00:00:05 ◼ ► I love that you managed to buy two new cars in the last like three seconds and it's already in the shop.
00:00:10 ◼ ► No, no, no. It's okay. It's okay. So I have a white Jetta loaner because it has to be white.
00:00:24 ◼ ► We should start by telling everyone that if you are not actively driving your car and are interested in a shirt that reflects the show art from the last episode and probably this episode as well,
00:00:34 ◼ ► you should stop everything, unless you're driving, and order one right now because they are only going to be available until, what is it, Tuesday? Monday evening our time. So the 28th.
00:00:50 ◼ ► If you want one of our gag Slack's Dental Tech podcast shirts, don't, just stop. Just stop what you're doing. Stop listening to me. Go right now.
00:00:58 ◼ ► ATP.fm/store. There's a link there. Please go. We had a bunch of people that have asked for this and we kind of kicked around between the three of us.
00:01:06 ◼ ► Is there going to be more than ten people that really want this? Is this stupid? Is anyone going to care?
00:01:10 ◼ ► But we talked to the people at Cotton Bureau and they said, hey, yeah, we can do it and we'll try to ship it as quick as we can.
00:01:21 ◼ ► It's definitely stupid. You have to hurry to buy this before it stops being even remotely funny.
00:01:27 ◼ ► But the best thing is, I've thought about this for our shirts, like, I think we could graph this somehow.
00:01:33 ◼ ► It's bumpy, but there's a trend to our shirts becoming more and more difficult to explain to people.
00:01:39 ◼ ► I mean, I guess you could explain it to Podcastshirt, but beyond that, you're like, those are the shapes of computers and they're rainbow colored because they're Apple computers.
00:01:50 ◼ ► But they're not all the Apple computers. They're professional ones. What does that have to do with the podcast? Well, on the podcast, they like to talk about you.
00:01:55 ◼ ► And then this one with the Slack logo made out of Mac Pros, there's a lot of explaining that has to go on.
00:02:05 ◼ ► I think it looks, I mean, forget it, forget the joke or anything about it. I think it looks nice. I think it's just a nice looking shirt.
00:02:11 ◼ ► But it is a very short lived gag. So you buy it now and then when the thing is threadbare in 10 years, you can explain to someone in the grocery store what the hell this shirt is that you're wearing.
00:02:20 ◼ ► And you can explain the one Mac Pro that was ever made after that point that's not included on the shirt.
00:02:25 ◼ ► Yep, indeed. So anyway, if you would like to buy them, this is, you know, when we do the shirts around WWDC time, we really genuinely think of that as a way to support the show.
00:02:39 ◼ ► Yeah, this is entirely a gag thing for the people who want it. Because people ask for it. They said, I want the, that's a funny thing. You should put that on the shirt. Okay, here you go. It's on a shirt.
00:02:51 ◼ ► Yeah, so this is, we will not make you feel guilty if you do not buy this shirt. But if you have a few extra bucks, quite a few extra bucks that you can throw our way, I think we could all be made happy by this ridiculous shirt that I actually should.
00:03:05 ◼ ► I wasn't planning to do this, but come to think of it, I should congratulate our resident artist Marco Arment for putting this together.
00:03:16 ◼ ► And actually, come to think of it, I don't recall there being any requested edits from Jon, which granted, this is a gag, but still, that is unheard of.
00:03:29 ◼ ► So, if you are interested, please check it out. Obviously, we deeply appreciate it. But this is, we will make you feel guilty in June over what ridiculous merchandise we come up with then. We're not going to make you feel guilty about this. This is just for funsies.
00:03:41 ◼ ► I'm not making anybody feel guilty about anything. Why do you even bring this up? It's such a terrible notion. Anyway, Pins are still for sale too if you want some.
00:03:52 ◼ ► Oh, we talked about my woes with Terminator AudioSync and I had mentioned that I wanted my kids to see Terminator 2, but not before they'd seen Terminator 1.
00:04:03 ◼ ► But the first movie is rated R and I said the second movie wasn't. That's not true. Terminator 2 is in fact rated R. It is a much softer R. It's mostly like rolling the R.
00:04:15 ◼ ► R for cursing and a little bit of gore, right? But it's not like, I don't know. Marko probably hasn't seen Terminator 2 in case he probably doesn't remember it.
00:04:31 ◼ ► In my mind, it seems very much PG-13. I feel like if it was released today, it might still be PG-13, but it was in fact rated R. So thank you, Todd Vaziri, for that correction.
00:04:40 ◼ ► Oh, and I have further term in our update. So when last we left, I was resigned to the fact that I was going to have bad AudioSync and we'd already all watched the movie anyway, so who cares?
00:04:50 ◼ ► I did actually engage with Apple to say, go through the process of either getting a refund or telling them there's a problem. Lots of people sent me a link to the page where you can supposedly do that.
00:05:01 ◼ ► Like, go here, you can get a refund. But it really just says report a problem. So you can report a problem and I did report a problem.
00:05:06 ◼ ► And then I went back and forth in email with somebody who was conversing with me in not particularly well-constructed English, which is always difficult.
00:05:14 ◼ ► It looked like it was a lot of copy and paste into templates of answers, but then the customized pieces were just not grammatically correct in a way that makes me think this is not a native English speaker.
00:05:25 ◼ ► So it was difficult to go back and forth. Eventually we arrived at the idea that they were trying to get me to delete the download and redownload it, essentially, but there's no way to actually do that from the Apple TV.
00:05:37 ◼ ► They were sending me instructions on how to delete it from iTunes eventually. I'm like, okay, but you do understand that I'm watching it on Apple TV, not on iTunes.
00:05:45 ◼ ► And I had already deleted it from iTunes. I had already downloaded it to iTunes, saw that the audio was in sync but it was dropping frames, and then I deleted it to save disk space.
00:05:52 ◼ ► So I'd done that once before. Nevertheless, I did it again. I downloaded it back again on the same exact Mac on iTunes and then deleted it.
00:06:02 ◼ ► And I'm like, okay, well, I did that. And then I went back to the Apple TV a day later and played the movie and the audio was in sync.
00:06:11 ◼ ► Is it because I deleted it or is it just because other people using the Apple TV had pushed the old version out of the cache?
00:06:17 ◼ ► The Apple TV will actually download the movie for you and just let it sit there on the SSD, but it will get pushed out because it's just a cache.
00:06:25 ◼ ► It's not like you have it permanently on there as offline storage or anything like that.
00:06:29 ◼ ► So anyway, the problem cured itself and/or my complaint over the course of a week conversing over email to try to come to a solution had triggered someone to fix a thing somewhere and then it had redownloaded.
00:06:40 ◼ ► I don't know. Anyway, problem solved. Although I didn't get a refund. I would have liked it if I had just gone straight to just give me a refund because I felt like I don't need to keep this movie.
00:06:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like I spent way more than $13 worth of this support person's time and way more than $13 worth of my time, which is, again, usually why I don't want to engage in this, to have to go back and forth with someone over email.
00:07:08 ◼ ► I felt the pain on the other end. I feel the pain when I try to help out people in my family remotely, asynchronously over the course of many days to solve a tech problem.
00:07:19 ◼ ► All right, we got some feedback about Apple Prime or Apple One or whatever this music video bundle would be. Do you want to talk about that, Jon?
00:07:27 ◼ ► Yeah, one thing I thought we had mentioned, but I was listening back to last week's episode, waiting for that part to come, and it never came, so I guess we didn't.
00:07:35 ◼ ► We did talk about tying Apple's video service to Apple Music to say, "Hey, you get Apple Music? Guess what? You get this video thing whether you like it or not," as the Prime model.
00:07:44 ◼ ► And of course we were talking about an Apple One thing, which is just a bundle of a whole bunch of stuff, and we discussed different things that could be in that bundle, and we'll get to that in a second.
00:07:52 ◼ ► But one thing we didn't mention, which I think we needed to, is despite us talking about Apple One or Apple Prime as this big, all-encompassing thing that has lots of cool stuff in it,
00:08:01 ◼ ► it is much more likely that Apple will instead offer a product, they'll call this thing whatever, Apple Video or whatever they end up calling it, and then there's Apple Music,
00:08:12 ◼ ► and you can get both the music and the video service together in a bundle that may or may not be discounted.
00:08:19 ◼ ► That is almost certainly going to happen no matter what, independent of all the other talking, and I think that's subtly different, but importantly different than, "Oh, it's just Apple Music, and by the way, the video thing gets shoved in for free,"
00:08:31 ◼ ► because this would be Apple introduces some kind of video streaming service, and you pay this amount for it each month, and if you're already an Apple Music subscriber,
00:08:39 ◼ ► maybe you don't want to pay for Apple Music and Apple Video, fine, then you can get a combined thing, and you get one bill and you get both services,
00:08:45 ◼ ► and that is so much more likely than any of the scenarios that we were spinning out that I think they pretty much have to do it, and that should have been mentioned, and now it has been.
00:09:05 ◼ ► Speaking of bundles with a bunch more stuff in them than just music and video, I thought the feedback on our discussion was interesting,
00:09:15 ◼ ► and that everyone else who was sending us notes and tweets and emails was doing the same things we were on the show, well, a little bit of the same things we were on the show,
00:09:23 ◼ ► which is envisioning a bundle of things that includes only the things that you want it to include, and also a discount of some kind, right?
00:09:32 ◼ ► So it was like, everyone wants to build their Apple One bundle that excludes all the services they don't care about,
00:09:39 ◼ ► includes all the services they currently subscribe to, plus one more that they can't bring themselves to pay for and get it all at a discount, right?
00:09:48 ◼ ► No one can tailor-bill their bundle. As Mark pointed out last time, you can't buy the shipping-only Prime or the shipping-and-video-only Prime but not get the music part.
00:09:57 ◼ ► The point of the bundle is Apple packages it in a way that is advantageous for Apple and that is also advantageous to enough customers to make it worthwhile,
00:10:06 ◼ ► but it's not going to be an a la carte build-your-own bundle out of the things that you want.
00:10:11 ◼ ► So what we were trying to think of last show was what kind of bundle makes the most sense for Apple to get adoption,
00:10:17 ◼ ► but it's easy as a consumer to think, "Well, I don't care about what works for Apple. Here are the things that I want,
00:10:23 ◼ ► and just put those in the bundle but nothing that I don't want." And I don't think that's going to happen.
00:10:28 ◼ ► So if you have that in your mind, dismiss it from your mind because A) there might not even be an all-encompassing bundle like this,
00:10:34 ◼ ► and B) if there is an all-encompassing bundle, it's going to include stuff you don't care about and that you have to end up paying for.
00:10:39 ◼ ► Oh yeah, and you know, keep in mind, this is still Apple. So what's definitely going to happen if they do a bundle like this,
00:10:47 ◼ ► I can guarantee you of three things. It's going to include things you don't want to pay for, it's going to cost more than you think it should cost,
00:10:55 ◼ ► and more than you want to pay, and it's going to have a really weird confusing name that we make fun of for a few weeks and then make it used to.
00:11:02 ◼ ► Yeah, we had that discussion in Slack about Apple One and Apple Prime. All those names are just derived from other services that already exist.
00:11:10 ◼ ► So Google has Google One and Amazon has Amazon Prime and what is the Microsoft one? I forget, but I think they use One for OneDrive.
00:11:16 ◼ ► Anyway, a lot of the names are taken and Apple Video is what Casey said he thought the video service would be,
00:11:24 ◼ ► which would certainly be straight up Apple's alley with Apple Music, Apple Video, Apple TV. It says Apple and then just plain old noun, right?
00:11:32 ◼ ► And if you wanted to name one service that included both Apple Music and Apple Video, unfortunately for Apple, but fortunately for us,
00:11:38 ◼ ► Google has taken the modern day Apple obvious name, which is Play. Apple would call this service Apple Play if they could,
00:11:46 ◼ ► but Google has squatted all over that. It's Google Play, Google Play Store, because what do you do with music and video?
00:11:52 ◼ ► What one word unifies them? You're not going to call it Apple Media, Apple Sensory Input, Apple Content.
00:11:58 ◼ ► Those Apple digital bits, like it doesn't, you know, whatever, it's Apple Play. It would be perfect, but they can't use it.
00:12:04 ◼ ► Wait, I got it. So, you know, remember how when Apple first launched the App Store, they trademarked the word App Store within certain contexts,
00:12:13 ◼ ► and they almost had a fight with Amazon, and Amazon launched the Fire tablets, Amazon launched their own App Store,
00:12:21 ◼ ► and they just called it App Store. And to avoid a problem, Amazon deleted the space between App and Store and just made the S lowercase,
00:12:29 ◼ ► so it's just one word, and the Amazon App Store, and Apple had the App Space Store, and that was apparently enough that they didn't fight over it.
00:12:37 ◼ ► So I wonder if maybe Apple can call theirs, like, Play Store, just one word, Apple Play Store.
00:12:44 ◼ ► Somehow I don't think they're going to do that, although I think Marco is right, that like all the good names are taken,
00:12:50 ◼ ► so whatever name they pick, it's going to be like, eh, at best. At best we're going to be like, eh, okay, and then we'll just get used to it,
00:12:56 ◼ ► unless it just goes away like Ping and then we'll just forget it, because Ping is not a great name either,
00:13:03 ◼ ► And honestly, you know, last episode when Casey said he thinks it's Apple Video, I turned it inside, I agree,
00:13:07 ◼ ► I think it is probably Apple Video, but I'm actually, I'm doubting that now. I think after more thought,
00:13:13 ◼ ► I think the most likely outcome, the most likely name of such a service is just Apple Music.
00:13:31 ◼ ► Yeah, if you look at what they're probably likely to do, like, they're probably going to put it all into Apple Music
00:13:36 ◼ ► and maybe raise the price of a few dollars for new people and say, look at this great stuff you're all getting,
00:13:41 ◼ ► and then, because, you know, nobody wants to launch a video service that has no subscribers built in.
00:13:46 ◼ ► Like, you know, the bundling is very powerful, because if they do it that way, then they launch a video service
00:14:06 ◼ ► but like, I was trying to think of names, like, following that formula of Apple boring word,
00:14:16 ◼ ► They have done Photo Stream, which shows that they're willing to go with Stream as a customer-facing product name.
00:14:21 ◼ ► Boy, yeah, that's going to be an exciting part of when this, probably more exciting than the service,
00:14:29 ◼ ► because the service is like, okay, we know what it's going to be like, you're going to go to a place and watch a video,
00:14:32 ◼ ► and then we care about what the shows are, perhaps, but the name actually is the most interesting part of this product
00:14:51 ◼ ► We've actually talked about Arc before, before they were sponsored, because I honestly love this app.
00:15:03 ◼ ► But what makes Arc different from most backup apps is that you don't even need to use their service.
00:15:07 ◼ ► It's software, and you can backup to your own cloud storage account instead of, or in addition to theirs.
00:15:17 ◼ ► Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or even your own network detect storage or external drive.
00:15:22 ◼ ► So Arc has you covered for your backup storage, whether you want to use their service, someone else's, or your own storage.
00:15:28 ◼ ► And the features are great too, because since you're paying for the storage yourself, Arc imposes no limits.
00:15:44 ◼ ► So you can easily, for instance, download files you left at home while you're on vacation.
00:15:58 ◼ ► Backups are critical, and you need to trust them, and Arc strives to be as trustworthy as possible.
00:16:13 ◼ ► Your data is stored in an open, documented format, and they offer an open source restore tool so it can always be restored.
00:16:24 ◼ ► And if you happen to report a bug, they have a very rapid turnaround time to get fixes out.
00:16:27 ◼ ► Arc is used by over 100,000 people, and they've been maintaining it continuously for 10 years so far.
00:16:58 ◼ ► This is something I was aware of, although it's a different name for it, and I didn't think to bring it up last episode.
00:17:06 ◼ ► And Christian writes, "Pretaining to Instagram's recent addition of close friends, I was wondering if any of you were aware of the concept of spam accounts.
00:17:13 ◼ ► I'm still in high school, and nearly every teenager here in Canada has two Instagram accounts.
00:17:17 ◼ ► One that is public, where you post all your nice pictures and selfies, and a private one where you only have a few dozen followers reserved for your friends.
00:17:23 ◼ ► Here they tend to be called quote-unquote spam accounts, although I've always heard this as Friendstagram, which is a very casey name, by the way.
00:17:29 ◼ ► But anyway, and have been used for years for the exact use case that the close friends feature fulfills.
00:17:35 ◼ ► I'd love to hear your thoughts on the idea of having multiple accounts versus one feature where you are bound to mess up occasionally and share personal things to the world."
00:17:42 ◼ ► Again, I don't feel like the risk of sharing personal things is that strong, and so I'd much prefer to have everything under one roof, so to speak.
00:17:52 ◼ ► And I don't personally like the idea of a Friendstagram or a spam account if you go the other direction or whatever the case may be.
00:17:59 ◼ ► But I certainly have heard from a handful of people, including a mutual friend of the three of ours, that they have accidentally gone and put something on their public stories that they intended for close friends.
00:18:16 ◼ ► But I don't personally see the need for this. Marco, I know you are not the most prolific Instagram user, and Jon even less so, but what are your thoughts on this, Marco?
00:18:25 ◼ ► I mean, wouldn't you have the same risk of accidentally making something public as you would accidentally publishing something on the wrong account?
00:18:34 ◼ ► I think it's unwise for anybody who's not a teenager to speculate on the behaviors of teenagers and their motivation. They have their own world, and we don't understand it, and we never will.
00:18:52 ◼ ► I disagree with this perspective entirely. Yes, they are different. But here they are telling us that they're conveying information. Do not reject the information. Accept it.
00:19:00 ◼ ► I think this is completely explicable from the perspective of a product designer. If you find out, like, so you make Instagram, and people are using it, and you have to learn from how they're using it.
00:19:10 ◼ ► And you see how they're using it, and you see these people, lots of people are making multiple accounts for this reason.
00:19:15 ◼ ► This is them telling you that your product does not fulfill one of their use cases. And their use case is, "I want to have one set of people that can see one set of things and another set of people that can see another set of things."
00:19:25 ◼ ► Doing it with multiple accounts is a brute force way that people were forced to use your product because this is the only way they could get what they wanted.
00:19:33 ◼ ► But the application is not designed for that. So you could say, "We can solve this problem in our product by making it really easy to switch accounts."
00:19:40 ◼ ► Like, a lot of Twitter clients do that. Like, "I have a bunch of Twitter accounts, and Twitter makes it pretty easy to switch accounts. There's even a gesture for it."
00:19:45 ◼ ► And so that's one possible solution. But another solution is, "We don't want that model. We want one person and one account, probably for advertising reasons, whatever."
00:19:53 ◼ ► So let's instead make it so that you don't have to have two separate accounts. Let's keep our application and the idea of you're always logged into your one and only account, but you can target different audiences to your close friends or your non-close friends.
00:20:06 ◼ ► Two different ways to address the same issue, but by your users using your application in this way, they're telling you that there is some need that is not fulfilled by your current model.
00:20:16 ◼ ► So it's always really important, whenever you make any kind of product, to see what people are actually doing with it in the wild. They might not tell you, "This is what I want."
00:20:25 ◼ ► Or they might think, "I just really need a really good way to switch accounts." But if you find out what they really want to do, which is show some people one thing and some people another thing, you can come up with different solutions.
00:20:34 ◼ ► So I thought this was an interesting case of Instagram catching up with the needs of this particular set of users.
00:20:41 ◼ ► As for spam accounts, I know this isn't the same thing, but when I see it, I was reminded once again that my mother still stubbornly refuses to have a single email account, and it causes no end of headaches.
00:21:04 ◼ ► I just let that sink in. One of them is for spam. But they both get spam. Pretty much in equal amounts, because guess why? The internet. But one of them is for spam.
00:21:14 ◼ ► And I can't get her to give one up. I can't forward them all to each other. I can let you mail through both of them. There will be no loss in functionality, but magically you only need to go to one place to check your mail. Oh my god, I can't do it.
00:21:29 ◼ ► Yes, of course. 50% of her mail goes to one. She calls it spam. When she buys things online, she uses the spam account. She's like, "I don't want those people to have my other emails."
00:21:42 ◼ ► I can't do it. I can't get her to do it. And also that means every time she uses it, whatever she uses to read her email, she has to deal with multiple accounts in her email client, which makes dealing with any email client much more complicated, because you have the unified inbox, what account does this account through, and if you try to organize your mail, you're organizing in one account or the other.
00:22:00 ◼ ► I also can't get my sister off Hotmail, so I have many familial, technological failings that bug me. So far, I think none of them have multiple Instagram accounts, and if they do, I would probably redirect them to close friends.
00:22:15 ◼ ► You know, it's funny. It just now occurred to me that this smells a lot to me like Google+'s circles, which I actually thought was a very clever idea. So if you were lucky enough to miss the hot second that Google+ was a thing, one of the cool things that Google+ did is that you could, I don't know if "arrange" is the right word, but kind of group contacts into one or more circles.
00:22:42 ◼ ► So you could, for example, have work friends versus regular friends, or you could have college friends versus work friends, whatever the case may be. And as you shared things, you could choose the audience to which you would share.
00:22:55 ◼ ► And Google+ was a disaster in so many ways, and it was force-fed down all our mouths for several years, and occasionally was up until very recently. But that whole idea, which wasn't that from Andy Hertzfeld, if I'm not mistaken, but whoever it was from, it was, I thought, very ahead of its time.
00:23:28 ◼ ► The other execution that Google+ was a failure was sort of all the surrounding contacts and the timing and the fact that they tried to integrate it forcefully into all the other services and just like they were just too late.
00:23:38 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. It's a perfect example of the better thing doesn't always win. They came along trying to do the exact same thing as Facebook, but to win on features, and that just never works. When you have an established incumbent with massive network effects, you're not going to come around and be the next Facebook because you have better features.
00:23:58 ◼ ► Yeah, but they did, and there were definitely some good ideas there. Also, a lot of good ideas would be like, "Oh, that's clever, and that appeals to us." Just because the feature provides functionality in an elegant way that is not provided elsewhere doesn't mean it isn't already too complicated for most people.
00:24:17 ◼ ► There's something to be said for the success of Twitter where it's so simple in the beginning, so straightforward, and you can add crap later, but you have to start off with something that people really understand, whereas circles is daunting in the same way that multiple windows is daunting to people who just like, "What? Do I have to arrange people?"
00:24:36 ◼ ► Any kind of service where someone who's excited about the service comes to you and says, "Let me show you how to set your stuff up," probably has a bit of a barrier to entry to regular people. If you're trying to go for a Facebook-level audience, it has to be as simple as, "Let me just see if my high school friends got fat." That's your tractor there.
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00:26:36 ◼ ► John, tell me about your Internet of Things. I have one. I have an internet and there are things in it, which is almost as dumb a name as mechanical keyboard because honestly everything that I have on the internet is a thing.
00:26:50 ◼ ► But now I have things that are on the internet that are categorized as Internet of Things. I have this because Adam Justice from ConnectSense sent me a smart outlet, Squared.
00:27:02 ◼ ► They're not a sponsor but they did send me this outlet for free so just keep that in mind. I was hemming and hawing about buying one. I remember I was asking around like, "Hey, I just want something to plug."
00:27:11 ◼ ► I don't have any smart, well I do have some Wi-Fi light bulbs upstairs, but I didn't want to buy smart switches or lights. I have crap in my house. I'm like, "They plug into the wall. Let me just get one of the outlets, like a smart outlet."
00:27:22 ◼ ► So I just plug lights into the smart outlet and then I'll just see how things go. I was asking around like, "Can you connect it up to multiple services in the same outlet? What's one with good reviews that's cheap?"
00:27:33 ◼ ► And Marco was telling me about the ones that he bought that replaced all his other ones or whatever. So I didn't know what to buy and I just wasn't even buying anything. Having this one sent to me for free is like, "Right, I'll give it a try."
00:27:42 ◼ ► So I got it. It's two plugs, two outlets. I plugged it into a thing. I plugged my lights into the thing. There was a little QR code for HomeKit on the paper manual that it came with so I scanned that with their little app on my phone.
00:27:54 ◼ ► And it did "ba-bloop, ba-bloop" and it said, "Name your things" and I named my things. I named the two lamps and it's like, put them in a room and I'm like, "Okay," and I put them in the living room and I was done.
00:28:07 ◼ ► Let me jump in right there because I also got one of these and I also have several Wemo devices, which is a Belkin brand. And it is worth noting that, and I don't think this is unique to the Connect Sense stuff, but it was the first time I personally had seen it.
00:28:20 ◼ ► When you do the setup and it has HomeKit support, like Jon said, you scan that QR code, but what's interesting is it takes care of getting on the Wi-Fi basically in one step. This is in contrast to a Wemo or I actually got, figuratively speaking, bequeathed some TP-Link stuff.
00:28:38 ◼ ► I think it's Kasa, K-A-S-A. It doesn't really matter what it is, but the point is, the way those all work is they, by default, broadcast their own Wi-Fi and you have to use the app and then when the app says, "Okay, wait for it, go!"
00:28:53 ◼ ► Then you connect to the device's Wi-Fi only long enough for the app to tell the device, "Here is your Wi-Fi information," and sometimes you have to enter it by hand, sometimes you don't.
00:29:02 ◼ ► Then it drops its Wi-Fi service, if you will, and then comes back onto your house Wi-Fi. It's this multi-step process that is not particularly difficult, but is kind of frustrating.
00:29:14 ◼ ► Whereas the Connect Sense thing, which again I think might be unique to HomeKit, not necessarily Connect Sense, you just scan the QR code, wait a few seconds, and everything's done. It just works, which is really cool. Carry on, Jon.
00:29:24 ◼ ► Yeah, and I could say during that step that it was doing it, it's like sharing the Wi-Fi connection and everything because otherwise how would anything work, but it was nice that it didn't have to prompt me.
00:29:32 ◼ ► As soon as that was done, I wondered when I was setting it up, I was like, "I have to download the Connect Sense app? Why do I need to do that? Why can't I do everything with your HomeKit?"
00:29:40 ◼ ► I keep forgetting these apps that Apple gives you, the HealthKit app and the HomeKit app or whatever.
00:29:45 ◼ ► Or is it just called Home and Health? I forget what the actual app names are. Those are more like clearing house front ends for the underlying database that contains it.
00:29:55 ◼ ► It's kind of like your contact database and you can have separate contact apps. I suppose you need the device-specific app to bootstrap the process, but once you're done, as far as I'm aware, I don't ever need to use that Connect Sense app ever again.
00:30:09 ◼ ► I can just use the Home app because in the Home app, the arrangement that I set in the Connect Sense app, the fact that these are lights, this is what they're named and this is what room they're in, it's reflected in the Home app because those are all constructs of the HomeKit data model, the underlying HomeKit data model.
00:30:22 ◼ ► So that's nice. I'm like, "Great." And then I just talk to the air and I turn individual lights off. And I also just said, "Hey, Dingus, turn all the lights off."
00:30:30 ◼ ► And because it's the only two lights that HomeKit knows about, it turned all the lights off. I'm like, "Great." And I realized if I went nuts and started going around my house and put a million of these things in, I couldn't say turn all the lights off anymore because I don't think HomeKit, maybe Marco can tell me, does HomeKit have an idea that it's in the living room along with those lights or would it turn every light off that it knows about if I said turn all the lights off or turn the lights off?
00:30:54 ◼ ► Oh, boy. I've only been using HomeKit for like two seconds, but you can define zones. You can say like turn off everything upstairs, downstairs. You can group things, but sort of only with some limitations.
00:31:06 ◼ ► I don't know if there's any built-in things to say turn off everything, but you can create scenes where that turn on or off or some combination of on and off, any number of things you want.
00:31:16 ◼ ► So like one of the scenes says like goodnight, and so you can say, "Hey, thing, goodnight," and I have it turn off everything downstairs, but turn on a couple of lamps in my bedroom.
00:31:26 ◼ ► But like what I was most interested in is the fact that of course I can address the lights individually by the names that I gave them, but I can also say, "Hey, Dingus, turn off the lights," which it has to understand, "Oh, you didn't tell me what light to turn off, but I will assume that you mean all the lights that I know about in an interstate," which I thought was nice.
00:31:43 ◼ ► And if that convenience goes away, if I get more lights, it's demotivating me from getting more lights because I like the ability to just say that.
00:31:50 ◼ ► Well, but I think there are fixes for this. Marco kind of glanced off of this a second ago. There are two different constructs in HomeKit that I have become familiar with.
00:31:59 ◼ ► There is what room a device is in. So you can say that this is in the living room and this other device is in the bedroom or so on and so forth, and you can address an entire room. So I can say, "Hey, Dingus, turn off Michaela room," and it will turn off all the devices in that room.
00:32:13 ◼ ► But as Marco said a moment ago, there's also the concept of a zone, and the typical example of this is upstairs versus downstairs.
00:32:20 ◼ ► So I can also say, "Turn on upstairs," and it will turn on all of the devices that are upstairs. So if you have anything other than those two constructs, like if you want to have something that's both a device downstairs and a device upstairs, that's where it starts to fall apart.
00:32:40 ◼ ► I think that's what Marco was talking about a second ago, and that's where you can use scenes, which is basically kind of like an automation from what I can tell of, "Hey, take these otherwise disparate devices and do this one collective operation on it."
00:32:53 ◼ ► Yeah, what I'm looking for mostly is I don't want to play a text adventure. I don't want to say, "Turn on upstairs," because it's not a sentence that makes sense to humans. It's a sentence that I'm constructing for the thing. I don't want to say, "Turn on living room," because that's not what I would say. I just want to be able to speak to it conversationally and have it know what I mean.
00:33:08 ◼ ► And I can mostly do that in this limited scenario, but as things get more complicated, then I have to start speaking text adventure, and that's no fun.
00:33:14 ◼ ► And I still had the name "The Lights," which was also an interesting challenge, because I don't at least give my lights names, but I actually do want to individually address these lights.
00:33:24 ◼ ► There's a reason I put these two lights on it, because they're both kind of annoying to walk to, and one of them reflects in the TV if you watch at night, so I just want the other one on.
00:33:33 ◼ ► Anyway, it worked really well, but then I immediately thought, "Okay, well, the whole point of me getting this and playing with it is just to dip my toe into this and also to see if I've got all these little cylinders in the house listening to me, so I want this thing to be hooked up to all the cylinders."
00:33:46 ◼ ► I'm like, "Well, I hooked it up to HomeKit following the little instructions in the book, which is like, 'Turn it on, get the app, scan the code, done.'"
00:33:52 ◼ ► How do I get it hooked up to my Amazon Echo thing? Maybe I tried Google Home first. I don't remember. Either one, I couldn't figure it out, because the Connect Sense app is like, "You're all set. Everything's good."
00:34:06 ◼ ► I'm like, "Yeah, I guess, but what if I want to connect it to other things?" So I looked at the box again, and it supports all these different services, so I had to actually go to the website and say, "How do I hook it up to..."
00:34:15 ◼ ► I guess this is not a thing that most people would do. I want it hooked up to all of the cylinders. I was like, "How many cylinders do you have?" "Well, just don't ask. I have a bunch."
00:34:24 ◼ ► My main problem is I never hooked anything up to those other cylinders. With the Echo thing, I already had the... They called their app the "trigger word." I can't even talk about their name.
00:34:38 ◼ ► The app that's named after the trigger word for the Echo devices. I went in that, and I'm like, "Add device." I'm searching around. I probably would have found it eventually, but at that point, I went to the web. I was like, "Oh, I have to add the skill."
00:34:53 ◼ ► I forgot. They do everything in skills. That's their vocabulary. You can't just add the device. You have to add the skill, because if you don't add the skill, you can't add the device, because the skill lets you know the device.
00:35:01 ◼ ► Anyway, add the skill, find it, does the thing, works fine, blah, blah, blah. Google Home took me a little bit longer to puzzle out. At this point, I don't even remember how I did it. They don't have skills, but you do have to end up going the equivalent of skills, like searching for the Connect Sense brand name in their big list of drivers for stuff or whatever.
00:35:19 ◼ ► You find it, you hook it up, it does all the things. Then it was time for a yell at the cylinders contest to see who turns on off the lights the fastest and who gives me the most back talk.
00:35:31 ◼ ► At first, Apple's HomePod was kicking butt, because it's got amazing microphones, it's in the same room with the thing, and it was instant. I was really happy with how fast it did things.
00:35:42 ◼ ► The only thing I was unhappy with, which is not the fault of any of the cylinders, was that there is a little relay in there that you can hear go "chk, chk." I'm like, "Oh, you need to make that sound." That's an electromechanical difficulty that's not up to the stuff.
00:35:55 ◼ ► Siri was saying, "The HomePod was so great," because it would turn the lights on and off instantly and wasn't making a peep. I'm like, "Alright, your move." I tried the Google Dingus and the Google would be like, "Okay, turned it on for you." I'm like, "Oh, no good."
00:36:14 ◼ ► I would talk to the Echo, and it also had sometimes a thing to say to me, or a bloop. I'm like, "Well, this is amazing. The HomePod is the only one that just does what I want immediately without saying anything." I was so happy.
00:36:26 ◼ ► Then I came in 20 minutes later, and I'm using my newfound magical spell powers, and I tell the HomePod to turn on one of the lights, and it says, "Okay, I turned it on for you." I'm like, "What happened? What happened, HomePod? You were doing so well, but now you want to have a conversation with me about which light you turned on, and I don't want to hear it."
00:36:43 ◼ ► That's basically where I'm at. I have put the internet things into my house. I have talked to cylinders to make things happen. I thought I had a good friend who would do just what I wanted immediately, but now the good friend wants to tell me about what's going on in their life every time they turn a light on and off.
00:36:59 ◼ ► My next step is to find out, is there a way to get it to be quiet? Can I put my Echo into that whatever Margot was talking about, the terse don't bother me mode?
00:37:13 ◼ ► Of course, the final challenge is now I have a bunch of plain old dumb lamps plugged into a smart outlet and a bunch of people in the house who are used to going over to those lamps and turning them on with the switches on the lamps, and that's not going to work anymore if I've turned them off with the smart outlets.
00:37:54 ◼ ► It tried to play the speech, but it had never downloaded that string or something. I don't even know.
00:37:59 ◼ ► Yeah, but the other thing is one thing that we've been told by a number of people, and I confirmed it since then that I didn't even know last time we talked about HomeKit, is that HomeKit is executed locally in your own network and on device.
00:38:15 ◼ ► And I've been experimenting, and it actually- when Siri hears me, which is most of the time, and when I'm asking for a direct command of turning on and off a named device, it is faster to turn the thing on and off than the Echo.
00:38:30 ◼ ► It's the only thing that Siri is fast at for me. Everything else, like setting timers or asking questions or music commands, Siri is way slower to respond for me than the Echo.
00:38:40 ◼ ► But HomeKit stuff is way faster than the Echo's smart home control stuff. So that's nice. It's so fast that oftentimes the devices that I'm asking to be turned on and off will have already responded before Siri even speaks a response.
00:38:56 ◼ ► And then it's like, by the time I'm hearing a response, I'll say like, "Hey, turn on whatever." And then I'll hear a click, and it'll turn on. And then Siri will say, "One second, communicating."
00:39:05 ◼ ► Okay, the things are on. It's like, "Okay, thanks." The other thing is, Siri is very- and I don't know if there's a way to like recategorize things.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Siri is very sensitive to the vocabulary for the literal device that it is. So in your case, you're not turning on and off lights. You're turning on and off outlets.
00:39:31 ◼ ► Well, but slow down. You can also- you can go into HomeKit and change the type of device it is.
00:39:42 ◼ ► Like, they're named as lights, and then they're no longer categorized as outlets. They're categorized as lights.
00:39:48 ◼ ► Yeah, but yeah, like it's- the other thing is, Siri does try to be a little too smart sometimes with like overriding the meanings of words.
00:39:57 ◼ ► And, you know, the same thing it does with reminders and to-do creation. It's like, like if you call something lamps or light or something like that, like that can sometimes cause weird vocabulary misinterpretations by Siri, where you'll say like, you know, "Turn on the lights," and it'll look for all devices that are classified as lights rather than the one that you've called light or a synonym of light such as lamp.
00:40:22 ◼ ► Like, as I mentioned last week, I used to- I have these lamps in my living room that for like two years now, I've been commanding via the Echo, calling them as a group lamps.
00:40:31 ◼ ► "Turn on lamps." They're the only lamps in the house that are like this, so when you say lamps.
00:40:35 ◼ ► And I cannot get them to work with Siri, with HomeKit, because Siri overrides what lamps means.
00:40:41 ◼ ► So I had to call them like, "Living room lamps," which is cumbersome, but like, it's still- I don't know. I- overall, I think I still like the HomeKit in practice setup more than the Echo in practice setup, but it's a close call.
00:40:56 ◼ ► Like, I wish Siri was smarter. That would make up for how amazingly fast it is to execute locally.
00:41:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I like the local execution as well. I remember reading a couple of people's emails about that. Also, I'm not sure what the data models are behind the Amazon and the Google stuff, but with the ConnectSense app, like, you could set up your stuff or whatever, but it also lets you set up automations for scheduled things or whatever.
00:41:19 ◼ ► And of course, that's just all part of the HomeKit data model. So yeah, you can set that in the ConnectSense app, but then when you go over to the Home app, I'm pretty sure all that stuff is reflected there as well. I did set up an automation, just like, basically to turn off the lights after everyone's in bed if someone forgets to turn off lights. Not that that is likely to happen, but I just wanted to use the automation.
00:41:38 ◼ ► Yeah, I like these type of services from Apple. HealthKit, HomeKit, Calendar, the idea where the operating system provides an underlying data model and third-party applications can write applications against it, and Apple will write some applications of its own, and that it gets everyone working together.
00:41:59 ◼ ► Both HealthKit and HomeKit would be such disasters if every application, if every vendor of every smart thing had to have its own app with its own stuff. And then it would basically mean that only the big players could play. It would just be like Amazon, Google, and Apple, and no one else could make their own products or anything like that.
00:42:18 ◼ ► You'd have to build your own ecosystem. You can use this app to control everything in your house as long as it's ConnectSense brand. I've never even heard of a ConnectSense. It's not a company the size of Amazon or Google, but ConnectSense can play in the home automation space because of these standards and because of these OS-level data models.
00:42:36 ◼ ► It's kind of amazing that we actually get to do that with Calendar because in other areas, Apple is not so generous with allowing third-party access to underlying core OS features. But mostly, I imagine, for historical reasons, they are for Calendars and they are for forward-looking reasons with Health and Home.
00:42:54 ◼ ► I think it was a pretty good first experience. Granted, I'm waiting 10 to 20 years into early adopters getting into home automation to try for the first time, but if you wait that long, things pretty much work on the first try and they're pretty cheap and it's all fine.
00:43:07 ◼ ► The Belkin Smart Switch or something like that, basically, Belkin and Wemo have a series of smart switches and one of them is updatable via software to get HomeKit support.
00:43:25 ◼ ► So for the longest time, Wemo had Amazon support, but it did not have HomeKit support and most Wemo devices still do not, but this one particular thing of which we have a couple of them now got support via software.
00:43:39 ◼ ► This was also interesting because early on, to get HomeKit support, you had to have hardware that Apple gives you, kind of like the lightning plug, but now you can do it via software.
00:43:47 ◼ ► So I did the software update and suddenly I had my first HomeKit devices. And then that got me thinking, you know, it would be really cool if I could get the rest of my Wemo stuff onto HomeKit.
00:43:58 ◼ ► And through a meandering series of events, I came to realize that, wait a second, HomeBridge is a thing. And HomeBridge, if you're not familiar, is a software thing, I almost said product, it's not for sale, it's open source.
00:44:11 ◼ ► It's a piece of software written in Node that is, as you can guess, a bridge between other devices and HomeKit.
00:44:19 ◼ ► So the idea is somebody wrote the general, you know, backing system and then there's a ton of different people that have written a ton of different plugins to put all sorts of different smart home stuff onto HomeKit, even stuff that doesn't have native HomeKit support.
00:44:34 ◼ ► And then I realized, wait a second, there's a Docker container for HomeBridge. Now, if you're not familiar with Docker, I'm going to get this technically wrong, don't email me.
00:44:46 ◼ ► But the general idea of Docker is that it's virtualization kind of like a virtual machine, but a little bit lighter weight.
00:44:53 ◼ ► So you don't have to emulate everything, you're kind of running against the local operating system, but it's sandboxed.
00:45:00 ◼ ► So it's kind of like a halfway VM, if you will, and that's all you need to know for the purposes of this conversation.
00:45:05 ◼ ► Well, I realized there's a Docker container that has HomeBridge pre-installed. And wait a second, our Synologies have Docker support. This just got interesting.
00:45:18 ◼ ► So I found some instructions on how to do HomeBridge with Docker and the Synology, and within literally 10 minutes, I suddenly had all of my Wemo devices, including the ones that have no HomeKit support within HomeKit.
00:45:34 ◼ ► A few minutes later, I have some very kludgy and wonky support for my Ring video doorbell, which I can't necessarily recommend, but it's cool that that's kind of a thing.
00:45:45 ◼ ► And I have also started investigating writing my own support for my thermostat, because now I've gotten this like bug in my ear, if you will, about how I just must have all the things on HomeKit.
00:45:58 ◼ ► And then I found a node package, not a HomeKit or HomeBridge package, mind you, but a node package for my thermostat, which I have been editing.
00:46:08 ◼ ► And now I forked and then made some changes to, and now I'm going to attempt to make a HomeBridge plugin for my weirdo thermostat.
00:46:16 ◼ ► And I bring all this up to say that, A, this is a thing if you're willing to fiddle. B, I had never used Docker before, and I was only vaguely familiar with the purpose of it.
00:46:31 ◼ ► Now is your turn to adopt the technology 10 years after, not 10 years, but 10 years in internet years.
00:46:36 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. But holy cow, it was so cool, because I just said to the Synology, "Hey, go grab this container and then run it," and then it was there. I didn't have to do anything else.
00:46:46 ◼ ► You should try making a container with some software that you care about. They make it really easy. There's lots of stupidity like any open source project, but to get yourself up and running of a container with some simple software in it that you choose, it's very quick.
00:46:59 ◼ ► Yeah, and so now I have this little teeny tiny, not VM, don't call it a VM, VM, that's running on my Synology, which is always on anyway, and it's providing me a bridge between HomeKit and all the devices that don't actually support HomeKit, which is super awesome.
00:47:17 ◼ ► And because it's all Node and JavaScript, and yes, we can all snark about Node, we can definitely snark about JavaScript, but I can feasibly write my own plugin for my thermostat, and that is incredibly cool, and as a developer, I find that incredibly empowering.
00:47:33 ◼ ► And now I've been procrastinationing, or whatever the Marco/Mike term was for it, trying to get all my devices in HomeKit.
00:47:43 ◼ ► And I think this is so cool that between Docker and HomeBridge, this was literally 10 minutes to get this working, and you don't have to have a Synology to run Docker. You can do this on a Raspberry Pi, you can do this on your Mac if your Mac stays on all the time.
00:47:59 ◼ ► And I want to echo what you guys were saying earlier, that HomeKit is incredibly quick. It is typically quicker than my Amazon device, and I've really been liking it. And plus, you can do timed things, like every day at 6.45 when we go up to start the bedtime process, I tell it to turn all the upstairs lights on, which is super cool.
00:48:23 ◼ ► And I can tell it to turn the humidifiers on that are in the kids' rooms, which are on these outlets, which is super cool. All of this is just incredibly neat, and I was so scared of running HomeBridge because I thought the configuration would be terrible, and it's not great, but it's well within the realm of something that any reasonable developer can do.
00:48:43 ◼ ► And even from what I can tell, writing my own plugin for it isn't bad, but there were 70-some pages on NPM of HomeBridge plugins. It's almost anything under the sun that has a plugin. And I just find this all fascinating. I'm glad that I finally had an excuse to use Docker for something, and all of this is so cool, and you should definitely check it out if you are at all interested in this.
00:49:07 ◼ ► I started looking into thermostats too, because our thermostat is ancient, and the only reason I was looking into it, not because I want new features from our thermostat, or even want to control them for HomeKit or have anything to do with it, but just because I look at my thermostat and it's been getting a little wonky lately.
00:49:21 ◼ ► I tried to change the time that the heat came on in the morning and it wasn't working, and I was like, "Let me just back away from this slowly." It's really old. Basically, I'm afraid it's going to break. And when it does break, I'll have to get a new thermostat. So I'm like, "Well, let me start the multi-year process of slow-motion researching thermostats."
00:49:42 ◼ ► The only thing I know already is that I don't want a Nest for sure, because I don't want any smart features at all. But it's like trying to find a non-smartphone that's good now, like good luck. Try to find a non-smart thermostat.
00:49:58 ◼ ► And the smart ones that aren't Nest are even more terrifying in terms of how terrible their software must be and how badly supported they're going to be and how unreliable they're going to be. And I don't have the sea wire thing that provides voltage to it, so I have to fish a wire up from the basement too.
00:50:17 ◼ ► So I'm just looking at all this stuff and saying, "Can I find basically a dumb thermostat that is not horrendously ugly?" I wanted something better than what I have, and then it will last a long time, but I don't want something so much better that it will become obsolete.
00:50:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I wasn't planning on getting anything. Pro tip, do not replace your thermostat when it's two degrees outside. So I wasn't, you know, not looking at this.
00:50:47 ◼ ► But in the spring or summer, if your house has no air conditioning like mine, it's the perfect time to replace your thermostat because probably you'll be fine. But I don't know, I'll still look into it.
00:50:57 ◼ ► I would like something that is slightly better than the ancient monochrome LCD little seven-segment letters. It's not a seven-segment display. It's more than that, so you can make little lowercase letters out of stuff too.
00:51:13 ◼ ► But that's basically what it is. I need something a little bit better than that, but I really don't want anything smart.
00:51:20 ◼ ► I kind of wish Nest made one because I've used a bunch of their products now, and I think for the most part they're okay. I just don't want any of the smarts. I wish Nest made a dumb thermostat that doesn't attempt to learn from anything.
00:51:33 ◼ ► That's how I've had mine. I've had Nest thermostats in my house for about six years now, and I have been using it in dumb mode for about 5.9 years now because we work at home. Our schedules are a little bit different every day.
00:51:50 ◼ ► The smarts are optimized for if you have the same schedule every day where all the members of the house leave the house during work and school hours, and then everyone comes back at the same time and you have weekends. That's what it's made for, for the learning stuff.
00:52:05 ◼ ► If you deviate from that at all, the learning stuff is useless to you. But I turn that off almost immediately, and now I still have smart, remotely controlled, programmable, nice-looking thermostats.
00:52:17 ◼ ► I'm just always afraid, though, because the Nest product is not designed to be like that, that I'm running counter to what they want the product to be, and that some software update is going to remove my ability to have it work like that.
00:52:26 ◼ ► I really want a product that, as one of its design criteria is, this is a programmable thermostat that lets you set time and days for temperatures. That's all I need. I'm not lacking features.
00:52:38 ◼ ► My house is one giant zone. It is a very old house. There's nothing fancy I can do. I'm not remodeling my house. I just want a simple thing that does the exact job of my current thermostat that is probably older than both of you.
00:52:52 ◼ ► I just want that, but maybe I could control it from my smartphone and override the thing if I'm on my way home. I would take a couple of interesting features, but I don't want any kind of learning.
00:53:05 ◼ ► Nest seems to be all about the learning, so I'm hesitant to buy one, and they're also very expensive, hesitant to buy one and then disable all of its signature features and hope that they never get turned back on.
00:53:15 ◼ ► I'm telling you, it's been fine for almost six years. That should not be a concern at all. That is totally fine. The only concern should be you need the common wire. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. You need the common wire.
00:53:26 ◼ ► You'll have to have somebody run that, but it's a low-voltage wire. It isn't that big of a deal.
00:53:30 ◼ ► I can run that myself. The thing is, while I spend the extra money, like someone's suggesting this EcoBee thing, which is half the price of a Nest, and there are even cheaper ones. They all kind of ape the Nest look and feel at this point too.
00:53:44 ◼ ► I'll think about it. It's not a big deal, but it's the type of thing where if that thing breaks, I want to know exactly what I'm going to buy, and then I'll just buy it. If some summer comes along and I'm looking for some home project to do, this is a reasonable one that I could probably do in an afternoon if all goes well and in a weekend if not.
00:54:08 ◼ ► Anytime you're doing a home project and it seems really simple, it's the parable of the Home Depot trips. If you're lucky and you actually do have everything you need, it'll take two seconds to do it. If you're unlucky, you realize you thought you were ready to do that project, but you're missing one thing from Home Depot, and then you go there and come back on the weekend. It takes longer than you thought.
00:54:27 ◼ ► You're doing the project and you get the thing half-disassembled and you're ready to put it back together and you find you're missing another part, so you go back to Home Depot and yeah, that's what I'm trying to avoid.
00:54:39 ◼ ► I'm telling you, just get the Nest. That's it. That's your answer. Get the Nest. Run the common wire wherever you need to run it. That's it. It might happen. We'll see.
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00:56:06 ◼ ► So there's apparently a stage light fault for MacBook Pros, which is I guess just a funny way of describing the problem, but I read this in the show notes and I was like, what? So I guess what's happening is the way that Apple is doing the, what is it, the backlight cable from the bottom of the laptops to behind the screen, is that right?
00:56:29 ◼ ► It's the whole display cable, the thing that basically sends the signal to the display.
00:56:32 ◼ ► Okay, there you go. It used to be thick and now it's thin. I'm obviously oversimplifying. But that's causing some wonkiness as it begins to fail because every time you open and close your laptop, you're putting a little stress on this cable.
00:56:45 ◼ ► And what ends up happening is it looks like a series of spotlights going across the bottom of your display and that's what your backlight looks like, which is obviously not desirable.
00:56:53 ◼ ► Well, iFixit has weighed in on this and said, hey, to replace this cable is like six bucks, but hey, guess what? Because Apple did it, mounted it in this ridiculous way, it costs $600 to fix this and replace the $6 cable. Cool.
00:57:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I didn't put the story in specifically for this issue because anyone who has had Mac laptops for a long time, it's like this is not the first time a cable that snakes from the laptop body into the display has failed, causing display problems.
00:57:23 ◼ ► Like, I think it's happened at least three times before on the fast. And I mean, you can understand the engineering challenge. Like you do open and close that lid.
00:57:29 ◼ ► Like, I'm not sure most people have laptops, haven't really thought about the idea of like, there's a hinge here, right? But there is also some kind of connection between the main part of the computer and the display to power the backlight and send a display signal.
00:57:43 ◼ ► So there's got to be something somewhere inside that hinge that is turning with the hinge and flexing, you know, and so that's, especially as displays have gotten thinner and laptops have gotten thinner and the hinge part has gotten tighter, right?
00:57:56 ◼ ► So it's not a new problem. In this case, one of the main complaints was that like, instead of having the cable have like connectors on both ends, which again would make it thicker and more complicated, the cable is like sort of integral to the display.
00:58:12 ◼ ► That's why it costs $600 because you have to replace the entire display. It's not like you can just yank out the cable and stick in a new cable and you know, and that wouldn't even solve the problem.
00:58:19 ◼ ► You just reset the timer on the little thing flexing, right? And it's thin cable versus thick and yada, yada, yada. But the reason I put this in here is a topic that I think I've talked about in the past and this made me think of it again.
00:58:28 ◼ ► And I haven't, I haven't really like boiled it down to a pithy saying or phrase or whatever. So every time it comes up, I just try to redescribe it. So I thought, take another run out of this time.
00:58:38 ◼ ► And I'll do it with a car analogy because that's where I mostly think about it. It's sort of the impossible dream of car design, which, you know, we just spoke about the 911, which may or may not make it into the show earlier.
00:58:50 ◼ ► Well, earlier this evening, we were talking about the Porsche 911. It's probably one of the closest to this ideal. And the idea is like iterative development, right?
00:58:58 ◼ ► Where you make some kind of product, whatever it may be, you make a car, right? And you sell it to a bunch of people and maybe you're lucky you made a pretty good car and a bunch of people like it, right?
00:59:07 ◼ ► But there, there's always going to be issues with the car. Like maybe not like I love, I love my 911, but like the seats are kind of wonky. They don't have a really good support and the steering wheel doesn't have a good place to put your hands, right?
00:59:23 ◼ ► And maybe those are the only two things that annoy you about your car, but otherwise you love your 911, right?
00:59:27 ◼ ► When this comes time to get a new 911 in your life or when they make a new generation or whatever, you may go look at it and you're like, wow, these new ones are really totally different.
00:59:40 ◼ ► And there's a different set of trade-offs, right? And that's the way it is buying most cars, not 911s maybe like the new generation of Accord.
00:59:47 ◼ ► Like they're both Accords, they're both four-door cars or whatever, but they're very different from each other, right?
00:59:52 ◼ ► And you might be thinking, even if you're a 911 owner, what I would have liked is like my old 911, but fix the steering wheel and fix the seats and maybe get a little bit more power and maybe restyle it.
01:00:07 ◼ ► And the idea being that over time, if you just took this, this car, and this isn't, to be clear, this is not what 911s do, despite the fact that people say they all look the same.
01:00:15 ◼ ► This is not what they do, but it's close because it has that appearance from the outside. Every time you have to make a new one, just look at the current one and assess every part of it in terms of the performance criteria you set for it.
01:00:29 ◼ ► How durable is it? How much do people like it? How pleasing is it to use? How well does it perform for its desired function? How heavy is it? How strong is it? Is it holding paint well? Does it ever make any noises?
01:00:40 ◼ ► Every part of the car is subject to that. And every year, find something that has a problem and improve it. But the things that don't have problems, don't break them.
01:00:49 ◼ ► So if you imagine a laptop that was like that, there would have been like one laptop designed a really long time ago, and it would slowly be refining, and it would slowly be getting thinner and smaller.
01:00:58 ◼ ► But in general, if some year they made a ribbon cable that flexed and broke and had a problem, like whenever the first time that happened, 15, 20 years ago, they would say, "Okay, we need to come up with a solution with this flexing cable problem."
01:01:09 ◼ ► First of all, one characteristic is it needs to be cheap to repair because they do fail. That can happen. So let's make sure that the cable is detachable. Maybe you do that in the next one.
01:01:18 ◼ ► In the next one, they say, "Okay, it's easy to repair, but it's still breaking. What can we do to make it not break as much? We can make the cable thicker."
01:01:24 ◼ ► Then the next year, you're like, "Well, it's so thick now, we want to make our laptops thinner. How can we make it durable, easy to repair, but not as thick?"
01:01:30 ◼ ► You just keep trying to refine it. But never do you go to the point where you say, "We need to make it thinner, but let's not worry about durability and repairability. Let's make it non-replaceable and make it even thinner than it was before, but now we've done..."
01:01:43 ◼ ► You would never regress. You would always say, "It has to have all the good characteristics that we care about and just improve on the ones that are bad."
01:01:50 ◼ ► The reason real products don't do that is it's incredibly boring. Even 911 doesn't do it because you want it to be a new car, all new interior, all new exterior, different wheels, different engine in significant ways.
01:02:03 ◼ ► You're not just taking the same air-cooled engine, even though you did this for a long time, very similar air-cooled engines, and just improving.
01:02:09 ◼ ► At a certain point, you have to go to water cooling because that's the next step and it's a scary, difficult step or whatever.
01:02:14 ◼ ► The interior, everything's different. The radio controls are different, the gauges are different, the pedals are placed differently, the ergonomics of the car are different, the window openings.
01:02:26 ◼ ► It's not. It's because people want new, interesting products and you can't keep trying to design for your customers that like your original product forever. It's ridiculous.
01:02:36 ◼ ► But it's a balance between those two things. There is never going to be the extreme of you make the one laptop and you just refine it over years and years.
01:02:43 ◼ ► If somebody had done that, for example, the keyboard would be bulletproof by now because it would be like, "We made one keyboard and then we fixed everything about it. We made it maybe thinner as a criteria."
01:02:52 ◼ ► So you make it thinner, make it more durable, make it feel better, make it more reliable, make it waterproof, make it so no matter how acidic and alien your finger grease is, you don't wear off the key cap note letters on them.
01:03:03 ◼ ► Just knock them down one by one to just make, by the end of this development, an amazingly solid keyboard that does everything. You couldn't just jump to that keyboard design.
01:03:13 ◼ ► You had to do it by trial and error over years and years by keeping the good and getting rid of and improving the bad in a series of trial and error.
01:03:21 ◼ ► And every time I see the umpteenth time they've screwed this up or the fact that they've sacrificed repairability or reliability for the sake of thinness, it's like you are not practicing the ideal of iterative development.
01:03:33 ◼ ► You're too far in one direction. You can't go all the way to the other direction because you end up with boring products and selling to your worst customers.
01:03:39 ◼ ► You do have to make new and interesting and appealing things. But on the other hand, you should try mightily to learn from your past mistakes and not regress.
01:03:46 ◼ ► Repairability is important. Making something thin but also durable is important. Surely they have some kind of test that open and closes their laptops a million times with a robot arm, right?
01:03:55 ◼ ► That should have found this failure. And when they found this failure, they said this is really bad because the only way to replace it is to replace the entire screen.
01:04:02 ◼ ► And maybe some accountant did some math and said, "Well, it still works out. We think the product has enough appeal to make up for the fact that it's a $600 repair and most will be under warranty and yada, yada, yada.
01:04:11 ◼ ► And if it's outside warranty, there's probably some reason this all makes sense in someone's spreadsheet. But from the perspective of a consumer, it is too far away from the ideal of the product that in all aspects gets better and better.
01:04:23 ◼ ► And the final thing is I think about this most when I'm sitting in cars and I think about door handles, both interior and exterior, because they're the part of cars that are such a big factor of the user interface, like the non-driving interface.
01:04:38 ◼ ► Every time you get into and out of the car, you use them. And they change absolutely for the sake of change all the time on every car model.
01:04:47 ◼ ► And I wish someone would say, "We have refined the handles of our cars, both interior and exterior, to be durable, pleasing, not sharp, not pointy, not too hot, not too cold, doesn't catch your fingers on it, are in the right place for people with most arms, very durable, don't freeze in the winter, don't get too hot in the sun."
01:05:06 ◼ ► All the things that can make handles good, work on every single one of those to make just the perfect door handles. And don't change them every three years. Entirely change them. Or door locks.
01:05:18 ◼ ► Just think of all the cars you've owned. How many have had remotely the same design for interior door handles? They're so radically different and there is no reason for that.
01:05:27 ◼ ► And every time I get a new generation of car, I'm like, "Well, this is better than the old handles in some ways and worse than the other." You are not making progress. Sometimes it's way worse overall, sometimes it's a little bit better overall, but there is no trend line of you learning from your mistakes of making door handles.
01:05:44 ◼ ► So, sorry for the long-winded rant, but I don't think "interior development" is the right word, but it's the best I can come up with. I just really wish, in addition to all the other complaints we have about Apple laptops and stuff, that for devices like this, they would build on the designs of the past to come to an increasingly satisfying product rather than radically changing everything every time and just remaking all the same mistakes.
01:06:07 ◼ ► You know, it's funny you bring up door handles. This is kind of tangential to the point you're trying to make, but I was watching a really, really great documentary created by the Everyday Driver folks, which is a YouTube channel that does car reviews with much bigger budgets and with much more skill than me.
01:06:26 ◼ ► But they did this documentary, American Original, which is about every Corvette from the C1 and 54 all the way up through today and a little bit of chatter about the forthcoming mid-engine Vette.
01:06:38 ◼ ► And of course, as they're driving all these different Corvettes, they're showing plenty of interior shots.
01:06:43 ◼ ► I'm looking at some of the pictures of these door handles and thinking, "God, that looks like it's from 50 years ago, even though it's a 20-year-old car." And the difference in the door handle between an early '90s ZR1 and today on just any modern car, it's a tremendous difference.
01:07:01 ◼ ► You would never think so. And this is exactly what you're talking about, John. This seems like it should have been a solved problem.
01:07:06 ◼ ► But yet, the door handles look so antiquated and weird in those older cars, and my dad has a year-old Z06, where there is no interior door handle. You hit a button. You hit a push button, and then it pops the door open for you.
01:07:23 ◼ ► And to be clear, and to address some of the people in the chat room, the idea is not something like the Volkswagen Beetle, where you literally don't change it, because not changing it at all is the worst, because you're not improving that. Surely there is something wrong with the original Beetle's door handles.
01:07:37 ◼ ► I don't even know if this applies to you, but there's always something wrong with it. There's always something that can be improved, even if it's invisible, even if it's like, "Everybody loved these door handles, but they broke after 300,000 miles."
01:07:46 ◼ ► Fine, so work on that, right? Everyone loved them, but they got a little bit hot when they were in the sun. There's always something you can address, so they should be changing over time, but they should only be changing in ways to address shortcomings without sacrificing the attributes that they had.
01:07:59 ◼ ► The same thing with the shift knobs. My wife's Accord is the special edition that's got a metal top to the shift knob. It gets hot in the summer. The top of the shift knob gets hot. She puts a little sock over it, right? All the previous shift knobs we've had and all of our other stick shift Accords and other Hondas have not gotten hot like that.
01:08:16 ◼ ► So this is a regression, and no one thought one of the characteristics we care about for our shift levers—and why did it change? It's entirely different. There is no part of the shift lever that is shared with the shift lever of the two-year earlier car. Zero part of it is the same.
01:08:31 ◼ ► It is an entirely different thing that you put in your hand. The boot is different. Everything about it is different. Did every single part of it need to be changed? I bet not, and I know one part that didn't need to be changed. The part that gets super hot that burns the palm of your hand when it's in the sun.
01:08:44 ◼ ► No one thought to think about the performance characteristics of our current knobs. What are our criteria for a good shift lever? Make sure we don't regress. Make sure we don't take something that was better at not absorbing and radiating the heat back and replace it with something that is.
01:08:59 ◼ ► You want progress and you want change, and sometimes you do have to have change for the sake of change and fashion. You do have to reassess at a certain point that maybe we shouldn't have shifting at all and the car should be electric. You've got to do that every once in a while.
01:09:14 ◼ ► Laptops still have hinges and they still have displays. Let's work on getting the hinge display assembly, getting all the characteristics of that to be better over time so we're not hearing the 900th story about a hinge display issue. Solve the problem. Don't just keep making new and different laptops that have new varieties of problems.
01:09:34 ◼ ► People probably come to me and expect me to get really, really super mad about this. I've heard a lot of people on Twitter today about this so far because everyone knows that I don't like this generation of laptops.
01:09:45 ◼ ► The fact that there is a flaw like this, in isolation, every generation of Apple laptops has had flaws. They've all had hardware flaws and Apple doesn't handle them very well. Simple as that. When Apple has a hardware flaw in something they sell, they really don't handle it well.
01:10:04 ◼ ► If you are one of the buyers of that thing, you have been there. The previous generation had problems with Nvidia GPUs desoldering themselves, screen delaminations, stuff like that. There are problems even with the generations that I like, which is all the ones before this. There's always been problems of some sort or another.
01:10:23 ◼ ► But man, it sure does seem like this generation has a lot of these problems. This generation has had so many engineering problems. You have all the keyboard reliability issues, the thermal throttling, you have the popping and cracking that seems to be thermal expansion issues that changes the characteristics or reliability of the keyboard or other parts depending on the temperature of the machine, even in regular temperature ranges.
01:10:47 ◼ ► You have problems with the earlier ones, especially the 2016s with USB-C devices that make the WiFi cut out. There have been so many problems with these generations. We don't know how they will be resolved long term. We don't know if Apple is hearing us yet until they actually make something new that's a new generation.
01:11:09 ◼ ► I do think that we can look at the MacBook Air and learn a little bit from it in a relevant area here. That when I fix it tore it apart, they noted a few areas that made it more repairable than the other laptops of this generation, especially things like the batteries and the glue and stuff like that.
01:11:30 ◼ ► These are small steps and they're not going to make these things suddenly as repairable as previous generations might have been. But it is possible that Apple is learning from the repairability angle at least.
01:11:44 ◼ ► I hope that this really has kicked them in the butt in terms of the numbers on these. Apple pays for warranty repairs out of their own pocket for things that are still under warranty. So things that are very expensive and challenging to repair, that hits Apple too. That hits their bottom line too.
01:12:04 ◼ ► Because for all the ones that are under warranty, they foot that bill. Granted, they're getting the wholesale price on these repairs, but still, Apple's footing that bill.
01:12:14 ◼ ► I have to hope that they made these devices so incredibly expensive to repair and they need such common repairs like basic keyboard stuff and now this screen issue.
01:12:25 ◼ ► I would hope that enough of them are under warranty when these things happen, that Apple is seeing these numbers. Because it's very clear to me the only reason we have these laptops, the only reason that they are still on the market and the redesign has not happened is because of numbers.
01:12:40 ◼ ► It's because they've decided to just stick it out, repair what needs to be repaired, and get their value out of this product line before they redesign it.
01:12:48 ◼ ► There have just been so many problems with this generation. Even if you like the keyboard, there's been so many other engineering and hardware and reliability problems with this generation.
01:12:58 ◼ ► And no generation is perfect, but boy, this does seem like a real lemon. And so I really hope that this era ends soon. I really hope this ends in 2019.
01:13:07 ◼ ► On the topic of repairability, there is a point that Apple's kind of approached in a few of its products now where repairability is just one aspect of product quality.
01:13:19 ◼ ► There's lots of criteria that make it. Is it pleasing to use? Does it feel nice? Is it durable? Does it break easily? If it does break, how easy is it to repair? So on the repairability angle specifically, some products, probably the watch will get here sooner than anything else.
01:13:33 ◼ ► The correct solution might be eventually, like, we have this thing and it has lots of parts and the parts are very small. Sometimes we have to use glue because there's no way to use fasteners, or the fasteners end up getting loose or having a place where water can get in or whatever.
01:13:46 ◼ ► So we end up gluing it together, but then the glue can come apart. You're kind of in this uncontrolled middle zone where you're like, "I can't really make this repairable."
01:13:54 ◼ ► It's not that type of thing, but when I try to make the product as well as I can so it feels and looks good, it uses techniques that have problems.
01:14:04 ◼ ► So you can imagine getting over the hump and saying, "Actually, the Apple Watch 17 is basically completely sealed in Lucid or quartz crystal. It is entirely sealed. There's no way for anything to get into it in any way.
01:14:20 ◼ ► There's no metal touching the outside. Everything is wireless and inductive or whatever, and it's one solid, complete, lightweight thing.
01:14:27 ◼ ► It just looks like, if you can imagine, a modern piece of Lucid with a piece of paper inside the middle of it.
01:14:33 ◼ ► It's incredibly durable. Nothing comes unglued because there is nothing to be glued, but it is 100% unrepairable.
01:14:40 ◼ ► If it has any problem whatsoever, you have to throw it out and get a new one. That ends up being the right call because it is so much less likely to break, and the cost of the entire thing.
01:14:51 ◼ ► This is a fantasy world, but imagine it's much cheaper than it is now because of technological advances or whatever.
01:14:57 ◼ ► Sometimes that's the right call, and it's like we are 100% sacrificing repairability for essentially disposability or recyclability.
01:15:04 ◼ ► Say it literally was made entirely of recyclable plastic with some nano things in there for display and compute, and you just melt it down and it just becomes completely inert, totally recyclable plastic that you use to make more Apple watches.
01:15:16 ◼ ► So when you bring it in and there's any problem, they just drop it in a little bin. That bin goes off to a place, it gets melted down and goes back.
01:15:22 ◼ ► It doesn't even have to be an environmental problem. Sometimes "disposability" is actually the right move if you get to the point where that's the better thing to do.
01:15:32 ◼ ► I think Apple sometimes thinks they're at that point. They're like, "Well, our products are so thin now that we need to make this ribbon cable super thin, and we don't have room for a connector, so let's just hook it up to display, and this will never break anyway."
01:15:42 ◼ ► They miscalculate, and now what you've made is a situation where this flexi cable that has a problem that has happened in seven of your other laptops in the last two decades, it's not a new problem.
01:15:52 ◼ ► Not only have you not solved it, but your hubris has made you make it worse. So now if and when it does happen, you have to throw out the entire screen, which is incredibly expensive and incredibly wasteful and just runs up your bills and stuff like that.
01:16:06 ◼ ► So I think Apple sometimes feels like they're much closer to that threshold of "Let's just make it all in one." Another example is the Unibody, which is a great innovation.
01:16:15 ◼ ► Let's take this laptop and refine it, refine it, and at some point someone says, "I've got an idea. Why don't we stop making this chassis and frame and parts that we've been refining and making better and stiffer over the years?"
01:16:25 ◼ ► That's like from going body-on-frame to Unibody. There's a new technology we can use to make the frame of our laptops better, and it's a big risk and it's going to be totally different, but we think it's going to be better overall.
01:16:38 ◼ ► And I think they have those same notions about a ribbon cable that is totally connected to the display and can't be removed, but they're wrong in that case.
01:16:46 ◼ ► So it's difficult. I'm not saying it's not difficult, but I still think about the dream of the door whose car handles over the course of 50 years just get better and better instead of the car whose door handles change every five years for no discernible reason.
01:17:00 ◼ ► You know, it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but as I got older as a developer, I found that clever code is less and less appealing to me.
01:17:14 ◼ ► Like when I was right out of school, if I could write something really clever or cram a whole bunch of different things onto one line, I always thought I was such a badass and, "Oh, look at me and look at this cool thing I've done."
01:17:24 ◼ ► And the older I've gotten as a developer and as a dude, the more I've come to value understandable and repairable code, something that's easy to understand and easy to maintain, as being more valuable and more useful than clever code.
01:17:45 ◼ ► And I would much rather write something in a hundred lines where a hundred of those lines are easy to understand than to write something in ten lines where it takes even future me two hours to figure out what the hell I was thinking.
01:17:58 ◼ ► And that may not be the case for everyone and it may not be the case always, but I rarely regret being more direct and being more clear.
01:18:10 ◼ ► And I think the analogy here, to twist this to hardware, is that being repairable is important.
01:18:17 ◼ ► Now, again, it's not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, but having something that's repairable is important, especially at the volume that Apple works with, because if you are shipping that many Mac laptops, it is inevitable that some of them will have problems and some of them will need to be repaired.
01:18:35 ◼ ► Maybe they'll have problems because of manufacturing defects, maybe they'll have problems because people drop them, but one way or another, these should be easily repairable.
01:18:45 ◼ ► And in the effort of going thinner and lighter, we have lost a lot of that repairability.
01:18:59 ◼ ► It would be cool if I could add RAM to an Apple laptop myself, but I'm not particularly embittered that I can't.
01:19:07 ◼ ► So there are some ways that I think these trade-offs are worth it, because I am willing to solder RAM onto the board in order to have something that much thinner and lighter.
01:19:22 ◼ ► It appears that these ribbon cables for the display should be easier to repair, and as much as I will tell you, I freaking love my MacBook One.
01:19:35 ◼ ► At the same time, I would sacrifice a little bit of that thinness and lightness to make it that much easier to repair.
01:19:42 ◼ ► And the same thing that the three of us particularly have been beating our chests about for years.
01:19:46 ◼ ► I would take a slightly thicker iPhone if it meant I had considerably more battery life.
01:19:51 ◼ ► And it's a very complex and I'm deeply oversimplifying it, but there are so many ways in which I feel like maybe we have gone too far.
01:20:11 ◼ ► Could we get a little bit of that thickness back to make these things so much easier to repair?
01:20:16 ◼ ► I think the example of SSD and RAM is a good one because there they traded repairability for reliability.
01:20:22 ◼ ► And I think it was the right tradeoff because they actually did get so much more reliability in exchange for having to replace the entire motherboard if your RAM goes bad.
01:20:31 ◼ ► But when you had SO DIMMs or whatever they were, you had all those different contact points.
01:20:38 ◼ ► And you are more likely to have some kind of RAM issue go bad because it's just inherently less reliable to have two pieces of metal pressing up against each other.
01:20:47 ◼ ► This giant array of pins and contacts where corrosion can come and any kind of moisture can get in there and things can wiggle loose.
01:20:57 ◼ ► And it's so much more reliable that it ends up being a huge net win for like, "Yeah, sometimes the RAM goes bad and you have to replace the entire motherboard."
01:21:09 ◼ ► And SSD, it feels worse. Those actually can be socketed, but then they solder them on and it's like, "Well, you could maybe make that socketed so I could upgrade or whatever."
01:21:23 ◼ ► But when they trade everything, when they just trade it all in, this laptop shares nothing with the previous laptop.
01:21:33 ◼ ► I always think in my Hondas that despite them changing the stupid door handles every generation, surely there are some parts of the car probably in the engine and suspension components that are like, "You know what? If you look at that part of the engine, it's basically been the same for the past 50 years."
01:21:47 ◼ ► And when they make the new engine, they basically take the part from the old engine and they maybe make it a little bit stronger in the places where it failed and maybe change some material here and there, but they don't change it that much because people can't see it.
01:21:58 ◼ ► I have to think that's how Honda and Toyota get to the point where they're as reliable as they are, is that the internal workings that you don't see, they don't reinvent the wheel every time.
01:22:07 ◼ ► They just take their seat belt buckle that they've always had and just improve it slightly and maybe put a different skin on the outside.
01:22:14 ◼ ► But the internals, they're not redesigning that from scratch every time because it's an important safety component or it goes to reliability and it's like, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
01:22:23 ◼ ► I wish that applied to the door handles too, but I'm sure that the most reliable car companies do that because there's no way you get a car with all these, especially an internal combustion car, with all these parts to be as reliable as they are if you haven't spent literally decades refining those parts so that you're sure that they won't freeze in the winter and won't crack when you go over a bump and won't be squeaky after 200,000 miles.
01:22:45 ◼ ► I think also repairability is one of those things that, it's almost like insurance. If you've never had anything bad happen to your products that needed repair, you might think, "Oh, I want them to keep making things thinner. I want the thinnest thing possible and I'll just deal with whatever happens."
01:23:05 ◼ ► And your view changes the first time that bites you, the first time that you have to eat the cost of a repair or that you're stuck with a model of something that ends up being a lemon.
01:23:17 ◼ ► That certain generations of products end up having known problems after a while that they can do a repair extension program and replace the thing a few times over a few years, but you're still going to have that problem with that model forever.
01:23:32 ◼ ► That just happens to certain models. If you happen to be the unlucky person who buys that, tough luck. The solution is buy the new one and hopefully dump the old one for some kind of price that you can stomach.
01:23:46 ◼ ► There are certain models that are just lemons and certain percentage of all models will break and need repair. Until that happens to you, you're probably thinking, "Please make it thinner."
01:23:58 ◼ ► But once that does happen, you realize, "Oh boy, I really wish these things were a little bit easier to repair and didn't require massive part replacements that cost $700 or whatever."
01:24:08 ◼ ► And so I feel like Apple has to be the grown-up here and make the decision for their customers like, "Look, we know that what you want is the extra half millimeter that we might be able to shave off of this thing by making these parts a little bit thinner and weaker over time."
01:24:27 ◼ ► But what we are giving you is what you should have, which is something that's reliable and when it does break, repairable.
01:24:34 ◼ ► And there's so many... I mean, look, the world made a lot of mistakes in 2016. I really hope we can fix this one this year.
01:24:44 ◼ ► Yeah. We'll see. Three men can dream. That's all we know. Let's do some Ask ATP, beginning with Andrew Jaffe who writes, "Hey, so what happens to projects like Homebrew when the ARM transition happens?
01:24:57 ◼ ► Lots of developers and scientists like me rely on these tools and I imagine that they won't all just trivially compile for ARM. Do we need ISH-like emulation? What do we do?"
01:25:06 ◼ ► So if you're not familiar with Homebrew, Homebrew is a kind of a package manager, so something like FFmpeg or YouTube DL, those are both open source projects.
01:25:14 ◼ ► And Homebrew makes it very, very, very easy to just say, "Hey, I would like FFmpeg, please." And it will figure out how to fetch it, download it, and in some cases, if not many, compile it and then put it in the appropriate places so you can run it.
01:25:29 ◼ ► So I'm curious to hear your answer to this, both of you guys. To me, I would assume that this shouldn't be a big deal, as I knock on wood, because most of these things are written in languages that are high enough on the stack that it should be able to be recompiled.
01:25:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, there are certain packages and everything that won't compile under ARM on modified and everything and would require some work and that might never get that work.
01:26:01 ◼ ► You might lose some packages. But the good thing is that if Apple does go ARM, they won't be the first ARM computer that has demand for server-side software and packages like Nginx and Memcache and PHP and Python and Ruby and FFmpeg and YouTube DL and all the stuff you might install from Homebrew.
01:26:26 ◼ ► They won't be the first ones to need that because not only does ARM have a small but growing server presence, but also Raspberry Pis are all ARM.
01:26:37 ◼ ► And they run Linux, and there's been demand for Raspberry Pis to run ARM versions of common Linux tools for years.
01:26:44 ◼ ► So while you won't have everything necessarily on day one, there is already a lot of ARM demand out there for Linux tools to work.
01:26:56 ◼ ► Apple wouldn't be going into this as the very first people. We wouldn't be starting from zero.
01:27:02 ◼ ► So it would take some work, but I have a feeling most of those tools would come over within not too long of a time.
01:27:10 ◼ ► Even though this is a question about source code and stuff, it actually does help a surprising amount that Apple now controls this entire compiler toolchain.
01:27:18 ◼ ► We've gone through these transitions before, and at various times Apple has had much less control over its compiler toolchain than it does now.
01:27:25 ◼ ► So yeah, people do need to update their source, but compiler differences and compiler flag differences are half the battle in dealing with getting something to build.
01:27:34 ◼ ► Because so much source code uses macros or other supposedly platform-independent things, and you can get tripped up on issues that are not actually portability issues,
01:27:43 ◼ ► they're just issues in an entirely different compiler for a different architecture, like from 68K to PowerPC or whatever.
01:27:49 ◼ ► So I imagine this transition will go as good as, if not better, than the ones with x86, because ARM is not a new architecture, it's also not a new architecture for Apple.
01:28:01 ◼ ► You'll just have to wait for stuff to get updated, but the stuff you care about will. And the esoteric stuff, you'll get left behind, but you won't care.
01:28:12 ◼ ► Because that's what happened the past two times. Things got left behind in 68K, things got left behind in PowerPC, but all the stuff that we care about came along, and so much new stuff happened.
01:28:20 ◼ ► We just mentioned Docker. I don't think anyone ever has worried about Docker running on a PowerPC Mac, because by the time Docker is five years old now or something,
01:28:29 ◼ ► PowerPC Macs weren't really a thing anymore, so they don't have to worry about it. So it'll all be fine.
01:28:34 ◼ ► John Wielander writes, "It took me four years to convince my mom to buy me a computer as a kid, and then I went on to build my career on computers.
01:28:41 ◼ ► Now that I'm a dad, I worry I'll do the same thing with my kids. So, for example, what future thing do you think there will be that you're going to miss?
01:28:51 ◼ ► Do you share this fear? How do you deal with it?" So, I think John's asking, computers seemed like a bunch of malarkey when they were the sizes of rooms, but suddenly when they got smaller,
01:29:02 ◼ ► should parents of that time encourage kids to use them, even though they seemed like they were just a time waster?
01:29:10 ◼ ► I think about this a lot, actually, and what things do I think are silly that I'll kind of poo-poo that I'm really doing a disservice to my kids by doing so?
01:29:20 ◼ ► So a great example to me of something that I don't understand and seems silly to me, but I feel like there's something there, is Minecraft.
01:29:32 ◼ ► I know, I know. I only have a vague understanding of it, but it seems like the sort of thing that left my own devices, I'd be like, "Pshh, just go grab some Legos, man."
01:29:48 ◼ ► You've played enough video games that once you actually do play Minecraft for a short period of time, you'll get it. I guarantee it.
01:29:54 ◼ ► Sure, but you get my point, right? That it seems on the surface like something that's easily dismissible, but in reality, I think is probably a really good way to build a lot of really good skills.
01:30:02 ◼ ► And I don't know what that'll be, but I keep trying to remind myself that even if something isn't important or really understandable to me,
01:30:12 ◼ ► that doesn't mean it's not going to be understandable to either of my kids or not going to be important to either of my kids.
01:30:17 ◼ ► And really, it seems like if my kids are excited about almost anything, I should probably encourage them and encourage them to pull on that thread and see what's there.
01:30:28 ◼ ► Because even if it's something as silly like, you know, Declan is four and he is obsessed with Paw Patrol, which to me seems like it's mostly saccharine.
01:30:37 ◼ ► It's a TV show that's mostly saccharine and I don't know what he would really get out of it.
01:30:41 ◼ ► But what if him playing with Paw Patrol, where one of the dogs is like a firefighter, what if that leads him into a career as a firefighter or something like that?
01:30:50 ◼ ► So I guess I'm saying it in a roundabout way that I feel like I should at the least get out of my kids' way when it comes to these things, not poo-poo stuff, just because I don't get it.
01:31:01 ◼ ► And if I'm really good and really smart, I'll encourage whatever it may be and encourage them to kind of see where the logical conclusion of whatever their interests are.
01:31:12 ◼ ► So this specific experience, I don't know how old our question asker is, but this experience of having to beg your parents to get you a computer, like I had that experience too.
01:31:21 ◼ ► But I think of people who are around our age, part of it is that computers used to be really expensive.
01:31:28 ◼ ► And the second part is that maybe you grew up in a house where you didn't have that kind of disposable income anyway.
01:31:34 ◼ ► It could cost as much as a car. They were a new thing, but they were also a new thing that was a serious financial commitment for the family.
01:31:43 ◼ ► And if you're a precocious five-year-old asking your parents to spend more than their last car cost for a thing that they also don't understand, it's a much bigger ask than, "Hey, I'm playing Minecraft, but you don't understand it.
01:31:58 ◼ ► As to the specific question, what things you worry about, like the things that you might poo-poo or whatever, it's not going to be, if we all live long enough, it's not going to be the case of a technology product or an app or something like that.
01:32:13 ◼ ► I'm not saying this is what it's going to be, but this is an example of something that would induce this feeling.
01:32:18 ◼ ► Say, in 10 or 15 or 20 years, our kids are grown and they're having children of their own and everybody is genetically engineering their children.
01:32:28 ◼ ► They're choosing the eye color, they're choosing the hair color, they're screening out. Basically, biological manipulation of DNA becoming commonplace.
01:32:38 ◼ ► That's the type of thing that people in our generation would be like, "I understand the technology, but I just don't think it's right.
01:32:45 ◼ ► I think you should just have your kids the old-fashioned way and just let the dice go where they may."
01:32:53 ◼ ► I'm not saying I actually believe this, but it would make people in our generation uncomfortable because we're not accustomed to elective genetic engineering as a casual thing.
01:33:10 ◼ ► That's the type of discomfort that you have to expect. Not that it's going to be, "Oh, computers," but different and more so in different apps and different cultural things.
01:33:18 ◼ ► But what about something entirely different that you thought was outside the realm of things that you mess with at all?
01:33:24 ◼ ► You see, the level is genetically modified. It's a new domain that makes you uncomfortable.
01:33:29 ◼ ► Think of the generation before computers seeing computers. That's a new domain of thing. There was nothing like that.
01:33:34 ◼ ► It's not just a much more complicated machine or much more complicated internal combustion engine.
01:33:55 ◼ ► Finally, Mike McThaden writes, "Apple's recent financial woes have prompted a spike in online commentary. Snide, rude, and grumpy comments are so common.
01:34:04 ◼ ► It makes me wonder how you guys handle it. Does the tech world have more jerks per capita than other sectors?"
01:34:15 ◼ ► When you have an audience, as we do, and we are small potatoes compared to a lot of people, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of people.
01:34:29 ◼ ► But when you come to have any audience, you start to realize that no matter what you say or do or think, someone will disagree with you.
01:34:51 ◼ ► And especially if you're on Twitter, you typically know how emphatic a person will disagree with you by how much of their real name appears in their information.
01:35:02 ◼ ► So, you know, Joe Smith with a egg as an avatar is going to be extremely vile in disagreeing with you.
01:35:10 ◼ ► Whereas Marco Arment with a picture that looks like him is probably going to be more respectful.
01:35:23 ◼ ► And sometimes I'll be in a bad mood and I'll see something really ticks me off and I'll call somebody on it and be like, "Hey, you remember I'm a person, right? Like, I have feelings. This isn't really necessary."
01:35:34 ◼ ► But to answer the other part of the question, you know, why more jerks per capita than other sectors?
01:35:40 ◼ ► I think it's because we are often, for a long time, like when I was growing up, because I understood computers, I, revered is too strong a word, but it was like, "Oh, he understands computers. He gets something that most people don't understand."
01:35:57 ◼ ► And that gives you a false sense of, again, not the right word, but like not power, but authority maybe.
01:36:02 ◼ ► And over time you start to believe your own hype and think, "Oh yeah, I understand this stuff. All these plebeian idiots don't get it, so of course I'm right about this."
01:36:10 ◼ ► And additionally, you just end up forming strong opinions. Like, how could you use Facebook, which by the way I do, but how could you use Facebook because there's so clearly an entire company of evil people?
01:36:22 ◼ ► Even that joking opinion that I just gave is very much a not true opinion, or a not true fact. There's plenty of people at Facebook who are genuinely well-meaning and nice, even if the company as a whole is kind of, well, evil.
01:36:36 ◼ ► It's just, I don't know, I think it's the self-profice—or this kind of, I don't want to say human centipede, but I can't think of a better word for it, where it's just, we all escalate on how certain we are about our particular viewpoints till it just gets to the point that it's unsustainable.
01:36:52 ◼ ► And I don't know when this is all going to break, but it's gross. It's gross in the tech sector, and I don't think it's limited to tech either.
01:36:59 ◼ ► One of the things that you learn when you exit childhood and become an adult, and some people don't learn this for a while, but one of the things that you hopefully eventually learn is that just because somebody is, say, a doctor, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're a good doctor, but that they're smart.
01:37:21 ◼ ► There are idiots in every field, and any titles or professions or statuses that children look up to and kind of think like, "Oh, well, this person's a doctor. They, of course, know what they're doing because doctors are smart."
01:37:37 ◼ ► As the adult, you learn that there's idiots everywhere, and they seem to be pretty evenly distributed, actually. Someone's at the bottom of those med school classes and could be your doctor.
01:37:48 ◼ ► And so, similarly, I think there's jerks everywhere. I don't think necessarily the tech sector have more jerks per capita than anywhere else. I think ultimately there's jerks everywhere, and they're probably distributed in roughly even proportions in most places.
01:38:07 ◼ ► There are some factors that can maybe boost the percentages. Casey, you touched on this a little bit where culturally tech nerds, growing up in the '70s through '90s, tech was very much not a mainstream thing, and those who were into it were usually much more likely to be nerds.
01:38:30 ◼ ► And there was this sense of, like, what you said, you were probably one of the smart kids. At least people thought you were, and people kept telling you that. And so you had this reinforcement of, "Yeah, I'm smart. I know what I'm doing."
01:38:43 ◼ ► And you oftentimes, especially before there was much internet usage, you often didn't have a lot of people around who knew as much as you did. And so you weren't being challenged very much, and so you really were able to get really far up your own butt.
01:38:58 ◼ ► But ultimately, that really stopped being the case probably a good 15 years ago, at least now. Computers became mainstream a while ago now, and knowing a lot about tech and being super into tech is no longer a geek thing. It's a mainstream thing.
01:39:16 ◼ ► And the people who grew up after that transition happened seemed to have about the same percentage of jerks as the people who grew up before it, like us. And so I don't think that is a contributing factor anymore.
01:39:31 ◼ ► I don't think that is substantially changing anything about how many people in tech are jerks. People in tech are really good at building systems, like we're really good at building tools to spread jerkiness.
01:39:43 ◼ ► And so maybe there's a higher percentage of jerk spread happening because of our own undoing that we've built. But I don't think it's worse than any other field. I mean, you look at a lot of other fields and you see similar issues everywhere.
01:40:01 ◼ ► The hopefully uplifting flip side of this is that while there are jerks everywhere, there's also good people everywhere. And usually there's more of the good people. And there are things that you can do to make the good people louder or make their message carry further.
01:40:23 ◼ ► Another thing I have to add is the question, does tech sector have more jerks per capita than other sectors? I think the answer is yes and the explanation is fairly simple. If you want to see how many jerks per capita your particular section of the world has, whether it be sports or model trains or woodworking or computers, just look at the ratio of men to women.
01:40:44 ◼ ► Because the cultural forces, the cultural gender roles that we have in this country of how men are supposed to behave, align things such that the more men you have, the more conflict, rudeness and pissiness there will be.
01:41:01 ◼ ► Because the more they are forever trying to prove their performative masculinity and joust with each other over the best gauge of model train or the best way to paint Warcraft figures or whatever, the sports team that is, you know, like, that's if you needed a single variable that you could determine how hostile an environment would be, just look at the ratio of men to women.
01:41:27 ◼ ► And I don't think it's because there's, you know, well, I'm not sure about the reasons, but I'm gonna say like, the culture is a big part of it, toxic masculinity and what drives boys to become men to become people who who act in this way, is that that is the like, that's the structure that they're working within.
01:41:46 ◼ ► That's what they're trying to prove that they are to each other. And it just, it causes a stappin, right? And Marcos, right? There's more good people than bad, and everybody has bad days and good.
01:41:58 ◼ ► But the reason I think tech actually is worse than other, you know, hobby areas or topic areas that have a better gender balance is just because there are more men.
01:42:09 ◼ ► And that's true of any place where there are more men than women. And it's, you know, and it's not to say that there aren't mean women and jerky women. It's I'm just saying like, when you when you run the numbers, if you gave me a blind test, and you and you like measured how much toxicity there was in an online environment.
01:42:25 ◼ ► And the only thing you gave me was the percentage of men, I bet I could stack rank them pretty easily.
01:42:37 ◼ ► Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Handy and ARK. And we will talk to you next week.
01:42:43 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental.
01:42:56 ◼ ► John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental.
01:43:07 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey, Liszt, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
01:43:25 ◼ ► N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N. S-I-R-A-C. U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:43:46 ◼ ► I don't think I have anything else exciting going on in my house. What's happening in your homes? Casey, what are you doing with yourself?
01:43:52 ◼ ► That's a good place to start. What are you doing with your... Explain yourself. Explain myself.
01:43:58 ◼ ► I mean, I see sometimes that there's some kind of car video thing going on in the house. And yet no car videos emanate from the house.
01:44:05 ◼ ► I know. What is it? Good as the enemy of perfect? Good enough as the enemy of perfect or something?
01:44:17 ◼ ► Yeah, well, enough time has passed that I've forgotten everything I once knew. Now, I really truly hand on heart believe I'm on the precipice of releasing the next video which was filmed in August. Excuse me.
01:44:31 ◼ ► And so hopefully that will be done in the next week or so, which really means it will be in February. Well, I guess that will be February regardless.
01:44:39 ◼ ► Hertz will be like, "Wow, Casey really does live in the South. Look at all those green leaves in the trees."
01:44:43 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly, right? And he's in shorts. Wow, it's so cold here. Actually, you know what it is? It's just I really care about my Australian viewers, all seven of them. And I really wanted them to feel at home.
01:44:54 ◼ ► No, I've been working on this and I think part of the... So there's several problems with this video that... And I'm already doing a good job of selling the video. It hasn't even come out yet.
01:45:06 ◼ ► So this was filmed between the Golf R and the GTI. But because the R and the GTI were so similar, I just shelved this one and released the GTI video really quickly.
01:45:19 ◼ ► Well, certainly compared to the speed in which I've released this one, but it was really quick regardless.
01:45:24 ◼ ► And the problem I'm running into is a couple of things all at once. First of all, I did not do a very good job of cataloging and organizing and getting all of my footage together.
01:45:35 ◼ ► Because you have to remember, I'm filming across three different cameras, my phone and two GoPros. I'm recording audio on two different devices depending on which one happened to be near me at the time.
01:45:47 ◼ ► And all of these files just landed on my Synology. And as I'm talking, I'll look at how big they are or what the total sum of all of these is. But there's a lot of media here.
01:45:58 ◼ ► And I took all of this in August, and then I just walked away from it for like six months.
01:46:05 ◼ ► And that's all of this. Everything I've just said is a completely self-created problem. The person I need to blame for all this is me.
01:46:14 ◼ ► But because of that, it's taken a long time to piece it all back together. It's a car that belongs to friends of mine.
01:46:23 ◼ ► So I feel some amount of compulsion to not give it an even shake. Like, I'm truthful about it, but there are places where I was a little more brutal than I think was absolutely necessary.
01:46:35 ◼ ► And I'm trying to be a little bit cognizant of that. But it's 111 gigs of data, which is about 200 files that I've recorded.
01:46:46 ◼ ► So that's audio, that's video, that's everything. And then another problem I have is that the GTI video I learned from the mistakes I made in this video.
01:46:56 ◼ ► But now, because this is coming out after the GTI video, I need to find a way to fake it so that it looks like I had all the knowledge I had during the GTI video before the GTI video was filmed.
01:47:11 ◼ ► Does that make any sense at all? Because I don't want it to look like it's a regression. Because in reality, it is a regression, because I filmed it before I filmed that GTI video.
01:47:19 ◼ ► And so obviously I learned things in doing this one. This is a Honda CRV that I've recorded.
01:47:26 ◼ ► I've learned things in doing this one that I leveraged on the GTI video, but I can't go back in time and fix it.
01:47:34 ◼ ► And yeah, I could borrow my friend's car again, but they were already kind enough to let me use it for a week when they were gone. I don't feel like it's really necessary to go back to them and be like, "Oh, I really need your car for another day or two. That's cool, right?"
01:47:49 ◼ ► And so I feel like I've gotten pretty close. This is not a flawless video by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like I've cleaned up a bunch of things. I'm really trying hard to make sure I don't repeat myself a lot on this video, because I think that was one of the biggest downfalls I had in the GTI videos.
01:48:06 ◼ ► I made the same point 85 times, or the same 6 points 20 times a piece. And so I'm really trying to cut it down. The runtime is—I actually don't have Final Cut Pro open at the moment—but the runtime is right around 10 minutes.
01:48:19 ◼ ► I feel like I could probably get it down a little bit more, but I'm struggling to see where. And I actually just swapped out where—there's a space where I talk about the interior quality, and that was all of a minute long or something like that.
01:48:35 ◼ ► And then I found other footage where I actually show what I'm talking about, and I was like, "Ah, I should probably use that, but it's like two minutes."
01:48:43 ◼ ► So now I've got to figure out how to slim it—well, I don't have to, but I'd like to figure out how to slim that down so I'm both talking and showing, but I'm doing so more concisely than I did when I recorded this back in August.
01:48:54 ◼ ► And so it's all self-created, and it's just taking me for freaking ever. And it's not going to be any better for the next one, because the next one that I have queued up is I spent one five- or six-hour window recording a Tesla Model 3 and a Tesla Model S and comparing the two.
01:49:17 ◼ ► And I did so—I was rushing the whole time. I didn't get a chance to properly set up anything, which was, again, a self-created problem.
01:49:25 ◼ ► And so I'm going to have the same issue again, where I did this other thing—the Teslas I did in November.
01:49:31 ◼ ► And I did a better job of organizing all my footage this time in terms of what was strewn across the Synology, but it's still a similar problem where I've got to remind myself what I've done, recreate—create a story in my head, and try to make it not look like garbage.
01:49:46 ◼ ► Now, this one I plan to be clear about the fact that I only had it for—you know, I only had the cars for a few hours, and it's not going to be quite as nice and as fancy as some of my other K
01:50:09 ◼ ► as some of my other KC on cars, if you consider them either nice or fancy. But it's still—it's kind of grab-ass by comparison.
01:50:07 ◼ ► And so if I can get through the CR-V one, which I really, really, really in my heart think I'm close, and then I can figure out a way to get through this Tesla one, or I mean, or I'd shelve it, but I'd rather not.
01:50:16 ◼ ► Then after that, then I think I can really crank, because my next one I'll probably do after that is our XC90.
01:50:23 ◼ ► I'm probably going to do a, you know, here's the Golf R a few months after. What do I like? What do I not like?
01:50:31 ◼ ► I've gotten some tentative, good vibes from my parents. They have a few cars that I think are worth reviewing, including the aforementioned Corvette that my dad has.
01:50:43 ◼ ► I don't know if he'll ever let me get my hands on that, but we'll see. But they have a couple other cars that I think are interesting.
01:50:48 ◼ ► So I really feel like if I can get myself in the groove, I have probably four to six videos I can get out. And if I do want a month, which I'd rather do more, but if I'm realistic, if I do want a month, that's half a year's worth of car videos.
01:51:06 ◼ ► One a month. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Maybe spend less time automating your home through Node.
01:51:13 ◼ ► And that's the other thing is that I seriously nerd sniped myself. And now I'm like, "Oh, I really want to see if I can figure out how to get this thermostat on HomeKit."
01:51:22 ◼ ► Do I need to? No. Do I ever expect to set anything on this thermostat? No. But I've allowed myself to get nerd sniped, and I just want to be able to prove to myself that I can do it.
01:51:31 ◼ ► And I think that there's some utility in this because, especially when I wrote my podcast "editor," and I talked about this on a few recent episodes of Analog,
01:51:41 ◼ ► it was good to prevent my iOS muscles from atrophying. I don't know if that's how you pronounce the word, but hopefully you get what I mean.
01:51:48 ◼ ► And I think it was good to remind myself how to write iOS apps because I was starting to kind of lose my chops a little bit.
01:51:55 ◼ ► And I feel like this is somewhat defensible because I hadn't really written Node since 2014 when I was writing my blog engine.
01:52:04 ◼ ► And hey, guess what? Node has changed a lot, and even JavaScript has changed quite a bit in those five years.
01:52:09 ◼ ► And so I think that this is useful. But you're right in saying it is not what I should be working on.
01:52:19 ◼ ► And so today, this morning when I was sitting down to do work work, I only did it for a little bit, like I don't know, maybe half an hour or something like that.
01:52:27 ◼ ► And then I moved on to doing several hours of Final Cut Pro, which is why you saw tweets fly by with me asking how to do the most basic of basic things in Final Cut.
01:52:35 ◼ ► Well, who's to say should? But the only reason I bring it up is it's clear that you still want to produce car videos from Orange.
01:52:45 ◼ ► Who's to say that what you should be doing with your time is making car videos and not making all the animation stuff in Node?
01:52:50 ◼ ► But it's so clear that you still do want to make car videos. So I just encourage you to do so.
01:52:55 ◼ ► It's only a matter of time before Mike brings you over to the dark side of time tracking or whatever the hell stuff he's on about.
01:53:07 ◼ ► Well, also, if you want to make more videos, the last thing you should do is track the value of your time.
01:53:12 ◼ ► I thought the value was just like, if I want to make any progress on videos, I have to spend a non-zero amount of time working on videos.
01:53:19 ◼ ► And so if you look at that, you spend time during the week, and you see I spent 17 minutes making videos.
01:53:27 ◼ ► It's not about you being productive. It's about you being honest about what you have actually spent your time doing.
01:53:32 ◼ ► Yeah. And the other thing is, I'm actually really excited to get into filming more videos because I feel like I've learned a lot.
01:53:40 ◼ ► That's the part you like is the driving the cars and the filming. Not so much making the videos afterwards.
01:53:44 ◼ ► Well, yes and no. As I do more and more of this and get more and more confident in Final Cut,
01:53:49 ◼ ► I think my desire to be a better editor gets stronger and stronger. And Marco has talked a lot about this in the past.
01:53:59 ◼ ► But I think some of Marco's most interesting work on this very show is not the things that he says during the show,
01:54:09 ◼ ► And it seems to me that Marco, you enjoy... maybe not enjoy, but there's a lot of enjoyment you get.
01:54:18 ◼ ► I was going to say you enjoy it more, the editing more, and I don't know if that's fair.
01:54:21 ◼ ► But it certainly seems like you get an immense amount of enjoyment from editing this show, more weeks than not,
01:54:39 ◼ ► Exactly. Well put. Well put. And so as I'm getting more and more confident with my tools,
01:54:48 ◼ ► Plus, I'm trying to compel myself to not repeat myself and cut the footage where I do repeat myself,
01:54:56 ◼ ► And I'm trying to figure out ways where, like if I'm calling it... so as an example on the CRV,
01:55:01 ◼ ► there's this like bar, this... I'll call it a light bar, but there's this bar at the top of the dashboard
01:55:06 ◼ ► or the instrument cluster that glows green when you're driving efficiently and glows silver when you're not.
01:55:12 ◼ ► And I have a scene where I'm showing a view of the dash, and I figured out a way in Final Cut
01:55:23 ◼ ► This is not advanced Final Cut by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, this is Final Cut 101,
01:55:28 ◼ ► or maybe even remedial Final Cut, but it's something I've never done before and I thought was interesting,
01:55:33 ◼ ► and I was able to figure it out. And it's stuff like that that's getting me more excited.
01:55:38 ◼ ► But right now, I feel like I have a whole bunch of footage between the CRV and the Teslas
01:55:54 ◼ ► but I didn't have the chance to fix it for the Tesla stuff, and I didn't realize it was a problem on the CRV stuff.
01:56:43 ◼ ► Thank God Honda has adopted enough of the BMW settings mania that you can turn that off in mine.
01:56:54 ◼ ► I wouldn't want it in my car, but that's because I have different car driving priorities than this.
01:57:09 ◼ ► But it is not a great car if you want the sorts of things that I want, which is of no great surprise.
01:57:38 ◼ ► But anyway, I am way more proud of this video as it sits in Final Cut Pro today, still in need of some edits.
01:57:53 ◼ ► But I definitely would like to get through it, get through the Tesla one, which I might shelve.
01:58:02 ◼ ► And then I really feel like... I know this is what everyone says, but it's the next one, you guys.
01:58:18 ◼ ► Plus, I got a new big camera that can finally shoot 4K, so I'm no longer going to be using my iPhone for exterior video.
01:58:48 ◼ ► Yeah, ever since my lost coffee roasting video, because of that 30 minute limit, I haven't shot a single thing since.
01:58:58 ◼ ► Well, that happened right before Christmas stuff, and so I've been very busy with Christmas stuff.
01:59:06 ◼ ► And stuff is finally slowing down and getting back to a regular work schedule, basically like this week.
01:59:19 ◼ ► I really feel like from about Thanksgiving until about this week, I have had Thanksgiving, I've had Christmas, I've had New Year's, I've had Michaela's birthday.
01:59:29 ◼ ► I feel like it's just been non--and actually right before Thanksgiving was Declan's birthday.
01:59:41 ◼ ► And it has felt like about this week that the reason I'm not getting more work done on the video is because I friggin' nerd sniped myself with Homekid.
01:59:54 ◼ ► And I know that sounds so ridiculous to Jon, because I remember when Marco said these things, it sounded so ridiculous to me.
02:00:07 ◼ ► And it's not like I'm trying to make it go away. As much as I joke, I'm not deliberately procrastinating on this stuff.
02:00:13 ◼ ► It's just, I feel like for three or four months now, I've just been swooped up in other things that are important.
02:00:36 ◼ ► And even though I have a tax person to make a lot of this go away, they can only make it go away once I give them all the information I have.
02:00:56 ◼ ► No, we've talked on Under the Radar a few times about how we will go weeks or even months sometimes without getting any substantial work done on our apps.
02:01:22 ◼ ► Is that you actually can deal with those things. Regular people have to still go to work and just try to deal with stuff that happened in their life.
02:01:36 ◼ ► We have the luxury of being able to put stuff in the parking lot for a little while and deal with something in the foreground that we need to.
02:01:44 ◼ ► Yeah. And I don't mean to sound unappreciative, because I am so lucky. Marco is so lucky that we have the flexibility to do these things.
02:01:58 ◼ ► And again, if you have a regular jobby job like Jon, this probably sounds not only deeply obnoxious, but just preposterous.
02:02:13 ◼ ► But really, it is stunning once you're living this life how quickly that time can just disappear.