The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello

00:00:01 ◼   ► Man, you always sound so good. I

00:00:03 ◼   ► Got I just am doing what Marco tells me to do. I know I've got it

00:00:08 ◼   ► I keep saying I'm gonna do what Marco tells me to do and I haven't done yet

00:00:11 ◼   ► Well, he keeps changing his opinion

00:00:13 ◼   ► I like I bought all the stuff that he told me to buy and then like a week later is like oh, oh

00:00:17 ◼   ► But this microphone is even better and then like two weeks later was like and then there's this microphone dude

00:00:22 ◼   ► I'm not gonna keep buying microphones

00:00:28 ◼   ► the other thing that gets me to is the

00:00:30 ◼   ► the

00:00:32 ◼   ► Now that I have the watch I feel like it's one too many devices to have to silence before a podcast

00:00:36 ◼   ► You know, I leave my watch silenced all the time

00:00:39 ◼   ► I do too except when I don't and I at least have to I feel like I at least have to check it before recording

00:00:46 ◼   ► Well, that's true. Yeah, I I leave it. I leave it off the whole time. I I can't remember the last time I turned it on

00:00:54 ◼   ► That would kind of I don't know it might be I might be wishing for too much magic

00:00:58 ◼   ► but I kind of wish that there was like a

00:01:00 ◼   ► Like some kind of way to tie into iTunes or iCloud and say silence all my shit. Oh, that's

00:01:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean the problem with the iPhones right and right just the iPhones have the physical silent switch

00:01:15 ◼   ► So right you could silence it, but it would still be switched to on I don't know I did I think about that

00:01:22 ◼   ► I wish I had a button to push, you know, for the valuable podcasting demographic, I wish I had a button to push that basically said,

00:01:27 ◼   ► "Okay, stop syncing all your drop boxes and stuff. Make everything silent.

00:01:33 ◼   ► Just enough already." I don't know, I, the Apple Watch sound,

00:01:39 ◼   ► that is one of the least compelling things about that product to me, and I just, I don't want to have, like, I

00:01:46 ◼   ► can feel the little taps. I kind of don't need to hear the sound.

00:01:51 ◼   ► Kind of agree. I forget who I was talking to. I don't it might have even been on it

00:01:55 ◼   ► You know

00:01:55 ◼   ► you never have that where you forget what you said on a podcast and what yeah in real life because I

00:01:58 ◼   ► Talk about the same stuff in real life that I talk about on shows. Yeah, I was like, yes

00:02:03 ◼   ► No

00:02:03 ◼   ► That was just a conversation I had

00:02:05 ◼   ► That the default might be wrong that the default for the Apple watch might be to be silent, huh? I

00:02:11 ◼   ► Can see why it's not because it's that's so

00:02:16 ◼   ► to every other device you own, but I feel like with the watch it actually

00:02:21 ◼   ► makes sense where most people you know maybe but if you're new to it and you're

00:02:25 ◼   ► unfamiliar and you're going through the infamous first week of getting to know

00:02:28 ◼   ► Apple watch defaulting to trusting the haptics or tap ticks whatever you want

00:02:33 ◼   ► to call them is I think the way to go yeah I don't see I don't see the point I

00:02:39 ◼   ► mean I I can see the point in making noise when it's not on my wrist but when

00:02:42 ◼   ► it's on my wrist and I can feel it, I kind of feel like that's enough for me. And the

00:02:47 ◼   ► shame of it is, if there are instances where you should be alerted audibly because something's

00:02:56 ◼   ► going on, they're mixed in with the ones where it's pointless, and so I just turn them off.

00:03:04 ◼   ► And I'd much rather scale them back to have them be only when it's particularly important.

00:03:10 ◼   ► But right now it's like every time anything happens, it wants to do a little ding.

00:03:14 ◼   ► And I don't need a little ding.

00:03:15 ◼   ► I've totally got the haptic feel down.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I know that it's tapping me.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I don't need a noise too.

00:03:23 ◼   ► And the noise annoys everybody else in the world.

00:03:25 ◼   ► The beauty of the haptics on the Apple Watch is that nobody hears your vibration like they

00:03:31 ◼   ► hear it on the phone.

00:03:33 ◼   ► It's just a complete secret message from your watch to you.

00:03:38 ◼   ► so why do I need a ding?

00:03:40 ◼   ► - You're recording, right?

00:03:41 ◼   ► - I am recording.

00:03:43 ◼   ► - We just got right into it.

00:03:44 ◼   ► This is great.

00:03:45 ◼   ► - I'm always recording.

00:03:46 ◼   ► I had a conversation with Dan Morin the other week

00:03:51 ◼   ► and halfway through we're like, is this a podcast?

00:03:53 ◼   ► No, it's not, but I was recording it.

00:03:56 ◼   ► It could have been, but it's not a podcast.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Just in case, why not?

00:04:00 ◼   ► - So I've been away, I've been on vacation for a while.

00:04:03 ◼   ► So there has not been a show for a while.

00:04:06 ◼   ► There's not really been much news that's gone on.

00:04:08 ◼   ► it seemed like I picked a very advantageous time to go on vacation news-wise, but there was

00:04:13 ◼   ► a couple of things that I was like, "Oh man, I wish I had time to write about this," because

00:04:19 ◼   ► this is like a good commentary type, punditry type stuff that burst out in the last two weeks.

00:04:26 ◼   ► But one of them, I guess this actually predates that. This is all the way back to June,

00:04:31 ◼   ► which is when the new Pebble Time started shipping. Did you get one of those?

00:04:35 ◼   ► I didn't. So you wore the original Pebble for years, right? For the two years, basically.

00:04:43 ◼   ► I mean, until I got my Apple Watch, and I was one of the Kickstarter people, so I got it in whatever

00:04:49 ◼   ► February of '13, something like that. So two years. Yeah, I kick-started it, the original, wore it for

00:04:56 ◼   ► like two days, and I bought the new one too, because I thought, well, I mean, I'm rooting for these

00:05:02 ◼   ► these guys. I really do hope that they pull it out and I think it's great that they have

00:05:08 ◼   ► a different set of priorities, not just to Apple but to everybody else in the space.

00:05:14 ◼   ► It really, especially after having worn Apple Watch for a while, it's so far behind in so

00:05:22 ◼   ► many ways that it just can't. The thing that made me think about it and just of all the

00:05:26 ◼   ► things I want to talk about with you, get it out of the way first, is you saying that

00:05:29 ◼   ► when the tactics go off, you don't have to worry about people hearing them. Well, when

00:05:32 ◼   ► the Pebble Time tactic goes off, everybody in the room knows it.

00:05:37 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. Yeah, you know, for me, it's, and it's not their fault, but as an iOS user,

00:05:42 ◼   ► I just, I can see the writing on the wall. Before it was like, you know, Apple had some

00:05:47 ◼   ► Bluetooth stuff that would send out notifications, and there were other devices that could support

00:05:51 ◼   ► it, including Pebble, and it seemed like, you know, it was what it was, but it was clear

00:05:56 ◼   ► than the background Apple was working on a watch and was going to put all their

00:06:00 ◼   ► effort into tying iOS with that watch. And you know, when I saw Pebble Time, I

00:06:05 ◼   ► thought, you know, they keep adding features for Android because they can

00:06:10 ◼   ► tie into all of the Android Wear APIs, and it just seemed clear to me that

00:06:14 ◼   ► Pebble was going to be a much better watch on Android than it was ever going

00:06:18 ◼   ► to be on iOS because it was never going to be a priority for Apple to support

00:06:23 ◼   ► Pebble because why would they they've got their own watch yeah and even if you

00:06:27 ◼   ► want to take a less cynical competitive or if you want to say anti-competitive

00:06:32 ◼   ► view it's just never gonna be a priority for them to spend the time to make those

00:06:37 ◼   ► API's public instead of private even if they kind of in in their heart of hearts

00:06:41 ◼   ► if Apple wanted to support third-party watches like pebble as best they could

00:06:47 ◼   ► on iOS they're never gonna have the API's cat caught up to where the private

00:06:51 ◼   ► APIs for Apple Watch are.

00:06:54 ◼   ► Just not gonna happen.

00:06:55 ◼   ► - Nor are they going to be as rich as what is

00:06:58 ◼   ► in the Android Wear stuff on Android.

00:07:01 ◼   ► So if you're Pebble, you're like, you know,

00:07:02 ◼   ► iOS is a nice market and you'd like to be there,

00:07:05 ◼   ► but your product is worse on it than it is on Android.

00:07:09 ◼   ► So I think, I understand why they're prioritizing things

00:07:13 ◼   ► that way and I would make the same decision.

00:07:15 ◼   ► And I don't blame Apple because, you know,

00:07:17 ◼   ► what does Apple want to focus on?

00:07:19 ◼   ► Apple Watch or kind of vague third-party support that really would only be, I mean, Google's

00:07:25 ◼   ► talked about doing, you know, Android Wear support on iOS, but it'll be the same thing.

00:07:28 ◼   ► There'll be an app that ties into some basic Bluetooth stuff and maybe some Google services

00:07:33 ◼   ► they'll be able to do, but, you know, I get the impression that Apple can do some very

00:07:38 ◼   ► clever things in the background in terms of launching, you know, like launching apps,

00:07:43 ◼   ► grabbing the data, sending it to the watch. That is not something that is allowed by third-party

00:07:48 ◼   ► apps and so they're always going to be ahead of things. Yeah.

00:07:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and if that's already a problem on Apple Watch and it is, you know, in terms of sometimes

00:07:56 ◼   ► the latency between tapping the weather complication on your face and actually getting the weather

00:08:01 ◼   ► to update with Apple having the inside access to it. Imagine how much worse it would be

00:08:06 ◼   ► for someone relying on third party. I can't help but think that that's why Google, that

00:08:10 ◼   ► was like a rumor leading up to, it was months ago actually, but a rumor leading up to IO

00:08:16 ◼   ► that was something that they might announce at IO in early June or late

00:08:19 ◼   ► June or May or whatever the hell IO was and didn't happen and I can't help but

00:08:25 ◼   ► think that one of the reasons you know maybe the main reason why not that they

00:08:28 ◼   ► haven't been working on it but that it is so it pales in comparison both to

00:08:33 ◼   ► Apple watch for iOS and Android wear for Android and so therefore why you know

00:08:38 ◼   ► it's second rate either way no matter just my experience with the pebble thing

00:08:42 ◼   ► is like pebble would update its apps in the background as long as the pebble app

00:08:45 ◼   ► was running and it would run for a while.

00:08:46 ◼   ► And at some point iOS would just kill it

00:08:48 ◼   ► because it hadn't been running for a while

00:08:50 ◼   ► and it needed the memory.

00:08:51 ◼   ► And at that point that was it.

00:08:53 ◼   ► Like Pebble won't talk to the watch

00:08:56 ◼   ► or I mean, won't talk to the phone after that

00:08:57 ◼   ► because you know, it's just an app

00:09:00 ◼   ► and it doesn't have any special powers there.

00:09:04 ◼   ► And you know, that's just how it is.

00:09:06 ◼   ► It's a tough situation, but I like them too.

00:09:10 ◼   ► I like the idea that this is a lower cost,

00:09:13 ◼   ► you know, simpler, long life. I like the fact that it's got the long battery life.

00:09:17 ◼   ► There are lots of things to like about it, but, you know, the fact is, platform vendors have so

00:09:22 ◼   ► much power over what these other products can do. And at least with Google, they can tie into the

00:09:30 ◼   ► stuff that Google built for Android Wear and good for them. That makes that a more compelling

00:09:34 ◼   ► product on Android. But on iOS, it's just never—I mean, I kept having this hope for the first two

00:09:39 ◼   ► years that they would get better, and it did get better for a while, and then it feels

00:09:44 ◼   ► like to me they hit a wall where it's like this is all Apple is ever going to let Bluetooth,

00:09:48 ◼   ► generic Bluetooth devices do.

00:09:50 ◼   ► Yeah. App is a sort of nebulous word, and as time goes on, it's ever more nebulous.

00:09:56 ◼   ► But the basic idea, because it doesn't really relate to anything like a low-level computer

00:10:01 ◼   ► science term. It's a bundle that basically means it's a process running on your computer

00:10:10 ◼   ► that displays a user interface to the user. To me, this is my interpretation of the word.

00:10:17 ◼   ► It's a word inherently of the GUI era of computing. It's a thing that no matter which computer

00:10:24 ◼   ► on that the user looks at and interacts with.

00:10:29 ◼   ► And I, you know, even on iOS and maybe in the early days like 2008 when the App Store

00:10:34 ◼   ► first debuted, that's really what apps were.

00:10:37 ◼   ► They were processes that showed a user interface and had an icon and if you were looking at

00:10:42 ◼   ► it and it, you know, it was running and if you weren't looking at it, it wasn't running.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And it was really pretty simple.

00:10:49 ◼   ► And now there's, you know, as iOS has evolved, there's a lot more that can happen in the

00:10:53 ◼   ► the background and apps can stay in memory as long as there's enough memory to keep

00:10:58 ◼   ► the most, you know, three, four, five most recently used apps. You can request for background

00:11:06 ◼   ► downloads even when you're not running, et cetera, et cetera. But basically, to interact

00:11:11 ◼   ► with another piece of hardware, to have a phone interacting with and controlling with

00:11:16 ◼   ► a watch, you don't really want an app for that. It has to be part of the operating system.

00:11:20 ◼   ► there's no way that third parties get to write parts of the operating system on iOS.

00:11:25 ◼   ► Yeah, you need some sort of feature.

00:11:27 ◼   ► And it's not like there aren't steps toward this in some of the iOS updates that have

00:11:32 ◼   ► come out over the last few years.

00:11:33 ◼   ► But, you know, for something like Pebble, you really need, like, a daemon to use Unix

00:11:37 ◼   ► terminology.

00:11:38 ◼   ► You need something that is a process that runs in the background all the time.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And Apple's not going to let—Apple always has the ability to—even when there is a

00:11:46 ◼   ► when there is a process running in the background, because iOS backgrounding, you know, S apps

00:11:50 ◼   ► can run in the background facelessly to do some updates and things. Apple is never going

00:11:54 ◼   ► to give up the option to kill something if it wants to improve the user experience by

00:12:01 ◼   ► freeing up memory so that this other app can run. And so, you know, somebody like Pebble,

00:12:05 ◼   ► they just can't, they can't install something that's running all the time and they can't

00:12:08 ◼   ► count on it being there. And that, you know, it limits what they can do, whereas Apple

00:12:12 ◼   ► can try to do that, we should say, because, I mean, you mentioned it. I sometimes will

00:12:17 ◼   ► put on like a weather complication or something like that, and it just—or the sunset on

00:12:24 ◼   ► that, what is it, the solar face, where it calculates out like the sunrise/sunset data.

00:12:28 ◼   ► I've had that just—it gives up and it shows it like it's the equinox, because even

00:12:33 ◼   ► though it's talking to the phone, whatever process updates that data has just died or

00:12:38 ◼   ► stalled. And so even Apple is struggling with it and they control the operating system.

00:12:42 ◼   ► And that's, you know, if it could, if it made any sense, and it doesn't for

00:12:47 ◼   ► Pebble to be connected to your Mac instead of to your phone, it doesn't because you're going

00:12:53 ◼   ► to wander away from your Mac with your watch on and want to have a connection. And that's why it

00:12:57 ◼   ► wants to connect to a phone and not to a computer. But if it, if it made any sense,

00:13:00 ◼   ► they could write Mac software that did everything they wanted to do, but it wouldn't go through the

00:13:05 ◼   ► the Mac App Store. It would be the sort of thing you download from getpebble.com

00:13:09 ◼   ► and install on your Mac the old-fashioned way because it would have

00:13:12 ◼   ► to do things that even in the even on the Mac through the App Store you're not

00:13:16 ◼   ► allowed to do. Well at that point you should just have Wi-Fi in the thing and

00:13:20 ◼   ► have it just talk to a web service. Right. And then only use the phone when it

00:13:24 ◼   ► absolutely has to but then it's not really a phone accessory anymore right

00:13:28 ◼   ► it's just a yeah or there's a web service that the phone is talking to and

00:13:32 ◼   ► that the watch is talking to. I mean, it's just a mess. It's not the same product at

00:13:36 ◼   ► that point.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Right. So my review of the Pebble, which I haven't written and I don't know if I'm going

00:13:42 ◼   ► to write. I didn't write a review of the first Pebble because it was sort of out of good

00:13:47 ◼   ► sportsmanship for lack of a better term, that it would have been very negative and I didn't

00:13:52 ◼   ► feel like that was... I just didn't want to do that. Plenty of other people wrote about

00:14:00 ◼   ► but I just felt like I'd be jumping on the pile.

00:14:03 ◼   ► With this one, I feel like, hey,

00:14:06 ◼   ► they've been around long enough,

00:14:07 ◼   ► and now the market is this.

00:14:09 ◼   ► It would be fair to write a negative review.

00:14:11 ◼   ► So maybe I will, maybe I won't,

00:14:12 ◼   ► but it's short, and it's basically,

00:14:15 ◼   ► A, the hardware really does not compare

00:14:18 ◼   ► in any meaningful way to what you can get

00:14:21 ◼   ► with an Apple Watch Sport.

00:14:23 ◼   ► So let's just compare it to Apple Watch Sport.

00:14:25 ◼   ► For 350 and 399, yes, that's more expensive

00:14:28 ◼   ► than the Pebble Time, which starts at 199.

00:14:31 ◼   ► But it's in the same ballpark.

00:14:35 ◼   ► To me, 199 and 349, it's close to half.

00:14:39 ◼   ► I guess it's half if you compare it

00:14:40 ◼   ► to the 42 millimeter version.

00:14:41 ◼   ► But it feels like way more than,

00:14:46 ◼   ► the Apple Watch feels way more than twice as well made.

00:14:48 ◼   ► And to me, aesthetically, you can tell just by looking

00:14:52 ◼   ► at a picture of the Pebble Time,

00:14:54 ◼   ► there's this double bezel effect around the display.

00:14:58 ◼   ► So the display is what actually lights up and is in color.

00:15:00 ◼   ► But then around that, there's a black thing

00:15:03 ◼   ► that goes around the display.

00:15:05 ◼   ► And then around that is a piece of plastic

00:15:07 ◼   ► that covers the crystal.

00:15:08 ◼   ► So there's like two bezels around the actual watch face.

00:15:11 ◼   ► And to me, in photographs, it looks like it is what it is.

00:15:15 ◼   ► But while I was wearing it,

00:15:16 ◼   ► every time I glanced at my wrist, it just stuck out.

00:15:19 ◼   ► And I realized that I've never seen a watch

00:15:21 ◼   ► that has anything like that before,

00:15:23 ◼   ► digital analog or otherwise.

00:15:25 ◼   ► and it really feels like a compromise in terms of engineering.

00:15:29 ◼   ► So aesthetically and build-wise, I thought it was really poor.

00:15:35 ◼   ► I know that it sounds like a petty thing, but to me, the Taptic Engine or whatever you

00:15:41 ◼   ► want to call it in the Pebble time, the fact that it's like a vibrator from your phone

00:15:44 ◼   ► and it's very loud, I mean like surprisingly loud, is just a deal breaker.

00:15:51 ◼   ► Part of that is just my experience with Apple Watch with the tactics being surprisingly

00:15:55 ◼   ► central to the experience of using Apple Watch.

00:15:59 ◼   ► With the Pebble Time, it to me is horrendous.

00:16:01 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:16:02 ◼   ► It may not even be any different than the one from the original Pebble.

00:16:06 ◼   ► But once you got used to Apple Watch or I did at least and it's sort of this subtle

00:16:11 ◼   ► tapping that is completely silent, that loud jarring like it just feels like the equivalent

00:16:18 ◼   ► of holy shit, something terrible is happening

00:16:20 ◼   ► that you need to be alerted to right away.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Even if it's like a text message

00:16:24 ◼   ► from somebody you're working with who says yes.

00:16:27 ◼   ► You get like a jolt to your wrist.

00:16:29 ◼   ► It almost feels like an electric shock.

00:16:32 ◼   ► And that to me, I'm not judging that

00:16:33 ◼   ► in terms of iOS or Android.

00:16:35 ◼   ► That would be the same no matter what you're using it with.

00:16:38 ◼   ► And lastly, my other big complaint about it

00:16:41 ◼   ► is that this color screen that they're using,

00:16:43 ◼   ► I understand that it gives tremendous battery life.

00:16:46 ◼   ► And the battery life on Pebble

00:16:47 ◼   ► is clearly the single best thing about it

00:16:49 ◼   ► compared to Apple Watch.

00:16:51 ◼   ► But I can't read the screen in any light

00:16:54 ◼   ► without getting it real close to my eyes

00:16:56 ◼   ► and holding it at a perfect angle.

00:16:57 ◼   ► Whether it's broad daylight, well-lit room indoors,

00:17:02 ◼   ► or especially in dim lighting.

00:17:03 ◼   ► In dim lighting, I can't see it even when it lights up.

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's a really, really low contrast screen.

00:17:09 ◼   ► And maybe I'm in a bad place on that

00:17:13 ◼   ► because of the stuff I've had with the Retina

00:17:15 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Even when I close my bad eye and just look at it with my perfectly good right eye, I

00:17:22 ◼   ► really have a hard time reading that screen.

00:17:23 ◼   ► Worse and to me, the contrast is the big thing.

00:17:26 ◼   ► The contrast is worse than with the original Pebble because I even went back and powered

00:17:30 ◼   ► up my original Pebble to compare.

00:17:33 ◼   ► Just for readability, to me, it's worse.

00:17:36 ◼   ► It's really, really low contrast.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I wasn't convinced that given the resolution

00:17:41 ◼   ► of it, I wasn't really convinced that the color was even necessary.

00:17:45 ◼   ► nice to have because they're going to get mocked if they don't have color, but it's

00:17:48 ◼   ► not like there are beautiful works of art on that display because it's not a very high-res

00:17:53 ◼   ► display. It really is about imparting this information to you and anything you do to

00:17:58 ◼   ► junk that up and it just makes it harder to read. I don't know. I'm with you. I feel like

00:18:06 ◼   ► I want to root for those guys, but even at the time, even when I backed that Kickstarter,

00:18:12 ◼   ► I felt like these guys had a very short window where they could come out.

00:18:16 ◼   ► I like that they're trying to be something different and cheaper and maybe they could

00:18:21 ◼   ► compete with the Fitbits of the world.

00:18:25 ◼   ► The warning sign I got was when they came out with the Pebble Steel because I didn't

00:18:30 ◼   ► mind the design of the original Pebble.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, it was a big black watch, but it was what it was.

00:18:35 ◼   ► It was a curved plastic big chunk and it told the time and that was fine.

00:18:41 ◼   ► Ultimately, it always told the time and it lasted a week and it did a couple of other

00:18:44 ◼   ► neat things.

00:18:45 ◼   ► So I was fine wearing it as just a watch.

00:18:48 ◼   ► But the Pebble Time, when it came out, it was more expensive and it was supposed to

00:18:50 ◼   ► be fancy.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And...

00:18:52 ◼   ► I mean, the steel.

00:18:53 ◼   ► I mean, the Pebble Steel, yeah.

00:18:54 ◼   ► And it was not...

00:18:55 ◼   ► It was not...

00:18:57 ◼   ► I didn't like the design of it.

00:18:58 ◼   ► I really wondered what they were doing at that point.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Like, it was this nice material, but if you ran your finger over the front of it, there

00:19:06 ◼   ► were sharp edges at the bezel because of the way they built

00:19:09 ◼   ► the steel bezel on top of the screen.

00:19:12 ◼   ► And so it was kind of like uncomfortable to touch.

00:19:15 ◼   ► And yeah, at that point I was starting to wonder

00:19:18 ◼   ► what are their priorities here?

00:19:20 ◼   ► And do they know that this freight train is running at them?

00:19:24 ◼   ► And Pebble Time, I think their timing was great

00:19:26 ◼   ► for their Kickstarter 'cause it was before Apple Watch stuff

00:19:30 ◼   ► started to really happen and they tried to get in

00:19:32 ◼   ► just before then.

00:19:33 ◼   ► but I don't know it's just yeah I feel bad for him but there was no way that I was gonna buy one.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Aesthetically I actually think the original Pebble is better than either of the subsequent ones.

00:19:46 ◼   ► Yeah I agree. It doesn't have that double bezel effect. It is a weird looking watch.

00:19:50 ◼   ► It's clearly some kind of smartwatch type thing but it's not too big and it's to me it's very

00:19:56 ◼   ► honest to itself. It looks like a hundred or one hundred and fifty dollar digital watch and it has

00:20:02 ◼   ► The band that it stripped with was a... it wasn't great, but it was fine. It was a fine,

00:20:07 ◼   ► you know, what would you ever call, you know, rubber...

00:20:09 ◼   ► It was a rubber... I took that off so fast. I just... I made my wrist sweaty and I got a

00:20:18 ◼   ► leather band for it. But there's lots of people who... there's lots of other digital watches,

00:20:23 ◼   ► though, that have a band that's very much like that. It's fine. But the fact that they picked

00:20:26 ◼   ► a standard watch connector so that it was easy for somebody, just as easy to put a new band on it as

00:20:31 ◼   ► it is any other standard watch. So I've seen, yeah, actually a lot of the people

00:20:36 ◼   ► who I know who have an original Pebble use, you know, some kind of other third-party

00:20:41 ◼   ► band. You know, I've seen you with yours many times, or used to at least. Yeah,

00:20:46 ◼   ► Black Leather Band from the shopping mall down the street, and you

00:20:50 ◼   ► know, it was easy to put it on. And I, you know, I like that. It was fine. It

00:20:54 ◼   ► did, it served its purpose, but you know, the Apple Watch was always hanging over

00:20:59 ◼   ► that product. And honestly, Google's Android Wear stuff too, because the platform vendors

00:21:07 ◼   ► were clearly going to come in and these poor little guys were going to be kind of squeezed.

00:21:13 ◼   ► Looking at it too, I'm looking at just the Get Pebble homepage where they show all three

00:21:17 ◼   ► of their watches, and they still sell all three. The other thing that really gets me,

00:21:20 ◼   ► I think that the Steel is truly an ugly watch. And I've seen a few people wearing them. Like

00:21:25 ◼   ► Like not people I know, but I've seen people on airplanes wearing them.

00:21:31 ◼   ► And they're very, very telltale to me.

00:21:34 ◼   ► Like there's a certain thing about the three lugs that stick out at the top and bottom

00:21:40 ◼   ► to connect the wristband to and the way that the display is almost, or not the display,

00:21:47 ◼   ► but the face is almost a rectangle, but not quite.

00:21:50 ◼   ► It's like a, it looks like a box that you've stuffed too much stuff into when you're moving.

00:21:55 ◼   ► It doesn't look like it's it doesn't look like it's supposed to be a rounded shape. It just looks like you know

00:22:00 ◼   ► They fattened it up on the sides a little bit

00:22:03 ◼   ► But the other thing that really gets me about looking at the picture is that they decided to print the word pebble

00:22:08 ◼   ► it's so bad black bezel underneath which is

00:22:11 ◼   ► I think a horrendous design mistake and it almost like hubris, you know, like

00:22:17 ◼   ► You can get into it with phones

00:22:21 ◼   ► But to me, it's a lot like the way that, you know, a lot of the, you know, almost all the

00:22:25 ◼   ► Android phones I've ever seen always have like Samsung written at the top, probably

00:22:29 ◼   ► with a Verizon or an AT&T stamped on the glass too. And it's just like a low rent move. And

00:22:36 ◼   ► it just, however well it flies in the phone world, it flies worse in the watch world.

00:22:40 ◼   ► Well, you know, it's not like a Rolex doesn't have a logo on it. But it didn't feel like

00:22:46 ◼   ► that to me. It felt like, yeah, it felt cheap to me on the pebble that, you know, oh, we

00:22:51 ◼   ► what we're gonna do we're gonna stick our name on there and you're never gonna

00:22:54 ◼   ► be able to get it off yeah I don't know why they did it it may just have been

00:22:58 ◼   ► that the to get the right size bezel and into the size of their screen yeah we

00:23:03 ◼   ► got extra space what do we do put our name there yeah I don't know I don't

00:23:08 ◼   ► know bothers me yeah so I my advice would be I don't think there I know

00:23:13 ◼   ► they're not a publicly held company but my advice would be if they were to sell

00:23:16 ◼   ► your stock but I am rooting for them so I feel I don't take any pleasure in that

00:23:22 ◼   ► really but I feel like they are this is the problem of headed going head-to-head

00:23:26 ◼   ► with your 200 billion dollar company or yeah I guess Apple's more like an 800

00:23:32 ◼   ► billion dollar whatever a company with Apple's resources yep let me take a break

00:23:38 ◼   ► and I will thank our first sponsor we have we have our good friends at Harry's

00:23:45 ◼   ► you guys know Harry's they sell high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of

00:23:50 ◼   ► the big razor brands

00:23:53 ◼   ► It was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg

00:23:57 ◼   ► But they got really really serious about this. This is the thing that always impresses me about Harry's is you hear well

00:24:03 ◼   ► It's some startup that's selling razors and stuff and you think that they buy this stuff white label and just buy razor blades

00:24:10 ◼   ► Third party and relabel them and package them in their own stuff

00:24:14 ◼   ► No, what they did is they found an old razor blade factory in Germany that they liked so

00:24:20 ◼   ► much they bought the factory and they make their own blades.

00:24:24 ◼   ► They're all high performing German blades crafted right to their own specs.

00:24:31 ◼   ► That's the thing that the whole shaving experience starts with.

00:24:35 ◼   ► Obviously before you get to any kind of products, before you get to the handles, it's the blade

00:24:38 ◼   ► that you're rubbing against your skin.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Harry's is so focused on that that they bought their own factory. Truly, truly impressive

00:24:45 ◼   ► and in my experience, it really shows in the product that they sell to you. What they do

00:24:51 ◼   ► is they offer this high quality stuff at factory direct pricing because they don't have a middleman.

00:24:57 ◼   ► When you buy stuff from harrys.com, it's Harry's who fulfills it and ships it right to you.

00:25:02 ◼   ► By getting rid of the middleman layer, by getting rid of distributors, by getting rid

00:25:06 ◼   ► of third party stores, by getting rid of drugstores that you have to go to and visit and go through

00:25:11 ◼   ► hassle of asking someone to unlock the case and open it up. They just sell it right to you. And

00:25:16 ◼   ► the starter set is a great, great deal. Really, really low price for 15 bucks. You get a razor,

00:25:22 ◼   ► moisturizing shave cream or gel, your choice and three razor blades. Then when you need more

00:25:29 ◼   ► blades, they're just two bucks each or less. An eight pack is 15 bucks. A 16 pack is just 25. And

00:25:37 ◼   ► And I think it goes up from there.

00:25:38 ◼   ► You can buy them bulk and save more and more

00:25:40 ◼   ► the more that you buy at a time.

00:25:41 ◼   ► But even if you just buy eight at a time,

00:25:43 ◼   ► it's 15 bucks for a refill.

00:25:45 ◼   ► You cannot beat that with Gillette Fusion

00:25:49 ◼   ► or any of those brands like that.

00:25:51 ◼   ► I think if you go to Amazon,

00:25:54 ◼   ► at least the last time I checked,

00:25:55 ◼   ► here's from my notes is that at Amazon,

00:25:58 ◼   ► and Amazon of course is a huge discounter.

00:26:00 ◼   ► They sell everything at a discount.

00:26:01 ◼   ► But for a 12-pack of Fusions from Gillette,

00:26:05 ◼   ► you pay 41 bucks.

00:26:06 ◼   ► So it's way more, it's more like three and a half bucks

00:26:10 ◼   ► a blade.

00:26:10 ◼   ► It truly is half the price for something

00:26:14 ◼   ► of comparable quality.

00:26:15 ◼   ► Great packaging, nice heavy handle.

00:26:17 ◼   ► I was just looking at my handle recently.

00:26:19 ◼   ► I've been traveling with it.

00:26:20 ◼   ► I've had this thing ever since Harry started sponsoring

00:26:23 ◼   ► the talk show.

00:26:24 ◼   ► I've had one handle from Harry's.

00:26:25 ◼   ► I was looking at it, I got like the chrome one,

00:26:27 ◼   ► whatever that one's called.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Run it under some hot water and wipe it off.

00:26:31 ◼   ► It looks mint condition and it's not like I baby it.

00:26:34 ◼   ► It's unbelievable.

00:26:36 ◼   ► looks brand new

00:26:37 ◼   ► so all i've ever done all i've ever done with these guys to refill it is i just

00:26:40 ◼   ► buy blades and one time i bought more shaving cream and that was it

00:26:43 ◼   ► uh... so here's what you do go to harry's dot com

00:26:46 ◼   ► use the promo code the talk show that's the code

00:26:50 ◼   ► and uh... you will save five bucks

00:26:53 ◼   ► off your first purchase

00:26:55 ◼   ► so my thanks to harry's

00:26:58 ◼   ► got the harry's chasing yeah that that handle it's still uh... yeah still super

00:27:02 ◼   ► sharp and yeah i just buy blades in the and the uh...

00:27:05 ◼   ► and the Shape Cream.

00:27:06 ◼   ► - The Winston set is the one I bought.

00:27:08 ◼   ► That's the one that comes with the chrome handle.

00:27:10 ◼   ► It's the Truman set that comes with the orange.

00:27:12 ◼   ► I don't know what that is, like ceramic or plastic

00:27:14 ◼   ► or something like that. - Yeah, I got the shiny one.

00:27:16 ◼   ► That's that one, the original one, the one you got.

00:27:19 ◼   ► And it's pretty and nice.

00:27:21 ◼   ► And yeah, it's funny, I was trying to come up with

00:27:24 ◼   ► who are the competitors, and it's like,

00:27:25 ◼   ► I don't even remember, they're gone.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I just get the Harry's blades now.

00:27:28 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:29 ◼   ► I've forgotten about those competitors, forget it.

00:27:31 ◼   ► Done. - Yeah.

00:27:34 ◼   ► All right, next on my list of topics for the show

00:27:39 ◼   ► is this thing that popped up,

00:27:41 ◼   ► I can't, jeez, like two weeks ago now,

00:27:42 ◼   ► but it was at the beginning of my vacation.

00:27:44 ◼   ► This whole idea that Safari is the new IE.

00:27:49 ◼   ► This was-- - I was on vacation too.

00:27:50 ◼   ► This was, I read this before going to bed

00:27:52 ◼   ► at my in-laws house, and it made me mad,

00:27:56 ◼   ► and I was like, I'm just gonna sleep on it.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And I woke up in the morning, and I was like,

00:27:58 ◼   ► nope, still mad. (laughs)

00:28:00 ◼   ► So this was written by a web developer named Nolan Lawson at his own website.

00:28:09 ◼   ► And it kind of blew up.

00:28:10 ◼   ► Ars Technica republished it.

00:28:13 ◼   ► I'm 99% sure, given Ars, that they paid him and that they republished it there.

00:28:18 ◼   ► But it certainly brought it to more people's attention.

00:28:23 ◼   ► And for people who were around in the '90s and disagreeing with--

00:28:28 ◼   ► and maybe even the early 2000s, honestly.

00:28:30 ◼   ► I think I've still got a style sheet for Daring Fireball that says IE sucks.ces.

00:28:36 ◼   ► You do.

00:28:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:38 ◼   ► I honestly would have to look it up.

00:28:41 ◼   ► I'm sure I've left a note for myself and Jimbo explaining why it has to be in a separate

00:28:46 ◼   ► file and why.

00:28:48 ◼   ► I think it's because I have it conditionally commented out on IE.

00:28:52 ◼   ► I think that's the story.

00:28:53 ◼   ► In the HTML for Daring Fireball, it's conditionally commented out.

00:28:58 ◼   ► It's a small style sheet, i.e. _sucks.php that you've got there. It's just setting margins

00:29:04 ◼   ► and hidden. Yeah.

00:29:06 ◼   ► It sucks.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Yep.

00:29:08 ◼   ► And that was, I think, I was mostly concerned with the Mac IE, which was a better IE in

00:29:13 ◼   ► my experience. But anyway.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Oh, by far.

00:29:15 ◼   ► People who had to deal with IE, it does not seem like you have to do that sort of stuff

00:29:20 ◼   ► with JavaScript. Or not JavaScript, with Safari. So it feels like it's accusations that the

00:29:28 ◼   ► headline was written to get attention rather than to accurately portray the article to

00:29:32 ◼   ► me were just.

00:29:34 ◼   ► I think, I don't think he intended it to become famous. I think I don't think so either.

00:29:42 ◼   ► But I think I think he was frustrated. Look, he went to a conference, one of many he probably

00:29:48 ◼   ► goes to about with web developers and all the web developers bitched about how, oh,

00:29:54 ◼   ► know, I want to do this thing but it's not on Safari and Apple doesn't let you do this

00:29:58 ◼   ► on Safari." And they complained about this stuff that Safari didn't do or didn't do well

00:30:03 ◼   ► and they, you know, perceived it's like, "Who knows what Apple's doing?" And, you know,

00:30:07 ◼   ► some of that may be Apple not communicating and some of that may be Apple not telling

00:30:10 ◼   ► them what they want to hear, but I think it was really very much like, "Who are we bitching

00:30:15 ◼   ► about at the meetings?" It used to be IE and now it's Safari, so Safari is the new IE.

00:30:20 ◼   ► And he ran with that, maybe being,

00:30:23 ◼   ► I think he was being cheeky,

00:30:25 ◼   ► and then it kind of blew up in his face.

00:30:28 ◼   ► But I think that was his intent.

00:30:30 ◼   ► And when I was at Macworld,

00:30:33 ◼   ► I would hear it from our developers, our web developers,

00:30:36 ◼   ► that both on the front end and also for our CMS,

00:30:39 ◼   ► who would do this stuff and show it to us, new feature.

00:30:43 ◼   ► And we would try it in Safari and they would be like,

00:30:46 ◼   ► we'd say, "It doesn't work in Safari."

00:30:48 ◼   ► And they'd be like, "Ah, Safari."

00:30:49 ◼   ► So I heard that from them too.

00:30:51 ◼   ► I suspect that might've been more

00:30:52 ◼   ► that they weren't properly testing on Safari.

00:30:55 ◼   ► But I definitely have heard from the web developers

00:30:57 ◼   ► I used to work with that Safari had some weird things

00:31:00 ◼   ► about it that were outliers,

00:31:01 ◼   ► and they had to do some extra stuff

00:31:03 ◼   ► in order to get what they were building for us

00:31:05 ◼   ► to work on Safari.

00:31:06 ◼   ► So there's, I mean, I'm sure there is some truth to that.

00:31:09 ◼   ► Although you could probably look at some stuff

00:31:11 ◼   ► that's in Safari and if you've developed for it,

00:31:13 ◼   ► then get frustrated by Chrome or Firefox too,

00:31:17 ◼   ► depends on your perspective.

00:31:18 ◼   ► And in Lawson's piece, I very much felt a very Chrome

00:31:22 ◼   ► and a little bit Android kind of perspective.

00:31:24 ◼   ► But I think in the end, what he really meant was

00:31:26 ◼   ► we used to bitch about IE and now we bitch about Safari

00:31:29 ◼   ► at these conferences that I go to.

00:31:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's twofold.

00:31:33 ◼   ► I think one is that a more accurate

00:31:35 ◼   ► and perhaps even more sensational headline

00:31:38 ◼   ► would have been Apple is the new Microsoft.

00:31:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, sure.

00:31:41 ◼   ► - If you just want a wow, blank is the new blank,

00:31:44 ◼   ► I think that's it.

00:31:45 ◼   ► And by that, I mean, they are in charge

00:31:48 ◼   ► of a dominant operating system,

00:31:51 ◼   ► where by dominant, I mean,

00:31:53 ◼   ► it means everybody has to support it

00:31:54 ◼   ► and most people feel like they need to support it

00:31:56 ◼   ► as a top tier target for their web development.

00:32:01 ◼   ► And it has a massive user base

00:32:03 ◼   ► and the company is not motivated to dance

00:32:08 ◼   ► to the rest of the web, open web communities

00:32:13 ◼   ► communities tune because they don't have to and so they can do what they want.

00:32:20 ◼   ► They can do what they want and so in many in many cases not all in both in

00:32:25 ◼   ► both Microsoft and Apple's cases not all the time but some of the time they just

00:32:29 ◼   ► decide well we that is not as high a priority for us as it is for you and so

00:32:34 ◼   ► we're going to do what we want to do and that is frustrating to them. I use the

00:32:40 ◼   ► phrase high priority or Apple's prioritizing and I got a whole bunch of angry, I was walking

00:32:47 ◼   ► around downtown San Diego on my vacation and I keep getting these like, every time I would

00:32:52 ◼   ► check my phone there'd be like 15, 20 new responses on Twitter and they were very much

00:32:57 ◼   ► from web developers and they focused so much on that idea, the prioritization. Like Apple's

00:33:03 ◼   ► got all the money, they don't need to prioritize, they can do everything which is not I think

00:33:07 ◼   ► accurate at all, but it is... The difference is that Microsoft in those days could really

00:33:14 ◼   ► define the web because almost every browser was using Windows and using IE. Almost like,

00:33:21 ◼   ► I mean like what, 90%, 85% was...

00:33:23 ◼   ► It was at least, it was probably around 90%. And at that time, the only devices that were

00:33:30 ◼   ► browsing the web were PCs.

00:33:31 ◼   ► Yes, there were no mobile devices doing this. And in the latter days, maybe there was like

00:33:36 ◼   ► WAP or something like that. But basically... But that's well past the point of where IE

00:33:41 ◼   ► became IE, you know. Right. Yeah. So that... it's a very different... one of these arguments

00:33:48 ◼   ► is about kind of access to a platform that people like, a shiny platform, which is we

00:33:51 ◼   ► want to be on iOS. And I definitely got a sense that, you know, this is about... originally

00:33:57 ◼   ► I was wondering if it was about Safari and WebKit in general, and as I read his article

00:34:00 ◼   ► I realized it's really just about mobile. He doesn't really care about the Mac Safari,

00:34:04 ◼   ► cares about iOS and wanting access to iOS and wanting to build things that work really

00:34:08 ◼   ► well on iOS. And I get that, but that's very different from a company that could literally,

00:34:14 ◼   ► like they could just whatever they did was the web and that was where Microsoft was.

00:34:19 ◼   ► So in some ways, it depends on how you define it, but in some ways, nobody's ever going

00:34:23 ◼   ► to be the new IE ever again. And so when I read that, I start to read it as this isn't

00:34:29 ◼   ► really about, it is about web standards, but it's about using web standards and being frustrated

00:34:34 ◼   ► that they don't grant you the level of access to a particular platform that you want to have. And,

00:34:40 ◼   ► you know, I understand where they're coming from, but it's not the same. It's a different kind of

00:34:48 ◼   ► argument, and that's where that analogy falls down for me. Right. And to me, one of the things

00:34:54 ◼   ► that Microsoft did that made IE IE is that they promoted purposefully, you know, for the reason

00:35:03 ◼   ► that you know it's not even that there could be an argument the other way there

00:35:08 ◼   ► is no maybe about it that they added features to IE that depended on windows

00:35:16 ◼   ► oh yeah well especially the active X stuff which was like literally just x86

00:35:20 ◼   ► how do we fix the web to make it more interactive we'll just embed x86 code in

00:35:24 ◼   ► web pages I mean I guess you could argue that that would be the that it wasn't

00:35:30 ◼   ► really about locking IE to Windows, it was about making it more interactive. But, you

00:35:37 ◼   ► know, I think that there were ways to make it interactive that wouldn't have been so

00:35:42 ◼   ► proprietary. And ActiveX could not have been more proprietary. There was no way for other

00:35:45 ◼   ► platforms to add ActiveX. Even IE on Mac didn't do any ActiveX. It was really, it wasn't even

00:35:51 ◼   ► about locking the web to IE, it was about locking the web to Windows, or at least part

00:35:55 ◼   ► of it and a whole slew of corporate type stuff where Windows was already entrenched and where

00:36:03 ◼   ► there were a lot of in-house Windows developers already all went that route with their websites.

00:36:10 ◼   ► As a Mac user from the whole era, there was a whole time when everybody was... It went

00:36:17 ◼   ► from there's no way I'm ever going to do banking online because that would be crazy. I'm going

00:36:23 ◼   ► to get hacked and lose all my money to maybe I should do banking online to I

00:36:27 ◼   ► think I I would like to do my banking online and then you find out that your

00:36:31 ◼   ► bank's website only worked with you know ie version blank or later on Windows

00:36:38 ◼   ► blank or later because the whole website was based on proprietary windows yeah

00:36:43 ◼   ► and and the we should say that during that period the web standards people

00:36:49 ◼   ► were a real lifeline for Mac users because they were saying this stuff isn't standard

00:36:54 ◼   ► and Mac users were the example, like this 10% of the web is not allowed to access this

00:37:01 ◼   ► stuff. Ultimately what cracked this open I think is first off IE got so bad that Firefox

00:37:09 ◼   ► started becoming popular and a lot of the same, a lot of the stuff that didn't work

00:37:14 ◼   ► on IE, didn't work anywhere but IE for Windows didn't work on Firefox on Windows either.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And so sites started to make sure that it also worked in Firefox. And I can't tell you

00:37:24 ◼   ► how many times you probably experienced this too. In that couple of years, things started

00:37:29 ◼   ► working on the Mac because the websites were redesigned to work on Firefox on Windows and

00:37:36 ◼   ► not just IE. And the Mac users were like, "Thank you very much because it works for

00:37:40 ◼   ► us too now. And that was a web standards based thing. When you're in a minority platform,

00:37:49 ◼   ► web standards are especially a big deal.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and so that's where I think the analogy between Safari and IE really breaks down.

00:37:58 ◼   ► And to me, it's really more about Apple and Microsoft and being more interested in their

00:38:03 ◼   ► own well-being and their own users' well-being. I've always said Apple's priorities are threefold.

00:38:10 ◼   ► first, it's users second, it's developers third. And it wants all three to be happy,

00:38:17 ◼   ► but when push comes to shove, that's the order in which things are going to fall. And I'm

00:38:23 ◼   ► sure that there are people at Apple who would argue that users come first, but in my experience

00:38:27 ◼   ► covering the company, I don't even know if I can think of a good example, but... Well,

00:38:36 ◼   ► hard to say. I don't know. I'm sure if I gave it some time, I could think of some examples.

00:38:41 ◼   ► There's a reason I've always said it that way.

00:38:42 ◼   ► I mean, this is—I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but I will say things like

00:38:49 ◼   ► Amazon and Comixology not being able to purchase in-app from a perfectly reasonable vendor

00:38:55 ◼   ► because Apple wants to intercept 30% because they're making money on Apple's platform

00:39:00 ◼   ► is not an improvement of the user experience, but it is an Apple benefit. So even, even

00:39:07 ◼   ► the fact that they disallow, say the Kindle app from having a link that goes, jumps you

00:39:11 ◼   ► out to safari to do the purchasing of Kindle. That is a perfect example. I think you could

00:39:17 ◼   ► also argue that their high profit margins on hardware are Apple first user second, you

00:39:24 ◼   ► know, irrelevant to developers more or less. It's hard not to argue that it wouldn't be

00:39:29 ◼   ► better for its customers if prices were a little bit lower across the board.

00:39:33 ◼   ► Which is not to say that they can't do what they want. It's just to say that these are the

00:39:36 ◼   ► priorities. Right. And then you could make a long-term argument that maybe that is good for

00:39:42 ◼   ► users because the high profit margin strengthen Apple as a company and make it more likely that

00:39:47 ◼   ► they're going to be successful and in a position to do cool new things going forward. You know,

00:39:53 ◼   ► that the iPhone could be developed when it was in 2007 because they had the money,

00:39:58 ◼   ► which were profits from the Mac to fund it, etc. I mean, but that now you're going, you know,

00:40:03 ◼   ► another level deep in the argument. But because of this, you know, Apple first user second

00:40:11 ◼   ► developers third, if you want to subdivide developers third, web developers are going

00:40:18 ◼   ► to come in underneath native third party app developers every time for Apple. And that's not

00:40:24 ◼   ► That's not to say that Apple doesn't want Safari everywhere, Mac and iOS, to be a great

00:40:29 ◼   ► platform and to have web developers use it, but it's never going to be a higher priority

00:40:34 ◼   ► than native stuff.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:36 ◼   ► And this argument, I feel like, I don't know if you listened to a couple weeks ago on ATP,

00:40:43 ◼   ► I felt like Marco and John were kind of, they weren't arguing.

00:40:48 ◼   ► It sounded like arguing, but they were actually just arguing two different points that I agreed

00:40:52 ◼   ► with both of them. And it depends on how you view the web. I mean, on one hand, the web

00:41:00 ◼   ► is, and the open web is a beautiful thing that we all benefit from and that we need

00:41:05 ◼   ► to keep because no one vendor is in charge of it. And it's a commonality that we all

00:41:11 ◼   ► have. You don't have to go use an app. Imagine a world where you had to use an app for everything,

00:41:14 ◼   ► right? It's like the web browser is great because some stuff doesn't need to be in an

00:41:18 ◼   ► app, doesn't have to be in an app. People build web pages, any device, including ones

00:41:22 ◼   ► we've never even thought of now can be devised and can read those web pages and isn't that

00:41:27 ◼   ► great. So that's the open web and I think it's powerful and important and web standards

00:41:31 ◼   ► are important because that way no one vendor is going to control the future of this and

00:41:36 ◼   ► everybody can access it. But for me the other piece of it and I mean what John Siracusa

00:41:41 ◼   ► has told me is you guys are really overdoing it but if you read the Nolan Lawson piece

00:41:47 ◼   ► I think it is definitely in there is this concept of what he calls the it was a point made in an installable web apps

00:41:54 ◼   ► breakout and

00:41:56 ◼   ► the whole idea there is

00:41:58 ◼   ► You know standards community wants to create that has decided that a good thing is to bundle up web apps and make them

00:42:06 ◼   ► installable like apps which is that the width of the you know, the Chrome App Store that idea and that is

00:42:13 ◼   ► That's really different because that's not the open web per se. It's sort of like using web technologies to build apps and

00:42:20 ◼   ► That is totally where I see somebody who understands Apple somebody who's inside Apple goes

00:42:26 ◼   ► Yeah, we're not as excited about that because that that doesn't sound like the open web

00:42:31 ◼   ► That sounds like you guys trying to say we want to have you know

00:42:37 ◼   ► Me too app platform on your devices and we don't love that idea, right?

00:42:43 ◼   ► At least right now like why would we prioritize that we're really happy with with

00:42:48 ◼   ► native apps

00:42:50 ◼   ► Well that said Apple of course is the company who in

00:42:54 ◼   ► 2007

00:42:56 ◼   ► First said this is how you can create apps for the iPhone

00:42:59 ◼   ► But it's limited to what the initial version of WebKit was Apple has allowed you

00:43:05 ◼   ► I mean because if we don't mention it we're both gonna get 500 emails about it.

00:43:08 ◼   ► You know I forget what version of iOS added this feature but it was years ago

00:43:13 ◼   ► it was certainly 2,000 single digit you know 2008-2009 where you hit the action

00:43:18 ◼   ► button and on any web page you can what does it call and save add to home screen.

00:43:24 ◼   ► If that wasn't in iOS 1 at some point it was certainly in iOS 2 but I think

00:43:30 ◼   ► Right and there's a way a very simple way as a web developer where if you

00:43:34 ◼   ► don't do anything when you do that you just get like a bookmark on your home

00:43:37 ◼   ► screen and you tap it and it opens that web page in mobile Safari like a regular

00:43:42 ◼   ► tab in mobile Safari but there's a way that you can have just with some simple

00:43:45 ◼   ► metadata you don't even have to do any programming really just some markup you

00:43:49 ◼   ► can have your web page open without being looking like it's in Safari it

00:43:54 ◼   ► looks like a standalone app and some people have made some pretty you know

00:43:59 ◼   ► know, app very, very close to native looking, native feeling solutions that way. And it's

00:44:05 ◼   ► still there. You can still do it. The difference with I think this Nolan Lawson argument and

00:44:11 ◼   ► the people who back him up is that they want those apps to be able to do more and more.

00:44:17 ◼   ► And I even think that one of the proposals that they want, I mean, some of the stuff

00:44:23 ◼   ► they want to do, I mean, this is just not going to happen if you know Apple is, is it

00:44:27 ◼   ► the service workers, I forget what they call it, is like doing stuff in the background.

00:44:33 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, that is not going to happen. And it ties into something I want

00:44:37 ◼   ► to talk about later, you know, which is the whole idea of web pages doing stuff in the

00:44:45 ◼   ► background by JavaScript and the adverse effects it can have on performance and battery life

00:44:49 ◼   ► and not to mention control, you know, from Apple's perspective. This is not going to

00:44:54 ◼   ► happen.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think that, like, I get why web developers would want to do this, because

00:44:59 ◼   ► it puts their skills in the most exciting place to be right now, is developing mobile

00:45:04 ◼   ► apps. And they're limited there. So I think they would like this, and any web standards

00:45:10 ◼   ► body is all about the web standards, so why would we, you know, they not want to be a

00:45:13 ◼   ► part of this. I totally get that. And I get why Apple would be resistant, and I get why

00:45:18 ◼   ► Google wouldn't care, and would perhaps even be egging them on and supporting it in Chrome,

00:45:23 ◼   ► it doesn't hurt Google like it hurts Apple because Google is happy to give away an operating

00:45:28 ◼   ► system and let everybody use it and whatever, while Apple needs to be different and pushing

00:45:33 ◼   ► their platform forward and having reasons why it's better. So I understand all of that.

00:45:38 ◼   ► I also think that ultimately, if every web browser does something, if this becomes sort

00:45:45 ◼   ► of the consensus of like, "This is how it's done," I don't think Apple's going to kick

00:45:49 ◼   ► and scream and drag its feet. I think it's going to embrace whatever ends up being the

00:45:54 ◼   ► standards, but I do think that it at this point stuff like this Apple is completely

00:45:59 ◼   ► understandably just saying yeah not our not our number one goal here because we really

00:46:04 ◼   ► like native apps and yeah the sweet solution has always been there but you know the App

00:46:10 ◼   ► Store is a huge strength of apples and I think they're they're they don't see a strategic

00:46:17 ◼   ► benefit in allowing web developers to bypass the App Store and create experiences that

00:46:22 ◼   ► may or may not be up to snuff from what can be done with native apps using the latest

00:46:29 ◼   ► iOS APIs.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Tim Cynova And part of it too, and it almost is not even

00:46:37 ◼   ► implicit, and a lot of these arguments from the pro web developer we want, you know, we

00:46:41 ◼   ► We see Apple is dragging its feet in this thing and that they're holding back the open

00:46:46 ◼   ► web.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Part of it is that Apple, yes, they have an interest in keeping the App Store as important

00:46:57 ◼   ► as it is.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And that's a strategic, just for Apple, advantage that richer web apps that you could just install

00:47:06 ◼   ► from everywhere that don't have an approval, that don't go through the App Store, that

00:47:09 ◼   ► it would hurt that.

00:47:10 ◼   ► the other thing that these that these developers want is that they're still

00:47:14 ◼   ► chasing the dream of right once run everywhere where they can write one app

00:47:20 ◼   ► that would run on all mobile devices you know Windows Phone and Android and iOS

00:47:26 ◼   ► with minimal if none if any per platform you know special cases and that's not

00:47:39 ◼   ► just against Apple's interest, that's actually against Apple's vision for what's best for

00:47:42 ◼   ► the platform. Because we've seen that for decades, you know, at any, any kind of right

00:47:47 ◼   ► once run anywhere runtime type thing is inherently a second class. Yeah, experience to what can

00:47:56 ◼   ► be done natively. And so there's a reason that that's actually in the long run, it really

00:48:02 ◼   ► is, it's maybe anti developer, maybe anti web developer, but it's in Apple's perspective,

00:48:07 ◼   ► much pro-user to say we want to take strategic we want to strategically keep

00:48:14 ◼   ► that from becoming the where the industry goes because we think it's a

00:48:17 ◼   ► much better vastly better user experience to mostly be using native

00:48:22 ◼   ► apps and if they're mostly using native apps it allows us Apple to do new things

00:48:27 ◼   ► quickly more quickly than if it depended on the industry update exactly right

00:48:33 ◼   ► - Exactly, I mean those are the two big issues.

00:48:36 ◼   ► One of them is this write once, run anywhere thing where,

00:48:40 ◼   ► and people who use Java today get really mad

00:48:44 ◼   ► when I talk about the 90s, but in the 90s,

00:48:46 ◼   ► we were all sort of sold this idea

00:48:49 ◼   ► that Java was this amazing technology

00:48:51 ◼   ► that was going to let people write apps

00:48:53 ◼   ► that ran on the Mac and ran on the PC.

00:48:55 ◼   ► And anybody on the Mac in the 90s who tried that

00:48:59 ◼   ► saw that when they ran, they ran badly,

00:49:03 ◼   ► and they never felt like you were using them

00:49:05 ◼   ► on the Mac anyway.

00:49:06 ◼   ► It was a bad experience.

00:49:09 ◼   ► And then you could put in as a developer

00:49:11 ◼   ► huge amounts of work to try and make it better on the Mac

00:49:15 ◼   ► and look more like the Mac.

00:49:16 ◼   ► But at that point now you've got all this huge chunk of work

00:49:19 ◼   ► that is about kind of localizing it for the Mac,

00:49:21 ◼   ► and you're no longer writing once and running anywhere.

00:49:23 ◼   ► So it was, that was my sort of like formative moment

00:49:27 ◼   ► in terms of saying, "Oh, it's important that stuff get written for the platform that it's

00:49:32 ◼   ► on." You can tell when it's not. I mean, you could even tell when things like Microsoft

00:49:37 ◼   ► Office were written for the Mac, but using some code and guidelines from Windows, even

00:49:42 ◼   ► when it wasn't right once run anywhere, it was still not a good experience on your platform

00:49:48 ◼   ► because it was really something that had come across from a different platform. So it's

00:49:54 ◼   ► not good for users and I don't think that I think you know this would be

00:49:58 ◼   ► similar and that's a bad experience and Apple knows that it would almost

00:50:02 ◼   ► certainly be a bad experience in most cases there's always that you know but

00:50:05 ◼   ► what about this but what about this I'm sure there would be some brilliant ones

00:50:08 ◼   ► that would be great but a lot of them would be exactly the same on Windows and

00:50:12 ◼   ► on Android and they would look kind of like neither and be kind of icky and

00:50:17 ◼   ► would we really want to do that and then your second point is absolutely true

00:50:20 ◼   ► Right now Apple can say, "Hey, new APIs at WWDC, new iOS coming out, developers jump on it,

00:50:27 ◼   ► look how we can push this platform forward. You've got access to a touch sensor now,

00:50:31 ◼   ► you've got, you know, whatever the next thing is, you've got, we put the metal APIs in there,

00:50:35 ◼   ► we're doing all of the stuff for you that makes making apps on our platform better than anywhere else

00:50:40 ◼   ► and makes our platform better and makes your apps better. So let's do that."

00:50:44 ◼   ► and then contrast that with, "Well, you know, everybody, what do we want for our standard?

00:50:50 ◼   ► Let's run it through the standards body. Let's see what everybody says." It's not that standards

00:50:55 ◼   ► aren't important and can't be good, but that seems pretty antithetical to what is a key part of Apple's

00:51:02 ◼   ► strategy, which is pushing things forward itself, being opinionated and saying, "We think this is

00:51:09 ◼   ► important. We built it," and having a team of, you know, a community of developers who will adopt

00:51:13 ◼   ► that stuff and then everything gets better and I have a hard time seeing how that happens quickly

00:51:20 ◼   ► in a you know in a web standards app development platform right and one of the things that seems

00:51:27 ◼   ► to be forgotten in this whole apple is opposed to the open web mindset is something that is very

00:51:36 ◼   ► much of a what can one opinionated company in a position of strength do which is the way that

00:51:42 ◼   ► in my opinion, Apple single handedly burst the pox that Adobe Flash was on the open web,

00:51:51 ◼   ► both in terms of user experience, in terms of battery life and performance, certainly in terms

00:52:02 ◼   ► of security, even to this day, like even this in July 2015, that this hacking team outfit over in

00:52:10 ◼   ► Italy, all their exploits were, or most of their exploits were based on Adobe Flash security holes

00:52:20 ◼   ► that were, you know, heretofore unknown to the public. And in terms of beings having what is

00:52:28 ◼   ► called the web, what you get on a web page being driven by standards. Well, Adobe Flash was on a

00:52:34 ◼   ► standards proprietary format controlled owned by Adobe. And when iOS shipped without Flash,

00:52:47 ◼   ► it was predicted by many as a reason that it would never really take off because you wouldn't be able

00:52:52 ◼   ► to see video on the web or do anything interactive on the web. And then as time went on and famously

00:52:58 ◼   ► Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, Thoughts on Flash, explaining why they haven't and

00:53:07 ◼   ► why they do not plan to and will not support Adobe Flash on iOS. And it was criticized by many,

00:53:15 ◼   ► including a lot of people who I think at the time would call themselves that, you know,

00:53:19 ◼   ► the argument was that plugins and plugin APIs are part of the web too. Well, it turns out that it

00:53:24 ◼   ► it did and it didn't keep it iOS users from seeing video it took years it did

00:53:29 ◼   ► take years and it you know one site at a time as they got their act together

00:53:33 ◼   ► switched to the open standard which is just the simple video tag from HTML 5

00:53:40 ◼   ► but here we are today and I I surf 99% of the time in Safari and I have iOS and

00:53:50 ◼   ► Mac and sometimes on the Mac I still run into sites where when they see that I'm

00:53:54 ◼   ► on a Mac, they insist on serving me Flash,

00:53:57 ◼   ► even if I change the, do the developer menu trick

00:54:00 ◼   ► and say, okay, I'm gonna tell you that I'm an iPad,

00:54:02 ◼   ► will you please give me HTML5 video?

00:54:04 ◼   ► Every once in a while, I still get that.

00:54:06 ◼   ► And I have to, if I really wanna,

00:54:08 ◼   ► most of the time I just give up and say,

00:54:09 ◼   ► screw you, I'm not watching your video.

00:54:11 ◼   ► If I need to, I can go to Chrome

00:54:13 ◼   ► and Chrome has the Flash plugin built in.

00:54:15 ◼   ► I can't remember the last time I encountered video

00:54:18 ◼   ► that didn't play on my phone or iPad though.

00:54:20 ◼   ► Just about everybody seems to have their act together

00:54:22 ◼   ► when they're actually dealing with iOS and serves that.

00:54:26 ◼   ► And that is not just for the benefit of iOS users,

00:54:28 ◼   ► that's for the benefit of anybody on any operating system

00:54:32 ◼   ► or any device that wants to watch video

00:54:34 ◼   ► and not have flash run.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And that is the sort of thing that,

00:54:39 ◼   ► if Apple just went along with what the quote unquote

00:54:41 ◼   ► community wanted, they would have added plugin support

00:54:44 ◼   ► to iOS, but by being a single opinionated company

00:54:47 ◼   ► with different priorities from maybe the industry

00:54:51 ◼   ► as a whole. Certainly different priorities from the all the web publishers that were

00:54:55 ◼   ► publishing flash-based video. They changed the web.

00:54:59 ◼   ► I think it gave Google some, you know, because Google remember tried to get flash running

00:55:07 ◼   ► on Android for a little while and at some point that fell apart and I feel like some

00:55:12 ◼   ► of that was also you had the courage to not bother because it was already not on iOS and

00:55:20 ◼   ► was one of those things that wasn't going to be, they thought it would be a competitive

00:55:24 ◼   ► advantage, it turned out to not be. And that was helpful for all of us. What would have

00:55:31 ◼   ► happened if Adobe had gotten Flash to work efficiently on Android? Maybe things would

00:55:36 ◼   ► have been different, but we do benefit from the fact that—

00:55:41 ◼   ► It's an enormous what if, since they haven't gotten it running efficiently on—

00:55:45 ◼   ► Yeah, they couldn't. They couldn't. They just couldn't. And if you saw it on Blackberry

00:55:48 ◼   ► playbook or you saw it on like the web OS tablets. It was awful. And yeah, yeah, I mean,

00:55:55 ◼   ► that was a...

00:55:56 ◼   ► I can't help but think I don't know enough people at Google to say that I can vouch for

00:55:59 ◼   ► that. I don't have any little birdies at Google who can say that this happened, but I would

00:56:03 ◼   ► bet my bottom dollar that there were an awful lot of people within Google, if not a majority

00:56:07 ◼   ► of people within Google who when, when they sort of doubled down on flash support on Android

00:56:13 ◼   ► that collectively within the company, they were like, what the heck are we doing? Why

00:56:16 ◼   ► don't we follow them and we can wipe this scourge off the you know web faster

00:56:22 ◼   ► why in the world would we not follow their lead here here somewhere where we

00:56:26 ◼   ► ought to be aligned with that it's because they were behind clearly it was

00:56:28 ◼   ► because they were really defensive and behind and they thought it was one of

00:56:31 ◼   ► their own but they to differentiation I think just for Android though right

00:56:35 ◼   ► that's one of those areas and that was at a time and and this has certainly

00:56:38 ◼   ► lessened greatly and I think it really does sort of correlate to when they got

00:56:43 ◼   ► Andy Rubin, you know, sort of shuffled him onto a closet and got him out and put Android

00:56:48 ◼   ► under the control of Sundar, whatever his name is.

00:56:54 ◼   ► That Android at that point became a lot more integrated with Google.

00:56:59 ◼   ► Up until then, and I wrote about this a couple of times on Daring Fireball, I always felt

00:57:02 ◼   ► like Android felt like its own independent company within Google, sort of like what Nest

00:57:09 ◼   ► supposedly and seems to be right now,

00:57:12 ◼   ► that it was in Android's interest maybe to do that,

00:57:14 ◼   ► but it certainly wasn't within Google's overall interest.

00:57:17 ◼   ► I think Google's overall interests were much better served

00:57:19 ◼   ► with Flash wiped out.

00:57:22 ◼   ► I mean, Flash, 'cause one, I mean, just think about search.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Any kind of content in Flash Player

00:57:27 ◼   ► was either not indexable or harder to index

00:57:31 ◼   ► than stuff that was in HTML.

00:57:33 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah.

00:57:34 ◼   ► I think that was right.

00:57:37 ◼   ► Google as a company is much more sort of open web standards kind of company.

00:57:42 ◼   ► And then there was the Android group.

00:57:44 ◼   ► And the Android group was like, "This is a -- Apple has given us an opening by refusing

00:57:48 ◼   ► to support."

00:57:49 ◼   ► It was kind of like, "Don't throw me in the briar patch a little bit."

00:57:51 ◼   ► It's like, "Yay, we get to support Flash because Apple didn't."

00:57:55 ◼   ► And then they worked with Adobe and realized, "Oh, this is not very good."

00:57:59 ◼   ► And it was -- in the end, it was not an advantage to have Flash on mobile.

00:58:04 ◼   ► But they thought it was and they hoped it was.

00:58:06 ◼   ► there were lots there were ads right there were like TV ads that said real

00:58:10 ◼   ► flash real web video yeah it was it was I mean it would but that was the thing

00:58:14 ◼   ► is it was it was strategic to try to find a weakness for Apple and when Apple

00:58:19 ◼   ► kind of blindsided everybody with the iPhone yeah and the ad putting that as

00:58:23 ◼   ► an ad was in my opinion a stupid thing because nobody ever had any idea what

00:58:27 ◼   ► was flashing what wasn't all they knew is that every once in a while and they

00:58:29 ◼   ► still do everyone's in a while as they get a dialog box saying you can't do

00:58:32 ◼   ► this unless you upgrade your flash. Click these 18 buttons and install all

00:58:38 ◼   ► your password in and stuff and install all this and then come back and

00:58:41 ◼   ► hopefully it'll work but they don't know what's flash and what's not especially as

00:58:45 ◼   ► long as it's working. The no flash thing was really great for Apple in the end

00:58:48 ◼   ► because I think how many how many native iOS apps were written in the early days

00:58:52 ◼   ► of the iPhone because the you know whatever a site's extrusion into the

00:58:59 ◼   ► world was built around Flash and they're like,

00:59:02 ◼   ► "Oh, geez, we can't do that.

00:59:04 ◼   ► "Let's write an app, we can do it that way."

00:59:06 ◼   ► Like the Major League Baseball app,

00:59:09 ◼   ► which has been one of the most successful apps ever

00:59:11 ◼   ► and was there on, I think, day one on the App Store,

00:59:15 ◼   ► one of the reasons that existed is because they didn't,

00:59:19 ◼   ► they were using Flash and then later, I think,

00:59:21 ◼   ► Silverlight for all of their audio and video stuff.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And they couldn't do that on the iPhone

00:59:26 ◼   ► and they really wanted to be on the iPhone.

00:59:28 ◼   ► So they, you know, rather than rebuild their entire infrastructure on the, on the, and,

00:59:33 ◼   ► and build, rebuild the front end for everybody, they just took those, you know, they made sure

00:59:37 ◼   ► they had some iPhone compatible streams on their servers and wrote an app. And so in the end,

00:59:43 ◼   ► the app market got a lot richer because companies wrote apps because they couldn't just rely on

00:59:50 ◼   ► flash on the web. And that was good for Apple. Yeah. And, and maybe MLB would have written an

00:59:56 ◼   ► app any either way anyway you don't know I mean they still don't have a Mac app

01:00:00 ◼   ► if you're on a Mac and you want to watch well they ballgame you still they do

01:00:03 ◼   ► have flash they do but or do they hits yeah they do I wrote a thing about it a

01:00:07 ◼   ► few months ago on six colors it is I think they wrote it last year it's still

01:00:11 ◼   ► posted it uses the it uses the streams that that the iPad app uses so it

01:00:17 ◼   ► doesn't use flash it crashes half the time not while you're playing it but

01:00:21 ◼   ► like the next time you launch it it crashes and then you launch it again

01:00:23 ◼   ► that works so like every other time it crashes on launch super hinky my

01:00:27 ◼   ► understanding is that they that they deprioritized it so it's basically I

01:00:32 ◼   ► think there's some developers at MLB who really wish that they were building this

01:00:35 ◼   ► thing because they're Mac users and they haven't been given any time to do it but

01:00:40 ◼   ► it is around you can find it and yeah it does work which is I was going to say

01:00:46 ◼   ► I'm in my in my mind I'm thinking of Mac books which is what I you know but if I

01:00:51 ◼   ► clearly the most majority of people use and I think that's that's not a good

01:00:55 ◼   ► machine to watch a ballgame on as I sit here talking to you staring in front of

01:00:59 ◼   ► a 30-inch retinum I'm a which I guess kind of would be a pretty good machine

01:01:03 ◼   ► to watch a ballgame in front of yeah I mean it's and not bad to just so I would

01:01:08 ◼   ► like to see that yeah it's it's okay it's better than a web page right and

01:01:11 ◼   ► and but you're right there is no they didn't need to do that on the Mac but

01:01:15 ◼   ► they did need to do it to get on iOS and so they did yeah and who knows how many

01:01:19 ◼   ► many other companies are in a similar position where they had a thing that worked in Flash

01:01:24 ◼   ► and then the developers and designers probably would have wanted to go native anyway because

01:01:31 ◼   ► they know how much better native can be and they could go to management and say we really

01:01:35 ◼   ► want to do a native app. Our choice as a company is to use the--this is in the hypothetical

01:01:40 ◼   ► world where you could get Flash to run on iOS. We can do this thing--we could just use

01:01:44 ◼   ► our Flash and adjust it to the screen size and it's going to be a really crummy experience

01:01:48 ◼   ► for them or we can take the time to write this native thing. Some companies are going

01:01:53 ◼   ► to say, "Ah, let's do the cheaper, easier thing and stick to Flash," as opposed to

01:01:57 ◼   ► in the actual world where the argument was we can either not run at all on these devices

01:02:02 ◼   ► in the iPhone or we can write an app. And that's a very different proposal to management.

01:02:09 ◼   ► We can do a crummy thing in Flash or go native or we can not be there at all or write a native

01:02:16 ◼   ► app.

01:02:17 ◼   ► one of the things that motivates Apple to look on skeptically at these issues of how

01:02:23 ◼   ► do we use web technologies to have installable mobile apps. I think they look at that, and

01:02:30 ◼   ► I'm of this opinion too, I think, that if there's a scenario where the perception is

01:02:36 ◼   ► you don't need to write an iOS app, and you don't need to write an Android app, you can

01:02:40 ◼   ► write a web app, and it's good enough, there will be a whole class of people who will just

01:02:46 ◼   ► just write the good enough thing. And, you know, maybe their apps aren't great, but

01:02:51 ◼   ► they're native, and it picks up a lot of the stuff that comes with being a native app,

01:02:56 ◼   ► and you update it for the next OS and it picks some things up. If you have a whole swath

01:03:00 ◼   ► of apps that are just kind of non-platform crappy, that's bad. I would argue that's

01:03:06 ◼   ► bad for both platforms. I'm not sure it's bad for Google, I'm not sure they care,

01:03:11 ◼   ► but I think it would be bad for Android users, it would certainly be bad for iOS users. And

01:03:14 ◼   ► And so I think that may be part of the thought process at Apple.

01:03:18 ◼   ► It's certainly what I thought of immediately is if we make it really easy to choose either

01:03:24 ◼   ► one, there are a lot of people who will just choose the easiest path.

01:03:28 ◼   ► And the easiest path is going to be bad for the user.

01:03:30 ◼   ► So we're going to prioritize the user over the developer and make them do the extra work

01:03:36 ◼   ► to do a native app because it's a better experience and force them to.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Yep, and I read exactly what I've you know what I said before that in my experience time

01:03:44 ◼   ► after time after time Apple first user second developers third and I really think that the

01:03:49 ◼   ► heart of this you know Apple is the new IE argument is really complaining about not putting

01:03:54 ◼   ► developers first and you know and I think in a lot of ways you could argue that that

01:04:01 ◼   ► was Microsoft's way and that Microsoft put developers ahead of users in terms of like

01:04:07 ◼   ► the way that Microsoft historically with Windows has bent over backwards not to

01:04:11 ◼   ► break APIs and to keep legacy APIs around as long as they can and that yes

01:04:17 ◼   ► we have this new thing but the old thing will still work I mean that you could

01:04:21 ◼   ► still run DOS apps and all open in a window the problem with Microsoft is

01:04:25 ◼   ► that unlike Apple which historically has had Apple and users and developers as

01:04:32 ◼   ► its constituents more than any other groups Microsoft it's it's Microsoft and

01:04:36 ◼   ► and users and developers and like the buyers, the clients, because there's so much business

01:04:44 ◼   ► aspect to it. And I feel like so much of that compatibility stuff wasn't really about honoring

01:04:49 ◼   ► the developers. It was more like the developers were stuck and maybe the developers even wanted

01:04:57 ◼   ► to move forward, but the businesses didn't. They wanted it to be just exactly the same.

01:05:03 ◼   ► And for most of Microsoft's modern history, that was the priority was how do we make a

01:05:08 ◼   ► product that will continue to get us the big contracts from the big businesses to buy a

01:05:14 ◼   ► billion PCs and install them everywhere and let's just do that.

01:05:18 ◼   ► And they didn't want change, they just wanted to stay in the mud.

01:05:21 ◼   ► So they did.

01:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:23 ◼   ► All right.

01:05:24 ◼   ► I want to talk about Chrome next.

01:05:27 ◼   ► So remind me.

01:05:28 ◼   ► All right.

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01:09:52 ◼   ► on that the renewal fees for domains that I've never used because I worry I feel like whatever the reason was I wanted to

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01:10:08 ◼   ► Yeah, just pay to pay 15 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever and just let it ride for another year

01:10:17 ◼   ► yeah, I I registered domains for these novels that I wrote like five years ago that I keep meaning to rewrite and

01:10:22 ◼   ► I

01:10:25 ◼   ► I kind of don't want to let them go because they're pretty great domains

01:10:28 ◼   ► If I ever finish the novels and sell them or something, I would want to have the domain so I just keep paying it

01:10:33 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, you gotta keep yeah, keep them going

01:10:35 ◼   ► That could be Twitter's business model

01:10:38 ◼   ► If they just started charging you for a subsequent out you get one username for free

01:10:44 ◼   ► I would have to start paying 50 bucks a year. I'm looking at my Twitter account

01:10:48 ◼   ► I've got like 10 accounts in my Twitter app right now. How many are used? Oh, they're all used. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah pretty much

01:10:54 ◼   ► I've got some that aren't I got a couple that aren't a couple of kind of gag ones

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01:11:03 ◼   ► All right

01:11:04 ◼   ► All right

01:11:04 ◼   ► so Chrome here's the other thing in the Safari is the new IE argument that I saw and that to me was very clear and

01:11:10 ◼   ► it's like to me and I

01:11:12 ◼   ► hate to broadly generalize but I I think it's true in this case is that there's a sort of

01:11:18 ◼   ► I was gonna say myopic but maybe it's a little bit more

01:11:22 ◼   ► I don't know what the word is

01:11:24 ◼   ► but it's it where you only can see your own perspective and you can't see anyone else's perspective and

01:11:29 ◼   ► To me a lot of these web develop not all web developers, but the web developers who jumped on this particular

01:11:35 ◼   ► storyline this safari is the new ie

01:11:38 ◼   ► All seemed to not be able to even see things from Apple's angle, right?

01:11:42 ◼   ► And that to me is what you what you wrote and I'll put your thing in the show notes for sure

01:11:47 ◼   ► It's really the first thing that made me want to have you as my guest this week

01:11:49 ◼   ► Because I thought your thing was short and sweet and I thought it really hit the point clearly that this is not in

01:11:55 ◼   ► Stuff that's not in Apple's interest Apple is not going to be enthusiastic over

01:11:58 ◼   ► regardless of the consensus of web standards and that's exactly what people jump jumped on you for but they don't they can't see that and

01:12:07 ◼   ► The the thing that kept coming up and there's a couple people who made this point

01:12:11 ◼   ► but the gist of it is if you read between the lines what they want them to do what they seem to want Apple to

01:12:16 ◼   ► do is just give up on WebKit and and

01:12:19 ◼   ► Let chrome and blink which is Google's fork of WebKit take over

01:12:25 ◼   ► Just like just like chrome do what it wants on iOS or even you know

01:12:29 ◼   ► And they would even I'm sure they would even say just you know

01:12:31 ◼   ► You don't have to build it in for out of the box

01:12:34 ◼   ► But just let the version of Chrome that you download from the App Store

01:12:38 ◼   ► Use blink and I think they don't go this far, but I think it you know once that happened they would realize and

01:12:45 ◼   ► Let blink do what it wants in terms of being able to install apps on the home page on iOS

01:12:53 ◼   ► Which is clearly outside the bounds of what any kind of app from the App Store can do today

01:13:01 ◼   ► because google with blank and chrome uh...

01:13:06 ◼   ► is moving very quickly and implementing

01:13:08 ◼   ► prospective new web standards for things like local storage and for background

01:13:15 ◼   ► updates and stuff like that

01:13:17 ◼   ► very very quickly

01:13:18 ◼   ► uh... and webkit is moving and always has it seems to be moved a little bit

01:13:24 ◼   ► slowly not that they don't support stuff but that they seemed to be in a webkit

01:13:27 ◼   ► is more of a conservative

01:13:29 ◼   ► standards-based rendering engine than Blink is and maybe than Mozilla's whatever they call the

01:13:39 ◼   ► rendering engine because they've got like a new one now but you know just Mozilla as an organization

01:13:47 ◼   ► and there's a reason you know there's a reason why Blink was forked from WebKit I mean Google

01:13:56 ◼   ► used to be the second biggest contributor to WebKit after Apple and

01:14:00 ◼   ► the reason basic basically the reason they forked and took WebKit on their own

01:14:06 ◼   ► and you know name their version blink was that they Google and Apple had

01:14:11 ◼   ► different priorities so if Apple had one if Apple followed any of this and what

01:14:16 ◼   ► you know was in line with them all they would have had to do all along is just

01:14:20 ◼   ► accept all of the Google's or not all or just most or more a lot more of Google's

01:14:25 ◼   ► you know, proposed patches and additions to WebKit, and they would have had exactly what

01:14:30 ◼   ► these people seem to think they want WebKit to be. Like, and there's a reason why it had

01:14:35 ◼   ► to be a fork.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Yeah, and the whole point here, I mean, it looks like an end-around to me. This is the,

01:14:41 ◼   ► this is the, well, if you don't, if you don't want to do this, just put Chrome on there

01:14:44 ◼   ► and let, and then we'll have, you know, it's basically make, why can't you be Android?

01:14:48 ◼   ► Make it like Android, because then we, then we can have what we want, which is problematic

01:14:53 ◼   ► for a couple of ways. First off, talk about giving one vendor the keys to the web. You

01:14:58 ◼   ► do want two vendors pushing and pulling in mobile. You want them pushing and pulling

01:15:02 ◼   ► at each other. You don't, well, unless you really are in the bag for one of them or the

01:15:07 ◼   ► other of them. And I'm sure we've been accused of being in the bag for Apple and we've, you

01:15:11 ◼   ► know, essentially accused Nolan Lawson of being in the bag for Google. But if you, what

01:15:15 ◼   ► you really want is for the standards process to be a push and a pull and have it be stuff

01:15:21 ◼   ► that neither Apple or Google is entirely happy with, but they can live with, and that is

01:15:26 ◼   ► like a middle ground, and that's the stuff that they're both willing to do. So that makes

01:15:31 ◼   ► sense as opposed to saying, "Oh well, why don't you just let it be Chrome on iOS, and

01:15:39 ◼   ► we can run with it." Plus, let's also say that's a totally unrealistic thought. That

01:15:45 ◼   ► you would have a scenario where you go to your bank, and the bank says, "Well, we've

01:15:50 ◼   ► got an app, but it's a web app. So what here's what you need to do. If you're on an iPhone,

01:15:55 ◼   ► you need to go to the App Store and download Chrome and install it and then come back here

01:16:00 ◼   ► and then we'll let you tap something and install it on it. No, that will never happen. That's

01:16:04 ◼   ► just never going to happen. It's unrealistic. And I think it shows how a lot of the people

01:16:10 ◼   ► who are having these conversations are not thinking like a regular user. They're thinking

01:16:14 ◼   ► like a web developer or a developer or a very technical person because, you know, just making

01:16:19 ◼   ► Chrome available for iOS would be great for power users. I was talking to Mike Hurley

01:16:23 ◼   ► about this because he uses Chrome. If you could use the Chrome rendering engine as a

01:16:27 ◼   ► power user, it's like, "Yay, okay, that would be great." But you cannot ever count on that

01:16:32 ◼   ► being – that's never going to take over. People on iOS are not going to rush to adopt

01:16:40 ◼   ► Chrome. It's just not going to happen. It would always be a minority browser. That's

01:16:44 ◼   ► That's actually why I'm kind of okay, not necessarily with embedding mobile apps inside,

01:16:49 ◼   ► but I'd be okay if Apple said, "You know what?

01:16:51 ◼   ► Yeah, okay, you can run within the Chrome app itself, you can run your rendering engine.

01:16:55 ◼   ► We'll let you do that."

01:16:56 ◼   ► If they did that, I don't think Chrome would ever be more than a tiny fraction of the web

01:17:02 ◼   ► pages viewed in iOS ever, because most people are never going to download it.

01:17:08 ◼   ► We should point out, because I know from my email, that there are a lot of people out

01:17:12 ◼   ► there who are rightfully confused about this issue because a lot of the email I got from readers,

01:17:19 ◼   ► more or less in support of Apple and against this Safari is the new IE, wrote to say,

01:17:25 ◼   ► "How can they say this? Here's the link to Chrome on the App Store," which is a reasonable mistake

01:17:30 ◼   ► to make because Chrome on the App Store does exist. It is popular with a fair number, but I

01:17:35 ◼   ► but I think you're right, decided minority of iOS users.

01:17:39 ◼   ► But the rules of the App Store are,

01:17:42 ◼   ► if you want to render HTML in any way,

01:17:45 ◼   ► you have to use the APIs for WebKit.

01:17:49 ◼   ► And there's a bunch of them now,

01:17:50 ◼   ► and we don't have to get into the differences

01:17:52 ◼   ► between the different ways that you can embed a WebKit view.

01:17:55 ◼   ► But basically, every browser in the App Store,

01:17:59 ◼   ► and there's a bunch, ICAB exists for iOS.

01:18:04 ◼   ► It's probably another one of those categories

01:18:06 ◼   ► where if I haven't looked for a while,

01:18:07 ◼   ► but there's probably like 200 apps in the app store

01:18:09 ◼   ► that are web browsers.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Chrome obviously would be the one that's most used

01:18:14 ◼   ► and most famous,

01:18:15 ◼   ► but it's using the iOS system version of WebKit.

01:18:18 ◼   ► 'Cause it's in it, that's the rules it has to be.

01:18:22 ◼   ► And so what Chrome does is it does all the other things

01:18:24 ◼   ► that a browser does.

01:18:25 ◼   ► It lets you log in with your Google credentials

01:18:27 ◼   ► and have your tabs synced up across.

01:18:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, you can see your bookmarks.

01:18:31 ◼   ► My wife uses Chrome on the desktop.

01:18:34 ◼   ► And so she's got Chrome on her iPad

01:18:38 ◼   ► because it's got her bookmarks in it,

01:18:40 ◼   ► but it's still using WebKit.

01:18:42 ◼   ► It's just using, you know, wrapped around Google's,

01:18:45 ◼   ► yeah, Google sync stuff.

01:18:47 ◼   ► - Right, and apps, you know, there are apps that for,

01:18:50 ◼   ► and they, you know, I think by definition

01:18:52 ◼   ► tend to be geared towards nerdier users

01:18:54 ◼   ► who will do things like give you an option.

01:18:58 ◼   ► Like I think, I think Tweetbot has the option

01:19:01 ◼   ► where you could say, when I open a link in a browser,

01:19:04 ◼   ► do you want it to be Safari or Chrome,

01:19:06 ◼   ► if you have Chrome installed,

01:19:07 ◼   ► so that you can open stuff in Chrome

01:19:09 ◼   ► instead of opening it in Safari.

01:19:11 ◼   ► - Of course, the story is in iOS 9,

01:19:12 ◼   ► all that stuff's gonna go away,

01:19:13 ◼   ► 'cause everybody's gonna use the Safari View Controller,

01:19:16 ◼   ► and that's just gonna be Safari inside the app completely.

01:19:20 ◼   ► And this is not the direction Apple is going

01:19:24 ◼   ► with this stuff to say it.

01:19:26 ◼   ► - But it is, it can be confusing to talk about

01:19:30 ◼   ► the differences between a rendering engine and the browser.

01:19:33 ◼   ► But basically it's the Chrome is the browser.

01:19:38 ◼   ► What goes around the rectangle where the HTML is rendered

01:19:42 ◼   ► is the browser and that rectangle where the content is,

01:19:46 ◼   ► the part that's gray when you go to during Fireball,

01:19:51 ◼   ► that's the rendering engine.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And it's a good example though,

01:19:58 ◼   ► this new Safari view controller.

01:20:00 ◼   ► So like, for example, probably everybody out there uses

01:20:03 ◼   ► some kind, everybody listening to me right now

01:20:05 ◼   ► is using some kind of Twitter client on their iPhone.

01:20:08 ◼   ► Whether it's the Twitter app or Tweetbot or Twitturrific,

01:20:12 ◼   ► they all have an in-browser thing so that you tap a link,

01:20:18 ◼   ► you don't get switched to another app,

01:20:19 ◼   ► you just stay right there and it renders it right there.

01:20:22 ◼   ► But if you ever notice, when you do that,

01:20:24 ◼   ► you don't get your bookmarks, it's not connected

01:20:26 ◼   ► your tabs when you go to Safari the next time, whatever that page is, if you left it open,

01:20:30 ◼   ► isn't open. Because it's the rendering engine is in the Twitter app and the browser is a

01:20:35 ◼   ► separate app with its own tabs and things. So with this new thing in iOS 9, the Safari

01:20:39 ◼   ► View Controller, apps will be able to open in the same way. It's a lot more like mail

01:20:45 ◼   ► has always been in iOS. Like when you send an email in app, it's using your actual email

01:20:52 ◼   ► account that you configured in mail. Well, that's what the Safari View Controller is

01:20:55 ◼   ► is going to do. It's going to be a real Safari view right in the app and you'll be able to

01:20:59 ◼   ► see all your regular Safari bookmarks and bookmarklets and etc. And then when you go

01:21:06 ◼   ► back to Safari, Safari will be aware of that tab that's open. So it's in that you can see that this

01:21:12 ◼   ► is one of the reasons why Apple, you know, maybe with it and I say this, I know some people, you

01:21:19 ◼   ► know, who feel strongly on the, you know, we should be able to install whatever they want will roll

01:21:24 ◼   ► their eyes. I'm not even saying I agree with it, but this is a reason why some people at

01:21:29 ◼   ► Apple have clearly have resisted until now allowing users to set a system wide third

01:21:35 ◼   ► party default web browser. Because when they come up with features like this, the users

01:21:41 ◼   ► in Tapples mind are better off having been using Safari all along because now here's

01:21:47 ◼   ► this amazing new feature and you get to use it because you've been a you're a Safari user.

01:21:52 ◼   ► - All right, and Google is never gonna be able

01:21:54 ◼   ► to provide that kind of feature.

01:21:56 ◼   ► So then you're gonna have, even if you,

01:21:58 ◼   ► like let's say Tweetbot or Twitterific

01:22:03 ◼   ► embeds this new Safari view controller thing

01:22:06 ◼   ► and also gives you the option to go open it in Chrome.

01:22:11 ◼   ► Well, those experiences are gonna be totally different

01:22:13 ◼   ► because one of them is gonna open a separate browser,

01:22:15 ◼   ► you know, separate app, switch you out of the app you're in

01:22:18 ◼   ► and the other one is going to keep you in the app

01:22:20 ◼   ► that you're in, but layer this Safari window on top.

01:22:23 ◼   ► And that's weird too, 'cause now you've got this like,

01:22:26 ◼   ► opening in another app versus not, which is just not,

01:22:29 ◼   ► you know, and it cuts both ways.

01:22:30 ◼   ► I mean, I use a third party email client,

01:22:34 ◼   ► and every now and then I tap on something somewhere

01:22:37 ◼   ► and Apple wants me to use mail, and I think,

01:22:39 ◼   ► "Oh, oh well, you know."

01:22:40 ◼   ► I, you know, what I end up doing is I set up

01:22:43 ◼   ► all my accounts in mail anyway,

01:22:45 ◼   ► and tell it not to check the mail,

01:22:46 ◼   ► and that way at least I can send mail from there,

01:22:48 ◼   ► 'cause that's usually what it's trying to do.

01:22:49 ◼   ► But, you know, that's just, those are the breaks

01:22:52 ◼   ► because the upside is you get all this tight,

01:22:54 ◼   ► super tight integration between these things.

01:22:57 ◼   ► And, you know, you can't, it makes it a lot harder

01:23:00 ◼   ► to open it up to third parties,

01:23:01 ◼   ► but it makes it a better user experience,

01:23:02 ◼   ► assuming the users are using the built-in apps,

01:23:05 ◼   ► which almost every user is.

01:23:07 ◼   ► That's the other thing we lose sight of.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I think there were a lot of geeks who were shocked

01:23:11 ◼   ► at the statistic that more than half of iPhone users

01:23:15 ◼   ► use the Notes app every day, or regularly anyway,

01:23:17 ◼   ► not every day, but regularly.

01:23:19 ◼   ► It's like, well, that's appalling.

01:23:20 ◼   ► There are so many better Notes apps than that.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Yes, but it's on the device, it's there.

01:23:25 ◼   ► And so people use it and people use Mail

01:23:27 ◼   ► and people use Safari, that's just, and they're gonna.

01:23:30 ◼   ► - Well, it's like when I was on Topolski's podcast

01:23:32 ◼   ► couple weeks ago, and he was incredulous

01:23:35 ◼   ► that I use Apple Maps.

01:23:37 ◼   ► It's the statistics that I've seen show that over 70%

01:23:41 ◼   ► of iOS users use Apple Maps.

01:23:44 ◼   ► And Maps is maybe, it's clearly maybe the one

01:23:46 ◼   ► where there'd be the most third party users,

01:23:49 ◼   ► especially around the world where Apple Maps

01:23:51 ◼   ► is nowhere near as consistent as Google Maps is.

01:23:55 ◼   ► That's one where you could really make the argument where,

01:23:58 ◼   ► I would make the argument that for me in my use,

01:24:00 ◼   ► it's as good as Google Maps for my use almost every time.

01:24:05 ◼   ► The only thing I've used Google Maps for

01:24:08 ◼   ► in the last two years is transit in New York City.

01:24:11 ◼   ► And hopefully, once I switch to iOS 9,

01:24:14 ◼   ► I won't even need to do that anymore.

01:24:16 ◼   ► But I totally understand and every time I say this I get email from somebody in another country

01:24:20 ◼   ► and they show me like what their neighborhood looks like in the two and

01:24:23 ◼   ► Google Maps looks like Google Maps and Apple Maps, you know has like, you know

01:24:28 ◼   ► The name of the town I live in and that's it

01:24:30 ◼   ► So I understand obviously they don't that but the fact that it's you know somewhere around 70% and it's a decided advantage

01:24:37 ◼   ► It just shows how powerful being the built-in app is. Yeah and let alone how you know

01:24:41 ◼   ► how comparable Safari and Chrome are or mail and Spark or

01:24:46 ◼   ► You know, what's the third-party email that you use?

01:24:49 ◼   ► I'm using mailbox on my iPad and I'm using the Redell Spark on my iPhone right now.

01:24:55 ◼   ► Yeah, boy, that's good. Man. Holy cow. That's got me thinking about switching. Yeah, really does.

01:25:00 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go back to mail for iOS 9 just to see, you know, how it's changed, but that's a

01:25:07 ◼   ► That's a really good app.

01:25:09 ◼   ► This is, I feel like that was the one of the subtext

01:25:11 ◼   ► of the latest Apple event too,

01:25:14 ◼   ► when they rolled out Apple Music.

01:25:16 ◼   ► I think that was a subtext was,

01:25:18 ◼   ► and hey, did you hear about how all our default apps

01:25:21 ◼   ► are really great and used even when there's

01:25:24 ◼   ► tough competition, these get used more than everything else?

01:25:26 ◼   ► Well, guess what streaming service is built

01:25:28 ◼   ► into a built-in app now, right?

01:25:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, that was definitely part of the message.

01:25:36 ◼   ► It's just like these built-in--that's powerful, the built-in apps.

01:25:38 ◼   ► It doesn't mean Apple Music's gonna take over the world or anything, but it is awfully powerful

01:25:43 ◼   ► that it's integrated and it's on every device.

01:25:48 ◼   ► And I read a piece today about podcasts and about how there was some survey that said

01:25:52 ◼   ► that not only--because there's a built-in podcast app--not only are most podcasts listened

01:25:57 ◼   ► to on iOS devices and not Android, but that most podcasts on iOS are listened to through

01:26:03 ◼   ► the built-in podcast app because, again, it's built in. It's hard to compete with. It's

01:26:08 ◼   ► not like Marco doesn't have a good business with Overcast, but that's among people who

01:26:14 ◼   ► think to look for something more in the App Store and then find it and then buy it versus

01:26:19 ◼   ► like, "Oh, podcasts. I'll search for podcasts. There it is. That's where all the podcasts

01:26:24 ◼   ► are." That's being the platform owner. The App Store is vibrant and that's great, but

01:26:29 ◼   ► Apple knows that some stuff needs to be in the platform.

01:26:34 ◼   ► At least a basic version of it has to be in the platform

01:26:38 ◼   ► because the platform needs to be rich like that.

01:26:41 ◼   ► And that's why they improve Notes

01:26:45 ◼   ► and that's why Maps is so successful.

01:26:49 ◼   ► - This just in from the home office in Lincoln, Nebraska.

01:26:56 ◼   ► There is a chance, I cannot check it.

01:26:59 ◼   ► Well, I could check it, but I'm not going to while I'm recording.

01:27:02 ◼   ► There's a chance that I botched the code for Harry's.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Could be that it's just talk show without the "the."

01:27:12 ◼   ► So anybody out there who's buying some shaving stuff,

01:27:14 ◼   ► if you try the code--

01:27:17 ◼   ► maybe I'll edit this, maybe not.

01:27:18 ◼   ► Maybe this will be a little mid-episode surprise.

01:27:22 ◼   ► You just stay tuned.

01:27:23 ◼   ► Here's a little mini read for our good friends at Harry's.

01:27:25 ◼   ► If you try the code "the talk show"

01:27:27 ◼   ► and you don't get any money off your order,

01:27:28 ◼   ► Try the code talk show without the the.

01:27:32 ◼   ► And one of those two, I guarantee you, will save you some bucks.

01:27:34 ◼   ► So now it's like a game.

01:27:35 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

01:27:36 ◼   ► >> It's like a coin flip.

01:27:38 ◼   ► And while I'm talking about sponsors, allow me to take a moment here and

01:27:42 ◼   ► thank our next one.

01:27:43 ◼   ► And it's another old time friend of the show, good people at Fracture.

01:27:47 ◼   ► It's really sad that all of our photos from recent years, so

01:27:54 ◼   ► many of them are trapped only on digital devices or maybe they're on an Instagram

01:28:01 ◼   ► feed and you really only look at them on these devices temporarily. Fracture is a

01:28:07 ◼   ► modern way to break your photos out of the digital world, the best ones, the ones

01:28:12 ◼   ► you really want to save, the ones you really want to see all the time and get

01:28:16 ◼   ► them printed on a piece of analog media and that you can hang on your wall, you

01:28:20 ◼   ► You can prop up on your desk.

01:28:22 ◼   ► Here's what they do, fracture.

01:28:24 ◼   ► They print your photos directly on pure glass, real glass.

01:28:28 ◼   ► Comes with a foam back that's ready to mount right out of the box.

01:28:31 ◼   ► The little one that comes with everything you need to hang it on a wall.

01:28:34 ◼   ► Comes with a nice little screw and stuff like that.

01:28:36 ◼   ► The bigger ones that you can prop up have, you know, the casing is as interesting as

01:28:40 ◼   ► the printing technology that they use.

01:28:43 ◼   ► But here's the thing.

01:28:44 ◼   ► It just takes your photos, which let's face it are all digital these days.

01:28:47 ◼   ► I mean, who shouldn't film anymore?

01:28:48 ◼   ► If you are, you're already way ahead of the game in terms of having prints because you

01:28:52 ◼   ► have to have a physical print to look at it.

01:28:58 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:59 ◼   ► There's something about a photo that is printed on a piece of analog medium that has to me

01:29:03 ◼   ► a more emotional appeal.

01:29:05 ◼   ► I'll give you an example.

01:29:06 ◼   ► Here's an example.

01:29:07 ◼   ► My wife, Amy, at the live talk show a couple of weeks ago when I had…

01:29:12 ◼   ► I forget the name.

01:29:14 ◼   ► I forget the name.

01:29:15 ◼   ► - Phil Schiller.

01:29:16 ◼   ► - Phil Schiller, that's right.

01:29:17 ◼   ► - Up and coming technology executive.

01:29:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, so that was a special night.

01:29:23 ◼   ► And she was backstage and she like poked her iPhone

01:29:26 ◼   ► through the curtain a little bit and took an amazing photo,

01:29:30 ◼   ► truly, truly amazing photo of me sitting alongside Phil.

01:29:35 ◼   ► We were front-lit in reality,

01:29:37 ◼   ► but from her perspective backstage,

01:29:39 ◼   ► we were back-lit by these lights in front of us,

01:29:43 ◼   ► which almost have like in the way that they showed up

01:29:46 ◼   ► on her picture, almost like a science fiction field.

01:29:48 ◼   ► It almost looked like we were sitting in front

01:29:50 ◼   ► of like a screening of a science fiction movie

01:29:52 ◼   ► with two stars in front of us with these two spotlights.

01:29:55 ◼   ► Fantastic picture, she posted it to Instagram.

01:29:59 ◼   ► And I thought it was great, I told her it was great

01:30:03 ◼   ► and I gave it a little heart on Instagram and there it goes.

01:30:07 ◼   ► But my friends at Fracture, I was away on vacation.

01:30:11 ◼   ► This is a true story.

01:30:13 ◼   ► Got back last night.

01:30:14 ◼   ► One of the things that we,

01:30:16 ◼   ► where we had the mail held till today,

01:30:18 ◼   ► and it actually worked, which is crazy.

01:30:20 ◼   ► I don't know about people in other countries,

01:30:22 ◼   ► but it may be in other cities,

01:30:24 ◼   ► but in Philadelphia it often doesn't work

01:30:26 ◼   ► when you tell them to hold your mail.

01:30:27 ◼   ► - Oh yeah. - Well, we got a whole pile

01:30:28 ◼   ► of mail today, including a bunch of packages,

01:30:30 ◼   ► and one of them was from Fracture, and it was for me,

01:30:32 ◼   ► and I thought, that's weird.

01:30:33 ◼   ► I don't remember, I did not order anything

01:30:35 ◼   ► from Fracture recently, and when you do order from Fracture,

01:30:37 ◼   ► this stuff comes right away.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Well, I opened it up, and here it was.

01:30:40 ◼   ► It's a little square picture.

01:30:41 ◼   ► they took it out of Amy's Instagram feed.

01:30:43 ◼   ► That picture printed on glass for me.

01:30:47 ◼   ► And it just, I didn't know what it was.

01:30:50 ◼   ► I opened it up and I saw it and I was just like, wow.

01:30:54 ◼   ► And it just was like a little jolt to my heart.

01:30:57 ◼   ► And I thought, wow, that's great.

01:30:58 ◼   ► So anyway, my thanks to Insta, not Instagram,

01:31:00 ◼   ► to Fracture for the gift, but to all of you,

01:31:05 ◼   ► do that with your favorite pictures.

01:31:07 ◼   ► Go through your Instagram and pick a couple of your

01:31:09 ◼   ► favorites and send them to fracture and get them printed out and you really are

01:31:14 ◼   ► gonna appreciate it looks so great let's see if I can get the code right because

01:31:19 ◼   ► if you do get it right you're gonna get 15% off your first fracture order and

01:31:24 ◼   ► the code for my show is I don't really have it here and drum roll Paul drum

01:31:30 ◼   ► roll to do I'm gonna guess it's during fireball and we'll see if that's right

01:31:37 ◼   ► But my thanks to them. Go to fractureme.com. Get something printed out. Do it. And use

01:31:43 ◼   ► that code and you'll save some money and you'll have something beautiful to hang on the wall.

01:31:46 ◼   ► I've got like six of them here.

01:31:47 ◼   ► Do you know what you could use? Use this. I know that this is the code that they use

01:31:52 ◼   ► because they sponsored that live show. The code that they used for that one was...

01:31:58 ◼   ► You know what's funny? I have it right here in front of me, but I can't see. Oh,

01:32:02 ◼   ► it's because I don't have the Safari status bar showing it's

01:32:08 ◼   ► WWDC use that code WWDC and then they'll think you're coming from the Phil Schiller episode

01:32:17 ◼   ► So either way you'll get the money

01:32:20 ◼   ► So the other thing that we that I missed while I was away on vacation

01:32:29 ◼   ► Was this whole thing that sort of blew up and I did write about this while you know because you can't you know

01:32:34 ◼   ► You did we're never really on vacation. I'm discovering that

01:32:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it is I'm curious how that's going for you now that you're a year in

01:32:42 ◼   ► It probably was different when you were at a publication that had a real staff that could keep everything

01:32:48 ◼   ► Yeah, you can say I'm on vacation you take care of it for me and then you go on vacation

01:32:52 ◼   ► Everybody helps each other out

01:32:53 ◼   ► But when you know

01:32:54 ◼   ► It's I do have Dan Morin writing for me a couple of days a week for six colors

01:32:57 ◼   ► So I was able to say sort of like, Dan,

01:32:59 ◼   ► this is the day that we're driving in the car

01:33:01 ◼   ► for eight hours, can you write on that day?

01:33:03 ◼   ► And also it's a shift in gears from my brain works

01:33:06 ◼   ► as thinking of like Macworld, we'd post 10 stories a day.

01:33:10 ◼   ► And I actually looked to you and Jim and Federico

01:33:14 ◼   ► and I, and you know, there's no,

01:33:16 ◼   ► there are no rules for this.

01:33:17 ◼   ► And I want to do right by my sponsors

01:33:18 ◼   ► and not like abandon the site for a week.

01:33:20 ◼   ► But at the same time, I have to train myself out of the idea

01:33:23 ◼   ► that if I don't have like five new items a day,

01:33:26 ◼   ► or even, you know, if a day goes by and all I have is a link or two, it's fine.

01:33:31 ◼   ► And I have to learn that lesson, that it's not, you know, I'm not running a comprehensive

01:33:36 ◼   ► news site that is going to have to feed the beast every day, and I, you know, I can't.

01:33:40 ◼   ► I just, I can't. I'm one person.

01:33:43 ◼   ► Steven: The sponsorship model, to me, it works both ways, where if you're writing more and

01:33:47 ◼   ► you're having a busy day, you're getting a bunch of things and more, you're getting a

01:33:50 ◼   ► lot more page views per day, and people might see the sponsor link in the sidebar if you

01:33:54 ◼   ► have it there or something like that. But on the other hand, with the idea that you

01:33:59 ◼   ► post like a little thank you to the sponsor, that idea then—and the times when you're

01:34:04 ◼   ► slower, at least this is the way I see it—the times when I'm slower and I'm not posting

01:34:09 ◼   ► as much, that post thanking the sponsor stays closer to the top longer.

01:34:14 ◼   ► It's true.

01:34:15 ◼   ► And it's, you know, I don't know which one is better. I don't know if it's better

01:34:19 ◼   ► to be the sponsor on a busy week at Daring Fireball or a slower week at Daring Fireball,

01:34:23 ◼   ► But I think there's a very simple argument to be made that there are pros and cons to

01:34:27 ◼   ► both of them.

01:34:28 ◼   ► One of them buries your thing sooner and the other one you have more pages being loaded

01:34:34 ◼   ► during the week.

01:34:35 ◼   ► So I've never once gotten a complaint about that.

01:34:38 ◼   ► Every once in a while, sometimes August is a little slower to sell.

01:34:42 ◼   ► Last year August did not sell for me.

01:34:44 ◼   ► It was like twice during the month of August I had to post like, "Hey, next week is still

01:34:50 ◼   ► available, get in touch, blah, blah, blah, sort of, you know, really sort of down to

01:34:55 ◼   ► the last day. This year, August sold out for me already in July. So, I don't know. But

01:35:01 ◼   ► it's, you know, so August is a weird month, though, for advertising, I mean, infamously

01:35:05 ◼   ► in all forms of media, TV, print. I mean, it's always slow. But other than the month

01:35:11 ◼   ► of August, I've never had complaints about that.

01:35:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, I mean, sometimes people will say to me, like, hey, it's Christmas, how's

01:35:16 ◼   ► Like I was thinking about sponsoring your site

01:35:18 ◼   ► I see that Christmas is open and my answer has always been and I've never once had a complaint about it

01:35:24 ◼   ► It is slower because people aren't at work and they're not get you're not getting those page views of I'm bored at work

01:35:29 ◼   ► Or I've just sat down and I you know, just want to see what's going on

01:35:32 ◼   ► But on the other hand I was like I think that what happens is a lot of people are at family events and they get bored

01:35:39 ◼   ► And they just go to their iPhones. So it's it's actually not that slow a week. Yeah, I agree. I agree

01:35:44 ◼   ► It's a yeah, I just kind of feel like I'm still trying to get into the rhythm of like

01:35:48 ◼   ► What's the heartbeat of the site? I don't want the site to seem like it's abandoned, right?

01:35:51 ◼   ► So I want to keep a little bit of a rhythm there also

01:35:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean I just I want to send a message that the site is here and it's gonna have stuff on it

01:36:00 ◼   ► And I'm still learning. I'm still learning but it is it is definitely a change

01:36:03 ◼   ► And it's not like I totally ignored work when I went on vacation

01:36:06 ◼   ► You know

01:36:07 ◼   ► I would be responsible and I would check in and I would occasionally see that news was breaking and write something

01:36:12 ◼   ► thing. I mean, I wrote a—I actually won an award for a thing I wrote at my in-laws

01:36:18 ◼   ► dining room table on an iPad. I actually won an award. I'm like, that is—I will always

01:36:24 ◼   ► look at that. I've got the little plaque here somewhere. And it was like for online commentary,

01:36:29 ◼   ► some journalism group. And I look at it and I think, well, iPad at the dining room table

01:36:34 ◼   ► in Irvine, but it's different here because, you know, something happens like that Nolan

01:36:42 ◼   ► Lawson thing and I'm like well I can't pass this to somebody if I want to say

01:36:47 ◼   ► something about it I need to say something about it so it's just a little

01:36:49 ◼   ► bit different not having that not having that net anymore but I'm getting I'm

01:36:53 ◼   ► getting there I'm getting used to it I I know that it was August I don't remember

01:36:59 ◼   ► the exact date but I was actually at the Jersey Shore with my folks and you know

01:37:04 ◼   ► Amy and Jonas heading out to dinner.

01:37:11 ◼   ► So it was probably around 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening

01:37:14 ◼   ► when the news broke that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO.

01:37:19 ◼   ► And somebody texted me.

01:37:24 ◼   ► And it was one of those things--

01:37:28 ◼   ► I'll bet everybody-- a lot of people when they first--

01:37:31 ◼   ► that was the sort of thing you texted other people about, right?

01:37:33 ◼   ► You heard that and you think of somebody and you think I got to text somebody

01:37:35 ◼   ► And I bet a lot of people who get you know saw the news the same way

01:37:39 ◼   ► We're like there's got to be a mistake this you know, and then your second thought is no actually it makes a lot of sense

01:37:45 ◼   ► You know and you kind of dreading it

01:37:47 ◼   ► But like I said, I you know told my family and then you know, my parents are a little a little bit not it

01:37:52 ◼   ► I

01:37:56 ◼   ► They more or less understand what I do now

01:38:00 ◼   ► But they understand it well enough that my you know when I said that they're everybody every nobody gave me a single moment of grief

01:38:07 ◼   ► Of okay, we understand you're not coming to dinner. Yeah, I had to drop everything and think about what I wanted to do and write

01:38:13 ◼   ► You know, that's one of the few times I can think of where I did that

01:38:17 ◼   ► But yes, you are on call and it makes me worry. It does make me worry. One thing I don't do is I almost

01:38:23 ◼   ► And I if I do I have tremendous anxiety, even if it's just for a couple of hours

01:38:28 ◼   ► I don't even like flying without Wi-Fi, as I do kind of feel like I need to be online all the time, just in case something like that happens.

01:38:34 ◼   ► I gotta say, I'm not as worried about it as I was, and this is only because for years, every single thing I did was in the frame of "What if Steve Jobs dies?"

01:38:47 ◼   ► Like, even when he wasn't that sick, and it was just like "What if Steve Jobs dies in a plane crash?" or something like that,

01:38:53 ◼   ► I had that like, what could be so huge? What is the huge thing? And after he died, I realized

01:39:02 ◼   ► for a while I would ask myself, what if Steve Jobs died? Oh, okay. And I just, for whatever

01:39:08 ◼   ► reason that was like, I always felt like that was the number one story that they would ever

01:39:14 ◼   ► be where you'd have to set up all the alarms. And I mean, it would still be true if something,

01:39:20 ◼   ► know, heaven forbid, happened to a major Apple executive or there are disasters that could

01:39:25 ◼   ► happen. But whatever it was like, I think I have a kind of a complex about that, about

01:39:30 ◼   ► Steve Jobs. And with him gone, that little neurotic part of my brain got like filed away,

01:39:38 ◼   ► got disconnected. And so it's not quite as bad now. But you're right. I mean, this is

01:39:41 ◼   ► the this is part of this business. It's again, less true now that I feel like I don't, I'm

01:39:46 ◼   ► not in the breaking news business. I may be in the breaking analysis business, but I'm

01:39:50 ◼   ► in the breaking news business where at Macworld, like literally, if something even like remotely

01:39:56 ◼   ► big broke, I would just be in the CMS making a new article saying headline, write a paragraph,

01:40:03 ◼   ► you know, more information to come post, like just to get it out there because we were really

01:40:08 ◼   ► in that game. And I'm not in that game so much now, but it's true. You also, you know,

01:40:14 ◼   ► I do think this is breaking analysis in a way, you know, you don't want to be left with

01:40:19 ◼   ► not saying anything about something huge that happens that matters to the people who read

01:40:23 ◼   ► your site or my site. You need to be engaged. And I at least have Dan to help out on some

01:40:31 ◼   ► accounts. But you know, during Fireball is you, so it needs to be you or it's nobody.

01:40:38 ◼   ► You got to get an intern or something. Jimmy the intern.

01:40:41 ◼   ► Well, yeah, it's like for a while, I don't really regret it, but I wonder if I ever,

01:40:48 ◼   ► if I've painted myself in a corner where it's like, you know, it's like Trump with his haircut,

01:40:52 ◼   ► you know what I mean? It's like everybody's giving him grief about it, but he's like stuck

01:40:55 ◼   ► with it so long where he can't, yeah, you can't really give in, you know what I mean?

01:41:02 ◼   ► And it's like, I feel like every single word ever written on Daring Fireball was by me,

01:41:08 ◼   ► know it's a nice streak but then it turned you know turns into a Cal Ripken

01:41:11 ◼   ► thing at some point yeah where maybe I should take a month off and not do

01:41:15 ◼   ► anything but you know I really don't want the site to go dark for a ride but

01:41:18 ◼   ► then I don't want I don't have a guest poster one you're like David Letterman

01:41:21 ◼   ► no guest hosts right but I've but I even said to you and I did when I did your

01:41:28 ◼   ► show to talk about Letterman that I actually feel like that hurt him in the

01:41:31 ◼   ► long run where I feel like there was a stretch a couple of years ago where it

01:41:37 ◼   ► it felt like maybe he was a little burned out.

01:41:40 ◼   ► It felt like he, you know,

01:41:42 ◼   ► and I don't think that ever happened to Carson

01:41:43 ◼   ► because Carson, as the years went on,

01:41:45 ◼   ► took off more and more time.

01:41:47 ◼   ► And one of the ways that he was able to take off time

01:41:50 ◼   ► was that instead of just showing reruns,

01:41:51 ◼   ► they had guest hosts.

01:41:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, he was working three days a week

01:41:54 ◼   ► and for 30--

01:41:56 ◼   ► - 40 weeks a year. - 40 weeks a year.

01:41:58 ◼   ► Man, what a deal.

01:41:59 ◼   ► And well, so only doing this for 10 months now.

01:42:03 ◼   ► I mean, I, look, if you, if you said,

01:42:06 ◼   ► 'cause you did sort of set this model,

01:42:08 ◼   ► but some of the people who followed you, like Jim,

01:42:12 ◼   ► like Federico, so the Loop and Max stories,

01:42:16 ◼   ► they changed the equation a little bit.

01:42:20 ◼   ► And Jim has like Dave Mark and he's had Sean King

01:42:24 ◼   ► and he had Peter Cohen for a while,

01:42:26 ◼   ► like supplementing what Jim does.

01:42:28 ◼   ► And in fact, I think Dave Mark posts more stuff to the Loop

01:42:31 ◼   ► than Jim does at this point.

01:42:33 ◼   ► And then Federico, although he is the primary author

01:42:36 ◼   ► of Mack's stories, he's got a bunch of,

01:42:39 ◼   ► like I saw Brett Terpstra on there the other day,

01:42:41 ◼   ► and I mean, he's got some people who contribute,

01:42:44 ◼   ► and that, I felt like that was enough,

01:42:46 ◼   ► that that sort of freed me.

01:42:47 ◼   ► I was like, oh, and with so many people I used to work with

01:42:51 ◼   ► losing their jobs simultaneously,

01:42:52 ◼   ► I said to Dan, you know,

01:42:56 ◼   ► in lieu of him getting a full-time job somewhere,

01:42:58 ◼   ► would you like to write some stuff with me?

01:43:00 ◼   ► And, you know, in the first days after Mackworld

01:43:03 ◼   ► had the big layoffs, like Dan Frakes wrote a thing,

01:43:05 ◼   ► And, you know, a few people wrote things for Six Colors,

01:43:09 ◼   ► but with Dan, it was a good opportunity

01:43:11 ◼   ► 'cause he wanted to keep his hand in the game.

01:43:13 ◼   ► He didn't want to vanish from writing about Apple

01:43:15 ◼   ► 'cause that's his profession,

01:43:17 ◼   ► but he wasn't working somewhere full-time.

01:43:20 ◼   ► So, you know, I think it was beneficial for him.

01:43:23 ◼   ► It was really beneficial for me,

01:43:25 ◼   ► but would I have done that

01:43:27 ◼   ► if I hadn't seen some other people who said,

01:43:30 ◼   ► "No, it's not just me.

01:43:31 ◼   ► "It's sort of me and some of my friends

01:43:32 ◼   ► "who are doing this," and I might not have.

01:43:35 ◼   ► and it's just a different feel. It's just a different feel. I can't, I mean, I could

01:43:40 ◼   ► see it, wasn't that one of the, I don't know whether it was Kottke or was it Andy

01:43:44 ◼   ► Bayo? I remember somebody who was like a big link blogger did this at one point where they

01:43:49 ◼   ► basically said, "I'm handing the reins."

01:43:51 ◼   ► No, Kottke's done that for years. Kottke has, but when Kottke does it is he gives it

01:43:56 ◼   ► away for the whole week.

01:43:57 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:43:58 ◼   ► You know who I actually, I believe the first person who ever did it for him, I think this

01:44:03 ◼   ► a little bit of inside the world of personal/professional blogging, whatever you call this thing that

01:44:11 ◼   ► we do, trivia is I think his first guest poster was Adam Lisagor.

01:44:17 ◼   ► And it was the first time.

01:44:20 ◼   ► I'd never even heard of him before.

01:44:24 ◼   ► And we could look this up.

01:44:25 ◼   ► If it wasn't the first, he was one of the first.

01:44:27 ◼   ► And it was before Twitter.

01:44:29 ◼   ► so it was before anybody who's heard of Adam Lisa Gore by Twitter had heard of him.

01:44:32 ◼   ► And it was certainly before anybody who's heard of Adam Lisa Gore before Sandwich's video.

01:44:37 ◼   ► And I went back and read it and it was, of course, fantastic. It was like, "Holy hell,

01:44:43 ◼   ► this guy's amazing." But Kottke's done that for years and he picks, you know, very—he

01:44:49 ◼   ► picks people though a lot of times and they're good, but he—and this is part of Jason Kottke

01:44:54 ◼   ► being Jason Kottke and being very talented. He picks people who bring like a very different—

01:44:58 ◼   ► Right voice to the site like people who are not cocky like

01:45:02 ◼   ► Whatever that means to be cocky like because I think that's sort of hard to define

01:45:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I forget all the guy he's had a bunch of guest posters over there when I was in Arizona visiting my mom

01:45:12 ◼   ► we were watching like a baseball game and a sandwich video came on and I said, hey, I know that guy and

01:45:17 ◼   ► My mom's like, oh really? How and I told her like, oh well, it's a lisagor and just this and just that and and

01:45:25 ◼   ► Now she sends me emails saying hey, I saw I saw that friend of yours again on a different ad

01:45:30 ◼   ► Like okay, I don't need updates about the sandwich video Empire, but it's cute. It's sweet

01:45:36 ◼   ► Hey Amy, and I were at a bar the first time that we

01:45:40 ◼   ► Saw a sandwich on real TV. It was like barred ESPN was on the TV behind the bar

01:45:46 ◼   ► It's a real moment when you see him on real TV instead of the internet

01:45:49 ◼   ► Posting things on the internet whatever but he's on TV

01:45:53 ◼   ► Right, we couldn't get the words out of her mouth

01:45:54 ◼   ► I forget which one of the two of us noticed first

01:45:57 ◼   ► but we both were just like not even saying anything just pointing at the TV and then we like

01:46:01 ◼   ► Like we're like we know that guy we know him and everybody, you know, we look like two mad people

01:46:06 ◼   ► But we were like, well if you're traveling you see ads you don't see other places and this is what this was

01:46:10 ◼   ► It's whatever he was selling him this ad in Phoenix was not a product that is available in my area

01:46:16 ◼   ► And so I was just like I've never seen this before but there he is

01:46:20 ◼   ► He's so what came to mind to me was

01:46:23 ◼   ► Was the scene in Goodfellas when the crew finds out that Tommy got made? Oh, yeah

01:46:29 ◼   ► Because it's like they're never gonna get made because it's just a bit is a

01:46:34 ◼   ► So right, so he's the only one who could get made and they're in tight with him

01:46:40 ◼   ► So this is the best they're ever gonna do is have it made guy and we're never gonna be on TV

01:46:45 ◼   ► I don't want to be on TV commercials. No way. I mean, it's not I'm not even you know, it's not gonna happen, right?

01:46:49 ◼   ► Uh, so the closest we're going to get to being on TV is having sandwich be on TV.

01:46:53 ◼   ► So we were like, holy cow, this is amazing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so hopefully,

01:47:00 ◼   ► uh, it's the same thing as when people, when, when your, um, relatives don't understand what you do

01:47:04 ◼   ► writing on the internet, this was always the case. I said this right after, um, I think when we talked

01:47:10 ◼   ► about, about Mac world and all that at the end of last year, that one of the things that I took

01:47:14 ◼   ► great pride in was so many people we published in the magazine and they could like take a

01:47:20 ◼   ► piece of paper of a magazine with their picture and their name on it and say, "Look, mom,

01:47:25 ◼   ► look grandpa, I wrote a thing in a magazine." And it was like validation in a way because

01:47:30 ◼   ► it was understandable and not something that people you knew got to do unless they were

01:47:36 ◼   ► very special. And I feel like watching Adam on a TV is a little bit like that too. It's

01:47:42 ◼   ► like, "Wow, that's the real television. This isn't this internet crap that we do.

01:47:46 ◼   ► That's the real TV."

01:47:47 ◼   ► DAVE SMITH Exactly. I just hope that Adam doesn't come

01:47:51 ◼   ► to the same end that Tommy did.

01:47:53 ◼   ► MATT ROWE You mean, oh, no.

01:47:55 ◼   ► DAVE SMITH Spoiler.

01:47:57 ◼   ► MATT ROWE Yeah, sorry.

01:47:59 ◼   ► DAVE SMITH I'll tell you what, anybody out there who

01:48:01 ◼   ► hasn't watched Good Times, you're--

01:48:02 ◼   ► MATT ROWE Good. What is wrong with you? Go do that immediately.

01:48:04 ◼   ► DAVE SMITH I promise you. And then go listen to Syracuse's

01:48:06 ◼   ► four and a half hour discussion of it. Which I don't, I'm not, I'm laughing just because it's,

01:48:12 ◼   ► it's good, not because it's not worthy of it. - Oh no, I have a, I'm hoping I do this before

01:48:18 ◼   ► somebody else gets it, but I want to do an incomparable with Sir, Siracusa about the

01:48:21 ◼   ► Godfather. - Ooh, man, don't you gotta, that'd be like a, if, if Goodfellas was--

01:48:27 ◼   ► - I know an 80-- - Four hours.

01:48:28 ◼   ► - 80 part episode about the Godfather. Someday I'll do that, because I love that. We, we, you

01:48:34 ◼   ► know, "Incomparable" is so much about, like, sci-fi stuff more than anything else, but

01:48:40 ◼   ► I do want to do more classic movie stuff, and that's one that, I mean, I would love

01:48:45 ◼   ► to do "Goodfellas," but I feel like it's kind of, it's been done. I would not want to just

01:48:49 ◼   ► rehash that same conversation that Jon and Dan had, and that's one of my favorite movies

01:48:53 ◼   ► of all time, but "Godfather," I'd love to do that too, because that's a classic too.

01:48:58 ◼   ► Alright, I have one more break to make and I gotta talk to you about Backblaze.

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01:49:41 ◼   ► There's PC version 2, runs native.

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01:50:12 ◼   ► Now, is there any kind of magic that makes it all get backed up immediately?

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01:50:18 ◼   ► You get a 30-day free trial.

01:50:20 ◼   ► Should be long enough with any kind of modern internet connection to get the whole thing

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01:50:28 ◼   ► After that, what happens?

01:50:29 ◼   ► Well, of course, everything gets backed up incrementally after that.

01:50:32 ◼   ► So one file changes, that file gets backed up.

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01:50:37 ◼   ► You can throttle the amount of bandwidth that it will use if you need to do something else

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01:50:49 ◼   ► No hassle, never just does exactly what you think it should do, which is just silently

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01:51:26 ◼   ► So it's a great way. It's not even just backup. It's a great way to just remotely access the

01:51:29 ◼   ► stuff on your Mac from anywhere. Let's say catastrophe hits. Your hard drive shits the

01:51:36 ◼   ► bed. All you have to do is you can just get everything. If you want to download it, you

01:51:41 ◼   ► can download. It's going to take a while. What you could do is just buy it on a USB

01:51:44 ◼   ► hard drive. They sell the USB hard drives at cost and then you can get a FedEx to you

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01:52:11 ◼   ► of mind that you have when you know that everything on your computer is backed up somewhere outside

01:52:16 ◼   ► your house. No add-ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges, no upsells or anything like that.

01:52:21 ◼   ► You just pay five bucks per computer per month for unlimited un-throttle backup. Five bucks

01:52:29 ◼   ► a month and you will sleep like a baby knowing that your stuff is backed up. So you get no

01:52:34 ◼   ► No credit card required, just go to backblaze.com and the code is daringfireball.

01:52:41 ◼   ► I think you go to backblaze.com/daringfireball and then I'll know you came from here right

01:52:45 ◼   ► away, right from the beginning.

01:52:47 ◼   ► So my thanks to Backblaze.

01:52:48 ◼   ► Go sign up at backblaze.com/daringfireball.

01:52:53 ◼   ► So the last thing I want to talk about, Jason, is this thing that came up.

01:52:56 ◼   ► I don't even know how it started, but everybody this month has been talking about how advertising

01:53:02 ◼   ► on the web has made things slow. And it's this weird catch-22 that a lot of sites have

01:53:09 ◼   ► gotten caught in. I wrote about iMore on Daring Fireball just as an example of a site that

01:53:19 ◼   ► I love, I link to all the time. I know a whole bunch of the people who work there. Maybe

01:53:25 ◼   ► I know everybody who works there. Of the staffed sites that cover--that was the phrase I use.

01:53:31 ◼   ► I couldn't think of a better term,

01:53:33 ◼   ► but of the sites with like a payroll and a staff

01:53:36 ◼   ► that cover Apple, I think right now

01:53:38 ◼   ► they're the top of the heap.

01:53:39 ◼   ► Really do like them, and I really think

01:53:42 ◼   ► that they love their readers and wanna do right by them.

01:53:45 ◼   ► And they have a website that is really heavy

01:53:49 ◼   ► with trackers, ad trackers, and with a lot of video content.

01:53:54 ◼   ► It caught four or five megabytes to download

01:53:56 ◼   ► just a regular article, five, six, 700 words.

01:53:59 ◼   ► and

01:54:01 ◼   ► It's more than just the time it takes to download that if you're on a slow connection or something like that

01:54:07 ◼   ► It's the fact that they that some of these trackers run execute for over a minute doing who knows what the hell they do on

01:54:13 ◼   ► JavaScript which hurts the performance of of your battery, you know and

01:54:18 ◼   ► 3/4 literally, I mean, I don't even think I'm exaggerating three or four hundred HTTP calls for separate resources on the page

01:54:28 ◼   ► And it sounds like well, they should just switch to different ads, but it's really is sort of a catch-22 where

01:54:33 ◼   ► That's the way for the sort of revenue. You need to run a site with a staff like that

01:54:38 ◼   ► The only way to do it is through advert

01:54:40 ◼   ► You know these existing ad networks and the way the ad networks work is exactly what you see. I'm more is not

01:54:45 ◼   ► outside the bounds of

01:54:48 ◼   ► These sort of sites in fact, I would guess I haven't done this

01:54:52 ◼   ► but I would guess that if you went around and went to all the sites that have you know, your mashables and

01:54:57 ◼   ► and the Verge and Engadget.

01:55:00 ◼   ► - I was hoping somebody would weigh the Macworld pages

01:55:03 ◼   ► 'cause they've just gotta be enormous.

01:55:05 ◼   ► - They have to be Macworld and IDG.

01:55:08 ◼   ► I mean, and you know this.

01:55:09 ◼   ► I mean, I can't let it go, but I mean,

01:55:11 ◼   ► Macworld had a feature, you know, it still does, I guess,

01:55:13 ◼   ► where it auto plays video on page loads,

01:55:16 ◼   ► which I'm guessing wasn't popular with the staff.

01:55:19 ◼   ► - No, I mean, that was the number one thing that the staff,

01:55:22 ◼   ► I think it's still not popular with the remaining staff,

01:55:26 ◼   ► But certainly everybody who was there back a year ago,

01:55:29 ◼   ► that was the number one.

01:55:30 ◼   ► I fought to get that turned off for like six months

01:55:33 ◼   ► and I finally got it turned off

01:55:34 ◼   ► and then they replaced the guy who was in charge

01:55:36 ◼   ► of the company with a new guy

01:55:37 ◼   ► who immediately turned it back on.

01:55:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:55:41 ◼   ► - It's, you know, and Bet Thompson, I would guess,

01:55:46 ◼   ► among anybody who doesn't have a site that does this.

01:55:49 ◼   ► So he's sure to know.

01:55:50 ◼   ► Ben Thompson at Stratechery, Stratechery?

01:55:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, he got rid, he changed the pronunciation.

01:55:55 ◼   ► - It's just Stratechery now.

01:55:56 ◼   ► - Well, I'm gonna stick with Stratechery.

01:56:00 ◼   ► - You can do that.

01:56:01 ◼   ► - Ben Thompson of Stratechery has made the case eloquently

01:56:05 ◼   ► that this is the business dynamics,

01:56:08 ◼   ► this is the corner that the industry has painted itself into.

01:56:11 ◼   ► This is the only source of advertising

01:56:12 ◼   ► that can generate the sort of revenue

01:56:14 ◼   ► that they need to do this.

01:56:16 ◼   ► How did we get here, right?

01:56:20 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:56:22 ◼   ► - It's, you know, we, so my boss for a long time at IDG,

01:56:27 ◼   ► for like most of the last couple of years I was there,

01:56:31 ◼   ► IDG has an ad network.

01:56:32 ◼   ► So he, and he was in charge of it.

01:56:33 ◼   ► And then he was put in charge of our company,

01:56:35 ◼   ► our consumer group.

01:56:37 ◼   ► A good guy, I really like him actually, but you know,

01:56:39 ◼   ► ad network, I learned about ad networks

01:56:41 ◼   ► and about programmatic buying and all of these things.

01:56:46 ◼   ► Like in the, back in the day,

01:56:48 ◼   ► and I can't believe I'm saying this about the web,

01:56:50 ◼   ► But back in the day, it was all like really,

01:56:53 ◼   ► I mean, web advertising has never been good, I would say,

01:56:59 ◼   ► or rarely been good on the mainstream.

01:57:02 ◼   ► It was all, it's all click-driven.

01:57:06 ◼   ► You know, everybody wants to see return on investment

01:57:08 ◼   ► based on clicks or based on purchases,

01:57:09 ◼   ► which I actually think is baloney.

01:57:12 ◼   ► That one of the most valuable kinds of advertising

01:57:17 ◼   ► is branding advertising, brand advertising,

01:57:20 ◼   ► which is another old boss of mine used to say,

01:57:22 ◼   ► a sales guy used to say,

01:57:23 ◼   ► you've gotta be known to be considered

01:57:26 ◼   ► and considered to be bought.

01:57:28 ◼   ► And the way you get known is through brand advertising.

01:57:32 ◼   ► You're then perceived as being a legitimate player.

01:57:36 ◼   ► And that's powerful,

01:57:38 ◼   ► but it might not lead to a direct sale, right?

01:57:41 ◼   ► It's just to get you in the ballgame.

01:57:43 ◼   ► It's like saying, if you sell accounting software

01:57:46 ◼   ► and you blanket the internet with,

01:57:49 ◼   ► and podcasts and websites and all that with accounting software. Are people going to say,

01:57:54 ◼   ► "Oh yeah, my company needs accounting software right now. I'm going to click through." Or

01:57:57 ◼   ► is it more going to be like, "That name is going to stick in them," and a year later

01:58:01 ◼   ► they're going to think, "Oh yeah, this is a piece of accounting software. Maybe I should

01:58:05 ◼   ► look into that. Maybe we should buy that." But that's not measurable by the web, and

01:58:09 ◼   ► the web has really pushed, because TV, with TV and magazines and newspapers, you couldn't

01:58:14 ◼   ► measure direct. You could maybe do like a specific phone number or P.O. box or something

01:58:18 ◼   ► like that and try to measure the volume, but really it was very hard to do. And the web

01:58:23 ◼   ► made it much more technically possible to do that sort of thing, and it kind of drove

01:58:30 ◼   ► everything to this crappy instant response kind of advertising. And then this takes it

01:58:35 ◼   ► even with the ad networks, it takes it even further where it's no longer the heyday of

01:58:40 ◼   ► the web where there were still like custom sales staffs with very specific like relationships

01:58:45 ◼   ► with buyers who understood what your content was about and understood what your audience

01:58:51 ◼   ► was. And now it's very much like everybody's in a pool, they say who their demographics

01:58:56 ◼   ► are, page views, not even like sites, but page views in certain parts of certain sites

01:59:01 ◼   ► are wholesaled and run through a program that's just buying a certain number of pages of a

01:59:08 ◼   ► certain kind on a stock exchange, essentially. And it's like if you didn't think web advertising

01:59:14 ◼   ► was bad enough five years ago, it is way worse now.

01:59:18 ◼   ► Ben Thompson had a great piece. I just made a note to put it in the show notes. So knock

01:59:23 ◼   ► on wood, it'll be in the show notes. It's always a crapshoot with me. He had a great

01:59:30 ◼   ► post explaining how the modern advertising networks work.

01:59:34 ◼   ► Yeah. He gave me the shivers because I learned that in the last couple of years. Yeah.

01:59:39 ◼   ► And in terms of... I've got a whole bunch of plays. I haven't had the time because I've

01:59:43 ◼   ► been away but I probably will I don't know about it if it'll happen before this podcast airs but

01:59:49 ◼   ► sometime within the next few days I'm going to write about it and link to all these things but

01:59:53 ◼   ► there's a piece at Digiday which is a I think a new site and if it's not I have never heard of

01:59:59 ◼   ► it before but it's an interesting article by Ricardo Bilton about how the Washington Post cut

02:00:05 ◼   ► its page load time by 85 percent in two years that two years ago the washingtonpost.com typical

02:00:12 ◼   ► article page took eight seconds for the page to load. And that was measuring where it was

02:00:18 ◼   ► usable by the, not necessarily completely done, but at the point where it looked done to the

02:00:24 ◼   ► typical reader. And they've, in two years, by making it a top priority in the whole development

02:00:31 ◼   ► staff, that they've got it down to 1.7 seconds, which is an 85% performance increase. And they

02:00:39 ◼   ► Mentioned this this is in the article which is interesting that this is the guy he's the his name is Gregory

02:00:46 ◼   ► Frantech hope I'm pronouncing that right his name is spelled a little unusually

02:00:51 ◼   ► But he's his title is chief architect at the Washington Post and one of the quotes from him

02:00:55 ◼   ► Is that in commerce?

02:00:58 ◼   ► There's a quote that one second load time is the one that everyone wants to hit in media

02:01:04 ◼   ► It doesn't seem as if there was ever that much emphasis on performance said Frantech

02:01:08 ◼   ► And that's in other words that we're writing like a commerce of website on the web

02:01:12 ◼   ► There was this mantra got to be one second or less or we're gonna lose this person

02:01:16 ◼   ► You know like god forbid somebody like goes so far is to put their

02:01:20 ◼   ► The product in their cart and then they go to check out and they're waiting and waiting and waiting and they're like ask her it

02:01:27 ◼   ► And they close well, you know that would drive that team and rightfully

02:01:30 ◼   ► so if they would say we got to get that in one second so that we don't lose them and

02:01:33 ◼   ► That media sites didn't have that that drive

02:01:36 ◼   ► Maybe they would say well be nice if if the page loaded in a second, but yeah, you know two seconds isn't bad

02:01:42 ◼   ► And then two seconds isn't bad three seconds isn't bad. And then if three seconds isn't bad

02:01:46 ◼   ► I'm sure they'll not gonna they're not gonna leave us if it gets to four seconds on average and

02:01:50 ◼   ► Then all of a sudden you end up with a Washington Post taking eight seconds to load which is a long time

02:01:55 ◼   ► It is I mean and you know

02:01:59 ◼   ► We can make all the arguments we want about how amazing

02:02:03 ◼   ► You know how amazed with Thomas Jefferson be if you could show him a web where every page loaded in eight seconds

02:02:09 ◼   ► Well, yeah, he'd be blown away. But guess what, you know, I wouldn't take him long before he'd be saying

02:02:14 ◼   ► Hey, can't we get these to load a little quicker?

02:02:16 ◼   ► It eventually no matter who you are where your perspective is eight seconds is too long

02:02:22 ◼   ► But the media backed themselves into that corner. Anyway this article with the post

02:02:25 ◼   ► Concludes there's a lot that publishers don't have complete control over

02:02:32 ◼   ► over, however, and it's basically ads.

02:02:35 ◼   ► And here's the quote from the guy, Fransic.

02:02:37 ◼   ► "We have very little control over ads

02:02:39 ◼   ► "that load later slowly, but we wanted to make sure

02:02:41 ◼   ► "the core user experience was as solid as possible.

02:02:44 ◼   ► "That's what we have control over," said Fransic.

02:02:46 ◼   ► And that, to me, is so telling,

02:02:48 ◼   ► that here's the Washington Post,

02:02:50 ◼   ► and even they say they don't have control

02:02:53 ◼   ► over the time it takes for the ads to load.

02:02:56 ◼   ► That, to me, is startling.

02:03:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, everything's on ad networks.

02:03:02 ◼   ► And so, I mean, I think what your goal needs to be

02:03:05 ◼   ► is you need to not be held accountable.

02:03:08 ◼   ► You need to build your pages so that they load

02:03:12 ◼   ► regardless of what happens with the ads

02:03:14 ◼   ► is basically what you have to do.

02:03:15 ◼   ► And that can be hard.

02:03:19 ◼   ► I can't tell you how much.

02:03:21 ◼   ► When I would fight for a development time at IDG

02:03:24 ◼   ► with our development group,

02:03:26 ◼   ► so much time went into AdOps, so much time.

02:03:29 ◼   ► And the big problem was AdOps was often driven

02:03:32 ◼   ► by salespeople who would sell some crazy campaign

02:03:35 ◼   ► and then they would have to deliver it.

02:03:36 ◼   ► And then the front end developers would have to try

02:03:39 ◼   ► and find ways to make it not break all the pages,

02:03:43 ◼   ► which is a totally backward way of doing it.

02:03:45 ◼   ► But that would happen all the time.

02:03:46 ◼   ► And so much went into that.

02:03:49 ◼   ► And the fact was more could go into it because your,

02:03:53 ◼   ► imagine, I mean, it's like anything,

02:03:55 ◼   ► imagine something that's completely out of your control

02:03:57 ◼   ► being dropped into every little bit of product that you do.

02:04:01 ◼   ► That's what happens with these things.

02:04:03 ◼   ► - And it's mind-boggling.

02:04:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, you try to mitigate it.

02:04:05 ◼   ► You try to reduce it as much as possible

02:04:07 ◼   ► and make it so that if the ad server fails,

02:04:10 ◼   ► and remember, this doesn't happen so much anymore,

02:04:11 ◼   ► but there used to be a time when one JavaScript call,

02:04:15 ◼   ► you know, breaking somewhere would prevent pages

02:04:18 ◼   ► from loading, like anywhere on the way.

02:04:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, because I don't, and I could be wrong here,

02:04:23 ◼   ► but I'm pretty sure that in the early days,

02:04:25 ◼   ► all JavaScript was synchronous, it wasn't asynchronous.

02:04:28 ◼   ► - Right, so get to that part on the page

02:04:29 ◼   ► and it would just wait for that third party server to load.

02:04:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the way pages used to render too,

02:04:36 ◼   ► like in the,

02:04:39 ◼   ► anything below it in the DOM would not render.

02:04:45 ◼   ► And I don't even think that was that long ago.

02:04:50 ◼   ► I seem to recall where there were problems

02:04:52 ◼   ► one time when the DEC network server went down, big chunks of Daring Fireball didn't render because

02:04:58 ◼   ► the DEC network JavaScript include call was at the top of the HTML, not at the bottom.

02:05:06 ◼   ► So it's not even, you know, the net, you know, that's only going back to the Daring Fireball era,

02:05:12 ◼   ► let alone the 90s. Here's my theory on this. And let me run it by you because, and again,

02:05:17 ◼   ► this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show this week, is that you can speak to this.

02:05:21 ◼   ► To me, I've always thought, and I've always been an outsider, I've never had a full-time job working

02:05:28 ◼   ► at a publication. What I always saw, and to me it seemed very obvious in the early years, was for the

02:05:38 ◼   ► most part the big name "web" in the early years came from two sides. It came from print and it

02:05:43 ◼   ► came from TV. So CNN had a big news website, New York Times had a big news website. And

02:05:51 ◼   ► in both cases, institutionally, the institutions did not value the websites as much as they

02:05:58 ◼   ► valued their traditional form. So print publications favored print over, it was the favored child

02:06:05 ◼   ► over the web. And the web was this thing that they were maybe not even drawn kicking and

02:06:10 ◼   ► streaming to but you know in some cases in some publications I think that was

02:06:13 ◼   ► true and a lot of them it just was always the second secondary child and

02:06:21 ◼   ► that they didn't have respect for it and they didn't have the respect for it that

02:06:25 ◼   ► they have for their flagship product because and here's what I would say the

02:06:34 ◼   ► New York Times was never gonna let advertisers into their printing press

02:06:37 ◼   ► like you Chevy you know doesn't get to put an ad in the New York Times and get

02:06:42 ◼   ► to go into the printing press and slow down the delivery of the next morning's

02:06:46 ◼   ► New York Times because they want to make sure that you know the colors are

02:06:50 ◼   ► aligned on the printing press or to draw another analogy Chevy doesn't get to put

02:06:57 ◼   ► an ad in the New York Times that the New York Times doesn't see first yep

02:07:00 ◼   ► CNN doesn't let the advertisers control whatever goes on over the air during the

02:07:07 ◼   ► 30 seconds that they bought. They give them a video and the video you know they

02:07:14 ◼   ► have the video in their hands before it runs. CNN delivers the video right

02:07:18 ◼   ► whereas the web from the very early on evolved in this way where there was a

02:07:24 ◼   ► lack of respect that they wouldn't have like for example New York Times is never

02:07:27 ◼   ► going to sell an ad that sticks to the two pages surrounding the op-ed page so

02:07:36 ◼   ► that if you want to read the op-ed page,

02:07:38 ◼   ► you've got to break an envelope seal,

02:07:41 ◼   ► find a sharp thing and do that.

02:07:43 ◼   ► Whereas they have things on their website

02:07:45 ◼   ► that are the equivalent of that,

02:07:47 ◼   ► where you have to spend a few seconds doing something

02:07:50 ◼   ► or waiting for something before you get to read