PodSearch

The Talk Show

215: ‘The “Press Real Hard” Era’ With Marco Arment

 

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.

01:36:19   I mean, that's a big deal.

01:36:21   That's why I wanted to bring up Apple Watch and Siri

01:36:24   and you saw it coming.

01:36:26   It's good for, it's okay for literally displaying things

01:36:31   like taking a glance at your watch to see what that tap was.

01:36:35   But for responding, Siri would be,

01:36:37   I would be better if Siri were reliable and fast enough.

01:36:41   - Yeah, and I think we're seeing,

01:36:44   like this is the direction

01:36:46   that some pretty big markets are heading.

01:36:48   Like obviously, I don't think Siri has a ton of,

01:36:53   I don't think it's massively holding back

01:36:56   the Mac or the iPad, and maybe not the phone,

01:37:00   but that's kind of a maybe.

01:37:02   But a lot of these markets where things are getting smaller

01:37:05   and especially anything wearable, as you said,

01:37:07   like anything where you have either no screen

01:37:09   or a very small screen,

01:37:10   that's only gonna get more important.

01:37:12   And the other voice assistants are not standing still.

01:37:15   They are really advancing quickly.

01:37:18   And Amazon I don't think is gonna ever

01:37:21   have great multi-language support

01:37:23   because Amazon, the company,

01:37:25   doesn't really have a lot of great support

01:37:26   outside of the US for pretty much anything.

01:37:29   Google does, and Google I think is doing pretty well

01:37:31   in that area so far.

01:37:33   Microsoft, probably also with Cortana,

01:37:35   I don't know much about that, but from what I hear,

01:37:37   it's pretty decent.

01:37:38   This is an area where, again, Apple should be

01:37:42   leading the way, this is user interface.

01:37:45   And Apple, in their DNA and in their history,

01:37:49   they have cared so deeply about making really great

01:37:53   user interfaces and user experiences.

01:37:55   And this is one area where, when it came out in 2011,

01:37:58   it was like, well, it's kinda crappy and kind of unreliable,

01:38:02   but it's pretty cool, let's see where this goes.

01:38:05   And hopefully Apple will have the best one of these

01:38:08   like forever, the same way they usually

01:38:09   have the best interface.

01:38:10   And that just hasn't happened,

01:38:12   and it's been quite the opposite,

01:38:14   where now like Siri seems like Windows

01:38:17   by comparison to even the most basic Alexa interactions,

01:38:21   because the Alexa interactions are just so damn fast

01:38:24   and reliable and pretty smart, honestly.

01:38:28   Like when I ask like general knowledge questions

01:38:31   or like local questions.

01:38:32   I will often try Siri first if I have my phone with me.

01:38:38   And so often it just gives me bad results

01:38:41   or no good results or a web search.

01:38:42   And I ask the exact same question

01:38:44   and the exact same phrasing to my Amazon Echo

01:38:47   and it gives me the answer.

01:38:48   And this doesn't happen every time that way

01:38:50   but it happens a lot that way

01:38:51   and it doesn't usually happen the other direction.

01:38:53   So it's concerning to me like just quite

01:38:56   how far behind Siri appears to be

01:38:59   and how slowly it seems to ever change.

01:39:02   It just seems like what I hope is coming

01:39:06   is a massive reset or like a big Siri 2.0.

01:39:10   I hope there's massive changes underfoot

01:39:13   that we just aren't seeing yet

01:39:14   because whatever they've been doing to date with Siri,

01:39:18   it's just not good enough.

01:39:19   And it doesn't seem to be getting good enough,

01:39:21   quickly enough to ever catch up

01:39:24   or ever even reach a minimum level of good.

01:39:27   There was a funny thing, and it is funny because we were talking about how we don't like

01:39:34   it when Siri tries to be funny, but there was a—Amy was the one who found it. But

01:39:44   before the Super Bowl, if you asked the Echo who's going to win the Super Bowl, like,

01:39:49   Siri has been—one of the things Siri has been ahead of is Siri's been hooked up to

01:39:52   like sports betting lines for a while. So you can ask like who's the favorite in an

01:39:57   upcoming major sports event, and Siri almost always can tell you exactly what the point

01:40:02   spread is or if it's a different type of sport where it's just odds, what the odds

01:40:06   are.

01:40:10   But when you asked—did you hear about this?

01:40:11   When you asked the Alexa before the Super Bowl who was going to win the Super Bowl,

01:40:14   they programmed her with a total jab at the Patriots.

01:40:18   Did you see this?

01:40:19   She said, "The team favored to win is the—excuse me.

01:40:24   Excuse me. It's the Patriots. That was tough to get out. But I'm flying with the Eagles

01:40:32   on this one because of their relentless defense and the momentum they've been riding off

01:40:36   their underdog status. E-A-G-L-E-S. Eagles. For whatever reason, Eagles fans, their chant

01:40:46   is to just spell out the word Eagles, but they're very into it. I thought it was amazing.

01:40:53   are speculating that it comes from the fact that Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots,

01:41:02   is best friends with Trump, and that Bezos has his issues with Trump. Perhaps that was the reason.

01:41:10   But for whatever reason, Echo was totally down with the Eagles in the Super Bowl. And I thought

01:41:15   that was actually pretty charming. I thought that was actually one of these assistants trying to be

01:41:19   be funny where it came off as pretty funny.

01:41:22   - Meanwhile, I asked Siri the morning of the Super Bowl,

01:41:27   who is playing the Super Bowl?

01:41:30   And it told me Justin Timberlake.

01:41:32   - Well, that's true.

01:41:34   That is true.

01:41:35   - Right, exactly, yeah, it's like, okay.

01:41:37   And if you said who is playing in the Super Bowl,

01:41:39   it would tell you the right answer,

01:41:41   but if you said who is playing the Super Bowl,

01:41:43   it treated that as a musical venue.

01:41:45   Because as everyone knows,

01:41:48   Super Bowl is primarily a musical venue. It's like you knew that the Eagles had a backup

01:41:53   quarterback in but you didn't realize they were so desperate that they were going with

01:41:56   Justin Timberlake. Yeah like it and it's like it's again it's like one of those it's just

01:42:03   a great example of like okay I can see why a smart ass computer that isn't very advanced

01:42:10   gave me that answer because like it interpreted who is playing place name as a musical venue

01:42:17   question. Even though the Super Bowl halftime show is a very large event, sure,

01:42:24   and it is a musical event, but if you say who is playing the Super Bowl that could

01:42:31   have multiple meanings and I think the far more common interpretation of that

01:42:38   is who is playing the sports game. Because I didn't say who was playing the

01:42:42   Super Bowl halftime show. Like the Super Bowl halftime show is the name of the

01:42:45   musical venue, the Super Bowl is a sporting event.

01:42:48   And so there's like, it should have gotten that right.

01:42:52   And again, it just, like your court saying,

01:42:54   it just said something totally, to me, bonkers,

01:42:57   even though it's not quite as bad as yours,

01:42:59   'cause it at least like, you can at least see

01:43:01   why it got there.

01:43:02   - I feel like the next level of this needs to be

01:43:07   a sort of, just, you know, I often say this

01:43:11   as like a life lesson, like, honestly,

01:43:14   I feel like where I sort of crossed from adolescence

01:43:18   into adulthood was when I realized that there's no shame

01:43:22   in saying I don't know when you don't know.

01:43:25   And so, you know, it was just like a breakthrough in my life

01:43:27   where I always was so, you know,

01:43:31   worried about how smart I was,

01:43:32   or if I didn't know something that it was shameful,

01:43:34   I, you know, I should know the answer to everything.

01:43:37   And it's like, if you just suddenly relax

01:43:38   and realize that if you don't know something,

01:43:40   don't waste people's time to say, you know what?

01:43:42   I don't, I don't understand either.

01:43:43   I don't understand this, can you stop and explain this to me

01:43:46   in a way that I understand or if somebody asks you

01:43:49   a question and you don't know, just say I don't know.

01:43:51   I don't know.

01:43:52   I want Siri to gain I don't know.

01:43:56   So if you ask that question and she doesn't know,

01:43:59   she's pretty sure you're either asking who's playing

01:44:01   the halftime show or who's playing the game, just ask.

01:44:04   Do you mean the game or the halftime show?

01:44:06   Like what a human being would do.

01:44:08   - Right, that would have been, yeah.

01:44:11   Well a human being would have said the team names

01:44:12   playing in the sporting event. But yeah, but even if a human was unsure and thought, you

01:44:17   know, like, you know, it, there's an uncertainty to these virtual assistants that I will that

01:44:24   that, you know, like a human should a normal human should pick that up. But you know, I

01:44:30   could see how some an assistant, especially an AI one that isn't a human could think,

01:44:35   Well, I don't think Marco is really all that into sports. So I'm not sure what he's asking

01:44:41   about here. Just ask, and you could just say it quickly. Just say, "Do you mean the game

01:44:45   or the halftime show?" And you could say, "The game," and then she would tell you who's playing

01:44:50   in the game. That would be fine. You would walk away from that interaction without even

01:44:54   thinking about that question in the middle, if it happened fast enough, roughly at the

01:44:59   speed that it would happen if it was a human being. And computers are so much faster than

01:45:04   human beings that there's no reason it shouldn't, even if it has to round trip to the cloud

01:45:09   briefly, right? It could still happen at roughly the same speed as human interaction.

01:45:14   You know, just think about the little questions you get asked. I've been thinking about this a

01:45:20   lot lately, and it's like, we have a little, great little grocery store here in Center City,

01:45:26   Philadelphia. It's called the Bruno Brothers, and they, you know, all sorts of great, like, Italian

01:45:33   lunch meats and stuff and fresh break bread. So I stopped in and all I did is just get

01:45:38   a big long loaf of Italian bread. And it comes in its own little paper sleeve. And I rang

01:45:46   out. That's all I needed. And I rang out and the guy was gonna, you know, he was like,

01:45:50   do you want to know you want a bag? And I was like, nah, because it's in a bag. But

01:45:53   like him asking me, do I want a bag for my bread that's already in a bag? And that's

01:45:58   all I've got to carry. Like, I didn't feel interrupted by that. You know, it because

01:46:02   it happened at a speed and a pace and there's no reason that our virtual assistant shouldn't

01:46:08   be able to interact with us like that. Like I don't expect it all to come out in one fluent

01:46:12   query from a human that gives the answer, you know, but just have some back and forth.

01:46:16   I love like if you were Siri, you would have asked a bag for what? And he would have said

01:46:24   your bread and you would have been like bread is a big food product made from wheat. Right?

01:46:29   The fact that she forgot we were talking about units of measure, it almost is like she's got a head injury.

01:46:36   Right, yeah.

01:46:38   You've hired an assistant, like a human, and it's great.

01:46:43   And then, oh my God, terrible news.

01:46:46   She's in a car accident, and she's injured her head, and then she comes back.

01:46:50   And you ask a question like that, and all of a sudden she starts telling you about Quartz the mineral.

01:46:56   know two seconds ago she just asked you a question about what do you want to

01:47:00   convert gallons to you would feel terrible but you would think like well

01:47:03   I've got a fire right yeah it's like this clearly this person like this is a

01:47:09   tragedy but this also means this person probably can't write job you know and

01:47:13   and it's like yeah here you don't have the human connection it's just this

01:47:16   person can't do this this AI really is not very good at this job all right let

01:47:21   me take a break here and thank our next sponsor that's our good friends at ero

01:47:25   E-E-R-O. Eero makes Wi-Fi systems for your house and they use what's called a mesh network

01:47:35   where you just plug a bunch of them in and you don't have, there's no special magic one

01:47:40   that's the base system. You just plug the same little puck size thing which is very

01:47:47   nicely designed. You plug them in all around your house depending on how big your house

01:47:51   is or what their shape is and there's all sorts of information at their website that

01:47:55   they can help you choose how many of them to buy. Well, they've got their second generation

01:47:59   product is out. And the second generation product is better as more speed, more range

01:48:07   and in same high quality elegant design as the original. And they've got these new ones

01:48:15   that are like a little, they call them a beacon. And the beacon, you just plug in like a night

01:48:20   light goes right in the socket. There's no cable or anything. You just plug it in a socket

01:48:25   somewhere like maybe at the top of some steps, stairway or something like that. And it even

01:48:31   has a light because it could be a nightlight. So it has a nightlight. But if you don't want

01:48:36   the nightlight, they're wonderful, excellent Euro app that you install on your phone, which

01:48:41   is where you control the whole system from. You could just turn off the light or turn

01:48:46   it on or put it on schedule or whatever. But anyway, the whole second generation system

01:48:51   from Eero adds a third 5 GHz radio and that makes it that's now tri-band and it's now

01:49:00   twice as fast as its predecessor. And the first generation Eero is the fastest Wi-Fi

01:49:05   system I ever had in my house in my life and it was great, still great. And you can just

01:49:10   if you already have first generation, you can add second generation hardware and it

01:49:14   just works together. And the app is great. And the app lets you do all sorts of terrific

01:49:19   things like do speed tests to make sure see what kind of upstream downstream connection

01:49:23   you're getting. It's really it's just a great product. The beacon is half the size of the

01:49:30   little of the normal stations that they have. And it really is it's very discreet. It is

01:49:35   the sort of thing that doesn't junk up your house or anything like that no one will even

01:49:38   notice that you've got it. But what you wind up with is a solid Wi Fi network, a single

01:49:44   network mashed together with these multiple hardware units. So it's not like when you're

01:49:49   moving from one area to another, your devices are going from one network to another. They

01:49:54   just see one network and it really can thoroughly cover a large house or a difficult house with

01:50:01   walls or something like that. It's really great. I use it here. You're hearing me right

01:50:06   now speak to you over in the Eero network. I really do like this product. And to me,

01:50:12   thing that I like is that it's just it could not have been easier to set up. I just plugged

01:50:17   them in and told the Eero app what room each one was in and that was it. I've never done

01:50:22   any more work than that to configure it. For someone as lazy as me that just wants good

01:50:29   Wi-Fi throughout the house, that's really pretty great. What more am I supposed to tell

01:50:37   I think I'm supposed to give you a URL and that's a euro.com. But what you got to remember,

01:50:45   you got to remember is the code and it's a code that will get you free overnight shipping

01:50:56   to the US and Canada. And that code is the talk show, T H E T A L K S H O W. So use that

01:51:06   code the talk show talk show with the the which I always pleases me a little bit and

01:51:12   you get free overnight shipping in the US or Canada to great product and a good deal

01:51:18   get free overnight shipping you're listening to me right now you can have this thing in

01:51:21   your house by tomorrow so there you go my thanks to euro.com for sponsoring the show

01:51:26   what do you do on the underscore show do you do the ads due to the sponsors or does underscore

01:51:34   - I do 'em, it's basically like a smaller version of ATP.

01:51:39   - So do you like, is it relaxing

01:51:41   to not have to do the sponsors?

01:51:43   - Oh, it's glorious.

01:51:46   Like what I love about doing this show

01:51:48   is I can just walk over to my desk

01:51:50   five seconds before we were gonna record

01:51:52   and just sit down and just start.

01:51:54   And I don't have to have any windows open,

01:51:56   I don't have to be like watching like the script

01:51:59   or the program or you know, having the list of sponsors out.

01:52:02   Like with ATP, at first I started,

01:52:05   for years I would do the ads live as we recorded,

01:52:07   and that was terrible,

01:52:10   because not only would I screw them up a lot

01:52:12   and require lots of editing,

01:52:13   but the whole show, I was like,

01:52:16   I was always like a little bit distracted that,

01:52:20   oh, I had this ad I have to fit in sometime,

01:52:22   like I have to like wait for a time and then jump on it

01:52:24   and just start doing it,

01:52:26   and it was always distracting me

01:52:27   from listening to the conversation

01:52:29   or really being more in-depth about my own conversations.

01:52:34   And so I started about, I don't know, six months ago

01:52:37   or a year ago, I started basically pre-recording them,

01:52:40   but I want it to sound like I'm doing them live.

01:52:43   So I record them like a half hour before I record the show.

01:52:47   So it's like my same setup,

01:52:48   like it's the same night I'm recording,

01:52:50   my voice sounds the same, the room is the same.

01:52:52   So it's still kind of like a mad rush

01:52:56   to get everything done before each show,

01:52:59   But now I at least like during the show,

01:53:00   I don't have to worry about it so much.

01:53:02   So during the show, like I can be more present

01:53:04   in the conversation and not be constantly looking

01:53:07   at the sponsor list and trying to figure out

01:53:09   like when I can do each one.

01:53:10   The downside is that it allows me to be

01:53:13   a little bit more of a perfectionist.

01:53:15   So a lot of times I have to do an ad read

01:53:17   like five times before I actually get it right.

01:53:19   - That's the same with me.

01:53:20   90% of the ad reads I do on the talk show,

01:53:23   I just do live during recording

01:53:25   like I did right there with Eero.

01:53:28   probably more than 90%, but then every once in a while,

01:53:30   something happens, either I botch it

01:53:32   or something happens in between recording

01:53:35   and doing the show, or I go to record

01:53:38   and there's a sponsor who's set to go,

01:53:40   but they still haven't given us the thing

01:53:43   and I have to do that the next day.

01:53:45   And when I do that, I almost never ever redo a read

01:53:50   when I do it live during the recording like this.

01:53:52   And every single time I do it independently by myself,

01:53:56   I botch it.

01:53:58   I can't, there is something,

01:54:00   I've developed some kind of mental muscle

01:54:03   where I no longer feel weird or awkward

01:54:11   talking to somebody like you doing the show.

01:54:14   Like I'm very comfortable right now

01:54:17   having this conversation with you,

01:54:18   even knowing that we're recording it

01:54:20   and tens of thousands of people

01:54:22   will soon be listening to it,

01:54:25   which originally I always felt very self-conscious about,

01:54:28   but I've developed a comfort.

01:54:30   But when I'm here just talking into the microphone

01:54:34   and nobody's listening to me, I feel incredibly awkward.

01:54:37   I don't know if you took notice that one of the reads

01:54:43   last week I had to redo, Paul Kaphasis was the guest,

01:54:48   and I had to do one of the reads the next day.

01:54:53   I don't know if you noticed. I forgot. Honestly, I usually skip ads. I thought it was a good

01:55:01   one. What was it? It was the Casper one because Casper had, you know this too because I think

01:55:11   they were on ATP. Yeah, the President's Day sale. And it was sort of like, they were like,

01:55:20   If your show airs on these dates in February, we want you to do the President's Day sale.

01:55:25   And the show is going to come out the day before, but at night.

01:55:29   And so we had the same issue.

01:55:31   And we actually went ahead, Jesse, like, go check with them.

01:55:34   Like, can we do it?

01:55:35   Like, what should we do the day before this day was going to come out at like, like 1030

01:55:39   at night the day before.

01:55:43   And they were like, we'd rather have the President's Day sale.

01:55:45   So I was like, I can do that.

01:55:47   I can do it the next day.

01:55:48   But I also had, I don't know if it sounded weird to people, if any, you know, backstory,

01:55:52   if you thought that the Casper's President's Day sale sounded weird last week, it was because

01:55:58   when I recorded with Paul, my voice was still really hoarse from having been out in Las

01:56:03   Vegas for the Super Bowl.

01:56:05   And I always come back from Vegas with a hoarse voice because it's dry and people smoke cigarettes.

01:56:10   And I'm not used to either, I'm not used to desert air and I'm not used to breathing cigarette

01:56:14   combined with the fact that in while watching the Super Bowl it's a really

01:56:19   noisy big cavernous room and to say anything you have to yell so when I

01:56:24   recorded I think on Wednesday with Paul my voice was still a mess and by

01:56:27   Thursday it was already sounding better but I was as I'm recording the ad I'm

01:56:31   like I should I should like scream a little or something to horse it up my

01:56:35   voice to get it back to where it was anyway yeah this is why like whenever

01:56:41   you record I do it the same night like right right before the show because

01:56:44   because otherwise it sounds different.

01:56:46   And I think most people really don't care, but I care.

01:56:50   Like when I'm doing it, I care that I want this to sound

01:56:54   totally seamless.

01:56:55   - Speaking of ad skipping, one of the recent things

01:56:59   that have come out in the world of podcasting

01:57:00   is Apple's long-awaited analytics have come out.

01:57:04   And so if you have a podcast in the iTunes store

01:57:08   and you've signed up for their,

01:57:10   I guess I don't think you can get listed

01:57:12   which are not in Podcast Connect, right?

01:57:14   Like they don't just list podcasts.

01:57:17   - Yeah, you have to sign up.

01:57:18   I think the only question is like,

01:57:20   you know, if you signed up a while ago

01:57:22   and you forgot what email you used,

01:57:24   like you might have to like basically like claim it

01:57:26   from them or register in a certain way with them.

01:57:28   I forget how, I did it a while ago,

01:57:29   so I forgot how to do this,

01:57:30   but like I was already registered in some way.

01:57:33   - Well, I have a cheat move 'cause I know,

01:57:35   I know some people on the podcast team there.

01:57:37   - Yeah, that's totally BS.

01:57:38   - But I do think though that,

01:57:40   Everybody, I think that's why they have the one special iTunes tag for the RSS feed

01:57:46   with an email address. That if you can email from the address that's in your RSS feed,

01:57:51   they trust it. And that makes a certain amount of sense that, you know, if somebody has right

01:57:58   access to your RSS feed for your podcast, you're screwed already.

01:58:02   You know.

01:58:03   Yeah, yeah. The game's over at that point.

01:58:07   But anyway, they came out with these analytics and what the advertising industry wants is,

01:58:14   of course, their JavaScript to be running all the time, turning on your camera to look

01:58:22   at you while you listen to podcasts.

01:58:24   The most intrusive thing you can possibly imagine, like all of standard web advertising

01:58:29   technology has fallen into where your fucking battery goes dead because of ads on web pages

01:58:35   now.

01:58:36   Of course that's what they want and of course Apple wasn't willing to give them anything

01:58:41   close to that, but they do have some basic listening stats.

01:58:46   And I was super happy but totally not surprised that the graph of every episode of my show

01:58:53   looks pretty much the same, which is that most people listen to the end, there's some

01:59:02   drop off, but that, you know, and I think some of that could correspond to people who

01:59:05   started listening to it and then listen somewhere else and it's not connected there. And you

01:59:11   can see in each episode, three dips where the sponsor reads go, and those dips are surprisingly

01:59:19   shallow. So yes, there are people who skip ads, but it is a definite minority of listeners.

01:59:28   And I, you know, I've said before, I often say it when you're on because we get into

01:59:31   shop talk about running a podcast. But I just see my job doing these ads as trying to make

01:59:37   them as interesting as possible, both for everybody's benefit, for the sponsor's benefit.

01:59:43   Even if you've heard me talk about ERO before or Squarespace, what can I say that maybe

01:59:47   would throw a monkey wrench in there and make you want to listen for another minute? And

01:59:54   if you want to skip, skip. I'm not going to try to fight you. It's my job to make it interesting.

02:00:01   We found pretty similar patterns when we looked at ATP stats in the same thing, which probably

02:00:08   makes sense because we probably have a lot of the same audience, where it turns out most

02:00:12   people listen to most shows all the way through and there's a small dip at the ad breaks that

02:00:18   you can see, but it's on the order of maybe 15% fewer people listen to the ad breaks.

02:00:24   It's not a huge jump down.

02:00:26   You can also see where they're using a 30-second skip.

02:00:29   it starts to come back in the second half of the ad read.

02:00:32   It does.

02:00:33   - Right, exactly, yeah.

02:00:34   - So I appreciate that.

02:00:37   I've always wanted to know, but I'm not surprised.

02:00:41   I often get emails from people when I mention it,

02:00:42   and people are so nice,

02:00:44   and I think it's because they realize that me,

02:00:48   and I'm sure it's true for you guys too,

02:00:52   I'm sure it's true for everybody at Relay,

02:00:55   all the people who have shows there,

02:00:59   But people realize that we're all very low to the ground here.

02:01:04   There's no employees at Daring Fireball.

02:01:06   There's no-- Six Colors doesn't have a sales department.

02:01:09   There's not much-- there's really

02:01:14   nothing between us and our readers and listeners.

02:01:19   And I often get email that takes that into consideration.

02:01:23   And they want us to succeed.

02:01:25   And the gist of these emails often are, hey,

02:01:28   I'm a long time listener of your show.

02:01:30   I love it, I love every episode that comes out.

02:01:33   I feel guilty though 'cause here's my personal,

02:01:37   and it's so funny how many people repeat the same thing.

02:01:39   They're like, I will listen to every sponsor

02:01:41   for the first time and sometimes a second time,

02:01:43   but then after that, I'll skip.

02:01:45   And I'm like, that's great.

02:01:47   And they're like, I write back,

02:01:48   you don't need to apologize, that's fantastic.

02:01:51   - Yeah, I'm happy with that.

02:01:54   I mean, when I started doing chapters in ATP,

02:01:58   question obviously becomes like you know how do you chapter ads like you know

02:02:01   some people don't put chapters in the ads so you so it's harder to skip them

02:02:05   if you want to. I decided I basically worked through a bunch of things and

02:02:10   decided what I do is I put a chapter at the start of the ad when the ad is

02:02:17   playing it shows it says sponsor colon name of sponsor and it links to the

02:02:20   sponsor URL so it's actually kind of better if you're you know if you're

02:02:24   interested in the product you get a link right there in the chapter title so like

02:02:27   it's showing right on screen.

02:02:28   You don't have to like go over to the show notes,

02:02:30   scroll down to the bottom and find it like it's right there.

02:02:32   So it's super easy.

02:02:34   If you want to look at the sponsor, the link is right there.

02:02:36   So I think sponsors are getting some additional value there.

02:02:39   And then you can skip that chapter,

02:02:42   but where that chapter ends is not at the end

02:02:46   of the sponsor read, but like 10 seconds

02:02:48   before the end of the sponsor read.

02:02:50   And so if you skip the sponsor read,

02:02:53   what you hear is the very end summary

02:02:56   where it says, "For a great mattress, go to this URL

02:02:58   "and use this promo code."

02:03:00   That's what you hear.

02:03:02   And so you're basically hearing a 10 second version

02:03:05   of the ad or so.

02:03:07   And that is what I found to be a very good compromise,

02:03:11   where if you've heard the ad a million times,

02:03:13   you already know what this company does.

02:03:15   You hit skip, you get reminded of the URL

02:03:18   and the promo code, and you move on.

02:03:22   I've heard from both listeners and from advertisers

02:03:26   that that seems to be a very good balance.

02:03:29   - I wrote to Caleb Sexton who,

02:03:32   after you posted that you did that,

02:03:34   and he edits this show, and I said,

02:03:36   "Hey, that's pretty clever, maybe we could do that."

02:03:38   And he was like, "I've been trying to do that all along."

02:03:40   And I was like, "Oh, I'll try to do a better job

02:03:42   "of doing a good summary at the end of this spot, thanks."

02:03:46   Or by all along he means ever since he's been using forecast

02:03:50   or whatever the--

02:03:51   - Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, forecast, yeah.

02:03:54   Yeah, 'cause it, and you do have to like kind of,

02:03:56   you know, structure your reads, like to,

02:03:58   what I basically say is like,

02:04:00   we're brought to you this week by so and so,

02:04:01   here's the URL and the promo code,

02:04:03   and then big long explanation for two minutes,

02:04:05   and then here's, once again, go to this URL, promo code,

02:04:09   thanks again, thanks to sponsor, you know,

02:04:10   like so you have to structure it in a way where

02:04:12   if you cut out the whole middle of it,

02:04:14   it still makes some sense.

02:04:16   - So when you guys record ATP, you guys,

02:04:18   you sit there and you've got a soundboard thing,

02:04:21   And so when like when Syracuse had mentioned file systems

02:04:25   and you play the ding, that's live when you're recording.

02:04:27   Like you don't do that in post.

02:04:29   - No, it's a bell.

02:04:30   I got, it's an actual bell.

02:04:32   - So it's not even a soundboard app.

02:04:34   You actually-- - I have a bell on my desk.

02:04:35   - Keep a bell and you do that.

02:04:37   What about--

02:04:39   - Yeah, the only time I've ever used a soundboard app

02:04:41   is when we did our live show last year.

02:04:43   I had a soundboard app running

02:04:44   so I could play like our ad transition music

02:04:47   and the outro music and the theme song.

02:04:50   That's the only reason I've ever used one.

02:04:52   But when we record live, I have a bell on my desk

02:04:54   and I bring it out and the first time

02:04:56   he mentions file systems, I hit that bell

02:04:58   and I put a bell away.

02:04:59   - What about the car door for car talk?

02:05:01   - I put that in during editing.

02:05:03   - Ah, so that is in post.

02:05:04   I thought that might have been live, I wasn't sure.

02:05:07   - Although, that is actually my car door

02:05:09   from the BMW I had like five years ago.

02:05:13   I actually went out one night and recorded those sounds.

02:05:15   So that was actually my car.

02:05:17   - Speaking of cars, I wanna say,

02:05:19   and while we're talking about ATP,

02:05:20   before we get back to the max stuff,

02:05:21   I wanna thank you guys for turning me on to the Grand Tour.

02:05:26   I never watched Top Gear, and I'm not really a car person,

02:05:31   but I've heard what--

02:05:32   - Did we turn you on?

02:05:32   I think we've hated the Grand Tour.

02:05:33   - I know, but I know.

02:05:34   - Did we actually turn you on?

02:05:35   - Well, in a way, but you guys seemed to like

02:05:38   Top Gear enough, and this Grand Tour thing

02:05:40   was intriguing to me enough.

02:05:42   And Jonas and I started watching it together,

02:05:46   and we both love it.

02:05:47   absolutely we watch season 2 first and just tore through it and

02:05:52   We don't have Jonas and I don't have a lot of shows that we both like

02:05:57   And and a lot of the ones we do are ones like Saturday night live that we watch with Amy -

02:06:04   And I mean, it's not like I'm looking for shows that only Jonas and I watch but it's you know

02:06:09   It's like a nice thing and like when he was growing up

02:06:11   We loved the Star Wars the Clone Wars animated series and and the rebels thing

02:06:17   But he's not into sports at all and a lot of what I watched during the day or like when he's still awake is sports

02:06:24   And we both love the grand tour

02:06:27   And and the thing I don't get though is you guys all seem to like when you watch it you like skip around like what?

02:06:33   What are the parts that you skip past you just watch the parts when they're like actually reviewing cars

02:06:38   Usually I will skip past any parts that have them in the studio. I love I love the parts. Oh yeah

02:06:46   - Yeah.

02:06:47   - A lot of them get pretty cringe word.

02:06:50   Like not all of them, but yeah, a lot of them do.

02:06:52   - It is.

02:06:53   - And like back when it was Top Gear,

02:06:55   I used to skip through a lot of that stuff

02:06:57   because I would skip through the celebrity part

02:07:00   because it would bring on usually like a British celebrity

02:07:03   who I didn't know.

02:07:04   And so I would skip it,

02:07:05   I was like, well, I don't even know this person.

02:07:06   I have no interest in this.

02:07:07   And I skipped that section and just jump in

02:07:09   to whatever they did next.

02:07:11   The problem with the grand tour of the US,

02:07:14   new US show is that they just I think need a lot more editing than what they

02:07:18   are guys see I and a lot of the jokes and stuff that they do in the indoor

02:07:23   segments I think are pretty I really disagree and Jonas likes it too we

02:07:28   watch the whole thing straight through and it's I'm not gonna say every bit

02:07:32   works but I think that they actually do a pretty good job of not letting any

02:07:37   segment run too long and like when they do the thing that's most like a podcast

02:07:42   the conversation street, it's always too short. It's like I would listen to those guys talk

02:07:47   about cars for three times as long per episode. So I feel like they do a really good job of

02:07:52   sort of leaving you wanting more. We love the show, we really do. And now we're like

02:07:57   halfway through season one. And I give credit to you guys.

02:08:02   I'm glad you enjoy it. Somebody has to.

02:08:04   I think you should give it another shot when new episodes come out. I think you should

02:08:08   just try just you know crack open an IPA or something just to take the edge off

02:08:12   and then just just watch the whole show straight through I'm telling you it

02:08:15   there's there there's something going on I don't know I I'm I really can't

02:08:20   believe I never watched these guys before I really like it and I'm not even

02:08:23   all that into cars well I'm glad you all right there was a thing last week and

02:08:33   And actually the original scoop, it wasn't "Gurman,"

02:08:36   it was actually, you know,

02:08:40   Fried at Axios actually had the first story.

02:08:43   I'm really digging Axios, by the way.

02:08:47   I don't know if you read news on Axios,

02:08:48   but Axios is this newish site that launched like last year.

02:08:53   And they just, like the whole style of Axios,

02:08:57   whether it's tech or politics or anything else they cover,

02:09:00   is sort of breaking everything down

02:09:02   into just like bullet points,

02:09:04   which isn't how I'd wanna read everything,

02:09:07   but it's really kind of efficient.

02:09:10   And it's like, I either wanna read something

02:09:13   that's truly a well-written article by a good writer,

02:09:16   and you could really dig into it like a piece of steak,

02:09:20   or I just want like the snack size tidbits.

02:09:23   And I feel like so much of the news industry

02:09:26   has sort of grown up around this idea

02:09:29   You know if you've got three sentences to say you've still got to dress it up in 750 words

02:09:34   History and whatever just to make it article length

02:09:38   But anyway, you know had this story first before german that there was some kind of meeting

02:09:45   Craig Federighi held

02:09:48   To give a revised plan to employees

02:09:50   and

02:09:52   And mentioned some features that were originally going to be set for iOS this year that got that are being pushed a year back

02:09:59   including a refresh of the home screen and the CarPlay interface and some other things,

02:10:08   but that there are new features, but that they're somehow doing something to focus on quality and

02:10:14   performance a little bit more than before and giving certain projects more time to go.

02:10:20   And then Germin, I think, had the story the same later in the same day, and I don't know

02:10:25   if it was pressured because Ina had it first or if it was going to run anyway. But his

02:10:32   story took more of an angle indicating that this is sort of a radical departure and that

02:10:38   people who heard it were surprised by this, that this is a big change. And my take on

02:10:46   it is that it's not a big change. It's like a course correction. And then there was a

02:10:51   a good thread on Twitter by Steven Sinofsky who was you know used to head up

02:10:55   the Windows division at Apple or Microsoft not Apple who sort of was

02:10:59   making the same case that this sort of three-way three-headed thing of schedule

02:11:05   quality and new features is always you know a balancing act I'm curious what

02:11:13   you what do you think about this it's hard for me to really have a

02:11:20   reasonable or useful opinion on the internal mechanics

02:11:25   of how big companies balance this stuff,

02:11:27   because I've never worked in a big company.

02:11:29   So I really am not familiar with that kind of thing at all.

02:11:33   All I can do is comment on what I see from the outside

02:11:36   and what I experience with the products.

02:11:38   Any way that I develop my stuff

02:11:42   or that I prioritize quality and time and everything else

02:11:45   is not at all the same way that a company like Apple

02:11:47   would do pretty much anything.

02:11:48   So what I can see is, I think it's clear that in recent years, Apple has struggled with quality,

02:11:57   and they have been seemingly torn between a lot of competing desires of, you know, moving fast versus

02:12:05   getting good quality stuff out there versus bug fixes versus expansion.

02:12:09   And these aren't easy problems to solve, and they've been doing overall a pretty decent job of most of it.

02:12:17   most of it. Like it's, the reason we're able to complain about minor problems here and

02:12:23   there is because almost everything is great and almost everything has been working well

02:12:29   for a long time and so you know the small stuff sticks out more. All I can see is that

02:12:40   platforms and products that I like a lot, that I depend on a lot or that I feel like

02:12:45   need attention, oftentimes don't get the attention.

02:12:50   It seems like Apple has always been pretty bad at multitasking.

02:12:54   And this isn't a Tim thing, this goes back

02:12:59   to the Steve era too.

02:13:01   Apple has been pretty bad at really well maintaining

02:13:03   multiple platforms and many products.

02:13:09   They do seem to have tunnel vision at times,

02:13:11   where certain things will get the focus

02:13:11   and everything else gets neglected pretty badly for a while.

02:13:15   And then eventually it'll come around

02:13:18   and the things that got neglected for a while

02:13:19   will get a big burst of investment

02:13:21   and then nothing for a few years or more.

02:13:23   And again, they had this problem under Steve.

02:13:26   - And it almost seems like that's happening again

02:13:28   with the iPad, where last year iPad,

02:13:30   for years people have been clamoring,

02:13:31   well look, this thing is supposed to be

02:13:32   a laptop replacement and it still has

02:13:34   all the same multitasking features of a phone.

02:13:41   of a 13 inch screen on my iPad Pro,

02:13:43   why can't I put two apps up side by side, et cetera.

02:13:46   And they finally addressed it, but now it seems like,

02:13:48   according to these rumors, that big new, you know,

02:13:52   major features like that for iPad

02:13:54   are punted for next year again already.

02:13:56   - Yeah, and it's hard to draw comparisons

02:14:01   for like the way things used to be.

02:14:02   Like, you know, people always say, well, you know,

02:14:04   when the iPhone came out, like then,

02:14:06   whatever version of Mac OS was that year,

02:14:08   I forget, like it was delayed.

02:14:10   And they famously said it took them too much effort

02:14:13   on the iOS, anyway.

02:14:15   It's really not that useful to make comparisons

02:14:18   to how it was back then because Apple today

02:14:21   is just vastly bigger and the competitive landscape

02:14:24   is vastly different.

02:14:26   It's such a different beast and such a different problem

02:14:29   today that you can't just apply blanket wisdom

02:14:33   or examples from the past.

02:14:35   But it does seem like they still don't multitask very well.

02:14:40   very well, like if they're all there growth

02:14:42   and all the new product lines they've launched

02:14:44   and everything, they still have that fundamental problem.

02:14:47   And I don't know, some analysts like to talk about

02:14:50   the corporate structure of Apple being

02:14:54   functional rather than divisional or something like that.

02:14:56   That's it, right?

02:14:56   - Yeah.

02:14:57   - Whatever that is.

02:14:59   And I don't know, maybe that's holding them back

02:15:01   in this area, I don't know.

02:15:03   But whatever the cause and whatever possible solutions exist

02:15:07   The problem to me is the same problem they've had

02:15:12   for a very long time, which is they just don't multitask

02:15:15   very well.

02:15:18   But today they have more platforms and products than ever

02:15:20   that they're trying to maintain.

02:15:24   And so even if, you know, back 10 years ago,

02:15:27   maybe they could only really maintain like one or two things.

02:15:30   Well now, maybe they can maintain 10 things,

02:15:33   but they have 12.

02:15:32   You know, like it's something like that.

02:15:34   Like even if they've gotten better at it,

02:15:37   they're still not able to do it well enough

02:15:40   at the scale they're at today.

02:15:42   And so you have things like, you know,

02:15:43   things being neglected for a long time.

02:15:45   You have like, I think one of the biggest,

02:15:48   you know, for a while you were right,

02:15:49   for a while the iPad was one of these things

02:15:51   where it just seemed like iPad,

02:15:54   the iPad OS was getting very little attention

02:15:56   to Frankel for years.

02:15:58   Fortunately, that seems to have turned around.

02:16:01   Today I would say one of the big dangers of that is the Mac.

02:16:06   I don't think I'm gonna make a lot of argument about that.

02:16:07   The Mac has had not seemingly a ton of software investment

02:16:12   in recent years, and it's really starting to have

02:16:17   some pretty big problems.

02:16:18   But again, I say this on a Mac, it's working.

02:16:21   Everything's relative, I guess, but it seems like

02:16:27   almost every week there's some kind of embarrassing

02:16:30   quality or security flaw in Mac OS.

02:16:33   And so like, obviously this is not getting

02:16:36   the type of attention it deserves,

02:16:37   or the time for bug fixing or quality assurance

02:16:41   that it needs.

02:16:43   So I think this is a problem that Apple can fix.

02:16:47   Like, they have a massive amount of resources

02:16:51   at their disposal.

02:16:52   I think, you know, you can't just throw money

02:16:55   at something and make it go away, it isn't that easy.

02:16:57   but it's also really hard to argue

02:17:00   that Apple can't do something

02:17:02   because they don't have enough of something.

02:17:04   That is really a tough argument

02:17:06   because they have all the resources in the world.

02:17:10   For example, if they can't hire enough engineers,

02:17:15   well, fix that problem.

02:17:17   Find ways to hire more engineers.

02:17:19   More engineers exist, they work at lots of other places,

02:17:22   why not Apple?

02:17:23   And so maybe there's changes to policies or cultures

02:17:28   or geographies that they need to make.

02:17:31   I don't know, I don't know what the problem is,

02:17:32   but these are problems that are within

02:17:35   their control to solve.

02:17:36   And so that ultimately what we need is a company

02:17:38   that is able to maintain the many products

02:17:43   and platforms and services that they keep launching,

02:17:48   they keep expanding into.

02:17:50   To me, it's not good if they just keep launching

02:17:54   new platforms and new services and stuff

02:17:56   and then just leave them to die

02:17:58   while they work on the next big thing.

02:17:59   That's not long-term gonna be healthy.

02:18:01   - Yeah, it's a hard argument to,

02:18:06   it's inherently mushy to say that it comes down

02:18:11   to three things, schedule, features, quality.

02:18:13   That's arbitrary to say those are the three things,

02:18:18   But it's not a bad way to break it up.

02:18:22   It's like the old analogy that you can have,

02:18:24   what, good, soon, or cheap, pick two.

02:18:30   The real thing is you can pick one,

02:18:32   that they're all at odds with each other.

02:18:34   But I do think that they've gone off the rails

02:18:39   in recent years a little bit.

02:18:42   And again, it's a course correction more than turning,

02:18:46   Apple, especially the iPhone, you know, it's just this massive, massive ship analogy-wise.

02:18:52   Just, you know, the biggest cruise ship you could imagine. And it's not like they need

02:18:57   to turn this thing 90 degrees and go in a totally different direction and break all

02:19:01   of this massive momentum they have. They need like a minor course correction, in my opinion.

02:19:05   But in the long term, just a handful of years, if you're off by just a few degrees, you can

02:19:13   wind up, you know, hundreds of miles away from where you should be. You know, it's

02:19:17   important to make course corrections because even a minor course correction

02:19:21   over time can get you way off track. And I feel like where Apple has gone wrong

02:19:27   in recent years is emphasizing new features over improving

02:19:35   existing features. It is the single biggest thing, and I think that's true

02:19:39   across all their platforms. And I really, I just think that there's like, the Mac to

02:19:45   me is the one that means the most to me personally. It's the one I love the most. If I could only

02:19:49   use one Apple platform, I swear to God, I would give up my iPhone before I gave up using

02:19:53   a Mac. That's how much I wouldn't even hesitate. If I had gone to my head, I wouldn't even

02:19:58   really be a tough decision. And I might bitch about it every day for the rest of my life

02:20:03   as I use a Google Pixel, but it's just too important to my work. If anything, maybe having

02:20:10   a phone I like less would be better for my attention or something like that.

02:20:14   And I worry the most about the Mac because I see weird things happening with the Mac

02:20:22   that to me are worrisome because to me, as somebody who to me gets the Mac and what makes

02:20:29   the Mac the Mac in a way that I even as a writer have trouble expressing

02:20:33   sometimes because it's it's like trying to explain why I love my wife you know

02:20:38   it's like I can give you reasons but there's also something ineffable about

02:20:43   it that I can't explain and I see weird things happen on the Mac that to me are

02:20:48   like this is weird and I'll just give you one minor example it's like I forget

02:20:52   like two or three years ago when they added tab documents to to cocoa yeah

02:20:58   Yeah, like I get it. I use tabs in Safari. I do I use tabs and terminal too

02:21:03   and then they added it to like NS document and like any NS document based app could have tabs and

02:21:10   It was all just so it it

02:21:14   weird because it wasn't designed the system the UI wasn't designed from the get-go to have tab windows and

02:21:22   Browsers kind of pulled it off because browsers have always sort of been a weird little world within a world where you can run apps

02:21:29   within a browser, you know and

02:21:31   Terminal is terminal and terminal is not really a normal app, but then to do it document wide and

02:21:38   It's like well what keyboard shortcut are you gonna use because all these other apps that have tabs have command T

02:21:43   For making a new tab, but all NS document apps have used command T since like 1988 with next step for opening the font panel

02:21:52   And I thought well, there's a lot of things that they're gonna

02:21:55   I can't wait to see how they clarify all these things and they they didn't really do anything

02:21:59   And to me I know there's people who love spaces, but I really cannot get into spaces and to me

02:22:07   It's just confusing and I often feel like where the hell am I and I get the idea of having multiple

02:22:12   Doc, you know multiple desktops that you can go between and maybe divide your work up between them

02:22:19   I get the idea but to me the fact that the system wasn't designed originally with spaces in mind and to me

02:22:26   They never really they never really clarified it and unified it into a hole and there's just a whole bunch of little things like that

02:22:33   so to me wanting Apple to add new features to Mac OS is

02:22:37   The wrong way to look at it

02:22:41   I almost feel like I feel like the desktop the idea of desktop computing in a window, you know mouse pointer and a

02:22:48   Windowing system and the max style of having the menu bar at the top. They've got that down that doesn't really need to be rethought

02:22:55   It's this is what it is and it'll have the future that it has and it's good for what it's good at and better

02:23:00   Than anything else for what it's better at

02:23:03   I feel just make those features work better. I feel like adding, you know, here's the thing that's all new it just

02:23:10   messes it up

02:23:13   Yeah, and to me like I I

02:23:17   I disagree somewhat with the concept that,

02:23:19   I know this is not what you just said,

02:23:20   but a lot of people think of this in a similar way,

02:23:23   where people think like desktop OSes

02:23:26   are kind of just a solved problem,

02:23:27   that they're just done,

02:23:29   and there's really nowhere to go with them,

02:23:30   and I fundamentally disagree with that.

02:23:32   Like, there's so much improvement that Mac OS could have,

02:23:36   and there's lots of different areas.

02:23:37   You know, just as a quick example, like app installation,

02:23:41   like the whole thing with like,

02:23:42   well you download a DMG,

02:23:44   and then you open up this virtual disk image

02:23:48   and you drag this, like that's crazy

02:23:50   and incredibly confusing to anybody

02:23:52   and that's no wonder that's a problem.

02:23:54   Also the fact that apps can just write all over the system

02:23:57   with temp files and other garbage that goes all over

02:23:59   like library and everything, that's kind of weird.

02:24:03   And that when you delete an app,

02:24:04   all of its crap isn't deleted.

02:24:06   There's a lot of things that we learned from iOS

02:24:07   that I think would be nice to be brought to the Mac

02:24:10   for things like the ease of software installation

02:24:13   deleting things and everything. The Mac App Store kind of went halfway with that,

02:24:17   but it has been done so poorly and so half-assedly for its entire lifetime

02:24:24   that it really doesn't do a great service to these concepts at all and

02:24:29   might even be doing more harm than good to some of these concepts and to the

02:24:32   advancement of the platform. But so to me like there's a lot of ways that

02:24:36   the Mac can move forward and needs to move forward. From simple things like

02:24:42   features like for instance I still very firmly believe that we need cellular

02:24:47   Macs. We need cellular Mac laptops and the system has the concept of

02:24:53   distinguishing a network connection request between cellular between like it

02:24:58   should run over cellular and this shouldn't run over cellular. It's been

02:25:01   there since iOS got it like three four years ago at least. So like there is a

02:25:05   framework there for apps to like control their data usage. There's also third-party

02:25:09   like trip mode that allow the user to control this.

02:25:13   So like the software support is either there or easy to add,

02:25:18   so they need to add cellular Macs.

02:25:20   I don't know why they still don't have them.

02:25:21   The PC industry's had them for 10 years.

02:25:23   - That's the sort of problem

02:25:24   that I always look to Apple to solve, right?

02:25:26   It is a problem that if you have a cellular Mac,

02:25:29   you wouldn't want it to behave the same way it would

02:25:32   when it's on unfettered WiFi.

02:25:34   And I can vouch for this,

02:25:37   having been on a cruise ship where you pay for the Wi-Fi

02:25:42   by very expensive one gigabyte doses,

02:25:46   where I quickly learned that even with trying my best to,

02:25:51   the last time I did this,

02:25:52   I knew that Jason Snell had recommended an app

02:25:55   and it ends up it was the trip mode,

02:25:58   but I didn't have it yet.

02:25:59   So even just getting it was hard

02:26:01   because it was on this terrible cruise ship Wi-Fi.

02:26:04   But literally just opening my Mac

02:26:06   and like having a Safari that didn't have any tabs open

02:26:09   in the background and don't open mail,

02:26:12   and it's like, it didn't matter what I did,

02:26:13   I'd mow through a gigabyte in like 10 minutes,

02:26:16   and it'd be like, what the hell just happened?

02:26:17   I don't even understand what the hell just happened there.

02:26:20   I've looked at Apple to solve that,

02:26:22   like, and I hate to say it to the Trip Mode people,

02:26:24   but what I would look for Apple to do

02:26:27   if they came out with cellular Macs

02:26:28   is coincide with an OS feature that puts,

02:26:32   you know, that puts Trip Mode out of business

02:26:34   by making, just giving you explicit control

02:26:38   over what can do what over cellular

02:26:41   and treating it very differently.

02:26:42   It's totally a solvable problem.

02:26:43   - Just like we have on iOS.

02:26:45   Like iOS solved this problem years ago with settings.

02:26:48   - Well, iOS solves it in a different way though,

02:26:51   where iOS has a very different concept

02:26:53   of what an app can do in the background,

02:26:55   meaning it's not the front most has input focus.

02:26:58   Like the Mac would have to solve it in a different way.

02:27:00   But it's totally solvable.

02:27:02   But iOS has a settings panel called cellular,

02:27:05   and you can go in there and you can see

02:27:06   how much data each app is using, you can turn them off.

02:27:08   And you can say, well this app is okay over Wi-Fi,

02:27:11   but don't use cellular for this app.

02:27:12   - Well I would imagine that in my mind,

02:27:14   and I could be wrong, you always have to try it

02:27:16   and see if it's good, but my mind,

02:27:18   if they came out with cellular Macs,

02:27:20   my mind, in my mind it would be something

02:27:22   more active, interactive, where like,

02:27:25   you turn on cellular and as soon as an app

02:27:27   tries to hit the network the first time,

02:27:29   you'd get some kind of alert like, "Hey, Tweetbot is trying to use the internet over

02:27:36   cellular. Do you want to allow this?" And have an option where it's only allowed to

02:27:41   do it when it's front most. I don't know.

02:27:44   That's interesting. Almost like Little Snitch telling you, "Hey, this app is trying to do

02:27:48   this."

02:27:49   Yeah, exactly. Little Snitch is actually what I have in mind, where some kind of thing like

02:27:53   that. And then once I say for the first time, "Oh yeah, Tweetbot, I always have that running,

02:27:58   But yeah, you know what, that would actually be fine on cellular if it only could use the

02:28:02   internet while it's the front most application.

02:28:04   That's fine.

02:28:07   And mail.

02:28:08   And just say, "Hey, when you're on cellular, do you want to turn off everything except

02:28:11   just downloading the text of mail?"

02:28:13   You don't want to...

02:28:14   And the iOS is very smart about this, where it won't download images in email and stuff

02:28:19   like that.

02:28:20   It's solely solvable.

02:28:21   What do you call it?

02:28:22   It's a Microsoft.

02:28:23   You guys talked about an ATP.

02:28:24   Microsoft has cellular Surface laptops and they're--

02:28:29   - Oh yeah, there's been cellular PC laptops

02:28:32   literally for over a decade.

02:28:33   Like this is not a rare thing.

02:28:35   I'm not asking for something that we don't know

02:28:37   whether it's possible or not.

02:28:38   No, we know it's possible.

02:28:39   The rest of the industry does it.

02:28:40   People buy it and it's fine.

02:28:42   So yeah.

02:28:43   And what worries me ultimately with the Mac is like,

02:28:47   it's hard to see a lot of those big features like that

02:28:50   getting done and/or getting done well.

02:28:55   Because what seems to be Mac involvement,

02:28:57   or Mac investment in recent years,

02:29:00   is a lot of stuff just never comes to the Mac.

02:29:03   Stuff that is introduced on iOS

02:29:05   that becomes fairly standard

02:29:08   that you kind of want everywhere.

02:29:09   Things like iMessage effects.

02:29:11   - And stickers.

02:29:12   - Where you can do them, yeah, you can do it on iOS,

02:29:15   you can't do it on the Mac,

02:29:16   and there's kind of no clear path

02:29:17   of how they would even do that on the Mac

02:29:18   in the current environment.

02:29:20   - I'll tell you which one gets me.

02:29:22   I love the tap back feature on iOS messages

02:29:26   where like somebody sends you an iMessage

02:29:29   and you can just press on the thing and give it a thumbs up.

02:29:32   I love it.

02:29:33   It's such a great way to communicate.

02:29:35   Instead of sending them an entire message

02:29:37   to just say, okay, good or whatever,

02:29:39   just put a thumbs up on their last message.

02:29:41   And on the Mac, you can do it,

02:29:44   but you've gotta like first bring up the contextual menu

02:29:47   and then tap back and then you get the tap back options.

02:29:51   Why aren't those thumbs and hearts,

02:29:54   why aren't they right there in the contextual menu?

02:29:56   There should just be a row of them.

02:29:57   - That's a good question.

02:29:58   You can also long click on it,

02:30:01   like as if you were doing a long press on iOS,

02:30:03   and that brings up tap back immediately,

02:30:05   but it's still almost funky.

02:30:06   - Yeah, but who the hell wants to do a long press?

02:30:08   That sucks.

02:30:10   - Yeah, and long click on Mac isn't a thing.

02:30:13   That's not a thing anybody wants to try,

02:30:14   'cause that's not a gesture in the system.

02:30:16   Anyways, so my point is for features like cellular Macs

02:30:21   or other major platform changes,

02:30:25   it's hard to see that happening

02:30:27   because it seems like the Mac

02:30:29   doesn't get a lot of those anymore.

02:30:31   You can look at recent things and you say,

02:30:33   oh, well the Mac got APFS, the new file system,

02:30:35   that's a big job.

02:30:36   But the main reason APFS existed

02:30:38   is probably for iOS devices.

02:30:40   That was something that wasn't just investing in the Mac,

02:30:42   that was investing in all of their software platforms,

02:30:45   including the big ones that get off the headlines

02:30:47   and make most of the money.

02:30:48   So it's hard to say that was like a Mac thing.

02:30:51   - In the hypothetical world where,

02:30:53   just bear with me for a second,

02:30:57   but if Intel-based computers had to use different SSDs

02:31:02   at a technical level than ARM devices,

02:31:07   like let's just say that in this hypothetical world,

02:31:10   SSDs are built into the CPU.

02:31:13   And there's a fundamental difference in the way

02:31:15   Intel does it from the way ARM ones do it. Would APFS have been written to

02:31:18   support both? I think that's a really... Right, it's like I want to say

02:31:24   yes that they would have abstracted away because HFS+ really was long in the

02:31:29   tooth. You know, you could play your little ding there, you only do once a

02:31:33   show. But my heart is telling me, yeah, I don't think that... I think

02:31:40   - Max would have been on HFS Plus forever.

02:31:44   Like it's a fact that they use fundamentally the same SSDs

02:31:49   that allowed that work to be justified.

02:31:52   - Yeah, and like when the Mac does get significant effort

02:31:59   put into it, it seems to be, like I often use the phrase,

02:32:03   it's kind of like a drive-by update,

02:32:05   where like some subsystem will be rewritten.

02:32:08   we had Discovery D a few years ago.

02:32:10   I think in Sierra we had the USB subsystem,

02:32:13   and that's why Sierra had so many USB audio bugs.

02:32:16   In High Sierra, I think the window manager was rewritten

02:32:20   to be metal-based, and so everything is,

02:32:23   that's one of the reasons why it's so much faster

02:32:25   in certain ways.

02:32:26   And then there's the PDF subsystem that was rewritten,

02:32:29   I think one or two versions ago.

02:32:30   - Yeah, I remember Michael Sauer writing about that.

02:32:32   And it was f-ed up in a bunch of ways.

02:32:33   - Right, and the problem is when, right,

02:32:36   like when these subsystems and things get rewritten

02:32:38   Mac OS they get brought up to like what basically seems like a beta. Disc utility.

02:32:44   Instability and features. Yeah the new disc utility that had like you know

02:32:47   grammatical errors and the dialog box and stuff like and the crazy password

02:32:51   authentication. It seems like these things get rewritten to like you know

02:32:57   it's almost done it works for me and then they ship it and then they never

02:33:01   fix it. So it's like it not only is the Mac not getting like really major

02:33:08   platform changing work put into it it seems but also what work is going into

02:33:14   it seems to be done in a more rushed fashion and it introduces bugs that seem

02:33:21   to never really get fixed and that is that to me that's what's most concerning

02:33:26   is not only that the platform is not moving forward in ways that I think it

02:33:31   could and should, but also that what we have,

02:33:34   in some ways, is getting worse every year

02:33:36   as more bugs are added for kinda three-quarters-assed

02:33:41   rewrites of system--

02:33:42   - Well, and it ties in with a couple of other recent rumors.

02:33:45   There's the other one that Germin had

02:33:46   where there's Project Marzipan,

02:33:49   which is supposedly some kind of way

02:33:52   to have universal iPad, iOS, Mac apps.

02:33:57   It's, you know, we can't get into details on it.

02:34:00   I talked about it on this show too.

02:34:03   I don't think, I think in typical German fashion,

02:34:06   there's probably something to it,

02:34:08   and it's, what it actually is,

02:34:12   is not really interesting or understandable by him,

02:34:16   and so it's misrepresented.

02:34:18   But it very likely could be some kind of either UI kit

02:34:24   on Mac or UI kit-like version of app kit on Mac.

02:34:30   And and to make a very long story very short UI kit is the fundamental framework for making iOS apps and app kit is

02:34:38   the Mac framework for making apps that dates back to next in 1988 and UI kit is

02:34:44   unsurprisingly

02:34:47   almost universally held as

02:34:49   What would you know a company?

02:34:52   18 years into app kit in 2006. What would they change if they had it to do all over again?

02:34:58   again. And therefore is easier, more convenient in certain ways for developers. AppKit developers

02:35:08   find it much easier to move to UIKit and, "Ooh, this is suddenly a lot easier." And UIKit

02:35:14   developers such as yourself often find it very frustrating to move to AppKit because

02:35:17   all of a sudden there's more grunt work to be handled by the developer. And so something

02:35:26   that would enable people with UI kit skills

02:35:29   to more easily make native Mac apps would be great,

02:35:31   if done well, in theory.

02:35:36   - Yeah, I am very excited about that possibility.

02:35:40   That, because as an iOS developer

02:35:43   who kind of reluctantly makes some Mac apps,

02:35:45   like I would love to make more Mac apps,

02:35:48   but it feels like my iOS skills

02:35:51   are almost completely useless.

02:35:53   Like it feels like it's a whole new platform,

02:35:55   Because in many ways, it's kind of a--

02:35:56   Forecast probably would have been a perfect app for that,

02:35:59   or maybe it would be.

02:36:00   Maybe it's so perfect for it that if it comes out

02:36:03   that you'd rewrite it using it, if that's basically what it is.

02:36:06   Because I think where AppKit really shines over UIKit

02:36:09   is on truly complex code bases.

02:36:13   Think about apps like the big Omni apps,

02:36:17   or some of Panic's apps, and stuff like that.

02:36:21   Apps that truly are way more complex than anything

02:36:23   could reasonably get by with on iOS.

02:36:26   AppKit is great at making that manageable.

02:36:29   And UIKit is better for sort of,

02:36:32   hey, all I need is this one screen, really,

02:36:34   and it'll have a list here of things

02:36:37   and a couple of buttons and a text field.

02:36:39   - Yeah, and like, I mean,

02:36:42   forecast is kind of an okay example.

02:36:45   A better example is overcast.

02:36:47   - Yeah, yeah.

02:36:48   - Overcast, like, it's,

02:36:49   most people listen to overcast on their phones.

02:36:52   And by far, I think it's something like 92% phone,

02:36:57   and then the rest is iPad, something like that,

02:37:01   like in that neighborhood.

02:37:03   And so it is primarily a phone platform,

02:37:05   but because I've written Overcast using a lot of stock

02:37:08   UI kit components, it is not that much effort

02:37:11   to also maintain an iPad version of it.

02:37:14   And even though the iPad version is only 7 or 8%

02:37:17   of the usage, first of all, I use the iPad version,

02:37:18   so that's kind of enough of motivation right there.

02:37:21   But also, it is only about seven or eight percent

02:37:25   more effort to maintain the iPad version to the degree I do.

02:37:28   Now I could make an incredibly awesome,

02:37:31   more customized iPad version that would take

02:37:33   way more effort, but it probably isn't worth that,

02:37:36   but it's fine, it only takes five percent more effort

02:37:39   to reach five percent more people.

02:37:41   If the Mac became a similar type of extension,

02:37:45   where I already have this entire iOS code base

02:37:49   with iOS UI in a lot of places.

02:37:53   I know it wouldn't be the most amazing Mac app in the world

02:37:56   in the same way that it isn't the most amazing iPad app

02:37:58   in the world, but if I could get a Mac app out of Overcast

02:38:02   for 10% more effort, I would totally do that.

02:38:07   Whereas right now, it would be nearly 100% more effort,

02:38:11   and the market is not able to justify that.

02:38:13   it's not a big enough market for that,

02:38:15   and it's not worth, I don't have that much bandwidth

02:38:18   to spare on something like that.

02:38:19   Whereas anything that would make it easier,

02:38:22   if it's gonna make developing for Mac from an iOS code base

02:38:27   about as much work, or even if it's more work,

02:38:30   but it's not that much more work,

02:38:31   than it is to port an iPhone app to the iPad,

02:38:34   that is going to enable a ton more Mac apps.

02:38:38   And yeah, they won't be the best Mac apps in the world.

02:38:41   There will be a lot of crappy ports,

02:38:43   just like there are on iPad, there will be a lot of

02:38:47   behaviors that are really a little too iOS-y

02:38:51   that feel a little bit weird on the Mac,

02:38:53   but it is better for the Mac on a whole if that exists,

02:38:57   and it's better for the iPad, because what you basically do

02:39:01   is, assuming that developing an iPad,

02:39:04   or assuming if you have an iPhone app,

02:39:07   that expanding it onto the iPad and the Mac

02:39:11   are probably kind of similar in a lot of ways,

02:39:13   then what you've basically done is you've almost doubled

02:39:17   the value of what a developer would get

02:39:20   out of making the app from their iPhone app

02:39:23   into this larger type of app.

02:39:25   And so you increase the odds that more developers will,

02:39:28   and you increase the amount of resources

02:39:30   that they're able to justify devoting to it.

02:39:33   And so what that does is have way more and better apps

02:39:37   for both the iPad and the Mac,

02:39:40   which both of those platforms could honestly use.

02:39:43   - Yeah, the Mac has such a great library

02:39:46   of long-standing apps, you know,

02:39:49   and I was looking at it the other day,

02:39:51   and most of the apps that I use have been around

02:39:53   for quite a long time.

02:39:55   BB Edit, Transmit, they both date back to classic Mac OS,

02:40:00   Omni Outliner, even Mars Edit is a long-standing app

02:40:05   at this point, I think Brent first shipped it in 2004,

02:40:09   I don't know but

02:40:11   You know it. I don't need a lot of new apps and these are the apps that I use on

02:40:16   You know acorn is a relative to me in my mind is still a relatively new app

02:40:20   It's up to like version 6.0. So it's not it's not that new

02:40:23   Yeah, like apps that succeed on the Mac tend to last for a long time

02:40:28   And those apps are great and are all in active development. There's new versions

02:40:34   I think of just about every one of those apps that I just mentioned brand new versions that have great new features in

02:40:39   Just like the last year BB edit transmit Mars edit

02:40:42   Tweet bot hasn't had a new version in a while on a Mac

02:40:48   But I'm just looking at the Mac apps that I rely on the most things

02:40:51   Has a new version out

02:40:54   But I still I do feel like so I'm not worried about those apps and app kits not going anywhere and they can keep using

02:41:01   It but I do worry about when's the last time like somebody shipped a new Mac app that you're like, wow

02:41:06   I love this is a new Mac app and I really do worry that that that's sort of a canary in the coal mine

02:41:12   for the platform, you know that

02:41:15   And it has so much momentum and so much, you know and sales of Mac hardware still as like all-time highs

02:41:23   It's all good

02:41:24   but as a platform I worry about the fact that

02:41:27   all the apps that I consider my most used and beloved and best examples of good apps on the platform are like

02:41:36   you know, even the new quote-unquote new ones are ten years old.

02:41:40   Yeah, and you know if you listen to you know, people like Mike Hurley and and other like Federico Vatici

02:41:48   people who are really into getting their primary work done on iOS

02:41:54   one of the most common reasons cited for that is

02:41:58   that there's honestly just more action on iOS with like what new apps are coming out, new

02:42:05   concepts and apps, new developers becoming prominent,

02:42:09   new design languages and new workflow strategies

02:42:13   and everything, there's so much more happening on iOS.

02:42:17   The Mac, there's not a lot of software innovation

02:42:22   and just software health that's really growing on the Mac.

02:42:28   Like the old apps that have been here forever

02:42:31   seem to be doing fine.

02:42:32   all of them, honestly. But many of them seem to be fine.

02:42:35   I just checked Acorn's about box. It's copyright 2007 to 2018, so it's 11 years

02:42:41   old and I just acted like it was brand new. I knew it wasn't, but still, compared to

02:42:46   BB Edit and Transmit, it's…

02:42:47   Yeah, right. Time flies.

02:42:48   Compared to BB Edit and Transmit, it's…

02:42:49   Time flies when your platform is being neglected.

02:42:51   Where's Transmit? Transmit is copyright 1997 to 2017.

02:42:55   BB Edit.

02:42:56   I was in middle school.

02:42:58   I know I first started using BB edit in

02:43:01   1992 and so

02:43:05   It's pretty old

02:43:09   Yeah, yeah, so like

02:43:12   My concern with the Mac is that if they don't do something like this if they leave the status quo

02:43:18   Where you have the Mac with its own?

02:43:21   You know API's for everything that are older and clunkier, you know

02:43:26   though richer in a lot of ways, but still older and clunkier

02:43:30   and basically turning off a lot of modern developers.

02:43:33   If you leave this the way it is,

02:43:35   I think we're just gonna keep seeing a continuation

02:43:38   of what we see now, which is not a lot of new developers

02:43:41   coming to the Mac, not a lot of new apps,

02:43:43   not a lot of new concepts, all the action continuing

02:43:47   to happen in the US. - I honestly--

02:43:47   - And that's not good for the Mac.

02:43:50   - If I could chew the ear of Apple's executive team

02:43:52   on what to do with the Mac going forward,

02:43:54   Honestly, I really think and and that's why I'm happy

02:43:57   I'm optimistic about this marzipan rumor is that I would rather see them focus almost entirely on

02:44:04   Stuff for Mac developers or would be Mac developers then actual

02:44:11   You know, here's a thing that you the user get from Apple right when you install the OS features

02:44:17   Like you the features are all there. There's windows. There's menus. There's buttons

02:44:23   But I feel like enabling people to making it

02:44:26   Doing for you know like when Coco was first came out, and it was just like man

02:44:31   You can make an app that is rich and has all you know complete rich text editor and all of these features for free

02:44:39   And just focus on the features you want to add for your app

02:44:45   And and you really could like a smaller team of developers or one person could make an app that

02:44:52   one person could never make on Windows because you just didn't you didn't get that much with the framework and I feel like

02:44:58   At this point they need to level that up again and make it like that again

02:45:02   I just wrote this week about how like to me the biggest threat to the Mac is this proliferation of

02:45:07   Non-native apps that people just accept as being well, that's what an app is these electron apps and shit

02:45:13   Like that's the way slack works

02:45:15   I think it's a threat to the platform that if the longer it goes on where that's accepted where

02:45:21   a 300 megabyte download app that consumes 500 megabytes of RAM just for opening one

02:45:28   window and is slow and doesn't use native controls and breaks a bunch of native conventions

02:45:34   and uses weird Moonman keyboard shortcuts. If that's just accepted as the way that it

02:45:39   is, then the Mac loses its reason for existence because any system, a Chromebook is as good

02:45:47   as that because the same app will run with the same keyboard shortcuts. All you need

02:45:51   is something that runs a web view. And if that's what desktop computers devolve to,

02:45:59   where it's really not about the OS but just about the form factor of having a clamshell

02:46:03   laptop that opens up and a keyboard that's connected and a trackpad, the Mac OS loses

02:46:09   its reason for existence. The whole reason that the Mac thrived or survived in the rough

02:46:14   years and thrived in later years is that it was better. And the reason it was better was

02:46:20   is that it had better apps.

02:46:21   And if new apps aren't coming out

02:46:25   that follow in the same mold as their predecessors,

02:46:28   it's a long-term problem for the platform,

02:46:31   like a serious problem.

02:46:32   - Yeah, and because, you know,

02:46:35   and when you have something, you know,

02:46:38   like you have apps that are just like web views

02:46:40   shoved into standalone apps for the Mac,

02:46:44   that's only a continuation of what we had a few years ago

02:46:47   before this became so common,

02:46:48   which is basically like the solution was on your phone,

02:46:51   you can use a cool native app,

02:46:53   and when you're on your computer,

02:46:54   you just have to use our webpage.

02:46:56   Like that just sucks, and I know why it's done that way,

02:47:00   but it sucks.

02:47:01   - It depends what the app or service is though.

02:47:03   Like OpenTable, I'm fine with OpenTable being nothing more

02:47:06   than a web thing on the Mac.

02:47:07   I don't wanna, I wouldn't install an OpenTable app

02:47:09   on my Mac, why would I?

02:47:11   - Sure, but what about things like Netflix?

02:47:13   - Right.

02:47:13   - Right, like Netflix should be a native app,

02:47:15   but instead it's a web view.

02:47:16   And you know, Slack is kind of a special case

02:47:19   'cause it's like, it's kind of a web view

02:47:21   on all the platforms, I think, but it's like,

02:47:25   there are a lot of apps where, you know,

02:47:27   they're willing to invest the effort into an iOS app

02:47:31   because the market supports that and the platform

02:47:34   really makes it hard to do anything else in a good way.

02:47:38   So like, you know, they're willing to do that,

02:47:39   but when it comes to the Mac, they're just like,

02:47:42   ah, well, you know, just web view is fine

02:47:44   because it isn't worth them making a whole separate

02:47:49   app kit code base just for this portion of the user base

02:47:52   when they can just throw the webpage at them.

02:47:54   So anything that Apple can do to help companies

02:47:58   leverage their iOS code base that they're writing anyway

02:48:02   to also make a Mac app fairly easily will pay off big time

02:48:06   because lots of companies are doing that calculus.

02:48:09   They're saying, well, it's not worth making a whole Mac app

02:48:11   from nothing, from scratch,

02:48:13   and not being able to reuse anything really.

02:48:16   But they would have a very different calculus

02:48:18   if the barrier was lower,

02:48:21   if you could share more of that iOS code.

02:48:23   And I wouldn't expect it to be like a new checkbox

02:48:27   in Xcode, just make Mac app and that's it, you're done.

02:48:30   You know, it's not gonna be that easy,

02:48:31   but I hope it can be more like what it is

02:48:36   to have an app go from iPhone to iPad,

02:48:39   where it does take some work to get it to be usable

02:48:41   and to get it to be nice,

02:48:43   but it's at least possible to do

02:48:46   without rewriting your entire UI from scratch.

02:48:49   - All right, let me take a break here

02:48:51   and thank our third and final sponsor of the evening,

02:48:55   two good friends at Squarespace.

02:48:56   Squarespace, look, when you wanna make a website,

02:49:01   what are you gonna do?

02:49:02   You're gonna start coding,

02:49:03   you're gonna start opening up a web hosting account,

02:49:06   you're gonna start writing PHP, HTML, all that stuff,

02:49:11   the way websites were made back in the stone ages. You could,

02:49:15   you could do that. You know what?

02:49:17   To be a lot easier way to do it is start at Squarespace,

02:49:20   go to Squarespace and spend half an hour making a new website.

02:49:25   Sign up, you get a free account, you get a free trial. Just to start going.

02:49:28   Squarespace handles everything. They are the host.

02:49:31   They provide the templates you can start with. They provide the,

02:49:35   the widgets that you can add to your page to add something like a store or to

02:49:40   add like image portfolio and then you can just upload the images and it'll go right

02:49:46   in. It is so much easier and takes so much work out of the process, especially if you

02:49:54   are like a technically minded person who listens to the show and people come to you and they're

02:49:59   like, Hey, I need a website. What am I supposed to do? You can build them a website at Squarespace,

02:50:04   get them started and then just hand it off to them and they can take care of everything

02:50:08   after that and do the updates. Back in the day when I was doing consulting and making

02:50:14   websites for people, I'd make the website and I thought it was all the work and then

02:50:18   I would just get all this continuing consulting work from them just to do content updates.

02:50:24   It was like, "Well, thanks for the work, but it's like you're paying me to just be a typist."

02:50:29   With Squarespace, a normal person, you can hand it over to them. It's a WYSIWYG interface

02:50:34   and they can take care of updating content, adding new posts if you give them a blog or

02:50:40   something like that on their Squarespace site. It really is so much easier and Squarespace

02:50:46   has amazing technical support that they can just, normal person can just call them up

02:50:52   and get help and instead of calling you, they'll call Squarespace. It's such a great product.

02:50:58   Let me tell you, I like to do this because they sponsor the show a lot. I keep telling

02:51:02   you more websites that you use on a regular basis are Squarespace sites than you would

02:51:07   believe and I don't know what is wrong with me that I do it I guess it's because Squarespace

02:51:11   sponsors the show so often but I every so I just view source and look for some of the

02:51:16   things in the HTML that indicate that it's a Squarespace site and I'm like damn I this

02:51:22   looks nothing like any other site I've seen it's totally branded to the company it doesn't

02:51:26   look like it came from a cookie cutter template. So I had relatives in town from both sides

02:51:33   of the family recently. They wanted to come to Philly, stay here at Daring Fireball headquarters

02:51:39   for the Eagles Victory Parade last week here in Philadelphia because you couldn't get a

02:51:43   hotel. The city was nuts. There were 3 million people at this damn parade. What do they want

02:51:49   to eat the next night? Of course, everybody wanted to get cheesesteaks because that's

02:51:52   you get in Philadelphia. Well, there's a great new cheese steak place pretty close to us

02:51:57   here in Philadelphia. Cleaver's C L E A V E R S. Um, and their website is cleavers,

02:52:06   philly.com. You can go there. It's a beautiful website. They have a beautiful restaurant

02:52:10   and they make delicious sandwiches and they have great sides. Uh, I love that you're doing

02:52:16   an ad for, well, guess what? Guess what? View source. It's Squarespace site. It is so

02:52:22   so great. It's a great website. What do you want? You want a menu? You want to see pictures

02:52:28   of their food? It's great. Go there, check it out. Check out to see what you can make

02:52:32   with Squarespace. Go to cleversphilly.com. When you want to make your own website, though,

02:52:39   where do you go? Well, you go to squarespace.com and you enter offer code. Now, this is what

02:52:45   you do when you're ready to pay. You can just go there, go to Squarespace. That's all they

02:52:48   care that you do to get started. Take their free trial and build what you want to build.

02:52:55   And then when you go to pay, that's when you've got to remember this code. This is the thing

02:52:59   you got to have long term memory for this. All you need to do to get started is go to

02:53:02   squarespace.com. There's no special URL. But then when you go to pay, when you sign up,

02:53:07   just remember the offer code talk show. No, the just talk show and you'll get 10% off

02:53:12   your first purchase. So that's Squarespace is where you go to build a new website. I'm

02:53:15   I'm telling you, the reason these people can make

02:53:18   these great cheesesteaks is they didn't waste time

02:53:20   building a website, other than going to Squarespace

02:53:25   and putting their design out.

02:53:26   They're not sitting there writing PHP,

02:53:27   they're sitting there cooking up steaks.

02:53:30   So go to squarespace.com and remember that offer code,

02:53:32   talk show, know the.

02:53:34   My thanks to Squarespace.

02:53:35   That's not your favorite cheesesteak place.

02:53:38   What's your favorite?

02:53:39   You don't like Campos either.

02:53:40   You go to the one that's a couple doors down

02:53:42   from Campos when you're here.

02:53:45   I forget what it's called, but it's it's the yeah, but campus is good too campus is really good

02:53:50   You got to go to next time you're here that will take you to cleavers cleavers is I'm telling you. It's really good

02:53:54   Now which is the one that I'm like the famous one that I don't go to that I'm supposed to be going to

02:54:01   Every time I take a picture, okay

02:54:03   The one I like a sunny is good sunny's is my favorite, but you've never been to campus

02:54:07   so it says every time people will probably tell you to go to

02:54:12   Well, there's Pat's and Gina's here and there's the one on South Street. What the hell's it called? Yeah, I hear Jim

02:54:17   And Dallas, I don't want to

02:54:20   Jim's Jim's if you google it Jim's has a lot of problems where every year or so they get busted for selling drugs

02:54:28   It's and in my opinion that it's not a great steak it's really not

02:54:34   It's a see when I have Sonny's I think why I'm not in Philly that much

02:54:41   much. Why, when I come here, would I not get this?

02:54:45   Well, like it's so good when I have it. I'm just like, I don't, I wouldn't want to

02:54:49   like waste a meal. But you're a couple of miles away. You could save, you could, you

02:54:54   could save a lot of driving or whatever by going to Cleaver's. You should, but see, and

02:54:57   you should try more than one. I'm telling you, Cleaver's is the way to go. If you wanted

02:55:01   to bust out and try one on the other side of Broad Street just because they, you know,

02:55:06   It's similar sort of small shop atmosphere

02:55:09   Jim's on South Street is designed to get like the most people through in the shortest amount of time like when they're busy

02:55:16   They I don't know I wouldn't be surprised if they serve

02:55:19   50 60 people an hour whereas you know like when you go to Sonny's it's like just going into a busy lunch place

02:55:24   There's not like a crazy line out the door

02:55:26   Yeah, that's fair but anyway I

02:55:34   Had a thing what's what's the shortest show no no you and I often go

02:55:38   All time record is me and Ben Thompson. Todd Visserie just updated his

02:55:43   Talk-show episode length chart, although I don't think he posted it publicly. He sent it to me privately

02:55:48   It's actually been going. Yeah, but we did one that was so long you split it into two

02:55:53   Oh, so, I don't know. I don't think would that actually got credit for that one? No, it is. He's going by episodes

02:56:00   Let me see here

02:56:04   I'll send this to you. Where'd you go? There you are. I had a thing that kind of ties into

02:56:14   what we were just talking about. Let me see if we have this in the notes. Oh, well, you

02:56:21   were talking about two Do apps on ATP recently, and I wouldn't mind talking to you about this

02:56:25   recently.

02:56:26   Mm-hmm. Sure.

02:56:27   Sure, but I had this thing I've I've moved for years. I was using an app called itta ita

02:56:33   From nice mohawk software for managing I had like a list of things

02:56:39   I take with me every time I leave the house for like a trip

02:56:41   And I've recently moved that into Apple notes and put it in one of the notes and use their checklist feature

02:56:49   Just to sort of have one less one fewer app to use and it seems like it might be sort of

02:56:55   Put out the pasture those guys are working on some cool new

02:56:58   Home energy monitoring stuff. I don't think it has been updated for iPhone 10

02:57:05   Etc. So anyway doing a checklist and Apple Notes. It's not really a to-do app type thing

02:57:11   It's a little bit more simple

02:57:13   but it's a nice way to have this note and every time and the way I update it is every time I

02:57:21   Leave the house for a trip and wind up thinking. Oh, I should have brought whatever

02:57:26   Then I just add it to the end of the list and I'll never forget it again

02:57:30   But the thing is and indeed it is not updated for the iPhone 10

02:57:34   After I pack for the trip I either as I pack everything on my list

02:57:41   I check it off and if it's something that's not relevant like I'll put

02:57:44   Swimsuit, but I'm going somewhere where there I'm not going to swim

02:57:48   Well, I'll just check it off because I know I don't need it. So checking it off the list either means I've packed it

02:57:53   It's in a bag that I know I'm not gonna forget or I don't need it

02:57:56   What do you do for your next trip?

02:57:59   Well, what you want to do is uncheck all of those check marks right and start all over on

02:58:04   iOS as

02:58:06   Far as I can tell the only way to do that in Apple Notes whether you're on iPad or phone is to go through each

02:58:13   Goddamn item and uncheck everything whereas in the Mac app

02:58:17   app in Notes, you can, there's a menu command where you can uncheck everything. It's like

02:58:27   mark as checked and then if you select them all, you can do mark as unchecked, like marking

02:58:32   multiple messages as unread. It's a menu command in the format menu, which seems like something

02:58:39   a computer program should do, right? Computers are supposed to alleviate us of tedium. Isn't

02:58:45   that great, right? But there's no way to do it. So these people like Mike Hurley and all

02:58:51   these other iPad lifestyle people, I believe them. I'm not disputing that they're leading

02:58:57   a happier life for them using an iPad as their main computer. But that's the sort of thing

02:59:06   that makes the iPad a complete non-starter is my main computing platform. Because the

02:59:13   fact that I would have to do that and that on the Mac version I can just hit a

02:59:16   menu command and have it all unchecked all at once is exactly why I like using

02:59:22   a computer as opposed to you know mimeo graphing 20 copies of the same

02:59:27   checklist on paper I mean and you know in there in the iPad users defense like

02:59:33   there are apps that do this better like so like the solution for something like

02:59:38   that where it's like well you can't do this very well on the iPad where the Mac

02:59:42   can do it.

02:59:43   The solution on the iPad is probably,

02:59:44   well, if you use this other app, this can do that.

02:59:47   So it's not that it's impossible,

02:59:50   but it's often that you have to seek out

02:59:52   a more power user-y app or a more obscure app

02:59:56   to do these kinds of things better.

02:59:57   - To me, it comes down to the most mundane and overlooked

03:00:01   and it's, 'cause it's been here since,

03:00:04   right since 1984 when the first Mac shipped,

03:00:07   but the menu bar, and I'm not saying that iOS

03:00:10   should get a Mac style menu bar because it wouldn't work.

03:00:13   But the fact that Mac apps have a menu bar

03:00:16   and you can put commands in there,

03:00:18   and in recent years, in the old days,

03:00:21   Mac apps didn't have toolbars at all.

03:00:24   Like the only thing in the window chrome

03:00:26   were the controls to close the window, zoom the window,

03:00:29   or like minimize the window at some point

03:00:34   when they didn't even have that at first.

03:00:38   And anything you wanted to do was mostly done

03:00:41   by using menu commands.

03:00:43   That was like the main way of doing it.

03:00:46   And I get it, 'cause they're hidden,

03:00:48   everything in a menu bar is at least one level down, right?

03:00:52   Like if you wanna save, you can't just click one button,

03:00:55   you have to go to File and then go down to Save.

03:00:58   I get it that even one level of indirection

03:01:03   is gonna put some people off who are less likely

03:01:07   to be technically minded. And normal people don't memorize keyboard shortcuts. That's

03:01:12   all fine. I get it. And I think the overall trend to putting the main functions of an

03:01:16   application as visible buttons that are always present in the window is a good trend. But

03:01:23   the max menu bar, the fact that it's still there and still useful is organized, if well

03:01:29   done and well designed, organizes things in a way that you know where to look for them

03:01:36   is such a powerful feature for something like

03:01:39   uncheck all of these check boxes,

03:01:41   which maybe most people will never need or want to use

03:01:46   or it wouldn't even occur to them that it exists,

03:01:49   but there it is, a feature for me who wants to do it

03:01:51   and thinks I should be able to do it.

03:01:53   Oh, there it is.

03:01:54   And there's no good way,

03:01:57   and the point of my story is I can't think of a good way

03:02:00   to put that many commands,

03:02:02   even just from the simple Apple Notes app,

03:02:04   How would you put as many commands that Apple Notes on Mac has in the iPad version?

03:02:10   Where would you put those commands?

03:02:12   Yeah, I mean this has been one of the big challenges to trying to bring touch screens

03:02:21   into like the more like pro computing markets or into more like, you know, pro software

03:02:28   uses.

03:02:29   And you know, it's a problem that I don't think we've really figured out yet as an industry,

03:02:33   how to design touchscreen-based apps in a way that can support the level of complexity

03:02:41   and functionality that we can have on desktops.

03:02:43   And there's two different problems to this, I think.

03:02:46   One of them is that you have far less precision in the input than you do on a PC, whether

03:02:54   it's a laptop or a desktop, whether it's Windows or a Mac.

03:02:57   On a PC you have a very precise pointing device,

03:03:01   in either a mouse or a trackpad or whatever,

03:03:04   where you can really get down to the pixel-level

03:03:06   precision there, so you can cram a lot more

03:03:10   click targets on screen than you can by using

03:03:13   our fat fingers on a 10-inch screen with a touch screen.

03:03:16   And then the other problem that you have is,

03:03:19   and you have this massive keyboard where you have

03:03:23   100 keys and conventions that have been going on

03:03:26   for decades of things like holding down certain modifiers

03:03:30   and certain other keys to do certain common actions.

03:03:33   And iOS has some support for common keyboard shortcuts,

03:03:38   but not great support for it.

03:03:40   And there's also like, there's conventions that you can do

03:03:42   with the keyboard and mouse that have not yet been

03:03:46   really established on iOS.

03:03:47   So for instance, like, power users pretty quickly discover

03:03:50   things like, you can drag a box around a whole bunch

03:03:53   of icons and then pick them all up at once.

03:03:55   or you can, if you're on one mail message,

03:03:59   you can hold down shift and click one really far away

03:04:01   from it and it selects all of them in the meantime.

03:04:03   Like, you can do things like that

03:04:07   that allow you to very efficiently work

03:04:10   in the Mac and PC type form factors

03:04:14   that the touch devices just haven't developed

03:04:16   those standards yet and in some ways,

03:04:18   it's kind of hard to see how they can

03:04:20   because of the limitations of their input.

03:04:22   Just not being, obviously it does certain things better

03:04:25   like drawing and stuff like that,

03:04:27   but because you don't have the incredibly precise

03:04:31   pointing device of a mouse and a mouse cursor,

03:04:34   and you don't have the incredibly rich button-filled

03:04:37   like 100-key keyboard, it's just very, very different.

03:04:40   And then the other problem is a visual design problem

03:04:44   of your menu bar thing.

03:04:46   It's like how do you expose lots of complex features,

03:04:51   or just how do you expose lots of features

03:04:55   in a UI on a touch screen.

03:04:57   You don't have a lot of the discoverability conventions

03:05:02   that we've had on PCs.

03:05:03   You know, you don't have hovering the mouse pointer

03:05:06   over something to get a tool tip to explain what it is.

03:05:09   You don't have right clicking really.

03:05:11   You have like forced touching or long pressing,

03:05:14   but those are, it's very hard to, I mean honestly,

03:05:17   I guess right clicking has the problem.

03:05:18   It's very hard to know like what you can force touch

03:05:20   and what you can long press.

03:05:22   And there's not a lot of like conventions

03:05:24   of how to show users that.

03:05:26   And then the way that you accommodate things

03:05:29   like that you would typically get like in a menu bar

03:05:32   where like, you know, a menu bar has a very, very small

03:05:35   amount of screen space devoted to it,

03:05:37   but you can click on it and then you get expanded

03:05:41   these lists of commands that they themselves can have

03:05:44   their own subcommands that expand out

03:05:46   when you hover over them.

03:05:48   So you can cram a whole bunch of functionality

03:05:50   into a relatively small amount of screen space

03:05:54   that is out of the way when you don't need it, et cetera.

03:05:57   In addition, it really enables power use

03:05:59   because it shows you what the keyboard shortcuts are

03:06:02   for these things.

03:06:02   So if you keep going to the same menu commands

03:06:04   over and over again, eventually you might notice

03:06:07   those little characters after it and figure out,

03:06:09   oh, that's the symbol on the keyboard,

03:06:11   oh, I can hit Command + T and do this thing, right?

03:06:14   And so it enables both the progressive disclosure

03:06:19   and management of lots of functionality,

03:06:22   as well as it kind of shows you as a power user

03:06:25   how to get faster at these things.

03:06:27   And on touch devices, we really don't have

03:06:29   good conventions for these yet.

03:06:31   We don't have good ways to show power users

03:06:34   how to do things faster.

03:06:36   We don't really have concepts of things

03:06:38   like keyboard shortcuts being incredibly discoverable.

03:06:41   I know on an iPad you can just hold down command

03:06:43   on an external keyboard and it shows a little overlay,

03:06:45   but that only applies to the iPad

03:06:48   and only when you're having a keyboard attached

03:06:50   and a lot of people are using a lot of Tux devices

03:06:53   that don't have keyboards attached to them that way.

03:06:56   And we don't also have in our UI paradigms

03:06:59   the amount of progressive disclosure that you get

03:07:04   from a menu, we don't have that really

03:07:06   in our design vocabulary on Tux OS software yet.

03:07:10   And instead, Tux OS things tend to do that

03:07:14   with just having lots of modes,

03:07:16   where you tap this toolbar icon

03:07:18   the whole interface changes to be this mode, and then it's, and that just gets very confusing

03:07:23   very quickly. And even then, you're usually using iconography, not text, to show what

03:07:30   the actions are, which makes it, in some ways it makes it more accessible if like, you know,

03:07:36   if it's not in your language or if you don't understand some of the terminology used. But

03:07:40   it also makes it a lot harder to skim and browse and kind of learn the ins and outs

03:07:45   of for a lot of people. So we have like, you know, it took us a long time to figure this

03:07:49   stuff out on desktops, or on PCs rather. And I think tux just, it's just too early in the

03:07:57   tux OS's and in how we design software for them to know how to how to solve some of these

03:08:04   problems because you can't just take the solutions from PCs and translate them right over in

03:08:09   a lot of ways because it just doesn't fit.

03:08:11   - And it's not quite true that you could use the menu bar

03:08:14   to explore the entire functionality of an app.

03:08:16   And like a perfect example of that

03:08:18   is like in Adobe apps, like Photoshop.

03:08:21   - The paradigms of good user interface.

03:08:24   - Well, even going back to the early days of Photoshop

03:08:27   when it was truly a good Mac app.

03:08:29   But you could, you can always,

03:08:30   as long back as I can remember,

03:08:32   let's say you have an image

03:08:33   and you're zoomed in way bigger than your screen, right?

03:08:36   But you still wanna pan around the image.

03:08:38   You can just hold down the space bar wherever you are

03:08:41   and the mouse cursor will change to the Mickey Mouse hand,

03:08:45   and then you can click and drag

03:08:47   to just drag the canvas around screen.

03:08:50   Well, that's not a menu command.

03:08:51   That's something you somehow you have to learn that.

03:08:53   And for whatever reason, QuarkXPress back in the day,

03:08:57   the desktop image or layout program,

03:09:00   desktop like publishing program

03:09:01   that at one point I practically lived my life in

03:09:05   had the same feature, but they used the option key,

03:09:07   which I actually always liked better than space bar

03:09:10   'cause it always felt like it should be a modifier

03:09:12   and just plain option clicking on something

03:09:14   was completely unused, right?

03:09:16   Command clicking, open links,

03:09:17   and control clicking opens control menus.

03:09:20   Option clicking was right there, but you had to learn that.

03:09:23   But for the most part though, if you just wanna learn

03:09:25   what's everything this app can do,

03:09:27   if you just go through the menu bar, you'll find it all.

03:09:30   And I'll give you a perfect example of that.

03:09:32   I've lost that curiosity almost,

03:09:35   or the instinct to like, when I have a new app, to do that,

03:09:39   Because even me, as somebody who thinks of himself primarily

03:09:43   as a Mac user, I've gotten so accustomed to the,

03:09:47   look, if it's not an icon in the window that I can click,

03:09:50   don't think about it.

03:09:51   Like when I was looking for that uncheck all thing in Notes,

03:09:55   I found another feature that I had no idea was there.

03:09:58   This is probably new to almost everybody

03:09:59   who I'm going to tell this to,

03:10:00   because you didn't even think to look at it.

03:10:01   But in Apple Notes on like Sierra and Hi Sierra,

03:10:05   you can open a note in its own window, right,

03:10:08   double-clicking it and then if you go to the window menu there's a float on top

03:10:12   command and that window will stay floating on top of all other windows did

03:10:17   you know you could do that open any note you want float on top and now it's like

03:10:25   an always on top thing look at that you can you know you can keep a little

03:10:28   skinny window open on the side while you're doing other work gathering notes

03:10:32   and it's always there for you to like drag stuff to it's fantastic but there's

03:10:37   There's no other way to do it other than to go to the menu bar

03:10:40   Anyway, that's my I really feel like that's the biggest one of the biggest problems facing the iPad

03:10:46   especially like because I don't think you want apps with an extra, you know, the

03:10:50   Even the biggest phone possible whatever whoever in China is making a six point whatever inch phone

03:10:57   It's it's a small enough screen where the maximum complexity of an app is

03:11:03   dictated by the size of the screen.

03:11:05   But there's no reason in theory that a 11 inch

03:11:08   or 13 inch iPad shouldn't be able to support apps

03:11:12   of the same complexity as a Mac,

03:11:14   but the UI metaphors just aren't there

03:11:16   for where to put those commands

03:11:17   that can't be shown on screen at all time.

03:11:21   - Yeah, like where do you put a whole bunch of functionality

03:11:24   and also how do you show users

03:11:27   how to use the app in a more powerful way?

03:11:31   So with the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts

03:11:34   and things like that,

03:11:35   like how do you show users what is possible?

03:11:38   - Yeah.

03:11:39   I don't know.

03:11:41   (laughing)

03:11:45   What else did I have to talk about this week?

03:11:47   Oh, I wanna talk about the sad state of Apple TV apps.

03:11:50   I really wanna talk about this.

03:11:51   - So do I actually.

03:11:52   I don't know, are you gonna release a three hour episode?

03:11:55   Like how do you do this?

03:11:56   - What are we at?

03:11:57   I see we got interrupted by a Skype drop before,

03:11:59   so I don't know where we are.

03:12:00   - Yeah, we're gonna be at about three hours.

03:12:02   - We'll be close.

03:12:03   Well, there you go, you get your money's worth

03:12:06   out of this episode.

03:12:07   - I'm finally gonna get counted in your episode

03:12:12   length records. - Yeah, I'll tell Vasiri

03:12:13   to update his chart.

03:12:14   The sad state of Apple TV apps.

03:12:16   And this popped into my bubbled up,

03:12:18   I wrote recently about the long awaited Amazon Prime app.

03:12:22   And I was just telling you, in fact,

03:12:24   all of those episodes of Top Gear,

03:12:26   the reason I hadn't watched it until now,

03:12:28   not Top Gear, Grand Tour. By the way, have you realized how clever the name Grand Tour is? For

03:12:35   people who don't know the backstory, the three guys who did the Grand Tour for years did a BBC

03:12:40   show called Top Gear, and it was very popular around the world. And then one of the guys,

03:12:46   Jeremy Clarkson, was at a steakhouse and having dinner with one of the producers, and I don't

03:12:54   know what happened. Nobody really seems to know what happened, but he punched the guy out.

03:12:58   (laughing)

03:13:00   - That wasn't quite what, yeah, it's close enough.

03:13:03   - Well.

03:13:03   - Yeah, he punctured a staff member,

03:13:07   and therefore, like the BBC basically had to fire him.

03:13:10   - And the other two guys in solidarity left,

03:13:12   and they went to Amazon,

03:13:13   and they've started what's effectively the same show.

03:13:16   Do you realize how clever it is

03:13:17   if you're well known for a show called Top Gear,

03:13:20   how perfect a name Grand Tour is,

03:13:23   because you're taking the same two letters,

03:13:25   T and G, and just replacing them,

03:13:28   And there's something, at least in my mind,

03:13:31   where they get filed right next to each other

03:13:34   in the hash table, in my mind.

03:13:36   They sound the same, Grand Tour, Top Gear.

03:13:39   They have the same cadence.

03:13:42   Like for three guys who couldn't take the name Top Gear

03:13:46   with them, the name Grand Tour is,

03:13:50   it's unbelievably perfect.

03:13:53   It's really crazy.

03:13:54   And I find myself saying,

03:13:55   even though I never even watched Top Gear,

03:13:57   I find myself saying Top Gear all the time just because it's, like I said, it's like

03:14:01   in the same, it's like a hash table collision in my brain because it's so perfect. Anyway,

03:14:07   the whole reason I put off watching it, even though you guys started talking about it when

03:14:10   their Amazon show launched last year, was because I couldn't watch it on my goddamn

03:14:14   Apple TV. And it's not like I'm spiteful and only watch stuff on Apple TV. It's just that

03:14:20   switching to something else never seems convenient enough.

03:14:24   Yeah, it's nicer to watch an Apple TV.

03:14:26   So now that there's an Amazon Prime app on Apple TV, and even though it's a garbage

03:14:30   app, which I wrote about, it's just horrible. And it's just a direct port from the Prime

03:14:37   app on all these other platforms. It's terrible. It's just really, really a bad app. It disobeys

03:14:44   so many conventions of Apple TV. It doesn't work like any other normal Apple TV app. But

03:14:49   The one saving grace that it has is it does integrate with Apple's Apple TV app.

03:14:54   So you can just go to the Apple's TV app and it seems to do a good job of

03:14:59   saying, Hey, you just watched episode three of season two of this.

03:15:02   Do you want to watch season four?

03:15:04   And I don't really have to interact with the Amazon app. But anyway,

03:15:08   this week YouTube came out with a new,

03:15:10   an updated version of their Apple TV app and it's like the exact same thing as

03:15:16   story is the Amazon app where it's just a direct port of their youtube.com/tv web app

03:15:23   doesn't look or act anything like an Apple TV app doesn't work well with the whatever

03:15:28   you think of the Apple TV remote control. Certainly this app isn't meant to be used

03:15:32   with it and it doesn't even make noises you move around. You know how like on Apple TV

03:15:36   you go up down left, right? It goes beep, beep, beep, beep. It doesn't doesn't make any

03:15:40   noise and I have a stupid TV setup where I don't have one button to hit to turn everything

03:15:45   on. I've got to hit a button to turn on the TV and a button to turn on my sound system.

03:15:51   And then, like, I always have to wake up the Apple TV, so that's the third button. So when

03:15:56   it wasn't making noise, I just assumed that when I went to turn on the sound system, I

03:16:01   didn't hit it. And now I'm like, well, shit, the green light's on. Oh, maybe I have to

03:16:04   turn the volume up. And I turn the volume way up. And if I turn the volume to, like,

03:16:08   you know, too loud. And I'm like, holy shit, they shipped an Apple TV app that doesn't

03:16:12   make noises you navigate. Yeah, this is so I pose a question in our notes here and

03:16:20   I think it might be a discussion like were in retrospect and and I'm not

03:16:26   saying Apple should have known this but it just as a question now in retrospect

03:16:31   was this model of letting everybody make their own apps for the Apple TV actually

03:16:36   the right model was it was this actually better than the previous Apple TV

03:16:41   software like before they had the fortune what was in 2015 before that one the app the

03:16:47   old Apple TVs before they were apps Apple basically wrote all of the like kind of channels

03:16:54   that that appeared there and they were all based on you know like a common code base

03:17:00   where it was basically like being fed like a list of things that can be played and they

03:17:04   were you know some structures it's a TV ML or something like that TV markup language

03:17:08   it was sort of like, well that's the new one.

03:17:11   - I thought that was the old one.

03:17:12   - Anyway, so, I don't think we ever knew the name

03:17:16   of what the old one was like.

03:17:18   It was basically, it was like a version of XML

03:17:20   that would like render.

03:17:21   - It was just an XML file, right.

03:17:23   - Right, and so all Apple TV video sources,

03:17:27   in the previous generation of Apple TVs,

03:17:29   all would work the same way.

03:17:30   Like you'd have the same kind of menu structure,

03:17:32   everything would look basically the same,

03:17:34   you'd just be accessing,

03:17:35   oh now you're running HBO's content,

03:17:37   and now you're running so-and-so's content.

03:17:39   And it all looked and worked in the standard way,

03:17:43   which is how TV stuff had always worked before.

03:17:47   Like your cable box, every provider who does things

03:17:51   on a cable service doesn't have their own app

03:17:53   that you don't have to navigate to.

03:17:55   Like if you wanna watch a show on a different channel

03:17:57   on a cable service, it works exactly the same way

03:18:00   as every other channel that you have access to

03:18:02   in your channel guide and whatever.

03:18:04   Everything works the same.

03:18:05   And so when Apple moved to the fourth gen,

03:18:09   there was a lot of questions about how they should do this

03:18:13   and people saying what they should and shouldn't do.

03:18:15   And what they did at the time,

03:18:16   which I think was probably the right move

03:18:18   with everything we knew at the time,

03:18:19   was now we just make everything apps.

03:18:22   And video providers and other people

03:18:25   can just make their own app however they want it to be,

03:18:29   and that's how they can bring their content

03:18:31   to the Apple TV, which is great in a number of ways.

03:18:34   it lowers barriers, it makes it so that, you know,

03:18:37   Apple doesn't have to hand create every one of these

03:18:40   video providers' channels on the TV, like,

03:18:42   the people can make their own apps,

03:18:44   and they can make them really awesome.

03:18:47   The problem is, when big companies make their own apps,

03:18:50   they often don't make them really awesome,

03:18:52   and they often have their own goals in mind,

03:18:54   like, you know, Amazon wants the Amazon app

03:18:57   to look the same way on all platforms,

03:18:59   Netflix, you know, same thing, YouTube,

03:19:01   probably the same thing, like,

03:19:03   So what we have now is companies that they control

03:19:08   the entire experience rather than Apple,

03:19:11   and what they've chosen to do is to make

03:19:14   kind of a crappy Apple TV experience.

03:19:17   - Not even kind of.

03:19:18   - Now there's no more recourse for that.

03:19:19   - And they both, I think Amazon at least

03:19:22   is using standard playback controls for the video stream.

03:19:24   Like once video is streaming,

03:19:26   it's a standard Apple TV video stream,

03:19:28   but YouTube uses their own video playback controls.

03:19:31   and they don't support, I mean, things that are fundamental

03:19:35   to the platform, like being able to tap, not click,

03:19:38   just tap the touch pad on the remote to bring up like,

03:19:43   "Hey, where am I?"

03:19:44   That doesn't work.

03:19:45   It doesn't do anything.

03:19:46   It's so literally tied to the idea

03:19:50   of a generic shitbox TV connected thing

03:19:52   with a D-pad and a select button

03:19:55   that anything other than that on the Apple TV remote

03:19:58   doesn't work, including just fundamental to the platform,

03:20:00   just tap on the thing to see where I am.

03:20:03   And the playback controls look all weird.

03:20:05   And they even bring up like a stupid picker,

03:20:08   the way that YouTube is so obsessed with always,

03:20:11   no matter where you are in a video,

03:20:13   you could be watching like a half hour YouTube video

03:20:15   and you're only 10 minutes into it.

03:20:16   But if you do anything, they immediately present you

03:20:18   with eight options for other things

03:20:20   you might wanna watch right now, right?

03:20:21   Like, I don't know how somebody

03:20:24   with a genuine attention deficit problem,

03:20:28   how they could ever watch anything on YouTube.

03:20:30   Like I don't have any kind of issues in that regard,

03:20:33   like in a clinical sense, but even I feel badgered.

03:20:37   Like I just wanted to pause the show.

03:20:39   Why are you telling me about eight other things to watch

03:20:42   and taking up a quarter of the screen?

03:20:45   All I wanted to do was freaking pause

03:20:46   and maybe see where I am in the video.

03:20:48   So the other thing I did, I told you earlier in the show,

03:20:53   I fired up the Fire TV 'cause I wanted to see

03:20:57   what the hell's going on with YouTube over there.

03:20:59   And so they have a youtube.com, at least on my Fire TV.

03:21:04   It was like one of the top two or three suggestions

03:21:06   for things to do.

03:21:08   And I was like, "Ooh, that's interesting."

03:21:10   And it didn't have the YouTube logo.

03:21:11   It was even a blue rectangle and not red.

03:21:14   So they weren't even trying to impersonate YouTube.

03:21:17   It's just a blue rectangle that said youtube.com.

03:21:20   And I clicked it and it said,

03:21:22   "You have two ways of watching YouTube on Fire TV.

03:21:25   "You can download Firefox,

03:21:27   or you can download Silk. That's Amazon's web browser. So I downloaded both. And when

03:21:36   you fire up either Mozilla or Silk, both of them assume that the only reason they exist

03:21:44   is to show YouTube. Like they're effectively both YouTube apps. So you download Silk on

03:21:51   the thing and it's just like, "You want to watch YouTube, right?" And they're like, "Yeah."

03:21:55   and then it just turns into the YouTube app.

03:21:57   And it looks exactly like the Apple TV app.

03:22:01   So running YouTube as a website in a web browser

03:22:06   on the Amazon Fire TV box is exactly the same interface

03:22:13   as Apple TV, with the small exception of at the very least

03:22:17   on Apple TV, the currently selected item does have the 3D

03:22:23   pops out effect and you can kind of jiggle it around

03:22:26   a little bit.

03:22:27   But every other thing is exactly the same.

03:22:29   So somehow, and my, I guess, is that the new YouTube app

03:22:33   on Apple TV somehow got an exception

03:22:36   and is running a web view, even though the web view

03:22:39   isn't really part of the Apple TV SDK.

03:22:43   And I think that they--

03:22:45   - Or it might not technically be a web view,

03:22:48   maybe it's some kind of thing where they're using

03:22:50   JavaScript under their hood to do most of their logic,

03:22:53   but they're rendering it differently.

03:22:55   But it doesn't necessarily have to be a WebView to do that.

03:22:58   But yeah, it's still some kind of cross-platform

03:23:01   gallery for people.

03:23:02   - And the other funny thing about the Prime app,

03:23:04   which is a great example, was the people who still have

03:23:08   the previous generation Apple TV,

03:23:11   the one from three generations ago,

03:23:14 <