ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Is your shopping done?

00:00:02 ◼   ► I think, but I haven't wrapped everything yet, and so that always leaves me wondering

00:00:07 ◼   ► like maybe I forgot something or somebody or I didn't get enough for somebody or something.

00:00:13 ◼   ► So it's always a baseline level of stress.

00:00:15 ◼   ► So I'm always very worried about not having gotten somebody something or enough.

00:00:20 ◼   ► That's why you have a spreadsheet to track these sorts of things.

00:00:24 ◼   ► That would be wise if I was thinking that far ahead, yes.

00:00:28 ◼   ► I agree that that's the kind of thing I should do.

00:00:30 ◼   ► - I assume Jon has just a series of Perl scripts

00:00:32 ◼   ► to figure out what to buy people.

00:00:35 ◼   ► - No, I don't do anything.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - I was thinking maybe you would have

00:00:38 ◼   ► just a large number of windows.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I think that would be more you.

00:00:41 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:42 ◼   ► Like maybe like one window that has like 15,000 tabs

00:00:44 ◼   ► right in it that was just like one tab

00:00:47 ◼   ► for every person you've ever known for each gift

00:00:48 ◼   ► that you might someday maybe wanna get them

00:00:50 ◼   ► plus the ones you did get them

00:00:51 ◼   ► plus the ones you got them in the past

00:00:52 ◼   ► for comparison and reference.

00:00:53 ◼   ► - Actually that does make a lot of sense.

00:00:55 ◼   ► - You need a burn down chart for a number of gifts

00:00:57 ◼   ► you have to buy other people.

00:00:59 ◼   ► - What is a burndown chart?

00:01:00 ◼   ► - I was about to say,

00:01:01 ◼   ► there's no way Marco knows what that is.

00:01:03 ◼   ► - No, I assume this is another business thing.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Well, it's a software development thing,

00:01:07 ◼   ► but also a business thing.

00:01:09 ◼   ► - What happens in a burndown chart?

00:01:10 ◼   ► I mean, it sounds really fun, I'm guessing it isn't.

00:01:13 ◼   ► - No, it's not.

00:01:13 ◼   ► - So you're looking for,

00:01:14 ◼   ► I think it's because they look like flames

00:01:16 ◼   ► if you have a layered bar chart,

00:01:18 ◼   ► but you're trying to make it go down to zero.

00:01:20 ◼   ► You're trying to make all these different things,

00:01:21 ◼   ► it's like how many of X, how many Y,

00:01:22 ◼   ► how many of Z in little bars over time,

00:01:24 ◼   ► and what you're trying to do is drop them all to zero.

00:01:27 ◼   ► So you're not buying anybody any gifts, is the goal.

00:01:30 ◼   ► - I'm in the midst of reconciling our Visa bill,

00:01:32 ◼   ► which is making me mildly upset, 'cause it's the holidays.

00:01:35 ◼   ► - Like during the podcast, you're doing this?

00:01:37 ◼   ► - I'm almost done, I only have a few.

00:01:39 ◼   ► - If you want, we can discuss watching paint dry.

00:01:42 ◼   ► - I was about to say, I know this is hugely entertaining.

00:01:44 ◼   ► - We can walk through a sort algorithm on the air,

00:01:48 ◼   ► and just like an example data set

00:01:49 ◼   ► of how a sort algorithm sorts it.

00:01:51 ◼   ► - That sounds super fun.

00:01:53 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:01:53 ◼   ► - I use this app called MoneyWell, which is--

00:01:56 ◼   ► - What a name.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Chuck your money down a well.

00:01:58 ◼   ► I think their icon was like a well at some point, too.

00:02:01 ◼   ► - Right now it's a bucket full of money,

00:02:04 ◼   ► but anyway, so I'm like four transactions away

00:02:07 ◼   ► from reconciling my Visa bill, and then I get to pay it,

00:02:10 ◼   ► which is super delightful because it's the holidays,

00:02:12 ◼   ► and now I'm broke.

00:02:14 ◼   ► - Well, the fact that your holiday purchases

00:02:16 ◼   ► are already on a bill you've received

00:02:18 ◼   ► means that you are way more ahead of the game

00:02:20 ◼   ► than I am usually at the holidays.

00:02:24 ◼   ► - Well, we should start with, this is a monumental,

00:02:28 ◼   ► so this is a Christmas miracle.

00:02:30 ◼   ► To the best of my knowledge,

00:02:31 ◼   ► and I am not presently looking at the notes

00:02:32 ◼   ► 'cause I'm finishing reconciling my Visa bill,

00:02:35 ◼   ► but to the best of my knowledge--

00:02:36 ◼   ► - You're still, just how long do you think it'll take?

00:02:39 ◼   ► Should we just sit here and wait?

00:02:40 ◼   ► - No, no, no, wait, watch this, and,

00:02:41 ◼   ► well you can't watch 'cause you're not seeing anything,

00:02:43 ◼   ► boom, reconciled, done.

00:02:45 ◼   ► - How does it feel to be reconciled?

00:02:47 ◼   ► - So great, except now I gotta pay this not cheap Visa bill.

00:02:52 ◼   ► But you are reconciled. That is so, it's like closure for all of your money. You're

00:02:57 ◼   ► saying goodbye to all of your money. You're in a fully closed state.

00:03:00 ◼   ► That's true. You could say I have some reconcilable differences.

00:03:03 ◼   ► But you've reconciled them. You have reconciled differences.

00:03:06 ◼   ► I was waiting for that. I was waiting for you to artfully work it in, but I guess you

00:03:10 ◼   ► would just give up.

00:03:11 ◼   ► You didn't think that was artful? Thanks a lot, jerk. I was pretty proud of that.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Anyway, what the crap were we talking about? I already got a slide chart. Oh yeah, do we

00:03:19 ◼   ► or do we not have a follow-up? I should take a screenshot of our show notes where there

00:03:24 ◼   ► is the heading follow-up, there is a single bullet, and there is nothing else.

00:03:29 ◼   ► Yeah, everyone's on vacation. I think we had a couple other shows where there was nothing

00:03:32 ◼   ► and then I, like, made something up on the fly, but I don't even have anything to make

00:03:34 ◼   ► up because everyone is off, everyone's watching Star Wars and they're on vacation and they're

00:03:38 ◼   ► not sending us follow-up. To that end, can we establish that I have not seen Star Wars

00:03:44 ◼   ► and I presume Marco hasn't either, and so I do not wish to talk about it and I do not--

00:03:47 ◼   ► - I assume Marco never will, so.

00:03:49 ◼   ► - That's true.

00:03:50 ◼   ► - Well, actually, I wanted to start this episode

00:03:52 ◼   ► with a bit of a game, with three truths and a lie.

00:03:57 ◼   ► - See, Marco knows things from corporate America.

00:03:59 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:01 ◼   ► That's Icebreaker they use.

00:04:03 ◼   ► - So here's three truths, three statements of these are true

00:04:07 ◼   ► and one of them is a lie, and you have to figure out

00:04:08 ◼   ► which one is the untrue statement.

00:04:10 ◼   ► - Are any of these things Star Wars spoilers?

00:04:13 ◼   ► - No. - Okay.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Number one, I wrote my first Swift code.

00:04:17 ◼   ► - Not possible.

00:04:18 ◼   ► - Number two, I played Journey.

00:04:22 ◼   ► Number three, I went to see Star Wars.

00:04:25 ◼   ► And number four, I started using Pinterest.

00:04:29 ◼   ► - I went to see Star Wars is the lie,

00:04:30 ◼   ► because Marco doesn't see things.

00:04:32 ◼   ► - Casey?

00:04:33 ◼   ► - I would concur with that, but it's hard to vote against

00:04:36 ◼   ► you actually writing, like, there's no way

00:04:38 ◼   ► you've written Swift, you're such an old man

00:04:40 ◼   ► that there's no way.

00:04:41 ◼   ► But I would have to agree with Jon

00:04:43 ◼   ► that that is the lie, that you have not seen Star Wars.

00:04:48 ◼   ► - You should have gone with your instinct, Casey.

00:04:50 ◼   ► - Really?

00:04:51 ◼   ► You saw Star Wars and I didn't?

00:04:53 ◼   ► - Tiff and I went today to a movie theater to see Star Wars.

00:04:57 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:04:58 ◼   ► - How did that, whose idea was that?

00:05:00 ◼   ► - I'm flabbergasted.

00:05:01 ◼   ► - It was actually my idea, but she was also planning

00:05:04 ◼   ► on wanting to go and going anyway, so it was kind of mutual.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - Did you do this just so you could read the internet

00:05:09 ◼   ► without worrying about spoilers,

00:05:10 ◼   ► or maybe Tiff was worrying about spoilers if you weren't?

00:05:13 ◼   ► Well, part of it was because I basically have no podcasts left in my podcast player that

00:05:20 ◼   ► I can play without being about Star Wars.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Everything that I have to listen to this week is about Star Wars, and I've listened to

00:05:25 ◼   ► everything else.

00:05:26 ◼   ► So you were actually concerned about hearing Star Wars spoilers, that means.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Otherwise you'd be like, "Whatever, Star Wars spoilers, I'm listening.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I don't care.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I'm never going to see it."

00:05:33 ◼   ► Well, so the greatest thing is, all of you Star Wars fans have been trying so hard to

00:05:37 ◼   ► avoid spoilers, to go into ridiculous lanes.

00:05:41 ◼   ► I successfully avoided any spoilers about the movie simply by just not really caring

00:05:44 ◼   ► about the movie.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I didn't put any effort into avoiding spoilers, but I went into the theater today knowing

00:05:50 ◼   ► nothing about it and being pleasantly surprised by everything in it.

00:05:54 ◼   ► See, funny how that works.

00:05:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I have—I would say I've been avoiding spoilers, but I haven't been going to particular

00:06:02 ◼   ► lengths to do so.

00:06:03 ◼   ► It's just if I see, like, a tweet fly by that looks like there might be a spoiler in it,

00:06:08 ◼   ► then I'll just skip over it.

00:06:09 ◼   ► I haven't been reading reviews or anything like that. I've asked friends that have seen

00:06:13 ◼   ► it, "Do you like it?" And that's all I've asked. And, you know, I've gotten some hints

00:06:18 ◼   ► as to the quality of the movie, but I've not seen it. I'm hoping that Aaron and I will

00:06:21 ◼   ► be able to see it, maybe even tomorrow, actually, but I'm still avoiding spoilers. And I think

00:06:26 ◼   ► my time is running out, because I think the internet has kind of collectively decided,

00:06:30 ◼   ► from what I can tell, that shortly after Christmas, all bets are off and everyone's going to talk

00:06:33 ◼   ► about everything.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And that's part of why I went to see it, because I'm fine ignoring major cultural events.

00:06:39 ◼   ► I've never seen any of the Lord of the Rings, never seen Harry Potter, never seen Twilight,

00:06:44 ◼   ► anything like that.

00:06:45 ◼   ► Most of the big movie franchises I've either never seen or I've seen some a long time

00:06:49 ◼   ► ago, and then never again.

00:06:50 ◼   ► Let me help you.

00:06:51 ◼   ► Lord of the Rings, big waste of time.

00:06:53 ◼   ► Harry Potter is pretty good.

00:06:54 ◼   ► Reverse that.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Please email Jon.

00:06:57 ◼   ► Anyway, so, but this one felt very, very important to my circles.

00:07:03 ◼   ► so than those other ones did. And also, I have seen the other Star Wars movies. I did

00:07:09 ◼   ► enjoy them. You know, I am a Star Wars fan. I'm just not like a massive Star Wars fan.

00:07:13 ◼   ► But I am a Star Wars fan, you know, in general. So, I did want to see it at some point. I

00:07:18 ◼   ► was planning on watching it when it came out to video maybe or something or I could get

00:07:20 ◼   ► on Netflix. But I figured like it's going to be talked about so much and it's so important,

00:07:26 ◼   ► you know, in the circles that I live in that I figured I kind of had to go see it in the

00:07:32 ◼   ► I should have gone with my instinct because you know in retrospect

00:07:35 ◼   ► The the lengths you would go to to prevent yourself from writing any Swift that should have been the obvious answer

00:07:43 ◼   ► I like I mean you have gone through some serious mental

00:07:46 ◼   ► Gymnastics in order to get to the point that you can justify not writing Swift

00:07:50 ◼   ► I didn't say I'm never writing Swift

00:07:52 ◼   ► I'm saying I'm not writing Swift yet

00:07:53 ◼   ► But that I do intend to learn it

00:07:55 ◼   ► Probably when 3.0 comes out next year because they're doing a bunch of big changes to lead up to that

00:07:59 ◼   ► Well, you had just changed your mind about it recently like in the past show you're like, oh I did that

00:08:03 ◼   ► You know that podcast I was like, oh, I'm not gonna do Swift for a while

00:08:06 ◼   ► But then the open source thing came out and kind of turned you around so you're primed to do Swift

00:08:09 ◼   ► but the real tell was that the fact that we were talking about Star Wars and that prompted you to do the

00:08:14 ◼   ► Truths and a lie thing so I mean I already had the list

00:08:18 ◼   ► I mean I already I knew you played journey and the other ones are easy

00:08:21 ◼   ► So it was just down to the Swift and the Star Wars. It just seemed so

00:08:26 ◼   ► Crazy view to actually leave the house and go to a movie theater the Pinterest thing didn't you didn't have any pause about the Pinterest?

00:08:31 ◼   ► Thing I know it. No, I know you did Pinterest. How'd you know? Yeah, how do you know Tiff told everybody? Yeah puppies

00:08:36 ◼   ► Oh, that's right. She did

00:08:38 ◼   ► Yeah

00:08:39 ◼   ► So I joined I started a Pinterest account so I could collect pictures of puppies watches and things I want to buy for the house

00:08:44 ◼   ► Like pipe heating wrap and the icicle melting zigzag wire that you put on the roof

00:08:50 ◼   ► Exciting stuff if you find good good pipe heating wrap

00:08:54 ◼   ► whatever you're gonna call it, tell me, because I have stuff around my, this is like stuff

00:08:57 ◼   ► you put around the pipes to keep the heat from just leaking out into the areas where

00:09:02 ◼   ► the pipes go through, right?

00:09:03 ◼   ► - No, it's to prevent them from freezing if you have a pipe in an uninsulated space.

00:09:06 ◼   ► - Nevermind then.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - So it's like, we have one in the garage from forever ago, it's like this ancient,

00:09:11 ◼   ► you know, two conductor cable that just like a heat wire that wraps in a coil around a

00:09:15 ◼   ► pipe that runs through our garage, 'cause it's not insulated so that could freeze.

00:09:18 ◼   ► That has burnt out and no longer heats, so I'm looking at new solutions to that, and

00:09:23 ◼   ► They're all basically scaring me into either not doing it or having an electrician do it

00:09:27 ◼   ► because it all basically says that these things are insanely dangerous and you will start

00:09:31 ◼   ► fires and they all require insulation around the pipe and everything and yeah.

00:09:34 ◼   ► So I'm probably going to actually outsource this job, but we will see.

00:09:37 ◼   ► You know, living in the Northeast is the best because you have to worry about BS like this.

00:09:41 ◼   ► Well, because we have winter.

00:09:42 ◼   ► Well, right.

00:09:43 ◼   ► Well, what you have really is months of depressing, evil, terrible, winter-like season, whereas

00:09:50 ◼   ► I have this brief respite from wonderful weather with slightly less wonderful weather, and

00:09:57 ◼   ► then it's back to wonderful weather again.

00:09:58 ◼   ► So, you continue being smug up there in your tundra, and let me know how that works out.

00:10:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it was wonderful there when we went there in July.

00:10:06 ◼   ► That was really wonderful weather you had there.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it was warmish.

00:10:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:10 ◼   ► That's not true.

00:10:12 ◼   ► It was very hot when you guys were here.

00:10:14 ◼   ► Even for us, it was extremely hot.

00:10:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:17 ◼   ► I also ordered a Tesla this week, but that's, we'll save that for the after show, I guess.

00:10:19 ◼   ► It was a big week.

00:10:20 ◼   ► - Big week.

00:10:21 ◼   ► - Big week for Marco and you killed the web font

00:10:23 ◼   ► on your website, which by the way,

00:10:24 ◼   ► I don't really agree with.

00:10:26 ◼   ► I think that whatever font you have going on now,

00:10:28 ◼   ► not making me happy.

00:10:29 ◼   ► - No, I don't think I found the right solution to that.

00:10:31 ◼   ► I'm experimenting with killing a web font.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I might at least do a different web font

00:10:36 ◼   ► because the service I was using,

00:10:39 ◼   ► the Heffler & Co. font,

00:10:41 ◼   ► because I like their Ideal Sans font.

00:10:43 ◼   ► There have been a few benchmarks done by people

00:10:45 ◼   ► that have shown that typically their web font serving

00:10:49 ◼   ► is not as fast as Typekit or some of the other big web font services and not as fast as self-hosting

00:10:56 ◼   ► and stuff. And they don't allow self-hosting, but they do kind of a weird thing where like

00:10:59 ◼   ► they--you have to go through their CDN, but then it redirects to the font files on your

00:11:04 ◼   ► server with no cache headers. So that you're making the clients make two requests, one

00:11:08 ◼   ► of them is going back to your slow server and not to their CDN to actually get the big

00:11:13 ◼   ► files, you know, the big like 300 kilobytes worth of font files. And the only reason I'm

00:11:17 ◼   ► really is because I really like this one font they have. They have very nice fonts over

00:11:19 ◼   ► there at Heffler. But I'm going to look at other options now because it just, it was

00:11:24 ◼   ► just too slow. Like if you look at the network timeline in the web inspector of like time

00:11:28 ◼   ► it's taking to render this page, it's just insane. And you could argue, I mean I've heard

00:11:32 ◼   ► many counter arguments for why I shouldn't worry about the speed of my web font loading,

00:11:37 ◼   ► most of which boil down to either that I should like async load it and then either pop it

00:11:41 ◼   ► in or save it for the next load and put it on the next load. Both of those I think suck.

00:11:46 ◼   ► Like, neither of those, I would say, are good options.

00:11:50 ◼   ► Just for, you know, user experience-wise, like, why would I want to do either of those?

00:11:54 ◼   ► You know, the other answer was, why do you care?

00:11:57 ◼   ► It's just a blog.

00:11:58 ◼   ► It doesn't matter how quickly it loads.

00:12:00 ◼   ► And that's BS, because not only does it matter quite a bit how quickly pages load to whether

00:12:05 ◼   ► people complete the loads, but when you're talking about loading a 300 kilobyte resource

00:12:10 ◼   ► that requires two requests to be made before the page can even begin to load, this is like

00:12:16 ◼   ► in the head on mobile and when you have bad connections and everything, that does matter.

00:12:21 ◼   ► That really does add up to a significant delay when loading a page.

00:12:25 ◼   ► You know, it isn't like when you embed a big image because that can load after the page

00:12:28 ◼   ► loads.

00:12:29 ◼   ► When you're on a mobile connection, that really matters.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And it turns out that my traffic, like everyone's traffic, is mostly mobile these days.

00:12:35 ◼   ► And you have to think about that when you're a blog or any kind of content site, especially

00:12:39 ◼   ► a tech content site read by tech people, you're going to see a large portion of traffic on

00:12:44 ◼   ► mobile.

00:12:45 ◼   ► of those people will be on cellular at the time they are loading it. Yes, it would be

00:12:49 ◼   ► nice if I didn't have, you know, ugly fonts on my site, but it would also be nice if my

00:12:56 ◼   ► page loads very quickly. So I think I have to balance those things. I think maybe doing

00:13:00 ◼   ► Typekit might be a little bit better because it's just a faster web font host. Maybe doing

00:13:06 ◼   ► self-hosting would be a little bit faster because then, you know, it could optimize

00:13:11 ◼   ► the connections a little bit better than going off to a different host. So we'll see. I'm

00:13:14 ◼   ► I'm gonna play with it.

00:13:16 ◼   ► What led you to do all this?

00:13:18 ◼   ► Because, no disrespect intended, it seemed to me that you've kind of, not abandoned,

00:13:25 ◼   ► but avoided writing posts for a while now.

00:13:28 ◼   ► I mean, you'll write your link posts to this show, to Under the Radar, but I haven't

00:13:33 ◼   ► seen a whole lot of real writing from you in a while, outside of, you know, when you

00:13:37 ◼   ► had headphones or podcast mics or what have you.

00:13:39 ◼   ► So what inspired you to just start paying attention again?

00:13:42 ◼   ► I was inspired by being forced by Dropbox.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Oh, right, right, right.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Basically, I use a Dropbox blogging engine that I wrote

00:13:51 ◼   ► that nobody else should use.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Please don't use it.

00:13:53 ◼   ► It's terrible, but I like it, and it's good for me.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And they ended support for the version

00:14:01 ◼   ► that was probably ancient, the Linux client

00:14:03 ◼   ► that I was using for Dropbox on my ancient server

00:14:06 ◼   ► running its ancient distribution of CentOS,

00:14:08 ◼   ► I think 5.5 or something.

00:14:10 ◼   ► So, you know, running an old stack,

00:14:12 ◼   ► an old version of their thing,

00:14:14 ◼   ► and I couldn't update it without upgrading

00:14:16 ◼   ► some pretty big things like libc,

00:14:19 ◼   ► and everybody was basically saying on the internet,

00:14:21 ◼   ► never upgrade libc on a Linux system.

00:14:24 ◼   ► If you can help it, it's kind of a problem.

00:14:27 ◼   ► So I migrated my whole blog to a new server.

00:14:31 ◼   ► I also, I love Linux.

00:14:33 ◼   ► So, you know, every Linux is basically like,

00:14:35 ◼   ► yeah, rock solid, runs forever, it's great,

00:14:38 ◼   ► but you wanna upgrade it?

00:14:39 ◼   ► "Forget it, please don't do this,

00:14:41 ◼   ► "you really shouldn't do this,

00:14:42 ◼   ► "you should never upgrade a Linux server,

00:14:43 ◼   ► "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

00:14:45 ◼   ► "never upgrade the distribution."

00:14:46 ◼   ► They all say that, like, "Don't do that."

00:14:48 ◼   ► The solution to upgrading a Linux server

00:14:49 ◼   ► is to abandon it and make a new one.

00:14:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:14:52 ◼   ► So that is what I did.

00:14:54 ◼   ► So I was already in there, mucking around

00:14:57 ◼   ► with the guts of it,

00:14:59 ◼   ► and setting up everything new and clean,

00:15:00 ◼   ► so I figured, while I'm here,

00:15:03 ◼   ► let me also take this opportunity to modernize it.

00:15:06 ◼   ► So I switched over to HTTPS,

00:15:09 ◼   ► and everything is now HTTPS, I dropped the www prefix,

00:15:13 ◼   ► you know, all this fun stuff to modernize the site.

00:15:15 ◼   ► And so part of that was, let me,

00:15:17 ◼   ► I'm thinking about dropping the web font for a while,

00:15:20 ◼   ► it was actually about to, it bills annually

00:15:22 ◼   ► and it was about to bill me again, 160 bucks,

00:15:25 ◼   ► so I'm like, you know, maybe this is a good time

00:15:27 ◼   ► to reconsider whether I want to keep using this font,

00:15:29 ◼   ► so let me try without it.

00:15:30 ◼   ► All that being said, you are right,

00:15:31 ◼   ► I have barely written anything on the site

00:15:34 ◼   ► of any consequence in a long time, in months, really.

00:15:38 ◼   ► And part of that was 'cause the last time I wrote stuff

00:15:40 ◼   ► about app pricing, it went very, very badly.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And so part of that was just I need to kind of rethink

00:15:47 ◼   ► what audience I want to be writing to,

00:15:49 ◼   ► who's reading this, do they really care,

00:15:51 ◼   ► do I want to be taking the risk of some of the things

00:15:55 ◼   ► that I would want to say,

00:15:57 ◼   ► to risk getting all the feedback from it

00:15:59 ◼   ► and having my name dragged all over the internet

00:16:01 ◼   ► in horrible ways and starting a bunch of drama.

00:16:05 ◼   ► And most of the time it's just not worth it

00:16:06 ◼   ► to me honestly anymore. It's just not worth it. I do want to keep writing, but I'm kind

00:16:11 ◼   ► of going through a process where I want to kind of try to figure out what I want to keep

00:16:16 ◼   ► writing on the site. Because having the kind of potentially controversial tech topic discussions

00:16:22 ◼   ► I think are better here, where it's more human and people know me better and you guys

00:16:26 ◼   ► are here to rebut and to provide your own answers to things so that I'm just not going

00:16:32 ◼   ► off the deep end, going crazy and getting all the, you know, getting trashed because

00:16:35 ◼   ► said something horrible without any kind of rebuttal and the developer help things, I

00:16:42 ◼   ► would rather do that on Under the Radar, the other podcast that I do with Undercover David

00:16:46 ◼   ► Smith and anything that doesn't fit there, anything that is kind of helpful to developer

00:16:52 ◼   ► economics, I think I'm just not going to reveal anymore because it has proven not to

00:16:56 ◼   ► be worth it. And then I have lots of other things I could blog about. I can blog about

00:16:59 ◼   ► headphones and coffee and microphones and stuff like that. I can blog about lots of

00:17:03 ◼   ► other things without being that controversial or at least controversial in those ways that

00:17:07 ◼   ► I've been kind of burned by. So I'll figure it out over time. I have noticed that not

00:17:14 ◼   ► writing anything of substance in a while is not making me feel good and is actually making

00:17:21 ◼   ► me a worse podcaster because as you can tell by this long rambling thing, I kind of not

00:17:27 ◼   ► only do I have like more to say because it like builds up in me all week and then I like

00:17:31 ◼   ► spew it all out at once in a podcast and that's no good. But also my arguments on the podcast

00:17:35 ◼   ► are getting less coherent and less organized. I think that is because partially because

00:17:41 ◼   ► I've been sick for like three weeks and partially because I think not writing is actually making

00:17:47 ◼   ► the arguments in my head more weakly structured or more weakly organized if that makes sense.

00:17:53 ◼   ► Just write it and don't publish it. That's one way to do it or like you know,

00:17:58 ◼   ► it's like a private email list or something like that,

00:18:00 ◼   ► that might be a good idea.

00:18:02 ◼   ► I'm not sure if it would be as good.

00:18:05 ◼   ► If you only surround yourself with people

00:18:08 ◼   ► that agree with you or that want to read it,

00:18:10 ◼   ► or if you're writing for something

00:18:13 ◼   ► that is such a small audience, possibly of just you,

00:18:16 ◼   ► then I think you lose the ability for people

00:18:19 ◼   ► to improve you in constructive ways.

00:18:23 ◼   ► And I think that would be unfortunate

00:18:26 ◼   ► and it would not give the writing as much value to me

00:18:29 ◼   ► as it would for, you know, if it was in public.

00:18:33 ◼   ► - Oh, I was gonna give you a constructive improvement,

00:18:35 ◼   ► but I just realized it might just be Chrome.

00:18:37 ◼   ► Let me just check.

00:18:38 ◼   ► - Reload.

00:18:39 ◼   ► I didn't change the name of the CSS.

00:18:40 ◼   ► If you reload, I think it's--

00:18:41 ◼   ► - No, it's just Chrome, nevermind.

00:18:43 ◼   ► - What?

00:18:44 ◼   ► - I was gonna complain that the new font you had chosen

00:18:46 ◼   ► apparently didn't have a good emoji glyph for the cloud icon

00:18:50 ◼   ► that you use next to the streaming heading

00:18:51 ◼   ► in the Overcast 2 post, but it's just Chrome.

00:18:54 ◼   ► - It's a black cloud.

00:18:55 ◼   ► - It looks like a little turd.

00:18:57 ◼   ► But it's just Chrome, nevermind, carry on.

00:19:01 ◼   ► - I don't understand why everyone loves Chrome so damn much.

00:19:04 ◼   ► - It loads t.co links successfully,

00:19:06 ◼   ► so it's got that going for it.

00:19:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, see, I turned off,

00:19:11 ◼   ► I think Renee Ritchie may have found it.

00:19:13 ◼   ► Somebody had found a way to do a defaults right

00:19:17 ◼   ► for Tweetbot, which I know is not what you use, Jon,

00:19:20 ◼   ► but to do a defaults right to just direct

00:19:22 ◼   ► to the actual URL instead of a TCO link or whatever we're calling them.

00:19:27 ◼   ► And that made everything a million percent better.

00:19:31 ◼   ► And all of the issues that so many people seem to have with Safari, I genuinely never

00:19:35 ◼   ► run into them.

00:19:36 ◼   ► So you haven't got the one, the new one in El Capitan where the entirety of the window

00:19:42 ◼   ► chrome becomes inert.

00:19:43 ◼   ► Like you can't put the insertion point in the address bar, you can't click the window

00:19:47 ◼   ► widgets, you can't click any of the toolbar buttons, you can't use the scroll bar.

00:19:50 ◼   ► I get that one twice a week now.

00:19:52 ◼   ► - No, but remember that I have a sane amount of tabs open.

00:19:55 ◼   ► I don't have 3,000 windows and 4,500 tabs.

00:19:58 ◼   ► - Oh, that's not why.

00:19:59 ◼   ► I gotta get up with two browser windows open

00:20:01 ◼   ► and then one of them is dead.

00:20:02 ◼   ► - Again, I'm sure that these people who say

00:20:05 ◼   ► that Safari is a piece of crap,

00:20:06 ◼   ► I'm sure they're saying that for a reason,

00:20:08 ◼   ► but darned if I know why,

00:20:09 ◼   ► because my experience does not match with that.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And I just, I mean, I don't think that Chrome is bad

00:20:14 ◼   ► outside of the piss poor, just awful emoji support.

00:20:19 ◼   ► I don't think Chrome is bad,

00:20:20 ◼   ► But I don't feel like it brings anything to the table that I care about.

00:20:24 ◼   ► And again, I'm sure that there are all sorts of Chrome diehard Chrome fans that are firing

00:20:30 ◼   ► up email clients right now.

00:20:31 ◼   ► No, they're not.

00:20:32 ◼   ► They're using Gmail.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:20:34 ◼   ► Probably using Gmail to write me some sort of nastygram about the things that Chrome

00:20:37 ◼   ► does better than Safari.

00:20:39 ◼   ► And maybe that's true.

00:20:40 ◼   ► I'm not saying that they're wrong.

00:20:41 ◼   ► But in my personal experience, I have never thought to myself, "You know what?

00:20:44 ◼   ► I really wish I could use Chrome for this because it does whatever better."

00:20:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I still run both.

00:20:50 ◼   ► - I use Safari as my primary.

00:20:52 ◼   ► I used to use Chrome, I used to use one at work,

00:20:54 ◼   ► one at home, so I would always be up to date on both.

00:20:57 ◼   ► And now I've just been using Safari now for a while

00:20:59 ◼   ► as my primary, and Chrome is my flash isolation area.

00:21:03 ◼   ► But anyway, my flash quarantine.

00:21:05 ◼   ► But Chrome has always been very consistent for me

00:21:10 ◼   ► with performance, with reliability and everything.

00:21:13 ◼   ► Safari is all over the map with every new version.

00:21:15 ◼   ► So sometimes Safari is great for a while,

00:21:18 ◼   ► Sometimes Safari gets slow or buggy or inconsistent or it crashes or something for a few releases.

00:21:23 ◼   ► And in my experience Chrome is just way more consistent. Also I think Chrome has the better

00:21:28 ◼   ► web dev tools most of the time. So we'll see. Anyway, we will hear from all the Chrome

00:21:33 ◼   ► people and what they think because Chrome I believe has more market share than Safari

00:21:38 ◼   ► in pretty much every, you know, by anyone's metric. I'm pretty sure it's substantially

00:21:43 ◼   ► head of Safari now. So the world has voted, just like they used to vote for, Compaq and

00:21:49 ◼   ► Dell computers, that those are the best.

00:21:51 ◼   ► Oh goodness. All right, so not speaking of things that are awesome, why don't you make

00:21:56 ◼   ► us happier after mentioning Compaq and Dell and tell us about something that is awesome.

00:22:02 ◼   ► There's this company out there that I have just talked about for the first part of this

00:22:05 ◼   ► podcast quite a bit, and it's called Linode. Or Linode? I don't even know. So it's Linux,

00:22:11 ◼   ► Linus Linode, I don't know, but I say Linode.

00:22:15 ◼   ► It's a web host, it's been around for a long time now,

00:22:18 ◼   ► and I have been a Linode customer myself

00:22:21 ◼   ► for quite a long time, I think maybe like

00:22:24 ◼   ► six or eight years at least, I've been there a while.

00:22:26 ◼   ► I have done a lot of web hosts in my time,

00:22:29 ◼   ► I've used a lot of them, big and small,

00:22:31 ◼   ► from stuff as big as hosting the first four years

00:22:35 ◼   ► of Tumblr at a huge host, all the way down

00:22:38 ◼   ► to hosting little private sites for myself

00:22:41 ◼   ► and my friends and everything.

00:22:42 ◼   ► Over the years I've liked Linode so much

00:22:44 ◼   ► and they've gotten so good that I now host

00:22:48 ◼   ► everything at Linode.

00:22:49 ◼   ► I think I have one dedicated server left somewhere else

00:22:52 ◼   ► for some auxiliary tasks only because I haven't

00:22:54 ◼   ► gotten around to moving it to Linode yet.

00:22:56 ◼   ► It is such a great host and they can't pay me to say this.

00:23:00 ◼   ► I'm saying this honestly as me.

00:23:02 ◼   ► I was hoping to get them as a sponsor

00:23:03 ◼   ► because I've used them forever and I really do

00:23:06 ◼   ► genuinely like them and recommend them.

00:23:09 ◼   ► In my opinion, it is the best value in web hosting today.

00:23:13 ◼   ► They did a major upgrade about, I don't know,

00:23:15 ◼   ► two years ago now, or a year ago,

00:23:17 ◼   ► when they switched everything to SSDs.

00:23:18 ◼   ► So it's all fast, all SSD, modern CPUs.

00:23:21 ◼   ► More recently, they switched their hypervisor software

00:23:24 ◼   ► from Xen to KVM.

00:23:25 ◼   ► The latest Unix benchmark showed that it is

00:23:27 ◼   ► 300% performance increase moving to KVM from Xen.

00:23:31 ◼   ► So I've done this with all mine, it's been fine,

00:23:33 ◼   ► rock solid, everything's great.

00:23:35 ◼   ► You want to host things at Linode, believe me.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Like if you want real web hosting,

00:23:40 ◼   ► you want root access to your own server

00:23:42 ◼   ► that you can configure however you want

00:23:43 ◼   ► and you can install your own software

00:23:46 ◼   ► and run your own stuff, you want to do that at Linode.

00:23:49 ◼   ► It really is an incredible value for what you get.

00:23:52 ◼   ► It is very affordable.

00:23:53 ◼   ► The hardware and speed and bandwidth is solid.

00:23:58 ◼   ► Check it out.

00:23:59 ◼   ► I use it, I recommend it.

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00:24:04 ◼   ► using promo code, "AccidentalPodcast10."

00:24:08 ◼   ► So go to Linode.com/ATP, get a $10 credit

00:24:11 ◼   ► by using promo code, "AccidentalPodcast10."

00:24:13 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Linode for sponsoring our show.

00:24:16 ◼   ► - We have some news in the Apple executive lineup.

00:24:20 ◼   ► Jon, do you wanna kinda give us a synopsis

00:24:22 ◼   ► as to what's been going on there?

00:24:24 ◼   ► - Oh, it was so long ago, I can barely remember.

00:24:26 ◼   ► That was the news that was like right after

00:24:28 ◼   ► we recorded last week's podcast,

00:24:29 ◼   ► we were like, "Wonder what news they're gonna dump

00:24:30 ◼   ► "at the end of the year?"

00:24:32 ◼   ► the news was I think a fairly tame reorg where Phil Schiller got control of the App Store

00:24:39 ◼   ► stuff, the App Store stuff that used to be under ADQ.

00:24:43 ◼   ► ADQ still has like the whole media thing and Apple Music and all that stuff I think.

00:24:49 ◼   ► And they named, what's his name, Jeff Williams, COO, but he was already doing that.

00:24:54 ◼   ► Not a lot of exciting things there, but the thing that developers got excited about is

00:24:58 ◼   ► the moving of any app store responsibilities from one person to another.

00:25:02 ◼   ► And I guess people are getting hopeful just because, hey, it's a change and things are

00:25:07 ◼   ► bad now, so change has the potential to be good, but Phil Schiller has been in charge

00:25:11 ◼   ► of App Review, Marco can correct me if I'm wrong, for a while now, right?

00:25:16 ◼   ► That's not new.

00:25:17 ◼   ► I believe since the start.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Yeah, he's just getting the rest of the App Store.

00:25:20 ◼   ► And so App Review is one of the things that developers complain about a lot, and Phil

00:25:24 ◼   ► Schiller has always had that.

00:25:25 ◼   ► So he's not exactly your sort of savior of the App Store.

00:25:29 ◼   ► If you've been disgruntled about app review stuff,

00:25:32 ◼   ► that's Phil Schiller and now he's got the rest of it.

00:25:33 ◼   ► The hope is, I guess, that Phil Schiller's organization,

00:25:37 ◼   ► I don't know, like will improve the tech parts of it better,

00:25:41 ◼   ► like make iTunes connect nicer

00:25:42 ◼   ► and let Mac developers use TestFlight

00:25:45 ◼   ► and fix the Mac App Store sandboxing

00:25:48 ◼   ► so people can actually test their apps in the sandbox.

00:25:51 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:25:51 ◼   ► Like that's the hope that Eddy Cue seemed

00:25:54 ◼   ► not be able to roll out the features, like the software and server-based features for

00:26:00 ◼   ► developers as quickly as developers wanted, and it somehow feels like it would do better.

00:26:04 ◼   ► I have no idea if that is the case, but I have to admit I'm also slightly optimistic

00:26:10 ◼   ► just because things have been kind of not great, limping along for a really long time,

00:26:15 ◼   ► and I like to see some kind of shakeup, even if it's like the world's most minor shakeup.

00:26:19 ◼   ► So, yeah, I mean, just to fill out what you said, basically the developer ecosystem of

00:26:25 ◼   ► Apple has always been under these three different divisions in the company. There's the engineering

00:26:30 ◼   ► division under Craig Federighi. They make all the APIs and new OSs and everything. And

00:26:35 ◼   ► then there's the developer relations division, which is under Phil Schiller's division

00:26:41 ◼   ► under marketing. And that does like WWDC, the developer program, and also App Review.

00:26:49 ◼   ► and the app review policies.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And then there's the store division

00:26:53 ◼   ► and the editorial part of it.

00:26:54 ◼   ► That has been under ediQ in the services division

00:26:57 ◼   ► and that decides what apps to be featured

00:27:00 ◼   ► and how the store works and running the store backend

00:27:03 ◼   ► and everything.

00:27:04 ◼   ► I would imagine it also involves the store apps themselves.

00:27:09 ◼   ► So that, to have this under three different divisions,

00:27:12 ◼   ► you could always tell in the past

00:27:14 ◼   ► where there has been some kind of miscommunication

00:27:17 ◼   ► or friction in the past.

00:27:18 ◼   ► So for example, you would have an app that was featured by the App Store editorial team

00:27:24 ◼   ► under ADQ because it was doing some new cool thing, and then the app review team would

00:27:29 ◼   ► call them up and say, "Oh, sorry, we're not going to allow this.

00:27:32 ◼   ► You've got to take this app down," while it's being featured by the department in

00:27:36 ◼   ► the store.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And so you have these kind of like weird miscommunications or disagreements between the divisions that

00:27:42 ◼   ► have caused some friction or some, you know, clumsiness in the past.

00:27:47 ◼   ► The engineering side is still going to be under Federighi, still totally separate, obviously

00:27:50 ◼   ► that makes sense.

00:27:52 ◼   ► But the developer relations and the app store is now together under Phil.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And interestingly, as our friend Ben Thompson pointed out on Stratechery, and I think this

00:28:00 ◼   ► was one of the private members only things, but if not I'm willing to it, a lot of people

00:28:04 ◼   ► aren't paying a lot of attention to the fact that actually that Phil Schiller has actually

00:28:07 ◼   ► lost a big chunk of his responsibilities in this as well.

00:28:11 ◼   ► What corporate people call MarCom, marketing communications, which I think that's like

00:28:16 ◼   ► like advertising and stuff, right?

00:28:17 ◼   ► - Oh, beats me, I know nothing about that stuff.

00:28:20 ◼   ► - Anyway, that used to be under Phil,

00:28:22 ◼   ► and now they announced the new hire,

00:28:24 ◼   ► whose name I forgot, I'm sorry,

00:28:25 ◼   ► the new hire is now taking over

00:28:28 ◼   ► marketing communications from Phil

00:28:31 ◼   ► and reporting directly to Tim Cook.

00:28:33 ◼   ► So this stuff has been removed from Phil's plate, it appears.

00:28:36 ◼   ► And then Phil has gained the app stores.

00:28:40 ◼   ► And logically, I don't know how this works internally.

00:28:43 ◼   ► There's obviously a lot of implementation details here

00:28:46 ◼   ► that we don't know.

00:28:47 ◼   ► Like, the big one to me is,

00:28:50 ◼   ► how do you separate the app stores

00:28:53 ◼   ► from the backend that they run on,

00:28:56 ◼   ► which is all presumably still under ADQ's division?

00:28:59 ◼   ► There's gonna be some weirdness there, I would imagine.

00:29:01 ◼   ► But, high level, it certainly appears that Phil has

00:29:06 ◼   ► lost his responsibility of running the advertising part of it

00:29:10 ◼   ► and gain the responsibility of running the app stores,

00:29:13 ◼   ► whatever that includes.

00:29:15 ◼   ► Because he already ran developer relations and app review,

00:29:18 ◼   ► that makes some sense.

00:29:19 ◼   ► So John, I'm with you in that I am optimistic about this.

00:29:23 ◼   ► I don't think we're gonna see meaningful change

00:29:26 ◼   ► to the app store policies.

00:29:28 ◼   ► Any kind of rule that you can't do now,

00:29:30 ◼   ► any kind of controversy over app review,

00:29:33 ◼   ► I wouldn't even expect improvements to app review,

00:29:35 ◼   ► at least on iOS.

00:29:36 ◼   ► Like on the Mac app store,

00:29:37 ◼   ► having these occasionally very long review times,

00:29:40 ◼   ► I hope they fix that, because that's just messed up.

00:29:43 ◼   ► I mean, that's bad, that's embarrassing.

00:29:44 ◼   ► And that's obviously not the way it's supposed to work,

00:29:47 ◼   ► to have your apps sit in review for a month.

00:29:49 ◼   ► But when it is working, like on iOS,

00:29:51 ◼   ► when you typically get a seven or eight day review time,

00:29:54 ◼   ► I don't think we're gonna see any major changes

00:29:57 ◼   ► to that system, the system of app review

00:30:00 ◼   ► as we know it today.

00:30:02 ◼   ► That is here to stay for a long time,

00:30:03 ◼   ► because the person who is at the very top

00:30:06 ◼   ► of that organization just took control

00:30:08 ◼   ► of the entire app store.

00:30:09 ◼   ► Obviously they're not looking to change that.

00:30:11 ◼   ► But the things that I think that I'm optimistic about here

00:30:15 ◼   ► are that first of all, I can't get a great read on Phil,

00:30:20 ◼   ► but the more that I know of him,

00:30:23 ◼   ► or the more that I hear him talk

00:30:26 ◼   ► or that I hear stories about him,

00:30:28 ◼   ► the more I think I like him.

00:30:31 ◼   ► I think he has sensibilities that line up with mine

00:30:36 ◼   ► more so than most of the other high up Apple executives.

00:30:40 ◼   ► And more so that are in the interest of

00:30:43 ◼   ► kind of the old Apple.

00:30:44 ◼   ► And that comes with some good and some bad.

00:30:46 ◼   ► That's why like, you know, App Review

00:30:47 ◼   ► I don't think is going anywhere

00:30:48 ◼   ► because that, you know, it's like the old school Apple.

00:30:51 ◼   ► But, overall this is a good thing,

00:30:53 ◼   ► if for nothing else, because as you said, John,

00:30:55 ◼   ► it is a sign of a pretty big change.

00:30:59 ◼   ► And if you look at like, things that

00:31:01 ◼   ► stagnate or have problems in Apple,

00:31:04 ◼   ► many of them, I would say possibly even most of them,

00:31:08 ◼   ► fall under that services division.

00:31:09 ◼   ► That is clearly a place where they have had

00:31:11 ◼   ► a lot of problems in the past,

00:31:13 ◼   ► and we keep hearing that they're getting better.

00:31:16 ◼   ► Some of the things they're doing are better,

00:31:17 ◼   ► like the new CloudKit stuff, the new Photosync,

00:31:20 ◼   ► some of that stuff is really good.

00:31:21 ◼   ► And so I think they are getting better,

00:31:23 ◼   ► and we're hearing stories about them like,

00:31:25 ◼   ► running Linux servers now,

00:31:26 ◼   ► and doing this Apache Mesos thing,

00:31:28 ◼   ► and now this is probably where Swift on Linux is going,

00:31:31 ◼   ► and we're seeing lots of rumblings that this department is getting better, and some

00:31:37 ◼   ► evidence of that is coming out to the consumers, but even if they start doing really well,

00:31:42 ◼   ► they also seem dramatically overloaded, and they seem like they have a lot of trouble

00:31:47 ◼   ► making progress, especially on multiple fronts. So the App Store has basically done nothing.

00:31:55 ◼   ► The App Store has gone almost nowhere, has improved very little, or has changed very

00:31:59 ◼   ► little since its inception in 2008.

00:32:03 ◼   ► If you look at the App Store today versus the App Store in 2008, it really is not that

00:32:07 ◼   ► different.

00:32:08 ◼   ► Yes, some things are better, but not what you'd expect for, what is it, seven years,

00:32:13 ◼   ► seven and a half years?

00:32:14 ◼   ► Like not what you'd expect for that amount of time.

00:32:17 ◼   ► So to move a big chunk of this division out of it under new leadership in a different

00:32:23 ◼   ► division of the company, to have that be the App Store, the thing that controls so much

00:32:27 ◼   ► of my living, many people's living,

00:32:30 ◼   ► the modern computing landscape,

00:32:32 ◼   ► like so much of this is dependent on the App Store

00:32:34 ◼   ► and the way it's run and its policies.

00:32:37 ◼   ► To move that to another executive is a big change, I think.

00:32:42 ◼   ► It seems like it would be a big change.

00:32:43 ◼   ► I mean, I don't think this is just like some paper thing.

00:32:45 ◼   ► So I hope that this is a sign that they are finally

00:32:50 ◼   ► going to change the App Store.

00:32:51 ◼   ► They're finally going to improve it

00:32:53 ◼   ► to start making meaningful changes.

00:32:55 ◼   ► And again, I don't think it's gonna be

00:32:56 ◼   ► in regards to app review.

00:32:57 ◼   ► I think we're stuck with that for a long time,

00:32:59 ◼   ► but it could be in regards to many things

00:33:01 ◼   ► that could use improvement.

00:33:02 ◼   ► Things like, you know, if you want upgrade pricing

00:33:04 ◼   ► or trials, that's the kind of place, you know,

00:33:06 ◼   ► this is the kind of change that would happen.

00:33:07 ◼   ► If you want improvements to the Mac App Store,

00:33:10 ◼   ► or better, I mean, if you look at the health

00:33:12 ◼   ► of the app stores, pretty much all of them,

00:33:14 ◼   ► except the iPhone one, need help.

00:33:16 ◼   ► Like, they're not in great shape.

00:33:18 ◼   ► The iPhone one is doing okay,

00:33:19 ◼   ► simply because of its massive volume,

00:33:20 ◼   ► but it could still, you know,

00:33:22 ◼   ► it could still use some improvement.

00:33:24 ◼   ► All of that now is kind of,

00:33:26 ◼   ► we have renewed hope that the App Store might finally get better because they just did this

00:33:33 ◼   ► seemingly substantial sounding move. I have high hopes for that, especially to be under

00:33:38 ◼   ► Phil, he cares a lot about the Mac, about the product quality, and they wouldn't have

00:33:44 ◼   ► moved this for no reason. There was nothing pressuring them to move it. There was no reason

00:33:49 ◼   ► they had to do this, so they clearly want to do this, and this move has to have been

00:33:56 ◼   ► been for a good reason.

00:33:57 ◼   ► I think there is some kind of pressure,

00:33:59 ◼   ► because it's always hard to tell why things are happening

00:34:02 ◼   ► inside Apple, because obviously the press release isn't going

00:34:04 ◼   ► to tell you.

00:34:04 ◼   ► And all I can do is look at the experiences I've

00:34:07 ◼   ► had in the companies that I've worked for when they've

00:34:09 ◼   ► shuffled people around.

00:34:10 ◼   ► And the only real underlying cling,

00:34:13 ◼   ► other than stuff you don't know about,

00:34:14 ◼   ► because there's so much information you don't have.

00:34:16 ◼   ► Like for all we know, like maybe someone

00:34:18 ◼   ► is going to retire soon.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Or maybe someone has expressed an interest

00:34:22 ◼   ► in doing something different.

00:34:23 ◼   ► You don't know about stuff that's

00:34:24 ◼   ► not in the press release.

00:34:26 ◼   ► But usually if some top executive like the CEO or whatever is not getting something they

00:34:32 ◼   ► want out of some subdivision of the company, they usually have that slide for a while,

00:34:37 ◼   ► but eventually it's like, "I've wanted X for two years now, and this person hasn't delivered

00:34:44 ◼   ► it.

00:34:45 ◼   ► It's time to give another person a chance."

00:34:46 ◼   ► Sometimes there's the, you know, "Give the really hard job to this one executive who's

00:34:50 ◼   ► great for, you know, tackling tough problems," and that person bounces around like the problem

00:34:55 ◼   ► Solver or the fixer or the you know like the what he called?

00:34:59 ◼   ► Silver NSX Casey. Oh, it's a movie reference. You won't get it the wolf

00:35:03 ◼   ► The wolf is definitely a fixer anyway. It could be that but like either way

00:35:07 ◼   ► It's like someone is not getting what they want out of

00:35:09 ◼   ► Insert thing and it could be is someone not getting what they want out of marcom

00:35:14 ◼   ► And that's why a new guy has to come in to take it is someone not getting what they want out of the app store

00:35:19 ◼   ► We don't know because it could be say it say the marketing stuff seems stagnant. You know like

00:35:23 ◼   ► Apple's marketing message isn't evolving and for a while we wanted to change and Phil doesn't seem capable to get out of the rut

00:35:29 ◼   ► So what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring in someone new they're gonna take over to marketing him in communication

00:35:33 ◼   ► But since Phil is such an important person

00:35:35 ◼   ► You can't take away that from him without giving him something else and Eddie's got a lot of stuff

00:35:40 ◼   ► So give it over to him. All right, so that's one plausible scenario

00:35:42 ◼   ► Another one is the one that we're all thinking of which is like Eddie for years

00:35:45 ◼   ► We wanted X out of you know, this app store stuff. It hasn't been happening

00:35:49 ◼   ► So we're gonna take that away from you and give it to somebody who is more

00:35:53 ◼   ► I don't know who we think is gonna do a better job

00:35:55 ◼   ► I don't know Phil Schiller is the person who's gonna do a better job with that particular thing

00:35:59 ◼   ► Like it's just so much we don't know but the bottom line is these things don't happen without a substantial reason because top executives hate having

00:36:07 ◼   ► Responsibility taken away from them. It's it's not a demotion, but it's seen as like, you know, so

00:36:11 ◼   ► Phil Schiller is not really, you know, he got a bunch of responsibilities taken away, but he took the mantle of something else

00:36:17 ◼   ► So I feel like this is you know in the political org chart of Apple is a little bit of a down-hour

00:36:23 ◼   ► an ADQ and a little bit of an up or sideways arrow on fill.

00:36:26 ◼   ► That's just the way it feels to me from the outside.

00:36:29 ◼   ► And what I think about is what, you know,

00:36:31 ◼   ► assuming this theory is corrected a little bit down

00:36:34 ◼   ► our ad ad ad ad EQ, what is it that top executives

00:36:38 ◼   ► might have wanted that they weren't getting out of ad EQ?

00:36:41 ◼   ► And that's makes me think of the success

00:36:43 ◼   ► heights problem things where in the beginning,

00:36:45 ◼   ► when ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad

00:36:48 ◼   ► ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad ad

00:36:49 ◼   ► going gangbusters. Hey, the App Store is super popular. Everybody loves apps. They're installing

00:36:53 ◼   ► stuff and like every year, every quarter, he, you know, at every meeting, and he could

00:36:58 ◼   ► be like, look at these crazy numbers. Look how many apps we have. Look how many people

00:37:01 ◼   ► are downloading stuff. Look how many developers are signed up. Like every metric that he could

00:37:05 ◼   ► possibly every chart he could put up every number he could throw in someone's face was

00:37:08 ◼   ► like, I'm in charge of the App Store and the App Store is awesome. But as you pointed out,

00:37:13 ◼   ► Marco, at a certain point, like those numbers, not that they level off. It's like, yeah,

00:37:17 ◼   ► yeah, we heard lots of apps, lots of whatever,

00:37:18 ◼   ► but what's this I'm hearing about, you know,

00:37:21 ◼   ► developers don't like this,

00:37:22 ◼   ► or it's hard to search in the store,

00:37:24 ◼   ► or we bought this company to redo the store,

00:37:26 ◼   ► but it kind of looks the same

00:37:27 ◼   ► and people don't think it's that much better.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And just from regular,

00:37:30 ◼   ► like you don't have to be plugged into this community,

00:37:32 ◼   ► just Tim Cook can go to the app store on his own phone

00:37:35 ◼   ► to try to find something

00:37:36 ◼   ► and notice that there are problems

00:37:38 ◼   ► and bring that up two years ago at ADQ

00:37:40 ◼   ► and it'd be like, oh yeah, no, we'll take care of that,

00:37:41 ◼   ► no, we're working on this, working on that.

00:37:42 ◼   ► And at a certain point, it's like,

00:37:44 ◼   ► it doesn't, you know, again,

00:37:45 ◼   ► things that someone who's not plugged into the developer community,

00:37:49 ◼   ► just Tim Cook on his own phone, using the App Store,

00:37:52 ◼   ► can be like, you know, it doesn't seem like,

00:37:55 ◼   ► regardless of whether I think this is good or not,

00:37:57 ◼   ► and your numbers are great, and your reliability is great,

00:37:59 ◼   ► and you're making a lot of money or whatever,

00:38:01 ◼   ► it just doesn't seem like it has gotten that much better

00:38:03 ◼   ► over the past several years, so maybe it's time for a change.

00:38:06 ◼   ► Now, this could all be delusions based on our perspective as outsiders,

00:38:10 ◼   ► and people who know a lot of developers,

00:38:12 ◼   ► it could be something entirely unrelated,

00:38:13 ◼   ► but to me that's a plausible scenario.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Not that EdiKey was coasting,

00:38:18 ◼   ► but that when you're on the fun part of the hockey stick,

00:38:22 ◼   ► it can hide a lot of stuff,

00:38:23 ◼   ► and at a certain point,

00:38:24 ◼   ► either the hockey stuff levels off

00:38:26 ◼   ► or that stuff becomes old hat,

00:38:27 ◼   ► and you need like, what have you done for me lately?

00:38:30 ◼   ► What have you done to the App Store lately?

00:38:32 ◼   ► 'Cause the complaints are there,

00:38:34 ◼   ► and the feedback is there,

00:38:35 ◼   ► and people leaving the Mac App Store,

00:38:37 ◼   ► and long review times,

00:38:39 ◼   ► I don't know if that's even involved in that,

00:38:40 ◼   ► and like features in iTunes Connect,

00:38:42 ◼   ► It just seems like at this point,

00:38:45 ◼   ► no matter how distantly you're removed

00:38:46 ◼   ► are from the developer community,

00:38:47 ◼   ► you can do what Marco just said and say,

00:38:48 ◼   ► look at what the App Store was like five years ago

00:38:51 ◼   ► and look at what it's like now and think,

00:38:52 ◼   ► is that five years worth of progress in the App Store?

00:38:54 ◼   ► And you just have to say no.

00:38:56 ◼   ► And so that's why that feels like the strongest reason

00:38:59 ◼   ► why there might be a shakeup related to the App Store,

00:39:01 ◼   ► regardless of what you think of it,

00:39:03 ◼   ► it's just that it's just not progressing and advancing

00:39:06 ◼   ► the way you would hope it would.

00:39:08 ◼   ► - Well, and also, I think as I mentioned last episode,

00:39:11 ◼   ► I think you can look at their recent product launches, the watch, the Apple TV, and the

00:39:17 ◼   ► iPad Pro.

00:39:18 ◼   ► In all three of those cases, you can very clearly point to the app ecosystem and the

00:39:24 ◼   ► app stores themselves as holding these products back significantly.

00:39:28 ◼   ► The TV app store is frankly embarrassing.

00:39:32 ◼   ► There's so little in it.

00:39:34 ◼   ► It is so hard to use.

00:39:36 ◼   ► It is so hard to find anything.

00:39:39 ◼   ► There's no public links for TV apps.

00:39:43 ◼   ► If you hear about, like, Badland 2 came out this past week or sometime recently.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I wanted to get it on my TV or at least find out if it was available on the Apple TV.

00:39:52 ◼   ► I could not find this information out anywhere except going over, walking over to the TV

00:39:57 ◼   ► and typing poorly "Badland 2" into that horrible text entry field and finding nothing.

00:40:04 ◼   ► And I wasn't sure, like, is search just bad right now or is it really not here?

00:40:08 ◼   ► And it turns out I don't think it's out for the TV yet.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Had it been out for the TV, I would have no way on my computer or my phone or any other

00:40:15 ◼   ► device to have clicked "Buy this app" and have it show up on my TV.

00:40:21 ◼   ► There are simple things like this where the store is really not helping.

00:40:24 ◼   ► It's really hindering things.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Not to mention the way bigger challenge of developer economics and making it worth developing

00:40:33 ◼   ► for these platforms, which is a whole separate discussion, but is related to this.

00:40:37 ◼   ► Who's in charge of that?

00:40:39 ◼   ► Just to give one example, upgrade pricing.

00:40:41 ◼   ► Developers have wanted upgraded pricing for a long time.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Of all the top execs we know at Apple, are the people saying no to upgrade pricing and

00:40:50 ◼   ► are they still in charge of that decision?

00:40:52 ◼   ► Well, I think it was kind of a combo.

00:40:55 ◼   ► That kind of thing before would have been...

00:40:57 ◼   ► If you look at the app review rules, there are many app review rules related to pricing

00:41:03 ◼   ► and what you're allowed to do with your pricing and what you're not.

00:41:05 ◼   ► what has to be free, what has to not break

00:41:08 ◼   ► or not have limits on it or whatever.

00:41:10 ◼   ► So a lot of that is under app review,

00:41:12 ◼   ► but then anything related to things like upgrade pricing

00:41:14 ◼   ► would have had to be implemented by an accused division.

00:41:18 ◼   ► So that kind of thing spanned both divisions,

00:41:22 ◼   ► and I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen

00:41:24 ◼   ► so little change of that type,

00:41:27 ◼   ► because it would have involved these two divisions

00:41:30 ◼   ► working together, which was probably problematic

00:41:34 ◼   ► or at least burdensome.

00:41:36 ◼   ► - They implemented bundles, which was like,

00:41:38 ◼   ► seems like so much more complicated than upgrade pricing.

00:41:40 ◼   ► I mean, they did in-app purchase and they did bundles.

00:41:42 ◼   ► Two features that are fairly complicated.

00:41:45 ◼   ► So it seems like when whoever is the head of this snake

00:41:48 ◼   ► wants to change to the economics,

00:41:50 ◼   ► we wanna make bundles possible.

00:41:52 ◼   ► We want to make in-app purchase possible.

00:41:54 ◼   ► That's gonna involve your team, Eddie,

00:41:56 ◼   ► 'cause you gotta handle all the bundle

00:41:57 ◼   ► and the pricing or whatever.

00:41:58 ◼   ► And in-app purchase is gonna be like a backend

00:42:00 ◼   ► that we're gonna talk to or whatever.

00:42:01 ◼   ► But it just seemed to me that those efforts

00:42:04 ◼   ► weren't coming from IDQ's team.

00:42:06 ◼   ► And I'm just wondering like who, you know,

00:42:08 ◼   ► I just pulled upgrade pricing out of the hat,

00:42:09 ◼   ► but just in terms of those economic issues,

00:42:11 ◼   ► somebody is setting the policy.

00:42:13 ◼   ► I feel like in an organization like Apple still,

00:42:15 ◼   ► if somebody high enough up said, you know what,

00:42:18 ◼   ► we're gonna do upgrade pricing.

00:42:19 ◼   ► It would happen.

00:42:20 ◼   ► Like regardless of who's in charge of implementing it,

00:42:21 ◼   ► maybe it would be credit and maybe like the interface

00:42:24 ◼   ► for it and iTunes connect would be bad.

00:42:25 ◼   ► And maybe it would be buggy to begin with.

00:42:27 ◼   ► And maybe it would be difficult for developers to test.

00:42:28 ◼   ► All those things you can blame on IDQ or whatever.

00:42:30 ◼   ► but I always wonder where the decision is made.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Do they have a meeting where I say,

00:42:35 ◼   ► should we revisit this upgrade pricing,

00:42:36 ◼   ► or does it never come up?

00:42:38 ◼   ► Do they decide once, back when Steve Jobs was still alive,

00:42:41 ◼   ► that upgrade pricing is good for developers

00:42:42 ◼   ► but bad for users, and let's never revisit that decision,

00:42:45 ◼   ► despite how the iPad Pro may change

00:42:48 ◼   ► that equation or whatever?

00:42:50 ◼   ► - You have to also look at how important is this thing,

00:42:54 ◼   ► that's very important to us,

00:42:55 ◼   ► how important is this relative to the division it's in,

00:42:59 ◼   ► than the company it's in, you know.

00:43:00 ◼   ► And so relative to all of Apple as a whole,

00:43:04 ◼   ► I don't know how important they consider things

00:43:06 ◼   ► like the App Store and developer happiness

00:43:08 ◼   ► with the App Store and everything else.

00:43:09 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:43:10 ◼   ► - But they see the tertiary effects.

00:43:11 ◼   ► It's like, why aren't more people buying iPad Pros?

00:43:13 ◼   ► Why are people leaving the Mac App Store?

00:43:15 ◼   ► Why aren't all these awesome apps

00:43:17 ◼   ► that we know it's possible to build

00:43:18 ◼   ► appearing on the iPad Pro?

00:43:20 ◼   ► Why is Adobe not making a full-fledged version

00:43:22 ◼   ► of Photoshop for the iPad Pro?

00:43:23 ◼   ► Like all sorts of questions about

00:43:24 ◼   ► why aren't people taking advantage of our platform?

00:43:27 ◼   ► one is that we haven't sold enough hardware, but it's kind of a you know a chicken egg situation other answers

00:43:32 ◼   ► What is it about especially specifically the iPad Pro like?

00:43:35 ◼   ► What is it about our platforms that you know we all know the answers that lends itself to?

00:43:40 ◼   ► applications that a bunch of people write and

00:43:42 ◼   ► Support while they can still make money and then abandon like there is no sort of

00:43:46 ◼   ► Ten year 20 year application because you can't get any more revenue from them unless it's like it in an app purchase type of thing

00:43:52 ◼   ► Where you're constantly you know fleecing people for in-app currency or whatever you know like other than that

00:43:56 ◼   ► those models, like why is there no model for sort of professional applications that people

00:44:01 ◼   ► buy on a regular basis? I guess they could do subscriptions, but then, you know, like,

00:44:05 ◼   ► we all know what the App Store policies are there that make it difficult to have a sustainable

00:44:11 ◼   ► high-end software package that continually is upgraded on Apple's iOS platforms. And

00:44:16 ◼   ► it's because all the tools people are used to either don't exist or have a 30% tax that's

00:44:19 ◼   ► just mostly untenable. Like Adobe loves their subscription revenue. Adobe would love subscription

00:44:25 ◼   ► revenue a lot less if Apple took 30% of it.

00:44:27 ◼   ► - Right, and I mean there have been so many

00:44:32 ◼   ► unimplemented or lost or canceled ideas

00:44:35 ◼   ► and services and products because of that 30%.

00:44:38 ◼   ► I mean that is not a small number.

00:44:40 ◼   ► That is a number that makes or breaks

00:44:43 ◼   ► people's business models in a lot of cases.

00:44:45 ◼   ► You know, going back to Eddy Cue, to his division,

00:44:47 ◼   ► like if you look at what else that division had to do

00:44:51 ◼   ► while the app store was under them,

00:44:53 ◼   ► That's all of iCloud, that's all of Siri,

00:44:55 ◼   ► that is all of the stores, the other stores,

00:44:58 ◼   ► the music stores, that's Apple Music.

00:45:00 ◼   ► - The streaming television plan that still hasn't happened.

00:45:02 ◼   ► - Right, and it's all the content deals.

00:45:04 ◼   ► It's negotiating and dealing with all these

00:45:06 ◼   ► content companies also, and Apple has not done well

00:45:10 ◼   ► in that area recently.

00:45:11 ◼   ► And I don't know if this is just Q doing his job badly,

00:45:15 ◼   ► probably not, it's probably more complicated than that.

00:45:17 ◼   ► - No, it's more like people have Apple's number now.

00:45:19 ◼   ► The first one was easy, and then people learned

00:45:21 ◼   ► their lesson from iTunes, and it was like,

00:45:22 ◼   ► know we're intentionally giving our business to Amazon to check your power

00:45:25 ◼   ► Apple so now it's it's much harder to go because you know Apple doesn't want to

00:45:30 ◼   ► come out with a plan well as far as I know nobody has a plan that is a

00:45:34 ◼   ► convincing replacement for quote-unquote real television at this point Apple

00:45:38 ◼   ► wants to be the first so they're gonna have to be the ones to explain to the

00:45:42 ◼   ► big networks and everybody just trust us this this won't disempower you and you

00:45:48 ◼   ► won't lose your shirt on this deal but you have to bring the price down because

00:45:51 ◼   ► because no one's gonna buy it if it costs as much as cable

00:45:53 ◼   ► but isn't as good as cable, which it won't be

00:45:55 ◼   ► 'cause our stupid Apple TV box isn't that good.

00:45:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:45:58 ◼   ► - Right, and this is another thing where,

00:46:00 ◼   ► kind of what I was saying last week

00:46:01 ◼   ► about how Apple doesn't really seem to know

00:46:04 ◼   ► how to be in a negotiating position

00:46:07 ◼   ► of not just absolute power.

00:46:09 ◼   ► Last week I was talking about developers,

00:46:12 ◼   ► but this week I think that applies very equally

00:46:15 ◼   ► to the content problems, the content deals.

00:46:18 ◼   ► - Well, I'm willing to say here

00:46:20 ◼   ► that in this negotiation between Apple

00:46:22 ◼   ► and television networks, I'm willing to put money

00:46:25 ◼   ► that the television people are being more unreasonable

00:46:28 ◼   ► than Apple.

00:46:28 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:46:29 ◼   ► It feels like a safe bet.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Every time Les Moonves makes a public statement,

00:46:33 ◼   ► I'd be like, I don't envy Apple trying to negotiate

00:46:36 ◼   ► with these guys because I think that they don't get it

00:46:40 ◼   ► and Apple is trying to explain it to them.

00:46:41 ◼   ► So I really, it's hard to fault Apple and these things.

00:46:46 ◼   ► Maybe they are being a little bit stubborn,

00:46:48 ◼   ► But geez, they're trying to pull an industry's head out of the sand and it's slow going.

00:46:53 ◼   ► No, and that's fair, but that industry I think is still doing really well without Apple.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And so the dynamic is different.

00:47:00 ◼   ► One of the reasons Apple was able to have so much power in music and get such great

00:47:04 ◼   ► deals for music is because the music industry was kind of naïve and also pretty desperate.

00:47:10 ◼   ► And in this case, today that's not the case anymore, especially with TV industry.

00:47:14 ◼   ► The TV industry is still doing very well and still making tons of money.

00:47:17 ◼   ► - Well, Apple should have been Netflix, but wasn't.

00:47:20 ◼   ► Like, and Netflix got there first, right?

00:47:22 ◼   ► So, and then now everyone, it's a bigger mess.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Like you're right, like music,

00:47:27 ◼   ► I don't know if music was more desperate,

00:47:29 ◼   ► but music was smaller and more tractable

00:47:31 ◼   ► and nobody knew what was gonna happen.

00:47:33 ◼   ► And Apple just steamrolled everybody.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And then everyone saw what happened

00:47:36 ◼   ► and everybody who basically lost power to Apple in that

00:47:39 ◼   ► was like, no, we're not doing that again.

00:47:41 ◼   ► So every other industry from eBooks, television,

00:47:43 ◼   ► to movies, to everything was like,

00:47:45 ◼   ► If Apple comes calling, look at the music industry as a cautionary tale and negotiate

00:47:50 ◼   ► differently and find another way and we're going to make our own streaming apps and we're

00:47:54 ◼   ► going to make deals with Netflix and, you know, who knows what we're going to do.

00:47:58 ◼   ► But yeah, it's a more complicated world.

00:47:59 ◼   ► Like I, yeah, and I do wonder, like, I don't know anything about EdiQ other than I see

00:48:05 ◼   ► the guy on stage and hear him talk.

00:48:06 ◼   ► We know he's not a big fan of buttoning a shirt.

00:48:08 ◼   ► Yeah, well, it's getting lower.

00:48:10 ◼   ► But I always wonder what like, what his core skill set is.

00:48:13 ◼   ► Like he's not an engineer, right?

00:48:14 ◼   ► He's not an ex-programmer or anything.

00:48:16 ◼   ► - We've always heard that he is like the negotiator.

00:48:19 ◼   ► Like that he is really good

00:48:21 ◼   ► at these content deals apparently.

00:48:22 ◼   ► Or I've also heard that he has a reputation

00:48:25 ◼   ► of like being the fixer.

00:48:26 ◼   ► Like, you know, kind of getting things done.

00:48:28 ◼   ► But I honestly, I don't see it.

00:48:31 ◼   ► - Not on iTunes Connect.

00:48:33 ◼   ► - No, well, and look, I mean, iTunes Connect

00:48:35 ◼   ► is the least of developers problems.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I mean--

00:48:38 ◼   ► - Well, all things associated with like

00:48:39 ◼   ► test flight integration and you know, the process,

00:48:42 ◼   ► your visibility into the app review process and the ability to contact a human about your

00:48:47 ◼   ► thing and all that stuff.

00:48:48 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah. But like, yeah, I mean the problems with the App Store go way beyond

00:48:53 ◼   ► like the iTunes Connect web interface. Like that goes so far beyond that. I mean that's,

00:48:57 ◼   ► iTunes Connect is good enough for what it does, you know, it's not great but it's

00:49:01 ◼   ► fine. It's like the admin panel that we all make for our websites. Like no one's

00:49:06 ◼   ► admin panel is nice. iTunes Connect is not nice. But I don't need Phil Schiller to

00:49:11 ◼   ► fix iTunes Connect. We need Phil Schiller to fix a lot bigger problems than that.

00:49:16 ◼   ► EdiQ got a bachelor's in computer science and economics from Duke.

00:49:21 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't know. I can't get a read. It was obviously

00:49:25 ◼   ► at this level of the hierarchy. You're not doing anything. You're telling people who

00:49:28 ◼   ► are telling people who are telling people to do things, which is fine. It's management.

00:49:34 ◼   ► I'm trying to think. Things that were put in our EdiQ that saw substantial improvements

00:49:41 ◼   ► or they got better or that, you know, like he's got a lot of sort of stars on his, you

00:49:46 ◼   ► know, whatever you call them on his lapel, right?

00:49:48 ◼   ► Like iTunes and the stores and the app store, especially in the initial part, there's lots

00:49:53 ◼   ► of big important good numbers you can put up there.

00:49:55 ◼   ► I bet he got a lot of big bonuses in a lot of those years and, you know, because everything

00:49:59 ◼   ► looked good.

00:50:01 ◼   ► But just lately, not that it doesn't look good anymore, it still looks good.

00:50:05 ◼   ► But like I said, it's like, what have you done for me lately?

00:50:07 ◼   ► What improvements have you made to the system?

00:50:09 ◼   ► yes, this is a system.

00:50:10 ◼   ► People can upload apps, they can put them on stores,

00:50:12 ◼   ► we have multiple stores, we have multiple things,

00:50:14 ◼   ► but it just doesn't seem like it's progressing.

00:50:16 ◼   ► We've all been hearing the exact same complaints

00:50:19 ◼   ► from the developer side of it for so many years,

00:50:21 ◼   ► and so just set that aside,

00:50:22 ◼   ► because a lot of people listening are like,

00:50:23 ◼   ► who cares about developers?

00:50:24 ◼   ► I don't care about developers.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Apple should only care about users.

00:50:27 ◼   ► Users should come above developers,

00:50:29 ◼   ► and I think that's right.

00:50:30 ◼   ► Users do come above developers and should,

00:50:31 ◼   ► because there's many more of them.

00:50:33 ◼   ► - But it's related, because as a user,

00:50:37 ◼   ► you might be like, I don't care what developers

00:50:39 ◼   ► think about pricing on the App Store,

00:50:40 ◼   ► and then at the same time you might be like,

00:50:41 ◼   ► I just got this iPad Pro,

00:50:42 ◼   ► why isn't there more software updated for it?

00:50:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, or why is this thing that I downloaded

00:50:46 ◼   ► this throwaway app that no one's ever gonna support

00:50:48 ◼   ► that doesn't work right?

00:50:49 ◼   ► But I'm saying set that aside for a second,

00:50:51 ◼   ► just 'cause I totally believe in the importance of that,

00:50:54 ◼   ► but just set it aside.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I really do feel that from the user's perspective,

00:50:59 ◼   ► the App Store as experienced by the user,

00:51:01 ◼   ► you just talked about it, Marco,

00:51:02 ◼   ► the App Store as experienced by users of Apple TV,

00:51:05 ◼   ► or just as a user going to the App Store,

00:51:08 ◼   ► finding stuff, feeling good and confident about the things

00:51:12 ◼   ► that you find there.

00:51:13 ◼   ► I think that has not progressed, and the sort of cesspits

00:51:17 ◼   ► of it have gotten deeper and more dangerous.

00:51:19 ◼   ► The cesspits of free to play, all those mechanics

00:51:23 ◼   ► that are taking money from people,

00:51:25 ◼   ► and the cesspit of, at this point,

00:51:27 ◼   ► sort of single-use unsupported applications

00:51:31 ◼   ► that are clogging up your search results

00:51:33 ◼   ► and make it much harder to find the one or two good apps.

00:51:38 ◼   ► They always brag about how many apps they have.

00:51:40 ◼   ► Once that number got to like six or seven digits,

00:51:43 ◼   ► it stops being a plus, it starts being a minus.

00:51:45 ◼   ► I don't want 10 million applications.

00:51:47 ◼   ► I don't want 1 million applications,

00:51:49 ◼   ► even 200,000 applications.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Like seriously, those all can't be winners, right?

00:51:55 ◼   ► There's a lot of, right?

00:51:57 ◼   ► So not that I'm saying Apple should reject more things

00:51:59 ◼   ► from the store or whatever, but like at a certain point,

00:52:02 ◼   ► the number of applications you have becomes Apple's problem

00:52:04 ◼   ► to solve, not their thing to brag about.

00:52:06 ◼   ► The problem to solve is, Amazon has probably millions

00:52:10 ◼   ► of products, but I find it easier to find decent things

00:52:14 ◼   ► on Amazon because their review system is better than Apple's

00:52:16 ◼   ► because they're people who like this, like that,

00:52:18 ◼   ► is a little bit better.

00:52:20 ◼   ► All the parts that have to do with dealing with lots

00:52:23 ◼   ► of products and presenting it to users,

00:52:25 ◼   ► that part of the experience of being a user

00:52:27 ◼   ► of Apple products has, again, regardless of what you think

00:52:30 ◼   ► of it, just hasn't gotten that much better

00:52:31 ◼   ► in years and years and years.

00:52:33 ◼   ► And so that is an area where I feel like,

00:52:35 ◼   ► No matter what you think about it, you have to say,

00:52:37 ◼   ► we are not progressing fast enough.

00:52:39 ◼   ► I don't know if competitors are nipping at their heels

00:52:41 ◼   ► or whatever, but if you can make that experience better,

00:52:44 ◼   ► as they showed with the App Store to begin with,

00:52:45 ◼   ► if you can make that experience better,

00:52:46 ◼   ► that can do really big things for your bottom line

00:52:49 ◼   ► and for your customer sat

00:52:50 ◼   ► and for your developer satisfaction.

00:52:52 ◼   ► Letting developers be able to respond to reviews

00:52:55 ◼   ► or contact people anonymously,

00:52:56 ◼   ► that's low hanging fruit.

00:52:59 ◼   ► It's not even that big a deal.

00:53:01 ◼   ► And it's like, well, we can't do that

00:53:03 ◼   ► if the App Store just came out.

00:53:04 ◼   ► It's been years.

00:53:04 ◼   ► like, give me one of those a year for five years and it would make much bigger difference.

00:53:09 ◼   ► And I know they did things, I just mentioned the bundles and in-app purchases arguably

00:53:13 ◼   ► are an important thing and subscriptions and opening the stuff that used to be newsstand

00:53:16 ◼   ► only up, like, they have done some things but it just feels like stagnation and I don't

00:53:24 ◼   ► feel good going into the app store these days unless I know exactly where I'm going.

00:53:28 ◼   ► And if I can't get a direct link like on the TV, I don't know what I would do.

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00:54:54 ◼   ► - So also in the last week,

00:54:55 ◼   ► 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose did a, not really an interview, but a feature on Apple.

00:55:03 ◼   ► And they were afforded a little bit more access than most TV crews are afforded.

00:55:10 ◼   ► Have you guys seen this?

00:55:11 ◼   ► Nope.

00:55:12 ◼   ► Of course not.

00:55:13 ◼   ► I did, but Stupid Football pushed it off the end of my TiVo, so I had to watch the rest

00:55:17 ◼   ► of it on CBS's, or whatever, network.

00:55:20 ◼   ► It is their terrible website that made me watch more ads, but I did eventually watch

00:55:23 ◼   ► it all.

00:55:24 ◼   ► I can do that?

00:55:25 ◼   ► Yeah, if you stupid football pushes the show out and your TiVo doesn't correctly adjust because stupid football ran long

00:55:31 ◼   ► Not enough time for TiVo to get updated guide information

00:55:34 ◼   ► then you can watch as much as you can watch your TiVo and then I just always assume I can go to the website of

00:55:40 ◼   ► The television show and watch the rest of it and lo and behold I could as long as I was willing to watch like

00:55:45 ◼   ► 17 of the same commercial before I could move a little play head up to the point where I left off

00:55:49 ◼   ► So what do you think about football?

00:55:52 ◼   ► I'm not gonna take this bait. I'm not gonna take this bait. It's not bait

00:55:55 ◼   ► I'm just saying like is there a TV schedule or isn't there a TV schedule?

00:55:58 ◼   ► I feel like if the football runs long it should switch to the football football overflow channel

00:56:02 ◼   ► Anyway, all right, I'm still not gonna take this bait. Um, so the feature I it is worth watching although

00:56:10 ◼   ► I don't think any like revelations came from it accepting apparently reddit seemed to think that a

00:56:16 ◼   ► MacBook that was shown in the background for four seconds was some new Mac

00:56:20 ◼   ► Which it wasn't which supposedly it wasn't or if it was like this is the best part of that theory

00:56:26 ◼   ► Let's assume that it was so what happens now like let's just stipulate for the purpose of this conversation that there was it

00:56:33 ◼   ► There was a different MacBook in the background now what happens?

00:56:35 ◼   ► Nothing happens. It looked like

00:56:38 ◼   ► Like it opens it closes. It has a screen and a keyboard. Can you buy one? Do you know what's in it? Nope pointless?

00:56:47 ◼   ► Plus we already know what they're doing.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Look, Skylake is coming out in the spring/winter/summer/god knows when.

00:56:54 ◼   ► Skylake is coming out soon.

00:56:56 ◼   ► It comes with a huge power savings.

00:56:58 ◼   ► The Retina MacBook Pro design is going to be about four years old by the time it comes

00:57:01 ◼   ► out.

00:57:02 ◼   ► They're going to take advantage of the power savings and they're going to make the stupid

00:57:06 ◼   ► thing thinner.

00:57:07 ◼   ► And it's going to be fine.

00:57:08 ◼   ► I'm going to complain about the keyboard and the battery life and the 4-star extract

00:57:11 ◼   ► pad and then I'll end up buying one and they're going to be the same laptops we have

00:57:14 ◼   ► now but thinner and cooler looking and maybe in space gray and gold.

00:57:18 ◼   ► Or not. Or they could have amazing features that, but none of them would be visible on

00:57:21 ◼   ► the screen. It looks like a laptop. It's a screen and a keyboard and a track net. I just

00:57:25 ◼   ► like to, you know, just arguing about it, it's like, I will agree right now that that

00:57:30 ◼   ► was a brand new unreleased product in the background and now what happens? Do we just

00:57:34 ◼   ► sit here and smile? I don't even understand. Anyway, go on Casey, we interrupted you.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Yeah, so there wasn't that much that I thought was really remarkable about the piece, about

00:57:44 ◼   ► piece, but I thought we should at least note that we, well, two-thirds of us have seen

00:57:48 ◼   ► it.

00:57:49 ◼   ► The one thing that I thought was really interesting was Dan Riccio saying, and I'm going to butcher

00:57:53 ◼   ► the quote because I don't have it in front of me, "Even a tenth of a millimeter of thickness

00:57:57 ◼   ► is sacred to us."

00:57:59 ◼   ► And this was with regard to the MacBook One, but probably pretty telling about Apple's

00:58:03 ◼   ► attitude about these sorts of things in general.

00:58:06 ◼   ► So that's a thing.

00:58:08 ◼   ► That's a thing that we've been lamenting for a while.

00:58:10 ◼   ► I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that.

00:58:12 ◼   ► Well, the quote that stuck out to me was when they were talking to Johnny Ive and he was

00:58:16 ◼   ► getting into his Johnny Ive mode where he is very passionate about things.

00:58:20 ◼   ► And I think the question was something about like, did you feel like that Apple could become

00:58:25 ◼   ► complacent or insular or something like that?

00:58:29 ◼   ► And his answer was basically like, I like all the things in this.

00:58:33 ◼   ► These are answers that anyone who follows Apple has heard before, just repeated in a

00:58:37 ◼   ► new context.

00:58:38 ◼   ► the the Johnny AI of answer from his folio which I which I believe is the

00:58:43 ◼   ► truth it's not like BS it's just that he has to answer the same questions a

00:58:46 ◼   ► million times like every you know every famous person has to and his answer to

00:58:50 ◼   ► this one is we're not really looking at what like we're not satisfied with what

00:58:55 ◼   ► we do like so we're not gonna be like oh just sort of you know lean back and just

00:58:59 ◼   ► phone it in or whatever and we're not comparing ourselves to what else is out

00:59:05 ◼   ► there and other people's products what we're comparing ourselves to is always

00:59:08 ◼   ► this ideal, this perfection that we have in our own minds.

00:59:10 ◼   ► So we're chasing perfection, our own internal,

00:59:14 ◼   ► intrinsic motivation, the ideal that we have in our mind,

00:59:17 ◼   ► and that's what we're chasing.

00:59:19 ◼   ► And I believe that because it shows in their products

00:59:22 ◼   ► that seem to be chasing some ideal

00:59:25 ◼   ► that is inside their minds,

00:59:27 ◼   ► and don't involve certainly too many looks

00:59:32 ◼   ► at what other people are doing, which is fine,

00:59:35 ◼   ► but also maybe not too many looks at how people use these things in the real world, you know, like

00:59:42 ◼   ► his answer makes sense, but it hinges entirely on what is that ideal that you're chasing, and

00:59:48 ◼   ► as articulated through many white background movies over many years,

00:59:52 ◼   ► the ideal that that Johnny Ive has always said that he's chasing has good and bad aspects of it.

00:59:58 ◼   ► The good one is like it has to look obvious, it has to seem like it's not designed,

01:00:03 ◼   ► It shouldn't be designed for design's sake, but we can see in the products that he makes that he

01:00:09 ◼   ► favors simplicity and symmetry and purity and beauty, and it can be argued that those things

01:00:15 ◼   ► have a psychological effect on the user-as-well products that it benefits their bottom line, but

01:00:23 ◼   ► there are practical considerations as well. And the balance between chasing that ideal

01:00:30 ◼   ► that again may be beneficial to the company but may not be beneficial to the product and

01:00:35 ◼   ► also doing things that you kind of have to do, whether it's more reliable strain relief

01:00:41 ◼   ► on cables or more grippy surfaces for things or thickness and battery life and all that

01:00:49 ◼   ► stuff.

01:00:50 ◼   ► I haven't seen a lot of interviews where that balance has been brought up and really pursued.

01:00:56 ◼   ► And I'm not expecting, like in 60 Minutes Interview, you know basically it's going to

01:00:59 ◼   ► be people you know if you follow up a lot it's gonna be people you've seen

01:01:01 ◼   ► before being asked questions they've been asked a thousand times you've seen

01:01:05 ◼   ► them be asked these questions a thousand times and you know what their answers

01:01:07 ◼   ► are gonna be because you've heard them give the same answer a thousand times

01:01:10 ◼   ► but and they they dotted each one of them like labor practices parking money

01:01:15 ◼   ► overseas popularity of products secrecy the new Apple campus I mean there's just

01:01:21 ◼   ► nothing new there but it is interesting that they you know you get to come in

01:01:25 ◼   ► the lab and see the tables draped with stuff and you get to see our milling

01:01:28 ◼   ► machine running and whatever, you know, you can peek at it in that way.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And it's interesting to see that people give the same answers and see if they

01:01:35 ◼   ► change. But what I always want is, you know,

01:01:37 ◼   ► I think what we all want as people who are either on or listening to this

01:01:40 ◼   ► program is deeper questions. Like, so, uh,

01:01:42 ◼   ► I think Gruber's interview with Schiller pursued this a little bit on the whole,

01:01:46 ◼   ► like, I forgot what he was talking about then.

01:01:48 ◼   ► Maybe he was also talking about battery life or maybe it was developer

01:01:50 ◼   ► relations, but anyway, you like to, to pursue, to have followups,

01:01:53 ◼   ► to dig a little bit, like to bring up this, because I'm sure Donnie,

01:01:56 ◼   ► It's not like this is news to Johnny if he knows about the the balance between you know practical features

01:02:00 ◼   ► I'm sure all the engineering people in the manufacturer is telling him practically speaking you need to do this and he's like no can we

01:02:05 ◼   ► Figure out a way to do this like that's that's why he was talking about you know fractions of millimeters

01:02:10 ◼   ► There there is a tension between what can be done. What is able to be manufactured? What is economical? What is beautiful?

01:02:17 ◼   ► What is ergonomic is there something that's both beautiful and ergonomic and obvious and durable and stays beautiful for a long time like this

01:02:24 ◼   ► This is that's what design is all about

01:02:26 ◼   ► I would love to hear an in-depth discussion with Johnny I've just about those trade-offs about how he figures out where that balance is

01:02:33 ◼   ► not in vague terms of getting into specifics because that I think is the most interesting thing about design and

01:02:38 ◼   ► Johnny I've had never talks about it. Maybe he's never going to because secrecy type thing

01:02:43 ◼   ► He doesn't want to give you a cute, you know a window into his mind

01:02:47 ◼   ► but if he retired and I could get him on this podcast, I would spend the entire show just

01:02:51 ◼   ► like

01:02:53 ◼   ► trying to figure out how they how they did that balance and what factors do we not understand that are involved in this and

01:02:59 ◼   ► Are there problems that we see that he doesn't and other problems that he knows are

01:03:03 ◼   ► Legitimate issues that we never see and take for granted and that would be a much more interesting

01:03:07 ◼   ► Interview than the Lopez on 60 minutes, but then again, it's 60 minutes. So what do you expect? I

01:03:12 ◼   ► Think my expectations for that were even lower than my expectations for Star Wars

01:03:16 ◼   ► Are your expectations low for Star Wars that you people have been saying good things about it the people involved were good

01:03:22 ◼   ► Everyone likes JJ Abrams, you know George Lucas wasn't involved. It seemed like your expectation should have been at least middle of the road

01:03:28 ◼   ► Well, let's just say the last three Star Wars movies I saw were not the best

01:03:32 ◼   ► I know but there's a whole different set of maybe you don't know but it's a whole it's all different set of people here

01:03:36 ◼   ► The old people are out. It's it's even bigger than the the eddy cue Phil Schiller thing all people out new people in well

01:03:42 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I'm like the average consumer. I wasn't really in that world of paying attention to all that stuff

01:03:46 ◼   ► I didn't expect much from it because

01:03:49 ◼   ► The last few Star Wars movies I've seen have been terrible.

01:03:52 ◼   ► No, they fixed that. They didn't just shuffle things around a little bit.

01:03:56 ◼   ► Complete change of hands, new people in charge entirely.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Everything on the internet comes back to Star Wars these days.

01:04:02 ◼   ► That's what you have to see. Just go see it tomorrow.

01:04:03 ◼   ► Yeah, how are you the one who hasn't seen this? Like, somehow Marco has seen it and you have—

01:04:07 ◼   ► I don't understand what's going on today.

01:04:09 ◼   ► Bizarro World.

01:04:10 ◼   ► It is Bizarro World.

01:04:11 ◼   ► It's a Christmas miracle.

01:04:12 ◼   ► This is our Christmas miracle.

01:04:14 ◼   ► Next you gotta tell me that Hop saw it.

01:04:16 ◼   ► I should have brought him. He would have enjoyed it.

01:04:18 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:04:18 ◼   ► No dogs in theaters. No, we need we need a babysitter because we have like a baby now

01:04:23 ◼   ► We're all like old and boring. I know but you got family close by you can make this happen

01:04:26 ◼   ► Yeah, put your kid in preschool. Actually the theater I went to an Alamo Drafthouse

01:04:30 ◼   ► We just like this a kind of like hipster theater chain

01:04:32 ◼   ► But I inadvertently booked a baby showing because they do they do like baby

01:04:37 ◼   ► Okay showing really they allow people to bring babies and if they cry, oh well

01:04:41 ◼   ► Tiff was really not happy that I booked this but it turned out not to matter

01:04:44 ◼   ► There was like one baby in whole theater that cried like once but it didn't matter

01:04:47 ◼   ► But that might exist near you if you can find that that is the kind of hipster thing you would have around that area

01:04:53 ◼   ► Around me. Yeah. No. No, there's no alma draught house anywhere near here

01:04:57 ◼   ► I think it's like at least an hour away

01:04:59 ◼   ► well

01:04:59 ◼   ► at any rate look look at look at local theaters to see if they have any like baby showings of movies because some I think

01:05:04 ◼   ► Some theaters are going to do that now. I went to a nerd showing it was great. What does that mean?

01:05:07 ◼   ► What does that include?

01:05:09 ◼   ► only nerds allowed

01:05:11 ◼   ► You know either people who are dressed up or people who think seriously about ever dressing up or people who could see believe you friends

01:05:16 ◼   ► someone who dresses up. Very respectful nerds, that's how I saw it. It's the only way to do it.

01:05:21 ◼   ► Did they market it that way, or is it just—? No, but it just happens naturally. We congregate.

01:05:25 ◼   ► I clearly am not a card-carrying nerd, because I have no idea when that would be.

01:05:30 ◼   ► If you saw it on the 17th, and especially if you saw it at either the very first showing,

01:05:35 ◼   ► or like a ridiculously late showing that no insane person would ever go to because you

01:05:39 ◼   ► end up getting back to your house at 3am, it's full of nerds. It was the best.

01:05:42 ◼   ► So I guess we're done talking about the 60 Minutes thing then, huh?

01:05:46 ◼   ► To be honest, I have no—I have nothing else to add.

01:05:49 ◼   ► I mean, it was—it was interesting to watch.

01:05:52 ◼   ► It's probably worth the 20, 30 minutes of your time.

01:05:54 ◼   ► Assuming that you live in the United States—I saw something fly by on Twitter that it's

01:06:00 ◼   ► locked down to the U.S. because reasons—but it is worth your time.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Don't expect anything monumental.

01:06:05 ◼   ► I also watched their—what do they call it?

01:06:08 ◼   ► 60 Minutes Overtime segments, which were not that particularly interesting nor worthwhile.

01:06:14 ◼   ► The one thing I will say is that I was happy to see Angela Ahrens come out from the shadows.

01:06:20 ◼   ► They spoke to her a few times and I was very impressed with her.

01:06:23 ◼   ► I thought she was really, really good, which is what one would expect given that she was

01:06:27 ◼   ► once a CEO.

01:06:28 ◼   ► They did have one.

01:06:29 ◼   ► All right, so there were some tidbits in there.

01:06:31 ◼   ► Maybe I just don't know about this, but one of the things is they were showing like the

01:06:33 ◼   ► model Apple Store, like, "Oh, this is where we tested our ideas for Apple Store."

01:06:36 ◼   ► And there was one wall that had a bunch of foliage on it.

01:06:38 ◼   ► I noticed that.

01:06:39 ◼   ► That was very weird.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And I'm assuming no real Apple Store has that.

01:06:42 ◼   ► But boy, I'd love to see that.

01:06:45 ◼   ► They try out all sorts of ideas there, right?

01:06:47 ◼   ► I would love to see that idea make it out of the model and be, just go into the Apple

01:06:50 ◼   ► store and have one wall, have a bunch of green vines hanging down.

01:06:54 ◼   ► And also the ones where they had cases and the case was the pull on the thing.

01:06:59 ◼   ► Lots of wacky ideas there.

01:07:00 ◼   ► So that was interesting to see for two seconds.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And the other reason to watch it, this will make you simultaneously angry about 60 minutes,

01:07:07 ◼   ► but interested in seeing this, is you get to see Tim Cook get fired up about Apple keeping

01:07:12 ◼   ► their money overseas and our stupid tax laws and labor practices and stuff, he gets kind

01:07:17 ◼   ► of angry.

01:07:18 ◼   ► Sounds like a fun time.

01:07:20 ◼   ► Not angry.

01:07:21 ◼   ► So they ask him the same questions you always ask him.

01:07:24 ◼   ► And they don't, like he probably gave like very substantial, thorough answers to them.

01:07:29 ◼   ► We've heard him give those answers before, like on Apple's earnings calls and the things

01:07:34 ◼   ► he has for the meetings he has for stockholders and everything.

01:07:37 ◼   ► But in 60 Minutes, you get three sentences that they cut out of your big, long, comprehensive

01:07:40 ◼   ► answer.

01:07:41 ◼   ► sentences when Tim Cook is the angriest and they don't explain anything and then they

01:07:44 ◼   ► move on to the next topic. So it was really garbage from a, you know, a perspective of

01:07:49 ◼   ► like giving insight to anybody who doesn't know about these issues. All you get the idea

01:07:53 ◼   ► is that we say this leading question, Apple angrily denies it, I don't know what the truth

01:07:58 ◼   ► is, not enough information, now it's time to ask about something else. But it was interesting

01:08:03 ◼   ► to see Tim Cook leaning forward in his chair and getting probably the most sort of worked

01:08:08 ◼   ► up I'd ever seen him in a public scenario like that. I also would have loved to have

01:08:14 ◼   ► heard what Steve Jobs would have said to those same things. I think he would have had his

01:08:16 ◼   ► smirk -- more of a smirk and less of an earnest sort of anger. Either way, there was no information

01:08:22 ◼   ► -- like, you couldn't draw any conclusions from that. Like, Tim Cook, I'm sure, gave

01:08:26 ◼   ► a good answer, but 60 Minutes just is not going to air it, which is a real shame.

01:08:31 ◼   ► I would love to see you interviewed on 60 Minutes, Jon, and to just see, like, how the

01:08:35 ◼   ► heck they would edit that.

01:08:36 ◼   ► That's the word. I feel for those guys because they're getting interviewed for like, you

01:08:41 ◼   ► know, half an hour, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, and they're going to take literally

01:08:44 ◼   ► five sentences. And that's what they're going to have. Five sentences. Five of the most

01:08:48 ◼   ► dramatic sounding sentences with no surrounding context. And there's nothing you can do about

01:08:52 ◼   ► it. You can't explain yourself before. You can't explain yourself. It's like, they're

01:08:55 ◼   ► just going to pull them out and that's what people are going to see. And just like, why

01:08:59 ◼   ► would they even agree to it? Why would they agree to be it? Because they have no control

01:09:02 ◼   ► over what those sentences are. I don't like it.

01:09:06 ◼   ► This is honestly, this is why I haven't rushed to watch it, because I figured TV interviews

01:09:10 ◼   ► are so low density.

01:09:14 ◼   ► I feel like there's so little content in them, there's so much padding and time wasting in

01:09:19 ◼   ► them, there's no smart speed.

01:09:22 ◼   ► It's just so low density.

01:09:24 ◼   ► There is a MIT though.

01:09:25 ◼   ► Oh yeah, of course there is.

01:09:26 ◼   ► Simpsons did it and Opera did it first.

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01:11:22 ◼   ► - So a long time ago, in a Galaxy Fire,

01:11:26 ◼   ► no, a long time ago we wanted to talk about

01:11:30 ◼   ► something that came out of nowhere, and it's a new service, product, company, startup,

01:11:38 ◼   ► it's a new thing, and it's called UpThere. And it has a lot of ex-Apple people in it.

01:11:44 ◼   ► And Jon, I think this was kind of your baby, so what do you want to tell us about UpThere?

01:11:48 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino Yeah, Bertrand Cerlet used to be in charge

01:11:51 ◼   ► of Apple software stuff, in charge of like OS X and everything, back before there was

01:11:54 ◼   ► iOS, and even a little bit after, I think. And he retired from Apple a while ago, that's

01:12:00 ◼   ► That's when Craig Federighi took over basically.

01:12:03 ◼   ► And he disappeared to, I don't know, go on vacation and do whatever he wanted to do.

01:12:07 ◼   ► But pretty quickly after he left Apple there were rumblings like "oh, what's Bertrand's

01:12:11 ◼   ► next thing?"

01:12:12 ◼   ► I guess you don't ever really leave.

01:12:13 ◼   ► I guess you would just leave and become like, I don't know, a venture capitalist or support

01:12:18 ◼   ► other technology things.

01:12:19 ◼   ► Anyway, the whole, the rumor was that he was involved in some kind of startup and they

01:12:24 ◼   ► were doing something having to do with computers and that's all anybody knew about it.

01:12:28 ◼   ► I didn't pay too much attention to it.

01:12:29 ◼   ► I figured he'll surface at some point.

01:12:31 ◼   ► And he did surface a couple months back with this company called UpThere.

01:12:35 ◼   ► And when I went to their website at first, it was like pretty impenetrable, because they

01:12:41 ◼   ► say if you had a cloud-to-butt translation on your web browser, it was like, "A lot of

01:12:47 ◼   ► butts going on here."

01:12:48 ◼   ► It was like, "They're doing something in the cloud, and there are computers."

01:12:53 ◼   ► and it's like, well, what is different about this company?

01:12:58 ◼   ► It seemed like they were saying they were gonna store

01:12:59 ◼   ► a bunch of your stuff on their servers

01:13:01 ◼   ► so you wouldn't have to store it on yours.

01:13:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, honestly, I have looked at this,

01:13:05 ◼   ► it's been in the show notes for like two months,

01:13:07 ◼   ► I've looked at this every so often before the show

01:13:09 ◼   ► and I cannot figure out what it is

01:13:12 ◼   ► and why I need to care about it.

01:13:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like the quote I pulled from the CEO,

01:13:15 ◼   ► who is not Bertrand Cerlet by the way,

01:13:17 ◼   ► he's just one of the founders,

01:13:18 ◼   ► but the CEO, Roger Bodamer says,

01:13:21 ◼   ► We'd like the word backup to vanish from the dictionary.

01:13:24 ◼   ► We built a consumer cloud from the ground up.

01:13:25 ◼   ► Oh, here we go.

01:13:26 ◼   ► We questioned everything, literally.

01:13:28 ◼   ► We experimented a lot.

01:13:29 ◼   ► We want the cloud to be the primary place for your data.

01:13:31 ◼   ► So this is a fairly succinct summary.

01:13:33 ◼   ► The whole idea is like, you know,

01:13:35 ◼   ► it's kind of like a Chromebook.

01:13:36 ◼   ► You don't back up a Chromebook

01:13:38 ◼   ► because there's nothing on it

01:13:39 ◼   ► that isn't already on Google servers somewhere, right?

01:13:42 ◼   ► And up there, the whole idea is,

01:13:44 ◼   ► don't worry about what's on your phone

01:13:46 ◼   ► or on your Mac or wherever you want it to be.

01:13:48 ◼   ► That's just like a local cache.

01:13:50 ◼   ► That's not where the stuff is.

01:13:51 ◼   ► Check your phone into the ocean.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Who cares?

01:13:54 ◼   ► There was nothing on it anyway.

01:13:55 ◼   ► You're fine.

01:13:56 ◼   ► All your stuff is up there in the cloud.

01:13:58 ◼   ► And the bit from here is like,

01:14:01 ◼   ► from the second quote is we experimented a lot.

01:14:04 ◼   ► They've been in stealth mode, as they say, for a long time.

01:14:07 ◼   ► So who knows what they've been doing behind the scenes?

01:14:09 ◼   ► But they do have a beta program and I'm on the beta

01:14:12 ◼   ► and it's a public beta program.

01:14:15 ◼   ► You just sign up for it.

01:14:16 ◼   ► And they have a couple of applications.

01:14:20 ◼   ► This is a Mac application and this is an iOS application.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Those are the ones I use.

01:14:25 ◼   ► And you launch them and it's like, "Hey, we're this cloud thing.

01:14:28 ◼   ► Sign up."

01:14:29 ◼   ► They already have two-factor authentication, which I thought was really nice, you know,

01:14:32 ◼   ► out of the gate because if you're going to be a cloud thing, like you don't add that

01:14:35 ◼   ► like in your fifth year or something, it's important enough to have it now.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And then it wants you to put stuff into their cloud.

01:14:40 ◼   ► I'm like, "All right."

01:14:41 ◼   ► Well, they have like an easy button press that's like, "Hey, do you want to put your

01:14:44 ◼   ► photos library into the cloud?"

01:14:46 ◼   ► And it's my photos library, not like the family one.

01:14:48 ◼   ► my photos library only has like 10,000 photos in it or something so I'm like sure here you

01:14:51 ◼   ► go take those you know like I mean a lot of this is going on I'm just trusting Bertrand

01:14:55 ◼   ► Cerlet this is not a shady company or whatever and you can upload it and you can drag files

01:15:02 ◼   ► into it or whatever just like whatever fine so I told it to pull up my photos library

01:15:07 ◼   ► and just let it do its thing and then it eventually uploaded my photos library and then on the

01:15:11 ◼   ► iOS application I can go and I can browse through all of my photos in my photos library

01:15:15 ◼   ► again only like 10,000 or so.

01:15:18 ◼   ► There was some weirdness in that to get the phone totally synced, like uploaded them from

01:15:22 ◼   ► my Mac, and then to get the phone totally synced, the best way to do it was to have

01:15:29 ◼   ► the phone in the application launch as like an option that says don't let your phone go

01:15:34 ◼   ► to sleep when the application is in the foreground because I guess it uploads better or faster

01:15:37 ◼   ► when the application is running and in the foreground.

01:15:39 ◼   ► And I didn't even know that was an option but apparently it is.

01:15:41 ◼   ► But anyway, they got everything uploaded there.

01:15:43 ◼   ► They have a camera application as well, which is kind of getting more into how this is supposed

01:15:48 ◼   ► to work.

01:15:49 ◼   ► It's a camera for your phone and you launch this application instead of launching Apple's

01:15:53 ◼   ► camera application, you take pictures.

01:15:55 ◼   ► But instead of the pictures going onto your phone, the pictures go directly into the cloud.

01:16:00 ◼   ► And the pitch there is you'll never fill your phone with pictures.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And that's a real thing that a lot of people who have smartphones do is they take pictures,

01:16:07 ◼   ► take pictures, take pictures, and then they fill up their phone.

01:16:09 ◼   ► Iowa storage management is such that there's not a real easy way out of that

01:16:14 ◼   ► without oh you need to have an iCloud photo library or do you have that turned

01:16:17 ◼   ► on do you have a Mac and like you know the up there thing is we're never gonna

01:16:22 ◼   ► fill your phone because we don't put the pictures on your phone you take the

01:16:25 ◼   ► pictures and we immediately upload them now obviously everything about up there

01:16:29 ◼   ► is predicated on you having a network connection and that can network

01:16:32 ◼   ► connection being somewhat reliable and somewhat you know having a reasonable

01:16:37 ◼   ► bandwidth. So it's a forward-looking play where it's like the future is not going to be doing

01:16:44 ◼   ► stuff locally and figuring out how to sync it. The future is going to be pushing everything up.

01:16:48 ◼   ► That's a pretty safe bet. What it all comes down to though, that's why everyone hears about this

01:16:52 ◼   ► and reads the website and thinks that it's like, well, whatever, you're uploading stuff to a server

01:16:56 ◼   ► somewhere, who cares? What it all comes down to is execution. How well does it upload stuff to the

01:17:02 ◼   ► Does the sync ever get stuck?

01:17:05 ◼   ► Can I actually scroll through all 10,000 of my pictures?

01:17:07 ◼   ► How long does it take for the thumbnails to load?

01:17:10 ◼   ► And I don't know what exactly they're doing tech-wise, because the website is not illuminating.

01:17:14 ◼   ► I would imagine, since they've been in stealth mode a really long time, what they're trying

01:17:17 ◼   ► to do is come up with a better interface than like...

01:17:20 ◼   ► The application uses POSIX APIs to do synchronous I/O to your local disk, and then some daemon

01:17:25 ◼   ► process wanders the file system, or Dropbox or whatever, and finds things, and opens an

01:17:30 ◼   ► connection and shoves the files one at a time to our servers. Like, that's the old way of doing

01:17:35 ◼   ► things. I don't know if they're doing exactly that or if they are, you know, I'm imagining sort of

01:17:41 ◼   ► more interesting abstractions where instead of going through a POSIX file I/O API, they have

01:17:46 ◼   ► their own file I/O API that does intelligent things like better support for streaming and

01:17:52 ◼   ► batching of multiple things and like, you know, handling failures better and being asynchronous

01:17:58 ◼   ► instead of synchronous by default and being multi-threaded and being able to use multiple

01:18:03 ◼   ► connections and handling, you know, like that's what I'm imagining is behind the scenes. But the

01:18:07 ◼   ► bottom line is it uploaded all my pictures and when I scroll through them I can scroll through

01:18:12 ◼   ► all of them and the thumbnails load and, you know, pretty fast and when you go to the iOS usage

01:18:19 ◼   ► screen to see how much disk space the up there applications are taking up it's like nothing,

01:18:23 ◼   ► it's like 90 megabytes. So I think it really is streaming all this stuff in real time

01:18:28 ◼   ► from the cloud, as they say.

01:18:31 ◼   ► And the pitch on their website is

01:18:34 ◼   ► storing our entire digital lives-- photos, video, music,

01:18:37 ◼   ► and documents-- in a single place

01:18:38 ◼   ► that is always accessible, growing, evolving,

01:18:40 ◼   ► and ready to share.

01:18:41 ◼   ► They're sharing stuff is even better than Apple's.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Already it's better than Apple's.

01:18:43 ◼   ► You can make something they call loop,

01:18:45 ◼   ► where you can have multiple people putting their photos

01:18:48 ◼   ► into a single bucket.

01:18:50 ◼   ► And so you could do that with a family photo library,

01:18:52 ◼   ► where the whole family could have camera applications.

01:18:55 ◼   ► And every picture they take could

01:18:55 ◼   ► go into one giant shared thing, where

01:18:57 ◼   ► people can contribute is it like,

01:19:00 ◼   ► it just seems like a forward looking way to do everything.

01:19:05 ◼   ► And is the implementation good

01:19:07 ◼   ► just because they have five beta testers

01:19:08 ◼   ► and all five of us are connected

01:19:10 ◼   ► to their super fast servers

01:19:11 ◼   ► and it will be terrible when there's a million people?

01:19:13 ◼   ► Could this scale to be the size of like Apple Music

01:19:16 ◼   ► or like photo library?

01:19:17 ◼   ► I have no idea.

01:19:18 ◼   ► All I know is that whatever the heck they're doing,

01:19:20 ◼   ► it's working and Apple should buy them

01:19:22 ◼   ► because it's better than everything Apple is doing.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Even though there aren't a lot of features yet,

01:19:25 ◼   ► I'm just going by like,

01:19:26 ◼   ► Did it upload my pictures?

01:19:27 ◼   ► Yes. Can I see them all?

01:19:28 ◼   ► Yes. Can I scroll through them quickly?

01:19:30 ◼   ► Yes. Is it storing any files on my phone?

01:19:32 ◼   ► Not as far as I can tell.

01:19:33 ◼   ► So it does what it says on the tin

01:19:36 ◼   ► and it's pretty impressive.

01:19:37 ◼   ► - I have been on the beta for like a week or two now

01:19:41 ◼   ► because I didn't get a clear read

01:19:44 ◼   ► on what the intention is for the app.

01:19:46 ◼   ► In fact, you describing it

01:19:47 ◼   ► has given me a much better understanding

01:19:49 ◼   ► than the very little bit of documentation I read.

01:19:52 ◼   ► I didn't really know what to make of it.

01:19:54 ◼   ► And like the Mac app, it has some tabs on the left.

01:19:56 ◼   ► It has flow, which I guess is just kind of like a newsfeed sort of thing.

01:20:00 ◼   ► It has photos and videos, music, and documents.

01:20:03 ◼   ► And it's not, I mean, I understand what those words mean.

01:20:06 ◼   ► I understand that it's presumably, I'm supposed to just start chucking things in these buckets,

01:20:11 ◼   ► but it wasn't entirely clear to me what the long-term play is here, and I understand that

01:20:15 ◼   ► a lot better.

01:20:16 ◼   ► It seems to work well, like you said.

01:20:19 ◼   ► I mean, I'm not, I haven't really tried much with it, but there's plenty of stuff there,

01:20:23 ◼   ► it certainly is streaming things from the cloud, like you said, very quickly.

01:20:29 ◼   ► So initial impressions by me were confusion, but happy confusion, if such a thing exists.

01:20:36 ◼   ► Now that I've heard you talk about it, I'm very interested to play with the iOS app,

01:20:39 ◼   ► which I had never bothered to download.

01:20:41 ◼   ► Maybe that was half my problem.

01:20:43 ◼   ► Very interested to play with that and see how it goes.

01:20:46 ◼   ► But it wouldn't surprise me if this was in some ways just an acquisition play to see

01:20:52 ◼   ► if Apple is feeling desperate to get away from web objects and hire a team that can

01:20:58 ◼   ► solve this problem once and for all.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Well, presumably, like, that it's a tech play.

01:21:02 ◼   ► It's not just that they've done, like I said, that they're doing exactly the same thing

01:21:05 ◼   ► everyone else is doing, just using HTTP connections with standard libraries and doing local file

01:21:12 ◼   ► I/O and just, like, doing that slightly better than, you know, 1% better than everyone else.

01:21:16 ◼   ► It seems like the only reason this could ever be a startup is someone has some good ideas

01:21:19 ◼   ► about how to abstract the file system and the network in a way that accounts for the

01:21:25 ◼   ► modern world.

01:21:26 ◼   ► That it is not like backward looking, to some degree like even drop boxes, that it's just

01:21:29 ◼   ► a bunch of local files on disk and this is other process that watches them and moves

01:21:33 ◼   ► them up and down.

01:21:36 ◼   ► When I think about with like the thumbnails, like surely it is not loading each of those

01:21:39 ◼   ► thumbnails one at a time.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Surely it is either chunking them up or streaming them down or like it's not making a new connection

01:21:45 ◼   ► for everyone, definitely, right?

01:21:47 ◼   ► How is it dealing with the size of the thumbnails and how is it keeping up with my scrolling

01:21:53 ◼   ► and knowing which things it wants to load and stuff like that.

01:21:56 ◼   ► And I mean right now it's a beta whatever.

01:21:58 ◼   ► I'm not putting anything, nothing is only in up there because that would be ridiculous.

01:22:02 ◼   ► My entire photo library, they're really smart to say there's a one button press, you launch

01:22:05 ◼   ► a thing it's like do you want me to upload your photo library?

01:22:07 ◼   ► All right.

01:22:08 ◼   ► I mean you don't use photos so you didn't see that button or it wouldn't be useful to

01:22:10 ◼   ► you.

01:22:11 ◼   ► But for me I'm like fine go ahead.

01:22:12 ◼   ► Because it's just reading from the photos library and it keeps in sync with it and everything

01:22:15 ◼   ► too.

01:22:16 ◼   ► When I take photos with the regular Apple camera app, like a million other apps, like

01:22:20 ◼   ► remember the Dropbox camera app or whatever, we'll try to see when you take pictures with

01:22:23 ◼   ► your photo app and it'll upload those.

01:22:25 ◼   ► What I'm basically using it now is a toy to play with every once in a while to see what

01:22:29 ◼   ► the performance is like and try to figure out what the heck they're actually doing behind

01:22:32 ◼   ► the scenes.

01:22:33 ◼   ► And yet another free backup for all of my photos.

01:22:37 ◼   ► The small photo library, not the big one.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I thought about signing up my wife for it and trying to put the big library up to the

01:22:44 ◼   ► thing to see if it would choke on that because 10,000 is not that big of a challenge. What

01:22:47 ◼   ► about 60 or 70,000? And maybe I'll do this, it's hard to test, but that would never burn

01:22:53 ◼   ► anything only up there. And business model, I don't know, it's all free in beta, so who

01:22:57 ◼   ► knows what they would charge for this stuff. So it's still a big question mark.

01:23:01 ◼   ► Pricing is a pretty big question mark, though. That matters a lot to how many people will

01:23:06 ◼   ► even bother trying to adopt it in the first place. Because photo libraries can be quite

01:23:10 ◼   ► And once you start talking about like storing all of my stuff up there or all of my documents or even many of my documents plus all my photos plus you know other kinds of media like that gets very big very quickly, especially if you have any video shooting.

01:23:22 ◼   ► shooting.

01:23:23 ◼   ► But their explanation and the people behind it make you think like, obviously they would

01:23:27 ◼   ► take that into account, that their whole idea is that the old way of doing things, the way

01:23:30 ◼   ► that everybody else is doing them, was sort of using 80s and 90s tech to solve a problem

01:23:36 ◼   ► that's really in the future for this future world where everybody has ubiquitous fast

01:23:40 ◼   ► connections, which is getting closer every day.

01:23:43 ◼   ► They are coming at it from that perspective.

01:23:45 ◼   ► They must have smart solutions for not just the API and how to write applications into

01:23:52 ◼   ► this back end, but how the back end works, how it's hosted, how it's scaled, how, you

01:23:57 ◼   ► know, what the economics are, how much does it cost for us to host X amount of data? Can

01:24:00 ◼   ► we undercut everyone else's prices by using better technology because we can more efficiently

01:24:06 ◼   ► store like I have, again, they don't tell you it's their secret, you know, whatever.

01:24:09 ◼   ► I have no idea what they're doing behind the scenes, but all I can look at is the front

01:24:13 ◼   ► end and the front end seems to work more smoothly than every other floor I've tried, whether

01:24:20 ◼   ► be Dropbox or the Microsoft's OneDrive thing or Google Drive or like we've all tried all

01:24:26 ◼   ► these different things. What was that one? BitKasa. There's been so many different services

01:24:30 ◼   ► that are like this. And you know, there are good ones. I use Dropbox all the time. Like

01:24:35 ◼   ► they're not bad. But this impressed me with just how sort of no nonsense and smooth it is.

01:24:42 ◼   ► And how I don't even know how they're doing it. How like how is it that I'm able to scroll

01:24:45 ◼   ► through 10,000 photos and the thumbnails like they're not there instantly. There's little

01:24:49 ◼   ► little white squares initially, but they come in pretty fast, whole screens full of thumbnails.

01:24:54 ◼   ► I have no idea how it's doing that, but it's pretty impressive.

01:24:57 ◼   ► - Assuming that this actually becomes a thing and launches to the public with some kind

01:25:02 ◼   ► of business model or something, would you, obviously they don't want to be your cloud

01:25:08 ◼   ► backup service.

01:25:10 ◼   ► They want to be your primary storage, and possibly your only storage, therefore, 'cause

01:25:15 ◼   ► Is there even an easy way to maintain a local copy of everything,

01:25:19 ◼   ► or do they really not want you to do that?

01:25:20 ◼   ► Well, that's what I'm getting at.

01:25:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:25:23 ◼   ► Maybe that's their long-term play, obviously,

01:25:25 ◼   ► but right now, they are perfectly willing to be omnivorous.

01:25:28 ◼   ► They will pull in content and say,

01:25:30 ◼   ► like you don't have to manually say,

01:25:31 ◼   ► "Oh, I took some new photos with my phone."

01:25:33 ◼   ► Like, every time you launch the app,

01:25:35 ◼   ► it will sync up any new photos you've taken.

01:25:37 ◼   ► Anytime I add anything to my phone,

01:25:38 ◼   ► like I'm just using photos.

01:25:40 ◼   ► I'm not using up there at this point,

01:25:41 ◼   ► but up there is, every time I launch it,

01:25:43 ◼   ► is pulling all that stuff in.

01:25:44 ◼   ► So, you know, it's a great sort of on-ramp.

01:25:48 ◼   ► Like, they want to make it easiest for people to launch this app and say,

01:25:51 ◼   ► "We know you have your stuff elsewhere, and probably you want to keep your stuff elsewhere,

01:25:54 ◼   ► and probably you're only going to deal with elsewhere, but we're here too."

01:25:57 ◼   ► And they would have to sort of get you into the flow by saying,

01:26:00 ◼   ► "We're cheaper than your other hosting.

01:26:02 ◼   ► We're more reliable than photos." Eventually become trustworthy.

01:26:05 ◼   ► I mean, realistically speaking, they'll probably be bought by somebody before any of this happens,

01:26:08 ◼   ► but because that does look impressive.

01:26:10 ◼   ► But, you know, I don't see any reason why they, what you're getting at,

01:26:14 ◼   ► I think is like would you event would you ever like put your stuff in there?

01:26:17 ◼   ► Really? What would you trust it as primary story just because they're trying to get rid of backups

01:26:22 ◼   ► I don't know that I could do that. Well, you know, I mean like it's it's aspirational like obviously, you know

01:26:27 ◼   ► You can't get rid of backups because if a meteor hits your data center, I need my stuff

01:26:32 ◼   ► All right

01:26:32 ◼   ► so we're always gonna have I'm gonna have you know, my

01:26:34 ◼   ► Online backups and my time machine and my clone and and the question of can you have local only copies?

01:26:41 ◼   ► Well, yeah, if I just keep using photos and I have one of the Macs set to always have local copies of the photos and

01:26:46 ◼   ► I have 17 backups of that including online like that's the way I would continue to go but

01:26:51 ◼   ► I could see for example

01:26:54 ◼   ► Not enabling the the thing that lets you know

01:26:58 ◼   ► whatever it is iCloud photo library that lets you see your entire library on your phone because it's too onerous or maybe and

01:27:02 ◼   ► enabling it but never going to it like for example when someone says

01:27:05 ◼   ► I like I like having access to all photo libraries. I was someone asked question like what you know

01:27:11 ◼   ► What did one of your kids look like when he was three years old, right?

01:27:13 ◼   ► I like being able to launch a thing on a phone and go to the year and say, you know

01:27:18 ◼   ► I have access to every single one of my pictures here

01:27:20 ◼   ► But it's slower to do that with iCloud photo library than it is to do that with up there

01:27:24 ◼   ► Just because it is like I can go to the year. It can launch it faster the thing load faster and you know, like

01:27:30 ◼   ► that's that's a win for me if that takes over that role where I

01:27:34 ◼   ► No longer go to photos to look at my photos

01:27:38 ◼   ► I just go to up there because the same things are in both places and it has nothing to do with backups or whatever

01:27:42 ◼   ► It's a long road from there to the aspirational goal of like hey, we keep all your stuff and that's right

01:27:48 ◼   ► But but I truly believe in that end state not the end of backups

01:27:52 ◼   ► But maybe the end of backups for regular people like where you could where they can get it to the point where it's reliable and redundant

01:27:58 ◼   ► enough that you won't be up because think about now you're obsessing with people like

01:28:03 ◼   ► Have you ever backed up your phone?

01:28:05 ◼   ► Have you enabled iCloud photo library if I run over your phone with the car or chuck it into the ocean?

01:28:11 ◼   ► Did you just lose the pictures of your infant child?

01:28:13 ◼   ► Who's now five years old because you've never emptied your phone before the whole problem of filling your phone with photos like all those concerns

01:28:19 ◼   ► I would like to be addressed and go away

01:28:21 ◼   ► I think Android is better at addressing the now and apples catching up with the iCloud photo library and up there is trying to say

01:28:27 ◼   ► We're at we're way out here at the extreme

01:28:29 ◼   ► where you guys want to be and I

01:28:33 ◼   ► I'm just looking at it as a competition between implementations, really, at this point, and

01:28:37 ◼   ► their implementation looks pretty good.

01:28:39 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture, and Harry's, and we'll see

01:28:45 ◼   ► you next week.

01:28:46 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh, it

01:28:57 ◼   ► was accidental.

01:28:58 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let it go.

01:29:03 ◼   ► 'cause it was accidental.

01:29:05 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:29:07 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:29:09 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:29:10 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

01:29:14 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:29:19 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:29:23 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:29:28 ◼   ► ♫ Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A-C-R-A-C-Uza ♫

01:29:35 ◼   ► ♫ It's accidental, accidental ♫

01:29:38 ◼   ► ♫ They didn't mean to ♫

01:29:41 ◼   ► ♫ Accidental, accidental ♫

01:29:43 ◼   ► ♫ Tech podcast so long ♫

01:29:48 ◼   ► I do love the Cloud To Butt plugin.

01:29:50 ◼   ► That is quite good.

01:29:51 ◼   ► It's magical.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Well, maybe you didn't spend any money this week, Marco, but you committed yourself to

01:30:00 ◼   ► spending some money sometime soon.

01:30:02 ◼   ► You want to tell us about that?

01:30:03 ◼   ► I spent some.

01:30:04 ◼   ► There's a deposit.

01:30:05 ◼   ► Fair enough.

01:30:06 ◼   ► Yeah, so I ordered a Tesla, and you lost the bet.

01:30:10 ◼   ► I know.

01:30:11 ◼   ► I knew already that I lost the bet, but nobody else did.

01:30:14 ◼   ► The bet was—and the winnings were just bragging rights—the bet was that Marco would absolutely

01:30:22 ◼   ► get the performance version of whatever Tesla that he ended up buying.

01:30:26 ◼   ► And that's because Marco doesn't typically know how to do halfway on anything.

01:30:31 ◼   ► As it turns out, I lost the bet and you did not get a P90D or a P90NoD or whatever it

01:30:38 ◼   ► is.

01:30:39 ◼   ► I forget the different permutations.

01:30:40 ◼   ► What did you end up getting?

01:30:41 ◼   ► Why don't you run through the setup with us?

01:30:44 ◼   ► I got the 90D.

01:30:46 ◼   ► So it is approximately M5 speed

01:30:51 ◼   ► and maximum range available in a Tesla today.

01:30:54 ◼   ► It's white because it's the only color that cars can be in.

01:30:57 ◼   ► No, just kidding, it's red.

01:31:00 ◼   ► This is gonna be my first non-dark colored car

01:31:04 ◼   ► in a long, ever really, and my first non-black car

01:31:07 ◼   ► in a decade at least.

01:31:09 ◼   ► So red Tesla 90D is coming in late March,

01:31:13 ◼   ► one of my leases up, but I ordered it now

01:31:16 ◼   ► to take advantage of some discounts

01:31:17 ◼   ► they were running before the end of the year.

01:31:19 ◼   ► - What wheels did you get?

01:31:20 ◼   ► - The 19 Silver Cyclone wheels.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I know in the pictures, so on red you can argue

01:31:26 ◼   ► that the dark colored wheels would probably look better,

01:31:29 ◼   ► and in pictures they do.

01:31:32 ◼   ► First of all, I think up close,

01:31:34 ◼   ► they look a little bit flat,

01:31:36 ◼   ► like they almost look like painted plastic.

01:31:38 ◼   ► I know they're not, but just like the finish on them

01:31:40 ◼   ► is kinda like flat and a little bit dull.

01:31:43 ◼   ► They also, because it is just like a thin color coating

01:31:46 ◼   ► on top of a regular, I don't know,

01:31:48 ◼   ► what are these made out of, steel, aluminum?

01:31:50 ◼   ► What are they usually made out of, what metal?

01:31:52 ◼   ► - It depends.

01:31:53 ◼   ► - Anyway, so whatever metal it is, probably aluminum,

01:31:55 ◼   ► the dark colored wheels, any kind of curb rash,

01:31:58 ◼   ► anywhere, any scratch whatsoever on them,

01:32:01 ◼   ► that bright colored metal below it just shines

01:32:03 ◼   ► right through and you can see it from a mile away.

01:32:06 ◼   ► And sure enough, whenever I'd be at a Tesla dealer

01:32:09 ◼   ► looking at these things, there would often be

01:32:11 ◼   ► customer cars parked in the lot,

01:32:13 ◼   ► like just getting serviced or people visiting

01:32:16 ◼   ► to, I don't know, look at new Teslas or whatever,

01:32:18 ◼   ► and every car I saw in person that was a customer-owned car

01:32:21 ◼   ► that had dark wheels on it

01:32:23 ◼   ► had very visible scratches on them.

01:32:26 ◼   ► - Those people can't just drive.

01:32:28 ◼   ► I went past a black Model S today

01:32:32 ◼   ► with the big dark-colored wheels at the supermarket,

01:32:36 ◼   ► red brake calipers too, I think,

01:32:37 ◼   ► and there were no scratches on them.

01:32:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, if it has the red calipers, that is a P model.

01:32:41 ◼   ► It was tempting to spend 20 grand extra

01:32:44 ◼   ► just for red calipers, but I did not.

01:32:47 ◼   ► It wasn't really tempting.

01:32:48 ◼   ► - Well, you get a lot more than red calipers,

01:32:50 ◼   ► but point noted.

01:32:51 ◼   ► - Well, but honestly, so you get the red calipers

01:32:54 ◼   ► and you get the faster rear engines.

01:32:59 ◼   ► The D models have the two engines.

01:33:00 ◼   ► The rear engine is faster,

01:33:01 ◼   ► but those are actually the only two differences.

01:33:03 ◼   ► Plus, you get less range,

01:33:05 ◼   ► but the suspension is all the same.

01:33:07 ◼   ► Everything else about the car is the same.

01:33:09 ◼   ► I've confirmed this with multiple people from Tesla,

01:33:11 ◼   ► that they always say the same thing in my drive,

01:33:13 ◼   ► and totally, it certainly seems that way.

01:33:15 ◼   ► The only thing different is the engine, the red calipers,

01:33:19 ◼   ► and you get the option for a spoiler on the back

01:33:21 ◼   ► that I hate.

01:33:22 ◼   ► - So you got red, you got the 19 inch silver cyclone wheels.

01:33:26 ◼   ► What other options?

01:33:27 ◼   ► You said 90D.

01:33:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, 90D, black interior, sunroof.

01:33:32 ◼   ► I got autopilot, range upgrade, premium interior,

01:33:35 ◼   ► the big next-gen seats.

01:33:37 ◼   ► I did not get the smart air suspension.

01:33:39 ◼   ► I was going to and I did some reading and did some research

01:33:43 ◼   ► and it sounds like the air suspension

01:33:47 ◼   ► really does make the car feel more like a Lexus,

01:33:51 ◼   ► like a cushy or softer ride.

01:33:53 ◼   ► And I did not think that that was even what I wanted,

01:33:57 ◼   ► let alone worth $2,500 extra on the purchase price,

01:34:00 ◼   ► even though I'm leasing it, but still,

01:34:02 ◼   ► I would pay probably half that.

01:34:04 ◼   ► So I didn't get smart air suspension

01:34:06 ◼   ► because I want a more firm, sporty ride.

01:34:09 ◼   ► And I did not get the ultra high fidelity sound

01:34:13 ◼   ► because I did a back to back test of those in the showroom

01:34:16 ◼   ► and could tell very little difference

01:34:18 ◼   ► in the two sound systems.

01:34:19 ◼   ► And neither of them sounded great to me.

01:34:20 ◼   ► Like they both sounded honestly pretty mediocre.

01:34:23 ◼   ► So I figured might as well not spend

01:34:25 ◼   ► extra money on mediocrity.

01:34:26 ◼   ► I did get the Sub-Zero weather package

01:34:28 ◼   ► because I live in a place with real seasons.

01:34:30 ◼   ► And I did not get the rear facing seats

01:34:31 ◼   ► because for the next three years at this lease we'll cover.

01:34:35 ◼   ► my wife and I decided that we would probably not be

01:34:37 ◼   ► comfortable with our kid in those seats during this age

01:34:40 ◼   ► period by enough to make it worth getting them

01:34:43 ◼   ► for an extra $3,000.

01:34:44 ◼   ► - What did you get as the interior trim accent?

01:34:47 ◼   ► You can get a carbon fiber looking or, you know?

01:34:50 ◼   ► - That was actually a tough call.

01:34:52 ◼   ► The carbon fiber looks decent but kind of hurt my eyes

01:34:56 ◼   ► and Tiff's opinion here matters a lot because she,

01:34:59 ◼   ► as the passenger usually while I'm driving,

01:35:01 ◼   ► she sees the trim way more than I do.

01:35:03 ◼   ► there's this big strip right in front of the passenger side and in the driver side you

01:35:06 ◼   ► don't really see much of it. So she didn't care for the carbon fiber so that was fine.

01:35:13 ◼   ► The two woods they just have like basically a glossy and a matte wood. I didn't like the

01:35:16 ◼   ► look of the matte so I was basically deciding between the glossy wood and the piano black.

01:35:20 ◼   ► The piano black, my current car has that. I know I like it. It is very nice. That being

01:35:25 ◼   ► said, it shows fingerprints and scratches like crazy. But I decided ultimately I would

01:35:30 ◼   ► I would rather have fingerprinted piano black trim

01:35:33 ◼   ► 'cause I just like it better.

01:35:34 ◼   ► I would rather have that than perfect glossy wood trim.

01:35:37 ◼   ► - You stoked?

01:35:38 ◼   ► - I am, yeah.

01:35:39 ◼   ► I'm actually looking forward to something new.

01:35:42 ◼   ► I mean, I mentioned before, I've loved having the M5.

01:35:45 ◼   ► It's been great.

01:35:46 ◼   ► I do, however, miss all-wheel drive.

01:35:48 ◼   ► Yes, I know they're adding it to the next model,

01:35:50 ◼   ► but it isn't there now.

01:35:51 ◼   ► I also mentioned earlier that I really want a quieter car.

01:35:54 ◼   ► BMW does not currently sell a quieter car

01:35:58 ◼   ► that has all-wheel drive, that has a transmission

01:36:00 ◼   ► that I would tolerate, except maybe the,

01:36:03 ◼   ► is 335 X-Drive still available in stick?

01:36:07 ◼   ► - You know, I don't know, well it's a 340 now anyway,

01:36:09 ◼   ► but I honestly don't know, I would think not.

01:36:12 ◼   ► - I think it might be, that would probably

01:36:14 ◼   ► be the only option, the 5 Series is totally out,

01:36:16 ◼   ► 'cause the 5 Series you can't get,

01:36:17 ◼   ► you can't get a stick with all-wheel drive,

01:36:20 ◼   ► if at all anymore, and you can't get a DCT

01:36:22 ◼   ► on any of the 5 Series, and I will not drive

01:36:24 ◼   ► the Sport Auto, yes, I've driven it,

01:36:26 ◼   ► and no, it is not the same.

01:36:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, the Tesla is, in some ways,

01:36:31 ◼   ► it's not as good as the M5.

01:36:33 ◼   ► I'm not expecting it to match it

01:36:35 ◼   ► in the luxury feel features.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Like the BMW interior is more luxurious feeling,

01:36:40 ◼   ► no question.

01:36:41 ◼   ► I'm very much going to miss the heads-up display

01:36:45 ◼   ► and the top-down parking camera.

01:36:47 ◼   ► - That thing is the best.

01:36:48 ◼   ► Real-time follow-up, you can get a 340i X-Drive

01:36:51 ◼   ► with a manual transmission.

01:36:53 ◼   ► - Okay, so that is the only other car BMW makes

01:36:56 ◼   ► that I would consider getting right now

01:36:57 ◼   ► out of the new lineup, but that also,

01:37:00 ◼   ► I really don't like the F30 3 Series, honestly.

01:37:03 ◼   ► I don't like it.

01:37:04 ◼   ► I don't like the steering system.

01:37:06 ◼   ► I don't really care for the way it looks,

01:37:09 ◼   ► and I think the interior has actually gotten lower quality

01:37:13 ◼   ► in certain ways than the previous 3 Series.

01:37:16 ◼   ► And the lack of the all button on the climate control

01:37:18 ◼   ► just kills me.

01:37:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, that is really insane.

01:37:21 ◼   ► - I don't know why you're not shopping

01:37:22 ◼   ► Mercedes at this point.

01:37:24 ◼   ► Neither one of you ever talk about Mercedes,

01:37:25 ◼   ► but Marco just bought a Tesla.

01:37:26 ◼   ► he's now safely within the Mercedes market.

01:37:31 ◼   ► - I did, on a recent trip, I actually rented a Mercedes,

01:37:36 ◼   ► 'cause I was on a trip about a year ago

01:37:38 ◼   ► and I had to rent a car, and I rented a,