ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► What show?

00:00:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that thing that we accidentally made when we were talking about cars.

00:00:06 ◼   ► We had a lot of really, really, really, really awesome feedback about the last episode.

00:00:12 ◼   ► And I don't say that to self-congratulate.

00:00:14 ◼   ► What I mean is a lot of listeners wrote in in various forms and tweets and emails and

00:00:19 ◼   ► all sorts of things to say, not only that they like all of us and that they also enjoy

00:00:26 ◼   ► of us and that they also enjoy the show. In particular, they enjoyed the end of the last

00:00:32 ◼   ► show. And I don't know that us having group therapy sessions is really going to be entertaining

00:00:36 ◼   ► on a regular basis, but I really appreciate and I think I speak for the two of you guys

00:00:41 ◼   ► as well. I really appreciate everyone that wrote in and said, "Keep on keeping on."

00:00:45 ◼   ► So that was very kind of every single one of you. And I tried to reply to pretty much

00:00:49 ◼   ► everyone that I saw, but if I missed you, my apologies and thanks so much for having

00:00:54 ◼   ► written in. That was really cool.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely. We got a lot of great feedback about that because I think a lot of people

00:01:01 ◼   ► don't talk about this stuff in public on the internet because it doesn't fit into

00:01:06 ◼   ► the topic of your site or your podcast. And this is true of lots of various human factors

00:01:11 ◼   ► that just don't really get enough coverage. But the few times where you can get people

00:01:16 ◼   ► to show you their more human side usually are pretty well received. And we didn't

00:01:23 ◼   ► it to solicit or fish for compliments. We got a lot of compliments and I'm very thankful

00:01:29 ◼   ► for that.

00:01:30 ◼   ► But you know, I was going to say it worked well that way, but that wasn't the point.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Right. That wasn't the intention. But we do appreciate everyone's feedback and it was

00:01:37 ◼   ► very nice. So thank you.

00:01:38 ◼   ► Yeah. A lot of people also said that even though it said this really isn't on topic

00:01:43 ◼   ► for the podcast or whatever, like, "Oh, well, you know, but you should talk about it anyway,"

00:01:47 ◼   ► because the same point a lot of them made was that in particular, the technology market

00:01:52 ◼   ► has difficulties with a lot of the issues we discuss, both personalities and technology,

00:01:57 ◼   ► taking and receiving criticism, and the whole angle on workplace problems and gender relations,

00:02:07 ◼   ► and the whole nine yards. It's true that that is a problem in particular in the tech industry.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I'm still entirely sure it's on topic for a tech podcast. So I know people are like, "Oh,

00:02:17 ◼   ► then you should start a different podcast, talk about these things," or whatever. But

00:02:20 ◼   ► I think it's good to do once in a while, and I think that there is an angle on it,

00:02:23 ◼   ► like if something related to those topics happens in the industry, that's how we find

00:02:27 ◼   ► ourselves talking about it.

00:02:28 ◼   ► We started off talking about the Paneer arcade thing, it just kind of drifted from there.

00:02:31 ◼   ► And I think that's fine, but I'm not sure it should be like a, you know, it really is

00:02:36 ◼   ► going off the rails if you start making your podcast about that.

00:02:39 ◼   ► That would be a perfectly good topic for another podcast, but we've all got enough podcasts

00:02:42 ◼   ► here.

00:02:43 ◼   ► Well, plus, you know, if it isn't immediately clear to everybody, the three of us could

00:02:46 ◼   ► talk about anything.

00:02:47 ◼   ► anything. We could go off the rails in any possible direction very easily, so it's

00:02:53 ◼   ► important that we at least try to keep ourselves somewhat on at least one topic per—or at

00:02:57 ◼   ► least one genre of show while we're actually recording that show.

00:03:01 ◼   ► Something like that. All right. So, yes. So, thanks again to everyone that wrote in. That

00:03:04 ◼   ► was very kind of you. And even if you didn't write in, thanks for indulging us while we

00:03:07 ◼   ► talked it out. Now, Jon, you seem to have—I'm assuming this was you, Jon—a lot of feedback

00:03:13 ◼   ► about PrimeSense.

00:03:15 ◼   ► Last week we talked about Apple buying PrimeSense, which is a company that makes Kinect-like

00:03:20 ◼   ► sensors, like the Xbox Kinect, and I still didn't even bother.

00:03:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't do any research.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Didn't bother looking up whether, what their relationship to the original Kinect was, whether

00:03:31 ◼   ► they were the company that made the sensor, whether they sold it to, I don't know.

00:03:35 ◼   ► But anyway, they make a Kinect-like sensor and Apple bought them, and last week I said

00:03:39 ◼   ► that the obvious idea would be that, oh, Apple bought them, and that means they're going

00:03:46 ◼   ► to use something like the Microsoft Kinect on whatever their crazy TV thing is. And I

00:03:51 ◼   ► said, what about if they use that same technology in an iOS device to do something less impressive?

00:03:58 ◼   ► I said that not knowing that if you had just simply gone to the PrimeSense website, you

00:04:01 ◼   ► would have seen on their listing of products that one of the products they offer is something

00:04:05 ◼   ► that's sized meant to fit inside a tablet. So there you go. It's not a stretch. It's

00:04:10 ◼   ► an existing product that is very small and could fit inside a tablet. And who knows what

00:04:15 ◼   ► Apple bought them for. But it's clear that this company could offer a lot of things to

00:04:22 ◼   ► both Apple's current product lines and product lines that we all speculate that Apple may

00:04:25 ◼   ► or even put something like that in a watch or whatever.

00:04:29 ◼   ► And then I have some more info on the issues

00:04:32 ◼   ► of this kind of technology.

00:04:34 ◼   ► In particular, if-- and this is a big if--

00:04:37 ◼   ► if you just look at what prime sense sensors are like

00:04:40 ◼   ► and what Kinect sensors are like and say,

00:04:42 ◼   ► could Apple use that type of thing in a television

00:04:45 ◼   ► or in an iOS device?

00:04:48 ◼   ► The problem with the iOS device angle

00:04:50 ◼   ► is that both of the approaches that prime sense

00:04:53 ◼   ► and the existing Kinect sensors use

00:04:56 ◼   ► don't work very well outdoors.

00:04:57 ◼   ► And iOS devices have to be able to-- I mean, I don't know what percentage of time they

00:05:01 ◼   ► spend indoors and outdoors, but enough time that if you have something that only works

00:05:05 ◼   ► indoors it's probably not viable for any iOS devices that Apple sells.

00:05:10 ◼   ► And the problem with doing it outdoors is they both use infrared, and infrared outdoors

00:05:13 ◼   ► can get washed out if it's a sunny day because the sun is going to have way more IR than

00:05:17 ◼   ► anything that's put out by one of these devices or sensors.

00:05:21 ◼   ► And one way to get around it is to really crank up the IR on the device, but that burns

00:05:25 ◼   ► and could blind people if you shined it in their face.

00:05:29 ◼   ► So it's not a great solution there.

00:05:31 ◼   ► And also the problem of what is the stereo distance

00:05:34 ◼   ► between the sensors?

00:05:36 ◼   ► You have to kind of pick, do you want it to be able

00:05:37 ◼   ► to get depth information about things that are really close,

00:05:40 ◼   ► like your finger on an iPad or something,

00:05:42 ◼   ► or do you want it to be able to get stuff

00:05:43 ◼   ► that's farther away and there's some

00:05:44 ◼   ► difficult trade-offs there.

00:05:46 ◼   ► So anything that uses this kind of technology

00:05:49 ◼   ► is probably going to be focused on indoor application,

00:05:53 ◼   ► but that's not to say that anything Apple is going to make

00:05:55 ◼   ► this company is going to have anything to do with any technology that we've already

00:05:58 ◼   ► seen. This is just looking at what they have done. Who knows what they're going to do.

00:06:02 ◼   ► And it's perfectly feasible that Apple might have bought them based on some technology

00:06:05 ◼   ► that they had in the works that nobody's seen yet. So, I don't know. It's a company you

00:06:11 ◼   ► watch. It's like PA Semi because it's interesting and exciting from a hardware angle. And software

00:06:17 ◼   ► is a little bit more mutable. We'll talk about that a little bit later, I think. But when

00:06:20 ◼   ► When Apple buys a hardware company, you have to think that they bought them because they

00:06:25 ◼   ► want to do something similar to what this company has done in hardware.

00:06:28 ◼   ► They're not just buying it to get, "Oh, well, you know, you might buy a company to

00:06:31 ◼   ► get a bunch of software developers, so we could put these guys to work at iOS."

00:06:35 ◼   ► But if you buy people who make this kind of a sensor, you've got to think they're doing

00:06:38 ◼   ► something with some kind of weird sensor, right?

00:06:40 ◼   ► So I'm excited by the possibilities of putting any kind of weird Kinect-like sensor in anything

00:06:45 ◼   ► that Apple makes.

00:06:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it should be interesting, although certainly I can't conceive of what they're going

00:06:50 ◼   ► to do with this, but that's just like you said, that's the beauty of it. Any other

00:06:53 ◼   ► follow up, you or Marco? Or Marco, do you just want to tell us about something that's

00:06:57 ◼   ► awesome?

00:06:58 ◼   ► This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is

00:07:01 ◼   ► the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website

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00:07:12 ◼   ► I think it used to be "in minutes." Anyway, it's really fast and easy.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Anything longer than a minute is technically in minutes, right?

00:07:18 ◼   ► Well, I mean even I think anything that's not exactly one minute could be minutes. There you go. You know if it's like 0.78 minutes

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00:08:41 ◼   ► Squarespace is everything you need to create an exceptional website and we thank them very

00:08:45 ◼   ► much for their support.

00:08:46 ◼   ► We use Squarespace and we like it.

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00:08:54 ◼   ► Not everybody needs to write everything from scratch and coming from me, that's kind of

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00:09:04 ◼   ► Years and years to do and they do it in minutes. So it's really great

00:09:07 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Squarespace for supporting our show. Don't forget use coupon code ATP 12

00:09:11 ◼   ► I thought of a new Squarespace based business plan

00:09:14 ◼   ► Find a business that you go to that you like or maybe or doesn't have to be as if you like when anything that some like

00:09:21 ◼   ► Your barber or your landscape or whatever and you see that they have a website

00:09:26 ◼   ► But it's terrible a new business idea is to fix people's terrible websites

00:09:32 ◼   ► They pay you and then you take some of the money they paid you and hit the Squarespace

00:09:37 ◼   ► It just gives them a Squarespace site which takes you like 10 seconds of clicking

00:09:40 ◼   ► You're basically becoming like a Squarespace value-added reseller for people because I always wonder why these people have such terrible websites when like for

00:09:48 ◼   ► Pocket change like I know how much these landscapers make they make they make plenty of money

00:09:51 ◼   ► Or you know anybody if you have enough money for any website

00:09:56 ◼   ► It's just these people's websites are terrible because they're not web designers

00:09:59 ◼   ► they don't know what they're doing. The websites look like they were made in 1992, and they

00:10:02 ◼   ► have little, you know, animated men under, you know, men working construction damage

00:10:08 ◼   ► at the bottom of it, and a website hit counter. It's like, "Just get a Squarespace site. It's

00:10:11 ◼   ► so easy, and it will look better, and everyone will be happier. And if you can facilitate

00:10:15 ◼   ► that, then that's maybe a viable business."

00:10:18 ◼   ► This is like, you know, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was this whole business—I

00:10:22 ◼   ► guess there still is—this whole business of web hosting resellers. Like, things like

00:10:27 ◼   ► C panel and stuff were developed not for one person running one server for themselves,

00:10:33 ◼   ► but were developed for people who ran tons of sites on tons of different servers, or

00:10:36 ◼   ► tons of sites on one server for clients, and charged them a big premium for that.

00:10:41 ◼   ► And it seems like Squarespace has really kind of made that entire industry half obsolete.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Yeah, because nobody wants to use a C panel for an interface.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Oh, terrible.

00:10:51 ◼   ► I mean, that is not anything that a regular-- that's what kept regular people away, and

00:10:54 ◼   ► they would pay some teenager to make their website,

00:10:57 ◼   ► and that teenager would go away, and they'd

00:10:58 ◼   ► be stuck with this website.

00:10:59 ◼   ► And they can never change.

00:11:00 ◼   ► It's terrible, and it never gets any better.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And yeah.

00:11:03 ◼   ► All right.

00:11:04 ◼   ► So speaking of acquisitions, Apple

00:11:07 ◼   ► is still up in buying things.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And they bought Topsy, which I had never heard of before.

00:11:15 ◼   ► I'd heard the name before, but I didn't

00:11:16 ◼   ► know what they did until I read the articles.

00:11:20 ◼   ► First of all, how does a company--

00:11:23 ◼   ► I mean, I guess I understand how a company like this exists.

00:11:25 ◼   ► But what do they get for it?

00:11:26 ◼   ► 200 million?

00:11:26 ◼   ► Something like that?

00:11:27 ◼   ► I believe that's right.

00:11:28 ◼   ► So this is a company that none of us have really heard of,

00:11:31 ◼   ► or maybe we heard the name or whatever.

00:11:32 ◼   ► This company apparently existed as a way

00:11:35 ◼   ► to mine data from the Twitter stream.

00:11:37 ◼   ► So they would absorb all the tweets,

00:11:39 ◼   ► and they would sort of index them and allow, I guess,

00:11:42 ◼   ► allow people to do searches to find out what's

00:11:44 ◼   ► going on on Twitter and stuff.

00:11:46 ◼   ► And I guess they resell this to people,

00:11:47 ◼   ► like advertisers, who want to see what's trending.

00:11:51 ◼   ► Or it's like B2B.

00:11:53 ◼   ► It's not a consumer level business.

00:11:55 ◼   ► Because these people, as far as I know,

00:11:57 ◼   ► did not make a company worth $200 million

00:11:59 ◼   ► to Apple by selling services to individual customers.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Right?

00:12:03 ◼   ► I believe that's right.

00:12:04 ◼   ► I mean, from what very, very little I know about it,

00:12:07 ◼   ► because I didn't do any research.

00:12:10 ◼   ► But everything-- I think that's right.

00:12:11 ◼   ► But the fact that they're so Twitter focused

00:12:13 ◼   ► is mysterious.

00:12:14 ◼   ► Because why would Apple buy a company so focused

00:12:19 ◼   ► on a service they don't own.

00:12:21 ◼   ► It's not like they bought a mapping company

00:12:23 ◼   ► to help them with their maps.

00:12:24 ◼   ► They don't have a Twitter equivalent.

00:12:26 ◼   ► So what does a company that has expertise

00:12:28 ◼   ► in mining the Twitter stream going to do for them?

00:12:30 ◼   ► Do they have some other stream that they

00:12:32 ◼   ► would like to point Topsy at and say,

00:12:33 ◼   ► we would like you to extract information from this?

00:12:35 ◼   ► Are they going to be collecting metrics from people wandering

00:12:38 ◼   ► through the app store?

00:12:40 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:12:41 ◼   ► I mean, the price tag was a little high to be an aqua hire.

00:12:44 ◼   ► But I think Facebook and Google buy all sorts of crazy crap

00:12:48 ◼   ► just to get talent in the door.

00:12:51 ◼   ► Really, they're just buying the staff.

00:12:53 ◼   ► That's the acquire phenomenon.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Apple has a big problem that they have a real need

00:13:00 ◼   ► for really good staff.

00:13:03 ◼   ► And we can see a lot of the areas

00:13:05 ◼   ► in which they are clearly short staffed.

00:13:07 ◼   ► We see a lot of the applications.

00:13:10 ◼   ► I've said recently that I think their hardware

00:13:13 ◼   ► is better than it's ever been right now,

00:13:16 ◼   ► but their services have never been great

00:13:18 ◼   ► are still not great. And even their software is really starting to go into disrepair in

00:13:23 ◼   ► a lot of different areas. I think the OS level stuff is rock solid. I think whoever they

00:13:28 ◼   ► have working on the OS level teams, they clearly have great people and enough of them, I think.

00:13:33 ◼   ► But it seems like the applications teams are really strained. And that's why you go,

00:13:39 ◼   ► like, you know, you have all these years of iWork 09 followed by this new release of iWork

00:13:47 ◼   ► that is really obviously unfinished,

00:13:50 ◼   ► that was rushed out the door for other reasons,

00:13:53 ◼   ► probably, you know, lining it up with the marketing

00:13:55 ◼   ► of the new iPads and et cetera.

00:13:57 ◼   ► But clearly Apple needs more people.

00:14:01 ◼   ► They need more engineers, they need more staff.

00:14:04 ◼   ► And they also have a bit of a retention problem

00:14:07 ◼   ► because from what I understand, this is purely anecdotal,

00:14:10 ◼   ► but from what I understand, they lose a lot

00:14:12 ◼   ► of really good people because there's this whole world

00:14:15 ◼   ► of apps and startups happening around them,

00:14:17 ◼   ► their own ecosystem that they've created,

00:14:19 ◼   ► and their own employees can't participate in that

00:14:22 ◼   ► while they're working for Apple.

00:14:24 ◼   ► And so it's very tempting for their employees to be like,

00:14:26 ◼   ► "You know, now that I've been working, you know,

00:14:28 ◼   ► "supporting UIKit or apps or whatever for all these years,

00:14:32 ◼   ► "maybe I wanna actually go make my app."

00:14:34 ◼   ► And Apple has a pretty good policy about if you wanna leave

00:14:38 ◼   ► and then come back within a certain amount of time,

00:14:39 ◼   ► you can like retain all your seniority and stuff.

00:14:41 ◼   ► So like, they have a problem getting people

00:14:44 ◼   ► and retaining people.

00:14:46 ◼   ► Even more than going and making an app, imagine if you wanted to do independent consulting

00:14:50 ◼   ► and you have Apple on your resume.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:14:54 ◼   ► You know, that pretty much is the only entry you need on your resume if you're going to

00:14:58 ◼   ► do either iOS or OS X development and consulting.

00:15:04 ◼   ► Well, you know, what makes you think that you're so special and you're good at this?

00:15:07 ◼   ► I used to work for Apple.

00:15:09 ◼   ► Where do I sign?

00:15:10 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:15:11 ◼   ► It really opens a lot of doors having that on your resume.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, I wrote iPhoto."

00:15:15 ◼   ► know.

00:15:16 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:15:17 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Or this API that everyone's coding against, I wrote the API.

00:15:22 ◼   ► So for Apple to buy a company like this, where it doesn't seem obvious to us what part

00:15:28 ◼   ► of the company's product they might want, $200 million is a lot of money for an acquirer,

00:15:34 ◼   ► but maybe they had some really good people.

00:15:36 ◼   ► Most acquirers are in the $10 to $50 million range, but if they had a bunch of really good

00:15:42 ◼   ► people, maybe that's worth it to them.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And this is a large web service that was consuming the live Twitter feed, or the live Twitter

00:15:50 ◼   ► fire hose, as they call it, which is kind of gross.

00:15:53 ◼   ► But they were consuming that.

00:15:55 ◼   ► That's a large-scale web service operation.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Apple needs a lot of help in large-scale web service operations.

00:16:01 ◼   ► Did you follow the second link I put underneath?

00:16:03 ◼   ► Of course not.

00:16:04 ◼   ► I didn't do any research.

00:16:05 ◼   ► Yeah, so the second link is a—

00:16:07 ◼   ► Oh, the Dalton one.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I did read that.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:10 ◼   ► I don't know if this is true or not, but Dalton of app.net fame says that as far as he knows,

00:16:16 ◼   ► Topsy is a "Pearl company," as he calls it, meaning that they implement their web servers

00:16:21 ◼   ► in Perl.

00:16:23 ◼   ► And for the most part, Apple does not know their Perl from their elbow.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And so the expertise that the programmers in those companies might have in writing, you

00:16:33 ◼   ► know, server-side applications in Perl, I can't imagine Apple thinking those particular

00:16:37 ◼   ► technical skills are worth anything to them.

00:16:41 ◼   ► Well, that doesn't matter.

00:16:42 ◼   ► When you're dealing with the scale

00:16:44 ◼   ► that Topsy was dealing with, or the scale

00:16:47 ◼   ► that Apple is dealing with or needs to be dealing with,

00:16:51 ◼   ► the actual language that you're writing your application in

00:16:54 ◼   ► really does not matter one bit.

00:16:56 ◼   ► It's really much more about how you write it,

00:16:59 ◼   ► how you use the resources of things

00:17:01 ◼   ► like the database, the network, the cache layer,

00:17:03 ◼   ► stuff like that.

00:17:05 ◼   ► it's such a bigger picture thing than just the language you use. It's like, it doesn't matter

00:17:10 ◼   ► what text editor you use to write a shell script. It matters what it's doing. Similar, when you get

00:17:15 ◼   ► to a scale like what they're doing, you can do it in any language, really. But when they do

00:17:20 ◼   ► acquahires, I have to imagine, if they do acquahires of people who they know they want

00:17:23 ◼   ► to put on the iOS team, they want the people who they hire, they could be app developers or

00:17:27 ◼   ► whatever, but they want them to be Objective-C programmers because they're going to put you deep

00:17:30 ◼   ► in the guts of Objective-C. Or if they're hiring someone for the CoreOS group, they want them to

00:17:34 ◼   ► OC and BSD API specifically, because that's where they're going to be.

00:17:37 ◼   ► They're not just like, "Well, you've worked on some operating system."

00:17:41 ◼   ► I have to think that the technical skills are relevant when in particular doing AquaHires.

00:17:45 ◼   ► It seems to me that Topsy has, from the outside it looks like, Topsy has abilities that Apple

00:17:52 ◼   ► wishes it had. They consume the Twitter firehose and they get something out of it.

00:17:57 ◼   ► I think Apple has a very specific thing in mind, some big giant stream of data that they want to

00:18:03 ◼   ► feed into something and get useful information out of it.

00:18:06 ◼   ► And it's high volume and they need a company that can take a high volume stream of data

00:18:09 ◼   ► and do something with it.

00:18:11 ◼   ► So that seems like the most likely thing.

00:18:14 ◼   ► I just can't think of exactly which stream it is.

00:18:16 ◼   ► I mean, there's many possible streams.

00:18:17 ◼   ► They have all this activity of customers doing things, buying things in stores, rating applications,

00:18:22 ◼   ► all that stuff.

00:18:23 ◼   ► Hell, it could even be map data, someone to handle all of the feedback that we've all

00:18:28 ◼   ► been putting into Apple Maps to say this thing is in the wrong place and we're frustrated

00:18:31 ◼   ► that it doesn't result in action quickly.

00:18:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:18:35 ◼   ► This also, I think, may be hard to tell.

00:18:37 ◼   ► With a sensor purpose, it'll be pretty obvious

00:18:42 ◼   ► when we see something with some crazy sensor on it,

00:18:44 ◼   ► we'll be like, oh, that was probably

00:18:46 ◼   ► that crazy sensor company that you bought.

00:18:47 ◼   ► But with Topsy, it may be hard for us to tell.

00:18:50 ◼   ► Maybe no obvious moment where we say,

00:18:53 ◼   ► oh, there must have been,

00:18:54 ◼   ► that's why they hired Topsy to do this.

00:18:56 ◼   ► It might not be obvious at all.

00:18:58 ◼   ► In fact, it might be entirely for internally facing tools they do for their own metrics

00:19:03 ◼   ► so they never show anybody.

00:19:04 ◼   ► So this is mysterious.

00:19:06 ◼   ► Also, going back a half step to the web service thing, Apple's web services are still, in

00:19:12 ◼   ► the grand scheme of things, young.

00:19:14 ◼   ► And a lot of them are compartmentalized or outsourced.

00:19:18 ◼   ► So if Apple wanted to build up a big service presence in-house, there's still a lot of

00:19:24 ◼   ► of room to start that, not quite from scratch, but close.

00:19:28 ◼   ► To really get it on the ground floor and do that.

00:19:32 ◼   ► They need to do that.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And so just because these people built a really big volume web

00:19:39 ◼   ► service using Perl that consumes a Twitter stream

00:19:41 ◼   ► to get certain things out, Apple really

00:19:44 ◼   ► might be using this just to start another department

00:19:48 ◼   ► or bring something that was outsourced in-house

00:19:51 ◼   ► from some big thing they're already doing.

00:19:54 ◼   ► with a fresh new start, a fresh new team,

00:19:56 ◼   ► or not having an outsource for the first time.

00:20:00 ◼   ► There's a lot of potential even for that.

00:20:02 ◼   ► And we've been saying every third week

00:20:07 ◼   ► that Apple sucks at web services and needs

00:20:09 ◼   ► to really take it to the next level

00:20:12 ◼   ► and take it a lot more seriously and make

00:20:13 ◼   ► it a bigger priority in the company.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Maybe something like this is the start of that.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Maybe they get Aqua hire Microsoft

00:20:19 ◼   ► to get the Azure team.

00:20:20 ◼   ► Is that possible?

00:20:21 ◼   ► Do we have to wait a couple more years?

00:20:23 ◼   ► I think just a couple.

00:20:25 ◼   ► I don't know how many.

00:20:26 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:20:27 ◼   ► Just hire Elop as the CEO, and then he'll make it really cheap for him.

00:20:31 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:20:32 ◼   ► So I wonder, though, if Topsy is about – what if it's about consuming Twitter data about

00:20:40 ◼   ► Apple and not allowing competitors to use the same technology to look at –

00:20:45 ◼   ► It's the ultimate vanity search.

00:20:47 ◼   ► Apple needs to know what are they saying about us on Twitter.

00:20:49 ◼   ► Topsy, tell us!

00:20:50 ◼   ► That's actually exactly what I'm talking about.

00:20:53 ◼   ► To be honest, my first thought, which I'm a little mad at you, John, because you stole

00:20:56 ◼   ► it from me before I had a chance to say it, was for internal use about like maybe the

00:21:01 ◼   ► App Store or something like that, which you said a moment ago.

00:21:03 ◼   ► But what if it is about the ultimate vanity search to see what, you know, Tim Cook loves

00:21:07 ◼   ► his customer sat, which that that abbreviation infuriates me.

00:21:11 ◼   ► To be fair, I think he stopped saying that recently.

00:21:13 ◼   ► Oh, well, whatever.

00:21:15 ◼   ► The customer satisfaction numbers.

00:21:16 ◼   ► I mean, Tim Cook loves his customer satisfaction numbers.

00:21:19 ◼   ► But they're already getting those numbers.

00:21:20 ◼   ► I have to think that there is nothing that Apple cares about what its customers think

00:21:25 ◼   ► $200 million worth.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Seriously, that's always been the edge of the company is we accept feedback from customers

00:21:32 ◼   ► to get a feel for what's out, but in general, they think it's their job to show us what

00:21:39 ◼   ► it is that we want rather than just asking what we want and trying to build that.

00:21:42 ◼   ► That's always been the company's MO, and that's what we like about them.

00:21:45 ◼   ► So I can't imagine an entirely, like,

00:21:49 ◼   ► oh, we need to figure out what's out there about Apple

00:21:51 ◼   ► or about Apple customers, $200 million worth?

00:21:54 ◼   ► Like, because the Twitter firehose is way more volume

00:21:57 ◼   ► than-- you just need to sample users, right?

00:21:59 ◼   ► Whereas if you want to get--

00:22:00 ◼   ► I don't think they're sampling the firehose.

00:22:02 ◼   ► I think they're consuming it all and indexing it

00:22:04 ◼   ► and all that stuff, which is very

00:22:05 ◼   ► different than surveying customers

00:22:07 ◼   ► and seeing how your satisfaction is.

00:22:08 ◼   ► I have to think they have things in place

00:22:10 ◼   ► for all of the sort of market research feedback

00:22:14 ◼   ► about what's needing to get repair, what are people unsatisfied about, all that stuff.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Like that has to already be in place. It doesn't seem like it's a problem area for Apple.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Well, also, that's not incredibly unique to Topsy. Like there have been multiple companies

00:22:27 ◼   ► that have, over the last five years, multiple people who have come up who take the Twitter

00:22:33 ◼   ► fire hose and parse stuff out of it. I mean, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's

00:22:40 ◼   ► certainly not unique to this one particular company that no one else will ever be able

00:22:43 ◼   ► Twitter bought one of them, didn't they?

00:22:45 ◼   ► Didn't they buy Summly or something?

00:22:46 ◼   ► Not the other.

00:22:47 ◼   ► There was some other--

00:22:47 ◼   ► Summize is what you're talking about.

00:22:49 ◼   ► That was a long time ago.

00:22:50 ◼   ► And that is what became Twitter Search.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:22:52 ◼   ► But that was always funny, though,

00:22:54 ◼   ► because Twitter was creating the data,

00:22:56 ◼   ► and they had to buy an outside company

00:22:58 ◼   ► to be able to search that.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Remember when Twitter Search sucked?

00:23:01 ◼   ► Twitter is actually a good success story

00:23:03 ◼   ► for a company that didn't know how

00:23:04 ◼   ► to make wide-scale web services and figured it out.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Because Twitter, in the beginning, had an idea.

00:23:10 ◼   ► They had Ruby on Rails.

00:23:11 ◼   ► They had, I'm assuming, hipsters in San Francisco,

00:23:15 ◼   ► or whatever it is they need.

00:23:17 ◼   ► But then they ran into the giant avalanche of users.

00:23:21 ◼   ► And then they had problems and problems and problems.

00:23:24 ◼   ► And they figured-- I mean, that's

00:23:26 ◼   ► kind of the natural arc of any startup.

00:23:27 ◼   ► Like, you try to build something,

00:23:28 ◼   ► you really hope somebody likes it.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Then all of a sudden the users come, and you're excited.

00:23:32 ◼   ► Then more users come, and you're a little bit scared.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And then you basically have to figure it out.

00:23:36 ◼   ► And they did, barely.

00:23:37 ◼   ► I would say Twitter came the closest to a company that

00:23:40 ◼   ► was crushed by its own success in terms of not being able to handle the traffic.

00:23:43 ◼   ► If they had anything close to a viable competitor that had the mindshare they had, they could

00:23:51 ◼   ► have just as easily gone down as a footnote of that company that we thought was going

00:23:56 ◼   ► to be big but couldn't keep their stuff together and some other company stole their bacon.

00:24:00 ◼   ► But it turns out they ended up getting enough mindshare soon enough that we all just tolerated

00:24:05 ◼   ► their terrible problems.

00:24:06 ◼   ► And now they've come out of it, and there are so much bigger hand-willing volumes that

00:24:09 ◼   ► would have made the head spin back in the 2006, 2007 days.

00:24:15 ◼   ► So if Twitter can do it, coming from essentially nothing to a world-class web service that

00:24:20 ◼   ► does incredible volumes, surely Apple can, right?

00:24:23 ◼   ► I mean, you say this every—it seems like they have.

00:24:26 ◼   ► They've got all the money in the world.

00:24:28 ◼   ► Why can't they get their stuff together?

00:24:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:32 ◼   ► And it's really about priorities, I think, and culture.

00:24:34 ◼   ► And they're such a big company that they need to make significant changes from the top to

00:24:41 ◼   ► the bottom.

00:24:42 ◼   ► They need somebody at the senior VP level whose only job it is to do stuff like this.

00:24:49 ◼   ► And isn't that like half of somebody's job up there?

00:24:53 ◼   ► Is it Eddy Cue?

00:24:54 ◼   ► I thought so.

00:24:55 ◼   ► Eddy Cue is in charge of services or something like that.

00:24:58 ◼   ► Some umbrella term like that.

00:24:59 ◼   ► He's basically in charge of the iTunes store and I think all of their web service-y type

00:25:04 ◼   ► things. Do you think he needs to be replaced? It's hard, you can't play politics with that.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Is it not his problem? Is it like, you know, is it that he's, does he have an impossible

00:25:15 ◼   ► job? Isn't Q in charge of scoring licensing deals and things of that nature? Didn't he

00:25:21 ◼   ► kind of become the de facto guy to do that? I think so. That's certainly what we've heard.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, he's always been like, his iTunes store, he was part of the content deals and everything

00:25:30 ◼   ► like that.

00:25:31 ◼   ► But…

00:25:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:33 ◼   ► So maybe the problem is he has too much to do.

00:25:34 ◼   ► That's exactly what I was driving at, is maybe he's so busy working on content deals,

00:25:38 ◼   ► perhaps for the Apple TV or whatever.

00:25:42 ◼   ► One way or another, perhaps he's too busy worrying about all of that, and he doesn't

00:25:45 ◼   ► have enough time to worry about services, or not as much time as he'd like.

00:25:51 ◼   ► And every company I've been in, there's one group in the company that sort of wears

00:25:54 ◼   ► the pants.

00:25:55 ◼   ► And a lot of times, but not always, it's the group that originally made the thing, that

00:26:01 ◼   ► made the company successful, and made the company what it is today.

00:26:06 ◼   ► And Apple, it seems like the group that has that power is...

00:26:12 ◼   ► I don't know what the balance is between hardware and software, but it's basically the people

00:26:15 ◼   ► who work directly on whatever the flagship product is.

00:26:18 ◼   ► So you made the operating system for the Macintosh, you made the hardware for the Macintosh.

00:26:23 ◼   ► That's the tail that wags the dog.

00:26:24 ◼   ► There's tons of other people in the company, but they're more or less running the show.

00:26:28 ◼   ► And that's fine when your company makes devices with hardware and software.

00:26:31 ◼   ► Shouldn't the people be running the show who make all the great hardware and software that

00:26:33 ◼   ► makes your company successful?

00:26:35 ◼   ► But now you throw the services thing into the mix, and I have to think that they are

00:26:39 ◼   ► sort of the, you know, redheaded stepchild of the company where we're writing software

00:26:45 ◼   ► too, but your software is not iOS.

00:26:48 ◼   ► Your software is not OS X.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Your software is just something that runs on a server, and we only care about you when

00:26:52 ◼   ► you screw up.

00:26:53 ◼   ► There's no glory in your job.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Just get it done.

00:26:55 ◼   ► You're about as important to our company as the people who keep our mail servers running.

00:26:59 ◼   ► And that culture that they're the B team and they're not as important to the company is

00:27:05 ◼   ► really difficult to overcome.

00:27:06 ◼   ► Even with leadership at the top saying, "We're rededicating to services.

00:27:09 ◼   ► iCloud is a big deal."

00:27:11 ◼   ► I don't know if they can get the best people, the most money, the priorities, the attention

00:27:18 ◼   ► from everybody, because everyone is so focused on, "What's the next iPhone?

00:27:21 ◼   ► What's the next version of iOS?

00:27:22 ◼   ► iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s, right? Whole company's focused on that. Launch, launch, launch. And

00:27:27 ◼   ► by the way, the service is better work, but we don't want to hear about it. Like, again,

00:27:31 ◼   ► this is all from the outside. I don't know if this is true, but it's very difficult to

00:27:35 ◼   ► change that internal culture that the iOS and the hardware and software guys who make

00:27:41 ◼   ► the flagship product are that those are the glory jobs. And at Google, the glory jobs

00:27:46 ◼   ► are the guys who run the search engine, right? Who run the web services, who index the entire

00:27:50 ◼   ► web every 10 seconds or whatever the heck you're up to now.

00:27:52 ◼   ► Well, I think I should serve the ads at least.

00:27:54 ◼   ► That's the glory job at Google, yeah.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Or the ad, you know, the thing that serves the ads, right, that makes the money for the

00:28:00 ◼   ► company.

00:28:01 ◼   ► Like, but it's not, the glory teams at Google are not the teams that make, I think it's

00:28:07 ◼   ► not even teams that make Android or the Android devices this way.

00:28:10 ◼   ► It's the web services.

00:28:11 ◼   ► And I think the real heart, if you dig down, the real heart of Google are the people who

00:28:15 ◼   ► run the infrastructure that run all their services.

00:28:18 ◼   ► Those are the real sort of the little Yodas inside Google, the people with the most respect

00:28:24 ◼   ► and clout and power, the ability to say no to your project and yester the project indirectly

00:28:29 ◼   ► by...

00:28:30 ◼   ► I mean, they make the services that make everything run.

00:28:32 ◼   ► And that is a very different location than the heart of Apple's company, which is probably

00:28:38 ◼   ► a couple of people in Johnny Ive's industrial design team and the people who really run

00:28:42 ◼   ► the Core OS and who decide, I guess, probably the compiler team and maybe the frameworks

00:28:46 ◼   ► team for UIKit.

00:28:48 ◼   ► That's the tiny little heart of Apple, and it is so distant from the heart of Google.

00:28:52 ◼   ► And I don't know if you can have two hearts or if you could spread the company out or...

00:28:56 ◼   ► Sounds complicated.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Yeah, it's timey-wimey.

00:29:00 ◼   ► If you're one of the iOS or OS X engineers and you know enough about Apple to know that

00:29:06 ◼   ► you are currently in the chosen one position, you're working on UIKit, you know you have

00:29:10 ◼   ► your future paved ahead of you in a good way, well, you're not going to be volunteering

00:29:15 ◼   ► for going to work on iCloud.

00:29:18 ◼   ► So anyone who's already there that's proven themselves

00:29:21 ◼   ► probably is gonna try to dodge the services bullet.

00:29:25 ◼   ► Maybe that's what this Topsy thing is all about,

00:29:27 ◼   ► and I'm reaching quite a bit here,

00:29:28 ◼   ► but maybe the answer is you get a group

00:29:30 ◼   ► that's really good at services,

00:29:32 ◼   ► and again, Topsy is a dodgy example,

00:29:35 ◼   ► but get a group that's really good at services,

00:29:37 ◼   ► say Dropbox, you know, three or four years ago

00:29:39 ◼   ► when it was even reasonable that they would be bought,

00:29:42 ◼   ► and have them come in,

00:29:44 ◼   ► They're not as bitter and jaded about not being on UI kit yet

00:29:47 ◼   ► And maybe that's what it takes to get services to be at a position that it's not a piece of crap

00:29:53 ◼   ► You missed the most important part about this top CX acquisition

00:29:57 ◼   ► Which is that if they hire this company and do not immediately throw away all of their technology like that's not their plan

00:30:03 ◼   ► Finally there is a job inside Apple that I might be qualified

00:30:11 ◼   ► So, let me know when you send your application in. I'll be a reference for you, John.

00:30:15 ◼   ► Yeah. I can only imagine interviewing there.

00:30:20 ◼   ► But you would have to move. You wouldn't move away from the greater Boston area, would you?

00:30:25 ◼   ► No, that I think is part of their hiring problem, actually, because so many companies are flexible about remote workers now,

00:30:31 ◼   ► and Apple historically has not been the most flexible company about remote work.

00:30:35 ◼   ► And I guess Yahoo's going the other direction as well, trying to lock things down there.

00:30:39 ◼   ► But it's really difficult.

00:30:41 ◼   ► We would like to hire you, but that

00:30:42 ◼   ► would mean you would have to move to one of the most expensive

00:30:44 ◼   ► places to live in the country.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And maybe your family's not near here.

00:30:47 ◼   ► And that sort of-- not artificially limits.

00:30:49 ◼   ► It's kind of a natural limit.

00:30:50 ◼   ► But it's difficult when you're the biggest or second biggest

00:30:53 ◼   ► company in the world that your requirement is everyone

00:30:55 ◼   ► who works for me has to live around here.

00:30:57 ◼   ► You're going to miss out on tons and tons of good people.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Yeah, and anecdotally, I've heard at least a couple

00:31:03 ◼   ► of stories about people who have interviewed at Apple,

00:31:07 ◼   ► perhaps even been offered a job at Apple, but have had to say, "Well, I really can't or won't

00:31:12 ◼   ► move to California," at which point the conversation's over. And there are other places,

00:31:17 ◼   ► like Google has offices at Google. I have an office in Boston. They have a big office in New

00:31:21 ◼   ► York City. Amazon has offices, and not just in Seattle. They have on the East Coast as well.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Apple, I think, does have some offices in Austin, and that one guy who makes all the money in

00:31:31 ◼   ► Ireland. They have remote locations, but the heart is really the giant flying saucer thing

00:31:36 ◼   ► that they're building in one infinite loop. So that is a possible way forward for Apple,

00:31:43 ◼   ► and I think that they were looking at that, to have a substantial presence, like to not say that

00:31:48 ◼   ► everything has to happen in California for our important products, of course.

00:31:51 ◼   ► Maybe that's a way for the server-side group to get some freedom from that, is make the

00:31:55 ◼   ► server-side groups based in Texas or on the East Coast somewhere, just so they can be independent.

00:32:03 ◼   ► then maybe you can build up a group there that sort of has its own pride and reputation

00:32:07 ◼   ► and isn't constantly overshadowed by iOS and Johnny Ive's hardware and all that stuff.

00:32:13 ◼   ► This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Igloo Software. This is great.

00:32:19 ◼   ► So if you go to igloosoftware.com/atp, you'll see those new landing page they made. And

00:32:24 ◼   ► a couple episodes ago, we were talking about enterprise software and how awful it is and

00:32:30 ◼   ► John's enterprise software assumptions and how John had such an ordeal with the Cisco

00:32:37 ◼   ► VPN stuff on Mavericks. Igloo, because they actually listen to our cool stuff and actually

00:32:45 ◼   ► our fans and support us for a very long time now, Igloo has made a page in response to

00:32:51 ◼   ► John's myths about enterprise software. It's pretty great. Go to igloosoftware.com/atp

00:32:58 ◼   ► to see.

00:32:59 ◼   ► I have not seen this yet up until just this very moment,

00:33:02 ◼   ► and this is utterly fantastic.

00:33:03 ◼   ► Isn't it great?

00:33:05 ◼   ► Usually on their landing pages, they'll sneak in an inside

00:33:08 ◼   ► reference or two.

00:33:09 ◼   ► You'll catch them subtly.

00:33:11 ◼   ► This time they went all out.

00:33:12 ◼   ► It's pretty great.

00:33:13 ◼   ► So Igloo's latest cloud update, Tinsel, arrives this Friday,

00:33:17 ◼   ► which is probably going to be the release

00:33:18 ◼   ► date of this show.

00:33:19 ◼   ► So let's say today.

00:33:21 ◼   ► It's a free update for every customer.

00:33:23 ◼   ► When you log into your Igloo, the new features

00:33:24 ◼   ► are immediately available starting this Friday.

00:33:28 ◼   ► With Tinsel, Igloo is making it easier than ever for you to get started. Some companies

00:33:32 ◼   ► -- oh, we should point out before I do this, they didn't tell me to say this, but I probably

00:33:35 ◼   ► should tell you what Igloo actually is before I go on about their latest update. Igloo is

00:33:40 ◼   ► a hosted, enterprise-ready intranet software platform that doesn't actually suck. That's

00:33:46 ◼   ► not their official tagline. That's my tagline for them. But it's basically an intranet that

00:33:49 ◼   ► doesn't suck. So they have great design and they have things like Twitter-like things,

00:33:56 ◼   ► micro blogs, wikis, all sorts of components that they can use for your company to use

00:34:01 ◼   ► internally and they're all private and encrypted and secure and everything. So they aren't

00:34:07 ◼   ► out there on the public internet, so that's very nice for companies, but it also is not

00:34:11 ◼   ► horrible, ugly, clunky, feature-limited enterprise software from the 90s.

00:34:16 ◼   ► With Tinsel, Igloo is making it easier than ever for you to get started. Some companies

00:34:20 ◼   ► don't need a full intranet. Now you can start your Igloo with just one of their web apps.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Like for example, if you just need file sharing or you just need micro blogs by themselves.

00:34:29 ◼   ► The best part is, you can still add additional apps into your igloo, expanding it later as

00:34:34 ◼   ► your needs grow.

00:34:35 ◼   ► So if you start with file sharing to replace Dropbox for instance, you can add an internal

00:34:39 ◼   ► blog and shared calendars later, all in one place.

00:34:43 ◼   ► Tinsel also adds a health check dashboard for your intranet.

00:34:46 ◼   ► It gives you detailed analytics into easy to read these charts about the people, content

00:34:50 ◼   ► and social activity happening in your intranet.

00:34:53 ◼   ► When your internet falls below igloo's benchmark data, suggestions appear in the health check

00:34:57 ◼   ► dashboard to improve your performance.

00:34:59 ◼   ► There's also great new features like content templates, color-coded channels, new widgets,

00:35:05 ◼   ► and more.

00:35:06 ◼   ► So start building your igloo today.

00:35:08 ◼   ► It's free to use up to 10 people and very affordable after that.

00:35:11 ◼   ► So go to igloosoftware.com/atp to see those great pigs they made for us and to sign up.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to igloo for sponsoring our show.

00:35:19 ◼   ► This is a great landing page.

00:35:21 ◼   ► I immediately scrolled to the bottom to see if they were going to do item number four,

00:35:25 ◼   ► because it was my – I forget what they call it – enterprise software assumptions, I

00:35:30 ◼   ► think.

00:35:31 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, basically.

00:35:33 ◼   ► And the first three were easy.

00:35:34 ◼   ► It's like, you know, when a new version of OS X comes out, assume your enterprise software

00:35:38 ◼   ► won't work.

00:35:39 ◼   ► So they're going to contradict that and say, well, Igloo will work, right?

00:35:40 ◼   ► And so on and so forth.

00:35:41 ◼   ► But the fourth one was actually, despite all the terribleness of enterprise software, sometimes

00:35:46 ◼   ► it's your fault.

00:35:47 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, how are they going to spin that one?

00:35:48 ◼   ► So they say, despite all the terrible things that are terrible about enterprise software,

00:35:50 ◼   ► it's at least partially your fault and then they add it in parentheses, but we'll help you fix it."

00:35:55 ◼   ► So they turned it into a customer service angle. If you screw up, Igloo is there to help you out.

00:36:00 ◼   ► So that's very clever. And the little paragraphs of text they wrote underneath each one of these

00:36:05 ◼   ► things, it's very nice. And I totally agree with it because Igloo is the internet that I wish I

00:36:10 ◼   ► could use, but don't. And I have to point out just a couple of quick items here. At the bottom of

00:36:16 ◼   ► number one. And just for John, Flash is optional and there are zero apps required.

00:36:20 ◼   ► Zero Java apps required. Sorry, yeah, sorry. And the "and just for

00:36:25 ◼   ► John" part, I pulled directly off the page, which is pretty awesome. And then I also enjoy

00:36:30 ◼   ► way towards the bottom, "Collaboration doesn't have to be craziness. Watch our sandwich videos

00:36:35 ◼   ► and save yourself from SharePoint." Which is pretty awesome. And that's dear to my heart.

00:36:41 ◼   ► Yeah, these guys really get it. So thanks a lot to Igloo.

00:36:45 ◼   ► And speaking of, it's sometimes your problem, about a week ago, I, for the second time,

00:36:52 ◼   ► you would think this would only happen to a geek like me once, but no.

00:36:56 ◼   ► For the second time, I called Verizon Fios to report an outage, and the problem was that

00:37:03 ◼   ► I had to reboot my own Apple Airport Extreme.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Did they tell you to do the thing where just plug it and unplug it in case any dust settled

00:37:12 ◼   ► on it in Merlin parlance?

00:37:14 ◼   ► No, they didn't make up any kind, you know, merciful reasons to make me do that.

00:37:20 ◼   ► They just, they're like, "Oh, have you tried rebooting it?"

00:37:22 ◼   ► And of course, immediately I'm like, "Oh yeah, I think I've tried that.

00:37:26 ◼   ► I must have tried that."

00:37:27 ◼   ► And then I'm like, "You know what?

00:37:28 ◼   ► Let me go try it just in case."

00:37:30 ◼   ► And this actually happened like six months ago also.

00:37:33 ◼   ► I was so embarrassed.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Like, because I, our Fios has not been that reliable.

00:37:39 ◼   ► Actually about two days ago, it had a real outage like all night and it was pretty rough.

00:37:43 ◼   ► So I've called them, over the course of having it for the last three years, I've called them

00:37:47 ◼   ► maybe five times about outages, and two of them have been, I just needed to reboot my

00:37:52 ◼   ► own router that I use arrogantly, not using theirs.

00:37:56 ◼   ► I'm really terrified to replace my Apple airport.

00:37:58 ◼   ► I have an airport extreme, like when they were the flat pancake thing, and actually

00:38:02 ◼   ► a much older model.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And it's not good.

00:38:04 ◼   ► It doesn't have good Wi-Fi range, but it is rock solid.

00:38:08 ◼   ► I have had to plug in and unplug it.

00:38:11 ◼   ► like I'll go away for vacation or something, but like maybe two times a year after that.

00:38:15 ◼   ► And it just doesn't crash, it doesn't reboot, it just runs and runs and runs. And every

00:38:20 ◼   ► other router that I read about, it's like, oh, I have to reboot it once a week, or it's

00:38:25 ◼   ► flaky or sometimes it just stops sending data or whatever. And that's why I'm so and also

00:38:29 ◼   ► I'm using it instead of using any files hardware, I go right from the ONT into my thing. And

00:38:33 ◼   ► I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to get it to release the IP address. So when I plug

00:38:36 ◼   ► in the new one, it won't be able to get like,

00:38:38 ◼   ► Oh yeah, you have to call them to do that. There's all these tricks on the internet about

00:38:43 ◼   ► like, "Oh, well if you hold down the buttons on the ONT and make it do a real full reset,

00:38:47 ◼   ► and it never works." It's held for, I think, at least a few hours on the server end.

00:38:53 ◼   ► I'm willing to wait a few hours. When I did the switchover, the guy who did my install

00:38:57 ◼   ► was good, and I told him what I was planning on doing, and he of course has to hook up

00:39:00 ◼   ► the Verizon, whatever, and he just basically said, "You should go to the admin interface

00:39:05 ◼   ► to this router and you can issue a command to have it release the IP. So issue the command

00:39:09 ◼   ► to have it to release the IP and then disconnect that router and then the next router you connect

00:39:12 ◼   ► it will give the IP. And so I didn't have to wait an hour for it. But yeah, I'm so scared

00:39:16 ◼   ► to get rid of this router even though it has such terrible range because A, because I hate

00:39:19 ◼   ► the stupid giant TARDIS looking thing from Apple that it has the fan inside it, which

00:39:25 ◼   ► I don't want, and B, any other choice that I have, I'm terrified that it's going to be

00:39:29 ◼   ► flaky and reboot all the time.

00:39:31 ◼   ► I'm just surprised that you got asked to do all those sorts of things because I don't

00:39:36 ◼   ► remember if I talked about this on the show and cut me off if I did, but a week or two

00:39:39 ◼   ► ago we had an outage and long story short it was because of a power spike in the box

00:39:45 ◼   ► that's in the garage, which isn't the ONT.

00:39:47 ◼   ► It's like the power station that powers the ONT ended up getting fried.

00:39:51 ◼   ► But I called them at like nine o'clock at night and I called Verizon and I said, "Hey,

00:39:55 ◼   ► you know, I have an outage and here's what I've discovered.

00:39:58 ◼   ► Not only is the internet out, but the phone and the TV are out."

00:40:00 ◼   ► And the only slightly weird thing they had me do was unplug this little power station,

00:40:06 ◼   ► as I call it, I know that's not the right term, and plug in anything else into that

00:40:10 ◼   ► outlet just to make sure the outlet was alive, which I thought was completely reasonable.

00:40:14 ◼   ► And that was the only thing.

00:40:15 ◼   ► Never asked about a router, never asked about anything else.

00:40:17 ◼   ► That was the only thing they did.

00:40:18 ◼   ► And then, sure enough, at 830 the next morning, somebody arrived to fix it and by no later

00:40:24 ◼   ► than nine o'clock it was already fixed.

00:40:26 ◼   ► and that was the second time I've had somebody to the house

00:40:30 ◼   ► about my file service since 2008.

00:40:33 ◼   ► - I will say also, I've had amazing luck with the people

00:40:38 ◼   ► that you get when you call them for tech support.

00:40:40 ◼   ► They're really consistently really good people,

00:40:43 ◼   ► and they do, I think you got the effect of this,

00:40:46 ◼   ► they do pick up pretty quickly whether you're a geek or not.

00:40:49 ◼   ► You don't have to try to convince them,

00:40:51 ◼   ► yes, I know what I'm talking about generally,

00:40:53 ◼   ► although I haven't tried rebooting my router,

00:40:55 ◼   ► But you don't usually have to go jump through hoops,

00:40:59 ◼   ► yes, okay, I'm plugging it in now,

00:41:03 ◼   ► you know, faking, you don't have to do that.

00:41:05 ◼   ► You can just tell them, hey, my ONT is failing.

00:41:07 ◼   ► And the fact that you know what it's called

00:41:10 ◼   ► will probably get them to immediately say,

00:41:11 ◼   ► okay, here, you do this, this, and this, and then that's it.

00:41:14 ◼   ► They're really good.

00:41:15 ◼   ► They're very geek-friendly.

00:41:16 ◼   ► - Right, as soon as I said ONT,

00:41:18 ◼   ► I think that flipped the switch into

00:41:19 ◼   ► this person must at least know slightly

00:41:21 ◼   ► what they're talking about.

00:41:22 ◼   ► - This person at least read a forum once.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Right, exactly. So this episode is sponsored by Verizon.

00:41:29 ◼   ► Going back a minute, back to Apple and their potential woes with services and the respect

00:41:34 ◼   ► within the company. How much of this do you think is a problem with the release and marketing

00:41:39 ◼   ► schedule? So when most people do web services, Google included, everyone, you know, Facebook,

00:41:46 ◼   ► Twitter, everything, they don't usually have big press events to announce feature

00:41:51 ◼   ► updates. New products, maybe. But generally, a feature update or a medium-scale improvement

00:42:00 ◼   ► won't really get a big event, and they won't hold it for a big event. Whereas Apple almost

00:42:07 ◼   ► always does that. Their web services seem to almost be versioned and fixed in time as

00:42:12 ◼   ► if they were OSes, or the OS updates that we get, where they will hold back certain

00:42:20 ◼   ► features or fixes or tweaks until the next marketing event to lump it all in. And part

00:42:26 ◼   ► of that is, I think, necessary because Apple has been battling this image that they're

00:42:33 ◼   ► not innovating anymore. So they probably feel pressure to, like, pump up their events with

00:42:40 ◼   ► as much crap as they can cram in there with all this cool stuff they've been doing.

00:42:44 ◼   ► But I think that ultimately is really dysfunctional for web services and web apps, because that's

00:42:51 ◼   ► not how the rest of the world works.

00:42:52 ◼   ► That's not how the web works.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And how much of their problem stuff in this area do you think is related to that kind

00:43:02 ◼   ► of forced product marketing schedule that both the public and Apple kind of forces on

00:43:07 ◼   ► itself?

00:43:08 ◼   ► But the good and the bad part of it is that web services are not held in high enough esteem

00:43:12 ◼   ► to be deemed worthy of holding back for the thing.

00:43:16 ◼   ► Remember they're doing the iCloud beta website,

00:43:19 ◼   ► iWork for iCloud or whatever the hell

00:43:21 ◼   ► those terrible web services were.

00:43:23 ◼   ► They put that out and they revised it and they improved it

00:43:26 ◼   ► and it was up for beta and then they rolled it out

00:43:28 ◼   ► to everybody and they'll do, because it's not a big deal,

00:43:31 ◼   ► they don't think it's gonna be that flashy.

00:43:32 ◼   ► And though they did demo it at the recent event,

00:43:35 ◼   ► they had been making changes and improvements to it.

00:43:38 ◼   ► I mean, just think of the whole history of that interface

00:43:40 ◼   ► that they've had that's supposed to look like Apple Mail.

00:43:42 ◼   ► they change that and improve that off cycle, like not during events, because it's like,

00:43:46 ◼   ► well, they don't think it's high enough priority for an event because it's not going to be

00:43:52 ◼   ► impressive or it's not their bread and butter.

00:43:54 ◼   ► I know they do want to have a big bang and tie it in with the new versions of the iLife

00:43:58 ◼   ► applications, but it's like they get to be in the presentation only because they're tied

00:44:02 ◼   ► to one of the real products that Apple makes.

00:44:04 ◼   ► And the rest of the time, they'll willingly update it and tweak it and do stuff to it.

00:44:09 ◼   ► It seems like they're better for not being tied to that schedule, but inevitably for

00:44:15 ◼   ► all of their products, they're going to have to—they do a pretty good job dealing with

00:44:18 ◼   ► it.

00:44:19 ◼   ► With the exception of hardware, they're going to have to get used to putting out products

00:44:23 ◼   ► on a less monolithic kind of schedule and more kind of a dribs and drabs.

00:44:28 ◼   ► And I think they are getting better about that.

00:44:30 ◼   ► When they have to, for example, the mail update to work with the Gmail stuff, you've got to

00:44:33 ◼   ► do what you've got to do.

00:44:34 ◼   ► That didn't come in 10.9.1.

00:44:35 ◼   ► The old Apple would have held that for 10.9.1, but in the new era of people trying to use

00:44:41 ◼   ► it in web services and Gmail to get their work done, you can't hold that for 10.9.1.

00:44:46 ◼   ► 10.9.1's not ready to come out.

00:44:47 ◼   ► It's coming, but they can't hold the mail fix, so it has to come out.

00:44:50 ◼   ► And same thing if there was a Safari error or whatever.

00:44:53 ◼   ► You just got to keep pushing these updates.

00:44:55 ◼   ► And I think the change in Mavericks to having optionally automatic updates of all applications

00:44:59 ◼   ► on the OS is all part of that.

00:45:02 ◼   ► is different because you have to make millions of these hardware devices in the months leading

00:45:07 ◼   ► up to your launch, and it's kind of hard to avoid a big run-up to a big bang and then

00:45:13 ◼   ► sell a couple million on a weekend. You can't let that out by drips and drabs. So I think

00:45:18 ◼   ► the hardware stuff will still be on that schedule, and as long as any hardware stuff is on that

00:45:21 ◼   ► kind of schedule, which I think makes sense if you want to have a big sort of opening

00:45:24 ◼   ► weekend in movie parlance, there's some software that's tied to that hardware too, and there's

00:45:29 ◼   ► There's no avoiding tying something to it, but the web services, for good or for ill,

00:45:34 ◼   ► seem less tied to the hardware and more likely to be updated off-cycle.

00:45:39 ◼   ► This kind of reminds me, in a weird way, of companies that say they use agile processes

00:45:47 ◼   ► but don't.

00:45:49 ◼   ► And Marco, you will know nothing about this because you don't have a real job.

00:45:52 ◼   ► You are correct.

00:45:53 ◼   ► But John, you might actually know something about this.

00:45:56 ◼   ► So I've worked at a couple of different places and for most of my career I've done consulting.

00:46:01 ◼   ► And the place in which I work now actually does do legitimate honest to goodness agile

00:46:07 ◼   ► development and there's not an overabundance of planning upfront.

00:46:12 ◼   ► There's just enough to get by.

00:46:14 ◼   ► And generally speaking, we manage all of our projects in terms of sprints.

00:46:20 ◼   ► We use Pivotal Tracker.

00:46:22 ◼   ► Everything gets assigned points.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Points are used as currency.

00:46:25 ◼   ► We cooperate with product owners about what to schedule, when to schedule it, etc.

00:46:30 ◼   ► It actually works pretty well.

00:46:34 ◼   ► When everyone is on the same page, when the product owner is invested, when the product

00:46:39 ◼   ► owner understands what a point is and what it represents, it works really, really, really,

00:46:45 ◼   ► really well.

00:46:47 ◼   ► But if there's any weak link in that system, if for example the product owner, which is

00:46:53 ◼   ► typically at the client, if the product owner doesn't have the time to invest or doesn't

00:46:58 ◼   ► really care or doesn't want to learn to understand, then suddenly everything stops

00:47:04 ◼   ► working well.

00:47:06 ◼   ► And I kind of wonder, to bring this back to Apple, if even if the web services teams were

00:47:14 ◼   ► behaving in such a way that they could do incremental releases regularly, I wonder if

00:47:21 ◼   ► superiors just kind of find that prohibitive. And I guess, Marco, this is kind of what you

00:47:25 ◼   ► were saying as well. But even if they themselves were prepped for really frequent releases,

00:47:31 ◼   ► I don't know that even if the higher-ups in Apple wanted them to do those more frequent

00:47:37 ◼   ► releases, because so much of the company is based on annual or semi-annual releases, I

00:47:44 ◼   ► don't know that it will ever really work because it's kind of like trying to force Agile on

00:47:48 ◼   ► on a situation where Agile just doesn't really fit.

00:47:51 ◼   ► - It made me depressed about Agile methodologies

00:47:54 ◼   ► and other methodologies that are used in jobs.

00:47:57 ◼   ► We should put that on topic lists for future podcasts

00:47:59 ◼   ► 'cause that stuff makes me sad.

00:48:00 ◼   ► - Wait, the fact that you don't use Agile?

00:48:04 ◼   ► - No, all those kind of like, here's the way,

00:48:07 ◼   ► here's a set of rules and if you apply these rules,

00:48:10 ◼   ► it will make you be able to develop software.

00:48:12 ◼   ► - Can I make a slight confession?

00:48:16 ◼   ► - Sure.

00:48:17 ◼   ► never used a methodology.

00:48:19 ◼   ► You're using one.

00:48:20 ◼   ► It just doesn't have a name.

00:48:23 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:48:24 ◼   ► It isn't that effective.

00:48:27 ◼   ► I wouldn't recommend my methodology.

00:48:28 ◼   ► Most importantly, you're not using one imposed on you by somebody else.

00:48:31 ◼   ► That is, no matter what methodology you're using, if you got to pick it, well then, you

00:48:35 ◼   ► know, it's very different than if a bunch of other people have decided this is the way

00:48:39 ◼   ► we are going to develop software, and then you come into that environment and have the

00:48:43 ◼   ► rules applied to you.

00:48:44 ◼   ► That is a very different—whatever the rules are, that is very different.

00:48:47 ◼   ► Now, Jon, does your company self-describe as adhering to any particular methodology?

00:48:54 ◼   ► We use a lot of the words from agile methodology.

00:48:58 ◼   ► But hold on. So you self-describe as agile. Now, I'm not asking what you are.

00:49:04 ◼   ► No, no. I don't think so. I don't think the company would say we use—because every time,

00:49:08 ◼   ► you know, in interviews and stuff, we use aspects of an agile system, and I would modify that to say

00:49:14 ◼   ► we use vocabulary from, which is what it devolves to.

00:49:20 ◼   ► But sure, again, I think that's--

00:49:23 ◼   ► I'm going to put that on the topic list for another--

00:49:25 ◼   ► for the day, because I think it's a big, long thing.

00:49:28 ◼   ► We would never start a big, long topic an hour into a show.

00:49:30 ◼   ► No, definitely not.

00:49:32 ◼   ► So I will let you slide on this one,

00:49:36 ◼   ► but we will add it to the show notes that don't exist.

00:49:38 ◼   ► Type it in the notes file, yeah.

00:49:40 ◼   ► Do you want to talk about this boring USB plug instead

00:49:43 ◼   ► of interesting things like Agile?

00:49:45 ◼   ► - Honestly, this thing is pretty funny.

00:49:47 ◼   ► So the USB 3.0 mini plug is a disaster,

00:49:51 ◼   ► as we've talked about before.

00:49:53 ◼   ► I still, so I have that card reader,

00:49:55 ◼   ► my one USB 3 device,

00:49:57 ◼   ► I still insert the plug wrong every time.

00:50:01 ◼   ► Like it's so weird to get that stupid mini 3 connector.

00:50:04 ◼   ► Anyway, so the news is that the USB standards group

00:50:10 ◼   ► or whatever, has agreed to make a new connector

00:50:14 ◼   ► that they haven't actually shown yet,

00:50:15 ◼   ► but it's gonna be a new connector

00:50:17 ◼   ► that, like the Apple Lightning connector,

00:50:20 ◼   ► will finally be reversible.

00:50:23 ◼   ► And this will come out if all goes to plan,

00:50:26 ◼   ► which of course rarely happens with committees.

00:50:28 ◼   ► If all goes to plan, devices that use this

00:50:31 ◼   ► will come out in about 2016.

00:50:33 ◼   ► Did I get that right?

00:50:34 ◼   ► - If you were looking at the notes file, you would know.

00:50:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:50:38 ◼   ► in the different tab.

00:50:39 ◼   ► Give me a break.

00:50:40 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:50:41 ◼   ► I thought it was 2015.

00:50:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:43 ◼   ► The final specification is expected to be published by the middle of 2014.

00:50:46 ◼   ► That's when the spec will be done, and then it presumably – but the thing is, with a

00:50:50 ◼   ► lot of – with these specs, kind of like the 802.11 specs, there's a possibility

00:50:56 ◼   ► that manufacturers will start building things to the not technically ratified or whatever

00:51:02 ◼   ► approved spec like they always do.

00:51:03 ◼   ► Like the draft N.

00:51:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:05 ◼   ► I mean, they can always upgrade the firmware, but a lot of times they don't even have

00:51:08 ◼   ► do that. With controllers, with connectors, it might be a little bit more dangerous, but

00:51:12 ◼   ► I don't know. But anyway, I would expect that the MO for the group that handles USB seems

00:51:17 ◼   ► to be to make sure that whatever crap they come up with, you can make it as cheaply as

00:51:22 ◼   ► possible. And that seems to be their one and only criteria for success because they sure

00:51:26 ◼   ► as hell don't care about making a good connector. And so this would be a change in methodology,

00:51:31 ◼   ► but their audience is still the same group of people saying, "How many pennies can we

00:51:35 ◼   ► saved by making your piece of crap connector. Can I bend a piece of metal into a shoebox

00:51:38 ◼   ► shape? Good. Ship it. Done. Piece of plastic in the middle of a bent piece of metal."

00:51:43 ◼   ► Well, and to some extent, they should be concerned about that, because that's one of the things

00:51:47 ◼   ► that has made USB so—to reuse part of its acronym—so universal. When USB first came

00:51:55 ◼   ► out, you had USB versus the old stuff, serial, parallel. But then FireWire came out, I think,

00:52:01 ◼   ► afterwards or right before and USB was always way cheaper to implement than FireWire.

00:52:09 ◼   ► And part of this is the controller chips and how that's arranged, but USB was always the

00:52:14 ◼   ► cheap way to go and so it caught on like crazy because it was just the cheapest.

00:52:19 ◼   ► And same thing now, you know, FireWire 800 comes out, USB 2.0 comes out.

00:52:24 ◼   ► Thunderbolt comes out, USB 3.0 comes out.

00:52:27 ◼   ► In every one of these generations, USB has dominated

00:52:30 ◼   ► and won and been way more universal and supported

00:52:34 ◼   ► than the other thing because it's just cheap

00:52:36 ◼   ► and it's simpler, it's cheaper for everyone,

00:52:38 ◼   ► cheaper to implement, cheaper to host, et cetera.

00:52:40 ◼   ► So that actually does matter here.

00:52:44 ◼   ► And I don't know how much of the total cost

00:52:45 ◼   ► of implementation is like the bits on the connector

00:52:48 ◼   ► versus the controller chips and the logic inside,

00:52:51 ◼   ► but I would imagine a reversible connector

00:52:54 ◼   ► with enough pins to support these kind of rates

00:52:56 ◼   ► and everything else they have to support in the physical cable, a reversible connector

00:53:01 ◼   ► is definitely going to be more expensive and more complicated to implement.

00:53:04 ◼   ► I'm not saying that cheapness is not something they should go for.

00:53:07 ◼   ► They just got the balance way off.

00:53:08 ◼   ► Because like it's, getting back to the last show, Pennywise, Poundfulish, "Oh, we can

00:53:12 ◼   ► save tiny pennies by making our connector really crappy and cheap and easy to construct."

00:53:19 ◼   ► The big one was, over Fireware and stuff like that, was that the smarts had to be in the

00:53:23 ◼   ► computer.

00:53:24 ◼   ► a complicated controller chip, whereas FireWire interfaces were smart enough to sort of talk

00:53:28 ◼   ► amongst themselves without a controlling computer. That's where all the money went. But they

00:53:32 ◼   ► were like, "Oh, what?" The mindset is just squeeze every penny you can out of these stupid

00:53:37 ◼   ► connectors and ignore everything else. And just shift that a little bit to say, "Make

00:53:41 ◼   ► them cheap. That's good." But it's like optimizing something. You have to profile it. Find out

00:53:46 ◼   ► where most of the time is being spent. Optimize that part. So profiling USB is like, "Where's

00:53:50 ◼   ► all the money being spent?" Well, it's stupid silicon chips in the controller. We can't

00:53:53 ◼   ► afford a big expensive controller like the FireWire things. We wanted to make a cheap

00:53:56 ◼   ► control that's easy to make, that can come from tons of manufacturers. That's good. Once

00:54:00 ◼   ► you've done that, don't worry so much about the connector because what portion of the

00:54:04 ◼   ► price is the connector? Maybe it's an increasing portion as the silicon price goes to zero

00:54:09 ◼   ► as we keep shrinking things, I don't know. But it's just such an incredible mistake.

00:54:13 ◼   ► I always talk about the USB connector guy saying, "How does he know whether he did a

00:54:16 ◼   ► good job?" If any of us were making a connector, we would spend 10 minutes thinking about what

00:54:20 ◼   ► what makes a good connector and surely we would come upon things like hard to put in,

00:54:23 ◼   ► can't put in the wrong way, not externally symmetrical and internally asymmetrical.

00:54:28 ◼   ► Those would come up if you just thought about it for a minute.

00:54:31 ◼   ► It's such a, on the one hand you can say, well if I save one penny I end up saving five

00:54:34 ◼   ► billion dollars over the life of a thing because of so many USB connectors, right?

00:54:37 ◼   ► But on the other hand, if you annoy people for one second, you annoy people for five

00:54:42 ◼   ► billion seconds of the life.

00:54:44 ◼   ► It's just a different way of looking at it.

00:54:47 ◼   ► So this gives me hope, and what I would like to see out of this, which I think would be

00:54:50 ◼   ► hilarious, is if this new USB connector, of which there are no pictures or design drawings

00:54:55 ◼   ► as far as I've been able to find, if this connector looks exactly like a Lightning connector

00:54:59 ◼   ► but slightly different, like a little bit wider or has a bulge in it or something.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Because think about it, what other kind of form factors can you get for a small connector

00:55:07 ◼   ► that's not that giant, wide, floppy USB micro thing that's not even very micro?

00:55:12 ◼   ► It has to be small.

00:55:13 ◼   ► It's the whole point of the thing because devices are getting smaller.

00:55:15 ◼   ► you want something small and reversible, it's very difficult to do something sturdy at that

00:55:19 ◼   ► size, you know, because look at the existing, like the ones that go into your cameras, whatever

00:55:24 ◼   ► the hell those connectors are, they're terrible.

00:55:26 ◼   ► Yeah, the micro USB, yeah.

00:55:27 ◼   ► Yeah, there's lots of different ones.

00:55:28 ◼   ► There's one that looks kind of like, it's got a wide angled sort of triangular trapezoid

00:55:34 ◼   ► thing on the bottom, then a rectangle, then there's the one that's just skinny and it

00:55:37 ◼   ► looks almost like it's just exactly rectangular, but it's got like little, the corners chopped

00:55:40 ◼   ► off of it.

00:55:41 ◼   ► I believe you're talking about mini and micro USB respectively.

00:55:44 ◼   ► I don't know what the names are.

00:55:45 ◼   ► They're both very small.

00:55:46 ◼   ► But those are their metal,

00:55:47 ◼   ► they're bent metal things and inside the metal,

00:55:50 ◼   ► it's like hollow and there's pins in there.

00:55:51 ◼   ► Whereas the lightning is reversed.

00:55:53 ◼   ► It's like a solid piece of,

00:55:54 ◼   ► not really solid, but it's solid.

00:55:55 ◼   ► And then the connectors are on,

00:55:56 ◼   ► the contacts are on the outside of the solid thing.

00:55:59 ◼   ► And I think that's the only way really to make a sturdy,

00:56:02 ◼   ► very small reversible connector.

00:56:04 ◼   ► Because you can't have anything go inside

00:56:06 ◼   ► the tiny little thing.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Like that's what makes the micro and mini so annoying

00:56:10 ◼   ► that there is that hollow spot that stuff has to go into.

00:56:13 ◼   ► And you could make that reversible, I suppose,

00:56:15 ◼   ► But I really, really hope that they basically just copy lightning and say, "Reverse it.

00:56:19 ◼   ► Condacts on outside, solid metal-ish thing."

00:56:23 ◼   ► Because then you can make that solid metal thing pretty thin and still be sturdy and

00:56:26 ◼   ► still be reversible.

00:56:27 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:56:29 ◼   ► But the problem with lightning, you know, the reason why Apple—and by the way, there

00:56:33 ◼   ► was a great post John Gruber wrote on Daring Fireball about this thing today—we'll

00:56:37 ◼   ► link to it in the show notes—about how this is like—like, lightning is like what makes

00:56:41 ◼   ► Apple, Apple, and it's everything that people love and hate about Apple. It's fantastic.

00:56:47 ◼   ► But in order to do this, you have to give up substantial concessions to complexity and

00:56:57 ◼   ► cost. To make something reversible, it is going to be more expensive. It is going to

00:57:01 ◼   ► be much more complex. And you're going to have, like, the dollar cables from Monoprice

00:57:07 ◼   ► might actually suck or might not work.

00:57:10 ◼   ► There's gonna be problems.

00:57:11 ◼   ► - You don't need as many contacts.

00:57:12 ◼   ► So lightning is expensive because it's meant to do more

00:57:14 ◼   ► than just be USB.

00:57:15 ◼   ► Like if it was just USB,

00:57:17 ◼   ► they would just be running USB over it.

00:57:18 ◼   ► Lightning does not just run USB over it.

00:57:19 ◼   ► Like lightning is Apple's expansion plan

00:57:21 ◼   ► for their iOS devices.

00:57:22 ◼   ► So that, you know, it's part of their,

00:57:25 ◼   ► how can we evolve our hardware

00:57:27 ◼   ► without having to change this connector again?

00:57:28 ◼   ► It's very flexible, very complicated.

00:57:30 ◼   ► They just basically need to run USB over a cable

00:57:33 ◼   ► with a different connector.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Well, but I think, well physically,

00:57:35 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that the lightning cable has like just barely enough contacts to run USB 3 over it

00:57:42 ◼   ► And and and pull that off

00:57:45 ◼   ► But it's like this flexible arrangement where it can change what the pins do and they sense each other like it's way more

00:57:50 ◼   ► It's like it's more expensive than it's way more expensive than uh than USB is going to be but I think like just physically speaking

00:57:57 ◼   ► Like you know ignore what's going over the wires and what's talking amongst them

00:58:01 ◼   ► Just look at the little metal thing that you plug into some other thing

00:58:05 ◼   ► I think the USB group can come up with a connector that's more expensive than any, they're just

00:58:10 ◼   ► in connectors, but is not outrageously so.

00:58:13 ◼   ► And then down the line continue, you know, as the wires connect, they connect to a USB

00:58:17 ◼   ► 3 hub and they have all the same, you know, cost constraints that they always have there.

00:58:21 ◼   ► I hope they can pull it off.

00:58:22 ◼   ► I love too how this is, this is one of those things like about half the articles about

00:58:27 ◼   ► it, and a lot of the comments that some of the reporters are getting from the various

00:58:31 ◼   ► USB spec people and from Intel and everything like that.

00:58:34 ◼   ► It's so funny how they try to avoid talking about Apple or giving Apple any credit whatsoever

00:58:39 ◼   ► in starting this thing.

00:58:41 ◼   ► It's like they'll try, they'll be like, "Well, we're designing this for emerging product

00:58:46 ◼   ► categories."

00:58:47 ◼   ► I think they've already emerged a couple years ago, actually.

00:58:53 ◼   ► And the worst thing about it is that USB was way out ahead in making connectors for very

00:58:57 ◼   ► tiny devices.

00:58:58 ◼   ► Like all these two terrible camera connectors that we were just talking about, those existed

00:59:02 ◼   ► way before lightning.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Like the USB group saw people want to connect their cameras or they're very small, I don't

00:59:07 ◼   ► know if they had tablets or smartphones or whatever charger.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Like they said they saw the need for small connectors way before Apple did.

00:59:14 ◼   ► Apple took so long with that stupid giant, you know, 30 pin connector.

00:59:18 ◼   ► They just, the USB group just made a series of terrible small connectors, right?

00:59:23 ◼   ► And like they were, they had all the advantages of the old world PC.

00:59:27 ◼   ► We can move fast.

00:59:28 ◼   ► We can fill needs as soon as we see them.

00:59:31 ◼   ► And they just did a bad job in every single one of them.

00:59:33 ◼   ► And so now they've sort of been embarrassed into this press release by Apple taking forever

00:59:39 ◼   ► to come up with anything, but when they came up with it, it's fantastic, at least for Apple's

00:59:42 ◼   ► purposes, obviously it wouldn't be fantastic for their group, for the expensive Lightning

00:59:46 ◼   ► interface that connects to it.

00:59:48 ◼   ► And so that's why it's so hard to envision this new USB thing being anything other than

00:59:52 ◼   ► looking a lot like the Lightning connector, unless it's terrible.

00:59:56 ◼   ► Because if they just make something that's like micro USB, but a slightly different shape

01:00:00 ◼   ► and reversible, I don't think that's a win.

01:00:02 ◼   ► Like would you rather plug in, say you took micro USB and now it's reversible.

01:00:07 ◼   ► Would you enjoy plugging that in?

01:00:08 ◼   ► I sure as heck wouldn't.

01:00:09 ◼   ► I hate plugging that thing into my camera.

01:00:11 ◼   ► It's not a good experience.

01:00:13 ◼   ► And so this is a test of whatever this is, the USB IF.

01:00:17 ◼   ► I don't know what the IF stands for.

01:00:20 ◼   ► But we'll see if they got their act together by what this connector looks like when it

01:00:24 ◼   ► comes out.

01:00:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm very curious, honestly.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And I would love them to do this on both ends of the cable.

01:00:33 ◼   ► And I don't know if they would ever do that.

01:00:34 ◼   ► USB has never had a symmetrical cable like that.

01:00:38 ◼   ► But I would love to see that, because certainly the computer end of the cables is just as

01:00:45 ◼   ► frustrating to insert upside down and everything.

01:00:49 ◼   ► It's just as bad.

01:00:50 ◼   ► That's one of the things they say in the thing.

01:00:53 ◼   ► Usability enhancements.

01:00:54 ◼   ► will no longer need to be concerned with plug orientation/cable direction.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Oh good!

01:00:59 ◼   ► Make it easier to plug in.

01:01:01 ◼   ► That would be fantastic.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And this will affect all of our lives, because even though we have Apple devices, we have

01:01:05 ◼   ► cameras and stuff too, and they will have whatever this connector is in a couple years,

01:01:09 ◼   ► you have to assume, right?

01:01:10 ◼   ► And the Apple laptops and Apple computers that have USB, which is all of them, you know,

01:01:15 ◼   ► those ports can get smaller too.

01:01:17 ◼   ► That may wait several more years. Remember how long it took Apple to get USB 3?

01:01:20 ◼   ► That's true.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Maybe in 17 years the Mac Pro will finally support these connectors.

01:01:27 ◼   ► So we're going to connect our Retina displays to our Mac Pros with

01:01:30 ◼   ► this new USB connector, because DisplayPort will never carry appropriate resolutions.

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01:04:19 ◼   ► - You know, another use for Hover,

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01:04:39 ◼   ► - All right, so I'm gonna make a big mistake

01:04:40 ◼   ► and ask you two to tell me where your Mac Pros are.

01:04:44 ◼   ► - It's under my desk right now.

01:04:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, you know what I mean.

01:04:49 ◼   ► You know what I mean.

01:04:50 ◼   ► Where are your trashcan Mac Pros?

01:04:53 ◼   ► 'Cause isn't it supposed to be before the end of the year

01:04:54 ◼   ► or did I make that up?

01:04:56 ◼   ► - I don't know.

01:04:57 ◼   ► - Well, they say December.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Now, we have to consider, yes,

01:05:01 ◼   ► when Apple says just a month for a product,

01:05:03 ◼   ► it often comes like the last day of the month,

01:05:05 ◼   ► but also Apple tends to be closed usually

01:05:08 ◼   ► a large part of the company tends to be closed for the last two weeks of December.

01:05:13 ◼   ► So I think if it's going to come in December, it's probably going to be within the next

01:05:16 ◼   ► week.

01:05:17 ◼   ► And my theory is that I think retina displays might not be totally ruled out for this launch.

01:05:25 ◼   ► Keep up alive.

01:05:26 ◼   ► You're like me with The Last Guardian.

01:05:28 ◼   ► They could have them.

01:05:29 ◼   ► It could happen.

01:05:30 ◼   ► Hey, 10.10 might have a new file system.

01:05:33 ◼   ► So I am not hoping about that.

01:05:37 ◼   ► realistic. You're secretly hoping. You know, with your idea of like that you were going

01:05:41 ◼   ► to wait and only buy one retina, that is having a new appeal to me now as I sit here and I

01:05:45 ◼   ► think about it. Like if they came out with them today, would I be rushing to buy one?

01:05:48 ◼   ► I'd probably rush to configure them to see the pricing.

01:05:50 ◼   ► Oh, me too. But I don't know if I would rush to buy them.

01:05:53 ◼   ► Maybe you and I will hold strong together and just say, nope, we're not buying trash

01:05:56 ◼   ► cans until we can get a retina display with it. Because I am not buying a Dell. I don't

01:05:59 ◼   ► even know how you sit in front of those Dell displays or whatever you got if you're set

01:06:03 ◼   ► up there. I'm not buying a Dell display. Oh, I have moved on from my mediocre Dell

01:06:07 ◼   ► displays. Now I have a mediocre HP display. Some ugly black thing, I know.

01:06:11 ◼   ► It's really bad actually. It has transformer wine and it's uh...

01:06:16 ◼   ► I think it's inverter wine actually. Whatever it is, it has a high pitched wine

01:06:21 ◼   ► occasionally. It's not even regular, it's occasional and uh... it's really obnoxious.

01:06:26 ◼   ► And the signaling interface to it is... either it's signaling interface or my Mac Pro is

01:06:34 ◼   ► video card is buggy in some way so that

01:06:36 ◼   ► mini display port no longer works

01:06:40 ◼   ► reliably, the picture will just cut out after a

01:06:41 ◼   ► while. I tried different cables, they're

01:06:43 ◼   ► out. So now I'm using DVI, which is a

01:06:45 ◼   ► giant thick cable running behind my

01:06:47 ◼   ► computer and if I move my feet slightly

01:06:50 ◼   ► the wrong way the screen flickers or

01:06:52 ◼   ► turns off because something is like

01:06:53 ◼   ► slightly on the edge of being connected

01:06:56 ◼   ► somewhere within the cable or the two

01:06:58 ◼   ► connectors so I'm just like I actually

01:07:00 ◼   ► I've decided that I really kind of can't

01:07:03 ◼   ► and shouldn't buy the new Mac Pro as long as I'm using this monitor because I'll

01:07:09 ◼   ► have to involve another adapter in that chain because it'll have only mini display ports

01:07:13 ◼   ► or thunderbolts. So I'll have to have the adapter to this flaky cable, to this flaky

01:07:19 ◼   ► monitor and God knows if that'll even work or if that'll have problems. So that's

01:07:25 ◼   ► yet another reason why I should wait until a retina display before buying this thing.

01:07:28 ◼   ► I was not excited by the whatever those rumors were of like a Dell 24-inch retina-ish display

01:07:34 ◼   ► because the, what would you call it, logical resolution?

01:07:38 ◼   ► Like once you go in high DPI mode, the resolution was too low.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Despite that it's also an ugly monitor and I, you know.

01:07:45 ◼   ► Well hold on, the resolution was too low on the big one, but on the 23-inch or 24-inch

01:07:51 ◼   ► one, it's exactly right.

01:07:53 ◼   ► What was the logical resolution?

01:07:55 ◼   ► 1920 by 1200.

01:07:57 ◼   ► Or by 1080, sorry.

01:07:58 ◼   ► - No, I gotta go bigger than that.

01:08:01 ◼   ► I can't stand being stuck in that.

01:08:02 ◼   ► I've been stuck in 1920 by 1200

01:08:04 ◼   ► since I guess the 22 inch Apple Cinema Display.

01:08:07 ◼   ► And I need bigger, my wife has a 27 inch

01:08:09 ◼   ► and it's not that much bigger in terms of resolution,

01:08:11 ◼   ► but it's bigger enough.

01:08:12 ◼   ► I cannot be in 1920 by 1200 anymore.

01:08:15 ◼   ► - Well, two things.

01:08:16 ◼   ► One, so I've, for all of Tumblr, I used two 24 inch monitors.

01:08:21 ◼   ► So I had two side by side monitors of that resolution.

01:08:25 ◼   ► Now I have one big 30 inch and I like the 30 inch better,

01:08:30 ◼   ► but not by a massive margin.

01:08:33 ◼   ► It's not that different.

01:08:34 ◼   ► The 24s give you, I believe, actually more real estate,

01:08:37 ◼   ► but the 30 of course is a little more useful for you

01:08:39 ◼   ► 'cause you can have one giant window if you really want to.

01:08:41 ◼   ► So I'd say it's kind of a toss up between the two.

01:08:44 ◼   ► Having two 24s or having one 30 or 27

01:08:48 ◼   ► is roughly the same amount of usefulness.

01:08:51 ◼   ► - I'm monitor monogamous.

01:08:53 ◼   ► Well, I do like having the one big one, because it makes the desk arrangement a lot easier.

01:08:58 ◼   ► Like I can fit my speakers on my desk, and I, yes, anyway.

01:09:01 ◼   ► Not on the on-screen, no, I use tons of windows, and the bigger area I have to spread those

01:09:07 ◼   ► windows, it's like having a big gigantic desk where you spread all your papers out, that's

01:09:11 ◼   ► how I treat my screen.

01:09:13 ◼   ► And I have had multiple displays at various points.

01:09:15 ◼   ► It's not that I dislike it so much, but I would much rather have one big screen than

01:09:18 ◼   ► two, even though the total area of the two might be much greater.

01:09:21 ◼   ► Oh, you're so wrong.

01:09:23 ◼   ► so wrong. I totally prefer having two screens, absolutely without a shadow of a doubt.

01:09:28 ◼   ► Yeah, but you're a more recent Windows user. Maybe that's it.

01:09:30 ◼   ► No, I'm—

01:09:31 ◼   ► What?

01:09:32 ◼   ► Who had multiple displays first? I was running two displays back when your PC had CGA graphics

01:09:37 ◼   ► and everything was teal and purple, so I don't want to hear about multi-monitors. I've

01:09:40 ◼   ► been there and done that. It's just the way I work is better with one monitor.

01:09:45 ◼   ► So the other thing to consider is on the Retina screens, they have those different scaling

01:09:50 ◼   ► Now, on the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro, I've used this thing a lot, I've gotten a lot of work on it,

01:09:55 ◼   ► so now I'm pretty comfortable knowing that the native 2x resolution is, as measured in points,

01:10:02 ◼   ► it's 1440x900, which is like a step below what you'd expect for a 15 inch laptop.

01:10:08 ◼   ► But you can tell the display to run in 1680x1050x2, and it just scales it to fit the actual physical pixels.

01:10:16 ◼   ► So that's that's how I use it most of the time

01:10:18 ◼   ► And it works just fine like it doesn't look bad it. I would say it's perfectly fine

01:10:23 ◼   ► So if they release a 27 inch monitor that only has the logical

01:10:29 ◼   ► 1920 by 1080 times 2

01:10:32 ◼   ► Which is what these rumors all point to?

01:10:34 ◼   ► If they do that resolution at 27 inches I assume they would offer the same kind of scaling mode where you could simulate the

01:10:41 ◼   ► 2560 by 1440 of the real 27 inch now

01:10:45 ◼   ► And I would just do that and I'm it would look I'm sure at that at that size and that distance

01:10:50 ◼   ► I'm sure you wouldn't even go to the difference

01:10:52 ◼   ► Non-native res is impressive that it works as good as it does on the 15-inch, but I I don't want that on my desktop

01:10:58 ◼   ► I'll know it's there even if I can't see it

01:11:01 ◼   ► Well, unfortunately, if they're gonna go retina, I think it's almost certain. That's how they would do it

01:11:08 ◼   ► I think they would really say 27 inch at

01:11:12 ◼   ► 2840 by whatever like at double 25 or double 1920 by 1080 well

01:11:17 ◼   ► I mean I keep coming back to the the resolution of those desktop images that are included in Mavericks

01:11:22 ◼   ► They are on the nose exactly four times the number of pixels is on the existing

01:11:27 ◼   ► 27 inch display, and I can't I can't think that's a coincidence like why would you do it? I think you're right however

01:11:34 ◼   ► The way them the way that the retina MacBook Pro scales it is it renders its own virtual resolution at 2x

01:11:42 ◼   ► and then down samples that image to fit the physical pixels. So if the highest

01:11:48 ◼   ► virtual resolution it offered was double 2560 by 1440, it would need a wallpaper

01:11:54 ◼   ► that size to be native, and then it would scale it down to 3840 by whatever.

01:11:58 ◼   ► Wow, the whole rest of the screen isn't like that. They just would just scale it up to fit

01:12:01 ◼   ► the the TumbleRes and then they would scale it back down. It's the same thing

01:12:04 ◼   ► what they do with any other drawing, it doesn't fill the screen entirely. I have

01:12:08 ◼   ► to think that they're going for, I mean, maybe not. Maybe the first one will be that kind of

01:12:13 ◼   ► scale thing, but I don't like that. Who wants to run non-native res? It's gross.

01:12:16 ◼   ► >> I'm telling you, on my 15-inch Retina, I've run it all the time, and you can't even tell.

01:12:21 ◼   ► >> I've seen it. It does look impressively good. It looks nice enough that I wouldn't

01:12:27 ◼   ► mind running it like that on a laptop, which is like a compromised machine, but on a desktop

01:12:31 ◼   ► where I've got this gigantic thing with this amazing GPU power, what's the point of it if

01:12:35 ◼   ► I can't have, you know, that's the whole reason you're buying this thing with all this power,

01:12:39 ◼   ► is I want to have actual real native retina desktop display.

01:12:42 ◼   ► Maybe I can't afford that this year.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Maybe they come out with it at $4,000.

01:12:45 ◼   ► Fine, I'll wait.

01:12:46 ◼   ► You know, maybe I'll have to buy one of those non-native res ones in between to get through,

01:12:51 ◼   ► but out there, in my future, is 4x the 27-inch display native.

01:12:57 ◼   ► So here's a question that will probably come up then.

01:13:00 ◼   ► Suppose they launch the monitor I think they're going to launch, which is 3840 at 27 inches.

01:13:05 ◼   ► So it's going to be, you know, you'd have to scale it up to get that kind of real estate.

01:13:10 ◼   ► Do you buy it and just be upset about it and angry for a few years?

01:13:13 ◼   ► Or do you hold back and still use 1X monitors with the new Mac Pro?

01:13:19 ◼   ► Or do you not buy either?

01:13:20 ◼   ► Do you not buy the new Mac Pro and you don't buy the new monitor until it has the resolution

01:13:23 ◼   ► you want, which might never happen?

01:13:25 ◼   ► Oh, it will happen.

01:13:26 ◼   ► You know, of course it will happen eventually.

01:13:28 ◼   ► It's just a question of how long.

01:13:29 ◼   ► I would seriously consider trying to get like fire sale prices on the existing 27 inch and

01:13:35 ◼   ► just running 1x for a few more years.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Oh man.

01:13:38 ◼   ► See, I would so much rather run scaled 2x than run real 1x.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And it wouldn't be because of the non-native thing.

01:13:47 ◼   ► It would just be because the logical resolution of the 1x 27 inch would be higher.

01:13:50 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:13:51 ◼   ► Like real estate, I'm trading the ability to have more space on my desk to spread my

01:13:55 ◼   ► crap out for that crap looking super sharp.

01:13:59 ◼   ► So I would have to say, 1920 by--

01:14:03 ◼   ► logical resolution of like, if it's

01:14:06 ◼   ► 1080 in the short dimension, I would

01:14:08 ◼   ► want it to be at least 1,200.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Because I'm not going to go down.

01:14:10 ◼   ► I'm not going to go from 1920 by 1,200,

01:14:12 ◼   ► which is what I'm looking at now, logical resolution,

01:14:14 ◼   ► to a lower logical resolution.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Like an animal?

01:14:19 ◼   ► Well, that's part of the problem that I've-- well,

01:14:20 ◼   ► part of the way of justified not getting a retina MacBook Pro

01:14:23 ◼   ► is since I have the old school high res anti-glare MacBook

01:14:29 ◼   ► Pro. What is this running at? Let me see. 1680 by 1050. Yep. 1680 by 1050. And what is

01:14:35 ◼   ► your 15 run at if you're in like retinified? 1440 by 900. Right. That's terrible. That's

01:14:41 ◼   ► atrocious. Well, alright. But you can just toggle it. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But he runs

01:14:46 ◼   ► the non-native to get more stuff on the screen. I do. Let me run. I can tell you that there's

01:14:50 ◼   ► this great utility, by the way, I don't want to plug this. It's called iFriendly. That's

01:14:53 ◼   ► I spelled E-Y-E, i-friendly, it's this awesome like five buck thing in the Mac

01:14:57 ◼   ► App Store that it lets you assign those resolution scaling things to hotkeys on

01:15:03 ◼   ► retina MacBook Pros which is really really nice. So I have like if you smash

01:15:06 ◼   ► all three modifiers and hit up or down arrow I have that toggle through the

01:15:10 ◼   ► modes. It's really really cool. Yeah I don't know I'd be fine with the scale.

01:15:13 ◼   ► Like if that's what I have to do to get retina in the next five years that's

01:15:17 ◼   ► what I'll do. Wait but I don't understand and I'm really being serious I'm not

01:15:21 ◼   ► I'm not trying to poke the bear here.

01:15:22 ◼   ► If the whole point in the retina screen

01:15:25 ◼   ► is getting everything to look as pretty as it does on iOS,

01:15:28 ◼   ► where you've got double the density

01:15:31 ◼   ► for the same effective space,

01:15:34 ◼   ► doesn't scaling defeat the whole point of that?

01:15:37 ◼   ► Yeah, you get a lot more real estate,

01:15:38 ◼   ► but isn't that kind of defeating the whole point

01:15:40 ◼   ► of the retina screen in the first place,

01:15:41 ◼   ► or am I just totally missing something here?

01:15:43 ◼   ► - It's like one and a half scale,

01:15:45 ◼   ► where things get fuzzy around the edges

01:15:47 ◼   ► 'cause it's a non-native resolution,

01:15:48 ◼   ► But the pixels are so small that non-native resolution, it doesn't look as blurry as--

01:15:53 ◼   ► maybe these all make fun of people who run non-native on their 800 by 600 iBook, and

01:15:58 ◼   ► they would change to non-native res to make everything bigger and it would look terrible.

01:16:01 ◼   ► At that size, everything is so small that it just looks a little bit softer.

01:16:06 ◼   ► And I find that I think retina is more important to me on an iPad or an iPhone, because I think

01:16:11 ◼   ► I just hold it closer to my face, that I could see the pixels if they were there.

01:16:17 ◼   ► a desktop, because I'm using it for work and stuff, I really want more space to move stuff

01:16:22 ◼   ► around. And I also want it to be retinal. I want everything. If I have to trade one

01:16:26 ◼   ► for the other, I really have to see what the logical res is and just stare at it for a

01:16:30 ◼   ► while in a store and see, could I tolerate using this at a non-native res in the 1.5x

01:16:35 ◼   ► mode? I don't know.

01:16:37 ◼   ► So this is kind of like one of those computer philosophy things. It's like, you're still

01:16:40 ◼   ► running hard drives on your desktop, right?

01:16:44 ◼   ► At home, yeah.

01:16:45 ◼   ► So there were a lot of people that refused to use SSDs

01:16:49 ◼   ► and might still, because they were waiting until they could

01:16:52 ◼   ► just buy like a two terabyte one for 300 bucks,

01:16:55 ◼   ► something like that, which actually we're not that far off

01:16:56 ◼   ► from, but for years it's like you had these people

01:16:59 ◼   ► who were crazy like me who would buy a small SSD

01:17:03 ◼   ► and then a big hard drive and jump through the hoops

01:17:05 ◼   ► you need to make that be reasonably good,

01:17:07 ◼   ► just because it was so good to even have an SSD at all

01:17:12 ◼   ► that it was worth the kind of hack to get it earlier

01:17:15 ◼   ► than when you can go all SSD.

01:17:17 ◼   ► So now I wonder if that's gonna be like you with Retina,

01:17:20 ◼   ► like you seem like the kind of person,

01:17:22 ◼   ► like you will on principle, you will wait

01:17:25 ◼   ► and not get this until you can have

01:17:28 ◼   ► the exact resolution you want,

01:17:29 ◼   ► whereas I will jump in sooner and I'm willing

01:17:32 ◼   ► to tolerate a little bit of hackiness

01:17:34 ◼   ► to get this massive, what I perceive as a massive upgrade

01:17:38 ◼   ► that I really want very badly earlier.

01:17:41 ◼   ► But I really want the extra real estate almost as badly as the Ret.

01:17:44 ◼   ► Like that's the problem.

01:17:46 ◼   ► The thing that will change my life the most will be having more room on my screen to put

01:17:51 ◼   ► stuff and I was hoping not to have to go backwards and hoping, you know, to get Ret and I wouldn't

01:17:57 ◼   ► have to sacrifice space.

01:17:59 ◼   ► I would also get a small bump in space or whatever.

01:18:01 ◼   ► So that's the other change that I'm looking for.

01:18:03 ◼   ► And for the SSD hard drive thing, Fusion Drive nicely takes care of that.

01:18:05 ◼   ► I don't think there's an equivalent though of Fusion Drive unless it's that 1.5x mode.

01:18:10 ◼   ► Fusion Drive has almost none of the disadvantages of spinning disks and almost all the advantages

01:18:14 ◼   ► of Retina, and I'm not sure that's true of the non-native Res Retina screen.

01:18:19 ◼   ► I guess it also depends on how dense it is, because I think the 15-inch MacBook Air is

01:18:24 ◼   ► going to end up being more dots per inch, native dots per inch, than the Retina desktop

01:18:29 ◼   ► display.

01:18:30 ◼   ► So it might look different than your laptop does in non-native.

01:18:33 ◼   ► That's actually a good point.

01:18:34 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I bet you're right about that.

01:18:35 ◼   ► I hadn't considered that, but I'm also sitting much further away.

01:18:37 ◼   ► But you are right that I think it will be significantly lower density.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Because the Retina MacBook Pro is already 2880 by whatever, so it's already at 15

01:18:49 ◼   ► inches.

01:18:50 ◼   ► It's most of that resolution to 4K.

01:18:52 ◼   ► It's like three-quarters of the horizontal resolution.

01:18:55 ◼   ► So yeah, maybe.

01:18:56 ◼   ► If we learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that waiting for Apple to

01:19:00 ◼   ► rev its displays is like technology version of the crying game.

01:19:03 ◼   ► Not in the way you think.

01:19:09 ◼   ► So many of my past Mac purchases have been either based on "Surely they'll update

01:19:16 ◼   ► the displays" or "I shouldn't buy a display now because this display is really old and

01:19:20 ◼   ► surely they'll revise it soon."

01:19:21 ◼   ► And you just wait.

01:19:22 ◼   ► And you wait.

01:19:23 ◼   ► And it's just sadness all around, waiting for them.

01:19:25 ◼   ► I don't know why they take so long to revise their displays, but they do, and we should

01:19:28 ◼   ► just expect it.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Now who knows how long it will be before they pair a display worthy of their black trash

01:19:35 ◼   ► cans.

01:19:36 ◼   ► But there was that one exception where when they released the first 27-inch iMac, that

01:19:44 ◼   ► was like a revolution in displays for that time where like at the time you could get

01:19:48 ◼   ► 30-inch displays for over $2,000 or you could get a 27-inch iMac with a better quality,

01:19:56 ◼   ► dense panel of the same resolution with a free computer stuck to the back of it for

01:20:01 ◼   ► like 1500. And it like, and they were the first ones to have those panels in any kind

01:20:05 ◼   ► of quantity. And for a long time, the only way to get that panel was to buy an iMac.

01:20:09 ◼   ► That's what I'm saying. They didn't put them like, Oh, where's the monitor that's just

01:20:12 ◼   ► like that, but without the iMac attached? What do you mean doesn't exist? Right. But

01:20:16 ◼   ► so like, I'm hoping they pull something like that with retina, you know, obviously, I'll

01:20:19 ◼   ► attach it to the new Mac Pro. Just glue the garbage can to the back of the monitor. Well,

01:20:26 ◼   ► it would almost certainly require Thunderbolt 2.

01:20:29 ◼   ► And so you can pretty much only use the new

01:20:32 ◼   ► Retina MacBook Pro and the new Mac Pro,

01:20:35 ◼   ► which makes a lot of sense.

01:20:36 ◼   ► I mean, obviously, we've talked about this before,

01:20:38 ◼   ► at least I've talked about this endlessly every episode.

01:20:41 ◼   ► We've talked a lot about how all the pieces are in place.

01:20:44 ◼   ► It's very obvious that they're planning

01:20:46 ◼   ► for a Thunderbolt 2 display that will be Retina,

01:20:48 ◼   ► that will work only with the new MacBook Pro and Mac Pro.

01:20:52 ◼   ► The only question is when that's gonna be available

01:20:54 ◼   ► and whether it will be at long-term.

01:20:55 ◼   ► For whatever reason, the original Mac,

01:20:59 ◼   ► the Mac Pros were seemingly slated to come out earlier

01:21:02 ◼   ► in the fall originally, and this feels like a delay to me,

01:21:06 ◼   ► to come out in, quote, December.

01:21:08 ◼   ► And I could be wrong, but it feels like

01:21:11 ◼   ► they were supposed to come out at the November event

01:21:12 ◼   ► and they didn't.

01:21:13 ◼   ► And all the things they use, the CPUs from Intel

01:21:17 ◼   ► are already shipping in volume to everybody else.

01:21:19 ◼   ► The GPUs are not new, they're a little customized for Apple,

01:21:23 ◼   ► but it's not a new part, so they're probably not

01:21:25 ◼   ► having yield issues.

01:21:26 ◼   ► So I have to wonder, what's the holdup here?

01:21:29 ◼   ► What are they holding this back for?

01:21:30 ◼   ► The US manufacturing plant getting that up online.

01:21:33 ◼   ► It could be.

01:21:34 ◼   ► But I would imagine that that happened a long time ago.

01:21:37 ◼   ► Well, at this point, it's like, why even bother

01:21:39 ◼   ► releasing it this year?

01:21:40 ◼   ► Like, I'm sure they'll just release it when it's ready,

01:21:42 ◼   ► because they don't care.

01:21:43 ◼   ► But it's not as if the holiday season has anything

01:21:45 ◼   ► to do with Mac Pro purchases, right?

01:21:47 ◼   ► So it's like, what kind of company

01:21:49 ◼   ► puts a new product up for sale in December?

01:21:51 ◼   ► It's nothing to do with the holidays.

01:21:52 ◼   ► They'll probably just put it out.

01:21:53 ◼   ► If it's ready, they'll ship it, and so what?

01:21:55 ◼   ► But it's like, you know, people going on vacation and stuff.

01:21:58 ◼   ► If they wait until January, is the world going to end?

01:22:01 ◼   ► No.

01:22:02 ◼   ► If it's ready December 16th or whatever that rumor URL just flew through, then fine, they'll

01:22:04 ◼   ► ship it then.

01:22:05 ◼   ► But, you know, I'm not holding my breath for it.

01:22:08 ◼   ► And like I said, even when it comes out, you're not going to buy right away.

01:22:11 ◼   ► I'm going to go and fiddle with the configuration right away and then just see what I think.

01:22:14 ◼   ► Well, if it comes out with a Retina display, I will buy it right away.

01:22:18 ◼   ► That's the only thing that would make me buy it right away.

01:22:21 ◼   ► No question.

01:22:22 ◼   ► I would order it that day.

01:22:23 ◼   ► The 8 core with probably 32 gigs of RAM, 1 terabyte SSD,

01:22:27 ◼   ► and probably the mid-range video card.

01:22:30 ◼   ► I did some research on the video cards.

01:22:32 ◼   ► It looks like the mid-range one is substantially better

01:22:34 ◼   ► than the low-end one, and the high-end one

01:22:36 ◼   ► is not that much better than the mid-range one.

01:22:39 ◼   ► So yeah, I tell you right now,

01:22:40 ◼   ► that's a configuration I would get,

01:22:41 ◼   ► sight unseen, 8 core, middle video card,

01:22:45 ◼   ► 1 terabyte SSD, and 32 gigs of RAM.

01:22:48 ◼   ► That's it.

01:22:49 ◼   ► - That'll be $6,000, please.

01:22:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, probably.

01:22:51 ◼   ► You know, D. Sheehy in the chat asked a very important question.

01:22:54 ◼   ► Marco, are you going to choose pickup from Amazon's German--

01:22:56 ◼   ► or excuse me, Apple's German factory option

01:22:58 ◼   ► when you buy your Mac Pro?

01:23:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:02 ◼   ► Do we know where the factory is?

01:23:03 ◼   ► Is it somewhere weird?

01:23:05 ◼   ► I thought it was outside Austin.

01:23:06 ◼   ► No?

01:23:07 ◼   ► I could go.

01:23:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I could go to Austin.

01:23:08 ◼   ► They have good barbecue there.

01:23:10 ◼   ► They have very good barbecue there.

01:23:11 ◼   ► Breakfast tacos.

01:23:12 ◼   ► I mean, breakfast tacos are an awesome invention of the world.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Like, you got to-- and ever since South by Southwest

01:23:18 ◼   ► started sucking, I haven't gone there.

01:23:20 ◼   ► there's I can visit Dan Benjamin I could eat barbecue let's do it you want to road trip it no

01:23:26 ◼   ► definitely not doing that you don't you don't want to do this I know John definitely would like to

01:23:32 ◼   ► road trip from Boston to Austin I think they stopped BMWs to the border of Texas oh at least

01:23:39 ◼   ► democrats to affix the giant steer horns to the front and then you're allowed to continue

01:23:47 ◼   ► Clearly you haven't spent a lot of time in Texas, John. There's more to Texas.

01:23:51 ◼   ► Well, it's Austin. It's not really Texas.

01:23:52 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

01:23:54 ◼   ► Well, and keep in mind, like, the border of Texas is going to be substantially more rural than Austin.

01:24:00 ◼   ► Oh, man. All right. So I think... Are we good? Is that a sign?

01:24:05 ◼   ► We should probably cut it off there. Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week,

01:24:09 ◼   ► Hover, Igloo, and Squarespace, and we will see you next week.

01:24:15 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:24:20 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:24:23 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:24:26 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:24:30 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:24:33 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:24:36 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:24:41 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:24:46 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:24:50 ◼   ► So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:24:54 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment

01:24:57 ◼   ► S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse

01:25:02 ◼   ► It's accidental

01:25:05 ◼   ► They didn't mean to

01:25:08 ◼   ► Accidental

01:25:10 ◼   ► Tech by car so long

01:25:15 ◼   ► John, what's up with your car? Do you want to talk about that, or do you want to save

01:25:19 ◼   ► that for another time?

01:25:20 ◼   ► It's always another time. Let's do it now.

01:25:22 ◼   ► I've got lots of little items. You know, I'm still on the first tank of gas in that car.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Seriously?

01:25:27 ◼   ► The tank of gas came from the dealer.

01:25:28 ◼   ► Wow.

01:25:29 ◼   ► That shows both how little driving I do, and also, I guess, how fuel-efficient it is. Although,

01:25:32 ◼   ► I'm not getting great mileage, because I'm, you know, stop-and-go traffic all the time

01:25:35 ◼   ► to work. It's much better to go highway miles, but...

01:25:38 ◼   ► Now, is that a five-speed or a six-speed?

01:25:40 ◼   ► Six.

01:25:41 ◼   ► But the Civic was five?

01:25:42 ◼   ► Yeah, this is my first six-speed car.

01:25:44 ◼   ► I was about to ask to see the BMW as my first six-speed car.

01:25:47 ◼   ► I have not entered sixth gear yet, though.

01:25:49 ◼   ► I was about to ask.

01:25:51 ◼   ► I was just about to ask.

01:25:53 ◼   ► I've been in fifth, but not sixth.

01:25:55 ◼   ► Fair enough.

01:25:55 ◼   ► So how do you like it?

01:25:56 ◼   ► I'm still babying the car.

01:25:58 ◼   ► Like, I don't even look in-- I haven't finished going

01:26:00 ◼   ► through the owner's manual.

01:26:01 ◼   ► But what do they tell you these days for engine breaking?

01:26:05 ◼   ► Between 1,000 and 1,500, usually.

01:26:07 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's going to be a long time before I can wind this

01:26:10 ◼   ► thing out to see what it can do.

01:26:12 ◼   ► Can that wind out?

01:26:14 ◼   ► Oh, it winds out.

01:26:15 ◼   ► Oh, that's terrible.

01:26:16 ◼   ► And, you know, if you buy an M5, or lease an M5 and get it in Germany, apparently break-in

01:26:24 ◼   ► just doesn't matter.

01:26:25 ◼   ► Well, there is break-in, just that the limits are so ridiculous.

01:26:28 ◼   ► It's a leased car.

01:26:29 ◼   ► He's not keeping that engine long-term.

01:26:32 ◼   ► Anyway, I digress.

01:26:34 ◼   ► So tell me, what do you like and what do you not like about the Accord?

01:26:37 ◼   ► I have a big list of things I don't like.

01:26:41 ◼   ► You?

01:26:42 ◼   ► Somehow I am not at all surprised by that.

01:26:47 ◼   ► This is my third Honda Accord.

01:26:49 ◼   ► It's my fifth Honda and I've only ever owned Hondas, although I've driven Mazdas and Volvos

01:26:53 ◼   ► and other things that my parents have owned and stuff.

01:26:56 ◼   ► Part of the problem is when you have multiple kids, you're always comparing it to the past

01:27:00 ◼   ► ones.

01:27:01 ◼   ► In my old Honda, this was like that and now it's different.

01:27:05 ◼   ► A lot of the past models have the advantage of familiarity in my mind.

01:27:11 ◼   ► I imagine a lot of my complaints about the new one will fade as I become more familiar

01:27:15 ◼   ► with it.

01:27:16 ◼   ► In fact, after only driving it for a few weeks or whatever had it now, I've seen that start

01:27:19 ◼   ► to happen where the things that seem weird at first you just kind of start getting used

01:27:22 ◼   ► to and you realize it wasn't that it was worse, it was just different than the car you're

01:27:26 ◼   ► used to.

01:27:27 ◼   ► Because a lot of the things about driving cars are like sense memory of where things

01:27:33 ◼   ► are and how things feel inside the car and how the car moves and everything.

01:27:38 ◼   ► And it feels weird and alien at first, but then eventually you start settling in, you

01:27:42 ◼   ► start knowing where everything is.

01:27:43 ◼   ► But some things are clearly regressions from past Hondas, and that's just such a shame.

01:27:49 ◼   ► Such as?

01:27:50 ◼   ► Well, so let's start with the key fob.

01:27:51 ◼   ► Oh, is it massive, like all the modern ones?

01:27:54 ◼   ► They are, they have been getting bigger, right?

01:27:56 ◼   ► But in exchange, like, you know, the first Accord I got was the first car that had something

01:28:01 ◼   ► on the key fob, where you could press the button to unlock the doors, and that's good.

01:28:04 ◼   ► I like that feature, right?

01:28:06 ◼   ► But it's big.

01:28:07 ◼   ► Obviously you'd prefer it to be like the BMW magical little thing where there's no key part

01:28:11 ◼   ► It's just the fob and you have little buttons, but that's not the kind of car

01:28:14 ◼   ► This is that being said the BMW one is in my opinion way too big

01:28:18 ◼   ► Oh yours is enormous compared to mine, and yes

01:28:20 ◼   ► I'm talking about key fobs well the f30 the new 3-series is the same size as the as the one I have so you said

01:28:26 ◼   ► For reference it's like they get bigger. They keep getting bigger. Yeah, I don't understand why they're so big

01:28:32 ◼   ► It's like battery life or something. I have no idea so genuine question though John your

01:28:38 ◼   ► Key situation in the Accord it is not a proximity key

01:28:41 ◼   ► And you actually do have to insert a metal object into the steering column in order to start the car

01:28:46 ◼   ► Yeah

01:28:46 ◼   ► And that was one of the speaking of things that like seem weird at first be start to get used to

01:28:50 ◼   ► This and I don't know why they change things like this

01:28:52 ◼   ► But when you have a metal key that goes into a slot to start your car

01:28:56 ◼   ► The angle that that slot is is something you may not think about until it changes

01:29:00 ◼   ► So all the other Honda's that we have the angle is I don't know what angle it is

01:29:04 ◼   ► but I just kind of know like when you grab the key in your hand you and you reach around the side of the

01:29:07 ◼   ► Steering wheel to stick it in the slot

01:29:10 ◼   ► You kind of know what angle you have to put it at and it's a more vertical angle and in this new Accord

01:29:15 ◼   ► It's much closer to horizontal which is very weird to do, you know, like the twisting the key

01:29:19 ◼   ► But that's not I complain about the fob

01:29:21 ◼   ► I complain about the fob is the old one had had three buttons on it in a triangle type arrangement and

01:29:27 ◼   ► The buttons were two different sizes two different textures one was concave one was convex one had a ring with little studs around it

01:29:33 ◼   ► If you felt that thing in your pocket you could tell of those three buttons

01:29:37 ◼   ► They were differentiated way in every way you could differentiate them except for they were all circles

01:29:41 ◼   ► It was way easier to fish around there if you're this is unlocked. This is locked

01:29:44 ◼   ► This is open the trunk right you could feel it the new fob is like a rectangle cut into thirds and

01:29:50 ◼   ► The thing that divides it into thirds is at the same level as everything else

01:29:55 ◼   ► So it just feels like one big smooth continuous rectangle.

01:29:58 ◼   ► And you have to kind of feel your way along and go,

01:29:59 ◼   ► okay, the middle one is unlock and the top one is lock

01:30:04 ◼   ► and the bottom one, which is a little bit concave,

01:30:06 ◼   ► is like open the trunk or whatever.

01:30:07 ◼   ► And so it's so hard to feel around in your pocket

01:30:09 ◼   ► to find the unlock button for that thing.

01:30:10 ◼   ► You always have to end up taking it out

01:30:12 ◼   ► or really concentrating on feeling where that little ridge is

01:30:15 ◼   ► and that's a regression.

01:30:16 ◼   ► I don't know why you would take a design

01:30:17 ◼   ► where you had three distinct widely separated buttons

01:30:19 ◼   ► in a triangle pattern that have different textures

01:30:21 ◼   ► and make one button that's sliced into three parts bad.

01:30:25 ◼   ► There's another one in the minor complaint department,

01:30:28 ◼   ► these are all minor, I guess.

01:30:30 ◼   ► This is not really entirely Honda's fault,

01:30:32 ◼   ► but kind of their fault.

01:30:34 ◼   ► So you know about NHTSA,

01:30:35 ◼   ► National Highway Traffic Safety Administration?

01:30:37 ◼   ► - I've heard of it.

01:30:38 ◼   ► - Is that how you say it?

01:30:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, well that's all, yeah.

01:30:41 ◼   ► My first job was at Car Talk

01:30:42 ◼   ► and we did the stuff with NHTSA data.

01:30:44 ◼   ► I don't know if that's how you say it,

01:30:45 ◼   ► that's how I say it, that's how everyone at Car Talk said it.

01:30:47 ◼   ► - That's fair, that's authoritative.

01:30:48 ◼   ► - Well, not the show, the website,

01:30:50 ◼   ► so we could have all just been saying it wrong.

01:30:52 ◼   ► But anyway, it's like GIF, GIF.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Anyway, NHTSA has new requirements for headrests,

01:30:56 ◼   ► not new, but like new since last time I bought a car

01:30:58 ◼   ► 11 years ago or whatever,

01:31:00 ◼   ► that limits the distance between the back of your head

01:31:03 ◼   ► and the headrest, like 'cause they found that

01:31:05 ◼   ► there was less injury if that distance was smaller.

01:31:08 ◼   ► And so the new rules are that to accommodate people

01:31:12 ◼   ► sitting in the weird positions they sit in,

01:31:13 ◼   ► the headrests have to be closer to your head.

01:31:15 ◼   ► And sure enough, in this new accord,

01:31:17 ◼   ► if you were looking at the seat back,

01:31:19 ◼   ► The seat back was up like perpendicular to the ground which it never is because no one sits bolt upright in there

01:31:24 ◼   ► See, but if you were to put it like that the headrest is tilted forward way forward

01:31:28 ◼   ► To try to minimize distance between your head and the headrest so much so that if you actually had the the seat in a right

01:31:35 ◼   ► Angle which again nobody ever does you could like this headrest would be shoving your head down

01:31:39 ◼   ► And what people actually do is they tilt the seat way back and at that point then the headrest starts to become closer to vertical

01:31:45 ◼   ► But it is a way different experience of the headrest. It looks like the headrest is like reaching back and

01:31:49 ◼   ► Hitting your head, and you're like stop leave me alone

01:31:51 ◼   ► You want the headrest to go back and it's if you google for like 2014 Honda Accord headrest complaints

01:31:58 ◼   ► you'll find people complaining about this and

01:32:00 ◼   ► It's partially Honda's fault for making a headrest. It's so far forward like that and it's not adjustable or whatever I guess but

01:32:06 ◼   ► It's I think they're doing it to comply with regulations that the new regulations are that you have to have a smaller distance between your

01:32:13 ◼   ► head and the headrest. This is one of the things I'm kind of getting used to once you

01:32:16 ◼   ► realize that it's kind of there. It actually fits my head a little bit better than the

01:32:19 ◼   ► old headrest when it's adjusted correctly. But it is closer than I think it needs to

01:32:24 ◼   ► be because I would like to have my seat a little bit more upright than I actually do,

01:32:27 ◼   ► but I have to tilt it back just to get a reasonable – so the headrest doesn't poke me in the

01:32:31 ◼   ► back of the head constantly.

01:32:33 ◼   ► I guess one more before we get off this topic because I have a very long list. We should

01:32:37 ◼   ► come back to it each week and revisit things that – the stalks, you know, the stalks

01:32:42 ◼   ► for the blinkers and the wipers and everything.

01:32:45 ◼   ► I can't tell for sure without actually seeing an accord

01:32:48 ◼   ► with flappy paddles, because they do have--

01:32:50 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure they have accords with flappy paddles.

01:32:52 ◼   ► I think they put the flappy paddles on the CVT version.

01:32:55 ◼   ► It's some ungodly transmission that I don't even

01:32:57 ◼   ► want to think about.

01:32:58 ◼   ► How does that even make sense?

01:33:00 ◼   ► There's not even gears.

01:33:01 ◼   ► It doesn't.

01:33:02 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

01:33:04 ◼   ► But they do it.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Tons of car companies do this.

01:33:06 ◼   ► They put CVTs in them because they're cheap and everything,

01:33:08 ◼   ► and they also put flappy paddles on them just

01:33:09 ◼   ► to make people have fun flapping and make them feel like they

01:33:11 ◼   ► have expensive stuff.

01:33:13 ◼   ► But my theory is that the stalks are way higher than they used to be.

01:33:19 ◼   ► Like instead of being exactly horizontal, they're up on an angle like 45 degrees.

01:33:25 ◼   ► And I think they're way higher and actually mounted higher on the steering column to make

01:33:29 ◼   ► room for the flappy paddles that I don't have in my car.

01:33:32 ◼   ► So when I go for the stalks with my fingers, reach around from behind the rim of the steering

01:33:37 ◼   ► wheel to reach where the stalks are, they're way higher than I expect them to be because

01:33:39 ◼   ► all my other Hondas they were lower down. It could be that they just Honda decided the

01:33:43 ◼   ► stock should be higher up and they're just higher up in all their cars, but my theory

01:33:46 ◼   ► is that the empty space below them where I have nothing is where the flappy paddles would

01:33:49 ◼   ► go and they didn't want to make two versions of the steering column with stocks in different

01:33:52 ◼   ► positions. So that's a little bit annoying.

01:33:54 ◼   ► But overall, you still do like the car.

01:33:57 ◼   ► I have like a list of 80 more complaints, but I think that's enough for today. But yeah,

01:34:01 ◼   ► so far car's been treating me well. I've been trying to keep it in the garage to see how

01:34:05 ◼   ► long I can go acorn dent free.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Nice.

01:34:08 ◼   ► So far, so far so good there. No scratches, no dings. It's getting a little bit dirty, but you know.

01:34:13 ◼   ► So when I walk up to it in the parking lot, I'm still excited to see it with its big shiny wheels

01:34:18 ◼   ► and its undented bodywork. Get into it and it's leather wrapped steering wheel, which is nice,

01:34:26 ◼   ► even though it's not heated, and play with all my various AV connections. And I'm getting into

01:34:30 ◼   ► a good rhythm with the iPods that I connect. I connect my Shuffle to it a lot to listen to

01:34:33 ◼   ► podcasts on it and then I take the shuffle out of the car with me, you know, so I can

01:34:37 ◼   ► listen on my way up the stairs out of the parking garage and everything.

01:34:40 ◼   ► So that's working out pretty well.

01:34:42 ◼   ► And one of my iPods has a permanent home in the car connected to the actual iPod connector

01:34:46 ◼   ► with the integration with the steering wheel controls and everything.

01:34:49 ◼   ► That's what I use to listen to music.

01:34:51 ◼   ► So it's going pretty well.

01:34:53 ◼   ► You're like the worst friend to have when thinking about beta testing a podcast app.

01:34:58 ◼   ► I got to have the physical buttons.

01:35:00 ◼   ► I cannot look at a screen to pause the podcast.

01:35:03 ◼   ► And why do I have to pause the podcast?

01:35:05 ◼   ► Because the kids are asking me a question.

01:35:07 ◼   ► Because my wife is calling me.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Because something, you know, I want to be able to just reach a button without looking

01:35:11 ◼   ► and pause.

01:35:12 ◼   ► And I can do that with steering wheel controls, and I can do that with an iPod Shuffle.

01:35:15 ◼   ► Can't do it with an iOS iPod app.

01:35:18 ◼   ► Well, you can with a clicker, if you have the headphone clicker.

01:35:21 ◼   ► Yeah, but I'm wearing headphones.

01:35:22 ◼   ► It's going over the speakers in the car.

01:35:23 ◼   ► It's the whole point of the integration.

01:35:24 ◼   ► I want to have sound in the car.

01:35:26 ◼   ► So you use the wheel controls.

01:35:27 ◼   ► What's wrong with that?

01:35:28 ◼   ► controls can't pause.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Can't you just tap the off button to pause?

01:35:32 ◼   ► No, we went through this on Twitter, didn't we?

01:35:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:36 ◼   ► I mean, even just like queuing up the podcast, like I like the shuffle.

01:35:39 ◼   ► Again, because I want to listen to it when I'm getting ready in the morning, when I'm

01:35:44 ◼   ► getting out of my car, going out of the parking garage, going up the stairs to the building,

01:35:47 ◼   ► and on the way back down.

01:35:48 ◼   ► You wouldn't think that would make a difference, but that's, you know, five, ten minutes a

01:35:51 ◼   ► day when I want to have the podcast with me.

01:35:54 ◼   ► That's fair.

01:35:55 ◼   ► During that time, I also don't want to be fumbling with something in my pocket or accidentally

01:35:59 ◼   ► hitting it.

01:36:00 ◼   ► It's going to be difficult to get me to use an iOS iPod or a podcast application.

01:36:05 ◼   ► If Apple had just stopped making the shuffle, then that'll do it.

01:36:09 ◼   ► What do the kids think?

01:36:10 ◼   ► Do they even have an opinion?

01:36:11 ◼   ► I don't think they care.

01:36:12 ◼   ► Are they allowed in the car?

01:36:15 ◼   ► They know about new car smell.

01:36:16 ◼   ► They say, "What's that smell?

01:36:17 ◼   ► This is their first new car smell."

01:36:18 ◼   ► So they're excited about that.

01:36:20 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, because they're both a lot younger than your previous car.

01:36:23 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

01:36:25 ◼   ► true. They were too young when we got the 2006 Accord they were alive but they were

01:36:30 ◼   ► too young to care about that. I'm excited because now they're both old enough and big

01:36:34 ◼   ► enough to only be in boosters and they don't have to be in like the big seats that destroy

01:36:38 ◼   ► your car. Nice. And so hopefully the seats in this car will not be destroyed by you know

01:36:44 ◼   ► the gigantic car seat strapping mechanisms that destroy cars. For whatever it's worth

01:36:48 ◼   ► so far I've gotten away okay with that. Like for I don't know if it like I have like this

01:36:53 ◼   ► one little pad, this little skinny pad that sits between the two, but for the most part,

01:36:59 ◼   ► I have those things tight as hell, and I've been fine.

01:37:02 ◼   ► Well, leather is probably more durable than cloth in terms of resisting the compression

01:37:06 ◼   ► and everything, and also you're not supposed to have anything under the car seat. If you

01:37:08 ◼   ► go to the local fire department, they'll yell at you about that.

01:37:11 ◼   ► The cop who installed the first one didn't complain about the thing I had, because you

01:37:15 ◼   ► could still get it so ridiculously tight that if you shake the top, it doesn't even budge.

01:37:20 ◼   ► It's like it's that tight.

01:37:21 ◼   ► You know, it's like it's so locked down that I don't think anybody could really

01:37:26 ◼   ► complain about it.

01:37:27 ◼   ► Is he still rear-facing?

01:37:28 ◼   ► Yeah, we're to the point now where he doesn't need to be rear-facing, but the current wisdom

01:37:35 ◼   ► is that—which makes sense—is that you should rear-face pretty much until they can't

01:37:40 ◼   ► fit rear-facing anymore.

01:37:41 ◼   ► Like until their knees are at their chin rear-facing, then you have to turn it around.

01:37:46 ◼   ► You're not supposed to get it too long because their little legs can get caught between the

01:37:48 ◼   ► seat and things, so there is a length limit for everything. But yeah, the real seat destruction

01:37:53 ◼   ► doesn't happen until you go front-facing. You'll see when you get like a gigantic...

01:37:57 ◼   ► Wait, when they can kick the back of the...?

01:37:59 ◼   ► That's part of it. Yes, they get their stupid feet all over the back of your seats, but no,

01:38:02 ◼   ► the ones that... The big seats that strap in end up just pressing down into the foam of your seat

01:38:11 ◼   ► in like four points of wherever the seat hits, the car seat hits your seats. That really destroys it,

01:38:17 ◼   ► it because you have to crank it down with the seat belt and it's not like the rear-facing

01:38:20 ◼   ► has the advantage of kind of being pulled into the little wedge of your seat like you're

01:38:24 ◼   ► taking the car seat and pulling that thing into the wedge of the seat whereas the front-facing

01:38:28 ◼   ► one has got to kind of be pulled down into the seat you'll see when you get one there

01:38:33 ◼   ► and plus they weigh more and they have more scratchy things and there's a much heavier

01:38:37 ◼   ► kid sitting in them.

01:38:38 ◼   ► Well the one I have now is both that you can reverse it but I mean there's no seat belt

01:38:42 ◼   ► involved in them where now it's all latch.

01:38:43 ◼   ► Yeah, well, what model do you have? I hate latch. What model do you have?

01:38:46 ◼   ► Give me a second. I couldn't even tell you. Tiff would know. It's uh...

01:38:49 ◼   ► Give me a second. Talk about something else with Casey for two minutes while I'm looking up on Amazon.

01:38:54 ◼   ► Going through your order history? Yeah. Alright, I'll pull out another complaint. The pedals are too close in the new Accord.

01:39:00 ◼   ► It's the Britax Marathon 70 G3.

01:39:03 ◼   ► Uh, yeah, Marathon. Alright, I know that one.

01:39:05 ◼   ► Yeah, it's it's pretty... the one we had before for the infant car seat we had was the Graco

01:39:11 ◼   ► whatever, Snug Ride, whatever, whatever.

01:39:13 ◼   ► It was a piece of crap.

01:39:15 ◼   ► Every time I had to remove or mount that car seat,

01:39:19 ◼   ► I wanted to burn down the world.

01:39:20 ◼   ► It was just a total piece of crap, like the latch--

01:39:26 ◼   ► horrible.

01:39:27 ◼   ► The Britax Marathon has been fantastic so far.

01:39:30 ◼   ► It's night and day difference in installation, qualities, views,

01:39:34 ◼   ► massive difference.

01:39:35 ◼   ► I don't know if we had a marathon.

01:39:37 ◼   ► I think we might have had another similar one.

01:39:39 ◼   ► But this is still like a little kid's seat.

01:39:41 ◼   ► Once you get the-- the big kids' seats are just brutal.

01:39:44 ◼   ► Like, if you can look at the little-- the part that contacts

01:39:47 ◼   ► the bottom, that little sort of the foot of the thing,

01:39:50 ◼   ► that is a much gentler foot than the big ones to start just--

01:39:56 ◼   ► yeah.

01:39:57 ◼   ► And the other thing is the food.

01:39:58 ◼   ► Oh, god.

01:39:58 ◼   ► The food that grinds into the thing that's underneath it

01:40:01 ◼   ► as they throw their food out, and then it

01:40:03 ◼   ► goes underneath there.

01:40:04 ◼   ► And then the sticky candy gets in there,

01:40:06 ◼   ► and then the seed is grinding it into the--

01:40:08 ◼   ► It's just, it's disgusting.

01:40:10 ◼   ► Kids are disgusting.

01:40:10 ◼   ► They just throw your car.

01:40:12 ◼   ► So no, I'm really excited about that I

01:40:13 ◼   ► don't have to have those giant seats in there anymore.

01:40:18 ◼   ► No more latch, no more belting the seat belt in,

01:40:22 ◼   ► doing the little clicky ratcheting thing, no more of that.

01:40:25 ◼   ► Just boosters.

01:40:26 ◼   ► Just boosters, yeah.

01:40:28 ◼   ► So you said you still have the first tank of gas,

01:40:30 ◼   ► and presumably the range on one of those

01:40:33 ◼   ► is somewhere around 400 miles on a tank?

01:40:36 ◼   ► I think it's less than that.

01:40:36 ◼   ► I think it's like 300 and something.

01:40:38 ◼   ► It's small tanks.

01:40:39 ◼   ► They put small tanks in them.

01:40:40 ◼   ► So, at that rate, if you've had the car, what, three or four weeks now?

01:40:44 ◼   ► Something like that, yeah.

01:40:46 ◼   ► So if you call it a month, that says it's going to take you another three months to

01:40:50 ◼   ► just get out of break-in.

01:40:51 ◼   ► It's in the honeymoon period.

01:40:52 ◼   ► Well, when we go on our summer trip to Long Island, this will be the car we take.

01:40:56 ◼   ► So that may be its first long trip.

01:40:58 ◼   ► Because Long Island never has any traffic or anything.

01:41:00 ◼   ► You'll be fine.

01:41:01 ◼   ► Well, we don't go the traffic-y way.

01:41:03 ◼   ► You sound like somebody from DC.

01:41:05 ◼   ► It's the same thing in DC.

01:41:06 ◼   ► "Oh, DC traffic is terrible."

01:41:08 ◼   ► "Oh no, it's not.

01:41:09 ◼   ► It's not terrible at all."

01:41:11 ◼   ► And so like the Hausman's, who I know Marco is friendly with, Stephanie had said, "Oh,

01:41:17 ◼   ► the traffic is fine in DC as long as you know where you're going."

01:41:20 ◼   ► "Oh no, just today," she tweets a picture of her on 95 or 495 or God knows what, "stopped

01:41:27 ◼   ► because DC traffic is terrible."

01:41:29 ◼   ► And I think Marco was going to say, "Long Island's the same way."

01:41:31 ◼   ► Well, and like everyone always thinks they have like their own little secret way that

01:41:34 ◼   ► they can go that won't have traffic. And then the problem is there's like, you know, millions

01:41:39 ◼   ► of people who all have the same idea and everyone thinks they have – it's like the AT&T store

01:41:44 ◼   ► on iPhone launch.

01:41:46 ◼   ► My way is not secret, but it actually avoids traffic.

01:41:50 ◼   ► Sure.

01:41:51 ◼   ► You just don't go on roads, you go on a boat. If you go from New London to Orient Point,

01:41:58 ◼   ► there's no traffic. Hey, I solved the problem. That's what we do when we go down there.

01:42:03 ◼   ► We take New London Ferry to Orient Point.

01:42:05 ◼   ► On that boat trip, there is no traffic.

01:42:08 ◼   ► I guess there's boat traffic, but they don't get in your way.

01:42:10 ◼   ► And then once you go from Orient down to where we stay, you're going in the North Fork.

01:42:18 ◼   ► It's not against or with traffic, there's just nobody there.

01:42:20 ◼   ► We don't get close to the city, so yeah, that's how you avoid traffic.

01:42:23 ◼   ► Take boats.

01:42:24 ◼   ► Going down to New London is usually not that bad.

01:42:26 ◼   ► It could be a couple.

01:42:27 ◼   ► I mean, it depends on what day we leave, but that'll be enough highway miles to get out.

01:42:32 ◼   ► I used to drive around, and then, I mean, it's not terrible.

01:42:36 ◼   ► There's always a little bit of traffic around the city, but you would actually end up getting

01:42:40 ◼   ► -- depending on where you're driving, it's very possible that you could get there faster

01:42:43 ◼   ► by driving around than you would by taking a ferry, because the ferry -- you've got to

01:42:46 ◼   ► wait for the ferry to show up, and the ferry is actually kind of slow, but you're not driving

01:42:49 ◼   ► during that time, so it's better.

01:42:51 ◼   ► It turns out boats full of cars are slower than cars.

01:42:55 ◼   ► They are, but it feels faster because you get a break, unless you're like me and can't

01:43:00 ◼   ► stand boats, but it's a testament to how unwilling I am to drive around, or how unwilling my

01:43:07 ◼   ► whole family is to drive around these days that I'm actually willing to get on a boat.

01:43:11 ◼   ► Although I dread it every time.

01:43:13 ◼   ► Are there any transport methods that you enjoy?

01:43:16 ◼   ► When I'm driving my car, I'm more or less fine with that, but no one likes to be stuck

01:43:21 ◼   ► in traffic, I guess.

01:43:24 ◼   ► I'm okay with teleportation.

01:43:25 ◼   ► Anyone wants to work on that?

01:43:27 ◼   ► I would love to hear Jon go hypercritical on teleportation.

01:43:32 ◼   ► I can only imagine what that would feel like.

01:43:34 ◼   ► I read too many bad sci-fi stories about the dangers of teleportation that I imagined.

01:43:38 ◼   ► It wouldn't go well.

01:43:40 ◼   ► It doesn't seem worth the risk.

01:43:42 ◼   ► I wouldn't go first. Let someone else go first, you know?