
1:03:31can get on a server right now is the E3-1270.
1:03:34It's an awesome CPU.
1:03:38I'm totally on board with a single processor, non-Xeon Mac Pro replacement machine, because
1:03:44if you can get it clocked higher than a Xeon, you can get it earlier than a Xeon, and it
1:03:48has other possible advantages, in terms of packaging and power consumption, I would not
1:03:53turn my nose up at that. I would prefer Xeon and all the other ECC RAM and all that crazy
1:03:58crap that we should not pay for, but we do. But, like, you know, better. I'll take what
1:04:04I can get, you know what I mean?
1:04:05Oh yeah, I mean, even my current Mac Pro, my "new" Mac Pro from the 2010 generation,
1:04:13it's a single-socket, because the single-socket CPU, it's the 6x 3.33 GHz one, and that, for
1:04:19for almost every type of workflow is faster than the dual socket ones, because the dual
1:04:23socket ones aren't that high.
1:04:24Yeah, it's not like the old days, where if you had a single CPU, that meant you had a
1:04:28single thread of execution.
1:04:29Right.
1:04:30They also had umpteen cores in them, and it's like, "Well, you just have one CPU."
1:04:34It basically just limits your RAM slots at this point.
1:04:38And so if the next generation of Mac Pro only has one socket in any configuration, that
1:04:45actually wouldn't be that bad because the single-socket Xeon's now are so good
1:04:49that, you know, although they do make a heck of a lot of profit on the bigger
1:04:54ones though, but I don't know, we'll see. I certainly think that my next Mac Pro
1:04:59after this, assuming it still uses Xeon's, is probably still gonna be a single
1:05:05socket one, and I bet that's gonna be true for a whole lot of buyers. I would
1:05:09spring for the double if it wasn't like, "add another CPU for $2,000," like if it's
1:05:14It's not ridiculous like it was.
1:05:15No, it would be.
1:05:16It would be at least $1,500, and it would be lower clocked.
1:05:19Look at the prices.
1:05:20That's all Intel, really.
1:05:21Look at the prices now.
1:05:22I'd have to think about it hard, because it's not as if this is a value.
1:05:27It's not as if I can calculate, "Oh, well, I don't need this.
1:05:31You know I don't need it."
1:05:32But if I buy a new machine every once every five years, damn it, I want it to be the big,
1:05:36beefy one.
1:05:37And I'll just have to decide, do I think that really is the big, beefy one?
1:05:41like you said, it probably would be lower clocked.
1:05:43If they offered a single core, they could crank it up.
1:05:44But there are too many variables.
1:05:46The point is, we just want something,
1:05:48even if it's not called a Mac Pro, whatever it is,
1:05:50something that's not an iMac, something that's not a laptop,
1:05:53something that's not a Mac Mini.
1:05:54And that's really, really fast.
1:05:56Didn't Cook say last year that sometime during 2013,
1:06:00they would have something that will make the Mac Pro
1:06:04customers happy?
1:06:05What he said was later next year.
1:06:06So in--
1:06:07Well, right.
1:06:07But we don't know what the later applies to.
1:06:09But that certainly does correspond well to the next iteration of the Zeons.
1:06:13Well, and beyond that, I mean, if he just said in so many words that there's not going to be
1:06:19anything until the fall, it sounds like he's running out of time. Well, he, I shouldn't say
1:06:24he. Apple is running out of time. I don't think anyone, there's like seven people waiting for
1:06:28the answer to that question. Yes, but all seven of you are very, very whiny.
1:06:33We are very whiny, we're very loud, but what he was actually referring to was like, you know,
1:06:37whatever, like, I again, I have to listen to their own calls, but like, possibly entering a new product category, whatever that means, it means something more exciting than a new iPhone, new iPad or new Mac. That's what, and even that didn't produce enough excitement to cause any sort of market bump. It's just like, all right, well, that's what we all expect. That's what you're right, Tim. That is what we're waiting for. But we're gonna sit here with their arms folded until we get that thing. And so, nah.
1:07:06Well, one thing that was also really interesting from the call was the number of iPads sold.
1:07:11And this was crazy.
1:07:12Basically they sold 19-point-something-million iPads, and that was more than they sold in
1:07:17the holiday quarter.
1:07:18That's crazy.
1:07:19Well, I think that makes sense, because if you look at all Asympto, Horace Dedu's graphs,
1:07:27if you look at all...
1:07:28Whenever he overlays them, so you can just see, "Let's just put each product's introduction
1:07:33and pin them to the zero on the x-axis.
1:07:36And you look at the slopes of the various curves.
1:07:38Here's how the iPad took off, and here's
1:07:40how the Mac took off, and here's how the iPhone took off.
1:07:43The iPad always had the steepest slope.
1:07:44It was like, boy, it was small.
1:07:47The absolute values weren't very high,
1:07:48but it's like, boy, the iPad is taking off
1:07:50much steeper than the iPhone.
1:07:51The iPhone took off much steeper than the iPod,
1:07:53and the Mac is just way back as this gradual ramp up to nothing.
1:07:58So yeah, it's not a surprise that the iPad continues
1:08:01to rocket up like that.
1:08:02And that's kind of like the wild card, which if you want to be optimistic about Apple is,
1:08:07where is the ceiling on iPad sales? Because it is so capable of replacing a PC for so many people,
1:08:17and will only become more capable in time, and they'll keep driving the price down.
1:08:22And we're just kind of, we're just getting off the ground. We're at the iPhone 3GS stage of the iPad
1:08:27right now. You know what I mean? We got the one, and then we got the one that's faster and cooler,
1:08:31but it's fatter, and now we got the mini, but we're now waiting for the big one to shrink.
1:08:36Once the iPad hits the iPhone 4 stage and the iPhone 5 and beyond, I think there is tremendous
1:08:45sales potential for these things as PC replacements, basically. Not you have this
1:08:52instead of a PC, but for people who've never had a PC before, this will get them in the door.
1:08:56For people who do have a PC, they're going to buy this as a companion and stop using their PC as
1:09:00much and we're nowhere close to the ceiling on that versus the phone market where it's
1:09:04like the competitors are locked in a deadly battle and the number of non-smartphones is
1:09:10dwindling. I think they just crossed 50% of smart non-smartphones and stuff like that.
1:09:15There's not this ridiculous upside where we're like, "Oh, by this time next year,
1:09:21there will be 7x as many smartphones sold." That time is over, but that time is not over for the
1:09:25the iPad. And the other thing is, the competitors in the tablet market are not making a dent
1:09:32in the iPad so far. Actually, that's not true.
1:09:37You're counting Kindles? Well, yeah. I mean, everyone else does.
1:09:40So yeah, you have to count Kindles and Nooks. I don't know if you have to.
1:09:43Well, yeah, I guess that's true. And nobody knows how much they've really
1:09:46sold, do they? I mean, everyone…
1:09:47It's not like where you see the market share graphs where it's like Android versus iPhone,
1:09:52Android is like 50-something percent and iPhone is like 20. Every time you see a tablet, Apple
1:09:59has like 70 or 80, depending on who's counting what.
1:10:01But I think that is steadily going down. I think it used to be Apple had like 85 to 90,
1:10:07and then it's been slowly creeping down, and now it's like 79. They still have, obviously,
1:10:13a dominant hold on it.
1:10:15It's okay for that to go on when the overall size of the market is going up so rapidly.
1:10:19It's okay to be like, think of the iPod. The iPod hovered around 70 for a long time, and
1:10:26that was just plain fine. 70 was considered dominant because other plus random competitors
1:10:31is always going to add up to 30% or something, but if you went to buy a music player, you're
1:10:35just going to get an iPod.
1:10:36I never realized it was that low, because everyone assumed that the iPod was pretty
1:10:40much the only game in town.
1:10:42I think if you look at it now, they always pegged the number around 70-something. It
1:10:47isn't as dominant as you would think it would be because we never would consider anything
1:10:49else. Like, what are people buying besides iPods? I wouldn't even know where to go for
1:10:53such a thing, but the world is a big place.
1:10:55Right. It's one of those things probably where number one is the iPod, number two is like
1:11:001%.
1:11:01Because "other."
1:11:02Because there's so many entries in that. What is it? The second plurality or something?
1:11:08Yeah. I don't know. I don't know math. I'm just a programmer. I think it's also worth
1:11:15of pointing out, based on what you just said about smartphones and market and everything,
1:11:21that we have crossed an important threshold in the industry. And I don't think the industry
1:11:25knows it yet, so I'm going to announce it here. Big news.
1:11:29You heard it here first.
1:11:31My mother just purchased her first smartphone.
1:11:34Really? How much prompting from you was about this?
1:11:38I told her not to get one, actually.
1:11:39Did she get another one?
1:11:41I didn't want to support that. And her needs for a--like, she has a MacBook Air and loves it.
1:11:46She had an iMac--or an iBook before that. She actually figured out the computer
1:11:51pretty well. I was pleasantly surprised, because she's really, really non-technical.
1:11:56I was pleasantly surprised by how well she does on the computer, but I told her, "You don't need an iPad,
1:12:01and you don't need a smartphone." Because I know what she does and doesn't do for the most part.
1:12:06And she abuses her phones, so I'm like,
1:12:10"Just get whatever cheap flip phone you can get." So she's had a flip phone for years,
1:12:14she just got her first smartphone against my advice.
1:12:18Can you guess what phone she got?
1:12:22A Galaxy Note. The free iPhone 4. John, you are
1:12:26correct. Even though I told her,
1:12:30she was visiting here, she was visiting my library of old iPhones
1:12:34in my house a couple of weeks ago or a month ago,
1:12:38and I showed her, okay, I'm like, here's the iPhone 4,
1:12:41here's the iPhone 5, I didn't share with the 4S
1:12:44because who cares, I knew she wouldn't care
1:12:47about the difference, so I was like, here's the 4,
1:12:48here's the 5, and I told her specifically,
1:12:51do not get the free one, the one that's even 100 bucks more
1:12:55is way better because the 4S, - Power of free!
1:12:57- The 4S is so much better than the 4,
1:13:00and I showed her the 5 and I'm like, look, for 200,
1:13:03you can get this one. It is way better than even the middle one.
1:13:07And, you know, trust me, this is the right... I was trying to push you a five.
1:13:11Like, just get the 16 gig, you know, the cheapest one. Trust me, get that. It's great.
1:13:15And if you don't want to spend 200 bucks, at least spend the 100 and get the 4S.
1:13:19Do not get the iPhone 4. She goes and gets the iPhone 4
1:13:23and calls me, like, afterwards saying, "Hey, guess what I just got?"
1:13:27And she kept saying, "It was free! I know you told me to get the other one,
1:13:31the other one, but this one was free.
1:13:33And it was so--
1:13:34- Like the Seinfeld episode, who buys batteries?
1:13:37- Like it was so powerful.
1:13:39That's why this really matters a lot
1:13:42to have that in the free category.
1:13:44I mean, it matters so much that, you know,
1:13:47people aren't thinking about the plan costs over time,
1:13:50or how you can just spend 100 bucks
1:13:55over this $2,000 phone contract,
1:13:57spend 100 bucks more and have way better device
1:13:59the whole time.
1:14:00She actually will keep it the whole two years.
1:14:03Like she's not gonna upgrade earlier or anything.
1:14:06So it's just-- - You don't have to sound
1:14:07so judgy.
1:14:09I'm still rocking my 4S because I'm too cheap
1:14:11to get a new one every year.
1:14:12- But the 4S is a decent phone.
1:14:14And even by today's standards, it's a heavy, big brick,
1:14:17but it's decent.
1:14:18- Oh, don't see it, sure. - That's why I said
1:14:20in my Apple 2013 to-do list,
1:14:23to add more variety for the phone lineup,
1:14:27make a purpose-built low-cost free phone instead of having the old one because I think you
1:14:32can get a better phone out for similar cost and similar margins than just redoing.
1:14:38Maybe I'm wrong about that, Tim Cook, and tell me about the manufacturing stuff, but
1:14:41think of how much better you would feel if she was getting a free phone with exactly
1:14:45the same power and specs as the iPhone 4, but not an actual iPhone 4, a purpose-built
1:14:52thing made with old technology but a newer phone.
1:14:54- Right, like an A5 with a plastic shell.
1:14:57- Yeah, well, I mean, you don't have to make it crappy,
1:14:59but like, you have the technology now
1:15:01to make a better phone than that.
1:15:02Maybe use dye-shrunk versions of components.
1:15:05Maybe you can make it a little bit smaller and lighter.
1:15:06Maybe you can bump up the margin a little bit, you know.
1:15:09I know why they wanna keep making the same phone.
1:15:10You've got the assembly lines going.
1:15:12You've got the parts going.
1:15:13It's like, you're in a groove.
1:15:14The cost of everything is going way, way down.
1:15:15But there's that certain point where like, you know,
1:15:18remember when USB 1 started to become more expensive
1:15:21than USB 2?
1:15:22There was that crossover point
1:15:24where it was like, if you actually wanted to put USB 1
1:15:27on your motherboard or in your computer,
1:15:28you would end up paying more,
1:15:29because everybody would switch to USB 2.
1:15:30- Or like when you have old RAM,
1:15:32and you wanna upgrade,
1:15:33if you still have something that uses DDR2,
1:15:36and trying to find that nowadays is very expensive.
1:15:38- It's not that extreme,
1:15:39but I think there is definitely a case to be made for,
1:15:43even if only just from a marketing perspective,
1:15:45so your mother doesn't care that she's getting an old phone,
1:15:47but some people do, they're like, oh.
1:15:48- I don't think she knows that it's old.
1:15:50- The iPhone 4, the 4 and the 4S looking the same,
1:15:53probably helps in this regard, but I would feel bad if I was Apple that people are out
1:15:59there today coming home with a new phone that is just as old as the iPhone 4. I'd rather
1:16:04them coming home with a phone with similar power but maybe better battery life, maybe
1:16:07a slightly better screen, maybe a fixed home button, maybe no glass on the back, all the
1:16:13things that you can do to make it more durable for people who you know aren't going to be
1:16:18is precious about their phones, right? I don't know how they make that work financially in
1:16:24terms of making the same phone over and over again being cheaper versus making a new one.
1:16:28But yeah, the power of free with contract, in the US anyway, I don't know how it is elsewhere,
1:16:33I would really like to see them do that and come out with a line of phones with the same
1:16:39price points free, $99, $299, and then the ridiculous phone, but not have, as soon as
1:16:46you go off the top line and have it be like, "Oh, you're just getting the old phone."
1:16:49Because there's something about that that makes me feel like they're leaving money and
1:16:54reputation on the table by continuing to sell old phones that far into the past. So the
1:16:59previous one, fine, but don't go back like two models or three models.
1:17:01Oh, I mean, yeah. I think about the tech world. Think about what you were doing and what else
1:17:07was around when the iPhone 4 came out. The iPhone 4 came out a few months after the iPad
1:17:13for one thing.
1:17:15- Yeah, and nobody wants an iPad One.
1:17:16If they give you an iPad One,
1:17:18who wants an iPad One at this point?
1:17:20You can't practically give them away.
1:17:22Like, even children turn their nose up out of them
1:17:24because they don't play the Tokuboko games
1:17:26at a good frame rate, you know?
1:17:27- So, it came out right after the iPad One by a few months,
1:17:31and it was in 2010.
1:17:33I was still at Tumblr when the iPhone 4 came out.
1:17:37And just thinking about how long we've had Retina screens.
1:17:41Now it seems like we've always had Retina screens
1:17:43our phones. Maybe not everything else, but on our phones, of course we've always had
1:17:46retina screens. Nope, it's been since 2010, which was almost three years ago, and I can't
1:17:53believe, like, there's people now getting A4 devices with crappy home buttons and questionable
1:18:00antenna designs, but I'm going to have to support those--
1:18:02- And like, give them a little bit more RAM, you know?
1:18:04- Right.
1:18:05- Like, do a, fine, make it an A4, shrink it, make it a slightly higher clock and double
1:18:09the RAM and then all of a sudden it's not as embarrassing anymore. It's not as much a pain
1:18:14for software developers who have to deal with this. You know what I mean? It's just so much
1:18:18better for everyone involved. And then you probably wouldn't care that much that your mom got the
1:18:21iPhone free model because you're like, "Oh, well, it's not that terrible." Oh, see, I disagree
1:18:26because what do you think the likelihood is that the iPhone 4 will run iOS 7 when it comes out?
1:18:31That's a very good question. As we know for sure. Your mom doesn't care if she can run iOS 7.
1:18:36Well, but as a developer, I have to care.
1:18:40If they're still selling all these, like, last year they were still selling three GS's
1:18:44until the iPhone 5 came out. Well, that's why I said double the RAM, because like
1:18:48RAM ends up being limited, like that's why multitasking couldn't go on the other phones.
1:18:52Like CPU power and GPU power keeps you out of games and stuff, but I think they're
1:18:56probably past the point now where they're adding OS features that can't run because of
1:19:00CPU constraints. It's always RAM, but they're still relatively RAM starved. And there's
1:19:04getting around that. There's nothing you can do to optimize your code. If the OS is taking up a
1:19:09bigger portion of RAM, you have less left over for you, and no matter how you optimize your stuff,
1:19:13you can't fix the OS. The 4 is just too old. The 3GS was even worse hanging around for that long.
1:19:22What were the RAM levels? What did the 3GS have? 128.
1:19:27128, and then... No, no, it was 256. Never mind.
1:19:30256, and then... It was email Casey.
1:19:32Yeah, like 512, 1 gig. If you look at the RAM things, they're doubling, right? And we're
1:19:37not out of the uncomfortable part. Even with the 1 gig, you feel like, "Oh, well, if I
1:19:44run a big game, it could be pushing up against the edge there."
1:19:47Yeah. Well, and Retinas took us back on that regard a little bit, because everything started
1:19:50taking—all the textures and everything started taking way more RAM, four times as much RAM.
1:19:54Yeah. And we're not even talking about adding swap. We're saying, "Fine, still no swap.
1:19:58We're still OK with that because we
1:20:00don't realize that the performance constraints
1:20:02are the reason for that.
1:20:03But at least get us out of the woods.
1:20:05If we go through two or three more doubling periods,
1:20:08then we're going to be like, all right,
1:20:09there's nothing they're going to do
1:20:11with the OS and any one individual app that's
1:20:13going to hose a 2GIG or a 4GIG phone.
1:20:17And then if your mom has a 4GIG phone,
1:20:21even if that phone is three years old,
1:20:22you're like, it's got 4GIGs.
1:20:24It'll be fine.
1:20:24I can't-- I don't know what they could add that will make
1:20:284 gig phone and say, "Oh, don't get that one. It doesn't have enough RAM to run the OS and
1:20:32basic apps."
1:20:33Now, you want to wrap it up?
1:20:35Sure.
1:20:36I think we're good.
1:20:37All right. Special thanks again to our two sponsors today, MailRoute and Hover. Go to
1:20:44mailroute. … Oh, crap. Is it net? Yes. I closed that window.
1:20:50We are so professional here.
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1:21:15I think it worked very well. And yeah, thanks a lot and we'll see you next week.
1:21:20week.
1:21:21[music]
1:21:22Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin
1:21:28'Cause it was accidental (accidental)
1:21:31Oh, it was accidental (accidental)
1:21:34John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:21:39'Cause it was accidental (accidental)
1:21:42It was accidental (accidental)
1:21:44And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:21:49And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
1:21:54@C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:21:58So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:22:03N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N S-I-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-U-S-I-C-R-A-C-R-A-C-R-A-C-R-A-C-R-A-C-R-
1:22:03♪ N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N ♪
1:22:06♪ S-I-R-A-C ♪
1:22:09♪ U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A ♪
1:22:11♪ It's accidental, accidental ♪
1:22:14♪ They didn't mean to ♪
1:22:17♪ Accidental, accidental ♪
1:22:19♪ Tech broadcast so long ♪
1:22:23- Is my voice synthetic?
1:22:25I feel like I'm subconsciously making my voice
1:22:27synthetically deep because there's an audience now,
1:22:30as though there wasn't an audience before.
1:22:32Well, maybe it feels more real now.
1:22:34Yeah, seriously.
1:22:35You know?
1:22:36Don't overthink it, Casey.
1:22:37I know, for real.
1:22:38I'm already dooming myself.
1:22:39I thought you were coming to this episode lubricated.
1:22:45Let's just say I had an after-work function where I might have had a drink or two, and
1:22:51I definitely have some of my—what do we call the coffee?
1:22:55The fussy coffee?
1:22:56I have fussy vodka.
1:22:58What exactly is—I mean, I know this is probably not relevant to the show, but who cares—what
1:23:01What exactly is fussy vodka?
1:23:03I don't think there is really such a thing.
1:23:05It's just a vodka that you have to special order from our local…
1:23:10So, to get alcohol in Virginia, you have to go to an ABC store, which is a state-run thing,
1:23:18and so in order to get this particular bottle of vodka, you have to special order it, and
1:23:22that's what I've done.
1:23:23So, it's marginally fussy.
1:23:25Okay, I guess that works.
1:23:28I'm not a coffee drinker, so it's the next best thing, right?
1:23:31Now, John, I'm curious, do you have fussy water?
1:23:36The fussiest water gets is I let the tap run until the water that's been sitting in the
1:23:41pipes and kind of coming up to room temperature runs out a little bit and I get the slightly
1:23:46colder water.
1:23:47That's as fussy as it gets.
1:23:49Oh, that's fantastic.
1:23:52So I guess you want to start the show?
1:23:54Maybe this is the show already.
1:23:55No, this is not the show.