0:00:00Alright, so a lot of OS updates these days.
0:00:03Yeah, like all of them.
0:00:05Yeah, like everything.
0:00:07I definitely sat down at 7.15 to upgrade my work Mac, which is the one I'm recording
0:00:13on, to El Capitan.
0:00:15I still hate that name.
0:00:17You upgraded to a .0 release on your podcasting machine a few hours before you had to podcast
0:00:24from it?
0:00:25Less than three.
0:00:26Oh my god.
0:00:27(laughing)
0:00:28I knew not to say anything to you guys,
0:00:31nor the internet, until I had at least gotten on the call
0:00:34and that much had worked.
0:00:36We'll see if I have actually recorded anything
0:00:38by the time this is all over, but yes,
0:00:41in theory everything's going well.
0:00:43- So typically the rule of audio setups,
0:00:47and this applies to a lot of things,
0:00:48but especially in audio setups, the rule is
0:00:51once you have something that works,
0:00:53don't touch anything ever, just leave it there.
0:00:56Don't touch it.
0:00:58And of course, in practice, this is harder to do.
0:01:00If you had to like, oh, one time had to do something
0:01:04different, then you gotta change the snob,
0:01:06change the setting, maybe change the wiring around
0:01:09for something, then you gotta change it back
0:01:11and it's a pain.
0:01:12And then of course in the age of computers and software,
0:01:16it's even worse and it's like, well,
0:01:19some people have to try to keep around an old machine
0:01:21running an old version of the OS 'cause the software
0:01:23doesn't work on anything newer or they just don't wanna
0:01:25risk it breaking.
0:01:26So there's a balance to be struck here,
0:01:30because obviously it's very hard to hold on
0:01:32to old versions of OS and old versions of software forever,
0:01:35and as time goes on, I think it's getting harder
0:01:37to hold on to old versions of things,
0:01:39but at the same time, it worked and you touched it.
0:01:42So I think there's a balance to be struck here,
0:01:45and you did not strike it.
0:01:46(laughing)
0:01:48- It probably is okay for me to upgrade
0:01:50as long as I don't have any drinks near the machine.
0:01:53I think that's a fair compromise.
0:01:54(laughing)
0:01:55(electronic beeping)
0:01:57All right, you wanna do some follow-up?
0:01:58- Talk about why people are upset about Marco pulling piece
0:02:03and one of the things that I think Marco brought up
0:02:05and we were trying to Google for the name of it
0:02:07was loss aversion.
0:02:08Joshua Pollock points out that another term
0:02:10that might fit is endowment effect.
0:02:12The hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things
0:02:15merely because they own them.
0:02:17So once you've got peace,
0:02:18it's super important that you have peace.
0:02:20Before you had peace,
0:02:21it wasn't super important that you get it.
0:02:23So once they've got the $3 application and you pull it,
0:02:26it's much worse than him never having launched it,
0:02:29even though the effect is the same.
0:02:31Anyway, people are weird.
0:02:33Thanks Joshua for the followup.
0:02:35- In summary, people are weird.
0:02:37(laughing)
0:02:38Good times.
0:02:39- And we can summarize much of our followup that way.
0:02:41- All right, what else do we have here?
0:02:44Daniel Melitz has a short anecdote about visual effects,
0:02:49which I think has been in the followup
0:02:50for about 12 years now.
0:02:52But would you like to tell us about that, Jon?
0:02:54- It's actually related to the iPad Pro and Pen stuff.
0:02:58He says he works in VFX, which is visual effects,
0:03:01and he says, "By my rough estimate,
0:03:03"somewhere around 50% of compositors use a Wacom
0:03:07"or Wacom tablet instead of a mouse for RSI reasons."
0:03:10And I see that a lot too, people using a tablet,
0:03:13not just to do drawing stuff,
0:03:16but to do everything in the computer.
0:03:18Like they're using their tablet basically as a mouse
0:03:21to select menus, to select tools from palettes,
0:03:23to move icons around on their desktop,
0:03:25in the finder, whatever it is they're doing.
0:03:27And that's relevant to the iPad Pro
0:03:29because recently Michael Johnson, Dr. Wave on Twitter,
0:03:34I think it was him, tweeted a picture
0:03:36of a bunch of people at Pixar trying out the iPad Pro.
0:03:39Apparently Apple visited Pixar
0:03:41and deposited some iPad Pro hardware
0:03:44in front of the Pixar artists
0:03:46and they all got a chance to try it out
0:03:48and the reviews were pretty good.
0:03:51I mean it's just tweets so it's not like some big article that you can read about the trial
0:03:57run of these things but the one thing I remember is they said that the palm rejection was really
0:04:00good which means like when you rest your hand on the surface of the tablet and then try
0:04:04to draw with the pen because you want to sort of steady the pen it doesn't think that your
0:04:07hand is a touch and suddenly draw things underneath where your hand is or move stuff around or
0:04:12whatever it just knows to take a look at the pen so anyway I am still looking forward to
0:04:17trying out this pen even though I don't really do any kind of illustration just because it
0:04:21looks neat. And who knows, maybe I'll get one someday.
0:04:26All right. Let's see. So Monty Good also wrote in, he said, "Conventional wisdom seems to
0:04:36be that the only people currently using ad blockers are nerds, which is to say a subset
0:04:40of Internet users. So I'm not understanding why the doomsayers think that an upcoming
0:04:44tweak to iOS, which is now here, is going to cause legions of people to do something
0:04:49that they are already not doing.
0:04:51This is something I wanted to talk about, but then Margo had to go and "calls all the
0:04:55drums," as they say.
0:04:56Sorry.
0:04:57So we had to have a whole show about that.
0:04:59But yeah, more broadly on the topic of ad blocking, I put this in here way before iOS
0:05:039 even came out, just because all of the discussion about ad blocking and the ethics of ad blocking
0:05:11and the possible effects on the publishing industry or whatever, I hadn't seen anyone
0:05:14really nail down what they expected to happen in terms of the number of people who run ad
0:05:20blockers.
0:05:21Obviously, introducing this feature to iOS is really important because iOS is a big platform.
0:05:26A lot of people use iOS, especially a lot of people who buy things use iOS.
0:05:31And adding the ability to have blockers where once there was no ability to have them, at
0:05:34least with the built-in browser, is significant.
0:05:37But you're still left with the question, how many people do we think are going to install
0:05:42an ad blocker?
0:05:43It's way easier to install one now.
0:05:45You can install it by tapping a couple of buttons on your iPhone, but iPhone users are
0:05:49only what, 20% of the smartphone market or 30% less than that of the overall phone market.
0:05:57And so even if you say 100% of iOS users are going to install an ad blocker the day iOS
0:06:019 comes out, which is totally not true, I'm going to say it's under 100%, but even if
0:06:04100% did, does that destroy publishing?
0:06:08100% of desktop users can install an ad blocker right now.
0:06:12percentage of desktop web browsing people actually do install an ad blocker.
0:06:17I don't have much experience with this except for reading things on the web and even I think
0:06:21like the nerdiest sites are only around like they're still under 50% ad blockers for like
0:06:26the very nerdiest most paranoid most privacy concerned readers.
0:06:33Even those sites seem to only get around you know 50% or less of people installing ad blockers.
0:06:39I would say for the general web on the desktop,
0:06:41it's well under 20% of people install ad blockers,
0:06:45but I don't know, I'm just pulling numbers out of my butt.
0:06:47Anyway, in the spirit of pulling numbers out of our butt,
0:06:50what do we think is going to happen with iOS?
0:06:54What percentage of iOS users are going to install
0:06:56some kind of ad blocker?
0:06:58- I would guess 10 to 20%, closer to 10.
0:07:01- Yeah, that sounds, I mean, that sounds high.
0:07:04If you say what percentage of iOS users
0:07:07will install anything.
0:07:08Like, it's such a broad base of people that it's, you know,
0:07:12I would say 10% would be a pretty good conservative,
0:07:17or a pretty good optimistic high estimate.
0:07:20I mean, think about like, the most popular app on the phone
0:07:23is probably the Facebook app,
0:07:24the most popular third party app.
0:07:26Most likely Facebook, right?
0:07:27If not YouTube, but probably Facebook.
0:07:29Then like, you know, how many people have that installed
0:07:33on iOS, what percentage of iOS users have that installed?
0:07:36maybe half, I don't know, maybe more, I don't know.
0:07:39I have no idea what to expect there,
0:07:40but that's a massive app right there.
0:07:43To reach half of iOS people, that's huge.
0:07:46So yeah, I would guess on the order of 10%
0:07:49is reasonable to be an optimistic goal.
0:07:53- I think it'll be a little bit higher than that eventually,
0:07:56mostly because it's not one app like Facebook or YouTube,
0:08:00it's basically a category.
0:08:02Do you have any kind of blocker installed?
0:08:04And I think word will spread among the people
0:08:07who care about this stuff at all,
0:08:09that like get a blocker, whatever,
0:08:12like pick a brand name, whatever brand name
0:08:14people is traveling around in people's social circles,
0:08:17it's gonna be like, you need to install X
0:08:19because it makes stuff faster on your phone.
0:08:22I bet people are gonna be saying,
0:08:23you need to install X because it makes Facebook faster,
0:08:26like the Facebook app, which is probably not true.
0:08:28I don't think Facebook actually uses any web views
0:08:31that would honor the content blocker, but either way.
0:08:32- Right, that's a big problem though.
0:08:34That's a big problem in regular people's expectations
0:08:37of what this will do and won't do.
0:08:38So keep in mind, content blockers can't block anything
0:08:42that is not displayed in a Safari view controller,
0:08:44which people like Twitter and Facebook and everything
0:08:47are unlikely to use at least anytime soon if ever,
0:08:50especially as Facebook is pushing more towards
0:08:52their own news format that it shows in a custom way
0:08:55and they're an app that isn't even a web browser.
0:08:56So that's problem number one.
0:08:58Problem number two is you sell somebody an app
0:09:01that says this will block ads on your iPhone,
0:09:03but it doesn't block in-app ads,
0:09:06like ads that are not in a web view in an app.
0:09:08It only blocks ads in Safari and Safari View Controller.
0:09:12And as more and more browsing is happening
0:09:14in apps that aren't Safari,
0:09:16and in some of these apps that have their own custom stuff
0:09:19that aren't just launching Safari View Controller,
0:09:21the percentage of ads that people on mobile see
0:09:25that can be blocked by this
0:09:27is probably going down over time, not up.
0:09:30sure they're gonna work around it but I don't think it matters whether it
0:09:32actually blocks it it only matters that this this sort of it's kind of like
0:09:36quitting all your apps this sort of information slash mince of
0:09:39misinformation starts traveling think of the force quitting all your apps which
0:09:44we've talked about many times before that travel has traveled pretty well
0:09:48doesn't matter what effect it does or doesn't have all that matters is that
0:09:52people think it does something so I I'm going to guess that the idea that you
0:09:56should install a whatever on your iPhone because it will make whatever better. That idea has
0:10:02legs and that idea will get around and I think people will install a blocker and won't be
0:10:07able to tell whether it does anything and won't ever bother to uninstall it. So I'm
0:10:10going to say that the percentage might be as high as like 20%. Like I'm willing to go
0:10:15up around that range.
0:10:17Keep in mind also before I move on from this point though, keep in mind also the process
0:10:22of enabling a content blocker after you've installed it is so buried and complicated
0:10:28that it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of those people you just mentioned install
0:10:32it and never actually turn it on.
0:10:34That's a good point. I had forgotten about that part of the process. All right. So I
0:10:37guess we have to modify it too and not how many people will install one, but how many
0:10:40people will install it and also turn it on. All right. Now I dropped my estimate down
0:10:44again.
0:10:45Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like I think 10% is optimistic.
0:10:47All right. Anyway, but all of our numbers that we're throwing out there are well below
0:10:5250% and this is what I'm getting at and all the discussion and hemming and hauling about content blockers and all the New York Times
0:10:56Articles or whatever no one seemed to say oh and by the way all this thing they were kicking up a fuss about
0:11:0290% of the people aren't going to install in any way and so that I think is the one of the most important underlying
0:11:08Premises of any argument about what ad blockers are aren't going to do to the economics of the web or whatever and understand sites like
0:11:17Don't want to have 10 or 20 percent of their people not seeing their ads and that this is a problem or whatever
0:11:21but it's not the sort of Armageddon doomsaying
0:11:23about ad blocking.
0:11:25It's a little bit overblown unless the same people
0:11:28who are speaking doom and gloom are also going
0:11:32to boldly assert that doom and gloom is coming
0:11:35because X percentage of people are gonna install it
0:11:38and because that percentage is, you know,
0:11:40equals doom and gloom, right?
0:11:42And no one seems to ever wanna nail it down.
0:11:44No one's going to say,
0:11:45all these bad things are gonna happen,
0:11:47and by the way, I think all these things bad
0:11:49are gonna happen because 5% of people
0:11:51People are going to install ad blockers, and guess what?
0:11:525% is enough to wipe out all publishing life on earth.
0:11:55(laughing)
0:11:57They don't, like, no one thinks it's going to be 100%,
0:11:59but no, and I think it's going to be a pretty low,
0:12:01and I think this is an important move,
0:12:03and I think it will have effects.
0:12:04I'm not saying it's not going to do anything,
0:12:06but every time I think about this issue,
0:12:08we're just guessing this one.
0:12:09We're trying to figure out
0:12:11how many people are going to do this.
0:12:13And I'm thinking, meme-wise, best case scenario,
0:12:16it spreads as far and wide
0:12:18as the force quitting your apps thing spreads,
0:12:20which is surprisingly far, but even that one,
0:12:23I bet is less than 50%.
0:12:25I bet if you just picked 50% random iPhone users
0:12:29from the world, put them in a room and say,
0:12:30do you even know, like show them force quitting apps,
0:12:33you can't say words because they won't know
0:12:34what force quit or whatever, you know, it's Mac lingo,
0:12:37show them the thing and say, do you know what this is?
0:12:39Have you ever done this?
0:12:40And I bet more than half of them will be like,
0:12:42I don't even know what you just did.
0:12:43I don't know what that is.
0:12:44I don't know why I would ever do that.
0:12:46The other half would say, yeah,
0:12:47you do that 'cause it saves battery.
0:12:48(laughing)
0:12:50I don't know, I see it a lot.
0:12:51I'm not saying you're wrong about any stretch,
0:12:53but I see it a lot.
0:12:55And just the other day when we were at a football game,
0:12:58the person in the row in front of me would open an app,
0:13:01do his thing, then go to the task switcher
0:13:05and force quit the app every single time.
0:13:07And it was maddening because I wanted to just be like,
0:13:09no, stop.
0:13:10- Yeah, Apple needs to like,
0:13:12I don't know what Apple can do about that.
0:13:14It kind of got away from them.
0:13:16Like what can they do to stop people from doing that?
0:13:19I think a fun thing to do would to make the app switcher,
0:13:24I don't know, like make the application disappear
0:13:29when you switch away from, I don't know,
0:13:30I can't figure it out.
0:13:31Like once people know that it's there
0:13:32and they just like doing it, it's just,
0:13:34it's kind of like the same as the people
0:13:35who don't put their iOS devices to sleep,
0:13:37but shut them down every time they're done using them.
0:13:39And then like five minutes later, they boot it up again,
0:13:41then they shut them down.
0:13:42- There are people like that?
0:13:44- Yep, then they boot them up and they shut them down.
0:13:46And they're annoyed by how long it takes.
0:13:48They gotta see the Apple logo, it takes so long.
0:13:50(laughing)
0:13:51- Oh man.
0:13:52- What do you do to stop that?
0:13:53Like you can show them the other way
0:13:54or you can try to convince them
0:13:55and they'll just say, "I like doing it this way.
0:13:59"I like it to be off.
0:14:00"I like it that we can play it off.
0:14:01"I don't like the idea of that it's on."
0:14:04I don't know, anyway.
0:14:05Yeah, so this, I have more to say on ad blockers
0:14:08but I think we've talked about them enough on past shows
0:14:10and we will circle back to it.
0:14:11Later on when we get to, I mean,
0:14:13because I think we're gonna eventually start getting numbers.
0:14:15Like the second round of stories about this
0:14:17to be like, "So iOS 9 has been out for six months, and here's a bunch of popular websites,
0:14:21and here's what they say about iOS users using iOS 9 or percentage..."
0:14:26You know, like, we'll get numbers on it, so we'll circle back then.
0:14:29Well, speaking of, our friend Ben Thompson is in the chat and has said that over 50%
0:14:34of Stratechery—he did embrace Stratechery, right?
0:14:37It's no longer Strateecary?
0:14:38Anyway, over 50% of Stratechery users have ad blockers.
0:14:42Now to his own point, it's a very geeky audience,
0:14:45but he got these numbers apparently
0:14:47by comparing Google Analytics numbers versus server logs.
0:14:51- Well, I wouldn't say that's a great comparison
0:14:54'cause of various JavaScript things
0:14:55and bots and everything else, but that's maybe a ballpark.
0:14:58But I think also what we're gonna see is
0:15:02we're gonna see a really big spike in those percentages
0:15:06if people have been tracking them temporarily
0:15:08because for the last few years,
0:15:12mobile traffic has been dominating so much
0:15:15that it's pretty common for typical sites
0:15:19to have over 50% of their traffic being mobile.
0:15:22And for all these years so far,
0:15:25there really haven't been mobile ad blockers
0:15:26in any meaningful numbers.
0:15:28So all of a sudden, like 50% of your traffic
0:15:32is now able to get ad blockers where it couldn't before.
0:15:36- Well it's not 50%, if it was 50% mobile,
0:15:38then that was like half Android and half iOS,
0:15:40depending on what kind of website you run.
0:15:42And the Android people, I'm assuming,
0:15:43have always been able to get ad blockers.
0:15:45Is that not the case?
0:15:46- I don't know.
0:15:47I don't think, I should have researched this.
0:15:49From what I've heard, I don't think there's like
0:15:51a standard reasonable system way to do it
0:15:54besides like some kind of like rooted thing
0:15:56that like interferes with DNS at the system level
0:15:58or something like that.
0:15:59But I don't think there's like a common way
0:16:01that people do it.
0:16:02- Well, there probably will be if there isn't already.
0:16:04- I don't know.
0:16:05I mean, I don't think Google will necessarily be
0:16:07leaving those hooks all over the place.
0:16:09- Yeah, but anyone can ship anything on Android, right?
0:16:11I don't know.
0:16:12We should ask the people on an Android podcast to find out.
0:16:14But anyway, all we're ever talking about is iOS.
0:16:17And again, in the circles we travel in
0:16:19and the friends we have, a lot of them run sites
0:16:21where the vast, vast, vast majority of people
0:16:22who are coming on mobile are coming on iOS,
0:16:24and the vast majority of people who are coming on desktop
0:16:27are coming on Macs, and it's a strange little world.
0:16:30When I was talking about sites that I thought
0:16:32barely started to push over to 3%,
0:16:33I'm talking about as mass-market as you can get.
0:16:35Like a, I'm not gonna say Slashdot and feel old or whatever,
0:16:38but you know, Ars Technica, Slashdot.
0:16:41- Slashdot was never mainstream.
0:16:43- But yeah, back in the day, it was all we had.
0:16:47Sites that are bigger than like an individual person's blog.
0:16:51Even just like Daring Fireball would be considered
0:16:53in the small camp because yeah,
0:16:54it's big for a one person thing,
0:16:56but it's not like an institution with lots of writers
0:17:01and 15 articles a day and so on and so forth.
0:17:03- All right, one last quick piece of follow up
0:17:06and then let's talk about all the new things
0:17:08that happened today.
0:17:09Ruggedized phones.
0:17:10- Yeah, this was in response to a couple shows ago
0:17:13I was trying to articulate for the millionth time
0:17:16this thing that I should have written down
0:17:17in a blog 17 years ago.
0:17:19The idea that product manufacturers
0:17:23can gain fanatical loyalty by making their products excel
0:17:28in a few ways and really sticking to that over the years.
0:17:32And one of those ways is rugged design.
0:17:36durability, doesn't have to be look fancy,
0:17:39doesn't have to be the best,
0:17:39doesn't have to be the cheapest,
0:17:40but if you have something that is reliably rugged,
0:17:43whether it's Fisher Price toys getting a reputation
0:17:46for like you buy this toy
0:17:47and the kid won't be able to break it,
0:17:48or I use Craftsman, although people say Craftsman
0:17:50has gone downhill or whatever,
0:17:52over the years if you really stick to that core value,
0:17:55you will get very loyal followers.
0:17:58And I said it's a shame that no one's doing that for phones
0:18:02because all the phones are pretty delicate and elegant
0:18:05and they're going for something different,
0:18:07like stylishness and chicness,
0:18:08and plus they gotta make millions of these things,
0:18:10so they're not gonna, you know.
0:18:11So where is the narrow focus manufacturer
0:18:14that's really concentrating on ruggedized phones?
0:18:16It's certainly not Apple.
0:18:18Well, so here's one example that someone sent in.
0:18:21Sorry, I lost the name,
0:18:22since this was feedback from a while ago.
0:18:24This is Sonim, or Sonim,
0:18:26and the example product is a Sonim XP7,
0:18:29which is a phone that looks like a rugged phone.
0:18:32It's just an Android phone
0:18:33with like tons of crap all over it,
0:18:35but it's like the things they claim
0:18:37about a long battery life,
0:18:39usable with gloves on, drop and impact resistance,
0:18:41oil and chemical resistant, temperature resistant,
0:18:43extreme pressure resistant,
0:18:45protection from micro particles,
0:18:48with powerful audio, waterproof, and puncture resistant.
0:18:51So here is a, you know, if you're going out in the woods
0:18:54and you wanna have a smartphone with you,
0:18:55and you don't wanna try to get an iPhone
0:18:57with like a screen protector in a case,
0:18:59someone is actually making ruggedized phones.
0:19:02This is a little bit more extreme.
0:19:03This is a little bit like those Toughbook things
0:19:05or those laptops that people would make for the military
0:19:07and stuff like that.
0:19:08I'm thinking more along the lines of like L.L. Bean
0:19:10or whatever, where it's regular person clothes,
0:19:12but they have a reputation for if not durability,
0:19:14then at least standing behind their stuff
0:19:16and it was like a zipper rips on your L.L. Bean jacket,
0:19:18you can get it replaced because they basically think
0:19:20that should never happen and if it does come to us
0:19:22and show us and we'll give you a new jacket or whatever.
0:19:25- Now we're gonna hear from those people.
0:19:27- The L.L. Bean people, I don't know.
0:19:29Anyway, I'm glad that, I mean,
0:19:31this is another advantage of Android.
0:19:32IOS is like whatever Apple decides to make.
0:19:34And if Apple decides that they don't want to make
0:19:36a smallish phone that's a little bit thicker
0:19:38that has longer battery life, tough luck.
0:19:40You can't get one with IOS like that.
0:19:41But Android has room for people
0:19:44to make different kinds of products.
0:19:45And so here, someone decided there's a market
0:19:47for ruggedized phones and they're using Android to do it.
0:19:50- I think most people just use cases
0:19:52to achieve these kind of goals.
0:19:53- Well, I mean, look at the goals.
0:19:55Like you can't achieve these kind of goals with just cases.
0:19:57- You can get pretty close.
0:19:59Cases can be surprisingly good.
0:20:01Yeah I mean I guess you just encase the phone in a Lucide brick or something like then you're
0:20:05good to go but this is trying to be integrated where it doesn't just look like a phone with
0:20:10it you know I don't know how good these phones are I've never tried them or whatever but
0:20:13I'm glad it's out there and it's good to see the market trying to find some way to fill
0:20:20the needs that a small group of people have but I still think it would behoove all like
0:20:24the major manufacturers whether it's Google or Apple or Samsung or whatever Samsung was
0:20:28actually doing pretty good too, but they were one of the first ones, the big vendors, to
0:20:32tout the fact that they make waterproof phones. But they didn't look waterproof, they were.
0:20:36And now people are taking iPhone 6s and dunking them in water and saying, "It's kind of
0:20:41waterproof-ish." Anyway, don't put your phone in water. Don't put your iPhone in water,
0:20:45if you can help it.
0:20:46Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity. And, as usual, Cards Against Humanity,
0:20:51rather than doing an ad, Reid has asked us to have Jon review a toaster.
0:20:55[Music]
0:21:06Around about this time, I think I should have Jason Sneller or somebody sing "Toaster or Not" because something arrived at my house.
0:21:13And it was a very large box, and on the outside of the box it said "Microwave and Convenience Oven."
0:21:21Toaster or not! Toaster or not!
0:21:24I gotta say that this box was not any bigger than the biggest toaster boxes I've gotten.
0:21:30So it was like comparably sized to the large toasters and the picture on the outside of
0:21:34it looked like, I don't know what that is.
0:21:36Maybe it's like a toaster microwave combination.
0:21:38I've already got had a toaster oven slot toaster combination.
0:21:41Maybe this is one of those things.
0:21:43This is how I get the model number.
0:21:45This is the the LG LCSP 1 1 1 0 s t.
0:21:51I know that model.
0:21:52Of course, the LCSP11110ST.
0:21:56It's the best.
0:21:57Yeah, I'll put the link in the show notes.
0:21:59You can take a look at it.
0:22:00Oh my god, it's huge.
0:22:02It's really big.
0:22:03I mean, I gave the inch measurements, but it is really big.
0:22:05So it looks like a microwave with a cash register, cash drawer below it.
0:22:09Exactly.
0:22:10So it's a microwave on top, you know, a microwave door and a bunch of number pads and all that
0:22:14other stuff.
0:22:15And then underneath the thing is a silver sort of pull-out handle tray thing.
0:22:22And before I unpacked this thing, I had one idea about what it might be, and then as I
0:22:27unpacked it, I realized what it actually was.
0:22:29It's literally just a plain old microwave with a little rotating dish and all the other
0:22:33stuff and some really bad UI on the controls.
0:22:36And then underneath it is a very, very flat sort of miniature oven that you couldn't put
0:22:43anything in that's any higher.
0:22:44Like the whole thing I've had about it is you can put pizza in there or chicken nuggets,
0:22:47but that's about it.
0:22:49You pull out the drawer and there's maybe an inch or two of clearance in there.
0:22:53Put something in there and it's got like a little pan that you have to use.
0:22:56I guess you could put something else that's not a pan in there.
0:22:59But anyway, you can't see anything when it's inside there.
0:23:01You just slide it in.
0:23:03That little slot thing gets really hot really fast because it's a small area.
0:23:08But this is not a toaster.
0:23:09You can't really make toast in this.
0:23:12It doesn't claim to be a toaster.
0:23:13It's a convenience oven.
0:23:14Although this convenience oven is the least convenient oven ever because the only thing
0:23:18you can really cook in it is things that are very flat or frozen pizzas. And the controls
0:23:23are like, the controls are inscrutable. I don't want to dwell too much in the controls
0:23:27because I have one other thing I really want to yell about about this thing that is not
0:23:29related to the functionality. But the controls are like, press this one button repeatedly,
0:23:35and each one of these buttons corresponds to some kind of weird preset. So like, press
0:23:39it once and it'll be this temperature. Press it, you know, if you press bake once, it's
0:23:43425. If you press bake twice, it's 400. If you press bake three times, it's 375. If you
0:23:47bake four times it's 350. Like, A, you would never guess that and B, I mean it has the
0:23:53display and it shows you but B, you've got a number pad for crying out loud. Why are
0:23:58you making me hit like, it's like auto bake, auto defrost, press the pizza button.
0:24:03Yeah, it has an auto pizza button.
0:24:04Yeah, and you press that multiple times for different kinds of pizzas. Like seriously,
0:24:08just it's all just voodoo. Like you really just want at least a microwave works normally.
0:24:12The microwave you punch a bunch of numbers and it's starting and the numbers are like,
0:24:15know, fill the thing with minutes and seconds and that works in a
0:24:18straightforward way. So anyway, the microwave part of it is really small.
0:24:21It's only about one cubic foot inside the microwave part, but the overall
0:24:26device is very large. I removed my other microwave to make room for this thing
0:24:31and it barely fits. It's much taller than my other microwave and about as
0:24:35wide and as deep, but the inside is smaller. So it's very space-inefficient.
0:24:39You really have to be getting a lot of use out of that slide-out drawer
0:24:44miniature pizza oven thing to make this worth your while.
0:24:47You know, I can't think of anything
0:24:51that I'd ever want to use it for.
0:24:53And the microwave is only, what is it, 1,100 watts,
0:24:56which is pretty wimpy for a microwave.
0:24:58The oven part is 1,400 watts.
0:25:00I should have done this.
0:25:01I didn't try running them both at once.
0:25:02I probably would have blown the circuit breaker.
0:25:05No, maybe not, I don't know.
0:25:06Anyway, so I'm gonna declare this not a toaster.
0:25:11It is not a toaster oven.
0:25:12oven is not a slot toaster.
0:25:14And I'm not entirely sure who this is for.
0:25:16And holy cow, 200 and something dollars, $289.
0:25:21That is, I mean, it's not a bad microwave.
0:25:23We can use it to warm up dinner tonight.
0:25:25It's fine.
0:25:26Like it's small, but the microwave part of it is fine.
0:25:30Like I said, the UI is not too messed up.
0:25:32But the oven thing, why is that even there?
0:25:34Maybe if you have frozen pizza a lot,
0:25:37it could heat up faster than your big oven,
0:25:38but you better hope your frozen pizza is small
0:25:40if it fit in that drawer.
0:25:41If it's a family size frozen pizza, it is not going to fit.
0:25:44I just think this is a bad, it's not a refrigerator toaster
0:25:48and it's still probably slightly more practical
0:25:50than the hybrid slot toaster oven,
0:25:53but this is not a toaster oven.
0:25:54It doesn't really make toast.
0:25:56So I give this a thumbs down.
0:25:57But all of that aside is one of the things
0:26:00that I think is the strangest worst thing I've ever seen
0:26:03in appliance in my entire life for people like me
0:26:05and perhaps for people like you.
0:26:07Took this thing out of the box, right?
0:26:10And if you're looking at the picture of it,
0:26:12on the front of it, there's like a brushed stainless steel
0:26:15part, and it had that like static cling plastic on it.
0:26:18You know, they put over stuff so it doesn't get scratched up
0:26:20in shipping.
0:26:21And I'm peeling out the static cling plastic,
0:26:22and it's a little bit difficult to peel off.
0:26:24And I'm like, oh, maybe it's got stuck in the drawer.
0:26:26So I pulled out the drawer, and it turns out
0:26:27the static cling plastic had sort of like
0:26:29been tucked under the lip.
0:26:31So you had to kind of pull the drawer out and pull
0:26:33the static cling plastic off of the inside
0:26:35of the lip of the drawer and stuff.
0:26:37And that was a little bit annoying.
0:26:39And then I looked at the top of it and there was a big sticker on top.
0:26:42And I'm going to say I'm a person who always wants to remove stickers from everything,
0:26:46but I'm going to go so far as to say everybody should remove stickers from everything.
0:26:50If you buy something from the store, like a dustpan or a broom or a vacuum cleaner or
0:26:55anything, a garbage can, and it has a sticker on it, take the sticker off.
0:27:00It's not there, it's not supposed to be there for the next 30 years as this garbage can
0:27:03says in your house.
0:27:04The sticker is just like to advertise at you in the store, it's not part of the product,
0:27:08please peel it off.
0:27:10Manufacturers please make that easy to do.
0:27:11Anyway, there's a sticker on top
0:27:12and I start peeling it off and it's difficult to peel.
0:27:14And I read the sticker
0:27:15and it's in like three different languages.
0:27:16It says, this product is coated with a clear vinyl
0:27:20for protection during shipping.
0:27:22You must remove this vinyl before using the product.
0:27:25Otherwise moisture will build up inside
0:27:27and bad things will happen and blah, blah, blah.
0:27:29Now I'm looking around on the thing.
0:27:30I'm like, well, I just peeled off all the static thing stuff
0:27:32from the front and that was a little annoying.
0:27:33Is that what they were talking about?
0:27:34But then it says, no, start peeling on back right edge.
0:27:38And I looked on the side and there's vents in the side of the thing.
0:27:40And the vents, like, I put, stick my fingers in them.
0:27:42There's no plastic blocking the vents, so it's not as if the entire vents were blocked up.
0:27:45But I was concerned because the bottom pizza part gets hot.
0:27:48Like, when you use it, it heats up considerably.
0:27:51So I didn't want to, like, have some plastic slowly melting to the thing, and that would be gross.
0:27:55So I go to the back right bottom edge, and I find the little edge of it.
0:27:59I'm like, "Oh, this entire, like, top, you know, it's all silver all around the whole thing."
0:28:04The entire top and sides is coated with this peel-off clear plastic.
0:28:08It's really hard to peel.
0:28:10And I start getting the edge and starting to peel the thing off.
0:28:12I think it's going to be like one of those big things, like a cable sasser, what does
0:28:15he call it?
0:28:16Competitive peeling, where he likes to peel off the big protective films in one big thing.
0:28:19So anyway, I'm peeling the thing off, and then I realize what's happening here.
0:28:24The top part of this oven thing, I don't know if you can see it in the pictures, this entire
0:28:29sort of silver top back case had this clear vinyl stuff stuck to it before assembly like on all edges
0:28:40oh no then they assemble the thing and now they want you to peel it off and as you peel
0:28:47it's impossible to get off cleanly because it's tucked in like as the pieces meet together the
0:28:53vinyl is tucked inside it so if you're trying to peel this thing off there is literally no and if
0:28:58And if you are sort of an anal retentive or obsessive compulsive person or like a neat
0:29:02– I'm using those words.
0:29:04Those are not the technical correct terms.
0:29:05If you are the type of person who likes things to be neat and tidy, you are either doomed
0:29:10to have a thing in your house that annoys you forever or to spend 17 hours with tweezers
0:29:14trying to pull this plastic crap out of the seams.
0:29:17Please, appliance manufacturers, never do this.
0:29:20It's cruel.
0:29:21It is cruel and unusual.
0:29:22Oh, my goodness.
0:29:24Either people aren't going to pull the vinyl off.
0:29:27They're going to ignore that sticker and it's going to be there forever.
0:29:29And it's probably fine because like I said, there are holes put in the vents.
0:29:32I don't see how it could have been a big deal.
0:29:33Or once you start peeling it and you realize what you're in for, you're like, "Oh no."
0:29:37So the thing is like this clear and it's all I can do every time I go over there is to
0:29:41stop trying to pick one of those little things.
0:29:43And of course, as you pick it out and it stretches and it rips, all it does is make the thing
0:29:46so small that you can't grab it anymore.
0:29:48Like the little toughs and, oh, the worst.
0:29:51I believe this is the worst thing, the worst thing that's ever happened to me from an appliance
0:29:55unpacking experience. If I had bought this I would have returned it immediately. Not
0:30:00that I ever would have bought this. Anyway, LG, I don't know what you are thinking. Like,
0:30:06I just, and never mind the fact that if there's any part of this that gets hot, like the parts
0:30:09that are down near the bottom, it's gonna slowly melt that plastic that's caught between
0:30:12the seams. Holy cow. I should take, if I had better like macro photography skills I would
0:30:17take a picture of this thing. It's just, it is the worst. So anyway, not a toaster, terrible
0:30:22vinyl wrapped around the whole thing, giant thumbs down.
0:30:24Is it a robot?
0:30:26Not.
0:30:27Toaster or not.
0:30:29Thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring our show once again.
0:30:34Alright, so today was it I believe? It was today within the last day or two as we record this.
0:30:41The Apple Music Free Trial ended for those of us who are day one adopters.
0:30:45Did you guys renew yes or no? I did not.
0:30:49- I did.
0:30:51I'm still on the fence, but I still use it occasionally.
0:30:57I probably don't use it 10 or $15 a month worth,
0:31:01but I do use it occasionally.
0:31:03- All right, what about you, Jon?
0:31:04Did you even do the trial?
0:31:06- I did, I did the trial, and for the most part,
0:31:09I was enjoying it.
0:31:10I've never used a streaming service before.
0:31:12Casey, you were in the same boat, right?
0:31:13I'm not gonna use Spotify, right?
0:31:15- That's correct, I use Spotify.
0:31:17Anyway, I'd never used a streaming service before,
0:31:20and so just the novelty of like,
0:31:21oh, I can go listen to any song I want whenever I want
0:31:23was interesting.
0:31:25And that part mostly worked,
0:31:27and I did look at the recommendations
0:31:28in the little for you section
0:31:30and tried to do some discovery stuff there.
0:31:32I kind of enjoyed wandering through their playlists
0:31:34and laughing at their playlists.
0:31:36I did discover Lana Del Rey,
0:31:37who I had never heard of before, through these lists.
0:31:40And what I did when I discovered an artist that I like
0:31:43is I just bought songs because I didn't want to just say,
0:31:46oh, add these in my collection,
0:31:48and then have to figure out later if I didn't renew.
0:31:51So anyway, I just found the songs
0:31:51and I bought them the old-fashioned way,
0:31:53like for $1.29 each.
0:31:54And so now when I didn't renew Apple Music,
0:31:58all those songs were still there.
0:31:59And I didn't renew, not because I didn't like it,
0:32:01it's just because I didn't like it
0:32:03whatever it is, like $15 a month worth.
0:32:05It was not working out economically speaking for me,
0:32:08because I do like a way to discover music,
0:32:11but realistically speaking, you can discover music,
0:32:16You can search for it anywhere, you can use some other streaming service, you can just
0:32:19ask friends and then go illegally download a song and then buy it for when you find the
0:32:23artist that you like.
0:32:24There are other ways to do music discovery than Apple Music.
0:32:28And Apple Music wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either.
0:32:32I don't know.
0:32:33I kind of like the idea that I could play whatever I wanted, it's just a little bit
0:32:38too expensive for me.
0:32:40The bugs that everyone complained about, I didn't get hit by any of those, but I was
0:32:43wary of them always, mostly because I think my music collection doesn't suffer from the
0:32:47things like, poor Jim Dow Rimp has got like 50 versions of the same song from different
0:32:51albums and album music gets all confused.
0:32:54I generally don't have that problem.
0:32:56If I do have lots of copies of the same song, they're like from CD rips and I name them
0:33:01differently, and iTunes is not confused by them because it can't make heads or tails
0:33:04of them, so it's just going by my metadata, which is all distinct.
0:33:08And album music really just, maybe it's because album music, like I said early on when we
0:33:12talking about the service just doesn't have enough of the obscure stuff that I like.
0:33:16Its selection of mashups, for example, is not great because most of those are illegal.
0:33:23And its selection of video game music is not really that great.
0:33:26Movie soundtracks it's a little bit better with.
0:33:28But anyway, I would like to continue to do it, but I couldn't justify the cost.
0:33:34I almost did it.
0:33:35I almost said, "You know what?
0:33:37I like it.
0:33:38I do like it."
0:33:39Just look at the price and I say I do not like it $15 a month birth
0:33:43I just don't I like iTunes match $25 a year worth easily
0:33:46So I'll just keep renewing that until they cancel the program and then I'll be sad
0:33:49But no didn't renew it but through no real fault of Apple music. I tried Spotify back in the day
0:33:57I'm just not
0:33:58the way I listen to music just doesn't lend itself to getting a lot of value out of streaming services because I'm very particular and
0:34:03I want to sort of pick the songs that I like and occasionally I want to go out into the wider world find new songs
0:34:08with new artists they like and I just bring them back to my collection and I listen to
0:34:12them there.
0:34:13So, sorry Apple Music, but you know, and it was a little bit annoying when it was expiring
0:34:18because it kind of let me still use the UI and it kept bringing up this dialogue that
0:34:21says Apple Music has expired.
0:34:22I'm like, well, fine, hide it from the UI for me.
0:34:24Why do I have to go on iOS and say show Apple Music yes/no?
0:34:28Once it's expired, stop showing it.
0:34:29I don't know.
0:34:30Anyway, they're just trying to get me to resubscribe, but I'm glad I had successfully done, figured
0:34:35out how to stop the auto-renew because a few times I was paranoid about it. Is auto-renew
0:34:39really off? Is this going to auto-renew? It didn't auto-renew. Everything was fine.
0:34:43Yeah, they don't make that incredibly easy or clear, but I don't know. I think Apple
0:34:49Music on the whole is, I wouldn't necessarily say it's quite this bad, but it's kind of
0:34:56like Apple's Surface, where they really tried to have this no-compromises, everything all
0:35:04all in one thing with iTunes and your local music
0:35:08and iTunes match and Apple Music
0:35:11and throw in the connect thing,
0:35:13which I don't know if anybody's using that,
0:35:14like all the social stuff.
0:35:15So they're trying to throw all this stuff into one product
0:35:19and the usability I think suffered tremendously,
0:35:23first of all.
0:35:24Even if everything worked properly all the time,
0:35:26which it doesn't, but even if it did work properly
0:35:29all the time, it is a design disaster.
0:35:32It is really, really hard to use, to figure out, to know what mode you're in and where
0:35:37your music is and whether you have your music or not.
0:35:39It is really tough.
0:35:41And it's part of that, I think it's just that it's a really big problem to be solved and
0:35:45no one could have designed it well.
0:35:47But they also didn't design it that well.
0:35:51I think it could have been designed better, but even in the best implementation it wouldn't
0:35:55have been great just because the problem is too weird and complex to cram into a good
0:35:59design.
0:36:00But it is very confusing.
0:36:01It does have a lot of functionality,
0:36:03but it's very hard to find it, and it's very unreliable.
0:36:07In my experience, playing songs off of it,
0:36:11like I'll play through a whole album,
0:36:13and every third or fourth track will either be skipped,
0:36:17or it will stop in the middle,
0:36:18and then it'll advance to the next one.
0:36:20Like, it's very unreliable for me.
0:36:22- Is that over cellular?
0:36:23- No, that's on my desktop at home.
0:36:26- So I didn't have that problem.
0:36:28I tried it over cellular a few times,
0:36:29and I'm always in these zones where I get like one dot
0:36:32on my stupid cell signal, so I blamed it on that.
0:36:34But desktop, it's always more or less worked for me.
0:36:37I haven't had any big delays.
0:36:38The songs start playing immediately,
0:36:40never skipped, never did.
0:36:41Maybe I was just like, yeah, I'm obviously not a heavy user
0:36:43and I have heard people reporting what you said,
0:36:45but that's the thing with like things that have,
0:36:48that are largely or in this case,
0:36:50like primarily a server-side phenomenon,
0:36:53depending on what the weather is like in iCloud, you know?
0:36:56Like if it's bad weather when you're trying to do it,
0:36:58piece of crap and nothing works, right? And if it's good, again, it goes back to like the bits on
0:37:02your disk are the same as the bits on my disk, but depending on what the weather is like in Apple
0:37:05Server Farm that day, it could just totally not work and be a piece of crap, and then when I do
0:37:09it, everything could be fine because it's a different time. And it's, you know, the servers
0:37:13are responding now. They're actually, you know, or maybe I'm getting different ones because it's like,
0:37:17you know, it's UIP routing for a different CDN or whatever the hell it is. That's the frustrating
0:37:22and inscrutable thing about cloud services. It's like, it's not just one thing that you can get
0:37:26get your hands on it. It really is more like the weather.
0:37:29Yeah, and unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of problem where Apple historically has
0:37:35done very badly. They really aren't as good as the other tech giants at making sure that
0:37:42things that are dependent on internet infrastructure and CDNs and everything being different in
0:37:47different places, making sure that works well for the most number of people. Apple traditionally
0:37:52is not very good at that. Netflix does it way better. Amazon and Google do it way better.
0:37:56Facebook I think is their own universe over there.
0:38:00They do it fine.
0:38:01I mean, it just seems like this is the kind of thing
0:38:03that Apple does not do very well.
0:38:05And they haven't.
0:38:06- It's an insidious problem because you can imagine
0:38:09complaining to an Apple executive like,
0:38:11hey, I tried to use your thing and it didn't work
0:38:14or whatever and they could be like,
0:38:17I'm totally gonna fix that for you.
0:38:18That's unacceptable, I've gotta have that work.
0:38:20And so maybe they'll try it themselves
0:38:22and it'll probably work.
0:38:23And they'll go back to the team and they'll be like,
0:38:25this person said this thing happened and, you know, whatever.
0:38:28And they'll be like, well, you know, what are you talking about?
0:38:30Everything's fine.
0:38:31Like it's always fine when you look like after the fact.
0:38:34And if it was just bad weather that day, like, well, well, you know,
0:38:38if you're not if you're not really obsessive about metrics and measuring
0:38:43measuring the actual experience of all of your users,
0:38:46it's very easy to convince yourself and others inside the company
0:38:50that everything's fine because look at our uptime.
0:38:52It's like this number of nines.
0:38:53and we are always up and we're always responding
0:38:56and our response times are good and so on and so forth.
0:38:58It's like, what is the end user experience?
0:39:02Maybe your servers are up
0:39:03but maybe your network routing is messed up
0:39:05or maybe for some point there was some corrupted CDN
0:39:07that was giving bad data that was causing the thing
0:39:10to repeatedly retry or whatever.
0:39:12If that stuff isn't visible to you,
0:39:14you can think everything is great.
0:39:15You can think all the metrics,
0:39:18all the things that you're measuring are great.
0:39:19Every time an executive gets angry
0:39:20and checks for him or herself, everything is fine.
0:39:23But then when you go to the engineering team, they're like, you know, and you try to tell them what the problem is
0:39:28Like well show me show me what's wrong and every time you know, every time an active executive does it it works great, right or
0:39:33Maybe it doesn't work for a second, but they try it again and it works and like oh, I guess everything's fine
0:39:38It's so easy to convince yourself that there's nothing that needs to be done
0:39:41Because you don't have the same experience as someone else had or you have it for a second and then it gets better
0:39:46It's like well, I guess this is fixed forever. I never need to look at this again
0:39:50It's you know server-side stuff
0:39:52You have to have a different philosophy than you do like making products is making products
0:39:56You look at them how they come off the line and they measure like return rates and stuff
0:39:59And I think they have a handle on how to figure out whether they're making quality products in that way
0:40:02but for service I stuff I think they just don't have I
0:40:05Feel like if they had the metrics
0:40:09They would be improving more rapidly. Whatever metrics they have are
0:40:13Convincing them that things aren't as bad as they are and maybe the only one they care about is like in the end
0:40:18I don't care about this crap all I care about is customer stat right customer satisfaction
0:40:22It's like in the high 90s and everything's fine
0:40:24And then I just get back to success hides problems because there are lots of things that are awesome about Apple and iOS devices
0:40:29And we all love them
0:40:30But that can hide the fact that as Marco said and I think as we all kind of feel
0:40:34They're a little bit behind everyone else in the cloud stuff in terms of reliability not a lot
0:40:40It's not a piece of crap. It does it works. You know
0:40:42Most of the time in fact the vast vast vast majority of the time. It's like but when it doesn't work
0:40:48It is just so infuriating and you can only do that a certain number of times before people are like you know what?
0:40:54I'm just gonna use Dropbox because Dropbox failed me once in the three years
0:40:59I've used it and this has failed me once in the one year. I've used it therefore
0:41:02You are bad like what do you mean once in the year? We have five nines. We're blah blah blah
0:41:06it's like yeah, but Dropbox seems more reliable and I
0:41:10Know that's that's the world of server-side. It's tough
0:41:14You know, it's to come back to why why not renew Apple music for in my case anyway
0:41:20I loved the Siri integration being able to say, you know
0:41:25Siri play such-and-such album or play songs by such-and-such artists. That was awesome. Really really liked it
0:41:32I also kind of liked being able to say, you know, I really like this album
0:41:35Just treat it as though I own it and I know that's a very polarizing
0:41:39Approach some people love that some people hated it. I liked it
0:41:43But what I kept coming back to was I just didn't care for the way in which you
0:41:50find music within iTunes, and I know it's so
0:41:54It's so obvious to complain and moan about iTunes and so I'm not going to go on about it
0:42:01but suffice to say I just really didn't care for the interface in iTunes and I
0:42:05really like
0:42:07Spotify's
0:42:08UI I mean it has its own problems for sure
0:42:11But if I want to find and play a piece of music in Spotify, it's very quick and very easy.
0:42:18And I found an Apple Music on both the Mac and on iOS. Maybe it's just I think differently.
0:42:23Maybe this is another example of Twitterific versus Tweetbot.
0:42:26You know, in that sense I come down from in the Tweetbot camp. Twitterific is somewhat inscrutable to me.
0:42:32And in this case, I come down in the Spotify camp. It doesn't mean that Spotify is by necessity better.
0:42:38It's just it works better for my brain. And so that's why I'm not renewing. Plus,
0:42:43I'm kind of the DJ for the house, so I didn't need to worry about family things.
0:42:46Erin very rarely listens to music that isn't on the radio. So, and Beats 1 was not her thing.
0:42:51So that's why I did it.
0:42:53But there's certainly a lot to like with Apple Music for sure, and I don't want to lose sight of that because there's
0:42:58It is pretty damn magical to say play songs by, you know, Bill Withers or something and next thing you know,
0:43:04you're listening to some pretty good
0:43:06Pretty good music. So there's stuff like just wasn't for me
0:43:09I like the aesthetics of Apple music better than Spotify that the one time I tried Spotify
0:43:14Maybe six months ago for an extended period I don't know if it was there
0:43:18Their weird icon or the color the way the UI looks it just looked like it was like a weird non-native web
0:43:24So I guess all the stuff in iTunes is webby stuff. Anyway, it just taste wise it seemed it
0:43:30Didn't match my taste as well as the Apple music stuff does functionality wise it was fine
0:43:36but it seemed a lot like I was using like, I don't know, like a weird, it was
0:43:44like a GUI made with Linux or something. It didn't look right, it didn't
0:43:49fit, and just it was not pleasant to look at. Apple stuff is
0:43:55always pleasant to look at, but a lot of it I would struggle to find the UI or
0:43:59I'd say like, "Oh, you've got a big giant play button on this recommended
0:44:02playlist for me. It would be nice to have more functionality here until I click
0:44:05into it or whatever, but I thought whoever did like the sort of, it's basically web design,
0:44:08whoever did the web design for Apple Music did a pretty good job. They have a lot of
0:44:11nice artwork and most of the things they present you have. I'm always surprised the amount
0:44:17of sort of custom artwork they have available for artists and playlists and stuff. They
0:44:23did a lot of work to basically add graphics for even the most obscure artists, not just
0:44:27album art, but also background images, pictures of the artists and stuff like that. And color
0:44:33themes and all the other stuff they do. It's actually something inside iTunes that I think
0:44:37looks nice, which is a nice change.
0:44:40All right. Any other thoughts, Marco? Or are you good?
0:44:42Nah, I think I'm good. I mean, I'm going to keep using it because I do like—when
0:44:47I want to go explore and find new artists, I do like being able to go and play their
0:44:53entire album straight through, or at least most of the songs, or the first half of most
0:44:58of the songs before they die and cut out. That part is very frustrating. But I do like
0:45:02I like the idea of being able to play through
0:45:05an entire album before I buy it.
0:45:08That being said, it's just so half-assed.
0:45:11Like the whole, all of Apple Music is so half-assed.
0:45:16I feel like I should probably try something else instead.
0:45:19Because, and ultimately, unfortunately,
0:45:22Apple Music has really destroyed the iOS Music app.
0:45:27It hasn't done as much damage to desktop iTunes.
0:45:30up iTunes, I can still use my way and it mostly doesn't get in the way. If canceling my membership
0:45:36to Apple Music would restore the iOS music app to the way it was before, I would do it
0:45:43in a heartbeat. You know, it seems like Apple Music is here to stay and it's going to keep
0:45:51taking prominence in Apple's stuff because it is an important business interest they
0:45:56have. So the business needs of Apple Music are going to keep influencing the direction
0:46:01of music and music integration on all of their platforms. And they've shown repeatedly that
0:46:06they're very, very happy to destroy iTunes and iOS music app usability in the name of
0:46:14promoting the new thing they're doing in music. And right now it's Apple Music and that's
0:46:19probably going to be the thing for a while. I wish things were better there. I wish either
0:46:25that they didn't destroy it in the name of Apple Music,
0:46:28or that just Apple Music was better than it is.
0:46:30And maybe over time it will get better, I hope it does.
0:46:34- We're still ripe for, as we talked about
0:46:36when Apple Music was announced,
0:46:37we're still ripe for a photos-like simplification
0:46:40and unification of music.
0:46:42They're close to it now, right?
0:46:43They're lurching towards it with iTunes Match
0:46:46and Apple Music, and this whole, you know,
0:46:48they've done a reasonable integration of like,
0:46:50hey, if you sign up for Apple Music,
0:46:51you have the access to all this music,
0:46:53and you can say whether you like it or not,
0:46:55And like Casey said, you can add it to your collection,
0:46:56now it's like your music,
0:46:57and you can actually also still buy it,
0:46:59so that if you, like I did,
0:47:00so if you unsubscribe from Apple Music,
0:47:02these songs don't go away because you actually bought them,
0:47:04but you discovered them through Apple Music.
0:47:06They're close, it just doesn't need to be 17 different plans
0:47:09all integrated with each other.
0:47:09It just needs to be one unified interface
0:47:11where every single song in the world
0:47:14is either part of your music,
0:47:16part of your music that you own,
0:47:17or it'll go, I mean, it's basically conceptually
0:47:20the same as what it is now.
0:47:21Like, I'm just describing exactly what the situation is now,
0:47:23but it's complicated now because it is,
0:47:26there's iTunes with nothing,
0:47:27there's iTunes match which you pay for separately,
0:47:29and there's Apple Music which you pay for separately.
0:47:31And there are separate tabs that you go to
0:47:33that are specific to Apple Music,
0:47:35then there are ones that are just your music,
0:47:36then there's a hybrid.
0:47:37Like, I'm not subscribed to Apple Music anymore,
0:47:39but I still have the hearts next to my things,
0:47:40and I can click on them and it encourages me.
0:47:42It says, yeah, click on more hearts,
0:47:44'cause that will tell us what kind of songs you like.
0:47:45I'm like, you're not gonna recommend anything to me anymore
0:47:48because I'm unsubscribed from Apple Music,
0:47:49and there's still iTunes,
0:47:50oh, forgot about iTunes Genius.
0:47:51There's still iTunes Genius,
0:47:52or maybe is the genius using the hearts?
0:47:54That's still there.
0:47:55There's a lot-- I don't know.
0:47:56There's a lot of crap in there.
0:47:57And so I think they've got all the functionality.
0:48:00It just needs to be like history eraser button, clean slate,
0:48:04and say, OK, we're finally admitting that music
0:48:06collections live in the cloud like photos.
0:48:09We keep the canonical copies.
0:48:11You can tell your Mac to download all of them.
0:48:13Basically, what they did with photos
0:48:14only was much, much better performance, please,
0:48:16and fewer bugs.
0:48:17But conceptually, they have everything that they need.
0:48:21They finally agreed that the files on your disk
0:48:25aren't the canonical copy that they can kind of do.
0:48:27iTunes match, iTunes in the cloud matching things,
0:48:29and they just need to get better about like the,
0:48:31sort of keeping track of everything they did.
0:48:33Hey, we found this file on your computer on this date,
0:48:36and this was the file, and we're never gonna get rid of it,
0:48:38we're gonna preserve it forever,
0:48:39but by the way, if you would like to replace it
0:48:41with this DRM-free 256 kilobit blah, blah, blah song,
0:48:45you can, but if we did the wrong matching for us,
0:48:47tell us and you can get your old one back.
0:48:50I feel like anybody who's used any of these features
0:48:51can spec out everything that they want.
0:48:53And it's a massive simplification if you just say,
0:48:55this is not seven programs and 15 features.
0:48:57This is one thing, they should have just called it
0:48:59Apple Music, just like it's called Photos or whatever.
0:49:02It's one thing and there are different things
0:49:04that you can pay for for different services
0:49:06and it is completely unified and it's just like
0:49:08a cloud-based music library with streaming features
0:49:13and all that other stuff.
0:49:14So I don't know if that also has to come
0:49:16with an iTunes rewrite, I don't know if that has to come
0:49:17with a backend rewrite as they slowly unify,
0:49:20iTunes Genius, iTunes Match, and all the other stuff,
0:49:22but I think we are going in the right direction.
0:49:26We're just, we are in a transitional phase now.
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0:52:11real-time follow-up you can get rid of what Apple calls "loves". They're not likes
0:52:16because "like" is not passionate enough for a company like Apple. Apple loves music
0:52:21and also probably Facebook has a trademark on "likes" or whatever. Anyway.
0:52:23I think Eddie Q loves music. Yeah. So in iTunes preferences under the general
0:52:29tab in preferences there's a pop-up menu for ratings you can pick stars, loves, or
0:52:33stars and loves. So I guess I can go to it and change it back to stars and not see the
0:52:36loves anymore but... Wait, what's the difference? Oh, the stars are the one through five, I
0:52:40Yes, and the loves are the hearts, and the hearts are relevant to Apple Music.
0:52:45I was doing that when I was going through their playlist and saying, "Well, I like this,
0:52:48I like that," and so it can recommend songs for you and it encourages you.
0:52:52It says, "Good, keep clicking those hearts because that lets us know what you like and
0:52:55we can make better playlists for you."
0:52:56But now that I'm not subscribed to Apple Music, it's not going to be making any more playlists
0:52:59for me, unless iTunes Genius is still in there, but it probably isn't.
0:53:03I always disabled iTunes Genius because it always made iTunes either crash or gobble
0:53:07up memory until memory was exhausted on my machine, which was always fun.
0:53:10And I'd watch it in the process thing.
0:53:13It would grow by like a gigabyte a minute, right?
0:53:15And that has bad effects after not too many minutes.
0:53:20And the only way to get it to stop back in the day was for me to just deactivate Genius.
0:53:25I've had it off everywhere.
0:53:26Like every time I launched iTunes, it'd be like, "Trying to send Genius to it?"
0:53:28I'm like, "No, stop.
0:53:29Don't do that.
0:53:30Whatever it is you're doing, you're not going to do it well.
0:53:33Stop."
0:53:34Anyway, iTunes is confusing.
0:53:36Alright then. Do you know what? Do you want to wear the pajamas with stars or
0:53:41would you prefer the pajamas with cars? Read that book all the time. What? It's a
0:53:46Sandra Boynton book. It's a reference. Don't worry about it. I know, I know a lot
0:53:50of her books. I don't know that one. Night-night little pookie. Anyway, moving
0:53:54on. So I received an iPhone 6s and Aaron received a iPhone 6s. Marco, I presume
0:54:02you and Tiff both received iPhone 6s? That's right. That makes everybody in the
0:54:06world except John. That is correct. I'm gonna have one in the house eventually. My wife's
0:54:09gonna get one. Just think of all the things you could be force pushing in the meantime.
0:54:13I know. I got to try one at work. I was excited by it. This is the big story, I think. Now
0:54:19that everyone has their successes, you guys have it, and everyone else in the world who
0:54:24ordered on day one has their thing, the word on the street is that 3D touch, please don't
0:54:31call it force touch anymore, is the bee's knees.
0:54:34- I would agree with that.
0:54:36With an asterisk, I think it's very cool.
0:54:39I think it's going to be even cooler.
0:54:42The problems I have with 3D touch,
0:54:44the biggest one is I forget that that's a thing,
0:54:46and so I don't think to try it.
0:54:48And the other problem is a lot of third party apps
0:54:50just haven't embraced it yet,
0:54:52which I mean, it's not third party developers' faults.
0:54:55They barely had any time with it so far.
0:54:57But like when I discovered it in Instagram,
0:55:01I just thought it was the most amazing thing ever.
0:55:03And I've been 3D touching all the things,
0:55:06which is kind of funny because--
0:55:07Ew.
0:55:09Because most of the touch targets in Instagram
0:55:12that do have a 3D touch affordance
0:55:14are fairly small because they're text.
0:55:17I really like the 3D touch.
0:55:18I think it's very, very cool.
0:55:20I'm very anxious and excited to see what third party
0:55:24devs do with it in the future.
0:55:26And what was very interesting to me was,
0:55:29somebody retweeted somebody else that I retweeted,
0:55:31we'll put the link in the show notes,
0:55:33apparently it's available via JavaScript as well.
0:55:35So you can do this on the web as well.
0:55:38I don't know if that's gonna be useful or not,
0:55:40but I just think that's kinda cool that it's exposed,
0:55:42whether or not anyone ever does anything neat with it.
0:55:45- Yeah, I have a similar problem as you
0:55:48where I keep forgetting that it's a thing I can do,
0:55:50but I'm sure over time that we'll all get used to it
0:55:52and consider it a really cool shortcut.
0:55:54There is a significant discoverability issue with it,
0:55:58where there's really no way to tell
0:56:00that something can be force-touched
0:56:01without just pushing all over the place
0:56:03and just seeing what happens.
0:56:04And I kinda worry that it's gonna be a little bit
0:56:06like the old days of Siri,
0:56:07where we're gonna try it on a bunch of stuff,
0:56:09most of it's not gonna work,
0:56:10and then we're just gonna forget
0:56:11to try it again for a while.
0:56:13You know, that happened a lot with Siri at the beginning,
0:56:17where it would fail a couple times,
0:56:18and you'd be like, "Well, I guess I'm not gonna try
0:56:20"that again."
0:56:20- But even Siri, I think the 3D Touch
0:56:22has the same effect as Siri in that people are like,
0:56:25"Well, Siri's messed up and doesn't do what I want,
0:56:26"but I still use it to set timers,
0:56:28"but I still use it to set reminders."
0:56:30Like, everyone found the one really, really easy thing
0:56:32they could have Siri do,
0:56:33so maybe people are gonna 3D touch everything,
0:56:36not find any new places to use it,
0:56:38but the two places where they do use it,
0:56:39they're gonna use it there all the time.
0:56:40- Siri still can't start the stopwatch.
0:56:43- I know, I know.
0:56:44I also can't set reminders for, what is it, 10 minutes?
0:56:47Whatever its frequency is, it drives me nuts.
0:56:49"Sorry, I can't set something that frequent."
0:56:50Why, why can't you do it?
0:56:52Wait, what do you have to be reminded of every 10 minutes?
0:56:56Stir the sauce, man.
0:56:58Of course.
0:56:59Remind me to stir the sauce every 10 minutes.
0:57:00Siri's like, "Sorry, I can't do that."
0:57:03You don't care about my sauce, Siri?
0:57:04You just want it to stick?
0:57:06You just want it to burn on the bottom?
0:57:08I'm so glad I asked.
0:57:09So seriously, that is my use case for it.
0:57:13So then what I have to do is remind you to stir the sauce in 10 minutes, and then it
0:57:18does, and then I've got to set another reminder for the next 10 minutes.
0:57:21I don't understand how this is better
0:57:22than setting it every 10 minutes.
0:57:24Speaking of iOS things that are,
0:57:26I guess maybe they're, the only thing I can think of
0:57:28is like, it's going off all the time
0:57:32and people don't know how to stop it or whatever.
0:57:34That's the only logic I can think of,
0:57:36or maybe they're afraid it's gonna hurt battery life.
0:57:38I have no idea.
0:57:38Anyway, I had someone today who had a problem
0:57:41with their iPhone and wanted to come over
0:57:44and have me look at it and see if I could fix their iPhone.
0:57:46I'm like, oh, what is this gonna be?
0:57:47Maybe they got that thing wedged
0:57:49they're gonna need the whole machine re-image,
0:57:51or they're gonna have to do an iTunes backup locally
0:57:53and then restore it from the backup
0:57:55or force an application to download
0:57:57or do something like that.
0:57:58No, what actually happened is they had
0:58:00triple tapped the home button.
0:58:02And it enabled voiceover.
0:58:03And they're like, it's like,
0:58:05all it does is say everything that's on the screen.
0:58:08It was iOS 6.
0:58:10Anyway, yeah, I turned that off for them.
0:58:13But yeah, I guess that's the thinking behind
0:58:16the not every 10 minutes.
0:58:19But anyway, circling all the way back to 3D Touch,
0:58:22yeah, I think that's, as I said in the impasse shows,
0:58:25the lack of discoverability is going to be a detriment,
0:58:29especially in the beginning when apps haven't implemented it
0:58:32so you have to experiment.
0:58:33Like, boy, I wonder, you know,
0:58:35the first update comes and they say
0:58:36they have 3D Touch support.
0:58:37I wonder what the hell they did.
0:58:39Or does this app have 3D Touch support?
0:58:40I'll just start shoving things.
0:58:42But the benefit is that if you're not into 3D Touch,
0:58:48My brief experience with the 6S's of friends that I've tried
0:58:51and from talking to people is that
0:58:53if you don't know 3D Touch is this, it doesn't bother you.
0:58:56Like it doesn't get in your way.
0:58:58It is not an essential feature that you have.
0:59:00Like the lack of discoverability is a feature
0:59:02and a detriment.
0:59:03It's a detriment to people like us
0:59:04who really wanna be like power users
0:59:05and make sure we're using things in the most efficient way.
0:59:08And so we're going to be shoving our fingers into the screen
0:59:10to find out where we can use it.
0:59:11But for everybody else, if they don't know 3D Touch exists,
0:59:14it does not bother them at all.
0:59:16And so it is completely invisible.
0:59:17It's a feature that is a benefit if they know it's there
0:59:19and it is not a detriment if they don't know it's there.
0:59:23Which is the best kind of thing
0:59:24because I can imagine someone will have a success
0:59:25for like a year and then someone will show them
0:59:273D touch on the camera or they'll do it accidentally once
0:59:30and be like, wow, that's great.
0:59:32Although the default settings,
0:59:33I was surprised at how hard I had to press.
0:59:35I don't know if anyone would do it accidentally.
0:59:37The first time I tried to 3D touch something,
0:59:39I long pressed it and all the icons started wiggling
0:59:41'cause I wasn't pressing hard enough.
0:59:42That's the defaults.
0:59:43I knew it was there.
0:59:44So what is that, three settings,
0:59:46like soft, medium, hard, or whatever.
0:59:48- Also in the 6S, the Taptic Engine, really like it.
0:59:54Can't really tell you why, I just like it.
0:59:56I feel like it's much crisper vibration.
0:59:58I found, I caught myself constantly mashing on
1:00:03like the Tweetbot icon on my home screen,
1:00:05just to get that doo doo doo.
1:00:06I find it so entertaining, I don't know why,
1:00:08it's the silliest thing in the world.
1:00:10But I really enjoy the Taptic Engine.
1:00:14I think it's well done.
1:00:15It's worth a little bit of extra weight,
1:00:17'cause that's what everyone's been saying, right?
1:00:18That that and the 3D Touch sensors
1:00:21is the added weight over the 6, is that right?
1:00:23- Or maybe it could also just be the shell.
1:00:26Like the shell got thicker
1:00:28and a little bit heavier and stuff, so.
1:00:29- Yeah, it's only a handful of grams anyway,
1:00:31so I think it's probably everything,
1:00:32but I would imagine the screen is the majority of it
1:00:35because the Taptic Engine is mostly air
1:00:37and it's probably less dense than the battery
1:00:39that it replaced.
1:00:40- Yeah, that's probably true.
1:00:42I did, when I first got the phone, I did immediately notice that it was, it felt substantially
1:00:50heavier.
1:00:51I think that's unfair.
1:00:52I think it was just heavier enough that I noticed it versus the 6.
1:00:56Now that I haven't held my 6 in several days, I don't feel like it's any different at all.
1:01:01I put the 6S in the Apple leather case that the 6 was in, and that seemed to be just fine.
1:01:10It seems a little tighter, but nothing egregious.
1:01:14So thumbs up for 3D Touch, thumbs up for the Taptic Engine.
1:01:17Live photos, two thumbs as high as I can possibly reach.
1:01:21I think it's extremely cool.
1:01:23And the thing about live photos that I think is going to be really cool is looking at a
1:01:27live photo in a year, or in two years, or in three years.
1:01:30Because I'm a very loyal user of Picture Life, and as with many of these sorts of services,
1:01:38the Photos app on iOS, if you 3D touch that on the home screen, you can look at, you know,
1:01:43the pictures you've taken a year ago, or two years ago, or six years ago, or ten years
1:01:46ago, if your library goes back that far.
1:01:49And I always love seeing those pictures.
1:01:53When I wake up in the morning, that's one of the first things I do, is go to the PictureLife
1:01:55app and look at those pictures, because I always get great memories from them.
1:02:00But there are definitely times that I will look at these pictures and have no friggin'
1:02:06idea why I took that picture or what it was off. And granted, Live Photos doesn't guarantee
1:02:11that that problem will be fixed, but it certainly helps. And seeing a picture of Declan just
1:02:20kind of sitting there looking adorable, but then giving it a little push and seeing the
1:02:25context of that picture, it's just genuinely magical. And I love it. And the problem I
1:02:32I have with live photos is that I love it so damn much that it almost makes me give
1:02:37pause to picking up my beloved Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera because I don't want to
1:02:43give up on that context on these pictures.
1:02:45Aren't you annoyed by the low frame rate and low resolution?
1:02:48Not really.
1:02:49You will be in a decade.
1:02:50Oh, oh, oh, absolutely I will.
1:02:52But today, no.
1:02:53And I think it's because I understand that we just, well, I'm assuming, I should say,
1:02:57that we just don't have the grunt to be able to do all that at once.
1:03:01But yes, in a decade I will be annoyed by it, but I would probably still just appreciate
1:03:06having that context over having no context at all.
1:03:08Yeah, and I think it's maybe the grunt, but probably even more of a factor is the size.
1:03:16If they had, you know, if they cranked up the size, cranked up the frame rate, assuming
1:03:19this was technically possible, cranked up the quality of the compression or whatever,
1:03:25then you know, people take a lot of pictures.
1:03:26If you turn all those pictures into three-second videos, that really adds up, especially on
1:03:3016 gigabyte phones, anyway.
1:03:32(laughing)
1:03:33Yeah, I think that has to be a factor.
1:03:35I'm just thinking of like,
1:03:36when my kids were born on babies and stuff,
1:03:39I was recording them on mini DV tapes,
1:03:43like camcorder camcorders in standard def,
1:03:46and they look awful.
1:03:47I mean, like that's just, you know,
1:03:49my childhood pictures are like in 16 millimeter
1:03:52or whatever, eight millimeter, whatever size film,
1:03:55as in, you know, video film type stuff was.
1:03:58So yeah, you can't help that.
1:03:59That's gonna be, you know, is the way it's been.
1:04:01The thing about live pictures is,
1:04:04it's going to be a gorgeous 12 megapixel photo
1:04:07surrounded by really low resolution,
1:04:10sub 30 frame rate video.
1:04:13So, yep, better than nothing and kind of neat.
1:04:16But actually, Casey, I'm wondering how you decide,
1:04:19is it just a toggle on/off,
1:04:22like do live pictures all the time
1:04:24or is it on a per shot basis?
1:04:25How do you decide what to make live pictures
1:04:26or do you even have that choice?
1:04:27So in settings, I think there's a general,
1:04:30is it even available setting if memory serves?
1:04:34- Well, it's just like HDR,
1:04:35where it's a thing you push during the capture screen.
1:04:38And you can turn it on, you can leave it on,
1:04:40or you can turn it on and off shot by shot.
1:04:42But it works just like HDR does.
1:04:44- Yeah, and that's what I was driving at,
1:04:45is that there's a little kind of like button
1:04:48on the heads up display in the Photos app
1:04:50that will let you toggle it on and off.
1:04:53But I could have sworn I had seen
1:04:55that there was a live Photos,
1:04:57I guess I'm crazy.
1:04:58I'm looking now and I don't see it anymore.
1:05:00I thought that I'd seen just a general,
1:05:02can you do a live photo, yes or no, in the settings app.
1:05:06I think I'm wrong.
1:05:07And what I was gonna say is what Marco just said,
1:05:09that as you're taking a photo, as you're in the camera,
1:05:13at the very top, there's what looks almost like a target.
1:05:16I'm not really sure why this is the live photos icon,
1:05:19but it's on the top dead center
1:05:22and that turns live photos on and off.
1:05:25- So what do you do?
1:05:26Do you have it on all the time?
1:05:27or do you use-- - Yes, no,
1:05:27it's on all the time.
1:05:28- I think also, by the way,
1:05:29I think I saw this on the web,
1:05:30I haven't tried it myself,
1:05:31that even if you take everything in live photo mode,
1:05:34you can selectively, is this right,
1:05:37decide that after you've taken the live photo,
1:05:39that you just want it to display
1:05:40as a regular photo in your collection?
1:05:42- I think that's right.
1:05:44- Seems like it'd be a simple thing to do,
1:05:47it'd basically just saying, just show the picture,
1:05:49ignore the live photo-y part of it,
1:05:50even if it was recorded.
1:05:52I don't think it deletes the live photo-y part of it,
1:05:53I think it just toggles it off.
1:05:54Either way, like Auto HDR and other settings
1:05:59that are up there in the weird swipey interface
1:06:02in the Apple camera, I imagine people are probably
1:06:06gonna either have live pictures on all the time
1:06:08or turn it off, especially in the beginning.
1:06:10If they turn it on all the time and they fill
1:06:11their stupid 16 gigabyte phones with hundreds
1:06:14of tiny videos, then maybe in their consultation
1:06:17with the Apple genius and their frustration,
1:06:20it'll come up and say, well, one way you can save space
1:06:22is to not do all these live pictures every time.
1:06:24or maybe people will find it annoying.
1:06:26Because here's the other aspect of live pictures
1:06:28that I'm speculating about
1:06:29because I'm not using a phone that has them.
1:06:32If you have it on all the time,
1:06:34there is the high potential for situations
1:06:37when taking photos of adults
1:06:38where the before and after three seconds of video
1:06:40is not flattering.
1:06:41And not that you don't want it,
1:06:44but I mean, some people are weird
1:06:46about having the picture taken at all.
1:06:48You wanna capture the incident when they're smiling,
1:06:51the incident before and after
1:06:52when they're making a weird face.
1:06:54They're not like kids where they're cute all the time.
1:06:56Maybe they're not happy that you have those
1:06:59one and a half seconds bracketing
1:07:01the reasonable picture, right?
1:07:03So I wonder if that's also gonna be a social issue.
1:07:07If you have live photos on all the time
1:07:09or people are gonna be wary
1:07:10when you're taking pictures of them,
1:07:11that they don't just have to be pleasant
1:07:13and smiling for an instant,
1:07:14they have to make sure that they're not making
1:07:16a weird face three seconds on either side.
1:07:18I don't know.
1:07:18- Yeah, you make a fair point,
1:07:21But I think in the end of the day,
1:07:24it's just going to be awesome to be able to,
1:07:26as I keep coming back, to have that context
1:07:29around the photo.
1:07:30And even if it's somebody giggling beforehand
1:07:32or making a funny face, in some ways,
1:07:34that almost makes the picture better.
1:07:35So you have the still life posed picture,
1:07:40but the goofy face that led up to it or what have you.
1:07:43I don't know, Marco, you haven't said much about it.
1:07:44What do you think about all this?
1:07:46- So Tiff sent me my first received live photos today.
1:07:49She and Adam were, she went to pick them up from school
1:07:51and they were out playing in a muddy baseball field
1:07:54near our house and she sent me a live photo of Adam
1:07:57like stomping on a giant mud puddle.
1:07:59And it was pretty cool to watch.
1:08:01I kind of got it then.
1:08:03I was like, oh, this is kind of nice.
1:08:07It wasn't a video, I mean it was a very, very short
1:08:09video clip with a photo that previewed it basically.
1:08:12So an actual video would have done a way better job
1:08:16of showing the moment if it was intended to be in motion.
1:08:20But it's a lot like the debate between,
1:08:25like you were saying, between using the iPhone camera
1:08:28versus using your fancy mirrorless.
1:08:30And when you have your phone camera
1:08:34versus some other type of camera,
1:08:36one thing that is relevant, that is important,
1:08:38is like, what are you gonna actually use?
1:08:42People say the camera that you have with you
1:08:44is the most important camera.
1:08:45Like, what are you actually gonna use?
1:08:46Like if you're actually going to take a picture
1:08:50and think about it and get out your mirrorless camera,
1:08:52great, it'll be way higher quality
1:08:53than what you can get with your iPhone.
1:08:55But if you, you know, the fact is
1:08:57you're not gonna have it all the time,
1:08:58and so you're better off not missing a moment
1:09:01and just capturing it with something
1:09:04rather than waiting until you have
1:09:06the better camera out to capture it.
1:09:08And so with live photos, I think it's gonna be
1:09:09a similar kind of thing where it's like,
1:09:12yes, you are better off switching over to video mode
1:09:15and capturing a 4K video if what you want
1:09:18is to capture this moment in time in a moving format.
1:09:22Like video, an actual intentionally shot video
1:09:26is going to be better at that for most cases.
1:09:29But with live photos on, you can kind of,
1:09:33you can get like half of the benefit of a video
1:09:37with every picture without really having to think about it,
1:09:39without having to choose that mode.
1:09:42So that, I think you're gonna get a lot more,
1:09:45like there are so many moments where you wanna
1:09:47take a picture and then like, you know, afterwards
1:09:49like, oh I wish that was, I wish I had a video of that also.
1:09:52Like that happens a lot.
1:09:53And so this does solve that.
1:09:55And it isn't, I don't think it's the best implementation.
1:09:59There's a number of implementation details
1:10:00that I would nitpick about.
1:10:02The quality is a big one.
1:10:05The fact is it's good enough when you're looking
1:10:06at it on a phone.
1:10:07And that is how most people are looking at most pictures
1:10:09these days, which is unfortunate because as technology
1:10:12as phones get bigger, as screens get better,
1:10:15these might not age very well compared to what they could be
1:10:18if they were higher resolution
1:10:19and especially higher frame rate would be nice.
1:10:21But, you know, I assume we will solve that over time.
1:10:26I really hope that the low resolution and low frame rate
1:10:31were decided for technical reasons
1:10:34of like this is what the sensor can do
1:10:36rather than we don't wanna take up more space
1:10:38in our 16 gig phones that we keep selling.
1:10:39I really hope that was the reason.
1:10:41So...
1:10:42I don't know.
1:10:43I don't feel as bothered by the low frame rate, nor the low resolution.
1:10:47I agree with both of you.
1:10:49In a perfect world, it would probably be better to have both.
1:10:53But it just really doesn't bother me.
1:10:54In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that part of the charm of it is that it's
1:10:59really a picture that has a little motion around it.
1:11:02And I think you hit the nail on the head, Marco, that if you're trying to catch motion,
1:11:06a live photo is not the right way to do it.
1:11:08A live photo, like I was saying before, is to capture a single photograph that gives
1:11:13you a little bit of context around it.
1:11:15And if you really want to capture video, again, I couldn't agree more that the right way
1:11:18to do it is to capture video.
1:11:20But I think the low frame rate, and even to a lesser degree, the low resolution is kind
1:11:26of, I don't know, adorable in its own way, because it's kind of janky in a kind of
1:11:32fun way.
1:11:33I don't know.
1:11:34That probably sounds really contradictory, but I kind of like it.
1:11:37- It's like Instagram and the filters.
1:11:39You want it to look like old 70s type photo.
1:11:41- Right, except that you don't have the high-res original
1:11:44saved to your camera roll.
1:11:45- Yeah, fair point.
1:11:46- Well, and also it's not harkening back to any real past
1:11:50that actually existed unless you're considering like,
1:11:52remember what your video looked like in 1990?
1:11:55Digital video, it was low frame rate and crappy wrist.
1:11:57Anyway.
1:11:58- It's almost vine-like.
1:11:59Like when you watch it, it's almost like a vine.
1:12:01I mean, it's a lot shorter and that's noticeable,
1:12:03but the benefit of it,
1:12:04and you can kind of loop it a couple times,
1:12:06Like it is kind of viney and I like that about it.
1:12:09- Did you know, this is an OS feature,
1:12:11I was messing with my thing the other day,
1:12:13I think it was in Twitter maybe,
1:12:15and I was swiping my finger on the screen
1:12:17when an animated GIF was playing,
1:12:18and you could scrub back and forth on the GIF.
1:12:20Is that an OS level feature for displaying GIFs in Safari
1:12:24or is that an app feature?
1:12:25- I didn't think so.
1:12:27- You can go, it isn't just pausing it,
1:12:29you can actually go back and forth.
1:12:30- Yeah, no, I move my thumb back and forth
1:12:32and it would go forward, back, forward, back, you know.
1:12:34It was a neat way to do it.
1:12:35Anyway, yeah, that is another, that kind of,
1:12:38that's not really an aesthetic,
1:12:39that's an accidental aesthetic.
1:12:41GIF animations, that someone should do a PhD thesis
1:12:44if they haven't already about GIF animations.
1:12:46How we got to this point, because like the history of GIF,
1:12:50the dawning of GIF resolutions, the dormant phase,
1:12:53and then having it come roaring back
1:12:54because every single freaking browser could play it.
1:12:56It's like, you know what?
1:12:57I'm done with dealing with embedded video or Flash.
1:12:59I'm just gonna do everything as GIF.
1:13:01But it's 256 college, doesn't matter.
1:13:03used a different 256 every frame of animation, but they're huge, doesn't matter, they play
1:13:07everywhere and that's all that matters is it plays everywhere and it's just this incredibly
1:13:13backwards, stupid, archaic format that nevertheless swept across the internet like a fire in the
1:13:19plains filled with dry grass and now we're kind of stuck with it.
1:13:23Anyway, just think, in an alternate universe where Apple was more a jokey company, there
1:13:29would be animated GIFs surrounding your 12 megapixel photo.
1:13:32So thank goodness for small favors, right?
1:13:34At least it's only a low frame rate H.264 video instead.
1:13:39So anyway, the most important question that you guys might not know the answer to is,
1:13:42what's the default?
1:13:43You get an iPhone 6s out of the box, is live photos on by default or off by default?
1:13:47I believe off.
1:13:48That's kind of a bummer because I feel like this is, this is a, I mean I guess it's easy
1:13:52to turn on, but I don't know how many people know how to use the, I think it's not particularly
1:13:57the whole weird swipey interface to going from videos to photos and turning auto HDR
1:14:03on and off. I've seen a lot of people be confused with that. I know how it works, I've accidentally
1:14:08switched modes a few times and had to take the extra 2 seconds to switch back and I find
1:14:11it frustrating. I don't really like that UI. But it's kind of a shame that I thought it
1:14:15was on by default.
1:14:16Right. Neither is 4K video, by the way.
1:14:19That's good. That shouldn't be on by default. That's like, "Well, if you really want it,
1:14:22you have it, but this is like a... they're going to have TV ads for this that I'm never
1:14:25going to see. Maybe they already do have TV ads for this showing, "Hey, live photos.
1:14:29This is cool." People with babies and teenagers will love this. Adults who don't want their
1:14:35pictures taken might not love it so much.
1:14:37And you're going to sit there with your dead photos and not enjoy all the fun.
1:14:40Exactly.
1:14:41You're dead. Yeah, that would have been the political way to do it. We're not going
1:14:46to call ours live photos. Everything else is a dead photo. We'll call them feature
1:14:50photos.
1:14:51Right.
1:14:52Good real-time follow-up the gif thing you were talking about as
1:14:56Jelly is said in the chat and as I confirmed by using his wonderful app to gift wrapped
1:15:01That is not a system thing that must have been a Twitter effect thing
1:15:05moving on touch ID
1:15:08Super fast in the new phones. I wouldn't go so far as to say instant
1:15:12I feel like most people that I've heard talk about it have said it's just so fast
1:15:17it's instant and I wouldn't say that I mean it is really really freaking fast noticeably faster faster and
1:15:25So fast that I am extremely pleased by it every time I use it
1:15:30But I wouldn't say instant one thing I did want to say though very quickly about that is I found an odd behavior
1:15:36And I'd be curious if those who are listening have heard this as well feel free to tweet at me
1:15:42Don't worry about John and Marco I
1:15:45I had the, I had my iPhone plugged in, my new 6S, plugged into the wall via, I believe
1:15:51it was an iPad charger and extension and then both Apple and not Apple USB to Lightning
1:15:57cords.
1:15:58And for whatever reason I couldn't get my Touch ID to work.
1:16:02I couldn't get it to work, couldn't get it to work.
1:16:03Tried re-learning several different fingers, couldn't get it to work, couldn't get it to
1:16:08work.
1:16:09In fact, I wouldn't even relearn the damn fingers.
1:16:11I was starting to get really bummed out because I thought, "Man, I've got a lemon."
1:16:14And then for whatever reason, I unplugged my phone.
1:16:18I don't know what possessed me to do this.
1:16:19And everything started working instantly.
1:16:22I didn't think much of it because that was the only time I'd had it happen.
1:16:25And then earlier tonight, Erin had the exact same problem on her phone, which is also a
1:16:32success.
1:16:33And I don't know if it's this particular charger.
1:16:35I don't know if it's gross power coming into our house.
1:16:38I wouldn't think so, but who knows?
1:16:41But one way or another, this is two times now that we've had this issue where Touch
1:16:46ID just would not recognize our fingers until we unplugged the phone.
1:16:51So I don't know what that could be, but if you did have that experience, I'd love
1:16:55to hear about it.
1:16:56So tweet me @CaseyLiss.
1:16:57That's Apple's new cord protection plan, subtly discouraging you animals from using
1:17:02your phones while they're plugged in because this is why your cords get destroyed.
1:17:06- Mm-hmm.
1:17:06- At least that's one possible theory,
1:17:08as I continue my streak of never having broken
1:17:12a 30-pin or a lightning cable in any way.
1:17:16- I've broken some 30-pins.
1:17:17I don't know that I've broken a lightning, though.
1:17:20- I'm getting worried about our couch charging cable.
1:17:22It's the end is starting to bunch up,
1:17:25where it meets the stress boot, it's starting to wrinkle.
1:17:28- Yeah, I've seen a lot of pictures of that phenomenon.
1:17:30Do you use it, ever use it plugged in when you're there?
1:17:34I usually don't, but Tiff and more importantly,
1:17:38Adam all the time do.
1:17:40- Kids destroy everything.
1:17:41- Yeah.
1:17:42- My son has bent the, like he's got an iPad 2 that he uses
1:17:46and picture it this way, put the headphone
1:17:49into an iPhone 2, put an Apple earbud headphone
1:17:51to an iPhone 2 and then slam it on the ground,
1:17:54headphone and down.
1:17:55So the headphone is bent now, like it still works,
1:17:59but if you hit the headphone in it,
1:18:00it is bent just at the part where, you know,
1:18:03it goes into the device, not a good look.
1:18:06This is the kind of, and the smart cover
1:18:08is slowly delaminating too, so yeah,
1:18:10kids destroy everything. - That's no good.
1:18:12- All right, anything else on Touch ID?
1:18:15Marco, you were pretty effusive about it,
1:18:17and I mean, not that I'm not,
1:18:18but would you say I am being ridiculous,
1:18:20or would you say that it's damn near instant,
1:18:23but not quite instant?
1:18:25- I agree with you, I wouldn't say instant.
1:18:26It also depends a lot on how precisely it recognized it,
1:18:31precisely recognized it.
1:18:34Like, it seems like if it has a really solid match,
1:18:37I think it can recognize it faster
1:18:39than if it kinda has to think about it for a second,
1:18:41you know?
1:18:42- Yeah, yeah.
1:18:43- So, I think the claim that Apple makes,
1:18:45which is that it's about twice as fast,
1:18:47I'd say that's accurate.
1:18:48- Yeah, I would agree with that.
1:18:49It is, again, I don't wanna sound like I'm poo-pooing it.
1:18:53It is definitely way, way, way faster.
1:18:55It's just, I had read or heard some of the early rumblings
1:18:59about it as being like instant.
1:19:01And it is instant, it is not, but gosh, it is close.
1:19:05And I love it, I really do.
1:19:07- Yeah, related to that is this,
1:19:08these are the links I put in here
1:19:09for Daniel Jalkut's thing about
1:19:10how Siri is always listening.
1:19:12We knew this from the keynote,
1:19:14and I think people are looking at Apple text docs
1:19:16or whatever, anyway.
1:19:17The M9 chip is related to Siri,
1:19:19and people were asking, "How does that M9 chip
1:19:21"that tracks when you're stepping or whatever,
1:19:23"how is that related to Siri?"
1:19:25All this gets down to having features on your phone,
1:19:30constantly doing something,
1:19:32constantly sensing the outside world,
1:19:33whether it's sensing whether you're shaking the phone
1:19:35up and down or sensing whether you're saying,
1:19:37hey Siri or whatever, without killing your battery.
1:19:40So that means you can't have the main CPU
1:19:42and the big beefy CPU, GPU, RAM, everything,
1:19:45big combination running all the time
1:19:47or waking up every two seconds and say,
1:19:49did the user say, hey Siri?
1:19:50Did the user say, hey Siri?
1:19:52That kills your battery.
1:19:53So this is-- - People are gonna kill us
1:19:54for this.
1:19:55- Maybe I'll have to bleep it.
1:19:58- Seriously, people, just turn this feature off
1:19:59on your phone, or give your, can you give your phone
1:20:01a different name yet?
1:20:02Is there another thing you can do?
1:20:03- I don't, well, the 6S actually does like a voice training
1:20:06thing where it, when during the intro setup,
1:20:09after it, when it asks to enable Siri,
1:20:11it forces you to actually train it,
1:20:13and it kinda teaches you to say,
1:20:15hey Siri, in your own voice, and it like forces you
1:20:17through this process.
1:20:19So now it seems to be matched to your voice.
1:20:22In practice, I don't know how tightly
1:20:24it is matched to your voice.
1:20:25- Yeah, it would be nice if you could rename it.
1:20:27Anyway, that problem of having a battery-powered device,
1:20:32always sort of listening, always sensing,
1:20:35but not killing your CPU is why the little M9
1:20:38and the little step counter thing is there.
1:20:40The thing that Apple does is they make dedicated hardware
1:20:42with its own little dedicated local buffer.
1:20:45I mean, I don't know how it works inside,
1:20:46but I'm imagining this is a super lower power chip
1:20:49that has this one job that just spools crap up.
1:20:52And if it senses something that it thinks is significant,
1:20:57it will then wake up the big CPU and say,
1:20:59"Hey, by the way, the thing just said, hey Siri.
1:21:00And by the way, here's the audio I recorded
1:21:02starting when they said, hey Siri, you take it from here."
1:21:05Like I'm just entirely speculating
1:21:07about how this actually works.
1:21:08But the bottom line is custom hardware
1:21:10that it takes way less power than the actual CPU
1:21:13to be sort of the guard, the guard post, like listening,
1:21:16listening for anyone to say, hey Siri,
1:21:17or counting the steps is even easier
1:21:20because they can just sit there and tick up a counter
1:21:22and then when the actual CPU wakes up,
1:21:23it's like, by the way,
1:21:24while you were just sleeping over there,
1:21:26this many more steps took place
1:21:27or here's the step data or whatever.
1:21:29So that's smart use of hardware.
1:21:34Features like that are coming all the time.
1:21:36Touch ID is kind of like that.
1:21:38I don't know to what extent it's already
1:21:39completely independent where the Touch ID sensor
1:21:41and its little secure enclave and everything
1:21:43can work entirely independently of the CPU
1:21:45and then just pass on the information.
1:21:47That must be true to some degree
1:21:49just for the security implications,
1:21:50but the way you get these things to be more responsive
1:21:54is not like, oh, we need the A10 CPU.
1:21:56No, it's custom hardware to say,
1:21:59the main part of the system
1:22:00is not involved in this process at all.
1:22:02This is like a sense organ
1:22:04that relays and buffers this information,
1:22:06and the faster you can make those little sense organs
1:22:09while keeping them low power,
1:22:10the better this is gonna get.
1:22:11So Marco is pegging it at about twice the speed,
1:22:14just like Apple said,
1:22:15that they can do that twice the speed
1:22:16for another two or three years.
1:22:18it really will be instant pretty quickly,
1:22:20'cause I don't think there's any particular limit
1:22:23on the sensing.
1:22:24Once you're touching it, you're touching it.
1:22:25It's not as if you need to,
1:22:27it needs to do this incredibly big computation.
1:22:30You could just dump the raw sensor data out
1:22:32once you're touching it,
1:22:34and then it's the processing and the matching or whatever.
1:22:37But yeah, if they can double it in one year,
1:22:41I'm optimistic that this will eventually actually be instant.
1:22:47- All right, anything else on the hardware?
1:22:50I have one other quick thought about the 6S,
1:22:51but anything else on the hardware?
1:22:53- How's the battery been for you?
1:22:54For me, I'd say it's about the same.
1:22:56- I'd say it's about the same, maybe marginally worse,
1:23:01but I also wonder if it's all in my head
1:23:03because I've been looking out for exactly that.
1:23:05- Right, exactly, yeah, it's hard to know.
1:23:07- Well, if it's about the same, that means it's worse
1:23:09because this is a fresh battery
1:23:11versus your one-year-old 6, right?
1:23:13So it should be better than a one-year-old 6, so.
1:23:16Yeah, I mean, it is not dramatically different, but I would definitely not say it's better,
1:23:24and I'm skeptical that when I say it's worse, it really honestly is.
1:23:28It may just be me thinking it is.
1:23:30You're also playing with your phones more, maybe.
1:23:31Like, you just got the success, you're force-touching things, the live photos and all that other
1:23:35stuff, so it'll probably settle down.
1:23:36But anyway, it being a wash seems reasonable.
1:23:39Yeah.
1:23:40My final thought about the success—and I tweeted about this a few days ago—it was
1:23:45interesting to me that anecdotally, based on zero facts whatsoever, I saw a lot less
1:23:51kvetching about, "Oh, my phone wasn't available. Oh, my phone wasn't available. I really wanted
1:23:57this in such and such color and such and such capacity, and it wasn't available." And I
1:24:01did see some of that for the rose gold pretty quickly. But, you know, last year, my recollection
1:24:07anyway was that by 3.15 in the morning in the one true time zone, which is Eastern time,
1:24:14A lot of people were already starting to say, "Oh my God, my thing is sold out. Oh my gosh."
1:24:18And I didn't see much of that this year. And in fact, somebody, I can't remember who it was, said to me,
1:24:23they pre-ordered like two or three days before the first, the launch day.
1:24:30And they were still able to reserve one for launch day.
1:24:33And I just found that surprising. And so I was theorizing, this was right before the numbers came out,
1:24:38that, well, maybe they didn't sell as many, or, you know, maybe it's just that it's easier
1:24:42because a lot of these components are similar.
1:24:43And then I got to thinking, well,
1:24:44not all that many of these components are that similar.
1:24:47And as it turns out, the numbers were through the roof.
1:24:50And I didn't realize at the time I had talked about this,
1:24:52but apparently the S years are always better.
1:24:55So I don't know what to make of this.
1:24:57Maybe it's just that Tim Cook's ops
1:24:59are really getting that much better
1:25:01or just getting more mature, if you will.
1:25:04But I was impressed by how few inventory problems
1:25:07we heard about with the exception perhaps of the rose gold.
1:25:10Well, one aspect of that that we have here in the show notes
1:25:12is that the A9 is being made by two different manufacturers.
1:25:15I'm not sure if that was the case with the A8, but--
1:25:18I think this is the first time they've ever done that.
1:25:20Yeah, so it's a Taiwan semiconductor,
1:25:22and Samsung are both making the A9.
1:25:24And the most interesting thing, I think,
1:25:26is that they're both making slightly different A9s.
1:25:28I guess they just have different transistor layouts.
1:25:30Maybe they're actually different sizes, different feature sizes
1:25:33on them.
1:25:33Anyway, we'll put a link to the chip work story
1:25:35that they actually opened these things up
1:25:37and sliced open the chips and took
1:25:39look at the actual little chip that's inside the package, and lo and behold, two different
1:25:43things. So that helps with inventory. You know, we talked about like, what is the thing
1:25:46that is most supply constrained on these phones? It's usually the thing that's hardest to make,
1:25:50and that's usually either something having to do with the camera sensors or something
1:25:53having to do with the CPU/GPU system on a chip thing. And this year it looks like they
1:25:57were able to make a lot of them. Although, I told my wife this, "Hey, people aren't getting
1:26:01sold out and you could have just, you didn't have to wake up at 3 a.m. and you could have
1:26:04just woke up in the morning or whatever." And she's like, "Great, I'll be able to get
1:26:06thing right away, and then I went to the Apple website or whatever, and it's like three to
1:26:09five weeks for the model she wanted.
1:26:12So maybe that was just a fluke, and by the time he does buy it, there'll be plenty of
1:26:15inventory, but it seems like it's not a bottomless pit.
1:26:20It seems like the demand did actually exhaust supply eventually.
1:26:25I haven't looked in recent days.
1:26:26I'm hoping by the time her contract is up and she goes for her other phone, we can just
1:26:30walk into an Apple store and there won't be a line of people there, and we can just get
1:26:33the phone that she wants.
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1:29:27All right, so you mentioned just a moment ago El Capitan, God, I still hate the name,
1:29:32El Capitan came out today.
1:29:34We were discussing before the show that I installed it on the machine that I'm presently
1:29:39recording on starting at about 7.15 this evening.
1:29:43We started recording at 9 this evening because basically I'm an idiot, but it worked out
1:29:47okay, so I'm a genius.
1:29:49In any case, initial impressions, already really like the split view, whatever they're
1:29:55calling it, for having to opt side by side and full screen.
1:29:59I think I like San Francisco.
1:30:02I feel like every platform I see San Francisco on, my first reaction is, "Eh," and then over
1:30:08time I end up really liking it.
1:30:11My site does indeed support pin tabs, which I'm really excited about, because I had no
1:30:17I had no idea if that was working or not.
1:30:19I didn't run any of the betas.
1:30:20This is all brand new to me, but so far so good.
1:30:23I really like it, and I did not lose my mouse yet,
1:30:27but Renz in the chat asked, and the mouse jiggle
1:30:30is very creepy and kind of delightful all at once.
1:30:33So that's my initial impressions.
1:30:36Any other initial impressions from you guys?
1:30:39- Well, should we do, is there gonna be
1:30:42an official John Siracusa review of El Cap on our show,
1:30:45Or will you kill me for even saying that?
1:30:48I haven't even installed the GM yet.
1:30:50God, look at you.
1:30:51You really kicked back.
1:30:52I know, you've graduated and suddenly it's like, whatever man.
1:30:55Yeah, no, it's like being spoiler, it's like my new change in philosophy of trying
1:30:59to be relatively spoiler free for the new Star Wars movies, whereas with episode one
1:31:03I wanted to know almost everything about it, and now I'm trying an opposite approach.
1:31:07So for OS X, it's like, you know, I installed the betas, I filled around with it, but I
1:31:12I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna do this
1:31:14like a regular person.
1:31:15I see the keynote, I installed the betas,
1:31:17I played around with it,
1:31:18but I don't know everything about the OS.
1:31:19I haven't been obsessively using it
1:31:21and searching around for it and trying all sorts of things.
1:31:23So I'm gonna read people's reviews.
1:31:24I haven't even gotten around to reading their reviews yet,
1:31:26but I have a lot of them saved away.
1:31:27I'm gonna read reviews and I'm gonna learn stuff.
1:31:29And that's a novel, exciting experience for me
1:31:32to find out new things about the OS.
1:31:36So I'm looking forward to installing it
1:31:37'cause I have used the betas and, you know,
1:31:41a lot of my betas are on a separate hard drive and a fresh install or on a computer they
1:31:44don't use so it always feels faster because like, "Wow, with nothing installed everything
1:31:48is faster and snappier."
1:31:49But I'm looking forward to performance improvements and the new feature and the new font and all
1:31:54the other stuff.
1:31:55I'm somewhat dreading dealing with the system integrity protection stuff, but I'm hoping
1:32:00most people have got that stuff worked out.
1:32:02Unlike Casey, I did not rush to install it.
1:32:06I did start downloading today.
1:32:07I've got about half downloaded and I haven't paused.
1:32:10But I haven't even updated Skype.
1:32:12Skype's been wanting me to update for months.
1:32:13And as Marco talked about with not changing stuff
1:32:16in audio setup, I'm like, why am I updating Skype again?
1:32:20Is there something wrong with Skype now?
1:32:21Is it not working now that I need to do this update?
1:32:24No.
1:32:24No, there's kind of always something wrong with it.
1:32:26I know, but everything is working fine.
1:32:29So I have been saying no, no, no.
1:32:30But I'm going to say yes now.
1:32:33Why would I might update?
1:32:34Because I would imagine that if there's
1:32:35going to be any LCAP compatibility differences,
1:32:38Like I need to install the latest Skype
1:32:39before I upgrade the OS.
1:32:41I have to go through the whole ritual
1:32:42of making umpteen backups
1:32:43and then making sure every single one of my apps
1:32:46is up to date for the version that is compatible
1:32:48and then doing the OS update.
1:32:50It's not that I dread it.
1:32:52I'm gonna upgrade, you know, by this weekend
1:32:54I'll have all the computers in the house upgraded probably.
1:32:56I'm usually pretty, gonna know about these things.
1:32:58I did the same thing for Mavericks.
1:33:01Everything was fine.
1:33:03And Yosemite, everything was fine.
1:33:04Your mileage may vary.
1:33:07But yeah, I don't have anything particularly deep and insightful to say about it because
1:33:12I just haven't used it enough to know those things.
1:33:15But as they come up, I'm sure I will mention them on the show, but don't be expecting
1:33:18like there's going to be like one episode where I just like recite 30,000 words with
1:33:22a review.
1:33:23That's not going to happen.
1:33:25Did you miss writing it at all?
1:33:28Didn't miss writing it.
1:33:29I missed a little bit having written it.
1:33:31Like I tweeted, it was kind of weird going to Ars Technica and seeing an OS X review
1:33:36and seeing that it wasn't mine. It's like it happened, but I didn't need to do anything,
1:33:41and this review appeared in Ars Technica. That's great. It's like magic. You just go
1:33:46to sleep, you wake up, and there's a review in Ars Technica. How did that get there? But
1:33:49yeah, people wrote it, and that's how it got there.
1:33:52Is it kind of like if you go back and visit an old job and you see that there's just somebody
1:33:57else doing your job and everything just went on without you?
1:34:00Yeah, it's fine. Again, I haven't read it yet. I looked at it. I saw there's some good
1:34:03techie parts. One person who tweeted about this that I retweeted said that they're really
1:34:08enjoying the Ars Technica review, including the traditional middle part that they only
1:34:11vaguely understand. So I'm looking forward to that. Those are the parts that I enjoy.
1:34:16I didn't enjoy the fact that the terminal examples where they showed terminal text had
1:34:19light text and a dark background. This is what happens when you stop doing it, someone
1:34:26else gets to do it and they get to make the choices, and that's just the price I have
1:34:29pay that someone else is making choices about the aesthetic tiny details of the review.
1:34:34They probably didn't even put in any references to all my traditional sources, but that's
1:34:39what happens when someone else writes it. So anyway, I'm looking forward to reading
1:34:42it. I'm looking forward to learning things. I'm looking forward to reading all the reviews
1:34:45that I have in there, and I'm looking forward to installing it and trying it out myself,
1:34:49and I'm sure I will have things to say about it.
1:34:51I hope so. I really do, because it is, you know, other people write these reviews now,
1:34:58and other people will always step in,
1:35:00and I'm sure they are good in their ways,
1:35:04but I do miss having it come from you.
1:35:07I do miss your review, 'cause what we got was a review,
1:35:11but we didn't get your review.
1:35:13- Yep, I would agree with that wholeheartedly.
1:35:15I read maybe 2/3 of the ARS review so far,
1:35:18and it is very good, without question,
1:35:20and I think it is definitely done
1:35:23in the spirit of a Syracuse review,
1:35:26But the tone is just different,
1:35:29and that's to be expected, of course,
1:35:31but the tone is just different
1:35:33and it doesn't feel the way it used to,
1:35:35just like you were saying, Marco, and I miss that.
1:35:37That's not an attack on the people who wrote it,
1:35:40by any means, they did a fine job,
1:35:41and God knows I would never have wanted
1:35:43to be the person to follow John Syracuse,
1:35:45but I miss that Syracuse tone
1:35:48and that kind of flair that you would put in
1:35:52that I didn't see in this one.
1:35:54- Well, that's like any kind of review type thing.
1:35:56I think the thing people may be most familiar with
1:35:58are like movie reviews where over time,
1:36:00if you read a particular movie reviewer
1:36:03for like years and years and decades,
1:36:05whether you agree with the reviewer or not,
1:36:07you start to get a feel for the reviewer as a person.
1:36:09So then you can say, what I know of Roger Ebert
1:36:12combined with what he said about this movie
1:36:14lets me know if I'll like it.
1:36:16And so having sort of insight into the person
1:36:20becomes like a comfort level,
1:36:23Whereas if a new person writes it, you're like, OK, well,
1:36:25I have the review, but I don't know
1:36:26that much about the person.
1:36:27So how do I figure out what I'll think of it?
1:36:30I know what this person thinks of it,
1:36:32but I don't know enough about this person
1:36:33to know what they think of it as-- what they think
1:36:35of it relates to what I think of it.
1:36:39I understand that.
1:36:41You just don't have the same comfort level with the reviewer
1:36:43because you don't know--
1:36:45you don't have a model of the inside of their brain yet,
1:36:48because you haven't been reading them for years or decades
1:36:50or whatever.
1:36:52But that'll change, and there's plenty of people
1:36:54who've never read anything by me anyway,
1:36:56and so I was just another random person.
1:36:58Trying to do all the little jokes and references
1:37:04and trying to keep it entertaining,
1:37:06it's challenging when you're writing
1:37:07about an operating system, I can tell you.
1:37:09It doesn't lend itself well to anything
1:37:11except for really bad puns, which I tried to avoid mightily.
1:37:15We all know the puns I'm talking about.
1:37:17People like to make, I'm not gonna name
1:37:19any particular publications 'cause I think
1:37:20this is perfectly fine, you wanna do it, you can do it.
1:37:22It is an epidemic in the tech industry,
1:37:24very sort of simple, obvious puns
1:37:28that people just absolutely cannot resist.
1:37:30I resisted them as much as I could.
1:37:33I still did them, especially early on,
1:37:34I was doing them all the time.
1:37:36But as time wore on,
1:37:38I'm trying to, we used to be trying to keep it lighthearted
1:37:40and keep people engaged in what is usually
1:37:42a pretty dry topic and eventually not even all that exciting
1:37:46when people were much more excited about iOS than OS X.
1:37:49So it's a, you know, it's not an easy task, but you know, someone else has got to do it
1:37:56and someone else is doing it.
1:37:57And like I said, from skimming through it, it looked like something that I would want
1:38:00to read.
1:38:01It looked like it covered a lot of the features and it looked like it did get down and dirty
1:38:05into a few specific areas.
1:38:07And that's what I always did.
1:38:08I didn't cover everything in super depth.
1:38:09It's just like, "Oh, this one feature is actually an interesting feature and let me dive really
1:38:12deep on this one thing."
1:38:13And I was like, "Why are you diving into even that one thing?
1:38:17You didn't even talk about this other feature.
1:38:18that would be a complaint I always got.
1:38:19I totally understand that,
1:38:20and that's what the R's review looks like,
1:38:22so I'm looking forward to reading it.
1:38:23- It's pretty good so far, like I said.
1:38:27So you said that you had run the betas, Jon,
1:38:30but you did not run them full-time.
1:38:32You ran them on a second partition or whatever?
1:38:34- Yep.
1:38:35- All right, what about you, Marco?
1:38:36Did you run the betas?
1:38:37- I've been running it on my laptop for a few weeks,
1:38:40and I really like it.
1:38:42And it's fine. - Nice.
1:38:43- It's, you know, I don't use my laptop full-time,
1:38:47So it's hard for me to really say,
1:38:50oh, it's amazing or oh, it's terrible in these ways.
1:38:53It has been perfectly fine for me on my laptop.
1:38:55I've run into no issues with it as far as I can remember.
1:39:00Certainly none that felt like it was
1:39:02because it was a beta before.
1:39:04And it's been fine.
1:39:05I like San Francisco a lot.
1:39:08I've been using iOS 9 all summer,
1:39:10so I was more used to it.
1:39:12But I like, as a font, I like it a lot.
1:39:15And I think it's good, it's fine.
1:39:18Yeah, I have no complaints so far,
1:39:19but we'll see when I install it on my desktop.
1:39:21I'm a little worried that I,
1:39:24I know during the beta there were some issues with audio,
1:39:27especially USB audio.
1:39:30And earlier I was asking the tipster in the chat
1:39:33if that's been fixed, and he said basically no.
1:39:36So I'm a little worried about messing with my audio setup
1:39:40that works by installing LCAP on my computer,
1:39:44but I got to install it pretty soon
1:39:46just to keep up with the dev tools and everything.
1:39:48I'm gonna wanna install it fairly soon.
1:39:50So I'm probably just gonna install it maybe at point one,
1:39:55or maybe even sooner than that, I don't know yet.
1:39:58But it seems like from what I've been hearing from people
1:40:01and reading today, it doesn't seem like there are
1:40:03any massive problems with it.
1:40:05Does that match with what you guys are seeing?
1:40:08- Yeah, I haven't seen, well, that's not true.
1:40:09Merlin said that 1Password was having issues on his box,
1:40:12but it seems to be working on mine.
1:40:14- As I said in the talking about the reviews in the past,
1:40:16and there was like a couple of threads online
1:40:18talking about this, like, "Oh, OS reviews,
1:40:21why bother reading them?
1:40:21They didn't tell us about all the problems
1:40:23that are in Yosemite," and stuff like that.
1:40:25Like day one reviews are never gonna tell you that.
1:40:27They're just never going to.
1:40:28You find them out when millions of people start using it.
1:40:31No matter how many, like, first of all,
1:40:33no reviewer that I'm aware of has like a giant lab
1:40:36with every model of Mac
1:40:37and every combination of software and hardware.
1:40:38So they can't do comprehensive testing.
1:40:40even Apple probably can't test every combination, right?
1:40:43And so there's no way a day one review
1:40:46is going to tell you that.
1:40:47If you're reading a day one review to find out
1:40:49what is the long-term compatibility and stability
1:40:52of this gonna be like over the next year,
1:40:54there's no way to know that.
1:40:55There's not even a way to know whether the GM will work
1:40:57and everyone's set up.
1:40:58The only way you find that out,
1:40:59I mean, the public beta is supposed to be helping with that,
1:41:00but the only way you find that out
1:41:01is massive number of people using it.
1:41:04And so that's just a job that a review
1:41:08that comes out on the same day as the OS cannot do, period.
1:41:10And so I long ago gave up basically doing that.
1:41:14If there's something egregious or if like,
1:41:16if I said this, you know, like a leopard,
1:41:18I remember being really flaky, like was always flaky
1:41:21and even the GM is flaky and it's clearly flaky.
1:41:25Like if you get a negative result of,
1:41:27I don't know, I'm using negative positive,
1:41:28or anyway, if you get a result that says there are problems,
1:41:30you can communicate that and like,
1:41:32I've never gotten this to work successfully,
1:41:34even in the GM on any of the computers I've tried,
1:41:37there's probably a problem.
1:41:38But if everything works fine for you,
1:41:39that doesn't mean everything's gonna work fine
1:41:41for everybody else.
1:41:41All it means is that the problems
1:41:42haven't yet been discovered.
1:41:43So if you're wary about LCAP, wait.
1:41:48So the advice I always gave was like wait for the .1
1:41:50if you're nervous, but if you waited for the .1 in Yosemite,
1:41:53that wouldn't have solved the Discovery D issue either.
1:41:56Took a long time for them to fix that.
1:41:58You'd never know what's gonna happen.
1:41:59So if you are nervous at all, wait six months, read the web.
1:42:02You'll find out if there are problems.
1:42:04If you don't wanna wait six months,
1:42:05then upgrade with the rest of us and just cross your fingers, right?
1:42:08Okay, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,
1:42:12Cards Against Humanity, Harry's, and Backblaze,
1:42:15and we will see you next week.
1:42:17Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin
1:42:24'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:42:29John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:42:35'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
1:42:40And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:42:45And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:42:55So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:42:59Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A
1:43:07It's accidental (accidental)
1:43:10They didn't mean to (accidental)
1:43:14♪ Ask about your tech podcast so long ♪
1:43:18- We need to talk about the TiVo Bolt.
1:43:22- What is that thing?
1:43:23- We need to talk about this because--
1:43:25- Wait, so I know nothing about this
1:43:27because I've never owned a TiVo
1:43:28and don't give two craps about one.
1:43:29So where is there a decent, like, two second overview?
1:43:32- Just go to the link in the show notes.
1:43:34- Does it not sit flat?
1:43:36- Yes, that is the first thing you need to know
1:43:37about the TiVo, the second thing.
1:43:39The first thing you need to know about the TiVo Bolt
1:43:40is the new box from TiVo.
1:43:41TiVo makes DVRs, right?
1:43:43I like them and I've owned tons of them
1:43:44and I'm somewhat obsessed with them.
1:43:46Anyway, the TiVo Vault,
1:43:48the second thing you need to know about it is
1:43:50that rather than being a sort of rectangular solid
1:43:53with rounded corners.
1:43:54- What is this?
1:43:56- It is bent.
1:43:57- It looks like a bent iPhone.
1:43:58- Ever so slightly bent so that it does not lay flat
1:44:02and so that the top of it is not flat.
1:44:05It's like, it's bent upwards
1:44:06and so there's a little space underneath it.
1:44:08It's not even symmetrically bent.
1:44:09It's not bent in the middle.
1:44:10It's bent like two thirds of the way down.
1:44:12It's a stylistic choice.
1:44:14It looks like an interesting type of sculpture or whatever.
1:44:16It is a terrible decision.
1:44:18Do not bend things that are gonna go
1:44:21in someone's AV stack under their TV.
1:44:23The only place that can possibly go is on top.
1:44:26But realistically speaking,
1:44:28you know people are gonna stack stuff on this
1:44:30and it's gonna look awful.
1:44:31People are going to stack it.
1:44:33You can't stop them.
1:44:33They're gonna do it.
1:44:34And they're gonna wedge stuff underneath it
1:44:35and they're gonna put pencils and books
1:44:36or they're just gonna have everything be tilted
1:44:38and slowly slide off their entertainment centers.
1:44:40This is a terrible choice.
1:44:42And by the way, it's white, a second terrible choice.
1:44:43I know you want to stand out and everything.
1:44:45Black is better for things that go underneath your TV
1:44:47and your cabinet.
1:44:48Black is the standard.
1:44:49If you're going to have a white one, like a console,
1:44:52give a choice for black.
1:44:53Bent. Like that is a just,
1:44:57I just would love to have been in those meetings
1:44:59when someone's like, but don't you understand?
1:45:00It's distinctive and people will remember it or whatever.
1:45:03No, just no, just make it flat.
1:45:05You have to be able to stack.
1:45:06It's like the PS3 did the same thing,
1:45:08like making the George Foreman grill thing out of it.
1:45:10I'd give game consoles a little bit more leeway
1:45:13because like look, something's gotta be
1:45:14on the top of your AV stack.
1:45:16And if it's gonna be a game console,
1:45:18maybe it has a top loading CD drive back in the old days
1:45:21or whatever you had to do it that way.
1:45:23I don't really give Sony a pass either,
1:45:25but only one thing can be on top.
1:45:26The PS4, they learned, it's flat, it's stackable.
1:45:29This is the first, this is the worst box
1:45:33that TiVo has ever made,
1:45:35or possibly that anyone has ever made.
1:45:36'cause I'm not aware of anyone who's ever so egregiously
1:45:38thumb their nose at the idea of stackable AVO components.
1:45:42'Cause it's not like this is just like a little bit off
1:45:43or whatever, they're intentionally going,
1:45:45"Guess what?
1:45:46"Yeah, we screwed you."
1:45:47(laughing)
1:45:50Anyway, it's white, the remote is white, it's ugly.
1:45:52All right, that's enough complaining about the box.
1:45:55There are other things to talk about this.
1:45:56Some interesting things related to the Bolt,
1:45:59the features that are touting.
1:46:00The first one that I wanna talk about is a smart speed,
1:46:03but they're not calling it smart speed
1:46:04'cause Marco would sue them.
1:46:05- Well, it isn't smart speed,
1:46:07because it's just to speed up.
1:46:09- Well, they can't do real smart speed,
1:46:10because there's video and they can't just skip silence.
1:46:12- Right.
1:46:13- You have to watch the video part when they're silenced too.
1:46:16But it just speeds up the video without pitch shifting,
1:46:19so people don't sound like chipmunks.
1:46:21It's a way to watch things in less time.
1:46:23They say 30% faster.
1:46:25- Right, that's a 1.3X playback mode.
1:46:27So that's interesting, that's useful,
1:46:29not particularly novel, maybe in the set-top box space,
1:46:32but like, you know.
1:46:33- No, I mean, it's the type of thing
1:46:35where you think, why didn't they have this years ago?
1:46:36'Cause, yeah. - Right.
1:46:37Well, I'm pretty sure the PS3 can do that.
1:46:40(upbeat music)
1:46:43Obviously, computer play, like, you know,
1:46:48QuickTime can do it.
1:46:49I'm sure VLC probably has an option somewhere to do it.
1:46:52But in the set-top box industry,
1:46:54I think it's pretty unusual, so that's interesting.
1:46:57- Yeah, I just mentioned it because smart speeds,
1:47:00like, it's smart speeds for your TV,
1:47:01so save time, watch your stuff in less time.
1:47:03If that's what you like, I would never do that anyway.
1:47:05Anyway, it's there.
1:47:05The other thing is commercial skipping.
1:47:07They've always had 30 seconds skip
1:47:09and fast forward scan and stuff like that,
1:47:11and now they're gonna have a button
1:47:12that will let you skip commercials.
1:47:13How does it do that?
1:47:14How does it know whether your commercials begin to end?
1:47:15Have they done some amazing machine learning?
1:47:17No, they have a bunch of humans
1:47:18taking the most popular shows
1:47:20and marking where the commercials are.
1:47:21So you can't do the skipping feature
1:47:23until the show has aired and TiVo's legion of actual humans
1:47:27has put in the metadata for commercial start here,
1:47:30stop there, start here, start there,
1:47:31and of course it will only work on the shows
1:47:33they do that for,
1:47:34going to do it for the most popular shows.
1:47:38And I imagine the relevant, the stakeholders as they say in the business world of advertising
1:47:45in television may be a little bit miffed by this, so this could lead to legal battles
1:47:49and grumbling and who knows what else.
1:47:50But in the meantime, you can buy this and in theory, if you don't watch the show live
1:47:55and if you allow, you know, if you watch it the next day or maybe an hour later, I don't
1:47:58know what the lag is going to be, you will be able to skip commercials with one button
1:48:01press.
1:48:02like why even make them press the button?
1:48:05- Yeah, why not just, I mean, yeah, why,
1:48:06I mean, I think the reality here is that
1:48:09so few people are buying Tevos anymore
1:48:11that no one's gonna even care.
1:48:13- I don't know, yeah, it's possible they won't care,
1:48:15but you'd be surprised what they care about.
1:48:16But anyway, I buy Tevos, so I care.
1:48:18So I would like to try that feature,
1:48:20even though I'm a 30 second skip wizard by this point.
1:48:24I'm really good at it.
1:48:26That's why I hate when they're not responsive,
1:48:27because it throws off my game.
1:48:28(laughing)
1:48:30But it's got that feature.
1:48:32Those are the big things that are kind of,
1:48:33oh yeah, and 4K video, which is mostly irrelevant
1:48:35because the only thing that's really broad,
1:48:36like, you know, their Netflix client will get 4K
1:48:38from Netflix and you can record in 4K,
1:48:40and it's good they're cranking it up.
1:48:42You know, they're gonna have to go 4K eventually,
1:48:44so it's good that they get some practice.
1:48:45Oh, and how long do you think it is before their UI is 4K?
1:48:48Yeah, no, supposedly, most, almost all,
1:48:51not all, because that would be impossible,
1:48:53almost all of the UI is now in HD.
1:48:55TiVo, for people to know,
1:48:57historically had a standard definition menu,
1:49:00you know, set of menus and everything,
1:49:01And even long after the TiVo device started recording HD video, the menus were still standard
1:49:06def.
1:49:07And slowly, slowly, more and more the menus became high def.
1:49:10This year has high definition come entirely to TiVo?
1:49:14Almost!
1:49:15It's like they're asymptotically approaching an HD user interface.
1:49:17So now only a few screens are standard def and most of them are high def, which is kind
1:49:21of embarrassing and stupid, but that's life.
1:49:24But yeah, the 4K support matters is that it means that they're putting in beefier hardware.
1:49:30Supposedly this one has more memory faster GPU faster video decoding it can handle 4k like these are all good things
1:49:36I want this to happen thumbs up, please
1:49:38TiVo if you made if you made a fifteen hundred dollar box
1:49:43I would buy it like I'm afraid to give you money why because I love TiVo
1:49:47And I just wish it was way faster. I'm like what I don't understand
1:49:50I don't watch maybe as much TV as you do we Aaron and I have maybe five or six shows that we watch religiously but
1:49:57to me our
1:50:00really f*cking Verizon DVR box is plenty fine. It's terrible. I will be the first to tell you, but we are using it to
1:50:07navigate between shows for maybe 15 seconds any given day. Like, I don't need the most robust whiz-bang awesome experience.
1:50:16And, by the way, our menus are entirely and exclusively in HD.
1:50:20So, I'm not saying you're wrong, but gosh,
1:50:23I don't understand what could make a DVR so magical that it warrants all this money,
1:50:29including a service charge, right?
1:50:31Like a monthly service fee or whatever?
1:50:32- No, no, I buy them outright.
1:50:35You can pay a whole bunch upfront
1:50:36and there's no monthly fee.
1:50:37I do that 'cause I keep them forever.
1:50:39So there's no monthly fee.
1:50:40I already pay a lot for these things
1:50:41and what I'm saying is I'd be willing to pay even more.
1:50:45What I'm paying for is the responsiveness, the features,
1:50:49like MyTivo has applications like Netflix and Hulu
1:50:51and stuff like that.
1:50:52The Netflix app, how long does the Netflix quote unquote app
1:50:55take to launch?
1:50:56How responsive is the Netflix?
1:50:58When I'm waiting for the Netflix thing on TiVo to launch,
1:51:00which I've been doing by the way,
1:51:00'cause my Apple TV's been flaking out
1:51:02to now actually using the Netflix thing on my TiVo,
1:51:05I don't like waiting for things to launch.
1:51:07Like the iOS app launches faster.
1:51:09Why is it slow on the TiVo?
1:51:10'Cause the TiVo's recording six shows at once
1:51:12and doing a bunch of other things
1:51:14and doesn't have enough memory and the CPU can't,
1:51:16whatever the problem is, I don't wanna wait.
1:51:17I want everything to be instant, I demand it.
1:51:20And I'm willing to pay for it.
1:51:22And so maybe I'm not TiVo's big customer.
1:51:24- But when we're navigating to figure out
1:51:27what show we want to watch, that's pretty damn instant.
1:51:30When it starts playing back, it's pretty damn instant.
1:51:33- How long does the TiVo client take the launch?
1:51:35Or not the Netflix client take the launch?
1:51:37- Oh, I don't have Netflix on my DVR.
1:51:39That's why I have a Fire TV stick or my Apple TV.
1:51:42- How long does it take to launch on those?
1:51:44- I actually haven't watched Netflix
1:51:45since House of Cards went away, so it's been a while.
1:51:48I would--
1:51:49- And how long does it take for the thing to come up
1:51:50and like to navigate to the thing that you want?
1:51:52Netflix is usually good about picking up like,
1:51:54oh, play the next House of Cards episode,
1:51:55but I don't like waiting.
1:51:57I've, I'm used to, when I was a kid,
1:51:59television was instant because it was all analog
1:52:01and that's what I want.
1:52:02- I mean, your point is fair and I'm confident
1:52:06that whatever waiting you do is less than the waiting I do,
1:52:09but I just, I guess our priorities are just so different
1:52:12and that's fine.
1:52:13I mean, that's what makes the world go round,
1:52:14but I never in my life have I looked at my very crappy
1:52:18cable issue or a Verizon file issue DVR and said,
1:52:21you know what, my life would be better
1:52:23if this thing was replaced.
1:52:25- Well, here's the thing.
1:52:26It's like one of those things where like, yeah, it's fine.
1:52:28But if I gave you a high-end TiVo,
1:52:30you wouldn't be able to go back to the other thing.
1:52:32'Cause you just get used to it.
1:52:32- Yeah, you're probably right.
1:52:33- Especially if I gave it to you for free
1:52:34and there was no monetary thing,
1:52:36it's just much more pleasant.
1:52:37And it's the type of thing, before you have it,
1:52:39it's not a big deal, you're fine.
1:52:40And after you get it, it's not that big of a deal,
1:52:42but would you like to go back to the old one?
1:52:44No, not really, this new one is better.
1:52:46There are plenty of things to annoy about TiVo as well.
1:52:49Anyway, the other thing I'm paying for
1:52:51with my big fancy TiVo is the thing
1:52:54that TiVo Bolt doesn't provide.
1:52:55The TiVo Bolt only comes, as far as I'm aware,
1:52:58according to TiVo's site right now,
1:53:00maybe they'll expand it out,
1:53:01in a sort of a wimpier model.
1:53:04It's not their high-end model.
1:53:05So the TiVo Bolt can come with a 500 gig
1:53:09or a terabyte hard drive and four tuners.
1:53:12The high-end TiVo Romeo,
1:53:14which is their previous high-end product
1:53:16and still their prior product,
1:53:17comes with a three terabyte hard drive and six tuners.
1:53:19And mine is like 70% full.
1:53:22So I could go, you know, they make six terabyte drives now.
1:53:24The Bolt uses a 2.5 inch drive, I think,
1:53:27which is why they've scaled things down.
1:53:28But again, what would you pay the extra money for?
1:53:30I would pay for a six terabyte drive.
1:53:32I would pay for two, three terabyte drives.
1:53:34Sure, throw them in there.
1:53:35Like the hard drives are fairly quiet.
1:53:38You know, I would pay for an SSD to make it smaller.
1:53:41This is the type of thing I'm willing to pay for.
1:53:44Do you need six tuners?
1:53:45Sometimes I use all of them.
1:53:46Is four enough?
1:53:47Yeah, probably, but I'd rather have six.
1:53:49So the Bolt is not their high-end product.
1:53:52But right now, the Bolt has a bunch of features
1:53:54the other things don't have.
1:53:55The skipping, the fast playing mode,
1:53:58the skipping they could bring to any of them.
1:53:59So the software update could bring that to my model.
1:54:02If it doesn't, I'll be kind of disappointed
1:54:04because that's entirely like a metadata service thing.
1:54:06It has nothing to do with the hardware.
1:54:07Maybe my model doesn't have the hardware support
1:54:12or fast enough innards to do the fast playback thing,
1:54:15but I don't care 'cause I would never use that feature.
1:54:17My Netflix app takes a while to launch
1:54:19and there's little spinners and I gotta wait.
1:54:21Is that ever gonna be faster on mine?
1:54:22probably not because the CPU is so lumpy
1:54:25and the RAM is not getting any bigger or whatever.
1:54:26So this TiVo Bolt thing is not a replacement for my,
1:54:30like it's not like I'm, I would never replace it.
1:54:33Storage capacity alone means I would never replace it
1:54:35with this, but I'm assuming the TiVo Bolt inner,
1:54:37it's the faster CPU, GPU, video decoder,
1:54:414K support, all that stuff.
1:54:42I'm assuming eventually there will be
1:54:44a high-end model of that.
1:54:45I just hope that it is not bent like this thing.
1:54:48And I also hope that it's not a white,
1:54:49even the remote is white for crying out.
1:54:51I know people like white.
1:54:52I kind of like the white PS4, but if you have kids,
1:54:55like you just see the crap that goes on.
1:54:56Please just don't make, don't make the remote white,
1:54:59don't make the box white.
1:55:00It would be the only white box besides my Wii
1:55:01and my entertainment center.
1:55:02I need everything to be black.
1:55:04I need it not to be bent TiVo.
1:55:06So excited by the interesting new features
1:55:09and the increased performance and the increased CPU grunt.
1:55:12Everything else about it is super annoying to me.
1:55:14[BEEP]