0:00:00I don't remember if I was barefoot last year.
0:00:02I'm pretty sure if this is not the first podcast I've recorded barefoot, this is the second.
0:00:09I feel like at the beach you kind of have to be. Like,
0:00:12because, you know, everything at the beach you're constantly going in and out between like sandy and wet and dry and it's hot.
0:00:18So your only choices are barefoot or full shoes, I think. Like, everything in between is not as good.
0:00:25You a flip-flop man?
0:00:26Not really I they don't stay on like I'm a big about like walking like I take long dog walks
0:00:31I take bike rides and they just don't stay on
0:00:34Enough for that like unless you get the kind that are basically sandals if they have a little backstrap
0:00:38But that's at that point. That's a sandal. I like a flip-flop. I do feel though that
0:00:42It's tiring. He's got it. You got to do a little curl with your toes. Yeah, like kind of all the time and you
0:00:50You know, this is a bicycle town
0:00:54I terrified of riding a bicycle with flip-flops because I feel like I'm on the verge of scraping my toes up
0:01:00Yeah, it's I mean like it's not quite as bad as like riding a motorcycle flip-flops would be but it's not that much better
0:01:05My show has been very erratically
0:01:10More erratic than usual publishing wise I just posted 258 yesterday
0:01:15But I need another July episode and I like to do these shows here in person. So here we are recording again
0:01:22in the middle of the season when there's not much news.
0:01:26- Yeah, well, we say that.
0:01:27Every summer we say, oh, there's not much news
0:01:30in July and August, so we better stretch it out
0:01:32and do Q&A episodes, as you did and stuff like that.
0:01:35But it's like, actually, a lot of stuff
0:01:37seems to be happening every summer.
0:01:38- One of the things I definitely wanted to talk about
0:01:42before we get into rambling territory
0:01:44is I wanted to talk about the purported 16-inch MacBook Pro
0:01:50because there was a, I'm sure you saw it,
0:01:53but there was a report out of the supply chain that,
0:01:57I think it still suggested that it was coming in October,
0:02:00which is a little weird,
0:02:01but that it was gonna start at $3,000,
0:02:06which would be really weird,
0:02:08because right now the 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,400.
0:02:11- Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much we can trust rumors
0:02:17from supply chain sources about pricing.
0:02:19- I had two thoughts on that.
0:02:21One, why trust the supply chain on that?
0:02:24They don't know names either.
0:02:26- Yeah, like pricing and naming,
0:02:27it's so well guarded the vast majority of the time.
0:02:31Like, there's almost always pricing guesses about,
0:02:34or alleged pricing leaks or rumors
0:02:37before new products are announced,
0:02:39and they're usually wrong.
0:02:40If you look at the track record of Apple rumors,
0:02:42I feel like pricing is one of those areas
0:02:44where we take a lot of guesses about pricing
0:02:46and we're wrong a lot.
0:02:48The other way they could do it though,
0:02:49is it could be $3,000 and they could just
0:02:51Tim Cook it by keeping the $2,400 one around.
0:02:56- And so there'd still be a $2,400 15 inch MacBook Pro,
0:03:01but it would be like a year old model.
0:03:03But that seems like a weird way to go with the MacBook Pro.
0:03:07It's, you know, that's like a MacBook Air move.
0:03:09- Well also, if we look at the rumors holistically,
0:03:12we look at like, you know, all the rumors
0:03:13that are going around about this, you know,
0:03:15upcoming alleged generation of laptops.
0:03:18I think they all seem to agree on one big thing,
0:03:21that the butterfly keyboard is not long for this world.
0:03:23Which I am like dancing on its grave already,
0:03:26even though it's not dead yet.
0:03:27As you know, I couldn't possibly be more happy
0:03:30that the butterfly keyboard appears by all accounts
0:03:33to be going away pretty soon.
0:03:35So if you think about like,
0:03:36if they did keep around the old 15 inch,
0:03:39what are they gonna do?
0:03:40Have that be like the only butterfly keyboard
0:03:41in the lineup for a while?
0:03:42Or like, if they hit the current air,
0:03:45and maybe keep it around at a cheaper price point next year.
0:03:49Like when the alleged new scissor switch Air comes out,
0:03:52depending on who you believe, either in September,
0:03:54October, or 2020, depending on all the different rumors,
0:03:57allegedly there's gonna be a new MacBook Air,
0:03:59and new 13 inch, and new 16 inch.
0:04:02Then if that's actually true, sometime in the next year,
0:04:06then there will be no new models with butterfly keyboards,
0:04:09unless they keep around some of the current ones
0:04:11at lower prices.
0:04:12And it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense
0:04:14they would do that only for the 15 inch
0:04:16and not for anything else like the Air.
0:04:19And it seems especially problematic that the 15 inch
0:04:21which is a high end computer that's bought
0:04:24in large quantities by businesses
0:04:26and by a lot of their pro market.
0:04:28It would be weird to have,
0:04:29if they're gonna go through all this hassle
0:04:31to get rid of the butterfly keyboard
0:04:32because of its problems, why would they keep it
0:04:34on such an important widely used model?
0:04:37It doesn't seem, that doesn't make sense.
0:04:38So I think the 16 inch is it and the pricing rumors,
0:04:43I don't give a lot of credibility to.
0:04:46- Yeah, I think so. - That being said,
0:04:47it wouldn't be totally out of the ordinary
0:04:51for Apple to release a new generation
0:04:53of an important product that costs significantly
0:04:54more than its predecessor.
0:04:56It would be not well-received,
0:04:58but that doesn't mean they won't do it,
0:05:00and that they do it all the time.
0:05:01So I think while I don't believe pricing rumors usually,
0:05:06I also wouldn't rule out the possibility
0:05:08that this new laptop might be $3,000,
0:05:11and that might just be the new starting price
0:05:13of the 15 inch class laptop, which is now 16 inches,
0:05:18that's totally plausible.
0:05:19Apple does that kind of stuff all the time.
0:05:21And another angle I was thinking about was
0:05:24Apple does, I mean maybe this doesn't matter
0:05:27'cause I think they sell a absolute ton
0:05:29of the base model configurations
0:05:31relative to any customized configs.
0:05:32But with the drop in flash storage pricing
0:05:35that's going on across the industry
0:05:37and they just drop their prices,
0:05:38Apple might just be forced by market pressure
0:05:41make less on their upgrade components as they used to.
0:05:46And so maybe they are gonna make up for that lost margin
0:05:49by just raising the base price on all the models.
0:05:52- I guess, I can't really think of anything
0:05:54that would make the price jump up that much.
0:05:55I mean, presumably-- - Apple.
0:05:57- Well, right.
0:05:58(laughing)
0:05:59But I can't-- - They don't need a reason.
0:05:59- Right, I think it's a marketing decision,
0:06:01not in a cost of goods decision.
0:06:04I mean, presumably the display is going to be
0:06:07at least slightly more expensive
0:06:09because they're calling it a 16-inch display.
0:06:11so it's gonna be bigger than the 15.6 inch display.
0:06:15- 15.4, I think we're at. - 15.4.
0:06:17Maybe, I don't even know.
0:06:22I don't know how many of the details of the screen came out,
0:06:24but the other thing that would be nice
0:06:26and would justify to some degree a price increase
0:06:30would be if it goes to truly native retina resolution.
0:06:35- Yeah, actual 2x of what the default setting is,
0:06:38which it has never,
0:06:39which it has had when the default setting was lower
0:06:42up until 2016.
0:06:43But yeah, 'cause right now, they ship it by default
0:06:47in the scaling mode.
0:06:48- Right.
0:06:49- And I mean--
0:06:51- It just feels off for the highest end laptop
0:06:53in the lineup to be scaled.
0:06:54- Like the 15 inch non-retina, going up until 2012,
0:06:59the non-retina 15 inch, the last couple of years of it,
0:07:03they offered this high res option, and a matte option,
0:07:06by the way, for like $200 extra.
0:07:08it was a small price increase, and it was,
0:07:10instead of being 1440 across, it was 1680 across.
0:07:14And when the 2012 Retina version came out,
0:07:18it was only the 1440 natively,
0:07:20but you could use these software scaling modes
0:07:22to simulate higher resolutions.
0:07:24So it was like, okay, that's nice, good job,
0:07:27you can get higher resolutions,
0:07:28but if you were accustomed to the 1680 point size,
0:07:32you were actually getting worse visual quality,
0:07:34'cause it was rendering it into an off-screen buffer
0:07:36like shrinking it down to fit the actual pixels
0:07:38of the screen, so everything was like a little bit blurrier.
0:07:41And it's not a massive difference, but you can tell
0:07:45it does look a little bit worse.
0:07:47And then what made it, I think, almost misleading
0:07:52and I wouldn't say criminal, but certainly offensive
0:07:55to a nerd like us who cares about image quality,
0:07:57is that starting from the 2015 MacBook
0:08:00and then the 2016 USB-C generation of laptops,
0:08:03they increased the default resolution
0:08:06from what the panels actually were to one step above.
0:08:10So they increased the apparent screen real estate
0:08:14to 1680 at 2x now on the 15,
0:08:17but they didn't actually increase the number of pixels.
0:08:19So I almost feel like they kinda cheated.
0:08:21Like they tried to make it look like
0:08:22the screens got better and they didn't.
0:08:24And what's disappointing is that so far
0:08:27the Ming-Chi Kuo rumor about the 16 inch
0:08:30has its pixel size pinned at something
0:08:33that would suggest that they haven't actually
0:08:35increased that again.
0:08:35- Yeah, I couldn't remember if that was part of the rumor.
0:08:37- Yeah, it was like, the current one is like 2880,
0:08:39and the new one I think is 3072, something like that.
0:08:42So it's like, it's not enough proportionally,
0:08:45I don't think, to make it seem like they're actually doing
0:08:47like a true 2X of what the default setting is.
0:08:51So if that rumor is true, then it sounds like
0:08:53they haven't actually fixed this problem.
0:08:54But this is actually one thing.
0:08:56When I had a briefing with some Apple people last year,
0:09:02I actually brought this up specifically as an issue.
0:09:04I'm like, you gotta fix this for the next generation.
0:09:06'Cause like this, to me, I understand making
0:09:09that kind of compromise on something like a MacBook Air,
0:09:12where it's a lower end product,
0:09:13you're doing it to hit a price point,
0:09:15the buyers might not care as much if the screen
0:09:17is a little bit blurrier than it could be
0:09:18at its default setting, fine, that makes sense.
0:09:20But on the MacBook Pro, where you care so much
0:09:23about this amazing screen, and they talk,
0:09:24and they put so much work into the amazing screen,
0:09:26they have this amazing color and contrast and detail
0:09:31and the finishing and everything,
0:09:33possibly higher refresh rates coming down the road.
0:09:35They put so much effort into the display,
0:09:38and on their highest end laptop,
0:09:40they can't make it actual true 2x pixels.
0:09:43Any argument they have for that,
0:09:45I don't think is a good argument.
0:09:46- Yeah, I don't think so either.
0:09:47- Especially because they do it right on the desktops.
0:09:49- Right.
0:09:50- And they have since 2014, when the Retina iMac came out.
0:09:52- Right.
0:09:53Well, and it's even in the name, they even call it 5K,
0:09:55I mean, they couldn't call it the Retina 5K iMac
0:09:58if it didn't really have 5K pixels.
0:10:01- Exactly.
0:10:02So we know they can do it, and so I wish they would.
0:10:06- What else is it we have news-wise?
0:10:07How about these, how you doing with the betas this summer?
0:10:11- Oh my God.
0:10:11- I listened to the ATP, I don't know if it was last week
0:10:17or the week before, but you said more or less
0:10:19you're giving up on getting anything
0:10:24other than the iPhone update to overcast out by day one.
0:10:29- Yeah, and I'm actually, I'm doing things,
0:10:33like I spent the summer, instead of doing like all iOS 13
0:10:37and Catalyst and independent watchOS stuff,
0:10:41instead of rewriting all my stuff in Swift UI
0:10:43and everything, which is like kind of what I thought
0:10:44I would be doing like the first day of WVDC
0:10:46when we heard all this stuff, I'm like great,
0:10:47this is gonna be a packed summer,
0:10:49I'm gonna be doing all this stuff, all the new betas.
0:10:51Yeah, then I got the betas and it turns out
0:10:53they're really still pretty rough, still pretty early.
0:10:56I don't even want to touch Catalist or Catalina anymore.
0:11:00Like I did the first two betas of that,
0:11:01and I'm like, all right, nope,
0:11:02I'm done with that for a little while.
0:11:04And even the API stuff, iOS 13 is still super rough.
0:11:09It's hard to tell, like when I make something
0:11:11with the UI of it, it's hard to tell
0:11:13whether any bugs are my fault or the OS's fault.
0:11:16And so I've just decided, you know what,
0:11:17I'm just gonna focus on underlying,
0:11:20like under the hood changes this summer
0:11:22that are preparing the way for me to do more of that stuff
0:11:24in like a month or two.
0:11:26And so like, for instance, like last week,
0:11:27I spent most of the past week
0:11:29writing the sync engine differently.
0:11:32Because the sync engine, the way it's been doing it
0:11:35from like 1.0 until now, has some limitations
0:11:38and more importantly, it has some really
0:11:40incredibly intense memory usage
0:11:43when you're doing a full re-sync to the servers
0:11:46when you have a lot of podcasts.
0:11:48And at first, I thought, well, who's gonna have
0:11:50more than like 20, 30 podcasts subscribed.
0:11:53And I looked at my own account, and I have 90,
0:11:56and I'm like, all right, maybe this is more common
0:11:58than I think, and I look, a lot of users have like 200,
0:12:02300, I think the peak is something like 600 to 1,000.
0:12:05- Wow.
0:12:06- And it isn't like one person, it's like multiple,
0:12:09it's not that uncommon to have a couple hundred
0:12:12podcast subscriptions in Overcast,
0:12:13especially after you've been using it for like five years.
0:12:15So the problem is that kind of sync engine
0:12:19fit in the Apple Watch's constraints.
0:12:22So when I want to make an independent watch app,
0:12:23which I do want to do, I can't bring the sync engine
0:12:26over until I change it.
0:12:27So now I've spent the last week doing sync
0:12:30in a pretty different way that should be much better,
0:12:33and changing the server to support it and everything else.
0:12:36So that's the kind of work I'm doing now,
0:12:37because I don't need to be using the beta SDK
0:12:39to do pretty much any of that.
0:12:41And once this fall comes around,
0:12:43I can actually install the GM versions of these tools,
0:12:48and hope they're at all ready to go
0:12:50and hope for the love of God, whoever's writing the iOS mail
0:12:53app has gotten their act together.
0:12:54Oh God, mail's so bad.
0:12:56Are you mailing betas?
0:12:57- I have it on my old iPhone 10
0:13:01and I have it on an iPad mini.
0:13:05I got so freaked that, 'cause I saw stories from people
0:13:11who were saying that I wasn't even running it
0:13:13on my main device, but it's screwed up my iCloud
0:13:17or my notes or something.
0:13:19- Yeah, that's the scariest.
0:13:20- And so I, and I just don't feel,
0:13:21it's not useful for me to try it
0:13:23with a throwaway iCloud account.
0:13:25Like if I'm not actually using my actual data,
0:13:28what's the point?
0:13:29So I'm not really doing it.
0:13:31What's wrong with mail on iOS?
0:13:32- My understanding is that they rewrote,
0:13:35so iOS 13 brought a lot of new changes
0:13:39to some of the basic UI components
0:13:41that a lot of the iOS apps use,
0:13:42namely table views and collection views,
0:13:45and how they manage their data, how when a new item comes in,
0:13:49you can animate it in instead of just refreshing the whole table
0:13:52as a single frame.
0:13:54And they made that easier, and they changed the APIs
0:13:56around that, and they introduced a bunch of new stuff
0:13:58to just make all that stuff better and easier to use.
0:14:01And so my understanding is they rewrote Mail entirely
0:14:04using Collection View and using some of these new data source
0:14:09methods.
0:14:10And it's really early, I would say,
0:14:13to try to be kind to people writing it.
0:14:15If you use the mail app on the phone,
0:14:18I would not recommend installing the iOS 13 betas
0:14:21because there's just all sorts of bugs that you might have
0:14:25if it was your very first,
0:14:27it's not like the kind of rewrote a lot of that UI
0:14:29from scratch, and it shows,
0:14:31'cause you'll have bugs like in table views,
0:14:34you'll have cell reuse bugs where as you're scrolling,
0:14:38the title of one message will be repeated
0:14:40on all the cells in the screen,
0:14:41or they'll all say no sender instead of the actual sender
0:14:45the mail or you'll have rows that are inserted
0:14:48that are empty, problems like that.
0:14:51So it's, yeah, if you use iOS mail,
0:14:53don't install the betas yet.
0:14:54- I think it's gonna be interesting because
0:14:56it sounds to me like
0:14:59Apple's behind for where they really should be
0:15:06to ship the iPhone, a new iPhone in early September.
0:15:10I mean, we're like five weeks out.
0:15:14But I don't know that they would hold the iPhone hardware
0:15:19up for an extra two or three weeks of bug polish
0:15:23and finish just to do it.
0:15:25Like I wouldn't be surprised if they announced the phone
0:15:28on schedule but maybe it doesn't ship
0:15:30until the end of September.
0:15:32They still have the early September event.
0:15:34But if it's buggy, if iOS is buggy,
0:15:37that is when reviewers get the phones, right?
0:15:39We get them right after the event.
0:15:42It just seems like it is, you know,
0:15:45they're playing with fire this year.
0:15:49'Cause that hardware date is sort of set in stone.
0:15:52- And I don't think they would even delay
0:15:54the shipping of the phones for software,
0:15:56because a lot of their products,
0:15:57the volumes that they might sell
0:15:59in additional two weeks and a quarter
0:16:01might not matter so much to their financials,
0:16:03but the phone matters a lot.
0:16:04Like if they miss two weeks of sales
0:16:06because the software's a little bit rough,
0:16:08that's gonna hurt them in the financials
0:16:09in ways that are probably not worth it.
0:16:11I'm guessing they ship the phone on the same day
0:16:13they were planning to no matter what.
0:16:15And they just make the software as good as they can make it
0:16:18by that day and just hope for the best.
0:16:21Maybe they're gonna delay the Mac OS and watch OS,
0:16:25or tvOS and whatever the heck the HomePod OS is called.
0:16:29Maybe they delay those things a little bit
0:16:31in order to prioritize iOS getting out the door
0:16:34on that hardware ship date.
0:16:35- Well, but they've been doing the new watch hardware
0:16:38at the iPhone event.
0:16:39- That's true.
0:16:41- And I presume, you know,
0:16:43I mean, there's so many, always so many fewer
0:16:47watch rumors than iPhone rumors,
0:16:49but I presume we'll see Series 5 watches this fall.
0:16:54- I mean, maybe.
0:16:55The watch hasn't been an exactly annual cycle, though.
0:16:58Like, there's been a couple little 18-month spans
0:17:00here and there, and between a couple of generations,
0:17:02so I think it's most likely we'll see a Series 5,
0:17:05but I wouldn't say it's, it isn't as sure of a thing
0:17:08as iPhones every September.
0:17:11But I do think it's most likely,
0:17:12and I think again they're basically gonna like
0:17:14take the prey approach to software quality
0:17:18(laughs)
0:17:19and just like try to make the deadline as hard as you can
0:17:22because it's going to come regardless
0:17:24because it's too important.
0:17:25With the phone, I think they literally
0:17:27would not even sell the phone.
0:17:28Or they wouldn't delay selling the phone for hardware.
0:17:31I think with the watch, they might.
0:17:33Like they might announce it that same day,
0:17:35and oh, it just doesn't ship for three weeks.
0:17:37- Yeah, or shipping in October or something.
0:17:39- Yeah, right.
0:17:40- All right, let me take a break.
0:17:43Thank our first sponsor.
0:17:44You like this, that you're having me do the sponsor reads?
0:17:47- Oh my god, it's luxurious.
0:17:48- You don't do them live on the show, though.
0:17:49You edit those things in.
0:17:51- Yeah, I record the sponsor reads right before the show,
0:17:54like a half hour before.
0:17:55Basically, whenever the livestream starts on ATP,
0:17:58I just finish doing the sponsor reads, basically.
0:18:00'Cause I do it all in a row, do the sponsor reads,
0:18:02do the livestream, and then I start the livestream
0:18:05I go refill my water cup and make sure I put my kid to bed
0:18:09and whatever else I might have to do in the meantime.
0:18:11But it's usually about a half hour before.
0:18:12- All right, well let me tell you about Fracture.
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0:18:24Your phone is probably full of thousands
0:18:27and thousands of photos.
0:18:28I think I've got like 28,000 photos in my iCloud library.
0:18:31You've got thousands of photos.
0:18:33You've got family members, friends, vacations.
0:18:35You're probably on big, you know,
0:18:37a lot of people who don't work at Apple
0:18:39are probably taking vacations in August.
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0:19:32Where did you hear about Fracture?
0:19:34Just remember to tell them it was the talk show.
0:19:35Or if you prefer, ATP.
0:19:38- Thank you very much.
0:19:40- So my thanks to Fracture, go check them out at fracture.me.
0:19:43- Yeah, they're pretty great, house is full of them.
0:19:44They're fantastic. - It is, yeah,
0:19:45I can verify that.
0:19:46Got a lot of cereal downstairs.
0:19:50I opened my big mouth.
0:19:51Talking about ATP, but you guys were talking
0:19:54about Grape Nuts, of course John Sirquiza loves Grape Nuts.
0:19:57- So do I, they're good.
0:19:59It's crunchy bread gravel.
0:20:01- I think Grape Nuts look like they're delicious.
0:20:04I kinda like a cinnamony sort of crunchy cereal.
0:20:08They look very different.
0:20:10First time I ever tried Grape Nuts,
0:20:11it was the most surprising taste.
0:20:14I just did not expect it.
0:20:16They really just taste like you're eating sand
0:20:19or kitty litter or something.
0:20:20- I feel like in the area of not that sugary cereals,
0:20:25'cause all breakfast cereal like that,
0:20:27it has a good degree of sugar and carbs and everything.
0:20:29it's really not the greatest thing you could be eating,
0:20:30but in the area of cereals, there's like the sugary ones,
0:20:34like the super sugary ones, like your Frosted Flakes,
0:20:37your Captain Crocs, that kind of stuff,
0:20:40and then there's the ones that have less sugar,
0:20:43like Cheerios and Grape Nuts,
0:20:46and I think in the less sugar category,
0:20:49Grape Nuts are, they do surprisingly well,
0:20:51'cause usually in that category,
0:20:53you just have some kind of weird wheat brand thing,
0:20:58compressed into some kind of flake or blob or shape
0:21:02or something and it's just really boring usually.
0:21:04Grape nuts have a really fun texture.
0:21:07Like you really gotta work hard.
0:21:08You really feel like I'm gonna,
0:21:10I'm earning these calories that I'm eating here
0:21:12by chomping on this gravel in my mouth
0:21:15that's taking forever to chew
0:21:16and it provides a lot more texture
0:21:19and I think more flavor than the other
0:21:22not that sugary cereals.
0:21:23Like Cheerios basically tastes like nothing.
0:21:25- Yeah. - You know,
0:21:26Cheerios are baby food basically.
0:21:27- Yeah.
0:21:28And they're quite commonly used for that purpose.
0:21:30- That's exactly, I still associate it, my son's 15 now,
0:21:33but I still associate Cheerios very strongly
0:21:36with when he was learning to eat solid food.
0:21:39- Oh yeah.
0:21:40- And it occupies the perfect kid food
0:21:42'cause it's not messy, I mean there's powder.
0:21:45- It does change the smell of a car forever.
0:21:48If you let your kids eat Cheerios in the car.
0:21:51The smell, you know how when you walk into somebody's house
0:21:55and they have a cat, you can always smell,
0:21:57that there's a cat lives here.
0:21:58Even if they're pretty clean people,
0:21:59you can always kind of tell,
0:22:00oh, you smell a little bit cat lives here, right?
0:22:02You can always tell if people have kids
0:22:03when you get into their car,
0:22:05'cause it'll smell a little bit like Cheerios.
0:22:07- 'Cause it's like sand at the beach,
0:22:09you can't really get all the Cheerios
0:22:11out of the backseat of the car.
0:22:12- Right, exactly.
0:22:13It'll always smell a little bit like that.
0:22:14- And it's, you know, with the kids too,
0:22:15it's always, when they're at that Cheerios age,
0:22:18they're also car seat age,
0:22:20and that just makes way more crevices
0:22:24where a straight Cheerio can get,
0:22:27and you wouldn't even notice.
0:22:28You get the kid out of the car,
0:22:30give an eyeball to the backseat
0:22:32and kinda clean up anything you need to clean up.
0:22:34But those Cheerios, they'll get into every crack in the car.
0:22:36- Oh yeah, meanwhile, then the car's being baked in the sun
0:22:38for the next three years, and those Cheerios
0:22:40are just roasting in that car seat crevice
0:22:41that you can't reach.
0:22:43That smell does not go away.
0:22:44- I'm always interested, 'cause we're of similar age.
0:22:49John Siracusa and I are very close in age,
0:22:51very similar backgrounds.
0:22:52We even share a first name.
0:22:53And it always is fascinating to me where,
0:22:58how much aligned our interests are, our perspectives,
0:23:02but then there's other areas where we are totally different.
0:23:06And so I thought it was interesting,
0:23:07like he was saying that when he grew up,
0:23:11he wasn't allowed to have sugar cereal, as we called it.
0:23:13In my house, I was telling you this last night,
0:23:18we weren't big junk food people,
0:23:22but my family really bought in completely
0:23:26to the mid-century, post-World War II Kellogg's
0:23:31start your day with a bowl of breakfast.
0:23:35So we had like a veritable selection of cereals.
0:23:40We always had Cheerios, my dad was a big Cheerios guy.
0:23:42So we'd have some Cheerios,
0:23:43we'd have the Corn Flakes was a big one,
0:23:46and then my sister and I could pick out
0:23:49two or three sugar cereals at a time
0:23:51and we'd have them open so I could have Fruit Loops one day,
0:23:54I could have Frosted Flakes another day,
0:23:56but every single day of the week
0:23:59was a sugar cereal day for us.
0:24:01- That's interesting, yeah, see,
0:24:02we were restricted to only weekends.
0:24:04We'd have like crackling oat bran on the weekdays,
0:24:07and then the weekends, that was the splurge,
0:24:10then that's when we could have such crazy innovations
0:24:13as like when I was a kid,
0:24:15that's when the Rice Krispies Treats cereal debuted.
0:24:18- Which did not need to exist.
0:24:20- No, and I remember when we got it, thinking like,
0:24:22this is gonna be illegal in like a year.
0:24:24Like, this should be illegal already.
0:24:26There's no way this is gonna keep being on the market.
0:24:28And here we are, still.
0:24:29- I used to, it would be something I would look forward to.
0:24:33I can't say I went to the grocery store
0:24:35all the time with my mom,
0:24:35but maybe like eight, nine, 10, you know,
0:24:38I might have been, I forget when I was allowed
0:24:41to stay home by myself if my mom went to the grocery store.
0:24:44But one of the things I liked to do at the grocery store
0:24:46would be to pick cereal.
0:24:48And in hindsight, it's kind of crazy
0:24:50that there's an entire aisle in a giant supermarket
0:24:52filled with nothing but junk food.
0:24:55- That's no accident.
0:24:56- That's passed off as a meal.
0:24:58- And there's so much about that too.
0:24:59Like the shape of the boxes
0:25:02is actually a huge waste of cardboard.
0:25:03- Oh, right, right.
0:25:04- It's like the most effective way to pack
0:25:07that kind of cereal would be in a much more
0:25:09like short squat box, almost like the shape
0:25:11of like a Pop-Tarts box, like a shorter squatter box
0:25:13that's deeper, but they make them
0:25:15these giant skinny flat rectangles
0:25:17so that they appear large on the shelf.
0:25:20They're like billboards for kids.
0:25:21And of course, all the sugariest ones are at kid height
0:25:25so that kids can see it and beg their parents to buy it.
0:25:27- Well, like at Whole Foods, they'll sell cereal
0:25:29that comes in a bag.
0:25:30They do have box cereal too,
0:25:32but they'll sell the cereal in a bag.
0:25:34And then I think they even label it on the bag,
0:25:36like this is space efficient.
0:25:38- Yeah, right.
0:25:38They're trying to tell you,
0:25:40'cause when we were growing up,
0:25:41there were bagged cereals at the very bottom
0:25:43and they were like the cheapo ones.
0:25:45So they're trying to probably get rid of that image
0:25:47of like, no, trust me, bagged cereal is good.
0:25:49I don't say I think it's a losing battle.
0:25:51I think that ship has sailed
0:25:52and no one's ever gonna think that, but they can try.
0:25:55One thing too, I realize like when I was a kid,
0:25:59just like how incredibly effective TV commercials
0:26:03during kids shows were at getting kids
0:26:06to make their parents buy them certain things.
0:26:08'Cause like now, like my kid now,
0:26:10I've been a cord cutter since before it was called that
0:26:13and my kid now has almost never seen TV commercials.
0:26:17Like, if we're like in a hotel room,
0:26:18we'll turn the TV on, and he'll be like,
0:26:21why does the show keep stopping, and what is this?
0:26:23Like, but, so for the most part, he doesn't see commercials.
0:26:26So it's interesting that he almost never
0:26:29requests certain exact things, like buy certain brands
0:26:33or certain toys, the way we would.
0:26:35And I just remember thinking, like, you know,
0:26:36the reason I knew about Rice Krispie Treat cereal
0:26:38when I was a kid was that I watched Saturday morning
0:26:40cartoons and probably TV throughout the week
0:26:43at different times as well.
0:26:44And so I always, I saw all the commercials,
0:26:46and I would beg for the things in them
0:26:48that were usually not as good as I thought they would be,
0:26:50like the Typhoon, hovercraft, piece of crap.
0:26:52(laughing)
0:26:54And like, you know, but now, so,
0:26:58I wouldn't say like so few kids watch commercials,
0:27:00but certainly a lot fewer now watch commercials
0:27:03than did like in the '80s and '90s.
0:27:06I wonder, like, how does that change,
0:27:08like, how do our kids even know like what to ask for?
0:27:12I mean, YouTube, I guess?
0:27:15In hindsight, I can definitely agree
0:27:17that I was more influenced by kid show commercials
0:27:21than I would have as a smart alecky kid
0:27:26who was fairly cynical from a young age.
0:27:31I would have sworn up and down that,
0:27:33that's for dummies who get brainwashed by commercials.
0:27:37I'm smart.
0:27:38And meanwhile, I'm asking my mom for Mr. T cereal.
0:27:41- Right. (laughing)
0:27:42And we don't even go,
0:27:44There were the two avenues of marketing that hit us hard.
0:27:47There's the commercials were the big one,
0:27:49and then also we would be going to a lot more retail stores.
0:27:53We would go to a toy store to buy certain toys.
0:27:56Now we just get 'em on Amazon.
0:27:57And so we don't, my kid is hardly ever in a toy store.
0:28:01I don't even know if any toy stores are still in business.
0:28:03- Right, everything just comes in a brown Amazon box.
0:28:06- Right, so the only method of marketing
0:28:08that seems to work on him is when his friends at school
0:28:11have something, then he'll often ask for one like that.
0:28:14- But that's about it.
0:28:15And a lot of his friends at school have similar parents
0:28:18who were like, you know, also are pretty much cord cutters
0:28:20and Amazon shoppers.
0:28:21So like, the amount of like things that he asks for,
0:28:25specifically, you know, certain brand names
0:28:27or certain types of food, are very, very low
0:28:29compared to what we did when we were kids.
0:28:31- Yeah, definitely.
0:28:32I think it's also the cereal racket,
0:28:37before we move on to other topics, the cereal racket--
0:28:39- This is better than tech news, I mean.
0:28:40- The cereal racket was always interesting to me
0:28:43because it was a very vibrant,
0:28:46it probably still is, I'm guessing,
0:28:48it's a very vibrant distinctive mix
0:28:50between all-time classics that haven't changed ever,
0:28:55Cheerios, Corn Flakes.
0:28:58- Yeah, and Grape Nuts are-- - I think Grape Nuts
0:28:59are in that. - Yeah, like there was
0:29:00the article I mentioned on ATP,
0:29:02the No Grapes, No Nuts, No Market Chair,
0:29:03I think it was called, like it said how they changed,
0:29:06they had to change the recipe twice, like once to add,
0:29:09they added back a little bit of the wheat hulls,
0:29:12they could call it whole grain.
0:29:13And at one time they fortified it with vitamins
0:29:16to make it comply with something.
0:29:18That's it.
0:29:19So yeah, most of these things like corn flakes,
0:29:22I think they have similar things,
0:29:23but they've modified very slightly over time,
0:29:25but they're basically the same thing.
0:29:26- But you've got these staples, you've got these classics.
0:29:29And then there's the, like I said, Mr. T cereal.
0:29:33I mean, I'm dating myself here,
0:29:34but I remember Pac-Man cereal was a big deal
0:29:37in the early '80s.
0:29:38- So they would just take whatever the fad of 1982,
0:29:42and then they would make a breakfast cereal out of it.
0:29:44- Of course, why wouldn't you?
0:29:45- I seem to recall, I think Nintendo had a cereal
0:29:47at one point.
0:29:48- Oh yeah, every big, yeah, I'm sure there were
0:29:50like Mario cereals and stuff.
0:29:52I'm sure there was probably a Sonic cereal
0:29:53when I was going through that time.
0:29:56'Cause they were always, cereal companies are shameless
0:29:59with licensing and everything.
0:30:00You can get pretty much anything.
0:30:01- Yeah, they should do like an iPhone cereal.
0:30:03Just you're eating like little tiny iPhones.
0:30:05- I wonder, could they get the super ellipse shape
0:30:08- The icons, can they get that right?
0:30:10- No.
0:30:11They couldn't even make Pac-Man right,
0:30:12but Pac-Man did not look like Pac-Man.
0:30:14- Yeah, it seems like the breakfast cereal factory tooling
0:30:17is not incredibly precise.
0:30:19- I always enjoyed too the small print on the cereal boxes.
0:30:24Would people sue?
0:30:28I don't know, but it's like they'd show you
0:30:30having your bowl of Cheerios
0:30:32and then there's a bunch of cut-up strawberries in it
0:30:34and then they have to tell you
0:30:36that the strawberries are not included
0:30:37And it's like, pretty sure fresh strawberries
0:30:39are not gonna do well in this box, but.
0:30:41- Yeah, strawberries shown for scale.
0:30:43Yeah, or like the part of this complete breakfast nonsense.
0:30:46- Oh, right, right. - That's always fun.
0:30:47I forget the story, there was some story behind that
0:30:49of basically, there was some reason why the cereal companies
0:30:53would advertise as part of this complete breakfast,
0:30:55and it was, again, as with many food claims,
0:30:58it's total BS, and it's like, the better breakfast
0:31:00would be that exact same thing minus the cereal.
0:31:03Like that would actually be a better breakfast
0:31:05than whatever you're adding the cereal to.
0:31:06- Right, yeah. (laughs)
0:31:09I also think, I think it's complete nonsense,
0:31:12I know that people debate about this,
0:31:14and I think different, this is,
0:31:15it's very personal, in my opinion,
0:31:17the way your body metabolizes,
0:31:19whether you're a morning person or a late-night person.
0:31:22But they really successfully sold all of North America
0:31:26on the idea that breakfast is the quote,
0:31:28"most important meal of the day."
0:31:30Like if-- (laughs)
0:31:31- Yeah, I feel like whatever meal your food goes in
0:31:35that you sell, you wanna make that claim.
0:31:36- Right.
0:31:37Well, I just think, you know, but that's a bold claim
0:31:42and they had like nothing to back it up.
0:31:43They were just like, well, we'll just tell people that.
0:31:45Yeah, and it makes--
0:31:45- I think what we've found is like,
0:31:46because now we have a variety of,
0:31:49like, you know, I know people who eat all sorts of breakfast
0:31:52from like large breakfasts to, you know,
0:31:54super unhealthy to super unhealthy to no breakfast
0:31:57and they all seem fine.
0:31:58It seems like it might be the least important meal
0:32:00of the day, actually.
0:32:01Like, it seems like you can do pretty much
0:32:02whatever you want for breakfast
0:32:03and it's not gonna have a massive effect on you.
0:32:06(laughing)
0:32:09- What else do we have?
0:32:12What's on your mind?
0:32:14- I don't know, I mean there's a bit of minor stuff.
0:32:16Like there was the whole listening to Siri requests thing.
0:32:20I don't know how much there is there.
0:32:21I don't really care that strongly about that honestly.
0:32:23- So that broke right before Molten and I recorded
0:32:28over the weekend.
0:32:30looked into it, The Guardian is usually pretty good, but I don't get this. Like, you definitely—I knew,
0:32:38we've always had to agree to some kind of terms with Siri that would acknowledge that they're
0:32:43letting you, like for quality control purposes, listening, but that they're doing it in a
0:32:51completely anonymized fashion. Like, it just did not seem like new news to me.
0:32:56- I think the difference is, and they talked about this
0:33:00this week on upgrade, the difference is that
0:33:03when you agree that like, oh, when you push the Siri
0:33:07button on your phone and you ask it to do something,
0:33:09it is going to servers.
0:33:10And those servers are also gonna have things like
0:33:12your contact information so it can know, like if you say,
0:33:15you know, call TIFF, it's gonna look at my contact
0:33:16to see who TIFF is.
0:33:18And it does all that logic server side,
0:33:19so the servers need your contact, stuff like that.
0:33:21So we, I think we who were in the know, we knew that,
0:33:24and we knew that was doing that.
0:33:26The main trick, this is what upgrade brought up,
0:33:28I think the main difference is that there's a lot of
0:33:30accidental invocations ever since the
0:33:33hey dingus support came out.
0:33:35Like we have a HomePod in our kitchen,
0:33:37and all the time we'll be having a conversation
0:33:40that does not include those two words at all,
0:33:43and HomePod will pipe up in the corner,
0:33:46"Hmm, sorry, what was that?"
0:33:48Or something like that, it'll make some noise
0:33:49that indicates that it was listening for a few seconds
0:33:51and thought we were trying to tell it something
0:33:52and then it failed for whatever reason.
0:33:54And that happens a lot.
0:33:56And the HomePod is the only device
0:33:58that I have Hade Ninga enabled for.
0:33:59I don't even use it on the other devices
0:34:01because honestly it's a lot easier
0:34:02to have a HomePod in your house
0:34:04if that's the only device you have respond to that command.
0:34:07It solves a number of problems.
0:34:09But anyway, by default that feature's on
0:34:11on most Apple devices these days.
0:34:14It'll tell you during the setup wizard
0:34:15and it'll give you a chance to turn it off.
0:34:17But kind of like the default run-through process,
0:34:20the encouraged flow is to turn it on.
0:34:22So a lot of people have the hey-ding-a support turned on.
0:34:25And so that, because it is both trying to be automatic
0:34:29with its invocation, and because it is honestly
0:34:32not as good as something like an Amazon Echo
0:34:35at knowing when you're calling it and when you're not,
0:34:38I think that's giving a lot of accidental input into Siri.
0:34:42And so the controversial part of these recordings is like,
0:34:45you didn't even realize it was recording.
0:34:47- And so who knows what you were talking about.
0:34:48- Right, and so you could have been doing something
0:34:50embarrassing or nefarious or private,
0:34:53and now somebody at some contractor in Silicon Valley,
0:34:58not even an Apple employee, but some contractor
0:35:00is reviewing your sex tape or drug deal or whatever.
0:35:04That goes against what people expect to be the case.
0:35:09Even though we know academically,
0:35:10oh yeah, recordings go to the server,
0:35:12you think of it, when you think of these things,
0:35:14you think of the typical or ideal case.
0:35:16You think, oh, when I push the button
0:35:18and tell it and ask it a question,
0:35:19it's gonna send what I said to a server, okay, no problem.
0:35:22You don't think about all this accidental invocations
0:35:24where it's recording just a random snippet of audio
0:35:26from your world and then some weirdos listening to it.
0:35:30- And I would guess that accidental invocations
0:35:34might be more likely to be reviewed because Siri,
0:35:38you know, like, usually she'll go, hmm,
0:35:39I didn't catch that or. - Right, yeah.
0:35:41- And that maybe those get flagged as, hey,
0:35:44the last 15 seconds of interaction here
0:35:47weren't completed successfully
0:35:49and maybe that sets a flag that makes it more likely
0:35:51to be reviewed.
0:35:52And I did see that, that was in the Guardian story
0:35:54where the anonymous contractor who was their source
0:35:57said that they heard drug deals and all sorts of--
0:36:01- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:36:02And I'm sure that isn't the common case.
0:36:04I'm sure most of what they hear is boring or nothing
0:36:06or just some random chatter, but yeah.
0:36:09Like the fact is that can happen
0:36:11and it does occasionally at least happen.
0:36:12And I think the main issue here is that
0:36:17people don't really know that that's happening.
0:36:20Like, you can tell them in some small print somewhere,
0:36:24but they don't really know.
0:36:26You're not really going to communicate well to people
0:36:29that your recordings of random audio snippets
0:36:32will be reviewed by humans sometimes.
0:36:35Like, there should be an explicit opt-out
0:36:38that says basically, like,
0:36:39"Can Apple review your recordings periodically
0:36:43"to improve quality," or whatever.
0:36:45I don't know where they word it,
0:36:46but that should be an explicit opt-out,
0:36:48and right now, there is no separate setting for that.
0:36:51If you don't want Apple to review your recordings
0:36:52periodically, you can't use Siri.
0:36:55And you can't both advance the position
0:36:59that Siri is the future and super important
0:37:01and we're tying so much functionality to Siri,
0:37:03and also say, well, if you don't like this detail of it,
0:37:07just don't use any of it.
0:37:08Like, that's not a valid argument, I think, at this point.
0:37:12- I do think Siri is getting better.
0:37:15I think it is, you know, I've always been a little more--
0:37:18- Like desktop Linux.
0:37:19- I remain optimistic about Siri's future.
0:37:24But I still think that we are in such ridiculous
0:37:28early days of this.
0:37:30And in some ways that frustrates me because it was like,
0:37:35we went, when I was a kid, we went from like Steve,
0:37:39the two Steves making the Apple One in a garage
0:37:44to having the Macintosh seven years later.
0:37:48Like, it was really, really rapid,
0:37:52and all of a sudden, by 1984, we had these computers
0:37:55that had this really polished interface
0:37:58that was, you know, like regular people could use it
0:38:01and understand it.
0:38:02Whereas Siri's been around since 2011?
0:38:07- Yeah.
0:38:09- And it's not progressing as fast.
0:38:12And none of them are that good.
0:38:13But one of the little things I noticed,
0:38:15and it's so hard, it's so much harder to evaluate
0:38:18than software on your phone or on your Mac
0:38:22where you see everything and you see all the details
0:38:24and you can say, oh, they changed the size of these buttons
0:38:27or they changed the color.
0:38:28Oh, they redid the disk utility window, right?
0:38:33It wasn't like when they redid disk utility a few years ago,
0:38:37it wasn't like there was any question in your mind,
0:38:40did they change disk utility?
0:38:41You could see it.
0:38:42With the voice assistant, you can never quite be sure,
0:38:46but I have noticed this summer,
0:38:48it has been very, very hot in Philadelphia.
0:38:50And one of the things I do most frequently with Siri
0:38:55is ask for the weather,
0:38:57'cause I might be getting dressed in the morning
0:38:59or something, I don't have my watch on yet,
0:39:01or I don't have my phone in my hand.
0:39:03And I have noticed that she hasn't once this summer
0:39:06given me any kind of smart alecky,
0:39:10Hot you know because it's 101 degrees you could like turn that down a little bit all that annoying well
0:39:15I'm a personality. I think they have but maybe I'm getting a bad sample size. You know like I can't prove it
0:39:23but I'm
0:39:25Specifically thinking about the hot temperatures. What was and in the winter she does burr or cold
0:39:30Yeah
0:39:31It's always it's always like about
0:39:3340% more words than you wanted her to give you in response to anything and it's oftentimes like a
0:39:39a lot more personality than is warranted
0:39:43by the accuracy and helpfulness of the assistant.
0:39:45It's like, I feel like if the assistant's gonna be
0:39:50fairly primitive in grand terms,
0:39:52and is gonna keep making mistakes a lot,
0:39:56the way many of these assistants do,
0:39:58and especially Siri, I feel like it shouldn't exhibit
0:40:01a lot of personality, because if it's doing something wrong
0:40:05and then it says, "Brr, you're just annoyed.
0:40:07"You wanna throw it out the window at that point."
0:40:09give a little personality, as little personality as possible
0:40:12until it's actually earned.
0:40:14And I feel like none of these assistants are good enough
0:40:16that they've earned the ability
0:40:17to start making smart ass comments back at you.
0:40:19- Right, and I feel like one of the ones for me
0:40:22is I have two contacts in my contacts database
0:40:26for women whose first name is Amy.
0:40:31One of them I send text messages to all the time
0:40:36and the other is somebody
0:40:37I have a professional relationship with
0:40:39and I don't believe I've spoken to her since like 2015.
0:40:42But I don't wanna delete the contact.
0:40:44- I feel like maybe you have to rename her.
0:40:46- Maybe, but then I feel like I'll forget
0:40:48what I renamed her.
0:40:49I guess I know her last name, I can just do that.
0:40:51But it's a little interaction that bothers me
0:40:56every single time when I'll say, text Amy something something
0:41:01and they'll say, "Which Amy?"
0:41:02And then I have to pick.
0:41:03- And it never learns.
0:41:04- And it never learns.
0:41:05And it just feels like the,
0:41:08like I could hire the worst personal assistant in the world.
0:41:14I could go to a local college and say,
0:41:17"Give me somebody who's on drugs and is flunking out,"
0:41:20and I'll hire that person as my personal assistant.
0:41:25They could be a really bad personal assistant.
0:41:27I could be fretting.
0:41:28I could say, "Oh, I think I gotta fire this person.
0:41:30"It's not working out."
0:41:31But if I told my assistant, text my wife,
0:41:34that I'm gonna be late, or text Amy that I'm gonna be late,
0:41:39they would know to text my wife.
0:41:40- Yeah, even the worst assistant, a human,
0:41:42would always have the judgment to know that context.
0:41:45I mean, right now, we have kind of a dual system family.
0:41:49Like, we had the Amazon Echo before we had the HomePod,
0:41:52and we still have both, and--
0:41:54- So do we. - Yeah.
0:41:55- It is so bad.
0:41:56- And we recently, like, Tiff took over the Echo as hers.
0:42:00We reassigned it to entirely hers,
0:42:02So it's all her accounts registered to her and everything.
0:42:06And the HomePod stays with me.
0:42:07And so we always joke that now we have two DIMM assistants
0:42:11that are just kind of DIMM in different ways.
0:42:14And you ask one of them to do something
0:42:16and it totally bombs out.
0:42:17You ask the other one, it'll usually get it right.
0:42:19But it's not like one of them is never,
0:42:22there isn't just one that's so good
0:42:24that we can keep just that one.
0:42:26Ultimately, what I hope is happening here,
0:42:28and maybe this is a bad example
0:42:29'cause we haven't seen the result
0:42:30of the big Maps rewrite yet.
0:42:33I know there was some concern that it might actually
0:42:35not be as good as we were hoping.
0:42:37But assuming that it does get good,
0:42:40I hope there is something like the great Maps rewrite
0:42:42going on for Siri.
0:42:43They hired John Gendrea, what about two years ago now,
0:42:47a year ago, something like that?
0:42:48- I think it was two years ago.
0:42:49- Something like that, yeah.
0:42:50- Maybe it was just last year.
0:42:52- I don't know, regardless.
0:42:53They hired him fairly recently,
0:42:55and he got promoted to SVP.
0:42:58And so clearly there was a major shift of Siri leadership
0:43:02with somebody who was very qualified
0:43:04to do this kind of thing in a way that I think
0:43:07was probably way better than the way Apple
0:43:08was doing it before.
0:43:09So hopefully there is some kind of great effort going on
0:43:13to really transform Siri and really bring it
0:43:16at least up to the level of the Amazon Echo
0:43:19and the Google whatever.
0:43:21Hopefully it gets past that level.
0:43:23But just to at least meet it in some of the basics.
0:43:26Like Siri, yes, Siri's ahead in some areas,
0:43:28but it still falls behind in some of the basics
0:43:31of like reliability, performance,
0:43:33some basic logic, basic learning.
0:43:36It's still way behind even where the Amazon Echo was
0:43:39like three years ago in a lot of those areas.
0:43:41So I hope they're, I hope and I assume
0:43:46that they actually are doing some kind of great Siri reset
0:43:48behind the scenes, although honestly I've heard nothing
0:43:50to that effect.
0:43:51- And it's, you know, it's so hard,
0:43:53It's obviously a very hard problem domain.
0:43:56But if I only understood my wife
0:44:01as often as Siri understands my wife,
0:44:03she would be concerned and tell me
0:44:06I need to go get my hearing checked at the doctor
0:44:08because this isn't working out.
0:44:11- And the problems go beyond hearing.
0:44:13- Right. - Siri hears me great.
0:44:14- Oh, see, she hears something,
0:44:17but it's like Amy, for whatever reason,
0:44:21Amy, you know, a fine podcaster in her own right,
0:44:25speaks very clearly.
0:44:26But it's shocking to me how often, like,
0:44:31when, like, her miss rate on, like,
0:44:35doing some of our home kit stuff,
0:44:36like with the lights or the shades or something like that,
0:44:38is really low.
0:44:40Or, and she'll say stuff like,
0:44:41open the kitchen shades.
0:44:46And one of the things that's great about Siri
0:44:48is that Siri doesn't make you do like a command line.
0:44:52You have to use the words the same way.
0:44:54You can say open the shades in the kitchen,
0:44:57open the kitchen shades.
0:44:59You don't have to program a scene with those specific names.
0:45:02You should generally just figure it out.
0:45:04But it's just, we have one where the main floor
0:45:09of our house is a couple of different rooms.
0:45:12So I do have a scene called open main floor shades,
0:45:18and that just opens all of them.
0:45:19And Amy will say open main floor shades, exactly,
0:45:22and Siri will say, I'm sorry,
0:45:25I don't have anything by that name.
0:45:27- So the one common issue I have with Siri is
0:45:30if you're saying something that is close to a common word,
0:45:34it's almost like my snap to grid thing,
0:45:36like if you're saying something
0:45:38that's close to a common word,
0:45:40but it's like a different word,
0:45:42sometimes Siri will hear it as that common word
0:45:44every single time no matter how you say it.
0:45:46So one example of this is, like when Siri first came out,
0:45:49you could say, you could tell your phone,
0:45:51like if your name, like in my office case,
0:45:53if your name was Tiffany, you could say, call me Tiff.
0:45:56And it would say, okay, from now on,
0:45:57I will call you, whatever you said.
0:45:58But in this case, she could not get Siri to say that.
0:46:02It would just say, no matter how she or I pronounced it,
0:46:05every single time it would say, okay, I will call you Test.
0:46:09Every single time.
0:46:09And even, and that was years ago now,
0:46:12but even now with the HomePod,
0:46:14They added the name timer support finally, thank God.
0:46:16It's great.
0:46:17I wish it would come to iOS, but cool.
0:46:19Start with the HomePod at least, that's good.
0:46:21And some mornings I'll make some bacon and eggs,
0:46:25and I will say, start a bacon timer for 12 minutes
0:46:27with the bacon in the oven.
0:46:29Every single time.
0:46:31Okay, I've started a baking timer.
0:46:32Every time.
0:46:33No matter how I say bacon,
0:46:36I cannot get it to not say back to me, bacon.
0:46:38- Right, and you would think,
0:46:40like if you were talking to a person,
0:46:43you could say start a bacon timer, B-A-C-O-N.
0:46:46- Yeah, right, yeah, you can clarify.
0:46:48- Yeah, and there's no way to clarify like that,
0:46:50and it's just like the,
0:46:51you just sort of start to break down, you know, I don't know.
0:46:57- Maybe I think I'm saying it like with an apostrophe
0:46:59instead of the G at the end. - Yeah, bacon.
0:47:01- I'm just bacon out here.
0:47:01- You're just dropping your Gs.
0:47:03- Yeah, right, yeah, start a bacon timer, bacon.
0:47:06- I also think that the name timer thing was interesting
0:47:11that the HomePod, well, and HomePod was single timer only.
0:47:15You couldn't name 'em, and it was single timer.
0:47:17- Yes, okay.
0:47:18- And the reaction from some people at Apple PR was,
0:47:24okay, it's a good feature, but is this really that big a deal
0:47:28and I-- - Yes, it is.
0:47:30- Well, and the thing is, is I think it was an instance
0:47:34where the cultural insularity of Apple,
0:47:38where a lot of Apple employees really only use Apple stuff.
0:47:42So if they weren't used to having an Echo,
0:47:49where you can do that and do it in the kitchen,
0:47:51it's like you're totally missing the point.
0:47:53It's like the main reason to buy an Echo, really,
0:47:56and put it in your kitchen,
0:47:57is to have these name timers that you don't have to touch
0:47:59and that you can query how much time is left on the pizza
0:48:04and get a very accurate answer.
0:48:06- And I think, too, I mean, this was a larger problem
0:48:08with the HomePod in general.
0:48:09The HomePod was such a poor market fit
0:48:14because maybe the way Apple saw it
0:48:16was the way they priced it and the way they marketed it,
0:48:18which is this is something you put in a living room.
0:48:20And in that kind of context,
0:48:22maybe you don't need multiple name timers very often,
0:48:24but the market has a very different opinion.
0:48:26The market says one of the best places
0:48:28for a voice cylinder is in the kitchen.
0:48:31And whether or not Apple want to position theirs as such,
0:48:34and that's part of the reason
0:48:35why everyone says it's too expensive,
0:48:37I was like, yeah, it's a pretty good $300 speaker,
0:48:39but it's not competitive in the market of voice cylinders,
0:48:44because voice cylinders cost 100 bucks.
0:48:47- And most people naturally don't wanna spend
0:48:49home entertainment system dollars
0:48:50for something that's just a gadget in the kitchen.
0:48:53- Right, and especially that integrates so poorly
0:48:55into any other type of a home theater system.
0:48:58You really kinda can't use a HomePod easily
0:49:01with pretty much anything else,
0:49:02so it is like a standalone thing.
0:49:04It actually is a really good kitchen speaker.
0:49:07It's very expensive for that purpose,
0:49:09but if you can swing it, it's a pretty good one.
0:49:12But I gotta say, the Echo's still better
0:49:14because the Echo is more reliable.
0:49:17Its name timer support is better
0:49:18and more reliable and faster.
0:49:21And they have the various models that have the screens,
0:49:23which honestly, I tried the very first Echo Show
0:49:25with the screen. - Yeah, I remember you saying--
0:49:26- I returned it within like a day.
0:49:28I'm like, nope, it was terrible.
0:49:29But I hear the new ones are better.
0:49:31But whether or not Apple wants the market to believe
0:49:35where it wants to position its products,
0:49:38it doesn't really matter what Apple
0:49:40wants the market to believe.
0:49:41The market's gonna believe what it's gonna believe.
0:49:42And so if the market says a voice assistant cylinder
0:49:45speaker thing should be about 100 bucks
0:49:48and should have multiple name timers
0:49:49'cause we're gonna put it in our kitchens,
0:49:51Apple can only do so much to change that perception
0:49:54because they wanna make something more expensive
0:49:55that's more home theater focused.
0:49:56Like the reality is that's what the market wants
0:49:58and so far that has proven to be
0:50:00what people still want the HomePod to be.
0:50:03Apple hasn't moved the market towards them.
0:50:05The market just kind of left them behind.
0:50:07- It makes me wonder what they're working on,
0:50:08what their plans are for HomePod.
0:50:10I could see them going in either direction.
0:50:13I could see them expanding it to be,
0:50:16which is what they did with the iPod back in the day,
0:50:18where they'd have multiple iPods of different sizes
0:50:21and hitting lower price points.
0:50:24I could see them making a smaller one that is less expensive
0:50:29and maybe still sounds really good for its size,
0:50:31or I could see them completely dropping it
0:50:33and getting out of the business of making it.
0:50:36- Yeah, I mean, 'cause to some degree,
0:50:37I think they might argue that the kitchen home pod
0:50:41is called the iPad.
0:50:42- Right.
0:50:43- And I don't think that's necessarily a good replacement,
0:50:46but that is, I think, what a lot of their marketing
0:50:49would try to have you believe.
0:50:51And for some people, it is a good replacement.
0:50:53If you want a device that responds to voice commands
0:50:56and can play music and stuff
0:50:57and has a screen to show you stuff,
0:50:58- Yeah, actually, an iPod's pretty good for that.
0:51:00And I do use my iPad in the kitchen very frequently.
0:51:02It's a great kitchen device.
0:51:04But I think what's most likely to happen with the HomePod
0:51:08is I think they're just gonna kinda slowly peter out
0:51:12and eventually bow out of the market,
0:51:13similar to how they did with Wi-Fi routers.
0:51:15For similar reasons.
0:51:16- That's exactly, I was trying to think about
0:51:17what I was thinking of, and I was thinking about
0:51:19the way that they got out of the Wi-Fi routers.
0:51:21Even though they, in some ways, I think,
0:51:26deserve credit for starting it.
0:51:28that Airport was one of the first
0:51:30highly publicized Wi-Fi systems.
0:51:32I mean, it was, they did the hula hoop.
0:51:34It was all radical.
0:51:37They had Phil Schiller jumping off a 20-foot platform
0:51:40to show that the accelerometer worked on the thing,
0:51:46and it was still broadcasting Wi-Fi.
0:51:50- Yeah, but ultimately, I don't think,
0:51:53they're never gonna compete well against Amazon,
0:51:55because Amazon is so good at making really cheap hardware
0:51:58that if you don't care so much about the materials quality
0:52:02and design and UI quality, I mean Amazon's UIs are atrocious
0:52:06for their products that do have screens, they're horrendous.
0:52:09But if you don't care about all that stuff
0:52:10and you just want a voice assistant cylinder
0:52:12that can play music and have multiple timers
0:52:14in your kitchen, Amazon is gonna kill them
0:52:16over and over and over again at that.
0:52:17Apple is just not good at making cheap, frequently updated
0:52:22like commodity hardware that interacts
0:52:24that they frequently updated web service
0:52:26that integrates with a bunch of third party things.
0:52:28None of that's in Apple's DNA.
0:52:29And so I think the HomePod is,
0:52:33rather than become competitive by having a wider range
0:52:36that spans multiple price points
0:52:37and making Siri really good on it,
0:52:38I think the more likely outcome
0:52:40is they just slowly bow out.
0:52:42They're already doing a whole lot of AirPlay 2 hardware
0:52:44with other hardware partners.
0:52:45I think that's the first step
0:52:47in getting themselves out of this business.
0:52:48And then give it a couple more years
0:52:51where AirPlay 2 is in more products
0:52:52that themselves have voice assistants built in.
0:52:55Like Sonos has a couple.
0:52:56I think Apple's out of this business in a couple years.
0:53:00- Yeah, and something like Sonos is, you know,
0:53:03it's so much more flexible because they've got
0:53:06like a whole range of products, you know.
0:53:09It's, I like HomePod as a product a lot, but it is not,
0:53:14like I wouldn't want it to be my TV sound system.
0:53:19- Well, and honestly, they sound great.
0:53:20Like if you get a stereo pair of them,
0:53:22They sound awesome, but they have no inputs.
0:53:24And you can make them work with an Apple TV,
0:53:28but it's a little clumsy to do that,
0:53:31and it's nearly impossible to make them work well
0:53:33with anything else.
0:53:34And so it's just not,
0:53:36Apple did a really good job engineering the microphones,
0:53:39they did a really good job engineering the sound,
0:53:41it looks kinda cool, it's a good size.
0:53:44It is a really nice product for a narrow set of use cases.
0:53:49But unfortunately that set of use cases
0:53:51is too narrow for the market.
0:53:53And it's the kind of thing that I would love
0:53:55for Apple to keep going on that and make it better.
0:53:59Make Siri support behind it better,
0:54:01make the software better, make the hardware,
0:54:03you know, move it forward, make a bigger range,
0:54:04make smaller ones, make bigger ones.
0:54:06I would love that, I just don't think they're gonna do it.
0:54:08If they did it, I think they could be better than everyone.
0:54:11If they really put their heart behind it,
0:54:13and if they really, you know, make Siri really good
0:54:16as the general, you know, initiative
0:54:17that I hope is happening there,
0:54:19and really put their back into HomePod.
0:54:20I think they could really make it amazing.
0:54:22And I would love that because I would like that way better
0:54:24than all the other alternatives that are kind of creepy
0:54:26and made with crappy hardware.
0:54:27But I just don't see it happening, unfortunately.
0:54:30- It's also a little frustrating knowing that it comes
0:54:32from the same company that made AirPods,
0:54:34which are amazing and in a lot of ways are sibling product.
0:54:39They're wireless, you talk to Siri,
0:54:43you're listening to music.
0:54:47Everybody I know, I know you have issues
0:54:49with the fitting in your ears,
0:54:51but other than like, if you think that they're comfortable,
0:54:54most people absolutely love AirPods.
0:54:56It would be interesting to see,
0:54:58somehow rub some of that AirPod magic on HomePod.
0:55:04- Yeah, and I mean, I think ultimately,
0:55:07it just again comes down to like,
0:55:09how much are they willing to play
0:55:11in that commodity hardware business?
0:55:13Like, how cheap are they willing to make this thing?
0:55:14How well are they able to compete
0:55:17to get, I'm not saying they have to beat or match
0:55:19the Echo's price, but they have to get closer to it.
0:55:22Like, it has to cost like 30 or 50% more,
0:55:26not like 300% more, whatever it is.
0:55:28- Well, and sort of in a way that AirPods are,
0:55:30they're expensive for EarPods.
0:55:32You know, are they still 160 bucks, 159?
0:55:34- I think the base is 170 now or something,
0:55:36and the wireless charging is 200.
0:55:38- Yeah.
0:55:39But when you compare them to the highest rated
0:55:43wireless buds from other companies,
0:55:46Like I just read a review last week of somebody
0:55:49who's reviewing the new Sony ones,
0:55:51which seem like a really good product,
0:55:53but they're more expensive.
0:55:55- Yeah, the AirPods are actually pretty price competitive
0:55:57for what they are, for the other competitive,
0:56:00both small wireless buds and just like the market
0:56:03of generally like decent Bluetooth,
0:56:06decent portable Bluetooth headphones.
0:56:08They're all around 200 bucks at least.
0:56:10So it's actually, those are actually pretty well priced
0:56:13for what they are.
0:56:14So we know Apple can do it, but the HomePod,
0:56:17I think they wanted to kill Sonos with it.
0:56:22Unfortunately, they didn't.
0:56:23And they didn't come anywhere near
0:56:25competing with the Echo family.
0:56:28- All right, let's take a break, thank our next sponsor.
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0:58:56Did you see the essay? I just linked to it the other day
0:58:58Craig mod. Yeah, but performance the fast software fast offers great software. Yeah. Yeah, and it's really good. He said he's a great writer
0:59:06I've known Craig for years
0:59:08very very thoughtful guy
0:59:10And it's funny 'cause he's writing about fast software,
0:59:14but it struck a chord with me
0:59:16because it's something I've thought about.
0:59:17I mean, I've spent hundreds of hours here on the show
0:59:19talking about software quality.
0:59:21But the very specific nature of software
0:59:26that feels fast and responsive
0:59:29and that the way that that makes him feel
0:59:31that that software is well built,
0:59:33and when you're using an app,
0:59:36Like one of his examples was the web export dialogue
0:59:41in Photoshop.
0:59:42And you know, it's a dialogue box a lot of people
0:59:46have to use a lot of time.
0:59:47And it's, I literally think that it's like a dialogue box
0:59:52that was written using Chromium or something like that.
0:59:55Like they're actually firing up like a web browser
0:59:57inside the window.
0:59:58It takes, you hit the command, it takes a couple seconds
1:00:01before the dialogue even appears.
1:00:03Makes you feel, it makes you not trust the software.
1:00:05- And it makes it feel just crappy.
1:00:09It feels almost uncared for.
1:00:11'Cause a lot of times, those of us who are lucky enough
1:00:16to be on fast hardware, if you buy a nice Mac,
1:00:20a nice MacBook Pro or iMac or iMac Pro,
1:00:23you got a lot of performance under that hood.
1:00:25And if then some software that you run
1:00:27performs horribly doing some common task
1:00:29like showing its new file dialogue,
1:00:31you kinda know this is not a hardware problem,
1:00:35which makes it even more frustrating.
1:00:36I have all these cores, I have all this memory,
1:00:39I have this fast SSD, all at your disposal software.
1:00:43What are you wasting it on?
1:00:44Like, what are you doing?
1:00:46- Well, and Photoshop is an interesting example
1:00:48because Photoshop used to be amazingly fast.
1:00:52And this was, we were talking like the early years,
1:00:55like early to mid-90s.
1:01:00And the hardware at the time,
1:01:03- Well, literally, I don't think it's an exaggeration
1:01:05to say that it was hundreds of times slower
1:01:07than a modern high-end desktop.
1:01:10- And in certain ways, even, like in things like I/O,
1:01:13even more, like, you know, 'cause first we got cheap RAM,
1:01:17then we got SSDs. - Right.
1:01:18- And like, 'cause you know, in the '90s,
1:01:20like I've said before, like the sound of computing
1:01:23in the '90s was the sound of your hard drive grinding.
1:01:25- Right. (laughs)
1:01:26- Because, you know, 'cause hard drives were slow
1:01:28to begin with, and also RAM was incredibly expensive
1:01:31in the 90s, and so it was, you know,
1:01:33nobody had enough RAM to do what the operating systems
1:01:35and everything wanted to do, so just constant swapping,
1:01:37just constant hard drive grinding.
1:01:39- I forget the exact details of it,
1:01:40but I remember in those early years,
1:01:42when everything was so limited,
1:01:44Photoshop even had its own custom swap disk code for--
1:01:48- Yeah, I think it had to.
1:01:49- Yeah, 'cause they couldn't trust,
1:01:51A, I think they wanted to write their own code
1:01:53'cause it was so mission critical,
1:01:54but it just wasn't something that the OS
1:01:58really provided at the time.
1:01:59- Yeah, or at least not all the OSs that ran on
1:02:01would have provided it.
1:02:02- And you used to have to wait for so much stuff
1:02:05in Photoshop, not because, and again, the app felt fast,
1:02:09and if there was something you needed to do
1:02:10in an export dialogue, and you did it all the time
1:02:13because you're using Photoshop,
1:02:14so you have the keyboard shortcut memorized,
1:02:17you'd hit that keyboard shortcut,
1:02:18and the dialogue was there instantly, no waiting.
1:02:21The things you'd have to wait for
1:02:22was the computationally difficult stuff,
1:02:27like if you're applying a Gaussian blur
1:02:29to a, at the time, what we thought of as large JPEGs.
1:02:33- Yeah, right.
1:02:34640 by 480. (laughs)
1:02:36- But even that, even though you had to wait,
1:02:40you might wait like 30, 40 seconds
1:02:42to apply a filter to a photograph.
1:02:45But everything about it was responsive.
1:02:47The dialog box appeared as soon as you hit the command.
1:02:51The actual filter started being applied
1:02:54the second you hit the return key
1:02:56or clicked the button to do it on screen,
1:03:00the progress dialog would appear instantly,
1:03:04would update at a regular basis,
1:03:05and then as soon as it got to the end
1:03:07of the progress bar to the pixel,
1:03:09it would disappear and you would see your result.
1:03:12Like that, it was a slow process
1:03:16'cause the computers were so slow,
1:03:18but the responsiveness to your user actions was impeccable.
1:03:24and it's just an interesting contrast
1:03:27that we have these faster computers
1:03:28and now slower interfaces.
1:03:31- Well, I think you could say a lot of the same things
1:03:33apply to the original iPhone.
1:03:35That the original iPhone was very slow hardware, really,
1:03:38like compared to anything.
1:03:41But at the time, it was like, this is the best we can do,
1:03:42so let's deal with it.
1:03:43And so they actually really engineered the software
1:03:46with tons of effort to maximize responsiveness
1:03:51while they knew they'd be waiting for the hardware.
1:03:53So things like the Safari drawing the little grid
1:03:56before things would render and stuff like that.
1:03:58- The checkerboard.
1:03:58- Yeah, the checkerboard, yeah.
1:03:59- Or if you scrolled too fast, you'd get ahead.
1:04:01It would only, 'cause it was so RAM constrained,
1:04:03they couldn't do the whole front page of the New York Times.
1:04:07So they'd render the top of it, and then as you scrolled,
1:04:10they would render more of it on the fly,
1:04:12but if you scrolled too fast,
1:04:13they would just show you that checkerboard
1:04:14so that it was always responsive to your touch.
1:04:16- And there's all the stuff deep in the system
1:04:18about things like being responsive to touches
1:04:20and scrolling being very smooth and things like that.
1:04:22And they did all this because they knew
1:04:25the hardware was very constrained,
1:04:27so they took a lot of effort and were very conscientious
1:04:30about making sure everything stayed fast
1:04:32as much as possible while they knew
1:04:34they'd be waiting on the hardware
1:04:35to do some more complicated things.
1:04:36And that's how early computers were too.
1:04:38Early computers in the '90s and '80s
1:04:40and even the early 2000s,
1:04:42they too were very constrained by their hardware.
1:04:46And so programmers at the time,
1:04:49both OS and application programmers,
1:04:51had to be more conscientious about what they did.
1:04:54And I think what has happened in probably the last
1:04:5610 years or so is that hardware has gotten so good
1:05:01and so fast and we have so much CPU power, so much RAM,
1:05:04SSDs came around to eliminate a lot of IO bottlenecks,
1:05:07and now programmers at almost every level
1:05:10don't really have to think about performance
1:05:13for most of the things they write anymore.
1:05:15So even though the hardware is faster than ever,
1:05:18also programmers have stopped caring about performance
1:05:21unless it's really a big problem.
1:05:23And as you get into things like big companies,
1:05:26like Adobe, and working on big projects like Photoshop,
1:05:30the argument for like, we need to make the new dialogue fast
1:05:34has to go through so many people.
1:05:35And they have so many conflicting priorities of things
1:05:39like, well, if we write this code once
1:05:40using web technologies, it can run on all of our platforms
1:05:43with the same code, look the same,
1:05:44fit our branding guidelines, and all this other crap.
1:05:47And performance is not on top of anybody's mind anymore
1:05:51because everything is so fast,
1:05:54probably half the team working on stuff like that
1:05:57has never had to write performance code.
1:05:59- And it's sort of just sort of a loss
1:06:01of the sense of craftsmanship in the work.
1:06:05Another example, right up your alley
1:06:07and from your personal experience is Tumblr
1:06:12was always very fast.
1:06:14I haven't used it in a while.
1:06:15I don't know if that's actually still true.
1:06:17But a lot of CMSs, you save an article
1:06:22and then it sits there and spins for seconds at a time,
1:06:29enough that it's like, you could see how somebody thought
1:06:34this is fine, who needs to be back in control of your CMS
1:06:39instantaneously upon hitting the post button.
1:06:42But it's actually not true.
1:06:46Like my CMS is actually a little slow in that regard
1:06:49where it takes a couple seconds for when I post an article
1:06:52to get back in control of everything.
1:06:56And when you notice the typo and you hit Update
1:06:59and you have to wait like seven seconds
1:07:01before you can fix it, it's just sitting there
1:07:04right in front of you but it's spinning,
1:07:06it'll drive you nuts.
1:07:07Whereas Tumblr was always, you hit Publish
1:07:09and it was like, did something happen?
1:07:11Yeah, oh yeah, it's already done.
1:07:12There it is.
1:07:13There's my new picture of my kid.
1:07:16- Well, and part of that is, you know,
1:07:18like your CMS, first of all, was made
1:07:20back when RAM was expensive,
1:07:22and is also, I believe, rebuilding static files
1:07:25every time you publish.
1:07:26- Yeah, but that shouldn't take long.
1:07:28- No, it shouldn't, but you know,
1:07:29if it's like rebuilding a bunch of archive pages
1:07:31or something, then you might have, okay, so maybe not.
1:07:33But anyway. - It's just bad software.
1:07:34- Yeah, and your software doesn't have to be
1:07:37that performing in that way
1:07:38because it has one user at a time.
1:07:40Like with Tumblr, everything had to be really fast
1:07:44because if it wasn't, the servers would explode
1:07:48because it had so many users and so much traffic
1:07:51at any given time.
1:07:52Things that we couldn't do quickly, we just couldn't do.
1:07:56So everything was designed,
1:07:59and to a large degree, Overcast servers,
1:08:00I've made the same way because I take a lot
1:08:02of the same design approaches to them,
1:08:04of basically like if something's going to be
1:08:06a very heavy operation that I can't do quickly,
1:08:09don't do it. I thought, I know I've talked about this before, but what are podcasts for other than
1:08:17retelling old stories? But I thought one of the interesting changes Apple made philosophically,
1:08:21number one, I'll go even further back out. Like, I've been thinking a lot lately, as the iPhone
1:08:28and iOS settle in as long standing platforms, like they're not new. I mean, you know, we had the
1:08:3410th year anniversary last year. I mean, this is a well-established software platform. But we went
1:08:40from the first version of Mac OS X to the iPhone in like six years. I mean, I know that Apple spent
1:08:48like five years working on Mac OS X before it actually shipped as a 10.0. But that era from
1:08:56like 2001 to you know and the iPod was new to okay here's the iPhone feels like
1:09:04a long stretch of time but it wasn't it was very that's actually just a handful
1:09:09of years and a lot of the people were the same and I thought one of the
1:09:13interesting things that Apple obviously changed its mind about between Mac OS
1:09:17and the original iPhone was what to make seem impressive.
1:09:22With Mac OS X, they valued rendering quality
1:09:33above all else.
1:09:36So like when you, and again, this seems like a goofy thing
1:09:39to get excited about, but back then,
1:09:42when you'd resize a window and the contents
1:09:44would update live, as opposed to just drawing an outline
1:09:47and then refreshing once when you let go of the window,
1:09:50that seemed impressive.
1:09:52And they were doing all of this fancy anti-aliasing
1:09:55and all these drop shadows and they had translucency.
1:10:00They just went way overboard with the quote unquote
1:10:04lickability of the interface.
1:10:06But it was slow.
1:10:08It was slow to resize windows.
1:10:10When you would drag a window around real fast,
1:10:13you could see it shearing on screen.
1:10:15And then six years later with the iPhone,
1:10:19they went the other way.
1:10:20And they were like, if we can't keep up,
1:10:22we'll just draw this checkerboard
1:10:24and make sure that the scrolling speed keeps up.
1:10:27And I remember talking to somebody at Apple about this once.
1:10:30And he told me an interesting story that
1:10:35they knew that Mac OS X was slow.
1:10:39They weren't fooling themselves that the,
1:10:42what was the word everybody used?
1:10:43the snappiness wasn't there.
1:10:46And they set up a lab where they,
1:10:49what was the version of Windows
1:10:51that would have been current in like 2001?
1:10:54- XP.
1:10:54- Yeah, I think it was XP.
1:10:56Yeah, yeah, it was XP.
1:10:57So they had a lab and they used high-speed cameras
1:11:01and timed things like you click on the file menu
1:11:06and how many milliseconds does it take
1:11:08for the dropdown menu to finish rendering.
1:11:12and if you drag your mouse down the menu
1:11:15and it starts highlighting things,
1:11:17how quickly after the mouse gets there
1:11:19does the highlight come?
1:11:20And they tested Mac OS X, they had a whole list,
1:11:24he said, of things that we timed
1:11:26that were mostly just rendering things.
1:11:29And their gold standard was XP.
1:11:32They were like, look at how much faster all of this is.
1:11:34And sure, it wasn't as fancy looking,
1:11:37but they wanted, this is our goal,
1:11:39to get it as fast as this.
1:11:41And it was the sort of thing that they were never
1:11:44gonna talk about publicly because they're not gonna admit
1:11:48that their stuff was slow and Windows was fast.
1:11:52But then the funny thing is when Windows 7 shipped,
1:11:55they installed it and they set up another machine
1:11:57and they realized everything had gotten slow.
1:11:59And they didn't know what to do and he said
1:12:03it was a real fight within the company
1:12:05as to whether they should still be benchmarking themselves
1:12:08against XP because that was the fast one
1:12:11And there were others who were like,
1:12:12"No, see, they're slow too, now we're fine."
1:12:14This is all good. - Oh, interesting.
1:12:16That's kinda sad that that was even a debate.
1:12:18- Yeah, well, the people who wanted to keep testing on XP
1:12:21won the debate.
1:12:22- I hope so, yeah, 'cause it's like,
1:12:23"Oh, everyone else sucks, we can suck too."
1:12:25That's a terrible argument.
1:12:27- Right. (laughing)
1:12:28But I think that's sort of the nut.
1:12:33Like, why did Craig Maud write this essay?
1:12:35Because there's so many people out there doing work
1:12:38who don't have that philosophy.
1:12:39I'm like, ah, if it takes four seconds,
1:12:41it takes four seconds.
1:12:42- Well, and I feel like it's even,
1:12:44we're talking about a lot of times smaller times than that.
1:12:47It's like one of the tricky things
1:12:50about trying to match responsiveness of old hardware
1:12:55is it used to be that when you pressed a key
1:12:58on your keyboard, it would generate a hardware interrupt
1:13:01and it would basically appear immediately on the screen
1:13:05within some tiny amount of time because of,
1:13:07but that depended on how the keyboard technology worked,
1:13:10how the screen technology worked,
1:13:12like the cathode gun, like how all that stuff worked
1:13:15to get that level of responsiveness.
1:13:16Hardware today is way more complicated than that,
1:13:20and there's all these different levels and layers,
1:13:21and a lot of things that introduce small amounts of latency,
1:13:23like having keyboards be wireless, stuff like that.
1:13:26There's all these little levels of latency
1:13:29that are the result of technological advancement,
1:13:31like the hardware got better in certain ways,
1:13:33it got more capable, more complicated,
1:13:35the OSes got more advanced,
1:13:37and there's different layers of everything now.
1:13:39So a lot of that's just down to that,
1:13:40but then I feel like the big challenge
1:13:43that we have with software is not that things
1:13:46take four seconds when they should take one,
1:13:49but that things that should take 20 milliseconds
1:13:52take 200 milliseconds.
1:13:54So we're talking about much smaller time intervals here,
1:13:58but that adds up, or simple things,
1:14:00like how I believe you said before,
1:14:02how when you invoke Spotlight with command space on a Mac,
1:14:07or when you open a new window on a Mac
1:14:09or do something like that,
1:14:10and then you start typing the commands
1:14:12of what you want to appear in a text field
1:14:14or a name or something,
1:14:16it'll queue up those commands
1:14:17and it will put them in as soon as it can.
1:14:20On iOS, if you hit Command + Space
1:14:22with a keyboard on an iPad Pro,
1:14:23it doesn't start accepting input
1:14:25until it has finished the animation
1:14:26and is showing you the text box.
1:14:28And there's little things like that,
1:14:29where the responsiveness-- - That has gotten fixed.
1:14:31- Oh, it has, in 13?
1:14:32- Yes.
1:14:33Don't quote me on this,
1:14:35but I actually think it is shipped
1:14:37in the latest version of iOS 12.
1:14:39A little birdie-- - Oh, interesting.
1:14:40- A little birdie who saw my rant about that was like,
1:14:43told me that this drives some of us nuts too.
1:14:47We're gonna try to sneak a, don't say anything,
1:14:52but don't quote me, but I think they fixed it.
1:14:55And I think they're definitely supposedly fixed it
1:14:57for iOS 13, but I don't understand how that ever shipped.
1:15:01How does that not, 'cause you would think
1:15:03if you are on the Spotlight team,
1:15:06like you're one of the people who's,
1:15:08one of your jobs is to program the Spotlight interface
1:15:12on iOS, wouldn't you think that you're really good
1:15:16at using Spotlight and that you might start--
1:15:18- Well, but also, I'm sure it was probably
1:15:21one of those situations where, first of all,
1:15:23on iOS, keyboard support was very rudimentary
1:15:26until iOS 13, like the APIs, I mean,
1:15:29I'm sure they had better stuff privately,
1:15:31but the public APIs for it were pretty rough,
1:15:33pretty rudimentary, and so I bet the whole stack
1:15:37of trying to capture the keyboard input
1:15:38works totally differently on the iOS
1:15:40than it does on Mac probably.
1:15:42And also, that's presumably a part of Springboard,
1:15:44and Springboard is famously this massively complex
1:15:47code base that does all sorts of stuff,
1:15:49and it's apparently been refactored a whole bunch of times
1:15:51to try to deal with its complexity,
1:15:53'cause it's just so big and so complex and so important,
1:15:56it's so critical to the OS, and so I can imagine
1:15:59that was probably a harder job than it sounded like,
1:16:01But that being said, again, it's this whole thing
1:16:04about performance being important or not.
1:16:06When you start talking about these differences
1:16:09between a 20 millisecond activity
1:16:11or a 200 millisecond activity or something like that,
1:16:14it's kind of like death by a thousand cuts.
1:16:15At the time, if something takes 200 milliseconds,
1:16:19that's a pretty frequent interaction
1:16:21that you could make faster,
1:16:22but it might be a little bit inconvenient to make it faster
1:16:25with the way things are built.
1:16:26At the time, you might be able to ship that.
1:16:28You might be able to say, you know what,
1:16:29we're on a tight deadline,
1:16:30"We're trying to ship this in time for the phones,"
1:16:31or whatever, "We have to get it out the door,"
1:16:34it just simply isn't important enough
1:16:36to get that time down right now.
1:16:37We'll do it later, and of course later never comes.
1:16:40And when you have enough of that in an app,
1:16:42or in an OS, or in a platform, it really,
1:16:46and I think this is what Craig Mobb
1:16:47was ultimately getting at, like,
1:16:48the just overall feeling of software
1:16:51that is built that way or that ends up that way
1:16:53is so different, and at no time does it ever seem
1:16:56like a critical problem as you're building it.
1:16:58And the company responsible for it,
1:17:00it might never be economically worthwhile
1:17:02for them to devote the resources
1:17:05to really make it incredibly faster
1:17:06once it is like quote fast enough to be usable like that.
1:17:10But ultimately, that really does result in
1:17:14a feeling of like you're just kind of
1:17:16moving through maple syrup.
1:17:18And to me, the performance in a lot of ways like that
1:17:21is as important as things like input reliability
1:17:24because it's tied to it.
1:17:26Part of the reason why I don't like certain things
1:17:29because I think my keyboard and mouse and trackpad
1:17:33should be 100% reliable, not 99.9% reliable,
1:17:36like 100% reliable.
1:17:38And if you are operating something
1:17:40and if you're typing a sentence
1:17:42and one out of 200 key presses doesn't register,
1:17:45that's a really big problem, actually.
1:17:47It seems like a small number.
1:17:48- I think it could be way higher than that.
1:17:49I mean, I think it could be like one in 10,000
1:17:51and it would drive you nuts.
1:17:52- Exactly.
1:17:53And so you feel like you're not in control at that point.
1:17:56- If you write a thousand word article--
1:17:58- Yeah, I guess it's probably 10,000 keystrokes, right?
1:18:00Yeah, so I feel like if you,
1:18:03you feel like you're not in control of your computer
1:18:06when it just randomly fails and things like that,
1:18:08and performance can give you that impression.
1:18:10Like if you are waiting for something to happen
1:18:13that shouldn't be slow, that is being even a little bit slow,
1:18:16it can give you that same feeling of like,
1:18:19this isn't working properly,
1:18:20or I'm not in full control over this.
1:18:22- One of the features I use a lot,
1:18:26and it annoys, I love the feature,
1:18:29and I'm so glad it's there, but using it every single week,
1:18:33well, I won't use it this week,
1:18:35'cause I don't need to share notes with you,
1:18:36but I use Apple Notes to share
1:18:39show notes with guests on the podcast
1:18:44and then with Caleb who edits,
1:18:47and we toss things in there like links
1:18:50that I often forget to post, title ideas,
1:18:54And the interface, do you use the shared notes feature
1:18:58in Apple Notes?
1:18:59- A little, not a lot.
1:19:00- It's one of those things where I should,
1:19:03it would be harder to write about it.
1:19:05It's like I kind of would probably be better
1:19:07as like a YouTube video.
1:19:08But it commits a sort of, number one, it's just slow.
1:19:13You go up to the share menu and you go to share
1:19:19and then a dialogue comes up.
1:19:20It takes way too long for the dialogue to come up.
1:19:22And again, famously I know, as a user of software,
1:19:27it is generally frowned upon to tell the developer
1:19:32of any particular software that something
1:19:35should be easy to add or fix.
1:19:39- Right, yeah.
1:19:39- Generally-- - It should take you
1:19:40about a day, right?
1:19:41- Explain your problem as politely as you can
1:19:44and let them figure out how easy it is.
1:19:46- How hard could it be?
1:19:48- So I'm not trying to violate that rule,
1:19:50but it doesn't seem like opening up the sharing dialog
1:19:53should take a while.
1:19:55It just takes, it just does not seem snappy enough.
1:19:58But then the part that drives me nuts
1:19:59is I always share it by iMessage,
1:20:02and you hit iMessage, and then the dialog box goes away.
1:20:06And then the one that lets you type the iMessage comes up.
1:20:11- Oh yeah. - And in between,
1:20:14there is no spinner, there's no HUD,
1:20:18it just looks like it failed.
1:20:19like you hit message. And a couple of weeks ago, somebody on Twitter dug up scans of the original
1:20:29Apple human interface guidelines from 1985 or '84, whenever they first published Inside Mac.
1:20:34And it was like the third page of the interface guidelines specifically said that if the user
1:20:41has to wait for something, show as accurate a progress as you can. Ideally, show a
1:20:48- Like a percentage bar kind of thing.
1:20:50- A percentage bar type thing, you know, the bar.
1:20:53If you can't, if it is indeterminate,
1:20:55show the watch cursor, you know,
1:20:57that was the old, the old wait cursor was the watch cursor.
1:21:01And if you used a Mac back then,
1:21:02you got used to the watch cursor.
1:21:04- Yeah.
1:21:04- Because, you know, the computers were so slow.
1:21:06But the watch cursor would appear
1:21:09the second you were waiting on the computer
1:21:11and it disappeared the moment it was done with whatever.
1:21:16And then it was always very accurate.
1:21:18Like if you got your arrow cursor back,
1:21:20you knew that it was done.
1:21:21You know, like talking about spinning hard disks,
1:21:26like you'd hit Command + S in some apps
1:21:28and you'd have to wait for the watch cursor.
1:21:29- Oh yeah, well and again, it's like,
1:21:30'cause back then computers were so slow
1:21:32that you had to design for waiting from the start.
1:21:36Like every app, many features of every app
1:21:39had to be designed right from the beginning
1:21:41for like the user's gonna have to wait
1:21:43for some period of time here,
1:21:44let's make that obvious and clear and everything else.
1:21:46And modern, like I bet whoever,
1:21:48I bet whatever systems are being invoked by
1:21:50the delay between that, you know,
1:21:52the CloudKit share dialogue and the, you know,
1:21:54message send from the share sheet,
1:21:56it probably is not even built with the assumption
1:21:58anybody would ever wait for it.
1:22:00And so there is no affordance.
1:22:01There is, we don't even have a wait cursor anymore.
1:22:04Like we have the beach ball, which is not a good thing.
1:22:06Like that's not something going wrong.
1:22:08You know, but like Mac OS,
1:22:10I don't think even has a wait cursor.
1:22:12- No. - And no modern OS
1:22:13as far as I know does.
1:22:14I don't know if Windows still has the hourglass,
1:22:16but I think we just assume the software
1:22:18doesn't make you wait anymore,
1:22:19or if it does, it'll show it in a nice way in its UI.
1:22:23But anyway, that dialogue, I mean,
1:22:26there's a lot of problems with it.
1:22:28So I don't see it as often in notes.
1:22:30I do see the same dialogue very frequently
1:22:32in photo sharing, in the Photos app.
1:22:35And it always takes me, first of all,
1:22:38it always takes me at least two tries
1:22:40to even bring up the dialogue,
1:22:42'cause I can't find where it,
1:22:44how do I create a shared note or photo album?
1:22:47And I always get it wrong the first time.
1:22:49And then I eventually figure out
1:22:51which button invokes the invite people thing.
1:22:53And it always takes me at least two tries to invite somebody
1:22:56because the link doesn't work
1:22:58or the box just goes away randomly
1:22:59or I thought I invited them
1:23:01but I didn't actually invite them or whatever.
1:23:03Like that whole system is really hard to use
1:23:06and surprisingly inconsistent and surprisingly sloppy.
1:23:09- Yeah, and it's not clear.
1:23:11It's one of those things that they could use
1:23:13from our labels.
1:23:14What is this button you keep pushing over here?
1:23:16- It's a mute button.
1:23:18- So as soon as you're done talking,
1:23:19you just mute yourself.
1:23:20- Yeah, that way I'm not breathing all over you,
1:23:22and I can take a sip from my cup here
1:23:24without you hearing the water sloshing around.
1:23:26- I should probably get one of those.
1:23:28- It's pretty great, yeah.
1:23:29Or rather, so it's the Roles MS-111.
1:23:32It's a totally mediocre mute switch.
1:23:35It's not great, but I have yet to find anything else
1:23:38that works better.
1:23:39Like I tried, Dan Benjamin recommends this one,
1:23:42I forget what it's called, it's like the cough stop
1:23:44or something like that, and I tried it,
1:23:45and every time you push it with a condenser mic,
1:23:48you hear a pop sound, and this is the only one
1:23:51I found that doesn't, but the problem is
1:23:52it doesn't actually mute it all the way,
1:23:53it only drops at like 20 decibels, so if I'm muted,
1:23:57and I talk really loud, you can still hear it.
1:23:59(laughing)
1:24:00But so it's good for muting the occasional cough
1:24:04or gas or whatever else, but you don't wanna
1:24:07really yell into it when it's muted,
1:24:09'cause you will be heard.
1:24:11(laughing)
1:24:11All right, let's take one more break here.
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1:26:47Ah, anything else?
1:26:49What else?
1:26:50- I don't know, what else is going on this summer?
1:26:52- Oh, what about Dropbox?
1:26:53- That's sad.
1:26:56- I, so I, you guys had a good segment
1:27:00on this Dropbox fiasco.
1:27:02I haven't gotten the new interface yet.
1:27:04I don't know what, I don't know what god
1:27:06you have to piss off to get it, but.
1:27:08It's been, I thought you had some interesting insight
1:27:14into this that when you raise that much venture capital,
1:27:17you kind of eventually, and your valuation is high enough,
1:27:20you've got to suddenly compete with,
1:27:23you're trying to be the next Microsoft.
1:27:24- Right, like all of a sudden,
1:27:26you raise that amount of money,
1:27:28you have this kind of business plan in mind
1:27:31that basically is like you becoming the next Office,
1:27:34like the next Microsoft Office,
1:27:35or the next Slack or something.
1:27:37And actually, it's really hard to compete
1:27:41with Microsoft Office or with Google Docs
1:27:44or these giant collaboration platforms.
1:27:47And that's what Dropbox is trying to be.
1:27:48And ultimately, they're not going to succeed.
1:27:51Dropbox is not going to become
1:27:53the next big collaboration platform
1:27:55that's on the level of Microsoft and Google.
1:27:57They're just not.
1:27:59It's a really hard market.
1:28:00Even Slack, you know Slack is trying on some level
1:28:02and Slack is very successful in where it is now,
1:28:07but I don't think Slack is trying to be the next,
1:28:11I don't think they're trying to be the replacement
1:28:13for an entire office suite.
1:28:16I think they're doing their own kind of thing
1:28:18off to the side, whereas Dropbox really does seem
1:28:20like they're trying to replace a lot more
1:28:22than what they are both qualified to do
1:28:25and what they are likely to succeed at doing.
1:28:27- I would be surprised if Slack came out
1:28:30with a file sharing extension that ran on your Mac
1:28:35without you asking for it that shares a folder.
1:28:38- Right, yeah.
1:28:39That seems out of scope for Slack.
1:28:41- Yeah, I think one of the keys to Slack's success
1:28:44in the way that they're very well,
1:28:46people who use Slack a lot,
1:28:48most people seem to really like it,
1:28:49and I think one of the reasons is because they're focused
1:28:51and they know exactly what they wanna do.
1:28:54and boy, Dropbox had that for a while too
1:28:58when it really was just a folder that syncs.
1:29:01- I feel like Dropbox's major success,
1:29:05as far as I can tell,
1:29:06granted I haven't looked into this
1:29:07and I haven't had a real job in a long time,
1:29:09but it seemed like Dropbox's major success
1:29:11was much more on the personal side
1:29:13than on the enterprise side.
1:29:15And it's a very common need for people
1:29:18to share files with themselves and their friends
1:29:20or a couple of coworkers or something like that,
1:29:21but it was very much a personal success.
1:29:25But it's hard to make money in the personal market.
1:29:29It's especially hard to make big, big, big money
1:29:32in the personal market.
1:29:33Like if you're gonna raise hundreds of millions of dollars
1:29:36and try to become worth billions of dollars
1:29:38and have a public stock and everything,
1:29:40you can't just have the consumer market and that be it,
1:29:44unless you are massive and incredibly successful.
1:29:48But that doesn't really happen that often.
1:29:50to raise that kind of money and to have those kind of
1:29:52growth goals in this kind of market,
1:29:54you need the big enterprise business accounts.
1:29:57And I think Slack was very smart by focusing on
1:30:00business stuff right from the start.
1:30:02Slack has always been business focused,
1:30:04and it has succeeded in businesses up to today
1:30:08seemingly very well.
1:30:10I mean, I don't know what their financials are
1:30:11and what their goals are, but it seems like
1:30:13what they set out to do, they are doing very well.
1:30:16And they were business focused right from the start.
1:30:18and they have, you know, people do use Slack
1:30:20for personal stuff also, but they are very,
1:30:23they're operating successfully at what they're trying
1:30:27to do in business, whereas Dropbox seemed like
1:30:29it was a really great personal story,
1:30:32then they realized, oh, we actually want the money
1:30:35from the business, or want/need the money
1:30:37from the business side of this, so we need to pivot this
1:30:39into more of a business product, but unfortunately,
1:30:42they were already so big at that point
1:30:44that both businesses already weren't taking them seriously
1:30:47and the business software providers
1:30:50were already introducing their own Dropbox-like things.
1:30:53So they were already kind of getting
1:30:54Sherlock'd over there on that end.
1:30:56And then also, the personal side of things
1:30:59was not interested in what Dropbox was doing.
1:31:02Like all the stuff Dropbox tried to do
1:31:03to push themselves more into business
1:31:05mostly just pisses off their personal customers.
1:31:09And so I feel like, that's why I feel like
1:31:11they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
1:31:14I understand why they're doing what they're doing
1:31:16given the situation they're in,
1:31:17where they've raised all this money,
1:31:19they're trying to become a big business thing.
1:31:23It makes sense to do what they're doing now,
1:31:26given those conditions.
1:31:27The real flaw was getting themselves
1:31:29into those conditions in the first place.
1:31:31Like, instead of raising all this money
1:31:32and trying to become something really big,
1:31:34they should've, I think, they should've stuck
1:31:36with the personal market, but that would've resulted
1:31:38in a smaller company and smaller finances
1:31:40and everything else, but they could've succeeded.
1:31:42They could've been sustainable doing that
1:31:44and had a really nice business.
1:31:45but that wasn't what they were going for.
1:31:48- Right, it's, you know, overcast isn't trying
1:31:53to be the iTunes music store.
1:31:55- Right. - You know,
1:31:56Daring Fireball isn't trying to be the New York Times.
1:31:59- And if we tried, we would probably fail.
1:32:01- Right, like I have a nice business
1:32:03that supports one employee.
1:32:04- Yeah, exactly. - Me,
1:32:06not that I have anybody else.
1:32:07And that's fine for me, but if I had raised venture capital,
1:32:13probably wouldn't be seen as a good business.
1:32:15- Right, exactly, yeah.
1:32:16Yeah, overcast would be a terrible return for VCs,
1:32:18as honestly as many podcasting-related ventures are,
1:32:23as I think the unfortunate luminary investors
1:32:27are discovering right about now,
1:32:29as they set $100 million on fire to a podcast app
1:32:34that seems to have no noticeable market share.
1:32:37- Yeah, and I haven't heard,
1:32:40I haven't really heard anything about it.
1:32:41Like they obviously got a decent initial injection
1:32:46of publicity based on some of the names
1:32:49of some of the people who are associated
1:32:52with the star power.
1:32:53People like to write the hot take of,
1:32:58hey, here's the next big thing in podcasting,
1:32:59it's the Netflix of podcasting or something like that.
1:33:02That sounds good as a slogan.
1:33:05- People can write whatever articles they want.
1:33:06Doesn't make it true.
1:33:07Doesn't actually make it play out that way, right?
1:33:11A lot of the press, and especially the business press,
1:33:14they can tell podcasting is hot.
1:33:16They want some kind of big platform plays
1:33:19to start happening so that both the investor side
1:33:21can make a bunch of money, and so that it shakes
1:33:23everything up and gives the press a lot to write about,
1:33:25and that's how other media have played out,
1:33:29so they kind of expect the same thing to happen.
1:33:32But the podcast market has shown itself
1:33:33over and over again to not work that way.
1:33:36And that basically the podcast market has
1:33:39a whole lot of inertia behind keeping things
1:33:41pretty much the way they are,
1:33:43and that's the most likely outcome here.
1:33:46So you can't try to make $100 million back in podcasting
1:33:50and expect that to succeed very well
1:33:53with pretty much any kind of effort,
1:33:55'cause that isn't the kind of business it is.
1:33:56Similarly, yeah, and so it's like, with Dropbox,
1:33:59and it's like maybe this whole folder that syncs
1:34:01between your computers thing
1:34:03that was mostly for personal use,
1:34:05maybe that shouldn't have ever been
1:34:07billion-dollar business. Yeah, and it's different. You know, people have been listening to audio
1:34:12content as long as we've had consumer electronics. It used to be called radio, but the radio market
1:34:18was very different simply because, you know, like Philadelphia had like two classic rock stations,
1:34:23you know? So if you wanted to listen to classic rock, you'd have two choices in a city of
1:34:28of millions. There's not really a market for like a make a lot of money in radio with 40,000
1:34:39listeners. Right, yeah, exactly. You know, and there might be some stations that only have 40,000
1:34:44listeners because they're rural or it's truly niche programming or something like that, but
1:34:50they're not making tens of millions of dollars, they're making... Yeah, they're supporting like
1:34:55like a single family or like a small number of families.
1:34:59Like it's not, you're not gonna, yeah,
1:35:00it's not gonna become a billion dollar business.
1:35:03- Did you see the story?
1:35:04I'm sure you did.
1:35:05I think you did, I think you guys even talked about it,
1:35:06but Bloomberg had a story a couple weeks ago,
1:35:09speaking of paid podcasting,
1:35:10that Apple is supposedly working on backing,
1:35:15doing their own luminary type thing, I guess.
1:35:19- Yeah, it was very light on the details.
1:35:22- Very, very light.
1:35:23The actual meat of the story was basically,
1:35:26some people are saying that Apple is thinking
1:35:28about doing something like this,
1:35:30which is very much like, there's not much there there.
1:35:34- And it definitely fits with the story
1:35:38they've been selling Wall Street for two years
1:35:40about services, and I'm not saying it's a bill of goods.
1:35:42They obviously, they report the money
1:35:44in the services business is absolutely growing.
1:35:46So I'm not saying that they're not actually focused
1:35:51and growing services and they had a services event
1:35:54just earlier this year where they've talked about
1:35:57the Apple News and Apple Arcade
1:35:59and obviously the new TV stuff,
1:36:03which is probably the highest profile.
1:36:05I don't know about podcasts though.
1:36:10And I don't know that it's something they have to do, right?
1:36:16And they already have Apple Music.
1:36:17Like how many things do they want us to subscribe to?
1:36:19And would it be like, you know,
1:36:21if you already have Apple Music,
1:36:25you get the podcast for free?
1:36:28But why music?
1:36:29Wouldn't it be, would it, you know--
1:36:30- What would it be part of, News Plus, maybe?
1:36:33- Podcasts don't really fit
1:36:34into any of the other subscription ones, right?
1:36:37It's not really news.
1:36:38- Yeah, I think music would be the most obvious one.
1:36:39Or if they ever did do like a big bundle,
1:36:42it would just be one of the many things
1:36:43you'd get from the bundle.
1:36:44- Right, when you get the Apple Bundle.
1:36:46- Yeah, it would be hard to have it stand on its own.
1:36:48I mean, this is one thing, and one of the reasons why,
1:36:51you know, Apple's presence in podcasting is massive.
1:36:54Like, they have this huge market share.
1:36:56They run by far the most important and biggest directory
1:36:59that a lot of apps, including mine,
1:37:01actually search against.
1:37:02You know, their client has, by far,
1:37:04the biggest listenership.
1:37:06Apple is podcasting to a large degree.
1:37:08And so, for them to try anything like this
1:37:11that, like, introduces content that's maybe locked down
1:37:13to them, or, you know, requires a paid subscription,
1:37:16Although, actually, I think one thing that I think
1:37:18Jason Snell brought up is like,
1:37:19I think it would actually be more damaging
1:37:21to the ecosystem if it was free.
1:37:23- Right, right. - If it was like,
1:37:24you could listen to these free podcasts,
1:37:26but only an Apple podcast and not any other apps like mine.
1:37:29Like, that would actually be, I think,
1:37:30significantly more damaging.
1:37:31But, you know, ultimately, even though they have
1:37:33all this power, like, I forget whether I've said this
1:37:36on a podcast yet, but like, so for years, I've been,
1:37:39I was noodling the idea in the back of my head of like,
1:37:41doing a kind of like readability thing for podcasts,
1:37:44of like you pay, suppose you pay overcast
1:37:46like 20 bucks a month and I would split it out
1:37:49and pay the podcast you listen to if they participated
1:37:52in this thing, I'd like you know,
1:37:53revenue share with all of them and I would take like
1:37:56you know, 10% for running it or whatever.
1:37:58And I talked, I ran this idea by a bunch of podcasters
1:38:01a few years ago, big and small, friends and you know,
1:38:04non-friends, like so you know, they wouldn't be too biased.
1:38:07And everyone basically said the same thing like,
1:38:08no it isn't worth it because like I guess I would take
1:38:11your money but I would never promote it because I have
1:38:13my own method of monetization,
1:38:15whether they have the listenership,
1:38:16or they have memberships, or they have private feeds,
1:38:18or they do ads or Patreons or whatever.
1:38:20- I seem to recall telling you this.
1:38:22- Yeah, everyone did.
1:38:23- I'm pretty sure you asked me.
1:38:25- Yeah, I probably did.
1:38:26I asked every podcaster I knew,
1:38:27plus some of the big ones,
1:38:28and they all were very gracious with their time,
1:38:30and basically said, yeah, I would take your money,
1:38:32but I wouldn't promote it,
1:38:33'cause I don't want other people
1:38:35getting in the way of me making my money.
1:38:36But anyway, assuming a program like that could exist,
1:38:41And so I ran the numbers and I kind of came
1:38:43to the conclusion that even if I could get everyone
1:38:45to do it, whatever that 10% that I would take,
1:38:48whatever it would be, it just wouldn't be enough money
1:38:51to make it worth the hassle and overhead
1:38:53of running this kind of program.
1:38:55And distributing all this money,
1:38:56handling everyone's finances, it's a lot of burden
1:39:00and it's a lot of messiness.
1:39:01And the amount of money I would likely make
1:39:03from it, assuming certain conservative percentages
1:39:05of how many people would want to pay and everything,
1:39:07it just wasn't enough money to make it worth it to me.
1:39:09But as a thought exercise, a few months back,
1:39:12I'd thought, well, I know my market share,
1:39:15and I know Apple's market share.
1:39:16So I extrapolated, what would Apple make
1:39:19by running a program like this,
1:39:20if they wanted to do something like this,
1:39:21where you pay Apple some service fee,
1:39:24and they split it up, kind of like they do with News Plus,
1:39:26they split it up to the podcast you listen to and pay them,
1:39:28like if you listen within Apple's app.
1:39:31What if they ran a program like this?
1:39:33How much money would they make?
1:39:35And I forget the number I came up with,
1:39:36but it was something like a couple of million dollars a year
1:39:40and it's like it just wasn't enough.
1:39:42- It doesn't move the needle for them.
1:39:43- Yeah, for them, a couple million dollars a year,
1:39:45it would be definitely not worth the administration
1:39:48of running such a program.
1:39:50All the costs involved in paying all those podcasters out
1:39:54and dealing with them all and dealing with the signups
1:39:56and dealing with the people and having to market
1:39:58this kind of thing to people to get them
1:40:00to buy the subscriptions in the first place
1:40:01and the engineering behind it.
1:40:03It's so much effort to run such a program.
1:40:05Podcasts, while it's a very big market
1:40:09for the content side of things,
1:40:11the platform side of things,
1:40:12it's hard to get enough people,
1:40:14especially paying people,
1:40:15to really make big money as a platform.
1:40:19Podcasting simply isn't big enough yet.
1:40:21And it may never be.
1:40:23It may be like talk radio.
1:40:26Talk radio kind of capped out.
1:40:28Talk radio is not still growing.
1:40:30It kind of capped out at a natural point
1:40:32where this is just how many people want this kind of thing,
1:40:34and that's it.
1:40:35Podcasting is still growing, but not incredibly quickly.
1:40:39Like, maybe it's already capped out.
1:40:41Maybe it's mostly done growing,
1:40:43or maybe it's almost done growing.
1:40:46And so even having their giant market share,
1:40:50trying to get people to pay for something on a large scale
1:40:54as the platform owner doesn't really pay.
1:40:58The math doesn't work out very well
1:40:59for a company that big to have a meaningful pay rate
1:41:02and to make meaningful money from paid podcast.
1:41:04Now, the economic change when you are the content provider.
1:41:08Like if you're trying to do the platform play
1:41:10where you take 10% or 30% of everything,
1:41:13it's hard to make enough money there to matter.
1:41:15But if you are making the 70% or the 90% of that,
1:41:19then your economics change.
1:41:21So it does make sense for a lot of individual podcasts
1:41:24to have a paid premium tier where they make
1:41:28most of the money from the listeners and everything.
1:41:30That economics are totally different.
1:41:33That often works out.
1:41:34and that's why there aren't so many of those.
1:41:35But on the platform side, it doesn't make a ton of sense
1:41:38for them to be like a pay everyone kind of solution.
1:41:41But this rumor wasn't about that.
1:41:42This rumor was about them making exclusive content
1:41:45and presumably tying it behind some kind of pay wall.
1:41:50And so from that, the math could work on that for them,
1:41:54but again, I think it would be most likely
1:41:59to be an add-on to Apple Music or something,
1:42:02not a standalone thing.
1:42:03- Well, while we're on this topic of podcasts,
1:42:08I know you and I have talked about this before.
1:42:11I find one of the strangest things
1:42:14about the podcast ecosystem is Apple's
1:42:18outsized dominance in market share,
1:42:22because they're, I mean, I presume,
1:42:25you would actually know this,
1:42:27but I presume most people who use Apple podcasts
1:42:30on their phone.
1:42:32People certainly use the Mac versions.
1:42:36I know people definitely use that.
1:42:37But there's this thing called Android,
1:42:43which has greater worldwide market share than the iPhone.
1:42:47And yet, even though Google has made some steps,
1:42:50you would think that's a business
1:42:51Google would want to be in, right?
1:42:53- Well, demographically, I mean,
1:42:57there are podcast players on Android.
1:42:59Google I think has made three of them so far.
1:43:01- And they just don't take off.
1:43:02- They don't go anywhere.
1:43:03- Right.
1:43:04- I think what you're seeing here is something that,
1:43:07I think a lot of people either don't see
1:43:11or don't want to say, but that the Android market
1:43:15is different from the iPhone market,
1:43:16demographically speaking.
1:43:17And the demographics of people who listen to podcasts
1:43:20are significantly tilted towards higher income,
1:43:24better educated, more liberal people.
1:43:26And those are the opposite demographics
1:43:28that Android tends to be tilted towards.
1:43:30So what you see is even though Android has a larger
1:43:33market share of devices worldwide,
1:43:37that it isn't so evenly spread,
1:43:38or it's the opposite for podcast listeners.
1:43:41Podcast listeners so far are significantly
1:43:45in favor of iOS.
1:43:47So there's actually, our friends over at Libsyn,
1:43:50Libsyn is a huge podcast host, been around forever.
1:43:52They host tons and tons of podcasts, big and small,
1:43:55including I believe both of these podcasts, right?
1:43:56- No, I'm still on SoundCloud.
1:43:58- Oh, geez, you gotta get off SoundCloud.
1:43:59Well, anyway, at least including ATP.
1:44:01- I have a lot of accumulated CMS data.
1:44:04- Yeah, yeah, you really do.
1:44:06Oh, God, I can't believe SoundCloud
1:44:08is still hosting podcasts.
1:44:09Anyway, but for everyone else who's on Libsan,
1:44:13they do a podcast called The Feed
1:44:17where two people from Libsan talk about podcast trends
1:44:22and how-to and everything, and part of that show
1:44:24every month is that they share data about user agents
1:44:27and what percentage of Libsyn's network-wide downloads
1:44:30are going to podcast clients like mine and Apple's,
1:44:33and they also break it down by platform,
1:44:35like Android versus iOS.
1:44:37And the Android to iOS ratio has been shrinking over time.
1:44:41It used to, a couple years ago,
1:44:43I think it was like seven or eight to one in favor of iOS,
1:44:46and now it's closer to like three to one or four to one,
1:44:49but it's still like, that's still, you know,
1:44:50iOS to have like, you know, three to one advantage
1:44:53over Android for podcast downloads across this entire
1:44:56network that hosts a huge variety of shows,
1:44:58so I think it's probably pretty representative
1:45:00of the market as a whole.
1:45:03That is totally out of whack with the actual market share
1:45:07of those platforms in a hardware sense.
1:45:10- You would think it would be more like Chrome and Safari.
1:45:12- Right, yeah, it's like you would think,
1:45:13based on Android's market share, you would think
1:45:15that Android would outnumber iPhone downloads
1:45:18something like two to one, but instead,
1:45:20it's the opposite direction and it's iPhone
1:45:22remembering Android like three to one for podcast downloads.
1:45:24So it's very much a demographic difference
1:45:27between those two platforms.
1:45:28And I think that's part of the reason, among some others,
1:45:30but that's part of the reason I think why Google
1:45:32has had no meaningful success having their own
1:45:35big podcast app on Android.
1:45:38- Here's my stats for my show.
1:45:40Overcast is number one, but our audience is--
1:45:44- Yeah, our audience is not representative.
1:45:47- Three times the market share of Apple Core Media iPhone,
1:45:51which is listening on the iPhone.
1:45:53But they list iTunes separately,
1:45:55so that's another 4% or so.
1:45:59- Yeah, desktop iTunes is not meaningful market share
1:46:02for most podcasts.
1:46:04- The only other third party,
1:46:07Pocket Casts is about 1/5 the size of iPhone,
1:46:11Apple's iPhone client.
1:46:14Castro's in the top 10, it's a great app.
1:46:19- Really, it's all just rounding errors after iTunes,
1:46:23or Apple's podcast app and Overcast.
1:46:26- Fun fact, according to Libsyn's stats,
1:46:27Castor has more market share than Luminary.
1:46:29(laughing)
1:46:32- Somehow that feels good.
1:46:33- It really does, actually.
1:46:34I'm very happy with that.
1:46:36- All right, we gotta wrap this up.
1:46:37This is probably the shortest Marco Arma appearance
1:46:40on the talk show in history.
1:46:42- Yeah, probably.
1:46:42- But I think we're out of stuff.
1:46:45I think we gotta, we have--
1:46:48- We probably should go to dinner.
1:46:49friends and family who are waiting for us to go to dinner, so we should wrap it up.
1:46:52Marco, I'm glad, happy to be here. I want to say thank you for inviting me and my family to your
1:46:58home, and thank you for taking time out of vacation week to do my show. Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:47:03It was a lot of fun, as usual. I always like it. It's always fun to do a show in person. Oh,
1:47:06yeah, definitely. Oh, I guess I should thank our sponsors. Yep. Squarespace, Linode, Linode,
1:47:14- And fracture. - And fracture.
1:47:15- Is that it? - Yeah.
1:47:16- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, before my podcast,
1:47:18Amnesia, kicks in. - Exactly.
1:47:21And we'll see you next week.
1:47:22- And we'll see, well, we'll see.
1:47:23I might need a break. (laughing)
1:47:24- Yeah, we've done a lot of shows.
1:47:26- Yeah, see you in a couple weeks.
1:47:29- Yeah.
1:47:29[ Silence ]