The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► All right, Adam, before we get into the show proper,

00:00:02 ◼   ► I'm gonna send you right now,

00:00:04 ◼   ► I'm gonna send you a photograph I took from my desk today.

00:00:08 ◼   ► This was hours ago, you'll see it, it was daylight.

00:00:11 ◼   ► This was the view from my desk at my home office.

00:00:14 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:00:15 ◼   ► - It's at the back of our house,

00:00:16 ◼   ► it overlooks a little courtyard,

00:00:18 ◼   ► and our rear neighbors across the courtyard

00:00:21 ◼   ► were having some, are having some home repairs done.

00:00:24 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:00:29 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:30 ◼   ► - I can't, I'm so excited.

00:00:32 ◼   ► - It's going. - It's going through Skype?

00:00:36 ◼   ► - No, no, no, I'm sending it as an iMessage.

00:00:38 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

00:00:39 ◼   ► - Keep it secure.

00:00:40 ◼   ► All right, it says that it sent.

00:00:44 ◼   ► - There it is.

00:00:46 ◼   ► - Now, I need you to realize that the guy,

00:00:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:54 ◼   ► the top guy,

00:00:56 ◼   ► is not a deck that is just a little sort of like a little ledge outside the the window.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Pete: Sure, yeah. Oh my god, what is he doing? That doesn't seem safe.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Pete; It doesn't seem safe at all. This is, this is at least, I don't know, the third floor,

00:01:15 ◼   ► the fourth floor, it's pretty high up.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Pete; And the other guy's on two ladders, he's straddling two ladders.

00:01:19 ◼   ► That's like a ripped pants Harold Lloyd gag in the making.

00:01:23 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:01:26 ◼   ► There is, if you look, it's hard to see because it's like the iPhone kind of focused on the screen

00:01:31 ◼   ► in my window, but if you look, there is sort of like a blue rope going to the roof of the house.

00:01:37 ◼   ► But the rope is actually connected to the other ladder that isn't being used. So it's like,

00:01:41 ◼   ► there's a ladder that has like a safety harness, but the guide does not.

00:01:46 ◼   ► - Oh God.

00:01:47 ◼   ► Oh these are some real, real morons.

00:01:52 ◼   ► Oh did you just stare for like an hour

00:01:55 ◼   ► waiting for them to fall?

00:01:57 ◼   ► - I had to close the window.

00:02:00 ◼   ► I could not, I couldn't get any work done.

00:02:01 ◼   ► My palms, my palms, my palms were sweating

00:02:06 ◼   ► such that I could have cured the drought in California.

00:02:09 ◼   ► - What were they doing?

00:02:10 ◼   ► - They're ripping up the roof or something.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I guess they're retiling the roof or something.

00:02:15 ◼   ► are doing, they're just doing work on the roof or whatever, but the way that they are on these

00:02:19 ◼   ► ladders does not seem safe. Pete: No, that's not good. That's not OSHA standards. That's not to

00:02:27 ◼   ► code. [Laughter]

00:02:28 ◼   ► Ted: That guy, the one guy, and he wasn't just straddling those two ladders for a second or two.

00:02:33 ◼   ► He, whatever he was doing up there, was one foot on one ladder and one on another. I felt like I

00:02:39 ◼   ► like I was watching a Chaplin movie.

00:02:40 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:43 ◼   ► And my fear was, I was just feared for their lives.

00:02:47 ◼   ► And then apparently, then they started,

00:02:49 ◼   ► they got into an argument with apparently

00:02:51 ◼   ► a rival contractor who's doing what appears

00:02:54 ◼   ► to be some other job on the same house.

00:02:56 ◼   ► But they're clearly not colleagues.

00:02:59 ◼   ► And they got into an argument.

00:03:01 ◼   ► But it's like the one group that's in the argument

00:03:03 ◼   ► is 30 feet up in the air in a ladder.

00:03:06 ◼   ► I don't feel like that's the time to have an argument.

00:03:08 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, they get into beefs, those construction crews.

00:03:15 ◼   ► It's very broey, that culture.

00:03:19 ◼   ► We've had some work done on our house recently.

00:03:23 ◼   ► And if the crew doesn't like somebody,

00:03:27 ◼   ► they'll do pranks, they'll do some fraternity shit and stuff.

00:03:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:35 ◼   ► For example.

00:03:36 ◼   ► - I don't know, you know, like hiding a guy's keys.

00:03:40 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:41 ◼   ► For like hours, you know, not like,

00:03:43 ◼   ► and they're, these are grown men.

00:03:44 ◼   ► These are like men in their 40s and 50s.

00:03:47 ◼   ► - I'm kind of glad that I don't work in an industry

00:03:52 ◼   ► where it's, it would be, it's commonplace

00:03:54 ◼   ► for people to hide your keys.

00:03:56 ◼   ► 'Cause I lose, I lose my keys frequently enough on my own.

00:03:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's just kind of permissible.

00:04:03 ◼   ► Adam, so we talk about lots of stuff.

00:04:08 ◼   ► We always talk about lots of stuff.

00:04:10 ◼   ► But I mean the big thing is Apple TV.

00:04:14 ◼   ► So the last episode of this show,

00:04:15 ◼   ► I did it with Guy English.

00:04:17 ◼   ► We were really just like,

00:04:19 ◼   ► I forget when we recorded, Friday?

00:04:22 ◼   ► Yeah, so I think I'd only had it 24 hours

00:04:24 ◼   ► and Guy had the dev kit one for a while,

00:04:27 ◼   ► but it was really only hooked up.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Like the dev kit thing really wasn't that useful

00:04:31 ◼   ► because the app store wasn't live in it

00:04:33 ◼   ► or anything like that till Friday.

00:04:34 ◼   ► So in terms of like getting a sense of the whole experience,

00:04:37 ◼   ► it was relatively new for both of us.

00:04:39 ◼   ► - Right.

00:04:40 ◼   ► - And so we've had another week.

00:04:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I've been with it for about 72 hours now.

00:04:47 ◼   ► So I've done my fair share of poking around,

00:04:52 ◼   ► mostly partially in prep for talking with you about it.

00:04:55 ◼   ► I feel like that's, I kind of have to go through the,

00:04:59 ◼   ► kick the tires and take it through,

00:05:00 ◼   ► run it through its paces. Right now I'm, oh I brought it into the office, I brought

00:05:05 ◼   ► my Apple TV into the office and I have it hooked up to a TV here so I can go through

00:05:10 ◼   ► all the UI as we talk about it. And right now I'm doing like a little science experiment

00:05:15 ◼   ► with the reflection as I, you know, in the icons, what do you call the?

00:05:21 ◼   ► - Refraction? I don't know what you call that.

00:05:24 ◼   ► - Well the reflection, 'cause there's a light source reflected in the pane and it's

00:05:30 ◼   ► striking me and I'm using a different reflective surface and I'm using the reflective part

00:05:37 ◼   ► of the remote, of the real remote, because I want to make sure, okay, yeah, it does.

00:05:44 ◼   ► It didn't, like the way that when you turn the pane to the left or the right, that the

00:05:49 ◼   ► reflection goes off to, you know, it goes off to the left or the right the way it would

00:05:57 ◼   ► in the real world, obviously, to mimic the physical universe.

00:06:01 ◼   ► You mean like when you just sort of jiggle your thumb on the touchpad a little bit, just

00:06:04 ◼   ► to make the currently selected item sort of rotate around?

00:06:08 ◼   ► Exactly, yeah.

00:06:09 ◼   ► Like it pivots, it pivots slightly.

00:06:12 ◼   ► That's right, it pivots and it also sort of pans over.

00:06:14 ◼   ► It's like really cool, like however they rigged this, it's almost like on a ball joint.

00:06:19 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good way to put it, right.

00:06:22 ◼   ► So like as if it's like sitting on a bowling ball and you push it back and forth and it

00:06:29 ◼   ► reflects the light source behind you, which is sort of a soft light bank.

00:06:34 ◼   ► God, they're just getting really good at this stuff, you know, mimicking the physical universe

00:06:40 ◼   ► in a way that, of course, it makes sense.

00:06:42 ◼   ► We kind of had to like pull it back and go flat for a while, while they got better at

00:06:49 ◼   ► doing this kind of stuff, this kind of visual effect kind of stuff.

00:06:52 ◼   ► Because before, you know, you look at like aqua and it looked kind of cool for the time,

00:06:59 ◼   ► but it looked like, you know, relative to the physical world, it looked like garbage.

00:07:02 ◼   ► It was dumb.

00:07:03 ◼   ► But this doesn't look dumb, I don't think.

00:07:06 ◼   ► Dave: No, I like it a lot.

00:07:09 ◼   ► I do like the way it looks, but it's the feel of it that I really like.

00:07:12 ◼   ► And if there's anything that I feel is just—and I've read a lot more other people's reviews

00:07:18 ◼   ► of it since, you know, since I spoke about it on the last show. And it does seem mixed.

00:07:24 ◼   ► It seems like it to me, a lot of people are, it seems like I'm in the minority. It seems

00:07:28 ◼   ► like a lot of the overall first week feedback is a lot more negative than I think it should

00:07:34 ◼   ► be.

00:07:35 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like way, way more controversial than you would ever think it would be. It

00:07:39 ◼   ► seems like a minority that's actually just really like stoked about this thing. And I'm

00:07:45 ◼   ► - Definitely on your side.

00:07:47 ◼   ► I think this is magical.

00:07:48 ◼   ► And I've been a Apple TV,

00:07:51 ◼   ► huge proponent of Apple TV since the first version.

00:07:54 ◼   ► So I've watched it, you know, I've owned a bunch of them.

00:07:59 ◼   ► I like, just in charge. - Four, I've owned all four.

00:08:01 ◼   ► I've owned all four.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, definitely I've owned all four.

00:08:04 ◼   ► And like, one, you know, kind of to the point of fixation,

00:08:08 ◼   ► where like I would get one for, they're cheap enough now,

00:08:13 ◼   ► you can get one for each TV.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And like, you know, we have two TV, you know,

00:08:18 ◼   ► two in the office and actually four in the office.

00:08:23 ◼   ► But Jesse Char reminded me today on Twitter

00:08:25 ◼   ► that I was the guy who would,

00:08:28 ◼   ► when the Apple TV first came out, version one,

00:08:31 ◼   ► I would actually travel with it.

00:08:32 ◼   ► Like if we would all, you know, come to a conference,

00:08:35 ◼   ► we'd come to a conference in San Francisco

00:08:38 ◼   ► and I would bring mine with me

00:08:39 ◼   ► and hook it up to the hotel TV, just in case.

00:08:43 ◼   ► And I kept my whole movie library on there, because there was no real cloud service kind

00:08:49 ◼   ► of stuff yet.

00:08:51 ◼   ► But I hacked mine.

00:08:54 ◼   ► Back then you used this, what was it?

00:08:57 ◼   ► Fire something.

00:08:58 ◼   ► Do you remember what it was?

00:08:59 ◼   ► What was it?

00:09:00 ◼   ► No, not FireWire.

00:09:01 ◼   ► No, there's a software company that basically sold a hack for the Apple TV.

00:09:09 ◼   ► Oh, I know what you mean.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I forget what it was called.

00:09:13 ◼   ► This is why we should have a live audience.

00:09:17 ◼   ► I know what you mean now.

00:09:19 ◼   ► And the fact was, really, I would just say,

00:09:22 ◼   ► going back, zoom out to the big picture.

00:09:25 ◼   ► There's really only been three Apple TVs.

00:09:29 ◼   ► The first one, which ran, it was like Mac OS X 10.4,

00:09:34 ◼   ► under the hood.

00:09:35 ◼   ► It didn't look like a Mac, but if you took it apart

00:09:37 ◼   ► and did the equivalent of jailbreaking it,

00:09:39 ◼   ► you could figure out it was an Intel x86 Mac,

00:09:43 ◼   ► more or less like a really low-end Mac mini

00:09:47 ◼   ► running a version of OS X,

00:09:49 ◼   ► but with this custom TV interface.

00:09:53 ◼   ► - Right, sometimes if something went wrong,

00:09:55 ◼   ► you had to surface like the BDOS or whatever.

00:09:59 ◼   ► You could see-- - Yeah, BSC, yeah.

00:10:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, you could see all the code running on it

00:10:05 ◼   ► and it felt real mainframe-y in a weird way.

00:10:07 ◼   ► - Then there's the second generation,

00:10:09 ◼   ► which is when they switched to a much smaller puck,

00:10:12 ◼   ► the little black puck, and it was much simpler

00:10:15 ◼   ► and it was under the hood running,

00:10:17 ◼   ► it was running a version of iOS.

00:10:19 ◼   ► The third generation is really sort of like 2.5

00:10:23 ◼   ► because it was just like, I forget what it added,

00:10:27 ◼   ► but maybe that was when they added 1080p support, I forget.

00:10:31 ◼   ► But it was--

00:10:32 ◼   ► - That is true, yeah, it was 1080p.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And for some reason, 'cause I have both versions

00:10:36 ◼   ► in my home right now, for some reason,

00:10:40 ◼   ► version two no longer runs YouTube.

00:10:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, no, I know why that is.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Long story short, it's because at some point,

00:10:47 ◼   ► Apple stopped doing software updates

00:10:49 ◼   ► for that second generation one.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And YouTube, like sometime within the last six months,

00:10:55 ◼   ► YouTube changed their API to such that anything

00:11:00 ◼   ► that hooked up to YouTube needed some sort of update

00:11:04 ◼   ► to keep active with YouTube.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And because the second generation Apple TV

00:11:10 ◼   ► isn't getting software updates anymore,

00:11:11 ◼   ► it can't use YouTube.

00:11:13 ◼   ► - Right, and so the second generation

00:11:16 ◼   ► is still running the old iOS,

00:11:18 ◼   ► which is all aqua-y and nasty.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And then version three iOS looks pretty good,

00:11:26 ◼   ► but nothing compared to this one.

00:11:28 ◼   ► But I looked it up, it's called Fire,

00:11:30 ◼   ► well now it's called Firecore,

00:11:31 ◼   ► that hack that you can install.

00:11:35 ◼   ► And it back then it was called ATV flash.

00:11:37 ◼   ► - ATV flash.

00:11:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, you would buy this software,

00:11:41 ◼   ► you would use a USB stick to flash your Apple TV

00:11:45 ◼   ► and override the OS somehow.

00:11:48 ◼   ► And then you could do things like, you know,

00:11:50 ◼   ► mount it on your Mac as an external hard drive,

00:11:54 ◼   ► copy your movie library onto there.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And I don't even remember how big the hard drive was,

00:11:59 ◼   ► but it was enough that I could, you know,

00:12:00 ◼   ► and if you had like a bunch of standard deaf movies,

00:12:04 ◼   ► you could store them on there.

00:12:06 ◼   ► You could also like hook up an external drive.

00:12:08 ◼   ► And so really that was my,

00:12:09 ◼   ► oh, you could all, you can install other apps like Plex.

00:12:12 ◼   ► I forget what else, but you know,

00:12:15 ◼   ► like those Xbox media center kind of media players.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And really like, that's the only,

00:12:21 ◼   ► I never jail broke my iPhone,

00:12:23 ◼   ► but I totally jail broke the Apple TV

00:12:26 ◼   ► just so I could like do more stuff with it.

00:12:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, so the original name was ATV Flash.

00:12:31 ◼   ► And what's the new name?

00:12:32 ◼   ► - Fire?

00:12:33 ◼   ► - Fire Core.

00:12:34 ◼   ► - Fire Core. - Now it's called Fire Core.

00:12:36 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:12:36 ◼   ► - I don't know what it does now

00:12:38 ◼   ► because there's really no need for it.

00:12:39 ◼   ► - Right.

00:12:40 ◼   ► Yeah, the first Apple TV, I mean, this was,

00:12:44 ◼   ► I mean, that was really, I mean, and, you know,

00:12:47 ◼   ► that was really when it was a quote unquote hobby for Apple.

00:12:49 ◼   ► But the basic idea with the first Apple TV,

00:12:51 ◼   ► again, it was like a Mac Mini under the hood.

00:12:55 ◼   ► It had a spinning hard disk, and more or less,

00:12:58 ◼   ► as I recall, unless I'm forgetting something,

00:13:00 ◼   ► pretty much all it really was good for

00:13:03 ◼   ► was watching movies that you had downloaded

00:13:05 ◼   ► to the Apple TV somehow.

00:13:07 ◼   ► Like either from your iTunes on your computer,

00:13:11 ◼   ► you could like play a movie that you had downloaded

00:13:13 ◼   ► or if you got or like rented or bought a movie from iTunes

00:13:18 ◼   ► on your Apple TV, you had to wait for the whole thing

00:13:20 ◼   ► to download and then it would play.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Maybe it would start before it finished

00:13:24 ◼   ► but you were still downloading it

00:13:25 ◼   ► and it was like taking up space on a hard drive.

00:13:28 ◼   ► - Exactly, and in hindsight, it makes total sense

00:13:31 ◼   ► why they would call that a hobby,

00:13:32 ◼   ► 'cause it didn't work that well.

00:13:34 ◼   ► It wasn't a good consumer experience.

00:13:37 ◼   ► There was no airplay.

00:13:39 ◼   ► There was very little.

00:13:42 ◼   ► You needed it to have a big hard drive

00:13:44 ◼   ► just so you could store the movies that you bought

00:13:46 ◼   ► 'cause you weren't getting them any other way.

00:13:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think we forget how much

00:13:54 ◼   ► just home bandwidth has improved in the last eight, nine years.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Yeah, geez, 2007 that first one came out. That does, it seems like a lot longer ago than that.

00:14:05 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think, you know, you go back in time to 2007 and, you know, run a speed test,

00:14:09 ◼   ► you probably have a lot, most people would probably have a lot slower connection at home.

00:14:13 ◼   ► I remember it used to be a freak, a common problem with that where you would get like ready to,

00:14:19 ◼   ► I do remember now that it definitely played before it completely downloaded a movie,

00:14:23 ◼   ► but it would give you like a ready to play and like for me like the best you ever got would be like ready to play in

00:14:29 ◼   ► two minutes

00:14:31 ◼   ► And you'd wait two minutes and you know, maybe go to the bathroom before the movie started

00:14:36 ◼   ► Maybe go mix a drink or something like that and then it would go but then sometimes you would get it

00:14:40 ◼   ► It'd be like ready to play 30 minutes spin spin spin

00:14:44 ◼   ► Or the work 31 minutes you were if you had a bandwidth problem going on

00:14:50 ◼   ► Ready to and you've got the popcorn popped and everything and then it's like ready to play 17 hours

00:14:55 ◼   ► 17 hours 43 minutes

00:14:58 ◼   ► Part one as a as a modern dad that really it just it really felt like it really felt like I was just letting my family down

00:15:07 ◼   ► Right, but you know

00:15:10 ◼   ► You could always go to the blockbuster video and rent the DVD in the same amount of time

00:15:14 ◼   ► Right like in the Norman Rockwell America where your dad is the guy who could like fix the chain on your bike

00:15:20 ◼   ► You know like you bust the chain on your bike and your dad

00:15:22 ◼   ► You know would have like a bench in his basement or the garage where you could like

00:15:27 ◼   ► Do whatever it takes to fix a busted bike chain like it my version of that is you know a large part of it involves

00:15:35 ◼   ► You know ones and zeros and connecting picture and making them work, and then you promise your family

00:15:40 ◼   ► You know like hey

00:15:41 ◼   ► Let's watch the new Pixar and everybody's excited and like you said the popcorns popped

00:15:46 ◼   ► and it says ready to play in 17 hours and it just never goes on well and I know

00:15:50 ◼   ► there are still times today I know that I don't know about with the new Apple TV

00:15:54 ◼   ► I've never had a problem like that yet in a week that I've had the new Apple TV

00:15:57 ◼   ► but I know that there are times where even with like the the third generation

00:16:01 ◼   ► Apple TV that just got superseded last week that people would get problems like

00:16:05 ◼   ► that or or just get a spinner that never stops you know you for whatever reason

00:16:10 ◼   ► yeah those edge cases those edge cases where you wouldn't know what to do like

00:16:15 ◼   ► the Apple TV wouldn't know what to do just because something went wrong but it didn't know how to

00:16:20 ◼   ► like correct itself quickly. Like if you like iTunes can't download this purchase that kind of

00:16:25 ◼   ► that kind of error message that it wasn't really clear what the hell happened except that the thing

00:16:29 ◼   ► that you bought won't play on your thing. But yeah there's no there's no better example of what it

00:16:38 ◼   ► what it of that domestic kind of uncomfortableness that happens when you and your you know your

00:16:45 ◼   ► domestic partner, your spouse are sitting down and she or he can't understand why you're so, why,

00:16:52 ◼   ► A) why you can't fix this thing because all she wants to do is watch a movie, but also

00:17:00 ◼   ► why you're spending so much time sweating it because like this is the future,

00:17:04 ◼   ► this thing that we hooked up to our computer is the future and just like give it time,

00:17:11 ◼   ► Just be patient. And she's like, there's a VCR sitting right there, like right there. We've got a copy of Beetlejuice, ready to go.

00:17:19 ◼   ► Right, and when we used to watch them on discs, DVDs or Blu-rays, or even going back to the tapes, where the worst thing you could have with the tape is you'd have to wait for it to rewind.

00:17:30 ◼   ► Even going back to that era, at least once, you know, the worst case scenario is that you,

00:17:35 ◼   ► maybe your DVDs in the shelf in the living room aren't alphabetized, you know, and it might take

00:17:41 ◼   ► a minute or two. Like, ever have that problem where it's like, where the hell is the movie?

00:17:45 ◼   ► Sure. Yeah, because they're very thin boxes. And I mean, sometimes a DVD scratches and it won't,

00:17:52 ◼   ► and it skips and it won't play. VHS, you take it out of the deck and you put it in your little

00:17:59 ◼   ► thing like your little car rewinder um you know your little rewind your VHS rewinder that's shaped

00:18:05 ◼   ► like a car wait for it maybe like two minutes to rewind um it seems like i guess the more complicated

00:18:11 ◼   ► technology gets this is a real uh Irma Bombeck observation the more complicated technology gets

00:18:19 ◼   ► more of a pain in the ass it is um it doesn't go over well when you get the

00:18:25 ◼   ► you get the 17 hours until it's ready to play.

00:18:27 ◼   ► Ben

00:18:29 ◼   ► But not only that, but my specialty was like AV stuff. Like I was AV guy in the family and

00:18:33 ◼   ► would always have every cable for everything and if my dad couldn't figure out how to

00:18:38 ◼   ► get the damn receiver to go to the DVD player then I would just like print out instructions and stuff.

00:18:43 ◼   ► But when it's in software, unless you're like a real smart person, you can't figure it out.

00:18:50 ◼   ► There's no troubleshooting it. You just gotta hit the thing.

00:18:53 ◼   ► thing. But this one seems pretty rock solid though.

00:19:00 ◼   ► The new Apple TV.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Perfect. Yeah, performances. I've had a couple of crashes. Not system crashes, but app crashes.

00:19:08 ◼   ► The worst thing I've seen so far is that I've had a couple of times where it's like I turn

00:19:14 ◼   ► my TV back on. And this is not Apple TV's fault, or at least it can't be, because my

00:19:19 ◼   ► My TV is so old that it doesn't have the,

00:19:22 ◼   ► it's called HDMI-CEC,

00:19:27 ◼   ► which is the way that if your devices all speak HDMI-CEC,

00:19:32 ◼   ► they can turn each other on and off

00:19:36 ◼   ► and they can do things like change the HDMI input.

00:19:40 ◼   ► So with an ideal TV set, in theory,

00:19:43 ◼   ► you can just turn on your Apple TV

00:19:45 ◼   ► and it will also turn on your TV

00:19:47 ◼   ► and will switch the input on your TV to the Apple TV input.

00:19:50 ◼   ► So you just do one, you know, hit one button

00:19:52 ◼   ► and it all goes on.

00:19:53 ◼   ► I don't have that.

00:19:56 ◼   ► My TV isn't even supposed to do that.

00:19:58 ◼   ► So I have to turn the TV on first

00:20:01 ◼   ► and then switch the input on the TV remote

00:20:03 ◼   ► and then turn on the Apple TV or vice versa.

00:20:05 ◼   ► But I've had twice so far in the last few days

00:20:07 ◼   ► where the Apple TV turns on,

00:20:09 ◼   ► I see the little white light on it,

00:20:11 ◼   ► but I don't see anything on screen, it's just like black.

00:20:16 ◼   ► But it's also not like a no signal picture.

00:20:18 ◼   ► It's just like still there.

00:20:21 ◼   ► - So what do you do?

00:20:22 ◼   ► You hit the menu button?

00:20:23 ◼   ► - What seems to fix it for me is switching to another HD.

00:20:29 ◼   ► This doesn't make any sense.

00:20:30 ◼   ► I don't even get how this would fix it.

00:20:32 ◼   ► But it seems like if I switch to another input on the TV,

00:20:36 ◼   ► like to the TiVo and then go back to Apple TV

00:20:38 ◼   ► and then hit menu or something or home, it'll work.

00:20:43 ◼   ► but if I don't switch, I can just sit there

00:20:46 ◼   ► and hit home or menu and it doesn't do anything.

00:20:48 ◼   ► Maybe, and that seems like a placebo to me

00:20:50 ◼   ► because switching the HDMI input on the TV

00:20:52 ◼   ► shouldn't affect what the Apple TV is sending out at all.

00:20:57 ◼   ► - Well, I think it just kind of rejiggers it a little bit.

00:21:01 ◼   ► - I think that's what I, if I'm right

00:21:03 ◼   ► that it's not a placebo, I do think that that's it,

00:21:05 ◼   ► that there's some kind of rejiggering.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Like when you first switch,

00:21:09 ◼   ► I don't know anything about HDMI,

00:21:11 ◼   ► I don't know how it works.

00:21:12 ◼   ► - Well, it is bi-directional.

00:21:13 ◼   ► - Right, and so in other words, yeah.

00:21:15 ◼   ► So the rejiggering might be like

00:21:17 ◼   ► when I switch the TV's input to the TiVo

00:21:22 ◼   ► and it's away from Apple TV.

00:21:24 ◼   ► It might tell the Apple TV, okay, I'm leaving.

00:21:27 ◼   ► And then when I switch back, it's like, hey, I'm here again.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And then the Apple TV somehow.

00:21:31 ◼   ► And I never had that problem with my previous Apple TV.

00:21:35 ◼   ► And I can't help but think it's some kind

00:21:36 ◼   ► of little silly bug and they will fix it.

00:21:39 ◼   ► And it's probably the type of bug

00:21:40 ◼   ► that was easily slipped through

00:21:42 ◼   ► because I'll bet that internally at Apple

00:21:44 ◼   ► they weren't really testing on a lot of TVs

00:21:46 ◼   ► as old as mine.

00:21:48 ◼   ► - Right, well, who knows?

00:21:49 ◼   ► I bet they have a warehouse full of every single TV

00:21:53 ◼   ► in the last two decades,

00:21:56 ◼   ► since flat screens have started being made

00:21:59 ◼   ► or since the HDMI standard came out.

00:22:02 ◼   ► I bet they test them pretty extensively.

00:22:04 ◼   ► They probably just don't put very much weight

00:22:07 ◼   ► into making it work perfectly.

00:22:09 ◼   ► - Well, and it doesn't happen every time.

00:22:11 ◼   ► So I you know, I'm not too concerned about it and it's you know

00:22:15 ◼   ► once you're already it I'm so used to the the little back-and-forth dance of

00:22:19 ◼   ► I got to use like two or three different remotes turn on the sound turn on the TV turn the input on the TV turn

00:22:25 ◼   ► On the thing but then once I have that set up then it once it's working. I can just use the Apple TV remote

00:22:29 ◼   ► I'm happy. Yeah, so we have a couple of these wait. We have a couple of these smart TVs at home

00:22:37 ◼   ► And I heard you and you and guy talking about this a little bit

00:22:39 ◼   ► He said he has a TV with a Netflix app built into it. Yeah, so Vizio makes these and they're real cheap

00:22:44 ◼   ► And they're smart TVs and they've got you know, they've got most of the apps. They've got Netflix Hulu

00:22:50 ◼   ► YouTube

00:22:52 ◼   ► Other ones Yahoo all of them the main

00:22:55 ◼   ► streaming video apps and there's there's something so freeing about

00:23:02 ◼   ► Like one of the TVs we have is 32 inches because it's just meant to go in like in the playroom

00:23:07 ◼   ► Basically, there's something so freeing about unplugging it picking it up putting it somewhere else. It's already on the Wi-Fi

00:23:12 ◼   ► Putting it down anywhere in the house and you just like launch the Netflix app and it'll play a video

00:23:18 ◼   ► Without any other crap connected to it. That's

00:23:21 ◼   ► You know, that's like that that is the era of software

00:23:25 ◼   ► in TV and I don't think most people have gotten to like really like

00:23:30 ◼   ► really see that future all that much. Just because we've, the

00:23:36 ◼   ► development of software in TV, in this way that we're seeing in

00:23:42 ◼   ► Apple TV has been really gone going on, it's been going on

00:23:46 ◼   ► concurrently, where smart where TVs themselves are getting

00:23:50 ◼   ► smart, but also there's just every every hardware company out

00:23:53 ◼   ► there is making its own little box that you're supposed to plug

00:23:56 ◼   ► So, it's really two roads at the same time, and it's a matter of who's kind of getting there first.

00:24:04 ◼   ► And I, for my money, you know, the Apple TV model, this really, really smart, elegant, you know,

00:24:13 ◼   ► box that holds everything, is probably the way that I would go instead of, you know, the other

00:24:21 ◼   ► model, which is them making their own screen or whatever it is.

00:24:23 ◼   ► - Did you see that I linked to a thing the other day

00:24:27 ◼   ► on Daring Fireball written by Abdel Ibrahim.

00:24:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I read that.

00:24:32 ◼   ► - He's got his own blog, but he wrote this one at Medium

00:24:35 ◼   ► and more or less he's saying, and this is after

00:24:39 ◼   ► he got his hands on the new Apple TV,

00:24:41 ◼   ► that he still thinks Apple is gonna build a TV set

00:24:43 ◼   ► with Apple TV built in, sort of the white whale

00:24:47 ◼   ► of Apple TV.

00:24:48 ◼   ► - Sure, sure.

00:24:49 ◼   ► - And I do see, you can't help but see the appeal

00:24:53 ◼   ► that a little bit. Even going back to my childhood, I mean it was probably before you were born,

00:25:01 ◼   ► you're a youngster, but when we first got our Atari 2600 and you'd hook it up to the

00:25:08 ◼   ► TV on the coaxial end, I guess, or maybe it wasn't even coaxial end. No, it wasn't.

00:25:15 ◼   ► There was this…

00:25:16 ◼   ► Ben: You screw them in. You screw them in with the little pins that you screw in.

00:25:19 ◼   ► - Like two little prongs, like two little prongs

00:25:22 ◼   ► and you'd screw them in.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It was like to hook up your Atari 2600,

00:25:26 ◼   ► you were like risking a shock.

00:25:30 ◼   ► But there was also, and I still, to this day,

00:25:34 ◼   ► this is probably something I should look up,

00:25:36 ◼   ► 'cause I've been curious about it since I was like seven,

00:25:39 ◼   ► is you had the option between doing it

00:25:40 ◼   ► on channel two or channel three.

00:25:42 ◼   ► - Oh no, it was three or four, wasn't it?

00:25:43 ◼   ► - Or three or four, whatever it was.

00:25:45 ◼   ► It was two of the lower channels.

00:25:46 ◼   ► And I don't know why that was an option.

00:25:48 ◼   ► there must have been some kind of case where this--

00:25:53 ◼   ► - Frequency interference.

00:25:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, that like if you got like a real strong signal

00:25:56 ◼   ► from your local channel three station

00:25:58 ◼   ► that channel four would be better for Atari or something.

00:26:00 ◼   ► - Right, or your microwave was on channel three,

00:26:02 ◼   ► so you had to put your Atari on channel four.

00:26:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:26:06 ◼   ► - Something stupid like that, you know?

00:26:07 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:26:08 ◼   ► - Just, oh God, analog, the analog video world

00:26:11 ◼   ► could not have gone away sooner, as far as I'm concerned.

00:26:14 ◼   ► - But even that little, once you had the thing hooked up

00:26:17 ◼   ► and there was the two, three thing.

00:26:19 ◼   ► And I don't know, sometimes it would,

00:26:21 ◼   ► I don't even know why, like maybe somebody

00:26:22 ◼   ► would accidentally flip that switch

00:26:24 ◼   ► 'cause they thought they were flipping

00:26:25 ◼   ► the difficulty switch on the Atari.

00:26:28 ◼   ► And then you'd be like, your Atari,

00:26:30 ◼   ► it wouldn't come on, it would just be static,

00:26:32 ◼   ► and you'd be like, turn the dial, you know,

00:26:34 ◼   ► and you turn the dial to four,

00:26:35 ◼   ► and it's like, anything like that is such,

00:26:37 ◼   ► it just feels irritating.

00:26:40 ◼   ► It just feels-- - It is irritating.

00:26:41 ◼   ► - It just feels like we're still in a race

00:26:45 ◼   ► to get back to the simplicity of TV

00:26:49 ◼   ► before there was anything you could ever plug into your TV,

00:26:51 ◼   ► where it was just a box that you turned on

00:26:53 ◼   ► and there was a dial that had 14 things on it.

00:26:58 ◼   ► It was like two through 13 and UHF, whatever that was.

00:27:02 ◼   ► And that was it.

00:27:04 ◼   ► You'd turn the dial to one of those 14 things

00:27:08 ◼   ► and you could turn the thing on or off and that was it.

00:27:13 ◼   ► - And there were four companies,

00:27:16 ◼   ► there were three companies out there

00:27:18 ◼   ► making everything that you could possibly need to watch.

00:27:20 ◼   ► - Well, everything that you really wanted to watch, right?

00:27:23 ◼   ► All of the prime time stuff

00:27:24 ◼   ► came from three different companies,

00:27:26 ◼   ► ABC, NBC, CBS.

00:27:28 ◼   ► I don't know what they had around the world,

00:27:29 ◼   ► but in the US that's what we had and we liked it.

00:27:32 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:34 ◼   ► Now obviously, we don't wanna go back to that,

00:27:37 ◼   ► but I feel like we've spent 30 years

00:27:40 ◼   ► trying to get back to that level of simplicity.

00:27:43 ◼   ► Absolutely. And I think where we're getting there is the intelligence of discovery, like the,

00:27:51 ◼   ► how software makes it so much easier, even though there's literally exponentially,

00:27:56 ◼   ► you know, thousands to hundreds of thousands of times more content out there,

00:28:06 ◼   ► always available for us than there used to be with just the three channels, you know, 14 channels.

00:28:13 ◼   ► The software has made it available—has made it so that we could filter and find the equivalent of

00:28:22 ◼   ► those three channels of stuff that we really want to watch at any given time. At least that's the

00:28:27 ◼   ► theory. Right. And it just can get confusing. Like, I've been listening—I listened to some

00:28:33 ◼   ► podcast this week where people were talking about Apple TV and like Jason Snell was saying that,

00:28:39 ◼   ► you know, for years now or at least the last few years he spent more, his family spent more

00:28:43 ◼   ► of their time when they watched Netflix doing it through the TiVo than doing it through Apple TV

00:28:47 ◼   ► and like Netflix is a perfect example because Netflix really is everywhere. It's on any device

00:28:54 ◼   ► that will take them. And so--

00:28:57 ◼   ► So I had a, I first saw it on a Wii.

00:29:00 ◼   ► Um, I didn't even have a streaming, I think Roku was maybe the first streaming box that got Netflix, but you could get the disc for, uh, for the Wii and launch that app from the disc and it would let you browse the Netflix streaming content.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And it was like, it was miraculous.

00:29:18 ◼   ► It was even kind of better than the other, like the Netflix, um, experience in the browser.

00:29:26 ◼   ► - But it's like there's so many ways to do it.

00:29:30 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:29:31 ◼   ► So you could use your TiVo, you could use your Wii,

00:29:33 ◼   ► you could use your PlayStation.

00:29:35 ◼   ► I guess there's one for Xbox.

00:29:36 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't have an Xbox.

00:29:38 ◼   ► But some of your TVs, like we were just saying,

00:29:43 ◼   ► some of your TVs have Netflix built right in.

00:29:45 ◼   ► So you don't even need to have a box connected,

00:29:47 ◼   ► or you could use your Apple TV,

00:29:49 ◼   ► or you could use the app on your phone or whatever

00:29:53 ◼   ► and just airplay it over to your Apple TV

00:29:56 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:29:58 ◼   ► - And it's all essentially just code.

00:30:00 ◼   ► It's just code whose only purpose is to deliver you

00:30:05 ◼   ► all of that media that Netflix has available.

00:30:07 ◼   ► - Right, but what I can see is,

00:30:10 ◼   ► I can kind of, and this is to me,

00:30:12 ◼   ► gets to the heart of what I feel like people miss.

00:30:15 ◼   ► I can kind of see how this new Apple TV

00:30:17 ◼   ► could be the only thing on your TV.

00:30:20 ◼   ► - Absolutely.

00:30:22 ◼   ► what I would like. I mean, as soon as it can get me every single piece of TV content I could

00:30:27 ◼   ► conceivably need, I do not want to switch to input 2.

00:30:30 ◼   ► I used to think that Apple was going to make a TV. I would agree with

00:30:41 ◼   ► Abdel's assessment like maybe a year or two ago. I don't think it makes sense for them to do it

00:30:50 ◼   ► anymore because they're able to iterate on this box so much faster than people want to buy a new

00:30:57 ◼   ► screen. That's personal. And we've talked, I think this is probably like the most evergreen topic in

00:31:08 ◼   ► the history of talking about Apple stuff because it's, I mean we've been talking about this

00:31:13 ◼   ► forever. I mean Dan Benjamin and I used to talk about this. I mean that was like 20 years ago,

00:31:18 ◼   ► It was a long time ago.

00:31:23 ◼   ► And my old thinking, well, of course they'll do it, is why sell a $100 box for a $2,000

00:31:32 ◼   ► TV instead of selling a $2,000 TV or for Apple a $3,000 TV?

00:31:38 ◼   ► And in the years since that basic thinking, the average cost of a big flat screen modern

00:31:43 ◼   ► TV has dropped way below.

00:31:45 ◼   ► They're not $2,000 anymore.

00:31:47 ◼   ► You can buy one for $2,000, but most people don't.

00:31:50 ◼   ► Most people get them for just a couple hundred bucks.

00:31:51 ◼   ► So there's not that much more money there.

00:31:53 ◼   ► - And maybe at some point they get to an equilibrium

00:31:56 ◼   ► where the cost of the screen comes down so low,

00:31:59 ◼   ► maybe to the point where it's the same cost as an iPhone,

00:32:02 ◼   ► and then the rest of it, the cost is subsidized

00:32:04 ◼   ► by all the media that you're gonna buy.

00:32:06 ◼   ► - Right. - Through it anyway.

00:32:08 ◼   ► - Right, and the other thing that makes me,

00:32:10 ◼   ► and I link to it and I'm optimistic,

00:32:12 ◼   ► 'cause I'd like to kinda see it,

00:32:14 ◼   ► and I would like to buy it, no matter what it costs.

00:32:17 ◼   ► I would like to buy the Apple branded TV.

00:32:19 ◼   ► I don't think that they'll make it though

00:32:23 ◼   ► because I feel like they would still have to make the box

00:32:28 ◼   ► and keep it up to date because so many people have a TV

00:32:31 ◼   ► that they don't wanna pay to replace.

00:32:34 ◼   ► - Yeah. - 'Cause it's, you know,

00:32:35 ◼   ► they've just bought it in the last few years,

00:32:37 ◼   ► it's, you know, good enough.

00:32:38 ◼   ► And as much as the people like us who obsess about this

00:32:42 ◼   ► and would just go, if somebody said,

00:32:44 ◼   ► here's the Apple TV, we're not gonna even tell you

00:32:46 ◼   ► the specs on it, do you wanna buy it or not?

00:32:47 ◼   ► Of course, I would just buy it.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Right, but we're not normal.

00:32:50 ◼   ► Normal people, and it gets lost because people,

00:32:54 ◼   ► normal people do upgrade their phones a lot.

00:32:56 ◼   ► It's just the way that it is.

00:32:57 ◼   ► Phones take a beating, they, you know,

00:33:00 ◼   ► a lot of totally normal, non-nerd people

00:33:03 ◼   ► upgrade their phone every two years,

00:33:05 ◼   ► and every three years, the number's even bigger.

00:33:08 ◼   ► People aren't like that with things like TVs.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And, you know, we might do it just because it's Apple,

00:33:14 ◼   ► but normal people wouldn't.

00:33:15 ◼   ► So it wouldn't make sense to say the only way

00:33:17 ◼   ► to get the current Apple TV experience

00:33:20 ◼   ► is to buy the entire Apple TV set.

00:33:24 ◼   ► So they'd still have to make the box.

00:33:26 ◼   ► And if they're still gonna make the box,

00:33:27 ◼   ► why not just make the box and just have that be it

00:33:29 ◼   ► and hook it up to everybody's TV?

00:33:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's the way it's gonna shake out.

00:33:35 ◼   ► And there's a couple of other reasons,

00:33:37 ◼   ► I believe, that now too.

00:33:38 ◼   ► And actually, it's funny, I noticed this phenomenon

00:33:43 ◼   ► Because when we shoot commercials in locations a lot, in people's real homes, and a lot of

00:33:49 ◼   ► the times we're looking for rich people homes.

00:33:53 ◼   ► And around LA, a lot of rich people will rent out their homes for locations.

00:33:57 ◼   ► And you can always see, you can walk into a home of any era and see when the owners

00:34:04 ◼   ► made their money, because you can tell when their TVs were installed, like when their

00:34:08 ◼   ► flat screens were purchased and installed on their walls because people don't replace their

00:34:14 ◼   ► TVs that that often. So a lot of times it's very common is go walk into like a two, three million

00:34:19 ◼   ► dollar house and all the flat screens are from, you know, 2006 or something with like super huge

00:34:26 ◼   ► bevel, you know, edges on the, you know, flat screens didn't start getting attractive until

00:34:33 ◼   ► very recently. And that's the other reason that I don't think Apple needs to make a TV

00:34:37 ◼   ► is because, you know, like I'm a big fan of Vizio TVs.

00:34:42 ◼   ► Vizio makes the bezel so small that you can barely see it.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And if it's any smaller, it's just a piece of glass.

00:34:48 ◼   ► And if Apple makes a piece of glass, then I'll buy that.

00:34:50 ◼   ► But otherwise, I'm fine.

00:34:52 ◼   ► I don't need, you know,

00:34:53 ◼   ► I don't need anodized aluminum or anything.

00:34:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've seen that too, looking at houses.

00:35:00 ◼   ► Like a couple months ago, we were looking at,

00:35:02 ◼   ► maybe thinking about a movement here.

00:35:04 ◼   ► And the place we looked at had,

00:35:06 ◼   ► It was a beautiful house overall.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Didn't really work for us,

00:35:10 ◼   ► but overall it was a beautiful house.

00:35:12 ◼   ► Almost more like so beautiful,

00:35:16 ◼   ► like beautiful for like taking pictures of the house

00:35:19 ◼   ► as opposed to actually living there.

00:35:21 ◼   ► - Sure, it stayed as well.

00:35:22 ◼   ► - It had this big living room, kitchen sort of

00:35:27 ◼   ► combination room with double height ceilings.

00:35:29 ◼   ► It was more like a lobby than like a room.

00:35:32 ◼   ► It almost was like the look more like the lobby

00:35:35 ◼   ► to like a really boutique small hotel.

00:35:38 ◼   ► And they had a beautiful fireplace,

00:35:40 ◼   ► and the fireplace all the way from the ground

00:35:43 ◼   ► to the ceiling above it was like rocks set together.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Not quite bricks 'cause they were like irregular,

00:35:51 ◼   ► but they did all the work of finding rocks

00:35:53 ◼   ► that perfectly fit together to form a column

00:35:55 ◼   ► going up to the ceiling.

00:35:56 ◼   ► And then set into the rocks above the fireplace

00:35:59 ◼   ► was space to install your flat screen TV.

00:36:02 ◼   ► And it was like, maybe like 46 inches.

00:36:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:06 ◼   ► Diagonally. - Right, yeah.

00:36:08 ◼   ► - And that's what they had.

00:36:09 ◼   ► They had like a 46 inch TV in there.

00:36:12 ◼   ► And we're in there as a family looking at this house

00:36:15 ◼   ► and I just looked at Jonas and Jonas looked at me

00:36:17 ◼   ► and he just shook his head. (laughing)

00:36:20 ◼   ► - He was disappointed.

00:36:21 ◼   ► - Right, but also like they literally set

00:36:24 ◼   ► the maximum size of a TV you could have

00:36:26 ◼   ► in this room in stone.

00:36:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh, they literally set it in stone.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Well, you can take the TV out, but then the only logical place to put a TV in this room

00:36:37 ◼   ► was there.

00:36:38 ◼   ► I mean, you can put a TV anywhere, but there's certain rooms, like a living room type thing

00:36:43 ◼   ► where you go in and it's like you can just tell.

00:36:46 ◼   ► If we're going to put a TV in this room, the TV is going to go there because it doesn't

00:36:49 ◼   ► really, for symmetry reasons or other layout reasons.

00:36:53 ◼   ► The only real place to put it would be on the wall above the fireplace.

00:36:56 ◼   ► It was set into the stone.

00:36:58 ◼   ► There was like a cutout where you would put your flat screen TV.

00:37:01 ◼   ► And I would say the maximum TV that would fit in there

00:37:03 ◼   ► was like maybe 46, maybe even a little smaller.

00:37:06 ◼   ► - Right, oh that's a shame.

00:37:07 ◼   ► - So you could just find, you could just find out,

00:37:08 ◼   ► you could, again like you said, I bet,

00:37:10 ◼   ► I don't know what time, what year the house was built,

00:37:12 ◼   ► but I'm sure you could figure it out

00:37:14 ◼   ► by finding out what year a 46 inch TV

00:37:16 ◼   ► was like the best model you could buy.

00:37:18 ◼   ► - The premium model.

00:37:19 ◼   ► - Right.

00:37:20 ◼   ► - When that was the model that cost like $5,000.

00:37:24 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:37:25 ◼   ► - 'Cause that's what rich people will spend on a TV.

00:37:28 ◼   ► - But, and then the last point, and you alluded to this,

00:37:29 ◼   ► but I think it definitely bears repeating,

00:37:32 ◼   ► is if Apple sold, let's say, a $2,000 TV set,

00:37:37 ◼   ► it would be so awesome for a year,

00:37:39 ◼   ► and then 12 months later, it's whatever A10 or A11,

00:37:44 ◼   ► whatever year you're imagining Apple comes out with this,

00:37:47 ◼   ► it's A10 system on a chip is all of a sudden outdated.

00:37:51 ◼   ► And nobody is going to buy a new TV set every year.

00:37:55 ◼   ► People might buy a new Apple TV box

00:37:57 ◼   ► that cost $100 every year, or every other year maybe,

00:38:00 ◼   ► just to keep up with, you know,

00:38:02 ◼   ► oh, we'll move the old one to the living room,

00:38:04 ◼   ► put a new one in it, you know,

00:38:05 ◼   ► or old one to the bedroom

00:38:06 ◼   ► and put a new one in the living room.

00:38:08 ◼   ► No one's gonna do that with actual TV sets.

00:38:11 ◼   ► And I do feel, I feel like there are tremendous advantages

00:38:14 ◼   ► that Apple's going to bring to bear on this market

00:38:16 ◼   ► and when it comes to games and stuff like that,

00:38:18 ◼   ► by having these A series chips

00:38:20 ◼   ► that get so much faster year over year.

00:38:22 ◼   ► And that only makes sense if Apple TV is a box,

00:38:26 ◼   ► not an actual TV set.

00:38:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's gonna be a while before

00:38:30 ◼   ► the actual screens themselves have such a leap

00:38:34 ◼   ► in technology that only one company's doing it

00:38:36 ◼   ► and you have to go with that company.

00:38:38 ◼   ► Something like stereo without glasses

00:38:41 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:38:42 ◼   ► Otherwise, higher resolution, fine.

00:38:45 ◼   ► 4K TV, you can't really tell the difference

00:38:49 ◼   ► from a certain distance away from it.

00:38:51 ◼   ► So the other ones are really good

00:38:54 ◼   ► and they're very cost effective.

00:38:55 ◼   ► You can get just a really, really good 50, 60-inch TV

00:39:00 ◼   ► for three, four, or $500 now.

00:39:04 ◼   ► - That's crazy.

00:39:05 ◼   ► Blows my mind.

00:39:06 ◼   ► All right, hold on a thought.

00:39:07 ◼   ► It'd remind me, I'm gonna take a break here

00:39:09 ◼   ► and thank a sponsor.

00:39:10 ◼   ► I wanna talk about 4K when we come back, and I'll forget.

00:39:13 ◼   ► But it's a funny coincidence.

00:39:16 ◼   ► You were saying, wouldn't it be great if Apple

00:39:17 ◼   ► just made a TV that was a piece of glass without a frame?

00:39:20 ◼   ► Well, guess what?

00:39:21 ◼   ► It doesn't play TV, but our first sponsor is Fracture.

00:39:24 ◼   ► Do that for your still photography.

00:39:27 ◼   ► You guys know Fracture, they have sponsored this show

00:39:31 ◼   ► for a long time now on a frequent basis.

00:39:33 ◼   ► They're the company, you send them,

00:39:35 ◼   ► you go to their website, you give them your still photos,

00:39:37 ◼   ► and you pick a size, and then they print them on the back,

00:39:41 ◼   ► right on a piece of glass.

00:39:42 ◼   ► They just print the photo right on this glass,

00:39:45 ◼   ► and then they mail it to you

00:39:46 ◼   ► in a really cool little package,

00:39:47 ◼   ► and then you hang this thing,

00:39:49 ◼   ► hang these pictures up all over your house.

00:39:51 ◼   ► And they're beautiful,

00:39:52 ◼   ► and they're really high quality prints.

00:39:54 ◼   ► It's not a piece of paper stuck to the glass.

00:39:56 ◼   ► It's not a frame.

00:39:57 ◼   ► It's a piece of glass,

00:39:59 ◼   ► and they have some kind of proprietary technology.

00:40:02 ◼   ► They call it the fractary

00:40:04 ◼   ► down in beautiful Gainesville, Florida,

00:40:06 ◼   ► where they print these things.

00:40:08 ◼   ► So great, so convenient, so beautiful.

00:40:11 ◼   ► No border.

00:40:12 ◼   ► You don't need a frame around this.

00:40:13 ◼   ► You don't need to put it in a frame.

00:40:15 ◼   ► There is no frame around it.

00:40:16 ◼   ► It's just a piece of glass, border to border

00:40:18 ◼   ► with your pictures on it.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Now, they wanna thank all of you.

00:40:21 ◼   ► They want me to thank all of you.

00:40:23 ◼   ► The reason they keep sponsoring our show

00:40:25 ◼   ► is that you guys keep buying these pictures from them.

00:40:30 ◼   ► I don't blame you, they're great.

00:40:31 ◼   ► We buy 'em too.

00:40:32 ◼   ► They wanna thank you for your support.

00:40:34 ◼   ► But they want me to remind you

00:40:37 ◼   ► that if you're gonna buy these as gifts

00:40:40 ◼   ► for the holiday season, and you should,

00:40:42 ◼   ► because these are just the best gifts.

00:40:45 ◼   ► If you've got kids or pets or something like that

00:40:48 ◼   ► where you can just give somebody in your life

00:40:51 ◼   ► a picture of people in your family.

00:40:54 ◼   ► Great, great gift, really great.

00:40:57 ◼   ► They want you to go ahead, just do it now.

00:41:00 ◼   ► Take like half an hour, find the best pictures

00:41:02 ◼   ► you've taken in the last year and send them to Fracture.

00:41:06 ◼   ► Do it now in early November because they can,

00:41:10 ◼   ► they print these things fast, but they fall behind

00:41:12 ◼   ► in the holiday season because most of us

00:41:15 ◼   ► procrastinate on buying our holiday gifts.

00:41:17 ◼   ► And they'll tell you when you go to the site,

00:41:19 ◼   ► Whenever you're, whatever day you're listening

00:41:20 ◼   ► to this broadcast, you can go there

00:41:23 ◼   ► and they give you like an estimated shipping date.

00:41:26 ◼   ► And if you do it now in early November,

00:41:28 ◼   ► it'll happen, no problem, you'll get it in a couple days.

00:41:30 ◼   ► But do it now because if you wait till like mid-December,

00:41:33 ◼   ► you're gonna run up to, wow, you know, maybe or maybe not,

00:41:36 ◼   ► it'll get to you before whatever holiday it is

00:41:39 ◼   ► that you're hoping to get it delivered by.

00:41:41 ◼   ► So just do it now and what a relief it'll be

00:41:44 ◼   ► to get it off, you know, get it off your back

00:41:46 ◼   ► that you've, you know, got these, all these people

00:41:48 ◼   ► get gifts for for the holiday season. It's an easy gift to buy. It is a gift that makes

00:41:54 ◼   ► people really happy. But do it now. So here's the important part. You remember this code

00:41:59 ◼   ► Daring Fireball. Use that and you'll get 15% off if it's your first order. And go check

00:42:05 ◼   ► them out at their website which is fractureme.com. And remember that code Daring Fireball and

00:42:12 ◼   ► you'll save some dough on it. Nice. Good segue.

00:42:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a great, they weren't even scheduled to sponsor the show.

00:42:20 ◼   ► I just figured out you just threw one in because that's exactly when you said that.

00:42:24 ◼   ► I thought, wouldn't that be cool if Apple, I was imagining in my mind, uh, an edge to

00:42:29 ◼   ► edge display with literally no bezel, which you wouldn't want on a handheld device because

00:42:34 ◼   ► you need something for your hands to rest your fingers on, but it would be cool on TV.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Absolutely and it feels like, you know, we can all sort of envision a future where screens

00:42:44 ◼   ► are so ubiquitous that the materials that make them are, and the materials that make them are so,

00:42:51 ◼   ► you know, so negligibly cheap that it's like Blade Runner time and, you know,

00:43:00 ◼   ► every single surface you look around at is glowing.

00:43:02 ◼   ► Pete: You were gonna talk-

00:43:04 ◼   ► Pete; And it's a race in time to see whether that happens or whether we all have augmented reality

00:43:11 ◼   ► displays on our faces and we don't even need physical screens anymore.

00:43:18 ◼   ► Friend of the show, yeah, 4K.

00:43:20 ◼   ► Friend of the show, Todd, who works, as they say, in the industry.

00:43:29 ◼   ► He does visual effects.

00:43:34 ◼   ► He is a listener to the show.

00:43:36 ◼   ► He wrote in, Guy and I were talking about 4K and I was, you know, maybe in response

00:43:41 ◼   ► to my link to Abdel's thing about, hey, maybe Apple will wait till there's this industry

00:43:46 ◼   ► transition to 4K to make their move into it.

00:43:50 ◼   ► Maybe if they do do a TV set, that'll be the time they do it because people would be in

00:43:53 ◼   ► a mood to upgrade or whatever.

00:43:56 ◼   ► Todd told me something I did not know, which is that an awful lot of movies, even very

00:44:00 ◼   ► recent ones, are not mastered in 4K.

00:44:05 ◼   ► And you probably know a lot about this.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Ben

00:44:18 ◼   ► that shoot 4K or 6K and oftentimes you'll shoot in 4K,

00:44:23 ◼   ► just so you have the extra resolution

00:44:25 ◼   ► to play around with in post.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Like it makes it real easy to just push way in on a shot

00:44:31 ◼   ► and get a closeup where you hadn't planned a closeup

00:44:33 ◼   ► and you only shot a medium closeup.

00:44:35 ◼   ► - Right, in other words, you can crop the image

00:44:37 ◼   ► and still have enough pixels

00:44:38 ◼   ► to get a totally usable quality picture out of it.

00:44:42 ◼   ► - Right, but you're not actually mastering in 4K

00:44:45 ◼   ► finishing in 4k even or doing post work in 4k is that because that's still really really really really render intensive

00:44:52 ◼   ► So and especially, you know, most of the stuff that we do is for web anyway, so why would 4k really right?

00:44:59 ◼   ► I I was I was vaguely aware of this but I it never it didn't really occur to me and

00:45:05 ◼   ► And the point of this being that if you're waiting for everything to go 4k and have 4k in your living room and have 4k

00:45:11 ◼   ► You know images

00:45:14 ◼   ► Streaming and stuff like that. It's not even an issue of the bandwidth of streaming the 4k

00:45:18 ◼   ► It's that that there's just not it just doesn't make a lot of it. The stuff isn't 4k anyway

00:45:23 ◼   ► yeah, the trade-offs are

00:45:26 ◼   ► are

00:45:28 ◼   ► The benefits outweigh that I think it's gonna have it's inevitable that it'll happen eventually

00:45:32 ◼   ► but but eventually might be a long time and that the pipeline for the visual effects and stuff like that like

00:45:37 ◼   ► Doing everything in 4k even if it like you said even if it was shot in 4k in a camera

00:45:42 ◼   ► Doing everything for the effects and stuff like that in 4k. It's too it's too much of a computational overhead

00:45:48 ◼   ► Yeah, so so maybe on your breath for 4k TV set

00:45:54 ◼   ► Yeah, but maybe our eyes just need to evolve to be able to appreciate the resolution differently

00:45:58 ◼   ► I know that when we go back and look at you know standard def versus high def then there's a real mark remarkable difference

00:46:05 ◼   ► and

00:46:07 ◼   ► but but it feels like the

00:46:09 ◼   ► The diminishing returns started at 10 a.m. I think so and you know and maybe it's you know

00:46:15 ◼   ► so maybe in other words don't get your hopes up for 4k everything everywhere and I

00:46:19 ◼   ► think there's a lot of boo-hissing going on that the this new Apple TV doesn't support 4k and

00:46:25 ◼   ► I just feel like that's it

00:46:27 ◼   ► I sort of rolled my eyes at it

00:46:30 ◼   ► But now that I know a little bit more I do so even more like because there's no way that they could they can't feasibly

00:46:37 ◼   ► Send all of the stuff you get from iTunes the iTunes, you know movies and TV shows that you buy or rent or whatever

00:46:43 ◼   ► They can't send them in 4k. So why what's the point if you're just gonna be watching upscaled 1080p stuff anyway

00:46:51 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to when they support stereo stuff, you know 3d stuff because I do I do enjoy that

00:46:59 ◼   ► I do enjoy I have it. I have a couple of the TVs are

00:47:03 ◼   ► 3d I have a projector

00:47:06 ◼   ► and it's a 3D projector and you know with glasses and the whole thing and

00:47:12 ◼   ► there are actually with like with these smart TVs there are apps out there that

00:47:18 ◼   ► just serve 3D content or stream 3D content or the like if you buy a Sony

00:47:25 ◼   ► blu-ray player you can put it on your Wi-Fi network and it'll go and grab 3D

00:47:30 ◼   ► content. And I know that 3D is sort of at a standstill right now. It peaked maybe a couple

00:47:37 ◼   ► of years ago with the amount, the number of movies that were being produced and distributed in 3D.

00:47:42 ◼   ► But I don't know, I think there's still a lot of opportunity there. Even looking, like I'm staring

00:47:47 ◼   ► straight ahead at the city, the screensavers. It's the one with the Ferris wheel. I don't even know

00:47:52 ◼   ► what city it is. Is that the terms?

00:47:53 ◼   ► Yeah, that's London. That's the London Eye, the Ferris wheel.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Right. And it's beautiful. It's at magic hour or something. And I could see like this would

00:48:04 ◼   ► look stunning in 3D. But I, you know, the hunger isn't there yet.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I hate 3D. I do. I don't, I don't, but I don't, I don't dispute that you like it.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And, well, I do. I mean, but I, part of that maybe, I don't know if your

00:48:24 ◼   ► Is you know this it precedes itself is my issue. I actually have not seen a 3d movie in the last

00:48:31 ◼   ► Whatever nine months since I've had the eye issues

00:48:36 ◼   ► So I'm curious how that will actually work. Although we were at Disney and I'd watched

00:48:41 ◼   ► Oh that you know what? That's funny that you say that

00:48:43 ◼   ► That's actually funny. I'd forgot. I had totally forgotten about this. So we were at Disney in July and

00:48:51 ◼   ► We were watching one of the attractions that was 3d like a 3d movie. I

00:48:55 ◼   ► Forget which one made it might have been fill our magic. You guys have that out in California

00:49:00 ◼   ► No, it's a good one

00:49:03 ◼   ► well, but you know, it's like a little seven minute 3d movie and

00:49:07 ◼   ► It's you know

00:49:09 ◼   ► Not even that new I was probably like 15 years old

00:49:12 ◼   ► and at the time in July my you know, the

00:49:16 ◼   ► vision and binocular vision combined

00:49:19 ◼   ► you know both my eyes open was really pretty crappy still it's still crappy but it's gotten better um

00:49:26 ◼   ► it's funny i almost cried during the movie and i've seen this attraction like i don't know like

00:49:32 ◼   ► 15 20 times over the years it was the best i've seen since since my eye my left eye went bad

00:49:38 ◼   ► it was weird but i thought i actually went into it thinking i'll bet this is gonna i bet i'm not

00:49:43 ◼   ► even gonna see it in 3d uh and in fact it was the opposite it was actually the best i'd seen with

00:49:48 ◼   ► with both my eyes open, period.

00:49:51 ◼   ► - That's super cool.

00:49:53 ◼   ► I also have, like, you know this,

00:49:56 ◼   ► I developed an eye problem in the same eye

00:49:59 ◼   ► at the same time that you did.

00:50:01 ◼   ► My retina kind of exploded.

00:50:03 ◼   ► And it's like recuperating now,

00:50:06 ◼   ► but still, like almost a year ago this happened.

00:50:09 ◼   ► And that was one of the first things that came to mind was,

00:50:13 ◼   ► oh shoot, I'm not gonna be able to appreciate stereo,

00:50:18 ◼   ► like 3D movies or virtual reality just as it's starting to come to the forefront. But

00:50:23 ◼   ► what's interesting about that is that you, because of where you put the display, when you put a VR

00:50:30 ◼   ► headset on your face, the display is literally like, you know, centimeters from your eye,

00:50:36 ◼   ► or millimeters, and my vision is, my near-focus vision is like a lot better than,

00:50:46 ◼   ► You know, the distortion that happens from the retinal issue is a lot worse in the distance

00:50:51 ◼   ► than it is near focus. So I can actually probably see better through virtual reality display than

00:50:57 ◼   ► I can in actual, in the world. Yeah, I have not tried a VR headset recently, and I suspect that

00:51:03 ◼   ► for me, again, this show monthly devolves into an ophthalmology show. But the fact that, but I have

00:51:12 ◼   ► - I have two issues with my left eye.

00:51:14 ◼   ► One is I had a cataract and it was removed

00:51:16 ◼   ► and so I have an artificial,

00:51:18 ◼   ► like what old people get in their eye is the focusing lens

00:51:21 ◼   ► and it's completely inflexible, completely inflexible

00:51:24 ◼   ► 'cause it's just an artificial plastic lens.

00:51:27 ◼   ► And so when I have my contact lenses or my glasses on,

00:51:31 ◼   ► I can't focus on anything within arm's length with that eye

00:51:35 ◼   ► 'cause I need reading glasses because it's,

00:51:36 ◼   ► effectively I have like a 70-year-old's short vision.

00:51:41 ◼   ► If I take my glasses off, I can see up close,

00:51:43 ◼   ► I can focus with it really close.

00:51:45 ◼   ► Then the second problem is with the retina

00:51:46 ◼   ► where everything is distorted.

00:51:47 ◼   ► When it is in focus, it's distorted.

00:51:49 ◼   ► So my guess is for VR, my guess is that it will work for me

00:51:54 ◼   ► and maybe it'll work very well.

00:51:56 ◼   ► And just like watching 3D movies,

00:51:58 ◼   ► it might actually be the best thing that I see, period.

00:52:01 ◼   ► But I think I'll have to take my glasses off.

00:52:04 ◼   ► And I think if I'm wearing my contact lenses,

00:52:07 ◼   ► I'm not gonna be able to focus.

00:52:08 ◼   ► because it's so close, but we'll see.

00:52:11 ◼   ► I don't know, I haven't tried it.

00:52:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, it'll take some experimentation,

00:52:15 ◼   ► and you might, I mean, who knows if VR's prevalent enough,

00:52:20 ◼   ► and they might be able to just custom tweak--

00:52:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I wonder.

00:52:23 ◼   ► - A headset to your-- - Right, right.

00:52:24 ◼   ► Or maybe there's some kind of calibration step

00:52:25 ◼   ► I can go through that would handle that.

00:52:29 ◼   ► 'Cause that actually has occurred to me too for VR,

00:52:32 ◼   ► 'cause I did, I had this same thing that,

00:52:34 ◼   ► you and I have talked about this privately,

00:52:35 ◼   ► but we went through these issues

00:52:37 ◼   ► where we had this, you know, both of us had one eye

00:52:38 ◼   ► go bad around the same time.

00:52:40 ◼   ► And we're both sort of, you know, technology and movie

00:52:42 ◼   ► and game enthusiasts, well not really game,

00:52:44 ◼   ► but you know what I mean.

00:52:46 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:52:47 ◼   ► - And it's like, we're just getting to the point

00:52:49 ◼   ► where VR headsets are gonna be commonplace

00:52:51 ◼   ► and all of a sudden, I might not be able to see 3D.

00:52:56 ◼   ► But I think, I actually think it might be the opposite.

00:52:59 ◼   ► I actually think that I might be able to see better 3D

00:53:03 ◼   ► with a headset than I see in a real, living, breathing

00:53:06 ◼   ► three-dimensional world 3D.

00:53:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I mean, who knows, just biomechanics

00:53:13 ◼   ► might just catch up with our physical failings as we age.

00:53:19 ◼   ► That would be pretty cool. - I've said this before.

00:53:20 ◼   ► I've said on the show, I don't know if you've listened,

00:53:22 ◼   ► but my problem with 3D movies is that when I watch

00:53:24 ◼   ► a 3D movie, a 3D feature film,

00:53:27 ◼   ► I find it mentally exhausting in a weird way,

00:53:32 ◼   ► as though my brain is holding its breath

00:53:34 ◼   ► through the whole thing, and I walk out,

00:53:36 ◼   ► Inevitably and I don't remember the second half of the movie

00:53:39 ◼   ► And then when I said this there's you know, I got some links from people and of course

00:53:44 ◼   ► I don't have them handy here, but that's a real thing that that it's you know

00:53:49 ◼   ► It does it taxes your brain in a way and some people for some people it's different than others, you know

00:53:55 ◼   ► but for me, it's definitely the case and so that's why I like at

00:53:58 ◼   ► like Disney World

00:54:01 ◼   ► Going into an attraction where there's a seven minute 3d movie

00:54:04 ◼   ► I love it and a lot of them I can watch them over, you know over and over and over again every year

00:54:09 ◼   ► And I enjoy it and I find the 3d to be you know

00:54:13 ◼   ► exhilarating and fun and everything it's supposed to be and then for like watching an entire 90 minute two hour feature film I

00:54:21 ◼   ► Find it. I

00:54:23 ◼   ► Just find it like like I go into like a blackout like I just come out and I'm like what the hell happened there

00:54:30 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, you can't really think as well because the light is being cut essentially in half and it's like being a...

00:54:37 ◼   ► You know how it's like, I don't know,

00:54:40 ◼   ► if you're walking around outside and it's nighttime, you're fine. If you're walking around outside and it's daytime, you're fine.

00:54:47 ◼   ► But if it's like that middle, if it's sundown and

00:54:51 ◼   ► it's not quite day or night, then your brain is trying to figure out what sense to make of the world.

00:54:56 ◼   ► - They taught me in driver's ed that that's actually

00:54:59 ◼   ► the most common time of the day for car accidents, by far.

00:55:02 ◼   ► - Absolutely, absolutely.

00:55:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:55:05 ◼   ► - The way they, you know, like anything in driver's ed,

00:55:08 ◼   ► they scare the crap out of you.

00:55:09 ◼   ► They made it seem like if you're driving at sundown,

00:55:13 ◼   ► that you will most likely die.

00:55:16 ◼   ► You probably won't be.

00:55:17 ◼   ► - You will be decapitated.

00:55:18 ◼   ► That is when you will be, that's the decapitation.

00:55:20 ◼   ► - But it's a combination of, like you said,

00:55:22 ◼   ► Like your eyes are like adjusted,

00:55:25 ◼   ► your eyes are on daylight, so they don't see so good.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Whereas opposed to like in the middle of the night

00:55:30 ◼   ► when it's totally dark, your eyes are fully dilated

00:55:33 ◼   ► and whatever else goes on in there to adjust to low light.

00:55:36 ◼   ► It's all set for low light.

00:55:38 ◼   ► And then the other factor they said was that

00:55:40 ◼   ► lots of people don't turn their headlines on yet

00:55:42 ◼   ► because they don't need the headlights to see,

00:55:44 ◼   ► but the headlights are there so you can see them.

00:55:46 ◼   ► People don't know that.

00:55:48 ◼   ► - Right.

00:55:50 ◼   ► - You know, so I went to, you definitely will.

00:55:55 ◼   ► I went to this, I went to a screening,

00:55:59 ◼   ► I think it was like the Directors Guild Theater,

00:56:01 ◼   ► so here in LA, 'cause John August was a part of this panel

00:56:06 ◼   ► on like technology and film or something,

00:56:08 ◼   ► it was really cool.

00:56:09 ◼   ► And they showed a 3D projection,

00:56:12 ◼   ► and I don't remember what it was,

00:56:13 ◼   ► it was maybe the Star Trek movie that had just come out.

00:56:16 ◼   ► But the projector that they have,

00:56:18 ◼   ► the system that they have in this theater

00:56:19 ◼   ► is so advanced that it doesn't cut any of the light. And that made all the difference in the

00:56:24 ◼   ► world between good 3D, like what 3D is supposed to be and what most of us think of it is, which is,

00:56:30 ◼   ► you know, periodically through the film you're like sort of taking the glasses off and looking

00:56:35 ◼   ► at what the picture looks like for real and you realize how much brighter it is as it's coming

00:56:41 ◼   ► out of the projector and you're like, "Damn, why can't it look like this? Why can't it be this

00:56:45 ◼   ► bright. So, who knows when that technology is gonna advance to the point that it's not a terrible

00:56:52 ◼   ► experience anymore. Pretty soon.

00:56:54 ◼   ► Pete: So, did you get tickets for Star Wars yet?

00:56:55 ◼   ► Pete; I didn't, but you know, I'm not really part of the whole frenzy as much as I think most people

00:57:04 ◼   ► are.

00:57:04 ◼   ► Pete; You only just saw Star Wars the first time, like, a handful of years.

00:57:08 ◼   ► Pete; Yeah, I might not have seen the whole movies as an adult. I can't really be too

00:57:15 ◼   ► - Pretty sure.

00:57:16 ◼   ► - I laugh because for those of us

00:57:18 ◼   ► who are really, really looking forward to it,

00:57:20 ◼   ► it's like you have to buy these tickets in advance

00:57:23 ◼   ► or else you're stuck waiting a week or two.

00:57:25 ◼   ► And like on the ATP podcast, John Siracusa,

00:57:32 ◼   ► an episode ago, he and his wife were both trying

00:57:37 ◼   ► to get these tickets for the opening day

00:57:40 ◼   ► and the Fandango website was,

00:57:44 ◼   ► was like the old days of the Apple store,

00:57:45 ◼   ► or like when you buy your iPhones, it just crapped out.

00:57:47 ◼   ► I mean, it just absolutely was,

00:57:49 ◼   ► it was like given like weird like PHP errors

00:57:53 ◼   ► and HTTP error codes that you never even see.

00:57:55 ◼   ► It was like, you know, HTTP error code 517,

00:58:00 ◼   ► server, you know, fainted.

00:58:04 ◼   ► You know, it's like, I didn't know that was any HTTP spec.

00:58:09 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:58:11 ◼   ► It's, you know, HTTP error code 607.

00:58:14 ◼   ► Server went for a drink.

00:58:15 ◼   ► But anyways, wife got through, got some tickets,

00:58:19 ◼   ► but they were 3D.

00:58:20 ◼   ► And it's like, you don't wanna, you know,

00:58:21 ◼   ► it was like, well, she got what she could get,

00:58:23 ◼   ► but it's like, he didn't wanna see 3D.

00:58:25 ◼   ► But I heard him say it was actually pretty smart.

00:58:27 ◼   ► I can actually see doing this where he's, you know,

00:58:29 ◼   ► he's fixed it, he's rectified it so that like,

00:58:31 ◼   ► his opening weekend tickets for, you know,

00:58:33 ◼   ► taking his kids and then he's gonna go with some friends.

00:58:35 ◼   ► They're all 2D.

00:58:38 ◼   ► but that he might go see, if the movie's any good,

00:58:41 ◼   ► if it holds up and it was worth seeing again,

00:58:43 ◼   ► then maybe if he goes see it a third time,

00:58:44 ◼   ► he will go see it in 3D because he's already seen it.

00:58:48 ◼   ► And I could totally see doing that.

00:58:49 ◼   ► My feelings on 3D are such that if the Star Wars movie

00:58:52 ◼   ► is good and we decide to go see it again,

00:58:54 ◼   ► I would go see it in 3D because I feel like

00:58:56 ◼   ► that would also alleviate my,

00:58:58 ◼   ► I don't know what the hell's going on

00:58:59 ◼   ► because I'll already know what's going on

00:59:01 ◼   ► because I saw it in 2D.

00:59:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's interesting that 3D will get in the way

00:59:05 ◼   ► of the story for you.

00:59:07 ◼   ► It's totally counterintuitive.

00:59:09 ◼   ► I would think it's the opposite,

00:59:10 ◼   ► that everybody's clamoring for the 3D.

00:59:12 ◼   ► - Well, it's definitely the case

00:59:14 ◼   ► that there are way more 3D showings.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Like the 2D is sort of the niche showing.

00:59:18 ◼   ► And it's funny because I mean, some places,

00:59:20 ◼   ► I don't know if they always charge more for 3D.

00:59:22 ◼   ► I know they charge more for IMAX in 3D.

00:59:24 ◼   ► So it's actually cheaper,

00:59:27 ◼   ► but it seems like it's sort of the,

00:59:28 ◼   ► it's sort of the, I don't know.

00:59:31 ◼   ► It's the one that if you care, you're going to the 2D.

00:59:36 ◼   ► Like it seems--

00:59:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, the purest, the Star Wars purest will go to TV.

00:59:40 ◼   ► And you don't think that that scarcity is artificial?

00:59:43 ◼   ► You don't think that they'll somehow miraculously open up

00:59:46 ◼   ► a few thousand more seats the day after it premieres?

00:59:50 ◼   ► - I don't know, I wonder.

00:59:51 ◼   ► I do, it just seems weird to me.

00:59:54 ◼   ► It's like one of those things where it's like,

00:59:55 ◼   ► I don't go, ever since I had a kid,

00:59:58 ◼   ► I don't go to the cinema as much as I used to.

01:00:00 ◼   ► I used to go, it was like the default thing to do

01:00:03 ◼   ► on any Friday or Saturday night is,

01:00:05 ◼   ► let's go find a movie.

01:00:06 ◼   ► It wasn't even like I knew what movies are out.

01:00:08 ◼   ► It was like, let's just go see the movie in a theater

01:00:11 ◼   ► that looks like the most appealing at the moment.

01:00:13 ◼   ► So we don't go to the movies that often, not much anymore.

01:00:15 ◼   ► We watch a lot more of them at home.

01:00:17 ◼   ► Which of course will bring us back to Apple TV.

01:00:20 ◼   ► But it still seems weird to me

01:00:22 ◼   ► to buy movie tickets in advance.

01:00:24 ◼   ► It seems to me like if a movie's popular,

01:00:25 ◼   ► and then I'm just being a curmudgeon,

01:00:27 ◼   ► but it just feels to me like you should not be able

01:00:30 ◼   ► to buy tickets in advance.

01:00:31 ◼   ► You should have to go wait in line.

01:00:34 ◼   ► we do it here and in probably a lot of big cities with the ArcLight or stadium seating theaters

01:00:41 ◼   ► because you like I know exactly what seat and row I want to sit in in the theater and so at the

01:00:47 ◼   ► ArcLight you can pick your seat in advance and that's always very important.

01:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah I feel like it should be one way or the other. It should either be all the way to where

01:00:54 ◼   ► you get reserved seats and we have two sets of tickets for the Star Wars. You know the first

01:01:00 ◼   ► night I think it's general seating and then we have another one, like a Saturday matinee at a

01:01:05 ◼   ► place with reserved seating, which I'm really looking forward to. Because I'm kind of worried

01:01:10 ◼   ► that the opening night one, we're not going to get good seats, but.

01:01:13 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:01:14 ◼   ► Pete: I love the idea of Syracuse just in a panic, in a sweat panic that he can't get tickets

01:01:22 ◼   ► and then he remembers, "Oh my god, Fandango has a watch app," and then he just launches the watch

01:01:28 ◼   ► app and it just shows him a movie quote and it's just like a big, big old "Fuck you"

01:01:37 ◼   ► to those movie fans.

01:01:39 ◼   ► It just has a quote.

01:01:43 ◼   ► It's just like a, it's a quote from Dumb and Dumber and a guy, you know, with his middle

01:01:48 ◼   ► finger up.

01:01:49 ◼   ► All right, let me take another break here and we'll get back to talking about Apple

01:01:57 ◼   ► TV. And let me tell you about Automatic. You guys know Automatic. That's another long-time

01:02:03 ◼   ► sponsor of the show. They make a really cool connected car adapter. I call it a dingus.

01:02:10 ◼   ► I think it's better to call it a dingus. They call it an adapter. It plugs into your car's

01:02:14 ◼   ► diagnostic port. Every car since 1996 has one of these ports. It's a standard port.

01:02:21 ◼   ► It's like the car equivalent of HDMI or USB or something like that.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Standard port, everybody, all these cars have them.

01:02:29 ◼   ► If your car is older than 96, I guess I can't help you, but anything since, you just plug

01:02:35 ◼   ► this thing in.

01:02:36 ◼   ► It pairs with your phone and then you use Bluetooth that connects to your phone.

01:02:42 ◼   ► It makes your driving experience better.

01:02:44 ◼   ► What does it do?

01:02:45 ◼   ► One thing it does is because it is a diagnostic port, anything that goes wrong with your car,

01:02:49 ◼   ► and it puts like a get service, you know,

01:02:51 ◼   ► it serves like service, you know,

01:02:52 ◼   ► get you overdue for service A3.

01:02:55 ◼   ► Well, you wanna know what service A3 is,

01:02:57 ◼   ► the automatic will tell you what it is.

01:02:59 ◼   ► If like an engine light comes on,

01:03:01 ◼   ► instead of just like engine light, go get help,

01:03:04 ◼   ► it'll tell you exactly what's wrong.

01:03:05 ◼   ► So you can tell, oh man, this is totally serious,

01:03:07 ◼   ► or oh, this isn't that bad, I can just, you know,

01:03:10 ◼   ► wait till tomorrow and I'll take it in tomorrow.

01:03:12 ◼   ► In plain English, it'll tell you exactly what's going on

01:03:15 ◼   ► instead of just having like a on or off, you know,

01:03:18 ◼   ► check engine, come on.

01:03:19 ◼   ► That's really cool.

01:03:21 ◼   ► It gives you a log of your trips.

01:03:23 ◼   ► It tells you if you want how well you're driving

01:03:26 ◼   ► in terms of your efficiency.

01:03:27 ◼   ► So you can set goals for what kind of fuel efficiency

01:03:31 ◼   ► you're looking for and it can tell you live

01:03:34 ◼   ► whether you're doing a good job or not

01:03:35 ◼   ► or whether you're a little heavy on the gas.

01:03:38 ◼   ► It can even do things like make emergency calls.

01:03:43 ◼   ► God forbid if you ever got into a car accident

01:03:45 ◼   ► or something like that and couldn't call yourself,

01:03:47 ◼   ► it can take care of that for you. Because it has GPS or your phone has GPS at least,

01:03:54 ◼   ► it can do things like remind you where you parked your car. So go to like a big stadium

01:03:58 ◼   ► or something like that and you can't remember where the hell your car is, it'll tell you

01:04:01 ◼   ► where it is. Really, really convenient. They've added so much stuff over the last year. They

01:04:08 ◼   ► call it, they have like what they call the App Store for automatic and they have over

01:04:11 ◼   ► 20 apps available that you can get. So here's an example, Nest. You got a Nest thermometer

01:04:17 ◼   ► in your house. Well, then you can connect it with your automatic and have it set to

01:04:22 ◼   ► do something when you get within, say, 10 miles of your house. So you're driving home,

01:04:28 ◼   ► have it set up so that when you're 7 miles away, turn the air conditioning off or on,

01:04:34 ◼   ► I guess it would be, or turn the heat on in the winter or something like that. Really

01:04:37 ◼   ► cool stuff that you can do like that. They integrate with IFTTT, If This Then That, which

01:04:43 ◼   ► is a really cool website that gives you these recipes where you can hook things up to all

01:04:48 ◼   ► sorts of things. Really, really cool. Great way to geek out with your car. Really, really

01:04:54 ◼   ► fun. Everybody should have one of these things. Here's the best part. It's normally just 100

01:04:59 ◼   ► bucks, which is cheap in and of itself. There is no service fee. You just buy this thing

01:05:04 ◼   ► for 100 bucks, stick it in your car, pair it to your phone and you can use it. Never

01:05:09 ◼   ► have to pay another nickel. But here's the best part. Use their code. Go here and go

01:05:15 ◼   ► automatic.com/thetalkshow. Spell it out. The talk show. And you'll save 20% off. That's

01:05:22 ◼   ► 20 bucks just for being a listener of this show. Ships in two business days and they

01:05:28 ◼   ► have a 45-day return policy. No questions asked. So buy it for 80 bucks. You have 45

01:05:37 ◼   ► is to decide if it's worth it or not. And if it's not, just send it back. But you won't send it back,

01:05:41 ◼   ► it's that cool. So my thanks to Automattic. Go check them out at automatic.com/thetalkshow.

01:05:45 ◼   ► All right, what else is on your mind with Apple TV?

01:05:50 ◼   ► Pete: Well, you know, sort of like, I'm into the bigger picture stuff because this, when you,

01:05:59 ◼   ► I think the most interesting thing to do with it is really to browse through the App Store and

01:06:04 ◼   ► and figure out what it means to be an app

01:06:07 ◼   ► in the context of this device.

01:06:11 ◼   ► 'Cause it's not the same as what an app means

01:06:13 ◼   ► on the App Store for iOS, or for the iPhone or iPad.

01:06:18 ◼   ► It's not the same as a watch,

01:06:19 ◼   ► not the same as the Mac App Store.

01:06:21 ◼   ► It's something new, and I think that people

01:06:22 ◼   ► haven't really wrapped their heads around

01:06:25 ◼   ► what it means yet. - Yeah, and I think

01:06:27 ◼   ► it was the most true with the iPhone early on.

01:06:32 ◼   ► I don't think the iPad quite had this problem,

01:06:34 ◼   ► because by the time the iPad came out,

01:06:36 ◼   ► the basic idea of, well, it's a big iPhone,

01:06:38 ◼   ► was close enough that developers kinda got it.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And there wasn't this period

01:06:42 ◼   ► where people didn't know what an iPad app was.

01:06:45 ◼   ► But with the iPhone, there definitely was.

01:06:46 ◼   ► And in the early days, a lot of them were just sorta like,

01:06:50 ◼   ► I don't know, like websites,

01:06:51 ◼   ► like websites that were packed onto a phone.

01:06:54 ◼   ► And it took a while before people could figure this out.

01:06:58 ◼   ► - Yes, and it's funny just 'cause the first thing

01:07:01 ◼   ► always do with a new sort of medium is like try to translate the old medium to the new one.

01:07:07 ◼   ► That that goes for, you know, stage to screen and or stage to movies to radio to TV.

01:07:15 ◼   ► That's the way that when you look at like an old, you know, like a Jackie Gleason era TV show,

01:07:20 ◼   ► it really just looks like they stuck a camera in front of a stage.

01:07:24 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:07:25 ◼   ► It doesn't mean that they weren't funny and it doesn't mean that they weren't great performers,

01:07:29 ◼   ► but it just it they just hadn't really mastered the medium yet because they haven't reframed it

01:07:35 ◼   ► or they haven't re they haven't developed the new language around it yet um what was so one of the

01:07:41 ◼   ► revelatory things for me browsing through the app store when i got when i set it up was uh like i

01:07:48 ◼   ► saw oh there's a fireplace app and then you know skipped ahead a few pages oh there's another

01:07:53 ◼   ► fireplace app and then there's just like this sort of downpour of like a fireplace app so there's

01:07:59 ◼   ► like a million of them already. And it dawned on me that the fireplace app is really like the fart

01:08:03 ◼   ► app for the Apple TV. [Laughter]

01:08:06 ◼   ► Pete: Except that it's charming. It's meant to be charming and soothing and to put you in a good

01:08:12 ◼   ► mood and maybe let you and a loved one relax and just enjoy, you know, maybe it's something you

01:08:18 ◼   ► put on your TV while you both enjoy a novel or something like that.

01:08:21 ◼   ► Pete: That's right. It is romantic and, you know, you can go to YouTube and find channels that are

01:08:28 ◼   ► all fireplace all the time or whatever, aquariums, anything, but it tells you exactly what this

01:08:33 ◼   ► device is for and it's for very, very passive activities and it's not, it's not for anything

01:08:40 ◼   ► else. It's not even, it's not meant to be meant, like, to be used as a soundboard, it's not for

01:08:46 ◼   ► anything active. I cracked up when I saw that Peacock had a giant Apple TV app, which is like,

01:08:54 ◼   ► "Who is really doing calculations on their TV?" It's hilarious to me. And it's almost like

01:09:01 ◼   ► exercising absurdism to put a calculator app on a TV. And I'm glad they did it. It's awesome.

01:09:12 ◼   ► - But you're not supposed to, you're not,

01:09:15 ◼   ► he's under no impression that there are kids

01:09:18 ◼   ► doing their homework in the living room.

01:09:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:09:21 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:09:22 ◼   ► - Dialing the math in on Peacock on the TV.

01:09:24 ◼   ► - But it helps you like sort of redefine where,

01:09:29 ◼   ► yeah I guess redefine what an app is in this context.

01:09:32 ◼   ► And an app is a mechanism for delivering content,

01:09:36 ◼   ► like very passive content.

01:09:40 ◼   ► I guess like cool content.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Television is always supposed to have been a cool medium.

01:09:46 ◼   ► - In McLuhan terms, right?

01:09:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, in McLuhan terms,

01:09:50 ◼   ► meaning you can sort of step away from it

01:09:52 ◼   ► and you don't have to stare intently

01:09:53 ◼   ► or be active while you're using it.

01:09:56 ◼   ► So it's really like the most fascinating thing to me

01:10:01 ◼   ► as a person who watches media evolve

01:10:04 ◼   ► is seeing all the network, the major network apps.

01:10:07 ◼   ► seeing that, you know, FX has a really cool app

01:10:11 ◼   ► that all their shows are on or Fox or NBC

01:10:16 ◼   ► and that all the networks are like now

01:10:18 ◼   ► they're pretty much on board with this.

01:10:20 ◼   ► There are a couple that are dinosaurs

01:10:21 ◼   ► and are late to the game and like

01:10:23 ◼   ► won't enable their content yet through streaming devices.

01:10:26 ◼   ► But for the most part, they're on there.

01:10:30 ◼   ► And you know, what you have to do

01:10:33 ◼   ► is you have to subscribe to a cable provider

01:10:36 ◼   ► Which I did when we moved into our house,

01:10:40 ◼   ► I set up a cable subscription at the lowest amount

01:10:43 ◼   ► you could possibly buy into,

01:10:45 ◼   ► which is like, I don't know, 20 bucks a month or something,

01:10:47 ◼   ► 20, 30 bucks a month.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Just so you can enter that code

01:10:51 ◼   ► that unlocks the channel in the form of an app.

01:10:56 ◼   ► But the, and that like, so okay, so that's fascinating

01:11:01 ◼   ► that now we can get these channels of content

01:11:04 ◼   ► that used to be the big three,

01:11:06 ◼   ► that used to be the only thing

01:11:07 ◼   ► on the whole televised media landscape.

01:11:10 ◼   ► They're now accessible in this little box,

01:11:12 ◼   ► time shifted for enjoyment,

01:11:15 ◼   ► but that they're right next to any other possible channel

01:11:20 ◼   ► of media content that the kid next door could be making.

01:11:25 ◼   ► That literally anybody could make an app,

01:11:27 ◼   ► set up a camera, make content, make dumb YouTube videos,

01:11:31 ◼   ► put it in an Apple TV app,

01:11:32 ◼   ► and it's right there next to ABC's app.

01:11:35 ◼   ► I think that's fascinating.

01:11:36 ◼   ► And it feels to me like people are missing that.

01:11:40 ◼   ► And maybe there's other ways, maybe there's a way to do that on Roku or Roku, whatever,

01:11:45 ◼   ► how do you pronounce it?

01:11:47 ◼   ► Uh, Roku, yeah.

01:11:48 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, that's been around for a while.

01:11:50 ◼   ► It's been around for a while.

01:11:51 ◼   ► We shouldn't like beat around that bush and pretend that Apple's the first person to enable

01:11:56 ◼   ► it.

01:11:57 ◼   ► But I feel like the way and the experience that Apple has with an app store and the familiarity

01:12:07 ◼   ► that anybody who's used an iPhone or an iPad has with the idea of, okay, you go to the

01:12:13 ◼   ► app store and you tap a thing to buy a thing and it asks you, "Are you sure?"

01:12:20 ◼   ► And then there it is.

01:12:22 ◼   ► They get it.

01:12:23 ◼   ► And that anybody can build it.

01:12:26 ◼   ► The only thing you're gonna get,

01:12:27 ◼   ► the only thing that's gonna keep you out of it

01:12:28 ◼   ► if you wanna make your own app for Apple TV

01:12:30 ◼   ► is whether it's inappropriate content.

01:12:33 ◼   ► But anything that's just like a kid with a YouTube channel,

01:12:37 ◼   ► if you wanna also put, like you said,

01:12:39 ◼   ► you wanna put your videos into their own app

01:12:41 ◼   ► and have an app on the home screen,

01:12:42 ◼   ► there you are right next to HBO Go.

01:12:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I don't think they,

01:12:47 ◼   ► it feels like they can't really censor content

01:12:49 ◼   ► for that long. - Well, they'll,

01:12:50 ◼   ► I think, I saw one thing that got filtered out was,

01:12:54 ◼   ► There's a, I forget what it's called,

01:12:56 ◼   ► like this something something computer club in Europe.

01:13:00 ◼   ► And it's like a hacker's group.

01:13:01 ◼   ► And their videos are about like how to like

01:13:04 ◼   ► jailbreak iPhones and you know,

01:13:07 ◼   ► and maybe other devices, and other devices too.

01:13:09 ◼   ► And Apple rejected their Apple TV app.

01:13:12 ◼   ► And you know, that's not, it's obviously, it's not porno.

01:13:16 ◼   ► I mean, I don't even know what, you know, like,

01:13:18 ◼   ► there's the argument that they're gonna censor stuff

01:13:21 ◼   ► that would be more than R-rated for sexual content

01:13:24 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:13:25 ◼   ► And I think clearly they would censor things

01:13:29 ◼   ► for extreme violence.

01:13:32 ◼   ► And famously, this is a famous,

01:13:34 ◼   ► and it's like, ooh, I don't know.

01:13:35 ◼   ► I don't know if I agree with that.

01:13:37 ◼   ► They have censored some apps over the years for,

01:13:43 ◼   ► I don't know how best to call that.

01:13:47 ◼   ► Is it politics?

01:13:47 ◼   ► But if there's an app that tells you

01:13:52 ◼   ► It's like an app that tells you, notified you every time

01:13:56 ◼   ► that an American drone killed somebody

01:13:58 ◼   ► somewhere in the world.

01:14:00 ◼   ► And that Apple rejected that.

01:14:02 ◼   ► - Too incendiary or something.

01:14:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like they just wanna stay out of it.

01:14:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, it doesn't seem like that's gonna last very long.

01:14:12 ◼   ► - Well, but the idea--

01:14:13 ◼   ► - On the media.

01:14:14 ◼   ► - Well, maybe it will on Apple TV though,

01:14:16 ◼   ► 'cause there is no, one of the things about Apple TV

01:14:18 ◼   ► is 'cause it doesn't have a web browser,

01:14:20 ◼   ► there's no open way around it.

01:14:22 ◼   ► So like the counter argument for something like the iPhone,

01:14:25 ◼   ► and okay, they won't put the drone,

01:14:27 ◼   ► what have the US drones done today, app in the App Store,

01:14:34 ◼   ► but that's not keeping you from learning about it

01:14:36 ◼   ► on your iPhone, 'cause you can just use Safari

01:14:38 ◼   ► and go to a website and see it somewhere else.

01:14:41 ◼   ► You just can't have an app in their store,

01:14:43 ◼   ► that their store has some level of curation,

01:14:46 ◼   ► and they're gonna keep some objectionable stuff,

01:14:48 ◼   ► which is more than just sexual content.

01:14:51 ◼   ► And again, I think that's a debate to be had.

01:14:53 ◼   ► If it were up to me, Apple would put the drone app

01:14:56 ◼   ► in the app store and let people make their own decisions.

01:15:00 ◼   ► - Absolutely, yeah.

01:15:02 ◼   ► Maybe they think of it differently

01:15:03 ◼   ► 'cause a piece of software or an app

01:15:07 ◼   ► in the context of the iPhone is a tool

01:15:09 ◼   ► for delivering information to you.

01:15:10 ◼   ► - Well, I think it's just that they wanna stay away from,

01:15:13 ◼   ► I think bottom line is that it is politically charged

01:15:16 ◼   ► and that you would say that basically it is

01:15:21 ◼   ► more or less a left-leaning position to say,

01:15:25 ◼   ► to question the US's, even just to question the US's

01:15:29 ◼   ► use of drones around the world.

01:15:31 ◼   ► And it's more of a right-leaning position to support it

01:15:36 ◼   ► and say, you know, if there's some collateral damage,

01:15:39 ◼   ► that's what it costs to keep our country safe,

01:15:41 ◼   ► to wrap an extremely complex issue into very basic things.

01:15:46 ◼   ► It is, there is a sort of left-right divide on this,

01:15:49 ◼   ► and I could just see why Apple wants to stay out of it.

01:15:53 ◼   ► - I get it, I mean, they wanna make the world a better place

01:15:58 ◼   ► and they wanna play some role as the moral center for--

01:16:03 ◼   ► - Right, I would bet, in fact,

01:16:06 ◼   ► I would wager extremely heavily,

01:16:08 ◼   ► I would wager thousands of dollars

01:16:10 ◼   ► that if somebody submitted an Apple TV app

01:16:12 ◼   ► that showed, you know,

01:16:15 ◼   ► or on either side of it, really,

01:16:19 ◼   ► but was devoted to say abortion politics,

01:16:22 ◼   ► that they're not gonna put that in the app store.

01:16:25 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter which side it was on,

01:16:27 ◼   ► I don't think they're gonna put it in,

01:16:28 ◼   ► 'cause I think they're gonna say,

01:16:30 ◼   ► that's not the type of content that the app store's for.

01:16:33 ◼   ► So it's more than just sex.

01:16:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think a good rule of thumb would be like,

01:16:37 ◼   ► if your cable company lets it through,

01:16:39 ◼   ► then Apple should let it through.

01:16:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

01:16:42 ◼   ► But I think it's all edge cases.

01:16:44 ◼   ► I think for the most part though,

01:16:46 ◼   ► anything you might reasonably want

01:16:48 ◼   ► to put on Apple TV.

01:16:49 ◼   ► You could put on Apple TV if you wanted to.

01:16:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it really just opens up.

01:16:55 ◼   ► These apps are just portals for media,

01:16:58 ◼   ► and it should just open up a portal

01:17:00 ◼   ► to whatever kind of media you wanna dump in there.

01:17:03 ◼   ► I don't know why.

01:17:06 ◼   ► That kinda sucks if they're policing it like that.

01:17:09 ◼   ► I don't feel too good about that.

01:17:10 ◼   ► - I don't either, but I understand

01:17:11 ◼   ► that there's some kind of line that has to be drawn

01:17:13 ◼   ► at some place where Apple,

01:17:15 ◼   ► There is a line to be drawn that I can get behind.

01:17:18 ◼   ► I really, you know, you remember the old

01:17:21 ◼   ► Faces of Death videos?

01:17:23 ◼   ► - Sure.

01:17:24 ◼   ► - I mean, I laugh when I used to rent them as a teenager.

01:17:28 ◼   ► We did, we just sat there and watched them

01:17:30 ◼   ► and laughed and laughed and laughed, but.

01:17:32 ◼   ► - Oh God, I was younger when we rented 'em

01:17:36 ◼   ► for slumber parties and we didn't laugh, we shat our pants.

01:17:38 ◼   ► - Well we did it first, but then once, you know,

01:17:40 ◼   ► there's, as I progressed as a teenager,

01:17:43 ◼   ► we went from ashen-faced, oh my god, to just laughing.

01:17:51 ◼   ► And if you don't know, I forget how many they made,

01:17:53 ◼   ► but there was a series of home videos called Faces of Death.

01:17:57 ◼   ► And they were effectively snuff films.

01:18:00 ◼   ► And they had footage of terrible things happening to people.

01:18:05 ◼   ► But some of them were clearly fake, though.

01:18:08 ◼   ► It was sort of like a mix of like, oh my god,

01:18:11 ◼   ► that looked real.

01:18:12 ◼   ► think that was actually a car accident that killed somebody. And then the next one, there was one

01:18:17 ◼   ► where people were eating monkey brains and I, you know, I think the monkey brains one was clearly,

01:18:21 ◼   ► you know, pro wrestling. It was fake. [Laughter]

01:18:25 ◼   ► Ben

01:18:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. I think the genre, and I found this out recently, the genre of that, of Faces of Death,

01:18:32 ◼   ► the genre that Faces of Death came out of was something like Mondo, Mondo, like sensationalist

01:18:39 ◼   ► filmmaking, where, and I think it came, like there was a lot of it being made in Italy, I believe,

01:18:45 ◼   ► in the, in like the, in the 70s and early 80s, where they would just, it was just a,

01:18:51 ◼   ► just a, a bacchanal of sex and violence in these sort of pseudo-documentaries like,

01:19:00 ◼   ► I don't know, everything to, like, think of in today's media, wherever you would go for the most,

01:19:08 ◼   ► the maximum amount of titillation of sex and violence, and that's where they would get their

01:19:14 ◼   ► rocks off back then is in movies like Faces of Death. I don't even remember whether there were,

01:19:19 ◼   ► you know, boobs in Faces of Death, but there probably were. There had to have been.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Ted: I don't remember. I do remember feeling a very weird, like, low-level

01:19:30 ◼   ► form of guilt after having watched them.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Pete: Absolutely. They were essentially snuff films. We just didn't know. They were very,

01:19:38 ◼   ► very fake. You go back and watch it now and you can see all the seams and all the fake appendages

01:19:44 ◼   ► but back then we didn't--

01:19:45 ◼   ► - And they were definitely passed off as being real.

01:19:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, absolutely.

01:19:50 ◼   ► - And I just, I just remember,

01:19:52 ◼   ► I guess the guilt that I felt more or less

01:19:55 ◼   ► was that it didn't really matter

01:19:57 ◼   ► whether they were real or not.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Or it mattered because in a sense it was almost like

01:20:01 ◼   ► I hoped that they weren't real

01:20:02 ◼   ► because it would be great to know

01:20:04 ◼   ► that nobody died in that horrible way.

01:20:06 ◼   ► But the guilt was that it didn't really matter

01:20:09 ◼   ► because either way, it's the fact that I was,

01:20:14 ◼   ► thought some of them could be real and that I enjoyed, I drew some kind of a--

01:20:18 ◼   ► Pete: You were getting entertainment from it.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Ted: Yeah, I found it entertaining and my friends and I were collectively,

01:20:22 ◼   ► you know, having a good time watching them and it just felt like it made me a terrible person.

01:20:28 ◼   ► Pete; And that's how I feel when I watch a horror movie and I don't watch horror movies,

01:20:32 ◼   ► but that's absolutely how I feel is like, why should I be getting any entertainment value from

01:20:38 ◼   ► this person's pain? Even if it's a fictional person.

01:20:39 ◼   ► Even if you know it's fictional. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's not getting on Apple TV.

01:20:45 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:20:46 ◼   ► No, it won't be. Just on YouTube, I guess. But like, do you ever, have you thought about,

01:20:56 ◼   ► you know the anecdote about Steve on his hospital bed and basically he's like, I forget what the

01:21:04 ◼   ► line is, but basically telling, and I forget even...

01:21:07 ◼   ► Isakson.

01:21:08 ◼   ► he told. But did he tell Isaacson, "I think I cracked it"? Well, do you think that applied here?

01:21:15 ◼   ► Do you think that had anything to do with Apple TV?

01:21:18 ◼   ► Ted

01:21:25 ◼   ► I don't think so. It's such a weird line. And it's such a like,

01:21:28 ◼   ► it, because it's so tempting, right? It's almost like, and I don't doubt, like,

01:21:32 ◼   ► I have so many complaints about Isaacson's book, but I do not, for a second, question his integrity.

01:21:40 ◼   ► So I'm sure that if he says that's what Jobs told him—I think he said "we," and I don't think he

01:21:45 ◼   ► said "I," but either way, it was either first-person plural or first-person singular,

01:21:49 ◼   ► but I think we finally cracked it. Maybe he said "I," I'm not sure, but that's all he said. He

01:21:57 ◼   ► He didn't tell him one damn thing about what cracking it meant

01:22:00 ◼   ► And it's like could you craft a better?

01:22:05 ◼   ► like

01:22:08 ◼   ► Yeah, that would just and then everybody can just fill that in with whatever their pet dream of what Apple TV could be is

01:22:16 ◼   ► whether it's whether it's you know, the actual TV set or whether it's

01:22:21 ◼   ► Apple replacing cable with the you know

01:22:24 ◼   ► $15 a month bundle that lets you stream all the major all the major cable networks whenever you want

01:22:30 ◼   ► Or this, you know an app store type, you know, the future of TV is apps type thing who knows, you know

01:22:38 ◼   ► What the hell he meant? I don't think that this is it though. I

01:22:41 ◼   ► Don't know. I mean obviously it does feel like it was it was said in sort of a fever dream state or

01:22:48 ◼   ► But I don't know there's a part of me that idealizes this

01:22:52 ◼   ► The device so much that thinks that this might this might kind of be what he was talking about and I think

01:23:00 ◼   ► My thinking is this that

01:23:03 ◼   ► What is it? Like what is the biggest problem?

01:23:07 ◼   ► that

01:23:09 ◼   ► Apple seems to have had in

01:23:11 ◼   ► bringing

01:23:13 ◼   ► bringing media to us

01:23:16 ◼   ► Like iTunes in itself as an invention was pretty

01:23:20 ◼   ► Influential is pretty impactful in the state of technology

01:23:25 ◼   ► But people complain about iTunes constantly and people complain about the iTunes store

01:23:31 ◼   ► constantly and it kind of sucks the whole process sucks and

01:23:35 ◼   ► even with all the

01:23:37 ◼   ► Resources that Apple has they haven't really figured out how to do that very one simple elemental thing

01:23:43 ◼   ► which is deliver us the media that we will use to enrich our lives. You know, you can argue that

01:23:50 ◼   ► nobody has figured that out very well. The cable companies still own it, still own the ecosystem

01:23:56 ◼   ► for the most part. There have been technology companies built up around delivering us media in

01:24:03 ◼   ► smaller channels and smaller formats, but for the most part, not much of it is compelling.

01:24:09 ◼   ► you could say that YouTube has been the most influential network of delivering media to us

01:24:21 ◼   ► on a really, really large scale. But in terms of making an actual market for that and a marketplace

01:24:30 ◼   ► for that, where anybody can be connected, any audience member can be connected with the media

01:24:37 ◼   ► that's going to enrich them the most and speak to them the most specifically. And I believe that

01:24:44 ◼   ► the Apple TV might be the closest that they've come to that. Everything else I feel like is a

01:24:50 ◼   ► tool, a tool for work, a tool for productivity or play or whatever it is, things that you use to do

01:24:57 ◼   ► other things. But I think this device specifically is used to enrich our lives because Steve,

01:25:02 ◼   ► if anyone knew the benefit of using the world's media and art and, you know, recorded art to

01:25:10 ◼   ► enrich his life. I can't help but think if I have to think what he meant by it, let's assume that

01:25:15 ◼   ► it wasn't in like a, you know, fever dream like you said, that he really meant it. I can't help

01:25:21 ◼   ► but think that it's this other shoe that's yet to drop which is an Apple branded streaming video

01:25:28 ◼   ► package pretty much let's I guess like the doing for TV what Apple music does

01:25:35 ◼   ► for music which is that you pay a monthly fee and you get to watch all

01:25:41 ◼   ► these shows from all these participating cable networks you know yeah and TV

01:25:47 ◼   ► networks I don't disagree with you I think that this is step one to that

01:25:52 ◼   ► right and everybody I mean this and one reason and there's so much stuff that

01:25:56 ◼   ► Apple does that is secret and they try to keep everything completely secret.

01:26:00 ◼   ► But the stuff with the media negotiations where they have to talk to all these TV networks,

01:26:05 ◼   ► it all leaks like a sieve because these TV network guys and the music people, they don't

01:26:09 ◼   ► keep anything secret and they just go probably like 30 seconds after Eddie Q leaves the room,

01:26:16 ◼   ► they're on the phone talking to people at the Wall Street Journal about the meeting

01:26:18 ◼   ► they just had with Apple.

01:26:24 ◼   ► not a fact that they're going to do it because who knows maybe they'll never

01:26:27 ◼   ► quite pull it together but it's it's it is it's certain as a fact that they're

01:26:31 ◼   ► trying to do it and I have heard and I know I'm not the only person but you

01:26:36 ◼   ► know there long you know a lot of people have heard that over the last year as

01:26:39 ◼   ► they've clearly you know got closer and closer to being able to ship this Apple

01:26:43 ◼   ► TV the one with a new remote and an App Store and not just built on iOS but

01:26:49 ◼   ► using these little quote-unquote apps that were just XML files to configure

01:26:54 ◼   ► You know what the content was and just you know

01:26:56 ◼   ► Put a list on the left and preview on the right and up down left right and that's it but an actual honest-to-god

01:27:02 ◼   ► iOS app, you know UI kit

01:27:05 ◼   ► App store where you can do games and everything from games to content

01:27:11 ◼   ► That there was debate within Apple as to whether they

01:27:17 ◼   ► Could or should ship that this Apple TV before they have the TV

01:27:24 ◼   ► content package in place.

01:27:27 ◼   ► You know, and there were people,

01:27:28 ◼   ► and I don't wanna say who,

01:27:29 ◼   ► and I don't wanna say at the executive level

01:27:31 ◼   ► that Eddy Cue was on one side

01:27:32 ◼   ► and Phil Schiller was on the other,

01:27:34 ◼   ► but that effectively somewhere in their divisions

01:27:36 ◼   ► where Eddy Cue's team that does the, you know,

01:27:38 ◼   ► negotiations with, you know, like the TV networks

01:27:42 ◼   ► and stuff like that, you know,

01:27:44 ◼   ► some of those people were the ones who were pushing for,

01:27:46 ◼   ► hey, you know, there's no use shipping this

01:27:48 ◼   ► until we have this in place,

01:27:49 ◼   ► and then there was a product side,

01:27:51 ◼   ► people who were like, this is really cool,

01:27:52 ◼   ► we've got a really cool thing here.

01:27:54 ◼   ► We can ship this and we can add the streaming thing

01:27:57 ◼   ► when it's ready.

01:27:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I 100% agree with those people,

01:28:02 ◼   ► with the product people, because they do.

01:28:04 ◼   ► They have, and you gotta lay the groundwork

01:28:06 ◼   ► for something like that.

01:28:07 ◼   ► You cannot reinvent television with one product,

01:28:11 ◼   ► with one product launch that's essentially in its version,

01:28:15 ◼   ► what, 2 or 3, 2.0, 3.0, depending on,

01:28:19 ◼   ► hey, look at the first iterations.

01:28:21 ◼   ► But this had to be a multi-decade project.

01:28:25 ◼   ► And yeah, absolutely.

01:28:28 ◼   ► It's so Apple to have released the device itself

01:28:32 ◼   ► with the rudimentary version of the App Store,

01:28:34 ◼   ► to just lay the groundwork and mentally prepare

01:28:40 ◼   ► the consumer base for this

01:28:44 ◼   ► so that enough people have them,

01:28:46 ◼   ► enough people understand what they are,

01:28:50 ◼   ► And then they launch the service and then it's like,

01:28:52 ◼   ► oh thank God, one box that has everything that I need.

01:28:56 ◼   ► - Right, I totally agree with that.

01:28:58 ◼   ► And I really am, let's hold this thought.

01:29:02 ◼   ► I wanna talk about it, but have you,

01:29:05 ◼   ► I feel like people are selling the new remote control short.

01:29:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's fantastic.

01:29:10 ◼   ► - Let's talk about the remote control next,

01:29:12 ◼   ► 'cause this is like one of my complaints about

01:29:14 ◼   ► what one weekend people's take on Apple TV.

01:29:17 ◼   ► but I want to tell you about another long time sponsor

01:29:21 ◼   ► of the show.

01:29:22 ◼   ► Honestly, it could be a great holiday gift,

01:29:25 ◼   ► although it's the sort of gift that you cannot give somebody

01:29:28 ◼   ► and not give them something else.

01:29:30 ◼   ► It's the sort of thing you should do for people

01:29:31 ◼   ► in your family in addition to a regular gift.

01:29:34 ◼   ► And I'm talking about Backblaze.

01:29:36 ◼   ► Backblaze is online backup for your Mac.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Anyone can backup data.

01:29:42 ◼   ► There's all sorts of backup services.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Backblaze is the one, and again, they're a long time sponsor of the show, but if they

01:29:50 ◼   ► had never sponsored the show, it is still the one that I would use for me personally

01:29:54 ◼   ► and the one that I would recommend for everybody in my family.

01:30:00 ◼   ► Here's how it works.

01:30:01 ◼   ► You install their app on your Mac, and it's written by former ex-Apple engineers.

01:30:08 ◼   ► This is truly native code.

01:30:09 ◼   ► It's not some kind of thing that you have to run using Java and install a Java VM.

01:30:14 ◼   ► real Mac code, you know, real Mac user interface, you access it right through system preferences,

01:30:20 ◼   ► you install it, there's a free trial period, you don't even have to pay right away. And

01:30:25 ◼   ► what it does is it just backs everything on your Mac up to Backblaze's servers, everything.

01:30:31 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter, it's not just your startup drive. If you have external drives

01:30:34 ◼   ► connected, it'll back those up too. There is no limit and there is no catch. It's not

01:30:38 ◼   ► like, well, you say there's no limit, but really the limit's one terabyte and after

01:30:41 ◼   ► terabyte you got to pay more. Nope. The only real catch on size, like let's say if you have

01:30:47 ◼   ► eight terabytes of stuff on an external drive, is that it'll take longer for the initial upload.

01:30:52 ◼   ► That's it. That's the only catch is that there's no way that they can magically make eight gigabytes

01:30:57 ◼   ► go from your Mac to their servers in the cloud faster than your internet connection. They can't

01:31:03 ◼   ► do magic. But other than that, it works great. And then once you have the full upload, it just runs

01:31:10 ◼   ► runs in the background, you'll never notice it, it doesn't make your CPU run real fast

01:31:14 ◼   ► or anything like that, it just runs quietly, silently in the background and just keeps

01:31:18 ◼   ► pushing your stuff up to the cloud.

01:31:21 ◼   ► And then when you need it, like let's say disaster strikes and your hard drive crashes

01:31:28 ◼   ► and that's it, that's your only backup.

01:31:30 ◼   ► It shouldn't be your only backup but let's say it is.

01:31:32 ◼   ► Well guess what, you don't have to download everything, you could just order a USB hard

01:31:35 ◼   ► drive from them, they'll sell you the USB hard drive at cost more or less.

01:31:39 ◼   ► You can get it over-nighted, and the next day you've got a USB hard drive delivered

01:31:42 ◼   ► to your house that has everything from your Backblaze account right there.

01:31:46 ◼   ► But 25% of their restores, 25% are just one file at a time.

01:31:52 ◼   ► So that's the situation where you're, let's say, in a meeting and you're away from your

01:31:55 ◼   ► computer and something comes up and says, "You've got a file on your Mac that would

01:31:59 ◼   ► be perfect."

01:32:00 ◼   ► Right now, if you had it, it would be useful right now.

01:32:03 ◼   ► You can just log on to any computer with a web browser, log in to your Backblaze account

01:32:07 ◼   ► and get that one file that you need right there

01:32:10 ◼   ► from any computer anywhere in the world.

01:32:12 ◼   ► So 25% of the restores they do are exactly like that.

01:32:15 ◼   ► They have iPhone and Android apps

01:32:17 ◼   ► that let you do the same thing,

01:32:18 ◼   ► access any of your files anywhere in the world.

01:32:21 ◼   ► They have backed up over 150 petabytes of total data

01:32:26 ◼   ► and they have restored over 10 billion files

01:32:29 ◼   ► for their customers.

01:32:30 ◼   ► It is a great service, it is great software,

01:32:33 ◼   ► and it will make you feel so much better

01:32:35 ◼   ► having installed on your computer.

01:32:37 ◼   ► And if you install it, like just when you go home

01:32:41 ◼   ► for the holidays, put it on your parents' computer

01:32:42 ◼   ► and just sign up, sign your parents up for it.

01:32:44 ◼   ► You know, it's not gonna set you back that much.

01:32:46 ◼   ► It's five bucks per month per computer for unlimited backup.

01:32:50 ◼   ► Five bucks per computer, that's it.

01:32:53 ◼   ► So just, you know, give it to your parents

01:32:55 ◼   ► or somebody else in your family.

01:32:57 ◼   ► Just sign 'em up, pay for it.

01:32:59 ◼   ► And someday they're gonna thank you a lot

01:33:03 ◼   ► because eventually every hard drive goes bad.

01:33:06 ◼   ► So stop putting it off.

01:33:07 ◼   ► Go get backed up at backblaze.com/thetalkshow.

01:33:12 ◼   ► The free trial, by the way, does not require credit card.

01:33:18 ◼   ► I've got one more sponsor coming up.

01:33:23 ◼   ► We'll talk a little bit about the remote,

01:33:24 ◼   ► but I got one more sponsor.

01:33:25 ◼   ► I'm very excited about the next sponsor.

01:33:26 ◼   ► It's a new sponsor, and it's gonna be groundbreaking.

01:33:31 ◼   ► 'cause I have to read a legal disclaimer.

01:33:34 ◼   ► - Oh, you're gonna do it right now?

01:33:37 ◼   ► - No, I'm not.

01:33:37 ◼   ► I just wanted to set the stage and have, you know, I wanna--

01:33:40 ◼   ► - That's awesome.

01:33:41 ◼   ► Groundbreaking and a legal disclaimer.

01:33:44 ◼   ► That's a good tease and I'm excited.

01:33:46 ◼   ► - All right, I have one complaint about the new remote

01:33:48 ◼   ► and that is that I, thousands of people have made it.

01:33:51 ◼   ► I think it's a mistake that it is symmetric vertically.

01:33:55 ◼   ► - Me too.

01:33:56 ◼   ► - I think it's a mistake. - Me too.

01:33:57 ◼   ► - And I do think that it looks better that way.

01:34:00 ◼   ► I think it looks great and I think that functionally it is a bad idea.

01:34:06 ◼   ► And the bad idea, for the obvious reason that people started saying, "I think it's a

01:34:10 ◼   ► bad idea that this is symmetric vertically," on September 9th when they first showed it

01:34:15 ◼   ► to us and before people had ever even touched it, which is that you won't know which way

01:34:19 ◼   ► is the right way to hold it in the dark.

01:34:21 ◼   ► Yeah. And not only that, even if you do know which way is the right way up, the buttons,

01:34:30 ◼   ► the buttons are too similar, like the circular buttons on the left are all identical, you

01:34:36 ◼   ► know, to the touch.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:38 ◼   ► And they didn't even put a little nipple on one of them so you could actually in the dark

01:34:41 ◼   ► feel which one is, which one is Siri. I don't even know. No, you know why I'm looking at

01:34:47 ◼   ► it? It looks like the Siri button might have a little indentation.

01:34:50 ◼   ► Oh, I can't feel it.

01:34:51 ◼   ► I can't feel it at all.

01:34:53 ◼   ► I didn't even know until I looked at it.

01:34:54 ◼   ► But they're the identically sized circles

01:34:57 ◼   ► and I can't tell you the number of times

01:34:59 ◼   ► I've already in the last three days

01:35:01 ◼   ► hit Siri when I went to hit menu.

01:35:04 ◼   ► - Right, and so there's two problems there actually.

01:35:07 ◼   ► So one problem is if you're holding it upside down,

01:35:11 ◼   ► you'll be swiping on a dead area, you know,

01:35:15 ◼   ► 'cause it's actually the bottom of the bone.

01:35:16 ◼   ► - I did that today, yeah.

01:35:17 ◼   ► - And nothing happens.

01:35:19 ◼   ► And the other problem, and for me,

01:35:21 ◼   ► this is actually more common, because I've gotten careful

01:35:24 ◼   ► about putting it down facing the right way.

01:35:26 ◼   ► But right, if you just take a guess

01:35:29 ◼   ► and you just feel a round button,

01:35:30 ◼   ► and you don't know if it's menu, you have to like,

01:35:33 ◼   ► the only way to be sure is if you feel a round first

01:35:35 ◼   ► and see, oh, I'm at the top of the buttons

01:35:37 ◼   ► or I'm at the middle of the buttons.

01:35:38 ◼   ► But with so few buttons, each button should be

01:35:40 ◼   ► like a different size, or I didn't think about that,

01:35:42 ◼   ► but put like a little nipple on like they do

01:35:44 ◼   ► on the F and JKs on the keyboard.

01:35:46 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

01:35:48 ◼   ► Also, there's no, the metaphor of like one side of the,

01:35:53 ◼   ► you know, the bottom is glossy and the top is matte,

01:35:58 ◼   ► that doesn't really apply to any, I don't know,

01:36:02 ◼   ► mental model of which side should be a trackpad

01:36:05 ◼   ► and which side is not active.

01:36:07 ◼   ► - Well, and the other-- - Because the iPhone,

01:36:09 ◼   ► when you swipe the glossy part.

01:36:10 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Like, and--

01:36:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, I didn't think about that, but that's true.

01:36:14 ◼   ► - Right.

01:36:14 ◼   ► - That is actually, I didn't even think about that,

01:36:17 ◼   ► but that's an outstanding point where the glossy feel

01:36:19 ◼   ► is what you swipe on an iPhone.

01:36:22 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:36:23 ◼   ► - The other thing I thought of, and this was a complaint

01:36:25 ◼   ► I saw some people defending the symmetry of the remote,

01:36:28 ◼   ► which is that tactile difference,

01:36:30 ◼   ► that if you feel the shiny, you know it's upside down,

01:36:33 ◼   ► you know to turn it around.

01:36:34 ◼   ► My problem with that is that if you just decide

01:36:37 ◼   ► to go by touch of the, is it glossy or matte,

01:36:41 ◼   ► if you have it held the right way

01:36:43 ◼   ► and you start rubbing your thumb over the matte part,

01:36:46 ◼   ► something happens right away.

01:36:48 ◼   ► As soon as you touch it, something happens right away.

01:36:52 ◼   ► - Always rub the bottom.

01:36:54 ◼   ► - In general, but then if you have it upside down

01:36:56 ◼   ► and rub the bottom and you have it backwards,

01:36:58 ◼   ► something will happen.

01:36:59 ◼   ► In other words, you'll immediately start scrubbing

01:37:03 ◼   ► forward or backward in the video stream

01:37:05 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:37:06 ◼   ► Now, the fact that something happens as soon as you start

01:37:09 ◼   ► touching it is actually to me part of,

01:37:12 ◼   ► and again, I know it's an abused term,

01:37:13 ◼   ► but part of what makes it feel magic.

01:37:15 ◼   ► And so if you know you have it held in your hand

01:37:17 ◼   ► the right way, and you just want to start scrubbing around,

01:37:22 ◼   ► fast-forward, or rewind in the video,

01:37:24 ◼   ► it is marvelous that you just touch it and just move.

01:37:26 ◼   ► And it just is instantly, it feels live in a way,

01:37:31 ◼   ► and it really does remind me of the original iPhone.

01:37:34 ◼   ► And when you first just started moving up or down

01:37:37 ◼   ► in a scrolling list or on a webpage,

01:37:39 ◼   ► and it just moved instantly, and it just tracked your finger

01:37:42 ◼   ► and it just felt like so much more alive

01:37:45 ◼   ► than anything I'd ever scrolled before.

01:37:48 ◼   ► This remote feels alive in a way

01:37:50 ◼   ► that like nothing I've ever felt before

01:37:52 ◼   ► 'cause you just touch it and it affects what you see live.

01:37:55 ◼   ► But in terms of deciding whether the remote

01:37:58 ◼   ► is in your hand the right way, it's terrible.

01:38:00 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:38:03 ◼   ► Still an attractive remote though.

01:38:05 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:38:07 ◼   ► Really attractively designed.

01:38:09 ◼   ► - Think back to the first version of the Apple remote,

01:38:13 ◼   ► the white one, the little white chiclet.

01:38:15 ◼   ► - I remember it well, I remember it.

01:38:19 ◼   ► - I mean, it still had the innovation of the wheel,

01:38:25 ◼   ► like the circular buttons.

01:38:27 ◼   ► It was really cleverly designed,

01:38:29 ◼   ► it just wasn't very attractive.

01:38:30 ◼   ► - But the one thing that that design had,

01:38:33 ◼   ► my problem with the old remote was mainly the fact

01:38:35 ◼   ► that it was IR, and I hate IR.

01:38:38 ◼   ► But if they had done a Bluetooth version of that,

01:38:40 ◼   ► it wouldn't be as good as this.

01:38:42 ◼   ► And I've heard some people say they could have just done

01:38:44 ◼   ► a D-pad, you know, up, down, left, right,

01:38:46 ◼   ► and it would have been just as good as this.

01:38:47 ◼   ► And I totally disagree with that.

01:38:49 ◼   ► I really do.

01:38:50 ◼   ► I feel like the momentum you can get from swiping,

01:38:53 ◼   ► I still, like, I'm still getting good at it.

01:38:56 ◼   ► I'm getting, like, my C-legs on how fast to go

01:38:59 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:39:00 ◼   ► But I'm already good enough that I, it's so good.

01:39:02 ◼   ► And it's so much better than click, click, click, click,

01:39:04 ◼   ► click to go over.

01:39:05 ◼   ► - So much better.

01:39:07 ◼   ► So much better.

01:39:07 ◼   ► It's not, it just feels like multi-dimensional.

01:39:12 ◼   ► It just, it feels like you're in volumetric space,

01:39:16 ◼   ► even though there's no 3D touch to it yet, but.

01:39:19 ◼   ► - But the one thing about that old design

01:39:20 ◼   ► is that you could never, ever, ever forget

01:39:22 ◼   ► which way was the right way to hold it in the dark.

01:39:25 ◼   ► - Sure.

01:39:26 ◼   ► - Somebody actually-- - 'Cause the buttons

01:39:28 ◼   ► were at the top.

01:39:29 ◼   ► - Somebody tweeted me the other day,

01:39:30 ◼   ► and you didn't have to worry about which button was which

01:39:33 ◼   ► because the placement was such

01:39:36 ◼   ► that there was never any ambiguity to it.

01:39:38 ◼   ► There was one circle and then two buttons underneath,

01:39:41 ◼   ► and that's it.

01:39:42 ◼   ► So you wouldn't even,

01:39:44 ◼   ► not just which way is it in your hand,

01:39:45 ◼   ► but which button is which,

01:39:46 ◼   ► you'd never be confused either.

01:39:48 ◼   ► You know, it was a perfectly capable remote

01:39:54 ◼   ► to use blindfolded, is one way to put it,

01:39:58 ◼   ► which is a good thing to be, I think.

01:39:59 ◼   ► Somebody tweeted me the other day

01:40:00 ◼   ► that I shouldn't be watching TV in the dark.

01:40:03 ◼   ► That's bad for my eyes.

01:40:05 ◼   ► - What?

01:40:06 ◼   ► That's so old fashioned.

01:40:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I--

01:40:08 ◼   ► - You're only supposed to watch TV in the dark.

01:40:10 ◼   ► - And I was gonna say that that's crazy.

01:40:12 ◼   ► How else are you supposed to watch a movie?

01:40:14 ◼   ► And then I realized, wait, I can't dispute,

01:40:18 ◼   ► it'll be bad for your eyes anymore.

01:40:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:40:21 ◼   ► Who knows, maybe that's the problem.

01:40:23 ◼   ► Maybe the fact that I've spent 30-some years watching TV

01:40:27 ◼   ► in as dark a room as I possibly can

01:40:30 ◼   ► is exactly what happened to me, I don't know.

01:40:33 ◼   ► I remember when Phillips was making those TVs that would glow on the wall.

01:40:38 ◼   ► The ambient color behind you?

01:40:39 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. What a dumb, stupid idea. I have this one TV that I bought a few years ago.

01:40:46 ◼   ► I think LG made it, and the remote for it was one of those space remotes that you hold in the air,

01:40:53 ◼   ► like, it was like a Wii remote, basically, a Wiimote, where the cursor on screen would do,

01:41:01 ◼   ► like, would be wherever you're pointing to it. Which was such a dumb idea.

01:41:03 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, yeah. Like, you're sort of like shining a flashlight on what you wanted?

01:41:07 ◼   ► PAUL Yeah, exactly. And such a dumb idea. It was badly calibrated. The actual shape of the remote

01:41:13 ◼   ► itself didn't have a flat side, so you couldn't set it down on a table. Just such a bad, bad idea.

01:41:21 ◼   ► And we, you know, over the years, I feel like I've tried all the universal remotes from

01:41:28 ◼   ► Radio Shack universal remotes

01:41:30 ◼   ► to the Logitech Harmony remotes.

01:41:32 ◼   ► Always because it's always just been such a pain in the ass

01:41:37 ◼   ► to switch inputs on eight different things

01:41:41 ◼   ► to get the audio and video where you need them to be.

01:41:44 ◼   ► This is quite elegant though.

01:41:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:41:50 ◼   ► - I do wish.

01:41:51 ◼   ► I also feel, I do, I feel like in addition

01:41:53 ◼   ► to being asymmetric, it's funny that you brought up

01:41:56 ◼   ► the nipple, the other thing I thought

01:41:58 ◼   ► is that it seems weird to me that they made the home button

01:42:01 ◼   ► not centered at the bottom.

01:42:04 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Like on an iOS device.

01:42:06 ◼   ► 'Cause that's what it does. - Totally, that would be

01:42:07 ◼   ► a perfect place for it, yeah.

01:42:09 ◼   ► - And I even feel like the icon for it

01:42:11 ◼   ► should be a rectangle,

01:42:14 ◼   ► like the rectangle of the apps, not a TV set.

01:42:19 ◼   ► And I even-- - That's such a weird icon.

01:42:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, it just seems weird to me

01:42:22 ◼   ► because I've heard people on podcasts talking about this

01:42:26 ◼   ► and they don't even know what to call that button.

01:42:27 ◼   ► Whereas if it was at the bottom, centered,

01:42:31 ◼   ► and it doesn't have to be at the bottom of the remote,

01:42:32 ◼   ► but just underneath all the other buttons,

01:42:34 ◼   ► centered with a rectangular icon,

01:42:37 ◼   ► everybody would know exactly what it is.

01:42:38 ◼   ► It's the home button, and it takes you home.

01:42:42 ◼   ► And you double click it.

01:42:45 ◼   ► Once you think of it as the home button,

01:42:46 ◼   ► and you know it's the home button,

01:42:47 ◼   ► it makes all the sense in the world.

01:42:49 ◼   ► But it's in such a weird spot, and it has a weird icon.

01:42:52 ◼   ► Other thing I would like, and I can't help but think

01:42:56 ◼   ► it'll come eventually, I hope, would be Touch ID.

01:43:00 ◼   ► And it would, in terms of a long run,

01:43:04 ◼   ► I don't know if it would come next year,

01:43:06 ◼   ► but within the next two or one or two years,

01:43:09 ◼   ► if they came out with one of these remotes with Touch ID,

01:43:12 ◼   ► it would solve an awful lot, I would hope,

01:43:14 ◼   ► of these problems that people are complaining about

01:43:16 ◼   ► with, well, I have to keep entering passwords

01:43:18 ◼   ► for this service for that service and stuff like that.

01:43:21 ◼   ► And get it in Touch ID and, I don't know,

01:43:25 ◼   ► be some way to do it.

01:43:26 ◼   ► And then even then, you could do things like,

01:43:29 ◼   ► just one example, everybody I think sets up their iTunes

01:43:33 ◼   ► so that you don't get asked for your password again.

01:43:37 ◼   ► I mean, that's what I did, right?

01:43:38 ◼   ► Your options are like ask every time, ask once an hour,

01:43:41 ◼   ► or never ask again for your iTunes password.

01:43:44 ◼   ► So I have it set up to never ask again.

01:43:46 ◼   ► I totally understand that there are some people,

01:43:49 ◼   ► depending on how rambunctious your kids are,

01:43:52 ◼   ► that maybe you don't wanna leave it set like that

01:43:54 ◼   ► because your kids will download a lot of stuff.

01:43:58 ◼   ► So having Touch ID in the remote, wouldn't that be great?

01:44:01 ◼   ► Then you could have it set so that you just use Touch ID

01:44:03 ◼   ► every time you wanna buy something.

01:44:04 ◼   ► But then it's only got like the adults

01:44:07 ◼   ► in the house thumb prints on it.

01:44:10 ◼   ► - Sure, but I'm sure like they'll probably enable

01:44:12 ◼   ► the remote app and which on a device that has Touch ID

01:44:17 ◼   ► available to it before they redesign the remote

01:44:21 ◼   ► with Touch ID.

01:44:23 ◼   ► - The remote app?

01:44:24 ◼   ► about the remote app, the iOS app?

01:44:27 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know, that might be going away.

01:44:29 ◼   ► - You have insight information.

01:44:31 ◼   ► - No, I don't have insight information,

01:44:33 ◼   ► other than the fact that that app

01:44:36 ◼   ► was never really a big part of their strategy or plan

01:44:41 ◼   ► for how you would use anything.

01:44:43 ◼   ► It was sort of like the work of one guy within the company

01:44:47 ◼   ► who made it and got it.

01:44:50 ◼   ► I was like, I think we should ship this.

01:44:53 ◼   ► I think we can do some cool things.

01:44:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it was so useful.

01:44:55 ◼   ► It was so useful.

01:44:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, but the company was never behind it.

01:44:59 ◼   ► Here's what I think, and I did think about this

01:45:02 ◼   ► in the last week, where for the last couple of years,

01:45:04 ◼   ► ever since, hey, the rumor that Apple is building

01:45:07 ◼   ► a next generation Apple TV has been out,

01:45:10 ◼   ► like one of the number one theories

01:45:12 ◼   ► that people have tossed out on Twitter

01:45:14 ◼   ► or written to me in email, readers of the site,

01:45:17 ◼   ► is the theory that it won't even come with a remote

01:45:20 ◼   ► and you'll use your iPhone as the remote.

01:45:22 ◼   ► And I've always shut that down because you cannot sell a $100 or even $150 box that requires

01:45:32 ◼   ► a $700 remote control.

01:45:35 ◼   ► And you cannot, it doesn't matter how careful your kids are, you can't have little kids

01:45:41 ◼   ► using, even the iPod touch is like the cheapest thing you can get, like a $200 thing with

01:45:47 ◼   ► a glass screen as the remote control.

01:45:50 ◼   ► It just does not fly.

01:45:51 ◼   ► But I think it's so funny that not only were they wrong

01:45:56 ◼   ► that an iPhone or an iPod touch would be the default remote

01:46:00 ◼   ► for the Apple TV, but that they've gone so far

01:46:03 ◼   ► as to actually not let you use it as one with the remote app.

01:46:07 ◼   ► It was like the worst,

01:46:09 ◼   ► it could not have been a more wrong prediction.

01:46:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it's not one that makes sense in any way.

01:46:16 ◼   ► Like why not enable software from another platform,

01:46:19 ◼   ► from another one of their devices

01:46:21 ◼   ► that extends the capabilities of this device.

01:46:24 ◼   ► It's such an easy, not easy technically,

01:46:28 ◼   ► it's probably really difficult,

01:46:29 ◼   ► but easy conceptually for it to do.

01:46:31 ◼   ► - I don't know, and the one area

01:46:33 ◼   ► where I feel like it really would be useful,

01:46:36 ◼   ► especially, and everybody's complaining this week

01:46:37 ◼   ► 'cause of the first run, where, you know,

01:46:40 ◼   ► and it ends up, I didn't know this,

01:46:41 ◼   ► but I learned that if you sign up for Netflix through iTunes,

01:46:45 ◼   ► that you don't have to enter your password again,

01:46:48 ◼   ► that it is somehow included in your iTunes account.

01:46:52 ◼   ► But I don't know, I think like most people,

01:46:55 ◼   ► I signed up for Netflix long enough ago

01:46:57 ◼   ► that I pay Netflix directly,

01:46:59 ◼   ► and so yes, I had to enter our Netflix password.

01:47:02 ◼   ► But for entering passwords,

01:47:04 ◼   ► or anything you actually have to type,

01:47:05 ◼   ► being able to do it on the phone

01:47:08 ◼   ► was such an incredible convenience.

01:47:11 ◼   ► And it is odd, I know, and some people complain

01:47:14 ◼   ► that Guy and I kind of blew it off last week,

01:47:16 ◼   ► but it is kind of curious that the old Apple TV

01:47:18 ◼   ► would let you pair a Bluetooth keyboard.

01:47:21 ◼   ► And it still lets you pair Bluetooth things.

01:47:23 ◼   ► You can pair any Bluetooth, like universal remote control,

01:47:27 ◼   ► and you can pair universal, or not universal,

01:47:30 ◼   ► Bluetooth game controllers.

01:47:32 ◼   ► And it's therefore very conspicuous

01:47:36 ◼   ► that they won't let you pair a Bluetooth keyboard with it,

01:47:40 ◼   ► which might only be useful,

01:47:41 ◼   ► or at least would be the most useful