0:00:00But where's my data? But I had a backup! I used Time Machine!
0:00:07Alright, is this the show? I guess.
0:00:11I don't even know. John, you have some FU, don't you?
0:00:14Yeah, I sure do. Last week we talked about Cisco VPN, Enterprise Software, and all that stuff.
0:00:19And I was trying to, like, I was telling a story from my life with a broader point about Enterprise Software.
0:00:25But the specifics of it were what most of you got responses to.
0:00:30One of the big responses was, "Hey, do you need that new version of the Cisco VPN software?
0:00:35Because even though you couldn't get it because you don't have a service contract or whatever,
0:00:39here are various places where you can get it, or do you want me to email it to you?
0:00:42If you do a Google search for this, you'll find it," or so on and so forth.
0:00:44So a lot of people were nice in offering me this piece of software, which I don't know
0:00:48if it's like, is that illegal software copying?
0:00:51Is that a—
0:00:52Probably.
0:00:53—a commercial piece of software?
0:00:54Thank everyone for their offers.
0:00:56I did not take anyone up on their offer
0:00:57'cause as I think I said at the end
0:00:59of the little segment last week,
0:01:02the final result of that was that it was partly my fault
0:01:05for not reading the message
0:01:06and that even if I could get the software,
0:01:07it didn't matter because I had to wait
0:01:10for my IT department to approve it for use.
0:01:12Like it has to be, this new version has to be approved
0:01:14for use with all the other stuff they do
0:01:15and then when it's approved for use,
0:01:17they will put it up on their download thing
0:01:20that you gotta go through the Java applet for or whatever.
0:01:21So anyway, even if I can get the software,
0:01:23which I totally could if I wanted to Google for the things that people tell me to Google
0:01:26for or whatever.
0:01:27It wouldn't do me any good because it's against our IT department's policy to install it.
0:01:31So I'm just now patiently waiting.
0:01:33So thanks for all the help, but I don't need it right now.
0:01:37And the second bit is from the—this is an AnyConnect Twitter account.
0:01:41Of course there is.
0:01:42I don't know why I didn't think this VPN software—this specific VPN software product wouldn't have
0:01:45a Twitter account, but it does.
0:01:47And the AnyConnect Twitter account responded a few times to me, and one of the things they
0:01:51they said was that about Cisco being clueless about 10.9,
0:01:55they said that Cisco had announced this issue publicly
0:01:58and reported it to Apple prior to the release.
0:02:00And a couple of other people said that
0:02:02there was some networking-related change really late
0:02:05in the beta period, like maybe right before GM
0:02:08that caught a lot of people off guard.
0:02:09So apparently, if you were following the right places
0:02:11that I wasn't following, you would have known
0:02:14that they were gonna be incompatible with 10.9
0:02:16and that they weren't ready in time of the GM.
0:02:18So apologies to Cisco for saying that they did not know
0:02:2110.9 was coming. Obviously they did. They had an issue. They filed with Apple. They
0:02:24just didn't get their stuff working in time for the 10.9 release. They did get it working
0:02:28a couple weeks afterwards. And now I'm just waiting on my IT department, however long that will take.
0:02:32That's always fun.
0:02:36Yeah. And the other thing I found out is a lot of people were recommending third party
0:02:40Cisco VPN compatible clients. One thing I think some people are confused about is that
0:02:45the built-in OS 10 VPN works with some Cisco VPNs,
0:02:49and we used to have a Cisco VPN that the built-in one worked with,
0:02:52and that was great, because no software to install,
0:02:54your OS works with it out of the box, it worked in 10.8, I think it worked in 10.7,
0:02:58but this new Cisco product they bought doesn't work with the built-in VPN.
0:03:02So a lot of people are saying, "Oh, here's how you can decrypt this file
0:03:05and get the right things to enter into the OS VPN preferences."
0:03:09I had already done that, I already had figured out all that stuff
0:03:11and it was working, but they upgraded, side-graded, whatever,
0:03:14change to AnyConnect which doesn't work with the built-in VPN but there are third-party
0:03:18products that you can buy not from Cisco that will apparently work with Cisco AnyConnect.
0:03:23One of them was called OpenConnect, it's like an open source project or whatever that looked
0:03:25like a little bit too much work for me to try to install.
0:03:28Another one is called Shimo which I checked out.
0:03:31I could not get it to work and I didn't want to fight with it because if I fail to get
0:03:35it to work three times in a row I get locked out which I did.
0:03:38I didn't really have to call someone on the phone.
0:03:39I asked them to unlock my thing for me so I'm just going to stick with the Cisco AnyConnect
0:03:44VPN, wait for my work to approve it for use, and then upgrade everything and continue my
0:03:50life.
0:03:51All right.
0:03:52We also had a great bit of follow-up from a guy named Jared who asks, "I'm wondering
0:03:58what you might perceive as a market for better enterprise software.
0:04:02I know that's a big question, but is there a place for a smaller company whose focus
0:04:07is enterprise software to come in and disrupt one of the big guys with something vastly
0:04:11better without the name recognition?
0:04:13I've been fighting with enterprise accounting software and seriously considering writing
0:04:16my own to try and combat the insanity that is most accounting software, but I'd be
0:04:20fighting an uphill battle.
0:04:21I'd love to hear your thoughts."
0:04:24So I picked this as something I wanted to talk about because my first job out of college
0:04:29was actually at a small enterprise software company trying to disrupt a bigger enterprise
0:04:33software market.
0:04:35And so I learned a lot there.
0:04:38And most of what I learned was just because I was a smart-ass college kid just out of
0:04:43school and thinking I knew everything and entering the workforce.
0:04:46And I was working with a bunch of way smarter people than me who were way better programmers
0:04:50and had much more wisdom accumulated among them.
0:04:53And so I got my butt kicked pretty severely in the best possible way during that first
0:04:59year or two, just like learning how to be a real professional software developer instead
0:05:04of just some college kid who runs a program. Part of that growing up process is that I
0:05:13think every programmer when they leave college is very likely to be the kind of person, and
0:05:17I certainly was, who looks at anything else and says, "Oh, well that's stupid. Why
0:05:22do they do it that way? Why don't they just do X, Y, Z?" Like, you think everything's
0:05:26a simple problem, and you think everyone else is an idiot. And obviously the reason why
0:05:30this sucks is because they're all stupid, and I know better, and I can walk in there
0:05:34and take over, you know, or I would do it better.
0:05:39And so I had a look at this market from that point of view.
0:05:43I'm not saying that's Jared's point of view, it probably isn't.
0:05:45He's probably, you know, more experienced than that, but that was certainly my point
0:05:48of view.
0:05:49And I learned kind of the hard way why enterprise software is so hard.
0:05:54And it really is.
0:05:55It's not as simple as, oh, well, crappy programmers write it because they didn't want to work
0:05:59on consumer stuff.
0:06:00It's not that at all.
0:06:01It's also not that the developers of enterprise software are just, you know, they don't
0:06:07care about interface or they don't care about quality.
0:06:09It isn't that at all.
0:06:10It's that the enterprise market is really, really complicated and it's not nearly as
0:06:16easy as the consumer market to enter.
0:06:18So one of the biggest reasons is just the buyers.
0:06:21When you think about the culture of a company, and in case you mentioned this a little bit
0:06:25last episode with meetings and people wanting to be heard and wanting to not get fired and
0:06:29relevant. One of the biggest problems is that, you know, you've heard the phrase, "Nobody
0:06:37ever got fired for buying IBM." And if you think about, like, if you're a big business
0:06:43buying a big enterprise software product and you're the IT manager or you're the CIO, whatever
0:06:48they do, you know, something like that, I don't know enough about these terms to know
0:06:52who makes these decisions usually, but let's call it the IT manager. If you install some
0:06:58crazy email system from a startup and the guy before you was running Lotus Notes, which
0:07:04is horrible for the users. It's horrendous for the users. But it's like, you know,
0:07:08quote enterprise and it's well known. You know, nobody ever got fired for installing
0:07:11Lotus Notes, although they probably should. Which by the way, Lotus is owned by IBM.
0:07:16Yeah, I know. It makes that extra funny. But although I don't think that it was always
0:07:21that way. But anyway, it doesn't matter. If you devote your whole company's budget
0:07:29for Category X and all this effort to install it and everything, and it turns out to kind
0:07:34of suck for you, if that's a really well-known thing, like Microsoft Office or the Exchange
0:07:40server, no one's going to fire you for that because that was a reasonable decision to
0:07:44make. If you go buy some kind of crazy startup thing and that doesn't work very well or
0:07:48or people just don't like it, that's on you.
0:07:50And so there's a lot of pressure just from the situation
0:07:53you're in there.
0:07:54There's a lot of pressure to go with
0:07:55the big established things.
0:07:56It's also a very human intensive sales process.
0:08:02You hear, there's an article forever ago
0:08:06that I'll have to link to on Joel on Software
0:08:08about software pricing, which I've probably linked to
0:08:10like 10 times over the last five years for various things.
0:08:14But one of the things he mentions is that
0:08:17there's really not a lot of software between $1,000 and $50,000. Because once you get above
0:08:24a certain price threshold, you have to start flying a sales force out to meet with potential
0:08:29customers and play golf with them and schmooze with them and go out there to support everything.
0:08:35And so it becomes a much more expensive proposition for you, the software vendor, to even sell
0:08:41software to big enterprises. So you have to charge a massive amount.
0:08:46That same process, that big sales process,
0:08:48makes it so that you basically have to have
0:08:51a very large sales force and a dedicated sales force
0:08:54to fly out and meet with people all the time
0:08:58if you want to sell enterprise software
0:09:00in any meaningful volume.
0:09:01You can't, for the most part, you can't just like
0:09:04have a website and a download button and that's it.
0:09:07Like much of the software, you gotta fly people out,
0:09:09schmooze with them, meet with them for months, et cetera.
0:09:13And then once you get the software built,
0:09:16Let's say you actually sell it to them, or you come close.
0:09:19Then you have to deal with their requirements.
0:09:22And this is one of the reasons why enterprise software is
0:09:25so expensive and why there's not a whole lot of choices
0:09:28for a lot of the stuff there.
0:09:31Enterprise stuff has to work at much larger scales and much
0:09:35higher reliability than a lot of consumer software.
0:09:39You might design your app thinking that, oh,
0:09:43what's the maximum number of database records
0:09:45that I'm going to have to handle in this app. What is it, maybe a million? And then
0:09:49you find out that your customer has to import 15 million records a year from the last 30
0:09:56years from their ancient system that was running on a mainframe that some contractors built
0:10:00in the 80s. It's that kind of scale that you're operating at with so many companies.
0:10:08You also have all these needs, like what John was saying last week. You have security needs,
0:10:13you have regulatory needs, you have logging and auditing and fine grain access control
0:10:17and groups and permissions and all these things that are so often required by enterprise customers
0:10:25that that's, you know, consumer stuff doesn't need most of that stuff or can get away with
0:10:29a smaller scale version of that or a less, a less official version of things like that.
0:10:33There's also, you know, you might have requirements in certain industries about like they might
0:10:39might want to know how you run your company.
0:10:41They might want to have security audits of your company.
0:10:44Quality audits of things like Six Sigma quality
0:10:48certifications, stuff like that.
0:10:50I don't know enough about it to say more of them.
0:10:52Stuff like that.
0:10:54They might put the burden on you to say,
0:10:55well, for us to buy your software,
0:10:58we have to have these organizations or regulatory bodies
0:11:01verify that your company is legit and secure.
0:11:05A lot like PCI compliance in the payment industry,
0:11:07that kind of thing.
0:11:08Can I interject real quick?
0:11:10Yeah.
0:11:10As somebody who has either worked for big enterprises
0:11:14as a consultant, or I also spent some time at a huge company--
0:11:17it wasn't a software company, but it was a huge company,
0:11:19nevertheless-- this is absolutely true.
0:11:22And a lot of times, you'll have really progressive and really
0:11:27smart developers putting in-- I touched on this last episode--
0:11:30putting in a situation where, because of all
0:11:33the requirements put on them about code reviews
0:11:35and about even the version control you use,
0:11:38Like in a past job, I had to use the rational suite where I couldn't check in code unless
0:11:43I associated it with a task in the bug/work tracking part of that same tool.
0:11:51So I couldn't make a change to the code unless I was tagging it and associating it with something
0:11:57that somebody else more important than me told me to do.
0:12:00And that's extremely, extremely frustrating.
0:12:03And the other thing is with big companies, they've typically been around long enough
0:12:07that they have screwed up in every possible way.
0:12:10And the answer to screwing up when you're in a big company
0:12:13is to make a procedure so you don't do that exact thing
0:12:16again.
0:12:17And so now you have a million and five procedures.
0:12:20And Marco, you were touching on this
0:12:21with Six Sigma and blah, blah, blah.
0:12:23You have a million and five procedures in place
0:12:25to avoid you pretty much getting work done
0:12:28with any sort of urgency or speed.
0:12:30And it's very, very difficult and very frustrating.
0:12:33You're absolutely right.
0:12:35And then, and the sales process is also weird,
0:12:38because first of all, there's analyst reports.
0:12:40These things are so big, and there's so much money at stake,
0:12:43one of the things analysts are paid to do
0:12:45is tell companies what kind of enterprise software
0:12:47they should be buying.
0:12:49And the analyst game at that scale is kind of a scam.
0:12:53You, as a software vendor, basically have
0:12:56to pay massive sums of money to become members or clients
0:13:01of the analyst firms, and then they'll start recommending you.
0:13:04And it's not ever actually said that way,
0:13:07but that's kind of how it works in practice.
0:13:09And so there's a lot of companies
0:13:10that they'll only buy what some analyst tells them to buy,
0:13:14and so you have to kind of get in that game.
0:13:15And it's a very expensive game to get into.
0:13:17And then even when you get in, it's like, well,
0:13:19they might not recommend you, or they might not put you
0:13:20in the right boxes or something.
0:13:22- Compliance is like that, too.
0:13:24I've been through a lot of compliance things,
0:13:26and those are basically like extortion scams.
0:13:28Because the company will come, you'll pay a company
0:13:32to come to tell you whether you are compliant with something,
0:13:35whether it be PCI or a million other acronym standards
0:13:38that you have to comply with.
0:13:39And they'll tell you which things
0:13:41you are non-compliant about.
0:13:43And then they will sell you consulting services
0:13:45to make you compliant.
0:13:46And after you pay this very same company the money
0:13:49to help remediate your failures to comply,
0:13:52then they will give you your certification.
0:13:55And once you get that critical mass of everybody
0:13:58in the X industry needs to have Y certification compliance just
0:14:02to be a player because people start putting it on each other's requirements. Marco talked
0:14:07about the requirements. Once everyone starts putting it on their requirements and everyone
0:14:10decides they have to be on it, the culture of companies that build up around allowing
0:14:14companies to get that compliance as a sort of little cabal, it's kind of like I was saying
0:14:20before with the startups all passing money back and forth to each other until the venture
0:14:24capital money ran out. Only this is for actual profitable companies and they're passing money
0:14:27back and forth to these middlemen who give them the compliance so that they can continue
0:14:31to sell to people and the little people who can't afford to play that compliance game.
0:14:34I'll let these compliance things start with the right intentions, especially government
0:14:39compliance, like in general, have some good intentions to begin with.
0:14:45And then there are just people finding little nooks and crannies of profit where they can
0:14:52live as the big sucker fish on the government shark or on the compliance shark and say,
0:14:55"We have found a little area where we can be profitable by helping other companies comply
0:14:59with these stupid things, it's not a pleasant place to be, this whole enterprise environment.
0:15:05And I've talked about it on past shows, where I think this whole environment that we just
0:15:10described, all these different things about that are weird and terrible and that people
0:15:13have to do, it eventually produces companies that are not able to compete.
0:15:19In the short term and the medium term, it produces companies that can crush other companies.
0:15:22But in the long term, it resigns you to death.
0:15:26Because once you're completely ossified with procedures and compliance and all that other
0:15:29stuff and you were the king of your mountain of these other big companies that are all
0:15:33playing the same game and you've defeated them all and there's like two or three of
0:15:36you left and you think you're the winner, some other little furry mammal comes up and
0:15:42the comet comes and you die and the furry mammal grows up to be the next dinosaur.
0:15:46Like that's the evolutionary process.
0:15:48And getting back to this question from Jared about like what do we think about some small
0:15:52company disrupting, stuff like that. This is happening all the time, this constant turnover
0:15:57of like the little company comes, then they become the big company, then they become a
0:16:01giant behemoth that can't do anything, and then they die, and the next one comes. That's
0:16:05always taking place. And in the enterprise market, a lot of places that are small, like
0:16:11I'm thinking of Igloo, one of our past sponsors with the whole big internet software. It's
0:16:15so easy to make a product that end users want to use more than the things that they're forced
0:16:20to use. The trick is for those companies to either be so incredibly desirable that the
0:16:26important people want it, and that's like the iPhone approach, where like, it doesn't
0:16:29matter, the CEO has an iPhone, the CTO has an iPhone, all the CLL executives have iPhones,
0:16:34IT department, you're going to make iPhones work with our network. I don't care, I don't
0:16:38want to hear about BlackBerry, just make it work. Like that's one way to go in there,
0:16:40and that's sort of like a, you know, from the top down type of approach. And the other
0:16:45one is the bottom up approach, where in our company at least, like we have SharePoint,
0:16:50which Casey can tell us all about how wonderful that is.
0:16:53And we all hate it, and it's terrible.
0:16:55And people just, you know, individual people,
0:16:58not developers, but just like regular,
0:17:00everybody, anybody in the company,
0:17:01salespeople, managers, everybody,
0:17:03just start using their own Dropbox accounts,
0:17:05or making shared Dropbox accounts with like, you know,
0:17:08just random names, then sharing them amongst all the people,
0:17:10because it was easier to share files with Dropbox.
0:17:12But that's not compliant with all our compliance stuff.
0:17:14So then it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
0:17:16you can't be using Dropbox, we have all these requirements,
0:17:18Data has to be in-house, has to be encrypted,
0:17:20but you know, blah, blah, blah.
0:17:22And what we're switching to now is box.net,
0:17:25which is like a secure Dropbox type of thing
0:17:28that lets you self-host and stuff like that.
0:17:30That's kind of like the igloo approach,
0:17:31where you take a product that any users really like,
0:17:34but they may not have enough of the requirements
0:17:38to get into an enterprise,
0:17:39and you go from the consumer side and you say,
0:17:41what if we just add just enough features and compliance
0:17:44to get us into not all enterprises,
0:17:46not even the biggest enterprises,
0:17:47But now we're a player in the small to medium business type of thing where we'll take a
0:17:52product that everybody loves.
0:17:54Apple did it itself with the iPhone.
0:17:55Take the iPhone that everybody loves and don't make it into a Blackberry, but give it enough
0:18:00enterprise features like remote wipe, the little bit of a management service or whatever.
0:18:03You don't bend over backwards and pervert your product to make it into a true enterprise
0:18:06software.
0:18:07You merely take a really desirable product that consumers love and you do what it takes
0:18:11to get in the door.
0:18:13And that's a bottom-up type approach.
0:18:14And there's a new Dropbox for business announcement as well.
0:18:17So now everyone's kind of doing that, where you can get into the enterprise without the
0:18:21fleet of salespeople and without being like, "We'll do anything for you in the big support
0:18:26contracts and stuff like that," by just taking a successful consumer product that you know
0:18:29people are using anyway, sort of on the sly or illegally, quote unquote, and just do what
0:18:33it takes to get in the door of a couple of businesses.
0:18:36I think that is a viable strategy for disruption.
0:18:39We'll see 30 years from now what the state of file sharing within large enterprises looks
0:18:43like.
0:18:44I was talking at work with somebody today, just today actually, and he was saying that
0:18:51he was talking to big banks at some conference a while ago.
0:18:55That must have been fun.
0:18:57Well, you would think not, but actually I guess it was very interesting.
0:19:00My coworker was saying he was talking to, I guess, like a director of innovation or
0:19:04something like that at a big bank.
0:19:06This particular gentleman said, "You know, I don't fear the other big banks, and I genuinely
0:19:12don't know which bank it was.
0:19:13But for the sake of conversation, let's say it was Bank of America.
0:19:16And the guy from Bank of America said, "I don't fear Capital One and I don't fear
0:19:20Wells Fargo."
0:19:21You know who I fear?
0:19:22The little startups because they can move so much faster than we can and there's nothing
0:19:28I can do about that.
0:19:29And that makes me think of, say, Square.
0:19:31And Square is never going to replace the Bank of America, but Square is my go-to mechanism
0:19:36for giving money to friends in sums more than like $10 or whatever I would have in my wallet.
0:19:42And if I have to pay a friend that I don't see on a regular basis because he did me a
0:19:46favor or I bought something from them secondhand or whatever the case may be, you know what
0:19:51I do?
0:19:52I use square cash.
0:19:53And it's that sort of disruption—I hate to use that word, I'm probably misusing
0:19:57it—but that sort of air-quote disruption that I think is scary.
0:20:01I think Jared's spot on in saying, you know, maybe that's possible.
0:20:05And if you make a great product, it could happen.
0:20:09This week's first sponsor is a repeat sponsor, I think.
0:20:13But anyway, we've had other things from them before.
0:20:17This week it is Ting.
0:20:19Ting is from the people at Two Cows.
0:20:21They are the same company, the parent company of Hover
0:20:23and so many good things.
0:20:24Ting is mobile that makes sense.
0:20:27They're a no BS, simple to use mobile service provider.
0:20:31They're a reseller on the, they're an MVNO,
0:20:33if anybody remembers that acronym.
0:20:35They're an MVNO reseller of the US nationwide Sprint network.
0:20:40If you go to our special URL, ATP.Ting.com, to get $25 off a new device or a $25 service
0:20:48credit if you bring your own.
0:20:50So Ting has great rates, and there's no contracts or early termination fees.
0:20:55You buy and own your device outright from the start.
0:20:58So they don't need you to have a contract or come back or pay these big ETFs.
0:21:02And what's most interesting about them, I think,
0:21:04is that they have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.
0:21:08You pay a base price of $6 per month per device,
0:21:11and then above that, you're just automatically billed
0:21:13for the actual amount of minutes or messages or megabytes
0:21:16that you actually use each month.
0:21:18So for instance, if you never use voice or messages,
0:21:21you don't pay for them.
0:21:22If you use, let's say you use 100 megs of data this month,
0:21:25that's a total of just $9,
0:21:27including that $6 per device base cost, nine bucks.
0:21:30And then next month, let's say you're traveling
0:21:32and use a gig.
0:21:33Then you'll pay 30 bucks.
0:21:35You don't need to guess what you're gonna need in advance,
0:21:38or remember to change it next month.
0:21:39Like if you boost up your data this month
0:21:41'cause you're gonna be traveling
0:21:42and then next month you gotta bring it back down,
0:21:44no, you don't have to do that.
0:21:45You just pay for what you use,
0:21:46they charge you properly in these little buckets
0:21:48and you can go on their site and see, it's really great.
0:21:51On top of that, there's a few small regulatory
0:21:53surcharges each month,
0:21:54but only what they're legally required to collect.
0:21:57They don't charge any mysterious or misleading
0:21:59like recovery fees that you see on most other wireless
0:22:02bills, you see all these random fees and you're like,
0:22:04oh, I wonder what those are.
0:22:05And some of them are legally required,
0:22:07some of them aren't and it's kind of shady.
0:22:08Well, Ting only charges you the minimum
0:22:10that they need to charge you for those.
0:22:12And you can add as many devices to your account
0:22:15as you'd like.
0:22:16You can use their awesome web interface
0:22:19to manage a big fleet of devices.
0:22:21If you have like a big pool of devices you wanna manage,
0:22:23you can do that.
0:22:24And it's really great.
0:22:26So one idea I had for how to use Ting is it'd be great for developers like me.
0:22:31If you want to have an Android test phone, let's say you're an iOS developer and you're
0:22:35making an Android version of your app or you need to test out your website on an Android
0:22:39phone or something like that.
0:22:42Tablets are fairly easy to get these days, but data plans really aren't and phones really
0:22:45aren't still.
0:22:47With Ting, you can get your own Android phone, you can buy a used one or you can get it new
0:22:51from them.
0:22:52an Android phone and just have this barely minimal data plane.
0:22:56You can pay $6 a month most months when it's sitting
0:22:58in the drawer.
0:22:59And then you can take it out.
0:23:01And you can say, oh, I'm going to take this around and test
0:23:03something out in the world with real service on my phone.
0:23:06And you'll end up paying like $3 or $4 that month.
0:23:08It's great.
0:23:09So I think that's a really great use case for Ting.
0:23:12You're a developer, you want a test device, boom.
0:23:15In fact, they even have this cool new thing.
0:23:17You can even buy a Nexus 5 from the Google Play Store.
0:23:21and then you can bring that to Ting
0:23:23to have a first-class Android phablet.
0:23:26Yes, I said phablet at a fantastic price.
0:23:30So go to ATP.Ting.com and you can check out this thing
0:23:34they have on there called the Savings Calculator.
0:23:37You can look at your current carrier's bills,
0:23:38you can enter in your actual usage and prices
0:23:40from the last few months, and it'll show you
0:23:41how much Ting will save over time.
0:23:44If you have Verizon, they will even, if you want,
0:23:46they will take your credentials to log into Verizon
0:23:48and they'll scrape all your info out of Verizon for you
0:23:51to do it all automatically.
0:23:53And then here's another cool thing.
0:23:54If you're stuck in a contract
0:23:56and you need to pay an early termination fee
0:23:57to get yourself to Ting, they have you covered.
0:24:00They will give you 25% of your ETF
0:24:03back in service credit up to $75.
0:24:05So that's pretty cool.
0:24:07So go to ATP.Ting.com.
0:24:10You can look, you can see you can bring your own device
0:24:12or you can buy a new device, you can buy a used device.
0:24:14Any, or not every, most Sprint devices are compatible.
0:24:17You can go there to see exactly which ones
0:24:19and you can buy one from them or bring your own.
0:24:22Remember, there's no contract
0:24:23and no early termination fees,
0:24:24so these are devices you just buy them,
0:24:26you own them outright, and you pay for whatever you use.
0:24:29Check out Ting at ATP.Ting.com,
0:24:32and thank you very much to Ting for sponsoring the show.
0:24:35- I have one quick bit of follow-up
0:24:37to end the follow-up train,
0:24:38and it vaguely relates to Everpix,
0:24:41which is going to really make everyone excited.
0:24:44The two Windows phone users came out of the woodwork
0:24:47over the last week to complain about the fact
0:24:50that I called it Windows Phone Series 7 Mobile Series phone,
0:24:54Metro not Metro phone.
0:24:56And to be honest-- - I think that was fair.
0:24:58- Well, to be honest, I mean, I think they're right.
0:25:00And I got some tweets from RB and an email from Chris M
0:25:05where they took issue with what I was saying
0:25:08and to some degree, I think they were right.
0:25:10And so let me read a quote from this email,
0:25:13which I never actually got blessing to read from,
0:25:14but whatever.
0:25:16They were talking about, among other things, and we saw this from other people as well,
0:25:20that SkyDrive apparently is kind of Everpix for Windows Phone pictures.
0:25:25And so this is Chris who emailed me, "When I jumped from iOS to Windows Phone because
0:25:31it was just too gaudy in 2010, I got something very, very nice, indefinite photo backups.
0:25:36I just looked at my SkyDrive and saw that I've got 8,581 photos backed up.
0:25:42That's many photos I've taken for just over three years on my phone.
0:25:45That whole ever picks debacle, that whole does or doesn't
0:25:48iCloud backup more than 1,000 photos,
0:25:50we don't have that problem, all 4% of us.
0:25:54And so it is worth noting that this is a really cool thing.
0:26:00And I didn't look into it any more than these emails
0:26:02and tweets that we got.
0:26:03But that's what I wanted from Apple.
0:26:06And it seems that Microsoft can do it,
0:26:08and perhaps they can do it because they have 4%
0:26:10of the users, like Chris said.
0:26:12But it is very compelling, and it is very interesting.
0:26:15And I should give Microsoft some credit for that.
0:26:17So my apologies to the Windows Phone users of the world,
0:26:21and I appreciate you guys pointing that out.
0:26:23The thing about all these, though, is that even though it
0:26:26seems like they're being magnanimous and doing this out
0:26:29of the goodness of their heart to help you keep your photos
0:26:31safe and maybe make you more satisfied with your Windows
0:26:34Phone or your Google Phone or whatever,
0:26:36it is also a form of platform lock-in.
0:26:39Because--
0:26:39Oh, sure.
0:26:40Say every one of these, say Microsoft, Google, and Apple all protect all your photos forever.
0:26:45Which one of those companies, if any, gives you a way to switch platforms?
0:26:50Say, "Oh, I've decided I don't like Windows Phone anymore.
0:26:52Now I'm going to try an Android phone.
0:26:54I'm going to try Google Nexus," whatever number they're up to.
0:26:57And then you think, "Oh, hey, wait a second.
0:27:00All my pictures are on Microsoft SkyDrive.
0:27:03When I buy my new Google phone and set it up, where are all my pictures going to be?
0:27:08How am I going to see them?
0:27:09Is Microsoft going to bend over backwards to say,
0:27:11oh, it's easy, you can just export all your photos here
0:27:13and put them in there.
0:27:14Do you assume that all the photos in your SkyDrive
0:27:16also exist on your local disk
0:27:18'cause they're mirror dropbox style?
0:27:19Or do you have backups of them?
0:27:20Like this siloing effect,
0:27:23I mean, it's good for all the individual companies.
0:27:25And I would think out of all the companies,
0:27:26Google is the most likely to give you a way
0:27:28to get your data out because they're pretty good thus far
0:27:30about giving you some sort of gigantic,
0:27:32give me my data out in a non-proprietary format.
0:27:34But certainly Apple is not good about that.
0:27:36And I imagine Microsoft would not be either.
0:27:39So that's something we didn't even talk about last time.
0:27:40Like, assume we snap our fingers and everybody
0:27:43provides a way to protect all our data,
0:27:45including our photos forever up in the cloud
0:27:47and blah, blah, blah.
0:27:48Now we're all locked in even further to the platforms
0:27:52that we're using, probably.
0:27:54- Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I think it's wise,
0:27:56when you're looking at how you're gonna do
0:27:59something like this, it's wise to break that hard link
0:28:02with one of these major platform vendors
0:28:05who's gonna have all these different strategy barriers.
0:28:08they're gonna probably erect.
0:28:10And I think it's better to go with something
0:28:12either self-managed, where it's on all your stuff,
0:28:14like a hard drive and transporter and Dropbox,
0:28:17stuff like that, or go with something like Everpix,
0:28:20which is a service that is kind of neutral
0:28:22and unlikely to be bought, well actually,
0:28:26I guess, sorry, I can't really say that.
0:28:29- If Everpix had stayed in business, fine,
0:28:30but then once they get acquired,
0:28:32kind of like how Facebook's always snapped,
0:28:33how Facebook bought Instagram and everything,
0:28:35you thought you were using this independent service
0:28:36and now it's part of the Facebook empire,
0:28:38like that's just something you have to watch for.
0:28:40Like we said in the last thing,
0:28:41none of these things are gonna be your solution forever.
0:28:43It's your responsibility to have all these different things
0:28:47and then when one of them goes away, gets acquired,
0:28:50starts behaving in a way you don't like or whatever,
0:28:52then you swap it out for what you are.
0:28:54Like you're never gonna be all set forever.
0:28:57You're always going to have to keep an eye on these things
0:29:00and decide when some service or vendor
0:29:03is now across the line into something you don't like
0:29:05then you've got to switch.
0:29:08Exactly.
0:29:09So totally changing topics.
0:29:10Jon, I assume you have been following the reviews of the PS4 and Xbone.
0:29:17I haven't even actually read any of the reviews, but I've read so much about both of them beforehand.
0:29:21It's almost like now that people actually have them, what are they going to say that
0:29:25I didn't already know about it?
0:29:27But the one thing that we all didn't know about any of these things is how many people
0:29:31are going to buy them.
0:29:32And now for the PS4 at the very least we do have sales numbers proudly announced by Sony
0:29:37itself.
0:29:39They said that they sold a million of these in the first 24 hours in North America alone.
0:29:44And that doesn't sound like a lot compared to how many iPhones sell on the first day.
0:29:47There was like 9 million that first weekend or something for the 5S.
0:29:51But in the world of game consoles, I put a link into this Economist story which I think
0:29:56had some nice graphs about it, or some interesting graphs anyway, but in the world of game consoles
0:30:01Those numbers are actually pretty good.
0:30:04The PlayStation 4 sold more consoles in its first 24 hours
0:30:09than any other previous console sold in, I think,
0:30:11its first week or maybe its first month.
0:30:14It's really big opening day numbers.
0:30:17And the reason I bring this up is
0:30:20because we had a conversation about Nintendo-- I don't know,
0:30:25a couple months ago when everyone was talking about Nintendo.
0:30:27I did this post on Hypercritical Nintendo in Crisis.
0:30:30We should put that in the show notes.
0:30:31And one of the things I said in it was that if the market for dedicated
0:30:36gaming hardware goes away, then Nintendo is probably in big trouble because I
0:30:40don't think Nintendo has the ability to put out a full fledged platform, like for
0:30:45applications and everything in the style of iOS or Android, just doesn't seem like
0:30:49that's in the, you know, it's just something that the company is not able to
0:30:52do.
0:30:52And to be fair, very few companies are able to do that.
0:30:55Who is able to produce a platform for mobile desktop or anything?
0:30:59Many companies have tried and most of them have failed.
0:31:03And we've got Windows Phone barely, Android,
0:31:06and we've got iOS.
0:31:07And on the desktop, we've got Windows, the Mac,
0:31:09and maybe Linux if you want to throw that in there.
0:31:12And dead bodies of all the past companies
0:31:14that have tried from Palm OS to Amiga to OS 2 and BOS,
0:31:21all these companies that couldn't do it.
0:31:23So I don't think Nintendo is a platform company.
0:31:25And I think their survival depends
0:31:28there being a market for dedicated gaming hardware.
0:31:30Now out of the next generation consoles, the PlayStation 4 is the most dedicated gaming
0:31:35hardware.
0:31:36The Xbox One tries to be like, we do television stuff and you can do Skype with your friends
0:31:42and you can overlay a web browser on top of your game, on top of your, you know, it is
0:31:45trying to, it has an HDMI input for crying out loud, it is trying to be a television
0:31:50experience with the Kinect built in and all of that stuff.
0:31:53The Wii U, I don't know quite what that is, I guess you would call it a dedicated gaming
0:31:57console as well, but it's actually very strange with the handheld tablet thing and everything
0:32:01like that.
0:32:02The PlayStation 4 is straight up the middle.
0:32:03It's a box that has controllers, plugs into your TV, you put a game disc in it, you play
0:32:08the game with the controller on the TV.
0:32:11Very straightforward.
0:32:13And so what does the very big opening day sales of the PlayStation 4 say about the viability
0:32:20of dedicated gaming hardware?
0:32:22I think, do you guys have the Economist thing open with those charts?
0:32:26Mmm, I don't but I can I don't do my homework click it in the link. It's in the show notes
0:32:30All right. I got it. Yeah, I I think these charts are interesting for a couple of reasons
0:32:36This shows that the generations of game consoles. I don't know how they come up with these numbers
0:32:41They're probably from the Wikipedia pages
0:32:42But the sixth generation is listed as the ps2 game cube and Xbox 7th is the Wii ps3 and Xbox 360 and the 8th is
0:32:49ps4 Xbox one and Wii U
0:32:51You guys all have the charts up now. Yeah
0:32:54You can look in the sixth generation and you can see how massively the ps2 dominated like if you're not into games
0:33:00Or don't follow the industry you might think oh that was the time when these three consoles existed
0:33:05And if your friends house who you always went over if they had an Xbox the original Xbox you would have thought yeah
0:33:10That generation was pretty much evenly split between like Xbox and ps2 and I don't know anybody with a GameCube or you might say
0:33:15Oh, I had a GameCube and it sold about as many as the ps2 and Xbox right now
0:33:20You look at these graphs, and it's very clear that was the ps2 generation
0:33:23Xbox and GameCube also existed as products, more or less.
0:33:27It's not, you know, it was a blowout.
0:33:29And then you look at the seventh generation
0:33:31with the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360,
0:33:33and you can see the Wii just shooting up like a rocket ship
0:33:36and then coming down like a rocket ship, you know.
0:33:40(both laughing)
0:33:41But still massively dominating that generation
0:33:44because the PS3 and the 360
0:33:46are just these little lumps underneath.
0:33:48And even though they had more longevity than the Wii,
0:33:50they could not come back from that just,
0:33:53I mean, look at the slope of that thing.
0:33:54It's just unbelievable.
0:33:55- All right, it's the model rocket trajectory.
0:33:57- Yeah, but clearly the Wii dominated that generation.
0:34:01It may have had a big fall, but it went up twice as high.
0:34:04Actually, I think I pulled numbers from Wikipedia
0:34:06for that to see what the heck was in there.
0:34:08Wii was 100 million, PS3 ended up being around 80 million,
0:34:11Xbox 360 ended up being 76 million.
0:34:13And most of that is because the Wii's sales just dropped off
0:34:16and the PS3 and Xbox kept chipping away.
0:34:17Like the longer that generation went on,
0:34:20the more the PS3 and 360 would start to catch up.
0:34:22But it was a blowout in the beginning and middle.
0:34:25And then the hilarious eighth generation chart
0:34:28they have here, you notice that gray area that says Fcast,
0:34:32which I guess is the hip way to say forecast.
0:34:35They're trying to forecast into the future.
0:34:37Each one of these charts has an area where they're
0:34:39forecasting into the future.
0:34:40But the eighth generation chart is all in the Fcast zone.
0:34:43It's all forecast.
0:34:45There's one data point that's not in the forecast.
0:34:47Right, well, the Wii U has been out for a little while,
0:34:50and the PS4 has been out for a day.
0:34:52and the Xbox One is not out yet.
0:34:53So they said, let's just make stuff up.
0:34:55Here's what we think the future of this thing will be.
0:34:57And they draw a bunch of lines,
0:34:59and they show the Wii U being small,
0:35:00that's probably a safe bet.
0:35:02And then they show the Xbox One and PS4,
0:35:04the PS4 being higher,
0:35:06but none of those lines come close to reaching
0:35:08the peaks of the Wii U or the PS2.
0:35:11Like they're having the PS4 top out
0:35:13around like 15 million, I guess a year or two from now.
0:35:18I don't know where they come up with these numbers, but.
0:35:20well if you look at the previous generation it looks like they're
0:35:22basically assuming that the ps4 is going to sell about as well as the ps3
0:35:26yeah and that the xbox one will be worse than the 360
0:35:29but see i think i would disagree with that because i i think if you look at this
0:35:32generation it's very clear
0:35:34as you said like that that sony is really
0:35:36targeting like gamers this is a gaming machine we're not gonna try to do a
0:35:40whole lot of other multimedia things
0:35:41we're not gonna try to be a tv pass through with you know all this other stuff that
0:35:45the xbone is doing
0:35:46they're really just trying to be
0:35:48a really good gaming machine
0:35:49And so I think they're probably going to do a lot better
0:35:54this time than Microsoft will.
0:35:57And I think they're probably gonna sell a lot more units
0:36:00than what's in this Fcast zone in this graph.
0:36:02- Yeah, and I said on a past podcast that,
0:36:05I think it was when I was on talk show
0:36:06talking about this with Gruber,
0:36:08that my premise, like, Nintendo better hope
0:36:12that there's a market for dedicated gaming hardware
0:36:13because they can't, they're doomed if there's not,
0:36:15because they can't do anything
0:36:16but dedicated gaming hardware.
0:36:18And I said, I think there is at least one more generation
0:36:23of dedicated gaming hardware,
0:36:25that it will be viable for one more generation.
0:36:26'Cause at that time, none of these things were out yet,
0:36:28except for the Wii U.
0:36:28And even though it wasn't doing that well,
0:36:30I said, I think maybe dedicated gaming hardware
0:36:32does go away.
0:36:33And we all play this on our phones wirelessly to our TVs
0:36:36or a little Apple TV style puck or whatever,
0:36:39but not this generation.
0:36:40We are at least one more generation
0:36:41of what we know as actual game consoles,
0:36:44whether they have fancy other functionality as well.
0:36:46And the reason I think that is because the last console generation was like seven to
0:36:50eight years long, which is pretty long for a console generation, especially at the pace
0:36:54things develop in the electronics industry these days.
0:36:58And so there's a whole generation of kids who grew up with these consoles who have never
0:37:02seen a new console launch.
0:37:03Like they started playing when they were seven, eight, or nine years old, and now they're
0:37:07like a teenager entering college, or maybe they're in their early to mid 20s or something.
0:37:12grown up their entire life with just one game console or like one one generation
0:37:17of game consoles. They're at that age where they have a job, they don't have
0:37:20anything else to spend on except for like, you know, entertainment, going to the
0:37:25movies, buying video games, and buying game consoles, going out like they don't
0:37:29have a mortgage or family or whatever. These people are absolutely positively
0:37:33ready to experience the thrill and excitement that people my age have
0:37:37experienced many times over of a new game console generation. Maybe they
0:37:41heard from the old folkies like us, like "Oh, the Nintendo 64 came out, Mario 64 blew our
0:37:45mind, and oh, the SNES, it was so amazing, got to play JRPGs," and like, you know, they've
0:37:51never had that. Their whole life has just been this. Imagine if your whole life, like
0:37:54the computer that you played with when you were eight, you were still playing with that
0:37:57same computer when you were 16. That feels like just way longer from the ages of eight
0:38:00to 16 than, you know, the same eight years for an adult. They are ready to buy, and it
0:38:06not surprise me that a million of them went out and bought the PS4 on day one, because
0:38:11these people who played with the PS3 and maybe their older brothers' PS2 and maybe they even
0:38:15went back to the PS1, but they have never been through a console launch.
0:38:18So boom, a million out the door.
0:38:19I think the Xbox One launch will also go pretty well.
0:38:23So far, so good for the idea of there being a viable market for dedicated gaming hardware.
0:38:28But I'm not sure that these one million buyers who bought on day one represent anything more
0:38:33than the most enthusiastic gamers.
0:38:35I'm not sure that they, like if you look at these graphs, is it going to be something
0:38:38more like the Wii graph where it goes up really steeply and then it takes a turn?
0:38:44I don't know if this kind of sales pace can be sustained.
0:38:47I think the PS4 is a great product and I think that at the very least everybody who bought
0:38:52a 360 or a PS3 would be perfectly satisfied with a PS4 or Xbox One.
0:38:57I'm just not sure how many of them think that this is something that they need to go out
0:39:00and buy.
0:39:02So I'm keeping my eye on this to see, not just like, oh, great opening day sales.
0:39:07If it was a negative result, like if no one went out and bought it on day one, that would
0:39:10be a terrible, terrible sign.
0:39:11But having it be such an overwhelmingly positive result, like, wow, biggest first day sales
0:39:16of a new console ever in the history of anything, that is merely neutral, I think.
0:39:21It doesn't preclude the idea that these sales will taper off and never get up to the levels
0:39:27of the PS2 or the Wii in the past generations.
0:39:31Yeah, I think there was a really good quote that I wanted to relay from the AnandTech
0:39:36review today that basically he has his hands on an Xbone and a PS4 and so he compares them
0:39:43and stuff.
0:39:44And first of all, I think it's really interesting to see the...
0:39:46He took side-by-side videos and screenshots so you can see the differences in the same
0:39:50game ported to both systems and the graphical difference between the two.
0:39:55And man, to my eye, the PS4 version looks way better.
0:39:59But on the very last page she says, "Being an early adopter of an XGen console is rarely
0:40:04a fun thing.
0:40:06Literally all of my friends are on Xbox 360s or PS3s, meaning online multiplayer with people
0:40:11I know is pretty much out of the question for at least a year or so."
0:40:14And then this is the part that I thought was most interesting.
0:40:17The launch lineup for both platforms is reasonable but could be a lot better.
0:40:21Having just played Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us, I'm going to need more than
0:40:24COD or NBA 2K14 to really draw me into the Xbox One or PS4.
0:40:29This is how the story goes with any new console launch.
0:40:32And I think that's, you know, I haven't heard of any must-have games for all three
0:40:38of these consoles.
0:40:39I mean, Jon, how's the Wii U doing on that front?
0:40:41Like -- Nintendo actually usually does pretty good about system selling games.
0:40:45They've really dropped the ball on the Wii U, but even they had more games out of the
0:40:49-- like, one of the reasons I don't have a PS4 yet is because there were no launch
0:40:52titles that I said I need to have that title, which is very often the case.
0:40:55And Anand's right about this.
0:40:56enough to have lived through many console launches. And it's gotten worse now that the console makers
0:41:01are on the hook to not necessarily produce a platform like iOS or Android, but they're on the
0:41:06hook to provide network services, social networking, digital downloads, fancy features. All these
0:41:12consoles are launching without the full complement of features that were promised in all the previous
0:41:17keynote speeches, the PS4 in particular. And all of them, even if they did launch with all the
0:41:21features, they won't work for months or years. Like this is the long game. It's not like an iPad
0:41:25where Apple releases a new iPad, and it better be the M Good, because next year another one's coming out.
0:41:29There's not gonna be another console for like six, seven, eight years, maybe longer.
0:41:33This is a long game for these guys, and out of the gate, their software platforms suck.
0:41:38They don't have the features that they want, they don't have, they don't work right, the ones that are there, like,
0:41:42all these things that the hardware is capable of, uh, you know,
0:41:46it just, like, the PS4 doesn't even have a standby mode, like, where you don't have to have to turn the thing entirely off,
0:41:50you got to turn it totally off, and then it's got to boot totally up, which is like,
0:41:53It's like didn't you have all these presentations saying oh the PS4 is going to have an auxiliary
0:41:58chip to keep it on, do all this stuff?
0:41:59Nope, doesn't do any of that stuff out of the gate.
0:42:01So anybody who's buying this console stuff, especially if you were an early adopter of
0:42:05the PS3 or the 360, is used to this now.
0:42:08Because when the PS3 launched the software was horrendous, like you couldn't even download
0:42:11games in the background.
0:42:12And the 360 has gone through many major revisions.
0:42:15So all the people buying this, I think especially on day one, they realize I'm getting a day
0:42:19one console.
0:42:20It's going to be a piece of crap.
0:42:21It's not going to work right.
0:42:23this exact same hardware three, four years from now, boy, it'll really be singing.
0:42:27They won't have to do any upgrades, they won't have to buy a new video card, they won't have
0:42:30to do anything except for apply software updates, which presumably will come down faster, and
0:42:34people using the PS4 have said, "Thank God, it downloads software updates much better
0:42:38than it used to."
0:42:40All that being said, like you were getting at before, the main thing about this is, okay,
0:42:45fine.
0:42:46It's gonna be buggy, it's gonna have many missing features that I was promised, I'm
0:42:48I'm assuming they'll come later, but as long as it has GameX that I really want to play
0:42:54in amazing next generation graphics with next generation features in the new controller,
0:42:58whatever, I'll buy it.
0:43:00And I don't think the PlayStation 4 has any of those games at this point, and that's not
0:43:04a very strong launch.
0:43:05They sold a million systems in 24 hours without any system selling games.
0:43:09There is no Mario 64 for the PS4.
0:43:12It didn't even launch with Last Guardian for the crazy people like me.
0:43:16There's no launch title out there that people say, "I wasn't going to get a PS4, but once
0:43:20I saw I had GameX, I had to get it."
0:43:22And that's, I guess, also still a positive sign.
0:43:25It's a negative sign for the PS4's game library, but I think with these sales numbers and the
0:43:30pipeline of games, we don't have to worry about there not being a lot of games for the
0:43:32PS4, but it was not a Nintendo-style launch where the only reason people buy the system
0:43:36is because there's one game on it that you absolutely have to play.
0:43:40So I think everyone involved in this process understands that this is not a sprint, it's
0:43:50a marathon.
0:43:51And I don't even know if the Wii U will be finishing that marathon at this rate.
0:43:55Yeah, I'm really not positive on my outlook of the Wii U's future.
0:44:01I really do think that this is going to be a PS4-dominated generation, and the X-Bone
0:44:06is going to be second place, probably half the volume of the PS4 over time. And I don't
0:44:13think the Wii U is going to show up much on the chart.
0:44:16I give the Xbox more. I don't think that the PS4 is going to be double it. But ask me again
0:44:21after the Xbox One line.
0:44:23Yeah, we'll talk about it again in a year.
0:44:24Yeah, because they do--the thing about the Xbox One is it's a good game machine and also
0:44:30X, Y, and Z. And Microsoft does online, and its software stacks so much better than Sony,
0:44:35that is increasingly important.
0:44:38I don't-- it's tough to handicap this,
0:44:41because they are very complementary.
0:44:44There's not a lot of overlap in their strengths.
0:44:46Microsoft is so strong in the areas
0:44:47that Sony is so weak and vice versa.
0:44:50So we'll have to wait and see.
0:44:52And these days, system-selling games are hard to come by.
0:44:55Like with Xbox, Halo is the reason the Xbox exists at all.
0:44:58If the Halo franchise did not exist,
0:45:00I don't think Microsoft would have
0:45:01been willing to put that much money into the console.
0:45:04and Sony had lots of systems selling Final Fantasy VII and all that stuff that made Sony,
0:45:08Sony. But nowadays, these launch titles that you see, I guess Killzone, everyone's got
0:45:16their one exclusive first-person shooter, but is that even the most popular first-person
0:45:19shooter? What about Call of Duty and all the other things that are multi-platform?
0:45:22Right, and all the big sports franchises are all multi-platform.
0:45:25Grand Theft Auto, so many things are multi-platform. And even when you think get an exclusive,
0:45:30all that means is it'll be on your platform in a year or six months or whatever. That's
0:45:33That's what exclusive means these days.
0:45:35So the only things that are exclusive exclusive are first party games, which I don't think
0:45:40even Halo is at this point.
0:45:41Oh no, is Halo?
0:45:42Yeah, Microsoft still owns Halo and they're having 343 Studios or whatever do it, and
0:45:47Bungie is off doing Destiny, which is multi-platform by the way.
0:45:49Sony has its own little arty in-house things and stuff like Gran Turismo and stuff like
0:45:55that.
0:45:56And Nintendo, of course, their entire business is built on first party.
0:45:58Those are never available anywhere, and that's the only reason anyone buys Nintendo hardware
0:46:03anymore is because the hardware/software synergy and you can't get that software anywhere else.
0:46:06So that continues to be Nintendo's hope for success. I think we should do one more sponsor
0:46:13and then I have a little bit more about Nintendo afterwards to wrap up this segment.
0:46:18I'm actually really upset that Sony killed the Wipeout Studio, so there's not going to
0:46:22be a Wipeout for PS4.
0:46:23They sold more games that would have survived.
0:46:26I probably would have bought a PS4 to play the next Wipeout. That's how much I love Wipeout.
0:46:30It is the only game I own for my PS3.
0:46:33Anyway, our next sponsor is Gemvara.
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0:47:20I actually looked before the show
0:47:22and looked at some of their stuff.
0:47:23They have metals I'd never even heard of yet.
0:47:25Like they have all the golds and platinums
0:47:27and stuff like that.
0:47:28But they even had, there's something called rose gold now,
0:47:29Do you guys even know where this existed?
0:47:31- No.
0:47:33- I'm sure, John, you're an expert on this.
0:47:35- Rose gold?
0:47:36Is that like the new color of the next iPhone?
0:47:39- Yeah. (laughs)
0:47:40No, it's actually, it's like a darker shade.
0:47:43It's interesting, it's a different shade of gold.
0:47:46Like, it's not white gold, they have white, yellow,
0:47:48and then there's rose, which is interesting.
0:47:49- I see it on the website, it looks nice.
0:47:51It looks kind of like copper-ish.
0:47:53- Yeah, like a little bit of like a pinkish, reddish,
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0:48:29So check out Gemvara. That's G-E-M-V-A-R-A dot com. They're the revolutionary leader
0:48:35of custom-made fine jewelry shopping online. Thanks a lot to Gemvara for sponsoring the
0:48:40show.
0:48:41You know, like with these sponsors like Gemvara and Warby Parker, where it's a web version
0:48:47to buy something that previously you'd always like, "Oh, I always have to buy those in
0:48:50person because of reasons X, Y, Z." I'm like fast-forwarding 50 years in the future,
0:48:56And instead of just having a website where you can build your own custom ring out of
0:48:59like, pick this, pick the gem, pick the accent thing, pick the metal color, pick the design,
0:49:03and like sort of building your own thing, like, I guess it's in sci-fi territory where
0:49:07it's like, why can't I just 3D print anything that I want?
0:49:10And I'll just go to a website and the replicator machine will make me, you know, tea or a grey
0:49:15hot or whatever it is that I ask for.
0:49:17And we're creeping up on that.
0:49:18And I think that that sales process of sitting in front of your computer and clicking a bunch
0:49:22of buttons and seeing some nicely rendered graphics update with the thing it is that
0:49:26you are potentially manufacturing or having manufactured on your behalf is so much nicer
0:49:30than driving to a store and talking to salespeople and going from store to store and sitting
0:49:36in traffic.
0:49:37Just sitting at a website and clicking buttons until you get what you want is much nicer.
0:49:41So we're creeping up on the replicator machines a little bit.
0:49:44There may be a web interface instead of a voice interface and a box in the wall.
0:49:48Awesome.
0:49:49All right, John.
0:49:52You said you had some more stuff about video games.
0:49:56Yeah, one final bit on Nintendo and their prospects.
0:50:00There was some rumors-- there's always rumors about Nintendo.
0:50:03And I don't know how founder these are,
0:50:04but just maybe think of this.
0:50:05The rumors were like, oh, Nintendo making an Android
0:50:07tablet or whatever.
0:50:08I think these have been going around for months and months.
0:50:10They're resurfacing.
0:50:11That's ridiculous.
0:50:12And everyone always wants to hear,
0:50:15Nintendo's making apps for iOS.
0:50:16Nintendo's going to do this for Android.
0:50:18All these things that they think, oh, Nintendo's problem
0:50:21a real platform and they don't have one and they can't make one, therefore they have to
0:50:25like join one, you know, instead of doing their own thing.
0:50:29And the reason I bring this up is because there is an aspect of it that can make the
0:50:34people who wrote those stories claim victory later.
0:50:37Like it's not as crazy as it sounds because Nintendo devices do need some kind of operating
0:50:41system, you know, these days because they don't just, it's not just you stick a cartridge
0:50:45in like a Nintendo and it just like plays the cartridge.
0:50:48They do other things.
0:50:49is sort of like an OS type layer.
0:50:51And if Nintendo decides that it's easier or better
0:50:53to use Android as its OS instead of whatever the heck they're
0:50:56using now as their sort of embedded OS,
0:50:58and they're sick of maintaining it and developing it
0:51:00and they just want to base it on Android, that's fine.
0:51:03But that is an entirely separate question
0:51:05from whether or not their devices will suddenly become
0:51:08quote unquote "Android devices," whether you'll
0:51:10be able to run Android apps that'll
0:51:11be part of the Android ecosystem,
0:51:13even to the degree that the Kindles are.
0:51:14Like, the Kindles like, oh, are Android a name only barely,
0:51:18but they can run applications that are built for Android or close to it, right?
0:51:23They're not entirely walled off.
0:51:25And my take on this is, for all we know, for all the average person knows, I know better
0:51:28and most gamers do as well, but for all the average person knows, the Wii U and the 3DS
0:51:33could be running Android right now.
0:51:34Like, it would make no difference to them, because what OS it runs under the covers has
0:51:39no bearing on what it feels like to use the device, you know what I mean?
0:51:44And actually when I was trying to look it up, I'm like, "What OS do those things run?"
0:51:48I was reminded that the Wii, not the Wii U, but the Wii U runs something called iOS, with
0:51:52a capital I in front of the OS.
0:51:54I think it predates the iPhone, maybe it doesn't.
0:51:57Is it a Cisco router?
0:51:58Yeah, that's the other iOS, right?
0:52:01It's the same type of thing.
0:52:02It's their firmware.
0:52:03It's not the OS OS, but it's the firmware that controls IO and stuff like that.
0:52:07I just thought that was funny.
0:52:08But anyway, the rumors of Nintendo, Android stuff, keep that in mind.
0:52:12if someday down the road someone says "oh my god, confirmed, Nintendo is going to Android"
0:52:18I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for them to use Android as part of building
0:52:22their products, but I don't think they would ever say the word Android, and I don't think
0:52:24you would ever know they were using Android under the covers. It would have nothing to
0:52:29do with their actual business strategy and everything to do with just internal implementation
0:52:32details of their software stack.
0:52:34And they probably wouldn't be selling their games on the Android marketplace.
0:52:37No, no, that's a whole different thing, and that's something else that people want, but
0:52:41You know, they don't get too tied up into, you know, what people are using under the
0:52:45covers.
0:52:46Like, "Oh my God, Google is moving to Linux.
0:52:48I hear Android is based on Linux.
0:52:49Don't tell anybody."
0:52:50You know, or they're going to use Java, but they call it Dalvik.
0:52:53These are all implementation details that have little to do with their business strategies.
0:52:59So I got a Retina iPad Mini, and I'm very excited about it.
0:53:04It has terrible burn-in, or image retention, or whatever you call it, image retention.
0:53:09and I'm choosing not to care because I'm not Marco.
0:53:12- Wait, hold on, to be fair, I have also chosen not to care
0:53:14because I went to the mall and waited in the Apple store
0:53:18for 40 minutes for them to get to me,
0:53:21even though it was 10 in the morning.
0:53:22I even took a picture to show how empty the store was.
0:53:25Like, there was very few people there.
0:53:27But I waited for 40 minutes, plus the trip to the mall.
0:53:31Overall, I spent an hour and a half of my life
0:53:33trading in my old iPad for,
0:53:35or trading in the one I just bought
0:53:36with this image retention problem
0:53:38for another one that also has an image retention problem.
0:53:41And it was the only one they had in stock.
0:53:43And I'm like, you know what, I'll just take this.
0:53:46I'm gonna choose not to not care anymore.
0:53:48- Have you found a way to get the screen manufacturer
0:53:51out of the firmware with some crazy thing yet or no?
0:53:54- No, I wasn't able to.
0:53:56I mean, nobody told me anything
0:53:57and I didn't really poke around.
0:53:58I've chosen to not care because in day-to-day use,
0:54:02you don't really notice it.
0:54:03The image retention in general on LCDs,
0:54:06It can be very noticeable when it gets really bad.
0:54:09It can be like, you know, you'll still see
0:54:11the Safari address bar when you move away from Safari.
0:54:14That's like an element that's always there.
0:54:17In reality, on the minis, I don't think it's bad enough
0:54:20to cause that for most people.
0:54:22Certainly, you know, if you do exactly the right,
0:54:24like if you're in one app that has
0:54:26this interface element on it for five, 10 minutes,
0:54:29and then you switch to an all white screen,
0:54:30you'd probably see that.
0:54:32But in reality, that doesn't come up very often for me,
0:54:35and I think for most people.
0:54:36- I saw it all the time on some of the first gen
0:54:3915 inch Retina MacBook Pros, the ones with the bad screens.
0:54:43And I don't know if there's something about the Mac,
0:54:45like having a windowed environment where certain elements
0:54:47like the dock or the menu bar or a text window
0:54:51that's in the background and then you switch to another app
0:54:54that has a bunch of empty documents and you see the text
0:54:56from the previous text window.
0:54:57I would not be able to have stood that out.
0:55:00I'm assuming, like you tested the ones in the Apple Store,
0:55:02right, you were taking pictures like,
0:55:03Look at these demo units.
0:55:04They totally don't have any image retention whatsoever.
0:55:07I ended up testing all four that they had on the iPad table.
0:55:13All four of them passed the test.
0:55:14None of them had any retention at all.
0:55:16However, they were also all for Wi-Fi models.
0:55:19I'm hearing mostly from people who
0:55:21are saying that their LTE ones have the problem.
0:55:24And so it really does seem like the LTE ones were made
0:55:26in smaller quantities.
0:55:28Maybe they had to get a lot of them out in time.
0:55:30Maybe they, either there's a bad batch of screens
0:55:34in the first big chunk of the LTE ones they manufactured,
0:55:37or they just have to get so many of them out on time
0:55:39that they lower their standards for the LTE ones.
0:55:41Either way, it kinda sucks, but it's also not that unusual.
0:55:45People were saying, I've had tons of people run the test
0:55:48on the first gen iPad mini, and it's way worse.
0:55:53And it's more around the edges,
0:55:55but it has way worse retention.
0:55:56The iPad 2 had way worse retention.
0:55:58So this actually is not like a totally unique thing
0:56:02to just the new mini, it's actually common
0:56:05in a lot of products that we've never noticed before.
0:56:06So it's not that big of a deal.
0:56:08I think other people have made a much bigger deal
0:56:10out of it than I would and wanted to.
0:56:13- Well, on the Red and Mac Pro's though,
0:56:15wasn't it like they had like screen stuff,
0:56:17chat room will tell me if I'm getting wrong,
0:56:18but it was like from LG and Samsung
0:56:21and like the LG ones had it much worse
0:56:22than the Samsung screens.
0:56:23- Yeah, and I actually have one of the bad ones,
0:56:25which is why I made that test a year ago in the first place.
0:56:27That's the whole reason I made that test,
0:56:29was because I've read about that on a forum,
0:56:30and I'm like, oh, I wonder how mine is.
0:56:31And I made a little test to test it, and mine failed.
0:56:35But what you're describing with being able to see it
0:56:38in regular use, I've never had that problem with this.
0:56:41So maybe mine is not as bad as the worst.
0:56:44But whatever brand it was that was the bad screen,
0:56:46I do have that brand of screen in the MacBook Pro,
0:56:48because you can tell in software.
0:56:50So I do have that screen, but it isn't that bad.
0:56:53- Yeah, and that's what bothers me a little bit,
0:56:55is that on the first retina of MacBook Pros,
0:56:57okay fine, it's your first retina device, there's going to be growing pains or whatever,
0:57:01you'll sort it out, and presumably they did. But at this point now, they should know, okay look,
0:57:06it seems like let's do image retention testing as part of our qualifications of vendors for screens.
0:57:10Like maybe I would have to think the only reason they would do this is either because they don't
0:57:15take the issue seriously enough yet, which I think they should, or because what choice do they have?
0:57:20Like there's one vendor that passes all their tests with flying colors, whoever that happens
0:57:24happens to be, but one vendor cannot provide them the capacity they need to meet the holiday
0:57:28season.
0:57:29So they're forced to go with the second best vendor, which has worse image retention problems,
0:57:33simply because no one else can provide them the number of screens that they need.
0:57:37And that strikes me as plausible, but either way, it's disappointing to me that image retention
0:57:42was an issue, continues to be an issue, and frequently we're in the situation where one
0:57:47manufacturer gets the "good screen," the other one gets the bad screen.
0:57:51have no way to tell, and obviously it is possible to make it without retention, but not everyone
0:57:56gets it. And that's kind of like the bad old days of dead pixels, where I was terrified to buy my
0:58:0122-inch Apple Cinema Display because of the dead pixels. And sure enough, I had like three dead
0:58:06pixels, which was not within the replacement threshold, and I just had to spend three years
0:58:11consciously not looking at the one pixel that was stuck on white and the one pixel that was
0:58:14stuck on red. And I knew exactly where they are, and I could picture them in my mind right now and
0:58:18and point you to them exactly where they are on the screen.
0:58:20Like, that bothers me.
0:58:22Obviously, it bothers me way more than it
0:58:24bothers normal people.
0:58:24I understand that.
0:58:25But Apple needs to get on the ball with that,
0:58:28because I forgive them, their first generation product,
0:58:30maybe their second generation.
0:58:31But at this point, they need to make it like-- they need
0:58:35to just say, look, this is our-- same way
0:58:37they do with color gamut and viewing angles and stuff.
0:58:40They just have to draw a hard line if they possibly can
0:58:42and say, this image retention stuff has to stop.
0:58:45I'm sure it's very similar to the dead pixel thing,
0:58:49where it's not that they will tolerate no image retention,
0:58:54it's that they have some kind of threshold.
0:58:56And I mean, these days dead pixels, I think,
0:58:58they don't-- I don't think I've ever seen a dead pixel
0:59:00on an Apple device.
0:59:01Yeah, no, we've come out of the dead pixel.
0:59:03Like at this point, I think if you had even a single one,
0:59:06you could probably get a replacement.
0:59:07But there were years where they had--
0:59:08if it's three within three inches of each other
0:59:11or whatever, but the thing with the image retention
0:59:12is there's like the good manufacturer and the bad one.
0:59:14It's like, no, why can't they all be the good one?
0:59:16I will accept that this is the best we can do.
0:59:19But obviously, one vendor can do way better
0:59:22than the other one, and I have to think it's just
0:59:24because that one vendor can't make enough screens.
0:59:25But I wish that one vendor would buy the other one.
0:59:28- They all could be the good one in a year.
0:59:31Like, for us to get the Retina Mini this year,
0:59:34we had to accept crap like this, I think.
0:59:36- But see, the thing is, that's when the first
0:59:39Retina macro pros were like, okay,
0:59:40they haven't had it sorted out, but surely a year from now,
0:59:42everyone will get on the same page.
0:59:43But no, we just keep going through this again and again with each thing.
0:59:45Is the Retina Mac Pro screen?
0:59:47Well, I guess they are, because the new IGZO thing, I-G-Z-O, I forget what it stands for,
0:59:51indium, gallium, zinc, oxide, whatever the hell.
0:59:55The new low-power Retina screens is what lets you have these Retina devices, because you
1:00:00could not have them with the old Retina screens, because they just took too much power from
1:00:04the backlights, right?
1:00:05So I guess I'll go back on what I said.
1:00:07Maybe I'll give them a pass on this, because I forgot they just changed screen technology.
1:00:11Maybe this is the sorting out year or the sorting out generation or two for this new
1:00:15LCD screen technology.
1:00:17But I really – the moral of the story is I really, really hate image retention.
1:00:22Okay.
1:00:23There was also – because I know we're going to get emailed about this – there was a
1:00:27test that was widely linked a couple of days ago from I believe DisplayMate, a company
1:00:34that measures and benchmarks display quality.
1:00:37and they ran their tests on all the modern,
1:00:41tiny Retina tablets that they had.
1:00:42The iPad Mini Retina, the Google Nexus,
1:00:46was it the Nexus 7, I think, the new Nexus 7?
1:00:49I don't know the line, what I want to say.
1:00:50The Kindle HDX, and I think that was it.
1:00:54And they came away saying that--
1:00:56- The iPad Air still as well.
1:00:57- Oh, and the iPad Air, right.
1:00:58And basically the--
1:01:00- Kindle was the best screen, yeah.
1:01:02I meant to bring this up last week.
1:01:03- Yes, and it uses a whole different thing.
1:01:05uses low temperature poly something LT.
1:01:08- Yeah, and Apple couldn't, that's not an option for Apple
1:01:10because they sell too many units.
1:01:12- Right, and that's the problem.
1:01:14You can make a tablet with a better display,
1:01:17but you probably can't make it at Apple's volume.
1:01:20And that's the problem they face
1:01:22with a lot of these component decisions.
1:01:23They never use OLED, and there's a few,
1:01:27there's things that they can't really use
1:01:29because of yield issues, that they just have to make
1:01:31so many of these things.
1:01:32That being said though, I am a little disappointed.
1:01:35Like seeing that test result, seeing the color gamut
1:01:38kinda sucks on the Mini 2.
1:01:40The iPad Air display has a much better color gamut.
1:01:43The Mini has, especially like in the red,
1:01:45it's a little bit muted and a little bit inaccurate.
1:01:48And that I think was disappointing to see.
1:01:51That being said, again, in regular use,
1:01:52I haven't noticed it at all, and I probably never will.
1:01:55- Yeah, Apple has to be on the cutting edge,
1:01:58but they can't be on the cutting cutting edge.
1:01:59When your volumes are low, like Amazon,
1:02:01or lower anyway, you can afford to be on that super.
1:02:05Apple could have gone, Ixo displays,
1:02:07I don't even know if that's how people pronounce it,
1:02:08I don't feel like saying the letters every time.
1:02:10But anyway, those are out like a year ago.
1:02:11Like it's not like they didn't exist,
1:02:13it's just that, oh, well, they're too new.
1:02:15No one can make them in big enough volume.
1:02:16So Apple can't ever be on the cutting, cutting edge.
1:02:19They have to wait until,
1:02:20and I think they're barely making it into like,
1:02:23can we have enough of these Ixo screens
1:02:26to support our holiday product line this year?
1:02:29I think they barely scraped by with that.
1:02:31So the low temperature polysilicon stuff is just like maybe next year, right?
1:02:36And then OLED existed forever, but there's been no OLEDs that have satisfied all of Apple's
1:02:41requirements for power, viewing angle, color gamut.
1:02:45Lyle Troxell, Jr.
1:02:46Lyle Troxell, Jr.
1:02:47Lyle Troxell, Jr.
1:02:48All that stuff.
1:02:49I mean, it's the same reason they had seven-inch tablets that were retina years ago from companies
1:02:50other than Apple.
1:02:51It's like, why can't Apple be retina?
1:02:54Because they can't go until...
1:02:56That's the price of being as big as Apple is.
1:02:58They can push the cutting edge, and they can be like the first one to have really high
1:03:02volumes of this great technology, but they can't be the very, very first anymore, unless
1:03:07they do something like they seem to be doing with that big quartz factory in Arizona or
1:03:10whatever where nobody has the capacity to make quartz-coated glass screens or whatever.
1:03:17We're going to be the only company in the world that has that capacity, and we're going
1:03:19to pay half a billion dollars to make our own factory that we don't own, but we paid
1:03:22for most of it, and they will exclusively build stuff for us, and that's how we will
1:03:28get the advanced new technology and get it in the volumes we need before anyone else.
1:03:32But that's pretty much their only road to being on the very, very cutting edge as compared
1:03:38to companies that sell in lower volumes. Someone says, I mean, Sapphire instead of Quartz.
1:03:42Maybe I do mean Sapphire instead of Quartz. I don't know. Is it? It's that thing in Arizona.
1:03:45I don't remember.
1:03:46Yeah, it's Sapphire. So anyway, so Casey, what do you think about the Mini?
1:03:52I'm sorry, are we still here? Is this the show? So yeah, so the Mini, I like it quite
1:03:56a bit. So I'm coming from, I still have my iPhone 5s, I had an iPad 3rd gen, so the first
1:04:03of the retina iPads. My iPhone is AT&T, I am still on the unlimited plan, thus I cannot
1:04:11tether because AT&T is a bunch of jerks. I bought a Verizon iPad mini, which is the first
1:04:16time I've gotten an LTE iPad, and coincidentally, day before yesterday, my Verizon FiOS for
1:04:23for the first time in five years, conked out.
1:04:26And it was a very excellent time to have an LTE iPad
1:04:30so I could get online,
1:04:32even despite not having internet connection at home.
1:04:35I should also note that additionally,
1:04:37I went to the T-Mobile store today
1:04:39and for $10 and 50 some cents because of sales tax,
1:04:42I picked up a T-Mobile SIM
1:04:44and plugged that into my iPhone mini,
1:04:46or excuse me, iPad mini,
1:04:48and was able to get cellular data for free because,
1:04:52well, if you accept the $10 for the SIM.
1:04:54And so that T-Mobile thing that people keep talking about,
1:04:57it was easy peasy.
1:04:59It took a little while at the store,
1:05:00but I don't know if that was a sales representative thing
1:05:03or if it's just that it takes a little while
1:05:05to get the stuff squared away.
1:05:07But now I have a T-Mobile SIM
1:05:09that'll get me 200 megs a month for free.
1:05:11I have a Verizon SIM that came with it
1:05:13that I can pay for for data.
1:05:15And what was really cool was I'd use the Verizon SIM
1:05:19for a bit and put something like 80 megs on the sim,
1:05:23or I don't know, it's a poor way of phrasing it,
1:05:25but I'd used about 80 megs of data on my Verizon sim.
1:05:28I popped that out, plugged in the T-Mobile sim,
1:05:30used like two or three megs just to prove to myself
1:05:33that it worked, popped the Verizon sim back in,
1:05:36and my cellular usage went back to 80 megs.
1:05:39So I was very pleased to see that the iPad was smart enough
1:05:42to keep the two separate
1:05:43and continue to track the two of them.
1:05:46So if you happen to have an iPad, an LTE iPad
1:05:49is unlocked, then you can spend your $10 and get your T-Mobile SIM if you live in the United
1:05:55States and get some free data, which is pretty awesome.
1:05:57Yeah, that's fantastic. Do you know, does anybody know, does it work on old iPads too?
1:06:01I mean, probably, maybe you need an LTE once, maybe it's like iPad 3, Mini, and Air, and
1:06:094. But that would be a great thing to do, like if you have, like if you just replaced
1:06:13an iPad and you're going to give it to your mom or something like that. That'd be a
1:06:17a great thing to just get one of these T-Mobile things, put it in, you know, if it's not going
1:06:21to use a lot of data, but you at least have then the option to have this thing be connected
1:06:25somewhere if you need it, or if you're giving it to somebody who's going to use it pretty
1:06:28lightly.
1:06:29Yeah, Nick Finn in the chat says it worked with an iPad 3, with a Verizon iPad 3.
1:06:33That's great.
1:06:34Which I agree, it is a very cool idea.
1:06:37And it worked really well.
1:06:38200 megs obviously isn't a lot of data, but it's enough to get you by in a pinch, which
1:06:43is really fantastic.
1:06:44So I'm pretty pleased with that.
1:06:46Now the only problem is I have two nano SIMs
1:06:49and I have no idea what to do with the other one,
1:06:51in the sense that it's so tiny,
1:06:55I'm inevitably gonna lose it, but that's okay.
1:06:58- One thing I was surprised by,
1:06:59when I moved my Verizon service
1:07:01from my first gen iPad Mini to my new iPad Mini,
1:07:04it actually said on the first gen,
1:07:07when I deactivated it,
1:07:08it basically said that it was bricking that SIM,
1:07:11that I can't even reactivate with that same SIM
1:07:13and if I ever wanna reactivate,
1:07:14to go to Verizon store and buy a new sim. And I don't know if that's true, I didn't
1:07:18try reactivating it, but that's kind of crappy.
1:07:21Did the magic smoke escape?
1:07:23I don't think, I didn't see one, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.
1:07:25It's like the Mission Impossible thing. Oh, and by the way, we're nuking your sim.
1:07:29Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
1:07:29Smoke comes out of the side.
1:07:32And I've been asked, I was asked on Twitter earlier today, "What happens when you run
1:07:36out of your 200 megs?"
1:07:38I don't know, to be honest.
1:07:39I would assume that they just stop giving you data.
1:07:42I did pay for my $10 SIM with a credit card just because it was easier, but the gentleman
1:07:48that had rung me up had said, "Are you paying with cash or credit or debit or whatever?"
1:07:53So I bring that up because it seemed to me like during the activation process, he never
1:07:58took a credit card for sure, and I don't think that me having paid for the $10
1:08:02with a credit card is indicative of the fact that they have my credit card
1:08:06information for anything other than that one sale. Well it probably works just
1:08:09like other iPad data plans always have, which is there is no automatic pushing
1:08:14you up into a new plan, which is awesome, and however Apple negotiated that it was
1:08:18genius. But probably Steve Jobs was probably involved, but you know it what
1:08:24they do is you know let's say you buy a 1 gig plan from Verizon or something,
1:08:27once you use that one gig, it'll start warning you
1:08:29when you get close, and then it just cuts off the data
1:08:32when you hit that limit, and it says,
1:08:33go to settings if you want to buy more.
1:08:35Or you'll get more on this date,
1:08:37which is like the one month anniversary next month.
1:08:40So that's probably how this is gonna work too,
1:08:42which is you can just use it and there's no auto billing,
1:08:45you can just use it until you hit 200 megs
1:08:47and then it'll just yell at you and stop,
1:08:49and you can go buy more if you want,
1:08:51or you can just wait.
1:08:53That's how I bet it's gonna work,
1:08:54but I don't know that for sure.
1:08:55- That's exactly what I expected as well,
1:08:57I haven't run into that yet so I can't say that with any sort of authority.
1:09:02Sam the Geek in the chat says as far as he understands they throttle to dial up is what
1:09:06he said.
1:09:08He wasn't absolutely positive that that was the case but in other words they give you
1:09:12just unbelievably crummy throughput or like Marco said and that's what I would expect
1:09:17they just cut you off entirely.
1:09:20But in terms of the screen you'll burn in, I keep calling it burn in, retention issues
1:09:23aside it's a beautiful screen.
1:09:26The iPad is very, very nice and it is a little bit heavier.
1:09:31I can definitely tell that it's a little bit heavier than the iPad Mini I had previously,
1:09:35which was not LTE.
1:09:36And I should also note that a friend at work got an iPad Air, which was not LTE, and I
1:09:43held my LTE iPad Mini and his Air that was not LTE, one in each hand, and I could tell
1:09:51you I couldn't tell the difference.
1:09:53And I looked at Apple's website and the iPad mini with LTE, the Retina iPad mini with LTE
1:09:59is 341 grams.
1:10:02The iPad Air without LTE is 469 grams, which is what, 120 grams-ish.
1:10:09But in my hand, my hand was not sensitive enough to tell the difference.
1:10:12They felt like they were the same darn weight.
1:10:14And that was a really great testament to how thin and light the iPad Air is because I swear
1:10:21to you. To me anyway, it felt the same as the iPad Mini in my hand. I know Marco, you,
1:10:26Tiff has an iPad Air, doesn't she?
1:10:27Yeah, yeah. It's actually her first new iPad. She kept using my hand-me-downs. This
1:10:32is her first new one. She moved from an iPad 2 to this, so it was a pretty big jump. But,
1:10:37yeah. And, you know, looking at these two devices, again, I think I'll echo what everyone
1:10:42else has said, like all the reviewers have said. You really can't go wrong with either
1:10:46of them, and you're basically just buying for screen size. You know, there is that very
1:10:51minor performance difference. I don't think anybody would really notice it in practice,
1:10:56to be honest. You're really just buying what screen size do you like better. And one way
1:11:02you can make an easy decision is just buy whatever screen size you were using before.
1:11:07So if you were using a first gen mini and you really got used to that size and you really
1:11:13want, you love that portability and everything, the Air is probably going to feel too big
1:11:17for you. And so you should just get another mini if you're going to upgrade, you know,
1:11:22get the Retina one. But if you're coming from a full-size iPad and you don't necessarily
1:11:26need it to get smaller and you do things that benefit from a bigger screen, like watching
1:11:30video or like drawing or sketching apps or, you know, certain games, things like that,
1:11:34that will benefit from a bigger screen, then by all means get the Air because, you know,
1:11:39it's a substantial improvement from the 3 and 4 and there's pretty much no downside
1:11:44except that it's a little bit bigger physically in size.
1:11:47There is a weight difference, but in practice,
1:11:51the bigger difference is that this is a much larger
1:11:55rectangle, and so when you hold it, it's gonna have
1:12:00different forces as you hold it if you're holding it
1:12:01up in bed, like the mini will be easier to hold
1:12:03for long periods, but the reality is, whichever one
1:12:08you've been using before, I would say use that one.
1:12:13whatever size class you were in before, you can probably stay in your size class and be
1:12:16perfectly happy. And obviously, the best thing to do is go to a store and try them both and
1:12:21see how you feel. But if I had to make an assumption to recommend without you trying
1:12:27anything, I would just say, stick within the size class that you already liked.
1:12:32Speaking of that performance deficit between the Air and the Mini that you mentioned that
1:12:36you probably can't tell, what is it, like 7% or something like that, just the clock
1:12:40speed?
1:12:41versus 1.4 gigahertz, but there's also the thermal issues that, again, an Antec did an
1:12:47awesome graph of this where the CPUs in all the A7s, so the iPhone 5s, the Retina Mini
1:12:54and the iPad Air, all have this thermal throttling behavior where they can work at really awesome
1:13:00speed for like a minute or two at max load and they start throttling down for heat reasons.
1:13:07And so the iPad Air has the highest ceiling for that.
1:13:11So the iPad Air can work at full speed for the longest.
1:13:14And then when it does throttle, it doesn't throttle down as far as the Retina Mini and
1:13:19the iPhone 5S, even though they all have roughly the same CPU.
1:13:23Just the Air has a more thermal mass to cool and everything.
1:13:26So I was going to recommend that article.
1:13:28We should put it in the show notes.
1:13:29Not only because of the actual iPad Air testing, but he snuck in there and in the Mini review
1:13:33too, I think.
1:13:34But he snuck in the Air one.
1:13:35lot more information about the A7 CPU.
1:13:38And I was excited to see that there's
1:13:41some advantage to actually knowing less about this stuff
1:13:44on a concrete level.
1:13:45Because obviously, those guys who work at Anand Tech
1:13:48know so much more about the individual part numbers
1:13:50and the supply chains and what the other vendors are doing
1:13:54and stuff like that.
1:13:55And I remember reading one of his--
1:13:57I think it was the 5S review when he was talking about the A7
1:14:00and saying how--
1:14:01he was speculating because he didn't know at that point.
1:14:03Like Apple didn't release any information.
1:14:05They didn't have any specs, and no one had cut the top off the chip yet.
1:14:07So we had to kind of guess of like, what, you know, Apple claims 2x speed, let's do
1:14:11some benchmarks, and sure enough it is like 2x speed, and what's making that happen or
1:14:15whatever.
1:14:17And we had a show where we talked about it as well, and I don't know all the details
1:14:21of all these chips or whatever, but I'm like, well, if they have 2x speed, you're not going
1:14:24to get that, we talked about obviously not going to get that from 64-bit, which may make
1:14:27you go slower, all the things being equal.
1:14:30And then the other thing was like, so how are they getting 2x speed?
1:14:33It's not going to be 2x class speed or whatever.
1:14:36And me knowing nothing about the details of this said, well, there has to be more execution
1:14:41units.
1:14:42I mean, you can't just be the same chip running faster or some small tweaks.
1:14:46You need actual more hardware to do stuff.
1:14:49And not in hindsight knowing more about the details.
1:14:52So they're like, well, it's not going to be double the width or triple the width in terms
1:14:57of execution units as the A6, because that's crazy.
1:15:00I mean, even the A15 doesn't have that kind of size,
1:15:02so it must be something else or whatever.
1:15:04And he was cursed with the knowledge
1:15:05of the individual details of how many execution units
1:15:07each one of these things have,
1:15:08which I didn't know off the top of my head.
1:15:11But it caused him to make the wrong call,
1:15:12because sure enough, when they cut the top off of this thing,
1:15:14it's like a six-wide machine with like,
1:15:17you can do simultaneously four integer, two floating point,
1:15:19whereas the other machine was like three wide,
1:15:21but you can only do like one and a half
1:15:23because there was dependencies on integer and floating point.
1:15:25And the A7 really is, in Apple's marketing speak, a desktop-class machine.
1:15:30In terms of the width and the number of execution units of the machine,
1:15:33out of order, being out of order like a desktop machine is,
1:15:36and it really is such a huge leap over the A6 that no one expected.
1:15:40And it's like, how could you get that machine into a laptop or into a phone, for crying out loud?
1:15:47And this iPad Air article and other things explain how they did it.
1:15:51like they cut the memory bus width in half,
1:15:56they do all these, they have four megabytes of on die SRAM,
1:16:01serving as sort of an L3,
1:16:04'cause they had to say,
1:16:05look, we're gonna cut the memory bandwidth in half,
1:16:06but we still need to run an iPad right in the screen,
1:16:08how are we gonna do that?
1:16:09Well, we'll put this huge SRAM thing here,
1:16:11and they said that for power savings,
1:16:14instead of doing simultaneously fetching from DRAM
1:16:16and from the L3, they check L3 first,
1:16:19And if it's not there, then they do a second request
1:16:22for a thing of DRAM.
1:16:24And if you're making a desktop CPU, you would never do that,
1:16:26but you have to make compromises for power.
1:16:28So they basically found a way to wedge
1:16:30a twice as wide machine into the same thing
1:16:33by making it worse than the A6 in many different measures,
1:16:37but overall being twice as fast.
1:16:38And it's an amazing balancing act
1:16:39when you look at what they did with this thing,
1:16:41because they did this seemingly impossible thing.
1:16:43When you learn details like, oh, it wasn't impossible.
1:16:45It was just really, really wise trade-offs
1:16:48give them, from the outside, what looks like an impossibility. A machine that's twice as
1:16:52fast at a similar clock speed in the same power envelope. It seems like it shouldn't
1:16:55be possible, but it's like, "Oh, I see where they compromised." And if I know how to tickle
1:16:58it just right, I can show you a benchmark where the A6 crushes the A7, but no real application
1:17:03is ever going to do that. So, thumbs up for Apple and on TechSight and scientific progress
1:17:09in general. Yay.
1:17:12It's pretty amazing when you look at the lineup. Now that we've had the whole fall lineup revealed
1:17:16for us, it's pretty amazing that the A7 is in all three of these products. And it's basically
1:17:24the same, it's almost the same performance in all three. And when you look at now, when
1:17:31the iPhone 5S came out, we were all like, "Whoa, that was like a bigger jump than we
1:17:35expected." Because now looking at it, you would expect that to be only in the iPad Air.
1:17:42And then the iPad mini should have had a die-shrunk A6, and then the iPhone should have had an
1:17:49A7 that was much lower clocked than the iPad.
1:17:53That's how you would have expected this to go.
1:17:55And in reality, you have basically the high-end iPad chip in all three devices with very minor
1:18:01differences, and that's really impressive.
1:18:03It was just the difference in thermal throttling and minor clock speed deficits, and that's
1:18:10it.
1:18:11Exactly.
1:18:12It's the same with memory bus, the same SRAM, the same, like, what it comes down to is that
1:18:16the iPhone 5S, that CPU has the ability to drive a Retina iPad screen, which is unbelievable.
1:18:21Exactly. I mean, it's really, really good. And this, you know, now we're starting to
1:18:27see, every year since the A4, when, you know, like, shortly before that they had acquired
1:18:32PA Semi and they were talking about, you know, doing their own silicon, or the rumors were
1:18:37at least, every year so far we're seeing quite how much that's paying off as they
1:18:42get more and more advanced into the kind of diversions they can achieve from everyone
1:18:49else's ARM chips. When you start seeing all the custom stuff they're doing, last
1:18:54year with the A6 you got to see their awesome new core design and now you're seeing these
1:19:00other trade-offs like the SRAM and stuff like that. It's really impressive what they're
1:19:04doing, and what's really interesting is why isn't Samsung doing something like this?
1:19:11Why aren't the other manufacturers able to match this as closely?
1:19:16It could be that Apple's just a little bit ahead. I would assume the next generation
1:19:21of ARM parts from other people are going to have similar—Apple's just there first.
1:19:25Sometimes Apple gets there first by two months, by six months, by eight months, by an entire
1:19:29year, we'll see. But I would assume everyone's just there first. That's the depressing
1:19:33thing about this from my perspective is that all these things we're seeing, going from an
1:19:38inner and a machine to going out of order, making the machine wider, putting on-die RAM,
1:19:43it's just a replay of the history of the desktop CPUs. Because if you go back, back, back in time,
1:19:49like back to the 386, 486, and Pentium, we're seeing in mobile the exact same evolution we saw
1:19:57there, only in a crazily constrained power envelope. So all the tricks you're seeing here,
1:20:02It used to be back in Ars Technica when John Stokes was doing all his articles about PowerPC
1:20:08versus Intel, and Itanium came out with Intel's new instruction set, and they were doing predication
1:20:14where they would execute two instruction streams at the same time, then discard the results of one.
1:20:18All these interesting ideas, some of them didn't pan out, some of them did.
1:20:22We went through this whole evolution to see how much instruction-level parallelism can you
1:20:29extract from regular programs that are compiled by people. How wide can you make machine before
1:20:33the point of diminishing returns? And then the multi-core and then cache coherency and multi-level.
1:20:37Like we did it all already and then we had to reset the clock to go, "Okay, here's a risk machine.
1:20:41It's in order. It sucks, but it fits in a phone." And then we have to go back through the exact same
1:20:46evolutionary cycle, hopefully with the knowledge of hindsight of like, "Oh, we know exactly how
1:20:50to make this faster," because jumping right to the A7, that takes into account those designers
1:20:55of the people who know what we did on the desktop. But there are still so many obvious things that,
1:21:00if you just look at the current generation Xeon, that has stuff inside that we just can't fit into
1:21:05a phone power output, but it's just waiting there. We know how to do it. It will make your software
1:21:11faster. We can clock it higher. Its branch prediction will be better. You'll have a higher
1:21:16cache hit rate. We have all these awesome things. You just can't fit them in a phone yet.
1:21:20And so we're just waiting patiently. And hopefully we will get back up to the point,
1:21:25You know like it seems like desktop CPUs like that's not where the money is anymore and people aren't interested in advancing them
1:21:29So we have to wait for the mobile CPUs and the process that makes them to catch us up to sort of where we are
1:21:35on the state of the art on desktop, and then we can finally start making sort of
1:21:37forward progress in the absolute realm sort of like whatever IBM is doing with the power 8 or whatever the hell power number they're up to
1:21:44Where they're always just like give an unlimited money and power budget
1:21:47How fast can we make a CPU for crazy supercomputing stuff assuming anyone besides the government and the NSA are available to buy it from us?
1:21:54It's kind of disappointing to me to see a replay of that in the mobile space.
1:21:58It's kind of exciting to have it in the palm of your hand, but on the other hand, I'm
1:22:01always interesting, you know, as with my love of the Mac Pro and everything, I'm always
1:22:05interested with the "let's see how fast we can really go" type of advancement, not merely
1:22:10"let's see how small we can really go with stuff that we already did on the desktop five,
1:22:14ten years ago."
1:22:15So, on a final note, John, I hear that you're having some disk woes.
1:22:20Care to share?
1:22:23I had them.
1:22:24This was like a couple of weeks ago.
1:22:25I just forgot to talk about it.
1:22:27It kept being at the bottom of my notes.
1:22:29This is a boring story.
1:22:31It's not that long.
1:22:32But again, I think there's a nice moral at the end.
1:22:34So I was running disk first aid on my wife's boot drive
1:22:37and her MacBook Air, which is an SSD.
1:22:39And why was I doing that?
1:22:41Because that's one of the things that I do.
1:22:43I run-- it's not called disk first aid anymore, right?
1:22:46I run disk utility and go to the first aid tab, whatever.
1:22:48But it's like FSCK, whatever you want to call it.
1:22:51Check your file system metadata structures
1:22:53to make sure they know where everything is on disk.
1:22:55They keep track of which bits are allocated,
1:22:57to which files, which bits aren't allocated,
1:22:59how many of these free blocks are available here,
1:23:01this, that.
1:23:02They keep track of all that information.
1:23:03And that information gets out of sync because HRS+ sucks.
1:23:06So I run this periodically.
1:23:08You know, I didn't know you thought that.
1:23:09Yeah.
1:23:10And I don't know how many people do this.
1:23:12Do either one of you run disk first aid
1:23:14on your disks or disk utility on your disk with any regularity
1:23:17ever, just for no reason?
1:23:18No.
1:23:19No.
1:23:19You should.
1:23:20You totally should.
1:23:22And that's the thing, like when I brought this up on one of my first shows about file systems,
1:23:25I said, "Just try this, go up to..."
1:23:27People were like, "HFS flux first find errors, any problems?"
1:23:29I'm like, "Okay, well, if you think that,
1:23:31go and look at one of your disks or run disk first aid on it and see if it finds any errors.
1:23:35If it finds any errors, that means something screwed up in the past.
1:23:37And eventually, if those errors accumulate, you will be sad because
1:23:40whole directories will go away and bad things will happen.
1:23:44Maybe it'll never happen to you, maybe you'll buy a new computer before that happens.
1:23:46You could be fine.
1:23:47But, things are going wrong on your disk and you may not know about it.
1:23:50the worst kind of failure. Anyway, I run it periodically, I think everybody should too,
1:23:55and I ran it and it found errors. Very often it does find errors, and there's a repair
1:24:00button, you can repair it, but when it's your boot drive you can't repair your boot drive,
1:24:02you can only verify it, you have to reboot from another drive. So great, use, you know,
1:24:05hold down command R, reboot into recovery mode or whatever it is, and then you can run
1:24:09repair on your boot volume, even though you're still booting from the same disk as the recovery
1:24:13partition. But anyway, I hit repair and repair fails. And when that happens, like, when you
1:24:19When you try to use Disk Utility, it says,
1:24:20"Well, there were problems with Disk,
1:24:21"and I couldn't repair them."
1:24:23Your choices are limited at that point.
1:24:25You can buy a third-party product that can repair it,
1:24:27like Disk Warrior or something.
1:24:29Many third-party products can repair things
1:24:31Disk Utility can't repair.
1:24:33So if you already have one of those,
1:24:35or if you desperately wanna repair it,
1:24:37I would recommend that.
1:24:38I had an old version of Disk Warrior,
1:24:40but I don't have an update one.
1:24:41I didn't wanna pay for it again.
1:24:42And I said, "Well, fine."
1:24:43So Disk Utility can't repair it.
1:24:45No big deal.
1:24:46I'll restore from Time Machine, right?
1:24:48So before I restore from Time Machine,
1:24:51this is another thing I think not enough people do,
1:24:52and I don't even know if the Genius Bar people do it,
1:24:55run a disk utility first aid check
1:24:57on your Time Machine volume before you restore from it.
1:25:02Because if you don't do that,
1:25:03you could be restoring some crazy garbage
1:25:05onto your boot drive from your Time Machine volume.
1:25:07So I ran the first aid on my Time Machine volume,
1:25:11and it found errors.
1:25:13I said, "Okay, I will repair the Time Machine volume,
1:25:15"which I can do without rebooting."
1:25:16I tell it to repair, it says sorry, can't repair.
1:25:19So now I have two disks, the disk utility says
1:25:21that there are errors on and it can't repair.
1:25:23And not only that, now the time machine volume
1:25:25won't mount anymore and it's grayed out in disk utility.
1:25:28And when I try to repair again, it hangs in disk utility
1:25:31and eventually says after many minutes,
1:25:32couldn't unmount volume, which makes no sense to me
1:25:34because it's not mounted as far as I can tell
1:25:37and it's grayed out in disk utility.
1:25:38And I said, all right, well, fine,
1:25:41let me erase this time machine disk.
1:25:42I'll get to why I can do that in a second.
1:25:44It wouldn't even let me erase it.
1:25:45I'm like, all right, screw it.
1:25:46Unplug that drive from the computer, put it away.
1:25:48At this point, most people would be screwed,
1:25:50'cause most people don't have it back
1:25:51to the first place.
1:25:52They're like, well, there's errors,
1:25:53but the disk is still working.
1:25:54The time machine volume I hosed by trying to repair
1:25:57with Apple's own Disk Utility Tool.
1:25:58So that must have been really far gone, right?
1:26:01But me being the paranoid maniac that I am,
1:26:03I still have my second time machine volume on my Synology,
1:26:07my super duper clone, and a crash plan backup.
1:26:10So I still have three viable backups,
1:26:12hopefully viable backups,
1:26:13even though I've not really lost my boot drive,
1:26:16but it has errors and my time machine volume
1:26:18is totally hosed because it couldn't even be repaired.
1:26:21So what I decided to do,
1:26:22I have lots of options at this point,
1:26:23lots of options that most people don't have.
1:26:25What I decided to do at this point was
1:26:27go with the SuperDuper clone.
1:26:31And my SuperDuper clone hadn't been made that recently,
1:26:34so I manually copied the few files
1:26:36that I know have been modified
1:26:37since my SuperDuper clone was made
1:26:40onto a spare partition on another disk.
1:26:43Then I erased my boot disk and I restored it from the Super Duper Clone.
1:26:46Oh, and by the way, I ran Disk First Aid on the Super Duper Clone before I did the restore
1:26:49and it checked out, right?
1:26:51Always run Disk First Aid on your things before you do anything with them, especially in a
1:26:55backup scenario, because the worst thing you want to do is to just start spreading corruption
1:26:59all around and think you've recovered and you haven't.
1:27:04And then after I had restored, the very next thing I did was ran Disk First Aid on every
1:27:10single thing, I ran it on all the volumes that were connected, and I did fresh backups
1:27:14on all destinations except for the super duper backup and the second time machine volume.
1:27:20So I did a new time machine backup to my local disk, which I finally did get erased through
1:27:24many reboots on another machine, and did full backups and everything else, ran disk first
1:27:29and then said now I'm back into a stable state where I have multiple backups, they're all
1:27:32check out, they're all in sync with each other, but I saved two to be the old thing, just
1:27:37Just in case there was something going wrong and I waited a few days after I had done this
1:27:41recovery process to see, now is it safe for me to finally toss my one good one that I
1:27:47think is good that I restored from, one other backup of time machine volume saying like,
1:27:52this hasn't been touched ever, it's perfectly fine, in worst case I can fall back on that.
1:27:58Everything was fine and eventually I just allowed those to sync up too.
1:28:00So I guess lessons you get out of this is one backup is very often not enough.
1:28:04Because say I just had that time machine volume.
1:28:06I mean, I didn't really lose the boob disk.
1:28:07It just had errors on it, but they were unrepairable errors.
1:28:10So what was I supposed to do in that case?
1:28:11Just leave them there forever and cross my fingers and hope new ones didn't accumulate
1:28:14or whatever error was.
1:28:15It wasn't important, you know?
1:28:16Yeah, that's nuts.
1:28:17I mean, for me, like, I treat any disk error as fatal and, I mean, well, I guess HFS, but
1:28:24anything, any kind of, like, hardware error, to me, that disk is dead to me.
1:28:27That's it.
1:28:28It's gone.
1:28:29But it's not a hardware error.
1:28:30This is a software.
1:28:31It's like a wrong number of hard link counts or, you know, I don't know the exact details.
1:28:35So it's like HFS+ metadata structure.
1:28:37It's not a hardware problem.
1:28:38That's an important distinction that people don't make
1:28:39'cause they think, you know,
1:28:40my hard drive is dying.
1:28:41If you have a hardware problem,
1:28:42usually you know it because it manifests in ways
1:28:45that are not visible in disk utility in any meaningful way.
1:28:48Like, you know, things freeze up on your computer
1:28:51and nothing happens.
1:28:52Terrible noises come from your hard drive,
1:28:53it's mechanical, you can detect those.
1:28:55This is just merely software corruptions.
1:28:57The disks are fine, right?
1:28:58Second lesson is that more backups give you more options.
1:29:03not just like, oh, and now I'm safe,
1:29:05it's that you have options, right?
1:29:06And the third lesson is that disk clones and time machine,
1:29:10stuff like that, have different pros and cons.
1:29:13So that when you have more options,
1:29:14if you have, I have a time machine one,
1:29:16I have a Super Duper one, I have an online backup,
1:29:19like disk clones, I really like, I really like Super Duper,
1:29:22because it's simpler and less can go wrong,
1:29:24and it's often faster to recover from,
1:29:27because it's just a plain old copy.
1:29:29In fact, you can boot from that clone if you need to.
1:29:30You can be a backup in a second
1:29:32if you just boot from that clone.
1:29:33it's a bootable clone. On the other hand, Time Machine gives you multiple backups. So
1:29:36if your SuperDuper clone was made after something terrible happened, it's no good to you because
1:29:39you really want like three weeks ago or whatever. So I highly recommend having more than one
1:29:44backup, more than one type of backup, and I also recommend running Disk First Aid. Not
1:29:49every day, not every week, but just once in a while, just to see what's going on there.
1:29:54So this whole story started with you electing to run Disk Utility?
1:29:58Yeah, I do it all the time. I do it, you know, whenever I feel paranoid.
1:30:02hourly? It's not all the time, but like, and the thing is I don't, I suspect computers
1:30:11with externally attached drives more than internally attached ones, so I run it more
1:30:15often on my wife's computer than mine. Hers is also more likely to someone like bump out
1:30:20the cable or she unplugs her laptop from the Thunderbolt cable without unmounting the drives
1:30:25that are attached through the firewire thing connected to the back of her Thunderbolt display.
1:30:32All the things that can go wrong with their system that are less likely to go wrong with
1:30:34my internal SATA drives.
1:30:36But yeah, I do it at work too.
1:30:38Make sure my backups are fresh, make sure they're still working, make sure...
1:30:41I mean, disk first aid is the most minimal check.
1:30:43It's not checking whether your data could be totally hosed.
1:30:45All it's checking is, "Hey, I'm a file system and I know where all the blocks on the disk
1:30:50are.
1:30:51I know which ones are allocated, I know which files they belong to, I know how many of them
1:30:53there are."
1:30:54That's all we're asking of the file system.
1:30:55Just keep track of that stuff.
1:30:57And when it loses track, sometimes it's not a big deal.
1:30:59it thought there were only 15 free blocks here, but there's actually 17.
1:31:03So what? It's not causing your data to be gone, but
1:31:06the accumulation of those little errors is eventually what causes
1:31:10software-based "disk failures".
1:31:13Disk hardware is fine, but your data is hosed in some way
1:31:17that you might need something like Disk Warrior or whatever that's going to brute force
1:31:20reconstruct the appropriate metadata for your disk and then write a new directory structure back out.
1:31:25I just wish I didn't have to do any of this, but I do, so I do.
1:31:28You know John, I have a pro tip for you. Ignorance is bliss.
1:31:33No, no it's not. It's bliss right up to the point where the crying starts.
1:31:38Yay!
1:31:39Where's my data? But I had a backup! I used Time Machine!
1:31:44Wow.
1:31:46I think we just found the beginning of the show.
1:31:48We have, and let's find the end of the show now.
1:31:50So thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Gemvara and Ting.
1:31:54And we will see you next week.
1:31:55week.
1:32:02Cause it was accidental, accidental, it was accidental, accidental
1:32:08John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:32:12Cause it was accidental, accidental, it was accidental, accidental
1:32:18You can find the show notes at ee.f.l, and you can read the twitter
1:32:25Show them on Twitter
1:32:27Sure
1:32:28C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
1:32:31That's K-C-L-A-R-C-O-A-R-L
1:32:35E-N-T Marco Armin
1:32:38S-I-R-A-C
1:32:40USA Syracuse-o
1:32:43Cause it was accidental
1:32:44Accidental
1:32:46They didn't need to
1:32:48Accidental
1:32:50Tech podcast
1:32:52You two should both just immediately run Disk Utility on all your disks.
1:32:59See the horrors that await you.
1:33:02Well now I'm curious.
1:33:04Well, the thing is, the worst thing is that like, if you have, I have like four, literally
1:33:08four million files on like my average disk, like my average, you know, boot volume or
1:33:13whatever, it takes, it takes forever.
1:33:15Man, are you talking about verified disk permissions or verified disk?
1:33:19Not permissions, I should have said that on the show. Please, please don't verify permissions.
1:33:22I mean, that does almost nothing.
1:33:25It does something.
1:33:26Doesn't sound anything useful.
1:33:27You go to the first aid.
1:33:29- My computer might be slow or unresponsive.
1:33:30Should I--
1:33:31- No, don't run, no, no, no.
1:33:33Don't run on your boot disk now.
1:33:34Yes, well, running it on your boot disk
1:33:37while you're booted into that disk will just walk away.
1:33:40You can run verify and it will tell you if there's errors,
1:33:45but I always just run repair on it.
1:33:47Because if there are any errors,
1:33:47my next thing I'm gonna run is repair
1:33:49and it takes so long anyway.
1:33:50So just pick an external drive.
1:33:51And by the way, when you select it in the sidebar, it shows the disk and then indented
1:33:55underneath it is the volumes that are on that disk.
1:33:58Running it on the top disk just checks the partition map, sort of.
1:34:02You have to select the volume below to actually check the structures on that volume.
1:34:06So usually checking the partition map is really fast and it'll almost always check out, and
1:34:10if it doesn't, you've got big problems if it doesn't know where the volumes are.
1:34:14But then running it on the individual disks is a thing that takes forever.
1:34:16And it'll find something small, like an incorrect number of...
1:34:20I don't even know what these messages are, but like they're just I my impression is the hfs+ keeps a lot of
1:34:25sort of
1:34:27denormalized counts of other structures
1:34:30So it'll have like a bunch of structures and then it'll have a number that indicates how many are available and how many are there?
1:34:35And it can reconstruct that count by walking the tree and finding out how many and writing the number there and that number gets out
1:34:40of sync
1:34:41Somehow and it's usually not a big deal as well like the easiest type of errors to fix
1:34:45But there are more serious ones getting all the way down to
1:34:47Could not repair your disk and by the way it will never mount again say goodbye to it
1:34:51And you can't even erase it that one really frustrated me because I was like what I can't even erase the disk
1:34:56I know I took I took the disk off. I put it on a whole different computer I
1:35:00Rebooted that computer a few times. I eventually got it to erase that disk
1:35:04I don't know idea what the hell its problem was but that disk is out of rotation now
1:35:07So that one that one is done enough wonky stuff to me that I'm like all right. You're you're having a timeout
1:35:12I used to test the next build of 1010 or something, but I was becoming a magnet donor
1:35:17Yeah, I swapped in a what one of my vast collection of caviar blacks and another enclosure
1:35:23So while we're on the topic of hard drives, I can't imagine this coming up quite like this again
1:35:28I recently decided to make a change in my hard drive buying policy
1:35:33It my policy used to be that I would I would look at the current
1:35:38you know, best bang for the buck capacity and buy like one or two of those, you know,
1:35:43for the either storage or maybe buy two of them to put them in a raid or something like
1:35:48that. And usually that was, you know, like today that's probably three terabyte. You
1:35:54know, in the past it's usually like one or two levels down from the biggest drive
1:35:57that exists on the market that day.
1:35:59Yeah, I never like buying the biggest. That makes me nervous.
1:36:02Well, so I think I'm deciding to change that policy and now just buy the biggest,
1:36:08because what happens is now I have this drawer full of like one terabyte hard drives.
1:36:14And a bunch of them went into the Synology, but I don't even have room for all of the
1:36:19hard drives I have in the Synology.
1:36:22Because now the problem is that when you buy anything but the biggest, its useful lifespan
1:36:29can be much shorter.
1:36:31I think that's an asset.
1:36:33Because then it keeps you from using a disk.
1:36:35What was that thing that had the--
1:36:37I tweeted it.
1:36:38Backblaze was showing the hard disk lifetime graph.
1:36:41Did you see that?
1:36:41Yeah.
1:36:42Did you see what happened at three years?
1:36:45The knee of the graph goes, and now you're screwed.
1:36:48So I don't want to have a disk.
1:36:50Wow, it's at such a capacity.
1:36:51I could use it for four years.
1:36:53No, don't do that.
1:36:54I would rather have it age out because it's too small.
1:36:57that's a positive force in the ecosystem of my spinning storage, I feel like.
1:37:02That's a fair counterpoint. I can totally see that. I guess so, yeah. It depends on how long
1:37:09you want to use it. But I mean, I was having some problems where I would buy two one terabyte disks
1:37:15to make a really fast RAID array, and then 18 months later, I outgrow that space and need more,
1:37:21and that sucks. Yeah, well, I mean, the size is now, I think, it's making it harder for you
1:37:26outgrow it now because like three terabyte is now kind of the not biggest size you can get.
1:37:31And it will take you longer to fill that. Your data needs have not tripled since one terabyte
1:37:36drives were the sweet spot. So now three terabyte drives are the sweet spot, but you can get away
1:37:40with it for longer. But in scenarios where you're putting them into a box where it's going to be
1:37:45some sort of RAID setup and redundancy, then yeah, I think it's better to go with the biggest
1:37:49possible capacity because you have built-in hardware redundancy. You're putting these in
1:37:55there, you're putting them in there to die. Like, I need the space. Because you have to overprovision
1:38:00so much for these RAID schemes or the Drobo-type schemes or anything else like that. Like, you have
1:38:03to just overprovision the space so much. And the only advantage you're getting is like, it's okay,
1:38:09one of you can die. Even two of you can die since I'm so massively overprovisioned. And then, yeah,
1:38:13just go up to the max. But what I'm mostly talking about is like individual drives that I use just as
1:38:18plain old drives, you know, internal. Like, in fact, sometimes I do multiple volumes on them.
1:38:22I'm the opposite of RAID. I tend to do multiple volumes per disk instead of multiple disks per
1:38:26volume. But yeah, I'm new to the box that holds a bunch of disks phenomenon. You want to do titles?
1:38:33Let's do titles. The Compliance Shark? Who said that one?
1:38:36You did. No, I didn't.
1:38:38Yes, you did. Maybe I mumbled something that sounded like The Compliance Shark.
1:38:42You totally said it. I'm going to cut it in. You'll see.
1:38:46Can anyone remember the context? It was early on we were talking
1:38:51about like enterprise software.
1:38:53Oh, it was like a sucker fish on the shark?
1:38:54Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:38:55Man, I might have said it.
1:38:56I don't know.
1:38:57You did say it.
1:38:58I say a lot of things.
1:39:02Nooks and crannies of profit where they can like sort of live as the big sucker fish on
1:39:06the government shark or on the compliance shark and say, "compliant shark, compliance
1:39:10shark."
1:39:11One of my favorites was accidental F cast.
1:39:16Let's make up some numbers here.
1:39:18And it's so precise.
1:39:20It's not even like vague, like, "No, we know exactly.
1:39:22It's these exact little kinks in the lines."
1:39:26What rant I wanted to make in the show, but we didn't have time for, maybe I'll do it
1:39:30next week, or maybe it should be a blog post, I don't know, is I look at people who are
1:39:37doing, they're trying to get away with just using an iPad.
1:39:40There was a great post that Fraser Spears mentioned how he records his podcast on just
1:39:46an iPad and Dan Benjamin was talking to Merlin on this week's Back to Work about possibly
1:39:52going iPad only for himself when he travels and it just like people will jump through
1:39:57the most ridiculous set of hoops to try to cram their life into going iPad only when
1:40:03it really doesn't serve their needs particularly well. Like it's like you can do that but maybe
1:40:08you shouldn't like SimCity 2000 on the Super Nintendo. Like you can yes you can do that
1:40:14but it's not ideal. You probably shouldn't. You should probably just use a computer for that.
1:40:19I was going to say, when people see me using my iPad with the keyboard attachment and little
1:40:24wing stand thing at WWDC, I would love to have a MacBook Air. I'm not doing that. But look at me,
1:40:30I'm living off my iPad. It's because I don't have an Air and they cost a lot of money and I already
1:40:34have an iPad. I'm doing it for cost reasons only. And every time I'm there, every year, I'm like,
1:40:38"Next year, I need to just rent a MacBook Air." It would be so much better for me. I do not want
1:40:43of these two things, like it's like the Microsoft Surface, like the keyboard is not attached
1:40:48to the thing.
1:40:49As much as I love my iPad, that environment is made for the MacBook Air and my wife.
1:40:54Well, let me take hers and I don't have an 11-inch so I get by with it.
1:40:57But yeah, when I see people doing it as a virtue, it's like the Airs are pretty light
1:41:01now, you know?
1:41:02And they, like it was, I guess maybe when it was 10 hours battery life versus three
1:41:06or four, then you could be like, "Okay, actually the iPad is better for your use."
1:41:10But now, maybe not the 11-inch, but the 13-inch versus the iPad Air, the battery lives are
1:41:17similar and the iPad Air is so much better for text entry.
1:41:23And you can get a used Air even, or buy one from the refurb store.
1:41:27Get the crappiest 11-inch Air model any time that the 11-inch Air has existed, from 2010
1:41:33until now.
1:41:34And for a lot of purposes, if you're not going to use it particularly heavily, if you just
1:41:39you just need something like to SSH to a bunch of servers
1:41:42with when you're away or to run a couple of minor things
1:41:46like where multitasking or a keyboard or a file system
1:41:50that you can actually access, like that helps.
1:41:51Like I was reading the post from Fraser
1:41:54about how he does his podcast, I was reading
1:41:56how he moves the files around between different apps
1:41:58on the iPad and it just sounded like
1:42:00such an incredible chore.
1:42:02- Yeah, it's like the towers of Hanoi.
1:42:03First you have to put the file over here.
1:42:04- Yeah. (laughs)
1:42:05- You pull into that app and you can't put the,
1:42:07it's like the big disk can't go on the small one.
1:42:08Yeah, and you're right, there is certainly a price argument,
1:42:12but I think for people who are that price sensitive,
1:42:14they probably are not gonna have an iPad at all.
1:42:17- Well, it's time versus cost.
1:42:20Like, if I go to WWDC once a year, if that,
1:42:23but if I was traveling all the time
1:42:24trying to type on my iPad, I would have long since bought.
1:42:26Like, you have to just, you know,
1:42:28I'm not buying it because I'm cheap,
1:42:29but also because I don't do that.
1:42:31That thing that I do at WWDC,
1:42:33that's the only time I ever do it.
1:42:34- Right.
1:42:35I should point out also,
1:42:36another thing I wanted to include,
1:42:37that didn't really get to is I got my Logitech keyboard cover for the iPad Mini today. I
1:42:45had the Ultra Slim for the full-sized iPad. When I got the iPad 3, I got that. And the
1:42:50full-sized Logitech keyboard for iPad is very good. And I use it a lot on planes. It's awesome
1:42:58on planes. Because normally I bring my giant 15-inch laptop. And sometimes when you're
1:43:02on a plane, if the person in front of you is an asshole and reclines their seat, then
1:43:06you really have a hard time using a 15 inch laptop.
1:43:09And so sometimes my only option is like smaller things,
1:43:12like iPads.
1:43:13And I found like if I'm just wanting
1:43:16to like dick around on Twitter and RSS and stuff,
1:43:18putting the iPad in the keyboard tray on the tray table
1:43:23is really, really nice on a plane.
1:43:25And it of course lasts forever and everything else.
1:43:27So I got the mini one.
1:43:29I even read the Lex Friedman review
1:43:31where he says they're all terrible.
1:43:33But I tried it in the Apple store and I got it anyway.
1:43:35and boy it is small.
1:43:36It's pretty uncomfortable.
1:43:41I can't imagine using it for heavy typing,
1:43:43but I got it for the same reason,
1:43:46where most of the time I use it,
1:43:47it's going to be used as a stand,
1:43:49less, more than a keyboard,
1:43:51and I'll probably type 10 or 15 emails on it
1:43:54over the next year.
1:43:56It's not gonna be a ton of typing.
1:43:58But it is in many ways very similar
1:44:03to the full size of the iPad One.
1:44:05you would think it's very obvious to the same device family, things are similarly proportioned
1:44:10just a smaller size. So it's interesting. I think though, if you're the kind of person
1:44:15who uses the keyboard cover a lot and you want to type on the iPad a lot, I think that's
1:44:20a pretty good reason to go with the iPad Air over the iPad Mini.
1:44:23Is the Mini covered the same size as the Mini?
1:44:25Yeah.
1:44:26Is that even possible?
1:44:27Yeah, it is possible.
1:44:31How can you type on that?
1:44:33You can use one finger in each hand?
1:44:35Pick, pick, pick.
1:44:37Maybe like the first two or three fingers.
1:44:39You can do it. It's not great.
1:44:41Does it make you start wanting to pick up the keyboard and use your thumbs?
1:44:45Having read Lex's review, I'll have to dig up these links,
1:44:48having read Lex's review, I thought it was going to be worse,
1:44:51and I tried one in the Apple store, they had one out,
1:44:53and it was better than I expected having read that review.
1:44:56I couldn't even tolerate the one that was the width of the big eye,
1:44:59because like I said, my wife has the Logitech thing for the big iPad 2, and that's why I
1:45:05went with the Wingstand thing, because I wanted a full-size keyboard, so I got the Bluetooth.
1:45:09I couldn't even stand one. It has to be full-size. Not that I'm the best typist, in fact I'm a
1:45:13terrible typist, maybe that's why I need the... I have no fallback technique. My fingers know
1:45:20where the keys are on a full-size keyboard, and I use all the wrong fingers to hit all the wrong
1:45:24keys and if anything is thrown off a little bit, that's it. Doesn't work.
1:45:29So for reference, I was just looking up, you can get a refurb 11 inch MacBook Air that
1:45:34is the current generation, 4 gigs of RAM, 128 gig SSD, 850.
1:45:41I would get an LTE iPad Air for that price though. Like not for that use, but like, yeah,
1:45:47I would like to have that because I remember I have an iPad 3 and I still haven't seen
1:45:51an Air in person.
1:45:52But again, it's what are you doing with it?
1:45:54Like, from my needs when I'm traveling,
1:45:57yeah, I have the iPad or the iPhone even
1:46:00for casual stuff like that,
1:46:01but I couldn't carry just that.
1:46:03I would rather have this,
1:46:06because then at least with this,
1:46:08yeah, I couldn't watch 10 hours of video with this
1:46:11in all likelihood, but I could log into a server.
1:46:14I could run Xcode if I needed to,
1:46:16even though you don't have a whole lot of screen space,
1:46:17but you can do it.
1:46:18You can run a full-size text editor,
1:46:21You can run TextMate.
1:46:23You can multitask.
1:46:24And easily, you can have all these different apps open
1:46:26that you use for different things.
1:46:28Whereas if you try to cram that kind of workflow into an iPad,
1:46:32you have to jump through so many hoops with so many of these things
1:46:34that you have to do.
1:46:36Yeah, some people can do the kind of work
1:46:39they need to do on an iPad just fine.
1:46:41But it kind of annoys me when I see people
1:46:44trying to cram in so much additional stuff
1:46:47and just jumping through ridiculous hoops
1:46:49that like really it would be so much easier to just do this on a computer.
1:46:53It's like using the wrong tool for the job.
1:46:55I'm looking at the picture that someone posted in the chat of the mini thing with,
1:47:01you know, the iPad mini keyboard that you were talking about.
1:47:04Pictures on the website make it look like one of those Casio personal organizers from
1:47:07the 80s.
1:47:08Yeah.
1:47:09The little, you know, the wide keyboard that is way too small for people to use.
1:47:14I guess the gigantic 2500 pixel wide screen on top of it is not like the 80s, but you
1:47:19know.
1:47:20Minor difference.
1:47:21Instead it would be like a four line, non-backlit passive matrix LCD.
1:47:26Exactly.
1:47:27Green background with black.
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