0:00:00I was going to buy a streaming box for a fleeting moment
0:00:02when I thought--
0:00:03- When you were becoming a vlogger, right?
0:00:04- Well, no, I'm still becoming a vlogger
0:00:07just exceptionally slowly, but I thought about
0:00:10buying a streaming box when I thought I was going
0:00:11to get into like Switch streaming with iMic
0:00:15and then never ended up doing so.
0:00:17- I wonder which of us makes our second YouTube video first,
0:00:21you or me?
0:00:21- It's a race to the bottom, I assure you.
0:00:24(laughing)
0:00:24(electronic music)
0:00:26All right, let's start with some follow-up.
0:00:27Guess what, we don't really have any.
0:00:29I think that's because in part we just released, or Marco just released last week's episode
0:00:37earlier today because we are recording the episode from the future in the past or something
0:00:44because it is currently the 20th of July.
0:00:47We are recording the episode that will be released on or around the 26th of July because
0:00:52our vacations are in serial.
0:00:54And so we didn't really have time to amass follow-up.
0:00:57than to say we are going to be doing a Q&A episode, I believe—what did you say, Jon?
0:01:03Master of Ceremonies, Syracuse? You said the fourth—
0:01:06Jon Streeter I think it's recording on August 4th, and
0:01:08we're doing a double recording with back-to-back episodes, which is why we're doing the Q&A,
0:01:12because we're just going to answer questions until we all die, and then Marc will make
0:01:15two shows out of it.
0:01:16[Laughter]
0:01:17Jon Streeter Sounds wonderful. So anyway, so yes, please
0:01:21pile up questions. At this time, the only way to get a question put in to be a contender
0:01:28for the show is to tweet with the hashtag #AskATP. Please do not email us because it
0:01:35will get lost to the ether. And if we were cooler like Hello Internet, we would have
0:01:40asked for postcards, but we are not that cool nor that organized. So tweet with—
0:01:44That would be a terrible mistake if we learned nothing from Hello Internet. Who wants to
0:01:48to go to the post office or PO box
0:01:50and bring home a bunch of pieces of paper
0:01:52and then transcribe the things on them, terrible mistake.
0:01:55- Yeah, so please tweet #askATP
0:01:59and we will hopefully select your question.
0:02:02Anyway, that's it for follow-up, right?
0:02:05That might be record time.
0:02:07We should have somebody go through and chronicle
0:02:10how long we spend on follow-up.
0:02:11Like, what does the trend line look like?
0:02:12- I'm sure there's like one angry fan
0:02:14who has already done that.
0:02:15- Is that fan you?
0:02:17Because no one else cares.
0:02:20Sometimes there's none at all.
0:02:22Sometimes there's just one thing.
0:02:24Sometimes there's a lot.
0:02:25If we record two days before we do a second recording, usually not that much.
0:02:29Funny how that works out.
0:02:30We should go on Adobe schedule vacations more often.
0:02:34Oh man, all right.
0:02:36So let's start with the topics, and first thing is the Apple A10X is 10 nanometer.
0:02:43That's cool.
0:02:44So tell us about this, John.
0:02:45Remember we were talking about Intel and their process advantage and how a Taiwan semiconductor
0:02:51was supposedly catching up, but Intel still had a lead and all sorts of stuff.
0:02:57And we were seeing, we were going to see Intel, it was going to be first at 10 nanometer with
0:03:02a significant type of chip, not just memory or something like that.
0:03:06But as people who took apart the new iPad with the Apple's A10X and it discovered the
0:03:14the ATENX system on the chip is using Tylon Semiconductor's 10nm process.
0:03:22And ATENX is not a tiny chip, I mean, in the grand scheme of things it's not as big as
0:03:27a Xeon, but it's pretty complicated, right?
0:03:29It's got multiple cores and a GPU and I/O, it's not as simple as a memory chip.
0:03:34So I haven't been keeping up with Intel and its various woes that much.
0:03:40But bottom line, of all the Apple devices we care about, which includes PCs and iPads
0:03:48and watches and phones and all sorts of other things, the first one, as far as I'm aware,
0:03:53to get a 10nm chip is this one, and the chip is not from Intel.
0:03:57So whether or not Intel has "lost its lead in process," it continues to be embarrassing
0:04:05that Apple's system on a chip, a XX line of chips, are so fast and so low power and now are on a
0:04:16smaller process than the chips that are in all of Apple's Macs. So it's kind of exciting/depressing,
0:04:23depending on how you look at it. So remind me, and I'm not being funny at all,
0:04:27what is the 10 nanometer represent? The lines within the processor, like the quote-unquote
0:04:33wires is that correct or is that not even close?
0:04:35Oh I don't know they call it feature size I'm sure there's some standard for measuring
0:04:38from you know this thing to that thing like I think it was like a dot pitch on monitors
0:04:43I'm sure there's some standard because you say well what is a feature like it's from
0:04:46you know from one transistor to another how closely you can pack them together or like
0:04:50I have no idea. Maybe it's like the center of one to the center of the next one? Yeah
0:04:54but but there's different geometries like this is their FinFET thing like they're actually
0:04:573D if you look at the shape of where the source and drain and gate and everything is they
0:05:02They all have all these clever arrangements of layers of stuff.
0:05:05Someone should look up, you can probably just go to the Wikipedia and find out, but basically
0:05:08if you think of it like dot pitch on a monitor, it's from, you know, how, from the center
0:05:14of, like what Mark was saying, from the center of one thing to the center of the other, the
0:05:16question is how do they determine that because I think there are different sizes and configurations
0:05:20of things that you can put down on a chip.
0:05:23I'm assuming it is like the smallest distance between two features.
0:05:28So anyway, Taiwan Semiconductor doing pretty well.
0:05:33Apple with its A-series chips doing pretty well.
0:05:36Intel, I don't know, doing okay.
0:05:41Kind of stumbling, it was the recent announcement
0:05:43they were getting out of the wearables market
0:05:45that they were never really in.
0:05:46- Yeah, I was gonna say,
0:05:47what did they have in the wearables market?
0:05:49- They had a program and an initiative
0:05:53and an attempt, like they've done many times.
0:05:55Like remember when they tried to get
0:05:56into the standalone GPU market with,
0:05:57what the hell was that called?
0:06:00Chat room will tell me in seven seconds or so.
0:06:02- Yeah, like about five years ago maybe?
0:06:04- Yeah, where they were taking a bunch of little x86 cores
0:06:07and put them on a Larabee.
0:06:09I got it before the chat room, haha.
0:06:11And they were gonna make a run at the GPU market
0:06:14and they had evangelists and they had APIs
0:06:16and they had some silicon and it just never came together
0:06:19and they said, "Oh, okay, well we're not gonna do that."
0:06:21And then they concentrated on their internal GPUs,
0:06:25like the integrated ones, and they've come a long way on that,
0:06:28partially, supposedly, rumor has it,
0:06:31at the behest of Apple asking for more powerful
0:06:34integrated GPU so they don't have to include a discrete GPU
0:06:37on every single Mac just to have any graphics performance
0:06:40worth a damn.
0:06:40They were gonna get into wearables,
0:06:43and they had an initiative, and they had a team,
0:06:45and they had a blah, blah, blah,
0:06:46and now they've just bailed out.
0:06:48They also had a bunch of things like getting into
0:06:51set-top boxes back in the day,
0:06:54What it's like of all the Intel failed programs
0:06:56where they were going to enter a new market.
0:06:57I mean, if you want to trace it all the way backwards,
0:06:59it's when they divested of all their ARM holdings.
0:07:01They had both at the-- another thing-- XScale.
0:07:04They had ARM CPU.
0:07:06And they said, now we're going to get out of that business.
0:07:09Probably it's going to turn out to have been a bad idea.
0:07:12But in theory, like-- I mean, it didn't have to be.
0:07:15It could have been they got out of that business
0:07:17and they made a bunch of their own x86 chips
0:07:21that were just as good as the things that Apple's making out.
0:07:24But they didn't, they didn't make those.
0:07:26And Apple did, and so that's how you lose.
0:07:28So you can trace it back and say,
0:07:29"Oh, you should've stopped."
0:07:30There's no guarantee that if they kept Xscale
0:07:31that they would've been able to do
0:07:33as good a job as Apple is doing now.
0:07:34So it's a weird world we live in
0:07:36for someone who grew up in the Wintel era.
0:07:38But I'm still rooting for Intel
0:07:40because they're all the CPUs and all the Macs,
0:07:41and I want a really good Mac, so let's get going.
0:07:45- Yeah, that's pretty much why I care about this stuff
0:07:48so much, like I know that it's probably,
0:07:51for lots of reasons we've discussed before,
0:07:52it's probably unlikely that we're ever gonna see,
0:07:55or at least I guess never say never,
0:07:56but that anytime soon we're gonna see Apple
0:07:59bring the A line of ARM CPUs to the Mac and have ARM Macs.
0:08:04And that's kind of a shame because these CPUs are awesome.
0:08:08Like they keep making these amazing chips
0:08:12and with their in-house designs
0:08:14that are kicking the butts of everything else
0:08:15in the middle market.
0:08:17And Intel is really having a hard time
0:08:21getting incremental performance gains every time they release something, and they were
0:08:24even having a hard time releasing anything.
0:08:27So I kind of wish that more of this excitement would be available on the Mac side, because
0:08:33who knows what they could do.
0:08:35Right now they have this amazing A10X chip, based on the amazing A10 chip, making the
0:08:41iPad very competitive with low-end Macs in CPU performance.
0:08:46And imagine what they could do with that
0:08:48if they let it run in a 150 watt desktop enclosure.
0:08:52That would be, that could be really amazing.
0:08:55But for lots of reasons we discussed before,
0:08:57basically making ARM Macs is neither easy nor likely.
0:09:02But I do think that's kind of a shame
0:09:04because there's all this exciting stuff happening
0:09:06over in the ARM world that us Mac fans
0:09:09are just kind of not a part of or minimally a part of.
0:09:14I continue to think that there is nothing specifically magical about ARM that guarantees
0:09:18that if Apple did have a team that said, "Hey, you've got 150-watt power budget.
0:09:22Go nuts."
0:09:23They would just have to end up doing all the same things that Intel does with its Xeon.
0:09:27Only Intel probably has a bunch of them patented, and Apple doesn't have experience with them,
0:09:30because you do end up making different choices when you have a ridiculously high power budget
0:09:33like that.
0:09:34And there's no secret sauce that only Apple knows.
0:09:37And a lot of the tricks they know from their experience with low-power stuff are not applicable
0:09:41to 150-watt power envelopes.
0:09:43So I think they would make good chips, no doubt.
0:09:46And maybe they would make ones that are actually better
0:09:48than what Intel offers.
0:09:49But I don't feel like they would be crushing them
0:09:51in the same way that they're crushing on the low power side.
0:09:55Because this is not Apple's first chip.
0:09:57What was it, the A6 was their first sort of their own design?
0:10:02They've had years and years to get this good at system
0:10:04on a chips in tablets and phones.
0:10:07They have no experience so far in making a Xeon class
0:10:10processor.
0:10:11So even if they did make one, the best
0:10:13could hope for is probably like parity or a slight edge on Intel's things because they
0:10:16can make different choices. But give them four or five years and I think they'd be doing
0:10:20really well. But who knows, then we wouldn't be able to run Windows as well as we can now,
0:10:25so that would be sad.
0:10:26Who runs Windows anymore? What year is this?
0:10:28I do. Casey does.
0:10:29I used to. No, I don't. I don't anymore. I used to.
0:10:31Yeah, Casey's a real developer now.
0:10:33Ooh, sick burn. But yay!
0:10:36Yeah, my apologies to everyone who has to develop on Windows. I feel bad for you.
0:10:41- Hey man, I maintain C# is an unbelievably good language,
0:10:44it's just everything around it that's garbage.
0:10:46- I agree, I completely agree.
0:10:48Yeah, and Microsoft has almost always been really good
0:10:52at developer tooling, like they're really good at that.
0:10:55Just Windows is terrible,
0:10:57but the developer tools are usually great, but yeah.
0:11:00And one thing before we cap off this topic is that
0:11:04I do think that even though my example of the 150 watt
0:11:07Mac Pro slash high-end iMac chip
0:11:11would maybe be hard for them to move to.
0:11:14The A10X, the iPad class of chip that they're making now,
0:11:18which is not that different from the iPhone class
0:11:20chip they're making, is probably suitable
0:11:24for at least the bottom two lines of MacBooks.
0:11:27At least the MacBook 12 inch and at least the,
0:11:30what I call the MacBook escape,
0:11:31the non-touch bar 13 inch MacBook Pro.
0:11:34I bet they could make an A series chip
0:11:36that would be very competitive in those two form factors.
0:11:41- Yeah, I mean, they already do, practically.
0:11:43- Yeah, exactly.
0:11:44- It's just a question of the GPU.
0:11:45And by the way, it's making me think about Mac losing out,
0:11:48like, oh, so they're missing out on Apple's,
0:11:50on the potential of Apple's expertise
0:11:52in the areas where they've been shown
0:11:53they can make a really good chip,
0:11:54and their potential expertise for higher bandwidth chips.
0:11:57And also, Apple thus far is missing out
0:12:00on the other place that the action is happening
0:12:01that's relevant to the Mac in terms of silicon chips
0:12:05that are inside there.
0:12:06Nvidia GPUs.
0:12:07That is currently where a lot of the exciting high-end action
0:12:10is happening on desktop computers.
0:12:13And Apple is thus far pretending it doesn't exist
0:12:17and continuing to ship AMD/ATI GPUs, which are fine,
0:12:21but it's not-- it's like the excitement is happening
0:12:24on the ARM side with Apple's own things.
0:12:26And in the GPU land, the discrete GPU land,
0:12:28the excitement is happening on Nvidia's side of the fence.
0:12:31And Apple is like, no, we're just going to go Intel and AMD,
0:12:34and we'll just ignore all those fireworks
0:12:36and then the happy laughter happening in other areas.
0:12:39- And I do think ultimately one of the biggest reasons
0:12:44why we're unlikely to see ARM Macs
0:12:46for the foreseeable future is I really don't think
0:12:50that a lot of Mac apps would be rewritten
0:12:54or recompiled for ARM in a prompt manner.
0:12:57I think the Mac is, some parts of the Mac are very healthy,
0:13:02content creation, high-end productivity tools,
0:13:05these are fairly healthy,
0:13:07but there's a whole lot of Mac apps out there
0:13:11that are basically unmaintained,
0:13:13and some of which are very, very old.
0:13:14And they continue to work now,
0:13:16just because the architecture hasn't changed in a long time,
0:13:18in over 10 years, and so they continue to work,
0:13:23but I worry if Apple were to force an incompatible move
0:13:28to the basis of the operating system,
0:13:30I worry about what would happen to the app ecosystem.
0:13:34I bet we'd lose a lot of apps.
0:13:36As we're seeing right now with, I mean look, iOS,
0:13:38in this way, iOS is way healthier than the Mac OS.
0:13:43And the transition to iOS 11 is losing lots of apps.
0:13:46Just from the 64-bit change, it was only a few years ago.
0:13:49For the Mac to change CPU architectures,
0:13:53it would be, I think, really difficult
0:13:57to move a lot of Mac software over.
0:13:59just because so much of it's un-maintained.
0:14:01- Numerically, iOS obviously will lose more
0:14:03'cause it's numerically got so much more.
0:14:05But on the Mac, I have some confidence.
0:14:07The Mac has gone through this multiple times
0:14:09before in the past that, yes, you always leave stuff behind,
0:14:11but the apps that we care about would be ported,
0:14:14just like they were ported from 68K to PowerPC,
0:14:17and those same apps that we care about
0:14:19that still aren't reported from PowerPC to Intel,
0:14:21and they were ported from Intel 32-bit to 64-bit,
0:14:23and they would be ported from 64-bit.
0:14:26The apps we care about would be ported.
0:14:27This is maybe like one or two random abandoned apps that you would lose.
0:14:31But numerically speaking, on iOS there's just so many apps and we all have some.
0:14:36I think, do you think you have more apps installed on, cumulatively on your iOS devices or on
0:14:41your Macs?
0:14:42Like numerically, each application icon counts as one thing.
0:14:45Oh, it's no question, iOS.
0:14:47I would guess the same.
0:14:49Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.
0:14:51Maybe not on my iPad.
0:14:52On my iPhone, yes.
0:14:53I think my iPad is relatively lean and mean,
0:14:55but iPhone, yeah, I think Marco's right.
0:14:58- How many applications are in your applications folder?
0:15:01On your Mac, just pick a random Mac.
0:15:03- I have 129.
0:15:05- 112.
0:15:06- Although many of these I barely even recognize,
0:15:08so I long show infrequently.
0:15:10- I know, we all have junk in there.
0:15:12Oh, this is reassuring.
0:15:14So in my applications folder,
0:15:17I have two applications called system preferences,
0:15:20which apparently have exactly the same name.
0:15:22- That's good.
0:15:24- This does not make me feel good.
0:15:27This is from 2014, and the second one is from 2015 and 2016.
0:15:31And one of them does not have a .app extension.
0:15:37That makes me feel good.
0:15:39- I gotta clear a lot of this crap out of here, my God.
0:15:42- Anyway, you wanna guess how many applications
0:15:44I have in my application?
0:15:44- I mean, if I have 129 and I keep things pretty minimal,
0:15:48I'm gonna guess you have 200 maybe?
0:15:51- Yeah, I'm gonna say 250-ish.
0:15:52Is it Price is Right rules?
0:15:54- No.
0:15:55- Oh, okay, then I don't have to bet one application.
0:15:58- 311.
0:16:00- Oof.
0:16:01- Wow.
0:16:02- Goodness.
0:16:03- But how many do you actually use on a regular basis?
0:16:06- Not 311.
0:16:07- I probably use something like 20 or 30 on a regular basis.
0:16:12I mean, the Mac tools tend to be larger in scope
0:16:16and fewer in number for a lot of people.
0:16:20I would bet.
0:16:22There's a lot more like large productivity tools,
0:16:25large creation tools, large library tools,
0:16:27as opposed to an iOS where you have a whole bunch of stuff
0:16:30that does like little things or one thing at a time.
0:16:33Not to mention, iOS has games,
0:16:35and the Mac unfortunately doesn't.
0:16:38- I do have a subfolder for games, let's see what's in that.
0:16:42- I have a subfolder for Mac ports that I haven't touched.
0:16:44- I mean, I have a Steam icon there too, all right?
0:16:47So the games folder only have 42 items,
0:16:49but there are subfolders in there,
0:16:50So it just goes on and on and on.
0:16:52I got a lot of-- here's the thing.
0:16:54The reason I have so many applications
0:16:55is they don't-- on the Mac, applications
0:16:58aren't in your face like they are in iOS.
0:17:00Like in Springboard, they're in your face
0:17:02unless you bury them in a folder, like all of them are.
0:17:05I don't watch applications if I go to the application folder.
0:17:07Nobody does.
0:17:08You do Command Space or whatever, right?
0:17:09Yeah, of course.
0:17:10And whenever I use Disk Inventory X or whatever
0:17:13to find out where all my space is being taken up,
0:17:15it's never with applications.
0:17:16Because in the grand scheme of things, they're tiny.
0:17:18my one terabyte drive, even a huge application.
0:17:21Maybe occasionally, like Marco, I
0:17:22get cranky at some multi-gigabyte sound samples
0:17:25that are part of some stupid Apple application.
0:17:27But other than that, all the data is elsewhere.
0:17:31So I never ended up deleting applications.
0:17:33I look in here, and I've got-- I don't know.
0:17:36Multiple old-- I've got Delicious Library 2 and 3.
0:17:39I've got many applications where they're
0:17:41like the history of the application
0:17:42is present in the folder as the versions and the numbers
0:17:45and the icons go up.
0:17:46And I never ended up deleting them because it's not as,
0:17:49and don't get me wrong, my iOS home screens
0:17:51are also a giant graveyard of ancient files,
0:17:54which is why I'm kind of dreading
0:17:55when they drop 32-bit support, 'cause it's gonna,
0:17:57well, dreading and looking forward to it,
0:17:59'cause it'll reduce the number of applications by half,
0:18:01because I think I still have applications there
0:18:03from my original iPod Touch that have just been
0:18:06carrying along from iTunes backup to iTunes backup.
0:18:08- I only had, I think, two.
0:18:10Yeah, I have Scorekeeper XL and iCast Pro.
0:18:14and the scorekeeper developer said he's updating it.
0:18:17iCast has already done a new version
0:18:19that's like a million dollars, so,
0:18:20you know, they're not actually really going to be lost.
0:18:24- Is iCast the thing you use to do
0:18:26the live broadcasts from the road?
0:18:29- I used to, yes.
0:18:30It's an iCast server, or an iCast broadcaster, rather.
0:18:34So I used to do that from the road.
0:18:36Now I just bring a Mac and use
0:18:38Vrgaminba's nicecast app, 'cause it's,
0:18:40'cause it really, I mean, what I learned, you know,
0:18:43while doing our live show and setting up for that
0:18:46and doing various things over the last few years,
0:18:48I've learned basically that I greatly prefer Macs
0:18:52to be in those kind of production roles
0:18:55and not just for superstition of Macs being reliable
0:18:58and iOS not being, but just for the flexibility they offer.
0:19:01And you can do these things on iOS if you need to,
0:19:05but I'm much happier and more versatile
0:19:08when I'm doing it on the Mac, if that makes sense.
0:19:10I mean, we all know that you can't get work done on iOS,
0:19:13so that's why you're doing it on a Mac.
0:19:15- Oh my God, I still have Firefox?
0:19:17(laughing)
0:19:19Does anybody still use Firefox?
0:19:21- So we've gone during the pre-show
0:19:23that hopefully has not hit the regular show
0:19:26of watching TV as a group,
0:19:28and now we're letting all the people listen to us
0:19:31plunge through and go spelunking
0:19:33through our application folders as a group.
0:19:35This is the best--
0:19:36- I still have MakeMKV.
0:19:36I haven't ripped a Blu-ray in years.
0:19:38- I just did that yesterday.
0:19:40- I have Firefox, I also have MakeMKV.
0:19:43- Yeah, I just ripped Days of Thunder yesterday.
0:19:46It's a great movie.
0:19:47- See, I don't need to rip anything,
0:19:48I can just play some off of your Plex server.
0:19:51- I know, that's exactly what I was doing.
0:19:53We bought Days of Thunder on Blu-ray,
0:19:55but Blu-rays are barbaric, and so I immediately ripped it,
0:19:59and it is now on Plex.
0:20:00- Ooh, I still have OpenTTD, I should play that.
0:20:02The Transport Tycoon.
0:20:03- Oh, so good.
0:20:04I have applications with the circle with a line through it,
0:20:09I should just probably delete those.
0:20:10- I don't think I've ever even seen that.
0:20:12- Did not run on my fancy new version of Mac OS
0:20:17called El Capitan.
0:20:18- Man, I can't even imagine cleaning out
0:20:20John's 10 year old computer like that.
0:20:23What you must find there.
0:20:24- Just never clean it, that's the secret.
0:20:26- We are sponsored this week by Fracture,
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0:20:32directly onto glass.
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0:22:17- So in the show notes, near-ish the top,
0:22:25but never ever ever high enough for us
0:22:28to actually talk about it, has been three words,
0:22:31and it has been here four months.
0:22:35And those three words are Netflix credits skipping.
0:22:39And apparently this is enough, and Jon is flustered enough,
0:22:43that he would like to talk to us about skipping credits
0:22:47in Netflix.
0:22:48I don't know why I'm in for this ride as much as you guys are.
0:22:52So let's all buckle up together.
0:22:54We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
0:22:56We really are.
0:22:57You know why this is in there.
0:22:59I mean, the link there explains it.
0:23:01So this is from March.
0:23:02So yes, it has been there for many, many months.
0:23:05The story-- we'll link to the Verge thing--
0:23:07is by now, that's the only URL we have for the story,
0:23:09is that Netflix, in their normal way,
0:23:11was testing this new feature on some platforms
0:23:15and some clients for Netflix.
0:23:16That when you're watching a show on Netflix
0:23:19and the credits come on, the opening credits to the show,
0:23:22there would be a button in the interface somewhere
0:23:25that says skip credits.
0:23:27And if you click that, it would skip it.
0:23:28When we were in Chicago, we were finishing up House of Cards.
0:23:31And I had done that by connecting my MacBook Adorable
0:23:34to the TV.
0:23:35And I saw and used that button.
0:23:37And so that was on the web client.
0:23:39Yeah, and I'm not sure where they're rolling it out to
0:23:41and what clients or whatever.
0:23:43But it's not everywhere.
0:23:44And it seems like it's the thing they're testing.
0:23:45Now, already for several years, Netflix has had a thing
0:23:48where if you're binge watching and you watch one episode
0:23:50and the next episode's gonna come,
0:23:52that it will not show the credits to the subsequent episode.
0:23:55So it'll just get right to the program.
0:23:56I've seen that.
0:23:57I don't know if that's show specific or whatever,
0:23:58but it's been doing that for a long time.
0:24:00So if you sit down and watch five episodes of a program,
0:24:03you don't have to see the opening credits five times.
0:24:04But you would have to see it once for the first one.
0:24:07And now with the skip credits thing,
0:24:08it'll be like if you don't want to see the opening credits
0:24:10to House of Cards because you're afraid you'll die of old age,
0:24:15and you're on the right interface,
0:24:17you can click this button to skip it.
0:24:19And the reason I put this in the notes so long ago is that--
0:24:26four years ago?
0:24:27Four years before this feature was added to Netflix,
0:24:30I, in one of my rare fits of blogging,
0:24:32wrote a blog post about this very thing,
0:24:34about the idea of credit skipping
0:24:38in Netflix-type environments specifically.
0:24:40It was also in the context of the PlayStation 4,
0:24:42which was not yet out, but had been announced,
0:24:44and the features had been announced,
0:24:45and the title of this post is Annoyance-Driven Development,
0:24:48the idea that you look at a technology product
0:24:52or something that you're working on
0:24:53and think about the things that annoy you and other people
0:24:57about your product and try to knock those down one by one,
0:25:01even if they seem silly.
0:25:03I think-- refreshing my memory on this thing--
0:25:05that the PlayStation examples were things
0:25:08like being able to pick up a game right where you left off
0:25:10and not having the thing start downloading a software update
0:25:15as soon as you turn it on.
0:25:16And so they did a lot of things in the PlayStation 4
0:25:18to remove the annoyances of the PlayStation 3
0:25:21by giving it a low power mode and an auxiliary processor
0:25:24that let it do useful things when it's quote unquote off.
0:25:26Like the fans are off, it's sitting there,
0:25:28you think it's completely off, but it's not.
0:25:30It's downloading software updates in the background.
0:25:32It's preserving the state of your game
0:25:34so you can pick up right where you left off.
0:25:36Even Nintendo has come on this bandwagon
0:25:37a little bit with the Switch
0:25:38where you can put the thing into sleep mode,
0:25:41pick it up, get it out of sleep mode,
0:25:42and you are exactly at the second you left off
0:25:44in your Zelda game,
0:25:46which makes you wanna pick it up and play
0:25:48more than if you had to wait through a boot sequence
0:25:50launch the game again or something like that.
0:25:52And software updates, which are ubiquitous nowadays, having to download multiple gigabytes
0:25:58of stuff while you sleep so that when you wake up it's all just already there for you
0:26:02is a great example of annoying driven development.
0:26:04Because it's not the end of the world, like, oh, software updates have to happen and there's
0:26:06no getting around the fact that you've got to have multiple gigabytes and we can't make
0:26:09your internet connection faster.
0:26:10It's like, but can we design the PlayStation 4 in a way to make this less annoying for
0:26:15people?
0:26:16so far I still have a separate mode with a separate CPU and a low power state of like
0:26:21it complicates the hardware tremendously but it's a big win.
0:26:24So in terms of streaming video, I was using House of Cards as an example because the credit
0:26:29sequence is really, really long.
0:26:30I was saying how Netflix has changed how you watch television and how you have to reconsider
0:26:35every part of the experience and think about how annoying it is.
0:26:37And the opening credits aren't annoying in the old world of television where there were
0:26:41no DVRs and you just watched television when it was on and that was it.
0:26:46were annoying but that's all a separate issue. But already with people with Netflix and streaming
0:26:50video they understand that people do binge watching and they did that thing where it
0:26:53will skip the credits to the next episode. They just need to go to the next step. Also
0:26:57by the way, releasing entire seasons all at once instead of doling them out an episode
0:27:00at the time. They reconsidered so many things and this seemed like the very next thing on
0:27:04the chopping block which is, hey, credits. They make sense when you are watching television
0:27:09in the old world. In the new world do they make as much sense to have opening credits
0:27:13before every single episode or before any episode.
0:27:16And I know, as I said in this post,
0:27:17there's lots of things about union contracts
0:27:20for screen actors and writers and everything.
0:27:22And then there's the other angle of like,
0:27:24oh, people should get credit for their work and blah, blah,
0:27:25blah, like basically the motivation behind
0:27:28all those union rules and everything.
0:27:29But I think you can't, you have to change,
0:27:34you have to change your outlook and the rules
0:27:37surrounding all this stuff as the technology changes.
0:27:39And technology is changing how we watch television.
0:27:42And so every single aspect of how we watch television should be up for grabs for reconsideration to say is this the best way to do it?
0:27:49Or is there a better way given how technology has changed how we watch television apparently Netflix eventually how many years later?
0:27:56four years later eventually more or less agrees with me that
0:28:00Maybe the credits are a little bit too much and maybe we should give people the option of skipping them entirely if they want
0:28:06There's already no commercials. So they've already got that going for them
0:28:09So anyway, I was excited enough about this in March to put it in the in the show notes and to leave it there
0:28:15And now I finally get to talk about it
0:28:17And I feel like this is I'm not gonna say it's vindication because I know a lot of people
0:28:22agreed with me when I originally posted this but it's more of a celebration to say
0:28:26You know, I'm I'm actually getting the thing that I was asking for and it seemed inevitable because Netflix is very aggressive these type of
0:28:32Things I'm just I'm actually surprised it took four years for them to do it, but more like this, please
0:28:37Wow.
0:28:38Cool.
0:28:39I feel better for having listened to that.
0:28:46Nothing you said was wrong, but I felt like this has been sitting in the show notes, like
0:28:50almost there, but not quite there for months, and I was expecting some sort of level.
0:28:56It's not timely.
0:28:57It's not like, you know, it doesn't go bad.
0:28:58Oh, Jon, I love you so much.
0:29:00And you don't have a product to speak of now that...
0:29:04What did Dr. Wave say to your application?
0:29:07was? Was it a fart app? Oh, yes. I was so confused.
0:29:12Well, it's kind of like I got farting. I don't know. Anyway, Marko's got a problem. Anybody
0:29:17who's listening to this who has a product or is involved in making a thing that people
0:29:20use, it's a potential edge in the market. Think about what is annoying about using products
0:29:27of your type, and in the next version of your product, try to eliminate those annoyances
0:29:31and don't keep any sacred cows like, "Oh, we can't change that." You'll find a lot of
0:29:36You'll find a lot of people hold sacred many things they won't even consider changing.
0:29:40Like, you have to consider everything and reconsider it in the face of technology and
0:29:44find the annoying things and be willing to do what Sony did.
0:29:49Make your product way more complicated and way more expensive, potentially introducing
0:29:54bugs, because the payoff is when people turn on the PlayStation 4, the 11 gigabytes of
0:29:59the Destiny 2 beta is already downloaded and the system update has already happened and
0:30:04they can start playing immediately.
0:30:05Even if it takes forever to download, if it does it while you're sleeping, you don't care.
0:30:09And it's 100% worth it to add an entire separate CPU and low power state and special OS mode
0:30:14for this.
0:30:16And also skip those House of Cards credits because come on, we've all seen them enough
0:30:19now.
0:30:20So long.
0:30:21I mean, they're beautiful, but they're so long.
0:30:22Oh my word, it takes forever.
0:30:24So long.
0:30:25So long.
0:30:26All right, so let's talk about something that always cheers us up.
0:30:31Twitter!
0:30:32And a while back, there was...
0:30:33God, I can't even remember when this was.
0:30:35How long was it? How long was a while ago, Casey?
0:30:37Apparently it was October of 2016.
0:30:40Why are we talking about a news article from October 2016?
0:30:42I have a reason for this one too.
0:30:44Oh my god.
0:30:45Bring it out, you're dead. That's right.
0:30:47I'm so sorry, listeners, for this entire episode.
0:30:51You apologize here. Where do episodes come from, Marco? When three podcasters love each
0:30:56other very much? Somehow, every week there's an episode, and it's because somebody, some
0:31:03elves go into the show notes and find a bunch of topics and put them in there. And if you're
0:31:08not going to do it, guess what? I'm going to do it. And then you don't get to complain
0:31:11about the things that we talk about and try to apologize for the listeners for things
0:31:14we're talking about. Because guess what? I build the show in the notes and that's what
0:31:18we're going to talk about. If you want to talk about something, feel free to rotate
0:31:20something up to the top and then we'll talk about that instead. In fact, I will offer
0:31:24that opportunity to you now because I just talked about Netflix credit shipping. Is there
0:31:27something that you would like to talk about that you would like to move up?
0:31:31Let me see.
0:31:32Overcast Springboard Crasher stories? That's a good one.
0:31:34It's kind of boring.
0:31:35No, it's not.
0:31:36I think it's exciting.
0:31:37It's exciting.
0:31:38It was exciting when it happened, but now I've forgotten most about it and probably
0:31:41you do too. But it was cool.
0:31:42It's not even old. It's not even old by comparison to October of 2016.
0:31:46It was a couple of months ago.
0:31:49In a surprising turn of events, Marco did not immediately Command-A and then delete
0:31:53the entire show notes in a fit of rage just moments ago.
0:31:58(laughing)
0:31:59- Oh my word.
0:32:00- The secret is he doesn't look at them most of the time.
0:32:01So that's-- - That is accurate.
0:32:03- So down, if we scroll down a couple pages,
0:32:04we have an item that says-- - Oh God.
0:32:06- TSMC ahead of Intel on process soon, question mark?
0:32:09- Look at that, the show notes.
0:32:10(laughing)
0:32:11They're like a crystal ball.
0:32:13(laughing)
0:32:15- Look at the slug on this.
0:32:1710 nanometer chip foundry process coming to Apple partner
0:32:21TM TSMC ahead of Intel.
0:32:23- And it was from the ever reliable news source.
0:32:26AppleInsider.com.
0:32:27This is dated September of '16.
0:32:30Oh my word.
0:32:31We didn't talk about it, but guess what?
0:32:33They did it.
0:32:34It came true.
0:32:35Maybe this is how we can make things come true.
0:32:36Just put them in our show notes.
0:32:37Put them in the show notes and it's like burying a time capsule.
0:32:42Our show notes are the crock pot of Apple news.
0:32:46Just wait long enough.
0:32:47It's going to be there.
0:32:48Oh my God.
0:32:50All right, so let's talk about Disney since Marco hasn't come up with something better.
0:32:54It'll be the Marco show after this when we talk about overcast and springboard.
0:32:57Marco should start remembering now all the details of the springboard graduate stuff.
0:33:02Did you know that letterpress moved off of Game Center?
0:33:04I did.
0:33:05I didn't know that.
0:33:06That's down here too.
0:33:07We should just—you know what we should do?
0:33:12If we get really desperate, we should go from the bottom up and just say, "We're dedicated.
0:33:16We have to do it.
0:33:17We have to do it.
0:33:18Just start at the bottom."
0:33:19Oh, my word.
0:33:21This is so bad.
0:33:22Anyway, all right, I'm just trying to bring this back around.
0:33:25So at some point one day eventually, or years ago it seems, there was some talk in late
0:33:312016 about Twitter potentially looking to be bought.
0:33:36And there were some potential suitors, I don't remember who they were other than Disney.
0:33:39What, some Salesforce in the running?
0:33:42Ah, maybe.
0:33:43And so what ended up happening, and I didn't get a chance to look at these show notes and
0:33:46refresh my memory, so being Chief Summarizer-in-Chief is a little dangerous today, but my recollection
0:33:52is that Disney was kind of sniffing around, saying, "Eh, maybe we do want Twitter," and
0:33:58then realized, "Oh, wait, Twitter's a cesspool of disgusting, terrible people, so yeah, we
0:34:03don't want anything to do with that."
0:34:04Well, the reason I put this in there, not because I don't care about this, whatever,
0:34:08people buying Disney, that's old news.
0:34:11I don't know why it stayed in the notes, I probably would have deleted it, but I saw
0:34:13it down there, and it brought to mind something, what was it, it was relevant, it's eternally
0:34:20relevant. I forget what the specific inciting incident was, but it's about when you have
0:34:25an online community of any kind. Oh, I know what it was. It was the PUBG thing. You guys don't
0:34:33follow this. Do you know what that is? Nope.
0:34:35Anyways, it's a new game, Player Unknown Battlegrounds. It's a game. It's a cool game.
0:34:40You'll like the premise of it. We love games.
0:34:43Yeah. Well, no, it's a game mode. I think it might've started as a mod and now it's
0:34:48it's his own game, I'd always get confused about the details.
0:34:50But anyway, you are like an army guy.
0:34:52You parachute into this fairly realistic looking world,
0:34:57like a big open field with some trees and buildings
0:34:59and stuff like that, and you have to sort of scrounge
0:35:02for weapons and bandages and stuff like that,
0:35:05and it's fairly realistic in that you can't take
0:35:07500 bullets, like a few bullets kills you, right?
0:35:10And there are teams, and there is sort of a gamey,
0:35:16shimmery circle, ring, dome around the entire play area that starts off really, really big,
0:35:22but it slowly shrinks over time, eventually corralling all the people together. And eventually
0:35:28there's one person who's left alive, right? So your strategy could be, I'm just going to crawl
0:35:32in the grass and hide behind this tree and be like a mile away from everybody, but the circle
0:35:35will shrink and shrink and shrink. And if you're not out there fighting, you're also not getting
0:35:38better weapons and getting healing supplies and stuff like that. So it's a fun game mode.
0:35:45And they're fun videos to watch because there are teams in this friendly fire and there's no radar or anything like that.
0:35:50You're just crawling around and going through buildings and some people camp out in buildings and you just go around a door and there's a guy.
0:35:55Anyway, it's a very popular game right now.
0:35:57And the guy who made the game has community standards for his game, basically saying if you intentionally kill people on your team because friendly fire is a thing, that's against the rules and you get banned.
0:36:09Temporarily banned and I assume you keep doing it permanently banned.
0:36:12Because that's bad behavior. We don't want someone who comes to you join a game and the guy in your team kills everybody on his own
0:36:16Teams takes their stuff like no, we don't have that right and he did that to like a popular streamer like twitch streamer
0:36:23and the switch streamer was cranky about it and
0:36:26Said some jokey things to him about like how he's gonna kick him in the face or something like that
0:36:30and the guy
0:36:33Because he had temporarily banned him and he explained to him
0:36:36Why he doesn't tolerate even jokey sort of threats of violence or whatever
0:36:40And anyway, that was the story like game creator,
0:36:44bands popular streamer and has to explain to him why he doesn't
0:36:48think threats of violence are funny, you know, counter to everything
0:36:52and macho stupid gamer dude culture. Right.
0:36:55And it made me think of Twitter and anybody who has any kind of community,
0:36:59whether it's the game that you made and the standards
0:37:01you make for the people who play your game online or Twitter,
0:37:03who makes a service that they let people use or, you know, just think of anything
0:37:07like if you have a website and you have comment section
0:37:10or you have the old style web bulletin boards or whatever,
0:37:14online communities and the policing of them.
0:37:17It always amazes me, or Reddit is a great example,
0:37:20it always amazes me how reluctant people are
0:37:24in these communities to enforce their will.
0:37:29So we all have opinions about what we think is good
0:37:34and what's not good,
0:37:35but the standard sort of non-oppressed majority opinion
0:37:40of like, I'm not in a group
0:37:47that is frequently the target of abuse,
0:37:51or I'm at the top of the pyramid,
0:37:52therefore I think everyone should be able to do everything.
0:37:55So even though I think something is bad,
0:37:58I'm not going to tell people in my community
0:38:00that they can't do that thing
0:38:02because who am I to judge, right?
0:38:04And even removing the motivation, just the whole idea of like, I want my community to
0:38:09be a place where everyone is free to be themselves and do whatever the heck they want.
0:38:13And it almost seems to me at various times on Twitter and other places that there is
0:38:18nothing so terrible that the community, the people who run the community would decide
0:38:23that it's not allowed, right?
0:38:24So it's like, I'm trying to think of something for the show that I could use as an example.
0:38:27Like someone comes in and says, I'm in favor of eating babies.
0:38:31I love to eat babies.
0:38:33They come out and I just eat them instantly, right?
0:38:35Perfectly healthy babies, I eat them, right?
0:38:37And people are like, you know, we don't like baby eating.
0:38:40Can you ban all the people who promote baby eating
0:38:44in this community?
0:38:44'Cause they're really annoying
0:38:45and we're all against it, right?
0:38:47Like everyone here in this community of, you know,
0:38:50knitters or woodworking people or, you know,
0:38:55go-kart enthusiasts or whatever,
0:38:59can we just say that if you promote the eating of babies,
0:39:02you get banned, like no baby eaters, right?
0:39:06And people around the community are like, "Well, I don't like eating babies.
0:39:10And I know most people don't like it, but those people should have the right to talk
0:39:13about baby eating."
0:39:14It's like, "What do you mean the right?
0:39:17It's your community.
0:39:18It's a website that you made.
0:39:19It's a product that you made.
0:39:21You're not the US government.
0:39:23They can talk about eating babies all they want on their front lawn.
0:39:26I don't want them in this community."
0:39:28And so they decide to make a community where everyone is allowed to do everything.
0:39:31Because that feels like egalitarian for them and you know, it's freedom and even if they don't invoke freedom of speech
0:39:35It's like this is the kind of community we want
0:39:37we want a community everyone is feels free to say anything they want even is about baby eating and
0:39:41There's a place for that type of thing. I think you usually call that place 4chan, right, but whatever
0:39:46But it it it's
0:39:51Continues to be amazing to me that you see so little of the other thing where they say, you know
0:39:56What this is my community and I don't like baby eating and if you talk about baby eating here
0:40:00You're banned forever and they're like that's not fair just because you don't like yeah. Yeah, just because I don't like baby eating
0:40:07That's the only reason and this is my community right whether it's this guy with his game
0:40:11And that's why you get a situation where this person saying hey
0:40:15Killing people on your team is bad and threats of violence on Twitter are bad and you're gonna get banned for it
0:40:20That's why it's a story like that's a story in the gaming news. It's it's a man bites dog story, right?
0:40:27Like whoa someone someone decided like their own personal opinion and they enforce their own personal opinion on their community
0:40:33Is this person the worst person ever enforcing their own personal opinion now in Twitter?
0:40:37There's no personal opinion or because Twitter is a giant massive corporation, but they have the same problem that they seem
0:40:42unable to choose to enforce
0:40:45You know any kind of standards was like well
0:40:49We don't want to enforce our standards and other people on the exam
0:40:51I use baby eating because I was hoping to find something that everyone or audience would be like, yeah
0:40:54against baby eating. Now the pro baby eating people go ahead and email us, whatever, but
0:40:58now I'm going to say one that I would have used years ago in place of baby eating,
0:41:02feeling confident that everyone who's listening to my voice would be like, "Yeah, totally baby
0:41:05eating is bad." But unfortunately, I cannot think that these days. And that is the example
0:41:10from Twitter where Twitter is like, "Hey, are you the neo-Nazi party? You want to promote a Nazi
0:41:17agenda? You're fine on Twitter. As long as you don't threaten violence or blah, blah, blah,
0:41:22or violate one of our things that we decide we're okay with Nazis like if they just want to talk peacefully about Nazi stuff
0:41:28That's fine with us as long as they don't threaten violence, right?
0:41:30Isn't all of their speech kind of well
0:41:33Like I would just hope that Twitter as a company be like, you know what?
0:41:37Even if Nazis are just like talking calmly about you know, they're they're not see agenda
0:41:43No, no Nazis like it not like are you in a group? Are you in the new Nazis? You're in an organization, right?
0:41:50Are you affiliated with them? Do you promote that in any way? You're banned. It's like, whoa, you can't ban them. That's freedom
0:41:56It's like no no, they can have their meetings like they can talk about their Nazi things. They just can't be on Twitter
0:42:01but
0:42:03Twitter seemingly cannot bring itself to do that because it would be seen as like oh
0:42:08Twitter don't go there because they don't let you if they don't like what they're saying they ban you right and not just like
0:42:12You know things that we all agree are bad
0:42:14But just like political ideas like the Nazi Party like some people are just into that man
0:42:19Why can't you just like can't we just say no and Twitter and many other companies inability to draw the line
0:42:25Yeah, and drop whatever Twitter wants to draw it like they I feel like you know, you lose all the Nazi people
0:42:32Yeah, the Nazi people will go elsewhere. They'll have to go someplace else like well
0:42:35But if I ban if I ban too many things everyone will leave and our daily active users will go
0:42:39It's like you have you have to make that choice. I feel confident if I was running Twitter that if we ban all the Nazis just
0:42:46on principle, like they don't have to do anything bad, they're just gone, right?
0:42:50That you won't lose too many users, and the users you do lose, it's good that you're losing them,
0:42:56right? And so it frustrates me as a user of Twitter and many other services to see the
0:43:02unwillingness to enforce personal standards. And even if more people did this, that would mean
0:43:10people are going to have weird personal standards. They're going to be like, "Sorry, nobody's name
0:43:13name begins with the letter J, and then I can't join their service and I would be mad
0:43:16about it, right? But it's their service. Like, they can make up their own stupid rules, right?
0:43:20I'm just saying, like, maybe the baby eaters and the Nazis, maybe get rid of them. And
0:43:24it's like, well, who cares? Twitter is being more successful if they let everybody in.
0:43:28But things like these rumors about, oh, someone was going to buy you, but your service is
0:43:32a cesspool, that, you know, your choices have a material effect on your company, not just
0:43:39on the users, which you should care about, like, what's it like to use Twitter? The decisions
0:43:43about what is and isn't allowed affect what it's like to use Twitter. They also affect
0:43:47potentially who's willing to buy you, right? And they affect your image like there's tangible
0:43:52and intangible repercussions to this. So I continue to hope that more services will act
0:43:59like small services with one opinionated person, like the guy who runs the, you know, Player
0:44:05unknowns battlegrounds to say I have rules and these are my rules and you
0:44:10might not like the rules that's my damn game you don't like the rules go
0:44:13somewhere else make your own game right you don't like the rules in Twitter
0:44:16Nazis we're banning you all from Twitter go make your own service go someplace
0:44:21else go do another thing because we're not the US government so anyway I'm
0:44:25against baby eating I'm against Nazis I'm also against player killing in
0:44:29in Battleground.
0:44:30- How do you feel about people who's name is being with Jay?
0:44:34- Neutral.
0:44:34(laughing)
0:44:37A lot of people's name is being with Jay, come on.
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0:47:15- Marco, you had some very interesting
0:47:24overcast crashes that you had a little bit of trouble figuring out and justifiably because
0:47:30having heard this story back a couple of months ago when you did discover what this fix was,
0:47:35I thought to myself, my goodness, I don't know if I would have ever been able to figure
0:47:38this out. But I think it's a really interesting, to the best of your recollection, story of
0:47:45both what was going on, why it was going on, and how you discovered it. So can you take
0:47:49us through this, maybe starting with like, how did you discover there was an issue in
0:47:53in the first place.
0:47:54- iTunes Connect, the backend for the App Store,
0:47:58reports your number of crashes for each version of your app.
0:48:01And this is as reported by people who opt in
0:48:04to sharing the stats with Apple and developers
0:48:07during the iPhone setup process.
0:48:09I started seeing a big uptick in crashes,
0:48:11and I started noticing a separate problem too,
0:48:13which is my app would crash in the background a lot,
0:48:17and I'd get all these crash logs for background crashes.
0:48:20I didn't immediately identify it as such.
0:48:22What I immediately saw was my app would not resume playback
0:48:27if you hadn't been running it in a while.
0:48:29So if you sent a play command,
0:48:31let's say you get in your car and the Bluetooth turns on
0:48:34and it sends a play command,
0:48:35or you put on Bluetooth headphones
0:48:36and you hit the play button on them.
0:48:37I noticed that the app was not in memory anymore.
0:48:40I started getting reports that were auto-generated
0:48:43from Springboard that it was terminating me
0:48:45in the background for holding onto a shared lock
0:48:50on the database file.
0:48:52So I did a number of things to try to fix this.
0:48:55I read somewhere that if you open up
0:48:58a background task assertion, so in,
0:49:01I forget how, if the Mac does this,
0:49:04but if the, on iOS you do the UI background task ID
0:49:08and you say begin background task with identifier
0:49:11and it basically gives you a little handle
0:49:13and you do your task and then you tell it,
0:49:15okay, I finished that, end this task.
0:49:17And then if your app is about to be terminated
0:49:20for whatever reason, and you have one of these open,
0:49:23the system will give you a little bit of extra time
0:49:25to go complete that.
0:49:27So, somewhere I read some articles that was, you know,
0:49:31that I can't find now, you know, which is probably good
0:49:33to protect the not so innocent,
0:49:36but somewhere I read some article that said,
0:49:38in order to fix these crashes
0:49:40about holding onto the lock too long,
0:49:41just open up a background task
0:49:43for every database query that you make.
0:49:46'Cause the way SQLite works is,
0:49:49every query it temporarily locks the database file,
0:49:53does what it needs to do, and then unlocks it.
0:49:55And this is required because that's how you have
0:49:58different processes sharing a file,
0:50:00or rather sharing a database through SQLite
0:50:03without some kind of server managing the background,
0:50:04like MySQL would have a server, but SQLite doesn't.
0:50:07So anyway, it needs to do file locking to do this stuff.
0:50:10So I got this tip from some random blog post that,
0:50:14oh, wrap every database query in a background task assertion
0:50:19and then you won't have this problem anymore.
0:50:21That was technically true,
0:50:26in the sense that-- - Oh, here we go.
0:50:28- When I shipped the version that included this fix,
0:50:32it was technically true that I was no longer
0:50:34getting killed with that background code.
0:50:36However, what was happening is I noticed
0:50:40that my crash rate, rather than going down,
0:50:44went way, way up.
0:50:47It took me a while to figure out what was going on.
0:50:49And during the time that I was trying to figure out
0:50:52what was going on, I also noticed that as I would be
0:50:54listening to Overcast, like in the car on long car trips,
0:50:57sometimes my entire iPhone would crash.
0:51:01And it would do what nerds might know as a re-spring,
0:51:04which is the phone does not reboot,
0:51:06but it looks like it's rebooting.
0:51:07And it just comes back up faster.
0:51:09And you see the little spinner, all your apps quit,
0:51:13and then eventually you get back to your lock screen.
0:51:16And the way you can tell that it wasn't a real reboot
0:51:18is Touch ID is still on.
0:51:20'Cause when you reboot for real,
0:51:22you have to enter your passcode the first time.
0:51:24But if it does a little spinner and back to the lock screen
0:51:26and all your apps are gone and Touch ID works,
0:51:28that was a springboard crash, not a full reboot.
0:51:31And I noticed my phone was doing this more and more.
0:51:34And it was very inconvenient at times such as
0:51:36when I was driving and following directions in ways.
0:51:40(laughs)
0:51:41And my directions were just gone for a little while
0:51:43while all the apps got killed
0:51:45and I had to restart everything.
0:51:47But anyway, and I started getting reports from people
0:51:49saying my phone keeps crashing with Overcast,
0:51:51but I can't figure out why.
0:51:54And it took until one guy sent me a video
0:51:58that he showed something amazingly useful to me.
0:52:01He said, "Look, Overcast, if you pause it in the background
0:52:06"and you bring up control center,
0:52:07"so you can see that Overcast is still
0:52:09"in the now playing thing in control center,
0:52:12"after 10 minutes exactly,
0:52:14or no, I think it was like three minutes.
0:52:16Anyway, after some short duration of minutes,
0:52:19it disappears, reliably, every time.
0:52:22So that led me to finally catch the inner debugger
0:52:25and to see that I was being killed
0:52:27with a certain crash with a certain code.
0:52:29And it still was not enough to actually figure it out
0:52:31because the code I was getting killed with was,
0:52:34you've exceeded some limit.
0:52:36(laughs)
0:52:37It's like, okay, well, helpful, maybe, thanks,
0:52:41but I have no idea still.
0:52:44And I tried a few things, trying to figure out
0:52:47what limit am I exceeding here, what does this code mean?
0:52:50Eventually I realized that this would also
0:52:53sometimes correspond with one of those springboard crashes,
0:52:57with the whole phone crash.
0:52:58And so I thought, I wonder if this is related.
0:53:01I direct messaged somebody who I know
0:53:05on the springboard team.
0:53:06I basically said, look, I'm at my wits end here,
0:53:08I can't figure this out.
0:53:10is there anything that would cause this crash code
0:53:14to be sent to my app that might sometimes
0:53:17crash Springboard?
0:53:18Little while later, I hear, oh, there's actually
0:53:22a bug report internal to Apple talking about
0:53:26how Overcatch is causing this problem.
0:53:28(laughing)
0:53:31I was like, nice.
0:53:31Oh?
0:53:32- Do you think they ever would've told you?
0:53:35They're just like--
0:53:36- I don't, so there is actually,
0:53:38There is a process that happens sometimes inside of Apple
0:53:43where if you have an app that's causing lots of problems
0:53:46for Apple, there is sometimes you will hear
0:53:51from one of the developer evangelists about it.
0:53:54This has happened to me maybe once or twice ever,
0:53:57so this isn't a thing that happens often.
0:53:59But this was happening in the lead up to WWDC.
0:54:03This is only a couple weeks before WWDC, I think,
0:54:05if I remember correctly.
0:54:06And so the problem with that is that this is a time
0:54:09when the entire, like all of Apple is basically
0:54:11freaking out, rushing to finish the WBC betas.
0:54:16'Cause that's like the first time the OS
0:54:19is really gonna see any kind of wide attention.
0:54:21It's gonna be installed on a bunch of developer devices
0:54:23and a bunch of enthusiasts who say they're developers
0:54:25who aren't and just use the developer betas anyway.
0:54:28So there's a massive rush right before WBC
0:54:31for anybody who works in anything near these new OSs
0:54:35to just get it done, to get that first beta ready
0:54:38for the public.
0:54:40And so this was happening during that big crunch time,
0:54:43so I imagine it slipped through the cracks.
0:54:45You know, I'm sure it was on somebody's to-do list
0:54:47to maybe see if they could reach out to me or something,
0:54:49and they didn't.
0:54:50Because you can imagine Apple is not so keen
0:54:52on an app that can crash Springboard.
0:54:54Like, that's not something that apps
0:54:56are supposed to be able to do.
0:54:57So basically, so there was this internal thing
0:55:02that I just happened to, like, I happened to ask somebody
0:55:05who started looking around who happened to find this.
0:55:07And then basically the notes that Apple Engineering
0:55:12had noticed about it was that I was taking a large number
0:55:17of background assertions in the app
0:55:20which was apparently causing Springboard,
0:55:23Springboard has like a watchdog that goes along
0:55:25and checks various limits every few minutes.
0:55:27And that watchdog when it looked at how many
0:55:30background assertions I had because I was doing one
0:55:33for every database query.
0:55:35(laughs)
0:55:36So like, you know, a typical load of the app
0:55:39is gonna make probably a few hundred database queries
0:55:41over the course of navigating the first few screens.
0:55:43So, you know, we're talking over the course
0:55:47of typical usage, I might make a few hundred
0:55:49to a few thousand database queries
0:55:51over like a well-used session of the app.
0:55:54The background task API was designed
0:55:57back in the early days of iOS
0:56:00for you to take out one background task assertion
0:56:04if you're finishing uploading a file to a web service
0:56:08or doing some kind of sync operation.
0:56:11Like, okay, take a background assertion,
0:56:12finish the sync operation, and then give it back.
0:56:14And so apparently this was designed for something more
0:56:19on the order of hundreds of these to happen
0:56:23during a process, not thousands of these to happen
0:56:26the way I was doing it with every database query.
0:56:30And this was causing two problems.
0:56:31Number one, it would cause this watchdog
0:56:34that goes around to check to see
0:56:37if you've exceeded your limits,
0:56:38it would cause it to kill my app to say,
0:56:41hey, you've exceeded your limits.
0:56:42But apparently there was also a bug in that watchdog
0:56:46in older versions of iOS before 11
0:56:48that sometimes if you had such a ridiculous number
0:56:53of them as I did, that watchdog would crash.
0:56:56And because it's a part of the system,
0:56:58If that crashes, basically all of Springboard comes down
0:57:01and is brought back up.
0:57:03This has been fixed in iOS 11,
0:57:05but it was not fixed for at least the earlier parts of 10.
0:57:08I don't know if the very last version of 10
0:57:10might have fixed it, I don't know, honestly.
0:57:12So basically, Overcast was not only exposing
0:57:15its own limit crossing behavior,
0:57:17and by the way, I don't know what that limit is.
0:57:19Nobody will tell me what that limit is.
0:57:21It doesn't really matter for my purposes.
0:57:23All that matters is background tasks
0:57:25for something to be used not in the thousands.
0:57:28(laughs)
0:57:29But basically, I was causing Springboard to crash.
0:57:33And I greatly, greatly appreciate both the user
0:57:38who sent me the video who showed that it would be terminated
0:57:41after a certain number of minutes,
0:57:42'cause that allowed me to get the crash code
0:57:44that was reliably causing this problem.
0:57:46And I also greatly appreciate anybody inside Apple
0:57:49who helped me track this down.
0:57:52And I really don't appreciate the blog post
0:57:54I read back forever ago and I'm glad I can't find it now.
0:57:57So I'm telling you all now, and you developers listening,
0:58:00don't use background task IDs for frequently occurring
0:58:03things like database queries.
0:58:05That is too granular.
0:58:07And the solution to the problem
0:58:09ended up being something totally different.
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0:59:17more visit betterment.com/ATP. That's betterment.com/ATP. Betterment, investing made better. So, going
0:59:30back to the original problem. The problem was I was holding on to a shared file lock
0:59:37in the shared app container because the database file, so quick, very quick overview, I apologize
0:59:43to non-programmers, this is probably very boring. I've been trying to not talk about
0:59:46for weeks and John's finally making me this week.
0:59:48But anyway, so--
0:59:49- And not just him.
0:59:50- Okay, you too.
0:59:52I voted.
0:59:53So anyway, long explanation, slightly less long again.
0:59:57iOS apps are totally isolated from each other.
1:00:00They, you know, for security reasons,
1:00:01for control reasons, for user-friendliness,
1:00:03there's lots of good reasons.
1:00:04iOS apps, if your app wants to read or write a file
1:00:09for its own data purposes,
1:00:11it writes it in a special sandbox folder
1:00:12that it can't read or write anything outside of that
1:00:15and no other apps can read its files.
1:00:18And this is extremely enforced such that
1:00:21even if you have multiple apps from the same developer,
1:00:24they are isolated from each other,
1:00:26even if you have extensions of your app,
1:00:29because an extension is technically running
1:00:30as a separate process on the system,
1:00:33the extension can't read and write the same data
1:00:35as its parent app even.
1:00:37Like that's how walled off everything is in iOS
1:00:39for various good security reasons.
1:00:42Which by the way, I love and I kinda wish
1:00:44that the Mac had more of that.
1:00:46Anyway, Apple created a system called
1:00:48Shared App Group Containers to try to solve the problem of,
1:00:52first of all, if you have multiple apps
1:00:55from the same developer, can they share any information?
1:00:57And then second of all, if you just have an app
1:00:59with an extension, it's pretty hard to make
1:01:02a useful extension that can't read or write
1:01:05any of its parent app's data.
1:01:07The shared app container is basically a,
1:01:10it's literally what it sounds like.
1:01:10It's a shared container that apps and extensions
1:01:14can all read and write from, you know,
1:01:16separately, you know, separately from their main data space
1:01:19so they can share data.
1:01:21I had the bright idea back when the,
1:01:23when watchOS first came out,
1:01:25and I had to make my watch extension,
1:01:26which was Overcast's first extension,
1:01:28what if I just move the database file
1:01:31into the shared app container,
1:01:32and then the extension can read and write
1:01:34the same database as the app?
1:01:35And I can copy the same model files over
1:01:37and have the extension have a lot of code sharing
1:01:40with the main app.
1:01:41The thing with iOS is that processes can be randomly
1:01:45suspended and terminated without their consent or whatever
1:01:51as the system deems them no longer necessary
1:01:53if the user quits, see whatever else.
1:01:55And this is especially enforced on extensions.
1:01:58If you open up, say, a widget,
1:02:00like the today, it used to be called today widget now,
1:02:03and I think they're just called widgets now, right?
1:02:05- I don't even remember.
1:02:06- Whatever they're called in this iOS release.
1:02:09So widgets have very, very low limits
1:02:11because you might have a screen
1:02:13that has like five of them on it.
1:02:14Like if you open up your whatever notification center
1:02:16is called now and you have the part of the notification center
1:02:18that used to be called today's screen,
1:02:19who knows what that's called now.
1:02:21Anyway, and so you have all these things
1:02:22that might be called widgets on that screen.
1:02:25(laughs)
1:02:26And so each one of those is running a separate process
1:02:29and so they have very, very aggressive limits on those.
1:02:32In the context of a widget
1:02:34or actually any extension technically,
1:02:36there is no such thing as a background task assertion
1:02:39in the typical sense where you say,
1:02:40begin background task and I'll tell you when I'm done.
1:02:43They have this other thing, this NSProcessInfo API
1:02:45that is horrendous and really hard to use.
1:02:48But basically, they very aggressively terminate
1:02:52the processes of those extensions
1:02:54whenever you're done with them.
1:02:56So the problem is if you have a shared app group container
1:03:00and you have the ability for one of these processes
1:03:03to take a lock on a file in that.
1:03:06You have a problem then, what do you do
1:03:09if say the widget has a lock on the database file,
1:03:12which is the single copy that's shared
1:03:14between the parent app and everything else.
1:03:16If the widget takes a lock on that file
1:03:18and then gets terminated before the lock is released,
1:03:21what should happen?
1:03:22Should the lock not be released?
1:03:25Then the app can't run because it's deadlocked.
1:03:27It's waiting for that lock to be released
1:03:28from the extension that's not running right now.
1:03:31Or should you just kind of force the lock to be released?
1:03:34Well then you have the risk of data corruption
1:03:36because then if the widget then relaunches,
1:03:39the widget thinks the file has been locked
1:03:41that whole time in the meantime, but it actually hasn't,
1:03:44so the lock is kind of meaningless
1:03:45and so you either have lots of bugs
1:03:48or you have data corruption or whatever else.
1:03:50So Apple, realizing this would be a problem,
1:03:53built in this wonderful system of this springboard,
1:03:57the special springboard crasher that you will get a log
1:04:00if your app is terminated while it's holding a lock
1:04:04in the shared container, you get these crazy crash logs
1:04:07that were the kind I was getting to begin with.
1:04:09This was the problem I was trying to solve at the beginning
1:04:11and the reason I did this whole background task thing
1:04:13that was horrendous.
1:04:14Finally, the end of the story.
1:04:17I had that problem for that reason
1:04:19and I tried to solve it with this background task
1:04:22on every database query thing, which was a terrible idea
1:04:25that causes other springboard crashes,
1:04:26way, way, way worse crash,
1:04:29And so instead, I decided, you know what?
1:04:32I'm just not gonna have the database
1:04:33in the shared container anymore.
1:04:35I just moved it back into the ask private storage.
1:04:38And instead of the widget communicating with,
1:04:42and the watch engine, instead of them communicating
1:04:44with the parent app by reading
1:04:46and writing the database directly,
1:04:48now they just have their own little mini APIs
1:04:50to the parent app where they are communicating
1:04:52via dictionaries that are just being written
1:04:55to little files in the shared container
1:04:57that are not locked or anything like that.
1:04:59So I took this elegant but complex solution
1:05:02of having the database be shared
1:05:04and made a much, much, much simpler lower tech solution
1:05:07of just passing around serialized dictionaries
1:05:09as unlocked files basically.
1:05:12And now all these problems are gone, it is totally solved.
1:05:16My crash rate has dropped to barely anything,
1:05:19relatively speaking, and it is finally done.
1:05:22And my users were very patient during this time
1:05:24and I greatly appreciate that,
1:05:25along with the guy who reported the initial bug
1:05:28and the Apple people who helped me find it.
1:05:30So that is the story.
1:05:31I think this was now,
1:05:33because this was before the WBC barrier
1:05:37in the year of Apple scheduling,
1:05:38I have very little recollection of most of these details,
1:05:41so I apologize if I got anything wrong.
1:05:43I apologize for the long-winded nature of this,
1:05:44but Casey and John made me do it.
1:05:46- So I have a couple of questions about this.
1:05:49- Yeah.
1:05:49- How many database queries were you making?
1:05:53I never really measured what exactly the threshold
1:05:57of being a problem was, but I think it's in the order of,
1:06:02it's in the magnitude of hundreds over a short time
1:06:07and then maybe approaching thousands
1:06:11if you use the app for a while.
1:06:13And it's doing a lot of, 'cause the app syncs back
1:06:15to the server every few minutes.
1:06:18As you're listening, every few seconds,
1:06:21it's writing your progress back to the database.
1:06:23That way, in case it crashes or your phone crashed
1:06:25or whatever else, you don't lose too much progress.
1:06:27So every few seconds, I'm running to disk at least.
1:06:29And then when you're doing a sync,
1:06:31there's a lot more queries that go on there.
1:06:33And if you browse a list, it's loading all that data
1:06:36as you page through that list.
1:06:37As you scroll, it's loading all those table cells
1:06:39for all the episodes, it's loading all that stuff.
1:06:41So I do a good amount of queries.
1:06:43- That was my question.
1:06:44So when you're scrolling through a list,
1:06:45it's like loading them on the fly at that point
1:06:48for the data source of whatever it's called,
1:06:49the data provider for the table view or whatever?
1:06:52- Yep.
1:06:53It's not like pulling the whole list and keeping it in memory and then just doling it out to
1:06:58the GUI data source provider thingy.
1:07:01You don't just do one big giant query up front to get the whole playlist and then just keep
1:07:05it in memory and chuck it out as the table cells ask for it.
1:07:08Well, I do.
1:07:10And I have some caching built into the database layer as well.
1:07:14So for instance, I do load the whole list of episodes for a playlist view.
1:07:19but then as you scroll, I need to know the artwork.
1:07:23And that comes from the podcast record,
1:07:26not the episode record.
1:07:27That's one level up.
1:07:28And so I have podcasts cached,
1:07:30I have that in a nice instance cache and everything,
1:07:35but keep in mind a lot of this stuff falls over
1:07:38if people have a lot of podcasts.
1:07:40Basically, if it exceeds what my app reasonably expects
1:07:43to cache or what will reasonably fit in memory to cache,
1:07:47there's a lot more queries happening as this stuff is paged in. Also, if things change,
1:07:53for instance, if I get a change value from the server, it invalidates a lot of these
1:07:59values that are cached, so I have to then reload those on their next request. If the
1:08:04list of playable content changes, which basically is like if a new episode comes in or if an
1:08:12an episode gets deleted, or if some criteria of an episode
1:08:16changes whether it is a member of a playlist or not,
1:08:19then that is called, in my app I call that
1:08:22the playable content change, which is basically
1:08:25some part of what belongs in the list of episodes somewhere
1:08:29is no longer valid, and when that happens,
1:08:32lots of things get invalidated.
1:08:34And so there's a lot going on.
1:08:35I mean, a podcast app is a lot more complex
1:08:39than most people would assume.
1:08:41It's certainly more complex than I assumed when I started writing one, as I found out.
1:08:47And they're only getting more complex over time as the market matures and as the scope
1:08:52of these things, the scope of what people expect, expands.
1:08:55It'll be interesting to see, you know, like a, I guess you'd probably get it in just
1:09:01looking at the console log or using instruments or something like the flow of database queries.
1:09:06Because I, you know, using Overcast, I would think, well, you know, this does some database
1:09:09queries, but surely I would never guess the size of the number of database queries like over the
1:09:14course of a 10-minute period that it would literally do thousands, like especially just
1:09:18during normal use, even accounting for the "hey I'm syncing your play position every few seconds" so
1:09:22I found that pretty surprising in this whole thing. And also I would say that whatever that
1:09:26blog post was that you found that was like "just do everything as a background task"
1:09:31I can't really blame the blog post because any solution like that is like the underlying
1:09:36assumption is you're not doing hundreds or thousands of database queries. Like you've
1:09:40got a couple database queries and you do them and you just put them in the background you'll be fine
1:09:44and you would have been fine if the number was like 20. You know, like a couple a minute, like
1:09:49five, five database queries every minute. But if it's hundreds or thousands then obviously that's
1:09:54just not going to work. My question, another question about your not having the database in
1:09:58the shared container and just having the thing right, pls to the shared container, does that mean
1:10:02that the main Overcast app has to be running
1:10:06to notice those things appearing in the shared container
1:10:08and take action on them because it owns the database now?
1:10:11Like, how does that work?
1:10:13- It would mean that, but for a variety of reasons,
1:10:16it either always is running or becomes running.
1:10:19So let me go through.
1:10:21Basically, there's only two extensions
1:10:23that matter for this purpose.
1:10:25One of them is the widget, the other one is the watch app.
1:10:28When watchOS, watchkit one, back for watchOS one,
1:10:33the extension for the watch was actually a process
1:10:37running on the phone.
1:10:39And so it had access to the shared data container
1:10:41on the phone.
1:10:42So it was actually surprisingly easy to make watchkit one
1:10:45apps because you could just share the database,
1:10:48share all the model files and everything,
1:10:50and then just have the watchkit read and write
1:10:51the database directly.
1:10:52And it kind of took care of that for you.
1:10:54WatchKit 2 and forward, so watchOS 2 and 3 and also now 4,
1:10:59moved the extension to run on the watch itself
1:11:03instead of on the phone.
1:11:04Because running it on the phone made the app really slow
1:11:07basically because it had to send all the interface stuff
1:11:08over Bluetooth and it sucked.
1:11:10That's one of the reasons why watchOS 1 was so bad for apps
1:11:13and why the newer watchOS has since then
1:11:15have been so much better.
1:11:17Anyway, so when the extension execution moved to the watch,
1:11:23That meant it could no longer read and write
1:11:24the container anymore, 'cause the container's on the phone.
1:11:26So it had its own container on the watch now,
1:11:29but anyway, it couldn't read and write the database.
1:11:31So that eliminated the whole reason
1:11:33I had it there in the first place.
1:11:35The only reason this came up is that
1:11:36when I made Overcast 3.0, I made a widget.
1:11:38And the widget was like the first time
1:11:41I was really using, or really taking advantage
1:11:43of the fact that the database was somewhere shared
1:11:45to begin with.
1:11:46The watch extension already needed to have
1:11:50ways to communicate with the app,
1:11:52to wake it up if need be and the watch connectivity
1:11:56framework allows for all that.
1:11:57There's different commands and stuff.
1:11:59There are ways for the, it basically is already
1:12:02communicating the way that I said I moved everything to.
1:12:05It was really only the widget that was causing the problems
1:12:09because I'd already made this move with the watch app.
1:12:11Anyway, so the widget, either the phone app
1:12:15is already running, in which case it notices anyway,
1:12:17or basically I have a mechanism in the widget,
1:12:21'cause the widget has a play button,
1:12:22and if you tap into the artwork in it,
1:12:24it'll play that one also.
1:12:26So the widget needs to have some way to wake up the app.
1:12:29If it was just one way data transfer,
1:12:31if the widget was just showing status from the app,
1:12:34like you might have,
1:12:35if you made a weather app, for instance,
1:12:37there'd be no reason for the widget
1:12:40to communicate back to the parent app
1:12:41and something like that.
1:12:43You might just have the widget launch the app,
1:12:45but you can do that already.
1:12:47In my app, I had to have some way for the widget
1:12:49to communicate back to the app,
1:12:51and the app might not be running.
1:12:53So what I did for that was the widget basically
1:12:57sends a command through one of these serialized playlets.
1:13:01It puts a file in the shared app container that says,
1:13:03"Hey, do this command."
1:13:05And if it doesn't get a response within some very short time,
1:13:08I think it's like a half a second or something,
1:13:10then I launch a URL scheme that launches the app
1:13:13in the foreground, and you'll notice that if you use it.
1:13:15If basically the app was already running,
1:13:17if you hit that play button in the widget,
1:13:20it'll start again in the background
1:13:21'cause the app was still running.
1:13:23So basically, this is all a giant pile of hacks.
1:13:26(laughs)
1:13:28The short version is the widget tries to send the app
1:13:31a command and if it doesn't get a response,
1:13:32it knows it isn't running so it launches it
1:13:34in the foreground.
1:13:35- My final question, because every overcast segment
1:13:39would not be completed without some kind of bug report
1:13:41slash feature request is--
1:13:43- Oh my word.
1:13:43- I'm still--
1:13:44- This better not be about offline watch playback.
1:13:46I swear I'm gonna set that feature on fire.
1:13:48- No, it is not.
1:13:49I know about your woes with that and I did try it myself and I had my own woes because
1:13:53the volume is too low and I couldn't hear anything but you know about that, right?
1:13:55It's getting worse.
1:13:56It's getting so much worse.
1:13:58My question is about the mysterious world of the internal state of something on my phone
1:14:05that decides what it is that will start playing when my phone connects to Bluetooth on my
1:14:10car.
1:14:11So very often I will enter my car and I just did it today actually.
1:14:17Before I entered the car, I unlocked my phone and looked and either I used the multitasking
1:14:24switcher to go to it or I tapped the overcast icon or it was already in it, but the point
1:14:27is overcast was the frontmost application.
1:14:30I had previously been listening to a podcast.
1:14:32I was not listening now.
1:14:33I think I double tapped my AirPods and put them away or whatever.
1:14:36But overcast is the frontmost app.
1:14:38So I hit the sleep button, I go into my car, it connects to Bluetooth, and instead of overcast
1:14:42continuing to play the thing I was just listening to, music starts to play.
1:14:46I have no idea how iOS determines what it should start playing when I get into my car
1:14:54and it connects to Bluetooth, but maybe 15% of the time it starts playing music instead
1:15:01of playing...
1:15:02I mean, sometimes Overcast is long gone.
1:15:04It kind of makes sense.
1:15:05Like, the last time I listened to Overcast was last night, and I've since used Twitter
1:15:08and browsed the web and done all sorts of stuff.
1:15:10Surely Overcast is not running anymore because I've just thrashed through the memory.
1:15:14So when I get into my car, maybe it's going to be like, "Oh, I should start playing a
1:15:18random playlist," right?
1:15:19But when Overcast is the front-most app and I was just listening to it and it starts playing
1:15:22music, it makes me realize I have no idea what the hell's going on inside there.
1:15:25I'm assuming you have very little control over this, as with so many things that seem
1:15:29like OS-level things, but can you shed some light on what the hell's going on there?
1:15:33Sure.
1:15:34I mean, I can tell you right now I have zero control over it, but I will tell you roughly
1:15:36what I know is happening.
1:15:39And a lot of this is conjecture.
1:15:40A lot of this is just figuring it out
1:15:43over time with experience, and some of this,
1:15:46some, very little of this has been documented before,
1:15:49but not most of it.
1:15:50So the short version is it tries to do whatever you did last
1:15:55but there are some exceptions to when this will happen.
1:15:58So first of all, a lot of times, especially recently
1:16:02with the rise of video clips on Twitter and Facebook,
1:16:06what you did last might not be what you think you did last
1:16:10or you might have forgotten, or it might have been something.
1:16:11So for example, if you are, you know,
1:16:14if Overcast is paused and you're looking at Twitter
1:16:17and you view some kind of embedded video clip,
1:16:21Twitter has just become the most recently audio playing app.
1:16:24And iOS keeps track of whatever the most recently
1:16:26audio playing app was for this purpose.
1:16:29But lots of things can take it.
1:16:31So anything that plays video, anything that plays audio,
1:16:34if you view a video in Safari, for instance,
1:16:39that becomes then the latest,
1:16:41the last app that played audio.
1:16:43So it could be lots of different things
1:16:45that you don't even realize are taking it over,
1:16:46but if you play that quick video and then it stops,
1:16:51it doesn't give the last audio app status
1:16:54back to what it had before.
1:16:56It just stays on whatever that was.
1:16:59So much of the time in practice, that's the problem,
1:17:02is you actually did play audio through something else
1:17:05and either subconsciously assumed
1:17:08that it would go back to Overcast after that, or that you just forgot or didn't realize
1:17:13that that's happening.
1:17:14So that makes sense, but that's never the case with me because I've never heard it
1:17:18do a tweet.
1:17:19And I think I've done what you've described, like played a video on Twitter, played a video
1:17:22on YouTube, but I've never heard it resume a YouTube video, resume a tweet video, resume
1:17:26anything.
1:17:27It always starts playing seemingly random playlists in my music collection.
1:17:31And I can tell you, I'm not listening to music on my iPhone, like ever.
1:17:35Like because I have a dedicated iPod connected with a USB cable in my car
1:17:39Like I don't even listen to my phone music on my phone in my car. I have a separate iPod for that, right?
1:17:44And it's amazing to me and I know it's doing it was taking a really long time. It's amazing to me
1:17:49I don't I don't know how it picks the playlist cuz it's not even like the playlist that I was last like if I go into
1:17:55music app intentionally and play a song and then forget about it that like it just I
1:17:58Don't know what it's doing
1:18:00Is it is it?
1:18:01honoring my shuffle, but anyway, it always plays music
1:18:03and it takes forever for it to start playing music
1:18:05because I have never even launched the music app.
1:18:08- Right, so there's other things at play here.
1:18:10So first of all, even if it remembers properly
1:18:14the last app you used was Overcast,
1:18:17if Overcast has crashed in the background, it won't resume.
1:18:20But again, I try to minimize background crashes.
1:18:25There are occasional ones that still happen
1:18:27that I'm still trying to track down,
1:18:28but they're very, very, they're relatively rare
1:18:30compared to other things, so that probably is not
1:18:33doing what you're doing now, but I can't tell you
1:18:34for sure it isn't.
1:18:35So other things that are at play here,
1:18:39if it tries to resume something like in a car
1:18:44setting like that, and the last used audio app
1:18:47does not respond in a certain amount of time,
1:18:50I think iOS defaults to music.
1:18:54There's also, this has been a problem for cars
1:18:58for a while that had iPod support.
1:19:01There are these iPod control protocols
1:19:03that work over with USB and Bluetooth, I think.
1:19:07And if a car has iPod support, what will sometimes happen
1:19:11is the car will basically invoke that
1:19:14instead of the generic Bluetooth play thing.
1:19:18And iOS devices, when prompted for music support,
1:19:21try to do the right thing.
1:19:22They try to show their music library to the car.
1:19:24And you said that the music's kind of random.
1:19:26So it used to be, whenever it would ask for the iPod library music stuff, it used to be
1:19:31that most of them would default to playing the first alphabetical song title.
1:19:36So whatever song you had that began with A in your library, it would just play that every
1:19:41time.
1:19:42My car does that with the USB connected iPod touch.
1:19:45It always goes with the A songs.
1:19:46Here's the thing.
1:19:47It still takes me two songs to figure out what it's doing.
1:19:50I don't know why I haven't identified the first song with the second song.
1:19:54Sometimes I'm up to the third song because I kind of like the first two songs.
1:19:56It's like, "Oh, this is good."
1:19:57Oh, and I do use random play.
1:19:59It's like, "Oh, conceivably, I could have picked the song 'Rainbow' by the third song."
1:20:02I'm like, "Wait a second.
1:20:03These all begin with A." And like, how many years am I going to do that?
1:20:06I'm dumb.
1:20:08And just as a note, okay, as this episode has been somewhat about, I'm not perfect.
1:20:13I make a lot of mistakes.
1:20:15But as a note to people who implement these kind of audio systems, nobody ever wants to
1:20:20play songs alphabetically by their titles.
1:20:22that is never a thing anybody ever wants,
1:20:24it is never the right idea,
1:20:26that just never ever ever do that.
1:20:28And there are so many like cars and things that do that,
1:20:31sometimes it's the only option in certain like views
1:20:33or certain parts of the UI,
1:20:35nobody wants alphabetical song playback, ever.
1:20:39Just don't do that.
1:20:40Anyway, it seems like in recent times,
1:20:42Apple has figured out, okay, nobody wants to hear
1:20:45All In by Stroke Nine every single morning
1:20:47when they get in their car,
1:20:48let's instead play something from Apple Music
1:20:51they might like.
1:20:52So if you subscribe to Apple Music, you often get that,
1:20:55where your car will suddenly start playing
1:20:56just some kind of radio station or some playlist
1:21:00off of your phone if you can't figure out what else to do
1:21:02and the car is requesting music.
1:21:04So that's a thing too, and that's been, I think,
1:21:06in the last two iOS versions, I think since iOS 10 at least.
1:21:10So there's lots of things that your car
1:21:14and your phone can negotiate and do.
1:21:17What you quickly realize as you dive into this stuff
1:21:19is that this is just an incredibly complex system.
1:21:21And most of it's complex for a reason.
1:21:23Like, you know, iOS's whole concept of the last used
1:21:27music playing or audio playing app,
1:21:29that is complex in itself because of all the things
1:21:30I mentioned like videos and Twitter and Facebook
1:21:33and stuff like that, you know, embedded stuff in Safari,
1:21:36YouTube videos, like it's so complex to even just try
1:21:39to keep track in a reasonable way of like,
1:21:41what was the last app that played media?
1:21:44And so if the user says play, what should I play?
1:21:48So I don't have a good answer for you,
1:21:50except it might be one of those things,
1:21:53or it might be something else.
1:21:55(laughing)
1:21:56- Nice. - I mean, like I said,
1:21:58almost, most of the time it works, 85% of the time,
1:22:0090% of the time, it does what I expect it to do,
1:22:02but it's the times that it doesn't,
1:22:04like, well, what was your problem this time?
1:22:06What you said about it trying to get it to play,
1:22:09but like it giving up after a short period of time
1:22:11and then going to music rings true for me,
1:22:13because it always seems to take longer.
1:22:15I can always tell when, uh-oh,
1:22:16I'm not gonna hear my podcast,
1:22:17I'm gonna hear music because everything on my car takes a long time in terms of Bluetooth and booting up and everything
1:22:22You know and so there this is are counted in seconds. I can say oh, I know it's gonna know what's gonna happen next
1:22:28It's gonna play music and it does but almost all the time at work. So
1:22:31Anyway, another thing. I mean, I guess that can be solved by
1:22:34Honda updating their in-car infotainment system which by the way, they did the new accords have an all-new android-based
1:22:42presumably
1:22:44non-disgusting
1:22:46You know like that. What do I have now is like pre Android iOS like the old world of
1:22:52car
1:22:54infotainment systems the bad old world and the new one is just you know
1:22:57The the modern era so I'm hoping it's better, and I'm hoping they put faster CPUs
1:23:02And I'm hoping it will take less time to connect to Bluetooth so the very least I can get the wrong thing playing faster
1:23:08In the meantime I will just you know I mean it's pretty pretty high success rate all things considered
1:23:14But yeah, it does sound complicated.
1:23:16It almost makes me wish that there was a way that I could say, "Look, all I ever wanted
1:23:19to happen, ever, ever, ever when I enter the car is for you to start playing Overcast."
1:23:23And that's it.
1:23:24But that doesn't seem like it's in the cards.
1:23:27So before you get a ton of email, hopefully, you were able to backchannel kind of directly
1:23:35to Apple and say, "Hey, what's going on here?"
1:23:38What do you think would have been your course of action if that wasn't available to you?
1:23:43Like aren't there--
1:23:44- DTS ticket would be the next thing.
1:23:46- That's exactly what I thought.
1:23:47So if you're not Marco Arment,
1:23:50and you know, yeah, that's fine for Marco,
1:23:51but you would have opened a DTS ticket,
1:23:53and hypothetically, that would have been escalated
1:23:56to an engineer who could have helped you, hopefully maybe.
1:23:59- Yeah, and the way these works,
1:24:00and forgive me for not having the details right,
1:24:03'cause I've actually never filed one,
1:24:04but basically every paid Apple developer membership
1:24:08includes, I believe, two developer technical support,
1:24:11with DTS, incidents per year.
1:24:14And you basically, you say you wanna use one,
1:24:18and you can actually get code level support.
1:24:21You can actually say, okay look, here's this code,
1:24:24it is not working here, I can't figure this out,
1:24:26can you help?
1:24:27And Apple engineers will actually help you
1:24:31with that problem.
1:24:31And so it's a pretty involved process,
1:24:33that's why they're limited.
1:24:35So it's two per year, and I think there's some provision
1:24:39where if what you found is actually an Apple bug,
1:24:41then I think they don't charge you your ticket for that year.
1:24:45They don't accumulate, so I would have a lot if they did,
1:24:49but they don't.
1:24:51But yeah, so there actually is this,
1:24:54there is a way to do this,
1:24:55and while I have no experience with it myself,
1:24:57I've heard from people who have used them
1:24:59that they're incredibly helpful,
1:25:01and so this is something
1:25:02that all developers have access to, so that's pretty cool.
1:25:05- That's awesome.
1:25:07- All right, we good?
1:25:09- I mean, I could tell some more long,
1:25:10boring stories if you want.
1:25:12- Well, we gotta figure out an after show
1:25:13'cause I have something brief,
1:25:14but I don't know if it's gonna be worth it.
1:25:16- Oh, I know what we should do.
1:25:17All right, thanks to our three sponsors this week,
1:25:19Betterment, Eero, and Fracture,
1:25:21and we will see you next week.
1:25:23♪ Now the show is over ♪
1:25:28♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪
1:25:30♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪
1:25:32♪ Accidental ♪
1:25:33♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪
1:25:35♪ Accidental ♪
1:25:36John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:25:41'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)
1:25:44It was accidental (accidental)
1:25:47And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:25:52And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
1:25:56@c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s
1:26:00So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:26:05♪ Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪
1:26:10♪ USA, Syracuse, it's accidental ♪
1:26:14♪ Accidental ♪
1:26:16♪ They didn't mean to ♪
1:26:18♪ Accidental ♪
1:26:19♪ Accidental ♪
1:26:21♪ Tech podcast ♪
1:26:23♪ So long ♪
1:26:25- So John, tell us about your Mongoose Californian.
1:26:29(John laughing)
1:26:31You're trying to really clear up the things in there.
1:26:33- Yeah, we have to set the stage.
1:26:34We have to set the stage.
1:26:35So forever and a day ago, at the very top of our show notes has some sections, including
1:26:44follow-up, and then the topics, right?
1:26:46So the very, very, very top, like the fifth line down, sitting in this document for maybe
1:26:54a year now, is my mongoose Californian, parenthesis, 1984, parenthesis, and two links.
1:27:01And this has been sitting there staring us in the face at the top of this document for
1:27:06probably a year, maybe two.
1:27:08Three years.
1:27:09Three years.
1:27:10It's been three years.
1:27:11And now is the time that we are going to finally clear this out.
1:27:15Good call, Marco.
1:27:16The thing that we really should be clearing out is like early on, someone, probably Casey,
1:27:20was trying to put sections in the notes.
1:27:22We didn't have names for things.
1:27:24It's, you know, the naming problem with programming again.
1:27:26Like it hadn't actually come up with, you know, precise names for things.
1:27:31So there's all sorts of like pre post show, public post show, after show, pre show.
1:27:36Like we didn't have the names for all the different times that we can talk to each other.
1:27:40The times when we're live, when we're not live, blah, blah, blah.
1:27:43So this section got anchored up here with public post show, which now we call the after
1:27:48show and it's lower in the document.
1:27:50And so that's how old this was.
1:27:53So I will be able to delete this entire section when we do this.
1:27:55The problem with this topic is it was a thing I was angry about.
1:27:59I was angry about it in 2014, unfortunately.
1:28:02It's hard for me to muster that anger again.
1:28:04Oh, oh, really?
1:28:07Is that so, Jon?
1:28:08Well, I demand that you do it, because you made me dig up my crash story.
1:28:12You weren't angry about it.
1:28:13That was a detective story.
1:28:16The anger should have subsided.
1:28:18You defeated the beast.
1:28:19Now you can look back on it, and it's more like a detective story.
1:28:23There was this mystery, and I solved it, and it was weird, and it's like a programming
1:28:27problem.
1:28:28had you do it in the middle of it like your app is currently out there and crashing and
1:28:32you still can't figure out what it is and then you talked about it, that would be a
1:28:34different story.
1:28:35But anyway, I'll see what I can do to bring myself back to 2014.
1:28:39This is precipitated by me being on a podcast that we'll link in the show notes, "Storming
1:28:44Mortal" where I talked about a whole bunch of things including, in the words of a show
1:28:50that God help me Casey must have seen and please Marco know that it at least exists,
1:28:56The best Christmas present I ever received and ever would receive.
1:29:00My 1984 Mongoose, California BMX bike.
1:29:03Casey, do you know what I was referencing?
1:29:06Nope.
1:29:07Not a bit.
1:29:08Come on, guys.
1:29:09Come on.
1:29:10What was it?
1:29:11Did I get it wrong?
1:29:12The best Christmas present I ever received and ever would receive?
1:29:17I'm close.
1:29:18I'm really close.
1:29:19You're not close enough for us.
1:29:22A Christmas story.
1:29:23They only play it 24 hours a day.
1:29:24I've only seen it like once or twice.
1:29:26Oh, what do you mean you've only seen it once or twice?
1:29:29I think I've seen it all the way through.
1:29:30They play it literally 24 hours.
1:29:32I know, I never pay attention.
1:29:34Yeah, exactly.
1:29:34It's one of those things that it's always on and so you never pay attention.
1:29:38If you had said you'll shoot your eye out with that thing, I would have known immediately.
1:29:41Well, at least there is that.
1:29:42Anyway, that movie, by the way, is a really, really, really good movie.
1:29:46Ignore the fact that it's played 24 hours.
1:29:48They used to not play it 24 hours.
1:29:49It is a really good movie.
1:29:51the kid in the movie gets uh... begun for christmas and he says that the
1:29:55narrator the older version of says the best christmas present he ever see you
1:29:58never received
1:29:59that's my that's my uh... bike for variety of reasons
1:30:02uh... and the reason the reference for a poster recognize there was not the bike
1:30:06itself just
1:30:07the best present that you know you know you're at the last half a very
1:30:10very near the end of the movies at the second or third to last line in the
1:30:14movies be sent chance
1:30:15no it's pretty significant line expressing the sentiment uh... anyway i
1:30:19I should get that quote exactly right so I can repeat it with more confidence in the
1:30:24future.
1:30:25Anyway, on this podcast we talked about a whole bunch of things I also talked about
1:30:27at BMX and around this time I was buying bicycles for my kids of various sizes, like non-training
1:30:35wheel bikes, like their first real bikes.
1:30:37And I found that experience incredibly frustrating.
1:30:40So I grew up in a bike culture, which is like 70s, 80s, suburban New York metro area.
1:30:49It was a bike culture.
1:30:51Kids were on bicycles.
1:30:52Can I tell people that you're a biker?
1:30:54Different, different thing, different context.
1:30:56Although we did put playing cards in our spokes with a clothespin so your bike sounded like
1:31:00motorcycles.
1:31:01Oh yeah, that really confused anybody ever.
1:31:04That's right, it was awesome.
1:31:06So kids were on bikes all the time.
1:31:07Like if you watch a Steven Spielberg movie
1:31:09showing kids in the 70s racing
1:31:10and riding around on bicycles,
1:31:11if you watch Stranger Things
1:31:12and kids are riding around on bicycles,
1:31:13that was a real thing.
1:31:14That's all we did.
1:31:15We'd come home from school, we'd get on a bike,
1:31:16so we'd go all over the place.
1:31:18Nobody had helmets.
1:31:19We would fashion jumps out of garbage.
1:31:21We found in other people's trash on trash day
1:31:23in the middle of the street.
1:31:25It's all very dangerous and scary,
1:31:27and we've never let our kids do it today,
1:31:29but that's what we did.
1:31:30And because we were in a bike culture
1:31:32and bikes were so important,
1:31:34there's a hierarchy of what kind of bike you had
1:31:36and all the fancy rich kids had Mongoose or Redline,
1:31:40which were expensive bikes, and I wanted a Mongoose.
1:31:43I think I thought Redlines were more expensive.
1:31:45I don't even think they were, but that's what I thought.
1:31:48And I wanted one for Christmas,
1:31:49and I thought there's no way I'm gonna get one
1:31:50'cause they're really expensive, and they were,
1:31:52and my parents totally surprised me with it.
1:31:54Like the present that you don't think
1:31:55you're ever gonna get.
1:31:56It's not even I was like hopeful for it, looking for it.
1:31:58It was just, it wasn't even, didn't even enter my mind.
1:32:00It's like being a kid and saying,
1:32:01"I want a Lamborghini Countach," and you're like,
1:32:03"Yeah, but like whatever, I'm not gonna get one."
1:32:04And then you wake up on Christmas morning,
1:32:05it's in your garage and it's yours, right?
1:32:07It was like that, basically.
1:32:09And I rode the hell out of that bicycle.
1:32:12I rode it everywhere, jumped it off jumps
1:32:14and dirt bikes and trails, rode up and down highways.
1:32:17This bike has no gears, by the way, it's a BMX bike.
1:32:19Like it's just straight up, took really good care of it,
1:32:23cleaned it and oiled it all the time.
1:32:25Like all the things you can imagine doing this bike,
1:32:27it's like my prized possession.
1:32:28I still have this bicycle, it's still in my house.
1:32:30- Oh my word, wow, in the attic?
1:32:33- In the basement.
1:32:34I tried to get my kids to ride the bike.
1:32:36It's like the reason I saved it for my kids.
1:32:38And they couldn't care less.
1:32:40A, they didn't care, and B, they didn't like it.
1:32:42(laughing)
1:32:44But I rode the bike.
1:32:46Here I am, 30-something years old on my BMX bike.
1:32:49You know what?
1:32:50It's still a really good bike.
1:32:51You get on it and you can tell.
1:32:53This is, it's not a complicated thing.
1:32:55It's got pedals and a gear,
1:32:57then a chain that connects to another gear,
1:32:58and some hand brakes and tires.
1:33:00And of course the tires have been replaced over the years,
1:33:02'cause I went through many tires
1:33:04many inner tubes over the time of owning this,
1:33:05but pretty much everything else on it, it's original.
1:33:08And to this day, like how old is this bike?
1:33:12It's a 1984 bike.
1:33:14It rides great.
1:33:15You pedal and it feels like, I don't know,
1:33:18like I can, for Casey, like a BMW manual transmission,
1:33:21or like a Swiss watch for Marco,
1:33:23Swiss watches are still hard,
1:33:24like precision piece of machinery.
1:33:26There is no slippage, there is no slop.
1:33:30All the bearings in it are smooth.
1:33:32There is very, very little friction.
1:33:34The brakes are a little crappy because the pads
1:33:37and the brakes have been replaced many times
1:33:38and they're kind of hard and crusty for me in the basement.
1:33:42But the pedaling experience in this bike,
1:33:43there are no squeaks and rattles, 100% solid.
1:33:47So when I'm looking for bikes for my kids,
1:33:48I'm like, well, they don't, whatever,
1:33:50I just need any old bike, right?
1:33:52But me being the obnoxious suburban rich dad
1:33:57trying to buy things that are too expensive for his kids,
1:34:02It's like, well, let me try to get, you know,
1:34:04I know it's just a kid's bike,
1:34:05but let me get a good quality one.
1:34:06'Cause I want my kids to have a good quality,
1:34:08but not just some cruddy like Toys R Us,
1:34:10made of like some weird, terrible, cheap aluminum alloy
1:34:14that you could bend with your fingers.
1:34:15It's just gonna fall apart or rust or just, you know,
1:34:18bend if it goes off in a little bump in the road.
1:34:20I wanna get a good bike, right?
1:34:21And maybe we'll have good resale value or whatever.
1:34:24And I'm looking to try to find one, a kid's size,
1:34:27you know, not an adult bike, but at a kid's size bike.
1:34:30I'm not gonna spend thousands of dollars,
1:34:32but I would spend a couple hundred bucks on it or whatever,
1:34:35that maybe it's not gonna be as good as my Mongoose,
1:34:38but just is competent.
1:34:40That you pedal and it feels like
1:34:43you are pushing yourself forward.
1:34:45You don't feel the gears in the chain
1:34:47or any other stuff like that.
1:34:48And we went through a couple of bikes
1:34:51and a couple of different ways to get them
1:34:53in a couple of different stores.
1:34:55And I felt like Marco buying something
1:34:57and then returning it and buying something
1:34:58and then returning it,
1:34:59'cause they were all just terrible.
1:35:01I hardly ever did that.
1:35:03Sometimes the problem was the shipment.
1:35:07The shipment would come and the box would be damaged.
1:35:09You could see that it was crushed
1:35:11and the gears would have been jammed against concrete
1:35:14or something because the little teeth on the gears were bent
1:35:16because you could tell that the paint was shaved off.
1:35:17Sometimes you'd get it and no matter how much
1:35:21you tried to lubricate things in it
1:35:23and get it up and running,
1:35:24always just the bike chain would bend and get a kink in it
1:35:28and never straighten out or the chain would jump off.
1:35:30I know how to, I have a lot of experience fixing
1:35:33and maintaining bikes over my life,
1:35:34all the way up to 10 speeds and everything when I was old.
1:35:35Like, I know what I'm doing.
1:35:38And these bikes were just crap.
1:35:39Every part of them was crap.
1:35:40Their bearings, if they had them at all, were crap.
1:35:42The parts were not precisely manufactured.
1:35:46They're made of crappy metal
1:35:47that I could bend with my fingernails.
1:35:49The paint jobs were terrible.
1:35:51They were heavy, they were ugly.
1:35:52They were slow, they felt terrible.
1:35:54Every one of them was like,
1:35:57I wouldn't have traded a thousand of them
1:35:58for my Mongoose, right?
1:36:00And I didn't understand why, you know,
1:36:03what the deal is with bikes.
1:36:04Like is it only like super adult multi-thousand dollar,
1:36:08even more obnoxious rich dude bikes that you have to get?
1:36:10Like is that the only place good quality components are?
1:36:14Even Mongoose, which is a brand that still exists.
1:36:16And I think Redline still exists too.
1:36:18Their bikes are these weird monstrosities
1:36:19that just don't seem to be the quality they used to.
1:36:22And it got me into the super duper old man,
1:36:25you know, second only to my literal telling children
1:36:27to get off my lawn.
1:36:29of like, they don't make things like they used to.
1:36:31- Wait, do you do that?
1:36:32- That was one of my, that's my favorite tweet
1:36:34I have ever made.
1:36:35(laughing)
1:36:36I gotta look it up for the show notes.
1:36:38So, this is the tweet,
1:36:40I'm gonna try to recite it from memory.
1:36:43The school bus stops in front of my house.
1:36:46This morning I found myself literally telling children
1:36:48to get off my lawn.
1:36:50This is a real thing that happened.
1:36:52Because the school bus stop is in front of my house,
1:36:54and when the school bus stop, the kids are like,
1:36:55oh, let's just go on this lawn here and like play ball
1:36:57and run around and stomp through the planting beds
1:37:01and throw balls so they end up hitting our house.
1:37:04I'm not there until the kids to get off my lawn.
1:37:06'Cause seriously, you think you wouldn't do this,
1:37:09but just think about it.
1:37:10If you had a bus stop in front of your house
1:37:12and every single morning a fleet of children are there
1:37:15just running around and stomping on your downspouts
1:37:17and bending them and crushing your bushes
1:37:19and throwing balls and bouncing off their house
1:37:21and the balls hitting your car in your driveway, Casey,
1:37:23you would go out there
1:37:24and you would tell the kids to get off your lawn.
1:37:26So I literally went out and told the kids to get off my lawn.
1:37:29The school bus stop is in front of my house, period.
1:37:32I am now literally telling children to get off my lawn, period.
1:37:368th of January, 2009.
1:37:38And you would too.
1:37:40You know, that's the oldest.
1:37:41The second oldest I ever felt is, and I heard my grandfather say this all the time, and
1:37:45I mostly just ignored him and rolled his eyes, but he would show me how they don't make them
1:37:48like they used to.
1:37:49Like, they don't make them with him, it was cars, right?
1:37:52And I contend they do not make bikes for kids like they used to.
1:37:57There is no bike at any price anywhere in the world that is of equal quality to my 1984
1:38:04Mongoose California in terms of the simple machine with bearings and pedals and wheels
1:38:10and chains that takes your leg energy and turns it into forward momentum.
1:38:17That stupid thing in my basement right now hanging from the ceiling is better than anything
1:38:21you can get at any price.
1:38:23And I find that depressing.
1:38:25And I'm assuming it's just because I
1:38:26don't know the secret place and the secret brands for today's
1:38:29good bikes.
1:38:29Or maybe kids don't like bikes at all until they're adults
1:38:33and ride grown-up bikes.
1:38:35But anyway, that was depressing.
1:38:37And I ended up getting my kids a series of terrible bikes
1:38:41from--
1:38:42I think they had a couple from bike stores and a couple
1:38:45from Target.
1:38:45And it's like, it doesn't matter.
1:38:46It doesn't matter how much you spend or where you get them.
1:38:48I just resigned to the fact that they're all crap.
1:38:50Just, you know, after any end times, instead of pushing a shopping cart through the ruins
1:38:55of civilization, I will be the 50-year-old man riding a way-too-small-for-him BMX bike
1:39:02that is awesome.
1:39:03Jon, I have good news, my friend.
1:39:06You have successfully mustered up the appropriate amount of anger.
1:39:08I was so much angrier then.
1:39:12Because like, you know, it's the Marco style anger, like, "Something that money can't
1:39:16fix?
1:39:17What is wrong with the world?
1:39:18I'm willing to spoil my children and buy them things that they shouldn't own, that they're
1:39:22not going to appreciate, and yet I can't?
1:39:24I'm not allowed to spoil my children?
1:39:28The thing I want is not available on Amazon?
1:39:30No, I was going to bike stores.
1:39:32I went to actual bike stores.
1:39:34We did actually buy a couple bikes at bike stores.
1:39:35At least we got some that were sturdy from bike stores.
1:39:38At tremendous expense, mind you, but I'm totally willing to support a bike store if it's going
1:39:41to keep a bike store in business.
1:39:42Because if you don't go to a bike store, it's Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, and like sporting
1:39:47good stores. None of which know anything about bicycles. So if you have a local bike store,
1:39:51go there and give them whatever they want because it is better than shopping elsewhere.
1:39:56I think you guys have, does Adam have a scoot bike?
1:40:00He has a balance bike. I don't know if that's the same thing. It's basically a bike with
1:40:04no pedals.
1:40:05Yeah, those are awesome.
1:40:06Yeah, and he has taken, like he's had it now for over a year, I think. Maybe even two years.
1:40:14He took to it immediately and is really into it.
1:40:17It's almost to the point now where I was thinking about,
1:40:20in a few weeks, I was thinking about trying him
1:40:22on a real bike to see if he can do it yet.
1:40:26I think he might be able to.
1:40:27- He's 100% ready.
1:40:28I've seen video of him doing it.
1:40:29He is ready for a bike.
1:40:31He is, you know, that scoot bike, he has totally mastered it.
1:40:34He's, yeah, my kids never wanted to use a scoot bike.
1:40:37Of course they want the scoot bikes.
1:40:38Oh, I understand the theory behind a scoot bike.
1:40:40It'll be awesome.
1:40:41My kids were like, nope, no way in hell I'm getting on that.
1:40:42So they took a long time to learn how to ride bikes.
1:40:45But Adam's gonna be riding a bike tomorrow
1:40:47if you give him a bike with pedals.
1:40:48Don't even bother with the training wheels, he's ready.
1:40:50- I didn't ride a bike until like middle school.
1:40:52Took me a long time.
1:40:53Same, 'cause I was like-- - This doesn't surprise you.
1:40:54- Yeah, I was going into scooters
1:40:56and just didn't really, I thought I didn't need the bike.
1:41:00- You didn't understand mechanical advantage.
1:41:02- Not at all, no.
1:41:04Yeah, so it took me a while.
1:41:05- Then you entered middle school
1:41:06and you learned about levers and other simple machines.
1:41:10- Well, and actually, at the beach,
1:41:12it's like a no cars community.
1:41:15Like there's no cars anywhere, so everyone bikes.
1:41:18Yeah, everyone bikes everywhere.
1:41:19And there were some bikes in the basement of this place,
1:41:23and so I took one out in the last couple times
1:41:25we'd been there and started riding it around.
1:41:27And I haven't ridden a bike since my high school bike,
1:41:30which was never quite adult size.
1:41:33It was like a couple inches smaller than like a regular.
1:41:35- Well, to be fair, you really hate adult size.
1:41:40So, I didn't even see where that was going.
1:41:42- I was just gonna say, to be fair,
1:41:43hoping you would auto-complete the joke,
1:41:45but I had to go a little farther.
1:41:48- Yeah, so, I started riding it,
1:41:50and first of all, riding a bike
1:41:52when you haven't ridden one in probably 20 years--
1:41:57- It's just like riding a bike.
1:41:58- Yeah, the old saying, "Oh, it comes right back to you?"
1:42:00I mean, yes, but not well, and it's terrifying.
1:42:04And also, the bike--
1:42:06- Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second.
1:42:08I took a long break riding bikes too, like most people.
1:42:10You ride a bike when you're a kid and then you become an adult and you get a license,
1:42:13you get a car.
1:42:14So I think there was a pretty big gap between riding my bikes.
1:42:16In my experience, it was like riding a bike.
1:42:20No problem.
1:42:21I'm like, "Of course I know how to do this."
1:42:23Maybe your gap was longer than mine or maybe you didn't have the hours, the flight hours
1:42:29in the seat of a bike.
1:42:30But I just rode my bike.
1:42:32I really like to pick up my car from the body shop where I got scratches fixed in my paint
1:42:37and I had to go pick up the car,
1:42:38but of course you can't drive a car to pick up the car,
1:42:40so I had to ride my bike to pick up the car.
1:42:42And you know, it was,
1:42:45that's not the first time I've ridden a bike in a long time,
1:42:46but anyway, in my experience it was just like
1:42:47riding a bike and it wasn't terrifying,
1:42:49but maybe your gap was longer.
1:42:51- Well, kind of an exacerbating factor is that
1:42:54the bike that was in the basement of this house
1:42:57is not only very, very old
1:42:59and has a lot of rust and failing parts.
1:43:01Like, it is an 18-speed mountain bike.
1:43:04I don't know what brand,
1:43:07I don't think it would be a brand anybody would recognize it.
1:43:08Like it isn't, it's a cheap bike,
1:43:10but it's also a cheap old bike
1:43:11that has been around sea air for a long time,
1:43:13so there's lots of rust.
1:43:15And it's to the point where like the gears,
1:43:18like if you shift the big gear, like by the pedals,
1:43:21if you shift that, the thing falls off.
1:43:25Like the thing that moves the gears back and forth,
1:43:27like it just falls off.
1:43:28And you have to like, it jams up in weird ways
1:43:30and you have to like unjam it in weird ways.
1:43:32- It kinks in your chain too.
1:43:33- Something like that,
1:43:34but only if you shift the middle gear.
1:43:35And then the back gears, like the smaller ones
1:43:38that are supposed to be more fine grained,
1:43:41the gear shifting thing seems to just skip
1:43:44every two or three at a time.
1:43:46So it is technically an 18 speed,
1:43:49but I can only actually get it to engage
1:43:51maybe three distinct speeds.
1:43:53And they're very far apart from each other.
1:43:55So I basically keep it in one gear.
1:43:58- When I rode to get my car, I was using some ancient,
1:44:01like it was given to us by a friend
1:44:03who was gonna throw it in the garbage.
1:44:04Same problem, it's like a mountain bike
1:44:06with a whole bunch of gears, and in theory,
1:44:08you have a whole bunch of them, but in practice,
1:44:09it jumps over all the gears, and the worst part for me is,
1:44:12because I have kinks in the chain,
1:44:14if you try to pedal hard, the chain pops off the teeth.
1:44:17- Oh, geez.
1:44:18- And then catches again, like seven notches later,
1:44:21and that is the worst thing when you're trying to pedal.
1:44:23It's like, I just, I mean, I don't blame that bike.
1:44:25I know there are available good mountain bikes
1:44:27if I was willing to buy them,
1:44:28just any hand-me-down bike, but yeah,
1:44:30riding a bad bike feels gross.
1:44:32The other problem is this bike is way too tall for me.
1:44:36Like it's, first of all, not comfortable.
1:44:40- You have your tippy toes to reach the pedal.
1:44:41- I have to almost jump onto it.
1:44:43Like that's how tall, it's way too tall.
1:44:47- We need some video of this.
1:44:48What is Tiff periscoping if not this?
1:44:50- Right, you took the words right out of my mouth.
1:44:52Like of all the stuff that you've periscoped.
1:44:54- And the seat is at the bottom.
1:44:56Like it can't be adjusted any further down
1:44:58than where it is now.
1:44:59And it's just too big for me.
1:45:01- We get you to do a running start
1:45:02and get that on Periscope.
1:45:03You gotta do the running start and jump on.
1:45:06- Yeah, so it's quite terrifying.
1:45:08If I have to slow down,
1:45:10to go around some people on the sidewalk,
1:45:12I just have to just stop and just put my feet down.
1:45:15I'll just wait for them to pass.
1:45:16- Well, at least you can put your feet down.
1:45:18When the seats are really high,
1:45:19when I first got a couple of my 10 speeds
1:45:20or when I'd ride my dad's 10 speeds,
1:45:22my feet couldn't reach the ground.
1:45:23I would have to jump off of the seat
1:45:25and even when it was on the bar,
1:45:26I'd be resting on my balls tilted over
1:45:29so one foot could be on the ground.
1:45:30- Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm only putting one foot down.
1:45:32I don't quite have your bar issue,
1:45:34but it's not that far off.
1:45:35Like, it's really, so yeah.
1:45:37I, and so actually, this was interesting.
1:45:40This was the second time I'm looking at bikes online today.
1:45:43Earlier today, I thought, you know,
1:45:45I would like to get, you know, obviously,
1:45:47a bike that fits me for this place,
1:45:49'cause I'm about to go be there for a long time
1:45:52for my big summer vacation, so I would like to
1:45:55maybe get my own bike that actually fits me,
1:45:58that would be less terrifying to ride,
1:45:59and maybe has years that work.
1:46:02So I thought maybe I should look at bikes.
1:46:04And I thought, you know, if there's one bike
1:46:05that I would really want to have.
1:46:07Okay, Jon, you know the decade that we grew up in.
1:46:10Can you guess what bike I want?
1:46:13- I do know the decade you grew up in,
1:46:16but I didn't grow up in that decade.
1:46:18I know what the answer would be if you were my age,
1:46:22but I'm assuming because you're 90s children
1:46:24that you want some kind of gross mountain biking thing
1:46:27with suspension.
1:46:28Casey, can you guess the one bike I might want
1:46:31from our childhood?
1:46:32- Oh, the Pee Wee Herman bike?
1:46:33- Yep, there you go.
1:46:34- That's closer to my generation.
1:46:36- Oh my word, I should've known.
1:46:38I should've known.
1:46:39- Well, that's better than a gross mountain bike getting.
1:46:41- I want the bike from Pee Wee's Big Adventure, right?
1:46:43And it turns out that there is a community of people
1:46:47who make replicas of these bikes,
1:46:49but they only make them for themselves as projects.
1:46:52They basically never go for sale anywhere.
1:46:54- There's no gears on the Pee Wee bike.
1:46:55You don't want that.
1:46:56- Well, but actually, for the place that I'm staying at,
1:47:00there's no hills, and you can't go that fast
1:47:02because you're on sidewalks with people on them.
1:47:04- But it could be too tall geared,
1:47:06and then it's hard to go slow.
1:47:08- I guess it's true.
1:47:09I imagine there would be some way to maybe swap out
1:47:11one, like the front gear or something,
1:47:12to fix that in some way, right?
1:47:14- I don't know.
1:47:16- I don't know. - I mean, of course you can,
1:47:17but I would think you could get,
1:47:18get me a Pee Wee Herman replica bike, because I'm Marco,
1:47:20but also give it to me with like five speeds or something.
1:47:23- I mean, it's a whole custom build anyway,
1:47:25so I'm sure I can get them to make one
1:47:27that's actually my size and maybe give me three speeds.
1:47:30I don't need a lot of speed.
1:47:31- It would not have occurred to me.
1:47:34I'm thinking, well, he's gonna get one of those expensive
1:47:36carbon fiber racing bike, that type of thing.
1:47:39Those are gonna cost a lot of money.
1:47:40No, Marco wants someone to build him a bike,
1:47:42some ridiculous bike from a movie.
1:47:45- Yeah, and one of them that was actually in the movie,
1:47:48one of the actual prop bikes,
1:47:50sold on eBay in 2014 for $36,000.
1:47:53- Yeah, don't get that one, please.
1:47:55So yeah, well I'm not gonna get that.
1:47:57Also, I wouldn't want to ride that one.
1:47:58- That was not gonna ride good.
1:48:00- Yeah, but apparently in order to build this bike,
1:48:02you have to get a frame from, I think it's a Schwinn,
1:48:07it's some kind of good bike frame from the 40s,
1:48:10like the 1940s.
1:48:12Like, find one of these frames
1:48:15and then get all this custom stuff to go around it.
1:48:18It's totally crazy.
1:48:20- I'm all for these bikes as long as if I get on them
1:48:23I pedal the pedals, I feel an efficient transfer of my leg force to forward momentum.
1:48:31I don't want to feel the gears or the chains or friction of the parts moving.
1:48:35I want to feel like my legs are magically attached to forward momentum.
1:48:41I swear to you, no children's bike that I've sat on is like one-eighth as efficient as
1:48:48a Mongo.
1:48:49So if you're going to spend all this money on the fancy bike that looks like the Pee-Pee
1:48:50your Hermann bike, also make sure that when you pedal it,
1:48:53it feels like 100 times better than those crap bicycles
1:48:55you're trying to ride now.
1:48:56You're like, wow, suddenly biking is easier
1:48:58because all the friction has been taken out
1:49:00of this mechanical system.
1:49:02- And the other thing is, if I actually want to bike a lot
1:49:06in this beach place, there are parts of it,
1:49:09I can only go so far unless I'm willing to go on sand
1:49:12for some portion.
1:49:13- Then you end up in the ocean of the bay, I know.
1:49:15- No, no, I mean, it's a long space island,
1:49:18But there's at some point, there are certain parts
1:49:21where there's just private property
1:49:23for the whole width of the island,
1:49:24so you actually can't progress.
1:49:25- Or then the ticks get you, you can't go any farther.
1:49:28Oh, the ticks.
1:49:29- Well you can if you're willing to drive
1:49:30in the sand for a little bit.
1:49:32So I actually, so they have, there are people around there
1:49:34who have those giant Sand Cruiser tire bikes,
1:49:37like the ones that have the five inch tires.
1:49:39So I actually, and there's a rental place there,
1:49:41so I think about renting one while I'm there
1:49:44just for a day and just try it and see if,
1:49:46I imagine I'm going to hate trying to bike on sand.
1:49:49It's probably ridiculously hard.
1:49:50- Yeah, those tires don't make it that much easier.
1:49:53- Yeah, right, exactly. - Still biking on sand.
1:49:55- The other, so basically I'm looking,
1:49:57considering two options.
1:49:58The other option is an e-bike, which is the very,
1:50:01this is like, this would be the high-end option.
1:50:03- Oh, god. - Of course.
1:50:04- If you're willing to spend like two grand, at least,
1:50:06on a bike, you can get one that has an electric motor assist.
1:50:10- Why do you even say if?
1:50:12- And so, well, but listen, I'll address that in a second.
1:50:15(laughs)
1:50:16You can get one that has an electric motor assist
1:50:18and a small lithium battery in it,
1:50:20and those would be nice when going on the sand
1:50:23to just assist you through the sand
1:50:24and you can get back on the pavement
1:50:25and turn the assist off.
1:50:26(laughs)
1:50:27So that's one thing.
1:50:29However, one thing I really hate about the practicality
1:50:34of using a bike in a place like this
1:50:35is that you have to lock it.
1:50:37Locking a bike sucks,
1:50:38and bikes, you always have to worry so much about theft
1:50:41because they're stolen so often,
1:50:43and even if you get the most ridiculous locks,
1:50:45they'll just like steal all the parts or whatever.
1:50:47- Are they gonna be stolen where you are?
1:50:49Because there is a physical reason why bike thieves
1:50:54would have more difficulty.
1:50:55Like unless it's gonna be stolen by your neighbor.
1:50:57- Right, yeah, it's like,
1:50:59'cause like where are you gonna take the bike?
1:51:00Are you gonna get on the ferry?
1:51:01- Where are you gonna go?
1:51:02- Yeah, exactly.
1:51:03- But--
1:51:03- You have time to catch them, there's a bottleneck.
1:51:05You can just show up at the ferry with some goons
1:51:07and be like, "Where are you gonna go?
1:51:09"Drive it off into the ocean?
1:51:10"No, I know where you're going."
1:51:12But I feel like there are two approaches here
1:51:16that would make sense.
1:51:17Number one, get a nice bike.
1:51:20Get a Pee Wee Herman bike or something that is of that style
1:51:23that I can really be proud of.
1:51:24Get a nice Schwinn, a nice brand, and give it some gears.
1:51:28Make it a really nice bike.
1:51:29That's probably gonna be about 1,000 bucks.
1:51:32Or you go the crazy e-bike route,
1:51:33but I don't think that's really necessary or practical
1:51:36or worth the cost, necessarily.
1:51:38- None of those things have ever bothered you before, ever.
1:51:41- True, or just get the cheapest bike you can possibly find
1:51:45and just don't lock it.
1:51:47Like, who cares?
1:51:48Like, if you steal it--
1:51:49- They'll still steal it.
1:51:50- They will still steal, but if it's like a $60 Walmart bike,
1:51:54then it's like, it's a lot less of a loss, you know?
1:51:56- You don't wanna ride that.
1:51:57You're gonna be spending all your muscle strength
1:51:59will be going to friction.
1:52:00Those things, it's just not an enjoyable experience.
1:52:03It's terrible.
1:52:04Don't do it.
1:52:05I mean, you don't have to spend,
1:52:06there's something in between $2,000 and $60.
1:52:08You can buy a $200 bike, don't lock it,
1:52:10resign yourself that it's going to get stolen every 1.5 years
1:52:13and just go.
1:52:14Right.
1:52:14Honestly, I think I would rather have
1:52:16that than a fancy expensive bike that I would worry
1:52:19about getting stolen all the time.
1:52:21And $2,000, by the way, is low.
1:52:23If you were to buy a racing bike, a road bike,
1:52:2610 speed is dated lingo or whatever,
1:52:29you can go up 10 grand easy on those.
1:52:31It's not like watches, but it is like Macs.
1:52:33You can keep going well into the five digits
1:52:36and just keep going and keep going, and it's insane.
1:52:38And also those, like that's the type of bike--
1:52:40- Five digits?
1:52:41- Yeah, yeah.
1:52:42- Holy, wow.
1:52:44I mean, I guess once you can start getting
1:52:46to like carbon fiber and stuff,
1:52:47I guess the sky's the limit, right?
1:52:48- And there's the, and like Max,
1:52:51there's the premium above and beyond.
1:52:52Yes, this is made of fancy materials and engineering,
1:52:54but also we know that, you know,
1:52:57you're the pro users and you're actual racers,
1:53:00and yeah, it can get very expensive very fast.
1:53:03- Man, who knew?
1:53:05- It's better than a watch.
1:53:06- Actually, people in the chat suggested
1:53:09the Schwinn Cruisers line.
1:53:11This actually looks pretty nice.
1:53:13- Yeah, they're like the same between the thing.
1:53:14They look like Pete with Hermann's style,
1:53:15but they're just playing up the middle bikes,
1:53:17couple hundred bucks.
1:53:19I've never been on one, but I assume they pedal okay.
1:53:22- Available exclusively at Schwinn's
1:53:24signature independent bike shops.
1:53:26- Yeah.
1:53:27Oh wow, 800 bucks?
1:53:28I guessed too low.
1:53:30- Yeah, the high end ones are 800 bucks.
1:53:31The lower ones are more like in the four to five range.
1:53:34- Yeah, well that's the thing.
1:53:35I don't know at what point in this price range,
1:53:38pedaling becomes just like grinding a bunch of metal gears
1:53:41through sand.
1:53:42At what point does it become like, you know,
1:53:44sliding the bolt on a well oiled rifle?
1:53:45That's the bike you want.
1:53:47If you can borrow my Mongoose,
1:53:49it might be the right size.
1:53:50(laughing)
1:53:52Actually, no, I would not let you borrow my Mongoose.
1:53:53- No, you wouldn't.
1:53:54- Even though it was the best Christmas present
1:53:55I ever received, never would have received,
1:53:57it is still one of my prized possessions.
1:54:00So that's why I still have it.
1:54:01- I would not want to borrow your Mongoose,
1:54:03because I'd be too afraid of damaging it.
1:54:05Oh, yeah, I did a pretty good job on it.
1:54:08This tells you how different I was as a child
1:54:11and how it took me a long time to become
1:54:13the thing that you see before you today.
1:54:16At one point, I wanted to make sure
1:54:19that I had fear of my bike being stolen
1:54:21because the mongoose and red lines were highly coveted
1:54:25in the neighborhood.
1:54:26And I wanted to make sure that I could identify my mongoose.
1:54:29And the way my nine-year-old brain decided to do this was
1:54:34was there was like a sticker on the front,
1:54:36like a little tube that connects the handlebars
1:54:38down to the front fork, right?
1:54:39And there's a sticker on the front.
1:54:41I decided to take one of my dad's razor blades
1:54:44from like his little tool area
1:54:46and cut a big line down the middle of the sticker,
1:54:48like cut like a valley and not even like a straight one,
1:54:50but it's like this big jagged, you know,
1:54:53as if you had taken something
1:54:54and just scraped the front of the thing.
1:54:56So like now I can always identify my bike
1:54:58and that's what I did.
1:54:59Does that sound the same to you?
1:55:00Like what?
1:55:01No version of my brain as exists today
1:55:03would consider like I literally damaged my own bike to identify it and so down there
1:55:07is down in the basement with a big giant gash there and me looking at it and saying what
1:55:11what were you thinking nine-year-old me wow oh my word now we just need to get Casey a
1:55:20bike and we'll be ready to go I I wanted not the mongoose Californian I want to say it
1:55:28the Huffy White Heat which was like... Huffy's crap. I'm not saying it was good. I'm not saying it was good, Sean.
1:55:36Huffy is like the bottom of the neighborhood ladder.
1:55:42There was nothing below that. There was no like Walmart brand by Huffy. That was
1:55:45the bottom. Oh my god. Are you done? Mm-hmm. Just saying. I don't even want to tell
1:55:51the story. I'm done. Go ahead. I gotta go get this bike now. It's the Huffy what? White Heat. I was looking for a
1:55:57a picture earlier. I never found a terribly great one.
1:55:59- Oh, it auto completed. It must be a popular bike.
1:56:02- I don't know.
1:56:03I think I wanted it because if memory serves,
1:56:07it had a pretty serious like marketing push.
1:56:11And I think it had like the little,
1:56:12like guards in front of the handlebars,
1:56:16which I thought was super cool.
1:56:17- It totally did.
1:56:18It's a mountain bike, not a BMX bike.
1:56:20- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:56:21And it was like neon green as you do
1:56:23in the late eighties, early nineties.
1:56:26And I just wanted it so hard and I eventually,
1:56:30did I get it?
1:56:31I don't remember now.
1:56:31You can tell how much it really--
1:56:33- I'm assuming it was still a crap bike
1:56:34because, you know, Huffy.
1:56:35- I'm sure it was.
1:56:36(laughing)
1:56:37- Wow.
1:56:39I mean, these days, Huffy is probably like, you know,
1:56:42it's a name brand.
1:56:42It's above like the whatever the random Walmart brands are.
1:56:46So it actually probably is probably the same,
1:56:48probably the same quality as Mongoose and Redline these days.
1:56:50But when I was a kid, Huffy was, you just, you know,
1:56:53oh, you just go to Huffy.
1:56:55It was a very materialistic, go-go '80s,
1:56:58money equals status environment
1:57:03for the single digit year old boys
1:57:07in suburban New York neighborhoods, 100%.
1:57:10(laughing)
1:57:12Huffy's a funny name.
1:57:13- I'm looking at this cool Schwinn bike.
1:57:15The only thing is it's like,
1:57:18I doubt I'm a 26 inch, I'm pretty sure that's like--
1:57:22- Do they have a bike store there near you?
1:57:24- There is a bike store in my town.
1:57:26It is not, whatever kind of dealer Schwinn says
1:57:28these are exclusively sold within,
1:57:29it is not showing up on their map.
1:57:31- 'Cause you do want to,
1:57:33well you can probably fit a bike in your Tesla, easy.
1:57:35What you wanna do is ride it.
1:57:36Go to a bike store to buy it, first of all,
1:57:38even though you're gonna pay way more,
1:57:39and then they'll let you ride it.
1:57:40Try it out, see how it feels,
1:57:42then you'll know what size,
1:57:43and you'll be able to distinguish the crap bikes
1:57:44from the good ones, you ride them back to back.
1:57:47It's well worth it.
1:57:48- Yeah, that is how I would do it,
1:57:50especially because I don't know what I'm doing.
1:57:52So I would want the expertise of a local shop.
1:57:55This is exactly what local shops are good at.
1:57:57- Yep.
1:57:58- Should I get a Mongoose Californian from 1984
1:58:01for Adam's first bike?
1:58:02- That would be amazing.
1:58:03- If you could find one in a new condition,
1:58:06and if he fits on the bike, yes, absolutely.
1:58:09- How old of a kid do you have to be to fit on it?
1:58:11- I think he's too small.
1:58:12He would have to be much bigger than he is.
1:58:14But if your kid was tall enough for it
1:58:16at the time that he wanted his first bike,
1:58:18yes, if you could find one.
1:58:19'Cause judging by the condition mine is in,
1:58:22I don't know if they're expensive to get in good condition, but yeah.
1:58:25Let's see.
1:58:26Have you actually looked?
1:58:28I have looked.
1:58:29I was looking for pictures of other people.
1:58:30The problem is a lot of them, they seem to be modified a lot.
1:58:33It's like trying to find a 1990s Honda Civic with no modifications in good condition.
1:58:37It's basically impossible.
1:58:39I can get just the fork for $400.
1:58:43Yikes.
1:58:46There's one on eBay for $600.
1:58:48Oh my God.
1:58:49These are much more than I expected.
1:58:52the popular bike. The ones that have the plastic wheels? No. You want the ones with the wire
1:58:56spoke wheels. Those plastic wheels are either an option or aftermarket. And just so you
1:59:01know that, let me find you a picture of my actual bike as close as I can find.
1:59:04Yeah, it looks like the going rate for these is generally, looks like it's around 500 bucks.
1:59:11If you look at eBay, sold items. That's probably close to what they are. Oh,
1:59:16look at this. Every single one I find is modified. So in this picture I'm going to put in the
1:59:20chat room now, it's close to mine. It has the... mine does not have the bent back seat.
1:59:24My seat pole is straight. The stock seat poles were straight. And also those pedals are weird.
1:59:30But that is very, very close. And you can see the sticker I put the scratch in, right
1:59:33in the little tube there. This is very close to... it's also probably in better condition
1:59:37than mine. But it's very close to mine.
1:59:38You should do the scratch technique with your jet black iPhone.
1:59:41Yeah, I always wonder what it looks like. Sometimes I forget I have a jet black phone
1:59:44because it's in the case and I think about what it might look like under there. The best
1:59:47thing about the '84 Californian is like Power Rangers, it came in colors. Black, red, blue,
1:59:54what was the other color? But anyway, you can see if you do a Google search for 1984
1:59:58Mongoose, California, you can see the red and the blue ones and the black ones. I got
2:00:01the black one obviously because it's the coolest. But the wheels on the red one were red, which
2:00:07was pretty cool. The wheels on the blue one were blue. Total Power Rangers vibe and the
2:00:12the colors looked awesome. They were like the candy colored IMAX before they were a
2:00:16thing. The point I would like to have, if I could get mint condition, I'm trying to
2:00:22think if there was a color other than red, blue, and black, but if I could get mint condition
2:00:25versions of all those with all the original stuff, like that would be right next to my
2:00:29LaFerrari and my fantasy unlimited money mansion.
2:00:34Wait, if you could get a mint condition what now?
2:00:37All three of these colors.
2:00:38Oh!
2:00:39Of these bikes.
2:00:41What is a two-speed kickback drivetrain?
2:00:44What is that?
2:00:45Is that the one when you pedal backwards to brake?
2:00:47I don't know.
2:00:49Never heard that term.
2:00:50It's the newfangled technologies.
2:00:52I was a kid, bikes were simpler.
2:00:55They didn't have these weird, they had these things to make changing your simp, you know,
2:00:58easier.
2:00:59Like you just like making a binary, like click this little wheel and it clicks the next number,
2:01:02you've changed gears.
2:01:03Whereas I come from the generation where you pull lever that pulls a cord and you have
2:01:08to pull it the right amount to get the thing onto the gear, right?
2:01:11So it was all, you know, completely analog adjustment
2:01:13of knowing just where to put it.
2:01:15Now they try to make it mechanical.
2:01:16All these things have some sort of ratcheting mechanism
2:01:18where it's like click, click,
2:01:19and it's exactly on the gear, or it's not.
2:01:22And there's nothing you can do about it.
2:01:23- So the people in the chat are saying
2:01:26what this means is that you pedal backwards
2:01:28really hard to shift gears.
2:01:30- That's terrible. - So it's a what?
2:01:31- It's a two-speed that you just like pedal backwards
2:01:33to shift between, so I guess it probably still has
2:01:34some kind of like, you know, handle, brake.
2:01:36Here, I'll place this thing in the chat room.
2:01:37This bike for some reason has a built-in cup holder
2:01:39and bottle opener.
2:01:41- Seems like a bad idea.
2:01:42- That's a high performance machine right there.
2:01:44(laughing)
2:01:45You know it's got a high cup holder and bottle opener.
2:01:48Yeah, I guess maybe it's a way to have gears on a bike
2:01:52that doesn't have a derailleur.
2:01:53It's, I've never heard of that.
2:01:55- Yeah, it probably just keeps the handlebar area simpler.
2:01:58Like you don't have the big cables running up
2:02:00to do the gear shifting.
2:02:01- And it also has some kind of suspension.
2:02:04That's a popular thing now for old people's delicate butts,
2:02:06like lots of bikes have suspension.
2:02:08- Yeah, yeah, yeah, you would expect that.
2:02:10I wouldn't expect that.
2:02:12- Well, I expect that, excuse me.
2:02:14- Expect a cushion for your bum.
2:02:16- You say bum?
2:02:18You're one of those people?
2:02:19- No. - You're a bum person?
2:02:20- No, it's like you're a posh-ish cushion,
2:02:22so you gotta say bum.
2:02:23- Yeah, see, the cool one I'm looking at here,
2:02:25this big classic one, this one has a cruiser springer fork.
2:02:30Does that mean it's like a little spring suspension in there?
2:02:32What does that mean?
2:02:33- Maybe.
2:02:34I mean, like I said, almost every bike for grownups
2:02:36has some form of suspension because grownups don't like
2:02:38going over the pothole ridden infrastructure
2:02:41on our crumbling nation.
2:02:43And realizing that those shocks
2:02:45transfer directly through to you, it's unpleasant.
2:02:48As a kid, I don't remember being bothered by this at all,
2:02:50but as an adult, as a much heavier, larger adult,
2:02:52I can tell you it is jarring
2:02:53to have those jolts come through.
2:02:56- This one is totally awesome.
2:02:57If I can somehow try this in person somewhere
2:02:59and if it actually fits me, I would seriously consider this.
2:03:02- Yeah, that's pretty stylin'.
2:03:04The other one was much more kind of like black and ugly.
2:03:07This looks like it.
2:03:08- Yeah, this one looks awesome.
2:03:09And it has, this is like total 50s throwback.
2:03:12It has a built-in headlight and a horn.
2:03:15- You gotta get a place to put a basket
2:03:16so you can put groceries and stuff in it.
2:03:18- It has the big back rack thing.
2:03:20Can you just hang stuff off of that, right?
2:03:22- Yeah, well you have like a,
2:03:23you can get panniers or something
2:03:24for the back on the sides of the wheels.
2:03:26- Is that what you call the little side things?
2:03:28- Yeah, or you can just get a big crate.
2:03:30You should ask the Portland people.
2:03:31They're all riding their bikes.
2:03:33They have these giant wheelbarrows
2:03:35that you put your kids in that you push
2:03:36in front of your bike.
2:03:38- We did everything on bikes over there,
2:03:39which I don't understand,
2:03:40'cause it isn't always raining there, but.
2:03:41- It is always raining here.
2:03:42Or there.
2:03:43And also, so, one of the reasons I don't have a bike
2:03:45here at home is because I live in a very hilly town.
2:03:48And biking on hills sucks.
2:03:50But, at the beach, it's totally flat.
2:03:53Like, there's no hills.
2:03:55And because you're riding on sidewalks
2:03:57that are shared with people,
2:03:58you can't go that fast anyway.
2:04:00- You're riding the bike on the side of,
2:04:02I guess there is no streets, right?
2:04:03- Yeah, they're like broad walks.
2:04:05Like, they're big.
2:04:06- Telling alleys.
2:04:07- Yeah, well they're basically like double wide sidewalks.
2:04:10Those are the streets.
2:04:12But there's a lot of people around
2:04:13like during peak weekends and stuff.
2:04:15So you do have to be cautious of people.
2:04:17And as you're walking you hear like the bike bells
2:04:19behind you, ding ding, and you gotta move over.
2:04:22Yeah, so I'm never going that fast.
2:04:25And I'm never going uphill.
2:04:27That's where I can get a ridiculous bike
2:04:28like a big cruiser like this.
2:04:29And it's not really impractical at all
2:04:31with the exception of having to lock it up
2:04:33and not worry about getting stolen.
2:04:35- The only thing I worry about with these bikes
2:04:37is because there are like 50 style bikes,
2:04:39the reason they don't make bikes like this anymore
2:04:40is they're heavy.
2:04:41Like all that metal stuff for the guards to like,
2:04:43oh, so the rain doesn't splash back up on you,
2:04:45you're not gonna be riding in the rain.
2:04:46Like everything about it, the metal cover for the chain
2:04:49and the big tube thing, like this is a heavy bike
2:04:52and heavy bike equals harder to pedal and you know,
2:04:55like not good.
2:04:56So all the bikes, you want the bike to be light.
2:04:58- Actually, so actually for my purposes here,
2:05:01I actually want, basically I've been enjoying biking there
2:05:06for exercise and kind of sightseeing,
2:05:09but exercise is one of the primary goals.
2:05:11Because I do a lot of dog walks,
2:05:13but my dog is fairly small, and he can only take so much.
2:05:16So if I wanna keep going with the exercise for the day,
2:05:19I gotta go out on a bike
2:05:20and get some more distance that way.
2:05:22But for my purposes, it's actually better
2:05:24if the bike is less efficient.
2:05:25- You're just saying that you didn't wanna ride bikes
2:05:28where there were hills, you gotta make up your mind.
2:05:29You wanna exercise or you do not wanna exercise?
2:05:31- I want some exercise.
2:05:33- But not that much.
2:05:34- Yeah, exactly.
2:05:35Anyway, I think in the grand scheme of things, you want a bike that is efficient, that doesn't
2:05:40have a lot of friction losses, and that is not too heavy because it is much more satisfying
2:05:44to ride an efficient bike for longer distances or faster than to ride a heavier bike for shorter
2:05:50distances. Like, it's the same amount of exercise work, but it feels worse to do the heavier bike
2:05:54for shorter distances. That makes sense.
2:05:57So you want to feel like, because the whole point of the bike is mechanically managed,
2:05:59like, look how fast I can go with just this much effort. If I put this much effort into walking,
2:06:03I'd be going slowly same on effort into a bike and I'm flying it's going fast as fun and the wind on you and it's you
2:06:09Know making the sweat evaporate and cooling you off you want the efficient bike
2:06:13Fine and you have to pass the periscope this give her her assignment. Oh, yes
2:06:18Absolutely. Yeah
2:06:21Whatever also honest periscope. I want to see you renting the sand bike and trying to
2:06:24I've never tried one of those things either. I see them right. I see them riding on the street
2:06:28You can hear them coming from a mile away like your m5 because the stupid tires the giant knobby tires and the asphalt make this
2:06:33- It's a terrible droning noise.
2:06:34- Yep.
2:06:35- Right?
2:06:36I've never seen one riding on sand
2:06:37and I've never tried it,
2:06:38but it seems like it would be terrible.
2:06:41- Yeah, that's why, yeah,
2:06:42I'm not in a huge rush to do that,
2:06:44'cause I suspect, you're right,
2:06:45I suspect it will be just awful.
2:06:48So that's one of the reasons why,
2:06:49I've been going there a lot this summer
2:06:51and I still haven't done it.
2:06:52I keep putting this off.
2:06:53Still haven't done it.
2:06:54So, probably not going to, but.
2:06:57- Hey Casey, here's what Huffy meant in my time.
2:07:00Take a look at that.
2:07:01- That's hideous.
2:07:02- That's a hell of a thing, huh?
2:07:031970s Huffy.
2:07:05And that seat you see there, it's not a banana seat,
2:07:07'cause banana seats are for girls,
2:07:09or so we thought when we were stupid kids in the '70s.
2:07:12It's like a manly banana seat.
2:07:14See how much thicker it is?
2:07:15- It's a bro-nana seat.
2:07:16- Yeah, and I had, before my mongoose,
2:07:19I had basically an off-brand Huffy.
2:07:21It's like it wasn't even good enough to be a Huffy.
2:07:22It was like generic, terrible bicycle,
2:07:25and I had one of those seats on it.
2:07:26I hated it.
2:07:27- All right, I have a question.
2:07:28This bike I'm looking at, this big Schwinn '50s thing,
2:07:31- It doesn't appear to have brakes in the--
2:07:34- Does it have coaster brakes?
2:07:35- Yeah, it says brakes coaster.
2:07:37- Coaster brakes are terrible, they're stupid,
2:07:39they're from the 50s, but that's what you're getting
2:07:41when you buy one of those.
2:07:42- Is that when you pedal backwards and it stops?
2:07:44- Yes, yep, you pedal backwards
2:07:46and it tries feebly to stop.
2:07:48There's a reason every real modern bike has hand brakes
2:07:52because coaster brakes suck,
2:07:53but you're not gonna be going fast,
2:07:54so you'll probably be fine.
2:07:55- Yeah, hmm, I'm gonna look at this.
2:07:57- Just don't get up to speed going down a big long hill
2:07:59and think you're gonna be able to jam on the brakes
2:08:01because you won't because coaster brakes suck.
2:08:02- But there are no hills.
2:08:04- And they only break the back wheels.
2:08:05So all it's gonna do, if you did ever start going fast
2:08:08and you tried to stop, all you would do is,
2:08:09if you were able to with the coaster brakes,
2:08:11if you were even able to, is lock up the back wheel
2:08:13and then your bike would continue to slide and slide.
2:08:16- Yeah, I'd just spin out at that point.
2:08:18- No, you don't spin out.
2:08:19You continue to go the direction you were going,
2:08:20you just don't stop.
2:08:21It's like locking up, imagine if you could just lock up
2:08:23the back wheels on a car.
2:08:25It would stop eventually and you could still steer
2:08:27during that time but you wouldn't stop as fast.
2:08:29So with the bike, you want to have front and back brakes that you're able to modulate so
2:08:33that you can stop faster.
2:08:36If you lock up both wheels, obviously you've got double the friction, you stop even faster,
2:08:39but usually it doesn't come to that.
2:08:42Have they not figured out analog brakes for bikes yet?
2:08:45Those are analog, yeah.
2:08:46You're pressing the levers.
2:08:47When I was out, this was the first time I rode my bike amongst the cars in a long time,
2:08:52because normally you're riding it recreationally, now it's riding to actually go somewhere.
2:08:56And I don't know if things have gotten worse since I was a kid, but people in cars want
2:09:00to kill people on bicycles.
2:09:03I was using all of my defensive bicycle driving skills honed over many years of riding on
2:09:08like actual major highways before I had my license with my 10-speed bike and everything
2:09:13just to stay alive.
2:09:14I was shocked at exactly how aggressively people in cars want to kill bicycles.
2:09:20- Yeah, I have zero temptation to ride a bike on roads.
2:09:25'Cause, yeah, I mean, up here in the suburbs
2:09:30it would probably be less horrible,
2:09:32but I still don't think it would be great.
2:09:34Because I feel like people, like drivers really hate bikers.
2:09:39I don't know, like I'm a driver, I don't care about bikers.
2:09:41- Or they're oblivious, even when there's bike lanes.
2:09:43They don't care, we have actual painted on the ground
2:09:47bike lanes with little pictures of bicycles
2:09:48dedicated lanes and cars are like, "This is my lane. Bicycle, go away. I'm going to run
2:09:53you off the road with my giant Tesla Model X." It's like, "Save me!" You know, like,
2:09:58it just, it was scary.
2:10:00So looking at the reviews of this bike, it's apparently 67 pounds? That's a pretty heavy
2:10:06bike. That seems like a lot.
2:10:08It is a lot. It's made out of 50s metal, and they have metal places where you don't need
2:10:12it. Why does there need to be a metal chain guard? Why does there need to be a chain guard?
2:10:15Why? Because that's what they did in the 50s because they were dumb.
2:10:18And all they had was metal left over from the war.
2:10:21They can't, like for this price, they can't throw in some aluminum, maybe?
2:10:24Like, there are lighter metals.
2:10:26I think it is probably is aluminum.
2:10:27There's just so much of it.
2:10:29I mean, so you need something structural, like structural steel or like very strong
2:10:33aluminum for the frame.
2:10:34Yeah, for the frame.
2:10:35But all the decoration pieces, that could be carbon fiber.
2:10:39It's not, though.
2:10:40It's metal, and it adds up.
2:10:42Maybe it's, the whole thing is steel.
2:10:43That would explain 67 pounds, but yeah.
2:10:45Yeah.
2:10:46- I think the weight for the Mongoose California
2:10:48is probably lower.
2:10:49- Well yeah, 'cause there's like no bike there practically.
2:10:52- 25 pounds for the Californian.
2:10:56- So I can fit almost three of them
2:10:59in the weight of this bike apparently.
2:11:01It does have excellent reviews.
2:11:04The reviewers all say basically what you'd expect
2:11:05is like this is an awesome bike, it's beautiful,
2:11:08it's smooth, it looks awesome, it's great,
2:11:11it's fun to ride, however it's heavy
2:11:13and the brake is not sufficient enough for its weight.
2:11:17- Coaster brake.
2:11:18- Everything you'd expect.
2:11:19- Oh no, I don't want eBay looking at these bikes.
2:11:23This is not good.
2:11:24- I told you, yeah, but it looks like they go,
2:11:26they seem to go in pretty reasonable quantity
2:11:29'cause if you look at sold items,
2:11:30there's a good number of them there
2:11:32and they seem to be approximately $500 range.
2:11:37- For non-original, like they're not even,
2:11:39I can look at them, I can say these are not original parts,
2:11:41all sorts of aftermarket stuff and still 500,
2:11:43there's lots of people with fond memories of this bike,
2:11:45I think, people my age with money they wanna spend.
2:11:48Chromoly, that's what the frame is made out of.
2:11:52What is chromoly?
2:11:54The world may never know.
2:11:55- Yeah, I've never even heard of that.
2:11:58- That was, it's a big selling point in the 80s,
2:11:59like blast processing.
2:12:00- Right, yeah, exactly. - Disgust amongst the kids
2:12:02in like the lunchroom, chromoly was disgust.
2:12:04(laughing)
2:12:07Does your bike have chromoly?
2:12:08No, it's a chromoly frame.
2:12:10Well, the chrome part of it you can get because it's shiny.
2:12:13Like the outside looks like it's shiny in chrome.
2:12:16What was it made about in the--
2:12:16I'm assuming it was some sort of aluminum thing or whatever,
2:12:19but blast processing in Chromoly.
2:12:21That's it.
2:12:23(beeping)
2:12:25[ Silence ]