ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► It's going to be a long drive, but I bought walkie talkies so that we could beat you at

00:00:05 ◼   ► like Top Gear stuff.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Of course you did.

00:00:07 ◼   ► You're going to find out how crappy walkie talkies are compared to the modern digital

00:00:11 ◼   ► cell network.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Yep.

00:00:13 ◼   ► And just start calling each other.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Yeah, but they're really fast.

00:00:15 ◼   ► That's the thing, you just push a button and talk.

00:00:16 ◼   ► That's it.

00:00:17 ◼   ► There's no like, type type type, you know.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I got decent ones.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Wait, when I said the modern digital cell network, I meant the voice.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Do you know you can talk into your phone?

00:00:28 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:00:29 ◼   ► What? No one does that. I'm just saying, you can call people on it. Try it. No, what are you saying?

00:00:35 ◼   ► Oh, how we miss the days of the Nextel push to talk.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it's not push to talk. If you just leave the call connected all the time,

00:00:41 ◼   ► you don't even have to push. You just set up a WebEx in each car.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Oh, Jesus. Now I'm definitely going to bed.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Damien Shaw writes, "Google Home allows for both compound commands and context-sensitive commands.

00:00:55 ◼   ► I do this all the time.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Quote, play something and set volume to five.

00:01:00 ◼   ► It gets it every time.

00:01:01 ◼   ► And, quote, Google, what's the weather in San Diego?

00:01:04 ◼   ► Oh, I just said it.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Oh well, sorry people.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Hey cylinder, what's the weather in San Diego today?

00:01:09 ◼   ► A few seconds later, hey cylinder, what about tomorrow?

00:01:12 ◼   ► And that also always works for Damian Shaw.

00:01:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean this was my bad,

00:01:17 ◼   ► 'cause I said last episode that none of the cylinders

00:01:19 ◼   ► supported multiple commands in one sentence.

00:01:23 ◼   ► I'm not talking about follow-up, like afterwards.

00:01:25 ◼   ► I'm talking about like, play Weezer and set the volume

00:01:28 ◼   ► to five, or you know, make a pasta timer for five minutes

00:01:31 ◼   ► and a sauce timer for 20 minutes, like stuff like that.

00:01:33 ◼   ► That's, having all that be in one command,

00:01:36 ◼   ► and I don't even know, did anybody say if it can do

00:01:38 ◼   ► multiple name timers, I don't even know.

00:01:40 ◼   ► Anyway, it doesn't matter.

00:01:41 ◼   ► Apparently Google Home can do it with certain commands,

00:01:44 ◼   ► so, oh well, I made a mistake.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I wish Siri and the Amazon service would add this.

00:01:51 ◼   ► That's, and this was in the context of Amazon adding

00:01:53 ◼   ► their follow-up listening feature to the Echo of like,

00:01:56 ◼   ► it'll listen for a few seconds after you give,

00:01:59 ◼   ► after it does a command to see if you have

00:02:01 ◼   ► anything more to say.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Like, you know, that's a BS non-feature,

00:02:05 ◼   ► but multiple command support in one sentence

00:02:08 ◼   ► is a great feature and something that we desperately need.

00:02:11 ◼   ► I thought nobody had it, turns out Google has it, done.

00:02:13 ◼   ► - So the thing about these cylinders is,

00:02:17 ◼   ► like they don't really have a particularly

00:02:18 ◼   ► discoverable interface, that's one of the reasons

00:02:20 ◼   ► that Amazon emails you all the time

00:02:22 ◼   ► to tell you all the new things that you can do

00:02:24 ◼   ► with your cylinder, because otherwise, how would you know?

00:02:26 ◼   ► Like, it just sits there, you know?

00:02:27 ◼   ► It doesn't, it has no apparent way to communicate to you

00:02:30 ◼   ► that it now has a new capability.

00:02:33 ◼   ► On this topic, are you sure, Marco,

00:02:35 ◼   ► that your Amazon cylinder can't do compound commands?

00:02:38 ◼   ► Like, when's the last time you tried?

00:02:39 ◼   ► - That's a reasonable question.

00:02:41 ◼   ► I don't, I guess I'm not sure.

00:02:43 ◼   ► The last time I tried was probably months ago,

00:02:45 ◼   ► and they could have added it last week.

00:02:47 ◼   ► I don't actually read those emails.

00:02:48 ◼   ► - I think I might have done multiple timers in one sentence,

00:02:51 ◼   ► but I don't know, I treat my Google cylinders

00:02:54 ◼   ► like every time I talk to them,

00:02:57 ◼   ► I'm daring them not to understand me.

00:02:59 ◼   ► I say things in an informal way, in a more complicated way

00:03:05 ◼   ► than, you know, not in a more complicated way,

00:03:08 ◼   ► but that I don't simplify them, I don't dumb it down

00:03:10 ◼   ► to say, "Okay, cylinder, I know you won't understand me,

00:03:14 ◼   ► "so let me explain to you very clearly and slowly

00:03:16 ◼   ► "what I want," I just say it.

00:03:17 ◼   ► And I'm just daring it to, like, "Go ahead, screw up."

00:03:21 ◼   ► and most of the time it succeeds.

00:03:23 ◼   ► And that's that little weird game that I play with it.

00:03:26 ◼   ► It's part of my satisfaction with the product.

00:03:28 ◼   ► Part of the satisfaction is the challenge

00:03:29 ◼   ► and seeing the challenge be met

00:03:31 ◼   ► by this little thing in my house, right?

00:03:34 ◼   ► But on the discoverability front,

00:03:38 ◼   ► I think actually one of the pieces of feedback that we got

00:03:41 ◼   ► that may not have made it into notes is that,

00:03:43 ◼   ► what the heck is it called?

00:03:46 ◼   ► HomePod also can do compound things

00:03:48 ◼   ► at least play music or other audio and issue a volume level at the same time.

00:03:55 ◼   ► And that goes back to what I was saying.

00:03:57 ◼   ► It's not always clear what these cylinders can do for us.

00:04:01 ◼   ► And the only way to really find out is to try.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And the problem with trying is if it falls on its face, you're like, "Oh, my stupid cylinder

00:04:07 ◼   ► can't do that thing."

00:04:09 ◼   ► Two months later, maybe it can do that thing and you have no idea.

00:04:12 ◼   ► So I guess the moral is...

00:04:14 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know what the solution is here because Amazon has an email as one approach.

00:04:18 ◼   ► keep spamming people so they realize you can ask it facts about dogs, right? But I don't

00:04:22 ◼   ► think that's a great solution either. You certainly don't want these cylinders, like,

00:04:27 ◼   ► when you wake up and tell the turn on the lights to throw in a sentence or two about

00:04:31 ◼   ► his new capabilities. Although, I can imagine, like, in sci-fi movies and in bad infomercials

00:04:37 ◼   ► made by people who don't know how actual people act, cylinders would always be telling you

00:04:41 ◼   ► about the stuff they can do, and you'd be delighted. Like, you know, the sci-fi actor

00:04:45 ◼   ► Wakes up in his futuristic apartment and all his devices tell him, "I just wanted you

00:04:51 ◼   ► to know that last night I had new capabilities and blah blah blah."

00:04:53 ◼   ► And he's like, "Oh, thank you, cylinder, blah blah."

00:04:56 ◼   ► But in real life, you'd smash the thing with a hamburger.

00:04:58 ◼   ► So I was talking to you in the morning like that.

00:05:01 ◼   ► And in advertisements, people are so happy to hear the new capabilities that the refrigerator

00:05:05 ◼   ► has.

00:05:06 ◼   ► No, they're not happy.

00:05:07 ◼   ► They don't want to know.

00:05:08 ◼   ► So I don't know what the solution is.

00:05:10 ◼   ► when you wake up, your five-year-old doesn't say, "Father, I can now understand compound

00:05:16 ◼   ► commands." They just grow and get better, and we expect them to grow and get better.

00:05:22 ◼   ► But appliances, especially appliances that we don't see doing software update, or appliances

00:05:25 ◼   ► that get enhanced by changes on the server that really are invisible to us, it doesn't

00:05:29 ◼   ► affect our -- it's tricky. Maybe they should have little tiny brain icons that grow as

00:05:35 ◼   ► they get smarter, and if you wake up this morning and say, "Oh, cylinder! I see your

00:05:38 ◼   ► brain is a little bit bigger, that's great. Not an actual solution, just kidding.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Also I feel like, you know, like supporting compound commands is not a binary like yes

00:05:49 ◼   ► it does now, no it doesn't thing, like people said the HomePod can do like you know play

00:05:53 ◼   ► a playlist at music level but can it do like set a timer for 10 minutes and turn on the

00:05:59 ◼   ► office lights and can Google Home do that? I don't know. Like one of the biggest use

00:06:03 ◼   ► cases I think for multiple commands would be turning on or off multiple smart home things

00:06:08 ◼   ► at once that don't already have a pre-existing group.

00:06:10 ◼   ► So you could say like, hey, cylinder,

00:06:12 ◼   ► turn on lights in office, bedroom, and kitchen.

00:06:15 ◼   ► That might be three commands by,

00:06:17 ◼   ► normally three separate commands, that's pretty tedious.

00:06:19 ◼   ► But where you can say like, hey, cylinder,

00:06:22 ◼   ► turn off outside lights and lamps in living room.

00:06:24 ◼   ► Like, can you do that?

00:06:25 ◼   ► Can you say, turn on kitchen lights

00:06:27 ◼   ► and start a pasta timer for five minutes?

00:06:29 ◼   ► Like, can you combine domains in one sentence?

00:06:32 ◼   ► Like, it's one of those things, again,

00:06:34 ◼   ► this is the kind of thing that humans expect to work

00:06:37 ◼   ► at some point, and I wish the cylinders were smarter,

00:06:41 ◼   ► but the good thing is that these assistants

00:06:43 ◼   ► are getting smarter, at some of them

00:06:47 ◼   ► faster paces than others.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Let's be honest here, Apple is lagging behind here

00:06:53 ◼   ► pretty badly in rate of improvement,

00:06:55 ◼   ► but the Amazon and Google services are doing great.

00:06:59 ◼   ► They're really improving very quickly,

00:07:00 ◼   ► and so that's promising.

00:07:03 ◼   ► It wouldn't surprise me if they get there fairly soon.

00:07:06 ◼   ► One other little nitpick while we're on the cylinder thing,

00:07:09 ◼   ► and this is something that bothers me about Siri,

00:07:13 ◼   ► that the Amazon service will interpret things you say

00:07:17 ◼   ► literally if you give like an unusual phrasing.

00:07:21 ◼   ► So for instance, if I say, if I want a timer for,

00:07:26 ◼   ► like if I'm starting, this is happening the night,

00:07:28 ◼   ► I was starting something in some rice or pasta

00:07:31 ◼   ► or something in a pot, and I also had some,

00:07:33 ◼   ► I was gonna put some french fries in the oven.

00:07:36 ◼   ► So I asked the Amazon Cylinder,

00:07:38 ◼   ► you know, start a timer for, you know,

00:07:40 ◼   ► Rice for 25 minutes, and I said,

00:07:42 ◼   ► "Start a start french fries timer for 10 minutes."

00:07:46 ◼   ► And so what I wanted was in 10 minutes

00:07:49 ◼   ► for it to say, "Start the french fries."

00:07:52 ◼   ► So it's weird, you have to say,

00:07:53 ◼   ► "Start a start french fries timer."

00:07:55 ◼   ► The Amazon service gets that right every single time.

00:07:59 ◼   ► It always knows what I mean by that.

00:08:00 ◼   ► It's like treating it as a string literal.

00:08:02 ◼   ► It's like, this is the name of the timer

00:08:04 ◼   ► you are creating here and it gets it right every time.

00:08:07 ◼   ► It's one of those things, like Jon said,

00:08:09 ◼   ► you know, like, where like you're almost trying

00:08:11 ◼   ► to trip it up, like by trying this kind of thing.

00:08:14 ◼   ► - Well, that's the opposite of what I said,

00:08:15 ◼   ► because you're playing it like it's X-Adventure.

00:08:17 ◼   ► You're doing the Ulta Vista thing of like,

00:08:19 ◼   ► you want a thing that works like a programmer

00:08:20 ◼   ► and you're a programmer and you're like,

00:08:22 ◼   ► you see the placeholders in your head

00:08:24 ◼   ► and you're filling them in

00:08:25 ◼   ► because you know how it'll be interpreted,

00:08:26 ◼   ► but I would argue that no human speaks

00:08:28 ◼   ► to another intelligent thing like that.

00:08:30 ◼   ► You're playing the game that is your cylinder,

00:08:32 ◼   ► which is fine, I think it's a useful feature

00:08:34 ◼   ► for people who want to play that game,

00:08:35 ◼   ► but it would be better, like,

00:08:38 ◼   ► if you were talking to another human,

00:08:39 ◼   ► you probably would have said,

00:08:41 ◼   ► "Don't let me forget to start the french fries in 10 minutes."

00:08:44 ◼   ► Or like something like that.

00:08:45 ◼   ► - Or, "Remind me in 10 minutes to start the french fries."

00:08:47 ◼   ► - But I was avoiding remind me

00:08:49 ◼   ► because that sounds more like the reminder.

00:08:50 ◼   ► - That's create a reminder, right.

00:08:52 ◼   ► - Oh, reminders and timers or whatever,

00:08:53 ◼   ► you just want it to know what you mean.

00:08:55 ◼   ► - Or, "Tell me in 10 minutes," you know,

00:08:56 ◼   ► like whatever it is, but that's what timers are.

00:08:59 ◼   ► Named timers are basically telling you this thing

00:09:03 ◼   ► in this time, and it's great.

00:09:04 ◼   ► It's a very, very useful function,

00:09:06 ◼   ► and it's awesome to hear the people go off and say,

00:09:09 ◼   ► your start french fries timer is done.

00:09:11 ◼   ► It's great, because it reminds you what to do

00:09:13 ◼   ► and staggering things out.

00:09:15 ◼   ► - That's awkward too, when it says,

00:09:17 ◼   ► your start french fries timer,

00:09:18 ◼   ► I don't want it to say, I want it to say,

00:09:20 ◼   ► it's time to start the french fries,

00:09:21 ◼   ► but it doesn't understand the name of the timer.

00:09:25 ◼   ► So I think the problem is in this weird area

00:09:29 ◼   ► where you can say it in a vague way,

00:09:32 ◼   ► but it doesn't understand what you meant and it tries to be smart.

00:09:35 ◼   ► Lots of people are complaining about Siri trying to get it to play--

00:09:39 ◼   ► or HomePod trying to get it to play songs that have weird titles that

00:09:43 ◼   ► themselves might be interpretable as commands,

00:09:45 ◼   ► and they just literally can't get it to play those songs or those albums.

00:09:49 ◼   ► Because there's no way to get it to--

00:09:51 ◼   ► to your point-- to get it to understand that it's a string literal,

00:09:55 ◼   ► that it's a placeholder, to get it to parse as initiation command,

00:09:59 ◼   ► placeholder for song name and then verb, right? And it just stubbornly refuses to do that.

00:10:06 ◼   ► And it's trying to be flexible so it can interpret meaning or whatever, but if there's any ambiguity,

00:10:11 ◼   ► it falls over, whereas the Alexa one is very cut and dried and there are certain forms

00:10:15 ◼   ► that you can put it in in certain places where it expects the placeholder. And if you play

00:10:18 ◼   ► that text adventure game with your cylinder, it has predictable functionality. Like it

00:10:22 ◼   ► doesn't vary. Like with the songs, with HomePod, some songs you can say it a million different

00:10:27 ◼   ► ways, because there's no way that song title is potentially misinterpreted. But other songs,

00:10:31 ◼   ► it screws up. Whereas with the placeholder format, anything you put in there. Like, I

00:10:35 ◼   ► bet you would get your cylinder to say, "Start a timer for a starter timer for 10 minutes

00:10:43 ◼   ► for 10 minutes." Like, I bet you could, you know, I bet you could nest it and it would

00:10:46 ◼   ► still, like, figure it out, because it's probably just doing a very naive text-to-speech and

00:10:52 ◼   ► then parsing that. And speaking of naive text-to-speech, on the thing you were getting at before about

00:10:56 ◼   ► doing compound things. Even Google is not above punting on this. They have a feature

00:11:01 ◼   ► of the HomePod where you essentially set up macros. You're like, "Look, if there's a

00:11:05 ◼   ► series of commands that you could issue, but you don't want to say all those words because

00:11:08 ◼   ► it's weird and awkward, just tell us what you're going to say. And when you say that,

00:11:12 ◼   ► we will do all these other things."

00:11:13 ◼   ► That's really cool.

00:11:15 ◼   ► And it's not. It's like the most brain dead thing ever.

00:11:17 ◼   ► No, but it's useful.

00:11:18 ◼   ► It's like someone posted a tweet of ones where they had just put ATP so they can say, "Hey,

00:11:21 ◼   ► so under ATP," and it says, "Play the latest episode of Accidental Death Podcast." It's

00:11:25 ◼   ► a shorter way to say that, but literally any list of commands you can do. It's just macro

00:11:29 ◼   ► expansion, very simple macro expansion. If it was truly intelligent, you wouldn't have

00:11:33 ◼   ► to do that. You would be able to converse with it and shorten what you say, and based

00:11:37 ◼   ► on how often you ask for things that's similar to this blah blah blah. We're not there yet,

00:11:40 ◼   ► right? But I'm just showing that Google eventually says the utility of letting programming people

00:11:47 ◼   ► essentially make macros of their own design, and then they'll just dumbly use speech to

00:11:54 ◼   ► text and then map it onto one of these macros and if it matches one of them, we'll do that

00:11:58 ◼   ► thing. It provides utility while they work on providing the actual intelligence at some

00:12:04 ◼   ► point in the future.

00:12:05 ◼   ► - No, I mean, and that's useful. And I would also posit that, you know, I bet Google Home

00:12:11 ◼   ► customers are more programmers than average. But also, like, you know, so going back to

00:12:18 ◼   ► my, you know, start a start French fries timer, like, that sounds, you know, contrived in

00:12:23 ◼   ► in an edge case, but I really get tripped up

00:12:27 ◼   ► by places where Siri does, 'cause Siri seems

00:12:31 ◼   ► to make no effort to understand that kind of syntax,

00:12:35 ◼   ► but that can also trip up legitimate,

00:12:37 ◼   ► you know, quote, legitimate use cases.

00:12:38 ◼   ► So for instance, the other day I said,

00:12:41 ◼   ► I asked Siri to remind me in things

00:12:44 ◼   ► to add the 12 volt battery to my Tesla repair.

00:12:48 ◼   ► Now, it's, the word add, Siri interprets that

00:12:53 ◼   ► as to add to the to-do list.

00:12:56 ◼   ► So even though I said remind me to add this blah, blah, blah,

00:13:00 ◼   ► it ignored the fact that there was already another word

00:13:03 ◼   ► in the sentence that said,

00:13:05 ◼   ► remind me to remind me, basically.

00:13:07 ◼   ► Like it didn't figure that out.

00:13:09 ◼   ► So when I said remind me to add 12 volt battery

00:13:12 ◼   ► to my Tesla repair, I got some, you know,

00:13:15 ◼   ► some task and things that said something along the lines of

00:13:17 ◼   ► like, you know, 12 volt battery to my test pair.

00:13:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:13:22 ◼   ► And it's, so it didn't parse a sentence correctly at all.

00:13:25 ◼   ► And I also have inconsistencies there where

00:13:28 ◼   ► when you're asking to remind you about something,

00:13:32 ◼   ► you will usually put some kind of word between

00:13:34 ◼   ► remind me like to, so,

00:13:37 ◼   ► remind me to take the trash out.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Most of the time, Siri parses that as

00:13:43 ◼   ► add a reminder with the text, take the trash out.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Sometimes, it parses it as

00:13:48 ◼   ► add a reminder with the text, to take the trash out.

00:13:51 ◼   ► So we'll have a reminder that says to take the trash out.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And it's like literally the same thing.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Sometimes we'll do that, sometimes we won't.

00:13:59 ◼   ► It's just like, this is one of those things like

00:14:01 ◼   ► whatever algorithms and machine learning Siri is doing

00:14:06 ◼   ► to parse sentence structure seems like it's significantly

00:14:10 ◼   ► behind the others and also inconsistent

00:14:13 ◼   ► like so much of Siri.

00:14:15 ◼   ► And it just kind of, I don't know, it's frustrating

00:14:17 ◼   ► like that 'cause that, this seems like easy stuff.

00:14:20 ◼   ► like basics of adding reminders and setting timers

00:14:24 ◼   ► and stuff like that, like this is what Siri was demoed with

00:14:27 ◼   ► in 2011, like this should be easier and better by now.

00:14:31 ◼   ► And we know from the other assistants that it can be better

00:14:36 ◼   ► 'cause theirs are better.

00:14:38 ◼   ► And so this is like, it's just yet one more thing

00:14:39 ◼   ► that just like, it's a little like paper cut

00:14:41 ◼   ► every time I use Siri that like one of these dumb things

00:14:43 ◼   ► happens and the other ones it doesn't.

00:14:46 ◼   ► - I think that was that reminders thing of where it thinks

00:14:48 ◼   ► trying to add something to a list was like one of my original Siri complaints, maybe

00:14:52 ◼   ► on this program, maybe on an earlier podcast.

00:14:54 ◼   ► I had the exact same problem.

00:14:56 ◼   ► The thing I wanted to remind me about, it stubbornly insisted on interpreting as an

00:15:00 ◼   ► attempt to either create or add to some unknown list that didn't exist because I was trying

00:15:06 ◼   ► to maintain the list and remind myself to put things on the list that was kind of like

00:15:09 ◼   ► you were doing and it just could not handle it.

00:15:12 ◼   ► Even today when I do reminders, sometimes I'll do multiple tries and I'll have to go

00:15:18 ◼   ► into text adventure mode where I'm just like look I'm gonna I'm gonna give a

00:15:22 ◼   ► name of this reminder I'm not gonna have like normal syntax I'm gonna be like

00:15:26 ◼   ► remind me and then a phrase that is unambiguously interpreted as text that

00:15:30 ◼   ► has to appear there but it's not the way I would want to phrase it like just

00:15:34 ◼   ► enough so that I will beat the text adventure but also not so much that when

00:15:40 ◼   ► I go look at the reminder I won't understand what I was doing and and this

00:15:44 ◼   ► is like here's another speaking of inconsistency I've always loved the

00:15:47 ◼   ► feature of Siri, I'm assuming it's a feature of Siri, where I would say I would create

00:15:54 ◼   ► a reminder or something involving one of a family member's name.

00:15:59 ◼   ► And I assume it would look in contacts for the spelling, right?

00:16:02 ◼   ► Like my daughter is Kate, but she spells it with a C. And it would transcribe it as like

00:16:07 ◼   ► a K, but then it would like do some processing and change it to a C, because it, I'm assuming,

00:16:14 ◼   ► knows that I have that listed as a nickname for my daughter and my contacts. And I appreciated

00:16:19 ◼   ► that feature. It's like, I'm constantly talking about this Kate person. It's never with a

00:16:23 ◼   ► K. And I'll correct it if it transcribes it with a K. And I like the fact that it seemed

00:16:28 ◼   ► like it had figured out, oh, at some point along the line, it's like, all right, there's

00:16:32 ◼   ► no Kate with a K in your contacts, which would be bad if there was. I think it should figure

00:16:35 ◼   ► it anyway. But there's no Kate with a K. I'll change it to a C. And every time I saw that

00:16:38 ◼   ► little K change to a C, I'm like, oh, that's nice. Let's hear you being smart. Again, kind

00:16:41 ◼   ► like the Google thing where you get like a good feeling from using a product that you

00:16:45 ◼   ► gave it something challenging and it used its smarts. But lately, it's decided to go

00:16:48 ◼   ► back to K. And I'm kind of annoyed at it. I'm like, "Come on, change to a C." And it

00:16:53 ◼   ► just never does. And it stays there. So I go and edit it and I change it to a C myself.

00:16:58 ◼   ► And why? I don't know. I don't know, man. Just stop working.

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00:19:23 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:19:26 ◼   ► - Moving on to annoyances and language,

00:19:30 ◼   ► but written language, Scott Little writes,

00:19:32 ◼   ► I'm almost sure that the "you shut down" dialogue, as in "you shut down your computer," only

00:19:38 ◼   ► happens after the user is force-powered off the machine, for example, and the whole system

00:19:42 ◼   ► hangs, not after a kernel panic.

00:19:44 ◼   ► So in reality, the text is accurate.

00:19:46 ◼   ► I could have sworn I tried to make this point on the show, and either I didn't, or maybe

00:19:51 ◼   ► it hit the editing room floor one way or the other, but that's what I thought, too, and

00:19:56 ◼   ► I thought we concluded I was crazy.

00:19:58 ◼   ► you are crazy, but maybe not for this reason.

00:20:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:20:03 ◼   ► - So am I.

00:20:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I was talking about how this dialogue

00:20:07 ◼   ► of you shut down your computer because of a problem

00:20:09 ◼   ► infuriated me because that often happens

00:20:12 ◼   ► when I don't feel that I'm at fault for the problem.

00:20:15 ◼   ► So I think this is correct, that it does only come up

00:20:18 ◼   ► with an improper shutdown, maybe not a kernel panic.

00:20:21 ◼   ► The problem is there are certain situations

00:20:24 ◼   ► where you have to force shut down the computer

00:20:28 ◼   ► because of a bug in Mac OS.

00:20:30 ◼   ► You know, like it won't wake from sleep

00:20:31 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Like this happens all the time, well not all the time,

00:20:34 ◼   ► this happens to every Mac person at some point,

00:20:37 ◼   ► especially if you're a laptop person.

00:20:39 ◼   ► This happens a lot, especially regarding waking from sleep.

00:20:43 ◼   ► So there are some times where you have to hold down

00:20:47 ◼   ► the power button for five seconds

00:20:49 ◼   ► to get the computer to turn off or to turn on.

00:20:52 ◼   ► And then it says, "You shut down your computer

00:20:55 ◼   ► "because of a problem."

00:20:56 ◼   ► So it's kind of like, it's kind of like slapping you

00:20:59 ◼   ► in the face, it's like, well, it was your problem,

00:21:02 ◼   ► like you're throwing this back on me,

00:21:04 ◼   ► but I didn't write the bug that caused my computer

00:21:07 ◼   ► to need to be power cycled.

00:21:09 ◼   ► So I think this is correct, I think it does only come up

00:21:12 ◼   ► when it's been improperly shut down,

00:21:15 ◼   ► but I still think that it's a bad,

00:21:17 ◼   ► it's bad like language design to throw the action

00:21:22 ◼   ► on the user to say you shut down the computer.

00:21:25 ◼   ► Like, you can just say, "The computer was shut down

00:21:27 ◼   ► "improperly," or, "The computer didn't shut down correctly,"

00:21:30 ◼   ► or something like, you can say, you can reword that

00:21:32 ◼   ► in so many ways that don't like ascribe the purpose

00:21:36 ◼   ► of this to the user, 'cause like, the user at that point

00:21:40 ◼   ► is probably not very happy with the computer,

00:21:42 ◼   ► because the computer just did something wrong.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Like, the computer just like malfunctioned.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And then the computer says, "You didn't do this right."

00:21:49 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:21:50 ◼   ► So it's not a good time to do that.

00:21:53 ◼   ► I think the wording actually is reasonably fair for the thing where it was user initiated

00:21:58 ◼   ► and we got a lot of feedback from people saying that's when they see this dialogue, but we

00:22:01 ◼   ► also got feedback from people saying, "I did not turn this thing off.

00:22:06 ◼   ► I didn't unplug it.

00:22:07 ◼   ► I didn't hold down the power key and yet I saw this dialogue."

00:22:10 ◼   ► And like I said, it can't know whether you are the one that caused whatever cleanup things

00:22:16 ◼   ► not to have been cleaned up so that on bootup it finds this uncleaned up file, whatever

00:22:20 ◼   ► flag thing at you, whatever heuristic it uses to determine that it didn't get the shutdown

00:22:25 ◼   ► properly last time, there are a number of things that can cause that to happen, only

00:22:29 ◼   ► a couple of which are the human doing something and it has no idea what you did.

00:22:32 ◼   ► So I think this dialogue still does show up in cases where there actually was no user

00:22:36 ◼   ► action.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Like if you have some kind of catastrophic crash that throws you back to the login window,

00:22:42 ◼   ► it might not have the time to clean up the things or the processes that died or crashed

00:22:48 ◼   ► couldn't have cleaned up the little thing so that when you log back in it throws us

00:22:51 ◼   ► out because again this is asking you do you want to open the applications that are open

00:22:54 ◼   ► when you shut down right like telling you if you want to resource state just in case

00:22:59 ◼   ► one of those applications is one of the things that caused the crash or something right so

00:23:01 ◼   ► it's a good dialogue box something like this should be there but I don't think it can know

00:23:06 ◼   ► that you shut down your computer I think it does guess right a lot of the time and I think

00:23:11 ◼   ► it's not actually telling you that the problem was yours or that you shouldn't have shut

00:23:15 ◼   ► down the computer, but it is a little bit more accusatory than it probably should be,

00:23:20 ◼   ► because it just can't be sure that you shut down your computer. Somebody did. It might

00:23:24 ◼   ► have been you. What if a different person turned on the computer, and the person who

00:23:27 ◼   ► actually shut it down left? Now you're being yelled at for shutting down the computer,

00:23:30 ◼   ► but you didn't shut it down. The guy who was here two seconds ago did. So probably not

00:23:34 ◼   ► the best wording, but it is at least a little bit potentially more accurate than we thought

00:23:39 ◼   ► it was.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Yeah, what if you have the world's worst office mates or roommates? They come to come by and

00:23:44 ◼   ► hold down power for five seconds at the computer sometimes.

00:23:47 ◼   ► - I remember holding down power doesn't reboot.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Holding down power just turns the thing off.

00:23:50 ◼   ► So you could, someone in your family, let's say,

00:23:54 ◼   ► could be annoyed at the computer

00:23:56 ◼   ► or something hung or crashed or whatever,

00:23:58 ◼   ► and they hold down the power button for five seconds

00:24:00 ◼   ► and the thing turns off.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I think that's what it does, right?

00:24:02 ◼   ► It just turns off when you do that, right?

00:24:04 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:24:05 ◼   ► - And then they leave and go to sleep.

00:24:06 ◼   ► Next morning, the whole family wakes up,

00:24:07 ◼   ► someone else goes to the computer,

00:24:09 ◼   ► hits the space bar, it doesn't wake up and go, huh?

00:24:13 ◼   ► And hopefully they find the power switch,

00:24:15 ◼   ► which used to be on the keyboard,

00:24:16 ◼   ► which was super convenient.

00:24:17 ◼   ► And the thing starts up and it says,

00:24:19 ◼   ► "You shut down the computer because of the problem."

00:24:20 ◼   ► You're like, "What do you mean?

00:24:21 ◼   ► "I just woke up, I didn't shut down the computer

00:24:22 ◼   ► "because of a problem."

00:24:23 ◼   ► So again, the dialog box can't know,

00:24:26 ◼   ► probably should err on the side of being,

00:24:29 ◼   ► on assuming your innocence.

00:24:32 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:24:34 ◼   ► - I love how much time we've given this dialog box

00:24:36 ◼   ► 'cause it drives me nuts every time.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And maybe-- - At least it doesn't

00:24:38 ◼   ► have a typo like this utility.

00:24:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:24:41 ◼   ► Like maybe in like, you know, peak Sierra

00:24:43 ◼   ► or whatever the hell comes next,

00:24:44 ◼   ► I don't know anything about California,

00:24:46 ◼   ► maybe somebody will reword this dialogue

00:24:48 ◼   ► in the English localization

00:24:49 ◼   ► to not do this stupid blame thing.

00:24:52 ◼   ► - Okay, we need to move on.

00:24:54 ◼   ► So, let's talk about GDPR,

00:24:56 ◼   ► which I already forgot the acronym,

00:24:59 ◼   ► but it's basically the You Are In Control of Your Data law

00:25:02 ◼   ► that we discussed last week.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Aaron Power writes in,

00:25:06 ◼   ► "With regard to the cookie law in GDPR,

00:25:08 ◼   ► "I think that the problem is that companies,

00:25:10 ◼   ► especially American companies, don't understand what the law covers and put warnings when

00:25:13 ◼   ► there is no need or don't put warnings in when they're required.

00:25:16 ◼   ► So to talk about the cookie law, then that doesn't apply only to cookies, according to

00:25:23 ◼   ► Aaron.

00:25:24 ◼   ► It applies to any form of persistent storage, like local storage.

00:25:27 ◼   ► It also doesn't apply to first-party cookies, so like a cookie to keep you logged in.

00:25:32 ◼   ► It only applies when there are cookies from a third party, like Google Analytics.

00:25:36 ◼   ► Now according to Aaron, the cookie law was weak, however GDPR is a much stricter and more

00:25:39 ◼   ► consequential law and there's bigger penalties if you don't follow it. So

00:25:44 ◼   ► there's a lot of bullets here. I'm assuming because one of you put this in

00:25:49 ◼   ► the show notes I am supposed to be reading them so I will do so. You're supposed to learn

00:25:52 ◼   ► how to summarize them. The challenge is so... You are the chief. You're not just a

00:25:56 ◼   ► summarizer, Casey. You're the chief summarizer in chief. I'm pulling at my

00:26:00 ◼   ► tie. I'm pulling at my tie right now. I'm adjusting my neck and whatnot. Okay, so

00:26:05 ◼   ► basically any of the personal information that you give to a company

00:26:08 ◼   ► it is qualified under GDPR. The company can't hold on to it unless there's a reasonable reason to do

00:26:14 ◼   ► so. They need to absolutely get your consent to hold on to it, and with kids it requires their

00:26:21 ◼   ► parents permission, which apparently must be verifiable. Then once you say, "No, I don't want

00:26:28 ◼   ► you to have my data anymore," then the data must be at least slightly anonymized such that a single

00:26:34 ◼   ► piece of data isn't enough to identify you, and then you can also ask at any time for

00:26:39 ◼   ► what personal data the company has for you.

00:26:42 ◼   ► And also you can get them to erase your data and inform third parties that they need to

00:26:47 ◼   ► erase their data.

00:26:48 ◼   ► Now the real kicker, though, is that if they don't do this, the fines can be up to 20 million

00:26:53 ◼   ► euros or 4% of the company's worldwide turnover, whatever that means, but I'm assuming that's

00:27:00 ◼   ► a lot.

00:27:01 ◼   ► And it's not whichever is lower, it's whichever is higher.

00:27:04 ◼   ► Turnover is one of those, I'm assuming it's a Britishism, but they just mean revenue.

00:27:08 ◼   ► 4% of the company's revenue in Americanese.

00:27:11 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:27:12 ◼   ► So basically, this could amount to a whole crap load of money.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And that's why everyone, especially in Europe, who's actually paying attention to this, is

00:27:22 ◼   ► freaking out.

00:27:23 ◼   ► And not to say that Americans shouldn't be freaking out, because we will be held to this

00:27:26 ◼   ► as well, but it seems that the Europeans are way ahead of this.

00:27:29 ◼   ► And I believe this comes online,

00:27:31 ◼   ► that's a poor choice of words,

00:27:32 ◼   ► but I believe this becomes law and it can be enforced

00:27:36 ◼   ► sometime in the next few months, if I'm not mistaken.

00:27:39 ◼   ► - This is like, you know, last episode,

00:27:41 ◼   ► I had read some about it, I was a little familiar with it.

00:27:45 ◼   ► I should have been a lot more familiar with it.

00:27:47 ◼   ► This is like the kind of thing like,

00:27:48 ◼   ► I don't know why I'm only hearing about this

00:27:51 ◼   ► like a month or two before it goes live,

00:27:54 ◼   ► but I'm glad I heard about it,

00:27:55 ◼   ► at least a month or two before it goes live, because--

00:27:57 ◼   ► - You can make your onboarding screen, right?

00:27:59 ◼   ► - Well, I'm not, well I already,

00:28:01 ◼   ► I mean I have a login screen already.

00:28:04 ◼   ► And I'm not really, like Overcast has already complied

00:28:08 ◼   ► with a lot of this already,

00:28:10 ◼   ► just by having fairly reasonable practices,

00:28:13 ◼   ► not collecting that much data in the first place,

00:28:15 ◼   ► having reasonable security practices,

00:28:17 ◼   ► and having like a very clear privacy policy.

00:28:21 ◼   ► Like I was kind of already inadvertently implementing

00:28:24 ◼   ► about two thirds of the stuff I needed to do.

00:28:26 ◼   ► So it's not a huge deal for me.

00:28:29 ◼   ► but this is a huge deal for pretty much anybody

00:28:33 ◼   ► who runs any kind of web service or app that collects data.

00:28:37 ◼   ► And it's not, 'cause it isn't just, you know,

00:28:40 ◼   ► Casey, you said like data that people enter.

00:28:43 ◼   ► That's not necessarily the limit,

00:28:45 ◼   ► it's just data that you collect and store about people.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Or analyze about people, like if you don't store,

00:28:52 ◼   ► like I think if you analyze it.

00:28:53 ◼   ► Anyway, it's complicated.

00:28:55 ◼   ► I suggest anybody who runs a web service

00:28:59 ◼   ► or an app that is responsible for it.

00:29:02 ◼   ► I strongly suggest you look into GDPR now,

00:29:05 ◼   ► like very, very, very quickly

00:29:08 ◼   ► because there are a lot of ramifications.

00:29:10 ◼   ► It's pretty cool, it's pretty big.

00:29:12 ◼   ► It does not just apply to European companies

00:29:14 ◼   ► 'cause it applies to any company worldwide

00:29:17 ◼   ► that stores data about European users or European citizens,

00:29:22 ◼   ► which is pretty much every web service

00:29:24 ◼   ► unless you block Europe for some dumb reason.

00:29:26 ◼   ► but it's gonna apply to pretty much everybody.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And so this is like, it's way more,

00:29:32 ◼   ► it's way stronger than that cookie law,

00:29:34 ◼   ► 'cause the cookie law I think only basically applied,

00:29:36 ◼   ► or at least was ever enforced for European countries

00:29:39 ◼   ► if it was enforced anywhere ever.

00:29:41 ◼   ► But only European websites would display

00:29:44 ◼   ► those cookie warnings, but this is way bigger than that.

00:29:46 ◼   ► And this will affect tech stuff worldwide.

00:29:50 ◼   ► And in the context of a lot of the stuff going on recently

00:29:53 ◼   ► with tech stuff, especially like this horrible Facebook,

00:29:57 ◼   ► Cambridge Analytics, you know, horrible scandal BS.

00:30:00 ◼   ► I mean, look, Facebook's a horrible company.

00:30:02 ◼   ► I don't-- - Who knew?

00:30:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like, not a lot of this is new

00:30:06 ◼   ► or shocking to me, it's just really horrible

00:30:09 ◼   ► and sad and just disgusting.

00:30:11 ◼   ► But anyway, this law will have a pretty big impact

00:30:16 ◼   ► on a lot of the worst stuff about the web.

00:30:21 ◼   ► and it's probably gonna be a pretty good positive impact.

00:30:24 ◼   ► It's probably, well, not good for them,

00:30:26 ◼   ► but screw them. (laughs)

00:30:28 ◼   ► It's probably gonna have a really good impact

00:30:30 ◼   ► for people who respect their users

00:30:33 ◼   ► and those users who want to be respected.

00:30:36 ◼   ► So it's gonna be a good thing.

00:30:39 ◼   ► I wish there were more resources online so far

00:30:42 ◼   ► about how to comply without having to hire

00:30:46 ◼   ► a GDPR compliance specialist for a lot of money

00:30:50 ◼   ► that you probably can't get in late April

00:30:52 ◼   ► to help you out, but it's going to change a lot of things

00:30:56 ◼   ► if it's enforced.

00:30:59 ◼   ► And the EU is usually pretty good at,

00:31:01 ◼   ► like when they pass consumer protection regulations,

00:31:04 ◼   ► they tend to enforce them.

00:31:06 ◼   ► So this should be interesting.

00:31:08 ◼   ► It's probably gonna be a really big deal,

00:31:11 ◼   ► and it's gonna be a slight pain in the butt

00:31:15 ◼   ► to just get some of the boilerplate stuff,

00:31:17 ◼   ► But it's all, like from what I've seen so far,

00:31:19 ◼   ► most of it's pretty common sense stuff.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It's gonna be a pain for bigger companies, I think.

00:31:24 ◼   ► But for small companies, it seems like it's actually

00:31:27 ◼   ► not that big of a deal.

00:31:29 ◼   ► - Cool.

00:31:30 ◼   ► I mean, it's intense, but it's for the best.

00:31:33 ◼   ► Nick Tumpellis writes in, to give you an example

00:31:36 ◼   ► of the teeth of this law, this is still the GDPR,

00:31:41 ◼   ► for the Cambridge Analytica breach,

00:31:43 ◼   ► Facebook would be fined up to $813 million

00:31:46 ◼   ► just for not notifying its users.

00:31:50 ◼   ► So, like we were saying, oh boy, this is the real deal.

00:31:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause there's also provisions about,

00:31:57 ◼   ► first of all, security measures that you,

00:31:59 ◼   ► security level responsibility that you have to maintain

00:32:02 ◼   ► to protect the user data, you have to keep logs

00:32:05 ◼   ► of who accesses the user data in your company,

00:32:08 ◼   ► so you can't say, oh, we didn't know

00:32:10 ◼   ► some intern was copying all the files.

00:32:12 ◼   ► You have to keep logs and keep audits,

00:32:14 ◼   ► there's stuff about that, there's stuff about

00:32:16 ◼   ► if you have a data breach, how you have to notify people,

00:32:20 ◼   ► stuff like that, what you have to do.

00:32:22 ◼   ► So it's very wide reaching.

00:32:25 ◼   ► It's a very, very big policy change

00:32:29 ◼   ► that is seemingly mostly or entirely

00:32:34 ◼   ► pretty good common sense stuff.

00:32:36 ◼   ► If you think like, how should things be

00:32:38 ◼   ► with regard to safekeeping and collecting personal data?

00:32:42 ◼   ► most of it's pretty common sense stuff.

00:32:44 ◼   ► So again, I think this is gonna be

00:32:47 ◼   ► potentially a very big thing.

00:32:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, agreed.

00:32:50 ◼   ► Continuing on, AWACS writes,

00:32:52 ◼   ► a key part of GDPR is that the company

00:32:54 ◼   ► collecting the personal data is directly responsible

00:32:56 ◼   ► for any leak or misuse.

00:32:58 ◼   ► It can't shift the blame to a contractor,

00:33:00 ◼   ► partner, or third party.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And we see that a lot in the US,

00:33:03 ◼   ► where, oh, there was this big leak,

00:33:05 ◼   ► actually Apple just recently,

00:33:07 ◼   ► it was a month or two ago, had,

00:33:09 ◼   ► what was it, it was like the bootloader

00:33:10 ◼   ► for an old version of iOS or something like that.

00:33:13 ◼   ► I'm sure I have the details slightly wrong.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was the source code to, yeah,

00:33:16 ◼   ► the source code to like iBoot, whatever that,

00:33:18 ◼   ► I guess as the bootloader,

00:33:19 ◼   ► I don't actually know that much about iOS internals.

00:33:21 ◼   ► But yeah, the source code to iBoot,

00:33:23 ◼   ► like an old version of it from a few years back leaked

00:33:26 ◼   ► and they said that it was apparently like an intern

00:33:28 ◼   ► had copied the entire source tree and taken it.

00:33:31 ◼   ► - Right, so AWACS's point here is that

00:33:34 ◼   ► you can't just pass the buck and be like,

00:33:35 ◼   ► oh, Joe Schmo's consulting firm

00:33:37 ◼   ► is the reason that this all leaked, go talk to them.

00:33:40 ◼   ► it's still your problem if you're--

00:33:42 ◼   ► - Well, that's an interesting theory.

00:33:43 ◼   ► I'm not sure how well that law works

00:33:46 ◼   ► in the American legal system, though,

00:33:48 ◼   ► because you know that any company the size of Apple,

00:33:51 ◼   ► if they contract any other company,

00:33:53 ◼   ► that basically says, oh, and by the way,

00:33:55 ◼   ► if the work you do for us causes us to get sued,

00:33:57 ◼   ► you agree to pay all damages.

00:33:58 ◼   ► Now, you can't get blood from a stone,

00:34:00 ◼   ► but at the very least,

00:34:01 ◼   ► Apple can't shift the blame to the third party,

00:34:05 ◼   ► but it can shift all of the penalties to the third party

00:34:08 ◼   ► until the third party disappears,

00:34:09 ◼   ► basically until they get run out of money, which may happen pretty quickly. But that's

00:34:14 ◼   ► generally how big companies protect themselves is that if there's some law that makes Apple

00:34:18 ◼   ► liable, they shift as much of that liability as possible to the small contractor company,

00:34:23 ◼   ► and then they just get whatever's left over on top of them.

00:34:27 ◼   ► Righto. Finally, Michael Saji writes, "GDPR is also incredibly technology-agnostic in

00:34:32 ◼   ► that it applies to everything everywhere and is conceived of as a regulation that nobody

00:34:35 ◼   ► will ever be able to comply with. I can't state whether or not that's true or false,

00:34:39 ◼   ► but that was their particular opinion.

00:34:41 ◼   ► So, that's another view of like a sort of wide-reaching regulation, that it starts to

00:34:48 ◼   ► seem like, "Well, this is so big. How could you ever comply with it?" Because it's

00:34:52 ◼   ► so vague and so far-reaching that like a motivated enforcer could find literally any company

00:35:00 ◼   ► in compliance of some portion of it, right? Because it tries to not fall into the trap

00:35:06 ◼   ► of the cookie law or fall into the trap of the interpretation of the cookie law anyway,

00:35:11 ◼   ► where it seems narrowly defined and you get all the negatives, the annoyance, and you

00:35:15 ◼   ► don't actually get any of the benefits because everything else, you can skirt around it as

00:35:19 ◼   ► technology evolves. And this tries to be so broad and so far-reaching and apply to everything

00:35:23 ◼   ► you say and do, and it's so hard to comply with. It's just like, "How can I ever comply

00:35:27 ◼   ► with. There's just too many regulations. But there are industries that are like that already

00:35:35 ◼   ► that, even in the U.S., that we manage to survive. So healthcare is one where there's

00:35:39 ◼   ► a bunch of laws related to healthcare and protection of information, you know, like

00:35:43 ◼   ► finance. You've got PCI for finance for basic credit card processing stuff. You've got HIPAA

00:35:49 ◼   ► for health information and other personally identifiable information and stuff like that.

00:35:55 ◼   ► And those are similarly weirdly acronymed fairly wide reaching regulations that I think

00:36:03 ◼   ► you could find any company out of compliance with.

00:36:07 ◼   ► Like HIPAA is very very broad and even a very diligent company trying to follow all the

00:36:15 ◼   ► rules inevitably there's some place where there's some kind of a breach.

00:36:21 ◼   ► The purpose of these laws is not to say everyone is going to be 100% in compliance, otherwise

00:36:27 ◼   ► the law is useless.

00:36:28 ◼   ► If people are even 50% in compliance, it's so much better than the status quo, and that

00:36:35 ◼   ► the law has to be sort of enforced responsibly, where, I mean it's kind of like, I think this

00:36:40 ◼   ► is a terrible analogy for lots of reasons, but it's something that people will be familiar

00:36:43 ◼   ► with.

00:36:44 ◼   ► Speed limits on American roads anyway.

00:36:46 ◼   ► is breaking the speed limit all the time, but through selective enforcement, the speed

00:36:51 ◼   ► limit allows the police to pull over someone who is really driving dangerously at a very

00:36:57 ◼   ► high speed that's not safe for conditions, while letting all the people who are five

00:37:01 ◼   ► miles an hour over the limit on the highway sail by. In some ways that is like giving

00:37:06 ◼   ► too much power to the enforcers, that basically everyone is not in compliance all the time

00:37:10 ◼   ► so you can arrest anybody.

00:37:13 ◼   ► But the reason it's a bad analogy is because I think we would agree that some data protection

00:37:19 ◼   ► is good for, you know, we want our data to be protected in some way, we don't want companies

00:37:25 ◼   ► to be able to do whatever they want with it.

00:37:27 ◼   ► So we will take any amount of improvement over the status quo, even if it means that

00:37:33 ◼   ► a ill-motivated enforcer of this law could punitively enforce pretty much any enforce

00:37:40 ◼   ► these guidelines on any company and say, "Oh, you've missed compliance in this one little

00:37:44 ◼   ► corner or whatever." So I don't think it's ideal, but I think, again, with HIPAA,

00:37:49 ◼   ► healthcare companies are not going out of business because there's zealous HIPAA enforcement by a

00:37:54 ◼   ► giant fleet of, you know, government officers wandering over all the businesses in the world.

00:38:00 ◼   ► That's just not how it works.

00:38:02 ◼   ► They're outnumbered, for one thing.

00:38:04 ◼   ► There's more companies than there are people going around to check for HIPAA compliance,

00:38:06 ◼   ► right?

00:38:07 ◼   ► It's more like when your company is already doing enough terrible things to get the attention

00:38:12 ◼   ► of law enforcement, that's when this stuff comes back to bite you.

00:38:18 ◼   ► And I'm not going to say that's a good thing, because again, I think it's open for abuse,

00:38:24 ◼   ► but it's better than the status quo where you can do whatever you want and keep it secret

00:38:27 ◼   ► and nothing ever happens to you.

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00:40:16 ◼   ► - All right, so we have good news for Marco.

00:40:23 ◼   ► We have a solution for your keyboard woes.

00:40:27 ◼   ► You can quit whining and complaining, Marco,

00:40:31 ◼   ► because Apple has patented a screen-based

00:40:34 ◼   ► MacBook keyboard that will feel like it's real.

00:40:41 ◼   ► Check that out.

00:40:43 ◼   ► How excited are you, my friend?

00:40:45 ◼   ► Try to contain your excitement

00:40:46 ◼   ► and keep it professional, if you please.

00:40:48 ◼   ► - This is my excitement.

00:40:49 ◼   ► You know what Apple also thinks they've released?

00:40:52 ◼   ► Is a keyboard that works and is good.

00:40:55 ◼   ► See, they think this will feel real.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Just like they think the MacBook Pro from 2016 is awesome.

00:41:01 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, this definitely reads to me

00:41:05 ◼   ► as one of those patents.

00:41:07 ◼   ► We were talking before, you patent every idea you have.

00:41:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:41:10 ◼   ► - Whether you've gotten it to work or not,

00:41:12 ◼   ► because our patent system is dumb,

00:41:14 ◼   ► and this is what you're forced to do

00:41:15 ◼   ► with our dumb patent system.

00:41:17 ◼   ► And so, when I look at patents,

00:41:19 ◼   ► I'm putting them into the bins of,

00:41:22 ◼   ► that's a thing that could conceivably ship,

00:41:25 ◼   ► I think they could have actually figured out a way to make that. And the other bin is that's an idea

00:41:30 ◼   ► that someone had some time that they probably never got to work but that they patented anyway

00:41:36 ◼   ► because you have to patent everything because patents are dumb. And this definitely falls into

00:41:39 ◼   ► the second bin where I, you know, as we've discussed before, Apple has on-screen keyboards

00:41:45 ◼   ► and considering future on-screen keyboards is an obvious thing to do, right? Especially for

00:41:52 ◼   ► for devices like iPads where you want the keyboard to be small and imagine if when you're

00:41:55 ◼   ► not using a keyboard you'd repurpose that as a second screen, it's an obvious thing

00:41:59 ◼   ► that they should be investigating.

00:42:01 ◼   ► And of course there's downsides to on-screen keyboards so you think they would investigate

00:42:05 ◼   ► how can we make on-screen keyboards less crappy.

00:42:08 ◼   ► And here's a patent describing a couple of ways and I was amazed, like since patents,

00:42:12 ◼   ► since you don't actually have to have like a working version of anything or understand

00:42:15 ◼   ► how you're going to manufacture this, it's mostly just an idea which is why patents are

00:42:20 ◼   ► dumb.

00:42:21 ◼   ► I was surprised by how unappealing I found the ideas in this patent.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Because normally you make the ideas like, "Imagine if there was a keyboard that did

00:42:30 ◼   ► this and that and the other thing."

00:42:31 ◼   ► You're like, "Wow, that would be cool.

00:42:32 ◼   ► Too bad.

00:42:33 ◼   ► We have no idea how to do that.

00:42:34 ◼   ► Ha."

00:42:35 ◼   ► Anyway, all the ideas in this one sounded awful to me.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Like, even if you could execute all of them.

00:42:39 ◼   ► So the idea is, it's a picture of a keyboard, but we all know typing on a picture of a keyboard

00:42:43 ◼   ► isn't great because you can't feel the keys and you can't rest your fingers on the keys

00:42:46 ◼   ► like you can on a keyboard.

00:42:47 ◼   ► We all know what the disadvantage is.

00:42:48 ◼   ► We all have on-screen keyboards, especially on iPads.

00:42:51 ◼   ► There are disadvantages to them.

00:42:52 ◼   ► So how do we overcome those disadvantages?

00:42:54 ◼   ► And this patent has a couple of ways.

00:42:58 ◼   ► One way is that the screen would actually smush in

00:43:01 ◼   ► when you press it to let you know when you've hit something

00:43:03 ◼   ► and then it would give you feedback.

00:43:04 ◼   ► That feels like a button, doesn't it?

00:43:05 ◼   ► I cannot imagine a screen that I can smush in with my finger

00:43:10 ◼   ► and it pushes back on me a little bit feeling like a button.

00:43:12 ◼   ► It would feel like a screen that smushes in a little bit.

00:43:14 ◼   ► - Well, to be fair, I mean,

00:43:15 ◼   ► that's what the trackpad buttons do.

00:43:18 ◼   ► but it doesn't deform underneath your fingertip.

00:43:20 ◼   ► It deforms across the entire axis.

00:43:22 ◼   ► Like if you look at the pictures,

00:43:23 ◼   ► this is the idea of like you are pressing,

00:43:26 ◼   ► you don't have to imagine how this would be

00:43:28 ◼   ► because just think back to your palm devices

00:43:29 ◼   ► that you all had because they're all old like me.

00:43:32 ◼   ► They did not have capacitive touchscreens.

00:43:34 ◼   ► They had pressure sensitive touchscreens,

00:43:36 ◼   ► which meant that you would have to squish the screen in

00:43:39 ◼   ► with your finger or your fingernail or a stylus

00:43:42 ◼   ► to cause it to register any kind of input.

00:43:45 ◼   ► So the screen would smush in just at the point of contact.

00:43:49 ◼   ► So if you press with the plastic stylus,

00:43:50 ◼   ► it would make a little dimple there.

00:43:51 ◼   ► If you press with your finger, it would make a little,

00:43:53 ◼   ► you know, it felt nothing like a button.

00:43:55 ◼   ► It didn't squish in very much.

00:43:56 ◼   ► This seems like an exaggerated version of that.

00:43:59 ◼   ► And this all, in theory, this would also solve the problem

00:44:01 ◼   ► of, oh, I can't rest my fingers on the home keys.

00:44:03 ◼   ► Because if you rest your fingers,

00:44:04 ◼   ► all of a sudden you're typing.

00:44:05 ◼   ► It's like, well, now you're not typing on this keyboard.

00:44:07 ◼   ► You're only typing when you smush.

00:44:08 ◼   ► Which, talk about an unsatisfying,

00:44:10 ◼   ► like if you don't like the low travel buttons

00:44:14 ◼   ► on the current Apple laptop keyboards,

00:44:17 ◼   ► imagining having some kind of squishy membrane

00:44:19 ◼   ► that you dig your little grubby fingertips into.

00:44:22 ◼   ► I don't know how that would really hold up.

00:44:24 ◼   ► And the second one is,

00:44:25 ◼   ► you can't feel the edges of the keys when everything's flat.

00:44:28 ◼   ► One way to get around that is to have the screen bulge out

00:44:31 ◼   ► around the key cap.

00:44:32 ◼   ► So it's like this lumpy island of Mentos or something.

00:44:35 ◼   ► Like you just have these lumpy little squishy,

00:44:40 ◼   ► I was gonna say pustules, but I don't,

00:44:42 ◼   ► do we not wanna go that far?

00:44:43 ◼   ► - No, we really don't.

00:44:45 ◼   ► - Stress bumps, let's go with that.

00:44:46 ◼   ► We're gonna go with the, is that, I don't even know.

00:44:50 ◼   ► Stress bumps is that. - Doesn't matter, move on.

00:44:51 ◼   ► - Back to work probably, anyway.

00:44:53 ◼   ► One of the Merlin Manchos.

00:44:56 ◼   ► That wouldn't feel too good either.

00:44:57 ◼   ► Another strategy they have is use,

00:44:59 ◼   ► I think they say electrostatic or something.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Use some kind of electrostatic charge

00:45:04 ◼   ► to make you be able to feel the edges

00:45:07 ◼   ► because there's a different sensation in your fingers

00:45:09 ◼   ► as you glide across the keys.

00:45:12 ◼   ► And that, I don't want any kind of tingly electrostatic anything telling me where the

00:45:18 ◼   ► edges of anything are on a screen.

00:45:21 ◼   ► So I think this is a patent full of bad ideas that I hope they never make.

00:45:26 ◼   ► And honestly, if you gave me like, you know, ILM and a movie and said make any kind of

00:45:34 ◼   ► futuristic looking keyboard input that you want for a movie thing.

00:45:41 ◼   ► The only thing that occurs to me that would be acceptable would be that the screen is

00:45:45 ◼   ► made up of little nano-machines that rearrange themselves to become essentially a mechanical

00:45:50 ◼   ► keyboard when you want to use a mechanical keyboard, and then when you don't want to

00:45:52 ◼   ► use it, the little nano-machines rearrange themselves to become a screen.

00:45:55 ◼   ► Because if you're going too stupidly, confine yourself to keyboard input as your futuristic

00:46:01 ◼   ► way of getting text into a computer, pressing a button with your fingers is a really good

00:46:07 ◼   ► solution.

00:46:08 ◼   ► And so I would have to have the screen change into an actual button, like a thing that moves

00:46:13 ◼   ► up and down and has edges, and then have it change back into a screen.

00:46:17 ◼   ► That's it.

00:46:18 ◼   ► I don't have any better ideas on unlimited technology.

00:46:21 ◼   ► Obviously the better idea is not to type, right?

00:46:23 ◼   ► Not to do anything like that.

00:46:24 ◼   ► It cracks me up about an anime series that neither one of you has heard of but that I

00:46:28 ◼   ► enjoy.

00:46:29 ◼   ► Ghost in the Shell was a movie and then there's a television series and other spin-offs from it.

00:46:33 ◼   ► And one of the signature visual flares is they have these, you know, sort of cyborg people or

00:46:39 ◼   ► robot people sitting in front of computer terminals. And because they're not regular people,

00:46:43 ◼   ► like, you know, their hands are all robotic hands. It looks like normal hands, but then they put their

00:46:48 ◼   ► hands over the keyboard. But now, since they're robots, their hands kind of like open up and fold

00:46:52 ◼   ► out and explode, and these huge tentacles come out of them where their fingers were.

00:46:56 ◼   ► and those tentacles fly over the key surfaces, typing faster than any human can type across

00:47:01 ◼   ► this giant keypad, right? Like that's their, you know, superpowers. Like a human can only type this

00:47:06 ◼   ► fast with their little meat fingers, but look at these Ghost in the Shell Cyborg machines. They

00:47:10 ◼   ► can type much faster because they have all these metal tendrils that go out all over the keyboard.

00:47:13 ◼   ► It's like, if you're a cyborg, just plug into the RS-232 port for crying out loud. It's gonna be

00:47:18 ◼   ► faster than typing keys on the keyboard. Like this is a control room designed for these robot cyborg

00:47:24 ◼   ► thingies, they can just connect with a serial cable. They don't need to press buttons. Anyway,

00:47:29 ◼   ► I'm digressing. But yeah, so this patent does not describe a product I would like to use,

00:47:34 ◼   ► and it does not describe a product I think anyone would like to use, but it does show

00:47:38 ◼   ► that Apple continues to investigate ways to make, to be able to have screen when you want

00:47:43 ◼   ► a screen and keyboard when you want a keyboard.

00:47:46 ◼   ► There is one good idea in this patent. They fixed the arrow keys. Oh, God. They have the

00:47:53 ◼   ► the correct arrow key layout in the patent illustration.

00:47:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, but if you get that layout,

00:47:58 ◼   ► you have to stand up out of your seat and say McDonald's.

00:48:00 ◼   ► Something sucks.

00:48:01 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:02 ◼   ► - I get the reference.

00:48:03 ◼   ► No, I mean, this is like,

00:48:05 ◼   ► this is potentially cool down the road,

00:48:08 ◼   ► but like, I think a concern that I have here,

00:48:12 ◼   ► again, this is not gonna be a half hour rant,

00:48:14 ◼   ► a concern I have here is like,

00:48:16 ◼   ► what if Apple looks at the current problems

00:48:19 ◼   ► of the keyboards and the laptops,

00:48:21 ◼   ► And instead of saying, wow, we need to make

00:48:24 ◼   ► more reliable key switches, what if they're like,

00:48:26 ◼   ► you know, there's a problem.

00:48:28 ◼   ► Laptop keyboards are unreliable.

00:48:30 ◼   ► How do we get rid of the laptop keyboards?

00:48:32 ◼   ► 'Cause this is a really, really complicated solution

00:48:37 ◼   ► to a problem that doesn't need to exist.

00:48:41 ◼   ► And we already have way simpler, cheaper,

00:48:44 ◼   ► more robust solutions already existing in the world

00:48:47 ◼   ► for quite some time.

00:48:49 ◼   ► They're called buttons and they're fine.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Like a keyboard with key switches

00:48:54 ◼   ► has existed for quite some time and they're wonderful.

00:48:57 ◼   ► They're proven, they're durable,

00:48:59 ◼   ► they're affordable, they're repairable.

00:49:02 ◼   ► It's wonderful.

00:49:04 ◼   ► It's cool that somebody is filing patents

00:49:06 ◼   ► and doing research in these crazy directions.

00:49:09 ◼   ► I just really hope that that's just for like,

00:49:11 ◼   ► you know, file as many patents as possible purposes,

00:49:13 ◼   ► not actual future product directions.

00:49:16 ◼   ► Because the problem they're solving

00:49:18 ◼   ► entirely self-created and optional.

00:49:21 ◼   ► - It's not cool that they're following patents.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Patents suck.

00:49:24 ◼   ► But we just saw a patent for a key switches last show.

00:49:28 ◼   ► So they are investigating that.

00:49:29 ◼   ► But I think it actually is important to investigate

00:49:33 ◼   ► ways to make onscreen keyboards better.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Because like, yes it's bad if they think

00:49:38 ◼   ► this is a replacement for keyboards,

00:49:40 ◼   ► but we already have onscreen keyboards.

00:49:43 ◼   ► I would like those onscreen keyboards to be better.

00:49:45 ◼   ► And I also think replacing those flat, smart keyboard things on iPads with thinner, lighter

00:49:54 ◼   ► things that can double a second screen when they're not a keyboard would give everybody

00:49:59 ◼   ► the multi-pad lifestyle.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And I think that's worth pursuing.

00:50:04 ◼   ► If you can figure out a way to make a combo keyboard screen that is an okay screen and

00:50:12 ◼   ► a passable keyboard, that's worth investigating. Not as a replacement for your laptops, unless

00:50:17 ◼   ► it is really fantastic, but just as a potential accessory. Now, that said, this particular

00:50:23 ◼   ► patent doesn't contain anything that I find compelling. Like, even if they could build

00:50:29 ◼   ► everything that's exactly the way they said, I don't think it would be a satisfying keyboard.

00:50:34 ◼   ► In fact, I think it might even be less satisfying than just a picture of a keyboard on a screen

00:50:37 ◼   ► that we have now. But I do think Apple should be investigating this, because they do have

00:50:42 ◼   ► lot of devices to the screens, they already have on-screen keyboards, so yes, of course

00:50:44 ◼   ► they should be investigating ways to make them better. And every way they investigate,

00:50:48 ◼   ► whether it turns out to be a turkey or not, they're going to patent it.

00:50:52 ◼   ► By the way, let's appreciate all the ways that patent diagrams are ridiculous. There's

00:50:56 ◼   ► of course the classic patent hands, where anytime you see a hand in a patent it looks

00:50:59 ◼   ► inhuman and weird. They do pretty good. These fingers look kind of like fingers, so I'm

00:51:03 ◼   ► proud of them there. But then the keyboard? Control isn't next to the spacebar, what the

00:51:07 ◼   ► hell? Like, you have a keyboard right in front of you probably when you're making this diagram.

00:51:11 ◼   ► look down control isn't next to the keyboard and they didn't label all the

00:51:13 ◼   ► modifiers anyway they just labeled some of them I'm gonna label control and you

00:51:17 ◼   ► know what controls next to the spacebar right on a Mac okay let's do that nope

00:51:20 ◼   ► Oh John oh my word speaking of Apple making things apparently they're making

00:51:27 ◼   ► their own displays so we got word over the last few days that Apple is trying

00:51:34 ◼   ► to do micro LED, which is I guess a also organic but different than OLED display

00:51:42 ◼   ► technology. And apparently somewhere in California and in cahoots with somewhere

00:51:47 ◼   ► in Taiwan, if I recall correctly, they are trying to in-house develop a brand new

00:51:53 ◼   ► display technology. And the theory goes that they will figure out how to create

00:51:57 ◼   ► it, figure out how to manufacture it, and then throw it over the wall to some

00:52:01 ◼   ► other company like Samsung or something, or perhaps Foxconn, to actually build these in

00:52:06 ◼   ► volumes. So they're not getting into the manufacturing business, but they are getting deeper into

00:52:11 ◼   ► the creation of hardware, specifically displayist business, in a move that surprises pretty

00:52:17 ◼   ► much nobody. I think this is a good idea. I like the sound of this. I don't personally

00:52:23 ◼   ► have too much more to say about it, but I'm assuming one of you do. So Marco, thoughts?

00:52:28 ◼   ► - I think it's a good idea for them to be looking into this.

00:52:31 ◼   ► The screen is such a critical part of all of their products

00:52:36 ◼   ► really, I guess except the HomePod and the iPod Shuffle.

00:52:39 ◼   ► They don't make those anymore.

00:52:41 ◼   ► The screen is so important.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And especially with modern high-end OLED screens,

00:52:47 ◼   ► that's every Apple Watch and the iPhone X

00:52:50 ◼   ► and every touch bar and presumably more products

00:52:54 ◼   ► as time goes on 'cause OLED is pretty awesome.

00:52:56 ◼   ► The problem is that there aren't that many OLED manufacturers.

00:52:59 ◼   ► It's pretty much like Samsung and LG.

00:53:02 ◼   ► And LG seems to do really well in TV OLEDs,

00:53:05 ◼   ► but seems to do pretty poorly in computer and phone displays.

00:53:11 ◼   ► Now, Apple has been tied to basically LG and Samsung

00:53:16 ◼   ► for LCD displays for years.

00:53:18 ◼   ► Like, I remember my 2012 Retina Mepo Pro,

00:53:22 ◼   ► when I had my image retention issue

00:53:24 ◼   ► and I made that waffle page.

00:53:26 ◼   ► I had the LG panel, and the LG panel was the one

00:53:29 ◼   ► that had all the image retention,

00:53:30 ◼   ► and the Samsung panel didn't.

00:53:31 ◼   ► It was that kind of thing.

00:53:33 ◼   ► They've had this two-supplier thing for a while.

00:53:37 ◼   ► With OLED for the phone,

00:53:38 ◼   ► it's an incredibly important component.

00:53:41 ◼   ► That OLED panel is the iPhone X.

00:53:44 ◼   ► It's such an important component.

00:53:45 ◼   ► It probably is a pretty large price component,

00:53:49 ◼   ► compared to the other components in it.

00:53:50 ◼   ► It might be the most expensive part of the whole phone.

00:53:53 ◼   ► So I can't imagine Apple is that happy

00:53:56 ◼   ► to rely on just one company.

00:53:59 ◼   ► Like those are only made by Samsung.

00:54:01 ◼   ► They can currently only be made by Samsung.

00:54:04 ◼   ► That probably doesn't make Apple feel good

00:54:06 ◼   ► from like a just reliance perspective.

00:54:09 ◼   ► Not to mention the fact that that company is Samsung,

00:54:11 ◼   ► which I'm sure they don't love.

00:54:13 ◼   ► And yeah, they buy like a lot of flash

00:54:15 ◼   ► from Samsung and stuff, but you can also get flash

00:54:17 ◼   ► from other people if you need to.

00:54:19 ◼   ► No one else can make that OLED screen.

00:54:20 ◼   ► That's in the iPhone X.

00:54:22 ◼   ► in addition to the fact that they're giving tons of money

00:54:24 ◼   ► to Samsung, so it does seem like an obvious thing

00:54:28 ◼   ► for Apple to try to take display technology in-house

00:54:32 ◼   ► the same way they've taken other critical parts

00:54:35 ◼   ► like the A series system on a chip and stuff like that.

00:54:39 ◼   ► That does make total sense.

00:54:41 ◼   ► Whether they can do it or not, I have no idea.

00:54:42 ◼   ► I don't know anything about this business.

00:54:44 ◼   ► It seems really ambitious.

00:54:46 ◼   ► There's probably a really good reason so far

00:54:48 ◼   ► why only Samsung can make these good enough OLED screens.

00:54:52 ◼   ► So, you know, Apple, you know, going into micro-led,

00:54:55 ◼   ► which I've never even heard of until this rumor came,

00:54:57 ◼   ► I didn't even know what was next.

00:54:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, same.

00:55:00 ◼   ► - Maybe that's easier, maybe that's, you know,

00:55:02 ◼   ► a thing they can do, maybe they've made some acquisitions

00:55:04 ◼   ► towards that, I have no idea.

00:55:07 ◼   ► But it's a totally like defensible and sensible thing

00:55:11 ◼   ► for them to be doing.

00:55:12 ◼   ► Whether it ever amounts to anything, who knows,

00:55:15 ◼   ► but it would be kinda cool if it did,

00:55:16 ◼   ► because I can't imagine that they love,

00:55:19 ◼   ► depending on Samsung, especially just Samsung,

00:55:22 ◼   ► instead of just having a balance.

00:55:24 ◼   ► And also, other things they have taken in-house

00:55:28 ◼   ► tend to be pretty awesome.

00:55:29 ◼   ► Like the Apple version of it that comes out later

00:55:32 ◼   ► tends to be better than the off-the-shelf stuff at the time.

00:55:35 ◼   ► Look at what they've done with the A-series CPUs,

00:55:37 ◼   ► what they're doing with the GPUs now,

00:55:39 ◼   ► what they're doing with the SSD controller and the Mac Pro,

00:55:43 ◼   ► like the T-thing, the wireless Bluetooth W chips.

00:55:46 ◼   ► Like there's so many different things now

00:55:48 ◼   ► they're doing in-house that used to be third party manufacturer components, and the Apple

00:55:53 ◼   ► versions, because of the integration and the tie-ins and the optimizations they can do,

00:55:57 ◼   ► are just better.

00:55:58 ◼   ► So if they can do that same thing to displays, cool.

00:56:01 ◼   ► So this strategy, I don't know if vertically integrated is the right word, because I've

00:56:05 ◼   ► never went to business school, but this strategy of aggressively, in the whatever Tim Cook

00:56:11 ◼   ► quoted as owning and controlling the major technologies that make up their products,

00:56:14 ◼   ► is actually more ambitious and more aggressive than the Apple of old, even the Apple of Apple's

00:56:26 ◼   ► heyday, which is a topic we will continue not to get to in this program.

00:56:32 ◼   ► Because it used to be that—and maybe not just Apple, but across the entire industry—for

00:56:39 ◼   ► Computer makers, they were people who made computers, and they were people who made parts

00:56:45 ◼   ► that go into computers.

00:56:46 ◼   ► And there were a lot of parts suppliers for almost every component.

00:56:52 ◼   ► Every once in a while there would be a parts supplier that has something novel, right?

00:57:00 ◼   ► You know, so Sony with 3.5 inch floppy disk was a change from the other floppy disks.

00:57:06 ◼   ► a very Sony type change.

00:57:07 ◼   ► Like we're going to improve on this thing,

00:57:09 ◼   ► we have a new idea of how floppy disks could work,

00:57:11 ◼   ► check this out.

00:57:12 ◼   ► I'm not sure if Sony was the maker of that thing,

00:57:13 ◼   ► but the Sony 3.5 inch floppy drive,

00:57:16 ◼   ► just to give an example.

00:57:17 ◼   ► And Sony, Apple would either know that they made it

00:57:21 ◼   ► or Sony would pitch them on making it.

00:57:22 ◼   ► I think there's a good story about the Macintosh engineers

00:57:25 ◼   ► hiding a Sony engineer in a closet,

00:57:27 ◼   ► not to let some higher up know that they were looking

00:57:29 ◼   ► into getting 3.5 inch floppy drive

00:57:30 ◼   ► because they were still insisting

00:57:32 ◼   ► that it had to use a five and a quarter,

00:57:33 ◼   ► which would have been so gross.

00:57:35 ◼   ► Good job closet hiding people.

00:57:38 ◼   ► We'll put a link to that in the show notes.

00:57:39 ◼   ► And the synergy between, hey, I'm a part supplier

00:57:43 ◼   ► and we have this cool idea for the thing,

00:57:45 ◼   ► and hey, I'm a person who uses parts to make products,

00:57:48 ◼   ► maybe we can make a novel or interesting product

00:57:50 ◼   ► or line of products out of this

00:57:51 ◼   ► and it's a good deal for you

00:57:52 ◼   ► because you get to make a cool product

00:57:53 ◼   ► and it's a good deal for us

00:57:54 ◼   ► 'cause we came up with this novel product

00:57:55 ◼   ► and eventually everyone can make 3.5 inch floppies

00:57:58 ◼   ► because they somehow skirted

00:58:00 ◼   ► the super stupid world of patents enough

00:58:02 ◼   ► to be able to have the part manufactured across the industry.

00:58:06 ◼   ► The iPod is another example.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Whatever that hard drive maker was, was it Hitachi or whoever came up with those really

00:58:10 ◼   ► teeny tiny hard drives?

00:58:11 ◼   ► Well, the light bulb goes off like, "What could we do with a little hard drive like

00:58:14 ◼   ► that?

00:58:15 ◼   ► It's really cool."

00:58:16 ◼   ► And you get something like the iPod, right?

00:58:18 ◼   ► But eventually, all sorts of little hard drives are available or Flash replaces the hard drives.

00:58:23 ◼   ► So like there's no sort of monopoly on one kind of thing.

00:58:27 ◼   ► And so Apple, in the days when that was the way the industry worked, was more or less

00:58:32 ◼   ► content to say, "We're going to source our parts from the best parts available.

00:58:37 ◼   ► Who has the best screens?

00:58:38 ◼   ► Who has the best RAM or the best combination of you can manufacture a lot of them, it has

00:58:42 ◼   ► a good price, they have good performance, they have good quality control, they would

00:58:45 ◼   ► shop around from the parts suppliers."

00:58:47 ◼   ► And from product to product and year to year, they'd pick different screens or different

00:58:51 ◼   ► RAM or different hard drives or different video cards back when they weren't really

00:58:54 ◼   ► super mad at Nvidia.

00:58:57 ◼   ► And that's how they built their computers.

00:59:00 ◼   ► There's a bunch of companies making parts, and we will pick among them, and maybe we'll

00:59:04 ◼   ► try to influence their roadmaps, and maybe once in a while someone has a great thing

00:59:07 ◼   ► we will assemble them into a product.

00:59:09 ◼   ► The more aggressive strategy is to say, "I see the world of parts manufacturers out there."

00:59:13 ◼   ► And they make all sorts of interesting things, and sometimes every once in a while someone

00:59:16 ◼   ► has a really cool one that sparks interest and we can make a cool product out of it.

00:59:21 ◼   ► But that's not good enough.

00:59:22 ◼   ► We know exactly what we want.

00:59:25 ◼   ► We want to push the envelope in a specific direction.

00:59:28 ◼   ► We have an idea of how this could be done better in service of a kind of product or

00:59:34 ◼   ► even a specific product that we have in mind.

00:59:36 ◼   ► And we're not going to try to coerce or cajole some other parts maker into making it, and

00:59:41 ◼   ► we're not going to wait around for someone else to make it.

00:59:44 ◼   ► And we're not going to buy anyone else's off-the-shelf parts and try to cobble together stuff off

00:59:48 ◼   ► the shelf.

00:59:49 ◼   ► We're going to design our own CPUs for our phones, but their own GPUs in them, and our

00:59:54 ◼   ► own weird, you know, step counting, neural network, fingerprint sensing, secure enclave,

00:59:59 ◼   ► whatever. Like, if the first version has to be assembled partially out of parts that come

01:00:03 ◼   ► in the industry, that's fine. But eventually we'd like to bring that in house because we

01:00:07 ◼   ► feel like we can do it better. We know exactly what we want for the watch. We know exactly

01:00:10 ◼   ► what we want for our phones. I don't want to have to convince some other company to

01:00:14 ◼   ► make this product for me. And in fact, we have some better ideas about how it might

01:00:17 ◼   ► be done because we hired all the best people in this industry because we have too much

01:00:19 ◼   ► money, right? And that is way more aggressive than just shopping among like, "Oh, we're

01:00:25 ◼   ► going to use the Sony panel on this display," or, "We're going to use Trinitron because

01:00:28 ◼   ► they're the best CRTs," and, you know, like, it's way more aggressive to say, "We're

01:00:32 ◼   ► going to do it ourselves because it's a competitive advantage not to have to wait

01:00:37 ◼   ► for the rest of the industry to do anything." And in the case of these screens, even if

01:00:41 ◼   ► you're in a situation where one company makes the best screens and Apple wants the

01:00:45 ◼   ► best screens and they feel bad getting one supplier, I think Apple's view on it, aside

01:00:49 ◼   ► from that we just don't like giving money to Samsung as a single supplier to say, "We

01:00:53 ◼   ► think we can do that better because we know exactly what we want."

01:00:55 ◼   ► And it's a pain to have to tell Samsung exactly what we want and get them to build the thing

01:00:58 ◼   ► that we want and go through all that thing.

01:01:00 ◼   ► We know what we want.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Why don't we just do it ourselves?

01:01:04 ◼   ► And that's what they've been doing with lots of components.

01:01:08 ◼   ► If they have any problems with any kind of supplier like Qualcomm being annoying about

01:01:12 ◼   ► charging them lots of money or them not having lots of alternatives and trying to get Intel

01:01:16 ◼   ► to build radio chips and stuff and eventually say, "You know what? I'm tired of this. We

01:01:20 ◼   ► have good engineers. We know how to build things. Why don't we build the radio chips?"

01:01:23 ◼   ► And not build so much as design and have manufactured for us. The last bastion of that is manufacturing,

01:01:30 ◼   ► where thus far Apple has been happy to say, "Manufacturers, compete amongst yourselves

01:01:36 ◼   ► and we will give you CPU fab, our design that you will fab for us. And we will give you

01:01:42 ◼   ► manufacturing thing, our case design that you will machine out of aluminum for us.

01:01:46 ◼   ► And we will help you buy the machines for it, and we'll help you work on the techniques

01:01:49 ◼   ► to use those machines, and we'll do all the stuff.

01:01:51 ◼   ► But in the end, Apple doesn't own the factories.

01:01:54 ◼   ► Apple does not own a silicon CPU fab.

01:01:57 ◼   ► It still allows other companies to do that for it.

01:01:59 ◼   ► So it hasn't gotten to the point where we say, "You know what?

01:02:01 ◼   ► I'm tired of waiting for a Taiwan semiconductor to come up with a new fab.

01:02:05 ◼   ► Let's make our own fab," because that starts to get a couple billion here, a couple billion

01:02:08 ◼   ► there, so you're talking real money.

01:02:10 ◼   ► So far, they've been avoiding that.

01:02:11 ◼   ► But the modern Apple, I think, is more aggressive than any other Apple has been in their drive

01:02:18 ◼   ► to get a real competitive edge in the market by saying, "We'll do it ourselves," and having

01:02:27 ◼   ► the confidence that they'll be able to do it better than anyone else, which is exciting

01:02:30 ◼   ► from a technology perspective to see, you know, that's what we always want Apple to

01:02:35 ◼   ► do.

01:02:36 ◼   ► Although it may seem exciting when Apple is able to synthesize from the parts that are

01:02:40 ◼   ► available to almost anybody or most people, plus or minus one or two parts, to make a

01:02:44 ◼   ► great product out of it.

01:02:45 ◼   ► It's even more exciting, I guess in the iPhone age, to see them make phones that are just

01:02:51 ◼   ► leaps and bounds better in certain areas than other phones for reasons that are directly

01:02:57 ◼   ► traceable to Apple's strategy to say, bring the system on a chip in-house.

01:03:02 ◼   ► That's why their system on chips is so much better than everybody else's.

01:03:04 ◼   ► If they were still sitting around and they were using the same chips as Android phones,

01:03:09 ◼   ► I think the phone landscape would look very different.

01:03:11 ◼   ► Apple wouldn't be able to do half the things that it does,

01:03:14 ◼   ► because it would be working with CPUs that are not--

01:03:16 ◼   ► not going to say that are worse or slower,

01:03:17 ◼   ► which in many cases they are, but that simply are not

01:03:20 ◼   ► tailored to the set of features that Apple wants.

01:03:22 ◼   ► It picks the exact number of cores,

01:03:23 ◼   ► the exact number of amount of cache, the exact layout,

01:03:28 ◼   ► so they can put all their different--

01:03:29 ◼   ► they know exactly what they want for the iPhone

01:03:31 ◼   ► tend to do face ID.

01:03:33 ◼   ► And if they had to adapt some weird Snapdragon processor that

01:03:36 ◼   ► has way more cores than they want, but not enough

01:03:38 ◼   ► something else that they want, we'd still be waiting for Face ID.

01:03:42 ◼   ► So I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I think that this aspect

01:03:47 ◼   ► of Apple, the technological aggression, is actually I think one of the most interesting

01:03:53 ◼   ► aspects of the company today and probably underappreciated by anybody who doesn't follow

01:03:58 ◼   ► Apple really closely and doesn't really care what's in their products.

01:04:01 ◼   ► But I find it exciting.

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01:05:43 ◼   ► - Alright, let's move on to Ask ATP.

01:05:46 ◼   ► Simon Edgsing says, "Hey, what's the deal with the bits

01:05:51 ◼   ► "that were once used as an important spec

01:05:53 ◼   ► "for gaming consoles?

01:05:54 ◼   ► "How many bits does a modern console have

01:05:56 ◼   ► "and why is it no longer used in marketing?"

01:05:57 ◼   ► And so, as soon as I read this,

01:05:59 ◼   ► I thought back to the days of the Nintendo 64, which everyone knew was 64-bit because

01:06:04 ◼   ► it was right there in the name.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And oh, man, was that thing way cooler than any other modern console or so I thought when

01:06:10 ◼   ► I was 10 or whatever.

01:06:13 ◼   ► So Jon, as the chief gamer of the three of us, can you explain to me what's the deal

01:06:17 ◼   ► with these bits?

01:06:18 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt And why are they no longer used in marketing?

01:06:20 ◼   ► Well, marketing has moved entirely onto blast processing as a different shooting factor.

01:06:24 ◼   ► All right.

01:06:25 ◼   ► So the bits thing, like, first I read this question,

01:06:29 ◼   ► I'm like, is that a thing that people really wonder about?

01:06:32 ◼   ► Like, are consoles still marketed with bits?

01:06:34 ◼   ► And I think the person who's asking this

01:06:36 ◼   ► must have lived through the error when that was true.

01:06:38 ◼   ► These days, I haven't seen like the PS3 or PS4,

01:06:42 ◼   ► or even the PS2 for that matter, marketing with bits.

01:06:44 ◼   ► Like it's a thing that has passed us by for good reasons.

01:06:49 ◼   ► But back when it was used as a marketing turn,

01:06:53 ◼   ► Ascribing a number of bits to a CPU, like, oh, this is a 16-bit CPU, this is a 32-bit

01:06:59 ◼   ► CPU, this is a 64-bit CPU.

01:07:01 ◼   ► There's no hard and fast rules, as with most things in marketing, when you can say something

01:07:06 ◼   ► like that.

01:07:07 ◼   ► But in general, the number of bits tended to be applicable because certain things have

01:07:14 ◼   ► the same number of bits.

01:07:15 ◼   ► So the integer registers, the place where you store a number, would have 16 bits, and

01:07:23 ◼   ► And the address bus would be 16 bits wide, which controlled how much RAM you could address.

01:07:29 ◼   ► And you'd call that processor a 16-bit processor.

01:07:31 ◼   ► It didn't have to be the case.

01:07:33 ◼   ► For example, there are many "32-bit processors" that shipped with, hardware-wise physically

01:07:42 ◼   ► speaking, a 24-bit memory bus.

01:07:44 ◼   ► I'm thinking of the original Macintosh and many after that.

01:07:47 ◼   ► You'd still call it a 32-bit processor, though, because the integer registers were 32 bits

01:07:50 ◼   ► wide.

01:07:51 ◼   ► a "32-bit processor," the floating point registers might have been 64 bits wide.

01:07:56 ◼   ► Why is that not a 64-bit processor?

01:07:58 ◼   ► And what if the memory bus is wider than the integers, and what if the integer is wider

01:08:01 ◼   ► than the memory bus?

01:08:02 ◼   ► So there is no hard and fast rule, but in general, because usually either the memory

01:08:06 ◼   ► bus or the integer register, where they're both, were on this number, and because there

01:08:10 ◼   ► was a progression, because it's more expensive, especially in the early days, to make wider

01:08:15 ◼   ► buses to make larger registers, right, that each leap, like now we can make the registers

01:08:22 ◼   ► 32 bits. Each leap was met with a marketing push to say, you know, the 386 is a 32-bit

01:08:27 ◼   ► processor. And importantly, in terms of representable numbers for integers, 64-bit integers end

01:08:34 ◼   ► way before you want them to, like 65,535, right? 32-bit integers ended a pretty high

01:08:41 ◼   ► number that you feel like, "I can do a lot more with 4 billion. There's a lot more

01:08:44 ◼   ► things I can count with precision, with the 4 billion items that I can count on.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Whereas 65,000, I can think of lots of scenarios where I might need a break, and I'm very good

01:08:57 ◼   ► at that.

01:08:58 ◼   ► So once we cross 32 bits, and same thing for memory addressing, although in the beginning

01:09:03 ◼   ► there was no personal computer that could fill up all the 32 bits of that memory bus,

01:09:07 ◼   ► so eventually we got there.

01:09:09 ◼   ► Once you cross 32, you have a lot more headroom.

01:09:11 ◼   ► So 8-bit and 16-bit, it's like, "Eh, lots of problems where this is annoying."

01:09:16 ◼   ► And floating point doesn't help you entirely because of precision and all that stuff.

01:09:19 ◼   ► 32-bits, you're like, "Ah, I can run this for a while."

01:09:21 ◼   ► And we did.

01:09:22 ◼   ► We ran on "32-bit processors" for a long time, until we eventually got to the point where

01:09:27 ◼   ► you could fill a PC with more RAM than could be addressed with 32-bits, and then we needed

01:09:30 ◼   ► to go to 64.

01:09:31 ◼   ► But that took a really long time.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Now our phones are friggin' 64-bit, which is amazing if you live through the era where

01:09:36 ◼   ► you had to progress your 16 and 32 and so on and so forth.

01:09:38 ◼   ► Game consoles, same deal.

01:09:39 ◼   ► computers, they have memory buses.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Usually they use cheaper stuff because they cost less money than a PC.

01:09:45 ◼   ► So when PCs were using 32-bit processors, game consoles maybe had 8- or 16-bit processors

01:09:50 ◼   ► just because they had to cost so much less money and it cost less money to make smaller

01:09:55 ◼   ► chips in surface area.

01:09:57 ◼   ► And the more lanes you have for your address buses everywhere and the wider your interest

01:10:01 ◼   ► registers and all that other stuff, the bigger they are.

01:10:05 ◼   ► So once consoles, like so 16-bit was TurboGrafx-16, SNES, Genesis, second Master System was 8-bit,

01:10:15 ◼   ► right?

01:10:16 ◼   ► Anyway, you can look on Wikipedia what the bits were, but so there was 8-bit gaming consoles,

01:10:21 ◼   ► 16-bit.

01:10:22 ◼   ► Once we got to 32, around the era, surprisingly, of the Nintendo 64, we got to 32.

01:10:28 ◼   ► PlayStation was 32.

01:10:30 ◼   ► Nintendo 64 was arguably not as 64y as they made it out to be.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Okay, why do you say that?

01:10:38 ◼   ► I don't think every, like, it didn't, I have to look up Wikipedia, but I don't think the

01:10:43 ◼   ► memory bus in Nintendo 64, for example, was 64 bits wide.

01:10:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you're right, that there were, like, parts of it that were 64 bit, but not,

01:10:48 ◼   ► like, it was arguable.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Because, like, because why would you make the memory bus 64 bits wide?

01:10:52 ◼   ► I have no idea, I'm just pulling this off the top of my head, but seriously, there's

01:10:55 ◼   ► no way in hell, physically speaking, they have a 64-bit memory bus on something that

01:10:59 ◼   ► that had like two megabytes of RAM.

01:11:01 ◼   ► Like it doesn't make any sense.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Right, because you need four gigs

01:11:04 ◼   ► to exceed the addressability of 32 bits.

01:11:06 ◼   ► And if they did, it must have only been

01:11:08 ◼   ► because they were reusing an existing part,

01:11:10 ◼   ► but it just doesn't seem like they would do.

01:11:11 ◼   ► It's the same reason they had 24-bit memory bus

01:11:13 ◼   ► on the Macintosh, because first of all,

01:11:15 ◼   ► you're never gonna address like four gigabytes of RAM.

01:11:20 ◼   ► Gigabytes?

01:11:21 ◼   ► You can't have four gigabytes.

01:11:23 ◼   ► You know, the Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM.

01:11:25 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:11:26 ◼   ► - So even a 24-bit memory bus was over.

01:11:27 ◼   ► So you save money because you have less room on the chip,

01:11:32 ◼   ► less traces on your board, blah, blah, blah.

01:11:34 ◼   ► So I'm assuming that it wasn't,

01:11:35 ◼   ► but if any part of it is 64-bit, you can call it 64-bit.

01:11:39 ◼   ► - Okay, so a little bit of digging as you were talking.

01:11:42 ◼   ► The R4200 has a 32-entry translation

01:11:46 ◼   ► local side buffer, yada, yada, yada, blah.

01:11:47 ◼   ► The system bus is 64 bits wide

01:11:49 ◼   ► and operates at half the internal clock frequency.

01:11:51 ◼   ► However, the R4300i, which is what I believe was in the N64,

01:11:56 ◼   ► a derivative of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and a cut-down 32-bit system bus for

01:12:00 ◼   ► reduced cost.

01:12:01 ◼   ► David ELLIS-COPP- Yeah. But in marketing, for marketing, and by the way, like I said,

01:12:06 ◼   ► lots of times in 32-bit processors, the, like, you know, with x86 and x86 have an 80-bit-wide

01:12:13 ◼   ► floating-point register or something like that. I don't remember. Something else--

01:12:15 ◼   ► Steven

01:12:16 ◼   ► I just had to learn how to decode that format.

01:12:17 ◼   ► David ELLIS-COPP- Yeah. But no one ever said it's an 80-bit processor. Just because of

01:12:22 ◼   ► convention they just kind of say, "Oh, the memory bus and the integer registers, that's

01:12:26 ◼   ► kind of what we call the processor," right? That's why they're marketing terms, because 16-bit and

01:12:31 ◼   ► 32-bit, you might think it means something, but unless you know exactly what it means,

01:12:37 ◼   ► never mind that the width of the memory bus and the size of integer registers really says nothing

01:12:43 ◼   ► about how fast the thing processes stuff. Anyway, gating speed is hard, but there was a clear

01:12:49 ◼   ► with number of bits up to about the 32-bit point

01:12:53 ◼   ► where we hung out for a long time,

01:12:54 ◼   ► and now that we've gone to 64-bit,

01:12:56 ◼   ► where we really are 64-bit,

01:12:58 ◼   ► you know, even 64 memory loss,

01:13:00 ◼   ► I don't think we're at full 64.

01:13:01 ◼   ► What does the Xeons have?

01:13:03 ◼   ► They probably have 48-bit.

01:13:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause there was that PAE thing for a while

01:13:08 ◼   ► where to address more than, I think, 16 gigs,

01:13:11 ◼   ► or something like that, where even the Intel,

01:13:14 ◼   ► even when Intel went 64-bit,

01:13:16 ◼   ► you couldn't address 64-bits worth of memory

01:13:18 ◼   ► without certain tricks here and there.

01:13:20 ◼   ► And I think that has since been lifted

01:13:23 ◼   ► to a pretty high level, but--

01:13:24 ◼   ► - But probably not a full 64.

01:13:26 ◼   ► I know that you can buy servers

01:13:30 ◼   ► with like 256 gigs of RAM in them, right?

01:13:32 ◼   ► But you can't buy servers with however much RAM

01:13:36 ◼   ► fits in 64 bits, which is some astronomical amount.

01:13:38 ◼   ► - Right, yeah.

01:13:39 ◼   ► - Zeta bytes or whatever the hell it is.

01:13:42 ◼   ► So we're still saving money in that regard,

01:13:44 ◼   ► but 64-bit integer registers

01:13:47 ◼   ► are going to run us a good long while.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And I don't really see anything going to,

01:13:52 ◼   ► first of all, there's no need for a 128-bit memory bus

01:13:55 ◼   ► because we can't even physically put 64 bits of memory

01:13:57 ◼   ► like to fill that whole address space.

01:13:59 ◼   ► And 128-bit integers aren't really getting you

01:14:02 ◼   ► that much more of problems that you can deal with

01:14:06 ◼   ► in 64-bit registers.

01:14:07 ◼   ► Floating point registers are even wider

01:14:09 ◼   ► than they've ever been now too.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And on GPUs and in sort of the media streaming

01:14:14 ◼   ► SIMD instruction sets,

01:14:16 ◼   ► Those could actually stand to go a little bit wider just to be able to process more

01:14:20 ◼   ► values at once because a lot of times they're using like what they call half precision values

01:14:24 ◼   ► for games and stuff where you don't need—so they'll still use 16-bit stuff just to pack

01:14:28 ◼   ► more in to process more at once.

01:14:29 ◼   ► So there's probably headroom for those to all crank up to 32 and 64-bit or to use floating

01:14:35 ◼   ► point everywhere for everything.

01:14:36 ◼   ► So there's some headroom there.

01:14:37 ◼   ► But no one brags about GPUs in terms of number of bits either because it doesn't make any

01:14:40 ◼   ► sense and that's just not how they're marketed.

01:14:43 ◼   ► So this is a very long-winded explanation that gets into more technical detail than

01:14:48 ◼   ► you probably cared about, but I think that's part of the thing.

01:14:51 ◼   ► This was entirely a marketing thing that latched onto a real thing that happened in the progression

01:14:56 ◼   ► of the width of certain aspects of CPU design in the '70s, '80s, and '90s that has leveled

01:15:03 ◼   ► off because there's no longer any obvious benefit to widening these things at an accelerated

01:15:09 ◼   ► rate.

01:15:10 ◼   ► Again, setting aside GPUs, which there is some benefit

01:15:12 ◼   ► to continuing to widen stuff there,

01:15:14 ◼   ► and they will continue to be widened,

01:15:15 ◼   ► but GPUs aren't marketed in that way.

01:15:16 ◼   ► So, marketing's weird.

01:15:18 ◼   ► - I would also say, like, you know,

01:15:20 ◼   ► back in, you know, like we grew up in the,

01:15:22 ◼   ► well, Casey and I grew up in these days,

01:15:24 ◼   ► John was already 50, but you know,

01:15:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:15:27 ◼   ► we grew up in the time where, like, you know,

01:15:29 ◼   ► like we both really saw, like, the eight bit

01:15:32 ◼   ► to 16 bit to 32 bit generations.

01:15:35 ◼   ► And, you know, eight bit systems,

01:15:37 ◼   ► like they didn't market themselves as eight bit,

01:15:38 ◼   ► it was the NES versus the Sega Master System,

01:15:42 ◼   ► vast majority dominated by the NES.

01:15:44 ◼   ► And then the Sega Genesis was very heavily marketed

01:15:47 ◼   ► when it came out as 16-bit,

01:15:49 ◼   ► 'cause it was like, this is twice as good.

01:15:50 ◼   ► That was really like when the marketing, I think,

01:15:52 ◼   ► was like, oh my god, this is 16-bit.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And then the Super Nintendo came out,

01:15:56 ◼   ► and that was well-marketed to be 16-bit as well,

01:15:59 ◼   ► not as heavily as the Genesis, though.

01:16:01 ◼   ► And then we went 32-bit with the PlayStation 1,

01:16:05 ◼   ► the Sega Saturn.

01:16:07 ◼   ► And then the generations kinda started being staggered.

01:16:10 ◼   ► Like the N64 came out, there was a gap

01:16:13 ◼   ► between the 32-bit generation and the N64.

01:16:15 ◼   ► So it started becoming like, oh look,

01:16:17 ◼   ► since there's a gap, and the N64 was in many ways

01:16:20 ◼   ► significantly better than the Saturn and PlayStation 1,

01:16:22 ◼   ► then it was like, this is, they were kinda trying to say

01:16:25 ◼   ► this is the next generation, even though it was kind of like

01:16:29 ◼   ► a half-generational step.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Like the generations were no longer in sync.

01:16:33 ◼   ► And then that continued.

01:16:34 ◼   ► in the future generations, like Sega went kind of

01:16:38 ◼   ► middle of generation with the Dreamcast,

01:16:40 ◼   ► then the PS2 came out really early,

01:16:43 ◼   ► and then the Xbox happened like a little bit later,

01:16:45 ◼   ► so like the generation started to become more staggered,

01:16:49 ◼   ► and it wasn't all like, okay,

01:16:51 ◼   ► these are the two systems for this one,

01:16:52 ◼   ► then these are the two systems for this one.

01:16:54 ◼   ► And then of course this corresponded with,

01:16:56 ◼   ► that's what John was saying,

01:16:57 ◼   ► how like the bits kind of stop growing and stop mattering.

01:16:59 ◼   ► The number of bits has so little bearing

01:17:01 ◼   ► on modern performance.

01:17:03 ◼   ► Like computers back then, especially the kind of computers

01:17:06 ◼   ► that were in game consoles, were really simple.

01:17:10 ◼   ► I think once we got to the era of having many different

01:17:14 ◼   ► processors being involved and having them all be

01:17:17 ◼   ► pretty complex and then having things like

01:17:19 ◼   ► vector instructions which take the,

01:17:22 ◼   ► you mentioned SIMD and then you have GPUs coming

01:17:25 ◼   ► and you have the GPU revolution that's happened

01:17:27 ◼   ► over the last decade or so where GPUs have gotten

01:17:30 ◼   ► is so incredible and so much of computing

01:17:33 ◼   ► is moving to the GPU and that's where so much

01:17:36 ◼   ► of the action is happening and there the bits

01:17:39 ◼   ► are completely different than the CPU bits.

01:17:43 ◼   ► A lot of things don't work the same way

01:17:44 ◼   ► or don't matter the same ways.

01:17:46 ◼   ► So I think most of the reason we've moved past

01:17:49 ◼   ► the bits thing is that, like Simon asked,

01:17:54 ◼   ► how many bits does a modern console have?

01:17:56 ◼   ► You kinda can't say 'cause like well,

01:17:58 ◼   ► how many bits in what part?

01:18:00 ◼   ► Do the integer registers of the CPU or the address bus

01:18:04 ◼   ► even matter to modern performance?

01:18:06 ◼   ► Or is it, like, for a gaming console,

01:18:08 ◼   ► you're probably looking more at the GPU than anything else.

01:18:11 ◼   ► How many bits wide is the GPU, you know,

01:18:14 ◼   ► in various, like, buses and things like that?

01:18:15 ◼   ► Like, that might matter, but even that's hard to compare

01:18:19 ◼   ► between different architectures and different generations

01:18:21 ◼   ► and everything else, like, it's just,

01:18:23 ◼   ► everything is so much more advanced now

01:18:25 ◼   ► that it's way more complicated.

01:18:27 ◼   ► There really is no single number you can say,

01:18:29 ◼   ► "Alright, this is a 128-bit system."

01:18:32 ◼   ► You really can't say that anymore,

01:18:33 ◼   ► and it's not really a relevant question to even ask.

01:18:35 ◼   ► - They do have the numbers that they say, though.

01:18:38 ◼   ► Like, to that end, manufacturers do throw numbers at you,

01:18:41 ◼   ► but the numbers are no longer about width.

01:18:44 ◼   ► In most cases, although, like I said,

01:18:45 ◼   ► I think they probably will go back to width

01:18:47 ◼   ► once they start, once the GPU precision starts going up

01:18:51 ◼   ► and that starts mattering more in games,

01:18:52 ◼   ► but for now, they don't say that.

01:18:53 ◼   ► But what they do tell you is,

01:18:56 ◼   ► They tell you FLOPS, floating point operations per second, of the GPU, because that's kind

01:19:01 ◼   ► of how they just do the sort of, you know, my GPU is bigger than your GPU.

01:19:06 ◼   ► Like the architecture is so complicated that no one can comprehend it, right?

01:19:08 ◼   ► No regular people can comprehend it, and it's very regular and repeated, and maybe they'll

01:19:12 ◼   ► tell you the number of execution units or something, the number of engines or the number

01:19:16 ◼   ► of building blocks, but really what you want to know is floating point operations per second.

01:19:19 ◼   ► That's just some big aggregate number that doesn't really have any bearing because you're

01:19:23 ◼   ► never actually maxing it out.

01:19:24 ◼   ► maybe if you're a really good game developer you might be maxing out for some period of

01:19:27 ◼   ► time.

01:19:28 ◼   ► They'll tell you memory bandwidth, which is important for how you can shuffle information

01:19:33 ◼   ► to and from your big pool of RAM and to and from the CPU and the GPU.

01:19:39 ◼   ► And those numbers I think have way more bearing on performance than any kind of width, because

01:19:43 ◼   ► at least they tell you like, "I can process this many things in this amount of times,

01:19:46 ◼   ► and I can ship this many things from A to B."

01:19:49 ◼   ► And these days that's what people are measuring consoles are.

01:19:53 ◼   ► And then maybe clock speeds they'll throw in there, but really it's not that much.

01:19:56 ◼   ► They don't even do that much CPU measuring.

01:19:57 ◼   ► There's lots of ways you could measure CPU, but they don't even really compare those because

01:20:00 ◼   ► they know that for the most part, especially as we've gone to HD and now 4K, the GPU is

01:20:06 ◼   ► very often the limiting factor.

01:20:08 ◼   ► So they throw that stuff around.

01:20:10 ◼   ► So there's always some number that come up with a marketing team to let people measure

01:20:16 ◼   ► their consoles against other people's consoles.

01:20:20 ◼   ► But it hasn't been bits for a while.

01:20:22 ◼   ► And speaking on the bits thing, I don't know if this was clear, but the reason it mattered

01:20:27 ◼   ► so much back when we were going to 8 to 16 and 16 to 32 is not just the accountability

01:20:34 ◼   ► of things, of saying, "Oh, 65K is not quite enough."

01:20:37 ◼   ► I think the thing that brings it home as a link that I couldn't find, I just tried to

01:20:41 ◼   ► Google for it, maybe he'll be more successful, is to think about what it would be like to

01:20:47 ◼   ► build a game on a device that had eight-bit integer registers and no floating point.

01:20:55 ◼   ► So you get zero to 255, and you have to make a game.

01:21:01 ◼   ► That's all you have.

01:21:02 ◼   ► You can add, subtract, divide.

01:21:03 ◼   ► You can do whatever you want with those numbers, right?

01:21:06 ◼   ► But there's no floating point, and you can never have a number bigger than 255, and you

01:21:10 ◼   ► can have a number smaller than zero.

01:21:11 ◼   ► And if you want to do negatives, you can reserve a bit for sign and halve your range, right?

01:21:16 ◼   ► that's, if my memory serves me correctly, that is not just the hypothetical exercise,

01:21:20 ◼   ► that's the original Game Boy. And if you think of the sum of the games that are arranged

01:21:23 ◼   ► in the middle of Game Boy, like say you're making a side-scroller, how do you keep track

01:21:27 ◼   ► of where they are on the thing? Or say you're doing a top-view Legend of Zelda, where are

01:21:30 ◼   ► they on the map? How many inventory items do they have? Like, try making a game where

01:21:35 ◼   ► you can only count from 0 to 255. It's really hard. You have to be very clever. And never

01:21:39 ◼   ► mind the "Oh, by the way, that's also the thing that's figuring out how to draw the

01:21:42 ◼   ► screen and what palettes to go from and how to define sprites and do stuff like that.

01:21:47 ◼   ► That's why the bits mattered so much because when you went from 8-bit to 16-bit, suddenly

01:21:52 ◼   ► you had enough numbers for counting that you could define bigger color lookup tables and

01:21:59 ◼   ► you could make bigger sprites and ship them around and count to higher numbers to make

01:22:03 ◼   ► bigger maps.

01:22:04 ◼   ► And yes, of course, audio processing is, you know, higher bitrate for audio and stuff like

01:22:08 ◼   ► that.

01:22:09 ◼   ► You would see the result of those bits on the screen.

01:22:13 ◼   ► The clock speed, you don't even care what that was.

01:22:15 ◼   ► You're just like, now I can count to higher numbers.

01:22:17 ◼   ► Now I can keep track of more colors and more things on the screen because I have, you know,

01:22:22 ◼   ► there's literally, you can count to higher numbers.

01:22:24 ◼   ► It makes a big difference, especially when you don't have floating point to approximate

01:22:27 ◼   ► those things.

01:22:30 ◼   ► And so the leap from 816 to 32 were huge partially because of the bitness, just because you were

01:22:38 ◼   ► so starved for the ability to just count and do basic math and keep track of things in

01:22:45 ◼   ► the limited architecture. But once you can count to 4 billion, you're probably okay with

01:22:50 ◼   ► the counting thing. You're probably okay with the number of colors. You've got all that

01:22:54 ◼   ► stuff covered. And by the way, you have floating point. Some of the point along the line floating

01:22:57 ◼   ► point comes in, so if you really need to do something, you can do floating point. And

01:23:02 ◼   ► so that's why you don't have bits anymore. But I think bits were actually super important,

01:23:06 ◼   ► Like Margot said, 16-bit was a change you could see.

01:23:09 ◼   ► So much more than you could see the difference between PS3 and PS4.

01:23:13 ◼   ► 8-bit to 16-bit was just like, it was bigger than Retina.

01:23:17 ◼   ► It was, no one is confused about it.

01:23:19 ◼   ► Is this an NES game or SNES game?

01:23:21 ◼   ► Nobody is confused.

01:23:22 ◼   ► It was such a big difference.

01:23:23 ◼   ► That's kids these days.

01:23:25 ◼   ► The closest thing they have is appreciating how much faster new iPhones are than previous

01:23:29 ◼   ► ones because they're still getting faster pretty fast.

01:23:31 ◼   ► But there is no technological equivalent to 8, 16, 32-bit console progression for people

01:23:39 ◼   ► growing up today, so far.

01:23:40 ◼   ► And maybe when we get into the holographic things or biological modification, we'll

01:23:43 ◼   ► have even bigger changes.

01:23:44 ◼   ► But for now, you just have to listen to stories from old people.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Well, I would say, too, I think one of the biggest reasons why we stopped talking about

01:23:52 ◼   ► bits is that even the whole concept of having these console-measuring contests just fell

01:23:59 ◼   ► out of relevance because consoles are all so powerful now.

01:24:04 ◼   ► I don't know anybody who, I mean, maybe except Jon,

01:24:07 ◼   ► who would make a console buying decision

01:24:10 ◼   ► based on hardware specs.

01:24:12 ◼   ► - Oh, you're just not in the right forums.

01:24:16 ◼   ► Console wars still exist.

01:24:17 ◼   ► - Oh, and I'm sure those people will always talk about it,

01:24:20 ◼   ► but I think it's definitely not in the mass market,

01:24:24 ◼   ► if it ever was even.

01:24:25 ◼   ► Like, you don't buy a new console today

01:24:28 ◼   ► because of how many mega flops or teraflops

01:24:31 ◼   ► or whatever the unit is today.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Like, you don't buy a console today based on that.

01:24:35 ◼   ► Like, if you're deciding between the Xbox of the day

01:24:39 ◼   ► and the PlayStation of the day and the Switch of the day,

01:24:42 ◼   ► that decision is going to be made based on things like games,

01:24:46 ◼   ► like titles that are available for the systems.

01:24:48 ◼   ► It's gonna be based on things like media features,

01:24:52 ◼   ► heart, like output features, like does it support 4K or not,

01:24:55 ◼   ► VR potential, add-on potential,

01:24:57 ◼   ► that's gonna be the kind of thing

01:25:00 ◼   ► that most people buy their consoles based on these days.

01:25:03 ◼   ► The hardware is so good now.

01:25:05 ◼   ► The gains that are occurring in the hardware

01:25:09 ◼   ► are oftentimes not very relevant in numeric terms

01:25:13 ◼   ► compared to other attributes of the system

01:25:17 ◼   ► that aren't necessarily its raw performance.

01:25:20 ◼   ► - So my dad, as I've mentioned in the past on this show,

01:25:23 ◼   ► worked for IBM for almost my entire life.

01:25:26 ◼   ► And I remember that he was so excited

01:25:30 ◼   ► about the cell processor in the PlayStation 3

01:25:32 ◼   ► and was talking to me constantly about it.

01:25:35 ◼   ► I don't know how much of that was just

01:25:36 ◼   ► because he was an IBMer and it was an IBM processor,

01:25:39 ◼   ► or at least in part anyway.

01:25:41 ◼   ► I don't know how much of that was like

01:25:43 ◼   ► regular people marketing or how much of that

01:25:45 ◼   ► was just IBM patting themselves on the back.

01:25:47 ◼   ► But, and John, I'm kind of looking at you to clarify,

01:25:49 ◼   ► but I heard about this cell processor constantly about,

01:25:52 ◼   ► "Oh, Casey, did you hear what they're doing with the cell now?

01:25:54 ◼   ► Oh, and they're doing this for scientific computing.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Oh, they're doing this for some other thing.

01:25:58 ◼   ► It's not just about the PlayStation.

01:25:59 ◼   ► This is gonna revolutionize the way computers are built."

01:26:01 ◼   ► Which sorta kinda was, sorta kinda wasn't.

01:26:05 ◼   ► But anyway, did that marketing ever really happen,

01:26:07 ◼   ► or was that just being the child of an IBMer?

01:26:10 ◼   ► - It did, and like I said,

01:26:11 ◼   ► part of the reason you don't see as much of that these days

01:26:15 ◼   ► is just because the consoles became so similar,

01:26:17 ◼   ► because the ability to create the stuff

01:26:21 ◼   ► that goes into consoles started to go so far outside the realm of console developers' ability.

01:26:26 ◼   ► They couldn't even outsource it and say, "We want you to build you a CPU like this," just

01:26:30 ◼   ► because it costs so much money.

01:26:32 ◼   ► And so they started to have to pool their resources, and it would be like, "NVidia says,

01:26:38 ◼   ► 'Well, we've got a lot of GPUs, and we can customize one of our GPUs for your thing,

01:26:43 ◼   ► but we're not going to build you a fresh GPU from scratch just for your thing.

01:26:47 ◼   ► we can cobble together something out of leftover bits of the last generation of our desktop

01:26:51 ◼   ► parts. And there's no way you, Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony, are going to design your

01:26:57 ◼   ► own CPU from scratch. Like, forget it. So how about everybody just uses PowerPC CPUs

01:27:03 ◼   ► of a couple of different variants and AMD ATI GPUs. And so we had a whole generation

01:27:07 ◼   ► of consoles with PowerPC GPUs cobbled together from cores that were used in Macs, slightly

01:27:12 ◼   ► modified and ATI at that time GPUs.

01:27:18 ◼   ► And in this generation you've got x86 CPUs from AMD, they're in the PlayStation and the

01:27:22 ◼   ► Xbox that use that, and GPUs from AMD also.

01:27:28 ◼   ► Very similar, very off the shelf parts.

01:27:31 ◼   ► So what are you going to brag about, right?

01:27:32 ◼   ► And so the cell was different.

01:27:35 ◼   ► The cell was probably the last gasp of, we want a radically different thing that is not

01:27:45 ◼   ► just a bunch of PowerPC or x86 CPU cores thrown in, although there were PowerPC cores in there,

01:27:49 ◼   ► because you can't do everything from scratch.

01:27:53 ◼   ► But it's going to be really weird and really different and really exotic and have lots

01:27:56 ◼   ► of interesting ideas in it.

01:27:59 ◼   ► And to make that happen, they had to convince IBM, or IBM had to convince itself, that your

01:28:05 ◼   ► dad said, "It's not just about the PlayStation, there's going to be lots of applications for

01:28:09 ◼   ► the cell, and we can use it for this, and we can use it for that, to justify the massive

01:28:11 ◼   ► investment they put in partnership with all these other people to make this thing."

01:28:15 ◼   ► And they did reuse PowerPC cores for certain, for like, I forget what they call it, the

01:28:19 ◼   ► PPEs, right?

01:28:20 ◼   ► But for the SPUs, they made these other little cores, and they made this ring bus and everything,

01:28:26 ◼   ► and it was a really cool, really interesting CPU architecture.

01:28:30 ◼   ► Like, go read the articles about the cell.

01:28:33 ◼   ► It is novel and interesting and has lots of ideas from like supercomputing and other things

01:28:38 ◼   ► in a small package.

01:28:40 ◼   ► Totally a technological feat.

01:28:41 ◼   ► So your dad was right to be excited about it.

01:28:44 ◼   ► But to Marco's point, you know, people don't care about that.

01:28:51 ◼   ► They just care about the games.

01:28:52 ◼   ► And to your point, Casey, Sony did market the exoticness of the cell as much as they

01:28:56 ◼   ► could.

01:28:57 ◼   ► They were all about the cell is different than other people's things.

01:29:00 ◼   ► And it was different.

01:29:02 ◼   ► pitch was it's different in a way that will make you have amazing things. In reality,

01:29:06 ◼   ► it was different in a way that will make it very difficult to write dev tools that work

01:29:09 ◼   ► to it because it doesn't work like any other game console, and it was very difficult to

01:29:14 ◼   ► write a program that efficiently used all those resources because it was honestly not

01:29:18 ◼   ► quite a good balance in resources. You really had to figure out how to orchestrate them

01:29:22 ◼   ► just so you were using them all to their maximum extent and not leaving any idle, and it was

01:29:26 ◼   ► just—it took years and years for the best developers, game developers in the world,

01:29:30 ◼   ► to figure out how to wring all the performance out of the cell. By the time The Last of Us

01:29:33 ◼   ► came out, it's like, "Wow, PS3 is pretty powerful. It's going to do some pretty amazing stuff."

01:29:38 ◼   ► But it's still kind of unbalanced, and the whole system is kind of RAM-starved, and I

01:29:41 ◼   ► wish it had more of this and a little bit of that. And it's the, you know, Casey must

01:29:46 ◼   ► love this, because the current generation of consoles, and you know, for a while now,

01:29:51 ◼   ► it's been the American approach of "There's no substitute for cubic inches." You know

01:29:53 ◼   ► you can solve this problem? Give it a ton of RAM, give it a big powerful x86 CPU and

01:30:00 ◼   ► like a cut down desktop GPU. Done and done. No exotic architecture needed. Solve the problem

01:30:06 ◼   ► by throwing displacement. That's what they're throwing at, right? And it's easy to develop

01:30:10 ◼   ► for it because it's kind of the same, you know, PC, game console, whatever. You get

01:30:16 ◼   ► an x86 CPU, a GPU that you're familiar with, 3D APIs that you're familiar with, a mature

01:30:22 ◼   ► toolchain and everything that's what people want and that's what they have so

01:30:25 ◼   ► the cell approach was technologically really cool and interesting and they did

01:30:29 ◼   ► market the really cool interesting part of it but it ended up making a console

01:30:34 ◼   ► that didn't produce the results in terms of cool fun novel games that Sony wanted

01:30:40 ◼   ► it to and so everybody learned the lesson of that including Sony and the

01:30:43 ◼   ► ps4 was like a giant apology about the ps3 the ps4 fixed everything that was

01:30:47 ◼   ► wrong with the ps3 was so conventional so straightforward had so much friggin

01:30:51 ◼   ► RAM was so simple to develop for and that's why the PS4 did so much better than the PS3.

01:30:58 ◼   ► That went on longer than I expected but that was awesome. So thank you John for telling

01:31:03 ◼   ► us about it.

01:31:04 ◼   ► Everybody loves game consoles. They're great.

01:31:06 ◼   ► I want to argue with you but I've been really liking my Switch lately as I keep bringing

01:31:10 ◼   ► up over and over again.

01:31:11 ◼   ► That uses an off the shelf Nvidia Tegra X1 because Nintendo can't even afford to have

01:31:16 ◼   ► people make mildly custom things for them anymore.

01:31:19 ◼   ► - I love the Switch.

01:31:20 ◼   ► I'm so, it is the system I,

01:31:22 ◼   ► and you know, it is the system that I've been happiest with

01:31:26 ◼   ► basically since my Genesis.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Like that's, I have not had a game system since my Genesis

01:31:31 ◼   ► that I was this happy with.

01:31:33 ◼   ► And it has almost nothing to do with the processor

01:31:36 ◼   ► or the GPU, I have no idea what it has in it.

01:31:38 ◼   ► I didn't look at that when getting it.

01:31:41 ◼   ► I haven't thought to look at that since.

01:31:43 ◼   ► I have no idea how it compares to the Xbox 17

01:31:47 ◼   ► whatever the hell Xbox is the current Xbox.

01:31:49 ◼   ► - Way less powerful, that's how it compares.

01:31:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, probably, but it doesn't matter at all.

01:31:54 ◼   ► Like, it just doesn't, because what matters is the games,

01:31:56 ◼   ► and the games are awesome.

01:31:57 ◼   ► Like, that's, that to me is so much more important

01:32:00 ◼   ► than any of the specs, and like,

01:32:03 ◼   ► I'm just, I'm incredibly happy with my game console,

01:32:06 ◼   ► and I have no idea what's in it.

01:32:08 ◼   ► - So it does matter in that if it was really difficult

01:32:11 ◼   ► to develop for the Switch, it would take longer

01:32:14 ◼   ► to make games that are up to the standards

01:32:17 ◼   ► currently playing them, right? And there will be fewer games because not as many developers

01:32:22 ◼   ► would be able to, you know, so like there are aspects of technology that impact, like,

01:32:27 ◼   ► how do we end up with good games? You need to have a minimum baseline of like, "Oh, I can develop

01:32:32 ◼   ► games to this and it's not too weird. And I can develop them efficiently with skills I already

01:32:36 ◼   ► have without encountering too many bugs, without having to learn an entirely new custom dev

01:32:42 ◼   ► environment and 3D API and toolchain and everything.

01:32:46 ◼   ► Like, that's a part of the technology selection that does

01:32:48 ◼   ► impact the part that you care about.

01:32:50 ◼   ► I would also argue that the power of the system

01:32:53 ◼   ► also influences what you care about,

01:32:54 ◼   ► but it's clear that the Switch is

01:32:56 ◼   ► a compromise between a plugged into the wall TV connected

01:33:01 ◼   ► console and a portable one.

01:33:02 ◼   ► So they have to make compromises in power,

01:33:05 ◼   ► and it is less powerful.

01:33:06 ◼   ► And I think that decrease in power

01:33:09 ◼   ► gives you the huge benefits of portability,

01:33:11 ◼   ► which according to Nintendo's surveys that they're running, tons of people use this in

01:33:14 ◼   ► portable mode, so they made the right choice there.

01:33:16 ◼   ► But the downside is that games that are possible on the PS4 and Xbox One X, especially the

01:33:24 ◼   ► Xbox One X, but also the Xbox One, may not be possible on the Switch.

01:33:30 ◼   ► And so they won't even get ports, or if they do get ports, they'll be cut down ports, which

01:33:32 ◼   ► means that most people will want to play them on their consoles, right?

01:33:35 ◼   ► So power is still a thing that Apple needs to—Apple.

01:33:38 ◼   ► Nintendo needs to give up with.

01:33:40 ◼   ► There are rumors that Nintendo actually is going to come out with a sort of a Switch

01:33:43 ◼   ► Pro with a more powerful, probably, Nvidia Tegra X2 maybe chip inside it.

01:33:48 ◼   ► Again, probably off the shelf.

01:33:51 ◼   ► Because that's the thing they're doing these days is making spec-bumped versions of existing

01:33:55 ◼   ► consoles that nevertheless play all the old games, sort of like a generation and a half

01:33:58 ◼   ► type thing.

01:33:59 ◼   ► And the reason they do that is, like, Nintendo also knows if we make this more powerful,

01:34:05 ◼   ► it expands the realm of the kind of games we can make.

01:34:08 ◼   ► The Breath of the Wild's follow-up,

01:34:09 ◼   ► if there ever is one for the Switch,

01:34:11 ◼   ► but whatever platform it's on,

01:34:12 ◼   ► we'll be able to have a more detailed,

01:34:15 ◼   ► more expansive world than this one is.

01:34:17 ◼   ► In the same way that you could never do Breath of the Wild

01:34:19 ◼   ► on a Wii U or a Wii,

01:34:21 ◼   ► like that better game that we all love,

01:34:24 ◼   ► it's just care about the games,

01:34:25 ◼   ► you can't do that game on less powerful consoles

01:34:28 ◼   ► because the world is too big,

01:34:29 ◼   ► the draw distances are too large,

01:34:30 ◼   ► doesn't have the hardware or software

01:34:33 ◼   ► all too set for all the level of detail stuff,

01:34:35 ◼   ► doesn't have the RAM, so on and so forth.

01:34:36 ◼   ► So technology does enable good games and has to be pursued, but absolute spec numbers are

01:34:43 ◼   ► not the end all be all.

01:34:44 ◼   ► Because if you add up all the theoretical floating point operations that the cell could

01:34:47 ◼   ► do, it looks like it's this amazing monster CPU, when in the end people couldn't even

01:34:50 ◼   ► figure out how to use half of it and half of the launch games were leaving huge swaths

01:34:55 ◼   ► of the surface area, the silicon surface area of the chip, idle because they just couldn't

01:34:58 ◼   ► figure out how to even use all those cores and their engine only knew how to use like

01:35:01 ◼   ► one or two.

01:35:02 ◼   ► use one or two and leave half the hardware idle like the launch games, that's not a good

01:35:07 ◼   ► situation.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and just to put a period on this four-hour Ask ATP, I really love having the ability

01:35:15 ◼   ► to pop the Switch out of the dock and just walk around with it.

01:35:19 ◼   ► And I might be the only one.

01:35:20 ◼   ► I mean, obviously what you said, Jon, is that it sounds like Nintendo is seeing a lot of

01:35:24 ◼   ► that, but—

01:35:25 ◼   ► Yeah, they released some numbers like we surveyed our users, like something that Apple never

01:35:29 ◼   ► does and say, "How often do you use your Switch docked portable and both?" And the

01:35:34 ◼   ► number of people who are like me and Marco who only use it docked was very small. It

01:35:38 ◼   ► was like 20 percent or something, and 80 percent of people are using it portable at least some

01:35:42 ◼   ► of the time.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. And I use it probably half and half, to be honest, which I know is probably

01:35:48 ◼   ► barbaric to you, but, you know, it is what it is. All right, so we'll try to do an abridged

01:35:53 ◼   ► couple of AskATPs to round this out. Johnny O. would like to know, "Hey, what's the deal

01:35:58 ◼   ► with sports. He writes, "Please explain to the nerd crowd the concept of being a

01:36:02 ◼   ► sports team fan. I don't understand why people refer to my team, etc., unless

01:36:06 ◼   ► they've actually played for that team." Well, you've written into the right

01:36:09 ◼   ► podcast, Jonny. We are sports experts here. No, we can cover this quickly. So, sports

01:36:15 ◼   ► is about more than just, as with anything in life, is about more than just looking

01:36:19 ◼   ► at the the quote-unquote ones and zeros of it and looking kind of a little bit

01:36:23 ◼   ► deeper. And so, let's talk about my team. So, I went to school at Virginia Tech in

01:36:28 ◼   ► in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech had, at the time,

01:36:31 ◼   ► this was in the very early 2000s,

01:36:33 ◼   ► had a exceptionally great football team

01:36:36 ◼   ► that was quarterbacked by Michael Vick,

01:36:38 ◼   ► who ended up being a not-so-exceptionally great human being.

01:36:41 ◼   ► - Wait, is this the Dukies, HomePods, whatever they are?

01:36:46 ◼   ► - Hokies.

01:36:47 ◼   ► - There we go, yep.

01:36:47 ◼   ► - There you go.

01:36:48 ◼   ► So the reason one would be enthusiastic about that

01:36:53 ◼   ► is because in the case of college sports,

01:36:55 ◼   ► that's your peers.

01:36:56 ◼   ► were also students of the same university that are playing in this, you know, national

01:37:02 ◼   ► arena. And so why is it my team? Because I was also a student at Virginia Tech, just

01:37:09 ◼   ► like…

01:37:10 ◼   ► Because you went to school in the same school that they did.

01:37:15 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:16 ◼   ► So you were there.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:18 ◼   ► And they were there.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:20 ◼   ► So doesn't it make it our time, Casey?

01:37:21 ◼   ► You don't get that reference. Stop laughing, Margot.

01:37:24 ◼   ► - No, I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation.

01:37:26 ◼   ► You're right, I don't get the reference,

01:37:28 ◼   ► but when I was in high school,

01:37:30 ◼   ► I was in the marching band for the football team, right?

01:37:33 ◼   ► So I was literally at every football game,

01:37:37 ◼   ► sitting 30 feet from the football players,

01:37:40 ◼   ► watching the whole game,

01:37:41 ◼   ► participating in this weird way of playing music

01:37:44 ◼   ► to encourage them and celebrate victories in the game.

01:37:47 ◼   ► And I still wouldn't say we won.

01:37:49 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:37:50 ◼   ► I would never call my team, our team,

01:37:52 ◼   ► It was literally like I was right there.

01:37:54 ◼   ► I was somewhat involved.

01:37:56 ◼   ► I never thought that way.

01:37:58 ◼   ► This is my team.

01:37:59 ◼   ► I couldn't give less of a crap how they did.

01:38:03 ◼   ► - But anyway, I think Casey is explaining,

01:38:05 ◼   ► is an accurate explanation of why people feel

01:38:07 ◼   ► it's their team.

01:38:08 ◼   ► I just think, my comment was being snarky and I'm silly,

01:38:11 ◼   ► but I think people who go to the school

01:38:12 ◼   ► do feel it's their team because they go to the same school.

01:38:15 ◼   ► Despite the fact that I feel like most college athletes,

01:38:17 ◼   ► especially at the highest level,

01:38:18 ◼   ► are really going to a different school than you are.

01:38:20 ◼   ► - Oh, absolutely. - The experience of school

01:38:21 ◼   ► so different than your experience of school. But it is still your school, and you are going

01:38:26 ◼   ► to it, and so are they.

01:38:28 ◼   ► Yeah, and this is also applicable for professional sports, except it's a much more nebulous

01:38:35 ◼   ► association.

01:38:36 ◼   ► Except the school is your state and/or region.

01:38:37 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:38:38 ◼   ► And/or country for the Toronto Blue Team.

01:38:41 ◼   ► Right. So if you look at a professional sports team, it's often that it's the team that

01:38:45 ◼   ► either your family has been rooting for. So as an example, I'm a fan of the New York

01:38:49 ◼   ► Giants, and my grandfather, my mother's father, has been a Giants fan pretty much since the

01:38:55 ◼   ► franchise started. And so I just grew up watching the Giants. That's just what we did. And at

01:39:00 ◼   ► the time we lived in the New York area. And so it made sense for that to be our team because

01:39:05 ◼   ► of geographic proximity. Where this really falls apart is all the completely, all the

01:39:12 ◼   ► people who are woefully uninformed and think that the Dallas Cowboys or the Pittsburgh

01:39:16 ◼   ► Steelers are good football teams with the notable exception of the 10 fans from each team that actually live in Dallas or Pittsburgh

01:39:23 ◼   ► Because if you ever notice an NFL fan

01:39:26 ◼   ► Generally speaking they either like the Cowboys or the Steelers and generally speaking they have no association with either Pittsburgh or Dallas

01:39:32 ◼   ► Not that I'm bitter about this. That's old football fans who remember when the Cowboys and the Steelers would win Super Bowls, right?

01:39:38 ◼   ► Steelers? They win Super Bowls? Isn't it now about like Cowboys versus the Cheaters?

01:39:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really how the Cowboys versus anybody yeah, then the cheaters are John's team actually I don't have a team

01:39:50 ◼   ► Well, cuz your team is cheaters. Yes. I wouldn't want to claim them either. I wasn't rooting for the Patriots in the Super Bowl

01:39:56 ◼   ► I'm just gonna say that so anyway, so the idea is that

01:39:58 ◼   ► Take something that you either participated in as a kid. So as an example, I played a little bit of basketball as a kid and

01:40:05 ◼   ► Imagine watching something that you can do. All right, but watching some watching somebody who is a professional

01:40:12 ◼   ► at that thing and it's just it's it's almost poetic watching how good they are at that particular skill in that particular sport

01:40:20 ◼   ► That's what's that's what's fun about it

01:40:22 ◼   ► And then when you add in that kind of ownership either by way of a school affiliation or geographic affiliation

01:40:29 ◼   ► It just becomes fun. And you know, why would you watch somebody play a video game, right? It's the same thing

01:40:35 ◼   ► Now, maybe you wouldn't claim that that's your team within the video game, but video games have teams now too though

01:40:40 ◼   ► That's their point. E-sports actually do have teams and the teams are regional and they're so they're trying to adopt that model

01:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah, but you get the idea is that?

01:40:48 ◼   ► Imagine something that you do

01:40:50 ◼   ► But it's some other people that do it a hell of a lot better than you will ever do it and it's just cool to

01:40:55 ◼   ► Watch and and plus, you know games are fun games are fun to watch games are fun to play

01:40:59 ◼   ► And so it's just a confluence of all of that and I have a feeling that Johnny Oh

01:41:03 ◼   ► You're gonna listen to this and be like, yeah that didn't convince me at all and that's okay

01:41:06 ◼   ► sports aren't for everyone. And I'm not a crazy sports person that watches ESPN all day every day

01:41:12 ◼   ► and lives for SportsCenter or anything like that. I just enjoy football and occasionally a couple

01:41:17 ◼   ► other sports too. Well, the question wasn't about why do I enjoy sports, it was about why being a

01:41:22 ◼   ► sports team fan of having my team. I think you did address that, but I don't think the question