0:00:00- I'm not naming names except it was me,
0:00:03but we came home from a trip to Disney World this year
0:00:07and there was a fruit fly situation.
0:00:10- Oh no.
0:00:12- It wasn't bad.
0:00:14It was not a terrible fruit fly infestation,
0:00:18but it was, and it was most definitely my fault.
0:00:22- We have people come and feed the cat.
0:00:26So there are at least some people doing basic check
0:00:29on whether there's something disastrous happening
0:00:31in the house when they come in to feed the cat.
0:00:33So that's good.
0:00:34It's like, check on the house, feed the cat,
0:00:37and also make sure that there's nothing.
0:00:38Yeah, we didn't leave a banana on the counter or something.
0:00:41(laughing)
0:00:43- Banana would be the worst.
0:00:46You'd have to move.
0:00:47- Yeah, I don't know, 'cause the banana skin is,
0:00:52well, yeah, no, you may be right.
0:00:54We've had other fruits that have rotted
0:00:56in the fruit bowl at the bottom that were worse,
0:00:59where I would walk in.
0:01:00And you know, they're insidious,
0:01:02'cause you don't really notice it
0:01:04if you're just in the house,
0:01:06but then somebody walks in from out in the world,
0:01:09out in the fresh air, and goes, "Oh no."
0:01:11Where is that coming from?
0:01:12And that's when you discover that there's a rotten nectarine
0:01:15at the bottom of a fruit bowl.
0:01:16Yeah, it's not good.
0:01:18- You know, my wife found a good tip.
0:01:20It's one of those, you don't have to buy anything.
0:01:23It's a use stuff in your own household
0:01:25to solve the problem.
0:01:27There's like a woman who had a whole bunch of those tips.
0:01:30- Oh, like hints from Heloise?
0:01:31- Yeah, hints from Heloise, right, exactly.
0:01:33I remember as a kid I didn't know how to pronounce her name.
0:01:36- She was a Letterman guest, wasn't she?
0:01:38She was on Letterman a few times, I think.
0:01:39- I think she was.
0:01:41So I don't know if this actually comes from her,
0:01:42but it's one of those type of tips.
0:01:43But the way to get rid of,
0:01:44one way to get rid of fruit flies
0:01:46is to fill a wine glass or two with,
0:01:50and the tip says white wine.
0:01:51I don't know if that makes a difference.
0:01:53I doubt it because, but it at least lets you see them.
0:01:56And then you put a little bit,
0:01:59maybe like an inch of white wine in the glass,
0:02:03and then on the top, just drop gently
0:02:07about two drops of dish detergent.
0:02:09And then the fruit flies are attracted to the wine,
0:02:13but the dish detergent that floats on top
0:02:15is viscous enough that they can't escape.
0:02:17- Yeah, we did that. - And they get nice and drunk,
0:02:21so you're killing them humanely.
0:02:23- I think we did that with vinegar,
0:02:30and like a plastic bag where you clip the end
0:02:33of like a Ziploc bag and you put it down in the glass
0:02:36with the vinegar below it and they go down
0:02:37and then they can't come back out.
0:02:40So that's another like homemade fruit fly trap,
0:02:42but we definitely have done that.
0:02:44- Anyway, we should get going.
0:02:50We only have limited time and we have six hours.
0:02:54- As much time as you want, yeah.
0:02:55- We have six hours of topics to pack into a two-hour show.
0:02:57- We do, as usual.
0:02:58- Starting out, I'm gonna get some follow-up out of the way.
0:03:05That's what you're supposed to do, a follow-up, right?
0:03:08So a couple episodes ago, I had "Moltz" on,
0:03:11and I spoke about my longstanding analogy
0:03:16that I like to use for designing a good interface.
0:03:20And this could be for software,
0:03:21it could even be for hardware products.
0:03:23But I like to think of it as the difference
0:03:25between feeling like you're going uphill or downhill.
0:03:28And a bad interface for something makes you feel like,
0:03:30it's like you have to push uphill every step of the way.
0:03:34And a good interface makes you feel
0:03:37like you're going downhill.
0:03:38And one of my favorite examples would be
0:03:42like a fantastic house interface for entering a new date
0:03:47or event where you can just start typing free form
0:03:50in a field podcast with Jason, Thursday or Wednesday
0:03:55at 5.30 and it'll just parse it and I'll have an event
0:04:00that's named podcast with Jason.
0:04:03It'll correctly interpret Wednesday as meaning
0:04:05the next Wednesday and 5.30 is 5.30 p.m. instead of a.m.
0:04:10because they're somehow smart enough to know
0:04:12that we're not going to podcast at 5.30 AM Eastern time.
0:04:16Brilliant interface.
0:04:17Feels like you're going downhill.
0:04:18It feels like I couldn't--
0:04:19I can't imagine how it would be easier to create an event.
0:04:22Whereas going uphill would be like sitting there
0:04:25and having to pick from a date field,
0:04:29and bring up a calendar, and pick the date,
0:04:31and then enter the time manually,
0:04:33and have to manually enter AM or PM,
0:04:36and going through all these different fields.
0:04:38Anyway, but I mentioned my frustration with that,
0:04:40because, with my analogy, because going downhill also has sort of a negative connotation. If
0:04:46you say, "Oh, man, Daring Fireball's really going downhill lately," most people would
0:04:50interpret that as meaning it's not as good as it used to be. So, listener Justin Scott
0:04:59on Twitter, thank you, Justin, he suggested that I switch to downstream and upstream,
0:05:06and then you swimming downstream, swimming upstream,
0:05:09and then you lose the second meaning
0:05:12where downhill has a negative connotation.
0:05:15So I'm gonna keep that in mind.
0:05:16I've bookmarked it.
0:05:17I'm gonna try to keep it in my brain
0:05:20'cause I don't need to bring it up a balance here,
0:05:21but I just wanted to thank him for his clever,
0:05:24can't believe I didn't think of it, suggestion.
0:05:28- It's good, you just gotta think about boats
0:05:30more than like walking or riding a bike or something.
0:05:32- Yep, exactly.
0:05:33- That's all.
0:05:34Secondarily, on the last episode with Glenn Fleischman,
0:05:37I went on an angry rant about the Amber Alert system
0:05:46that set your phone off.
0:05:48And a couple of people wrote in to say
0:05:50that that was a little bit cruel or something.
0:05:52And somebody pointed me, I will put this in the show notes,
0:05:55that the AmberAlert.gov website
0:05:57claims to have these statistics,
0:05:59and they claim that 40 children have been rescued
0:06:01because of wireless emergency alerts.
0:06:05I don't know, I started taking a look at their report.
0:06:08They have reports, but the reports only go up to 2015,
0:06:10so I don't know what's going on with 2016.
0:06:12I started reading it, it was just a gobbledygook.
0:06:17So I'll just accept it, I'll say, okay,
0:06:20I'll admit, let's just say 40 kids have been saved
0:06:22who would have otherwise not been saved,
0:06:23so go Amber Alerts.
0:06:28Oh, the other follow-up on that is I heard that,
0:06:29I posited that Apple was legally required to participate.
0:06:34And a couple of people wrote in to say that,
0:06:35"No, it's voluntary, but everybody does it."
0:06:37- That's bad luck if you're like, "No, no,
0:06:42we don't want to find missing kids."
0:06:44No, you gotta put that in there.
0:06:47- It's sort of implicitly mandatory
0:06:49because it's sort of a bad PR, you know?
0:06:53- Yeah.
0:06:54- What else?
0:06:57We have one last bit of follow-up suggested by you.
0:06:59Now this is pure coincidence.
0:07:00Last time you were on the show,
0:07:02which was quite a while ago, I think,
0:07:03we were talking about old fashioned keyboards
0:07:07and you had a new mechanical keyboard that you had ordered,
0:07:11or two maybe, and you pointed out,
0:07:14I will put a link to this.
0:07:16I'm afraid I actually don't know
0:07:18how to pronounce its surname.
0:07:19I believe it's Stephen Troughton Smith?
0:07:22Maybe it's Troughton Smith?
0:07:23- I say Troughton, Troughton Smith, I think.
0:07:25- Yeah, Troughton sounds, I guess, sounds more British.
0:07:28but very good friend of the show,
0:07:29or friend of the website at least, expert iOS,
0:07:34I call him like a spelunker,
0:07:35like he digs into the betas,
0:07:38uncovered all sorts of juicy tidbits
0:07:41from that HomePod iOS release,
0:07:45premature release a couple weeks ago.
0:07:47Anyway, he had preordered,
0:07:49he'd showed me this actually privately,
0:07:51at least the plans for it.
0:07:53He preordered, there's a,
0:07:56I forget the company, is it WASD?
0:07:58I think it's WASD.
0:08:00- I just say WASD, yeah.
0:08:02- Do you have one of their keyboards?
0:08:04- I don't, I've actually been thinking of getting one.
0:08:07And then I saw Steve Trout and Smith's tweets
0:08:11and oh boy, I'm gonna have to at some point.
0:08:15'Cause they let you do custom key caps.
0:08:18And that is, so the one I've got is a weird Chinese keyboard
0:08:23that I like a lot.
0:08:25but it comes with the key caps that are on it,
0:08:29and they're really generic Windows key caps.
0:08:31And the advantage of the WSD is you can order it
0:08:35with custom printing on whatever key cap,
0:08:38like colors and printing,
0:08:40when you order a keyboard from them.
0:08:41- Yeah, so, Trouton Smith made his
0:08:45Apple Extended Keyboard 2 style,
0:08:47which is actually the style of a whole era
0:08:50of Apple keyboards.
0:08:52There was a pretty long era of Apple keyboards,
0:08:56pretty much the entire,
0:09:00like probably starting around the late '80s
0:09:02and right up until the Steve Jobs,
0:09:04Johnny Ive iMac.
0:09:07- Like until that iMac keyboard, yeah, I think so.
0:09:10- Where all of Apple's keyboards used,
0:09:13I actually forget the exact thickness and weight,
0:09:16but it's a universe condensed,
0:09:18a version of universe condensed slanted or italic,
0:09:20I forget if they call it italic or slanted,
0:09:22but the font universe, very distinctive.
0:09:25And it does look beautiful.
0:09:29So he made a custom keyboard layout.
0:09:32I think he took somebody else's and then tweaked it
0:09:34and got a keyboard that truly does look,
0:09:37I mean, that's remarkable.
0:09:38I mean, the colors are a little,
0:09:40probably not what Apple would use,
0:09:42but in many ways looks like a modern version
0:09:44of an Apple extended keyboard too.
0:09:46- Yeah, he did a good job.
0:09:48WASD lets you use Illustrator,
0:09:50There's also like a free open source app that you can download that lets you set these template files up.
0:09:56And so you can put in kind of any font and any symbol you want.
0:10:00And if you're a Mac user, you kind of they've got some they've got like a pre formatted Apple layout, but it's not great.
0:10:07That's one of the things that's prevented me from from buying from them is that I'm concerned that if I'm going to use their their service of customizing keys, I want it to be right.
0:10:17and then I start to dive in and I'm like,
0:10:19"No, no, no, no, no, this is going to be a whole project
0:10:21like Steve Trout and Smith found out."
0:10:23It's a whole serious project, even if you search the web
0:10:27and find somebody who's done a particular layout
0:10:30that you can use and then adapt.
0:10:31But it looks great.
0:10:33I wish WSD let you choose the body of the keyboard,
0:10:38but all their keyboards are black,
0:10:39and I think by default with black keys.
0:10:40And so Steve's keyboard is black body with gray keys,
0:10:46which is not ideal, but it looks great and the layout looks great. I'm not sure I would
0:10:52do custom keycaps harkening back to this era. I might do something a little more modern,
0:10:57but still Apple-like. You can't glance at those keys and not feel like you're in the early 90s.
0:11:05My bit of feedback to him, and I don't even know if Wazd lets you do it, but I think you could do
0:11:09it yourself. There must be some way you could do it yourself by popping the keys off and on.
0:11:14But one of the changes that Apple made at some point
0:11:19was they changed the little home row alignment nubbins.
0:11:23I don't know if there's a keyboard engineering
0:11:25name for them.
0:11:26But everybody familiar with the modern keyboard
0:11:28thinks of them as the things on the F and J key
0:11:31that your index fingers feel.
0:11:33And it's to help you know that you're on the right row.
0:11:36But back in that era, in the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 era,
0:11:40and I think dating back as long as I can remember as a kid,
0:11:45all the way back through the big clacky, clacky Apple IIs,
0:11:48Apple used to put them on the D and K keys
0:11:51for your middle finger.
0:11:52And for me, as somebody who still uses
0:11:57an Apple extended keyboard on my,
0:11:58or keyboard two to be precise, on my iMac,
0:12:01I actually prefer, I prefer the middle finger
0:12:05rather than the index finger.
0:12:06And so I feel like trial and smith should have done that.
0:12:08- Of course you do.
0:12:09You're from Philly. Of course you prefer the middle finger.
0:12:12But they, WISD lets you customize like everything.
0:12:16Like you can, you can get,
0:12:17you can order a key from them in a particular color.
0:12:20So I'm sure that if he wanted to,
0:12:23or if somebody else wanted to,
0:12:24they could order that nubbin key
0:12:26with the other letter printed on it.
0:12:28And then you just pop them off.
0:12:30I mean, they can sell you a little tool that helps,
0:12:33but you just pop off the key and put on a new key.
0:12:35I did a whole custom key layout thing
0:12:38for my stupid keyboard that I use, the same deal.
0:12:41And I use WASD's case 'cause they are the ones
0:12:44that will print anything on a key.
0:12:47(laughing)
0:12:50- Anyway, great work, great company.
0:12:53I guess I should put a link to WASD,
0:12:55WASD keyboards in there too.
0:12:57So what company was your keyboard from?
0:13:00- Oh, it's called, I got from Josh Chipolsky.
0:13:04He was pointing out these things.
0:13:06It's a Leopold is the name of it.
0:13:08- Oh, I advise.
0:13:10- Yeah, it's tenkeyless or it's maybe a 60%.
0:13:13Basically, it doesn't have a function key row
0:13:14and it doesn't have a number pad.
0:13:16And I really love it because it's small
0:13:18and that means that my track pad is right next to it.
0:13:21But it is weird because it's got a non-standard space bar,
0:13:24which means that I can't buy keycap sets
0:13:27and swap out the space bar.
0:13:30I would have to start using super glue
0:13:32and rubber cement and weird stuff
0:13:34and I'm never going to do that.
0:13:36So it is, it's pretty good.
0:13:39And I'm using Cherry MX Brown mechanical switches.
0:13:43The first one I got was blue and it was super clicky.
0:13:46And this one's a little more kind of clacky.
0:13:49I know that doesn't make any sense,
0:13:50but it is like that was clicky and this is clacky
0:13:53and I liked the clacky better.
0:13:55So now I know like I figured out which switch I liked.
0:13:58So now if I order a WASD keyboard,
0:14:00I'll be like, give me the Cherry Brown
0:14:01because that's the switch that I have that I like.
0:14:03And I wouldn't miss, or I would be okay
0:14:06with getting a function key row back,
0:14:08because I've got keyboard shortcuts mapped,
0:14:10but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
0:14:11I just don't want it to be any wider,
0:14:13'cause the further, the more wide the keyboard is,
0:14:15the further away my pointy device is,
0:14:18and then I'm stretching with my right hand to get to it,
0:14:21and it gives me some wrist pain.
0:14:23I'm much more comfortable with everything
0:14:25as close together as possible.
0:14:26- Part of it, part of this reminds me of,
0:14:29and I do, and there's a part of me that's a nerd
0:14:31who loves to configure everything.
0:14:34I do love that.
0:14:37I love being able to design everything.
0:14:40Like the Ray Ban website lets you design
0:14:44your own sunglasses.
0:14:46And so I could pick exactly, you know,
0:14:49the frames that I like, I could get them.
0:14:51I can pick like gold chrome, silver chrome,
0:14:55or brushed chrome.
0:14:57You could pick like which lens color
0:15:00one for the sunglasses.
0:15:02Because they're like the ones I like are like aviator style.
0:15:04You can even pick what color the bit of plastic that
0:15:07goes behind your ears is.
0:15:09I love that.
0:15:11And I really feel like I got mine just right.
0:15:15And so I appreciate that.
0:15:16But this choice between like cherry red and cherry brown
0:15:20and et cetera, and the fact that at each one
0:15:23there's like different types.
0:15:25There's like another color that's
0:15:27exactly like one of the other ones,
0:15:28but just takes less pressure to push,
0:15:33but has the same exact thing at the bottom.
0:15:38The thing at the bottom is the thing
0:15:39that makes them most different from each other.
0:15:41I forget what the word is, but it's the way
0:15:43that it actually clicks.
0:15:45But then how much pressure it takes
0:15:47is sort of a secondary choice.
0:15:48And I'm overwhelmed by it, because I
0:15:51find-- I think I like the cherry red, but maybe cherry brown.
0:15:56I don't know.
0:15:57And so I find that choice paralyzing.
0:16:00And I appreciate the fact that with an Apple extended
0:16:02keyboard too, you just got the ones that Apple liked best.
0:16:05- Yeah, yeah.
0:16:07And if you didn't like it, maybe you get a different
0:16:09keyboard that they like the IBM keyboards
0:16:12were totally different.
0:16:13And that's like Rich Segal loves the IBM keyboard, I believe.
0:16:15And it feels completely different.
0:16:17But back then it was, now it's an enthusiast thing
0:16:19where it's like we make one keyboard
0:16:21and then you choose the switches.
0:16:22And they're emulating like this brand of keyboard
0:16:25or that brand of keyboard.
0:16:27I bought the tester, actually after we talked,
0:16:29people pointed out in the last episode that I was on,
0:16:33that you can get a little tester,
0:16:34which is like a little block.
0:16:35And I did it and it led me to the Cherry Brown,
0:16:39which I'm happy about, but it's not the same.
0:16:42Like it's not the same to have a little tester
0:16:45where you're clicking a key,
0:16:46trying to imagine how it's different from the key next to it
0:16:48versus actually like typing on a keyboard.
0:16:51It's not, you know, it's better than nothing,
0:16:54but short of buying six keyboards,
0:16:56which is totally insane.
0:16:58Short of doing that, you're never
0:17:01going to really know for sure.
0:17:02Right.
0:17:03It gives you-- the tester is actually
0:17:05a fun little fidget toy.
0:17:07And I know that in the intervening months,
0:17:09since you were last on, fidget toys
0:17:11have become like a phenomenon.
0:17:14It is a very fun little-- I like to have it at my desk.
0:17:18But it's exactly right.
0:17:19It's like pressing one key.
0:17:21It can give you a basic sense of, oh, no, no.
0:17:24Definitely not that one.
0:17:26But when you get to two that are kind of close,
0:17:29there's no way that either one gives you
0:17:30the feeling of what it's like to just write
0:17:32an article using a keyboard full of the exact same switch.
0:17:35And to further compound the decisions you have to make,
0:17:38they also ship two kinds of little gaskets
0:17:42that you can optionally add to any of these.
0:17:47So there's like four levels of choice.
0:17:49It's which bottom out style do you want.
0:17:53Do you want the lighter touch or harder touch?
0:17:56And do you want no gasket, a red gasket, or a blue gasket?
0:18:01And I think the gaskets are sort of like quieters,
0:18:03like dampeners.
0:18:05- Yeah, that's exactly it.
0:18:06- You know, and so you could, that's a choice.
0:18:10The gaskets you can change on your own,
0:18:12but it's like, you know, it's a lot, you know,
0:18:15what is it, 110 keys or something like that?
0:18:16Or 101 keys on a lot of these layouts?
0:18:18So it's a lot of--
0:18:19- It takes a while.
0:18:21You can order them with the gaskets on,
0:18:22but you can also do it yourself.
0:18:24And it takes a while.
0:18:25I've done that. It takes a while.
0:18:26No, it shows you the advantage of bringing this
0:18:31to a broader version of the same topic,
0:18:35the advantage of what Apple does,
0:18:36where, you know, when you buy an Apple product,
0:18:39you are kind of putting yourself in their hands and saying,
0:18:43I want you to make the right decision for me here.
0:18:46And Apple is not a company that generally says,
0:18:48well, you can get it in these 10 different things, right?
0:18:51They 10 different SKUs.
0:18:52You get it, the one that we think is the one
0:18:54that most people are gonna like, and it's the best one.
0:18:56And that frustrates some people.
0:18:58Going to this keyboard thing,
0:18:59it is the exact opposite of that.
0:19:01It's like you have so much choice,
0:19:03and nobody's motivated to say,
0:19:06"No, no, no, this is the best one,"
0:19:08because everybody's got a different opinion,
0:19:10and they wanna give you all the choice,
0:19:11but you become paralyzed.
0:19:13And this is why I haven't bought
0:19:14one of those WASD keyboards, is I have to choose,
0:19:17even now that I've settled on the Switch color,
0:19:21which took me a while, there are all of these other issues,
0:19:24and then there's like the keyboard layout thing
0:19:26on top of that.
0:19:27It's like so much choice.
0:19:28And with Apple, it's like, no, we sell a keyboard,
0:19:30it's this one, you know, like it or lump it,
0:19:33but this is the only one we make,
0:19:34so this is the one you're getting.
0:19:35There is something to that.
0:19:38- The closest I can think Apple has come to that
0:19:40would be last year with the iPhone 7.
0:19:42I found it excruciating to decide
0:19:44between the flat black and the jet black, right?
0:19:48- That's true.
0:19:49offering two blacks is very unapple-like.
0:19:52- Yeah, it's like they couldn't decide which one.
0:19:55There was an internal struggle about the two.
0:19:58And so they're like, fine, whatever,
0:20:00we'll ship them both and see what happens.
0:20:03I wonder what happened.
0:20:05- I'd be interested too.
0:20:07I would be fascinated.
0:20:08And it's the sort of thing that, oh my God, I don't know.
0:20:10I bet so few people within the company really know.
0:20:13I mean, I think like anecdotally,
0:20:15you could talk to like a retail employee
0:20:18and they could say, you know, somebody who sells phones
0:20:20in an Apple store on a daily basis probably
0:20:23might have a good sense of which one is more frequent.
0:20:26But who knows how that lines up worldwide, you know,
0:20:32that there might be regional differences
0:20:34or something like that.
0:20:35But I think you must be exactly right
0:20:37that internally they couldn't decide.
0:20:39And that's the reason why someone whose tastes
0:20:42so largely align with Apple's institutionally like me
0:20:45would have found it so hard to decide between the two.
0:20:48I've always thought it's so hard.
0:20:50One of the nice things of being a huge,
0:20:52being a diehard Mac user,
0:20:54and I've always said this is one of my,
0:20:56what I love is Mac OS and using the Mac software.
0:21:01And I would, if I had to choose between
0:21:03like a ThinkPad running Mac OS
0:21:07or a MacBook Pro running Windows
0:21:10or any other system that could run,
0:21:12I would choose the PC hardware running Mac OS
0:21:15without even a moment's hesitation.
0:21:17before you even finish the question.
0:21:20I would buzz in on my Jeopardy thing and say,
0:21:22give me that one.
0:21:23So I always consider myself so fortunate,
0:21:28as somebody who really also does care about the hardware,
0:21:31that I'm not like, I don't feel that way about Windows.
0:21:33If I felt that strongly as a pro Windows user,
0:21:36I would find buying a new laptop excruciating.
0:21:39It would take me months,
0:21:40and I could, by the time I made up my decision,
0:21:42then probably I'll be outdated.
0:21:44I would find it so hard to decide,
0:21:46because I might have a vague idea
0:21:49that I want something roughly 13-inch diagonal,
0:21:52you know, and I want, you know, high-end specs.
0:21:54But you've got so many options
0:21:58that are roughly equivalent to each other.
0:22:01- I think this is one of the core reasons
0:22:04why people misunderstand Apple when they write about Apple,
0:22:06or even just people who don't use Apple products
0:22:08and misunderstand why people like them, is this,
0:22:12which is it's not a, 'cause they'll say,
0:22:14but there are so many other choices."
0:22:16It's like, "Yeah, but there is something to be said
0:22:19for somebody with good taste."
0:22:20You know, and you are relying on the taste of that entity
0:22:24to make those decisions for you and say, "We've looked at it,
0:22:26and this is really the one that you want,
0:22:28and that's what we're selling you."
0:22:30And, you know, some people -- for some people,
0:22:31that's not the way they want to live their life,
0:22:33and that's great, but there's a just huge amount of power
0:22:38in being able to just sort of say,
0:22:40"You have three choices.
0:22:41We made all the other choices for you.
0:22:43pick these from these three and walk away.
0:22:46And that's it.
0:22:47- Totally agree.
0:22:49All right, so ends our followup section
0:22:50and I'll take this break
0:22:52and I will thank our first friend of the show.
0:22:54It's our good friends at Squarespace.
0:22:56Make your next move and make your next website to it
0:22:58at Squarespace.
0:22:59Listen, Squarespace sponsors this show all the time.
0:23:03They're possibly, I think quite probably
0:23:06the most frequent sponsor of the talk show in its history.
0:23:11So you've heard me talk about them before
0:23:12if you've listened to the show on any regular basis.
0:23:14Just file this away in the back of your brain
0:23:16the next time you have a project
0:23:18that you need to create a new website for.
0:23:20Try it at Squarespace first.
0:23:23I'm telling you, I know in the back of my head
0:23:26that I would think, eh, I don't know,
0:23:28something where you'd actually just drag and drop
0:23:30on the website, on a webpage itself to make your website.
0:23:33How's that gonna be?
0:23:34I'm telling you right now, there are so many websites
0:23:36that you use on a daily basis that are Squarespace sites,
0:23:39and you'd never know it,
0:23:40because the design flexibility and the number of options you have is as infinite as if you
0:23:46really were sitting there in BB Edit with a brand new empty HTML document and the world's
0:23:52your oyster. Any and everything you could possibly want to design, you can design. And
0:23:57the thing that would gnaw on the back of my head before I tried it is I would think, "Ah,
0:24:01I'll bet it's like when you created a blogger site 10, 15 years ago and you had like three
0:24:06templates to choose from and everybody's blogger site look like one of these three things.
0:24:10It's not like that at all. Squarespace sites can be branded right down to the pixel from
0:24:17corner to corner. I'm telling you right now that I think I mentioned it the last time
0:24:21I sponsored the show. If you view source on Pixar.com, Pixar.com has the Squarespace stuff
0:24:27in their metadata. They're using Squarespace for at least part of their site. It really
0:24:32is that powerful, where you would want to use it with infinite resources. But if you
0:24:37don't have infinite resources, if you're just somebody who's like making a website for a
0:24:41friend, do it with Squarespace and you can turn the whole thing over to your completely
0:24:46non-technical friend and they'll be able to take it from there. It'll just get them off
0:24:51your back and you'll be done with it. Really, it's just highly recommended. I'm telling
0:24:58you to check them out the next time you need a website or someone you know needs a website
0:25:01and they come to you for advice, go check them out.
0:25:05Go to squarespace.com/gruber,
0:25:09and you use that code GRUBER,
0:25:10and you get 10% off your first order.
0:25:13My thanks to Squarespace.
0:25:14What do you like better, Jason?
0:25:15You like doing the podcast reads,
0:25:17or like being the non-reader?
0:25:21- Oh, you know, I can do either one.
0:25:25I'm okay.
0:25:26The one that drives me crazy is when it's a podcast read
0:25:28that I also do, because then I like,
0:25:30I can see the text in front of me.
0:25:32And those are the ones where I will chuckle as,
0:25:35like Marco, let's say, will be reading an ad.
0:25:38And I'll notice the ways that he does it better
0:25:41and the ways that I think I do it better
0:25:43and like which things he omits or rewords versus what I do.
0:25:47That's kind of fun when that happens.
0:25:49But otherwise I don't really mind since I do both, right?
0:25:51I'm on podcasts like when I do upgrade with Mike,
0:25:54he does most of the spots,
0:25:55but I do other podcasts where I read the ad spots.
0:25:58And so I'm okay either way.
0:26:00The pressure's off when you don't have to read the spot.
0:26:02That is nice.
0:26:03- You and Mike show is exactly what I was thinking,
0:26:07'cause I know Mike does them,
0:26:09and I know that on a whole bunch of other ones,
0:26:11of your 20 podcasts that you do them.
0:26:14- Yeah, yeah, fair.
0:26:16- I used to find, I've said this before,
0:26:18I used to find it excruciating
0:26:19when I first started doing the show on my own,
0:26:21'cause I knew I was bad at it,
0:26:23but it's like anything,
0:26:25if you don't work at it, you can get better.
0:26:28And I find it's--
0:26:29It's turned into the most energetic part of the show for me,
0:26:31'cause every time I do one, I just try to get fired up
0:26:33and I think, "What can I do to make this interesting?"
0:26:37- Yeah, I think that's the lesson that I took from it.
0:26:40Back in the early days when I started doing Ed Spots,
0:26:42when the incomparable was on five by five
0:26:45and I would listen to the way Dan Benjamin did those spots,
0:26:47and I really was legitimately like, "Oh, I see."
0:26:52You're supposed to bring energy and enthusiasm
0:26:55to these Ed reads, got it, right?
0:26:56And that was a really good thing to follow.
0:26:59And I've tried to get better and improve that
0:27:02and bring that energy to it.
0:27:03And it could always be better,
0:27:06but it's something that those of us
0:27:09who came from the side of being a writer,
0:27:12a lot of times you're actually meant to keep some remove
0:27:16from that stuff.
0:27:17And so then to read the ad is like,
0:27:19I need to get in a different frame of mind to do this,
0:27:21'cause this is not my usual low key,
0:27:24somewhat cynical kind of frame of mind.
0:27:27I'm reading in the ad spot.
0:27:28So yeah, I think every now and then,
0:27:31Mike hands me one on upgrade
0:27:32just because it's a service that's not available in the UK
0:27:35and I need to talk about it.
0:27:36And those are fun to do too.
0:27:38- All right, most important issue of the week
0:27:40by far and away is Google announced that Android,
0:27:45whatever version number they're up to,
0:27:48I actually don't even know,
0:27:51but they're doing the thing with Android
0:27:52where they give each version a candy/snack name.
0:27:56Sort of like, so everybody knows it by the name
0:27:59rather than the number.
0:28:00Sort of like Mac OS releases where people know Sierra
0:28:05and Hi Sierra and starts blurring together in your brain
0:28:08whether which one's 12, 10.12 and whatever.
0:28:12Anyway, the new version that's coming out imminently soon
0:28:15is called Android Oreo.
0:28:17And I wrote on Tearing Fireball
0:28:22about my love, I took it as an opportunity.
0:28:23And I mean this sincerely, I really, really wasn't,
0:28:26I think people took it as me throwing shade at them.
0:28:28But I really wasn't, but I liked Oreos growing up.
0:28:33But back in college, I think even, in the late '90s,
0:28:36I discovered Numinos from Paul Newman's snack company.
0:28:39And I wrote, they're so much better to me,
0:28:45it's unbelievable.
0:28:46And again, I'm quite convinced, I am quite convinced
0:28:50I would bet money that I could take a Pepsi challenge
0:28:52and taste test a Newman over scenario.
0:28:54They definitely taste different in my opinion.
0:28:58And I think that a Newman no tastes more like a real cookie
0:29:01where, and if you look at the ingredients,
0:29:02it's made with just like flour and sugar
0:29:04and stuff like that.
0:29:06And there's no high fructose corn syrup.
0:29:07And Oreos to me tastes a little bit,
0:29:10especially the aftertaste,
0:29:11it tastes a little bit like you ate some sunscreen.
0:29:14- Yeah, a little more engineered.
0:29:15I agree.
0:29:16In my house, the great debate currently is
0:29:19that my wife thinks double stuff Oreos are an abomination,
0:29:23and my children think the more of that filling,
0:29:26whatever it is and wherever it comes from, the better.
0:29:28I'm kind of on the fence about that.
0:29:30I agree with you about Numinos being good.
0:29:32I actually really fell in love with the ginger-os,
0:29:37which are a Numin-o, but it's like a ginger cookie instead.
0:29:41And they're so good, they're so good.
0:29:43- I've had those and they are very good.
0:29:45- Yeah.
0:29:46- I had, I mean, it's the way taste buds evolve
0:29:50from childhood through adulthood.
0:29:52You'd enjoy sweeter things.
0:29:56This is the reason why kids love candy.
0:29:58When you're younger, your taste buds are geared towards it.
0:30:00And it's why kids typically don't drink black coffee,
0:30:04is bitter things don't taste as well
0:30:08when you're a little kid.
0:30:10When I was a teenager, like late junior high, man,
0:30:13I just ate, I probably ate half my weight in candy every day
0:30:16and like, just like the Willy Wonka Gobstoppers
0:30:19and oh man, Nerds, remember Nerds?
0:30:22- Oh yeah, yeah.
0:30:23- Oh man, that's just like super concentrated sugar.
0:30:26I mean, I don't know what the hell is Nerds,
0:30:28but it's just like lemon lime flavored sugar.
0:30:33I love that stuff.
0:30:34So back then I did love Double Stuf Oreos
0:30:37because it was just more of the sweet stuff.
0:30:39I would tend to agree with your wife now though
0:30:42that it's sort of an abomination.
0:30:44It's way out of whack.
0:30:45It's definitely out of whack.
0:30:47- Yeah, I get why kids liked it, right?
0:30:50That makes sense.
0:30:51But yeah, you wanna keep it in balance.
0:30:54But yeah, as an adult, your palate is totally different.
0:30:56Whenever Halloween comes around,
0:30:58we have that same thing where I have like one or two
0:31:00of those candies and it's sort of like,
0:31:02wow, that is so much sugar.
0:31:04But my kids are happy to just keep on eating that sugar.
0:31:08So it works for them.
0:31:10you should try one of those sour candies
0:31:12or something like that and say,
0:31:13"Holy shit, I'm not gonna taste anything for a week."
0:31:15And meanwhile, my son is popping them one after another.
0:31:18- No, my tongue starts to hurt
0:31:21after a couple of those candies,
0:31:22where it's just like, it's not, no, no, it's not gonna work.
0:31:25- But anyway, I bring it up
0:31:28because I really do mean this sincerely,
0:31:31and I know exactly what you're,
0:31:32if you're out there and you hear alternate Oreo
0:31:35and you think, "Ah, they suck," like the Hydrox,
0:31:38I always thought Hydrox were terrible growing up.
0:31:41I forget there was a brand,
0:31:42I think it might've been regional,
0:31:45Southeastern Pennsylvania,
0:31:46Lance, I think was the name of the company.
0:31:48And like our high school sold these cookies.
0:31:53They were Oreo, exactly like Oreos,
0:31:55black cookies sandwiching a layer of white sugar cream
0:32:00or whatever that stuff is.
0:32:02And they were awful.
0:32:02I mean, they just tasted like the Oreos
0:32:04you'd get in prison or something like that,
0:32:06or the ones they had in the Soviet Union.
0:32:08I mean, they just tasted like cardboard.
0:32:10And so I know if you have like a bias in your head
0:32:15that anything like an Oreo, but that's not an Oreo,
0:32:17it is terrible.
0:32:19I implore you to buy one package of Numinos.
0:32:22I implore you to find them at like Whole Foods
0:32:24or somewhere like that,
0:32:26I'm sure you can get them on Amazon.
0:32:29Just try one thing of Numinos.
0:32:30I'm telling you, the whole Newman product line
0:32:33is actually great.
0:32:34I think they make good pretzels.
0:32:35It's really high quality stuff.
0:32:38It really is like a better quality Oreo.
0:32:43- I think the story with the Newman,
0:32:46I read a story about the whole Newman's Own business.
0:32:51And I believe the way that a lot of this works
0:32:53is because they sell in lower volume for higher prices.
0:32:55What they, you know, kind of let the food manufacturing,
0:33:00they subcontract out all the food manufacturing, right?
0:33:02It's just like Trader Joe's does
0:33:03and your local grocery store does.
0:33:05but it lets them set their standards
0:33:08a little bit differently.
0:33:09And so you get something where as an Oreo
0:33:11may be just engineered to have a certain amount of flavor
0:33:16to make the kids happy and also costs
0:33:18so that they've got their profit margins
0:33:20where they want them.
0:33:21The Newman's label, it's a little bit different
0:33:24and that's because it doesn't get sold
0:33:27in every single store in mass quantities.
0:33:30And it actually reminded me of our argument
0:33:33about like the high-end iPhone, the same thing,
0:33:35where it's like, you know, Apple sells so many iPhones now
0:33:38that to a certain point, they need any feature,
0:33:41any piece of electronics they put in an iPhone,
0:33:42they need to mass produce because they sell
0:33:45tens of millions of iPhones in a year.
0:33:48And that's kind of like an Oreo.
0:33:50And the Numinos are like, I'm not going to say
0:33:53it's like Andy Ruman's essential phone,
0:33:55but it's a little like that.
0:33:55It's like lower volume.
0:33:56They can afford to be different
0:33:58and charge a different price and not have to worry about it.
0:34:01And I think that's a clever thing.
0:34:02It may even in fact even be made in the same factory
0:34:05where they make Oreos.
0:34:06I don't know, they don't say, right?
0:34:08They can't tell you that.
0:34:09But with a different mixture of ingredients
0:34:13that lets them have a different product.
0:34:15- Have you ever seen, there's a website that is devoted
0:34:21to backwards engineering where Trader Joe's stuff
0:34:25actually is from?
0:34:26Trader Joe's stuff, Trader Joe's, I think some of their stuff
0:34:29is exactly what you're saying,
0:34:30where they just contract somebody to make it.
0:34:31but a lot of their stuff is just rebadged, identical stuff.
0:34:36And so for example, the one that is the most painfully
0:34:40obvious is their crinkle cut salt and pepper chips,
0:34:44which are excellent, excellent potato chips,
0:34:47are clearly Kettle brand salt and pepper crinkle cut chips.
0:34:51- Exactly the same.
0:34:52- There are, it's sort of a very distinctive chip.
0:34:55It's super thick, it's kind of greasy,
0:34:58but really, really good, and it is literally
0:35:00exactly the same and they used to sell cattle chips
0:35:03right there in the store.
0:35:04There's a whole website.
0:35:07There's a website that's devoted to sort of
0:35:09backwards engineering exactly what everything
0:35:12in Trader Joe's actually is.
0:35:14- Yeah, 'cause it comes from all over the place,
0:35:17but it's good, it's mostly good.
0:35:18We go to Trader Joe's all the time
0:35:19'cause there's good stuff.
0:35:20You learn over time which ones are the good ones
0:35:23and which ones are the bad ones.
0:35:24- I like Trader Joe's a lot.
0:35:25We do, we have one pretty nearby
0:35:27and I feel like I don't go there enough.
0:35:29Every time I go there, I think I should come here
0:35:30more often 'cause I actually enjoy going there.
0:35:32And just by coincidence, it's like their free samples
0:35:36way more often appeal to me and I guess I would like
0:35:39to try a little bit of that than most stores.
0:35:41Most stores, it always seems to me like they're offering you
0:35:43some pretty weird stuff on the free samples.
0:35:48- We went into a Walmart on this road trip we took
0:35:53and for I guess good reason,
0:35:57but we don't have Walmart around here
0:35:59anywhere near where we live.
0:36:00It's, I don't know, 30 miles away or something
0:36:03goes to Walmart.
0:36:04And I'd never even been to one
0:36:05until I was visiting my mom in Arizona.
0:36:08And that's like one of the few places they can go
0:36:11where they're out in the desert there to shop.
0:36:13And so we go to one on this road trip
0:36:16and it was kind of a nightmare.
0:36:18We're looking for groceries, we're looking for snacks,
0:36:20we're looking for stuff.
0:36:21And it was a little bit like sort of like the opposite
0:36:24of Trader Joe's.
0:36:25Like they only had the most marketed and mass available products.
0:36:33And so we're like looking for a very particular kind of, we're looking for like Sun Chips
0:36:37and this Walmart was like, nope, you don't have those here.
0:36:40It's like, what are you?
0:36:42Because they've got, it's like Walmart, they only had like Walmart brand and some Doritos
0:36:47and it was weird, a huge rack, but the brands were all over the place.
0:36:50And I kept thinking, this is what I always read about about Walmart, which is that they
0:36:54They have, they're ruthless when it comes to
0:36:56what products they stock and what suppliers they use.
0:36:59And just walking into this one Walmart in Utah,
0:37:03it definitely, I could tell,
0:37:05like there was some stuff that was there
0:37:07and the other stuff's like, nope,
0:37:08we decided not to carry that.
0:37:10And Walmart is powerful enough to just decree that stuff.
0:37:13It was weird.
0:37:14Yeah, it's a weird store.
0:37:15Retail is fascinating.
0:37:17- All right, the actual biggest topic,
0:37:19or I don't know if we're gonna spend a lot of time on it,
0:37:21but the big thing,
0:37:23And the reason I specifically,
0:37:24well, I thought of asking you to be on this show
0:37:26is that last week I commemorated the 15th anniversary
0:37:30of "Daring Fireball,"
0:37:31of which I consider this podcast to be a part.
0:37:34And I'm, oh my God, did I get email after that
0:37:38from so many readers.
0:37:40I lost count.
0:37:41And I thank all of you for sending it.
0:37:42I read every single one of them and replied to like two.
0:37:45'Cause if I replied to them all,
0:37:48I wouldn't even have time to do the show.
0:37:50But I thank you.
0:37:52And I really, I have to say, I don't know,
0:37:55you might have noticed 'cause you're a close reader,
0:37:57but like when "Daring Fireball" turned 10,
0:37:59I didn't say anything and I didn't do five.
0:38:01This is the first time I've ever mentioned an anniversary
0:38:03and I certainly don't do it every year,
0:38:05but I didn't do it at 10 either.
0:38:06And my thinking changed between 10 and 15 where 10,
0:38:12I just like, for example, the other thing too
0:38:14is to the best of my knowledge,
0:38:16"Daring Fireball" has never won a single award.
0:38:19And I just don't, I don't like that.
0:38:22That's just antithetical to me.
0:38:24I don't like it.
0:38:25And to me, celebrating anniversaries feels like,
0:38:31I don't know, like awarding myself an award or something.
0:38:34There's part of my nature that is,
0:38:36that finds self-congratulatory stuff to be,
0:38:39I don't know, I don't like it.
0:38:44- Yeah, but I think it's good.
0:38:47I think it's healthy to be a little uncomfortable
0:38:48about celebrating your own accomplishments
0:38:51and letting other people do it.
0:38:52- But this year I thought, you know what?
0:38:54I'll bet readers would be happy to know.
0:38:56And so why the fuck not?
0:38:58- Yeah.
0:39:01- So I wrote about it.
0:39:02But then I thought, you know,
0:39:03and it was actually from my friend, Jim Kudol,
0:39:05who I don't even think it was this year.
0:39:06I think it was like last year,
0:39:08but Jim and I were hanging out somewhere.
0:39:13It was probably in Vegas and just idly,
0:39:17and this is the type of thing that like occurs to Jim,
0:39:20is he just said, "Do you ever just do a word count
0:39:23"and figure out how many words you've written
0:39:24"on Daring Fireball?"
0:39:26And I said, "No."
0:39:27And he said, "You should do that
0:39:29"'cause I bet that's an amazing number."
0:39:31And so as an excuse to actually point out the fact
0:39:36that Daring Fireball had turned 14, I did it.
0:39:39And I counted separately my original words
0:39:43and separately words that are block quotes.
0:39:47In other words, things from other people's articles
0:39:49that I quote, which anybody who reads "Daring Fireball"
0:39:52knows exactly what I'm talking about.
0:39:53I block quote things all the time.
0:39:55What was the full tally here?
0:39:57So combined between my full articles and link list entries,
0:40:00I've written two million, and it's just so funny
0:40:03that it's this close to being over.
0:40:05It's two million, as of last Friday,
0:40:082,001,516 original words,
0:40:12and 3,100,000 and change total words,
0:40:15including block quotes, which is a lot of words.
0:40:18And that your full columns is just over a million,
0:40:20the full pieces, 1,048,000.
0:40:24I did the math on this 'cause I was,
0:40:25those are amazing numbers.
0:40:27And then I was like, okay, what does that mean?
0:40:28What's the average during Fireball Week?
0:40:30And I looked it up and it's like 2,500 words a week,
0:40:33every week for 15 years, gives you your combined total.
0:40:36And of that, about 1,300, 1,400 is full column.
0:40:41So that may be one or two kind of column length pieces
0:40:44a week.
0:40:44big column, but probably over time it was, you know,
0:40:49two or three shorter pieces more often than not.
0:40:52And then you throw in an extra thousand words
0:40:55of linkless commentary, and that's your average week.
0:40:58It's not, it is a huge accomplishment on one level,
0:41:02and on another level it shows you that it's really
0:41:04the accomplishment is being consistent at doing a good job,
0:41:09not an unreasonable, like writing 2,500 words a week,
0:41:13it's not unreasonable at all.
0:41:14but to do it every week for 15 years
0:41:16is not something that most people do.
0:41:20- No, it's a tribute mostly to just keeping,
0:41:24just keep putting one foot in front of another.
0:41:27And then, you know, do it for 15 years
0:41:29and you can go a far distance.
0:41:32- Yeah, that's totally it.
0:41:33- I seem to recall reading years ago
0:41:36that a New York Times op-ed columnist,
0:41:38like the regular columnists,
0:41:40like Paul Krugman and Maurice, Amarene Dowd,
0:41:43their columns are either 700 or 750 words more or less.
0:41:48And there's a little bit of play
0:41:51that they can do layout-wise with a block quote
0:41:54or something to stretch or to expand,
0:41:56but roughly 700 or 750 words.
0:41:59And I think that they all,
0:42:00I think most of them do two a week.
0:42:01So that's about the same.
0:42:03It's roughly 1300, 1400 words of regular columns a week
0:42:07is roughly the output of being like an op-ed columnist,
0:42:10which feels like it's about right.
0:42:13My one-pager in Macworld all those years
0:42:16was about 800 words, 780, 760.
0:42:19But I always shot for 800.
0:42:21And I remember thinking, David Pogue,
0:42:25back when he did the back page column in Macworld,
0:42:28he would write eight,
0:42:29sometimes we would jump him to a column in the back.
0:42:32So like 800 backward, which was terrible,
0:42:35between 800 and a thousand words.
0:42:38And he did that 12 times a year.
0:42:39And I remember marveling at that and thinking,
0:42:41"Wow, how does he come up with 12 column ideas every year?"
0:42:46And you know, today I write 800 words a week for Macworld,
0:42:51and then I write six color stuff,
0:42:53and it's like 52 column ideas a year.
0:42:56How is that even possible?
0:42:57But you find a way.
0:42:59But that does seem like a natural, like 800 words.
0:43:01I think that's why I shoot with my Macworld columns now too,
0:43:04even today, it's like, that's not bad.
0:43:06That's like a thought, a pretty clear, supported thought,
0:43:10and then you're out.
0:43:11I feel like I'm so lucky that I've spent my entire writing career.
0:43:15Well, I used to write print in college for the print newspaper.
0:43:19And that was sort of constrained to the sort of--
0:43:22couldn't go too long, couldn't be too short.
0:43:26And so I have done it both ways, I guess I should say.
0:43:28And I've written for the back page of Macworld and had that sort of--
0:43:32and again, there was always a little bit of play.
0:43:34It wasn't that precise.
0:43:36There was a little bit--
0:43:37some kind of a pull quote or something, and you could stretch it
0:43:39or shrink it a little bit.
0:43:41But the basic minimum and maximum were pretty narrow,
0:43:46and it's harder, it's absolutely harder.
0:43:48So I do marvel at like a Paul Krugman,
0:43:50who two times a week, 48 weeks a year at least,
0:43:55hits this exact narrow timeframe,
0:43:57because so much of what I write
0:43:58is either way longer than that or way shorter.
0:44:01I love not having to stretch a smaller idea into bigger.
0:44:08I always hated it.
0:44:10And even worse, I always hated having good sentences cut
0:44:14out of a long piece just because it wouldn't fit.
0:44:17Like that seems crazy in hindsight now.
0:44:20- First thing I ever did as an editor,
0:44:21my first day on the job at Mac user back in '94,
0:44:26something like that was, oh,
0:44:29the regular letters column editor is out
0:44:30and she's your boss.
0:44:31So you need to cut this, it's 70 lines over.
0:44:35And literally I had a printout of the letter section
0:44:37of Mac user and had to sit there with a pencil,
0:44:40lining out words to pull up a line or sentences.
0:44:45And that was in print.
0:44:46I mean, that is still how it's done
0:44:48for those who are still doing print.
0:44:49And yeah, it can be brutal.
0:44:51It can also be kind of a great lesson,
0:44:53like those pieces you wrote for Mac world.
0:44:56I think I, most of, when you were writing those,
0:44:58I think I was probably the editor on those.
0:45:00And it was very much like that of like,
0:45:02can I change one word to be a little bit shorter here?
0:45:05And then that'll pull up a line
0:45:07'cause you were three lines over or something like that.
0:45:09And the best is when you do that and send the PDF back
0:45:12to the writer, you in this case,
0:45:14and say, can you check this out?
0:45:16And if it doesn't look like anything changed,
0:45:18that's the best.
0:45:19But, you know, 'cause in the end,
0:45:21you don't wanna change the meaning,
0:45:22you just wanna pull up those widows
0:45:26that are dangling over into another line.
0:45:28You wanna pull three of those up
0:45:30so that you can get it, the whole column on that one,
0:45:32on that one piece of paper, which is, it's a fun constraint,
0:45:35But I agree with you, it is so much better
0:45:37when you know you have one thing to say
0:45:39and it's only gonna be two paragraphs
0:45:40to just say it and move on instead of,
0:45:42can I take three things that are each worth 200 words
0:45:46and put them together somehow
0:45:47and make 800 words out of it?
0:45:49Which is, it's no good that way,
0:45:50but if you're working in print,
0:45:53everything has to be 800 words long
0:45:55or whatever your constraint is.
0:45:56- I think I've told this story before,
0:45:58but I'll tell it again.
0:45:58But my first regular writing for the public
0:46:02was at the student newspaper at Drexel, The Triangle.
0:46:05And my sophomore year, I started submitting op-ed columns,
0:46:11where I tried to do sort of a Dave Barry-ish sort
0:46:15of comical look, tried to be funny in op-ed columns,
0:46:21as opposed to-- which I thought was so maddening,
0:46:23as most of the shit on the Triangle op-ed page
0:46:26was like people trying to write serious shit about Bill Clinton
0:46:30and stuff like that.
0:46:31And it's like, why the fuck would you want to read that
0:46:33in a student newspaper?
0:46:34It's like, I thought I cracked jokes
0:46:35about the shitty stuff going on at this university.
0:46:38And I also had this thought that,
0:46:43my God, I can do better than these people.
0:46:46And the way you, of course, now this is '93, I guess,
0:46:49when I started, right?
0:46:50Or '92, it would have been 1992.
0:46:53The way you submitted a column is you,
0:46:54I think it had to be in MacWrite format.
0:46:58And then I think later it was either MacWrite
0:47:00or they expanded to MacWrite, Claris.
0:47:04What was the Claris suite called?
0:47:07- Was it ClarisWorks?
0:47:07- ClarisWorks, the ClarisWorks word processing suite,
0:47:10which maddeningly was made by the same people as MacWrite,
0:47:14but was a different document format or Microsoft Word.
0:47:17And you'd just bring it in on a floppy disk,
0:47:20and they'd put the floppy disk in and copy it over
0:47:22and tell you they'd get back to you,
0:47:24see if it got in.
0:47:26I don't even remember how they got back to me
0:47:28because in 1992, I had email because I was majoring
0:47:32in computer science, but I don't think school-wide
0:47:35there was email yet, or if there was, I don't know.
0:47:37So somehow they got back to me and said,
0:47:38"Okay, we're running it."
0:47:40And I was very, very proud.
0:47:41And I think my third column, the third one I submitted,
0:47:45when it came out, and of course I read it,
0:47:49every time it would, those early ones,
0:47:51I'd read every single one in print, and it was amazing,
0:47:53'cause there's my writing and my name
0:47:55right there on a real freakin' newspaper.
0:47:58And like halfway through, one of my sentences got rewritten.
0:48:03And I thought it turned what was previously
0:48:05a very clever, funny sentence into one
0:48:07that wasn't even funny at all.
0:48:10And I was like, what the hell did I,
0:48:11what, you know, did I make a grammatical error?
0:48:14Like if I did, I would be damned if I knew what it was.
0:48:17And so when I submitted my next one,
0:48:19the guy who was the op-ed editor said,
0:48:21I remember his name, Francis Wisniewski, very nice guy.
0:48:25And I asked him, I said, "Hey, by the way,
0:48:28"this last one I had right here."
0:48:29And I said, "I originally wrote whatever the sentence was,
0:48:32"and you changed it to this.
0:48:33"What did I do wrong?"
0:48:34And he goes, "I didn't do anything wrong.
0:48:35"I just needed to move it up a line."
0:48:37Like the column was one line too long.
0:48:42So he edited that sentence to make it shorter enough
0:48:44that the whole column gained one line.
0:48:48And as soon as he said that, I thought,
0:48:50"I need to become the op-ed editor."
0:48:52(both laughing)
0:48:54And I was like, I'm-- - Well, 'cause that's his,
0:48:56his failure was that he blew your joke
0:48:58in changing the line count, right?
0:49:00'Cause a good editor would keep the joke
0:49:02and find another way to make it work.
0:49:04- Right, and Francis, I did not steal his job.
0:49:09He was not, it wasn't like his aspiration.
0:49:12And in fact, I think he really, really wanted to be,
0:49:14was like the business manager.
0:49:16And he went on to do that and do a very good job.
0:49:18So it wasn't like I stole his job.
0:49:19And as you might expect, semester to semester,
0:49:21there's a lot of turnover in a student newspaper.
0:49:24But I literally, I took the job as op-ed editor
0:49:28so that I could, and then taught myself,
0:49:31learned there at the newspaper graphic design
0:49:34and Quirk Express and everything.
0:49:35But I did it specifically so that my columns would,
0:49:38A, never get mangled like that,
0:49:43and then B, ought to be honest,
0:49:45to always give them the best spot on the page.
0:49:48(laughs)
0:49:50- Sure, of course.
0:49:51That's your prerogative, quite frankly.
0:49:53- Here we are 20, 20, geez, 20 some years later
0:49:56and my column still gets the best spot.
0:50:00(laughing)
0:50:01- I'm looking by the way at something,
0:50:03if this is 14 years ago,
0:50:04I'm not sure if this is the first thing you wrote for me,
0:50:07but one of the things in the early days of "Daring Fireball"
0:50:10that I wanted to mention is I have a distinct memory
0:50:12that we had you write some how-to articles about BB edit.
0:50:15- Oh, I remember that. - I found one of them
0:50:16that's still on the web about version control in BB edit.
0:50:18It's 2000 words, how-to article,
0:50:20but I think you wrote a few.
0:50:22- Yes, I do.
0:50:23- At least, 'cause I remember you saying to me
0:50:26at some point, it may have been in this 2003 era,
0:50:29where we were having you write some freelance stuff for us,
0:50:32where you said, "I made more money on what I wrote
0:50:35"for Macworld last year than I did for 'Daring Fireball.'"
0:50:38And literally you wrote like three articles for me.
0:50:40But those were the early days when you were just
0:50:42getting started with "Daring Fireball."
0:50:44And that was, it was funny 'cause it was really literally
0:50:47like I saw your work on the web and were like,
0:50:50"Oh, there's a guy who can write.
0:50:51I wonder if he could write some stuff for us.
0:50:53And I know you had worked on BB edit stuff before,
0:50:56and so you knew that.
0:50:56And so in those early days,
0:50:59we threw some how-to stuff your way.
0:51:02And then eventually you did those back page columns
0:51:04for a while, including that one.
0:51:06That's gotta kill you though, the how Apple rolls thing.
0:51:08Like that's like one of the more famous things
0:51:11that people quote all the time,
0:51:12and you have to link to it on Mac world every time
0:51:14because it's on, I think you could reprint that.
0:51:16I think you have the rights to reprint that now.
0:51:18- I was just gonna tell you,
0:51:20I actually had plans.
0:51:22I was just going to reprint it and wait for a while.
0:51:26- I think you have the rights.
0:51:27I think the way that the writers contract,
0:51:29there was a, we redid our writers contract at some point.
0:51:32And it was two freelance editors or freelance writers
0:51:37who really pushed back on some of the details of it,
0:51:39including Bruce Fraser, who was an expert in publishing
0:51:44and pre-press and color and color management.
0:51:46Great guy, passed away a few years ago.
0:51:49and he made like 20 changes to the writer's contract.
0:51:53But one of the things that came out of that contract
0:51:54was this idea that you get rights back
0:51:58or like they keep the copyright,
0:52:00but you get a permanent sub-license after a period of time.
0:52:03So I think, yeah, I think you could probably republish that
0:52:05and stop linking to the Mac world version
0:52:07and nobody would notice, probably.
0:52:09- Yeah, I've actually been meaning to do that.
0:52:12And I even thought it even repop into my head last week
0:52:15when I did the word count,
0:52:16'cause I thought, well, should I count that?
0:52:18And then I thought, well, then I'd have to find
0:52:19all the other ones too.
0:52:20And it seemed like I'd already given myself enough work.
0:52:23So I didn't count them.
0:52:25And you know what, I probably would have done it
0:52:28if instead of being like a thousand words over two million,
0:52:31if it had come out like 1,500 words under two million,
0:52:35I would have gone and done it so that I could.
0:52:37Because it's like, and nobody,
0:52:40I know nobody was gonna double check my work.
0:52:42So I could have just lied too and pumped it over,
0:52:45but I couldn't sleep if I had done that.
0:52:47So I would have somehow figured out a way
0:52:49to add to the word count, and that would have been the way.
0:52:53- So how'd you do the word count?
0:52:54I have to ask, how'd you do the word count?
0:52:56Did you do like a crazy, like custom movable type template
0:52:59and just export it out and then do some greps,
0:53:02do some regular expression stuff?
0:53:03- No, even easier.
0:53:04So in movable type, you can, what is it?
0:53:08Export, I think it's export.
0:53:10They have two features.
0:53:11One is backup, like you backup your blog,
0:53:13and somehow they say this is a complete bad.
0:53:15I don't know what that is, and I did that,
0:53:16took forever.
0:53:17And I don't even know where they put it.
0:53:19It must be in some directory on my server,
0:53:22in the movable type directory, like in a zip.
0:53:24And I tried the export, and I thought,
0:53:26this is probably going to time out.
0:53:29But the export for my regular articles didn't take too long.
0:53:33And it instantly turns it into a download in your browser.
0:53:36So it just downloads a dot text file.
0:53:40The link list one, which has-- what did I say?
0:53:4225,000 entries?
0:53:45It took a while, but it never timed out.
0:53:47I never let my browser go to sleep, and I don't know.
0:53:51At some point, I don't know if it was 5.10,
0:53:53because I stopped paying attention,
0:53:55but there was a big text file in my downloads folder.
0:53:58And it's one file for each of the two blogs.
0:54:02You know, my one blog in movable type is the full articles,
0:54:05and the other one is the link list entries.
0:54:08So I had one file for each, and it's sort of an easy
0:54:12to understand format, you know, that movable type created for this.
0:54:18Where there's like seven dashes to separate articles and five dashes on a line to separate
0:54:24fields.
0:54:27And then, you know, a little bit of grab here and there just to delete all the other fields.
0:54:32And then I was left with nothing but just article text.
0:54:37I will add, because this is the director's commentary of "Daring Fireball," I made the
0:54:44decision, a completely arbitrary decision, that I would count my headlines as words written
0:54:50for my articles, but not for link list entries, where sometimes I will write something which
0:54:57I think is clever as a link list entry title, but very often I just take the headline from
0:55:04the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal,
0:55:06or gently rewrite the original headline
0:55:09and it doesn't feel like it's fair to count them as words
0:55:13or as original words, whereas my headlines I do think are.
0:55:16So I deleted all the headlines,
0:55:17the titles for the link list entries,
0:55:19but didn't delete the titles for Daring Fireball.
0:55:22And then I just wrote, I have a Perl script
0:55:24that just went through and counted all the words
0:55:28on lines that started with, you know,
0:55:32right pointing, you know, the greater than sign,
0:55:35and counted those as block quotes
0:55:42and counted all other lines as words of text.
0:55:44So the other thing in there,
0:55:48where the counts are probably a little bit inexact,
0:55:51to tell you the truth,
0:55:52is that the first year and a half or so
0:55:54of "Daring Fireball" entries weren't written in Markdown.
0:55:57They had to, 'cause Markdown didn't exist.
0:56:00And so for those, I think the block quotes
0:56:02actually got counted as original words.
0:56:05So I forget.
0:56:06I think, I don't know.
0:56:08- I think it's close enough.
0:56:10- Yeah.
0:56:11- I did that after my first year doing six colors.
0:56:14I did it.
0:56:15And I think I set up like a template
0:56:18that was just body text of things with my byline
0:56:21since Dan and I both read on the site.
0:56:22And I just did, I did it that way.
0:56:24And it just spat out an HTML file
0:56:26that I could grab a little bit.
0:56:28but it was one file with everything?
0:56:30- Yeah. - Yeah.
0:56:31- Yeah, it was like an archive,
0:56:32but I just downloaded the same thing here,
0:56:35and I can see how that would be a smart way to go,
0:56:39'cause it is just a super simple text file.
0:56:41I had a bunch of people ask me,
0:56:42like, "How do you think you did the word count?"
0:56:44So I thought I would ask.
0:56:45- Ah, that's a good question. - Nerds, you know.
0:56:47(laughing)
0:56:48- And then I also, the other thing I did
0:56:50is I documented it in a note to myself in Yojimbo
0:56:53exactly what I searched and replaced for in the file.
0:56:56So the next time I do it,
0:56:57I can just bring up that doc
0:56:58and I don't have to spend 10 minutes tweaking grep patterns
0:57:01to exactly nuke the parts I don't want.
0:57:03The funny part is-
0:57:06- I wanna say, go ahead.
0:57:07- Well, no, you go first, I won't forget.
0:57:11- All right, I just wanna say,
0:57:13it's a big deal to do anything for five years,
0:57:17let alone 15 years.
0:57:18So to be as consistent as you've been with a site
0:57:21is a big deal.
0:57:22And people don't,
0:57:23I think people don't give consistency enough credit.
0:57:27it is a big deal to write 1,500 words or 2,500 words
0:57:31every week for 15 years.
0:57:33It's a huge deal.
0:57:34And you do -- because as simple as it seems to put one foot
0:57:36after another, it isn't over time,
0:57:40because at some point you want to take a break from that.
0:57:42And to keep doing it and persisting is a big deal.
0:57:46I also wanted to say, personally, that the --
0:57:51and this is a funny thing about the way the web works
0:57:54and the way the media works, but, you know,
0:57:57When I got to know you, I was the editor of a magazine with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and whatever,
0:58:01and we gave you some freelance work and all of that.
0:58:03But the fact is, you know, more often than not, Daring Fireball was an inspiration to me about how the way we were writing about technology was changing on the web.
0:58:14And when I was unhappy in my job in the last few years I was at IDG, I have to say, you know, one of the things that I thought of was, could I do what John does?
0:58:25Could I try to do that?
0:58:27And nobody's, you know, we're different people
0:58:30and the web is a very different place
0:58:32than it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago.
0:58:35But be that as it may, one of the big things in my mind
0:58:39when I decided to go out on my own
0:58:41rather than try to find a different job in the media
0:58:44or somewhere else was I'm not gonna forgive myself
0:58:48if I didn't give that a try.
0:58:50And that was because I saw what you had done
0:58:53and I liked it so much.
0:58:54And I thought that is the thing to do.
0:58:55That is the job I would like to have,
0:58:58is something like what John does.
0:58:59So as an inspiration to me,
0:59:02not just for all your great work writing about this stuff,
0:59:04but on a personal level,
0:59:06as somebody who I looked at and said,
0:59:08he's doing great stuff.
0:59:10And I would love to be somebody who can do something
0:59:12even sort of like that.
0:59:14I wanna thank you.
0:59:16- Well, you're very, very welcome.
0:59:17And I have to, I'm very, I have to say,
0:59:21proud of the number of sites that are, you know, like Six Colors, like Jim's Loop, you
0:59:30know, Max Stories, 512 pixels. I mean, there are a lot of them that it's very clearly you're
0:59:34the inspiration for that. Absolutely. And, you know, and it's, it's, to me, it is a non
0:59:40zero sum game. So it's like, you know, like when other sites started getting more Daring
0:59:47fireball-ish site started appearing, I didn't think, "Oh, you fucker, you ripped me off."
0:59:51I thought, "Hey, this is cool." I did. Now, it's the difference between me and somebody...
0:59:55If somebody made a site that looked like Daring Fireball, I'd be angry and I'd say something.
0:59:59Somebody who makes something that follows this format, which is different than what
1:00:02came before and tries to monetize it in similar ways, to me, that makes me proud. So I appreciate
1:00:11your kind words about that. And it pains me. I hate taking compliments, but I'll take this
1:00:15- Yeah.
1:00:16- The other thing that I found
1:00:19in my perusal of these archives,
1:00:21I remembered that I had done this,
1:00:23but I had, you know, this whole thing
1:00:26where I had to sort of parse the ones written
1:00:28in Markdown differently than the ones written in HTML.
1:00:33I, sometimes I do forget it though.
1:00:34Like I know it, but when I look at it, it was weird.
1:00:37So I linked to, for the anniversary,
1:00:40I linked to my very first article on "Daring Fireball"
1:00:42and all of the links, every single link in the article
1:00:45was a 404.
1:00:46It's, I would guess that over 90% of the links
1:00:50from the first year or two of doing Fireball are now 404s.
1:00:53And so I thought, well, I'll fix them as best I can
1:00:55by painstakingly going to the internet archive
1:00:58and finding an archive version of the same thing
1:01:00and link to it.
1:01:01And it worked for all but one.
1:01:02And it makes me furious and I'm gonna call them out,
1:01:05was eWEEK.
1:01:06eWEEK is still, there still is an eWEEK website.
1:01:09But eWEEK not only broke their own goddamn URL,
1:01:14But their robots text forbids the internet archive
1:01:18from archiving the article,
1:01:19so I can't even point to it there.
1:01:21So it's literally lost to time.
1:01:23So fuck you, you weak.
1:01:25But everything else, I wanted to fix the links,
1:01:28including a whole bunch of links to apple.com.
1:01:31And it was kind of funny finding them
1:01:33and looking at that, 'cause you can link to it
1:01:34and you can see the old apple.com web design from 2002.
1:01:38But when I went to fix those links,
1:01:41I opened it up in movable type
1:01:44And I was like, what the fuck is this?
1:01:46It's all these P tags all over the place.
1:01:51Just a moment.
1:01:52It only took me a moment to remember, yes, you
1:01:54had to invent Markdown to not be writing in HTML.
1:01:58But there is this brief moment where I really thought that--
1:02:00I thought that it was like an SQL error or something.
1:02:04Something broke in my browser, and I
1:02:06was looking at something that I wasn't supposed to see.
1:02:09And I realized, oh, yeah, that's how I used to have to do this.
1:02:13Anyway, though, the thing that I found that I remember is I publicly announced Markdown
1:02:18as a beta in March of 2004. But I had been working on it since like September or October of 2003.
1:02:30And I started writing my articles on Daring Fireball using Markdown months before I announced it.
1:02:40and mostly going back and forth with Aaron Swartz,
1:02:44who was my muse for this.
1:02:48Like there were a couple people who when I started,
1:02:50I emailed them and said,
1:02:50here's what I'm thinking about making.
1:02:52Would you be interested in like more or less beta testing
1:02:55that's giving me feedback on this?
1:02:57And every, almost every, every state,
1:02:59literally every person I went to,
1:03:00I forget who else I went to,
1:03:01but almost every other person wished me well
1:03:04and didn't want to say anything, you know,
1:03:05like, that's a stupid idea.
1:03:08But I think they all have more or less thought,
1:03:10that's a stupid idea.
1:03:11I'm fine writing in HTML.
1:03:13Like I don't have a problem writing in HTML,
1:03:15so why in the world would I want to abstract it?
1:03:17You know, except Aaron.
1:03:19Aaron got it right away.
1:03:20Even though he had his own thing, which was called ATX,
1:03:25which was sort of, you know,
1:03:27the exact same idea is marked down.
1:03:28Like here's like a format you can write in
1:03:30that alleviates you of the tediousness
1:03:33of putting in every single HTML tag by hand
1:03:36and all those, you know, littering your text with it.
1:03:39And I even, you know, a liberal, and I said to him,
1:03:41you know, here's the ideas I'm stealing from ATX.
1:03:43But he got, he instantly got how,
1:03:48even before I, you know, my first cut at the markdown,
1:03:51what it would be, he instantly saw it as superior
1:03:53to anything else that was out there, including ATX,
1:03:56and at the time, textile, which was pretty popular.
1:03:58But what would happen is every couple days
1:04:01I'd do a new build and either, you know,
1:04:04I changed the syntax in subtle ways.
1:04:06But I started writing my articles in it well before this.
1:04:11And then it's the smartest thing I think I did
1:04:14in the whole thing because so much changed
1:04:16after I actually had to use it.
1:04:17Like my ideas for how Markdown would be good.
1:04:20When the rubber met the road, some of them were bad ideas.
1:04:23And then there were things that I just hadn't thought of
1:04:26that I was like, one of them I remember is originally
1:04:30I didn't have any syntax in Markdown for lists.
1:04:35I just thought, well, of all the things
1:04:36you have to enter in HTML, the OL tags and UL tags
1:04:40for unordered lists is no big deal.
1:04:44But then I realized, as so many other things go so much easier
1:04:47to write, I was like, wouldn't it
1:04:48be great if I could just put an asterisk space,
1:04:50and then it would be a bullet item?
1:04:52So it was through actually using it that it happened.
1:04:55But that meant, though, that every time I changed the syntax
1:04:59as the months went on, I had to go back and edit
1:05:03every single article that I'd written for the last,
1:05:06two weeks, three weeks, and all by the end,
1:05:10it was like, I'd have to go back,
1:05:11I'd make like a subtle change and I'd have to go back
1:05:13and double check three months of articles
1:05:16and change the syntax so that they wouldn't break.
1:05:19So it was kind of a pain in the ass.
1:05:20So anyway, I found the first article I ever wrote
1:05:24and published using Markdown.
1:05:26It was an article titled "Run, Panther, Run"
1:05:28on the 3rd of November, 2003.
1:05:30And you can verify this, there's a trick on Daring Fireball
1:05:34where if you add a dot text extension to any URL,
1:05:38you can see the markdown version of that article.
1:05:41And so on the one previous to that article titled
1:05:45Command Tab at the end of October, 2003,
1:05:47it's still written in raw HTML
1:05:49and then the next one's written in markdown.
1:05:52I think I counted-- - You have to do dot T,
1:05:54dot T-E-X-T.
1:05:56- Yeah, T-E-X-T, 'cause I'm not an animal.
1:05:58who's limited by a three character extension.
1:06:01So anyway, I think I counted,
1:06:02and by the time I published the beta,
1:06:05and I think there were some subtle changes after that,
1:06:07but once the beta came out,
1:06:09I don't think much changed that broke older articles,
1:06:12but there were 31 articles
1:06:13that I'd have to check for changes.
1:06:16It was quite a pain in the ass.
1:06:19It's a good thing I'm a perfectionist,
1:06:22because otherwise I would have,
1:06:23the desire not to have to go
1:06:26and tediously edit these articles would have led me
1:06:29to just have shitty syntax in Markdown.
1:06:32- I think it's funny that when you announced Markdown,
1:06:35you got the same complaints that I always got
1:06:37when I tried to explain to people why I wrote in Markdown.
1:06:40It's the exact, the argument was there fully formed
1:06:43at the beginning, which is why don't you just use HTML?
1:06:45And there's a good answer why, which is I'm much less likely
1:06:49to make a mistake using this basic syntax
1:06:52and then compiling it into HTML than I am
1:06:55to making sure I get all the angle brackets
1:06:57and quote marks were right.
1:06:58Plus it's more readable.
1:07:00But from day one, that was the question about Markdown.
1:07:03- You know what, to tie it with the earlier thing
1:07:05in the show, to me, writing in Markdown
1:07:07feels like swimming downstream
1:07:09and writing raw HTML is upstream.
1:07:12It's ever so slightly, it's not hard.
1:07:14HTML, raw HTML, especially if you're not doing
1:07:16the whole document, you're just doing the article portion
1:07:19where you have P tags and A tags for the links
1:07:22and stuff like that.
1:07:24It's not terribly upstream, but it's subtly upstream.
1:07:28And especially to me, and that's, you know,
1:07:30not to turn this into a Markdown show
1:07:31instead of a Daring Fireball show,
1:07:33but especially for reading what you've already written.
1:07:36It's so much nicer.
1:07:37- I agree.
1:07:39- But those, that early, I guess,
1:07:43almost two years of "Riot's Timbuktu,"
1:07:45boy, that feels like, that really feels like old times to me.
1:07:48That's the only part that really feels old to me.
1:07:51Otherwise, the weird thing about the 15-year anniversary
1:07:53And how much, you know, I was 29 then, I'm 44 now.
1:07:56I mean, that's, you know, what 29 is by most people's
1:07:59definitions, a young man and 44 is clearly middle age.
1:08:03It's a long 15 years, but it's still,
1:08:06Tearing Fireball still feels new to me.
1:08:08I don't, I can't explain why, but I think that's healthy.
1:08:13- I think so, I think so.
1:08:15My daughter is 15, right?
1:08:17And I, that seems not that long ago,
1:08:20and yet it also seems like forever ago.
1:08:22And that's just, I get it.
1:08:25I was trying to think of what I did
1:08:27before I wrote in Markdown.
1:08:28And I think the answer is that I just wrote in plain text
1:08:31and I had a bunch of scripts that would wrap
1:08:33(Dave laughs)
1:08:34the paragraph tags around the plain text.
1:08:37And then maybe I would just use bold and italics tags
1:08:41and H refs.
1:08:43I think I would just put those in,
1:08:44and then I would just wrap it in paragraph tags at the end
1:08:48using a script and then paste it in somewhere.
1:08:51I think that's what it is.
1:08:52literally exactly how Markdown started. Well, half the story of how Markdown started. That's
1:08:58what I used to do for the first two years is write in something that looked sort of
1:09:02like Markdown, maybe without the italics tags. For italics, I would actually put an M in
1:09:08there, but no P tags. And then at some point, I'm so visually distracted by an inline AHREF
1:09:18equals quote, here's a big long URL.
1:09:20And inline links really distract me
1:09:23when reading the raw HTML.
1:09:26I had something that I could grep for to--
1:09:30in the first draft, I could keep the URLs out of the text.
1:09:34But then once I was like, OK, this is done,
1:09:36I'd run a script or a couple of search and replace.
1:09:39Then it was in HTML.
1:09:40But then at that point, any subsequent edits
1:09:42had to be done in the HTML.
1:09:45It was like you could do it up to your first--
1:09:47Right. And so the idea was, well, why not try to make something, you know, and there was already a
1:09:53very popular textile plugin for movable type. You know, that would let you know, it was the same
1:09:58idea as markdown where you could keep it in that format. And it would only, you know, every time
1:10:02you publish, it would just spit out a version. As part, but that's exactly what I did too.
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1:13:17(sighs)
1:13:20All right, I'm done talking
1:13:22about Daring Fireball's anniversary.
1:13:24Are you?
1:13:25I mean, I thank everybody for the good words,
1:13:27but let's start on the next 15.
1:13:30- You covered it, yeah.
1:13:31- All right, next on my list of topics
1:13:34is this new feature that Apple's added to iOS 11
1:13:38that people are calling like a cop mode.
1:13:40But the basic idea is that there's a new feature on iOS 11
1:13:46where if you quickly tap the home button five times,
1:13:49it doesn't have to be super quick either.
1:13:51It brings up the emergency SOS screen
1:13:54where you can just slide to call 911.
1:13:58And if you set up your phone with your medical information,
1:14:02it can just slide to unlock that.
1:14:04So for example, let's just say you've got some kind
1:14:07of medical condition and you pass out
1:14:09or have a seizure or something like that,
1:14:11or you're in an accident and you're incapacitated.
1:14:13A first responder, if they find an iPhone in your pocket,
1:14:18it wants this word spreads around,
1:14:20they can tap that button five times
1:14:22and if there's a medical thing and it tell them
1:14:24that you're allergic to penicillin like I am
1:14:26or something like that, there it is right there
1:14:28and they know how to get to it
1:14:29and they don't have to unlock your phone.
1:14:30It's a great feature.
1:14:32Well, in one of the most recent betas,
1:14:33I think it was like two betas ago,
1:14:35Apple added a feature to this
1:14:37where once you enter this SOS emergency screen
1:14:39to unlock your phone after that,
1:14:43you have to use the passcode, not touch ID.
1:14:47So in the same way that when you power the phone off,
1:14:49and this has been like this ever since touch ID came out,
1:14:51and power it back on from being truly off, not just asleep,
1:14:55you have to enter the passcode before touch ID can work.
1:15:00Now this is really useful though for somebody,
1:15:02let's just say like if you're going through customs
1:15:04or something like that, and let's face it,
1:15:06in today's world, it's a reasonable concern
1:15:09that you might wanna engage this mode
1:15:13and then you can't be required to use touch ID
1:15:18or coerced into using touch ID to unlock your phone.
1:15:22I think this is a great feature
1:15:25and I think Apple's implemented it really, really well.
1:15:28- Yeah, the idea that you can do this,
1:15:31like just stick your finger in your pocket
1:15:32and press the button and you've deactivated Touch ID,
1:15:36essentially, until you log in.
1:15:38It's not, you know, it's, first off,
1:15:40this emergency ID thing is a really cool feature.
1:15:42There's a version of it in now,
1:15:44where if you get to the password screen,
1:15:46there's an emergency button
1:15:48and you can make an emergency call without logging in.
1:15:50And there's also personal data there.
1:15:53You enter it through the health app.
1:15:55So I've got that in mind.
1:15:58And the idea is first responders know that it's there
1:16:02and they know how to get to it.
1:16:03And I don't have a medical alert bracelet.
1:16:05I used to wear one because one of my pupils
1:16:06is larger than the other,
1:16:07and that can lead to a misdiagnosis of a concussion
1:16:10when I don't have one.
1:16:11And so I've got that in my medical info in my iPhone,
1:16:15just as another place where they could gather info.
1:16:19And it's got like my wife's name and phone number
1:16:21and some other health information about me.
1:16:24And it's really useful.
1:16:25but this adds this other layer of not only quick access,
1:16:28but the touch ID lockout,
1:16:30which everybody else was saying like, you know,
1:16:32lick your finger and then touch it on the button
1:16:35a few times until it fails and goes back to the password.
1:16:37This is way better than that.
1:16:39I should say that all these security experts will tell you
1:16:42making your phone not able to open biometrically
1:16:48does not, and forgive me, this sounds terrible,
1:16:50but it's really accurate,
1:16:51does not stop them from beating it out of you.
1:16:53If it's somebody who is a, if you're in a place
1:16:58with authorities who can get that out of you
1:17:01by some other means, your actual password, they can do that.
1:17:05But in the United States, if they're following the law,
1:17:07they can't physically compel you to enter your password,
1:17:11but they, legally, but they can physically compel you
1:17:14to put your finger on your phone.
1:17:15So that, it makes a difference, makes a difference.
1:17:18- At least according to some court cases
1:17:20that have already come out,
1:17:21I don't think it's actually gone to the Supreme Court
1:17:23and been officially decided,
1:17:24but there have been court rulings
1:17:25that police can force somebody to, you know,
1:17:28require somebody to use their fingerprint.
1:17:31And in one case, the funny part was that in the one case
1:17:33where it happened, the law enforcement got the judgment
1:17:38that said, yes, you can require this guy.
1:17:39You can't make him tell you your passcode,
1:17:41but you can make him put his finger on the thing.
1:17:43And by the time they got the judgment,
1:17:45the timeout period had gone
1:17:46so that the phone required the passcode anyway,
1:17:49which is, I enjoyed that very much.
1:17:53Anyway, the other reason- - I would imagine that they
1:17:54can't, I imagine they can't force your finger
1:17:57onto the phone either, that you have to sort of do it
1:17:59of your own free will, although there might be
1:18:01a court case about that at some point too.
1:18:03- Right, the other reason this is interesting
1:18:05is that there are rampant rumors that at least one
1:18:08of the new iPhones coming out probably next month
1:18:13is going to use 3D facial recognition
1:18:17as a biometric identification,
1:18:20either in addition to Touch ID or instead of Touch ID.
1:18:25And I'm sure you've heard the same thing too,
1:18:27talking about it and writing about it
1:18:29over the last few months,
1:18:30is an awful lot of people who are very, very reasonably,
1:18:33this is, I'm not making fun of or disagreeing at all,
1:18:35but who are very, very reasonably wary
1:18:38of having something where the cops,
1:18:42law enforcement wouldn't even need to force you
1:18:45to put your finger on the thing.
1:18:47If you're being held,
1:18:49they could just hold the phone in front of your face
1:18:50and unlock it.
1:18:51Totally reasonable concern.
1:18:53It actually, I agree, it would be easier for law enforcement
1:18:57to get into a phone with facial recognition than Touch ID.
1:19:02And this is an interesting thing where once you anticipate
1:19:06that this is going to happen,
1:19:08you're literally just five quick taps away
1:19:11from locking them out of that.
1:19:12- I do wonder about this face ID feature
1:19:19that I would think that it would be constructed in a way
1:19:24where it would try very hard to get the sense
1:19:28of whether you were holding your phone or not, right?
1:19:31That it would be one of the fundamental things here
1:19:34is somebody across the table from you
1:19:36cannot pick up your phone, unlock it,
1:19:38and then start looking through your email.
1:19:41Somebody can't walk away with your phone
1:19:43and then from across the room surreptitiously
1:19:46as you're looking frantically for your phone,
1:19:47hold it toward you and then get all your information out of it.
1:19:51That it needs to be able to,
1:19:53if it's going to have this wide-angle lens and
1:19:55have an idea of where your face is,
1:19:57it should actually be able to make a judgment about like,
1:20:00you're not close enough for me to unlock at this point.
1:20:05That has to be part of the deal.
1:20:06>> Yeah, you would think so.
1:20:08I would anticipate that assuming that this pans out,
1:20:11this is going to be a significant segment of
1:20:13the keynote address introducing the phone,
1:20:15explaining how it works and the way it tries to be smart.
1:20:18Just to scratch another thing off the things
1:20:24I've been meaning to talk about here,
1:20:26just to alleviate a nonstop stream of feedback
1:20:30from listeners is skepticism from people
1:20:34who hear about this feature and think,
1:20:35this is going to be terrible.
1:20:37I don't wanna have to hold my phone in front of my face
1:20:39like I'm taking a selfie every single time
1:20:41I wanna unlock the phone.
1:20:44You're thinking, if you ask your concern,
1:20:46you're thinking about this all wrong.
1:20:47There's no way Apple would use this
1:20:49if that was how it worked.
1:20:50It's not like taking a picture of yourself.
1:20:52I'm sure of it.
1:20:53I know nothing of this.
1:20:54I've heard, I have no little birdies
1:20:55who've told me about this.
1:20:57I just, just knowing Apple,
1:20:59they wouldn't add the feature if that's how limited it was.
1:21:02Surely it's something that worked
1:21:04with a very wide range of view
1:21:06so that it's not like taking a picture.
1:21:09It may not even be a camera per se,
1:21:12that it's just some sort of 3D IR sensor.
1:21:16Oh, and the other thing is that,
1:21:17of course it'll work in the dark.
1:21:18And I think there's even rumors coming out
1:21:19of the supply chain that it's an infrared system,
1:21:22that it's not like you won't be able to unlock your phone
1:21:26unless you turn the lights on in the middle of the night.
1:21:29It's just not that sort of thing at all.
1:21:32- Yeah, I am fascinated.
1:21:34Look, I mean, bad products exist, bad features exist.
1:21:37It absolutely is the case.
1:21:38I am fascinated by,
1:21:41I think it must just be human nature
1:21:42that some people will hear about something
1:21:46and immediately imagine the worst case scenario
1:21:49and then attack that and say, "That sounds terrible."
1:21:52Because I had this happen to me the other week
1:21:54where I forget even what it was.
1:21:56I think it was like the plot to a movie or something.
1:21:58And somebody said, "Oh, well, that's gonna be terrible
1:22:00because it's gonna be like this."
1:22:01And I thought, "Well, you just imagined the worst thing
1:22:04and then said it would be bad, but you did that,
1:22:07not the people who are making the movie.
1:22:09That was you and your creativity finding something bad.
1:22:12Like the bar for biometric unlocking on the iPhone is so high.
1:22:17This is such a core feature.
1:22:19It is so not,
1:22:21if you think back to the iPhone 7 Plus and the two cameras, right?
1:22:25That was a, "Oh, well,
1:22:26it's going to be in beta and it's not really done yet," and all of that.
1:22:30That was not a core feature of the OS.
1:22:34This is a core feature.
1:22:36So if you are imagining a scenario
1:22:39where there's gonna be a new iPhone
1:22:41and the only way you're gonna be able to unlock it
1:22:42is with this janky face unlock
1:22:45that requires you to smile and take a selfie
1:22:48and turn on the light if it's too dark and things like that.
1:22:52Like if they were at that point,
1:22:54they would have killed the feature.
1:22:55- You have to be wearing the same pair of glasses
1:22:57that you were wearing when you first set it up.
1:23:00No, it cannot work like that.
1:23:01It cannot work like that.
1:23:03- No, they would have killed that.
1:23:04And in fact, I wonder sometimes
1:23:05Because I remember this rumor has floated around before.
1:23:09I wonder if they have been testing this a while
1:23:12and it was just not good enough.
1:23:14And that only now is it good enough for them to do it.
1:23:16But there's just no way
1:23:18that Apple is going to ship this thing.
1:23:19Now, might it have quirks, especially at first?
1:23:22Sure.
1:23:23But it's just, I cannot envision Apple screwing up
1:23:27something as important as a biometric ID system.
1:23:30Like this has got to work rock solid,
1:23:33or they would never have put it in production.
1:23:36- Yeah, and Touch ID is where the bar is.
1:23:39And really, it's not just like Touch ID
1:23:43from three or four years ago with the iPhone 5S,
1:23:45it's where Touch ID is today with the iPhone 7
1:23:48and iOS 10 and just how quick, you know.
1:23:51I don't know, for me at least,
1:23:54I can't imagine how making Touch ID faster
1:23:56would improve anything, 'cause it doesn't seem to me
1:23:59like it's as close to instantaneous as I desire.
1:24:02- And the goal is for this to be seamless.
1:24:04I have to think the reason they're doing this
1:24:06is because they want the ultimate experience
1:24:09of using an iPhone to be
1:24:10that when you're holding your iPhone, it knows it,
1:24:13and everything just works.
1:24:14And when you're not, it's locked.
1:24:16And how do you do that?
1:24:17Well, there's technology and infrared
1:24:19and who knows what else is going on behind the scenes.
1:24:22But from the user's perspective,
1:24:23leaving all the tech aside,
1:24:24what Apple, the ultimate goal is
1:24:26when you're using your phone,
1:24:28it works fine and you have access to everything.
1:24:30And when you're not, it's locked, right?
1:24:32And if this is how they're doing that,
1:24:34the goal here is that you shouldn't have to,
1:24:36Touch ID is not a great burden, right?
1:24:38But what they're saying is you shouldn't even need that.
1:24:41All you should need to be is physically present.
1:24:43And the phone will figure out, oh, you're here,
1:24:46then here's all your stuff.
1:24:48- Yeah.
1:24:49And possibly could even lock automatically
1:24:53just when your face is no longer within the field of view.
1:24:57I don't know, maybe, or something.
1:24:59- Yeah.
1:25:01I don't know, there's all sorts of potential there,
1:25:02but Apple knows the bar is high.
1:25:04And Apple does make mistakes too, that's the other thing.
1:25:07The argument here is that Apple is perfect,
1:25:09never screws anything up, but I would argue
1:25:11that they never screw up anything like this.
1:25:14And I know that there are phones out there
1:25:17that have facial scanners for identification,
1:25:21and I know that every single one
1:25:22that's already out there sucks in some way.
1:25:25It's either foolable by a flat still picture of the person,
1:25:29or it's slow or it has to be a narrow field of view
1:25:34or something like that.
1:25:36I know that there's a bunch out there that suck,
1:25:38but Apple would, there's no way they would make one
1:25:40that sucks when they already have a biometric ID,
1:25:43touch ID that it doesn't suck.
1:25:44- And touch ID, when it was rumored,
1:25:48we heard these same stories
1:25:49because there had been fingerprint readers.
1:25:51Like I think Samsung had one where you kind of had to like,
1:25:53move your thumb like over it slowly,
1:25:57like you were swiping a credit card somewhere,
1:25:58like you had to slowly slide your thumb over it
1:26:01and it was a bad experience.
1:26:03And then Apple did it and it was not that experience.
1:26:05It was much better.
1:26:06And like, yeah, I just really believe,
1:26:08not that Apple doesn't make mistakes,
1:26:11but that this is such a core feature
1:26:12that if it was no good, the phone just wouldn't ship.
1:26:17They would have a different phone without it.
1:26:19- Disney World for years has had a thing
1:26:22where they have, in Florida,
1:26:24the Florida parks have a thing where you,
1:26:26you get in the park, you have to put your finger on a thing.
1:26:29You give them your ticket or scan your band or whatever,
1:26:31and then you use your finger.
1:26:33And the idea is it's obviously a method
1:26:37of trying to prevent a single pass
1:26:40from being used by multiple people, right?
1:26:43Whether for the day or like if you have like an annual pass
1:26:47or something like that, you can't just let your cousins
1:26:49use it or something like that.
1:26:50And it works pretty great in terms of how quickly
1:26:56you expect to go through the turnstile at a theme park,
1:26:58but it's way slower than you would ever want for your phone.
1:27:01If your iPhone unlocked at the speed
1:27:04that the Disney World turnstiles do,
1:27:06I recognize in your fingerprint, no one would use Touch ID.
1:27:09Everyone would do everything with their passcode.
1:27:11They wouldn't even, you wouldn't even bother
1:27:13setting up Touch ID.
1:27:14And so I remember when this was announced back with the 5S
1:27:20and people, I remember people saying,
1:27:21"John, you go to Disney World, I know that.
1:27:23"This is gonna suck."
1:27:25And it's like, ah, come on, it has to be better than that.
1:27:27And of course it was way better than that.
1:27:29- Yeah.
1:27:31- We could kind of quickly segue
1:27:37into Germin's article on this point,
1:27:39but I don't wanna make a big segment out of it.
1:27:42But Mark Germin had a story in Bloomberg the other day,
1:27:45that the premise of which was that Apple's success
1:27:49is because they're very good at following the features
1:27:53from other phones that come out first.
1:27:55And the reason it's not even worth going into
1:28:00is that the article was very just bad
1:28:03because the actual article itself
1:28:05and the artwork that accompanied it,
1:28:07he listed like 13 features
1:28:09and eight out of the 13 features he listed
1:28:11were in iPhones before they were in competing phones.
1:28:14But one of them, the thing that made me think of it
1:28:16was that he listed the fingerprint scanner
1:28:18as a thing that came out in a competing phone first
1:28:22that Apple followed.
1:28:23But the Motorola one that had that, it was truly awful.
1:28:28I mean, every single review--
1:28:29I even looked a couple of them up the other day
1:28:31when I was thinking about writing German stories.
1:28:33And everybody said, this is terrible.
1:28:35This is absolutely horrible.
1:28:37And Touch ID right from day one was actually
1:28:39really kind of amazingly good.
1:28:41So I mean, if you really want to be pedantic,
1:28:43you can say, yes, Apple was the follower there.
1:28:45But the fact that all phones, all modern phones
1:28:48across operating systems today have fast, accurate
1:28:52trustworthy fingerprint scanners.
1:28:55You know, Apple led the way on that.
1:28:57- Yeah, one of the things in that story
1:29:01is about like mobile payments.
1:29:02And I mean, you read the story as basically being,
1:29:05Apple doesn't have to be first, but they do it right.
1:29:08They have to do it right.
1:29:10And I think that's accurate.
1:29:11I think that that's an accurate way of viewing Apple
1:29:13is that Apple isn't always first
1:29:14and people who claim, oh, look at Apple,
1:29:16they're just copying X.
1:29:18The point is not to be first,
1:29:19but to be the one that does it right.
1:29:21And that leads to sour grapes of like,
1:29:22how is it that Apple gets all this credit
1:29:24when this other company did it first?
1:29:26And the answer is because Apple did it better
1:29:28and Apple Pay is the perfect example, right?
1:29:31Like Google Wallet existed three years,
1:29:33three and a half years before Apple Pay was launched
1:29:36and nobody cared.
1:29:38And then Apple did Apple Pay and they did it right
1:29:40and they launched it properly.
1:29:41And Google recast their payment as Android Pay
1:29:46and Samsung did Samsung Pay.
1:29:48And it was all just, let's do what Apple just did.
1:29:50And so no, Apple wasn't first, but Apple was the first one to do it right.
1:29:55Now, that isn't always the case.
1:29:57Like OLED, they like list OLED and it's like, well, the early OLED screens weren't really great and there was a reason.
1:30:04But recently there have been some very good phones with OLED screens and Apple hasn't done it yet.
1:30:08So that's a place where Apple's a little behind.
1:30:10And I think you pointed out on Twitter that the big screen thing is the most obvious one.
1:30:14like Apple was lagged way behind
1:30:16in having a large screen phone
1:30:18when that was clearly a successful market category.
1:30:22- Yeah, and that was baffling to me
1:30:24that Gurman didn't even mention that
1:30:25because that's the one where his premise
1:30:27was closest to being true,
1:30:29which is that the competing phones had it, Apple didn't.
1:30:32It was in demand.
1:30:34I mean, famously came out.
1:30:36It's one of those rare insights
1:30:37into Apple's internal deliberations
1:30:39where there was an email thread that came out
1:30:42thanks to the subpoenas or whatever you want to call it during the Apple Samsung lawsuit,
1:30:47but that an internal Apple presentation was introduced as evidence.
1:30:54And I think the exact phrase was consumers want what we don't have, meaning five plus
1:31:01inch phones.
1:31:04I think marketing, I think product marketing wise, the correct time for Apple to introduce
1:31:09the plus size phones would have been with the iPhone 5.
1:31:12I don't know if they were about two years behind on that.
1:31:16- Totally.
1:31:17- And because of how far in advance
1:31:18they have to plan their supply chain for iPhones,
1:31:22there was no way,
1:31:23it was literally impossible for them
1:31:25to pivot quicker than that.
1:31:26Like they were already committed
1:31:28when the iPhone 5 came out,
1:31:30they were already fully committed to the iPhone 5S
1:31:32as their next year strategy
1:31:34with no phone bigger than four inches.
1:31:38- Yeah, and there was a software component too,
1:31:40which really hamstrung them, is that they had,
1:31:43the apps were all designed for that pixel perfect layout,
1:31:46and that they struggled to get even like iPhone 5 apps
1:31:49that were taller, and obviously at WWDC, like the next year,
1:31:54they really leaned into basically size independent layout
1:31:59of apps because they were going in that direction.
1:32:02But like, even if they had shipped a 5+, I'm not sure,
1:32:07I mean, the software was not ready
1:32:11to take advantage of it yet.
1:32:12They would have really struggled with apps.
1:32:14They would have been upscaling apps and things like that
1:32:16because the OS needed a couple more years
1:32:19to get to the point where they could scale.
1:32:21- Yeah, but they really got caught flat-footed on that.
1:32:23- They did, they totally did.
1:32:25- Because it was the sort of thing that would take
1:32:27two years of supply chain planning
1:32:29and maybe probably roughly,
1:32:31I mean, the software side's a little squishier.
1:32:33It's not quite as cut and dry as hardware,
1:32:35But you're right, there was about a two year transition
1:32:39period in iOS where the way that you do layout
1:32:44was shifted from pixel perfect designs to these,
1:32:49forget what the term is, but,
1:32:50and it plays out now in things like having
1:32:53a narrow column app on the iPad that's roughly
1:32:56an iPad or iPhone width, but goes the full
1:33:00of the iPad screen.
1:33:01All of that stuff came about over the course
1:33:03of like two or three revisions of iOS,
1:33:05which is an annual thing.
1:33:07Yeah, so you're right there.
1:33:10- It's funny to see this perception and how it is,
1:33:14I don't think it's wrong, I don't know.
1:33:15I mean, Mark Gurman knows a lot about Apple.
1:33:16So the weirdness is in the story.
1:33:19Sometimes I wonder since he's been at Bloomberg,
1:33:21how much of this is him and how much of it is
1:33:23his sort of superiors who want to do this kind of story.
1:33:26And they've got an idea of a narrative.
1:33:28And because it's not, that's what's weird about the story
1:33:32is it's not wrong.
1:33:34it's just also not quite right.
1:33:36And it kind of misses the mark about what Apple
1:33:39is trying to do here.
1:33:40'Cause it is true that Apple is sometimes behind
1:33:44in new tech, not always, but sometimes.
1:33:46But sometimes they're the one who,
1:33:48they make their first cut the right cut
1:33:50instead of doing what their competitors sometimes do,
1:33:53which is rush something out before it's ready.
1:33:55- You're right from a couple of minutes ago,
1:33:57you're right that there's a very good story in this,
1:34:01which is primarily about Apple only doing things
1:34:03releasing things once they're up to a certain standard.
1:34:07And many opposing, opposite companies,
1:34:10competing companies having a lesser standard of,
1:34:13well, we've got a fingerprint scanner that quote works,
1:34:15so let's stick it in the phone.
1:34:17There's an interesting story there,
1:34:20but this story isn't it.
1:34:21Like it, and again, point by point,
1:34:23it's not that his article was wrong,
1:34:25but the central premise was clearly wrong,
1:34:27which is that Apple always follows.
1:34:30- Yeah, the janky thing about like,
1:34:33janky face unlock detection stuff.
1:34:36Like, you could say, oh, Samsung had, you know,
1:34:39facial recognition and face detection a long time ago.
1:34:42They had that goofy feature where,
1:34:43like you're watching a movie and your eyes look away
1:34:46for a moment and it pauses the video,
1:34:47which is not what anybody ever, ever, ever wants.
1:34:50You must stare at this movie.
1:34:52Don't look away, not even for a second.
1:34:55But they did have something, right?
1:34:56It was just not very good.
1:34:58And that's the difference is,
1:35:01it reminds me of the days
1:35:03when there were all these Mac versus PC articles
1:35:05and there was all these check boxes,
1:35:06and they'd be like, "Oh, the Mac doesn't have that."
1:35:09And as a Mac user, you'd be like, "Wait, wait, wait,
1:35:11but that's not a thing that works on the Mac.
1:35:13Why is that relevant?"
1:35:15And if you boil it down to that level,
1:35:17if it's that reductive, you can get,
1:35:21it can be kind of misleading.
1:35:22And I see some of that in this approach.
1:35:24- Yeah, I was gonna say that, I'm glad you brought that up,
1:35:26but the checkbox checklist comparisons,
1:35:31Apple has never fared well on and never will
1:35:35as long as they remain the Apple that we know.
1:35:38And I think there is something to the fact
1:35:40that their struggles in the mid '90s,
1:35:44part of it was based on that,
1:35:47that so much of the growth of the PC industry
1:35:49from, say, 1985 to '95 was driven by businesses
1:35:54and that sort of checklist comparison of,
1:35:59we can get all these check marks
1:36:02and pay this much, $700, with this option,
1:36:06and we only get these three check marks over here
1:36:09and it costs $800, so we can get more check marks
1:36:12for less money with this, whether it's a software package
1:36:15or this PC hardware or something like that.
1:36:18Apple has never done well with that.
1:36:21You've got to understand why Apple products are desirable.
1:36:26you've really got to thoroughly explore
1:36:28the overall experience.
1:36:30Always been true. - Right, because otherwise,
1:36:31you're gonna say, you know, facial recognition check, right?
1:36:35That Samsung thing that paused your movie
1:36:38when you weren't looking at it.
1:36:39Like, okay, that check, right?
1:36:41And years before, but it's not the same,
1:36:44and it's not, or Apple Pay is a good example of like,
1:36:47well, it's just a rip-off of the thing
1:36:49that Google did three years before, right?
1:36:51Except it wasn't.
1:36:52The way it was implemented was different,
1:36:53but you can't reduce it to that.
1:36:55And again, yeah, it's a good,
1:36:58this is a really meaty topic
1:36:59'cause this is how you compete
1:37:03and this is how Apple does what it does,
1:37:05is like deciding the right time to spring.
1:37:07And sometimes they don't make it right.
1:37:10Sometimes they can't ship it.
1:37:11Sometimes they don't think it's an issue,
1:37:14which is I think what it was with a large phone.
1:37:16I think that for a while,
1:37:17they just didn't believe that those phones
1:37:19were gonna be truly popular and then they had to scramble.
1:37:23- I didn't.
1:37:24- I personally didn't, and I think I have a mindset
1:37:27that is very copacetic to those people who work
1:37:30and design things at Apple.
1:37:31And just picking up an inert, don't use it.
1:37:34Does he just pick up a big plus?
1:37:36I still think it today, honestly, with the iPhone Plus.
1:37:39I don't like the size, I really don't.
1:37:41- I agree.
1:37:42It's not for us, right?
1:37:45So we're just willing to go along and say,
1:37:47"Sure, I don't see the appeal of it."
1:37:49But I'm not sure Samsung did either,
1:37:51but Samsung, their whole strategy is just make
1:37:54the phones and all the sizes and see what happens and that one hit and to their credit.
1:38:00Yeah and in hindsight I can kind of see the mistake where imagine a world where every
1:38:05MacBook is a you know like a MacBook Air or the 12-inch MacBook and all the competitors copied it
1:38:16and so all of the laptops are this that size and then somebody comes out with a 15-inch laptop
1:38:23And you'd be like, well, that's ridiculous.
1:38:26It's going to break your back.
1:38:27It's not going to fit in your bag.
1:38:30And you can't use it on an airplane seat.
1:38:32This is ridiculous.
1:38:35But of course, since the laptop world didn't really
1:38:37evolve that way, it evolved with multiple choices
1:38:39and started big and got small instead of starting small
1:38:43and getting big.
1:38:45Nobody thinks it's goofy that Apple offers
1:38:48a range of laptop sizes from the 12-inch MacBook
1:38:50up to the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
1:38:52- Yeah, and going back to our point about keyboards earlier,
1:38:57you know, sometimes it's great to have that steward
1:39:00who says, "I think this is what you're looking for."
1:39:03And, but that can be too extreme too,
1:39:06where you make, I hear this about the MacBooks all the time,
1:39:08right, where people who don't like a new MacBook keyboard,
1:39:11it's like, sorry, it's everywhere now.
1:39:12You don't get the choice.
1:39:13There is, if you want a Mac laptop, you get that keyboard,
1:39:16and that's the end of the discussion.
1:39:18And I think the iPhone was very much like that,
1:39:20where some of it was the way the operating system was set.
1:39:23The apps were so great,
1:39:25but they were all tied to that very particular screen real estate,
1:39:28and the OS needed to be updated,
1:39:30and the apps needed to be updated to change it.
1:39:32So that was part of it.
1:39:33But part of it was the original iPhone did so well that Apple's like,
1:39:37"Well, we nailed it.
1:39:39This is the only phone we need to make."
1:39:42And it took Apple quite a while to realize,
1:39:45"Maybe we need more sizes of iPhone,
1:39:47just like we have more sizes of laptop."
1:39:49and it took them too long.
1:39:50- Yeah.
1:39:51At their best, Apple is solely focused on experience,
1:39:58and that's really what it always comes down to.
1:40:00And so I can see, like at a technical level,
1:40:03if you just, let's say you and I are assigned to the team
1:40:06to make a phone that detects when you're looking
1:40:10at the screen and can pause a movie
1:40:12when your eyes move away.
1:40:15And imagine-- and it sounds like a cool project, right?
1:40:19Like to actually just the engineering of having,
1:40:22well, what kind of sensors do we need?
1:40:24Is a camera good enough?
1:40:25Do we need some other sensor that can specifically
1:40:28look at some kind of retina scanning type thing?
1:40:33Or do we need infrared?
1:40:35What do we need?
1:40:35And get the hardware working.
1:40:36And then you get the software-- you just blindly go and get it
1:40:39all working.
1:40:40And imagine you get it working perfectly.
1:40:42And it's like every single time you avert your eyes,
1:40:45the movie pauses, and it's like high fives all around,
1:40:47this works great, and then you just ship it in the phone,
1:40:50and never really thinking like,
1:40:52is this actually a desirable experience?
1:40:55Which it's not, right?
1:40:58You've done all this hard work,
1:41:00and I don't even know, 'cause I didn't have that phone,
1:41:01so I don't even know if it was actually
1:41:04very accurate technically, you know?
1:41:06But let's just give them the benefit of the doubt
1:41:09that they solved all the technical problems
1:41:10and got it working as perfectly as it could be.
1:41:13as well as Touch ID works for fingerprint sensing.
1:41:16They've just created a feature that (laughs)
1:41:19sounds like hell on earth.
1:41:21- Yeah, it's a brilliant piece of technology
1:41:24and is not how anybody actually wants to use it.
1:41:28And that's, you're right, that Apple,
1:41:29Apple at its worst, that's what happens.
1:41:33But Apple's culture is built around
1:41:35not letting that kind of thing happen.
1:41:37The technology for technology's sake.
1:41:39It's like, why would somebody want to do this?
1:41:42and you start with that.
1:41:43Although I have to give lots of people credit
1:41:45because the iPhone 7 removing the headphone jack
1:41:50is apparently now a feature to be emulated
1:41:52except for the LeEco phone,
1:41:56which really trailblazed that category
1:41:58by not having a headphone jack.
1:41:59- That might've been the biggest eye roll
1:42:01in Gherman's article,
1:42:02was not giving Apple credit
1:42:04for removal of a headphone jack.
1:42:06A, calling it a feature
1:42:08and B, not giving them credit for trailblazing that.
1:42:11when the example was a company that literally nobody on earth
1:42:14had ever heard of.
1:42:15There's people who work at Laco
1:42:16who'd never heard of the company.
1:42:18(laughing)
1:42:20The eyeball tracking deposit movie reminds me,
1:42:23there's a whole class of jokes like this
1:42:25of people getting sent to hell.
1:42:28The version I remember for some reason
1:42:30is some guy who's an avid golfer, has a heart attack,
1:42:33and feels his soul going down instead of up
1:42:37and thinks, "Oh, God, this is terrible.
1:42:39"I'm spending eternity in hell."
1:42:40And then he gets there and they welcome him.
1:42:42And first thing he gets is a brand new set
1:42:46of pink golf clubs.
1:42:48He's like, "What the hell?"
1:42:49And then they open the gates and hell is an exact replica
1:42:52of Augusta National Golf Course.
1:42:54And it's just in beautiful condition
1:42:55and the weather is perfect.
1:42:57And the devil's there to greet me.
1:42:59He's like, "What's going on?
1:42:59"This is hell?"
1:43:00And the devil says, "Oh yeah."
1:43:01And he says, "You want a tea time for tomorrow?"
1:43:05And he's like, "Sure, that'd be great."
1:43:07And he's like, "All right."
1:43:07And he's checking out the bag and he goes,
1:43:09"Where do I go to get golf balls?"
1:43:10And the devil goes, "Golf balls?"
1:43:12(laughing)
1:43:15Right?
1:43:16It reminds me like you get sent to hell
1:43:17and you're like, they give you a phone
1:43:19and you can watch all the movies you want,
1:43:20but every time you move your eyes away, it's gonna pause.
1:43:23Like it just sounds like it's on that spectrum of, you know.
1:43:27- Clockwork orange, you know.
1:43:29- Yeah, exactly.
1:43:30(laughing)
1:43:31Right, you got it.
1:43:32All right, let me take a break here
1:43:36and thank our next sponsor.
1:43:37He's a brand new sponsor of the show.
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1:43:59But the way it works is that they have small transducers
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1:44:05They don't go inside your ears like earbuds,
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1:44:31And then you get used to it
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1:44:42with nothing in them.
1:44:44And there are some major, major benefits like this.
1:44:47This means that if you're using them in an environment
1:44:49where you wanna hear the outside world to some degree,
1:44:51like if you're living in a city like I do
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1:44:57while you're listening to stuff,
1:44:59you hear more of the outside world with these
1:45:02than you do with in-ear earbuds.
1:45:05Another one, and this is huge,
1:45:06and I know that there are tons of people out there like this
1:45:09who just can't wear earbuds.
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1:45:39It's really an amazing technology.
1:45:42It really blows my mind that it's actually sending
1:45:44vibrations through my cheekbones and I can hear them.
1:45:47But really the fact that you can hear the sound
1:45:50from the outside world around you
1:45:52is just the game changer in this.
1:45:54Another one I can just imagine,
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1:45:57or something like that, you wanna be able to hear the baby
1:46:00if you're listening to stuff all day long.
1:46:02It's absolutely great for that.
1:46:04What's the downside?
1:46:05Well, the downside is they're not good
1:46:06for really noisy surroundings
1:46:08where you wanna block out the surrounding sound.
1:46:11But there's all sorts of,
1:46:12that's what existing headphones are already great at.
1:46:15It's really, really great.
1:46:16They're wireless.
1:46:17That's the Trex Titanium model, which they sent me.
1:46:21Battery life is quoted at six hours of playback
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1:46:28I found that they easily match that.
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1:47:36So my thanks to them for checking them out
1:47:38or for sponsoring the show, I should say.
1:47:40What's next on our agenda there, Jason?
1:47:44- It looks like, do we need to talk about favicons?
1:47:50- Yeah, that was something I wrote about recently.
1:47:52I don't think we have to spend a lot of time on this,
1:47:55but I do wanna, I just wanna quickly say that,
1:47:57I don't know, you might've been traveling
1:48:00when I wrote that article, but.
1:48:01- Oh no, no, that was right before I left because I wrote--
1:48:04- Oh, I see, 'cause you wrote about it too, right.
1:48:05- I wrote a thing about whether they,
1:48:07for me the core thing here,
1:48:09'cause I mean the short version is Chrome shows
1:48:11the little favicon thing that's been around forever
1:48:16in tabs and Safari doesn't and should it is question one.
1:48:21And for me, it always comes back to the pinned tabs thing
1:48:26that they added last year on macOS,
1:48:29which is in a completely different format.
1:48:31It's an SVG, so it's resolution independent,
1:48:35and it's a single color, essentially,
1:48:37and it's a silhouette when it's not selected,
1:48:40and when it's selected, you can choose,
1:48:42you define what color shows up as the color of your shape,
1:48:46and that's it.
1:48:47So Apple invented this entire feature
1:48:49that's like outdoing the favicon,
1:48:53and so I'm not sure Apple really ever wants
1:48:57to put anything in the tab,
1:48:59especially since it's not in any of the other tabs
1:49:01anywhere else in Sierra,
1:49:04which they added the ability to put tabs everywhere,
1:49:06but none of them have icons.
1:49:08So that's one.
1:49:08And two, like if they really liked that format,
1:49:11the favicon format that every website has,
1:49:14why would they have invented their own
1:49:15when they did pin tabs?
1:49:16But they did, they totally invented their own format that,
1:49:21and that's separate still from the thing
1:49:23that I don't think anybody mentioned,
1:49:24which is the touch icon,
1:49:27which is what happens if you save a bookmark
1:49:30to your home screen on an iPhone or an iOS device,
1:49:33that's a different format altogether that is also available.
1:49:36So I don't know.
1:49:38I mean, I think the simple answer may be
1:49:40that Apple doesn't think that you need an icon in your tabs,
1:49:44but it is kind of funny that Apple keeps trying
1:49:47to invent new formats because the existing formats
1:49:50that are on the web aren't good enough for them.
1:49:52- So it makes sense that the touch icon is different
1:49:55because it needs to be bigger than a favicon.
1:49:58So it needs to be a different image.
1:49:59There's nobody who has a favicon
1:50:01that's big enough to look good,
1:50:02stretched to the size of an icon on the home screen.
1:50:06My guess, and it's somewhat informed,
1:50:10is that this issue is divisive within Apple.
1:50:15There's certainly, there's a lot of people within Apple
1:50:19who wish that Safari showed favicons on the tabs
1:50:23have for years, and there's another contingent that is opposed to it on--this part is a little
1:50:31bit speculative, but I can't even imagine what else it is on aesthetic grounds, that
1:50:35a bunch of randomly colored tabs, icons on tabs, is aesthetically discordant, perhaps,
1:50:45is a way to put it, as opposed to what it looks like now, which is monochromatic and,
1:50:50You know, I mean, even the toolbar buttons
1:50:54in modern Mac design are all monochrome,
1:50:57which, you know, in some ways I can see,
1:51:01that does look good, but in other ways,
1:51:03I think suffers usability-wise,
1:51:04where having a stop sign for like a stop button be red
1:51:09actually is a little bit easier to identify quickly
1:51:13than having a monochrome one.
1:51:15And I think that the monochrome crowd won out.
1:51:19And so my guess is to, and this is truly just a guess,
1:51:22is my guess is that when they did pin tabs,
1:51:24the pin tabs, the whole idea is that
1:51:26they're supposed to be super small.
1:51:28And therefore you need them to be iconified.
1:51:30There's no way that you can use text to notify,
1:51:33the whole point is supposed to have a little tiny tab
1:51:34over on the side that is there all the time.
1:51:37So it has to be an icon.
1:51:39But if the argument within them all,
1:51:41it was mostly based on not having random color elements
1:51:44and sticking to a monochrome aesthetic,
1:51:46they kind of needed to introduce their own format
1:51:50so that they'd be in a format
1:51:51that would look good monochrome.
1:51:52'Cause you can't just take any,
1:51:54you can't just take any fav,
1:51:56some would look good, some fav icons,
1:51:58like daring fireballs might look good
1:51:59if you took all the color out of them.
1:52:02Might not look that different at all.
1:52:04Others might be rendered unidentifiable.
1:52:08And so if you're going to introduce a new format,
1:52:10why not use SVG and make them resolution independent
1:52:14as opposed to limiting them to 32 pixels or 64 or whatever.
1:52:17So that's my guess as to how that format came about.
1:52:20And it wasn't, that it wasn't so much arrogance
1:52:22on their part that we can just force the web
1:52:24to adopt a format that we specify,
1:52:27but that internally to get the feature approved,
1:52:29it needed to be monochrome,
1:52:30and if it needed to be monochrome,
1:52:32it needed to be a new format.
1:52:33- Yep.
1:52:36Makes sense.
1:52:38So the question is,
1:52:41should Apple make this a feature or turn it on for everyone or make it an accessibility?
1:52:46I heard a lot of accessibility commentary that I kind of understand, like the ability to discern,
1:52:51especially if you have lots of tabs. I don't do lots of tabs. And I totally get there are some
1:52:56really damning screenshots of Safari with lots of tabs versus Chrome with lots of tabs. And you can
1:53:02pick out that tab of that site on Chrome and you have no idea on Safari. And I think it's a strong
1:53:08argument. Personally, I don't. I think when I wrote about it, I think the first thing I said was,
1:53:13"I kind of don't care, but I'm trying to understand like why Apple has this attitude that it has." And
1:53:19I think you're right. I think it is aesthetic. And I think the Apple or the pin tab thing is,
1:53:24it shows that there are people inside Apple who are like, they don't want to touch
1:53:28those fat icons if they can help it. I mean, they're in your like bookmarks menu and stuff.
1:53:35They do exist in a few places, but they're really de-emphasized.
1:53:39So obviously Apple wants to keep them at arm's length.
1:53:42I, I've, I've really hoped that they do this.
1:53:46I mean, I went so far as to write this article, you know, pushing for it, but I
1:53:51was just blown away from when I first brought this up as to how many people wrote
1:53:55to me and said that they're using Chrome because of this and they would love, they
1:53:59know about the battery life advantages of Safari and, or they, they would love to
1:54:04to take part of Safari's better integration with iCloud,
1:54:09like with the reading list that you can send articles
1:54:12from any other app, use the sharing sheet
1:54:14and send it to reading lists, and then read them in Safari
1:54:17later.
1:54:17It just integrates better with an iCloud-based lifestyle.
1:54:21They would love to do it, but they
1:54:22have lots of tabs open all the time,
1:54:24and they pick them out by favicon
1:54:26and therefore can't use Safari.
1:54:28Really just this one issue.
1:54:29And is that true or not?
1:54:31if 200 people wrote to me out of however many thousand
1:54:35people read the article and said that,
1:54:37is it really true that if Safari introduces five icons
1:54:40and tabs that these people would switch or give it a try?
1:54:42I mean, I can't prove that,
1:54:44but I got enough earnest emails from people
1:54:46that I honest to God believe
1:54:48that some measurable percentage of Mac users
1:54:52would switch from Chrome to Safari
1:54:54if Safari had five icons, at least as an option.
1:54:57And the option thing I think is key to it.
1:55:00Like, sure, and I heard from some people who were like,
1:55:02"Oh my God, I don't want,
1:55:04I find those favicons to be so gross, I don't want them."
1:55:07So fine, I'd say definitely make it an option.
1:55:10Maybe even make it off by default.
1:55:12I mean, but just put a thing in the Safari view menu
1:55:16to show favicons and tabs.
1:55:18And it would really have, I really mean it,
1:55:22a measurable effect on,
1:55:25maybe that measurable effect is 3%, I don't know.
1:55:27But that's, I'll bet the people on the WebKit team
1:55:29and the Safari team would love to have those 3%.
1:55:33If your life's work is working on Safari and WebKit,
1:55:37it would drive me nuts knowing that we're losing 3%, 4%,
1:55:41or 5% of our potential Mac users
1:55:44simply because we're not permitted to put tabs in the,
1:55:47favicons in the tabs.
1:55:49- I think it's not unreasonable to give people options.
1:55:55I can see the aesthetic arguments against it,
1:55:57but they could either invent a new format.
1:56:00And I had somebody say to me,
1:56:02"Well, yeah, but most sites don't do that."
1:56:04It's like, "Well, yeah, I know most sites don't."
1:56:06You'd have to have a generic thing,
1:56:07just like PinTabs has a generic icon that comes up
1:56:11that if it tries to make its best guess,
1:56:13it uses the letter of the website
1:56:14and then a dominant color on the page.
1:56:17And it says, "Okay, that's your icon now."
1:56:19It's not perfect, but I'm a little surprised
1:56:22that they don't wanna do something other than,
1:56:25I mean, maybe that's the answer is that even anything in there
1:56:29is considered junky and that there's some purity of the tabs.
1:56:31But if you look at the layout of like tabs in Safari
1:56:33when you get a lot of tabs, Safari's tab logic
1:56:36is also a little questionable.
1:56:37Like the Chrome tabs are much more kind of evenly spaced
1:56:41and logical.
1:56:42And when Safari gets a lot of tabs,
1:56:44everything gets weird and mashed up and not great.
1:56:47And I think part of that is because they
1:56:48don't have favicons.
1:56:49Because what Safari does-- what Chrome tries to do
1:56:52is actually very simple.
1:56:53and it tries to keep all tabs the same width
1:56:56and just keeps making them smaller and smaller
1:56:58and then as they get to this point where you can't read text
1:57:01just center them on the favicon.
1:57:03What Safari does is keeps the ones that are leftmost,
1:57:09and it depends on the size of your screen,
1:57:11but let's say like the leftmost 10 tabs, I don't know,
1:57:14just a basic number, equidistant or equisized
1:57:20And it's a size that's big enough
1:57:23that you can see at least the first few words
1:57:26of the title of the page.
1:57:28And then any additional tabs are on the left
1:57:30and are really, really small to the point
1:57:32where you literally-- they're only a few pixels wide.
1:57:36And it's just sort of--
1:57:37And then you have to scroll.
1:57:37Yeah.
1:57:38You basically have to swipe left or right in order
1:57:40to move through the tab bar.
1:57:43And I think that they are kind of forced
1:57:46to do that because if they don't have favicons,
1:57:48the minimum usable width is a couple of words of text.
1:57:53Whereas, so I think Safari does a better job
1:57:57with lots and lots.
1:57:58Like if you're the type of person
1:57:59who has 40 tabs in a window,
1:58:01I think the Safari design is better in that way.
1:58:04In so far is that I think Chrome does something ridiculous
1:58:08with that where they have all 40 tabs
1:58:09and you only see a fraction of the favicon.
1:58:12Like I think that to me,
1:58:14I think the ideal design would be something in between
1:58:16where they shrink to about a generous size that
1:58:20would accommodate the favicon and only the favicon.
1:58:23But then after a certain point, even Chrome, I think,
1:58:25should start making them really tiny off the left
1:58:29so that there's only so many on screen.
1:58:32What else was I going to say about that?
1:58:36I had another point, but I think I've forgotten it.
1:58:39Anyway, I think they should do it.
1:58:42Oh, I know what it was.
1:58:42It was people who said-- people who wrote in and said,
1:58:45You shouldn't have-- nobody should
1:58:47have that many tabs open.
1:58:48You should-- I swear to God, I got a couple of emails
1:58:52like this that this--
1:58:54Safari's design is better because it prompts you not
1:58:58to have too many tabs open.
1:59:00I kind of get that.
1:59:01In some ways, user interface design
1:59:03should sort of encourage good behavior.
1:59:06But that's too prescriptive.
1:59:09It's more important for UI to accommodate
1:59:13what people actually do rather than to be designed
1:59:17for an ideal use case scenario.
1:59:21- Yeah, the fact is people, there are people,
1:59:23not all people, but there are people
1:59:25who are very tab-dominated.
1:59:28And even if you don't think that they should be, they are.
1:59:32That's just how it is.
1:59:33It reminds me of, in web design,
1:59:37there was always this idea of search-dominant users
1:59:40and nav dominant users where like you can build
1:59:44the most beautiful nav bar at the top of your website.
1:59:47But the fact is some percentage of you users
1:59:50are just looking for a box to type words in and search.
1:59:53And there's nothing you can say, no, no, no,
1:59:56you're gonna get bad results.
1:59:57The best thing you're interested in sports,
1:59:58you should click on sports
1:59:59and you'll get the best headlines.
2:00:00And they don't care.
2:00:02Like that's just, and so at that point,
2:00:05as a good UX person, you have to say,
2:00:10I need to make my search experience better
2:00:12because they're going to use it.
2:00:14I can't stop them.
2:00:16So it better be good.
2:00:17- Yeah, exactly.
2:00:19You have to be realistic and designed for how people behave,
2:00:23not how people should behave.
2:00:24Like secondarily would be steering them
2:00:27towards the better behavior.
2:00:29But primarily you have to,
2:00:30your first obligation is to design for how people use it.
2:00:34And the truth is there's an awful lot of people
2:00:36who use their browser in a way that tabs aren't usable
2:00:39unless they have five icons.
2:00:41End of story.
2:00:42All right, let's go speed zone
2:00:46through the next three topics.
2:00:47Project Titan, New York Times had a story yesterday
2:00:49by Daisuke Wasabai, forget his--
2:00:53- Wakabayashi. - Wakabayashi.
2:00:54With an update on Apple's Project Titan,
2:00:58which is their car project,
2:00:59which sort of was coming from the angle
2:01:01of Apple had these bold plans to make a car
2:01:04and now they've scaled it back
2:01:05and now they're just making self-driving autonomous software
2:01:10and maybe the technology, the sensors and stuff for that.
2:01:14But also had the intriguing tidbit
2:01:17that they're seemingly on the cusp of launching a shuttle
2:01:20that will just rotate between their Bay Area campuses,
2:01:23like between the new campus and Infinite Loop
2:01:25and maybe a few other stops in Palo Alto area
2:01:29where they have office buildings.
2:01:31And these shuttles will be self-driving and autonomous
2:01:34and they'll be on the road, and that's pretty interesting.
2:01:37- Yeah, I heard something about how,
2:01:42in the separate fufa about Apple building a campus
2:01:47in a suburb where there's not a lot
2:01:49of public transport access and whether that's good or bad,
2:01:52versus Amazon building in downtown Seattle.
2:01:54And, you know, lots of different perspectives there.
2:01:58I have some opinions, but I also think
2:01:59there's some reasonable opinions across the spectrum.
2:02:02What I hadn't really thought was,
2:02:04Well, one of the ways that you get public transportation use up is have you build your
2:02:09own public transportation system.
2:02:11And this felt a little bit like that.
2:02:13Like, you know, if you have autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, not just those Apple
2:02:17buses that are coming from San Francisco to take people to Cupertino, but like moving
2:02:22between different campuses and also moving to different like train stations and things
2:02:28like that.
2:02:29I hadn't really thought about that, but that would be a very interesting application of
2:02:32this technology that would give Apple a lot of data on a very limited set of streets,
2:02:36right, where they could get really great data about the streets in these small cities in
2:02:42the South Bay and do it there on those on that finite number of roads. So it's a really
2:02:47interesting idea.
2:02:48Yeah, and the article states that there were sort of two mindsets within Apple at the outset
2:02:54of this, and one was to have sort of a regular car with self-driving autonomous features,
2:02:59of a traditional car with a regular driving steering
2:03:04wheel and stuff.
2:03:06And then a more ambitious vision that apparently,
2:03:10according to the article, was endorsed by Johnny Ive
2:03:13to totally reinvent the car and go fully autonomous only.
2:03:19And so there's sort of a negative-- to me,
2:03:22there was a very negative slant to the article in terms of it
2:03:26being, like I said, like the gist of it
2:03:28seemed to be Apple had ambitious plans,
2:03:30and now they've scaled back and are just
2:03:32building this autonomous system.
2:03:34Whereas I think a more interesting way
2:03:36to read this article, just the facts in the article,
2:03:40the more ambitious plan seems to be the one they're pursuing.
2:03:44It seems like what they abandoned was the--
2:03:47let's just make sort of like a Tesla with the autopilot.
2:03:51And that the fully autonomous car, which obviously
2:03:54would take years longer to hit the road,
2:03:57it still seems to me what they're building towards.
2:04:00Like, I don't think the idea that they're
2:04:02going to produce their own car hardware--
2:04:05it sounds funny to call it car hardware,
2:04:07but to actually make the cars, I don't think
2:04:10that's off the table at all.
2:04:12And in fact, I can't imagine--
2:04:14I know a lot of people seemingly--
2:04:16in a couple of podcasts I've listened to over the last year
2:04:19or so as this whole Bob Mansfield reboot of Project
2:04:23Titan and they're just building the autonomous system.
2:04:26I just can't fathom that if they're successful and build
2:04:30an autonomous driving system, that they would license it
2:04:33to existing carmakers.
2:04:35That's just not Apple.
2:04:37I would find that shocking.
2:04:39I really would.
2:04:39I don't even think it's on the--
2:04:41again, I have no inside information on this.
2:04:43Strategic information like that just
2:04:45exists only at the highest levels and doesn't leak.
2:04:48I just think that--
2:04:49I don't even think it was even discussed.
2:04:50I'd be shocked if that was actually--
2:04:52we can go to Ford or BMW or somebody
2:04:55and license the Apple self-driving technology.
2:04:57I think if they get to that point, they're making a car.
2:05:00- Yeah, I think I read that section of this article
2:05:05as being more about, it actually reminded me
2:05:08of like old bad Apple back when they would come up
2:05:12with these amazing things that would never be a product.
2:05:14And I felt like the way I read it was that Mansfield
2:05:17was applying some focus to a project that lacked focus.
2:05:21Because the fact is, if you say,
2:05:23"Hey, we have maybe an unlimited budget.
2:05:26We have this incredibly rich company.
2:05:27It's got so much cash.
2:05:29Let's reinvent the car."
2:05:30And then what they end up doing is like,
2:05:33"Let's design a door, and let's design an interior
2:05:37without a steering wheel or gas pedals,
2:05:39and let's investigate whether we can literally,
2:05:41not a metaphor, reinvent the wheel
2:05:43by using a spherical wheel
2:05:45instead of a traditional radial car wheel."
2:05:49And I read that as being like, Bob Mansfield came in
2:05:52and said, "Okay, stop.
2:05:54The core of what we're gonna do is autonomous driving.
2:05:57Everything else is a distraction.
2:05:59Let's get this right.
2:06:00And then if we get this right, we'll put it in a car.
2:06:03Let's not reinvent the entire car."
2:06:04- Let's see what we'll do.
2:06:05If we get this right, let's see what we'll do.
2:06:07And it reminds me a lot, I'm not the first person,
2:06:09I'm probably the thousandth person
2:06:11to make this direct analogy,
2:06:13but it sounds exactly like what Apple did
2:06:14with touchscreen technology,
2:06:16where Apple had people working on touchscreen technology
2:06:19for, I think, 10 years before the iPhone came out.
2:06:24And not specifically-- famously, the basic thought
2:06:28was, well, some kind of tablet-type thing.
2:06:31So it wasn't even a phone project.
2:06:33But rather than bite off, like, let's
2:06:37create the iPad from scratch, it was,
2:06:39let's just see what we can do with touch screens
2:06:41and then see what we can do from there.
2:06:44And I think you're exactly right that Mansfield's focus is,
2:06:48Let's make a working autonomous system and then see what we can do from there as opposed to, you know.
2:06:54Yeah, right.
2:06:55It looks like designers and the article suggests Jonathan Ive himself, right, is very much into, "Oh, we could completely reimagine the car," and that at some point it's like, "Well, let's stop. Stop.
2:07:05Let's go back to what we're really good at and get really good at that and see where it leads us rather than trying to reinvent every single aspect of this car."
2:07:14I also think there was a, we talked about this on Upgrade a while ago, and then somebody pointed me
2:07:19to an episode of a podcast that's about, basically it's about Tesla, but it was, that episode was
2:07:25about the Apple car. And one of the things that they suggested that I thought was really brilliant,
2:07:30and it really changed my mind about where Apple might go to this, is the concept that Apple might
2:07:35not sell a car. Apple might in the long run be thinking about doing a car service. And the idea
2:07:42there is you sign up as a member of this car service, and when you need a ride, you call
2:07:48and an autonomous car comes.
2:07:51But the cars are all owned by Apple, and they're maintained by Apple.
2:07:54And so Apple doesn't need dealerships.
2:07:56Apple doesn't need to sell a car.
2:07:58Apple just creates the Apple Car Service of self-driving cars, which is where Uber is
2:08:03going too.
2:08:05And what I like about that idea is that I have a hard time seeing, one, Apple licensing,
2:08:10as you said, this technology to just regular old car makers.
2:08:14Oh, our car comes with Apple.
2:08:15Way, yay, nobody cares.
2:08:17And I also can't see Apple really like buying a car maker
2:08:21or maybe making, the closest I could come
2:08:24is like making a strategic investment in a car maker
2:08:27and having them build their car for them.
2:08:31But even then, like, are they gonna sell it?
2:08:32Is Apple gonna sell it?
2:08:34Is Apple gonna build a network of showrooms?
2:08:37But if it's a service and nobody ever buys an Apple car,
2:08:41then at that moment I thought, oh, I could see that.
2:08:45I could see Apple doing that.
2:08:46'Cause you can roll it out in specific regions
2:08:48and specific cities.
2:08:49You can do a slow rollout and learn as you go and build.
2:08:52And at no point do you have to support
2:08:55and maintain somebody's purchased vehicle
2:08:58because it's a fleet and they all belong to you.
2:09:00And you don't know what car is gonna get you
2:09:03when you press the button.
2:09:04You just know that a car is gonna come pick you up
2:09:06and pick your kid up and take them to school or wherever.
2:09:08- And it's gonna be an Apple car and it's gonna be nice
2:09:11and it's gonna integrate with,
2:09:12as soon as you get in, it'll pick up something
2:09:14from your iPhone and it'll have your music and...
2:09:17- Exactly.
2:09:18- I could see that.
2:09:19- That makes more sense to me.
2:09:21- Yeah, I don't know.
2:09:22I still think, and the other thing that was interesting
2:09:25about the article is the article definitely
2:09:29definitively said that, yes, they let go of some hardware
2:09:33on the Bob Mansfield reboot,
2:09:36but they've hired back a lot of people.
2:09:39So it's still a big project.
2:09:40That's the thing I take away from it,
2:09:42is that however big you thought Project Titan was before,
2:09:45it is still a very large initiative within the company,
2:09:48which to me is very exciting.
2:09:49- Yeah, I agree, 'cause there's something there, right?
2:09:52I mean, cars in, what I've always been saying about cars
2:09:54since this first rumor happened was,
2:09:56cars in 20 years are not gonna be anything like cars of now
2:09:59or 20 years ago or 50 years ago.
2:10:01Like we are on the cusp of some pretty dramatic changes
2:10:04with the computer technology, with electric drivetrains.
2:10:07Cars are going to change.
2:10:09The run of the classic like automobile for a century plus,
2:10:14I think is coming to an end to be replaced
2:10:16with something that's different.
2:10:17- We're gonna have a good time telling our grandchildren
2:10:19about what cars are like.
2:10:21- You had to put gas in them
2:10:23and you had to drive them yourself.
2:10:25And you bought one for like 30,000, $50,000.
2:10:30It's huge amounts of money,
2:10:31more than you'd spend-- you had to take a loan in order
2:10:33to get them.
2:10:3440,000 to 50,000 people a year died on the roads in car
2:10:38accidents in the United States alone every year.
2:10:42And we just--
2:10:43People would just fall asleep at the wheel,
2:10:44and the car would crash.
2:10:46Can you believe that?
2:10:47Because that doesn't happen anymore, right?
2:10:48Now that the computers do all the driving, and you owned--
2:10:51I mean, I really do believe it could be you owned a car.
2:10:54And can you believe those days when you owned a car?
2:10:58And well, what did it do when you weren't driving it?
2:11:00It just sat in a parking lot or a garage somewhere
2:11:03and didn't do anything.
2:11:04Well, that sounds crazy and wasteful.
2:11:06Yes.
2:11:07- Wouldn't you get bored while driving
2:11:08and wanna look at other things and devices?
2:11:10And it's like, oh yeah, people did that.
2:11:12And then they would just drive right in.
2:11:14Drive right into the car.
2:11:15- Those fatalities we were talking about earlier,
2:11:17that's where they came from.
2:11:19- Oh yeah, people got bored and looked at their,
2:11:20we used to call them phones.
2:11:21People used to look at their phone.
2:11:24- Before they were right in your eye.
2:11:25Then they, yeah.
2:11:27And so if I'm Apple and I've got,
2:11:28this is my standard line on this.
2:11:30is like, if I'm Apple and I've got billions of dollars
2:11:32in cash and I know that this industry is gonna change
2:11:35and I know that technology is gonna drive it,
2:11:37why would I, that is such an easy bet to make.
2:11:40And it doesn't mean it's a sure thing.
2:11:42And it doesn't mean it's easy to do it.
2:11:43But like, if I'm Apple and I'm in the position Apple is
2:11:46with the money that it's got and the resources that it has,
2:11:49you would be, I would say that like, as a stockholder,
2:11:53if I was a stockholder, which I'm not,
2:11:55I would be like, you have a responsibility
2:11:58to take a shot at the car market,
2:12:00because it may be right up your alley,
2:12:02and it could completely change,
2:12:05so now's the time to get into it.
2:12:06So I think it's great that they're doing it,
2:12:08no matter what happens.
2:12:09- And I think that it's a very good bet
2:12:11that however the car world looks in 20 years,
2:12:15or 30 years, whatever, in large parts of the world,
2:12:20and especially in the United States,
2:12:21there's a need for something like a car,
2:12:24a vehicle that goes on roads,
2:12:25because the country is too sparse and big.
2:12:28And for someone like me who lives in the middle
2:12:31of a big city, I can see cars getting off the roads
2:12:34in big cities.
2:12:35I can imagine that future very easily
2:12:37and being replaced by other things.
2:12:39But in general, will there be things like cars on the road
2:12:44and a need for them?
2:12:45Absolutely.
2:12:46And Bay Area is a perfect example.
2:12:48I just can't imagine how the Bay Area
2:12:50isn't gonna have cars.
2:12:52It's just, it's...
2:12:55- Yeah, and if they're efficient,
2:12:57I mean, then you're using freeway space
2:12:59to move people around and it's already there
2:13:02for a lot cheaper than building new trains.
2:13:05- When you watch the computer simulations
2:13:06of what self-driving cars,
2:13:08how efficient they could be on a freeway, it's remarkable.
2:13:10It could turn the entire freeway into effectively
2:13:12a train-like density of people.
2:13:17Anyway, I came to read from this article
2:13:20being excited for Project Titan, not despondent.
2:13:25One last quick one before I take the last break is iMessage is an unheralded social
2:13:30networking Goliath.
2:13:31There was an article that I linked to on during Fireball making the case that iMessage is
2:13:38the number one social platform for teenagers in the United States.
2:13:41And yes, it's stronger among teenagers.
2:13:44And yes, it is a US centric thing.
2:13:46And around the world, like especially in Asia, there are other independent services that
2:13:50or cross-platform like your WeChat and your WhatsApp
2:13:55and what have you that are more popular.
2:13:57And iMessage isn't really even relevant
2:13:59in some of those countries.
2:14:01But here in the US, iMessage is super, super dominant.
2:14:05And I've been banging this drum for a while
2:14:07that it is completely and utterly overlooked
2:14:10by most of the business and tech press
2:14:11as a huge social networking win for Apple.
2:14:17I'm curious, your kids, are they on iMessage?
2:14:20- Yeah, so my son doesn't use his phone a lot,
2:14:24but when he does, he is sending iMessages to his friends.
2:14:26That's absolutely the case.
2:14:27I'm on his iPad too.
2:14:29My daughter, Snapchat is the number one.
2:14:31Snapchat still has it.
2:14:33She does use iMessage,
2:14:37but I think it's more utilitarian
2:14:42when she uses iMessage.
2:14:43Like literally, I need to send you a text right now,
2:14:46But for all of the more social, fun, conversational stuff,
2:14:50it's basically all Snapchat.
2:14:52- Yeah.
2:14:53Giuseppe Stuto is the guy who wrote this article.
2:14:57I'll try to remember to put a link in the show notes.
2:14:59It's super strong among my friends.
2:15:03My son's 13, and again,
2:15:06it's probably extraordinarily different,
2:15:09especially at that age among boys and girls.
2:15:11But when his friends are coordinating like a,
2:15:14"Hey, let's all get on PlayStation and play a certain game."
2:15:17The coordination all takes place on iMessage.
2:15:19- Yes, yes, that's true with my son's friends too.
2:15:22A little less with my daughter,
2:15:23although again, that's the utilitarian part,
2:15:25which I think gets mixed up in this story a little bit.
2:15:27I suspect just as having observed a 15 and a 13-year-old
2:15:30at close range, that I think iMessage is calling it like,
2:15:35it feels a little less social.
2:15:38It is a little social, but like for my daughter,
2:15:40the really fun social is split off into Snapchat.
2:15:44But they do both use it the same way we use it,
2:15:48which is to say, yeah, we're gonna play this video game.
2:15:51Let's get on, play Overwatch or whatever.
2:15:54And my son and his friends do that all the time.
2:15:57- So I actually feel bad and I actually acknowledge,
2:16:00and again, this is just the way people do behave
2:16:03and the way people should behave.
2:16:05I agree that in an ideal world,
2:16:08the de facto messaging platform
2:16:11would be universal and cross-platform,
2:16:14the way email is, the way SMS is.
2:16:16I mean, SMS sucks in a bunch of ways,
2:16:18but at least it didn't matter if you were on Verizon
2:16:20or AT&T, you could still text each other.
2:16:23And so I actually think in a way,
2:16:26I don't say this as like, wow, this is great for the world,
2:16:30it's good for Apple, but I think it sucks
2:16:32that a kid who, and I think an awful lot of kids
2:16:35get like a hand-me-down phone.
2:16:37And if your dad's last phone was an Android
2:16:41and that's the phone you get, I think it sucks
2:16:45that you're out of your group chat,
2:16:47the group chats of your friends that are on iMessage.
2:16:49I think that sucks.
2:16:50I mean, I'm not saying that Apple is morally obligated
2:16:53to do iMessage for Android.
2:16:55And I totally understand the strategic value
2:16:58of keeping it a competitive advantage.
2:17:00And if there is some sort of peer pressure to get iPhones
2:17:03because your friends are using group chats on it.
2:17:06But just as a dad who remembers what it was like
2:17:10to feel left out certain times as a teenager,
2:17:12I think that sucks, right?
2:17:15But it's the way it is.
2:17:16And I think to deny that it's a huge factor
2:17:19in US teen culture today is,
2:17:22you're just being willfully ignorant.
2:17:24- Yeah, and it's probably used as a tool
2:17:26to ostracize people who don't have iPhones, right?
2:17:29- Of course, right, if we're being honest
2:17:30about the way teenagers work, right?
2:17:32I could just search Google or Twitter someday,
2:17:35just pause the podcast and go search for green bubbles
2:17:38and you'll find adults, you'll find adults complaining
2:17:43about how gross it is to text somebody
2:17:44from their iPhone and see green bubbles.
2:17:47It's, you know, it is a thing.
2:17:49Anyway, I will take a break right here
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2:20:07All right, we're running long.
2:20:10I have a few things I wanna talk about though.
2:20:13- Okay.
2:20:14- You recently, I just linked to it today actually,
2:20:16but you posted from a,
2:20:17you went on an 11 day road trip with your family.
2:20:20And I, your notes from the road trip crystallized
2:20:25like some vague thoughts that have been running in my head
2:20:28as to how things are changing.
2:20:32One of them was a segment, and that's the part I quoted,
2:20:36was Wi-Fi versus cellular, and that you guys stayed
2:20:39in a couple of houses, rental houses and hotels,
2:20:42and that some of the houses had advertised,
2:20:44"Hey, we've got Wi-Fi in the house, and that sounds great."
2:20:46And then you got there, and the one was backed by DSL.
2:20:50Like I remember when DSL first came out,
2:20:52and DSL, going from a modem to DSL was like,
2:20:54"Wow, this is like real internet."
2:20:57And DSL now feels like it's closer to like modem speed.
2:21:02- Absolutely.
2:21:03- That was like, DSL was the days when like,
2:21:07it was like cool that you could download music
2:21:10over the internet.
2:21:11Like video, no, you can't download video,
2:21:14let alone stream it.
2:21:15Like, you know, you look back, it makes you look back
2:21:19and you know, we talk about the 15 year anniversary
2:21:21of Daring Fireball, like 15 years ago,
2:21:23the idea that you could download high quality HD video
2:21:26fast enough to watch it as it comes.
2:21:29It was ridiculous.
2:21:30And so like you said, like on your trip,
2:21:34like you guys burned through a big chunk
2:21:36of your monthly cellular allotment.
2:21:38That's exactly what happens to us whenever we travel now
2:21:41for the exact same reason.
2:21:42- Yeah, and it was rough 'cause we're, I mean, it was good.
2:21:45We're on one of the new AT&T plans now
2:21:47where they, when you hit your limit,
2:21:49and it's a much higher limit than it used to be,
2:21:50but we hit it.
2:21:51And they don't just charge you $15
2:21:55for another little block, which we would have gone through
2:21:57like $75 if that had happened, $100.
2:22:01The problem is that it limits your speed per device
2:22:04to like 128K.
2:22:06- Oh, man.
2:22:07- And that was brutal.
2:22:09That was really brutal.
2:22:10It kind of worked, but it was really awful.
2:22:12And what frustrated me is for the vacation,
2:22:15what I wanted to do was call up AT&T and say,
2:22:18can I give you $50 just to be unlimited this month?
2:22:23and then we'll go back to our plan,
2:22:25but they kind of don't want to do that.
2:22:27So I just kind of, and if they do, somebody let me know,
2:22:30but I found that they don't make that easy
2:22:32at the very least in doing it that way.
2:22:34- The iPad makes that possible.
2:22:36Like if you have an iPad cellular plan,
2:22:38you can burn through it and then just renew, you know,
2:22:41like, so Amy did that.
2:22:42Amy's a huge, huge iPad user,
2:22:44and she's on AT&T on their iPad, on her iPad.
2:22:47And in the midst of traveling,
2:22:49and again, in a rental house earlier,
2:22:51it was exactly the same situation.
2:22:53the wifi was just, it literally just went out randomly.
2:22:56You know, like it was slow when it was on and it went out.
2:22:59And so she just used cellular and burned through her month,
2:23:03you know, I don't know, in a week and a half
2:23:05and just paid another 50 bucks to get another month,
2:23:08you know, and all of a sudden-
2:23:09- Yeah, if I had to do it all over again,
2:23:11I would've brought my T-Mobile SIM with me
2:23:13and pop that into my iPad and just bought a pass
2:23:16for, you know, for the month with a lot more data
2:23:19and just said, okay, we're using, you know,
2:23:20we're using this now because that's what happened
2:23:22in the DSL place, which also had the spotty Wi-Fi.
2:23:25I would just have to unplug and replug the router,
2:23:28the DSL router that had Wi-Fi every so often
2:23:30'cause it just stopped working
2:23:32until I unplugged and replugged.
2:23:34And there I was using cellular and we all were,
2:23:38and that was great except that then we got to,
2:23:40by the time we got to Salt Lake City,
2:23:42we were over our cap and it was over.
2:23:44And the hotel we stayed in was surprisingly,
2:23:47not all hotels are good,
2:23:48but the hotel we stayed in had good internet.
2:23:51It was really nice.
2:23:52But then we went to another rental and it was the same deal.
2:23:55They had cable internet, but it was spotty,
2:23:59but it was better than what we had before
2:24:01and we were out of cellular data.
2:24:03Oh, well.
2:24:05- You mentioned long cables.
2:24:06Keeping like two six foot cables in your travel bag
2:24:12is such a key kip because it's amazing how many times
2:24:16you end up in a hotel room where like,
2:24:19oh yeah, there's a socket right next to the side of the bed
2:24:22and then the other side of the bed,
2:24:23there's nothing anywhere.
2:24:25- Yep.
2:24:26Yeah, and the long cables also comes,
2:24:29I mean, I bought them originally
2:24:30because my kids kept destroying lightning cables.
2:24:34And I discovered that my daughter was like
2:24:36holding her phone at completely taut
2:24:39while plugged into the wall
2:24:40because of where the cable was and where the plug was.
2:24:44And so I said, and my son did something similar
2:24:47with his iPad and I was like, all right, here we go.
2:24:49These are nylon braided, six foot long, use these.
2:24:54And it's been better, I would say.
2:24:56I think they still will probably destroy them,
2:24:58but it would take them longer.
2:24:59And it has this added benefit of, in the car,
2:25:03our power plug is on the dash.
2:25:06And I've got one of those dual USB things,
2:25:08but to get to the kids in the back seat, it's too far.
2:25:11But with the six foot ones--
2:25:13- Not have the people in the front seat
2:25:14have a cord right by their neck, taught.
2:25:17- Exactly right.
2:25:18- Yeah, just ready to snag you and knock you down.
2:25:21So that worked great because I said,
2:25:23everybody bring your long cables
2:25:24and we plugged them in and that was great.
2:25:26And then the other thing that blew me away
2:25:27is we made a stop in Nevada out in the middle of nowhere
2:25:31at a Flying J truck stop, I believe is what it was.
2:25:35Or maybe it's a pilot, but it was a truck stop on I-80
2:25:38in middle of nowhere in Nevada.
2:25:39Somewhere, maybe Elko,
2:25:41I don't think it was as big as Elko.
2:25:43I think it was somewhere between Winnemucca and Elko.
2:25:46anybody who's driven that, there's nothing out there.
2:25:48We love Nevada, but parts of Nevada are very barren.
2:25:52We get to the truck stop and I fill up the car,
2:25:56and everybody takes a bathroom break.
2:25:59Since everybody else was doing that
2:26:01while I was filling up the car,
2:26:02everybody's getting in the car and I said,
2:26:03"Okay, I'll be right back." I go in there.
2:26:05We got my son a Nintendo Switch for his birthday,
2:26:09which was on this trip.
2:26:10Except that because it's Nintendo,
2:26:13The power plug that comes with it is USB-C,
2:26:16but it doesn't detach.
2:26:18It's just a plug on one side and a USB-C plug on the other.
2:26:21So you can't use it in a car.
2:26:24And I come out of the bathroom, and I'm staring,
2:26:26and they have two, like, two giant displays,
2:26:30like, on a wall of cords.
2:26:33And so many of them, first off, are Lightning,
2:26:35which really -- I think the mindshare of Apple products
2:26:40is so dramatic, like 80% of the cords were Lightning cords.
2:26:44- Right, which is bizarre because everybody keeps saying
2:26:46that even in the US, iPhone is like 20% markets there
2:26:50or something like that.
2:26:52I know exactly what you're talking about.
2:26:53And it's like, how can this be?
2:26:55It's very strange. - I know.
2:26:57It doesn't make sense to me.
2:26:58I mean, they did have mini and micro USB and they had USB-C.
2:27:01So if you're somebody who's got an Android phone
2:27:03and you want to plug it in, you can do that.
2:27:04And I was amazed because I was looking for a USB-C
2:27:07to USB-A cord for the Nintendo Switch so my son could keep playing it while we were driving.
2:27:15And not only did I find one, I found a six-foot nylon braided USB-C to USB-A cord. So I came
2:27:21out of the truck stop convenience store and just handed my son the box and said, "Here
2:27:26you go. Now you can play." Even though his battery was dead, now you can play. And I
2:27:30think he couldn't play but not charge because there's weird power things about Nintendo
2:27:34stuff, which I think is why it comes with a plug.
2:27:37But it just was a funny moment that we're out
2:27:39in the middle of nowhere, and not only is there a wall
2:27:41of cable adapters in this truck stop right next
2:27:43to the Slurpee machine or the whatever, the IC machine,
2:27:47and next to the racks of beef jerky,
2:27:48and everything else you find in a,
2:27:50and slot machines, 'cause it's Nevada.
2:27:52And then there are these, and all these cords,
2:27:55most of them lightning.
2:27:56- I bought a cord at the beginning of the summer,
2:27:58and I'm so glad I did, is I've got a couple
2:28:01of micro USB things to charge, most important of which,
2:28:03me is the like a portable battery charger, something I can put in my pocket and charge
2:28:08stuff. But they always charge from micro USB. But I always have my Kindle in the backpack
2:28:13and there's just, you know, there's a couple of things. And so I hate having the two cables.
2:28:17I got this thing from Belkin. It was ungodly expensive. I think it was like $30 might have
2:28:21been more, but it's six feet long and it's a lightning cable with at the end of the lightning
2:28:27cable there's a little like cap that you put over that's a female lightning port
2:28:33that has micro USB out oh yeah so you can't lose it because it's attached and
2:28:39so if you pop it on its micro or I think it's if you pop it on it's it's
2:28:43lightning yeah with it with it on its lightning and you take it off and it's
2:28:47micro USB and so you can have one cable that can charge both and it is so great
2:28:53It's one of my favorite additions to my backpack
2:28:56in a long time.
2:28:57But the downside of that--
2:28:58- I had one of those and it died in like two months
2:29:01and I just gave up and I said, all right, this isn't for me.
2:29:03It didn't last. - Maybe this.
2:29:04- 'Cause I loved it when I had it.
2:29:05- Well, so far so good with mine.
2:29:08But the downside to it is that now I still,
2:29:10it's only, it hasn't really gotten me
2:29:12from two cables to one because now I need a USB-C cable too
2:29:15because I've got enough USB-C things like the switch.
2:29:19- Yeah.
2:29:20Like the complete eradication of micro USB
2:29:23cannot come soon enough.
2:29:24- I still have, I had to bring a mini USB with me too,
2:29:28because I brought my portable audio recorder
2:29:31to do one podcast from the road.
2:29:33I only did one podcast while I was gone.
2:29:35It was about the solar eclipse,
2:29:37which was why we took the trip.
2:29:39So it was a good reason to bring it.
2:29:40But that one, if you don't run it off of battery,
2:29:43it's micro USB.
2:29:45So I had to have a micro USB and a mini USB for the Kindles
2:29:48And the USB-C, it turns out for the Switch, plus lightning,
2:29:51which is, it's ridiculous.
2:29:53This is why USB-C needs to be a thing,
2:29:55because all this other stuff needs to go away.
2:29:57It's ridiculous.
2:29:58- Yeah.
2:30:00So that leads us to the solar eclipse,
2:30:02so that you guys took a family road trip up to Idaho?
2:30:05Where'd you go?
2:30:06- Idaho, yeah, went to Idaho.
2:30:07- And you got the full total solar eclipse.
2:30:10I didn't even think about it.
2:30:11I honestly, it just, it never really occurred to me.
2:30:14And now reading your stuff and reading Jason Kotke's posts
2:30:18about seeing it, it seems like I was kind of a fool
2:30:22not to at least think about driving to Tennessee
2:30:24or something from here.
2:30:25- I got good news for you.
2:30:29There's another one in 2024,
2:30:33and it will pass through Western Pennsylvania
2:30:37and Buffalo, New York,
2:30:38and other places not too far away from you.
2:30:41So it'll be a little closer for you further for me.
2:30:44- And if we want to travel Austin, Texas,
2:30:45which is a beautiful town.
2:30:47- Oh yeah, you can go to Mazatlan, Mexico too,
2:30:49if you really want to do it right,
2:30:51you can go there, they'll have it too.
2:30:52- All right, Speed Zone,
2:30:53because I'm really running out of time here.
2:30:56Letterman's gonna have a Netflix series.
2:30:58Yay!
2:30:59- And he cited, in some interview he did,
2:31:03he cited Jerry Seinfeld's thing,
2:31:05and even said like,
2:31:06"I wish I could just do Jerry Seinfeld's thing."
2:31:07And when he retired, that's what I thought,
2:31:09is he's gonna do a Seinfeld thing,
2:31:11something that is exactly what he wants
2:31:13and only as much as he wants, right?
2:31:14And then no more.
2:31:15I'm so happy because I was really worried that he was going to be like Johnny Carson
2:31:19and just go away and never do anything.
2:31:22And did you see his National Geographic thing that he did when he went to India?
2:31:26Yeah, it was remarkable.
2:31:27It was pretty good, right?
2:31:29So I kept thinking, you know, this is the thing is, you know, find some people to produce
2:31:33it for him.
2:31:34He knows what he's going to want to do.
2:31:37And so in this case, he's going to get six episodes, I guess, next year on Netflix to
2:31:41do this and we'll see where it goes from there.
2:31:44I think it's great to have him,
2:31:46and also I think it's, I mean, his joke,
2:31:49that you and I both quoted, which is,
2:31:51which is, you know, ask your family before you retire
2:31:53to spend more time with your family.
2:31:55- So here's a question for you.
2:31:56Do you think he keeps the beard or not?
2:31:58- I think so.
2:31:59I think I saw him in an interview say, like,
2:32:01I never, you know, I'm tired.
2:32:03I'm done with shaving regularly.
2:32:04So I think, plus if you think about it,
2:32:06he's probably going to record this in an unusual way
2:32:08over a longer stretch of time.
2:32:10Having like beard,
2:32:12I mean, maybe there's a beard continuity issue,
2:32:14but I think like keeping it just as the Bushy Beard
2:32:16and it's just Bushy Beard Letterman.
2:32:17I think that's his thing now.
2:32:19I think it's just gonna be beard, Elle Beardo.
2:32:21- That's like what post talk show Letterman looks like.
2:32:24- Yeah.
2:32:25But hooray, yeah.
2:32:28Basically yay is the answer for you and me both.
2:32:31Just more of him, you know,
2:32:33talking to people he wants to talk to and doing,
2:32:35it sounds like also like doing some maybe
2:32:37man on the street stuff again,
2:32:39which is very interesting to me.
2:32:41Like he seems to have an idea for what he wants to do.
2:32:43And so, yeah, I can't wait.
2:32:45- Yeah, I can't wait either.
2:32:47I think it's gonna be great.
2:32:48And I think it'll be interesting to see him,
2:32:51he see him play in the Netflix area
2:32:54where he doesn't need to worry about commercial breaks
2:32:56because he's always been a master of form.
2:32:59And I think he could do something interesting with that.
2:33:03- Yeah.
2:33:04- And then last but not least on my list at least is,
2:33:09And again, sort of related as a fellow talk show geek,
2:33:12Jerry Lewis died a couple days ago.
2:33:14And I want to throw in here, you know,
2:33:17like when we do audible reads and throw in like a
2:33:19recommendation of a book,
2:33:20I want to throw in a recommendation for a movie to watch,
2:33:22which is Martin Scorsese's, "The King of Comedy,"
2:33:25which by talking about the basic plot doesn't really spoil
2:33:30anything, but it's,
2:33:31the gist of it is that Jerry Lewis plays a very Johnny
2:33:34Carson-esque late night talk show host who lives in New York
2:33:38who gets kidnapped by a character played by Robert De Niro,
2:33:42who's a very hard to describe,
2:33:45sort of a kook who wants to be a comedian.
2:33:49And it is a very, the vibe of the movie
2:33:53is very hard to explain because there's moments
2:33:56when you're watching it where you're thinking
2:33:57it's devolving into farce,
2:34:00but it never leaves a sort of realistic take.
2:34:06It's, and it was a commercial failure
2:34:10when it came out in 1983,
2:34:11but it's one of those movies
2:34:14that has become like a cult favorite.
2:34:16And Jerry Lewis is just amazing.
2:34:19I'm presuming here that you've seen it.
2:34:21- I haven't seen it since I was in like high school.
2:34:26So I have basically no memories
2:34:28other than like the broad outlines of it.
2:34:30I should probably revisit it
2:34:31since I like most of Scorsese's work,
2:34:34especially from this period.
2:34:35I haven't watched it recently.
2:34:38So I'm looking forward to it.
2:34:40And it's a shame that it takes a guy dying for me
2:34:42to think I should watch a movie.
2:34:46But I've watched it recently enough that it--
2:34:50I always thought--
2:34:51I remember the first time I saw it,
2:34:52I thought, this is a fun movie.
2:34:54How come nobody knows about this movie?
2:34:56But watching it semi-recently, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago,
2:34:59is it's absolutely astounding how comfortable and--
2:35:05to be that Johnny Carson-esque character,
2:35:08part of what made Carson Carson was
2:35:10that it was like a well-worn shoe for our culture,
2:35:14like your favorite pair of slippers.
2:35:16It's just like every night when his show came on,
2:35:18or whenever Carson would appear anywhere,
2:35:20like if he hosted the Oscars or whatever, it's like, ah,
2:35:23there's Johnny Carson.
2:35:23And you knew exactly what he was and who he was.
2:35:27It's just remarkable how Jerry Lewis,
2:35:29it feels like he had, somehow it felt like
2:35:35I was totally comfortable with the fact that he was a guy
2:35:38who was on TV for an hour a night,
2:35:40every night for the last 20 years, even though he wasn't.
2:35:43And you could almost see how in another world,
2:35:46Jerry Lewis, the real Jerry Lewis might've been
2:35:48like a host of "The Tonight Show" or something like that.
2:35:51- Really weird casting, and I think brilliant casting
2:35:56in the way of like, you need somebody who feels like
2:35:59they are this iconic larger than life figure.
2:36:01And Jerry Lewis fit the bill, right?
2:36:03Even though he wasn't a talk show host,
2:36:05it was close enough that that was a great pick.
2:36:09Like, 'cause if it was somebody random,
2:36:11then it wouldn't have the same impact.
2:36:14It's not like how, you know,
2:36:15Gary Shandling doing Larry Sanders,
2:36:18I mean, he guest hosted The Tonight Show
2:36:19for many, many years.
2:36:20And it was a close enough fit that it made sense in a way
2:36:25that some random casting would not have worked.
2:36:28- Right, it's exactly it.
2:36:30There's a rare sort of onscreen personality
2:36:34that is believable as a nightly talk show host.
2:36:39And somehow Jerry Lewis totally pulled it off,
2:36:43even though in real life, he was really the opposite,
2:36:46which is like the consummate talk show guest
2:36:48to come out and be manic and crazy
2:36:52as the guest in front of the straight man host.
2:36:56And then he could just turn that inside out
2:36:58and play the host.
2:36:59And it's really a great movie.
2:37:01I highly recommend it.
2:37:02That's my pick of the week for those of you out there.
2:37:05- All right.
2:37:06- Anything else, Jason?
2:37:09- I don't think so.
2:37:11Boy, if there's, we didn't talk about sports, let's not,
2:37:15but we'll say that for the next time.
2:37:17- Save it for next season for you.
2:37:18- At least.
2:37:21(laughs)
2:37:24Anyway, everybody can find Jason's fine work
2:37:26at sixcolors.com.
2:37:30Is that right?
2:37:32I just know, I just get to the S-I-X and it fills in.
2:37:35(laughs)
2:37:37And you could spell--
2:37:38- I wanted a dot com, it had to be a dot com.
2:37:40I wasn't gonna settle for less.
2:37:41- Those of you on the other side of the pond
2:37:42can spell colors any way you wish, and it'll still work.
2:37:46Your podcast, you can find them,
2:37:49A bunch of them at the Incomparable upgrade is over there
2:37:53with the great Mike Hurley.
2:37:54- At Relay FM, yeah.
2:37:57- Relay FM.
2:37:58And what else is there?
2:38:01- There are many, I mean, basically,
2:38:04Six Colors will get you my writing
2:38:05and the incomparable.com will get you
2:38:07my pop culture podcasting
2:38:08and Relay FM will get you my tech podcasting
2:38:11along with Space and some other stuff.
2:38:14- Yeah, and it's all great.
2:38:15And I really appreciate it.
2:38:17You and Mike have been doing a great job this summer.
2:38:18It's one of my favorite shows, it really is.
2:38:22- Thank you, it's a lot of fun to do.
2:38:23It's weird, you and I have had this conversation,
2:38:25it's weird to think that we're as much podcasters
2:38:28as writers in our careers, but Upgrade is a lot of fun,
2:38:33and that is sort of the, I'd say that's the incomparable
2:38:36upgrade and Six Colors are the things that I do
2:38:39if I was telling somebody what I do.
2:38:41So I'm glad you like it.
2:38:42- Yeah, and it's, you know, not to start
2:38:43a whole 'nother segment here, but I like listening to Mike,
2:38:46And I liked listening to CGP Grey, too.
2:38:49I really like listening to the iPad enthusiasts,
2:38:54the people who really love the iPad.
2:38:56What a summer it's been to hear them think about
2:39:00where iOS 11 is going because it's been so great.
2:39:02And I love it because I'm not, you know,
2:39:05I appreciate the iPad and I like it,
2:39:08but I'm so staunchly stuck on the Mac mentally.
2:39:14I was blown away by your thing from the road trip, right?
2:39:17- That I didn't take a Mac with me
2:39:19for 11 days out on the road.
2:39:20That was, I made that decision.
2:39:23And I noticed that your note on "Daring Fireball"
2:39:25was, gives you the heebie jeebies
2:39:28that you can think about it.
2:39:30- I would just feel like I was walking around with that,
2:39:31like that nightmare you have
2:39:33where you forgot to put your pants on
2:39:34before you went to school.
2:39:34That's how I would feel every moment of the day.
2:39:36I'd be like, "Oh my God, what if I need a Mac?"
2:39:38- Yep.
2:39:41- So anyway, it's been great listening
2:39:42to your show over the summer.
2:39:44It's great times to be talking to someone with an iPad.
2:39:48Enthusiasm.
2:39:52My thanks to you.
2:39:53What a great, how generous you are with your time.
2:39:56By my clock, we've been on for four hours.
2:39:59- Yeah, it's a little bit, yeah.
2:40:01Metric time.