The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You see all this crap about how Facebook is using people's two-factor numbers to basically

00:00:05 ◼   ► spam them into more engagement?

00:00:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it's awful.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Why would you do that?

00:00:09 ◼   ► And you're literally punishing people.

00:00:11 ◼   ► You're punishing people for doing the right thing.

00:00:15 ◼   ► If you think that the right thing is setting up two-factor, which I actually think is sort

00:00:19 ◼   ► of debatable if one of the factors is your cell phone.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time it was first started being used.

00:00:29 ◼   ► what almost 10 years ago but I think that's as we've seen like security-wise

00:00:35 ◼   ► that's actually not that great not as great as we think it is no you know

00:00:41 ◼   ► butcher his name Mac Jay Cichlowski that the pinboard guy mm-hmm so he was in

00:00:48 ◼   ► town over the summer I think and we met up and he sort of he's sort of like

00:00:54 ◼   ► thrown himself in head over heels into the world of best practices for personal security.

00:01:01 ◼   ► And he's doing it. He's an activist for a bunch of Democratic candidates for Congress

00:01:08 ◼   ► for this coming year.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Oh, yeah, the Great Slate.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah, the Great Slate. It's absolutely

00:01:13 ◼   ► fantastic including the district that's my—the home district where Amy and I grew

00:01:19 ◼   ► up, which is arguably, literally, in the entire country, the single most gerrymandered congressional

00:01:24 ◼   ► district in the country. It's unbelievable. If you grew up in the area, like if you just

00:01:29 ◼   ► look at the map, it truly has got these little tiny slivers that connect areas. But if you

00:01:35 ◼   ► grew up in the area like I did and think about how disparate the areas are, it's absolutely

00:01:43 ◼   ► preposterous. And anyway, there's a great candidate that the great slate is running

00:01:47 ◼   ► for there. And I'm thinking about really putting some significant promotional effort

00:01:52 ◼   ► into it on the during fireball this year to get her elected anyway he came by and and

00:01:59 ◼   ► you know he's doing things with these Democratic candidates to teach them like hey what's the

00:02:03 ◼   ► best way to protect your email so that the you know Russians can't get into your Gmail

00:02:07 ◼   ► like they did you know two years ago and one of his big things and I believe it he totally

00:02:12 ◼   ► convinced me is go through if you have a Google account you know you could use Gmail as your

00:02:19 ◼   ► Google account. Not, you know, relatively safe. But if you use two factor, get it off

00:02:23 ◼   ► yourself. Don't don't let Google know your cell phone. Just completely disconnect your

00:02:28 ◼   ► cell phone from your Google account. Because as soon as you hook up your cell phone as

00:02:33 ◼   ► this as a factor and two factor, you're at the mercy of your carrier and the carriers

00:02:37 ◼   ► are awful, just awful. Somebody calls up and says, Hey, I'm Marco Armond. And I'm having

00:02:43 ◼   ► trouble with my my cell phone. You know, all of a sudden, they've got like a SIM card with

00:02:48 ◼   ► with your phone number on it.

00:02:49 ◼   ► And then, boom, game over for two-factor

00:02:52 ◼   ► if they also know your email.

00:02:54 ◼   ► It's really terrible.

00:02:54 ◼   ► It happens all the time.

00:02:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's one of those things like,

00:02:59 ◼   ► the foundation of that being secure was on the assumption

00:03:03 ◼   ► that, well, nobody else can get my phone number

00:03:05 ◼   ► except me, obviously, right?

00:03:06 ◼   ► But I don't think people realize,

00:03:08 ◼   ► no, that's actually fairly easy for people

00:03:10 ◼   ► to clone your phone number and start receiving things

00:03:12 ◼   ► that are supposed to be going to your phone number.

00:03:14 ◼   ► - Right, and it's not quite as easy

00:03:16 ◼   ► going in with the name, but I mean,

00:03:18 ◼   ► you don't need much information to go into your local AT&T

00:03:21 ◼   ► or Verizon or whatever, T-Mobile,

00:03:24 ◼   ► and just have some $11 an hour clerk print up a SIM card.

00:03:28 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:31 ◼   ► There you go.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I mean, it happens, it's really crazy.

00:03:35 ◼   ► So anyway, get your, think about that, anyway.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And anyway, that's what Facebook has done,

00:03:40 ◼   ► is they got people to sign up with Two Factor,

00:03:43 ◼   ► And then the longer you go without signing in to Facebook,

00:03:47 ◼   ► the more often they send you text messages asking you.

00:03:51 ◼   ► And it's so stupidly passive aggressive.

00:03:56 ◼   ► It's like, are you having trouble signing in?

00:03:59 ◼   ► It's like, no, I haven't signed in.

00:04:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's worded as though, like, obviously,

00:04:05 ◼   ► if you haven't signed in recently,

00:04:07 ◼   ► there must be something wrong with your account.

00:04:08 ◼   ► It's not that you don't wanna sign into Facebook.

00:04:11 ◼   ► I saw one guy who got hit by this and he tweeted that he's texting, you know, he's getting

00:04:18 ◼   ► these text messages and he's trying like the, those SMS bot interfaces. So he's trying things

00:04:24 ◼   ► like stop. I forget what else he tried. And then he went and checked and Facebook, I swear

00:04:31 ◼   ► to God, posted his things that he texted back to the SMS bot. They posted him to his wall

00:04:37 ◼   ► and Facebook.

00:04:38 ◼   ► So it was also, I felt like, stop, opt out, unsubscribe?

00:04:42 ◼   ► Yes, yeah.

00:04:43 ◼   ► That's amazing.

00:04:44 ◼   ► It all caps.

00:04:45 ◼   ► It's interesting because, you know, I famously, or perhaps not famously, I've still never

00:04:52 ◼   ► signed up for Facebook.

00:04:53 ◼   ► I do have an Instagram account, though, so I don't know, you know, I don't know how,

00:04:57 ◼   ► it's, I can't, I can't claim any sort of, you know, holiness in this regard.

00:05:05 ◼   ► But I never signed up for Facebook. Certainly as the years go on, it's looking like a better

00:05:11 ◼   ► and better decision. It, to me, is reminiscent of my decision to never put comments on Daring

00:05:16 ◼   ► Fireball. There were some early years where it seemed like, "Hmm, maybe I'm missing out.

00:05:21 ◼   ► I don't know." And then it crossed a certain threshold and it was like, "Dodged a bullet

00:05:25 ◼   ► on that one."

00:05:26 ◼   ► Yeah, you're playing the long game on Facebook. You're going to have 10 years of people saying,

00:05:34 ◼   ► how can you not be on Facebook, but you know,

00:05:36 ◼   ► it's starting to appear like a reasonable choice recently.

00:05:39 ◼   ► - But--

00:05:40 ◼   ► - I mean, like Tiff, so you know,

00:05:41 ◼   ► my wife Tiff deactivated her account on Facebook

00:05:44 ◼   ► over a year ago, I think, and really hasn't missed anything.

00:05:48 ◼   ► I have an account there, but I don't really ever use it

00:05:53 ◼   ► for much of anything, and all I get is like,

00:05:56 ◼   ► emails basically spamming me with like,

00:05:59 ◼   ► "Somebody commented on the Overcast page.

00:06:01 ◼   ► "You should really log in and read it

00:06:03 ◼   ► and respond to increase your rate of whatever.

00:06:05 ◼   ► And then I get emails from like strange members

00:06:08 ◼   ► of my family, like look at their comments.

00:06:10 ◼   ► I don't want to look at their comments.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I'm not speaking to them.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And it's like all I get is like this is like,

00:06:17 ◼   ► either spam about engagement on my Overcast page

00:06:19 ◼   ► or like stuff with people that like Facebook

00:06:23 ◼   ► just doesn't get the hint that like I actually

00:06:25 ◼   ► don't want to interact with some people.

00:06:27 ◼   ► And it's just like, and you know,

00:06:30 ◼   ► I read something earlier on Twitter.

00:06:32 ◼   ► I forget who it was, I'm sorry, but it was like,

00:06:34 ◼   ► it was somebody who was saying like,

00:06:36 ◼   ► she's getting these spam text messages from Facebook

00:06:39 ◼   ► and it's all about like her ex-boyfriend who like she,

00:06:41 ◼   ► you know, it kind of hurts to hear about him

00:06:43 ◼   ► and you know, it's like Facebook just doesn't,

00:06:45 ◼   ► either they, you know, their algorithms don't get it,

00:06:48 ◼   ► which is certainly likely,

00:06:50 ◼   ► but also I think they just don't care.

00:06:52 ◼   ► You know, they're shameless and they will spam the crap

00:06:56 ◼   ► out of everybody relentlessly because they know that,

00:07:00 ◼   ► you know, it works for X percent of people

00:07:02 ◼   ► to get X more page clicks and more engagement

00:07:05 ◼   ► and they need to keep their numbers up

00:07:06 ◼   ► because they're apparently bleeding users.

00:07:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the thing is that it's the,

00:07:11 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say that they're in trouble

00:07:13 ◼   ► or that they're to bring out everybody's favorite

00:07:16 ◼   ► classic Apple word, beleaguered.

00:07:18 ◼   ► - Doomed.

00:07:20 ◼   ► - They're making more money than ever,

00:07:22 ◼   ► but that's really more that they're getting more efficient

00:07:28 ◼   ► at getting more money per user,

00:07:30 ◼   ► not that they're getting more users.

00:07:32 ◼   ► Like, logins in the US are actually down for the first time,

00:07:36 ◼   ► which if I were on Facebook,

00:07:37 ◼   ► would probably keep me up at night,

00:07:39 ◼   ► because I would be very concerned about that.

00:07:43 ◼   ► - Isn't that actually also kind of what's happening to Apple?

00:07:46 ◼   ► Like, you know, basically making more money from users

00:07:49 ◼   ► rather than growing the user base itself?

00:07:51 ◼   ► - That's very possible.

00:07:52 ◼   ► I read an article today,

00:07:54 ◼   ► 'cause I tried trying to write less and less

00:07:56 ◼   ► about the financial stuff, and we can get into it.

00:07:59 ◼   ► I find it excruciatingly boring.

00:08:01 ◼   ► - There was a great Walt Mossberg tweet

00:08:03 ◼   ► I'll probably get to later in the show

00:08:04 ◼   ► just about focusing on the financial stuff

00:08:07 ◼   ► is the wrong way to look at it.

00:08:09 ◼   ► If you're really trying to look at it from the,

00:08:13 ◼   ► is Apple making good products?

00:08:15 ◼   ► Which is really what I'm interested in.

00:08:17 ◼   ► But I read a thing that, it was just some,

00:08:21 ◼   ► somebody was like, "You should file this as claim chowder."

00:08:23 ◼   ► And it was just some shitty Forbes columnist

00:08:25 ◼   ► who's saying that Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway

00:08:30 ◼   ► has upped his investment in Apple in the last year,

00:08:33 ◼   ► and this guy was making the argument

00:08:34 ◼   ► that that's a huge mistake,

00:08:36 ◼   ► and that instead, if he wants to invest in a tech company,

00:08:39 ◼   ► he should invest in Amazon.

00:08:40 ◼   ► And I don't like to get into the investment type stuff,

00:08:46 ◼   ► but I actually think that this guy maybe has a point

00:08:48 ◼   ► because I kind of feel like Apple,

00:08:50 ◼   ► if I were going to give investment advice,

00:08:53 ◼   ► I think it's quite possible that Apple's growth is over,

00:08:57 ◼   ► or at least slowed down significantly.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And this is his argument from the last two years

00:09:00 ◼   ► that Apple's only grown at like six or seven percent

00:09:03 ◼   ► the last two years, which is fine growth

00:09:05 ◼   ► for a giant company or the biggest company in the world,

00:09:08 ◼   ► but it's not, you know, if you want,

00:09:10 ◼   ► trying to be super aggressive with your investments,

00:09:13 ◼   ► it's probably not, whereas Amazon, who knows?

00:09:15 ◼   ► I don't know what the hell backs up their stock

00:09:17 ◼   ► other than the fact that, you know,

00:09:19 ◼   ► it has nothing to do with profits.

00:09:20 ◼   ► It has just to do with their,

00:09:22 ◼   ► the idea that whenever they get into something,

00:09:24 ◼   ► they dominate.

00:09:26 ◼   ► I think it's possible that Amazon stock could go up

00:09:28 ◼   ► way more than Apple's in the next, say,

00:09:30 ◼   ► two, three, four years, I don't know.

00:09:31 ◼   ► But I don't think that's a ridiculous argument.

00:09:34 ◼   ► But anyway, I think the argument that Apple's sort of

00:09:37 ◼   ► reached peak Apple is possible, at least in terms of reach.

00:09:41 ◼   ► - I mean, maybe not peak, but just like,

00:09:43 ◼   ► it's like they've transitioned, I think,

00:09:45 ◼   ► I mean, granted neither of us are financial analysts,

00:09:47 ◼   ► or really even experts in this field,

00:09:49 ◼   ► but it does seem like they have transitioned

00:09:51 ◼   ► from a growth company to a stable, long-term,

00:09:56 ◼   ► like a high-risk stock to a low-risk stock, basically,

00:10:00 ◼   ► in the sense that I don't expect them,

00:10:04 ◼   ► whatever their price is now, I don't know,

00:10:06 ◼   ► 100-something, I don't even follow.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I don't expect it to be 200 next year.

00:10:10 ◼   ► I wouldn't expect that kind of growth anymore.

00:10:13 ◼   ► - And you're just never gonna--

00:10:14 ◼   ► - They're so big.

00:10:16 ◼   ► - You're just never gonna see the sort of

00:10:17 ◼   ► quarter over quarter, year over year,

00:10:19 ◼   ► every single, for a whole series of years

00:10:22 ◼   ► after the iPhone came out, it was every single quarter

00:10:25 ◼   ► was up 28% year over year, up 30% year over year,

00:10:30 ◼   ► up 50% year over year.

00:10:31 ◼   ► Just quarter after quarter after quarter,

00:10:34 ◼   ► every single quarter of the year,

00:10:35 ◼   ► year after year after year,

00:10:36 ◼   ► were these insane consistent growth numbers

00:10:39 ◼   ► because the iPhone was growing insanely.

00:10:43 ◼   ► But you don't have to be a genius to realize

00:10:46 ◼   ► that the iPhone is possibly never going to be replicated

00:10:51 ◼   ► by any company in our lifetimes in terms of being a product

00:10:55 ◼   ► that will be used by such an incredibly large percentage

00:11:00 ◼   ► of the people who might reasonably buy one

00:11:04 ◼   ► and sells for a relatively high price,

00:11:07 ◼   ► what the average selling price now is up to 800 bucks,

00:11:11 ◼   ► and gets replaced every two to three years by normal people.

00:11:15 ◼   ► Like there's no other product in the world like that.

00:11:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, especially now that the subsidy thing

00:11:22 ◼   ► in the US has largely shifted and kind of gone away

00:11:26 ◼   ► or at least changed, like the price of the phones

00:11:28 ◼   ► is more visible to people.

00:11:30 ◼   ► Well, I guess maybe you could argue it isn't

00:11:32 ◼   ► 'cause now everyone's just paying

00:11:33 ◼   ► on these monthly installment plans.

00:11:34 ◼   ► But it's remarkable that people find a way,

00:11:39 ◼   ► whether it's subsidized or parceled up by months

00:11:43 ◼   ► or whatever it is, that people are buying a brand new

00:11:48 ◼   ► $800 plus phone every one to three years

00:11:53 ◼   ► in pretty large quantities.

00:11:54 ◼   ► That's remarkable.

00:11:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, they just accept it.

00:11:58 ◼   ► - Because people never bought computers at that rate.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Even people like me who are like,

00:12:04 ◼   ► I'll buy lots of things 'cause I like them

00:12:06 ◼   ► and I like computers a lot,

00:12:07 ◼   ► and I don't buy a new computer every year.

00:12:11 ◼   ► - Now wait a second.

00:12:12 ◼   ► - Well, if you exclude laptops.

00:12:15 ◼   ► - That's only because Apple doesn't come out with them

00:12:17 ◼   ► frequently enough.

00:12:18 ◼   ► You buy a new Pro desktop as frequently as Apple

00:12:21 ◼   ► comes out with them.

00:12:22 ◼   ► - No, that's not true.

00:12:23 ◼   ► I had my 2014 iMac, the same one that you, I think,

00:12:27 ◼   ► are still using.

00:12:28 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:12:29 ◼   ► - I bought that in 2014, and there were three other updates

00:12:32 ◼   ► to it that I didn't buy before the iMac Pro came out.

00:12:36 ◼   ► - Hmm.

00:12:38 ◼   ► - I mean, they were minor updates, really, but.

00:12:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, none of them have even vaguely tempted me

00:12:43 ◼   ► to be truthful.

00:12:43 ◼   ► - Well, like changing a desktop is a pain in the ass.

00:12:46 ◼   ► Like, I don't wanna have to change that very often.

00:12:48 ◼   ► - Oh, I hate it.

00:12:49 ◼   ► - It's a big deal.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And again, and you know, when the gains to be had

00:12:53 ◼   ► are fairly incremental, then it's kind of dumb

00:12:57 ◼   ► to go through the expense and logistical crap

00:13:01 ◼   ► of replacing your desktop every year

00:13:03 ◼   ► when you're getting, what, a 5% increase

00:13:05 ◼   ► in performance maybe?

00:13:06 ◼   ► Like, that's not enough to make that worth it.

00:13:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's also, I mean, this has been a recurring

00:13:11 ◼   ► theme on the show ever since I started it with old Dan

00:13:15 ◼   ► back in the day.

00:13:16 ◼   ► I mean, I just hate setting up a new Mac.

00:13:18 ◼   ► - Old Dan.

00:13:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I just hate setting up a new Mac, I really do.

00:13:22 ◼   ► I liked, so I just, whether it's a desktop or a laptop,

00:13:27 ◼   ► I just buy the best one I can afford, which, you know,

00:13:31 ◼   ► now that I'm older is actually like the best one they make.

00:13:33 ◼   ► So like the iMac, 5K iMac I bought in, what was that,

00:13:37 ◼   ► - 2014 or 2015?

00:13:39 ◼   ► - Yep, 2014.

00:13:40 ◼   ► - I just bought the maximum everything.

00:13:43 ◼   ► I just got the fastest i7 chip.

00:13:47 ◼   ► I put, what is it, 32 gigs of RAM?

00:13:50 ◼   ► It's gotta be 32. - 32 gigs of RAM,

00:13:51 ◼   ► one terabyte SSD.

00:13:53 ◼   ► - One terabyte SSD. - And very young,

00:13:54 ◼   ► something 290, I think, or 90, something like that.

00:13:56 ◼   ► - I don't know if I upgraded the video.

00:13:58 ◼   ► I'd have to double check on that.

00:13:59 ◼   ► - It was a small additional expense,

00:14:01 ◼   ► and I think I did it just because I didn't,

00:14:04 ◼   ► like I'd upgraded everything else, same as you,

00:14:06 ◼   ► and I'm like, I don't wanna regret this later,

00:14:08 ◼   ► and so I did it.

00:14:09 ◼   ► Although I didn't, on the iMac Pro,

00:14:10 ◼   ► now I didn't get the fancy GPU for that,

00:14:12 ◼   ► because the number, it was like $600 more,

00:14:16 ◼   ► and I don't do anything with the GPU, really,

00:14:19 ◼   ► so I got the base GPU.

00:14:20 ◼   ► - So back to the iPhone,

00:14:25 ◼   ► there's just never gonna be anything like that again.

00:14:28 ◼   ► Or if there is, whatever it is is unforeseen at this point.

00:14:33 ◼   ► There's nothing on the market that's going to be like that.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And so I just, like the insane growth for Apple is over.

00:14:41 ◼   ► The fact that they're sustaining it,

00:14:42 ◼   ► the fact that like the numbers

00:14:43 ◼   ► that I just linked to a thing today,

00:14:46 ◼   ► that for the first time ever, Apple, some group,

00:14:49 ◼   ► who knows if it's accurate or not,

00:14:50 ◼   ► but some groups at Apple took 51% of the revenue

00:14:54 ◼   ► in the global smartphone market,

00:14:57 ◼   ► which is insane for a product that sells for $800

00:15:01 ◼   ► on average, and all competing devices sell

00:15:04 ◼   ► for an average of 300, and Apple has 51% of the revenue.

00:15:08 ◼   ► It's crazy.

00:15:09 ◼   ► - I mean, look, Apple is really good

00:15:11 ◼   ► at making lots of money.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Like, they are really good at that.

00:15:15 ◼   ► You know, we can get into lots of debates,

00:15:17 ◼   ► and we probably will, about things like, you know,

00:15:19 ◼   ► competitiveness and market share in certain areas,

00:15:21 ◼   ► but like, they're really good at making money

00:15:23 ◼   ► with whatever market share they have in something.

00:15:25 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:15:26 ◼   ► That's very true.

00:15:28 ◼   ► Same thing with the watch, really.

00:15:31 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Which is funny,

00:15:32 ◼   ► 'cause the watch are coming at it a different way,

00:15:34 ◼   ► where there was a story this week

00:15:35 ◼   ► that they sold more watches

00:15:37 ◼   ► than the entire Swiss watch industry combined,

00:15:40 ◼   ► I think last quarter, not last year.

00:15:43 ◼   ► But holiday quarter's a big one for watches,

00:15:45 ◼   ► 'cause people get 'em as gifts.

00:15:47 ◼   ► And I think that they said that the average Swiss watch

00:15:51 ◼   ► sells for something like $780,

00:15:54 ◼   ► and the average selling price of an Apple watch,

00:15:57 ◼   ► I think both by common sense and by Horace Dedue's estimates, which have some actual

00:16:04 ◼   ► factual analysis of Apple's financials behind them, pegs at around like $330. And by common

00:16:12 ◼   ► sense, I mean a $330 average selling price for Apple Watch means the average Apple Watch

00:16:17 ◼   ► is the base model made out of aluminum.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Yeah, because you figure like they probably sell more of the 42 size than 38 size.

00:16:24 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:25 ◼   ► And what does that cost? 300 for the 42 base model?

00:16:27 ◼   ► - Something like that, yeah.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And you know-- - Yeah, so that makes sense.

00:16:30 ◼   ► - And you know, whether or not you get it

00:16:31 ◼   ► with the cellular or whatever.

00:16:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:16:34 ◼   ► - But it's all centered around the base models

00:16:36 ◼   ► and the total number of people buying

00:16:38 ◼   ► the stainless steel ones, let alone the edition,

00:16:41 ◼   ► are so few that it hardly even moves,

00:16:44 ◼   ► hardly even nudges the average selling price.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And anecdotally, from what I see on people's wrists,

00:16:49 ◼   ► that's exactly it.

00:16:50 ◼   ► And it's, you know, makes common sense.

00:16:52 ◼   ► For most people, a $300 watch is a really expensive watch.

00:16:56 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, especially one that you basically

00:16:58 ◼   ► have to replace every two years or so,

00:17:00 ◼   ► because its battery becomes useless.

00:17:01 ◼   ► - Right, I mean--

00:17:02 ◼   ► - Is there gonna be a battery gate for the watch?

00:17:05 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:17:06 ◼   ► - I wonder.

00:17:07 ◼   ► - I hope not.

00:17:08 ◼   ► I don't wanna have to talk about that for six months.

00:17:10 ◼   ► - Anecdotally, it does seem like Series Zero watches,

00:17:14 ◼   ► like the original Apple Watch,

00:17:16 ◼   ► they're getting worse battery life.

00:17:18 ◼   ► Like, we got Jonas one when it was brand new,

00:17:20 ◼   ► and he's worn it, he's worn it pretty much every day,

00:17:25 ◼   ► or certainly like every school day,

00:17:27 ◼   ► ever since they came out,

00:17:28 ◼   ► and his battery life has gotten worse recently.

00:17:31 ◼   ► And it makes sense.

00:17:33 ◼   ► It's what, two and a half years of charge cycles,

00:17:36 ◼   ► of nightly charge cycles in,

00:17:38 ◼   ► and I think the battery's worn out.

00:17:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I think as a developer,

00:17:45 ◼   ► it's really hard to support the first gen Apple Watch,

00:17:48 ◼   ► and I think a big thing holding back

00:17:51 ◼   ► what watchOS can offer for developers,

00:17:54 ◼   ► like API-wise and backgrounding-wise,

00:17:56 ◼   ► things like my background audio requests.

00:17:59 ◼   ► I think a lot of that is being held back

00:18:01 ◼   ► by the first generation watch hardware,

00:18:03 ◼   ► but it's kind of, from that angle,

00:18:05 ◼   ► it's not so nice if you have one,

00:18:07 ◼   ► but it's kind of nice from that angle

00:18:08 ◼   ► that these watches are just really becoming

00:18:12 ◼   ► not very useful anymore en masse this year,

00:18:16 ◼   ► because the batteries are now so old in them

00:18:18 ◼   ► that they're not holding a charge

00:18:20 ◼   ► throughout the whole day anymore,

00:18:21 ◼   ► for most people who have them.

00:18:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's true.

00:18:25 ◼   ► I don't know if it's gonna be a scandal or not.

00:18:27 ◼   ► I don't know, it's hard to predict.

00:18:30 ◼   ► - Probably not.

00:18:31 ◼   ► - I do feel like-- - The first generation

00:18:32 ◼   ► watch was so slow, like can you even tell

00:18:34 ◼   ► if it's being throttled?

00:18:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know, I don't know about that.

00:18:38 ◼   ► It felt like maybe they just turned on throttling

00:18:42 ◼   ► right out of the factory.

00:18:44 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:18:46 ◼   ► It's funny, I was thinking about that recently,

00:18:50 ◼   ► and I was thinking about it in, we can get to it,

00:18:54 ◼   ► in light of the balance between shipping stuff

00:18:59 ◼   ► on a schedule, shipping stuff with a certain number

00:19:05 ◼   ► of features, and shipping stuff with a certain quality level

00:19:08 ◼   ► that those three things, it's not, you pick one,

00:19:11 ◼   ► you wanna balance all three.

00:19:14 ◼   ► And I don't know, I kind of, Apple Watch did ship late,

00:19:19 ◼   ► I think a little bit later than even Apple hoped.

00:19:21 ◼   ► I mean, there were reports that they were,

00:19:23 ◼   ► that the year that they announced it in September

00:19:26 ◼   ► and even said then it'll ship next year.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And it didn't ship the next year until like May.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And even then it was like six weeks back ordered

00:19:36 ◼   ► for most people.

00:19:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was like immediately back ordered

00:19:39 ◼   ► for most configurations.

00:19:40 ◼   ► - Right.

00:19:41 ◼   ► - For up until, like I think it officially launched

00:19:44 ◼   ► in April, but you couldn't really get

00:19:46 ◼   ► a lot of the configurations until like June or July.

00:19:48 ◼   ► - Right, and it was a product that by several accounts,

00:19:53 ◼   ► Apple had been hoping until pretty late in the game

00:19:58 ◼   ► that they might get out for the holidays the year before.

00:20:02 ◼   ► And it came out as late as it did

00:20:03 ◼   ► and really was sort of a subpar,

00:20:06 ◼   ► both software and hardware thing.

00:20:10 ◼   ► I honestly, in hindsight, I'm, in hindsight,

00:20:14 ◼   ► I've been wondering, should they have waited another year?

00:20:18 ◼   ► should like what we now call the Series 1 watch

00:20:21 ◼   ► have been the original Apple Watch.

00:20:23 ◼   ► I kind of see why they did it,

00:20:26 ◼   ► and the other factor you have to recall at the time

00:20:29 ◼   ► is they were facing a daily battery of,

00:20:33 ◼   ► Apple hasn't released anything new

00:20:34 ◼   ► since Steve Jobs died, reports.

00:20:36 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, 'cause that was not that long after the

00:20:41 ◼   ► can't innovate anymore my ass thing.

00:20:43 ◼   ► That was like, what, about a year later?

00:20:45 ◼   ► And you know, 'cause that really was,

00:20:47 ◼   ► that was the narrative back then was Apple can't innovate anymore, Samsung was doing

00:20:50 ◼   ► all the innovation and it turned out that was mostly about big phones. It turned out

00:20:55 ◼   ► that Apple wasn't making big enough phones and then they started making big enough phones

00:20:58 ◼   ► and everyone stopped talking about that. So that was kind of BS, it turns out. But the

00:21:04 ◼   ► Apple Watch Series 1, or the first generation Apple Watch had so many problems with just

00:21:10 ◼   ► like focus. You know, like the software was a disaster, it was a total mess. The third

00:21:16 ◼   ► party app implementation was horrible with like the watch kit where like the

00:21:21 ◼   ► everything was running on the phone and just kind of sent like basically

00:21:24 ◼   ► drawing commands to the watch that would end it was so slow almost nothing worked

00:21:29 ◼   ► everything would time out or fail like it was it was really rough and then all

00:21:34 ◼   ► of the you know marketing focus on things like they wanted you to like be

00:21:38 ◼   ► browsing like news feeds on your watch and and all the stuff about like that

00:21:42 ◼   ► like the digital touch sending people your heartbeat and doodling little

00:21:45 ◼   ► pictures and poking your friends through their wrists.

00:21:48 ◼   ► Like there was so much weird stuff

00:21:50 ◼   ► in that first watch release that fortunately

00:21:52 ◼   ► they've mostly moved past or mostly fixed.

00:21:55 ◼   ► There's still some of that weirdness in the watch.

00:21:57 ◼   ► Like, you know, like I think the honeycomb screen

00:21:59 ◼   ► is still terrible and there's like digital,

00:22:02 ◼   ► at least digital touch stuff,

00:22:03 ◼   ► they like buried pretty well now.

00:22:05 ◼   ► You don't usually find it.

00:22:06 ◼   ► But yeah, there's still so much about watchOS

00:22:11 ◼   ► that seems like it was made on a different planet

00:22:14 ◼   ► than Apple's other products?

00:22:15 ◼   ► - I definitely think that they should have, in hindsight,

00:22:18 ◼   ► maybe they should have released it

00:22:19 ◼   ► when they did as a product,

00:22:21 ◼   ► and maybe it was useful enough,

00:22:23 ◼   ► and maybe by releasing it when they did

00:22:26 ◼   ► and getting feedback from real people

00:22:29 ◼   ► that the subsequent watchOS 2, 3, and 4

00:22:32 ◼   ► were better than they would have been

00:22:34 ◼   ► if they'd waited a year.

00:22:35 ◼   ► They would have been a year behind

00:22:36 ◼   ► on sort of zeroing in on, okay,

00:22:39 ◼   ► notifications and fitness tracking, that's it.

00:22:43 ◼   ► That's what people like and use about this product.

00:22:46 ◼   ► So I get being wrong about things like digital touch,

00:22:51 ◼   ► you know, was that a thing or not?

00:22:53 ◼   ► But the one thing that they clearly should have known

00:22:56 ◼   ► before they released it was that the original SDK

00:22:58 ◼   ► was garbage.

00:22:59 ◼   ► This is, that this is, this is, yeah.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Just in, it's the only time I can ever recall.

00:23:06 ◼   ► And now it's, you know, it's been a long time.

00:23:10 ◼   ► I don't know, however long.

00:23:12 ◼   ► The first review product I ever got from Apple

00:23:15 ◼   ► was the Verizon iPhone 4, so I think that was 2010.

00:23:19 ◼   ► So since 2010, I've been getting products to review,

00:23:23 ◼   ► and every time I've gotten--

00:23:25 ◼   ► - It was early 2011, I think.

00:23:26 ◼   ► - Maybe it was 2011, maybe it was like--

00:23:28 ◼   ► - The 4S was fall of 2011, right before Steve died.

00:23:31 ◼   ► So I believe that came out like January or something.

00:23:33 ◼   ► - All right, you're right then, so 2011,

00:23:34 ◼   ► so seven years of me getting products from Apple to review.

00:23:42 ◼   ► And every time I've gotten a product to review from Apple,

00:23:47 ◼   ► and everybody I know who gets products to review from Apple,

00:23:52 ◼   ► when you get it, they don't just ship it to you.

00:23:55 ◼   ► Every once in a while, there's an exception,

00:23:57 ◼   ► like with the MacBook Pros, the new MacBook Pros.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I did have a briefing, but they didn't have--

00:24:05 ◼   ► - Their new MacBook Pros?

00:24:06 ◼   ► - No, the last time when they came out

00:24:08 ◼   ► with the Touch Bar ones.

00:24:10 ◼   ► Every time I've gotten a review product,

00:24:11 ◼   ► I've had a product briefing with somebody

00:24:13 ◼   ► from product marketing and somebody from Apple PR,

00:24:16 ◼   ► either by myself or in a very small group,

00:24:18 ◼   ► like say just me and Dalrymple together.

00:24:21 ◼   ► And they show you what they wanna show you

00:24:25 ◼   ► and they take your questions, which is great.

00:24:28 ◼   ► But they never just give you the product

00:24:32 ◼   ► in like a PDF pamphlet or something like that.

00:24:35 ◼   ► They wanna tell you about it.

00:24:36 ◼   ► And like the exception I was gonna say

00:24:39 ◼   ► with the MacBook Pros is I had a product briefing,

00:24:41 ◼   ► They didn't give me like all of them and then because they weren't ready yet

00:24:44 ◼   ► And so they did ship me like the 15 inch like a week later or something something like that

00:24:49 ◼   ► So it's not like they're gonna make you if they're gonna give you two or three MacBook pros to review

00:24:54 ◼   ► That's right

00:24:54 ◼   ► Like everyone only got the MacBook escape to review right first time and then like the touch bar 15 came later, right?

00:25:01 ◼   ► So yeah, exactly

00:25:02 ◼   ► So the escape and and there was a briefing where we could play with the touch bar

00:25:06 ◼   ► But they didn't have them for us to take with us and so they shipped them to us a week later

00:25:11 ◼   ► But there was a briefing where we had the touch bar thing in front of us and could ask questions about it

00:25:15 ◼   ► So it's I would call that like the podcast equivalent of a footnote

00:25:20 ◼   ► It's a minor exception. Anyway, the only product I can ever

00:25:24 ◼   ► Remember where the briefing was mostly

00:25:28 ◼   ► Apologizing for problems with the product was the original Apple watch

00:25:32 ◼   ► It was like this is gonna be slow like even in the product briefing with a prepared Apple watch and their prepared demo

00:25:39 ◼   ► There were things, aspects of it that they were like,

00:25:42 ◼   ► this is gonna be slow, we're working on it.

00:25:45 ◼   ► And it's just so unusual.

00:25:47 ◼   ► - Like in so many ways it was kind of the opposite

00:25:50 ◼   ► of the first generation iPhone.

00:25:51 ◼   ► Where like the first generation iPhone,

00:25:53 ◼   ► it was similarly to the watch,

00:25:55 ◼   ► it had like extreme technical constraints

00:25:57 ◼   ► to try to get an acceptable amount of processing power

00:26:00 ◼   ► and battery life into something that size,

00:26:01 ◼   ► running this kind of advanced OS.

00:26:04 ◼   ► But with the original iPhone,

00:26:05 ◼   ► they chose to basically have it do less,

00:26:08 ◼   ► but have the things it does be executed very well.

00:26:12 ◼   ► Whereas the first generation watch,

00:26:14 ◼   ► and to this day I think still kind of the entire watch,

00:26:17 ◼   ► it's not as bad now, but the first generation watch

00:26:20 ◼   ► had the kind of the opposite approach of like,

00:26:22 ◼   ► we're gonna have this do a whole bunch of crap

00:26:24 ◼   ► even though we don't actually think it can do

00:26:26 ◼   ► a lot of it very well because we wanna

00:26:29 ◼   ► kinda see what sticks.

00:26:30 ◼   ► And that was, it's a fundamentally different approach

00:26:32 ◼   ► and you know, it's easy for us to argue in hindsight,

00:26:34 ◼   ► like well, turns out it's only used for notifications

00:26:38 ◼   ► fitness or whatever, you know, whatever the use case is,

00:26:43 ◼   ► it's easy for us to look back on it now and say,

00:26:45 ◼   ► launching that first SDK was almost certainly a mistake.

00:26:48 ◼   ► Like, it should have launched without third-party apps

00:26:52 ◼   ► because it was clearly not able to handle third-party apps

00:26:55 ◼   ► yet in both hardware or software.

00:26:58 ◼   ► So it should have launched that.

00:27:01 ◼   ► But it's hard, like thinking back,

00:27:01 ◼   ► like when you're actually in the process of making these

00:27:04 ◼   ► products, it's really hard to make the right call on that

00:27:06 ◼   ► that kind of thing every time.

00:27:07 ◼   ► Like, do you support third-party apps or not?

00:27:08 ◼   ► And I think at some point during some interview,

00:27:11 ◼   ► I think somebody asked Schiller about that.

00:27:13 ◼   ► It might have been on your show at WBC.

00:27:15 ◼   ► I can't remember whether it was that or not,

00:27:17 ◼   ► but it seemed kind of like Schiller,

00:27:20 ◼   ► in the most verbose way that he ever will,

00:27:26 ◼   ► said something along the lines of,

00:27:28 ◼   ► it was a hard decision and maybe we picked wrong

00:27:30 ◼   ► on whether to ship with support for third-party apps.

00:27:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't remember if it was on my show or not,

00:27:35 ◼   ► I have terrible podcast amnesia.

00:27:37 ◼   ► But that sort of feels true, and in hindsight,

00:27:39 ◼   ► that's sort of how I feel.

00:27:41 ◼   ► And they could have gotten away with

00:27:43 ◼   ► the third party interaction with the watch,

00:27:45 ◼   ► could have been, on that first version of the watch,

00:27:48 ◼   ► could have been entirely through the mirroring

00:27:50 ◼   ► of notifications from your phone.

00:27:53 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, and in fact, I think a lot of apps

00:27:55 ◼   ► are actually doing that now.

00:27:56 ◼   ► A lot of apps are realizing now that

00:27:58 ◼   ► actually just using rich notification functionality

00:28:01 ◼   ► from the phone provides a better overall watch experience

00:28:04 ◼   ► than making a watch app.

00:28:05 ◼   ► - Yep, it's the only thing I ever use, honestly,

00:28:07 ◼   ► other than playback controls for my AirPods, really.

00:28:10 ◼   ► And it would've been fine, I think, in the first year.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Anyway, that's sort of a sidetrack.

00:28:18 ◼   ► While you're here, it's so funny, too,

00:28:22 ◼   ► 'cause I have other people on the show

00:28:24 ◼   ► who have their own podcasts,

00:28:25 ◼   ► and I listen to them on their shows.

00:28:27 ◼   ► But you're the only one, possibly because ATP,

00:28:30 ◼   ► and I'm not just here to butter your toast,

00:28:32 ◼   ► but it's the only show I can think of

00:28:34 ◼   ► where I try to listen to every episode.

00:28:37 ◼   ► So I listen to a lot of it.

00:28:40 ◼   ► I keep thinking tonight that you sound

00:28:41 ◼   ► like you're talking real slow.

00:28:43 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:28:45 ◼   ► - You sound the same way to me.

00:28:47 ◼   ► - I just keep thinking, God, why is he so slow?

00:28:51 ◼   ► Is he tired?

00:28:53 ◼   ► And then I realize it's, you know, we don't have.

00:28:55 ◼   ► Wait, smart speed is where it takes all the gaps

00:29:00 ◼   ► in my sentences.

00:29:02 ◼   ► What's the other feature?

00:29:02 ◼   ► Just speed up.

00:29:03 ◼   ► Is there a name for that?

00:29:04 ◼   ► - Well, there's, yeah, there's variable playback speed.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Every podcast app offers that.

00:29:09 ◼   ► Yeah, so that's just literally speeding up all the audio

00:29:11 ◼   ► by a certain rate, and smart speed is what shortens

00:29:13 ◼   ► the silence is more than the surrounding audio.

00:29:15 ◼   ► - You know what, that's one reason why I don't mind

00:29:18 ◼   ► at the moment that I can't just tell HomePod

00:29:23 ◼   ► to play something from Overcast.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Like, I wrote about it in my HomePod review,

00:29:29 ◼   ► but I tried out the built-in play a podcast thing.

00:29:34 ◼   ► You just tell it an episode of a podcast

00:29:36 ◼   ► and it gets it from iTunes library and it works pretty well.

00:29:39 ◼   ► And there's too many podcasts that have ambiguous names,

00:29:42 ◼   ► including mine, unfortunately.

00:29:43 ◼   ► But although it kind of worked for my show, I don't know.

00:29:48 ◼   ► Some people said that it say that it doesn't.

00:29:50 ◼   ► Some people, speaking of old Dan,

00:29:51 ◼   ► some people say that when they try to get my show to play,

00:29:53 ◼   ► it plays like an old episode with me and Dan Benjamin.

00:29:57 ◼   ► I tried it with my show and it played the newest episode with Moltz or whoever it was.

00:30:03 ◼   ► But then other times it just plays like some other show that's called a talk show or something.

00:30:07 ◼   ► Anyway, it works. But because I use Overcast to follow the podcasts I listen to, I don't

00:30:14 ◼   ► want to listen to anything outside it and then not have it be marked as read or for

00:30:18 ◼   ► like long shows like ATP to keep my playback position for when I return. So I just use

00:30:24 ◼   ► you know, and the nice thing about podcasts is that unlike a song, which is only three minutes,

00:30:31 ◼   ► three, four minutes, and if you're doing it by airplay, you've only got three minutes before the

00:30:38 ◼   ► next thing is up, you know, whereas a podcast tell it to play an hour or two hour podcast.

00:30:43 ◼   ► I don't care if you know, because I can still talk to the HomePad and tell it to

00:30:47 ◼   ► pause or play or something like that. And it'll keep going. But doing it with airplay through

00:30:52 ◼   ► through overcast, I still like having the variable speed too. It's ruined me, really.

00:31:00 ◼   ► I can't listen to any kind of audio show, like radio thing, and not feel like they're

00:31:06 ◼   ► talking too slow. Even the morning news feature where you come down and you're making coffee

00:31:11 ◼   ► and you're like, "Hey, HomePod, tell me the news," and it's like, "Why do these people

00:31:16 ◼   ► on NPR talk so slow?"

00:31:19 ◼   ► - What's really hard for me is watching YouTube videos

00:31:22 ◼   ► because obviously there's no audio manipulation

00:31:24 ◼   ► going on there.

00:31:25 ◼   ► Although why they don't add a dynamics compressor

00:31:28 ◼   ► to make everyone's volume high, I don't know.

00:31:31 ◼   ► Why is that not an option in either production or playback?

00:31:34 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:31:35 ◼   ► 'Cause YouTube volume levels are all over the place.

00:31:38 ◼   ► So that's a huge problem that they should solve.

00:31:41 ◼   ► But yeah, it's really hard for me to watch YouTube videos

00:31:43 ◼   ► because they just move so much more slowly

00:31:46 ◼   ► than what I'm accustomed to hearing,

00:31:48 ◼   ► which is podcasts with smart speed at like 1.25x.

00:31:52 ◼   ► So it isn't a huge difference,

00:31:55 ◼   ► but it's noticeable enough that it just,

00:31:57 ◼   ► every YouTube video to me seems really slow paced.

00:32:01 ◼   ► It also doesn't help that nobody seems to edit.

00:32:05 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:07 ◼   ► - I don't know, we can get into YouTube later

00:32:10 ◼   ► when we talk about their Apple TV app.

00:32:12 ◼   ► But anyway, I listen to your show all the time.

00:32:14 ◼   ► - I am a little curious though,

00:32:15 ◼   ► Like with the HomePod and podcasting, like, so you know, I would love so much, and I talk

00:32:20 ◼   ► about this everywhere, so I'm not gonna dwell on it too long, but I would love so much for

00:32:23 ◼   ► there to be an audio Siri intent, which would also enable things like Spotify, just to be

00:32:29 ◼   ► able to tell, you know, "Hey, Dingus, play, you know, play the latest episode of the talk

00:32:34 ◼   ► show in Overcast."

00:32:35 ◼   ► You know, the same way you can tell Siri to add things to your to-do list in other apps,

00:32:42 ◼   ► in things, in OmniFocus.

00:32:43 ◼   ► You can use other app names for certain intents,

00:32:46 ◼   ► and they work pretty well.

00:32:48 ◼   ► So I would love to have that kind of thing with Siri,

00:32:52 ◼   ► just to have an audio intent.

00:32:53 ◼   ► The main challenge to this IC is, I guess, twofold.

00:32:58 ◼   ► One is you have to build some kind of indexing interface

00:33:03 ◼   ► so that the audio app can provide Siri

00:33:07 ◼   ► with a list of what content is available in it.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And for something like Overcast, that is fairly easy,

00:33:14 ◼   ► because if you limit it to only things

00:33:17 ◼   ► that you already subscribe to in the app,

00:33:19 ◼   ► that might only be between two and 30 entries

00:33:22 ◼   ► for most people.

00:33:24 ◼   ► But for something like Spotify, it's like,

00:33:26 ◼   ► well, are you gonna ask Spotify

00:33:28 ◼   ► for all the music that they have?

00:33:30 ◼   ► Like, that's a bit of a challenge to implement that,

00:33:33 ◼   ► and maybe they don't wanna tell you

00:33:34 ◼   ► all the music that they have,

00:33:35 ◼   ► so there's challenges there.

00:33:37 ◼   ► So that's why I think they probably haven't done

00:33:39 ◼   ► something like this.

00:33:40 ◼   ► But another thing is, and this is kind of a bigger problem

00:33:45 ◼   ► I think with the HomePod, is that Siri is still very

00:33:48 ◼   ► device specific with what you're asking it

00:33:52 ◼   ► when it comes to those APIs.

00:33:55 ◼   ► The HomePod has a built-in Apple Music client,

00:33:57 ◼   ► so it can directly query Apple Music with no phone nearby,

00:34:00 ◼   ► and it can get songs and things from Apple Music

00:34:04 ◼   ► and from the podcast directory.

00:34:07 ◼   ► But if they built something, if they built the Siri audio intent

00:34:09 ◼   ► that would allow Overcast and Spotify and things like that,

00:34:12 ◼   ► if they built it the way that these things are built so far,

00:34:15 ◼   ► they're only running on the phone.

00:34:17 ◼   ► And so that phone would have to be nearby

00:34:20 ◼   ► for it to say, hey phone, play this thing,

00:34:22 ◼   ► and the phone would have to look at its own

00:34:24 ◼   ► locally stored index of what's available

00:34:27 ◼   ► and then tell the HomePod, okay, play this thing.

00:34:30 ◼   ► And doing it that way would provide something like,

00:34:32 ◼   ► well, maybe would provide something like Smart Speed.

00:34:35 ◼   ► Because if the app is just running on the phone

00:34:38 ◼   ► and the Siri command just tells it what to play,

00:34:43 ◼   ► and preconfigures the AirPlay output

00:34:46 ◼   ► to say send to the HomePod, that's great.

00:34:48 ◼   ► But a much more powerful way to do this

00:34:50 ◼   ► is the way that I think all of the other assistants work,

00:34:52 ◼   ► and the way Sonos works,

00:34:55 ◼   ► which is, and Google's Chromecast protocol,

00:34:57 ◼   ► or casting protocol,

00:35:01 ◼   ► is like if you have some kind of scalar integration

00:35:02 ◼   ► with the voice assistant,

00:35:07 ◼   ► you tell it, play this thing in Overcast,

00:35:06 ◼   ► and it queries overcast's web service.

00:35:09 ◼   ► And doesn't involve any phones or iPads at all.

00:35:11 ◼   ► It queries the web service and the web service tells it,

00:35:14 ◼   ► here's a URL, start playing this URL.

00:35:18 ◼   ► And it fetches that and plays it

00:35:19 ◼   ► without the involvement of phones.

00:35:21 ◼   ► That is a much more versatile and resilient way

00:35:25 ◼   ► to do things, but that's not how Siri Kit

00:35:29 ◼   ► works right now at all.

00:35:30 ◼   ► And when you're just talking about Siri on the phones,

00:35:34 ◼   ► the iPad on the watch, that's kind of okay, although it does limit the watch over LTE,

00:35:38 ◼   ► but that's otherwise that's kind of okay. But now that you have the HomePod, it kind

00:35:43 ◼   ► of raises the question like, is that the right design for this? And, and, you know, would

00:35:48 ◼   ► they be better off doing something that's more web service based? But honestly, I don't

00:35:54 ◼   ► think I see Apple doing that or being good at that.

00:35:57 ◼   ► It just seems outside their DNA. It's like they're so app centric, you know, like, I

00:36:02 ◼   ► I don't think that the reason that this thing comes out of the box not being able to support

00:36:06 ◼   ► Spotify, I really don't think it's pure competitive spite.

00:36:10 ◼   ► You know, like, screw Spotify, we want everybody to sign up for Apple Music, so we're only going

00:36:15 ◼   ► to support Apple Music.

00:36:16 ◼   ► I think it's way more complex than that.

00:36:18 ◼   ► I think that it's entirely possible that they want, like what you said, an audio intent for

00:36:24 ◼   ► SiriKit that would let Overcast hook up to it and would let somebody like Spotify hook

00:36:31 ◼   ► up to it if they wanted to, through the phone app and only work when the phone is at home

00:36:38 ◼   ► on the network. I don't see them, but like most of these other devices, and I'm a bit

00:36:46 ◼   ► of a rube when it comes to Spotify, but I've learned since Ombod came out, you know, that

00:36:52 ◼   ► what's it called Spotify Connect or something is the name of their cast like service.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that sounds awesome.

00:36:57 ◼   ► - Right, but it's like you said,

00:36:58 ◼   ► it's driven by the truth is,

00:37:02 ◼   ► as Steve Jobs said, the truth is in the cloud.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And so you can give the direction from your phone

00:37:08 ◼   ► and the direction goes from the Spotify phone app

00:37:12 ◼   ► to Spotify server.

00:37:14 ◼   ► And the direction is play whatever playlist

00:37:17 ◼   ► and play it on my kitchen speaker.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And the server says, okay,

00:37:22 ◼   ► and then pings your kitchen speaker,

00:37:24 ◼   ► which is already signed into your account

00:37:25 ◼   ► and says, yeah, like you said, here, play this URL.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And then it plays.

00:37:29 ◼   ► And so it's going from whatever device

00:37:31 ◼   ► you issued the directive on to Spotify in the cloud,

00:37:35 ◼   ► from Spotify in the cloud to whatever device that is,

00:37:37 ◼   ► which might be the same device, you know,

00:37:39 ◼   ► could just come right back, but then it plays right there.

00:37:41 ◼   ► - And then from that point forward,

00:37:43 ◼   ► once the playback has started,

00:37:44 ◼   ► the source device is not involved.

00:37:47 ◼   ► - Right, but I don't see Apple,

00:37:49 ◼   ► I don't blame Apple at all for not supporting Spotify's

00:37:54 ◼   ► own proprietary connection thing.

00:37:59 ◼   ► It's not just as much, it's not simple,

00:38:03 ◼   ► we're not gonna let any third party audio play at all.

00:38:06 ◼   ► So I could see them adding support for this

00:38:11 ◼   ► and I don't know if Spotify would do it though

00:38:12 ◼   ► if it's not Spotify Connect, who knows?

00:38:14 ◼   ► - Ultimately, I don't know what Apple's strategy here is

00:38:20 ◼   ► but I think they could sell a lot more of these

00:38:24 ◼   ► probably high profit $350 speakers

00:38:27 ◼   ► and presumably there's probably gonna be

00:38:29 ◼   ► more than one HomePod model in the future

00:38:31 ◼   ► so they could probably sell many different items

00:38:33 ◼   ► in the family of HomePods.

00:38:35 ◼   ► Selling a lot of high profit hardware

00:38:38 ◼   ► if they covered more use cases

00:38:41 ◼   ► and supported more third party services.

00:38:44 ◼   ► And I would imagine,

00:38:46 ◼   ► while there is a lot of long term strategic value

00:38:50 ◼   ► to boosting Apple Music, Apple Music itself

00:38:52 ◼   ► is probably not much of a money maker.

00:38:54 ◼   ► You know, music streaming is famously unprofitable,

00:38:57 ◼   ► as Spotify knows very well.

00:38:59 ◼   ► So it, like, I would imagine Apple is probably better suited

00:39:03 ◼   ► making sure their hardware sells really well,

00:39:06 ◼   ► rather than trying to artificially hamper the hardware sales

00:39:11 ◼   ► to boost an unprofitable web service.

00:39:13 ◼   ► That doesn't really sound like Apple.

00:39:15 ◼   ► - Well, anyway, we can keep talking about HomePod

00:39:17 ◼   ► in a minute, but I wanna take a break here.

00:39:19 ◼   ► But it reminded me with you on the show,

00:39:22 ◼   ► and I've been meaning to say this on the show,

00:39:25 ◼   ► I just posted on "Daring Fireball" yesterday

00:39:27 ◼   ► about sponsorships and sponsoring a podcast in particular,

00:39:31 ◼   ► that I never, the podcast has been doing,

00:39:33 ◼   ► my podcast has been doing well.

00:39:35 ◼   ► I think ATP's been doing well.

00:39:38 ◼   ► Lots of shows, you guys do 52 shows a year, which is nuts,

00:39:42 ◼   ► but lots of shows, three sponsors a week,

00:39:45 ◼   ► and it's great, and I'm very happy about it.

00:39:47 ◼   ► And I love all the sponsors that have come back.

00:39:49 ◼   ► I love sponsors that have been with me for years

00:39:52 ◼   ► and I'd like it because it seems to me like validation

00:39:57 ◼   ► that it actually works, that paying money for me

00:40:00 ◼   ► to tell you about such and such company

00:40:03 ◼   ► and then years later, they're still sponsoring

00:40:05 ◼   ► an episode, one episode a month or even more than that

00:40:09 ◼   ► shows that they must be getting good results,

00:40:11 ◼   ► so that's great.

00:40:11 ◼   ► But then I never have to, I don't have to pimp it

00:40:15 ◼   ► for lack of a better word.

00:40:16 ◼   ► I never say, hey, you know, like if you have an app

00:40:19 ◼   ► or a service, or you work at a company

00:40:21 ◼   ► where you think their thing would do well

00:40:23 ◼   ► with the talk show or Daring Fireball audience,

00:40:26 ◼   ► you should think about sponsoring the show.

00:40:28 ◼   ► And I almost, in the back of my head,

00:40:30 ◼   ► I think that I've got a lack of variety

00:40:35 ◼   ► on the sponsors on the podcast.

00:40:38 ◼   ► And I think, duh, because I never tell anybody

00:40:40 ◼   ► that you can sponsor it because I don't have to.

00:40:43 ◼   ► And so I'm taking a moment here

00:40:44 ◼   ► before I introduce our first sponsor,

00:40:48 ◼   ► who happens to be a new sponsor, which is very cool.

00:40:50 ◼   ► But just to you, the listener, to think about it,

00:40:54 ◼   ► if you've got an app or something like that,

00:40:56 ◼   ► the rates for the podcast are less than half the rate

00:41:00 ◼   ► to sponsor the weekly sponsorship thing at Daring Fireball.

00:41:02 ◼   ► So it's more affordable.

00:41:04 ◼   ► It is, to me, I think a terrific audience.

00:41:08 ◼   ► And just to me, just to sell it,

00:41:11 ◼   ► the number of sponsors who come back over and over again

00:41:13 ◼   ► is sort of my proof that it's a pretty good,

00:41:17 ◼   ► effective way of spending your ad money.

00:41:19 ◼   ► And the other thing too that I run into both

00:41:21 ◼   ► with the podcast and when I sell the weekly sponsorships

00:41:24 ◼   ► in particular is that a lot of the sort of indie type

00:41:28 ◼   ► companies that sponsor it, the whole idea of buying ads

00:41:33 ◼   ► is new to you and therefore weird.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Just to name a company, like Squarespace knows

00:41:42 ◼   ► how to buy ads.

00:41:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, they're pretty good at it.

00:41:45 ◼   ► - Right.

00:41:46 ◼   ► You know and it can be scary to say I'm gonna spend a couple thousand bucks to sponsor a podcast I get it

00:41:54 ◼   ► But you know if you've ever been thinking about it, seriously, it's not hard and you can just go to

00:42:00 ◼   ► For me I had the landing page for me if you're interested

00:42:03 ◼   ► Is that neat any AT fm? That's Jesse char who handles booking the the spots here?

00:42:11 ◼   ► Because I'm too disorganized to to keep that together

00:42:16 ◼   ► But she's very nice and you can go there and I think at least through the end of March

00:42:22 ◼   ► I think you guys are doing the same thing but for new sponsors if you never sponsored the show we're offering a discount

00:42:27 ◼   ► And I would love to have some new sponsors just for variety's sake

00:42:32 ◼   ► not yep, same deal with ATP through the same site through the same nice person Jesse char and

00:42:37 ◼   ► Yeah, it's and what I would say is

00:42:42 ◼   ► Podcast listeners, just business-wise,

00:42:44 ◼   ► how you're gonna spend your money,

00:42:46 ◼   ► podcast listeners are a little bit expensive

00:42:49 ◼   ► to get relative to other listeners.

00:42:51 ◼   ► - CPM, right. - Because we are so valuable.

00:42:54 ◼   ► - Right. - And so where this pays off

00:42:57 ◼   ► is if you stand to make more than a couple bucks

00:42:59 ◼   ► per new customer.

00:43:00 ◼   ► So I actually don't recommend it.

00:43:02 ◼   ► We occasionally get inquiries from people

00:43:04 ◼   ► who are selling apps for $3 on iOS,

00:43:07 ◼   ► and I actually tell them, you probably shouldn't do this.

00:43:09 ◼   ► - I do too. - Because that,

00:43:11 ◼   ► Where podcast really pays off is like podcasts,

00:43:16 ◼   ► especially our podcast because we are so awesome,

00:43:21 ◼   ► have an audience of people who are willing to spend

00:43:23 ◼   ► good money for good products.

00:43:27 ◼   ► And so that's why you have something like Squarespace

00:43:29 ◼   ► because this is like a nice web hosting platform

00:43:33 ◼   ► and the value of a customer to Squarespace

00:43:36 ◼   ► is probably in the hundreds of dollars over time range.

00:43:38 ◼   ► If you're buying a nice mattress from our friends at Casper,

00:43:41 ◼   ► you're spending like $800 on a mattress.

00:43:44 ◼   ► Basically, our audiences are willing to pay for good stuff.

00:43:49 ◼   ► So if you're selling something where you stand to make

00:43:54 ◼   ► like 30 bucks per customer, let's talk.

00:43:56 ◼   ► If the most you can make from somebody is like a dollar

00:44:00 ◼   ► from the app store, that's probably not a good fit.

00:44:03 ◼   ► There's lots of businesses where this is a good fit.

00:44:06 ◼   ► things like subscriptions and nice priced items,

00:44:09 ◼   ► like nice things, and for that, please contact us.

00:44:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree, and I've done the same thing

00:44:16 ◼   ► with like two or three dollar apps.

00:44:18 ◼   ► There was somebody who just came out with a,

00:44:20 ◼   ► it's a pretty cool puzzle game.

00:44:23 ◼   ► I don't even play games on my phone,

00:44:24 ◼   ► but I kinda, this one sucked me in for at least 20 minutes.

00:44:27 ◼   ► But at three bucks a pop, and if you really are hoping

00:44:32 ◼   ► that you're gonna multiply that by whatever number

00:44:35 ◼   ► to at least break even, it's probably not gonna happen.

00:44:38 ◼   ► You're gonna sell some copies of the app,

00:44:41 ◼   ► but it's probably going to leave you in the red,

00:44:43 ◼   ► and it may not, in the long run, help you get in the black,

00:44:47 ◼   ► because it's just not that type of thing.

00:44:50 ◼   ► So I do the same thing.

00:44:51 ◼   ► I never, ever, ever, and hopefully I've never,

00:44:54 ◼   ► in all the years I've been selling sponsorships and ads,

00:44:56 ◼   ► I've never taken a dollar from somebody who I thought,

00:44:59 ◼   ► like, ooh, they shouldn't be spending this.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I sleep like a baby every night.

00:45:05 ◼   ► So I'm--

00:45:06 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:45:07 ◼   ► On a castor mattress, on a hollow pillow.

00:45:10 ◼   ► - Right, by certain standards,

00:45:11 ◼   ► I am a terrible businessman because that's,

00:45:14 ◼   ► there's, you know, I don't think there's any salespeople

00:45:17 ◼   ► who listen to our shows, but if somebody out there

00:45:20 ◼   ► is like a professional car salesman or something like that,

00:45:23 ◼   ► they're like, "What the hell are you talking about?

00:45:25 ◼   ► "Somebody wants to spend money

00:45:26 ◼   ► "and you tell 'em not to buy your thing?"

00:45:28 ◼   ► But I, you know, I would rather sleep well.

00:45:31 ◼   ► - I think it's also a good long-term business.

00:45:35 ◼   ► If you take someone's money knowing

00:45:36 ◼   ► they're gonna not see a return on that,

00:45:39 ◼   ► then maybe down the road, if they were gonna buy something,

00:45:44 ◼   ► if they're selling something down the road

00:45:45 ◼   ► that could benefit from it,

00:45:46 ◼   ► or they could make money from it,

00:45:47 ◼   ► they're gonna be less likely to go to you.

00:45:48 ◼   ► Or if they tell a friend,

00:45:49 ◼   ► they're gonna be less likely to recommend you,

00:45:51 ◼   ► or they're gonna actually trash you,

00:45:52 ◼   ► or the idea of podcast advertising to their friends

00:45:55 ◼   ► or their company or whatever else.

00:45:57 ◼   ► It's not good long-term business

00:46:00 ◼   ► to take people's money knowing that you're

00:46:02 ◼   ► kind of burning them.

00:46:02 ◼   ► - Right, exactly, like it could show up on a Quora

00:46:05 ◼   ► forum thread a year later where somebody would be like,

00:46:08 ◼   ► "Hey, is sponsoring the talk show a good idea?"

00:46:10 ◼   ► And somebody would be like, "Yeah, I spent a couple

00:46:12 ◼   ► "thousand dollars and got $20 in sales."

00:46:16 ◼   ► No, it's terrible.

00:46:17 ◼   ► - Or like, you know, they could go work for an ad agency.

00:46:19 ◼   ► Who like is, you know, some client asks them,

00:46:22 ◼   ► "Hey, should we be buying podcast ads?"

00:46:24 ◼   ► And they'll say, "Oh no, they're a terrible deal."

00:46:26 ◼   ► Like, it's much better to actually like,

00:46:28 ◼   ► Keep people happy and not take their money when you know that they're not going to see

00:46:31 ◼   ► a return.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Well, anyway, our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor.

00:46:36 ◼   ► I can't do the read right now.

00:46:37 ◼   ► It is a company called Tres Pontas.

00:46:39 ◼   ► Tres Pontas, they're a Brazilian company and they sell coffee and olive oil, which is the

00:46:45 ◼   ► most intriguing mix of products I've ever seen from a company.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And tomorrow, I'm getting by FedEx some of their coffee and I'm going to make it and

00:46:55 ◼   ► I'm gonna and then I'm gonna through the magic of editing. I'm gonna jump in right around right here and

00:47:00 ◼   ► I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna cheat you Marco and I recording on Thursday night, but on Friday

00:47:06 ◼   ► I'm gonna jump in here with the recording and I'm gonna tell you what their coffee tastes like

00:47:20 ◼   ► Okay, this is next day John Gruber

00:47:23 ◼   ► I'm recording this about 12 hours after the show last night with Marco. I got my shipment of tres Pontes coffee this morning

00:47:30 ◼   ► They sent me their cut to a and I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of that. It's Portuguese cat

00:47:37 ◼   ► you a I and

00:47:39 ◼   ► They sent it to me in four roasts light medium dark and French roast. I've had two pots of this coffee

00:47:46 ◼   ► I've made two for some a/b testing with the dark roast light roast. It's excellent coffee. I love it

00:47:51 ◼   ► I've drank way too much of it

00:47:54 ◼   ► Quite frankly, it's really good

00:47:58 ◼   ► I think I prefer the light roast did a lot of done up did a lot of a/b testing between the light and the dark

00:48:03 ◼   ► I guess I'll do medium and French tomorrow

00:48:06 ◼   ► It's really good stuff. So here's the deal trace

00:48:10 ◼   ► Pontus coffee, you've probably heard of single origin coffee

00:48:13 ◼   ► Well, tres pon tas coffee is takes it to a new level. It's single farm

00:48:18 ◼   ► coffee

00:48:21 ◼   ► all of it comes from

00:48:23 ◼   ► the

00:48:24 ◼   ► race re is race family farm

00:48:27 ◼   ► Just underneath the peaks of the tres pon tas mountains in Brazil

00:48:32 ◼   ► For over a hundred years and three generations the race family has been growing some of the best coffee in Brazil previously

00:48:40 ◼   ► They only sold it to local roasters

00:48:43 ◼   ► Recently, they've only recently started exporting it

00:48:46 ◼   ► here to the United States.

00:48:48 ◼   ► And so this is a new product

00:48:49 ◼   ► that you really couldn't get before,

00:48:50 ◼   ► and you can get it now, and it's just excellent.

00:48:52 ◼   ► You have two ways to find out more information

00:48:57 ◼   ► and to order it.

00:48:57 ◼   ► You can go to their website, traspontas.com,

00:49:00 ◼   ► T-R-E-S-P-O-N-T-A-S.com/coffee.

00:49:04 ◼   ► You can find out all sorts of more information

00:49:06 ◼   ► about their coffee.

00:49:06 ◼   ► You can order it right there.

00:49:07 ◼   ► And when you order their coffee, that's when they roast it,

00:49:11 ◼   ► and then they ship it to you immediately.

00:49:13 ◼   ► The coffee I got, it's stamped,

00:49:14 ◼   ► it was roasted yesterday, which is insane.

00:49:17 ◼   ► But getting fresh roasted coffee

00:49:20 ◼   ► is probably the number one way

00:49:21 ◼   ► that you can up your coffee game.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Just about any coffee you get in a grocery store,

00:49:26 ◼   ► even a quote unquote gourmet store

00:49:28 ◼   ► that's been sitting on shelves,

00:49:30 ◼   ► even for just a couple of weeks, loses freshness.

00:49:33 ◼   ► Roasted coffee is a commodity that goes,

00:49:40 ◼   ► just loses its flavor quickly.

00:49:43 ◼   ► Fresh roasted coffee really does make a difference

00:49:46 ◼   ► and Tres Pontas coffee only gets roasted once you order it.

00:49:49 ◼   ► The other thing you can do is you can go to Amazon.

00:49:51 ◼   ► This is so much easier if you just wanna try it.

00:49:53 ◼   ► Go to Amazon and search for Tres Pontas.

00:49:55 ◼   ► T-R-E-S-P-O-N-T-I-S and their coffee

00:49:59 ◼   ► will be the first thing you see.

00:50:00 ◼   ► And when you buy on Amazon,

00:50:01 ◼   ► your coffee will still be roasted fresh to order

00:50:04 ◼   ► and shipped out from Tres Pontas right away.

00:50:06 ◼   ► When you get it from Amazon,

00:50:07 ◼   ► it's not like it's sitting pre-bagged in warehouses

00:50:10 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:50:11 ◼   ► It's just a front end.

00:50:12 ◼   ► The order goes through to Tres Pontas.

00:50:14 ◼   ► They roast the coffee and they ship it to you.

00:50:16 ◼   ► You can get it in any one of those four roasts,

00:50:19 ◼   ► light, medium, dark French roast,

00:50:20 ◼   ► and you can get it pre-ground or whole bean.

00:50:22 ◼   ► I recommend whole bean, quite frankly.

00:50:25 ◼   ► And all orders enjoy free shipping,

00:50:27 ◼   ► regardless of where you order it.

00:50:28 ◼   ► I don't, that seems too good to be true.

00:50:31 ◼   ► The other thing you can do,

00:50:33 ◼   ► if you get it, you like it, you wanna get more,

00:50:34 ◼   ► is you can sign up for a coffee subscription

00:50:36 ◼   ► from Tres Pontas and get roasted beans

00:50:38 ◼   ► to you every one, two or four weeks, your choice. And when you sign up for a coffee subscription,

00:50:43 ◼   ► you save 10% off every bag of coffee. Now here's the really good deal. Listeners of the talk show

00:50:49 ◼   ► can get an extra 10% off using the code "THETALKSHOW" with the "the" at checkout when you buy a coffee

00:50:55 ◼   ► subscription. This means you get a total of 20% off every bag of coffee in your subscription in

00:51:00 ◼   ► perpetuity with that code. Just remember to enter the code "ATCHECKOUTTHETALKSHOW" when you sign up

00:51:05 ◼   ► subscription. So my thanks to Trace Pontas for sponsoring the show and for

00:51:10 ◼   ► sending me this excellent coffee to sample. Now we're back. We're back

00:51:15 ◼   ► after my magically inserted review of Trace Pontas coffee. I do know one thing

00:51:22 ◼   ► about their coffee. I do know how I'm going to grind it and that will be with

00:51:27 ◼   ► what's the name of the thing I have, Marco? The Baratza Virtuoso. The only

00:51:31 ◼   ► - The burrata grinder you should have.

00:51:32 ◼   ► - The burrata virtuoso.

00:51:33 ◼   ► This was a source of conflict in our friendship

00:51:38 ◼   ► for years and years because I had a piece of crap burr,

00:51:43 ◼   ► well no, a burr grinder is what I have now.

00:51:45 ◼   ► I just had like, it was just like a little--

00:51:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, you had the spinning blade.

00:51:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, a little spinning--

00:51:49 ◼   ► - The kind that everybody has, yeah.

00:51:50 ◼   ► - A little spinning propeller from KitchenAid, I believe,

00:51:54 ◼   ► for years, and I said, "Well, what should I buy?"

00:51:59 ◼   ► And then you told me what to buy,

00:52:00 ◼   ► and I figured out how big it was,

00:52:02 ◼   ► and it literally wouldn't fit in our old kitchen.

00:52:04 ◼   ► But now we have a new kitchen,

00:52:06 ◼   ► and it's a much bigger kitchen,

00:52:07 ◼   ► and it's so big that I have my own cubby hole

00:52:11 ◼   ► where I'm allowed to put stuff.

00:52:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:52:13 ◼   ► So I have the Baratza Virtuoso,

00:52:18 ◼   ► and I like it, I like it every day.

00:52:21 ◼   ► I don't know--

00:52:22 ◼   ► - I still remember,

00:52:23 ◼   ► you gave me one of my favorite compliments of all time.

00:52:27 ◼   ► when I visited you in your old kitchen

00:52:30 ◼   ► and your old place a few years back,

00:52:32 ◼   ► and I brought some of my own coffee that I roasted.

00:52:35 ◼   ► Oh no, no, it wasn't even that,

00:52:36 ◼   ► it was when I mailed it to you at some point.

00:52:38 ◼   ► - Oh yeah. - And you told me

00:52:39 ◼   ► after you tried it, you said,

00:52:42 ◼   ► "I almost wanna say fuck you, this is so good."

00:52:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:52:46 ◼   ► I was like so, so perfect.

00:52:49 ◼   ► And there's been times in my life

00:52:50 ◼   ► where I have said that now to other people about things,

00:52:53 ◼   ► because it's just so, it's so perfect.

00:52:55 ◼   ► - It was good coffee.

00:52:56 ◼   ► It was very good coffee, I have to admit.

00:52:59 ◼   ► I don't know that I could Pepsi challenge the difference

00:53:03 ◼   ► between fresh ground coffee,

00:53:05 ◼   ► ground with the Baratza Virtuoso,

00:53:07 ◼   ► versus the old crappy grinder that I used to have.

00:53:12 ◼   ► I think I probably could.

00:53:13 ◼   ► I do feel that on a daily basis,

00:53:16 ◼   ► I'm giving my coffee more Bs and As,

00:53:23 ◼   ► and fewer Cs and Bs,

00:53:25 ◼   ► in terms of how good I think it tastes.

00:53:28 ◼   ► I don't know how much of it's due to that,

00:53:29 ◼   ► but it just works better.

00:53:32 ◼   ► I like that I can just set the dial and walk away.

00:53:35 ◼   ► And the way that it cuts it up,

00:53:38 ◼   ► even if it doesn't taste better,

00:53:40 ◼   ► it's a much neater grind for,

00:53:43 ◼   ► I do pour over almost every day.

00:53:45 ◼   ► But even when I make, I think I use a finer,

00:53:48 ◼   ► I always have to look it up.

00:53:49 ◼   ► I think I use a finer grind for the plunger thing,

00:53:53 ◼   ► the AeroPress. - The AeroPress.

00:53:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, you should.

00:53:55 ◼   ► But on the AirPress, you should be setting that dial

00:53:57 ◼   ► to roughly like 10.

00:54:01 ◼   ► - I think I do 12. - The dial goes like zero

00:54:03 ◼   ► to 40, and yeah, for the AirPress, you should be around 10.

00:54:06 ◼   ► - I do like 12, and I do 20 for pour over.

00:54:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's about right.

00:54:11 ◼   ► - But the bigger difference, whether it tastes better or not

00:54:14 ◼   ► is it's way neater.

00:54:16 ◼   ► Like it comes right out of that little plastic thing,

00:54:20 ◼   ► and there's just a couple of little pieces of the husk

00:54:23 ◼   ► that are sort of floaters, you know.

00:54:25 ◼   ► - But Jeff, yeah.

00:54:26 ◼   ► - Right, but they clean up real easy,

00:54:28 ◼   ► just like one swipe with a wet towel

00:54:30 ◼   ► and they're off the counter.

00:54:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, most of that's just static.

00:54:32 ◼   ► - But there's no dust, it's not like dust

00:54:34 ◼   ► like the old grinder.

00:54:36 ◼   ► - Well, it's also, it's a much more consistent grind size,

00:54:40 ◼   ► like the grains that come out are much more consistent size.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Like the problem with the spinning blade grinders,

00:54:45 ◼   ► it's kind of similar, if you ever use a food processor

00:54:47 ◼   ► or a blender, like you try to blend something

00:54:50 ◼   ► that's like a little bit thick or chunky,

00:54:52 ◼   ► like vegetables or a smoothie or something.

00:54:54 ◼   ► And the part near the blade gets totally pureed

00:54:58 ◼   ► and then the stuff around the edges

00:55:00 ◼   ► that just kind of sticks to the walls

00:55:01 ◼   ► just kind of stays all clumpy and everything,

00:55:04 ◼   ► it doesn't get blended.

00:55:05 ◼   ► So you have this huge variety between

00:55:07 ◼   ► the stuff in the middle, which is super finely blended,

00:55:09 ◼   ► and the stuff on the outside, which is really not.

00:55:11 ◼   ► That's what a blade grinder does to coffee.

00:55:13 ◼   ► So you have some of the grounds

00:55:16 ◼   ► that are really finely ground

00:55:18 ◼   ► and some that are really coarse.

00:55:19 ◼   ► And depending on how you're brewing it,

00:55:22 ◼   ► this may matter or it may not.

00:55:24 ◼   ► Typically, like the pour over or drip methods

00:55:27 ◼   ► are pretty forgiving of grind size.

00:55:29 ◼   ► AeroPress and French press are really not.

00:55:33 ◼   ► For French press, you want them to be really big

00:55:36 ◼   ► so they don't seep through the filter.

00:55:38 ◼   ► And for AeroPress, you want them to be really small

00:55:40 ◼   ► because one of the great advantages of the AeroPress

00:55:42 ◼   ► over any other method is that you can have

00:55:43 ◼   ► a really fine grind and get tons of dense flavor

00:55:47 ◼   ► packed into a small amount of liquid

00:55:49 ◼   ► without having all the grounds seep through the filter.

00:55:52 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:54 ◼   ► I tried French press years ago

00:55:55 ◼   ► when I first started getting even semi-serious about coffee

00:55:59 ◼   ► and I think compared to you who roast your own beans,

00:56:03 ◼   ► I still can only say I'm semi-serious about it.

00:56:05 ◼   ► Way more serious than anybody else in my family

00:56:08 ◼   ► and way less serious than a lot of people.

00:56:11 ◼   ► But I thought, well--

00:56:13 ◼   ► - By the way, I'm way less serious than a lot of people.

00:56:15 ◼   ► - I know.

00:56:16 ◼   ► - The way I roast is pretty casual.

00:56:19 ◼   ► Like I don't get into like, you know,

00:56:20 ◼   ► custom roasting profiles and tweaking the temperatures

00:56:24 ◼   ► just right to like during the roast

00:56:25 ◼   ► to get these right curves.

00:56:26 ◼   ► I don't do any of that.

00:56:27 ◼   ► I basically do like the stock preset on the roaster

00:56:31 ◼   ► of how to roast and I just decide like,

00:56:33 ◼   ► how far do I go before I stop it?

00:56:35 ◼   ► That's it, that's the only decision I make.

00:56:37 ◼   ► - I do think though, I did try French Pest years ago

00:56:45 ◼   ► and I fucking hated it.

00:56:47 ◼   ► But it was because it was too much of the coffee

00:56:50 ◼   ► was getting into the, you know, the beverage.

00:56:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause you had the wrong grinder.

00:56:55 ◼   ► - Right, I had the wrong grinder.

00:56:57 ◼   ► And I was like, yeah.

00:56:57 ◼   ► - French press can be amazing.

00:56:59 ◼   ► The reasons that I don't like it are mainly

00:57:02 ◼   ► that it's a pain in the butt to clean,

00:57:04 ◼   ► which everyone has this problem.

00:57:06 ◼   ► And also that I prefer the, like,

00:57:09 ◼   ► AeroPress gives a little bit stronger of a flavor,

00:57:11 ◼   ► and I just prefer that.

00:57:12 ◼   ► But French press is also very good, very respectable.

00:57:15 ◼   ► If I'm at a restaurant that has some kind of

00:57:17 ◼   ► nice coffee as a French press option

00:57:19 ◼   ► that you can order after the meal.

00:57:21 ◼   ► I'll sometimes do that and share it with somebody

00:57:23 ◼   ► 'cause it is kinda nice.

00:57:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it definitely has to be ground right.

00:57:26 ◼   ► Otherwise it's like you're drinking mud.

00:57:28 ◼   ► Oh, I had one other coffee related thing.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Oh, I know.

00:57:33 ◼   ► Everybody had always told me for years,

00:57:36 ◼   ► and I believe it, but the optimal water temperature

00:57:40 ◼   ► for pour over is, I don't know,

00:57:42 ◼   ► like 185 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhere around there.

00:57:46 ◼   ► - Depends who you ask.

00:57:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess it depends who you ask,

00:57:48 ◼   ► but definitely not 212.

00:57:50 ◼   ► - Right, although a lot of coffee pros

00:57:55 ◼   ► think it actually isn't that far off 212.

00:57:57 ◼   ► Like, I think, I forget what the SCAA,

00:58:01 ◼   ► the Specialty Coffee Association of America,

00:58:03 ◼   ► they have like a bunch of standards.

00:58:04 ◼   ► I think their temperature is 204.

00:58:07 ◼   ► So it doesn't need to be that much off.

00:58:09 ◼   ► Like, I use an electric kettle,

00:58:11 ◼   ► and it has presets for basically every 10 degrees,

00:58:14 ◼   ► And I use the 200 preset and it's fine.

00:58:17 ◼   ► - So I don't have an electric kettle

00:58:18 ◼   ► and I don't feel like, you know,

00:58:21 ◼   ► I do have my own cubby hole but I'm running out of space

00:58:24 ◼   ► in there with that and a SodaStream.

00:58:26 ◼   ► So I just-- - Trust me,

00:58:28 ◼   ► I was an electric kettle skeptic for a long time

00:58:31 ◼   ► and what happened basically,

00:58:33 ◼   ► like my favorite glass kettle finally broke.

00:58:36 ◼   ► - The one that had the-- - Somebody had the,

00:58:38 ◼   ► I did, the aerial printing.

00:58:39 ◼   ► - The aerial printing. (laughs)

00:58:41 ◼   ► - Yes, I called it the Helvetic Kettle for years,

00:58:44 ◼   ► friends with you and later learned that it was actually printed in Arial.

00:58:47 ◼   ► Right. And the problem was that if you get the same kettle it's the

00:58:51 ◼   ► Medelko like glass kettle and the problem is if you get it after a few

00:58:55 ◼   ► years ago they changed the font that it's printed and it's now printed in

00:59:00 ◼   ► something that was kind of like italic comic sans. Like it's completely the

00:59:04 ◼   ► opposite of what you'd want. Wait what's it called? It's Medelko and it's like just

00:59:10 ◼   ► the Medelko glass kettle. It's like 12 bucks and and like and and then and the

00:59:15 ◼   ► picture on Amazon did not reflect the font change for a long time. I don't know

00:59:18 ◼   ► if it does now. Let me see. I don't know. Hold on. No, I don't think so.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Although there's two. So see here. So this is so there are two that like

00:59:31 ◼   ► there's one that still shows the old font and it's M-E-D-E-L-C-O if you search

00:59:37 ◼   ► Medelko kettle one so she was the old font and right next to it is one that shows oh

00:59:41 ◼   ► Oh my god, it's it's as though somebody at that company

00:59:48 ◼   ► Who doesn't it does not see the difference between Helvetica and and

00:59:54 ◼   ► Ariel and enough people like me wrote to them to complain and they were like, oh, yeah

01:00:00 ◼   ► You want to complain about the font? Fuck you buddy. Here you go

01:00:05 ◼   ► Exactly. So it went from almost Helvetica to

01:00:09 ◼   ► To knock off Comic Sans. It's not even

01:00:13 ◼   ► Better if it was actually Comic Sans

01:00:16 ◼   ► There might be some because like if you look at where it says 12 cup capacity that looks almost exactly like Comic Sans

01:00:21 ◼   ► Oh, it almost looks like it's doing a fake italic. We're just slanting the text

01:00:25 ◼   ► Whistling kettle looks correct. Yeah, maybe that was like an actual italic. Maybe I don't know what Comic Sans italic is

01:00:33 ◼   ► Maybe that's just Comic Sans italic. I'm sorry. The problem is like imagine so like, you know, imagine God even the numbers you order the aerial

01:00:40 ◼   ► It's amazing it's like who would want this

01:00:45 ◼   ► That's so funny though, because I literally did not buy it even though you said that you recommended it

01:00:51 ◼   ► I literally didn't buy it years ago because it was printed in aerial and now they've done this. It's so much worse. Oh my god

01:00:58 ◼   ► I've since moved on to because yeah when that broke I knew I couldn't get a new one

01:01:03 ◼   ► and so I dug out an electric kettle

01:01:05 ◼   ► I had bought a while ago for a camping trip

01:01:07 ◼   ► and we've been using that since.

01:01:08 ◼   ► And Europeans laugh at me whenever I would say

01:01:12 ◼   ► like how I boil things in the kettle,

01:01:13 ◼   ► they're like, "Wait, what?

01:01:14 ◼   ► "Like on your stove?

01:01:15 ◼   ► "What are you doing?

01:01:16 ◼   ► "Like that's barbaric."

01:01:17 ◼   ► 'Cause like most of the rest of the world

01:01:18 ◼   ► has figured out by now that electric kettles

01:01:20 ◼   ► are way better at boiling things,

01:01:22 ◼   ► boiling water for coffee and tea.

01:01:24 ◼   ► - Why?

01:01:25 ◼   ► - We are the only, first of all, they're way faster.

01:01:28 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know about that.

01:01:29 ◼   ► I got it, we have a new range and I'll tell you what,

01:01:32 ◼   ► that fucker boils water fast.

01:01:34 ◼   ► - You have induction, right?

01:01:37 ◼   ► That's pretty crazy.

01:01:38 ◼   ► - No, well, we do have induction,

01:01:40 ◼   ► but I just boil it right over a big old gas flame.

01:01:43 ◼   ► - Oh, so you have gas, okay.

01:01:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, we have gas.

01:01:47 ◼   ► - We also have a really heavy-duty gas stove,

01:01:50 ◼   ► and so it would boil pretty fast in the aerial kettle,

01:01:53 ◼   ► but it's either the same speed or it's faster

01:01:58 ◼   ► in the electric kettle.

01:01:59 ◼   ► It's super fast and electric

01:02:01 ◼   ► because they just draw tons of power

01:02:02 ◼   ► and are pretty efficient at converting that to heat.

01:02:05 ◼   ► And then what's nice about it is that first of all,

01:02:07 ◼   ► you can set it to a certain temperature

01:02:09 ◼   ► and have it hold it at that temperature,

01:02:10 ◼   ► which is very nice.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Especially if you're doing something

01:02:12 ◼   ► that's not a full boil,

01:02:14 ◼   ► if you're doing green tea,

01:02:16 ◼   ► green tea has to be 170, 175,

01:02:19 ◼   ► you don't want it to be any hotter than that.

01:02:20 ◼   ► And it's always kind of a pain to do that

01:02:23 ◼   ► with a kettle on the stove.

01:02:24 ◼   ► - Right, or if you're halfway--

01:02:25 ◼   ► - So you can hold it at certain temperatures.

01:02:26 ◼   ► - If you're halfway through making coffee

01:02:27 ◼   ► and get interrupted 'cause the UPS guy shows up or something.

01:02:30 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

01:02:31 ◼   ► It can also hold it at a certain temperature

01:02:33 ◼   ► for like a half hour.

01:02:34 ◼   ► So if you're like, if you wanted to just start it

01:02:36 ◼   ► while you prepare everything else,

01:02:38 ◼   ► by the time you're done assembling the AeroPress

01:02:41 ◼   ► and grinding up the coffee and everything,

01:02:43 ◼   ► it's boiling, it's ready.

01:02:44 ◼   ► And it's holding it at the temperature you requested.

01:02:46 ◼   ► So that's really nice.

01:02:47 ◼   ► It also just boils it, it's really fast,

01:02:49 ◼   ► it holds a ton of water.

01:02:50 ◼   ► The one I have holds like one and a half liters at once.

01:02:53 ◼   ► So if you're making a lot, it's great.

01:02:55 ◼   ► If you're making back to back, it's great.

01:02:57 ◼   ► And then finally, you can do it

01:02:59 ◼   ► in a different part of the kitchen.

01:03:00 ◼   ► you're not taking up a burner on the stove.

01:03:02 ◼   ► So what I found is it allowed me to like

01:03:05 ◼   ► compact my coffee preparation area

01:03:08 ◼   ► from like this big triangle that like spanned

01:03:11 ◼   ► from the cabinet to the stove to the sink.

01:03:13 ◼   ► It was basically like my whole kitchen.

01:03:14 ◼   ► Now I can do it like all in this one little countertop

01:03:17 ◼   ► next to the sink.

01:03:18 ◼   ► 'Cause it's all like I'm able to have it wherever I want.

01:03:20 ◼   ► So that part's nice too.

01:03:21 ◼   ► And also it just saves wear and tear

01:03:22 ◼   ► out of my stupid gas burners that break constantly.

01:03:24 ◼   ► Never get a Viking stove or a house

01:03:26 ◼   ► that has a Viking stove already in it.

01:03:28 ◼   ► - Ugh. (laughs)

01:03:30 ◼   ► - So, go electric.

01:03:32 ◼   ► It seems a little weird for the first day,

01:03:35 ◼   ► and then you're like, how did I ever use the stove

01:03:38 ◼   ► every day like an ape?

01:03:40 ◼   ► - Where do you put it?

01:03:41 ◼   ► I mean, it's just like on a countertop?

01:03:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, you basically put it where you make your coffee.

01:03:47 ◼   ► - No way, yeah.

01:03:48 ◼   ► I like cooking. - 'Cause you already have

01:03:49 ◼   ► a grinder plugged in, so put it next to your grinder.

01:03:51 ◼   ► - Nah, I don't have room for it over there.

01:03:53 ◼   ► No, I like cooking-- - Don't you have like

01:03:54 ◼   ► four sinks in there?

01:03:56 ◼   ► - Nah, two sinks.

01:03:57 ◼   ► And there's no room by my sink.

01:04:00 ◼   ► No, I figured out in my optimal solution

01:04:02 ◼   ► is I put just the right amount of coffee in the kettle.

01:04:05 ◼   ► I put it on the high flame.

01:04:08 ◼   ► And then as I grind the coffee and get it prepared,

01:04:11 ◼   ► by the time I'm ready for it, it's boiling.

01:04:14 ◼   ► And then here's my trick.

01:04:16 ◼   ► My trick is, and I go over and I get two ice cubes

01:04:21 ◼   ► and throw two ice cubes in,

01:04:23 ◼   ► and it immediately turns the 212 water

01:04:25 ◼   ► into a better temperature, which I have measured precisely

01:04:29 ◼   ► with my Thermapim, and it's exactly like 188

01:04:33 ◼   ► or 190 or something.

01:04:34 ◼   ► - All right, that's, I mean, as long as you can do that

01:04:38 ◼   ► in like a repetitive way, which just sounds like you can,

01:04:41 ◼   ► then that's fine, I guess.

01:04:42 ◼   ► - I'm not even fully awake, and I've got the ice cubes

01:04:45 ◼   ► in my hand ready to toss 'em in.

01:04:47 ◼   ► And I don't know--

01:04:47 ◼   ► - It's a little easier to just hit a button

01:04:48 ◼   ► that says 185 and just move on.

01:04:51 ◼   ► - I don't know, to me, there's something cool

01:04:52 ◼   ► about throwing ice cubes into boiling water.

01:04:55 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:04:56 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

01:04:57 ◼   ► - Where were we?

01:05:01 ◼   ► We were talking about HomePod.

01:05:01 ◼   ► How about this thing with the HomePod

01:05:03 ◼   ► leaving rings on people's furniture?

01:05:05 ◼   ► I'm astounded by this.

01:05:07 ◼   ► I really am.

01:05:08 ◼   ► - It just seems, yeah.

01:05:10 ◼   ► - Do you know how much fucking trouble I would be in if--

01:05:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:05:16 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:05:17 ◼   ► - Like we've got, I don't even know what material they are,

01:05:20 ◼   ► there's some kind of stone type material that are countertops in the kitchen.

01:05:24 ◼   ► I, you know, they're not marble,

01:05:28 ◼   ► but they're some marble like material that we've either granted or courts. Yeah.

01:05:32 ◼   ► One of those and it might, I forget, but it's something like that. And, uh,

01:05:36 ◼   ► you know, meticulously picked out at, you know,

01:05:40 ◼   ► some input by me, but you know, the whole thing was designed by Amy. Um,

01:05:45 ◼   ► and I mean, you've been, you've seen, it's a really nice, it's,

01:05:49 ◼   ► She did good work. It's it's a really designed kitchen if I'll tell and that's where I set up the home pod and

01:05:54 ◼   ► When I first got to review it, I'll tell you what if I left a fucking ring on that counter from that home pod

01:06:00 ◼   ► You have any much I'd I would be fucking dead. I I cannot I

01:06:04 ◼   ► Mean she would literally kill you we would not be told doing this podcast right? I mean literally killed I

01:06:09 ◼   ► And I realize it doesn't leave rings on that material. Thank fuck. Thank God, but

01:06:16 ◼   ► You know, I've seen pictures of some of the people like who've had it on

01:06:21 ◼   ► You know the the tables and and shelves that that they've left these rings on they all seem like perfectly reasonable

01:06:28 ◼   ► Places to put a home pod. Yeah. Well, and you know, it's a really popular countertop material butcher block oiled wood, right?

01:06:34 ◼   ► Exactly really popular right and that's just it is that in some alternate universe, you know

01:06:40 ◼   ► I could very easily imagine that that would have been the direction we would have gone

01:06:45 ◼   ► You know it maybe if I picked it would have been the direction we would have gone

01:06:49 ◼   ► I you know I've been in you know new kitchens that or even old kitchens

01:06:54 ◼   ► But you know nice kitchens that have that type of material. I could totally see it I

01:06:59 ◼   ► That's it's just crazy to me that that that product didn't ship with a

01:07:05 ◼   ► I mean if there's some kind of thing of that that's that

01:07:11 ◼   ► That's the way to go with the silicon material at the base and I realize there's an acoustic component to that right that this

01:07:18 ◼   ► That the home pod the way that it shoots audio in all directions including down

01:07:23 ◼   ► that the

01:07:25 ◼   ► material and how it

01:07:27 ◼   ► Rests on the thing it's sitting on has some kind of an effect on that and there might there might be that they were well

01:07:32 ◼   ► aware of this and went with it anyway, but the fact that it didn't ship with a

01:07:36 ◼   ► discrete

01:07:38 ◼   ► warning about it along the lines of the way that they said like hey if you buy the jet black iPhone 7

01:07:44 ◼   ► It's gonna pick up scratches all micro abrasions or whatever. They called them all over the back, you know, just let people know

01:07:50 ◼   ► Yeah, like like the the the iPhone 7 micro abrasion thing

01:07:55 ◼   ► I think was that is the best parallel to like how they should have gone like assuming that

01:07:59 ◼   ► assuming that they didn't want to or weren't able to

01:08:01 ◼   ► Change the material before this thing shipped which that's a big assumption

01:08:06 ◼   ► I think they probably should have found this during their apparently widespread and long-standing

01:08:11 ◼   ► test of these home pods that were in employees' homes and being tested.

01:08:15 ◼   ► This had to have come up.

01:08:18 ◼   ► So there's possibly a process issue there where either this wasn't found in the test

01:08:25 ◼   ► because they didn't do enough testing, or it was found and they decided to ignore it

01:08:28 ◼   ► for whatever reason.

01:08:29 ◼   ► Maybe they had good reasons, who knows?

01:08:31 ◼   ► But either way, there's probably a process problem there.

01:08:35 ◼   ► And then there's definitely a communication problem

01:08:38 ◼   ► both in the fact that we weren't warned ahead of time,

01:08:40 ◼   ► that it's not like a little note

01:08:41 ◼   ► in the instruction manual or anything.

01:08:44 ◼   ► And honestly, I thought their response

01:08:45 ◼   ► to these claims yesterday was kind of dismissive

01:08:49 ◼   ► and almost as bad as the, you know,

01:08:51 ◼   ► you're holding it wrong thing.

01:08:53 ◼   ► It was really not, I think, a good moment in Apple PR.

01:08:57 ◼   ► But it just seems like, you know,

01:09:00 ◼   ► it's such a dumb little thing.

01:09:03 ◼   ► This is not a big deal.

01:09:05 ◼   ► This is, like I said on ATP, it's not a big deal.

01:09:07 ◼   ► It's not gonna like sink the home pod.

01:09:10 ◼   ► It's not going to result in like a massive recall

01:09:13 ◼   ► in all likelihood.

01:09:14 ◼   ► I mean, you know, Watson announced it tomorrow

01:09:16 ◼   ► and put me wrong, but like I don't think

01:09:17 ◼   ► they're gonna do anything about it.

01:09:18 ◼   ► I think it's gonna be like a footnote

01:09:20 ◼   ► in the support documents basically says like,

01:09:22 ◼   ► hey, don't put this on certain services

01:09:24 ◼   ► without some kind of protection.

01:09:27 ◼   ► And you know, but you know, like the response of,

01:09:31 ◼   ► well, you should probably just refinish your table.

01:09:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:09:34 ◼   ► - That's not a good response.

01:09:36 ◼   ► - Right, and you know, it's--

01:09:37 ◼   ► - And it seems like it's kind of like an unforced error

01:09:40 ◼   ► because like lots of other products

01:09:44 ◼   ► sit on these surfaces without leading marks.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And it's not to say that like,

01:09:49 ◼   ► I think I saw something earlier today

01:09:51 ◼   ► that apparently the Sonos One leaves very, very faint marks

01:09:55 ◼   ► on its four corners, like four little L-shaped corner pads,

01:09:58 ◼   ► and apparently it leaves some mild version

01:10:00 ◼   ► of the same thing.

01:10:01 ◼   ► So like it's not that the HomePod

01:10:02 ◼   ► is the only thing that does this.

01:10:04 ◼   ► You know, similar to how like the iPhone 4

01:10:06 ◼   ► was not the only phone where you hold it a certain way

01:10:08 ◼   ► to block the antenna.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And they spent a lot of that press conference

01:10:12 ◼   ► telling you that.

01:10:13 ◼   ► But it is Apple's problem in the sense that, you know,

01:10:17 ◼   ► this is the big story about it.

01:10:18 ◼   ► This is something that the HomePod seems to do more

01:10:21 ◼   ► than anything else.

01:10:22 ◼   ► And I don't think it's reasonable to expect people

01:10:27 ◼   ► to know this ahead of time.

01:10:30 ◼   ► Like just to automatically know,

01:10:32 ◼   ► oh, you shouldn't put things with rubber feet

01:10:36 ◼   ► on your oiled wood countertops.

01:10:38 ◼   ► To me, something with rubber feet

01:10:40 ◼   ► seems like it would be totally fine.

01:10:41 ◼   ► - Clean, especially. - It's not totally inert.

01:10:43 ◼   ► It seemed like that would be protecting

01:10:45 ◼   ► the surface from damage.

01:10:46 ◼   ► - Right, and I'm even-- - And even though--

01:10:47 ◼   ► - I'm even careful about things

01:10:49 ◼   ► like getting my finger grease on something.

01:10:50 ◼   ► So when I took the HomePod out of the box,

01:10:53 ◼   ► I was careful to only touch it by the sides

01:10:56 ◼   ► and from Shenzhen, China, until it touched my countertop,

01:11:01 ◼   ► the bottom had never been touched by human hands.

01:11:04 ◼   ► You know, and I thought like, well, that's clean.

01:11:06 ◼   ► You know, it's a clean countertop

01:11:08 ◼   ► and the HomePod is certainly clean

01:11:10 ◼   ► because I just took it out of the box and never touched it.

01:11:13 ◼   ► It never would have occurred to me in a million years

01:11:15 ◼   ► not to put it on wood kitchen countertops

01:11:18 ◼   ► if we had had wood kitchen countertops.

01:11:20 ◼   ► Just wouldn't have even entered my mind as like a,

01:11:24 ◼   ► hmm, maybe I shouldn't put it there.

01:11:26 ◼   ► You know, like things like, hey, maybe I shouldn't put it,

01:11:29 ◼   ► you know, I would think of things like,

01:11:32 ◼   ► well, maybe I shouldn't put it next to a sink

01:11:34 ◼   ► because, you know, an accidental spill could happen here.

01:11:37 ◼   ► Like, you know, I just put it next to where our echo was.

01:11:42 ◼   ► So, but that spot was chosen because, you know,

01:11:45 ◼   ► it seemed like a spot that is almost always dry

01:11:48 ◼   ► and doesn't have accidental spills.

01:11:51 ◼   ► So that occurred to me.

01:11:53 ◼   ► The idea that it would leave rings

01:11:54 ◼   ► never would have even occurred to me.

01:11:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's the kind of thing like,

01:11:58 ◼   ► Obviously, like Apple should know,

01:12:00 ◼   ► and I'm sure they do know,

01:12:01 ◼   ► that this category of product,

01:12:04 ◼   ► as much as they are trying really hard

01:12:07 ◼   ► in the marketing and the PR

01:12:09 ◼   ► to make this about audio quality

01:12:10 ◼   ► while it's sitting in your living room,

01:12:12 ◼   ► the fact is this category of product

01:12:14 ◼   ► is very often used in kitchens.

01:12:16 ◼   ► And a very common place to put it is on a countertop.

01:12:20 ◼   ► And so they should have, and I hope did,

01:12:24 ◼   ► test it on every popular countertop material

01:12:27 ◼   ► that's available.

01:12:28 ◼   ► And they would have found this if they did that

01:12:31 ◼   ► because butcher block is very, very popular

01:12:33 ◼   ► and very common because it's really nice

01:12:36 ◼   ► and pretty inexpensive.

01:12:37 ◼   ► And so they should have found this and they didn't

01:12:40 ◼   ► or they decided to ship it anyway.

01:12:42 ◼   ► And so it's just, again, this isn't a huge problem.

01:12:47 ◼   ► There's already like 10,000 awesome little coasters

01:12:50 ◼   ► that people will sell you for $30 made out of leather

01:12:52 ◼   ► and metal and stuff and custom engraved,

01:12:55 ◼   ► artisanally hand-stitched leather coasters for it.

01:12:58 ◼   ► And maybe Apple will sell their own this fall

01:13:02 ◼   ► for $100, this little leather circle

01:13:04 ◼   ► with an Apple logo in the middle of it.

01:13:05 ◼   ► But it isn't a big problem,

01:13:09 ◼   ► but it's just kind of embarrassing,

01:13:10 ◼   ► and I think it does reveal some potential process flaws

01:13:14 ◼   ► in how this got out without even a warning.

01:13:17 ◼   ► - Just seems very surprising to me.

01:13:20 ◼   ► I think the two most, I don't know,

01:13:24 ◼   ► Everybody's different, I don't know.

01:13:26 ◼   ► But to me, the two most natural places for one of these

01:13:30 ◼   ► are a kitchen and a bedroom.

01:13:31 ◼   ► 'Cause I don't think it's a great living room product

01:13:34 ◼   ► if your living room is your TV room.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Like I use that interchangeably.

01:13:39 ◼   ► So I realize that in like a lifestyle magazine,

01:13:42 ◼   ► people don't have a TV in their living room

01:13:44 ◼   ► because it's meant for hosting parties and everybody.

01:13:48 ◼   ► - In the magazines, they also have white couches.

01:13:50 ◼   ► - Right, everybody, all the chairs face around each other

01:13:53 ◼   ► so you can talk to each other and there's no place for a TV.

01:13:56 ◼   ► Well, our living room has a TV.

01:13:58 ◼   ► But because it is, you know, if you have a TV,

01:14:01 ◼   ► a TV room is not a great place for a home pod

01:14:03 ◼   ► unless you really listen to enough music

01:14:05 ◼   ► independent of your TV that having a sound system

01:14:09 ◼   ► that's completely independent of your

01:14:11 ◼   ► home entertainment system makes sense to you.

01:14:14 ◼   ► It doesn't really make sense to me that way.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Kitchen though is perfect because traditionally

01:14:19 ◼   ► most people don't have a good sound system in their kitchen.

01:14:24 ◼   ► And a lot of people spend a lot of time in their kitchens.

01:14:27 ◼   ► A lot of families eat their meals in the kitchen.

01:14:30 ◼   ► So it's a great place for that.

01:14:33 ◼   ► And a bedroom would be another place

01:14:35 ◼   ► where maybe you don't have a good sound system.

01:14:38 ◼   ► But that's another place where you might have wood.

01:14:41 ◼   ► I'm still not sure about the details of what types of wood,

01:14:44 ◼   ► what types of treatment.

01:14:46 ◼   ► It's like ones that have a polyurethane coating are safe,

01:14:49 ◼   ► and ones that are just sort of oiled aren't.

01:14:52 ◼   ► But it seems to me like a lot of people

01:14:54 ◼   ► might have bedroom furniture

01:14:55 ◼   ► that exactly is along those lines too.

01:14:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, it seems like the problem is that,

01:15:01 ◼   ► it's in surfaces that their main treatment is just oil

01:15:06 ◼   ► that is like slightly seeped into the wood.

01:15:09 ◼   ► And that the problem therefore is that

01:15:10 ◼   ► when you stick the silicone on top of it,

01:15:13 ◼   ► that the silicone absorbs some of that oil into itself,

01:15:16 ◼   ► pulling it out of the wood

01:15:17 ◼   ► and creating basically an unfinished circle in the wood.

01:15:21 ◼   ► And that's why it goes away after a few days,

01:15:23 ◼   ► 'cause the oil has time to reabsorb

01:15:24 ◼   ► into that area of the wood.

01:15:26 ◼   ► - So I had a tweet the other day, yesterday actually,

01:15:30 ◼   ► that went semi-viral for me, at least, 1,322 likes.

01:15:34 ◼   ► It was an interaction I had.

01:15:35 ◼   ► It was with a HomePod in my office.

01:15:37 ◼   ► The entire tweet-- - Oh, the courts thing?

01:15:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, the entire tweet is just my, the playback.

01:15:45 ◼   ► And I believe it's word-for-word accurate.

01:15:46 ◼   ► So here's me, hey Siri, oh I shouldn't say that, I'm sorry.

01:15:49 ◼   ► Hey, you know.

01:15:50 ◼   ► - No, if Phil Schiller said it on your show,

01:15:52 ◼   ► you can say it on your show.

01:15:53 ◼   ► - Well, I'm gonna say, hey HomePod,

01:15:54 ◼   ► hey HomePod, how many quarts are in a gallon?

01:15:57 ◼   ► And HomePod said, what would you like me

01:15:59 ◼   ► to convert one gallon to?

01:16:02 ◼   ► And I already knew we were off to a rough start,

01:16:04 ◼   ► and I said, quarts.

01:16:05 ◼   ► And there was a little bit of a pause,

01:16:08 ◼   ► and HomePod said, quarts is a mineral compound

01:16:12 ◼   ► composed of silicon and oxygen atoms

01:16:14 ◼   ► in a continuous framework,

01:16:16 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:16:18 ◼   ► It was verbatim the first paragraph of Q-U-A-R-T-Z

01:16:23 ◼   ► from Wikipedia.

01:16:25 ◼   ► And I thought it was so funny.

01:16:28 ◼   ► And it was weird, and I actually know this.

01:16:31 ◼   ► I actually, it was a weird conversation

01:16:34 ◼   ► when Amy was doing something and she said,

01:16:37 ◼   ► how many quarts are in a gallon, two?

01:16:39 ◼   ► And I was like, no, no, four,

01:16:40 ◼   ► because that's the quart and quart is a quarter,

01:16:44 ◼   ► and it's a quarter gallon.

01:16:46 ◼   ► That's how I remember it.

01:16:47 ◼   ► - Wait, is it really?

01:16:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's four quarts in it.

01:16:50 ◼   ► - I never knew that.

01:16:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, so there's four quarts in a gallon

01:16:52 ◼   ► and the way to remember it is that the Q-U-A-R-T

01:16:56 ◼   ► is the same whatever route as quarter.

01:16:59 ◼   ► So there you go, you'll never--

01:17:01 ◼   ► - Oh, that's awesome.

01:17:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I actually knew it.

01:17:04 ◼   ► I hate the dipshits on Twitter who were like,

01:17:06 ◼   ► "Oh, don't you know that?"

01:17:07 ◼   ► And it's like, you know what,

01:17:09 ◼   ► I'm a big fan of Fahrenheit, everybody knows it.

01:17:13 ◼   ► I'm okay with miles instead of kilometers.

01:17:16 ◼   ► But you know, like for the volume,

01:17:21 ◼   ► I mean, the imperial system is terrible.

01:17:24 ◼   ► I mean, you know.

01:17:26 ◼   ► And it even shows, like, you know,

01:17:28 ◼   ► that you can buy like a two liter of soda, you know,

01:17:30 ◼   ► like we do sell products and like the liter

01:17:33 ◼   ► is the one thing that sort of seeped into American life.

01:17:36 ◼   ► So I'm down with that.

01:17:37 ◼   ► I can't remember for the life of me

01:17:39 ◼   ► how many cups are in anything or anything like that.

01:17:41 ◼   ► But I knew the answer to this,

01:17:43 ◼   ► But I just thought off the top of my head, hey,

01:17:45 ◼   ► here's a question to ask Siri on the HomePod.

01:17:50 ◼   ► And the way that this interaction went bad was--

01:17:54 ◼   ► I swear to God, this is verbatim, word for word,

01:17:56 ◼   ► what she said.

01:17:57 ◼   ► And then I immediately, after this,

01:18:00 ◼   ► immediately tried it again.

01:18:02 ◼   ► And I said the same thing.

01:18:03 ◼   ► Hey, HomePod, how many quarts are in a gallon?

01:18:05 ◼   ► And it got the right answer.

01:18:08 ◼   ► I said, there's four quarts in a gallon immediately.

01:18:11 ◼   ► So I got it.

01:18:12 ◼   ► I had this comical response, immediately asked again,

01:18:16 ◼   ► and it gave me the right answer.

01:18:18 ◼   ► And so a whole bunch of people on Twitter,

01:18:21 ◼   ► I didn't explain it.

01:18:22 ◼   ► All I did was post the transcript of my interaction

01:18:24 ◼   ► and a whole bunch of people said,

01:18:25 ◼   ► "I just tried it, it works for me."

01:18:27 ◼   ► But I thought it was kind of enlightening

01:18:31 ◼   ► that the way that this blew up

01:18:34 ◼   ► and became a widely retweeted and liked and everything,

01:18:37 ◼   ► clarified for me some mushy thinking

01:18:40 ◼   ► on what's wrong with Siri.

01:18:43 ◼   ► And that sort of like, hey, I tried it, it worked for me.

01:18:48 ◼   ► And the fact that it worked for me, five seconds later,

01:18:51 ◼   ► I get it, I see that all the time.

01:18:53 ◼   ► And that to me is the fundamental problem with Siri today.

01:18:58 ◼   ► And it's not how much Siri can do

01:19:01 ◼   ► and how many features Siri has.

01:19:05 ◼   ► And even though I think that's what too many people

01:19:07 ◼   ► focused on compared to the Amazon Alexa on the Echo products and the Google on theirs

01:19:14 ◼   ► and how many home, smart home stuff they can hook up to and what syntax you have to use,

01:19:19 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah. To me, that's way--you're already past the fundamental problem, which

01:19:23 ◼   ► is that Siri is completely unreliable, even at the things that Siri can do and maybe even

01:19:30 ◼   ► does most of the time correctly. But if you can't count on it--I don't know what percentage

01:19:36 ◼   ► of my queries like how many courts are in a gallon go wrong like this. But whatever

01:19:43 ◼   ► that percentage is, and I'm going to guess it's, I'm going to say off the top of my head,

01:19:47 ◼   ► it's 10%, maybe 15%. And I could be way wrong either way because I don't keep track of it

01:19:54 ◼   ► and human memory is very faulty. But whatever that percentage is, it's way, way, way too

01:20:00 ◼   ► high and it breeds contempt. It breeds absolute contempt for the feature. And the analogy

01:20:10 ◼   ► I would draw is that when I click or tap, you know, on the Mac I click and on the iOS

01:20:18 ◼   ► I tap a button on the screen. And I know that I've hit the target correctly, that my mouse

01:20:26 ◼   ► is within the buttons region or my finger is with touches within the button tap region,

01:20:33 ◼   ► what percentage of the time does that button actually activate when I tap it? That percentage

01:20:38 ◼   ► is very, very close to 100% and it may well be 100%. It may well be that I, in the what,

01:20:47 ◼   ► five, six months I've been using an iPhone 10, that I haven't once tapped the screen

01:20:51 ◼   ► on a tap target and not had the tap target fire.

01:20:56 ◼   ► When I type a key on my keyboard, and this gets to some of the problems with the new

01:21:00 ◼   ► MacBook Pro keyboard, when I type a D key, how many times do I get a D on the screen?

01:21:06 ◼   ► A hundred percent of the time.

01:21:08 ◼   ► Not 99% of the time, not 99.8% of the time.

01:21:11 ◼   ► A hundred percent of the time.

01:21:13 ◼   ► And anything less than that is unacceptable.

01:21:16 ◼   ► And I feel like that's the problem with Siri.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And I get it that Siri's not, in the year 2018,

01:21:22 ◼   ► Siri's not going to be at 100%,

01:21:24 ◼   ► and it's probably not gonna be at 99%,

01:21:27 ◼   ► but it should be in the high 90s,

01:21:29 ◼   ► and it's nowhere near that.

01:21:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, Siri has a lot of, I think, pretty big problems

01:21:36 ◼   ► and pretty big challenges,

01:21:37 ◼   ► but the reliability is definitely, I think,

01:21:41 ◼   ► one of the biggest, because when this was introduced,

01:21:45 ◼   ► again, in 2011, that was a long time ago,

01:21:48 ◼   ► and Apple really was indeed way ahead of the competition then.

01:21:51 ◼   ► You know, it's kind of like, you know,

01:21:52 ◼   ► when they introduced the iPhone and Steve sat on stage

01:21:56 ◼   ► that they were five years ahead of the competition.

01:21:58 ◼   ► And that proved to be roughly correct.

01:22:00 ◼   ► - Right.

01:22:01 ◼   ► It really did.

01:22:02 ◼   ► - With Siri, I think they were, you know, similar,

01:22:05 ◼   ► you know, maybe like three to five years

01:22:06 ◼   ► ahead of the competition.

01:22:08 ◼   ► But it seemed like the competition then, of course,

01:22:11 ◼   ► caught up in that time, like Siri, you know,

01:22:13 ◼   ► like many Apple innovations do,

01:22:14 ◼   ► Siri kind of set the roadmap of the rest of the industry

01:22:18 ◼   ► for them, and so they did, the industry followed.

01:22:22 ◼   ► But it seemed like Siri has not gotten better

01:22:27 ◼   ► at anywhere near the rate

01:22:28 ◼   ► that everyone else is getting better.

01:22:30 ◼   ► It seems like Siri gets better

01:22:32 ◼   ► at an absolutely glacial pace compared to developments

01:22:37 ◼   ► at Amazon, Google, and even Microsoft.

01:22:41 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

01:22:42 ◼   ► So it seems like, and I don't know what it is,

01:22:46 ◼   ► I don't know what exactly Siri's challenges are,

01:22:49 ◼   ► whether there's like problems with the project or whatever.

01:22:52 ◼   ► I have no idea, it doesn't really matter.

01:22:53 ◼   ► What matters from the outside is that it is fundamentally

01:22:57 ◼   ► way too unreliable compared to its competitors

01:23:02 ◼   ► and also seems to be improving way too slowly.

01:23:06 ◼   ► And there's a lot of things the competitors can do

01:23:09 ◼   ► that Siri still can't do.

01:23:11 ◼   ► There's a lot of basic things that the competitors do

01:23:13 ◼   ► faster and more reliably than Siri does.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And there's a lot of things that I think

01:23:20 ◼   ► the competitors have figured out about

01:23:21 ◼   ► how to design the system, how things should respond,

01:23:25 ◼   ► how things should be that Apple seems to either

01:23:27 ◼   ► disagree with or not care about.

01:23:29 ◼   ► Like one of the big things there is like

01:23:31 ◼   ► Siri is very kind of a smart ass about certain things.

01:23:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've mentioned that before.

01:23:38 ◼   ► You can be a smart ass if you're really,

01:23:40 ◼   ► really good at your job.

01:23:42 ◼   ► You can occasionally be a smart ass.

01:23:44 ◼   ► - And you know that as a smart ass yourself.

01:23:47 ◼   ► You know that.

01:23:48 ◼   ► And I know it as somebody who's a bit of a smart ass

01:23:51 ◼   ► and in my youth was an intolerable smart ass.

01:23:55 ◼   ► But only when I knew that I was the smartest person

01:23:57 ◼   ► in the room. - Now you're definitely not.

01:23:59 ◼   ► Yeah. (laughs)

01:24:01 ◼   ► But if I was somebody's assistant

01:24:03 ◼   ► and I acted the way that I do

01:24:06 ◼   ► while I also messed up a third of the things

01:24:08 ◼   ► that I was asked to do in comically obtuse ways,

01:24:12 ◼   ► I would be fired in a day.

01:24:13 ◼   ► Like it would take less than a day I'd be fired.

01:24:17 ◼   ► Like Siri, I think there's always been this design

01:24:21 ◼   ► of Siri to be like kind of a smart ass

01:24:23 ◼   ► and that was kind of cute in 2011.

01:24:26 ◼   ► But, and it would still be kind of okay.

01:24:29 ◼   ► I mean, not always, honestly, I think a lot of,

01:24:31 ◼   ► it turns off a lot of people,

01:24:32 ◼   ► but it would still be kind of okay

01:24:35 ◼   ► if Siri was just awesome and if it did everything like awesomely.

01:24:40 ◼   ► But the reality is like, you know, no voice assistant

01:24:45 ◼   ► is as reliable as our keyboards and our other input devices.

01:24:51 ◼   ► And that's kind of a shame, honestly. If you think, you know, your earlier thing about, you know,

01:24:55 ◼   ► how often does a keyboard fail or does tapping on a screen fail?

01:25:00 ◼   ► I'm not sure there's any other area of consumer computing that we tolerate as high as we can.

01:25:04 ◼   ► rate as high of an error rate as we do with with voices. No, it's no, I mean, the only

01:25:10 ◼   ► other thing I can think of is is my Apple TV remote is not as accurate as my as my mouse

01:25:19 ◼   ► at my iMac, my trackpad on my MacBook Pro or my keyboard like or the touchscreen on

01:25:27 ◼   ► my iPhone and iPad. There's definitely a, I overshoot things with that remote or, or,

01:25:34 ◼   ► but it's still way more accurate and efficient, you know, a combination of accuracy, reliability

01:25:41 ◼   ► and efficiency than Siri way more. It's, it's not even close. And I've been, I was puttering

01:25:47 ◼   ► around with the fire TV again recently, just, I wanted to see, I want to get to it later,

01:25:54 ◼   ► to talk about the updated YouTube app for Apple TV.

01:25:58 ◼   ► And I wanted to see what was going on

01:26:00 ◼   ► on the Fire TV with YouTube,

01:26:02 ◼   ► because there's that whole pissing match

01:26:04 ◼   ► between Amazon and Google,

01:26:06 ◼   ► where Amazon booted off the official,

01:26:10 ◼   ► or YouTube yanked the official YouTube app

01:26:13 ◼   ► or started blocking it, and we could get into that.

01:26:16 ◼   ► But their remote is sort of Apple TV-like in its minimalism.

01:26:21 ◼   ► I don't know if you have one.

01:26:24 ◼   ► Do you have a Fire TV product?

01:26:25 ◼   ► - I bought the first one, I have since sold it,

01:26:29 ◼   ► but does it still have that same kind of black,

01:26:31 ◼   ► almost like triangular profile remote?

01:26:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, sort of.

01:26:35 ◼   ► It's got a circular D-pad at the top,

01:26:38 ◼   ► sort of a lot like the old Apple TV remote.

01:26:40 ◼   ► It's got a circular D-pad at the top,

01:26:43 ◼   ► a home button, a back button, and a menu button.

01:26:46 ◼   ► The menu button is the one that puts it a little bit more

01:26:49 ◼   ► in the more buttons than Apple has.

01:26:52 ◼   ► But it's, you know, it's roughly Apple TV-like

01:26:55 ◼   ► and it's minimalism.

01:26:56 ◼   ► And it's not, I like the Apple TV,

01:27:04 ◼   ► maybe it's 'cause I'm used to it,

01:27:06 ◼   ► 'cause I use Apple TV almost every day.

01:27:08 ◼   ► I like the Apple TV, we could do a whole show

01:27:13 ◼   ► and we all, you and I always go along,

01:27:15 ◼   ► and we could do a whole show about the problems

01:27:17 ◼   ► with Apple TV's remote.

01:27:20 ◼   ► But the basic idea of a touchpad on a remote,

01:27:22 ◼   ► I think, is definitely a solid one.

01:27:26 ◼   ► There are times when it's so much-- it is nice and efficient.

01:27:29 ◼   ► It feels like I can go more than one row.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Like, the D-pad on the Fire one, it's like one click at a time sucks.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And if you press and hold, it goes way too fast.

01:27:38 ◼   ► But even so, I never feel as completely frustrated

01:27:45 ◼   ► as I do when a Siri interaction goes wrong.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And think about that.

01:27:48 ◼   ► I do think that this one that I tweeted, it's really interesting how it went wrong.

01:27:53 ◼   ► So the it's four interactions, two for me, two from Siri.

01:27:57 ◼   ► And my first one is how many courts are in a gallon, which should be,

01:28:02 ◼   ► you know, and again, I don't know, you know, to Apple's credit,

01:28:06 ◼   ► they at least have the right goal,

01:28:08 ◼   ► which is that they want to allow arbitrary syntax.

01:28:13 ◼   ► Like you don't have to say, maybe I would have gotten a better result if I said,

01:28:18 ◼   ► "Hey, convert one gallon to quarts."

01:28:22 ◼   ► I don't know if that's better

01:28:24 ◼   ► than how many quarts are in a gallon.

01:28:26 ◼   ► But Apple's stated goal, which I think is admirable

01:28:29 ◼   ► and which is correct,

01:28:30 ◼   ► which is that it should just process language the way we do,

01:28:33 ◼   ► where if I asked you, a human, thinking you knew the answer,

01:28:38 ◼   ► it wouldn't matter to you which way I put it, right?

01:28:41 ◼   ► And so I think it's admirable from Apple's perspective

01:28:44 ◼   ► that they're approaching it that way.

01:28:46 ◼   ► And her response is, "What would you like me

01:28:49 ◼   ► "to convert one gallon to?"

01:28:51 ◼   ► So she obviously knew I was converting something to gallons,

01:28:56 ◼   ► but must have misheard me say quarts,

01:28:58 ◼   ► but it's just a weird thing.

01:29:00 ◼   ► But then she asks me, "What would you like me

01:29:02 ◼   ► "to convert one gallon to?"

01:29:04 ◼   ► And all I said was the one word answer, quarts.

01:29:06 ◼   ► And so she was in the mode where she's listening

01:29:09 ◼   ► for me to respond.

01:29:10 ◼   ► I didn't have to say, "Hey, HomePod, quarts."

01:29:14 ◼   ► I could just, you know, there's certain multi-step things with Siri where she's expecting an

01:29:19 ◼   ► answer and you can just say it.

01:29:21 ◼   ► So what would you like me to convert one gallon to?

01:29:24 ◼   ► I say one word, quartz, and somehow this gets misconstrued as what is quartz, the mineral.

01:29:31 ◼   ► Like how…

01:29:32 ◼   ► It's a…

01:29:33 ◼   ► Yeah, that's…

01:29:34 ◼   ► There's no excuse for that.

01:29:35 ◼   ► It's a really strange interaction.

01:29:39 ◼   ► really bizarre to me that she asked me what would I like to convert one gallon

01:29:43 ◼   ► to and and if anything knowing that I was converting a gallon you would think

01:29:48 ◼   ► you know listen for common forms of you know volume measures of volume you know

01:29:55 ◼   ► whether they right yeah you didn't say like miles or airplanes or whatever it's

01:30:00 ◼   ► like it was something that's very that it should be a very expected and common

01:30:04 ◼   ► response to that question and and quartz should be on a very short list of things

01:30:09 ◼   ► an English speaker might want to convert one gallon to. It's a very bizarre way for that

01:30:14 ◼   ► to have gone off the rails. And again, immediately, within 10 seconds, I took a little bit of

01:30:21 ◼   ► time just to jot it down, because I really suspected I wouldn't be able to reproduce

01:30:25 ◼   ► it. So I wanted to get it down as best I could. And I even quick looked up the Quartz QRTZ

01:30:33 ◼   ► Wikipedia page to make sure that—and it was word for word, so I didn't have to memorize

01:30:37 ◼   ► that portion of it. I could just copy and paste it from Wikipedia. And then immediately

01:30:42 ◼   ► tried it again and it worked. And it did. But to me, that level of unreliability is

01:30:48 ◼   ► why people stop using it. And the problem is we're no longer at the point where Siri

01:30:56 ◼   ► is, "Well, it's okay if it sucks because it's just sort of an extra and nobody really

01:31:01 ◼   ► depends on it." Because now, with HomePod, they're shipping a product where the primary

01:31:05 ◼   ► interfaces Siri. And again, even just leave aside, just leave aside the comparisons to

01:31:13 ◼   ► Alexa and Google Assistant. Just judge it on its own merits. Is it good enough? And

01:31:19 ◼   ► I really do think the answer is no, it's it's not it's like having it would be like shipping

01:31:23 ◼   ► a touchscreen phone before capacitive touchscreens, right? Like back in the when you had to press

01:31:30 ◼   ► real hard era.

01:31:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:31:33 ◼   ► Like this, Siri is very frustrating to me

01:31:37 ◼   ► because I want so badly to only be

01:31:40 ◼   ► in the Apple ecosystem for this stuff.

01:31:43 ◼   ► Like I want so badly to not have an Amazon cylinder

01:31:47 ◼   ► of commerce and creepiness in my kitchen.

01:31:49 ◼   ► Like I want that to be a HomePod.

01:31:51 ◼   ► I want to be all in on Apple stuff

01:31:53 ◼   ► because a lot of stuff just works better that way

01:31:55 ◼   ► and I like their privacy and I like their apparent

01:31:58 ◼   ► sound quality and niceness of their devices and everything.

01:32:00 ◼   ► are like, I want so badly for that to be the case,

01:32:03 ◼   ► but Siri, I really think is holding them back

01:32:06 ◼   ► in some pretty big ways.

01:32:08 ◼   ► It just is not good enough.

01:32:10 ◼   ► You know, I think you're right.

01:32:12 ◼   ► The rate of just errors and weirdness and unreliability

01:32:17 ◼   ► and honestly, fragmentation is another major concern here.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Of like, you know, Siri on different platforms

01:32:22 ◼   ► handling different things or not handling different things.

01:32:26 ◼   ► I think that's a pretty big problem.

01:32:28 ◼   ► There's lots of problems with Siri,

01:32:29 ◼   ► But it all comes down to the fact that like, it is now seven years old, and it's still not reliable.

01:32:38 ◼   ► And not to the sense that it's like 100% reliable, because as I said earlier, like, none of the voice assistants are 100% reliable.

01:32:45 ◼   ► But like one of the most shocking things to me when I first got the Amazon Echo, after only having used Siri before that,

01:32:52 ◼   ► was that the Echo, even though in some ways it is less advanced,

01:32:57 ◼   ► like it's less advanced in things like non-English language support,

01:33:01 ◼   ► in things like what order you say certain phrases in with like understanding the syntax.

01:33:06 ◼   ► So there's areas that like Apple and its fans are always happy to try it out and say,

01:33:11 ◼   ► "Well Siri is really advanced in these areas, fine."

01:33:15 ◼   ► But the Amazon Echo is 100% reliable for me in what it can do.

01:33:19 ◼   ► It almost never misunderstands me.

01:33:22 ◼   ► It almost never gives me, I think I've heard

01:33:25 ◼   ► like their version of like the, like when Siri says,

01:33:28 ◼   ► sorry, I can't help you right now,

01:33:29 ◼   ► where it's like basically like a server error happened.

01:33:32 ◼   ► I've heard that on the Echo, I think twice in two years.

01:33:37 ◼   ► And we use it multiple times a day for lots of stuff.

01:33:41 ◼   ► So the Echo is clearly way ahead in reliability.

01:33:46 ◼   ► It's also way ahead in speed.

01:33:48 ◼   ► Like I remember when I first got it,

01:33:50 ◼   ► just being amazed compared to Siri,

01:33:51 ◼   ► just how quickly and how consistently

01:33:54 ◼   ► it responded to things.

01:33:55 ◼   ► So we have speed, consistency, and reliability

01:33:59 ◼   ► with the Amazon Alexa service

01:34:01 ◼   ► that we just don't have with Siri.

01:34:04 ◼   ► And I think that, like, that shouldn't be the case.

01:34:08 ◼   ► This is not one of Amazon's like core competencies,

01:34:12 ◼   ► historically, this is not the kind of thing

01:34:13 ◼   ► that like their products heavily depend on it.

01:34:16 ◼   ► Well, now they do, but they didn't at the time.

01:34:17 ◼   ► Apple should be kicking Amazon's butt in this area.

01:34:21 ◼   ► And the fact that they're not, I think,

01:34:22 ◼   ► should be cause for serious concern in the company

01:34:25 ◼   ► because this is not just some toy accessory feature

01:34:30 ◼   ► that is kind of a fun thing.

01:34:32 ◼   ► Like you said, this is becoming a really important feature

01:34:35 ◼   ► and in some ways the most important feature

01:34:37 ◼   ► of certain products.

01:34:38 ◼   ► And it's just embarrassing that Apple seems to be

01:34:44 ◼   ► unable to compete to that let to even a basic level of reliability and quality compared to

01:34:50 ◼   ► What the other players in this same market were able to do in less time

01:34:55 ◼   ► It's in arguable to me that Siri is the primary interface to home pod

01:34:59 ◼   ► I don't see how else you I don't see how you could argue. Otherwise sure you can control it by airplay and

01:35:05 ◼   ► Yes, there are hardware volume buttons and you can tap it for play pause, but it's it's clearly

01:35:12 ◼   ► I mean, it doesn't ship with a remote control.

01:35:14 ◼   ► I mean, there's no--

01:35:15 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah.

01:35:16 ◼   ► - The fact that it doesn't ship with a remote control,

01:35:18 ◼   ► and it's conceived that the remote control is your voice.

01:35:22 ◼   ► - And one could argue that the Siri might even be

01:35:26 ◼   ► a pretty close second interface for the Apple Watch.

01:35:28 ◼   ► - Exactly, you took the words right out of my mouth.

01:35:31 ◼   ► And AirPods, AirPods a little bit less so,

01:35:36 ◼   ► but I think if Siri was better on AirPods

01:35:39 ◼   ► and faster to respond, it would be primary.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Like it's only not primary because it takes so long

01:35:46 ◼   ► and isn't reliable for like, you know,

01:35:50 ◼   ► changing what you're listening to or play pause

01:35:53 ◼   ► or you know, changing the volume and stuff like that.

01:35:58 ◼   ► And their future products are going to be,

01:36:03 ◼   ► I mean, what is Apple great at?

01:36:05 ◼   ► They're great at making personal computers

01:36:08 ◼   ► smaller and smaller and more personal and more personal.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And once you get beneath the size of a phone,

01:36:15 ◼   ► a screen is really not that great as a primary interface.