ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► So, are you recording in a format that is not just call recorder?

00:00:03 ◼   ► Nope.

00:00:04 ◼   ► Start recording in a format that is not just call recorder.

00:00:07 ◼   ► You're just asking me to mess things up.

00:00:09 ◼   ► Oh, because you're afraid that he's gonna pull a casey?

00:00:12 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:00:13 ◼   ► My UPS lasts for at least five minutes.

00:00:15 ◼   ► I'm actually plugged into it, so.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Yes, yes.

00:00:18 ◼   ► Oh, wait, I hear the truck.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Do you hear it?

00:00:20 ◼   ► Do you hear it?

00:00:21 ◼   ► It's driving away.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Let's see.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Maybe it's leaving.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's driving away.

00:00:26 ◼   ► All right.

00:00:27 ◼   ► (electronic music)

00:00:29 ◼   ► - So Marco had just asked John if he could start

00:00:31 ◼   ► a crash resilient sound recording program

00:00:34 ◼   ► so that if this truck was doing some sort of electrical work

00:00:37 ◼   ► and suddenly the power went out,

00:00:39 ◼   ► it wouldn't be a big deal because John hopefully

00:00:42 ◼   ► would be using something that isn't call recorder

00:00:44 ◼   ► like I was using when my Mac crapped out.

00:00:47 ◼   ► - Which I can tell you why that matters

00:00:49 ◼   ► if we ever get to talk about the MP3 file format.

00:00:51 ◼   ► - I would love to do that actually, but anyway.

00:00:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:54 ◼   ► John had said to Marco, "Oh, well it doesn't matter

00:00:56 ◼   ► because my UPS lasts for at least five minutes

00:00:58 ◼   ► and I'm plugged into my UPS.

00:01:00 ◼   ► - That's how I said it.

00:01:01 ◼   ► That was an accurate reproduction.

00:01:03 ◼   ► - That is a completely flawless reproduction.

00:01:05 ◼   ► It was effectively verbatim.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - If only it was recorded.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Oh yes, it was on my end.

00:01:09 ◼   ► On my call recorder recording,

00:01:10 ◼   ► it will successfully make it to disk.

00:01:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:14 ◼   ► - So anyway, I bring all this up

00:01:15 ◼   ► because not 20 minutes ago,

00:01:18 ◼   ► I was sitting at my iMac,

00:01:20 ◼   ► knowing that I'm going to be going out of town

00:01:23 ◼   ► and thinking to myself,

00:01:25 ◼   ► I don't know what to do because I really want to let this thing run for another week and

00:01:30 ◼   ► see if it reboots itself.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And if it doesn't, I think at that point I will personally be fairly convinced that the

00:01:39 ◼   ► OEM RAM is good and that the OWC RAM was bad.

00:01:44 ◼   ► But I'm probably going to be using Plex at some point.

00:01:47 ◼   ► The Plex server is the iMac.

00:01:49 ◼   ► If this thing turns itself off, I don't have any mechanism to turn it back on.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Should I turn it off and plug it into the battery part of the EPS?

00:01:59 ◼   ► I don't know!

00:02:00 ◼   ► And I decided not to, because I went into System Preferences and confirmed that the

00:02:05 ◼   ► little checkbox that reads "Start up automatically after a power failure."

00:02:10 ◼   ► And so I'm just going on faith that either we won't have a power failure, or if we do,

00:02:15 ◼   ► the Mac will start itself back up.

00:02:17 ◼   ► And somebody in the chat is asking, "You don't shut down your machine at night like the rest

00:02:21 ◼   ► of us?"

00:02:22 ◼   ► No.

00:02:23 ◼   ► This thing is on always.

00:02:24 ◼   ► I turn the screen off.

00:02:25 ◼   ► Yup, I'm the exact same way.

00:02:26 ◼   ► No one should be shutting down their machines at night anymore, ever.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Doesn't make any sense.

00:02:30 ◼   ► To be fair, there's no reason not to, I guess?

00:02:33 ◼   ► No, there is.

00:02:34 ◼   ► There is a pretty big reason.

00:02:35 ◼   ► They do use a good amount of power, but probably the ideal balance between functionality and

00:02:40 ◼   ► power savings is sleep mode.

00:02:43 ◼   ► to actually put the machine to sleep, not the deep hibernation mode, but regular sleep

00:02:47 ◼   ► mode, that is, I think, a great balance for most people.

00:02:50 ◼   ► You know, to put it to sleep, your energy saver settings should do that for you. After

00:02:54 ◼   ► one hour of idle time, go to sleep or whatever. Yeah, but I don't want that happening during

00:02:58 ◼   ► the day, though, when I'm awake. Because at any moment, I might want to do something on

00:03:02 ◼   ► this Mac remotely. And yes, I could do wake on LAN, blah, blah, blah, but...

00:03:06 ◼   ► That's what scheduled sleep is for, then. If you know, schedule to go to sleep at 11

00:03:09 ◼   ► every day and wake up at 5 a.m. and you're fine.

00:03:11 ◼   ► - I didn't know that that was a thing.

00:03:13 ◼   ► - That's a thing.

00:03:14 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, schedule.

00:03:15 ◼   ► - That's how I do my Backblaze backups.

00:03:16 ◼   ► My computer wakes itself up at around 3 a.m.

00:03:19 ◼   ► and does Backblaze and then goes to sleep.

00:03:22 ◼   ► So I don't actually run it continuously all day.

00:03:23 ◼   ► I just do nightly backups.

00:03:25 ◼   ► - Interesting.

00:03:26 ◼   ► - Is that, so I assume the wake up is the Mac feature

00:03:28 ◼   ► and then Backblaze is the thing to say,

00:03:29 ◼   ► put it to sleep when it's done?

00:03:31 ◼   ► - Backblaze has its own independent schedule,

00:03:33 ◼   ► which is either run continuously

00:03:34 ◼   ► or choose when you want me to run.

00:03:35 ◼   ► So I have two independent schedules

00:03:37 ◼   ► I just synchronize good old cron style, say the Mac wakes up at 3, or the Mac wakes up

00:03:42 ◼   ► at 2.55 and Backblaze starts at 3 and yeah.

00:03:46 ◼   ► So every day you're ruining five minutes of power usage of your computer, you're just

00:03:50 ◼   ► wasting that power.

00:03:51 ◼   ► It's not five minutes, it stays awake for like an hour, I let it do all its stuff.

00:03:54 ◼   ► During that time I probably just Time Machine backups and like Power Nap is, I think, predates

00:03:58 ◼   ► or post-dates my Mac, but Power Nap will have things wake up from their sleep and do Time

00:04:03 ◼   ► Machine backups and check mail and stuff, but it doesn't help with Backblaze.

00:04:06 ◼   ► Although technically if it wakes up to do time machine backplays will also run if you

00:04:09 ◼   ► have a set to continue.

00:04:10 ◼   ► So anyway, the point is this scheduling feature is part of OS X.

00:04:12 ◼   ► It's been there for years and years and years.

00:04:14 ◼   ► You should use it.

00:04:15 ◼   ► It's cool.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I probably should sleep this thing at night, but I just never do.

00:04:21 ◼   ► And I say that only because nothing is happening on it while I'm sleeping.

00:04:25 ◼   ► I mean, I guess that one of you guys, or maybe like Jason Snell since he's three hours in

00:04:29 ◼   ► the past, might be trying to watch something off of my Plex server that I've shared with

00:04:34 ◼   ► you guys.

00:04:35 ◼   ► In principle, there's no reason I shouldn't just let the thing sleep at like midnight or one o'clock or something like that and wake itself

00:04:40 ◼   ► back up at

00:04:42 ◼   ► Like six or seven in the morning

00:04:44 ◼   ► I mean you can use that as like your own kind of like political statement of you know

00:04:48 ◼   ► You guys should really go to bed like stop watching Top Gear off my flexor

00:04:50 ◼   ► You need to go to sleep

00:04:52 ◼   ► Well, I just thought it was funny because I was having this

00:04:54 ◼   ► This internal debate with myself about whether or not I should move the Mac onto the battery side of the UPS and once

00:05:00 ◼   ► Once I have--

00:05:01 ◼   ► - It should only be a question of when, not whether.

00:05:04 ◼   ► - Well, sure, and that's exactly what I was about to say,

00:05:06 ◼   ► actually, once I have my data point with regard

00:05:09 ◼   ► to the OEM RAM, at that juncture, I will move it over

00:05:13 ◼   ► to the battery side of the UPS, but I don't wanna mess

00:05:15 ◼   ► with anything until then.

00:05:17 ◼   ► - I am still a little concerned that there was that one

00:05:21 ◼   ► seeming GPU-related failure, like a day after you put

00:05:24 ◼   ► the stock RAM back in, that is, that's like the only thing

00:05:28 ◼   ► that's weird about this to me that says, like,

00:05:29 ◼   ► maybe this is a more complex problem.

00:05:32 ◼   ► But the fact that it hasn't happened at all

00:05:34 ◼   ► in what, three weeks or something,

00:05:36 ◼   ► and it was happening about every week?

00:05:38 ◼   ► - That's correct.

00:05:38 ◼   ► - That is a pretty strong switchover there.

00:05:41 ◼   ► So I'm not entirely ready to say it's definitely the RAM,

00:05:45 ◼   ► but I'm probably about ready to say

00:05:49 ◼   ► you should at least get the RAM swapped.

00:05:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, and basically, as I've said in the past,

00:05:55 ◼   ► all I'm doing right now is trying to get a data point

00:05:58 ◼   ► that I can go to OWC or Mac sales, whatever the hell they're called, and say, "Hey, listen,

00:06:03 ◼   ► you know, I was having reboots once a week.

00:06:05 ◼   ► I put the OEM RAM back in.

00:06:06 ◼   ► It ran for blank without a reboot.

00:06:09 ◼   ► I'm pretty confident it's the RAM.

00:06:11 ◼   ► Can you send me new sticks?"

00:06:12 ◼   ► And actually, I don't have the individual's name handy, but somebody had sent me a couple

00:06:17 ◼   ► of tweets over the last couple of weeks saying that they had similar issues with OWC RAM

00:06:21 ◼   ► and ended up returning it, I think.

00:06:24 ◼   ► And I presume at this point I'm well out of the return window because I got this computer

00:06:27 ◼   ► in January. But anyways, they said that they had gotten crucial RAM instead, and thus far

00:06:36 ◼   ► it had been flawless, although to be fair it had only been a few days at that point.

00:06:39 ◼   ► So I think what I'll try to do is I'll try to do a return on the OWC RAM, assuming my

00:06:46 ◼   ► test plays out the way I expect it will, and then if that RAM has similar issues at that

00:06:51 ◼   ► point I'll probably either ask to return it, or I should say an exchange or whatever, and

00:06:56 ◼   ► And then I'll ask to return it if the new hypothetical RAM has the same issue and maybe

00:07:01 ◼   ► just get like, you know, crucial RAM or something like that.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Anyway, we should probably do some follow-up.

00:07:07 ◼   ► Is Jon doing LensRentals wrong?

00:07:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I got an email today that said, this is a reminder from lensrental.com, this is

00:07:14 ◼   ► a reminder that your rental ended yesterday and our system indicates that it has not been

00:07:17 ◼   ► sent back to us.

00:07:19 ◼   ► So I was surprised by his email because first of all, my rental didn't end yesterday.

00:07:23 ◼   ► It ended on Monday, and yesterday was Wednesday, and I sent it back on Monday.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And of course when I sent it back I got a receipt from the FedEx place, and I took a

00:07:32 ◼   ► picture of the receipt with my phone, so as soon as I got this email I could immediately

00:07:36 ◼   ► reply with a picture of my receipt with a tracking number that if they entered into

00:07:39 ◼   ► the FedEx website they would see was on truck for delivery back to their place in Missouri

00:07:44 ◼   ► or whatever they are.

00:07:46 ◼   ► And my question is to Marco, who's done this before, did I do it wrong?

00:07:48 ◼   ► Am I supposed to enter my tracking number after I return it?

00:07:51 ◼   ► Am I supposed to go to the website and click a button that say that I shipped it back?

00:07:54 ◼   ► Did I mess this up somehow?

00:07:56 ◼   ► You didn't mess it up at all.

00:07:57 ◼   ► Basically something messed up that doesn't usually do that.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Anyway, they don't have the lens I want to rent for a moist vacation, so I'm kind of

00:08:03 ◼   ► upset about that too.

00:08:04 ◼   ► Wixia, what lens is it?

00:08:06 ◼   ► It's a lens that I probably don't want to buy because it's $1,000, and I'm trying to

00:08:10 ◼   ► find like a zoom that I wouldn't want to buy because it's like a compromise, but it's a

00:08:14 ◼   ► pretty good compromise.

00:08:15 ◼   ► This is the Sony Vario Tessar T-Star E 16-70mm.

00:08:21 ◼   ► It's a very compact zoom.

00:08:23 ◼   ► It's like if you want to just have one lens on your camera on vacation, it takes decent

00:08:27 ◼   ► pictures at many ranges and has a pretty good zoom range, not really really big zoom, but

00:08:32 ◼   ► you know, pretty wide to pretty close up and folds back to a small size.

00:08:38 ◼   ► This looks like a good lens for that, but then again it's also $1000 and do I really

00:08:42 ◼   ► want to spend $1,000 on a zoom lens that isn't optically that amazing, but it really is very

00:08:48 ◼   ► flexible and it's much smaller than the zoom lens I had. So I'm thinking of renting that

00:08:52 ◼   ► and then just buying some primes with the camera.

00:08:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, honestly, and I was actually very pleased. We got a lot of feedback from

00:08:57 ◼   ► other photographers so far basically saying that they too, and these are some pro photographers,

00:09:04 ◼   ► that they too only own primes. And some of them said I occasionally rent a zoom for like

00:09:09 ◼   ► an event, but for the most part there's been a number of people who are basically saying

00:09:13 ◼   ► that they agree with my plea last episode to please consider only using primes and please

00:09:19 ◼   ► at least get the 50 prime equivalent for your system. There were actually quite a lot of

00:09:23 ◼   ► those. That was very nice to hear. So it does seem like you are looking at that. I also

00:09:28 ◼   ► left a dimension last show. If you're not looking at the Sony system, I would also give

00:09:34 ◼   ► serious consideration to the Fuji XT line or X Pro line.

00:09:39 ◼   ► There was the XT1 that a lot of people loved.

00:09:43 ◼   ► I believe the XT2 is now out or at least it's about to be out.

00:09:47 ◼   ► The whole Fuji X-Trans sensor thing is kind of cool and has some pretty cool advantages.

00:09:52 ◼   ► So I would strongly recommend if you don't want to jump all the way up to Sony's A6300/A7

00:09:59 ◼   ► ranges, consider the Fuji X line because it is, I have not had any direct experience with

00:10:06 ◼   ► it, but it is very well regarded and a lot of people like that a lot at the slightly

00:10:11 ◼   ► lower price point.

00:10:12 ◼   ► People were trying to talk me into micro four thirds, I'm totally aware of all these things.

00:10:17 ◼   ► I think I've read every single review on DPReview for every 2016 camera at this point, so I'm

00:10:22 ◼   ► very aware of the things and you know, I'm pretty settled on the Sony body.

00:10:26 ◼   ► I'm willing to pay the extra money for the extra,

00:10:28 ◼   ► and it's a camera that I use.

00:10:30 ◼   ► It's a known known at this point.

00:10:32 ◼   ► I rented it, I used it, I liked it.

00:10:34 ◼   ► The Fugees are less expensive,

00:10:35 ◼   ► but I don't mind the extra cost for the body,

00:10:37 ◼   ► especially when I'm looking at lenses

00:10:39 ◼   ► that all cost a bazillion dollars.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Anyway, still no purchases made, but I'm thinking about it.

00:10:43 ◼   ► - Also worth pointing out, as one person did

00:10:45 ◼   ► that I also neglected to mention last episode,

00:10:47 ◼   ► the lenses that I buy are the full frame lenses,

00:10:50 ◼   ► the Effie line in Sony's parlance.

00:10:53 ◼   ► John would not need to buy the Effie lens.

00:10:55 ◼   ► he could buy the crop sensor E lenses.

00:10:57 ◼   ► And so like the lens you were just mentioning, John,

00:11:00 ◼   ► that is not available in full frame.

00:11:01 ◼   ► There is no equivalent to that for full frame.

00:11:03 ◼   ► - I know, that's why it's a good lens.

00:11:04 ◼   ► Like it's perfect for my camera.

00:11:06 ◼   ► - That's why it's a versatile lens.

00:11:07 ◼   ► - Well, for my camera, I don't wanna pay

00:11:10 ◼   ► the amount of money I'd have to pay

00:11:12 ◼   ► for a full frame version of the same lens

00:11:14 ◼   ► and I don't want the size that that would bring.

00:11:15 ◼   ► So here is a lens made specifically for my size sensor

00:11:18 ◼   ► that is very compact, that has a good zoom range,

00:11:20 ◼   ► that is optically pretty good.

00:11:21 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah.

00:11:22 ◼   ► So for your needs, I do recommend for most people

00:11:27 ◼   ► that they, like if they have the budget

00:11:29 ◼   ► for one of these Sony A7 series full frame cameras,

00:11:33 ◼   ► to step up to it if you can

00:11:34 ◼   ► because the quality difference is immense.

00:11:36 ◼   ► However, for what you are using and for your stated needs

00:11:40 ◼   ► for zoom lenses basically, for really far reaching

00:11:44 ◼   ► but also small and somewhat affordable zoom lenses,

00:11:47 ◼   ► I would not recommend full frame.

00:11:48 ◼   ► I think you're making the right move

00:11:50 ◼   ► by not going full frame for that particular reason.

00:11:53 ◼   ► It pains me to say that.

00:11:55 ◼   ► - I would go full frame if the body wasn't so big.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Like I would sacrifice the zoom if the body wasn't so big

00:12:01 ◼   ► and if the body wasn't literally three times the cost.

00:12:03 ◼   ► Like it's not a small price jump.

00:12:05 ◼   ► I'd pay a couple hundred extra, but 3,500 bucks, I'm out.

00:12:08 ◼   ► - And one thing to consider,

00:12:10 ◼   ► if you don't wanna go all the way to the $3,000 A7R II,

00:12:14 ◼   ► the regular A7 II without the R came out

00:12:17 ◼   ► something like six to nine months earlier

00:12:19 ◼   ► And I rented one of those before I decided to wait for

00:12:23 ◼   ► and then buy the A7R II.

00:12:24 ◼   ► The regular A7 II is not that much more money

00:12:28 ◼   ► than the A6300, and it's not quite as advanced

00:12:32 ◼   ► in some of the newer stuff, like some of the video features

00:12:34 ◼   ► and the focus, I think there aren't as many

00:12:37 ◼   ► face detection focus points on it, I think.

00:12:39 ◼   ► - And the burst mode thing, and it's bigger.

00:12:41 ◼   ► Like yeah, I know, I looked at it.

00:12:42 ◼   ► - But the sensor for the A7 II, it is full frame,

00:12:45 ◼   ► and I think, you can get those things for what,

00:12:47 ◼   ► like $14 or $1500, for what they are,

00:12:51 ◼   ► they're an incredible value right now

00:12:52 ◼   ► because it's kind of like last year's model,

00:12:54 ◼   ► that's still for sale basically.

00:12:55 ◼   ► That is a very good buy if you want full frame

00:12:58 ◼   ► but don't wanna spend like three grand on it.

00:13:01 ◼   ► And compared to what was available,

00:13:02 ◼   ► like if you wanted full frame before the Sony A series,

00:13:07 ◼   ► you had to go for like a 5D Mark II, Mark III,

00:13:10 ◼   ► and those were like $3000 cameras.

00:13:12 ◼   ► That used to be the only way to get full frame.

00:13:14 ◼   ► Like that was like the entry point for full frame

00:13:16 ◼   ► was these like $3,000 Canon big SLRs.

00:13:19 ◼   ► To have something like the Sony A7 series

00:13:21 ◼   ► and to have their full frame sensor starting at like

00:13:24 ◼   ► 1500 bucks is amazing for quality photography

00:13:27 ◼   ► and for bringing that to people.

00:13:29 ◼   ► It's really quite something.

00:13:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm gonna do the Casey prediction now

00:13:32 ◼   ► and say here's what's actually gonna happen.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I'm gonna get this camera, we're gonna use it

00:13:35 ◼   ► for a few years, the new, whatever replaces your camera

00:13:38 ◼   ► is gonna come out and/or there's going to be

00:13:40 ◼   ► a full frame camera in a similar form factor to the 6300.

00:13:44 ◼   ► And several years after buying this camera

00:13:45 ◼   ► a bunch of lenses, I'm going to sell it all and buy a full frame mirrorless camera, which

00:13:51 ◼   ► may or may not be from Sony. So I know that's going to happen, like it's inevitable, but

00:13:54 ◼   ► I'm willing to spend the three or four years now with this small camera as a transitional

00:13:58 ◼   ► face.

00:13:59 ◼   ► Yeah, that's totally fair. Honestly, I would bet against that future for you, just because

00:14:03 ◼   ► like...

00:14:04 ◼   ► You think I'm too cheap?

00:14:05 ◼   ► No, I think...

00:14:06 ◼   ► Is fair?

00:14:07 ◼   ► Fair. I mean, that might be a factor here, but I've been talking to you about cameras

00:14:11 ◼   ► for like two years now or three years now,

00:14:13 ◼   ► and you've never wavered on the point of like,

00:14:17 ◼   ► I like good cameras,

00:14:18 ◼   ► but I will never buy one that's that nice.

00:14:20 ◼   ► - I know because it's a Money Pit.

00:14:21 ◼   ► I know I'm susceptible to this Money Pit,

00:14:23 ◼   ► and my wife made me enter it,

00:14:25 ◼   ► and as predicted, once you have one and use it a lot,

00:14:28 ◼   ► like you just, it's, I know, I know myself,

00:14:30 ◼   ► I was trying to avoid this particular Money Pit.

00:14:33 ◼   ► Now I'm easing into the Money Pit.

00:14:34 ◼   ► And also I feel like your camera is like,

00:14:37 ◼   ► I feel like your camera is still

00:14:38 ◼   ► a little bit in transition.

00:14:39 ◼   ► I feel like this whole mirrorless revolution is kind of like just getting going here and

00:14:43 ◼   ► I want to, I really believe that you could have a decent full frame camera with all of

00:14:49 ◼   ► your features in a smaller form factor that has even better performance.

00:14:52 ◼   ► I think that is coming, I just have to wait like five to seven years and I'm willing to

00:14:55 ◼   ► wait and the 6300 was really cool and I think I'll use that while I wait.

00:15:01 ◼   ► I'm not sure it's going to get that much smaller honestly because like the A7 line before the

00:15:07 ◼   ► the A7 II, A7 R2, the regular A7 line

00:15:10 ◼   ► was a little bit smaller.

00:15:12 ◼   ► One of the reasons it had to get bigger

00:15:13 ◼   ► was the giant in-body stabilizer thing.

00:15:16 ◼   ► If you look, there's actually a tear down

00:15:18 ◼   ► on iFixit of the A7 R2.

00:15:20 ◼   ► There really is not a lot of room in there

00:15:22 ◼   ► to shrink this thing any further.

00:15:24 ◼   ► And also, if they did shrink it further somehow,

00:15:27 ◼   ► that would probably mean an even smaller battery,

00:15:29 ◼   ► and that's the last thing this thing needs.

00:15:31 ◼   ► - There's plenty of room for more battery.

00:15:33 ◼   ► If they need to talk to Apple about scalped batteries

00:15:35 ◼   ► or something, there's room for more battery in there.

00:15:36 ◼   ► - And you can't change them.

00:15:38 ◼   ► - I'm totally willing to not have the in-body stabilization,

00:15:40 ◼   ► like do the 6300 but with a full frame sensor,

00:15:43 ◼   ► but without the stabilization, like anyway.

00:15:45 ◼   ► I believe in the future of technology

00:15:47 ◼   ► and I believe cameras will get smaller and better

00:15:49 ◼   ► and so I'm willing to wait it out.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And even if it doesn't.

00:15:52 ◼   ► - Wait, if you don't want the stabilization,

00:15:55 ◼   ► hold on, how much is an A7R, the first A7R?

00:15:58 ◼   ► Actually that's contrast only, you don't want that.

00:16:01 ◼   ► - But that's the old camera, slow burst mode

00:16:03 ◼   ► and not as good sensor.

00:16:05 ◼   ► Yeah, you don't want contrast autofocus, never mind.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, forget about it.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Anyway, we're getting enough camera talk.

00:16:11 ◼   ► At some point I'll buy something,

00:16:14 ◼   ► then we'll talk about it some more.

00:16:15 ◼   ► Okay.

00:16:16 ◼   ► All right, good talk.

00:16:19 ◼   ► We got a bit of feedback with regard to QNX,

00:16:22 ◼   ► which is that real-time operating system,

00:16:24 ◼   ► and Dan Dodge, I believe is the gentleman's name

00:16:26 ◼   ► that was co-founder and is now working at Apple.

00:16:29 ◼   ► And anonymous, well, two different anonymous sources.

00:16:32 ◼   ► The first told us that the M5 that Marco had, my 335, both the iDrive systems are running

00:16:41 ◼   ► on QNX, and this particular individual also added that there really isn't any requirement

00:16:47 ◼   ► for real-time OS for infotainment.

00:16:49 ◼   ► It just kind of happens to use QNX.

00:16:52 ◼   ► It's kind of like the standard that everybody does.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I was about to say, and that's apparently fairly popular.

00:16:57 ◼   ► And furthermore, from what I understand, the CarPlay features that are in a lot of modern

00:17:04 ◼   ► cars, a lot of that support happens at the QNX OS level, even before the iDrive tier,

00:17:14 ◼   ► if you will, or level in the software.

00:17:17 ◼   ► And then a different anonymous source wrote us a really fascinating email, which I'd love

00:17:21 ◼   ► to read the whole thing, but I presume Jon has called out a couple of parts that I'll

00:17:25 ◼   ► read to you.

00:17:26 ◼   ► The biggest performance problem in car UIs is usually

00:17:29 ◼   ► the embedded chipset used.

00:17:30 ◼   ► Our system has to work on 10-plus chipsets by different

00:17:33 ◼   ► manufacturers.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Car companies save every cent on their chipset.

00:17:37 ◼   ► The fact that some cars built today still have less than

00:17:40 ◼   ► 128 megs RAM, although RAM costs almost nothing, shows

00:17:43 ◼   ► that perfectly.

00:17:45 ◼   ► As my head of engineering once said to me, they'd rather

00:17:47 ◼   ► spend money on three software engineers for two years trying

00:17:50 ◼   ► to get that system to run as efficiently as possible,

00:17:54 ◼   ► rather than spending a few dollars more on each chip.

00:17:56 ◼   ► And that's because of the economy of scale

00:17:59 ◼   ► that when you're building 11 gazillion cars,

00:18:02 ◼   ► a few dollars per car really starts to add up.

00:18:05 ◼   ► And I just, I mean, it makes sense,

00:18:06 ◼   ► but I didn't really think of it that way

00:18:08 ◼   ► until this anonymous little birdie wrote in and said that.

00:18:11 ◼   ► So I thought that was fascinating.

00:18:12 ◼   ► - It doesn't make sense.

00:18:13 ◼   ► It's the exact definition of Pennywise pound foolish.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Like, because I think like, oh, you're right about the math

00:18:19 ◼   ► and how it multiplies out, but you're wrong about,

00:18:21 ◼   ► or the car companies are wrong about the value

00:18:23 ◼   ► provided by having good software.

00:18:27 ◼   ► The good software is an important differentiator,

00:18:29 ◼   ► an increasingly important differentiator in cars.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And you saving two bucks on that chip

00:18:33 ◼   ► is not worth the value lost to your brand.

00:18:36 ◼   ► Like all the people, like Marco said,

00:18:38 ◼   ► drives this really nice Mercedes,

00:18:41 ◼   ► but it's disgusted by the infotainment system.

00:18:42 ◼   ► You spent all this money on this car.

00:18:45 ◼   ► So many parts in the Mercedes are 50 cents more expensive

00:18:48 ◼   ► than they are in other cars.

00:18:49 ◼   ► One cent more expensive, $1 more expensive

00:18:51 ◼   ► from like the fuel lines to the filters,

00:18:53 ◼   ► to the mufflers, to every single part of that car

00:18:55 ◼   ► is just a little tiny bit more expensive than Honda.

00:18:57 ◼   ► That's what makes it a Mercedes.

00:18:59 ◼   ► The software you can't treat like,

00:19:00 ◼   ► "Oh, well, we're only gonna put 120 megs of RAM

00:19:02 ◼   ► because doubling the RAM would cost three extra cents

00:19:05 ◼   ► and instead we're gonna spend, you know,

00:19:07 ◼   ► have three engineers work on this

00:19:09 ◼   ► and to jam the software into this tiny little chipset

00:19:11 ◼   ► with a small amount of RAM."

00:19:12 ◼   ► Because hey, it's cheaper, do the math.

00:19:14 ◼   ► It is cheaper, but you're making your product worse

00:19:16 ◼   ► in a way that is way out of proportion

00:19:18 ◼   ► to the money that you save.

00:19:19 ◼   ► If you just add up like, okay, two bucks,

00:19:21 ◼   ► two extra bucks per car times the number of cars we sell,

00:19:23 ◼   ► you're adding so much more value to your brand as Mercedes,

00:19:26 ◼   ► as a car that people wanna buy by making decent software.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And you make decent software

00:19:30 ◼   ► by not making your software engineers

00:19:32 ◼   ► have to jam their software into a bunch of weird,

00:19:35 ◼   ► underpowered chipsets that are RAM constrained.

00:19:38 ◼   ► It's a terrible idea.

00:19:39 ◼   ► You know, this email ends to say,

00:19:41 ◼   ► the good part is all these problems

00:19:43 ◼   ► are slowly getting worked on.

00:19:44 ◼   ► The companies creating these infotainment systems

00:19:47 ◼   ► are slowly getting better at understanding

00:19:48 ◼   ► the technology hurdles.

00:19:49 ◼   ► And some car companies that really care

00:19:51 ◼   ► are taking this away from third party vendors,

00:19:53 ◼   ► basically taking it in house, kind of like Tesla does.

00:19:56 ◼   ► So they're getting better about this,

00:19:57 ◼   ► but the mindset is like totally wrong.

00:19:59 ◼   ► And we're totally not blaming the people

00:20:01 ◼   ► who make these infotainment systems,

00:20:02 ◼   ► because as this person said, they have to write this thing,

00:20:05 ◼   ► it has to work on these terrible washing machine chipsets

00:20:08 ◼   ► that are in these cars because they're cheap.

00:20:10 ◼   ► And of course they're terrible.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And by the way, the infotainment system on QNX thing,

00:20:13 ◼   ► that was in response to the last episode

00:20:16 ◼   ► where we were talking about QNX, and it's like,

00:20:17 ◼   ► well, you don't need a real-time operating system

00:20:19 ◼   ► for the infotainment, you need it for like the self-driving car, the automatic stopping

00:20:24 ◼   ► system that prevents you from hitting pedestrians, and other things that are critical that need

00:20:27 ◼   ► to be in real time.

00:20:28 ◼   ► But QNX is also a reliable, popular embedded operating system, so I guess they just use

00:20:32 ◼   ► it for the infotainment systems too.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Maybe they're not even using the real-time features.

00:20:35 ◼   ► This was my question.

00:20:37 ◼   ► What is it about the infotainment system that needs real time?

00:20:40 ◼   ► And the answer is nothing.

00:20:41 ◼   ► It's just a good embedded operating system that automotive engineers are familiar with

00:20:45 ◼   ► that runs on those washing machine chips

00:20:48 ◼   ► with a tiny amount of RAM, so there you have it.

00:20:50 ◼   ► - I should also point out that I had to reboot my car today.

00:20:53 ◼   ► - How do you do that?

00:20:54 ◼   ► - It happens, you hold down a key combination, right?

00:20:57 ◼   ► - Yes, and I should point out too,

00:20:59 ◼   ► this is the third time I've had to do this.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And since owning the car for three months.

00:21:04 ◼   ► - You should really look at the RAM, Marco,

00:21:06 ◼   ► I hear that's troubling these days.

00:21:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, so.

00:21:09 ◼   ► - So what was the symptom?

00:21:10 ◼   ► - So the first time I had to reboot it,

00:21:13 ◼   ► so there's two screens, there's the screen

00:21:14 ◼   ► where the speedometer is right in front of you

00:21:16 ◼   ► on the little dash console thing,

00:21:18 ◼   ► and there's the giant touchscreen in the middle.

00:21:21 ◼   ► And those are actually running two different computers,

00:21:23 ◼   ► or the one in front of the driver is kind of

00:21:26 ◼   ► like a sub-interface that remotely controls

00:21:29 ◼   ► the main one in the center, and the main one

00:21:31 ◼   ► in the center also controls all the HVAC stuff,

00:21:35 ◼   ► all the media stuff, and a bunch of other things

00:21:39 ◼   ► that are not driving, but are a lot

00:21:40 ◼   ► of other accessory features of the interior.

00:21:43 ◼   ► So I went out one afternoon and the driver facing one said,

00:21:48 ◼   ► there's a problem with your center console, call service.

00:21:51 ◼   ► I hate talking on the phone,

00:21:52 ◼   ► so rather than calling customer service,

00:21:54 ◼   ► I just searched the web for this error message

00:21:56 ◼   ► and found some forums, posts and everything saying,

00:21:59 ◼   ► oh, just reboot it.

00:22:00 ◼   ► And then it took me another 10 minutes

00:22:01 ◼   ► to figure out how the heck do you reboot it.

00:22:03 ◼   ► And the way you reboot it is,

00:22:05 ◼   ► the steering wheel has a little jog wheel on each side

00:22:07 ◼   ► like by the buttons for the controls.

00:22:10 ◼   ► And if you click in both of those jog wheels

00:22:12 ◼   ► and hold them in for like five seconds,

00:22:15 ◼   ► the center screen reboots.

00:22:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:17 ◼   ► - Interesting.

00:22:18 ◼   ► - So I did that, it fixed the problem,

00:22:20 ◼   ► you know, it came back up,

00:22:21 ◼   ► it takes like 20, 30 seconds to reboot,

00:22:23 ◼   ► came back up, it was fine.

00:22:25 ◼   ► And then I did it willingly about a month ago

00:22:29 ◼   ► because the navigation, when it highlights

00:22:33 ◼   ► the road you're supposed to drive on with a blue overlay,

00:22:37 ◼   ► sometimes if you zoom or pan

00:22:40 ◼   ► or otherwise cause the map to redraw,

00:22:43 ◼   ► sometimes the blue overlay stops drawing reliably.

00:22:46 ◼   ► It'll either omit sections or it'll just not draw at all.

00:22:50 ◼   ► And it looks like it's maybe like running

00:22:51 ◼   ► out of texture memory or something,

00:22:53 ◼   ► and so like the texture is just not being painted right

00:22:55 ◼   ► or something.

00:22:56 ◼   ► I don't know how these systems work in enough detail

00:22:57 ◼   ► to say for sure, but it looks like some kind of just like

00:23:00 ◼   ► memory leak bug that slowly this just stops

00:23:02 ◼   ► working very well.

00:23:03 ◼   ► And actually when I had the service loaner,

00:23:05 ◼   ► when I got my windshield replaced,

00:23:06 ◼   ► that car had that same symptom where it just wasn't

00:23:08 ◼   ► drawing the overlay right.

00:23:09 ◼   ► so I know it's not just my car.

00:23:11 ◼   ► I used to know how to fix it in the service owner,

00:23:12 ◼   ► but now I do, you just reboot it, it's immediately better.

00:23:15 ◼   ► And then today, the center console just stopped responding

00:23:18 ◼   ► and the audio froze and it was playing over Bluetooth

00:23:21 ◼   ► so it wasn't like a cable issue.

00:23:22 ◼   ► And yeah, so I was driving at the time,

00:23:24 ◼   ► so I'm like, well, I hope this doesn't do anything weird.

00:23:26 ◼   ► So I was stopped at traffic lights, I'm like,

00:23:28 ◼   ► all right, good time, hold 'em in, reboot.

00:23:31 ◼   ► It was fine, came back up again, totally fine.

00:23:35 ◼   ► I will say overall, now that we're on the subject

00:23:37 ◼   ► of these infotainment systems, it kind of annoys me

00:23:40 ◼   ► that Tesla is working on all these automatic driving things

00:23:44 ◼   ► and pouring so much of their resources into that

00:23:47 ◼   ► while their in-car navigation and media system

00:23:51 ◼   ► still could use a lot of improvement.

00:23:53 ◼   ► It's still pretty rudimentary.

00:23:54 ◼   ► It is nice in that it has the big touch screen

00:23:57 ◼   ► and everything, but the media interface is extremely basic.

00:24:02 ◼   ► It supports very little of Bluetooth audio capabilities,

00:24:06 ◼   ► control capabilities, doesn't support like artwork

00:24:08 ◼   ► and stuff like that, doesn't support fast forward

00:24:10 ◼   ► and rewind, there's no of course browsing or anything,

00:24:13 ◼   ► no iPod interface, no CarPlay, so they're missing a lot

00:24:17 ◼   ► there and then the navigation is also very rudimentary.

00:24:21 ◼   ► You can't set waypoints, you can't like say,

00:24:24 ◼   ► all right, well drive here to here but use this highway

00:24:26 ◼   ► or drive here to here but stop here in the middle.

00:24:28 ◼   ► You can't do that, you have to just make separate trips.

00:24:31 ◼   ► So stuff like that and also the directions,

00:24:33 ◼   ► Like the map images come from Google,

00:24:37 ◼   ► but I think Tesla has its own street data,

00:24:41 ◼   ► and Tesla also provides its own navigation,

00:24:44 ◼   ► despite wherever the data's coming from.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Like it's not using Google's navigation,

00:24:47 ◼   ► Tesla has its own navigation.

00:24:49 ◼   ► And Tesla's time estimates are never right with traffic,

00:24:52 ◼   ► and it is not very good navigating

00:24:55 ◼   ► around traffic-heavy cities.

00:24:56 ◼   ► Like I've made the mistake of following it

00:24:57 ◼   ► a couple times for Manhattan,

00:24:59 ◼   ► and it was a disaster every time.

00:25:02 ◼   ► And it was not that driving in Manhattan

00:25:04 ◼   ► had to be a disaster, it just made really bad choices

00:25:06 ◼   ► and I followed them.

00:25:07 ◼   ► And then I would look over and like,

00:25:09 ◼   ► oh, if I would have just stayed on the highway

00:25:11 ◼   ► one more exit, I would have bypassed all of this.

00:25:13 ◼   ► That took me 40 minutes.

00:25:15 ◼   ► So overall Tesla's head unit is,

00:25:19 ◼   ► or like the Navigate system is, it's good.

00:25:22 ◼   ► I love having the big screen.

00:25:24 ◼   ► However, I wish they'd put more resources into that

00:25:27 ◼   ► because it seems like they haven't really touched that

00:25:30 ◼   ► in a long time.

00:25:31 ◼   ► and for them to be putting all this amazing effort

00:25:34 ◼   ► into cool AI features and stuff, that's nice.

00:25:37 ◼   ► And if you look at the big picture,

00:25:39 ◼   ► if these things end up saving lives, that's awesome,

00:25:42 ◼   ► and that is more important.

00:25:43 ◼   ► But at the same time, as a customer of their car,

00:25:46 ◼   ► I do wish the system was better.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And it is kind of weird that such a tech-forward company

00:25:52 ◼   ► has kind of dropped the ball on the basic features

00:25:56 ◼   ► of their technology in the car facing the user.

00:26:00 ◼   ► Also, the touch screen is just really sluggish.

00:26:03 ◼   ► Navigating the map is very, very low frame rate.

00:26:07 ◼   ► It's kind of like navigating Google Maps on a Pentium 3.

00:26:12 ◼   ► It's not like using an iPad.

00:26:14 ◼   ► It's not at all like that.

00:26:16 ◼   ► It's very sluggish and there's all this latency

00:26:18 ◼   ► in the interface and you do kind of expect more

00:26:22 ◼   ► from a car of that caliber.

00:26:23 ◼   ► - So features aside, getting back to the rebooting

00:26:27 ◼   ► your car and stuff, you kind of, well, I don't know, it's hard to separate it from the features

00:26:32 ◼   ► when talking about this, but I think a lot of regular people have this feeling, and it's

00:26:37 ◼   ► easy for us to slip into it too, it's like, when things were simpler and didn't have as

00:26:42 ◼   ► much computer stuff, they were more reliable because there were fewer things that can go

00:26:46 ◼   ► wrong, and as soon as they started adding software to their stuff, like when we talked

00:26:50 ◼   ► about this with smart TV, that old smart TV post I had from CES, so worst products through

00:26:54 ◼   ► software. They had all this software, and it just makes the thing less reliable and

00:26:58 ◼   ► more annoying to use. And you're speaking of it in terms of the basics, like, they've

00:27:04 ◼   ► added a bunch of software to the car, which is good, and they're better at it than a lot

00:27:07 ◼   ► of other people, but on the other hand, it's also less reliable. In my terrible, terrible

00:27:11 ◼   ► infotainment, if you want to even call it that system on my Honda Accord, I've never

00:27:15 ◼   ► had to reboot it, but it's just terrible all the time. So that's kind of like in the in-between

00:27:19 ◼   ► phase where everything is not as simple as it used to be, like on my wife's Accord that

00:27:23 ◼   ► has no infotainment screen at all.

00:27:25 ◼   ► That was, you know, it's simple, fixed function,

00:27:27 ◼   ► everything implemented in hardware

00:27:29 ◼   ► with some very rudimentary firmware, you would even call it.

00:27:33 ◼   ► No sort of general purpose touch screen menu system software,

00:27:37 ◼   ► like nothing like that.

00:27:38 ◼   ► There's a bunch of CPU's in there,

00:27:40 ◼   ► there's a bunch of memory,

00:27:40 ◼   ► but they're all basically like little embedded systems.

00:27:43 ◼   ► That's like as far as the car industry can go

00:27:46 ◼   ► along the lines of like everything is super reliable.

00:27:48 ◼   ► And as we all know as programmers,

00:27:50 ◼   ► but it's sometimes easy to forget as consumers,

00:27:53 ◼   ► As soon as you make real live software like a GUI, you can't make it the same way as an

00:27:58 ◼   ► embedded system.

00:27:59 ◼   ► You have to have a GUI framework and an API and regular application development for human

00:28:04 ◼   ► interaction as opposed to this is custom software for this little chip that controls the radio.

00:28:13 ◼   ► The more you start making a platform, the more you start making what we know is like

00:28:16 ◼   ► a PC style platform where you build applications on top of it where you're farther away from

00:28:21 ◼   ► that ideal embedded system that just has like a ROM or something and you just get all the

00:28:25 ◼   ► bugs out of it and you get it right.

00:28:27 ◼   ► If there are bugs, there are sort of known bugs.

00:28:28 ◼   ► Once you start having real live software, there's nothing so far that we as humans have

00:28:34 ◼   ► been able to figure out how to do to make that software as reliable as the thing without

00:28:41 ◼   ► software without sacrificing huge things like just, okay, we'll do space probe reliability

00:28:49 ◼   ► tricks, but it will take us years and years to write a very small amount of code and the

00:28:53 ◼   ► limitations are so onerous that no one would ever want to do anything that way.

00:28:56 ◼   ► Unless you're writing a space probe, in which case you have no choice, right?

00:28:59 ◼   ► But cars are not space probes, the cost-benefit ratios are different.

00:29:03 ◼   ► So bottom line is, once you add software to cars, you have to reboot your car.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Like essentially that is inevitable.

00:29:08 ◼   ► We do want software to be added to our cars, because we think it's a better user interface

00:29:12 ◼   ► and they can do a lot of stuff, but you will have to reboot your car.

00:29:14 ◼   ► Like there's no, like, if only you had tried harder Tesla, then Marco wouldn't have had

00:29:18 ◼   ► to reboot his car. There's a sliding scale of quality, but a car with software is never

00:29:25 ◼   ► going to be as reliable as the car with the hardware radio, because the hardware radio

00:29:31 ◼   ► either works or it doesn't, and when it stops working, you throw it out and you put in a

00:29:33 ◼   ► new hardware radio, and for the life of that hardware radio, it doesn't change, there's

00:29:36 ◼   ► no firmware updates, there's no software being sent to it, and it's doing so much less, it's

00:29:39 ◼   ► doing so, so much less than Marco's thing. It's like pulling images and doing GPS and

00:29:44 ◼   ► navigating and talking to you and putting images up on the screen. It's doing so much

00:29:48 ◼   ► much less. Like it's not as if, you know, it's this magic sauce. When you do more stuff,

00:29:52 ◼   ► it's more complicated. Software has bugs. The more software you have, the more bugs

00:29:55 ◼   ► you have. And until we get like a sort of emergent AI to write and fix our software

00:30:00 ◼   ► for us, that seems to be the way of things probably for most of our life. So we should

00:30:05 ◼   ► just kind of get used to this. Now, the features discussion, I think, is a separate issue,

00:30:08 ◼   ► which Mark was saying, like, you know, you're going to have bugs, you have a lot of software,

00:30:12 ◼   ► spend more of your time here instead of less of your time there. And we say the same thing

00:30:15 ◼   ► about Apple, especially on the Mac.

00:30:17 ◼   ► If you're not, don't try to look for the next big feature, Ed.

00:30:19 ◼   ► Why don't you just make all the features that are already there much more reliable?

00:30:22 ◼   ► And that definitely is possible, and it is something Tesla should be doing.

00:30:25 ◼   ► But whenever I feel high and mighty about the fact that I never had to reboot my cord,

00:30:29 ◼   ► I realize it's only because it doesn't really have as much software and features as

00:30:32 ◼   ► Marco's car does.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And as soon as it does, it's going to be just as bad.

00:30:37 ◼   ► And we as programmers understand why that happens, because software without bugs doesn't

00:30:42 ◼   ► exist.

00:30:44 ◼   ► More software, more bugs.

00:30:46 ◼   ► - I see what you did there.

00:30:47 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:30:48 ◼   ► - Is that depressing?

00:30:49 ◼   ► I don't know, but like, you know,

00:30:51 ◼   ► that's the way of things.

00:30:52 ◼   ► I feel like we should understand that better than anyone

00:30:54 ◼   ► because we do it for a living

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00:32:38 ◼   ► Jamie has written in and they asked, "I'm surprised that the clocks in different computer

00:32:43 ◼   ► recording devices can't keep frame accurate time. I say frame since I come from the film

00:32:47 ◼   ► world, but you know, accurate to a 24th or 30th of a second. This has been solved in

00:32:52 ◼   ► sound recorders and cameras since the 50s and 60s, using a quartz crystal with the inaccuracy

00:32:56 ◼   ► of a few parts per million. Computers can't provide the accuracy of a quartz watch. It's

00:32:59 ◼   ► so nuts." Marco, would you like to comment?

00:33:02 ◼   ► >> Marco: Yeah, so this is in response to my discussion about audio drift being a problem

00:33:06 ◼   ► and long podcast recordings where basically when your sound card is sampling your microphone

00:33:13 ◼   ► at 44,100 times per second, then over the course of like a two hour recording, what

00:33:20 ◼   ► your computer thinks is the correct time and the number of samples it has recorded might

00:33:24 ◼   ► be off from your co-host's computer by like half a second to one second. And it's just

00:33:31 ◼   ► due to imprecision between the computers.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Like, my sound chip might just be, you know,

00:33:36 ◼   ► .0001% less accurate than yours,

00:33:39 ◼   ► but when you're doing 44,100 samples per second

00:33:42 ◼   ► over two hours, that could start to add up

00:33:44 ◼   ► to something noticeable, 'cause it only takes

00:33:46 ◼   ► like a half second for the two tracks to be off

00:33:49 ◼   ► before you can really notice it.

00:33:50 ◼   ► My reply to Jamie's feedback here is,

00:33:53 ◼   ► I don't know why they can't do it.

00:33:54 ◼   ► I mean, if it's possible to do it somewhere else,

00:33:56 ◼   ► I don't know why, I'm sure there's a good reason,

00:33:58 ◼   ► 'cause this has been a problem for a long time.

00:34:00 ◼   ► One of the ways that this problem gets avoided

00:34:02 ◼   ► in professional equipment,

00:34:03 ◼   ► which Jamie's probably familiar with,

00:34:05 ◼   ► if you look at pro audio gear,

00:34:07 ◼   ► like really pro audio gear,

00:34:09 ◼   ► there is usually a clock input and output port on the back,

00:34:14 ◼   ► and you can use separate devices for clock generation.

00:34:17 ◼   ► So what they do is they don't rely on incredible precision

00:34:21 ◼   ► to make sure that this device and this device

00:34:23 ◼   ► have exactly the same precision on their clock chips.

00:34:26 ◼   ► No, they just outsource the problem.

00:34:28 ◼   ► They declare like one source of the clock rate

00:34:32 ◼   ► to be authoritative, and they just hardwire

00:34:35 ◼   ► all to each other and say, all right,

00:34:37 ◼   ► this device is providing the clock for me,

00:34:39 ◼   ► so my internal circuitry's not gonna do it.

00:34:40 ◼   ► This is the world I know very little about.

00:34:42 ◼   ► I just know that this exists, so if I'm getting

00:34:44 ◼   ► those details wrong, I apologize, but that's the gist of it.

00:34:47 ◼   ► That is how that world deals with it.

00:34:48 ◼   ► It's not by getting incredibly processed components.

00:34:51 ◼   ► It's simply by outsourcing the problem to one device

00:34:54 ◼   ► and saying, okay, you're the master of the clock.

00:34:57 ◼   ► I put this feedback in there because I had the same question when you were describing

00:34:59 ◼   ► it and I was thinking along the lines of, look, the clocks have to be pretty darn accurate

00:35:04 ◼   ► from one computer to the next.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Could it be instead that, because again we're not using real-time operating systems here

00:35:10 ◼   ► to record our audio, that it's easy to miss a frame here and there because some other

00:35:16 ◼   ► thing happens and it's not a big deal, you'll never notice it audio-wise, but if you add

00:35:20 ◼   ► that up, like in other words it's basically a software problem and not a hardware problem,

00:35:24 ◼   ► the quartz crystals in our computers are all close enough to each other that it wouldn't

00:35:29 ◼   ► matter but our computers aren't hardware audio recording devices, they're general purpose

00:35:33 ◼   ► computers and in the end it's a piece of software that's pulling samples off a bus and so many

00:35:37 ◼   ► things in the middle of it, missing a few things here and there. But I guess that wouldn't explain

00:35:42 ◼   ► systemic drift because if it was really a random error and it was equal on all our computers maybe

00:35:46 ◼   ► it would even out anyway. I don't know the answer either. Your theory sounds reasonable but I have

00:35:51 ◼   ► have the same questions about like look quartz crystals should be accurate and

00:35:55 ◼   ► matching but then again I didn't know about this whole thing of having a clock

00:35:57 ◼   ► being fed into multiple audio components so I don't know what to think so if you

00:36:01 ◼   ► are an audio person who does audio on computers and you know the definitive

00:36:04 ◼   ► answer please write in and tell us yeah that'd be great also for whatever it's

00:36:07 ◼   ► worth I've always noticed that laptops have way more drift than desktops Mac

00:36:14 ◼   ► pros have way less drift than IMAX like so it does seem to possibly be related

00:36:20 ◼   ► just like kind of the quality and the conditions of the components.

00:36:25 ◼   ► I wouldn't say like the components like a laptop may just be under more stress like

00:36:29 ◼   ► it's more likely to be thermal throttling up and down and doing other stuff like again I would

00:36:33 ◼   ► imagine that the clock crystals inside the related chips and all those things are of equal quality

00:36:38 ◼   ► but it's not it's a we are not solid state audio recording devices like a little handheld thing to

00:36:44 ◼   ► do it's a whole computer in there so so much can go wrong between the samples being pulled off this

00:36:49 ◼   ► this really complicated bus and going out to a file.

00:36:52 ◼   ► So anyway, please write in and tell us.

00:36:54 ◼   ► But we all see the results.

00:36:56 ◼   ► If you want to try to experiment yourself, feel free.

00:36:58 ◼   ► Do a double-ender podcast with two friends across the country

00:37:01 ◼   ► on a laptop and try to put the audio together

00:37:02 ◼   ► and you'll realize why you need Marco's thing.

00:37:05 ◼   ► - All right, let's see here.

00:37:07 ◼   ► So one of you put in here, and I'm quoting,

00:37:11 ◼   ► "The ARM Mac feedback that won't die."

00:37:14 ◼   ► - It won't.

00:37:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:37:16 ◼   ► People keep suggesting it.

00:37:17 ◼   ► It's been like, what, three months? Six months? This literally will not die.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And I feel like now, okay, fine, we will address it.

00:37:24 ◼   ► Quote, "It's obvious what's going on with the Mac lineup," colon, "Total ARM reboot."

00:37:29 ◼   ► This is from a tweet. This is a concise form of what everyone is telling us every time we complain about,

00:37:34 ◼   ► "Where are the new Macs? Why aren't they updating the Mac Pro? What's taking so long with the Mac Pro updates?

00:37:38 ◼   ► Everything says 'Don't buy' in the Mac buying guide thing on the MacRumors site.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Doesn't seem like they care about the Mac anymore." Everyone's like, "You dummies!

00:37:45 ◼   ► It's because every single Mac is being converted to ARM

00:37:47 ◼   ► and they're just taking a long time.

00:37:48 ◼   ► Well, I don't understand why you don't realize that.

00:37:50 ◼   ► Why don't you reply to my tweets,

00:37:51 ◼   ► "All the Macs are going ARM."

00:37:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:37:54 ◼   ► Maybe, maybe all the Macs are going ARM.

00:37:57 ◼   ► We've talked about that many, many times in the past.

00:38:00 ◼   ► A couple things I have to say about that

00:38:03 ◼   ► and the reason why we don't bring that up.

00:38:04 ◼   ► First of all, we've talked about ARM Macs forever

00:38:06 ◼   ► on past shows and all the different trade-offs inherent

00:38:08 ◼   ► and then we're not gonna rehash all that, right?

00:38:11 ◼   ► But first, if all the Macs are going ARM,

00:38:14 ◼   ► still kinda doesn't excuse the tremendous delay.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Like, look at the Intel transition.

00:38:20 ◼   ► They didn't stop selling PowerPC Macs

00:38:22 ◼   ► and not update them for three years

00:38:23 ◼   ► before the transition to x86, right?

00:38:26 ◼   ► And they knew that was coming for a long time.

00:38:27 ◼   ► You sell the old computers right along

00:38:30 ◼   ► until you tell the world,

00:38:31 ◼   ► "Hey world, we're changing to a new architecture."

00:38:34 ◼   ► - Well, in all fairness though, that's a bad example

00:38:36 ◼   ► because back then, the Mac was Apple's main product.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Like, they cared a lot more about it.

00:38:42 ◼   ► prioritize it a lot more engineering wise, these days it doesn't seem like it is that

00:38:46 ◼   ► high of a priority.

00:38:48 ◼   ► But if it's not a high priority, it's not a high priority whether it's changing or not.

00:38:51 ◼   ► And that gets back to last week's argument of like maybe it's not a high enough priority

00:38:54 ◼   ► to care to switch to ARM because then you'd have to develop ARM chips suitable for all

00:38:57 ◼   ► your Mac line and that costs a lot of money.

00:38:58 ◼   ► But anyway, the second thing is, and the conventional wisdom about the ARM transition is, if Apple

00:39:05 ◼   ► is going to convert to ARM, they have to essentially pre-announce it because developers need to

00:39:09 ◼   ► to get their stuff together,

00:39:10 ◼   ► the same way they pre-announced the x86 transition.

00:39:12 ◼   ► They didn't announce it and say,

00:39:13 ◼   ► "And you can buy an x86 Mac today."

00:39:15 ◼   ► Nope, they had to announce it to developers first,

00:39:17 ◼   ► and then developers could get like that test hardware,

00:39:19 ◼   ► it was like a Pentium 4 in a cheese grater case,

00:39:22 ◼   ► and you could make sure you recompile your apps

00:39:25 ◼   ► and update all the tools and blah, blah, blah.

00:39:27 ◼   ► So could be, could be that Apple

00:39:29 ◼   ► is converting their whole line to ARM,

00:39:32 ◼   ► but that is not the obvious explanation of what's going on,

00:39:37 ◼   ► And it's not even the number one most likely explanation.

00:39:39 ◼   ► It's probably like the number two or three

00:39:41 ◼   ► possible explanation.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And I would be very surprised if Apple

00:39:45 ◼   ► was converting the entire Mac-lined ARM

00:39:48 ◼   ► and didn't tell the world and developers

00:39:51 ◼   ► before you could buy the hardware.

00:39:52 ◼   ► So I don't know, anyone, you have anything else to add

00:39:55 ◼   ► about this eternal feedback that tells us we're adults,

00:39:59 ◼   ► we're not realizing it's a complete ARM reboot?

00:40:01 ◼   ► - Like it's a nice idea if you don't think about it

00:40:03 ◼   ► for too long or if you're not that familiar

00:40:05 ◼   ► with what would be involved or like the markets here.

00:40:08 ◼   ► I just don't think it's realistic.

00:40:09 ◼   ► I don't think there's, not to say that Apple couldn't

00:40:13 ◼   ► release a whole line of ARM Macs, but that--

00:40:15 ◼   ► - They totally could.

00:40:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, as we've talked about, and we're all

00:40:19 ◼   ► under the impression that they probably have

00:40:21 ◼   ► ARM OS X running in the labs and have for some time,

00:40:23 ◼   ► they probably just maintain it as like a parallel

00:40:26 ◼   ► just in case branch, but there really is just not

00:40:29 ◼   ► a lot of motivation for them to do that right now.

00:40:31 ◼   ► As we discussed, I'll summarize it briefly,

00:40:34 ◼   ► basically it would take a lot of work,

00:40:36 ◼   ► would have a lot of downsides,

00:40:38 ◼   ► and Intel just isn't bad enough yet.

00:40:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, what I get carrying back to is like,

00:40:44 ◼   ► ARM Macs, yes, no, whatever,

00:40:46 ◼   ► but the delay in updating all the Macs is unrelated,

00:40:50 ◼   ► because there's no reason why you would say,

00:40:52 ◼   ► because we're doing the ARM thing,

00:40:54 ◼   ► therefore we're gonna delay.

00:40:55 ◼   ► It's not as if they would say,

00:40:56 ◼   ► we don't have time to update those old cruddy Macs,

00:40:58 ◼   ► we're gonna take every person

00:41:00 ◼   ► who was working on Mac hardware before

00:41:02 ◼   ► and put them all on the ARM hardware,

00:41:04 ◼   ► that, you know, it doesn't make any sense.

00:41:07 ◼   ► Also because there have been massive delays in the past,

00:41:09 ◼   ► like the Cheesegrader Mac Pro not being updated forever,

00:41:11 ◼   ► and that wasn't explained by an ARM reboot either.

00:41:14 ◼   ► It's just plain old, like,

00:41:15 ◼   ► there's so many more explicable reasons about Skylight

00:41:17 ◼   ► having bugs and taking a long time to come out

00:41:19 ◼   ► and being delayed and them skipping generations,

00:41:21 ◼   ► like those are the actual reasons why there's a delay.

00:41:23 ◼   ► Even if they come out with a complete ARM reboot in a month,

00:41:26 ◼   ► I will still say this theory was wrong.

00:41:28 ◼   ► Why?

00:41:29 ◼   ► Because all those delays were not related

00:41:30 ◼   ► to the ARM reboot, they're related to all the things

00:41:31 ◼   ► we've talked about so many times.

00:41:32 ◼   ► are not—it's not speculation that they skipped chip generations. They did. They skipped

00:41:36 ◼   ► them. And then it's not speculation that Skylight was delayed and had rollout problems.

00:41:39 ◼   ► That's a real thing that happened. That alone is sufficient to explain the delay.

00:41:44 ◼   ► And what we're complaining about on the past shows is, "Hey, Apple, don't skip generations,

00:41:48 ◼   ► because if you do, any bump in Intel's plan makes your computers embarrassingly late."

00:41:53 ◼   ► Bingo. And by the way, update your GPUs.

00:41:55 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:41:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:41:58 ◼   ► - Well, and the other thing I just wanted to throw in there

00:42:01 ◼   ► really quickly is that it's been, for me personally,

00:42:05 ◼   ► less of an issue since my new job

00:42:07 ◼   ► and since I'm doing iOS development.

00:42:09 ◼   ► But in my last job, and a job or two before that as well,

00:42:14 ◼   ► all of the developers, generally speaking, used Macs.

00:42:18 ◼   ► But they all lived in VMware Fusion or Parallels

00:42:22 ◼   ► or VirtualBox if they really hated their lives.

00:42:26 ◼   ► And virtualizing against the same chipset is fairly easy.

00:42:31 ◼   ► You know, to have OS X running on x86

00:42:34 ◼   ► and then virtualize Windows, which is also running on x86,

00:42:37 ◼   ► that's fairly straightforward and easy.

00:42:39 ◼   ► If this was an ARM Mac trying to virtualize x86,

00:42:43 ◼   ► that would have just slowed everything down tremendously

00:42:45 ◼   ► in all likelihood, and would really be a potentially

00:42:50 ◼   ► very bad thing for business users that need to have VMs.

00:42:54 ◼   ► even business users that need VMs not for their day-to-day,

00:42:57 ◼   ► but for their one old legacy app that only runs on IE6.

00:43:01 ◼   ► And so they need to boot into XP and a VM

00:43:03 ◼   ► to use that one app.

00:43:05 ◼   ► Like that happened a lot in past jobs.

00:43:08 ◼   ► And maybe if it's just that one app in IE6,

00:43:11 ◼   ► you can deal with it being slow.

00:43:12 ◼   ► But I mean, up until this job, I lived in VMware Fusion

00:43:15 ◼   ► and I was developing in VMware Fusion.

00:43:18 ◼   ► And it would probably be a lot worse

00:43:21 ◼   ► if the Mac in which I was using wasn't Intel.

00:43:24 ◼   ► And to the point that I would probably have to use

00:43:26 ◼   ► some crappy Dell or Lenovo or something like that.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And that would be just sad.

00:43:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, Microsoft did take a run at this ARM transition

00:43:33 ◼   ► with whatever the Windows for ARM thing

00:43:35 ◼   ► for their Surface thing, and that's not going so well.

00:43:38 ◼   ► And they did it badly, they didn't commit.

00:43:40 ◼   ► They're just like, well, we're also gonna have

00:43:41 ◼   ► an ARM version of Windows, that's cool, right guys?

00:43:43 ◼   ► And the market was like, not that cool

00:43:47 ◼   ► 'cause we need to run our x86 software.

00:43:48 ◼   ► Yeah, the only way to do it is the way Apple does it,

00:43:50 ◼   ► which is like, look, we're changing everything

00:43:51 ◼   ► from 68K to PowerPC, get on board,

00:43:54 ◼   ► and if they do an ARM transition on Mac,

00:43:55 ◼   ► I feel like they're gonna do the same thing.

00:43:57 ◼   ► They're not gonna let the two computers live on,

00:43:58 ◼   ► which will mean exactly like Casey said,

00:44:00 ◼   ► if you've gotta run that x86 stuff in virtualization,

00:44:02 ◼   ► you're gonna be super sad,

00:44:03 ◼   ► and it's not gonna be feasible.

00:44:06 ◼   ► It's gonna be like the bad old days

00:44:08 ◼   ► when I ran virtual PC to run x86 software on PowerPC,

00:44:11 ◼   ► and it was so slow.

00:44:13 ◼   ► Oh, just the worst.

00:44:14 ◼   ► - Do you remember, I think we talked about this here

00:44:17 ◼   ► at some point, but they had the daughter cards

00:44:20 ◼   ► for old, old, old Macs.

00:44:21 ◼   ► I remember hearing about this when I was a kid.

00:44:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, but they had 486s on them and stuff.

00:44:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was basically just a whole PC on a card.

00:44:27 ◼   ► - Yep, that's what it was. - Right, right.

00:44:29 ◼   ► And this was just so that you could have

00:44:32 ◼   ► a somewhat livable virtualization experience on ancient Macs.

00:44:36 ◼   ► All right, one last piece of follow-up,

00:44:37 ◼   ► and then we are finally done.

00:44:39 ◼   ► - I can't believe we're still in follow-up.

00:44:40 ◼   ► - I know, especially since we recorded, what,

00:44:42 ◼   ► two nights ago, three nights ago?

00:44:43 ◼   ► How is this possible?

00:44:44 ◼   ► - These are topics, come on, these are really just topics.

00:44:46 ◼   ► No, these are all—I can justify every single one of these for being follow-up, and so can

00:44:51 ◼   ► you, because you know what they're about. Apple is follow-up. We talked about it last

00:44:54 ◼   ► episode.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Oh, stop it. I have issues with long follow-up, but it just so happens that we have long follow-up.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Gwyneth Paltrow and Will.I.Am, which we sort of kind of knew, and Gary Vaynerchuk—I hope

00:45:04 ◼   ► I pronounced that right—

00:45:05 ◼   ► You did.

00:45:06 ◼   ► —are going to be the advisors for Planet of the Apps. That was just announced—was

00:45:09 ◼   ► that today or yesterday? Sometime recently, as we record this.

00:45:13 ◼   ► as a—Gwenyth Paltrow is going to be a mentor to the contestants, so I guess she's there

00:45:17 ◼   ► for just moral support and motivates them. I'm not quite sure what her credentials

00:45:22 ◼   ► are to help people develop applications, but you go, guys. Anyway, and she's famous.

00:45:27 ◼   ► And Vaynerchuk is a VC, so I guess he's on the VC side of the Shark Tank fence. Will

00:45:34 ◼   ► I Am is a famous person who likes Apple, who has worked with Apple a lot, and he's an

00:45:38 ◼   ► entertainment industry person, and I guess that's relevant to building apps if you're

00:45:41 ◼   ► affiliated entertainment, and they will serve as advisors,

00:45:45 ◼   ► which I'm not sure is different than a mentor.

00:45:47 ◼   ► Anyway, if you're wondering who they're gonna get

00:45:48 ◼   ► to be on the show, Vaynerchuk, I could've,

00:45:50 ◼   ► like that's right up the middle of what I would expect

00:45:52 ◼   ► in VCs who want to promote themselves and their VC-ness.

00:45:55 ◼   ► - Well, Vaynerchuk is not quite really a VC.

00:45:59 ◼   ► He does his own stuff, he's like a business consultant.

00:46:02 ◼   ► He came up through Wine Library TV,

00:46:05 ◼   ► and then came up and developed this promotional company

00:46:08 ◼   ► with a bunch of his own media projects,

00:46:10 ◼   ► He's basically a media personality and a business speaker

00:46:14 ◼   ► and business consultant and everything.

00:46:15 ◼   ► - Did he do Corked with Dan Benjamin

00:46:17 ◼   ► or was that a different guy?

00:46:18 ◼   ► - No, that's Dan Siederholm, I believe.

00:46:20 ◼   ► But Gary Vaynerchuk, he got famous by having this

00:46:25 ◼   ► really quite amazing very early video series,

00:46:28 ◼   ► I don't even know if it was on YouTube,

00:46:30 ◼   ► I think it was on YouTube but I'm not positive,

00:46:32 ◼   ► called Wine Library TV.

00:46:33 ◼   ► His family owns this big wine retailer in New Jersey

00:46:38 ◼   ► and every day he would just go and do this five minute video

00:46:43 ◼   ► featuring a couple of wine reviews

00:46:45 ◼   ► from a really New Jersey middle class approach to wine.

00:46:50 ◼   ► So it was very low BS, reviewing low cost stuff,

00:46:55 ◼   ► and he was very good at describing how it tasted,

00:46:58 ◼   ► like oh this tastes like grass.

00:46:59 ◼   ► He was surprisingly charismatic and excellent

00:47:03 ◼   ► at this seemingly boring topic of wine reviews.

00:47:07 ◼   ► Anyway, so then his whole career kind of ballooned after that

00:47:10 ◼   ► of being this kind of outrageous, loud guy

00:47:13 ◼   ► who promotes stuff and talks to businesses

00:47:16 ◼   ► about how to do stuff.

00:47:17 ◼   ► But actually, I would say of this list of people,

00:47:20 ◼   ► he is probably by far the most qualified to advise people

00:47:24 ◼   ► on how to do their app stuff.

00:47:27 ◼   ► Although, I admit I have not followed his work

00:47:29 ◼   ► very closely recently, but from what he has done

00:47:33 ◼   ► in the past, he's definitely more related

00:47:36 ◼   ► and is better at knowing how to promote stuff.

00:47:40 ◼   ► - Real time follow up, Gary Vaynerchuk did buy corked.

00:47:43 ◼   ► He bought it from the two that,

00:47:45 ◼   ► Dan Zenerholm and Dan Benjamin.

00:47:47 ◼   ► Yeah, and by the way, I found this out by Googling

00:47:49 ◼   ► and selling the site winecast.net.

00:47:53 ◼   ► Brief aside, if we could all go to winecast.net everybody

00:47:55 ◼   ► and look at the logo in the upper left hand corner.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Do not make your logo look like a condom.

00:48:02 ◼   ► - Oh, goodness gracious. - Oh wow.

00:48:04 ◼   ► - That's no good. - With a tiny little sperm

00:48:06 ◼   ► crawling its way, bad job, Winecast.

00:48:08 ◼   ► - I'm also seeing a PHP warning being emitted

00:48:11 ◼   ► into the page on top.

00:48:12 ◼   ► - MySQL, GNOME Fields, expect parameter one

00:48:14 ◼   ► to be a resource, Boolean given.

00:48:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:18 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:48:18 ◼   ► - That's fine.

00:48:19 ◼   ► Anyway, bad logo.

00:48:21 ◼   ► - All right, so yeah, so it's Gary Vaynerchuk,

00:48:23 ◼   ► will.i.am, who I believe we had already known

00:48:26 ◼   ► was involved with this from a producer standpoint

00:48:29 ◼   ► or something, or advisor or something like that.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:48:32 ◼   ► - And like you said, Gwyneth Paltrow.

00:48:34 ◼   ► So I don't know, I mean, I don't think this is really meant for us, and we talked about

00:48:38 ◼   ► this a lot in the past, we don't need to go into this too much, but I don't think this

00:48:41 ◼   ► is a show meant for us.

00:48:42 ◼   ► I think it's, in theory, a show meant for people who are not really in the industry.

00:48:47 ◼   ► But I'm curious to see it.

00:48:50 ◼   ► I will certainly watch, just like, you know, the new Top Gear, I will watch an episode

00:48:54 ◼   ► or two, and, assuming, is it on Apple Music?

00:48:57 ◼   ► So I guess maybe I can't, because I don't subscribe to Apple Music.

00:49:00 ◼   ► But anyway, if I can, I will...

00:49:01 ◼   ► You can watch it off my Plex server.

00:49:03 ◼   ► Yeah, right. If I can, I will watch an episode or two. And I suspect it will not be very

00:49:09 ◼   ► good, but you know what, you don't know until you try. So we'll see what happens.

00:49:12 ◼   ► I'll watch it for Gary Vee. I like him. So I will gladly watch it for him.

00:49:16 ◼   ► Fair enough. All right, at this point, I think we are officially out of follow-ups. So what

00:49:20 ◼   ► else is awesome these days? Yeah, we need a break and a cigarette.

00:49:24 ◼   ► No, I don't smoke. Neither do I. None of us do. Come on.

00:49:28 ◼   ► I can see Jon, like, sneaking under the deck or something.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Smoking is not the least likely thing you'll ever see me doing.

00:49:40 ◼   ► If any of the three of us had a secret smoking habit, Jon would be by far the most amusing

00:49:44 ◼   ► one to have.

00:49:46 ◼   ► Oh goodness.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Smoking out like under the tree that drops the acorns hitting every so often.

00:49:53 ◼   ► I told you, the tree is defeated for the most part.

00:49:57 ◼   ► All the limbs are cut off.

00:49:59 ◼   ► Unquestionable limb when I look up might still be in line of sight, but a lot of that tree

00:50:03 ◼   ► is all gone now.

00:50:04 ◼   ► We've solved that problem.

00:50:05 ◼   ► That's why it's safe for my wife's new Accord.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Now you can get your Ferrari.

00:50:07 ◼   ► Not safe for a Ferrari because you don't want to leave that outside in the winter and

00:50:11 ◼   ► you don't want to squeeze it into my garage.

00:50:13 ◼   ► We are also sponsored this week by Harry's.

00:50:18 ◼   ► Go to harrys.com/ATP to get $5 off your first purchase.

00:50:22 ◼   ► You know how razor companies keep putting out new models and raising their already high

00:50:26 ◼   ► prices?

00:50:27 ◼   ► Harry's does not believe in upcharging.

00:50:30 ◼   ► They just made a bunch of improvements to their razors

00:50:32 ◼   ► and they're keeping prices exactly the same.

00:50:35 ◼   ► So it's still just $2 per blade cartridge

00:50:37 ◼   ► compared to four or more dollars you will pay

00:50:39 ◼   ► for the big brands at the drugstore.

00:50:41 ◼   ► So Harry's five blade razors now with these new improvements

00:50:43 ◼   ► now include, they still have the same five blades,

00:50:46 ◼   ► they now have a softer flex hinge

00:50:48 ◼   ► for a more comfortable glide,

00:50:49 ◼   ► they have a trimmer blade for hard to reach places,

00:50:51 ◼   ► they have a lubricating strip on one side,

00:50:54 ◼   ► and a textured handle for more control when it's wet.

00:50:56 ◼   ► so it had like a rubber grip on the handle now.

00:50:59 ◼   ► So, Harry's was founded by two friends

00:51:01 ◼   ► to offer people a great shave at a fair price.

00:51:04 ◼   ► These razors, they market them mostly towards men,

00:51:07 ◼   ► however, we hear from lots of women,

00:51:09 ◼   ► these are really unisex razors and women use them too

00:51:12 ◼   ► and they are great for both.

00:51:13 ◼   ► Now, quality's 100% guaranteed.

00:51:16 ◼   ► If you don't love your shave,

00:51:17 ◼   ► Harry's will fully refund your money.

00:51:19 ◼   ► And these blades are made in this incredible

00:51:22 ◼   ► German blade factory that Harry's bought

00:51:24 ◼   ► and they sell their own razors direct from this factory

00:51:28 ◼   ► and because of selling direct and they own the factory

00:51:30 ◼   ► and there's no retailers or anything else,

00:51:31 ◼   ► they literally charge you half the price or less

00:51:35 ◼   ► of what you're paying at the drugstore

00:51:36 ◼   ► for similar blades from big brands.

00:51:39 ◼   ► So I got the starter set today.

00:51:40 ◼   ► The Harry Starter Set is an amazing deal.

00:51:42 ◼   ► You get a weighted razor handle of your choice,

00:51:45 ◼   ► moisturizing shave cream, three precision engineered

00:51:48 ◼   ► five blade cartridges and a travel cover,

00:51:50 ◼   ► all for just 15 bucks.

00:51:52 ◼   ► And that's 15 bucks at the regular price,

00:51:54 ◼   ► But again, if you go to harrys.com/atp,

00:51:58 ◼   ► you will get $5 off your first purchase.

00:52:00 ◼   ► So that means you could get the starter kit for just 10 bucks

00:52:02 ◼   ► so that would be 10 bucks to cover handle, shaving cream,

00:52:06 ◼   ► and three blade cartridges.

00:52:07 ◼   ► That's incredible, that's an incredible deal.

00:52:09 ◼   ► So right now go to harrys.com/atp to claim that deal.

00:52:12 ◼   ► That's harrys.com/atp, thanks a lot.

00:52:15 ◼   ► - There's a rumor that Apple has pivoted their brand

00:52:23 ◼   ► and is going to be taking a different approach to the Apple TV, as in like the set top, the

00:52:31 ◼   ► television set sort of thing.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Again?

00:52:34 ◼   ► Again.

00:52:35 ◼   ► Recode reports that they're going to make the most baller TV guide ever.

00:52:40 ◼   ► That's a growth industry.

00:52:41 ◼   ► Yeah, right?

00:52:42 ◼   ► And I guess the plan is to be able to let you search and no matter where the thing you're

00:52:49 ◼   ► looking for may be, be it paid or not or whatever, it will figure out a way to get it to you,

00:52:56 ◼   ► presumably through your existing accounts at like Netflix or whatever, which I think

00:53:00 ◼   ► it can do already, but also perhaps by partnerships with some of the traditional TV folks, like

00:53:06 ◼   ► maybe ABC or CBS or something like that.

00:53:09 ◼   ► So I mean, this is kind of cool, and I would certainly be interested in it, but I mean,

00:53:15 ◼   ► Like you said, Marco, this is, I don't know, TV,

00:53:19 ◼   ► I don't wanna say it's not long for this world,

00:53:21 ◼   ► because I mean, it's been around for a long time,

00:53:22 ◼   ► and I don't see it going away that soon,

00:53:25 ◼   ► but I mean, is this the sign of major changes

00:53:29 ◼   ► in how we consume our television?

00:53:31 ◼   ► I mean, that and Netflix and Amazon

00:53:34 ◼   ► creating their own television shows.

00:53:38 ◼   ► I don't know, what do you think?

00:53:39 ◼   ► - This seems like kind of an extension

00:53:41 ◼   ► of what they're already trying to do with the Apple TV.

00:53:42 ◼   ► They already have Universal Search,

00:53:44 ◼   ► And it is, I think it is still limited to partners only,

00:53:48 ◼   ► on the Apple TV at least, if not on iOS.

00:53:51 ◼   ► So they already have like cross provider search with Siri

00:53:55 ◼   ► and being able to search for a TV show or movie or whatever

00:53:59 ◼   ► and say, all right, well it's available on Netflix,

00:54:01 ◼   ► on an HBO Go, and for my tune.

00:54:03 ◼   ► They can already list all this, that's already there.

00:54:06 ◼   ► So if this is just kind of an extension of that,

00:54:09 ◼   ► or an expansion of that, that's great, that's good.

00:54:14 ◼   ► I would question their ability to get these deals though

00:54:17 ◼   ► because it seems like we've been hearing reports

00:54:20 ◼   ► for what, three years now?

00:54:22 ◼   ► That Apple keeps trying to make a TV service,

00:54:25 ◼   ► like one grand new TV service to rule them all,

00:54:28 ◼   ► or something along those lines.

00:54:30 ◼   ► Honestly, there was a story I was making fun of

00:54:35 ◼   ► last week or whenever about Eddy Cue

00:54:38 ◼   ► walking into the meeting with TV executives

00:54:40 ◼   ► wearing shoes without socks and a Hawaiian shirt and jeans

00:54:43 ◼   ► whatever it was, and Apple's basically like,

00:54:47 ◼   ► we're Apple, screw you, method of negotiation

00:54:49 ◼   ► with TV companies, and who knows if that was real or not.

00:54:52 ◼   ► We don't really know how accurate that was.

00:54:56 ◼   ► - That was a story sourced from TV executives, by the way.

00:54:58 ◼   ► - Exactly. - Of course they're gonna say

00:55:00 ◼   ► the other side was unreasonable in our negotiation,

00:55:02 ◼   ► and they wore the wrong clothes.

00:55:03 ◼   ► - Exactly, so chances are, those details

00:55:07 ◼   ► are probably not 100% accurate,

00:55:10 ◼   ► but it was probably the gist of it.

00:55:12 ◼   ► it's very likely that that was the gist of what happened.

00:55:14 ◼   ► And we've heard similar attitudes,

00:55:17 ◼   ► we've heard of that before from both Eddy Cue and Apple.

00:55:21 ◼   ► So it wouldn't surprise me if the gist of this is true.

00:55:24 ◼   ► - I would say that the TV companies

00:55:26 ◼   ► are being more unreasonable in these scenarios.

00:55:29 ◼   ► If you are a TV company,

00:55:30 ◼   ► it seems like Apple's being unreasonable

00:55:31 ◼   ► because Apple is not budging on things they want you to do

00:55:34 ◼   ► that you are never gonna do.

00:55:35 ◼   ► But if you were to be a third party outside observer

00:55:38 ◼   ► and say what things are the TV people never going to do

00:55:41 ◼   ► what things does Apple want, you would say, "Eh, it's probably better for everyone involved,

00:55:46 ◼   ► or at least it's probably better for us as the consumer if TV companies who did what

00:55:50 ◼   ► Apple asked." But the question is, is it better for the TV companies? And maybe not, so that's

00:55:55 ◼   ► why we don't have a deal.

00:55:56 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing. I mean, we've heard for years now that Apple is, you know, they're

00:56:01 ◼   ► working on this new thing. And the details of what that new thing is shift slightly over

00:56:06 ◼   ► time, but the gist has been the same. They're working on some kind of TV plan that unifies

00:56:10 ◼   ► multiple TV sources, something or other, you know,

00:56:13 ◼   ► whether that's related to the new Apple TV or not.

00:56:15 ◼   ► That's been the plan for years now.

00:56:17 ◼   ► And it just seems like they aren't getting the deals.

00:56:20 ◼   ► And so maybe this approach they're taking to deal making,

00:56:24 ◼   ► they're walking in there as though they own the place.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And I think at one time, maybe they did at one time

00:56:32 ◼   ► have that kind of power in certain industries,

00:56:34 ◼   ► but I think it's pretty clear that

00:56:36 ◼   ► what they're doing isn't working.

00:56:37 ◼   ► And so when we see another report that says,

00:56:39 ◼   ► "Well, now the new thing is they're gonna be

00:56:42 ◼   ► "this version of this plan."

00:56:45 ◼   ► Well, show me any evidence from the past

00:56:47 ◼   ► that we should believe them on this.

00:56:48 ◼   ► Like, there's nothing.

00:56:50 ◼   ► - Well, that's why they're pivoting though,

00:56:51 ◼   ► because they've failed with the past approaches.

00:56:53 ◼   ► They're not sticking to the past approaches,

00:56:54 ◼   ► they're pivoting and trying new things.

00:56:56 ◼   ► But like, in some respects, I think Apple still feels

00:56:58 ◼   ► like time is on their side, and they may be right,

00:57:00 ◼   ► because the holdouts in all of this

00:57:03 ◼   ► are not the Netflixes of the world,

00:57:04 ◼   ► but it's like the ABC, NBC, Disney, you know, CBS,

00:57:08 ◼   ► Like, those are the difficult ones there, and all the local television, and all the

00:57:12 ◼   ► deals with other things.

00:57:13 ◼   ► So Apple's most recent pivot that we have in front of us in our houses now is like,

00:57:16 ◼   ► "The future of TV is apps, and we make Apple TV, and on your Apple TV you can find an app

00:57:20 ◼   ► for Major League Baseball, you can find an NFL app, you can find an app for ABC, CBS,

00:57:24 ◼   ► Netflix, Showtime, HBO.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Like, that's what you can find."

00:57:27 ◼   ► And this—I wouldn't even call this a pivot—but this latest rumor is basically that Apple's

00:57:33 ◼   ► new approach—sort of their version of the omnivorous box that I talked about in the

00:57:37 ◼   ► last show, they're like, "We will take in all content and provide you one unified interface."

00:57:41 ◼   ► Like the current Apple TV is like, "Here's your unified interface. It's a bunch of rounded

00:57:44 ◼   ► rectangles. Isn't that a great unified interface?" And you can do Siri search across them, you

00:57:49 ◼   ► know, like as this article says, like they already have a thing where people who make

00:57:54 ◼   ► the Disney app or the ESPN app or the NFL app, if you use Apple's APIs and make your

00:57:58 ◼   ► information searchable that when you say, "Show me whatever," that the Apple TV can

00:58:03 ◼   ► search across all of them. But it's not quite the same as a TV guide. Like a lot of what

00:58:06 ◼   ► a lot of people want to do is say, "What's on?" or "What are the series that are currently

00:58:11 ◼   ► running that are popular?" We can imagine a much better interface to television that

00:58:15 ◼   ► is independent of where the shows come from. TiVo does this, as many people have heard

00:58:19 ◼   ► about TiVo. TiVo has a thing where you can search for stuff and it's like, "Here's this

00:58:22 ◼   ► show. It's airing these episodes. These five are streaming. The season passes. Show the

00:58:25 ◼   ► different icons to see where you can get them from." But that's what we all want. We don't

00:58:28 ◼   ► want to have to switch inputs. We want one unified interface to everything the old way,

00:58:32 ◼   ► which Apple declined to participate in, which I still think would have been a good idea

00:58:35 ◼   ► because it shows so far no one has been able to do it so they could have been doing that old thing

00:58:38 ◼   ► anyway, is to just be a box that takes input from all the different places but nowadays TV doesn't

00:58:44 ◼   ► come from all these different sources from cable from these you know like it comes increasingly

00:58:49 ◼   ► across the internet but there's still these whole things that come across you know that all the

00:58:53 ◼   ► television networks as you still have the similar omnivore's box program but Apple has been able to

00:58:58 ◼   ► persuade the networks for the most part to put apps on their platform like we're getting close

00:59:02 ◼   ► guys, right? All we need to do, the last thing, is to give people like a unified

00:59:06 ◼   ► interface to that, to all that programming across all these apps, only

00:59:11 ◼   ► instead of the interface being here's a bunch of rounded rectangles, arrange them

00:59:13 ◼   ► how you want and pick the one you want, or talking to this terrible remote

00:59:17 ◼   ► control and try to find the show you want, we want to provide what people are

00:59:19 ◼   ► kind of used to, like a guide. Maybe it doesn't look like the big grid or

00:59:22 ◼   ► whatever, and we will we will be the face of television to people in the same way

00:59:25 ◼   ► that TiVo is the face of television to anyone who had TiVo, especially the days

00:59:28 ◼   ► before streaming services, but even with the streaming services it's kind of

00:59:31 ◼   ► worse because you've got to go find the client. But anyway, Apple wants to be the face of

00:59:34 ◼   ► television. The one unified interface, the one box, you never change inputs, it's always

00:59:38 ◼   ► on Apple TV, you can watch whatever you want. To do that, they need to make deals. The deals

00:59:43 ◼   ► are not happening because most of the deals are probably not in the interest of the networks.

00:59:45 ◼   ► And you can imagine if you're the network, like, if your only interest was, "We are the

00:59:49 ◼   ► network, we want to survive as a thing that can extract money," I think there's a lot

00:59:56 ◼   ► of problems with that long term anyway, but you would say, "Never give up the primacy

00:59:59 ◼   ► of, you know, never give up the interface to television to Apple. Like, don't let them

01:00:05 ◼   ► be the face of television. They are just decreasing your value, making you just one more source

01:00:09 ◼   ► of content. And then the only value you have is your ability to produce quality content

01:00:13 ◼   ► that people want to watch. And network television, for the most part, is terrified of that because

01:00:18 ◼   ► historically, they have not been really good at that. And it's only because of the legacy

01:00:22 ◼   ► of the fact that they have these certain frequencies in the airwaves that they're ABC, NBC, CBS,

01:00:26 ◼   ► you know, Fox or whatever, and although Fox arguably got its place by having quality content,

01:00:31 ◼   ► they're being outcompeted by HBO and Netflix and Amazon, for crying out loud in some cases,

01:00:38 ◼   ► in the "Hey, can we make interesting content that people want to watch?"

01:00:41 ◼   ► That's the only competition.

01:00:42 ◼   ► If it's like Apple is the interface and the programs come from these services that you

01:00:46 ◼   ► pay for and you pay for the service that has the shows you want, the networks are like,

01:00:51 ◼   ► "People are going to pay to watch NCIS colon some other word?"

01:00:54 ◼   ► Those people are really old and they're dying and everyone else is watching Game of Thrones

01:01:01 ◼   ► on streaming services.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And so of course they're terrified of that future.

01:01:04 ◼   ► But in the meantime, that basically means that Apple's strategy of like we are the unified

01:01:07 ◼   ► interface to all your television is a no-go because there's still enough television, particularly

01:01:12 ◼   ► live television, local news, and sports that is tied up behind owners and contracts for

01:01:19 ◼   ► companies that don't want to be basically disenfranchised.

01:01:23 ◼   ► So I don't know if this latest strategy of Apple is, I guess it's better than the old

01:01:27 ◼   ► ones and at least you can do something, but I don't know if it's ever going to work.

01:01:30 ◼   ► And I think the whole like, "Well, fine.

01:01:32 ◼   ► We don't have a deal," that Apple's trying to wait them out.

01:01:34 ◼   ► It's like, "Look, we don't have to do anything, network television and everything."

01:01:39 ◼   ► Netflix and HBO and Showtime and Amazon and AMC and all these other cable companies are

01:01:46 ◼   ► nibbling, coming at you from all sides.

01:01:49 ◼   ► They're making better content.

01:01:50 ◼   ► There's more of them.

01:01:51 ◼   ► are willing to pay for their services,

01:01:52 ◼   ► whereas they're only willing to pay for you

01:01:53 ◼   ► as part of a bundle.

01:01:54 ◼   ► You get to be over the air,

01:01:55 ◼   ► but all this legacy stuff, we'll just wait you out.

01:01:59 ◼   ► And so I feel like Apple is walking away from the table

01:02:00 ◼   ► with their flip flops and Hawaiian shirt and saying,

01:02:03 ◼   ► all right, well, we tried,

01:02:04 ◼   ► we made another run out of this time,

01:02:05 ◼   ► but time is on our side.

01:02:08 ◼   ► For every year you refuse to do a deal with us,

01:02:10 ◼   ► your competitors make you less and less relevant.

01:02:12 ◼   ► And when the generation of kids that's born today grows up,

01:02:15 ◼   ► they're not gonna care what the hell you are

01:02:17 ◼   ► and all their shows are gonna be in other networks.

01:02:19 ◼   ► And once that happens, we have good relationships

01:02:21 ◼   ► with the Netflixes of the world.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And they're already on our app platform,

01:02:25 ◼   ► and we just need to make a really good app platform.

01:02:26 ◼   ► They haven't quite done that yet.

01:02:28 ◼   ► But in the meantime, we will just

01:02:29 ◼   ► keep sliding that terrible remote around our rectangles

01:02:32 ◼   ► and being careful not to ever touch it while watching TV.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Don't touch it.

01:02:35 ◼   ► You'll mess everything up.

01:02:37 ◼   ► Honestly, do you think this is more about UI control

01:02:42 ◼   ► or more about just money?

01:02:44 ◼   ► If I had to take a guess, I don't

01:02:46 ◼   ► think the TV execs give two craps about the UI.

01:02:48 ◼   ► I think it all comes down to money.

01:02:50 ◼   ► Well, the money is the reason Apple won't do the deal because the other companies won't

01:02:55 ◼   ► do a deal that Apple—Apple wants a deal that's palatable to customers, and the parties

01:02:59 ◼   ► that have to be involved in that deal want more money.

01:03:01 ◼   ► Apple would have to charge too much for it.

01:03:03 ◼   ► That's why this never—that's basically what it comes down to.

01:03:06 ◼   ► So you're right, it does come down to money, but why do the networks want so much money?

01:03:10 ◼   ► Because it's not like the UI.

01:03:11 ◼   ► They just don't want to be taken out of the equation.

01:03:14 ◼   ► They want you to move your little rectangle to go to the ABC app.

01:03:17 ◼   ► They want you to know that ABC is a thing, a brand that means something, that the shows

01:03:21 ◼   ► are on ABC.

01:03:22 ◼   ► They don't want you to just say, "What's on?" and see a giant undifferentiated grid

01:03:27 ◼   ► with maybe an ABC logo somewhere on it and just say, "This is all television and I will

01:03:30 ◼   ► pick the show I want to watch," because again, that reduces them entirely to the quality

01:03:34 ◼   ► of the shows they produce.

01:03:35 ◼   ► And they don't want that because they need the other intangible BS branding stuff to

01:03:42 ◼   ► prop up the fact that they make worse shows than other people.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Like it used to be the fact that like they are channel four and they come over the airwaves

01:03:49 ◼   ► and they're one of the five sets of channels that come in good on your little rabbit ears

01:03:53 ◼   ► and therefore they have a default importance that you cannot argue with even if all their

01:03:57 ◼   ► shows are crap.

01:03:59 ◼   ► If they're just another provider of video behind a unified interface, undifferentiated,

01:04:04 ◼   ► made not any different than any of the other services that some of which may not even be

01:04:08 ◼   ► "real TV stations" like Amazon, that's not good for them.

01:04:13 ◼   ► So that's, you know, you're right that money, I think, is definitely a part of it and why

01:04:17 ◼   ► the deals don't happen.

01:04:18 ◼   ► But why do they want so much money?

01:04:19 ◼   ► What's the big deal?

01:04:21 ◼   ► Because if they're going to give up that role, they want to be paid for it handsomely because,

01:04:25 ◼   ► you know, they're CBS or whatever.

01:04:28 ◼   ► I feel like this is AT&T and the iPhone are singular at the time and the iPhone all over

01:04:33 ◼   ► again.

01:04:34 ◼   ► It's not exactly analogous because I think, to my recollection, AT&T are singular at the

01:04:40 ◼   ► time was really not doing terribly well and Verizon was just eating their lunch and I

01:04:46 ◼   ► think they were kind of on the ropes and knew it.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And to their credit, they had the wherewithal to know that they were on the ropes and make

01:04:51 ◼   ► this really onerous deal with Apple from their perspective.

01:04:57 ◼   ► But it ended up paying out for them big time.

01:05:00 ◼   ► And I can't help but wonder who's going to be the singular of the big American TV channels,

01:05:08 ◼   ► you know, the Fox, the ABC, the CBS, and NBC.

01:05:12 ◼   ► You know, who's gonna be the first one of them

01:05:13 ◼   ► to say uncle and make a deal?

01:05:16 ◼   ► And will that be better that way?

01:05:19 ◼   ► Will it be worse?

01:05:20 ◼   ► Will they end up becoming more popular

01:05:23 ◼   ► and rolling in cash?

01:05:25 ◼   ► Or are they just gonna be hastening their own demise?

01:05:28 ◼   ► - Well, and the difference here is like,

01:05:30 ◼   ► you only need one cell carrier.

01:05:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:05:32 ◼   ► Like once you got the cell carrier,

01:05:33 ◼   ► now you have an iPhone as a product,

01:05:35 ◼   ► but until you get them all,

01:05:36 ◼   ► it's kind of like the music label.

01:05:37 ◼   ► of iTunes that the iTunes Music Store had rolled out

01:05:39 ◼   ► with some of the labels but not other ones is tough.

01:05:42 ◼   ► - Honestly, we have not seen Apple score

01:05:46 ◼   ► a lot of great content deals in recent years.

01:05:49 ◼   ► I really do question whether,

01:05:52 ◼   ► obviously anything we hear about these deals

01:05:55 ◼   ► is always rumor and speculation and everything

01:05:57 ◼   ► 'cause they're not gonna go talk about

01:05:59 ◼   ► how they went or anything,

01:05:59 ◼   ► but it just seems like Apple's negotiating position

01:06:03 ◼   ► might just be wrong or possibly too arrogant

01:06:08 ◼   ► or asking too much or whatever the conditions are.

01:06:11 ◼   ► - But it depends if you think time is on their side.

01:06:13 ◼   ► If you think time is on their side,

01:06:14 ◼   ► it's like the longer we wait,

01:06:16 ◼   ► the next time we come to the table,

01:06:17 ◼   ► we will be even stronger because you will have been weakened

01:06:20 ◼   ► by your internet native competitors.

01:06:22 ◼   ► And I think that's been true.

01:06:24 ◼   ► Every time that Apple has gone back to the table,

01:06:25 ◼   ► they have been in a stronger position

01:06:27 ◼   ► because the networks have been in a weaker position,

01:06:28 ◼   ► not because of anything Apple did,

01:06:29 ◼   ► but because of what the competitors

01:06:31 ◼   ► to the networks have done.

01:06:32 ◼   ► So I think, I mean, you may argue if they don't make a deal,

01:06:36 ◼   ► then someone else will come and sweep this way.

01:06:38 ◼   ► But they are developing the Apple TV.

01:06:40 ◼   ► It is improving, unlike some other products

01:06:43 ◼   ► they might have where the Apple TV was in a drought

01:06:46 ◼   ► and now it's sort of on the track again.

01:06:49 ◼   ► It's just a question of whether someone else

01:06:51 ◼   ► is gonna get there first.

01:06:52 ◼   ► But nobody, like as far as I'm aware,

01:06:54 ◼   ► nobody has deals with all these networks.

01:06:55 ◼   ► Because of the iTunes thing, everyone is scared to be like,

01:06:58 ◼   ► as an industry, we can't all sign a deal

01:07:01 ◼   ► with one company because that takes away too much power. So let's all just bargain individually

01:07:05 ◼   ► with each things like Hulu is, I forget who's behind Hulu, is that NBC or Comcast, you know,

01:07:10 ◼   ► Cable Town, whatever. It's balkanized because everyone's afraid to give one technology company

01:07:15 ◼   ► too much power. But I don't know, I'm kind of in favor of not doing a deal that is unfavorable

01:07:24 ◼   ► because if they do that deal, like financially speaking, they'd have to take a loss on every

01:07:27 ◼   ► subscription or they would have to make it too expensive and it would be unappealing.

01:07:31 ◼   ► Like they have to undercut cable is what they have to do.

01:07:33 ◼   ► They have to be able to offer a thing that's like,

01:07:35 ◼   ► this is like cable, but either cheaper and way better

01:07:39 ◼   ► or way better and around the same price.

01:07:41 ◼   ► They can't say this is like cable, but 25% more,

01:07:44 ◼   ► but hey, there's a bunch of good features

01:07:45 ◼   ► 'cause no one's gonna go for that.

01:07:47 ◼   ► - All right.

01:07:48 ◼   ► So Apple today has announced or let slip,

01:07:53 ◼   ► I'm not entirely clear what happened here, but--

01:07:55 ◼   ► - Announced.

01:07:56 ◼   ► - Oh, it was announced, okay.

01:07:57 ◼   ► 'Cause I saw a tweet fly by of somebody taking like

01:07:59 ◼   ► picture of a slide at some conference or something like that, and so I wasn't sure

01:08:03 ◼   ► if this, like, leaked or if it was formally announced. Anyway, Apple, I guess,

01:08:07 ◼   ► announced that they are doing a bug bounty program, and so if you're not

01:08:11 ◼   ► familiar with what that is, basically that means if you find a bug in some of

01:08:17 ◼   ► Apple's code, and the specifics, you know, change per company, but generally

01:08:22 ◼   ► speaking the way it works is if you can exercise it and show Apple, rather than,

01:08:26 ◼   ► letting it out into the wild, if you come to Apple and say, "Hey, I found a bug. Here's

01:08:29 ◼   ► how you exercise it," and you do the "right thing" in quotes, then they will pay you,

01:08:36 ◼   ► in some cases, a tremendous amount of money for having done the right thing and brought

01:08:41 ◼   ► that bug to them and not just used it for nefarious purposes.

01:08:46 ◼   ► And what's also interesting, apparently, if you choose to donate the money that they give

01:08:51 ◼   ► which in some cases is up to $200,000, they will match that donation one for one.

01:08:56 ◼   ► So that $200,000 hypothetically becomes $400,000.

01:09:00 ◼   ► I think this is a great thing. The prices, the relative prices, I thought were a little bit weird.

01:09:06 ◼   ► Like $200,000 was for like the bootloader or something like that, or something pretty low-level,

01:09:12 ◼   ► which made sense. But like the secure enclave was half that or maybe even a quarter that,

01:09:18 ◼   ► which struck me is very weird. I would assume that the Secure Enclave, if you found a bug

01:09:21 ◼   ► in that, that would be worth easily as much as the highest reward, easily worth $200,000.

01:09:30 ◼   ► You have to price them not just how valuable it is to find the vulnerability, but how difficult,

01:09:36 ◼   ► which translates to how many vulnerabilities you think people will find. So it's kind of

01:09:40 ◼   ► depressing where you're like, what is it, sandboxing vulnerabilities is only $25,000.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Sandboxing vulnerabilities are serious, but I think Apple thinks there's probably a lot

01:09:47 ◼   ► of them and they're probably not as hard to find as boot ROM vulnerability.

01:09:51 ◼   ► So it's a balancing act of like how do you price these things?

01:09:54 ◼   ► You can't just price them on how important they are if you're kind of afraid that you

01:09:57 ◼   ► have like tons of sandboxing bugs because you will, you know, if it's 200K each and

01:10:02 ◼   ► you get 300 of them, that starts to add up.

01:10:04 ◼   ► Even Apple doesn't like to just give away money.

01:10:06 ◼   ► But the charity thing is a total Apple move to kind of like guilt you into not keeping

01:10:09 ◼   ► the money yourself by spending even more of their own money.

01:10:14 ◼   ► This has been, I think we had something way, way down the shunt so someone can find a new

01:10:17 ◼   ► delete later about, you know the problem with Apple is that they don't have bug bounty programs.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Every other company has bug bounty programs.

01:10:23 ◼   ► And so people find bugs in Apple stuff and it's more valuable for the people who find

01:10:27 ◼   ► the bugs to like sell it to jailbreak people or use it for malware than it is to go to

01:10:32 ◼   ► Apple because from Apple you get nothing.

01:10:33 ◼   ► You don't even get like a thank you.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Like you just throw it into a black hole and they don't fix it for a year and then you

01:10:37 ◼   ► fret about whether you feel — the good — the white hat people are like, "I sent you this

01:10:43 ◼   ► bug Apple for free.

01:10:44 ◼   ► It's super serious.

01:10:45 ◼   ► Have the suspicion that I'm not the only person in the world who knows it

01:10:48 ◼   ► I haven't told anybody but if I know it that probably means the bad guys know it too

01:10:52 ◼   ► And it's been six months since I reported it to you and I've heard nothing if I don't hear from you soon

01:10:56 ◼   ► I'm gonna tell the world

01:10:57 ◼   ► Hey guys

01:10:58 ◼   ► You all have a phone that's normal to this exploit and chances are good the bad guys already know about it and then Apple gets cranky

01:11:03 ◼   ► About that or why are you disclosing and then the people like well?

01:11:05 ◼   ► Why don't you fix the damn bug and people have vulnerable phones? And anyway the bug bounty program?

01:11:10 ◼   ► adjust the incentives to

01:11:14 ◼   ► To make things nicer. They have an incentive to give it to Apple. Apple has an incentive to do something about it, I suppose

01:11:19 ◼   ► And they you know, it's it's more likely it makes it more valuable that even the bad guys will say I found this exploit

01:11:26 ◼   ► How can I make the most money from it's like, you know what I can make 100k right now

01:11:31 ◼   ► Guaranteed if I do this and I just give it to Apple so I hope this works

01:11:35 ◼   ► And by the way, this was announced at the black hat conference

01:11:38 ◼   ► Which is this big, you know as the name implies a hacker conference or security vulnerabilities and stuff

01:11:43 ◼   ► As far as I'm aware, Apple has not had any formal presence or a particularly prominent

01:11:49 ◼   ► formal presence. Their relationship with the security community has been sort of standoffish,

01:11:55 ◼   ► as evidenced by not having a bug bounty program and people being cranky about sending things

01:11:59 ◼   ► to Apple and then not hearing anything. And this is just another—

01:12:01 ◼   ► JEAN-BAPTISTE. Yeah, it's about as friendly as they've been to the developer community.

01:12:04 ◼   ► FITZPATRICK. Well, it's a little bit worse, because when you find a security vulnerability,

01:12:08 ◼   ► Apple's kind of angry about it. They're not particularly grateful, and security researchers

01:12:12 ◼   ► done that thing where they said I sent this to you, Apple, I did responsible disclosure,

01:12:16 ◼   ► but you haven't done anything, so then I'm going to announce it to the world. And Apple's

01:12:18 ◼   ► like, don't announce it to the world, we hate you now. It's like, but I found this bug.

01:12:22 ◼   ► And anyway, it's a fraught relationship. But this is another tiny step along the line of

01:12:27 ◼   ► Tim Cook's more open Apple. The Apple sends, what was it there, their head of security

01:12:31 ◼   ► engineering to Black Hat to speak there, to represent Apple and to say, here we have this

01:12:37 ◼   ► thing that everyone else in the world has had forever. You know, they're playing catch-up,

01:12:41 ◼   ► But this is Apple being more open and doing more of the things that everyone has said

01:12:45 ◼   ► they should always do. So thumbs up.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Yeah, this is only good things. It is kind of embarrassing that this wasn't already in

01:12:52 ◼   ► place given the rest of the market. However, this is great progress and I'm glad they're

01:12:57 ◼   ► doing it.

01:12:58 ◼   ► Yep, I completely echo what you guys said. I can't believe it's taken this long, but

01:13:03 ◼   ► at least I got there. That's what matters.

01:13:05 ◼   ► One more thing on this, as someone in the chat room pointed out, as in the stories we're

01:13:08 ◼   ► out like, "It's Baby Steps. This is not a program where, hey, anybody who finds a bug, report it to

01:13:13 ◼   ► us. It's an invite-only program where you find a bug. If you are among this class of people that

01:13:19 ◼   ► Apple says, 'We find you are trustworthy and you have the skills, so please send us a bug.'" But

01:13:25 ◼   ► there's also this thing, I think this is from Gruber's site, that said, "Sources that Apple

01:13:30 ◼   ► mentioned, if someone outside the program discovers an exploit in one of these classes,

01:13:33 ◼   ► they could be added to the program." So it isn't completely closed. And I don't understand that

01:13:37 ◼   ► that makes sense. Look, it's closed or it's not. It's like, well, it's closed, but if

01:13:40 ◼   ► you find a vulnerability, we will add you to the group that's closed. So I guess if

01:13:43 ◼   ► you can demonstrate that you're a good guy by giving them an important bug that will

01:13:50 ◼   ► put you into the program, but then do you not get paid for the bug that puts you, you

01:13:53 ◼   ► know, apple, apple be applin', I guess. You know, they could just make it open to everybody,

01:13:59 ◼   ► but they don't. But it's kind of open. So anyway, maybe next year we'll be announcing

01:14:05 ◼   ► that black hat that the bug bounty program

01:14:07 ◼   ► is open to everybody, just like everyone else's

01:14:09 ◼   ► bug bounty program.

01:14:10 ◼   ► - But they would keep 30%.

01:14:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Wow.

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01:15:43 ◼   ► You can run VMs, you can run containers.

01:15:45 ◼   ► There's so much you can do at Linode.

01:15:47 ◼   ► It's having your own server and it's great.

01:15:48 ◼   ► The support is great, I've used that before.

01:15:51 ◼   ► I really, really enjoy Linode

01:15:52 ◼   ► and they're not paying me to say that.

01:15:54 ◼   ► They can't pay me to say that, I'm saying that anyway

01:15:55 ◼   ► because that's how much I enjoy it.

01:15:57 ◼   ► I'm so happy they're finally a sponsor.

01:15:59 ◼   ► They now have, and their pricing's always been good,

01:16:02 ◼   ► but it gets better every year or so.

01:16:05 ◼   ► They do hardware updates and stuff,

01:16:06 ◼   ► and they just make their plans better for the same prices.

01:16:09 ◼   ► It's so great.

01:16:10 ◼   ► So they now offer, for $10 a month,

01:16:13 ◼   ► a VPS with two gigs of RAM.

01:16:15 ◼   ► You can do a lot.

01:16:16 ◼   ► I actually have six of those doing all my feed crawling,

01:16:19 ◼   ► 'cause for 10 bucks a month, why not?

01:16:21 ◼   ► Why not have six of them?

01:16:23 ◼   ► It's so great, so great.

01:16:25 ◼   ► Go to linode.com, that's L-I-N-O-D-E.com, like Linux,

01:16:28 ◼   ► linode.com/ATP and use promo code

01:16:32 ◼   ► "accidentalpodcast10" for $10 credit.

01:16:35 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Linode for sponsoring our show.

01:16:37 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:16:39 ◼   ► - And a final note for today's episode,

01:16:43 ◼   ► speaking of things that have taken a long time,

01:16:46 ◼   ► diversity at Apple.

01:16:47 ◼   ► Progress, it seems, is being made.

01:16:51 ◼   ► I was looking at these numbers

01:16:52 ◼   ► when they were released a day or two ago,

01:16:55 ◼   ► And it didn't seem like things were too terribly rosy year

01:17:01 ◼   ► on year.

01:17:01 ◼   ► And I'm trying to find which specifically number it was,

01:17:04 ◼   ► but I can't at the moment.

01:17:06 ◼   ► But suffice to say, Apple's released their annual,

01:17:09 ◼   ► semi-annual diversity page and diversity numbers.

01:17:12 ◼   ► And one of the more impressive things

01:17:15 ◼   ► that I think we definitely need to applaud

01:17:16 ◼   ► is that they claim to have 100% pay equity across all of Apple

01:17:22 ◼   ► so that any job that a woman would do, that a man would do,

01:17:27 ◼   ► those two people should make the exact same amount of money

01:17:31 ◼   ► for doing that exact same job.

01:17:32 ◼   ► And of course, everything's open to interpretation,

01:17:35 ◼   ► so it's hard to say whether or not that's really real,

01:17:38 ◼   ► but Apple is claiming and is asserting that that's the case.

01:17:43 ◼   ► So that's stupendous.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Oh, there, here it is.

01:17:47 ◼   ► The number that I didn't like was data

01:17:49 ◼   ► from the last three years, most of the way down the page,

01:17:52 ◼   ► 2015, 54% of Apple was white.

01:17:55 ◼   ► 2016, 56% of Apple was white,

01:17:58 ◼   ► which is not getting more diverse,

01:18:01 ◼   ► it's getting less diverse.

01:18:03 ◼   ► So that's not good,

01:18:05 ◼   ► but I'm nitpicking perhaps on one particular data point,

01:18:10 ◼   ► but it's 1% less male-dominated.

01:18:14 ◼   ► We went from 69% to 68%, which is an improvement.

01:18:18 ◼   ► And one thing that they've made very clear on this site

01:18:22 ◼   ► is that their hiring practices are changing.

01:18:26 ◼   ► So it says, "Our hiring trend over the past three years,

01:18:28 ◼   ► we are steadily attracting more and more

01:18:30 ◼   ► underrepresented talent, global female new hires.

01:18:33 ◼   ► In 2014, it was 31%, 2016, it was 37%.

01:18:37 ◼   ► And U.S., what is it?

01:18:40 ◼   ► URM is underrepresented something or other--

01:18:44 ◼   ► - Underrepresented minorities.

01:18:45 ◼   ► - Thank you.

01:18:46 ◼   ► US URMs, new hires, God, URMs just sound so dismissive.

01:18:50 ◼   ► I don't like that at all, but anyway,

01:18:52 ◼   ► 21% in 2014, 24%, 2015, 27% in 2016.

01:18:57 ◼   ► So definite improvement in new hires,

01:19:00 ◼   ► which should be celebrated.

01:19:02 ◼   ► So a little bit of good, a little bit of bad,

01:19:04 ◼   ► but the fact that they seem to be paying

01:19:07 ◼   ► this much attention to it, I think is 100% good.

01:19:10 ◼   ► - This is some borderline Amazon charts down here, though.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Like, every so-- they have three data points now.

01:19:16 ◼   ► So they had two, and you can make a line out of two.

01:19:19 ◼   ► But it's more impressive when you have three.

01:19:20 ◼   ► And of course, they highlight, here

01:19:21 ◼   ► are the lines with the slopes that are going up

01:19:23 ◼   ► and to the right.

01:19:24 ◼   ► And they are doing better with new hires

01:19:25 ◼   ► of underrepresented minorities.

01:19:27 ◼   ► They are doing better with female hires, right?

01:19:29 ◼   ► So they show these things, but there's

01:19:31 ◼   ► nothing along the y-axis.

01:19:33 ◼   ► There is no y-axis.

01:19:34 ◼   ► They just show-- they decide 21% is

01:19:36 ◼   ► like a centimeter from the bottom, and 27%

01:19:38 ◼   ► is like three times higher.

01:19:39 ◼   ► 27 is not three times higher than 21.

01:19:41 ◼   ► - Oh, it's not zero based?

01:19:43 ◼   ► - No.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, anyway, positive trends, progress is slow.

01:19:49 ◼   ► They're highlighting where they're doing the best,

01:19:51 ◼   ► obviously, and new hires,

01:19:52 ◼   ► if you're gonna do the best somewhere,

01:19:54 ◼   ► like that's, you know, it's, you know, forward-looking,

01:19:56 ◼   ► try to fix this going forward as much as possible.

01:19:59 ◼   ► And the other numbers, yeah, I don't know.

01:20:02 ◼   ► Anyway, one of the most important things

01:20:04 ◼   ► is that Apple has a webpage at apple.com/diversity,

01:20:08 ◼   ► and that they're open and transparent with these things.

01:20:10 ◼   ► But as always, there's a tension between, oh, good job,

01:20:15 ◼   ► Apple, slap on the back.

01:20:16 ◼   ► You really care about this.

01:20:17 ◼   ► Let's give you cookies for being caring and having a web page.

01:20:20 ◼   ► On the other hand, it's like, but on the other hand,

01:20:23 ◼   ► these numbers aren't awesome.

01:20:25 ◼   ► And so Apple's job is kind of-- it's kind of weird

01:20:27 ◼   ► making this web page.

01:20:28 ◼   ► Your job making this web page is show that Apple cares.

01:20:31 ◼   ► The website is there.

01:20:32 ◼   ► Good.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Show the progress Apple is making.

01:20:35 ◼   ► But also, be honest and upfront, as they

01:20:37 ◼   ► have been in the past, about where your problems are.

01:20:39 ◼   ► I think that's maybe where this falls down a little bit

01:20:41 ◼   ► because their original diversity thing was like,

01:20:43 ◼   ► we take a look at a diversity,

01:20:45 ◼   ► we are not doing a good enough job.

01:20:47 ◼   ► Like it was totally unflinching saying like,

01:20:49 ◼   ► oh, there's good and bad.

01:20:50 ◼   ► Now the first run of this, I forget what year it was,

01:20:52 ◼   ► was like, we are not happy with this.

01:20:54 ◼   ► We are not doing a good job.

01:20:56 ◼   ► We are not meeting our own standards for how this should be.

01:20:59 ◼   ► And the same pages, this page this year is more about like,

01:21:02 ◼   ► hey, we're doing well and everything.

01:21:04 ◼   ► I'm sure internally they still have their eyes on the prize

01:21:06 ◼   ► and like, all right, there's still progress to be made,

01:21:08 ◼   ► But there is a danger of falling into the trap

01:21:12 ◼   ► where every time they've come out with these numbers

01:21:14 ◼   ► that we just parrot back the cherry stats

01:21:18 ◼   ► that are getting better and don't realize

01:21:19 ◼   ► that the overall picture is still pretty grim.

01:21:22 ◼   ► So I don't know, I don't wanna slam them

01:21:24 ◼   ► for not making progress faster because again,

01:21:27 ◼   ► it takes a long time to turn a ship this big.

01:21:30 ◼   ► It's not like you're gonna fire all your employees

01:21:32 ◼   ► and start over again from scratch.

01:21:34 ◼   ► And new hiring is the place where you can fix things

01:21:36 ◼   ► and they're doing better.

01:21:37 ◼   ► But on the other hand, there's a long road ahead.

01:21:40 ◼   ► So I hope this page is still here 15 years from now.

01:21:42 ◼   ► And I hope if you were to do the 15 year graph

01:21:44 ◼   ► with an actual labeled Y axis,

01:21:46 ◼   ► that it would still show equally encouraging,

01:21:49 ◼   ► a zero based Y axis,

01:21:50 ◼   ► it would show equally encouraging trends.

01:21:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's tough because I want to celebrate this so much,

01:21:58 ◼   ► but there's a lot of room for improvement.

01:22:02 ◼   ► I mean, 2016 global gender in what they describe as tech

01:22:06 ◼   ► is 77%, and 56% of it is white.

01:22:09 ◼   ► Like, that's a lot of room for improvement there.

01:22:12 ◼   ► But I mean, if you look at-- to be fair,

01:22:15 ◼   ► if you look at my company, there are four Android developers,

01:22:18 ◼   ► four iOS developers, and every single one of us

01:22:21 ◼   ► is a white male.

01:22:22 ◼   ► So I mean, I shouldn't really be throwing stones on this myself.

01:22:25 ◼   ► But I hope we get better.

01:22:29 ◼   ► I would love to see us get better.

01:22:30 ◼   ► And hopefully, as we open other offices, we will get better.

01:22:34 ◼   ► But it's, I don't know, it's hard and it shouldn't be, but it is.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Thanks so much for our three sponsors this week, Hover, Harry's, and Linode, and we

01:22:45 ◼   ► will see you next week.

01:22:46 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:22:57 ◼   ► was accidental.

01:22:58 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:23:04 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (it was accidental)

01:23:07 ◼   ► It was accidental (accidental)

01:23:10 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:23:15 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:23:20 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:23:24 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:23:28 ◼   ► ♪ M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C ♪

01:23:33 ◼   ► ♪ U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A ♪

01:23:36 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:23:38 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:23:39 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:23:42 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:23:43 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:23:44 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:23:46 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

01:23:48 ◼   ► - All right, so Marco, you and I went through

01:23:51 ◼   ► a deeply painful episode last week

01:23:55 ◼   ► when we had to hear about TiVo for entirely too long.

01:23:58 ◼   ► - And remind me again why that was so painful?

01:24:00 ◼   ► - Because I just don't care.

01:24:01 ◼   ► I just really don't care.

01:24:02 ◼   ► - It's painful to hear about things you don't care about?

01:24:05 ◼   ► It's painful?

01:24:06 ◼   ► - No, I'm just being silly.

01:24:07 ◼   ► It's not painful.

01:24:09 ◼   ► - I actually, I thought it was gonna be worse than it was.

01:24:11 ◼   ► I just zoned out and I just pretended

01:24:14 ◼   ► like I was listening to Hypercritical.

01:24:16 ◼   ► And I just forgot that I could talk for most of the time

01:24:19 ◼   ► and just pretend like I was listening to Hypercritical.

01:24:21 ◼   ► And for that it was great,

01:24:22 ◼   ► because it was basically a brief interlude of Hypercritical.

01:24:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's fair.

01:24:27 ◼   ► - No, I'm just giving you a hard time, Jon.

01:24:30 ◼   ► - Well, this is not gonna be a brief interlude

01:24:31 ◼   ► of build and analyze, because I don't think

01:24:33 ◼   ► you would have ever talked about the MP3 file format

01:24:35 ◼   ► on build and analyze.

01:24:36 ◼   ► - No, I didn't know that much about it back then.

01:24:38 ◼   ► - But even if you did, this is very nitty gritty,

01:24:40 ◼   ► I feel like.

01:24:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, so tell us what it is that we need to know

01:24:43 ◼   ► and don't know about the MP3 file format,

01:24:45 ◼   ► because I genuinely am very interested.

01:24:47 ◼   ► - So this is basically kind of like this developer rat hole

01:24:50 ◼   ► I fell into last weekend, where I had some work time,

01:24:53 ◼   ► and rather than do what I'm supposed to be doing this summer,

01:24:56 ◼   ► just updating Overcast to iOS 10

01:24:58 ◼   ► and making a whole new watch app

01:24:59 ◼   ► and making a today widget and all this other garbage.

01:25:01 ◼   ► And today I was procrastinating by working on forecast,

01:25:04 ◼   ► my MP3 encoder.

01:25:05 ◼   ► And I decided, you know, let me just do

01:25:08 ◼   ► whatever work is required to make it work with VBR output.

01:25:12 ◼   ► So to back up a little bit,

01:25:14 ◼   ► just a high level version of the MP3 file format.

01:25:19 ◼   ► So the way MP3s work at a very high level,

01:25:22 ◼   ► and please, if you're a nerd about this stuff,

01:25:24 ◼   ► please forgive me about these details

01:25:25 ◼   ► if I'm getting any of them wrong.

01:25:26 ◼   ► I'm trying to give a very high level overview here.

01:25:28 ◼   ► The way lossy compression works is basically

01:25:31 ◼   ► try to not store things that you probably won't notice

01:25:36 ◼   ► if they're not stored.

01:25:37 ◼   ► And then for the things you do notice,

01:25:40 ◼   ► try to store them with less precision.

01:25:42 ◼   ► In an MP3, one of the famous ways it does this

01:25:46 ◼   ► is by omitting sounds that you probably won't hear.

01:25:49 ◼   ► And so obviously things that are outside

01:25:51 ◼   ► the range of human hearing, that's the easy one.

01:25:53 ◼   ► They also do things like, there's a principle

01:25:55 ◼   ► called masking, where if there's a very quiet sound

01:25:59 ◼   ► and a very loud sound at the same time,

01:26:01 ◼   ► the very loud sound is going to be so overpowering,

01:26:04 ◼   ► the very quiet sound is just gonna be drowned out.

01:26:06 ◼   ► So there's no reason to store the information

01:26:09 ◼   ► about the very quiet sound,

01:26:10 ◼   ► because the very loud sound, that's all you'll hear.

01:26:12 ◼   ► One way they achieve the size savings

01:26:14 ◼   ► is just by omitting things that are just kinda drowned out

01:26:17 ◼   ► or that you won't hear.

01:26:19 ◼   ► Another way they do it is by reducing the precision

01:26:21 ◼   ► of the things you do hear.

01:26:22 ◼   ► And so there are a few different tricks they can do

01:26:25 ◼   ► for this 'cause basically the precision at which

01:26:28 ◼   ► we perceive what we hear is not constant

01:26:31 ◼   ► throughout the frequency range.

01:26:32 ◼   ► Very low frequencies, very high frequencies,

01:26:35 ◼   ► we tend not to have as much precision

01:26:38 ◼   ► about perceiving those things.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And so they can store those less precisely

01:26:42 ◼   ► and therefore using less data.

01:26:44 ◼   ► They can also do things like in a stereo recording

01:26:47 ◼   ► where you might have very, very similar sound

01:26:50 ◼   ► coming out of left and right channels

01:26:51 ◼   ► with just slight differences.

01:26:53 ◼   ► So there's a method called joint stereo

01:26:55 ◼   ► where basically this is the left channel

01:26:57 ◼   ► and the right channel differs by this much

01:26:59 ◼   ► and just sort of the difference for the right channel.

01:27:01 ◼   ► We are also very bad at perceiving not only the details

01:27:05 ◼   ► about very high-pitched and very low-pitched sounds,

01:27:07 ◼   ► but also where they're coming from.

01:27:09 ◼   ► And you might realize this,

01:27:10 ◼   ► like if you can hear a very high-pitched sound

01:27:12 ◼   ► like in your house, like back in the old days,

01:27:14 ◼   ► like you'd hear the very high-pitched whine of a CRT TV

01:27:17 ◼   ► and you could just walk into a house,

01:27:19 ◼   ► you can hear, like I can hear there's a TV on

01:27:21 ◼   ► somewhere in the house,

01:27:23 ◼   ► but you might not be able to pick out where exactly,

01:27:25 ◼   ► like what direction exactly it was coming from.

01:27:27 ◼   ► Also, similar reason why subwoofers in home theater systems

01:27:31 ◼   ► tend to just be one subwoofer that you just put somewhere,

01:27:34 ◼   ► and it kinda doesn't matter,

01:27:36 ◼   ► because the very low frequencies, again,

01:27:37 ◼   ► you're not nearly as good at perceiving

01:27:39 ◼   ► where they're coming from.

01:27:41 ◼   ► So they can do things there too,

01:27:42 ◼   ► they can save space there too, with things like,

01:27:44 ◼   ► all right, well, you know,

01:27:45 ◼   ► if we have to store this separated stereo image here,

01:27:49 ◼   ► maybe we can just store the average of the very high

01:27:51 ◼   ► and very low stuff in the middle

01:27:53 ◼   ► and not have to worry about the sides,

01:27:54 ◼   ► you know, not have the separation.

01:27:56 ◼   ► So the whole principle of the MP3 file format

01:27:59 ◼   ► and all lossy audio formats is based on this idea

01:28:03 ◼   ► of like figure out what we can either omit entirely

01:28:07 ◼   ► from storing and then figure out tricks we can use

01:28:10 ◼   ► to store it less precisely.

01:28:12 ◼   ► Obviously though, as you lower the amount of space

01:28:15 ◼   ► you're willing to spend on it, as you lower the bitrate,

01:28:17 ◼   ► how many bits per second you're willing to devote

01:28:19 ◼   ► to storing this, you start hearing artifacts,

01:28:23 ◼   ► you start hearing the quality loss,

01:28:24 ◼   ► you start hearing, oh, now this is sending muffled

01:28:27 ◼   ► or that's sending distorted or that's sounding weird

01:28:29 ◼   ► or that symbol hit kinda sounded weirdly telephonic.

01:28:33 ◼   ► You start hearing flaws.

01:28:36 ◼   ► I don't wanna get into too many of the details

01:28:38 ◼   ► of the argument over whether you can hear

01:28:39 ◼   ► the difference or not.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Generally, most tests show that about 192 kilobits

01:28:45 ◼   ► per second, you don't really hear the difference

01:28:47 ◼   ► in most things for most people.

01:28:49 ◼   ► That's beside the point though.

01:28:50 ◼   ► So when you're encoding a podcast,

01:28:52 ◼   ► there's a few different ways you can go about

01:28:55 ◼   ► managing the bitrate, how many bits per second

01:28:58 ◼   ► you are willing to spend on the audio.

01:29:00 ◼   ► The most direct kind is constant bitrate or CBR,

01:29:05 ◼   ► which basically, so MP3 files are divided into frames,

01:29:08 ◼   ► and it's just a time slice, every frame is 1152 samples.

01:29:13 ◼   ► whatever your sample rate is, like at 44K,

01:29:16 ◼   ► that's like 26 milliseconds,

01:29:18 ◼   ► every frame you have a bit rate and you say,

01:29:20 ◼   ► all right, well in constant bit rate mode,

01:29:22 ◼   ► every frame will get 96 kilobits or 64 kilobits

01:29:26 ◼   ► or 128 kilobits or whatever.

01:29:28 ◼   ► And that's a very simple way to do things

01:29:30 ◼   ► and that mostly works and podcasts

01:29:32 ◼   ► are almost always encoded that way.

01:29:36 ◼   ► I started to wonder why exactly,

01:29:38 ◼   ► because we also have these other methods

01:29:41 ◼   ► that are based on variable bit rates, or VBR.

01:29:45 ◼   ► The encoder has some idea about the complexity

01:29:48 ◼   ► of each frame, each one of those little 26 millisecond,

01:29:51 ◼   ► each one of those little time slices.

01:29:52 ◼   ► The encoder can decide, this part I'm encoding right now,

01:29:56 ◼   ► this little time slice, is a pretty complex,

01:29:58 ◼   ► there's a lot going on here, so to encode this

01:30:01 ◼   ► with a certain degree of perceived quality,

01:30:03 ◼   ► I need more bits.

01:30:05 ◼   ► And then maybe like three seconds later,

01:30:07 ◼   ► there's a quieter passage, or a simpler passage,

01:30:11 ◼   ► and you can say, you know, this part,

01:30:13 ◼   ► I don't need this many bits,

01:30:14 ◼   ► I can encode this at a lower bit rate.

01:30:15 ◼   ► You know, you can have the encoder kind of decide

01:30:18 ◼   ► on a target perceived quality level

01:30:20 ◼   ► and just use as many bits as you need

01:30:22 ◼   ► to achieve that quality level

01:30:23 ◼   ► and have it just vary constantly throughout the file.

01:30:25 ◼   ► For podcasts, this is an obvious choice, right?

01:30:29 ◼   ► It makes sense that for podcasts,

01:30:31 ◼   ► that should work really well

01:30:32 ◼   ► because podcasts have a lot of silence.

01:30:35 ◼   ► This is, I've kind of built my current living on this.

01:30:37 ◼   ► They, podcasts have a lot of silence

01:30:40 ◼   ► and voice is pretty easy,

01:30:42 ◼   ► and then occasionally you throw in like a music clip

01:30:44 ◼   ► or a music bed running under things,

01:30:46 ◼   ► or a theme song, or a clip from TV or something like,

01:30:50 ◼   ► so you occasionally have more complex stuff

01:30:53 ◼   ► that could use more complexity.

01:30:54 ◼   ► And like in our show, we started out being

01:30:57 ◼   ► a 64 kilobit mono show for like the first year or two.

01:31:02 ◼   ► And it sounded okay, it didn't sound great,

01:31:05 ◼   ► it sounded okay.

01:31:05 ◼   ► One of the things that sounded the worst

01:31:08 ◼   ► was our theme song because 64K mono is kind of terrible for music. A while back now, maybe

01:31:14 ◼   ► a year ago or something like that, I switched to 96K stereo and it made the theme song sound

01:31:21 ◼   ► way better and anytime we'd insert a clip like from a Steve Jobs keynote or anything

01:31:25 ◼   ► it made all those sound way better, any kind of musical clip or any kind of insert sounded

01:31:28 ◼   ► way better and our voices sounded better too. And even though the entire rest of the podcast

01:31:35 ◼   ► is us talking and I don't do any kind of stereo separation,

01:31:38 ◼   ► so it's just a mono thing.

01:31:40 ◼   ► Because of the way the joint stereo encoding works,

01:31:42 ◼   ► we just get all 96 kilobits to our mono channel