ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► When we last saw our heroes, they were doing all the things they normally do.

00:00:05 ◼   ► But today, they do something different. This is the Q&A episode.

00:00:09 ◼   ► All right, so it is still in ATP time, Friday the 4th of August. But most of you listening are

00:00:17 ◼   ► probably listening somewhere on or around the 9th of August. And we did this because, as we covered

00:00:22 ◼   ► last episode, we didn't plan our vacation as well. In any case, so yeah, we're gonna do a Q&A episode.

00:00:28 ◼   ► So we had solicited "had" being the keyword, solicited questions via Twitter.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Are you telling our audience to please stop asking questions now?

00:00:36 ◼   ► Is that what that means?

00:00:37 ◼   ► Well, you can certainly continue to ask questions, but we are not planning another Q&A episode

00:00:42 ◼   ► for at least a year.

00:00:44 ◼   ► So you can ask, but they're pretty much going into the ether.

00:00:48 ◼   ► But what about the Ask ATP segment that we're going to add to the show?

00:00:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I would like to keep the questions going.

00:00:53 ◼   ► Oh!

00:00:54 ◼   ► I mean, they don't have to be as many questions, because we're answering like two of them,

00:00:57 ◼   ► but…

00:00:58 ◼   ► All right, the hosts have spoken.

00:01:01 ◼   ► We have a…

00:01:02 ◼   ► So just two or three people ask a question every week.

00:01:05 ◼   ► You figure it out amongst yourselves, you coordinate, and then…

00:01:09 ◼   ► All right, fair enough.

00:01:10 ◼   ► So we are going to do this in quasi-chronological order.

00:01:15 ◼   ► We have selected questions…

00:01:16 ◼   ► That's a terrible idea!

00:01:17 ◼   ► Because of this…

00:01:18 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:01:19 ◼   ► They were going into this spreadsheet, but I was afraid if I tried to sort them that

00:01:22 ◼   ► that it would mess with the automate, I don't know,

00:01:25 ◼   ► like whatever, we're gonna go from top to bottom

00:01:28 ◼   ► in this document.

00:01:28 ◼   ► - I think you can't save, the document you can't save.

00:01:31 ◼   ► - I think it turns out that adding every single tweet

00:01:35 ◼   ► with this hashtag to a giant spreadsheet

00:01:38 ◼   ► and having no way to like filter or upvote

00:01:41 ◼   ► or sort them at all might not be the best tool

00:01:43 ◼   ► for this job, turns out.

00:01:45 ◼   ► - Well, I am happy for you to coordinate the replacement,

00:01:50 ◼   ► my friend, 'cause this seemed like the lowest impact

00:01:53 ◼   ► way to me.

00:01:53 ◼   ► I agree with you, it is not ideal,

00:01:55 ◼   ► but it's the lowest impact version I got.

00:01:57 ◼   ► - Are we supposed to be using things like Reddit?

00:01:59 ◼   ► Is that a thing?

00:02:00 ◼   ► Are we supposed to be using--

00:02:01 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah, that is what the Reddits are for, isn't it?

00:02:03 ◼   ► - No, we're not supposed to be doing that.

00:02:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:07 ◼   ► - All right, that's question number one, answered.

00:02:09 ◼   ► - All right.

00:02:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:10 ◼   ► - All that said, if anyone on this show or off the show

00:02:15 ◼   ► wants to make "A replacement that's better

00:02:16 ◼   ► than this spreadsheet," I will endorse it.

00:02:19 ◼   ► - It would be, we probably should have some way

00:02:20 ◼   ► to upvote or downvote, and some way for one of the admins,

00:02:24 ◼   ► which would be us, to say, all right,

00:02:25 ◼   ► this question we're just not gonna answer,

00:02:27 ◼   ► so just kill it.

00:02:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, but unlike Reddit, I'm not sure this needs

00:02:30 ◼   ► to be publicly accessible, but whatever.

00:02:33 ◼   ► - All right, let's do it.

00:02:35 ◼   ► - Okay, so the show notes for this episode

00:02:38 ◼   ► may or may not exist, we'll see what happens.

00:02:40 ◼   ► But because it's basically just a bunch

00:02:43 ◼   ► of questions and answers.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And so I'm just gonna try to MC this

00:02:47 ◼   ► do the best I can with names, with questions, etc. And we're going to dig in with Gulik,

00:02:53 ◼   ► who asks, "Hey, why no more toaster reviews, Jon?"

00:02:58 ◼   ► The toaster reviews were a sponsorship, believe it or not. I know you don't remember that,

00:03:02 ◼   ► but like, they weren't just like, "Hey, you're reviewing a bunch of toasters." It was actually

00:03:05 ◼   ► ads for Cards Against Humanity, but instead of an ad read, they wanted me to do toaster

00:03:09 ◼   ► reviews. So they are not advertising, quote unquote, "advertising" on the show anymore.

00:03:15 ◼   ► "I don't have any other campaigns."

00:03:16 ◼   ► So that's why there's no more toaster reviews.

00:03:17 ◼   ► And if they did, they wouldn't do toasters again,

00:03:19 ◼   ► so you're not gonna get any more toaster reviews.

00:03:22 ◼   ► - And we have had many people suggest new things

00:03:26 ◼   ► that we could have a series of reviews for.

00:03:30 ◼   ► And honestly, none of them sounded as funny as that.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Like, that was such a great thing.

00:03:35 ◼   ► It had a wonderful progression, it ended.

00:03:38 ◼   ► I don't think it could have continued indefinitely.

00:03:39 ◼   ► I think it was pretty much done when it ended.

00:03:41 ◼   ► And every other suggestion we've seen since then

00:03:43 ◼   ► has been less funny.

00:03:45 ◼   ► So yeah, nobody has tackled anything more than that

00:03:48 ◼   ► and I think it probably won't happen,

00:03:50 ◼   ► at least in that format.

00:03:51 ◼   ► - And those suggestions weren't from sponsors, right?

00:03:54 ◼   ► That sponsorship is the key part of the toaster.

00:03:56 ◼   ► 'Cause I don't think we would have endured

00:03:58 ◼   ► like in the middle of a tech podcast,

00:04:00 ◼   ► let's talk about toasters for five minutes

00:04:01 ◼   ► unless it was a sponsorship behind it.

00:04:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think one of the funniest things about that

00:04:07 ◼   ► was like Cards Against Humanity,

00:04:09 ◼   ► and we later came to learn that the person

00:04:11 ◼   ► who was organizing all this there was Alex Cox,

00:04:14 ◼   ► now of Dubai Friday fame.

00:04:15 ◼   ► And like they really,

00:04:19 ◼   ► they weren't just sending random toasters,

00:04:22 ◼   ► like there was a clear progression,

00:04:24 ◼   ► like getting from the normal ones slowly

00:04:27 ◼   ► into the really bizarre and crazy and horrible things

00:04:30 ◼   ► like those big breakfast stations

00:04:32 ◼   ► that could make the egg on top and stuff like that.

00:04:34 ◼   ► It was clearly in this wonderful progression

00:04:37 ◼   ► that it was just so well done.

00:04:40 ◼   ► and you gotta give Cards Against Humanity credit

00:04:43 ◼   ► for that incredible run.

00:04:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, completely agree with you.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Kathy Wise writes in, "What cameras are you using now?"

00:04:52 ◼   ► And so I will begin, I'm using the same camera

00:04:55 ◼   ► that we got shortly before Declan was born,

00:04:57 ◼   ► that's an Olympus OM-D EM10,

00:05:00 ◼   ► which is a truly terrible name.

00:05:02 ◼   ► It is a Micro Four Thirds camera.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I have a prime lens for it,

00:05:06 ◼   ► that is what I use generally speaking,

00:05:07 ◼   ► and if you remember from the last episode,

00:05:10 ◼   ► which in ATP time happened about 15 minutes ago.

00:05:13 ◼   ► I also have a zoom lens, which I actually quite like.

00:05:17 ◼   ► And I was going to argue with you, Marco,

00:05:18 ◼   ► when you were saying, oh, you can't get a zoom lens

00:05:20 ◼   ► that covers all three parts of the triangle, if you will.

00:05:24 ◼   ► But as you were talking, you had mentioned,

00:05:26 ◼   ► well, if you do have a decent zoom lens,

00:05:29 ◼   ► that means it's exorbitantly expensive

00:05:31 ◼   ► and still probably has some other concessions.

00:05:35 ◼   ► And that is the case for me.

00:05:37 ◼   ► the zoom lens I have was like $800 or something like that.

00:05:40 ◼   ► And otherwise it's very nice, it's F2.8.

00:05:42 ◼   ► I think it's 100 to 300 millimeters in regular cameras.

00:05:47 ◼   ► I forget what it is in a Micro Four Thirds.

00:05:50 ◼   ► But anyway, I like it a lot, but it was very expensive.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Marco, what are you using?

00:05:56 ◼   ► - I am mostly using my iPhone, which makes me sad,

00:06:00 ◼   ► but that is the reality of it.

00:06:02 ◼   ► We do have the 5D Mark IV now in our family.

00:06:07 ◼   ► We actually had, we had for years,

00:06:09 ◼   ► ever since they came out, we had the 5D Mark II,

00:06:12 ◼   ► which came out I think in 2007 or 2008, something like that.

00:06:16 ◼   ► It was late 2008.

00:06:19 ◼   ► And so we had that since then and it was great,

00:06:22 ◼   ► but it was getting long on the tooth

00:06:23 ◼   ► in a lot of different ways.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And so for a little while, I had a Sony phase.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Because the Sony A series of cameras,

00:06:31 ◼   ► First I had the little RX1, then I had the A7R II,

00:06:35 ◼   ► and those are awesome cameras in a lot of ways.

00:06:38 ◼   ► But I found, I'll make it brief

00:06:40 ◼   ► 'cause we've talked about this before,

00:06:42 ◼   ► I have found that I generally prefer the speed

00:06:47 ◼   ► and handling and battery life of full-sized SLRs

00:06:51 ◼   ► to the little Sony mirrorless cameras.

00:06:53 ◼   ► And I think over time that will probably eventually

00:06:56 ◼   ► change back as the little Sonys get better.

00:06:59 ◼   ► You know, the A9 has now come out

00:07:01 ◼   ► and it solves some of the problems I had.

00:07:03 ◼   ► It makes certain things worse.

00:07:05 ◼   ► So maybe there'll be an A7R III at some point

00:07:09 ◼   ► or an A9 Mark II or something like that

00:07:12 ◼   ► that I might go back for, but for now I'm very happy

00:07:14 ◼   ► in the world of big Canon SLRs when I need fancy photos.

00:07:19 ◼   ► But I take fancy photos less and less every year.

00:07:23 ◼   ► My wife takes them much more often

00:07:25 ◼   ► and she is way, way better of a photographer than I am.

00:07:29 ◼   ► So most of like the good pictures of our family and stuff are taken by her.

00:07:35 ◼   ► And so that kind of frees me out to do mostly the casual stuff.

00:07:38 ◼   ► So that's -- I'm shooting mostly on my iPhone if I shoot anything at all.

00:07:42 ◼   ► >> I'm still using my Sony A6300.

00:07:45 ◼   ► I thought of trading in for a 6500.

00:07:47 ◼   ► That was right up until I saw that the battery life was slightly worse.

00:07:51 ◼   ► And that really much did it for me because the battery life in 6300 is just barely enough.

00:07:56 ◼   ► Like I have two batteries.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And on vacation I never needed to swap the batteries even a day at the ocean, but I come

00:08:01 ◼   ► close and so I don't think I can give up that whatever 10% battery life.

00:08:06 ◼   ► And the 6500 is more expensive and so I've never done the swap.

00:08:09 ◼   ► I'm still looking at it.

00:08:10 ◼   ► I'm still, you know, I would still recommend the 6500 or the 6300 as long as you can deal

00:08:15 ◼   ► with the battery life, but be sure that you can because that's a big quality of life issue.

00:08:19 ◼   ► So I'm happy with that.

00:08:21 ◼   ► The only new lens I got recently is that big zoom.

00:08:24 ◼   ► I forget which one it is, but it's one of the Sony ones.

00:08:27 ◼   ► It's not a very good lens, like whatever.

00:08:29 ◼   ► What is it, 55-300, so it's a pretty big range again adjusting for what that is on an APC

00:08:37 ◼   ► sensor.

00:08:38 ◼   ► It's not, you know, those are the full frame numbers.

00:08:41 ◼   ► Still like my 50mm prime the best.

00:08:43 ◼   ► I have my own super expensive zoom that does 16-70 and is over $1000 and that is my sort

00:08:50 ◼   ► of general all purpose lens that I keep on the thing.

00:08:52 ◼   ► It's not as good as the 50 prime and it doesn't zoom as long as the big zoom but it's kind

00:08:57 ◼   ► of a nice all-arounder.

00:08:59 ◼   ► To get a reasonable, okay all-arounder, a thousand bucks.

00:09:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Indeed.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Also from Kathy Wise, "Did the last show, which was actually two shows ago if I'm doing

00:09:09 ◼   ► this mental math right, shame you into clearing out your application folders?"

00:09:12 ◼   ► No, it did not.

00:09:13 ◼   ► Nope.

00:09:14 ◼   ► Not only did it not shame me into cleaning out my application folder, but I realized

00:09:19 ◼   ► after he finished that show that I was just looking at slash applications.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I also have a tilde slash applications with way more things in it.

00:09:26 ◼   ► more things in it, which is, that's like an old, an old school next early Mac OS X error

00:09:31 ◼   ► thing of having an applications folder in your home directory, which you can totally

00:09:35 ◼   ► have and the OS knows about it and gives it the little A icon, but only weird people do

00:09:41 ◼   ► that.

00:09:42 ◼   ► All right, moving on.

00:09:44 ◼   ► Oplez asks, "Which ad blocker do you guys, did actually Marco choose?"

00:09:50 ◼   ► It's not you guys.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Which ad blocker did Marco choose?

00:09:53 ◼   ► I'm kind of, you know, I was for a long time, so as soon as I killed peace, within I think

00:10:00 ◼   ► a month or two I stopped using it too. You kind of just to be fair, it kind of felt wrong

00:10:04 ◼   ► for me to use it and no one else did. I switched to one blocker back then and one blocker is

00:10:10 ◼   ► fine. It's, I don't have really much bad to say about it or much great to say about it.

00:10:16 ◼   ► It's just if you're going to go with one of those mass market blockers, one blocker at

00:10:20 ◼   ► the time I looked was the best one. I have noticed though over time more and

00:10:25 ◼   ► more sites are broken by it and and it there was a there was one of the iOS 11

00:10:32 ◼   ► betas where it was not working due to some limits that had changed so I went

00:10:37 ◼   ► looking and I started using better which is better.fyi it's a paid app and

00:10:42 ◼   ► it's like five bucks they have a Mac version and then I was version which is

00:10:45 ◼   ► nice and the Mac version kind of keep itself up to date which is nice it's

00:10:48 ◼   ► this little like menu bar extra thing.

00:10:50 ◼   ► So I've been trying Better out.

00:10:52 ◼   ► It doesn't seem to block as much stuff as One Blocker,

00:10:56 ◼   ► but it also doesn't break as many sites,

00:10:58 ◼   ► and it seems to block enough that works for me,

00:11:01 ◼   ► and it seems to get regular updates.

00:11:02 ◼   ► So right now I'm using Better,

00:11:04 ◼   ► but I've only been using it for maybe a few weeks at most,

00:11:08 ◼   ► so it's harder for me to really say

00:11:10 ◼   ► you should definitely go buy this.

00:11:11 ◼   ► But if you're looking to buy something right now,

00:11:13 ◼   ► that's the one I would start with.

00:11:15 ◼   ► - Jon, any thoughts?

00:11:16 ◼   ► They also use OneBlocker for the record, but John, any thoughts?

00:11:20 ◼   ► >> I'm also using OneBlocker, but occasionally, I don't know if the OS updates do it or something.

00:11:25 ◼   ► Sometimes it gets turned off and I don't notice for a while.

00:11:27 ◼   ► I don't have a good blocker situation going on.

00:11:30 ◼   ► You know, and half the time when things don't work, I do the little long hold down on the

00:11:35 ◼   ► reload to reload without blockers to see if that's the problem.

00:11:38 ◼   ► I think some sites are getting more obnoxious.

00:11:41 ◼   ► The Boston Globe is like, "You're running an ad blocker.

00:11:44 ◼   ► I don't like you," whatever.

00:11:45 ◼   ► and it's like, all right, well, fine.

00:11:47 ◼   ► You're gonna learn not to even tap those links.

00:11:50 ◼   ► And some site, I think it's like The Atlantic

00:11:51 ◼   ► or something like that, it's like,

00:11:54 ◼   ► sorry, something is wrong and we can't serve you ads.

00:11:56 ◼   ► And so I reload without content blockers

00:11:58 ◼   ► and it says the same thing.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Like, well, what do you want me to do?

00:12:00 ◼   ► Or like you're running an incognito mode.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Like I'm not, I'm not an incognito mode.

00:12:04 ◼   ► I'm just on my phone and I wanna read your website

00:12:06 ◼   ► and I turn everything off and you still,

00:12:08 ◼   ► and the worst thing is it does it with like a sheet

00:12:10 ◼   ► that goes down over the actual article

00:12:11 ◼   ► and you just wanna like right click

00:12:13 ◼   ► and inspect and delete node,

00:12:14 ◼   ► but you can't because you're on your phone.

00:12:15 ◼   ► It's like, this is, when Casey occasionally goes off

00:12:20 ◼   ► on his little angry rants about how he feels constrained

00:12:22 ◼   ► by iOS, I have that in small degrees too.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And it's basically whenever I do anything on a webpage

00:12:27 ◼   ► and I realize I don't have access to my web developer tools.

00:12:29 ◼   ► And I feel just completely crippled.

00:12:32 ◼   ► It's like, it's just a stupid web.

00:12:33 ◼   ► It's just a freaking div.

00:12:34 ◼   ► Let me delete it.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Like, I just saw the articles right there.

00:12:37 ◼   ► So here's what I do.

00:12:37 ◼   ► This is what I literally do.

00:12:38 ◼   ► To find out if I want to actually read the article,

00:12:41 ◼   ► I did long press to read the slug in the URL,

00:12:44 ◼   ► hoping that it's something sensible, but sometimes it's not.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Or I repeatedly revisit the page

00:12:48 ◼   ► and try to read the headline

00:12:50 ◼   ► before the stupid thing slides down on it.

00:12:51 ◼   ► Like I get three words in, oh, it slid down.

00:12:53 ◼   ► And then I reload three words in just to find out

00:12:55 ◼   ► is this a story that I want to bother

00:12:57 ◼   ► going to a quote-unquote real web browser

00:13:00 ◼   ► and looking at it or whatever.

00:13:03 ◼   ► Anyway, websites are annoying.

00:13:05 ◼   ► - You guys try way too hard to really,

00:13:07 ◼   ► if a site makes it difficult for me to read an article,

00:13:10 ◼   ► I just close it and I move on.

00:13:11 ◼   ► Because you know what?

00:13:13 ◼   ► no matter how good of a writer you are,

00:13:16 ◼   ► or no matter how great of journalists you are,

00:13:18 ◼   ► or whatever else, there's a lot of things

00:13:20 ◼   ► to read out there on the web.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And if you're gonna make it hard for me to read yours,

00:13:24 ◼   ► I'm just not going to read it.

00:13:26 ◼   ► And that might be like, if you have a site

00:13:28 ◼   ► with an anti ad blocker blocker thing,

00:13:31 ◼   ► if you won't let me read the site with an ad blocker,

00:13:34 ◼   ► that's a fair game.

00:13:35 ◼   ► I respect that decision of yours,

00:13:37 ◼   ► but that means I'm not going to turn off my ad blocker,

00:13:40 ◼   ► I'm just not going to read it.

00:13:41 ◼   ► But if that's the option you presented,

00:13:43 ◼   ► then fine.

00:13:44 ◼   ► That's what I'm saying, like I'm willing,

00:13:46 ◼   ► like oh, I detect you have an ad blocker,

00:13:48 ◼   ► like fine, I will turn off my ad blocker.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I'll turn it off, I'll be like, wait,

00:13:51 ◼   ► reload without content blockers, here I am.

00:13:53 ◼   ► I'm ready to see your thing.

00:13:55 ◼   ► It's not behind a paywall,

00:13:56 ◼   ► it's not like they want me to sign up,

00:13:57 ◼   ► subscribe or pay money, like there is no,

00:13:59 ◼   ► the site is just broken is what I'm saying.

00:14:00 ◼   ► I think it's a pretty well-known site,

00:14:01 ◼   ► maybe it's the Atlantic or whatever.

00:14:02 ◼   ► It's like, I'm doing everything you want me to do.

00:14:05 ◼   ► Turn off all my blockers, turn them off in settings,

00:14:08 ◼   ► not be in incognito mode, there's no paywall,

00:14:11 ◼   ► You're not asking me to sign up or subscribe.

00:14:13 ◼   ► You just, every time I try to load it, it's like,

00:14:15 ◼   ► sorry, I couldn't figure out something.

00:14:17 ◼   ► And I'm gonna put a big,

00:14:18 ◼   ► I'm gonna slide a big animated sheet down

00:14:20 ◼   ► over the article that's perfectly good.

00:14:21 ◼   ► There's no reader mode for people asking.

00:14:23 ◼   ► There's no, you know, websites, man.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Like, do you ever test on the iPhone?

00:14:27 ◼   ► It's a popular platform.

00:14:28 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:14:30 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

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00:15:03 ◼   ► and there's no obligation to buy.

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00:15:10 ◼   ► do is pick out what you want and they'll send you this box of home try-ons.

00:15:14 ◼   ► You can try them, you can show people in your life, you can look in the mirror, you can

00:15:17 ◼   ► take pictures, whatever you want to do to decide what's right for you.

00:15:20 ◼   ► And there's no obligation.

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00:15:23 ◼   ► But I bet you will because they're really high quality glasses.

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00:15:30 ◼   ► a nice hard case, a cleaning cloth.

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00:15:39 ◼   ► Warby Parker really believes in giving back to the world and they really make great glasses

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00:15:54 ◼   ► a home try-on companion feature which allows you to use their iPhone app to preview how

00:16:00 ◼   ► how the glasses will look on your face.

00:16:02 ◼   ► You can stitch it into a video,

00:16:04 ◼   ► you can share it with friends to help you pick a winner.

00:16:06 ◼   ► So even before you get the frames mailed to you

00:16:08 ◼   ► in the home try-on program,

00:16:09 ◼   ► you can preview how they're gonna look on you.

00:16:11 ◼   ► And then you can educate your guesses that way.

00:16:13 ◼   ► They make it so easy to buy glasses online,

00:16:16 ◼   ► and the value here is incredible.

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00:16:47 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.

00:16:50 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:16:53 ◼   ► - All right, Jack Johnson, yes, from New York City apparently

00:16:58 ◼   ► has two questions that are related.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Do you think it would be a good move for iTunes

00:17:02 ◼   ► to offer a higher resolution audio file

00:17:05 ◼   ► for download or streaming?

00:17:06 ◼   ► And then kind of tangentially related,

00:17:09 ◼   ► do you think part of the HEVC strategy

00:17:11 ◼   ► is to set the groundwork for 4K streaming?

00:17:13 ◼   ► I will say that I don't think anyone really cares,

00:17:17 ◼   ► except Marco, about higher resolution audio

00:17:20 ◼   ► coming out of iTunes and--

00:17:22 ◼   ► - I don't, I don't even care about that.

00:17:24 ◼   ► - I'm surprised.

00:17:25 ◼   ► - So as for all my audio fileness

00:17:27 ◼   ► when it comes to like selecting headphones and stuff.

00:17:30 ◼   ► I have never been swayed by like higher than CD quality

00:17:35 ◼   ► audio files or lossless compression schemes.

00:17:39 ◼   ► I know a lot of people like these.

00:17:40 ◼   ► A lot of people think they can hear a difference.

00:17:43 ◼   ► I don't think you can, but I know for sure that I can't.

00:17:46 ◼   ► - All right, hold on though, hold on.

00:17:47 ◼   ► How do you download your Phish concerts?

00:17:49 ◼   ► - MP3.

00:17:50 ◼   ► They offer Flak options.

00:17:51 ◼   ► - I am stunned.

00:17:53 ◼   ► That's what I assumed you were gonna say.

00:17:54 ◼   ► - No, they offer Flak for a few more dollars

00:17:57 ◼   ► And there is, so I have bought, so quick background here,

00:18:02 ◼   ► Phish sells all their live shows legally

00:18:04 ◼   ► through their own site, like a few hours

00:18:06 ◼   ► after the show's end.

00:18:07 ◼   ► And so you can buy a season pass

00:18:09 ◼   ► and you can basically have downloads of every show they do

00:18:12 ◼   ► for like a whole tour.

00:18:13 ◼   ► So I do this, I've been doing this

00:18:14 ◼   ► since something like 2009 or so.

00:18:17 ◼   ► And there was one tour early on that I bought in Flack.

00:18:21 ◼   ► I preordered it and I'm like,

00:18:23 ◼   ► gosh, let me get the Flack Verge

00:18:24 ◼   ► and I'll see if it's something different.

00:18:26 ◼   ► and it was such a pain because, first of all,

00:18:30 ◼   ► iTunes didn't support Flack at the time.

00:18:31 ◼   ► I think it actually is finally adding that in High Sierra,

00:18:34 ◼   ► I think, but it didn't at the time.

00:18:36 ◼   ► And so I had all these massive files that,

00:18:40 ◼   ► first of all, I didn't want to ever delete them

00:18:42 ◼   ► because I paid for these massive files.

00:18:45 ◼   ► So they're taking up tons of space on the hard drive.

00:18:47 ◼   ► Then I still had to transcode them

00:18:49 ◼   ► to make them actually playable in anything.

00:18:51 ◼   ► I did play the original ones or there was,

00:18:55 ◼   ► see I think I think one one time I transcoded them to a lack or maybe I

00:18:58 ◼   ► download maybe they sold them as a lack I forget so I did for a group of them

00:19:03 ◼   ► transfer them and play them as lossless files as a lack files in iTunes and I

00:19:08 ◼   ► just I couldn't tell any difference at all and there's there's lots of again

00:19:13 ◼   ► there's lots of people who claim they can they can hear a difference there's a

00:19:15 ◼   ► whole lot of tests that have been done that have shown mostly otherwise but

00:19:21 ◼   ► this is one of those things kind of like my subwoofer thing from last episode of

00:19:24 ◼   ► Like, I do things my way, and some people consider them

00:19:28 ◼   ► insufficient, or some people want better things,

00:19:31 ◼   ► and I think I'm just, I don't, I can't care anymore.

00:19:34 ◼   ► Like, if you wanna do things your own way,

00:19:36 ◼   ► if you wanna get massive files with 2496 or 24192

00:19:41 ◼   ► sample rates, and if you wanna have lossless encoding,

00:19:44 ◼   ► and you want your albums to take up a gig each, fine.

00:19:48 ◼   ► It's, hardware space is cheap, do whatever you want.

00:19:51 ◼   ► - Wow, I could not possibly agree with you more,

00:19:53 ◼   ► But I was expecting to snicker as you told me about how flack is the only answer so kudos to you, sir

00:19:59 ◼   ► I am stunned. Do you want audio this lower quality and has like hiss and pop in it?

00:20:04 ◼   ► Here we go

00:20:08 ◼   ► something for Casey and I

00:20:10 ◼   ► like I

00:20:12 ◼   ► Don't I think it's not the right move for Apple to offer high-resolution audio

00:20:16 ◼   ► But if Apple ever gets to the point

00:20:19 ◼   ► I don't think they will because again streaming is what everyone cares about now as Marco pointed out earlier

00:20:23 ◼   ► slash on the last show, but it would be a way to make the Ferrari have purchasable downloadable

00:20:31 ◼   ► music.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Hey, can we charge more money for something that people perceive as better?

00:20:34 ◼   ► The answer is yes, you can.

00:20:37 ◼   ► You sell a lossless or a higher bit rate or some combination thereof, and a very small

00:20:42 ◼   ► number of people who think that is worthwhile for them will buy it.

00:20:46 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter if anyone can hear the difference.

00:20:48 ◼   ► It only matters whether they'll give you money in exchange for these goods, which are able

00:20:51 ◼   ► to be produced.

00:20:52 ◼   ► So I wouldn't totally rule it out.

00:20:53 ◼   ► I don't think it's something Apple needs to do at all.

00:20:55 ◼   ► But someday, if buying music at all downloadable

00:20:59 ◼   ► continues to be a thing, some smart person in marketing

00:21:02 ◼   ► may say, we're leaving money on the table

00:21:04 ◼   ► by not selling high resolution audio.

00:21:06 ◼   ► And they'll just do it and charge more money for it.

00:21:09 ◼   ► And a couple people will buy it

00:21:11 ◼   ► and there'll be a tiny bump in a graph

00:21:12 ◼   ► and someone will get a good performance review.

00:21:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, but you're right.

00:21:16 ◼   ► Like the thing is like, there is demand for this.

00:21:19 ◼   ► There is absolutely demand for higher than CD quality

00:21:23 ◼   ► sample rates and everything and higher bit rate formats

00:21:26 ◼   ► or more advanced formats or lossless formats.

00:21:29 ◼   ► There is definitely demand for that.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Most people don't even know,

00:21:33 ◼   ► people who listen to the show probably aren't aware

00:21:35 ◼   ► quite how many options there are for

00:21:40 ◼   ► what basically amount to fancy iPods

00:21:44 ◼   ► that sell today for like $400 or more,

00:21:48 ◼   ► that Sony makes a bunch of them.

00:21:51 ◼   ► They're basically little, pocketable,

00:21:54 ◼   ► portable audio players, as far as a deck of cards,

00:21:57 ◼   ► like that kind of size class,

00:21:58 ◼   ► that have a headphone just like the old iPod Classic,

00:22:01 ◼   ► that play these super high bitrate files.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Like they could actually output them

00:22:05 ◼   ► and decode them with a fancy DAC and everything else.

00:22:08 ◼   ► This market exists.

00:22:10 ◼   ► People buy these things for like $400,

00:22:12 ◼   ► but not a lot of people.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And there are streaming services,

00:22:16 ◼   ► Things like Neil Young's Pano, things like even Tidal,

00:22:20 ◼   ► which is a fairly decently sized streaming service now,

00:22:23 ◼   ► like streaming services that have either been,

00:22:27 ◼   ► or even music sales service, I don't think Pano

00:22:30 ◼   ► even was streaming, I think it only sold stuff

00:22:32 ◼   ► if it even still exists.

00:22:33 ◼   ► But anyway, there are services that will either sell you

00:22:36 ◼   ► high bit rate music legally, or that will let you

00:22:39 ◼   ► stream them like Tidal.

00:22:41 ◼   ► And they use these things as, they use the quality

00:22:44 ◼   ► as their main selling point,

00:22:46 ◼   ► but they don't really ever become mass market,

00:22:47 ◼   ► they don't really ever get anywhere off the ground really.

00:22:49 ◼   ► The only reason Tidal has gotten anywhere

00:22:52 ◼   ► is because it has had exclusives.

00:22:54 ◼   ► Like they've had exclusive album releases on there.

00:22:57 ◼   ► Other than that, when they were really only

00:22:59 ◼   ► about the music quality, they got nowhere.

00:23:01 ◼   ► The fact is, most people don't care,

00:23:05 ◼   ► and most people don't need to care,

00:23:06 ◼   ► because for most of these gains,

00:23:07 ◼   ► there actually is no perceptible difference to most people.

00:23:10 ◼   ► So while Apple could sell high bit rate song stuff,

00:23:15 ◼   ► that would just be appealing to a very, very small market

00:23:18 ◼   ► in what is already a declining market,

00:23:20 ◼   ► which is the market of music sales.

00:23:23 ◼   ► - So the second part of this, about HEVC being part of 4K,

00:23:26 ◼   ► yep, 100%, like 4K video is bigger,

00:23:30 ◼   ► HEVC is a higher efficiency codec,

00:23:32 ◼   ► it supports higher resolutions for video,

00:23:36 ◼   ► not just the images with the HEAV thing.

00:23:38 ◼   ► Anyway, yes, it's 100% part of that,

00:23:40 ◼   ► And that's why we're going to see a 4K Apple TV and ATVC-encoded content that plays on

00:23:45 ◼   ► it.

00:23:46 ◼   ► I agree.

00:23:47 ◼   ► Adam Sack writes in to say, and this is the first in a theme that I noticed, which was

00:23:54 ◼   ► try to get the ATP hosts to hate each other.

00:23:57 ◼   ► So he writes in, "If you had to use the daily tech setup of one of your co-hosts for a week

00:24:03 ◼   ► instead of your own, whose devices would you choose?"

00:24:07 ◼   ► and I will start off and I would probably choose Markos

00:24:10 ◼   ► because it is in general most similar to my setup.

00:24:14 ◼   ► Obviously there are differences, but most similar to mine.

00:24:16 ◼   ► And he has some pretty kick-ass headphones, so win-win.

00:24:19 ◼   ► - Everyone would pick Markos, including Marco,

00:24:21 ◼   ► because he has the best stuff.

00:24:23 ◼   ► Who's not gonna pick Marco's setup?

00:24:24 ◼   ► I don't wanna use Casey's crappy laptop, come on.

00:24:27 ◼   ► No one wants to use my 10-year-old Mac Pro.

00:24:28 ◼   ► So, I would pick Marco's.

00:24:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, I would pick Casey's because non-retina.

00:24:33 ◼   ► Sorry, John, you lose.

00:24:36 ◼   ► You should have picked my wife's. You should have picked the 5K iMac. It's the one without

00:24:39 ◼   ► image retention.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Yeah, that's actually better than mine.

00:24:43 ◼   ► Oh, that's funny. Ian Muren writes in to say, and I don't think I selected this as one to

00:24:50 ◼   ► answer but I have a feeling I know who did. "I have an 08 Accord. When's the ideal time

00:24:55 ◼   ► to replace it? It's at about 80,000 miles. No maintenance issues to date."

00:24:59 ◼   ► Jon, did you perhaps star this as a question to be answered?

00:25:03 ◼   ► I did because I think this is a good question.

00:25:05 ◼   ► No way.

00:25:06 ◼   ► That's a good question.

00:25:07 ◼   ► So the right time, probably the best time to replace this Accord was right now or last

00:25:12 ◼   ► year because the best time to get an Accord is at the tail end of a generation when they

00:25:19 ◼   ► worked all the kinks out of it and they have, we always get the special edition, even if

00:25:22 ◼   ► you don't get the special edition.

00:25:23 ◼   ► Like they know how to build that generation of car.

00:25:26 ◼   ► It has the most doodads and nice things added to it and they figure it out low and the first

00:25:31 ◼   ► model to put the USB port in the wrong place or you know fiddle things like

00:25:34 ◼   ► that's the time to get it. The first car of the generation, the new Accord, I

00:25:41 ◼   ► think the new Accord is uglier than the old one but it does have a better

00:25:46 ◼   ► infotainment system so that's the other time you can get us like the excitement

00:25:51 ◼   ► of getting in on the first car in a new generation but in general when your

00:25:56 ◼   ► Accord starts getting to be around 10 years old I feel like that's the time to

00:25:59 ◼   ► If you want to have any chance of having any reasonable trade-in on it or private sale,

00:26:03 ◼   ► whatever you want to do with it, don't wait until the car is basically worthless or it's

00:26:07 ◼   ► worth like a couple hundred bucks.

00:26:08 ◼   ► Wait until it's still a couple thousand dollars worth of value in your car.

00:26:12 ◼   ► It's before crap starts breaking.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Like you said, it's 80,000 miles, nothing is issued with it.

00:26:18 ◼   ► It's an '08, right?

00:26:19 ◼   ► It's getting to be around 10 years.

00:26:21 ◼   ► Time to replace.

00:26:23 ◼   ► You know, just as a point of comparison, I pretty much agree with you, but when we bought

00:26:29 ◼   ► the Volvo, we traded in Aaron's 2007 Mazda6, which had a little bit shy of 80,000 miles

00:26:36 ◼   ► on it, and as I believe I talked about on the show, was pretty much a tank.

00:26:40 ◼   ► That thing almost never had any problems.

00:26:43 ◼   ► And we got $3,000 in change for it.

00:26:47 ◼   ► I think Carmax offered us three grand.

00:26:49 ◼   ► So it was not worthless by any means, but I agree with you, Jon, that this is the kind

00:26:53 ◼   ► of edge of the cliff, I think, and you go too much further and you're going to fall

00:26:57 ◼   ► right off that cliff.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Marco, any thoughts on this?

00:27:01 ◼   ► Nope.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Good talk.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Joe Sullivan writes in, "Is there anything that Syracuse is in favor of or likes without

00:27:09 ◼   ► any caveats, reservations, or asterisks?"

00:27:11 ◼   ► And I have to congratulate Joe Sullivan because there are about a million ways to ask this

00:27:16 ◼   ► question like a big fat jerk, and this was not one of them.

00:27:18 ◼   ► So well done.

00:27:19 ◼   ► That's a great question.

00:27:20 ◼   ► They put too many things at the end of this question.

00:27:23 ◼   ► Caveats, reservations, or asterisks?

00:27:24 ◼   ► Well, caveats, you kind of know what that means.

00:27:28 ◼   ► Reservations, meh, it's still getting a little bit vague.

00:27:30 ◼   ► What would asterisks mean?

00:27:31 ◼   ► Like, oh, something else in addition that you want to say about it?

00:27:33 ◼   ► Like to answer your question, there is nothing, there's nothing so perfect, come on, it's

00:27:37 ◼   ► right in the slogan.

00:27:38 ◼   ► Like there are tons of things that I really like, but if pressed to say, hey, you really

00:27:44 ◼   ► like Kiki's Delivery Service, is there anything wrong with that movie?

00:27:47 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I feel like it's actually probably closest.

00:27:52 ◼   ► If pressed, I can come up with asterisks for Kiki's Delivery Service, sure.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Of course you can, right?

00:28:00 ◼   ► Nothing is going to be absolutely perfect.

00:28:03 ◼   ► If you literally can't think of anything wrong with it, then you probably don't understand

00:28:07 ◼   ► the thing.

00:28:08 ◼   ► But that doesn't mean, like, these are my favorite things in the whole world.

00:28:10 ◼   ► Overwhelmingly, everything I feel about these is that they're great, right?

00:28:14 ◼   ► So I think that qualifies.

00:28:16 ◼   ► And that reasonable definition of is there anything

00:28:19 ◼   ► that you are like without any caveats reservation?

00:28:22 ◼   ► Like if someone said, hey, you know,

00:28:26 ◼   ► I need a good movie to watch.

00:28:27 ◼   ► And I say, well, if you've never seen

00:28:29 ◼   ► the Empire Strikes Back, watch Star Wars

00:28:31 ◼   ► and then Empire Strikes Back.

00:28:32 ◼   ► I'm not gonna add reservations.

00:28:34 ◼   ► Oh, but also here's some reservations

00:28:36 ◼   ► about the Empire Strikes Back.

00:28:37 ◼   ► I'm gonna add no reservations.

00:28:38 ◼   ► There is no nothing to say about it.

00:28:40 ◼   ► So I would say that qualifies.

00:28:42 ◼   ► The only definitions are the pedantic one

00:28:43 ◼   ► in which nothing qualifies for anybody

00:28:45 ◼   ► Or the reasonable definition in which there's tons of things that I really like.

00:28:48 ◼   ► If you want to hear me, things that I really like, listen to the incomparable.

00:28:52 ◼   ► Very, very often on that show I talk about things I really like.

00:28:54 ◼   ► You know, from the video game journey, television shows, movies, books.

00:29:00 ◼   ► We do talk about asterisks if you want to call it that, but that doesn't mean we don't

00:29:04 ◼   ► love them.

00:29:05 ◼   ► So I think this question is not a good question.

00:29:08 ◼   ► That's more than an asterisk, more than a reservation.

00:29:11 ◼   ► I think that was a great question because of the answer it got.

00:29:13 ◼   ► Yes

00:29:15 ◼   ► Complaining about the question. I'm moving us sure of anybody like is there anything even we ask you the you chose it

00:29:20 ◼   ► Is there anything you two like uncritically without caveats reservation or asterisks?

00:29:24 ◼   ► I think if you're honest with yourselves you have to say that's not true for either of you either

00:29:27 ◼   ► I mean, I think the chat room offered up a number of good options your kids your wife your dog, Long Island journey

00:29:34 ◼   ► Those are BS questions. You got reservations about your wife and your kids. Don't say you don't ice cream

00:29:40 ◼   ► If you are if you think your spouse does not have any asterisks you are either newly married or willfully

00:29:46 ◼   ► Naive because everybody has asterisks everybody

00:29:50 ◼   ► I like where I am. What can I say?

00:29:53 ◼   ► Yeah, but there are always asked what is asked is like the tiniest little thing, you know

00:29:58 ◼   ► It's like could something be a little bit different. Of course, of course always I don't even know where to go from here

00:30:05 ◼   ► Like and especially kids like no my child is perfect. Yes, lots of parents think that mm-hmm

00:30:09 ◼   ► Maybe a little bit less screaming?

00:30:13 ◼   ► Like three seconds less screaming in a lifetime of screaming.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Would you accept that?

00:30:18 ◼   ► Say yes, I would accept three seconds less screaming.

00:30:20 ◼   ► Well, that's an asterisk.

00:30:21 ◼   ► There you go.

00:30:24 ◼   ► Maybe if that poo hadn't exploded out the side of the diaper that one time when I had

00:30:27 ◼   ► a new car, would you – oh, it was an asterisk.

00:30:29 ◼   ► Now you don't love your children because you didn't want the poo to come out the

00:30:32 ◼   ► side of the diaper and go all over your new car seats.

00:30:34 ◼   ► Oh, that's amazing.

00:30:36 ◼   ► All right.

00:30:37 ◼   ► We got to move on.

00:30:38 ◼   ► We're never gonna get through this.

00:30:40 ◼   ► - That's amazing.

00:30:41 ◼   ► - Let's see, what was next?

00:30:42 ◼   ► I have so many frickin' tabs open.

00:30:44 ◼   ► I must be John Syracuse.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Edward Lovell writes in,

00:30:48 ◼   ► "What podcast do you currently listen to

00:30:50 ◼   ► "and would recommend?"

00:30:51 ◼   ► I listen to a ton of podcasts,

00:30:53 ◼   ► but there's a couple that I would recommend.

00:30:55 ◼   ► The aforementioned "Dubai Friday" is excellent.

00:30:58 ◼   ► I will pitch one of my, or a couple of my co-host shows.

00:31:03 ◼   ► I think that "Reconsolable Differences" is phenomenal,

00:31:07 ◼   ► and so is Under the Radar, but I will also pitch a couple others very quickly.

00:31:12 ◼   ► If you wanted to hear a smart person talk about conservative politics, which you may

00:31:19 ◼   ► or may not want, the Ben Shapiro show is very interesting and very good.

00:31:24 ◼   ► I don't listen to every episode by any means.

00:31:26 ◼   ► It's like 45 minutes and it's pretty much every weekday, but when I have time, usually

00:31:30 ◼   ► about once a week I'll catch it, and I typically deeply, deeply disagree with the things he

00:31:36 ◼   ► things, but nevertheless it is interesting. I will also say that wheel bearings is neutral

00:31:44 ◼   ► by people who actually know what they're talking about.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Who would want to listen to that? Yeah, I know, right? And then 20,000 hertz

00:31:51 ◼   ► is also very good. Think 99% invisible, but specifically around sound. So those are just

00:31:56 ◼   ► some selections from my extraordinarily long list of podcasts that I listen to. John, since

00:32:02 ◼   ► I've been tagging Marco first more often. Let's go to you next.

00:32:06 ◼   ► >> I have a strong recommendation for Roderick on the Line, which I love.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Flophouse, obviously, my probably oldest recommendation. That show is still going.

00:32:18 ◼   ► Obviously, Hello Internet and Cortex, the pair of shows both involving CGP Grey. Those

00:32:26 ◼   ► are great. What else have we got? I'm scrolling through Overcast to look at -- I have way

00:32:31 ◼   ► way too many things in our chasm scrolling through there.

00:32:35 ◼   ► Debug, which I don't know if it's still ongoing, but the back catalog of debug is great.

00:32:40 ◼   ► It's a tech show where they talk to lots of important people in tech.

00:32:43 ◼   ► You should definitely check that out.

00:32:45 ◼   ► And there's tons more, but I think that's a good place to get started.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Marco.

00:32:50 ◼   ► You guys have already mentioned pretty much everything I was going to say.

00:32:53 ◼   ► The usuals, Dubai Friday, Hello Internet, Cortex, Roderick on the line.

00:33:00 ◼   ► In the tech world, again you've covered many good ones, I would also add Upgrade on Reel

00:33:05 ◼   ► AFM with Jason Sinell and Mike Rowley.

00:33:07 ◼   ► That is probably my favorite tech show.

00:33:11 ◼   ► It's just really, really great.

00:33:14 ◼   ► So yeah, otherwise you guys pretty much covered it.

00:33:16 ◼   ► Yeah, 99.PI, you know, and what I love about, I mean I could obviously talk about podcasts

00:33:20 ◼   ► forever so I will try not to, but what I love about this is that none of us mentioned shows

00:33:25 ◼   ► that were like the biggest podcasts in the world.

00:33:27 ◼   ► 99.PI is probably the biggest one we mentioned, but when people think podcasting, they so

00:33:32 ◼   ► often will make an assumption like, "Everybody listens to This American Life," right, you

00:33:36 ◼   ► know, stuff like that. But the fact is there isn't any podcast out there that everybody

00:33:40 ◼   ► listens to. And like the world of mass market or very, very popular podcasts is still actually

00:33:47 ◼   ► fairly diversified. And there's a lot of people who listen to a lot of podcasts who don't

00:33:53 ◼   ► listen to any of those big ones. So this is, it's just part of what I love about podcasting

00:33:57 ◼   ► is like it's so incredibly diverse and specialized

00:34:00 ◼   ► that like I can look at so many podcasts

00:34:02 ◼   ► and there are so many amazing podcasts out there,

00:34:06 ◼   ► but I don't need to spend any time listening to things

00:34:08 ◼   ► that aren't like really interesting to me

00:34:11 ◼   ► and that aren't specialized to my interests

00:34:14 ◼   ► because there's so much that is

00:34:15 ◼   ► and that's just part of what I love about podcasting.

00:34:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, my overcast list is huge.

00:34:21 ◼   ► I subscribe to tons of things.

00:34:22 ◼   ► I was trying to give recommendations

00:34:23 ◼   ► that maybe people might not go for,

00:34:25 ◼   ► like a, you know, this one of the reasons, you know, I didn't recommend the talk show

00:34:29 ◼   ► because I assume you know that show exists and it's good and you should totally listen to it.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Like I didn't recommend This American Life because I'm assuming you know that show exists and it's

00:34:34 ◼   ► good and you should listen to it, right? Trying to find these slightly more obscure corners. But

00:34:39 ◼   ► that's the other thing I like about podcasts. I subscribe to way more podcasts than I

00:34:44 ◼   ► faithfully listen to. Like I'm not a podcast completionist. I have tons of descriptions,

00:34:48 ◼   ► a few shows I keep up with very religiously, but a lot of shows I let age and then go through five

00:34:52 ◼   ► episodes at a time and a lot of shows I just pick and choose from. That's the best thing.

00:34:56 ◼   ► Not only do you not have to like, "Oh, there's only five podcasts that everyone listens to."

00:35:00 ◼   ► You should find a podcast that you really like. And sometimes you find a podcast and you only

00:35:07 ◼   ► have to listen to the episodes that you really like. Even like The Incomparable, if they do

00:35:11 ◼   ► an episode reviewing something you don't care about, skip that episode. They're standalone.

00:35:15 ◼   ► If they do a thing about a TV show that you didn't watch and you're not interested in,

00:35:18 ◼   ► fine. Just pick and choose. It's the beauty of podcasting.

00:35:21 ◼   ► But you should listen to every episode of our show, obviously.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, obviously.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Of course.

00:35:26 ◼   ► I mean, how could you not?

00:35:27 ◼   ► Regular Language writes in, "What do you think about the current state of Swift?

00:35:31 ◼   ► I would like to hear what Jon and Marco have to say about, I guess, Casey, a rant about

00:35:38 ◼   ► Swift opens."

00:35:39 ◼   ► Oh, I think there's new lines missing here.

00:35:41 ◼   ► Basically, what do you guys think and maybe me talk about Swift open source?

00:35:45 ◼   ► So I will, I guess, round this out at the end.

00:35:48 ◼   ► So let's start with Marco and then go to Jon.

00:35:51 ◼   ► - Honestly, I don't pay that much attention

00:35:54 ◼   ► to what's going on in Swift.

00:35:55 ◼   ► I know I'm supposed to, I know I should.

00:35:58 ◼   ► Overcast contains some Swift code that I added

00:36:01 ◼   ► to try to teach myself the language and stuff,

00:36:04 ◼   ► but I'm still writing most code in Objective-C,

00:36:06 ◼   ► and it's not really out of a judgment of Swift

00:36:09 ◼   ► so much as it's just a pragmatism that I still don't see

00:36:14 ◼   ► a lot of motivation for me to switch.

00:36:17 ◼   ► I recognize that I should, but I, in practice, don't.

00:36:21 ◼   ► John?

00:36:22 ◼   ► - This is too open-ended of a question.

00:36:24 ◼   ► I would have never have picked it.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Swift seems like it's chugging along.

00:36:27 ◼   ► I do keep up with the things that are going on in it.

00:36:29 ◼   ► It's still got challenges,

00:36:32 ◼   ► but it's making slow, steady progress,

00:36:34 ◼   ► so I think Swift is moving in the right direction

00:36:36 ◼   ► at varying speeds.

00:36:37 ◼   ► And what do we have to say about C?

00:36:42 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no, that's not C, the language.

00:36:44 ◼   ► I think basically the question was,

00:36:46 ◼   ► what do you guys have to say about Swift

00:36:48 ◼   ► and what do I have to say specifically

00:36:49 ◼   ► about Swift open source?

00:36:50 ◼   ► So-- - All right, well, go ahead.

00:36:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think your summary of Swift is good and brief

00:36:55 ◼   ► and I stand by it.

00:36:57 ◼   ► Swift open source is a double-edged sword.

00:36:58 ◼   ► I think that the problem that I have with Swift open source

00:37:03 ◼   ► is that it seems like a lot of the really, really,

00:37:07 ◼   ► really academic, like,

00:37:09 ◼   ► I'm trying to think of a way to say this

00:37:11 ◼   ► without being pejorative,

00:37:12 ◼   ► but people who are much more interested

00:37:15 ◼   ► the academic side of programming languages seem to be the ones that are most vocal and

00:37:19 ◼   ► most interested to participate on the mailing lists and things of that nature.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Where someone like myself, which is not to say I'm at the same caliber as a super academic,

00:37:27 ◼   ► but someone like myself who I like to think of as, "I'm a reasonably smart guy, but I

00:37:33 ◼   ► don't really have any interest in following the intricacies of what's going on in the

00:37:37 ◼   ► mailing list.

00:37:38 ◼   ► I don't really have any interest in arguing about different pitches that have been made

00:37:43 ◼   ► via the mailing list."

00:37:44 ◼   ► I just want to get crap done, man.

00:37:47 ◼   ► And to me, I feel like Swift open source, it feels like, from an outsider's point of

00:37:54 ◼   ► view, that maybe it could use a little more stern direction from Apple to prevent the

00:38:00 ◼   ► kind of meandering and the kind of, I don't know, language features that I find to be

00:38:05 ◼   ► really, really silly and not terribly helpful for actually just shipping products.

00:38:11 ◼   ► And that's where I kind of get a little frustrated.

00:38:13 ◼   ► But it's easy for me to throw stones from outside the glass house, right?

00:38:18 ◼   ► And really, if I wanted to effect change, what I should be doing is participating on

00:38:22 ◼   ► the darn mailing list that I'm lamenting.

00:38:24 ◼   ► I'm not sure you should be doing that, because I'm going to put this out there.

00:38:27 ◼   ► Language design is a different skill than being a programmer and using that language.

00:38:32 ◼   ► And so I think it is entirely appropriate that the list where people are designing the

00:38:36 ◼   ► languages looks weird to someone who's like, "I just want to write my programs."

00:38:40 ◼   ► Like, you make the language and give it to me.

00:38:42 ◼   ► Like, they don't need to cross over.

00:38:44 ◼   ► I think, with evolution, I've seen a lot of languages

00:38:47 ◼   ► on mailing lists, and switch evolution is above average,

00:38:51 ◼   ► believe it or not.

00:38:53 ◼   ► And maybe if you look on the outside,

00:38:54 ◼   ► this is the first time you follow the development

00:38:56 ◼   ► of any language, it can look like dominated by academics

00:38:59 ◼   ► and weird and chaotic and a lot of bike shedding,

00:39:01 ◼   ► but in the grand scheme of things, they are above average.

00:39:04 ◼   ► And just coming so early to say,

00:39:07 ◼   ► look, we're gonna have releases,

00:39:08 ◼   ► we're gonna exclude things from them,

00:39:09 ◼   ► And then, you know, like there's going to be people discussing things in the list,

00:39:12 ◼   ► even though they say they're excluded from Swift 3 or Swift 4, like, but in

00:39:15 ◼   ► general, I think they're pretty well behaved and I do want essentially language

00:39:19 ◼   ► nerds or people like people with the skill, the language design skill and,

00:39:23 ◼   ► you know, RPG problems or whatever.

00:39:24 ◼   ► To be designing the language rather than having a bunch of people who just want

00:39:29 ◼   ► to use the language, throwing out the first idea that pops into their head that

00:39:32 ◼   ► they think might make their, their night, like beginning language designers.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Like I've been programming for 20 years and I think a language would be cool

00:39:39 ◼   ► Well, how many languages have you designed?

00:39:41 ◼   ► Have you tried doing that?

00:39:42 ◼   ► What does it actually turn out to be?

00:39:44 ◼   ► I like language design as a separate skill being developed among people who just do that,

00:39:50 ◼   ► and seeing them do their thing definitely does look weird, but I endorse it.

00:39:55 ◼   ► And part of why I have not adopted Swift more is that the idea of investing my time into

00:40:03 ◼   ► a language that is still very much a beta is a huge turnoff for me.

00:40:08 ◼   ► I do not, I have no interest in participating

00:40:11 ◼   ► in the design of this language.

00:40:13 ◼   ► I have no interest in beta testing this language for anybody

00:40:16 ◼   ► in the same way like, I don't wanna beta test

00:40:17 ◼   ► brakes on my car.

00:40:19 ◼   ► You know, I wanna get the final brakes, thank you,

00:40:21 ◼   ► and I want them to work and I don't wanna ever

00:40:22 ◼   ► have to think about them or I never want them

00:40:24 ◼   ► to flake out or fail or cause me undue work.

00:40:27 ◼   ► - Sounds like a test loaner, you don't wanna

00:40:29 ◼   ► beta test the brakes, they just thought

00:40:30 ◼   ► it sent us new firmware for your brakes last night

00:40:32 ◼   ► while you were sleeping.

00:40:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:40:34 ◼   ► - Like for me, like I, especially like every summer

00:40:37 ◼   ► when during beta season when like all the new stuff comes out and I see all the iOS

00:40:41 ◼   ► developers I know complaining about something that Swift broke, I am very happy to not be

00:40:46 ◼   ► very reliant on it right now. And you know, because the fact is like I'm an independent

00:40:51 ◼   ► developer, I don't have a lot of time. I like and the time I have to spend coding, I have

00:40:57 ◼   ► to spend it very wisely. And the most frustrating thing for me, which is true of many people,

00:41:03 ◼   ► is fighting with my tools.

00:41:05 ◼   ► And so any language or part of my developer tool chain,

00:41:09 ◼   ► I'm going to try to minimize reasons

00:41:12 ◼   ► that I would have to fight with it,

00:41:14 ◼   ► or the amount of work it's going to require from me to use.

00:41:18 ◼   ► And Swift, while it does look like a fairly,

00:41:22 ◼   ► I'm sure it will be good once it's done for me,

00:41:26 ◼   ► right now, the reality of using Swift

00:41:28 ◼   ► is still a lot of overhead and a lot of dealing

00:41:32 ◼   ► the changes as they come and dealing with weird things breaking sometimes and I just

00:41:36 ◼   ► want to wait until it's all settled before I invest heavily into it because I have zero

00:41:41 ◼   ► interest in being an early adopter for things like this. All I want is for it to work so

00:41:45 ◼   ► I can spend my time in other ways.

00:41:47 ◼   ► You know, I will say that there are certainly annoyances and I can't legitimately argue

00:41:53 ◼   ► with anything that you've said, but it feels like it's gotten a lot better over the last,

00:41:58 ◼   ► you know, six to twelve months.

00:42:00 ◼   ► Oh yeah, it has.

00:42:01 ◼   ► - It has.

00:42:02 ◼   ► - And the dabbling I've done on the Xcode 9 beta,

00:42:06 ◼   ► by and large, I mean, it's a beta, of course,

00:42:09 ◼   ► but by and large, it looks really solid.

00:42:10 ◼   ► And so I think, and of course,

00:42:12 ◼   ► you would say this every year, right?

00:42:14 ◼   ► Now is the time to dive in, Marco.

00:42:16 ◼   ► It's all better than it ever was.

00:42:17 ◼   ► And you know, it's the year Linux on the desktop, right?

00:42:20 ◼   ► It'll always be better the next year.

00:42:21 ◼   ► But it is not nearly as scary now as it once was.

00:42:25 ◼   ► But there's still dragons back there from time to time.

00:42:29 ◼   ► - And I would also love to use Swift on the server.

00:42:31 ◼   ► That's one thing that has me very interested in learning it

00:42:35 ◼   ► 'cause the idea of learning one language

00:42:37 ◼   ► that I can use in both places

00:42:38 ◼   ► is incredibly attractive to me.

00:42:40 ◼   ► 'Cause that would be a great use of,

00:42:43 ◼   ► if I'm gonna learn more languages and master more frameworks

00:42:47 ◼   ► being able to use the same one in both places

00:42:49 ◼   ► basically makes it twice as valuable to me.

00:42:51 ◼   ► So I would love that.

00:42:52 ◼   ► But it's all just so early.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And to have basics like concurrency not worked out yet

00:42:59 ◼   ► is, I just, I need--

00:43:01 ◼   ► Well, yes and no, right? Like it's just as worked out as it is in Objective-C, because

00:43:05 ◼   ► you still have GCD and whatnot. It's just that—

00:43:07 ◼   ► Well, when I'm saying "server," I mean Linux, though.

00:43:10 ◼   ► Well, okay, fair. But my point is just that, like, concurrency, I agree with you, should

00:43:15 ◼   ► be worked out in a much better way, but it's not like we're handcuffed now. It's just

00:43:19 ◼   ► that it's the existing GCD API—again, maybe not on the server, but at least on the client—it's

00:43:26 ◼   ► It's the existing GCD API and it actually is a lot nicer in a lot of ways, but there

00:43:31 ◼   ► should be something like, you know, everyone is calling for C#'s async await, so we'll

00:43:36 ◼   ► see what happens.

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00:45:30 ◼   ► David Klein writes, "About two years ago,

00:45:35 ◼   ► "you discussed Women in Tech and podcasting

00:45:37 ◼   ► "and even exchange hosts.

00:45:39 ◼   ► "How do you feel today regarding Women in Tech?"

00:45:42 ◼   ► This is a very good question,

00:45:44 ◼   ► which stresses me out because I feel like I'm going to step on some landmine here.

00:45:50 ◼   ► But that being said, I feel like we have made, we, not the three of us, like we as a community,

00:45:59 ◼   ► have made a fair bit of positive strides, but still have a almost equal amount of improvement

00:46:07 ◼   ► left to make.

00:46:09 ◼   ► And I feel like people are paying a lot more attention to the fact that there's so much

00:46:14 ◼   ► sexism in tech, and it's such a crummy place to be a woman. And I think the easiest example

00:46:19 ◼   ► of this is people, like, regular people knowing what a cesspool Uber is/was, and regular people

00:46:27 ◼   ► deciding to use Lyft instead of Uber, which, quick aside, I used Lyft in Chicago when Erin

00:46:35 ◼   ► and I were on our 10-year wedding anniversary, and it was great. Worked great. No different

00:46:41 ◼   ► than Uber, and so I highly recommend it. But anyway, so we still have a ton of room. Like,

00:46:47 ◼   ► it's one of those things where we have taken like the tiniest, littlest step forward, but

00:46:51 ◼   ► there's still like 85,000 miles in front of us, so it's almost imperceptible. Marco?

00:46:55 ◼   ► - I basically agree. I mean, I unfortunately am not an expert in this topic. You know,

00:47:03 ◼   ► few men in tech are. You know, that's not a coincidence. It's a huge problem, and we

00:47:10 ◼   ► We still have so, so long to go, but we are talking about it now way more than it used

00:47:18 ◼   ► to be talked about.

00:47:20 ◼   ► So even though I don't have the knowledge to know whether it's actually making progress

00:47:26 ◼   ► really, I have no idea.

00:47:28 ◼   ► I would guess it's making slow progress.

00:47:31 ◼   ► But we are talking about it and a lot more people, ourselves included, are much more

00:47:37 ◼   ► more conscientious of this being an issue than we used to be.

00:47:41 ◼   ► And that has to help too.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And there's obviously a lot more that we can all do

00:47:47 ◼   ► and that we need to all do, but I do think that awareness

00:47:52 ◼   ► is way better than it was and that will slowly

00:47:56 ◼   ► start helping this problem.

00:47:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's like the first stage of all these things

00:48:01 ◼   ► is the very long process of getting people to be aware

00:48:05 ◼   ► that this is an issue at all.

00:48:06 ◼   ► what's the issue, what is the problem,

00:48:08 ◼   ► is this a thing that exists?

00:48:09 ◼   ► And that takes a really long time.

00:48:11 ◼   ► It's kind of depressing to me because my childhood,

00:48:13 ◼   ► like I felt like the whole,

00:48:16 ◼   ► one of the previous names of a larger version of this,

00:48:18 ◼   ► of the women's lib movement back in the 60s and 70s

00:48:22 ◼   ► and even to the 80s, was also in that stage of like,

00:48:25 ◼   ► hey, raise awareness, like women's liberation,

00:48:28 ◼   ► what do women need to be liberated from?

00:48:29 ◼   ► What do you mean, right?

00:48:31 ◼   ► I felt like we went through that.

00:48:34 ◼   ► And then like that knowledge was lost somehow.

00:48:38 ◼   ► And now here we are back in the tech sector,

00:48:40 ◼   ► which is a microcosm of the larger world.

00:48:42 ◼   ► It's like, do we have to relearn that sexism exists?

00:48:45 ◼   ► Apparently the answer is yes.

00:48:46 ◼   ► And we're learning it better and more thoroughly.

00:48:48 ◼   ► And with, I think, a clearer eyed picture

00:48:52 ◼   ► and not accepting as many limitations

00:48:55 ◼   ► as the previous feminist movements

00:48:57 ◼   ► and women's liberation and all that other stuff.

00:48:59 ◼   ► But I still very strongly feel

00:49:01 ◼   ► we are in the awareness phase for everybody. Like for, you know, for me as well, right?

00:49:06 ◼   ► And I do see some concrete signs of progress. I find myself seeing, I mean, from my perspective,

00:49:13 ◼   ► a lot of what I see is like, who's speaking at this tech conference? I see and watch and hear

00:49:19 ◼   ► about and get forwarded to me more really good talks by women at tech conferences,

00:49:24 ◼   ► as the circles I travel in, in my Twitter or whatever, than I did several years ago.

00:49:29 ◼   ► And I feel like that is progress, probably just progress in my awareness that that is a thing.

00:49:34 ◼   ► And also progress in the people I follow forwarding me those things. And, you know,

00:49:39 ◼   ► like you just said, like the fact that there can even be a story that has any real world

00:49:44 ◼   ► consequences to a company about, "Hey, this company is run by a bunch of sexist jerks."

00:49:48 ◼   ► And that actually like is, A, a thing we hear about, and B, something, anything, literally

00:49:52 ◼   ► anything happens about it. Maybe not the right thing, maybe not the best things, but something

00:49:56 ◼   ► happens, like if one extra person deletes their app, like that is a tiny bit of progress.

00:50:02 ◼   ► But yeah, that's pretty much how I feel how it's going. And about us specifically on the show,

00:50:08 ◼   ► like we're still, we still talk about it, we still discuss it, we still try to

00:50:12 ◼   ► do what we can in the ways that we can, you know, it's a continuing struggle.

00:50:17 ◼   ► Yep. Robin Kristofferson writes in, "Which, if any, of the many rumored changes to the new iPhone

00:50:23 ◼   ► would actually make you decide not to upgrade if it comes to pass.

00:50:27 ◼   ► I'm gonna go on a very small rant about this. I don't understand people who say,

00:50:34 ◼   ► and I can't think of a specific example of, "Oh, actually the Touch Bar is a great example.

00:50:39 ◼   ► I will never like the Touch Bar and I will never buy a Mac that has a Touch Bar."

00:50:43 ◼   ► That to me just doesn't make sense, because it stands to reason that at least for portable Macs,

00:50:50 ◼   ► the touch bar is going to be the future probably across the line. It may not be for five years or something like that,

00:50:55 ◼   ► but it will probably be the future. And even if the touch bar, if you think that's a crummy example,

00:50:59 ◼   ► it doesn't matter. My point is, like, just get on the bus.

00:51:02 ◼   ► The bus is pulling away, get on the bus. And you may not love it,

00:51:07 ◼   ► but get on the bus. Because what's the alternative? Go to Windows? Ha, have fun. And so to me,

00:51:12 ◼   ► there may be something that I don't like about the new iPhone. So for the sake of example,

00:51:17 ◼   ► I'm skeptical that I would terribly enjoy the face unlock and I would you know and I suspect I wouldn't miss touch ID

00:51:24 ◼   ► but I mean I will certainly give it a shot and

00:51:28 ◼   ► I will certainly give it a shot and if it ends up that I like touch ID better

00:51:33 ◼   ► Well, then that's a stinky part of the new iPhone, but everything else will be amazing. So it'll all even itself out

00:51:38 ◼   ► So I don't really and I understand the question, but I don't really understand this question

00:51:44 ◼   ► You think the narrower view they're asking would make you not want to upgrade and when I saw this question

00:51:48 ◼   ► I thought about like touch ID on the back

00:51:50 ◼   ► If they couldn't if they can't get the touch ID under the screen for this generation

00:51:55 ◼   ► but we know for a fact was other phones do this that

00:51:58 ◼   ► Fingerprint sensing under a screen is a technology that exists that just you know wasn't up to Apple's caliber yet for whatever reason I might

00:52:06 ◼   ► Say if I was if it was my upgrade year, which it isn't by the way I might say oh

00:52:10 ◼   ► "Oh, I'm not gonna upgrade to this phone.

00:52:13 ◼   ► I'll wait till next year when hopefully they'll have that sorted out, or we even wait to the

00:52:17 ◼   ► next generation because you know I have no problem waiting."

00:52:19 ◼   ► It's not like Casey was saying, "Oh, I'm never gonna buy a Touch Bar."

00:52:22 ◼   ► Obviously, eventually you're gonna have to get a new phone, and eventually I would choose

00:52:25 ◼   ► to get an iPhone.

00:52:27 ◼   ► But specifically, "Oh, if they make a new form factor and it's the first model year

00:52:30 ◼   ► and they had to make weird compromises and touch ideas in the back," even if it's just

00:52:33 ◼   ► as simple as, "They put Touch ID in the back, but I've never used Touch ID in the back,

00:52:37 ◼   ► I'm not sure I like it.

00:52:38 ◼   ► I'd rather let a bunch of my friends who I know really well buy this phone and tell me about it so that the next year

00:52:43 ◼   ► I'll know whether I think I'll like it or like just play with them to start whatever. So yes, there are lots of weird things

00:52:48 ◼   ► Involving the phone that would make me decide not to upgrade

00:52:51 ◼   ► But I don't think there's many things that would make me decide I'm never going to buy an iPhone again

00:52:56 ◼   ► And that's that's a different question

00:52:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean I I think pretty similarly. I mean look we all know I'm gonna buy it regardless

00:53:04 ◼   ► So, why even bother?

00:53:07 ◼   ► I mean, I think the answer is,

00:53:10 ◼   ► I'm gonna do what I always do,

00:53:12 ◼   ► which is I'm going to buy the new thing immediately,

00:53:16 ◼   ► and then I'll complain about anything

00:53:17 ◼   ► that's worse about it.

00:53:19 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:53:20 ◼   ► That's typically how these things tend to go.

00:53:23 ◼   ► I did not want to answer this question,

00:53:27 ◼   ► because this is another example of where I don't care.

00:53:31 ◼   ► But somebody, and I think that person's name

00:53:33 ◼   ► might be John Syracuse has decided we should answer this question so Stephen

00:53:37 ◼   ► Sandhoff writes tabs or spaces I honestly don't even have the faintest

00:53:41 ◼   ► idea what my editors set to it's whatever the default for Xcode is don't

00:53:45 ◼   ► care you're a monster don't even know I don't even know just pick one actually I

00:53:52 ◼   ► can say the same thing so I know what it is in textmate but for my iOS code and

00:53:57 ◼   ► Xcode I actually have no idea which one it is but in I will say in textmate it's

00:54:01 ◼   ► spaces, but I, this is the kind of, like,

00:54:04 ◼   ► I tweeted about this a few weeks ago, like,

00:54:06 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter because good tools

00:54:09 ◼   ► let you switch between one or the other

00:54:11 ◼   ► with like one command, so it's,

00:54:13 ◼   ► it really doesn't matter at all.

00:54:15 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no, that's not something

00:54:17 ◼   ► a tab user would say, it totally matters,

00:54:19 ◼   ► let me tell you why.

00:54:21 ◼   ► So first of all, my answer on tabs versus spaces is spaces,

00:54:25 ◼   ► and the reason I say spaces is because spaces

00:54:27 ◼   ► are the same size visually everywhere.

00:54:30 ◼   ► But the whole point in tabs, I thought, is that I can choose to have my tabs be a thousand

00:54:36 ◼   ► width.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Right, okay, yep.

00:54:38 ◼   ► So now tabs, now it's like, okay, well tabs are semantic, indent here, but don't tell

00:54:42 ◼   ► me how big it has to be.

00:54:43 ◼   ► The problem with that is that I think good formatting in most, not maybe, some, let's

00:54:53 ◼   ► just say, in some programming languages, good formatting needs to be done, has instances

00:54:59 ◼   ► in which you want to indent by less than one indentation level to align things.

00:55:08 ◼   ► And if you use spaces everywhere, there is no ambiguity and you can make it look like

00:55:14 ◼   ► how you want it to look like.

00:55:16 ◼   ► If you use tabs, some joker is going to set their tab to two and someone else is going

00:55:21 ◼   ► to have it set to four and someone's going to have it set to eight and the part and the

00:55:24 ◼   ► line where you use tabs but then use spaces to align a bunch of things is going to look

00:55:28 ◼   ► crazy pants.

00:55:29 ◼   ► So spaces is the correct answer, but I'm forced to use tabs at work and have for many years.

00:55:33 ◼   ► And so if you're a working programmer, you got to do what you got to do with the actual

00:55:36 ◼   ► answer of spaces.

00:55:38 ◼   ► And Chris Lattner agrees with me, so there you go.

00:55:41 ◼   ► And that's all that really matters.

00:55:42 ◼   ► I bet that's going to be what eventually drives you to quit your job.

00:55:45 ◼   ► Like eventually, one day, you're going to hit that tab key for the last time, and you're

00:55:50 ◼   ► like, that's it, I'm done.

00:55:51 ◼   ► No, I mean, you still hit the tab key even when it does spaces.

00:55:54 ◼   ► But work changed both my brace style and the indenting character, but this is what it means

00:55:59 ◼   ► to be a working programmer.

00:56:00 ◼   ► It's too far.

00:56:01 ◼   ► Wait, what is your preferred brace style?

00:56:04 ◼   ► Many years ago, I used BSD style opening and closing in the same column for basically my

00:56:11 ◼   ► entire career up to like maybe ten years ago.

00:56:13 ◼   ► And then I forcibly switched to K&R.

00:56:17 ◼   ► No cuddled elses.

00:56:18 ◼   ► Come on, people.

00:56:19 ◼   ► I'm a K&R person myself.

00:56:21 ◼   ► You know, I used to--first of all, I had no idea those were the two--like, I didn't know

00:56:25 ◼   ► the names for those two styles, but I used to be violently, devoutly in favor of--what

00:56:31 ◼   ► did you say, BSD, where all of the opening and closing--

00:56:34 ◼   ► Maybe I'm getting you wrong, it might be Allman.

00:56:35 ◼   ► It's the one where the opening curly is underneath the "I" and "if."

00:56:39 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

00:56:40 ◼   ► That's the way I used to be, just--and I was passionately about it, like, almost as bad

00:56:45 ◼   ► as I am about people who say "jif."

00:56:47 ◼   ► Like I passionately believed that you have to put it under "I" and those monsters that

00:56:53 ◼   ► say "jif" that also put the opening brace at the end of the line are just without help.

00:56:59 ◼   ► And over time, similar story, I think because I started writing a fair bit of JavaScript,

00:57:04 ◼   ► I ended up kind of switching to the other style where you have, you know, if something

00:57:10 ◼   ► open brace, new line.

00:57:12 ◼   ► I think it's an important part in every programmer who doesn't work for themselves in a single-person

00:57:16 ◼   ► shop in their careers is becoming not just multi-language fluent, but becoming able to—and

00:57:22 ◼   ► you work on open source projects, you're forced into this too—becoming able to write code in

00:57:26 ◼   ► the style demanded by the thing that you're doing, whether it's a job or an open source project or

00:57:30 ◼   ► whatever. You can't—I mean, you can be precious about it and have a preferred thing, but you have

00:57:34 ◼   ► to be able to get the job done in whatever language or formatting that is dictated by the—you just

00:57:40 ◼   ► have to. It's just practically—and in the end, I was also pretty strongly about opening Curly

00:57:45 ◼   ► under the little eye and I still think it's the style that makes more sense but you know

00:57:51 ◼   ► you get over it a few years of using K&R and you're like okay like it's fine and it's actually

00:57:56 ◼   ► difficult if you get into a groove to switch back and forth like you have to mode switch

00:58:01 ◼   ► between them you'll just your fingers will you'll find them doing the thing that they

00:58:04 ◼   ► do and you have to switch back but like that's life that's programming for you.

00:58:08 ◼   ► No actually the reason why I use K&R style is that I used to use the brace under the

00:58:13 ◼   ► the eye, but like in college, and like as I was teaching

00:58:15 ◼   ► myself how to program and going through college,

00:58:17 ◼   ► like I used that style, and then my first job used

00:58:20 ◼   ► strictly KNR style, and they just like broke me

00:58:23 ◼   ► of that habit, and then that became my style.

00:58:26 ◼   ► Anyway, we can all agree, tabs versus spaces,

00:58:30 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter, but the right answer is spaces,

00:58:33 ◼   ► unless you use two spaces, in which case you're an animal.

00:58:37 ◼   ► - I think I could probably get behind that.

00:58:39 ◼   ► Spencer Holbrook writes in, "What low-level part

00:58:41 ◼   ► Apple stack would you like to see replaced next hfs+ to APFS objective C to Swift open GL to metal etc

00:58:48 ◼   ► I think I'm most anxious and most interested in hfs+ to APFS

00:58:54 ◼   ► And I can't think of another example off top my head. I'm sure John you'll probably have one

00:58:58 ◼   ► But none of these are really rev my engine that much. Sorry John Marco

00:59:04 ◼   ► They're asking you what you want to see replaced next they listed a bunch of ones. They're already doing oh, so following all of that yes

00:59:10 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah, wish list.

00:59:14 ◼   ► - I don't even know, I'd have to think about that.

00:59:16 ◼   ► I'm not sure, to be honest.

00:59:18 ◼   ► I'll pass on this one.

00:59:18 ◼   ► Marco, what do you think?

00:59:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm sure John's gonna have the best answers here,

00:59:22 ◼   ► but my-- - Yeah, exactly.

00:59:23 ◼   ► - Thank you for going to me first,

00:59:24 ◼   ► I don't have to follow him.

00:59:26 ◼   ► My boring answers are basically, I have two,

00:59:28 ◼   ► it's like, if the API framework,

00:59:32 ◼   ► or if the UI framework is the correct level

00:59:35 ◼   ► for this question, I would love to see

00:59:37 ◼   ► what surpasses AppKit on the Mac, if ever.

00:59:40 ◼   ► - Oh, that's a good one actually.

00:59:42 ◼   ► That's very good.

00:59:42 ◼   ► - That's not low level.

00:59:44 ◼   ► - So if you go a little bit lower level,

00:59:45 ◼   ► what I would also like to see,

00:59:47 ◼   ► it's another thing on the Mac actually,

00:59:49 ◼   ► I would like to see Mac sandboxing

00:59:50 ◼   ► completely rethought and matured.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And rethinking of the Mac security model with the new,

00:59:56 ◼   ► so like basically bringing a more iOS-like

01:00:00 ◼   ► sandboxing environment to the Mac.

01:00:02 ◼   ► So to do things like, you could knowingly safely

01:00:07 ◼   ► install an application and then delete that application

01:00:10 ◼   ► and know that everything that goes with it gets deleted.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Know that it can only write to and read from

01:00:14 ◼   ► certain directories that are easy to manage

01:00:17 ◼   ► and isolated from other things and can't,

01:00:19 ◼   ► like every app that you install as you, the user account,

01:00:22 ◼   ► can't read your entire user directory.

01:00:24 ◼   ► And they started down this path of sandboxing,

01:00:26 ◼   ► whenever that was, like eight years ago,

01:00:28 ◼   ► and they did like the most bare bones basic version

01:00:31 ◼   ► and then just stopped and they'd never matured it.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And because of the version they did

01:00:38 ◼   ► and the various shortcomings it had,

01:00:40 ◼   ► it basically made it so that most apps

01:00:42 ◼   ► could not be reasonably sandboxed

01:00:44 ◼   ► if they did anything cool at all.

01:00:46 ◼   ► And I bet there's a better balance to be struck.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Now in the modern day with what we know,

01:00:52 ◼   ► with where the software world is, where the economics

01:00:55 ◼   ► and where the ecosystem has gone since then,

01:00:57 ◼   ► I would love to see a more modern,

01:01:00 ◼   ► more secure version of sandboxing on the Mac

01:01:04 ◼   ► that brings it closer to iOS in those security

01:01:06 ◼   ► and user assuredness ways,

01:01:09 ◼   ► but that still has the power of Mac software

01:01:12 ◼   ► available in various new clever ways.

01:01:16 ◼   ► I know that's a very hard thing to solve,

01:01:18 ◼   ► but there's also, A, I think we need to solve it,

01:01:21 ◼   ► and B, I think there's massive gains to be had there

01:01:23 ◼   ► when it is solved.

01:01:25 ◼   ► - All right, John.

01:01:26 ◼   ► - So there's probably, there's a bunch of stuff

01:01:29 ◼   ► all the way down to the kernel itself

01:01:30 ◼   ► that I can list here, but the reason I put this in

01:01:32 ◼   ► was 'cause I don't have any really good answers

01:01:34 ◼   ► for low level stuff that I'm dying for,

01:01:36 ◼   ► except for one, as actually mentioned in here,

01:01:38 ◼   ► they said, you know, HFS to APFS,

01:01:40 ◼   ► Objective-C to Swift, OpenGL to Metal.

01:01:43 ◼   ► The OpenGL to Metal one is the one

01:01:45 ◼   ► I actually have objections to.

01:01:46 ◼   ► I don't, like, I understand Metal,

01:01:48 ◼   ► and it's a good thing to have,

01:01:49 ◼   ► and Apple is heavily behind it,

01:01:52 ◼   ► but I think Apple should still have

01:01:54 ◼   ► a world-class OpenGL implementation.

01:01:56 ◼   ► And I know that's a tough sell,

01:01:57 ◼   ► but it's like, what do we even need that for?

01:01:59 ◼   ► We're all in on Metal, Metal is the future,

01:02:02 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I don't think you should get rid of Metal, but OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever is still

01:02:09 ◼   ► a thing and it is still worth Apple not just maintaining but like, you know, advance it.

01:02:19 ◼   ► Like either don't have it at all.

01:02:20 ◼   ► It's kind of like Flash.

01:02:21 ◼   ► Like look, if you think it's viable to have a web browser without Flash, don't support

01:02:24 ◼   ► it at all.

01:02:25 ◼   ► Don't just say, "Oh, our Flash implementation is slow and so people won't use it and they'll

01:02:28 ◼   ► migrate to H." Just don't support it at all.

01:02:30 ◼   ► Don't support at all. And if you think you can't, you know, oh, we can't drop OpenGL

01:02:34 ◼   ► We have to have it our whole a West Run. So well, then make a good version of it

01:02:37 ◼   ► Like I was this came up recently in the article. I think Casey read was he retweeted it

01:02:41 ◼   ► But I read earlier about the dolphin

01:02:43 ◼   ► Game cube emulator and all interesting technical problems Casey. You can have a show note there put that one link in the show notes

01:02:51 ◼   ► It's a good article

01:02:53 ◼   ► lots of good articles on that and it goes through some fun technical details and then towards the bottom of this really nice article it

01:02:59 ◼   ► and here's a section for Mac users.

01:03:01 ◼   ► None of this is relevant to you because your OpenGL stack

01:03:03 ◼   ► is a piece of crap and none of the features

01:03:05 ◼   ► that we even talked about even exist

01:03:06 ◼   ► in your OpenGL implementation,

01:03:08 ◼   ► let alone exist in our performance.

01:03:09 ◼   ► So screw you guys.

01:03:10 ◼   ► And it's like, look, Apple, it's embarrassing.

01:03:13 ◼   ► I wish I want them, and what do we lose by that?

01:03:16 ◼   ► We don't get to have a cool GameCube emulator

01:03:18 ◼   ► unless we boot into Windows or Linux for crying out, Linux.

01:03:22 ◼   ► So I hope that Apple gets their act together with OpenGL.

01:03:27 ◼   ► Either don't support it at all

01:03:29 ◼   ► and then figure out what you have to do to make your computer still viable or actually

01:03:32 ◼   ► support it and be awesome.

01:03:35 ◼   ► That was not what I expected, but that was a pretty good answer.

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01:04:52 ◼   ► Betterment, investing made better.

01:04:55 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:04:58 ◼   ► - JC Calhoun writes, "How about an update

01:05:00 ◼   ► "on how the Overcast advertising is working out?"

01:05:03 ◼   ► So John, no, I'm just kidding.

01:05:05 ◼   ► What do you think, Marco?

01:05:07 ◼   ► - I mean, the short answer is it's great.

01:05:09 ◼   ► I mean, there's not a whole lot to say on it.

01:05:12 ◼   ► This is, so they're talking about like how I switched

01:05:14 ◼   ► a few months ago to selling my own direct ads,

01:05:18 ◼   ► and now they're entirely for podcasts.

01:05:20 ◼   ► At first it was like for podcasts and/or websites.

01:05:24 ◼   ► The podcasts have been buying them so much

01:05:27 ◼   ► that I actually recently stopped selling them

01:05:29 ◼   ► for anything that's not a podcast.

01:05:31 ◼   ► The capability's still there if I choose to use it later,

01:05:33 ◼   ► but I don't think I will need to for a while.

01:05:36 ◼   ► I worked out some various pricing

01:05:40 ◼   ► and inventory level tweaks over the last few months,

01:05:43 ◼   ► just working out how should these things be priced,

01:05:46 ◼   ► how many should I have in each category,

01:05:48 ◼   ► what should the categories even be.

01:05:50 ◼   ► But I think it's pretty stable now.

01:05:52 ◼   ► And it's making good money, it's making something like

01:05:56 ◼   ► 10 times what I was making from Google ad,

01:05:59 ◼   ► whatever their ad mob, that's what it is,

01:06:01 ◼   ► yeah, the mobile ad thing.

01:06:02 ◼   ► So it's going great.

01:06:03 ◼   ► And as long as this continues to sell at all reasonably,

01:06:08 ◼   ► I don't see myself changing the model anytime soon.

01:06:11 ◼   ► - From your analytics or whatever you've got

01:06:14 ◼   ► running against these ads,

01:06:16 ◼   ► does it seem like they're working?

01:06:17 ◼   ► Like obviously they're working in the sense

01:06:19 ◼   ► that you keep selling them,

01:06:20 ◼   ► but are they working in the sense that it seems like

01:06:22 ◼   ► they're pushing subscriptions to shows and all that?

01:06:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I have that info and I share that,

01:06:27 ◼   ► like, the advertisers, when you buy an ad,

01:06:30 ◼   ► they see in their little control panel on the website

01:06:33 ◼   ► how many impressions, how many taps,

01:06:35 ◼   ► and how many subscriptions it has gotten.

01:06:38 ◼   ► They don't see anything else,

01:06:39 ◼   ► but they see those three numbers, and that's all.

01:06:41 ◼   ► Honestly, I don't collect anything else.

01:06:42 ◼   ► That's all I collect.

01:06:43 ◼   ► So, and that plays into how I price them.

01:06:46 ◼   ► Like, I try to keep the cost per new subscriber

01:06:49 ◼   ► within a certain range.

01:06:50 ◼   ► The challenge in pricing these ads is not trying to get people to buy them, it's trying

01:06:56 ◼   ► to avoid the temptation to raise prices like crazy because they're selling out frequently.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And it's hard for me to know like what should a new listener be worth?

01:07:08 ◼   ► What ring should I keep this price in?

01:07:10 ◼   ► The way I've been pricing it, I've been keeping it between one and two dollars for most categories.

01:07:14 ◼   ► But certain categories, like I recently separated out business podcasts into their own category.

01:07:20 ◼   ► 'Cause I ran the numbers of what is a listener to,

01:07:24 ◼   ► sorry, what's a listener to ATP worth?

01:07:26 ◼   ► And if you've run the numbers over the course

01:07:28 ◼   ► of certain time spans or a year or two,

01:07:30 ◼   ► it ends up being like five bucks, something like that.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And so I thought if I keep the price

01:07:36 ◼   ► of between one and two dollars,

01:07:37 ◼   ► that keeps it pretty good,

01:07:39 ◼   ► pretty compelling for most people.

01:07:41 ◼   ► But certain categories like business,

01:07:44 ◼   ► business podcasts are huge, first of all.

01:07:46 ◼   ► Like that's a huge market for business tips and tricks

01:07:49 ◼   ► and writing books and everything,

01:07:50 ◼   ► and many of them monetize not just by ads,

01:07:53 ◼   ► but by selling you books, ebooks, conferences, seminars,

01:07:58 ◼   ► stuff like that, so they might have

01:08:01 ◼   ► a very different valuation of what

01:08:03 ◼   ► a new subscriber is worth to them.

01:08:05 ◼   ► And this is true of many of the different

01:08:08 ◼   ► categories of podcasts, and some of them,

01:08:12 ◼   ► the people don't care what a new listener's worth to them.

01:08:14 ◼   ► They just want to get some listeners,

01:08:15 ◼   ► and then they have a new show maybe,

01:08:17 ◼   ► and they wanna get it basically going from zero.

01:08:19 ◼   ► And so they use the ads for that.

01:08:21 ◼   ► If you look at it purely as like how should I price these,

01:08:25 ◼   ► in terms of like pure demand, they keep selling out,

01:08:29 ◼   ► so I should price them way higher.

01:08:31 ◼   ► But if I price them higher,

01:08:32 ◼   ► we're gonna start getting into numbers

01:08:34 ◼   ► that if you think about the numbers,

01:08:36 ◼   ► if you run the numbers of like what is a listener worth,

01:08:38 ◼   ► it starts not to make sense for a lot of people.

01:08:40 ◼   ► So I don't want to reach that level.

01:08:42 ◼   ► So basically the answer is,

01:08:43 ◼   ► I think I even could make more money from it

01:08:46 ◼   ► if I tried to, but I would be afraid if I did that,

01:08:49 ◼   ► that I would have like a brief period of making more money

01:08:53 ◼   ► followed by a crash as a lot of advertisers

01:08:56 ◼   ► started seeing this actually isn't worth

01:08:58 ◼   ► what I'm paying for these users and starts bailing out.

01:09:00 ◼   ► So I wanna keep it reasonable

01:09:02 ◼   ► so that I have the most advertisers possible.

01:09:03 ◼   ► But besides that, that minor concern,

01:09:06 ◼   ► which I think is largely alleviated now

01:09:08 ◼   ► by just time and stability, it's going great.

01:09:12 ◼   ► It really is going great.

01:09:13 ◼   ► And it's one of the only advertising things

01:09:15 ◼   ► I've ever seen where basically all the parties win.

01:09:20 ◼   ► Because I'm not showing you ads for Viagra mattresses,

01:09:23 ◼   ► I'm showing you ads for podcasts in categories

01:09:27 ◼   ► that you subscribe to while you're using a podcast app

01:09:31 ◼   ► in a way that respects your privacy,

01:09:33 ◼   ► that isn't a huge burden, that doesn't get in your way.

01:09:36 ◼   ► It's a great setup.

01:09:39 ◼   ► And this obviously is not a method that every app can do.

01:09:43 ◼   ► So it's not like, I'm not saying like every app

01:09:45 ◼   ► should monetize the way I've monetized,

01:09:47 ◼   ► because, well, you simply can't, it doesn't apply.

01:09:50 ◼   ► But for what I am doing, it's working great.

01:09:54 ◼   ► And I have more advertisers who want to buy ads

01:09:58 ◼   ► than I have inventory to sell them, and that's wonderful.

01:10:01 ◼   ► - That's really awesome.

01:10:03 ◼   ► John, any additional thoughts on that?

01:10:06 ◼   ► - Nope.

01:10:07 ◼   ► - All right, Edgar Perez writes in,

01:10:09 ◼   ► and this is the first one that I noticed in this context,

01:10:13 ◼   ► But I've seen this come up a lot, particularly after our 1Password discussion.

01:10:17 ◼   ► And he writes to say, "I agree that $3 a month for an app service is reasonable, but what

01:10:21 ◼   ► if all the apps I use monthly want $3 a month?

01:10:24 ◼   ► Can't let apps kill the Mac."

01:10:26 ◼   ► I understand what people are driving at.

01:10:28 ◼   ► And again, Edgar isn't the first person to say this.

01:10:30 ◼   ► "Oh, if every app I use is a subscription app, well, suddenly I won't be able to afford

01:10:34 ◼   ► anything anymore."

01:10:36 ◼   ► And I get that.

01:10:37 ◼   ► But I think in my eyes, if everything I used became a subscription, I would either change

01:10:45 ◼   ► my usage or I would pay for it all.

01:10:49 ◼   ► And since we're now deep into the second episode, I don't remember if it was this episode or

01:10:53 ◼   ► last week, we talked about ad blockers.

01:10:55 ◼   ► I think it was last week, which was really two hours ago, talked about ad blockers and

01:10:59 ◼   ► how, Marco, you were saying, "Well, if an ad blocker shows up, then I'll just leave

01:11:04 ◼   ► and I just won't read that content."

01:11:05 ◼   ► It was this one, by the way.

01:11:06 ◼   ► Oh, it wasn't this one?

01:11:07 ◼   ► OK, thanks. So I'm getting tired. It's nearly midnight. But anyway, so point being, you

01:11:14 ◼   ► know, I think it's a similar thing. So like for me, and this is just for Casey, it may

01:11:18 ◼   ► not be for others, but for me, I absolutely will pay for 1Password and I will absolutely

01:11:23 ◼   ► pay for Day One. But maybe you're, you know, the listener here, maybe you're a Day One

01:11:27 ◼   ► user, but you don't love it. You just kind of like it. And maybe it's not worth paying

01:11:32 ◼   ► for on a regular basis. So you just stop using Day One and use Apple Notes or something like

01:11:37 ◼   ► that. That's okay. That's an option like that, that that will work in life will go on, but

01:11:43 ◼   ► I don't know. That's just the way I look at it. John, what do you think?

01:11:46 ◼   ► John Wall,

01:11:46 ◼   ► If you had remembered back to actual last week, I address this on the one password episode

01:11:52 ◼   ► I said look not every I did it from the perspective of an app developer

01:11:55 ◼   ► Not every app can sustain subscription pricing your app has to be valuable enough to enough people to sustain subscription pricing

01:12:02 ◼   ► So I don't think there's any fear that every single app is going to be you know

01:12:06 ◼   ► Three dollars a month because there are app categories entire categories level on individual apps that can't sustain it

01:12:12 ◼   ► But they don't deliver that much value to people

01:12:15 ◼   ► so

01:12:16 ◼   ► You have to you have to know your application and your market to say is any are enough people willing to subscribe to this

01:12:22 ◼   ► People probably aren't gonna pay three dollars a month for a fart app

01:12:25 ◼   ► Alright, even if you have new farts released every month like they're there a whole you know

01:12:30 ◼   ► You have to turn it you'd have to turn it into like a free for free to play, you know

01:12:35 ◼   ► Casino gambling exploit human nature type service to get that and then it's a different kind of app entirely, right?

01:12:40 ◼   ► So this is a fear that I don't think is a real thing.

01:12:43 ◼   ► If you're a customer, this will take care of itself.

01:12:45 ◼   ► Don't like the price, don't buy it, right?

01:12:47 ◼   ► And from a developer's perspective,

01:12:49 ◼   ► if you don't wanna be on the losing end

01:12:51 ◼   ► of that problem taking care of itself,

01:12:53 ◼   ► you should know, you know,

01:12:55 ◼   ► if we can't develop this without subscription pricing,

01:12:59 ◼   ► make sure that it is valuable enough to enough people

01:13:02 ◼   ► to justify subscription pricing.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And 1Password certainly is,

01:13:05 ◼   ► because a lot of people find it a very valuable thing

01:13:07 ◼   ► and they want it to work on an ongoing basis

01:13:09 ◼   ► and they understand the ongoing maintenance costs and they're willing to pay for it,

01:13:13 ◼   ► but your FART app might not be. So I would say don't worry about this too much and

01:13:17 ◼   ► if you don't want to pay for a subscription, don't pay for it.

01:13:19 ◼   ► I mean every time subscription pricing comes up, people bring up this issue of what's

01:13:27 ◼   ► going to happen when everything's subscription and everyone gets tired of it and stops paying

01:13:31 ◼   ► for it, you know, something like that, you know, the idea of subscription fatigue. And,

01:13:37 ◼   ► you know, we've been able to charge subscription prices now

01:13:39 ◼   ► for a little while, and that's just not happening.

01:13:43 ◼   ► I have not seen any sign that that's happening.

01:13:46 ◼   ► I think this is one of those things

01:13:47 ◼   ► that the market just sorts out itself.

01:13:49 ◼   ► Like John said, most apps aren't willing to,

01:13:52 ◼   ► or sorry, most customers aren't willing to pay

01:13:55 ◼   ► for most of their apps.

01:13:56 ◼   ► But they wouldn't be buying a $36 a year upgrade either

01:14:01 ◼   ► instead of paying $3 a month.

01:14:05 ◼   ► The fact is most apps have a lot of competition and aren't that necessary for most people.

01:14:10 ◼   ► So they're going to have a hard time no matter how they charge. But the apps that are really

01:14:15 ◼   ► valuable to people, that are difficult for people to go without or they're required for

01:14:20 ◼   ► them to do their work or whatever else, or that appeal to markets that don't care about

01:14:23 ◼   ► spending $3 a month, they can do this just fine. I don't think the whole slippery slope

01:14:30 ◼   ► argument of like, "Well, once all the apps go this way, no one's going to want to pay

01:14:32 ◼   ► anymore, I just don't think that's happening.

01:14:36 ◼   ► I think we would've seen that by now.

01:14:39 ◼   ► We would've seen that at least starting, and it's just not.

01:14:42 ◼   ► Most apps are not even trying to charge subscription rates,

01:14:47 ◼   ► and the ones that are mostly do okay.

01:14:51 ◼   ► - I agree.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Jude Dunne writes in, "Is it technically possible

01:14:54 ◼   ► "for Apple to make second-gen AirPods noise-canceling

01:14:57 ◼   ► "or noise-isolating?

01:14:58 ◼   ► "I really, really want that."

01:15:00 ◼   ► I don't see why not.

01:15:02 ◼   ► I think the problem with that is it's even more processing

01:15:04 ◼   ► to be done, thus even more battery usage,

01:15:06 ◼   ► but I mean at this point I don't know

01:15:08 ◼   ► that it would be a tremendous difference.

01:15:11 ◼   ► And certainly noise isolating,

01:15:12 ◼   ► I mean they could change the look of these things

01:15:16 ◼   ► and change where they sit within your ear,

01:15:19 ◼   ► but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

01:15:20 ◼   ► Marco?

01:15:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean you basically got it.

01:15:23 ◼   ► I mean the noise cancellation requires

01:15:26 ◼   ► a microphone on the outside and then DSP on the inside

01:15:29 ◼   ► to basically emit sound waves on the inside,

01:15:33 ◼   ► mixed into your sound, that will cancel out

01:15:37 ◼   ► by phase of the wave, that will cancel out the waves

01:15:40 ◼   ► of the ones coming in from the outside world.

01:15:42 ◼   ► So there's nothing stopping them from doing that,

01:15:44 ◼   ► as far as I know, in the hardware they have now,

01:15:46 ◼   ► or in that style of hardware they have now, rather.

01:15:50 ◼   ► But that wouldn't be very useful without better isolation.

01:15:54 ◼   ► And isolation is right now where they really fall down.

01:15:58 ◼   ► and that doesn't require any circuitry,

01:15:59 ◼   ► that requires physical barriers, basically,

01:16:02 ◼   ► literally just isolating you from the world around you.

01:16:04 ◼   ► And to do that, right now they are earbuds,

01:16:08 ◼   ► and what earbuds are are little drivers

01:16:10 ◼   ► that sit kind of inside your ears,

01:16:13 ◼   ► but they're more like resting

01:16:15 ◼   ► in a little curvy spot in your ear.

01:16:17 ◼   ► They're not really blocking your ear canal at all.

01:16:20 ◼   ► There are other types, like canal phones,

01:16:22 ◼   ► or in-ear monitors, they're also called,

01:16:26 ◼   ► that actually block your whole ear canal

01:16:27 ◼   ► with some kind of big rubber cone thing

01:16:30 ◼   ► or something like that and they physically block the sound

01:16:34 ◼   ► from getting into your ears.

01:16:35 ◼   ► Larger over-ear headphones have a similar effect

01:16:39 ◼   ► but they cup over your ears as if you're putting your hands

01:16:43 ◼   ► over your ears and block the sound that way.

01:16:45 ◼   ► Either way, you're physically blocking the sound

01:16:47 ◼   ► from getting there.

01:16:49 ◼   ► For the ear pods, sorry, for the AirPods or EarPods

01:16:52 ◼   ► to do that, they would have to have a totally different

01:16:54 ◼   ► shape that would actually block your ear canal

01:16:58 ◼   ► and be more like canal phones.

01:17:01 ◼   ► Or they would have to have some kind of coating or cover

01:17:04 ◼   ► you could put on them, some kind of accessory

01:17:06 ◼   ► that you could put on them to do that.

01:17:08 ◼   ► Although I think they would, ideally they would be

01:17:10 ◼   ► designed for this from the start.

01:17:12 ◼   ► So there's nothing stopping Apple from releasing

01:17:16 ◼   ► AirPod canal phones.

01:17:18 ◼   ► But it's a different style of product.

01:17:21 ◼   ► It's a whole different shape, it's a whole different

01:17:24 ◼   ► set of constraints and design goals

01:17:25 ◼   ► you'd have to have for it.

01:17:27 ◼   ► I don't expect they would do that, probably at all,

01:17:31 ◼   ► but if they do it, it would probably be a separate product.

01:17:34 ◼   ► It probably would not just be like AirPods 2,

01:17:37 ◼   ► now they block your whole ear canal.

01:17:39 ◼   ► It would probably be like, here's the new, you know,

01:17:41 ◼   ► air canals or, you know, whatever,

01:17:43 ◼   ► they would have a better name than that,

01:17:44 ◼   ► but it would probably be a separate product

01:17:46 ◼   ► because that's a very separate physical design

01:17:48 ◼   ► of these products.

01:17:50 ◼   ► - Let's just work on Apple being able to ship AirPods

01:17:52 ◼   ► in a reasonable timeframe before we worry

01:17:54 ◼   ► about adding features to them.

01:17:55 ◼   ► - Sick burn.

01:17:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, I also would not spend too much time

01:18:00 ◼   ► waiting around for the AirPod 2s,

01:18:03 ◼   ► AirPods 2, whatever they're called.

01:18:05 ◼   ► I don't think Apple was updating the AirPods anytime soon.

01:18:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think you're probably right about that.

01:18:11 ◼   ► Alex S. Glomsass writes in to say,

01:18:15 ◼   ► "If you could make a single change to Swift,

01:18:17 ◼   ► "what would it be?"

01:18:18 ◼   ► I will say that even though it's probably not the biggest

01:18:24 ◼   ► thing in the world, what I'd really love to

01:18:25 ◼   ► see is reflection.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And I've talked about this from time to time.

01:18:28 ◼   ► Reflection or introspection means at runtime you can look

01:18:31 ◼   ► at an object in code and say, what are the properties it

01:18:33 ◼   ► has, what are the methods it has.

01:18:35 ◼   ► And typically, along with that, you'll see annotations,

01:18:40 ◼   ► which are attributes in C# world, which means you can

01:18:44 ◼   ► decorate your code with metadata, which

01:18:46 ◼   ► is also super useful.

01:18:47 ◼   ► I could go on and on and on about this,

01:18:49 ◼   ► but it's not terribly interesting.

01:18:50 ◼   ► So I'll just say, reflection with a bonus choice

01:18:53 ◼   ► of stealing Marco's thought earlier

01:18:56 ◼   ► of a better concurrency model.

01:19:00 ◼   ► So since I've stolen your obvious answer, Marco,

01:19:02 ◼   ► what would you say afterwards?

01:19:04 ◼   ► - Honestly, I don't really have a good answer

01:19:05 ◼   ► to this question, 'cause I don't know enough about Swift

01:19:08 ◼   ► because of the aforementioned factors.

01:19:10 ◼   ► I don't use it really enough.

01:19:12 ◼   ► So I really am not qualified to say.

01:19:14 ◼   ► - Jon?

01:19:16 ◼   ► So if a single change, if concurrency counts as a single change, oh, just solve concurrency.

01:19:23 ◼   ► The solution of your choosing, either a good implementation of async await or something

01:19:27 ◼   ► entirely different or whatever, that would be my single thing, but that's kind of vague.

01:19:29 ◼   ► If I have to be narrow, I would say regular expression literal.

01:19:34 ◼   ► You know.

01:19:35 ◼   ► No way.

01:19:36 ◼   ► Both of those things are coming, by the way.

01:19:38 ◼   ► It's just a question of when.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Brian Middleton asks, "What arcade games are each of you nostalgic for from your childhood?

01:19:45 ◼   ► Is there one game you would like to own?

01:19:47 ◼   ► I will start as usual.

01:19:49 ◼   ► We actually have a pinball machine in the house.

01:19:51 ◼   ► My dad, many years ago, had gone through a phase of restoring, or maybe not restoring,

01:19:58 ◼   ► but repairing old pinball machines.

01:20:01 ◼   ► And so he had like six of them at one point, but unloaded all but two of them, one of which

01:20:06 ◼   ► went to me and one of which he still has.

01:20:09 ◼   ► So I obviously have nostalgia for all those.

01:20:12 ◼   ► But in terms of like traditional arcade games, NBA Jam, Cruisin' USA, and Street Fighter

01:20:19 ◼   ► 2, I didn't play any of them that much, but I enjoyed deeply all three of those, both

01:20:28 ◼   ► in arcade form and occasionally in console form.

01:20:31 ◼   ► So I would say those three.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Marco?

01:20:34 ◼   ► >> Honestly, I hardly went to arcades in my childhood.

01:20:37 ◼   ► We didn't really live that close to them, and we didn't have a lot of money.

01:20:41 ◼   ► And so the idea of just going there and blowing tens of dollars maybe, that would not really

01:20:49 ◼   ► happen in my family.

01:20:51 ◼   ► But when I did play a little bit of arcade games, since I was a teenager here and there,

01:20:56 ◼   ► the one I most liked was Daytona USA.

01:20:59 ◼   ► This was during the mid-90s or so, so the Sega Saturn was coming out, and so they had

01:21:06 ◼   ► a few cool games like Virtua Fighter and everything that were coming out alongside of it. And

01:21:11 ◼   ► Daytona USA was my favorite one. It was a racing game and it was just basic NASCAR style

01:21:17 ◼   ► I think. I don't know if that's what I'm about to say. Whatever style uses what appear to

01:21:23 ◼   ► be stock cars on a round track without a lot of turns. And it was a lot of fun but it was

01:21:30 ◼   ► a dollar per play in most arcades. So I hardly ever played it with the exception of there

01:21:35 ◼   ► was this like I was in some kind of youth group and there was one time that they had

01:21:39 ◼   ► a lock-in at a Magic Mountain arcade where we just got everything set to free play and

01:21:44 ◼   ► we got to play them all night. So I played a lot of Daytona USA for one night and that

01:21:50 ◼   ► was awesome. But other than that, I mean this is kind of a sad story. Like other than that

01:21:54 ◼   ► I hardly ever played arcade games so I don't really know.

01:21:57 ◼   ► Jon.

01:21:58 ◼   ► I played a lot of arcade games.

01:22:00 ◼   ► I was a lot that I'm very nostalgic for.

01:22:05 ◼   ► It's hard to pick one that I would want to own though because in general arcade games

01:22:09 ◼   ► back then, and I'm assuming still today, were made to take your money.

01:22:13 ◼   ► And so I remember getting lots of tokens or quarters and feeding them into these machines

01:22:19 ◼   ► and I think if I owned any of them, they would become shallow very fast, especially the games

01:22:26 ◼   ► I'm nostalgic about.

01:22:27 ◼   ► unless you do something like Centipede or like Pac-Man or you try to make it like the

01:22:30 ◼   ► perfect game or whatever.

01:22:31 ◼   ► But in a couple of summer camps I went to they had arcade games that were either set

01:22:37 ◼   ► to free or were only 25 cents when instead of 50 or whatever and that I played a lot.

01:22:45 ◼   ► And so there are some games I got really good at.

01:22:46 ◼   ► Like one of them that was Tiger Heli which is a top-down vertically scrolling shooter

01:22:53 ◼   ► thing or 1942 similar type of game.

01:22:56 ◼   ► those were at camp, I got really good at those games.

01:22:59 ◼   ► That was where you'd put in one quarter and I'd play it for a really, really, really long

01:23:02 ◼   ► time.

01:23:06 ◼   ► But even then, you feel like, "Oh, well now I've seen the whole game.

01:23:09 ◼   ► This is all there is to this game, and so I really wouldn't want to own it."

01:23:12 ◼   ► So I don't think I would want to own any of these machines, but most nostalgic for the

01:23:17 ◼   ► Star Wars sit-down game, After Burner, which was impressive when it first came out, especially

01:23:21 ◼   ► with the one where you move around inside the thing.

01:23:23 ◼   ► Was one of the first 50 50 cent games I can remember the classics centipede Galaga

01:23:29 ◼   ► I like time pilot is a weird one called section Z

01:23:32 ◼   ► Sidearm this was a totally weird one that I still think was awesome

01:23:35 ◼   ► I have all these on Mame now though, so I don't need to own any of these machines nice

01:23:39 ◼   ► Nuclear eclipse

01:23:43 ◼   ► Asks that this is John Reese when will you record neutral season two my official answer is we've been recording it

01:23:50 ◼   ► for the last three years and after shows of this show,

01:23:54 ◼   ► my unofficial answer is not soon enough.

01:23:57 ◼   ► John, let's go to you first.

01:23:59 ◼   ► - Well, you answered it.

01:24:00 ◼   ► There's no neutral season, so you're listening to it.

01:24:02 ◼   ► This is it. - Yep.

01:24:03 ◼   ► - Done and done.

01:24:05 ◼   ► Krusty the Clown writes, "Do you think an iOS laptop

01:24:09 ◼   ► would be a viable product, i.e. an iBook?

01:24:12 ◼   ► I was hoping Apple would announce it at WWDC,

01:24:14 ◼   ► but it didn't happen."

01:24:16 ◼   ► Isn't that kind of what an iPad Pro is?

01:24:18 ◼   ► like I understand, or well I presume that Roger Escobar,

01:24:22 ◼   ► the person who wrote in, is asking something

01:24:25 ◼   ► that has the physical, like connected keyboard and screen

01:24:28 ◼   ► that you can never separate the two.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I feel like an iPad Pro is so close to there that it's--

01:24:36 ◼   ► - Oh, it's so not. - I don't see really,

01:24:38 ◼   ► is it not? - It's so not.

01:24:38 ◼   ► - Okay, so I've never owned an iPad,

01:24:39 ◼   ► okay, well that's the thing, I've never owned an iPad Pro,

01:24:41 ◼   ► so learn me, so show me why I'm wrong.

01:24:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I have, I've now had the 9.7 Pro

01:24:47 ◼   ► and the 10.5 and I keep it always in the keyboard cover,

01:24:52 ◼   ► almost all the time, the Apple keyboard cover.

01:24:54 ◼   ► And there are other keyboard covers

01:24:56 ◼   ► that kind of make it a little bit more laptop-like,

01:24:58 ◼   ► but they're mostly not that great.

01:25:01 ◼   ► For the way some people use it,

01:25:04 ◼   ► and I'm one of these people, I would use that.

01:25:07 ◼   ► I would buy that product

01:25:08 ◼   ► because I always want the keyboard.

01:25:11 ◼   ► The keyboard is what made iPads usable for me.

01:25:14 ◼   ► It's simple as that.

01:25:15 ◼   ► I do occasionally go on the couch

01:25:18 ◼   ► and fold the keyboard back behind it

01:25:20 ◼   ► and try to use it without it, and I hate it.

01:25:21 ◼   ► I always end up folding it back out

01:25:23 ◼   ► and trying to use it on my lap, which is awful,

01:25:25 ◼   ► 'cause it's all floppy and back weighted and everything.

01:25:28 ◼   ► So I would say this is not a huge market probably,

01:25:33 ◼   ► but if they did it, I would certainly buy it that way,

01:25:38 ◼   ► because iOS for me, part of the reason

01:25:43 ◼   ► why it feels so hobbled to me so often

01:25:45 ◼   ► is the lack of a keyboard when I'm on my phone

01:25:48 ◼   ► or when I'm on an iPad without that.

01:25:49 ◼   ► So that's why for me the keyboard really has made

01:25:52 ◼   ► a huge difference for me in making iOS on the iPad

01:25:55 ◼   ► and making the iPad worth having and worth keeping out

01:25:59 ◼   ► in my kitchen all the time.

01:26:01 ◼   ► So a clamshell version of that would be welcome.

01:26:05 ◼   ► But I honestly, I would be very surprised if they did it.

01:26:09 ◼   ► - Jon?

01:26:10 ◼   ► - This is whether it would be a viable product

01:26:13 ◼   ► and I think it totally would.

01:26:14 ◼   ► Like as iOS expands its functionality to solve some of the same problems that are currently

01:26:18 ◼   ► only or best solved by a Mac today, it inevitably has to come into that area because it's a

01:26:25 ◼   ► proven form factor.

01:26:26 ◼   ► People like that form factor.

01:26:27 ◼   ► It's just a question of, oh, can you combine that form factor with a bunch of other things,

01:26:32 ◼   ► software and battery life and cost and other trade-offs to make a compelling product?

01:26:36 ◼   ► Yes, you totally can.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you could do it with iOS today, but certainly as iOS continues to get more

01:26:40 ◼   ► sophisticated.

01:26:41 ◼   ► So it would be a viable product.

01:26:43 ◼   ► Whether or how soon Apple will do it, I don't know.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Chance Rubbage writes in to ask, "More and more podcasts are going behind paywalls.

01:26:50 ◼   ► Is it a good idea for Apple to enable a tip jar or in-app purchase for podcasts?"

01:26:55 ◼   ► I don't see how that could really work out, especially since it would presumably be locked

01:27:00 ◼   ► to the Apple Podcasts app.

01:27:03 ◼   ► And even if you could just magically snap your fingers and make that work across any

01:27:06 ◼   ► podcast app anywhere, I don't know.

01:27:08 ◼   ► I think it would help the smaller podcasts,

01:27:11 ◼   ► but for something like us, I don't know that it would make,

01:27:15 ◼   ► and not to say we're like, sorry,

01:27:16 ◼   ► that implies that we're like a 99% invisible.

01:27:19 ◼   ► We're not that either, but like a mid-level,

01:27:22 ◼   ► if we can generously call ourselves that,

01:27:24 ◼   ► like a mid-level show like this one,

01:27:26 ◼   ► I don't know that it would make a big difference.

01:27:28 ◼   ► Let's go to Jon first.

01:27:29 ◼   ► - Apple implementing it is the problem here,

01:27:33 ◼   ► because having a way for people to do a tip jar

01:27:38 ◼   ► app purchases for podcasts, that would be a good thing because the ability to do more

01:27:44 ◼   ► business models more easily lets different shows find different ways to fund themselves.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Depends on the show and the audience and so on and so forth.

01:27:50 ◼   ► But having it be an Apple thing is bad because one of the great benefits of podcasts is they're

01:27:55 ◼   ► not owned and controlled by a single corporation to the degree that a lot of other things are.

01:28:00 ◼   ► And so I wouldn't want Apple to do this because if they're wildly successful it's a problem

01:28:06 ◼   ► And if they're not successful, then what the heck was even the point?

01:28:08 ◼   ► You don't allow more business models.

01:28:10 ◼   ► So I would love for there to be standards that, you know, that the clients would

01:28:16 ◼   ► work with across multiple platforms, just like RSS is a standard that clients work

01:28:20 ◼   ► with across multiple platforms to distribute podcasts.

01:28:23 ◼   ► If there was a similar standard, similar open cross-platform standard for enabling

01:28:28 ◼   ► different kinds of business models, that would be great.

01:28:29 ◼   ► But guess who's motivated to make such a thing, not Apple and not a lot of other

01:28:33 ◼   ► companies too.

01:28:34 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:28:35 ◼   ► - Marco.

01:28:37 ◼   ► - I would say also like this question starts

01:28:39 ◼   ► with the statement more and more podcasts

01:28:40 ◼   ► are going behind paywalls.

01:28:42 ◼   ► This sounds like a big trend,

01:28:44 ◼   ► but I don't think it is much of one really.

01:28:46 ◼   ► I think the only podcasts that have actually succeeded

01:28:50 ◼   ► in going behind paywalls for the most part

01:28:52 ◼   ► are the ones that monetize their back catalogs.

01:28:55 ◼   ► They're fairly timeless and that you can either use

01:28:58 ◼   ► their own possibly paid app or pay for some membership

01:29:02 ◼   ► to download like, archived older episodes,

01:29:04 ◼   ► but then the current ones are still free.

01:29:07 ◼   ► That's a way more common thing.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And even that doesn't work for every show,

01:29:11 ◼   ► like that only works for shows that are timeless.

01:29:13 ◼   ► It wouldn't work for a show like ours

01:29:15 ◼   ► where we talk mostly about news, you know?

01:29:17 ◼   ► So, like that whole, like, I don't think a lot of podcasts

01:29:21 ◼   ► overall are going behind paywalls

01:29:23 ◼   ► in the traditional sense of like,

01:29:25 ◼   ► you can't listen to this unless you pay us.

01:29:28 ◼   ► The fact is, that's really hard,

01:29:30 ◼   ► it's really hard to grow an audience if you're behind a paywall. As, I mean, you look, look

01:29:34 ◼   ► around the whole rest of the web. Lots of news sites and everything have tried paywalls,

01:29:39 ◼   ► very few have succeeded because of this problem. And the ones that have, have these kind of

01:29:45 ◼   ► porous paywalls where you can get a bunch for free up front and then you might have

01:29:50 ◼   ► to pay us or clear your cookies. Or you can, you have to pay us to read all of our articles

01:29:54 ◼   ► unless you come from Google or Twitter. Like, there's like, there's all sorts of like these

01:29:58 ◼   ► holes because paywalls are really hard to make work. Podcasts have survived and thrived

01:30:05 ◼   ► and grown all this time, driven almost entirely by advertising. The exact same way most websites

01:30:11 ◼   ► have always funded themselves for all the same reasons. Again, it's hard to grow an

01:30:16 ◼   ► audience if you're making people pay on the way in and it's generally easier to sell ads

01:30:24 ◼   ► than to do that and advertisers will typically pay more than your audience will.

01:30:29 ◼   ► So I don't really think this is a big problem either a trend that is happening or something

01:30:35 ◼   ► that really needs to be explored that much.

01:30:38 ◼   ► So that being said, if Apple were to enable tip jars or in-app purchases for podcasts,

01:30:45 ◼   ► I've honestly I have thought about doing this in overcast before.

01:30:47 ◼   ► I've talked to podcasters about it.

01:30:49 ◼   ► The overall conclusion I have reached is that that would be a very messy business to be

01:30:55 ◼   ► in and that for the most part, podcasters now, because there isn't a big centralized

01:31:03 ◼   ► system run by Apple anywhere else, podcasters now have found ways to monetize their podcasts

01:31:08 ◼   ► on their own.

01:31:10 ◼   ► Ways that they own, ways that they control.

01:31:13 ◼   ► People have Patreons, people have memberships, some people just do ads like we do, some people

01:31:16 ◼   ► do some combination thereof.

01:31:18 ◼   ► But the point is that no one's involved.

01:31:20 ◼   ► There is no middleman.

01:31:21 ◼   ► There is no Apple skimming 30% off the top

01:31:24 ◼   ► and making everything go through them

01:31:26 ◼   ► and disallowing everything else

01:31:27 ◼   ► with the way there is in apps.

01:31:30 ◼   ► There is no middleman.

01:31:31 ◼   ► And when I talk to podcasters,

01:31:33 ◼   ► when I was thinking about doing something like this

01:31:34 ◼   ► in Overcast, the universal response was,

01:31:38 ◼   ► we don't want anyone else handling our money for us.

01:31:41 ◼   ► We don't want anyone else getting between our audience

01:31:43 ◼   ► and us, me or Apple or anybody else.

01:31:46 ◼   ► No one wanted that.

01:31:47 ◼   ► And I would say like, you know,

01:31:49 ◼   ► what if I started collecting money

01:31:50 ◼   ► and I just distributed it to you,

01:31:52 ◼   ► like, you know, readability style,

01:31:53 ◼   ► like, would you go for that?

01:31:55 ◼   ► And the universal response was kinda like,

01:31:58 ◼   ► yeah, I guess I would take the money,

01:32:00 ◼   ► but I wouldn't promote it,

01:32:01 ◼   ► because if I'm gonna promote something,

01:32:02 ◼   ► I wanna promote my own membership thing on my own site,

01:32:05 ◼   ► or my own Patreon, or whatever else.

01:32:06 ◼   ► Like, everybody wanted to do their own thing

01:32:08 ◼   ► with their own money,

01:32:09 ◼   ► and they don't want middle people to come in

01:32:12 ◼   ► and collect money on their behalf.

01:32:14 ◼   ► You're not doing them a favor by doing that.

01:32:16 ◼   ► So ultimately I see why this question is asked

01:32:21 ◼   ► and it's going to keep being asked every six months

01:32:24 ◼   ► for the next 10 years as everyone thinks

01:32:26 ◼   ► about these things with podcasts.

01:32:28 ◼   ► But I just don't think this is really a big problem

01:32:33 ◼   ► and I don't think anybody wants a huge middle man

01:32:36 ◼   ► to come in and get in the way between them

01:32:38 ◼   ► and their customers.

01:32:40 ◼   ► - And things like Patreon are a middle man as well

01:32:42 ◼   ► but they're divorced from podcasting.

01:32:44 ◼   ► There's nothing about Patreon that is podcast specific.

01:32:46 ◼   ► So it's just a question of like,

01:32:47 ◼   ► how do you find a way to fund the thing that you're doing?

01:32:49 ◼   ► And you have all these tools.

01:32:50 ◼   ► I mean, Stripe is a middleman there.

01:32:53 ◼   ► Like if they're taking a percentage of your transactions

01:32:55 ◼   ► or any, like there's always going to be people

01:32:57 ◼   ► taking a percentage of transactions,

01:32:58 ◼   ► but in the world of podcasting, it's nice to not have,

01:33:03 ◼   ► oh, you have to do it this way

01:33:04 ◼   ► because this is how podcasts are sold.

01:33:05 ◼   ► You wanna use Stripe, you wanna use Patreon,

01:33:07 ◼   ► you wanna use Kickstarter,

01:33:09 ◼   ► you wanna solicit donations on your webpage

01:33:11 ◼   ► use any one of those services.

01:33:13 ◼   ► None of those are tied to podcasting

01:33:15 ◼   ► and are interested to the podcast ecosystem

01:33:18 ◼   ► or force you to do something, unlike, for example, the App

01:33:21 ◼   ► Store where Apple absolutely controls

01:33:23 ◼   ► how you can collect money for your applications.

01:33:27 ◼   ► Chris Adamson writes, what streaming services

01:33:30 ◼   ► other than Netflix do you guys use?

01:33:32 ◼   ► Does Syracuse have a country roll subscription?

01:33:34 ◼   ► So actually, let's start with Jon,

01:33:36 ◼   ► and then we'll end with me.

01:33:38 ◼   ► So I saw this question I was trying to think of.

01:33:40 ◼   ► I subscribed to Hulu, I subscribed to Amazon Prime.

01:33:43 ◼   ► I do not have a Crunchyroll subscription,

01:33:45 ◼   ► but I have had one in the past.

01:33:46 ◼   ► Maybe there's other ones.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Honestly, I thought about it the other day.

01:33:52 ◼   ► I should catalog all the things I've subscribed to.

01:33:55 ◼   ► So I am aware, right up around the line,

01:33:58 ◼   ► eel style of not having too many subscriptions,

01:34:02 ◼   ► but they've been creeping in.

01:34:03 ◼   ► Like, I mean, for things like Hulu,

01:34:05 ◼   ► it's like, oh, I want to see "The Handmaid's Tale,"

01:34:07 ◼   ► so I've subscribed to Hulu.

01:34:08 ◼   ► But now I just have a Hulu subscription forever

01:34:10 ◼   ► because I find other shows that I want to watch.

01:34:12 ◼   ► I already watched "The Good Place" on there.

01:34:14 ◼   ► There's other things I'm gonna watch on Hulu, right?

01:34:17 ◼   ► This can't continue indefinitely

01:34:19 ◼   ► 'cause I will be end up, you know,

01:34:20 ◼   ► I gotta add up all those five, 10, whatever dollars a month

01:34:23 ◼   ► and see whether I, oh, HBO?

01:34:25 ◼   ► Well, no, but that's part of my cable.

01:34:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:34:27 ◼   ► Too many, I guess is my answer.

01:34:30 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

01:34:32 ◼   ► Marco.

01:34:33 ◼   ► - For us, it's just, it's Netflix and HBO,

01:34:37 ◼   ► go or now, whichever one is, you know,

01:34:40 ◼   ► the one that doesn't require a cable. Those two, that's it.

01:34:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, for us it's Netflix,

01:34:44 ◼   ► and we are Amazon Prime members by virtue,

01:34:47 ◼   ► or Prime Video members by virtue of Amazon Prime.

01:34:50 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, us too, never use it.

01:34:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's the thing, like,

01:34:53 ◼   ► outside of the Grand Tour, we never use it,

01:34:55 ◼   ► and I probably would have subscribed to Prime Video

01:34:57 ◼   ► specifically for the Grand Tour, and then regretted it,

01:34:59 ◼   ► because the Grand Tour was terrible.

01:35:01 ◼   ► Let's see, Xalf writes in, do I have a real name here?

01:35:06 ◼   ► Sorry, a little fancy spreadsheet doesn't catch real names.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Zalf Ryden writes in, "I'm standing in the computer store in my local mall before Christmas

01:35:13 ◼   ► 1986.

01:35:14 ◼   ► John, sell me on a Mac Plus over the Apple IIGS."

01:35:18 ◼   ► Oh, the pixels are the size of boulders on the Apple IIGS.

01:35:22 ◼   ► The number of amazing games that you'll have to play on the Mac Plus will impress any Apple

01:35:29 ◼   ► IIGS.

01:35:30 ◼   ► Yes, I know the IIGS is color, but A, the Mac is the future, and B, the pixels are tiny,

01:35:34 ◼   ► And see, the Mac has an incredible amount of charm.

01:35:38 ◼   ► Like it's no contest.

01:35:40 ◼   ► If you have the money, as they say, if you have the means, I highly recommend one.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Do not do the Apple II GS.

01:35:46 ◼   ► It is a dead end.

01:35:47 ◼   ► That was Ferris Bueller, by the way.

01:35:51 ◼   ► All right.

01:35:52 ◼   ► Melvin Gundlach writes in, "How did you initially meet, and what got you started making podcasts

01:35:59 ◼   ► together?"

01:36:00 ◼   ► Bits and pieces of this story have been told many, many, many times in the past, so I'll

01:36:03 ◼   ► I'll try to give the chief summarizer and chief version.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Marco and I met when we were little kids.

01:36:10 ◼   ► Your parents or grandparents, it isn't entirely important,

01:36:13 ◼   ► had a house that was on a small lake in upstate New York.

01:36:16 ◼   ► My grandparents had a different house

01:36:19 ◼   ► on the same small lake in upstate New York.

01:36:21 ◼   ► And we would hang out over the summers

01:36:23 ◼   ► because basically we were the only kids that were there.

01:36:25 ◼   ► And we kind of fell out of touch, not in an angry way,

01:36:28 ◼   ► just in a, you know, we were kids

01:36:29 ◼   ► and we grew up kind of way.

01:36:31 ◼   ► And I think one of us would email the other from time

01:36:35 ◼   ► to time over the years.

01:36:36 ◼   ► And then shortly after--

01:36:38 ◼   ► I think it was after we both got married,

01:36:39 ◼   ► so not too terribly long after college--

01:36:42 ◼   ► one of us reached out to the other.

01:36:43 ◼   ► If I recall correctly, each of us

01:36:45 ◼   ► blames the other for doing this in both the good way

01:36:47 ◼   ► and the ha-ha way.

01:36:49 ◼   ► But anyway, somehow or another, we fell back in touch.

01:36:53 ◼   ► And we just kind of rekindled our friendship

01:36:55 ◼   ► from forever ago.

01:36:56 ◼   ► So of the people that I still talk to,

01:37:00 ◼   ► Marco and our now mutual friend Brad Lautenbach, who works for Light, they are my two oldest

01:37:06 ◼   ► friends that I've known for about the same amount of time, and it's been something like

01:37:09 ◼   ► 20 years now.

01:37:10 ◼   ► So fast forward to WWDC 2011, 2012, I forget which one it was, I want to say it was 2011.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Marco and I are in line for the keynote, and I forget if John Seracusa walked up to us

01:37:21 ◼   ► or Marco found John, but one way or another, John found us and we found John, and we hung

01:37:27 ◼   ► out for the rest of the day, and then John and I kind of became friendly after that.

01:37:31 ◼   ► And around the time that Build and Analyze ended in late 2012, I guess it was, I had

01:37:37 ◼   ► started needling Marco about, "Hey, we should do a car show. We should do a car show. Even

01:37:41 ◼   ► if nobody listens to it, it'll still be fun. We should do a car show." Spoiler alert, nobody

01:37:45 ◼   ► listened to it. But anyway, Marco had the presence of mind to say, "You know, Hypercritical

01:37:50 ◼   ► just ended. I wonder if John would do it too, because he likes cars." And so that's how

01:37:54 ◼   ► Neutral got started and then we would, as three nerds are off to do, we would start talking about

01:37:59 ◼   ► nerdy stuff after the fact. And Marco, similar story, had the presence of mind to put that on

01:38:04 ◼   ► SoundCloud, which by the time you listen to this may not even exist anymore. And so he put those

01:38:10 ◼   ► episodes on SoundCloud and we realized, well, people actually like when we talk about things

01:38:14 ◼   ► we sort of know about and people are not that interested in us pontificating about cars, of

01:38:18 ◼   ► which we know nothing about. So maybe we should stop with the car thing and start with the tech

01:38:23 ◼   ► thing and that's kind of the super abridged version of how this all came to be and so

01:38:27 ◼   ► ATP really became a thing I think in March of 2013 and here we are in the middle of 2017

01:38:34 ◼   ► it's it's still a thing so let's start with Marco any other thoughts to add and then John

01:38:38 ◼   ► after him. Only that this is now one of the longest jobs I've ever held Instapaper was

01:38:44 ◼   ► longer. You caught me while I was taking a sip of water oh my god I almost died just

01:38:48 ◼   ► - Well done.

01:38:49 ◼   ► - Insta-Hiver was about five years,

01:38:51 ◼   ► so we're in year four now for this.

01:38:54 ◼   ► - Does that mean the clock is ticking

01:38:56 ◼   ► or should I get worried?

01:38:58 ◼   ► - No, I'll celebrate it.

01:39:00 ◼   ► Once this becomes the longest job I've ever held,

01:39:02 ◼   ► which I'm pretty sure will happen,

01:39:03 ◼   ► then I will celebrate then.

01:39:05 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

01:39:07 ◼   ► John, any other thoughts?

01:39:08 ◼   ► - I continue to protest the characterization