Marco Is Not a Platform
No.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
All right.
So you want to do some follow up.
We can start with handwriting recognition, which I'm assuming is more of John's follow up.
Yeah, I don't know why none of us thought of this, probably because we're all Westerners.
But the one thing we didn't talk about with iPads and styluses or styli is that handwriting recognition is good.
Text input with a pen is good for people who don't write with Roman characters, who have tons and tons of characters, Chinese, Japanese.
It's a pain in the butt to enter those with a keyboard because they have to have these crazy multi-level keyboards where you, you know,
tap one key, then tap another, tap another, work your way down to the actual character you want or combine multiple taps to make one thing.
Whereas these people know how to draw it if you just gave them a pen.
So if you can recognize that, it's actually way more convenient than trying to use a keyboard.
So that, I mean, I don't know if that's harder or easier than recognizing, I assume it's harder than recognizing, you know, regular Roman characters that we have.
But it's definitely, if you can get it to work, it's definitely more convenient for the person inputting the characters than hunting through some crazy keyboard.
Absolutely.
I will say that a friend of mine, Will Haynes, he had shown me – he lives in Tokyo despite having grown up in Australia.
And he had shown me the Japanese keyboard.
I'm sure there's like a name for it, like kanji or something like that.
And that's probably wrong too.
But anyway, he had shown me the Japanese keyboard, which involves drawing these little characters on the bottom of the screen, very much like the palm was way back in the day.
And –
As someone who has never seen that before, it was amazing.
It was extremely cool.
And I could see how having a stylus would make it that much better.
Monk Bent in the chat room is telling us that very few people write with characters these days.
Most of the young people, because everything is digital, just deal with the crappy input systems.
So it could be that everyone just gets over this and they forget how to write their traditional characters.
I don't know.
I mean, like...
we've been getting on the people in the far east have been getting along without this for a long time with these with these various hacks of keyboards that have hierarchies to them or graffiti like systems where you do a series of strokes to sort of narrow down and you know it's kind of like autocomplete for individual characters which represent entire uh words or ideas um so we may be already be past that threshold uh
This is where we need someone from the Far East to come on the program and tell us whether this is something that people actually like.
But it's so hard to say how, I mean, we'll talk about this later when we talk about Apple's earnings, how things play in countries other than the United States and what those markets really want.
And it's very difficult to tell how much of what Apple does is influenced by people and cultures that we know nothing about.
Yeah, absolutely.
As a quick aside, Marco, Tiff's car has the iDrive with handwriting recognition, is that correct?
It does, yes.
Do you use it ever?
I tried it, I think, once, and it wasn't really worth it because it was actually slower than just using the wheel to go around and picking the letters.
because you have to draw the characters one at a time so you write the character and then you wait and then it recognizes it and then you keep going and so in just because because of the the lag inherent in those steps uh it just wasn't really any faster than using the wheel so i just use the wheel now when i drive her car
Fair enough.
I mean, it's not a one-to-one comparison, but it was the closest that I could think of off the top of my head.
You could possibly argue it's better for safety that you're not looking at the screen as much.
In practice, that's not true.
In practice, it is just as distracting as using the wheel, and you still have to look at the screen just as much.
So I just try not to enter navigation directions while I'm moving.
Yeah, that seems like the smartest approach.
Yeah.
All right.
So we had a very interesting email from Matt Chandler, and I really wanted to talk about this.
And then I thought, well, maybe that's mean of me.
And then someone else who is not me, and I'm guessing is not Marco, added it to the show notes.
This is why Marco should look at the show notes before the show.
So he'll know when he has a question that's directed to him.
Oh, you picked out this one?
Oh, boy, this will be good.
Yeah.
Okay.
So from Matt Chandler, I listened to Marco on the talk show, the episode Now It's All Floppy, where he discussed how Apple's feedback system is, quote, extremely hostile, quote, because among other reasons, you get no feedback or response from Apple when you file a radar.
I was surprised by this as some of my friends and I have filed bug reports for Overcast, both through Twitter and email.
Yeah.
and have never received any feedback, no form, response, tweet, or favorite on Twitter.
This didn't bother me as I didn't expect a response, but I wondered why Marco called this behavior by Apple extremely hostile while he takes the same approach with Overcast.
Yes, Overcast is smaller, but it certainly receives much less feedback as well.
Thanks for the great show, and Marco, thanks for the great work on Overcast.
I can answer this one if you want.
The reason I put it in here is not because necessarily I felt Marco had to answer it, but I felt like anybody can answer it.
Casey, do you want to answer it?
Marco, I know, can answer it.
I can answer it.
Can anyone in the audience not answer this?
I mean, I'd be curious to hear both of your answers.
To me, it seems pretty obvious that even in operation the size of Overcast, if one were to acknowledge every single bug request and report and feature requests, that that would be a tremendous mountain of just thanks and okay and I got it and dupe and et cetera's.
And I can see why Marco wouldn't want to do that.
But the difference is Marco's business isn't – well, I don't know.
I already feel like this is a weak argument.
But Marco's business isn't to make other people's bug reports his job.
Whereas when you're providing developer tools, that kind of is your job.
John?
Yeah.
What was your answer, John?
Oh, you want my answer now?
Well, I think Matt Chandler knows the answer, too.
Yes, Overcast is smaller.
You think?
Is it a little bit smaller than Apple?
Maybe a little bit smaller than Apple.
I'm not sure.
We have to check Marco's earnings for this year to see if he pulled in $18 billion in profit this quarter.
I don't think he did, but we'll check.
I didn't quite hit that target, no.
Yeah.
Yes, Overcast is smaller, but it certainly receives much less feedback as well.
Exactly.
It is smaller and proportionally receives less feedback.
How much smaller than Apple is Overcast?
And what proportion of his things, you know?
So that's one thing.
Obviously, it's ridiculously smaller.
It's one person.
He would spend all his time just dealing with bug reports.
And the second, in case he already covered it, he's not a platform.
He is not...
publishing APIs for people to write code against there.
He has no developers.
There is no overcast developer program.
There is no marker armament developer program.
You know, people are not paying for a membership to a thing to be supported.
You're merely a customer and sending a report.
Now, all that said,
That's not to say that he shouldn't give responses, forum responses, personal responses, or whatever.
To the degree that he feels like he can do sort of the Daniel Jowkut, I give you amazing, exceptional customer support, he should by all means.
It is a good thing to do that.
But on the list of priorities, responding to every single bug report,
And giving an acknowledgement that it was received are probably pretty low for a one-person shop that's doing all the stuff that Marco is doing.
So I don't say that it's like he shouldn't send a response and people shouldn't expect one.
But the explanation for why there was no response and why he might say it's extremely hostile for Apple to not send a response is fairly clear.
It's hostile for Apple because Apple does not have any constraints that would make it have to be such a big black hole.
I mean, look at AppReview.
They're hiring people to look at every single of these hojillion apps that come in.
If Apple wanted to do this,
listed as a priority they have more than enough money and resources and expertise to do this uh so that's why it's hostile for apple because from apple it's like a choice it's like a prioritization of something that we think should be much more important to apple than it is and we know they have the resources to do it in marco's case you could still be angry at him because you got exceptional support but from this other one person operation because they value support more than he does but if marco
shifts to to do support differently he's got to pull from someplace else so what other part of marco's business do you think he should sacrifice to make sure that everybody who sends a bug report gets a reply i'm you know that's these are trade-offs that he makes and you can argue whether the right trade-offs or whether you like that kind of company but i don't think you should be confused about why marco can call apple extremely hostile for doing the same thing he does because he's not apple and they're so different than different standards apply
So, Marco?
This is going to be possibly a little controversial.
Not that I should be that surprised, or anybody who knows me should be that surprised by me previewing something I'm about to say with that.
This should be good.
Wait, let me go make some popcorn.
Hold that thought.
The sad truth is that it is not worth answering your email.
you plural, not like you this guy, you everybody, in general, on average, it is not worth answering your email.
And let me go into why that is.
I don't say this to be a jerk.
I'm saying this literally as like...
Just simple time constraints and economics.
So here's how this works.
This morning, so usually I go through the Overcast feedback email in the evening or like before bed on the iPad.
I'll go through it a lot there because I respond to almost none of it.
Really, almost none.
I respond to maybe three or four emails a day from that account.
since last night when i last cleared it out i've received 207 um and there's still three more hours today before i go to bed so i expect to receive maybe 220 250 we'll see what happens um that's that's pretty pretty typical most days i receive between 60 and 200 i'm getting a little more now because there's there's some sink bugs i'm trying to squash
When you buy my app, so I'm a one person company.
I blog about how much I made.
It was like 160,000 before expenses and taxes and all that stuff last year.
So, you know, that's roughly what I make.
It's like it's one developer's good salary.
It's not stunningly great.
It's just a good developer salary for the level of experience I have.
That's not so much that it would make a lot of financial sense for me to hire a support person, for instance.
And I have tried outsourced support services in the past.
I've had very mixed results with them.
And I question whether that was money well spent at all.
I could also attempt to answer more emails by using TextExpander to make my few form answers and just send those to everybody.
And I did that for the first couple of months of Overcast.
And I question whether that's better than not answering them at all.
And I should point out on Hello Internet, they had a similar conversation to this a few months back.
Is something that you're pretty sure is a form response, a template response, is that actually better than no response at all?
Is a response that is clearly insincere and that I didn't put a whole lot of time into, is that really a good thing?
That's up for debate as well.
The simple fact is, when you get 200 support emails a day and you're one person and
My job is not answering email.
My job is making the product and making it work for everybody.
And responding to email, and this isn't just support email.
This is email in general.
Responding to email is one of the least time efficient things you can do.
And of course, it varies depending on why you're responding to the email, who you're responding to and for what.
But in general, responding to email is an extremely inefficient use of limited time.
Because you are taking your time to produce something that's only ever going to go to one person.
Whereas if I spent that time instead fixing the bugs that everyone's complaining about, then they're fixed for everyone.
Or if I can make the product better in some way for everyone...
That's way better use of that time than responding to every email one by one saying, thanks for the report, I'm looking into it, or thanks, I'm about to fix this, or this is fixing the next version, or the version is pending approval.
It's such a better use of time.
In an ideal world, you would have time to do both.
I recognize that.
But this is not an ideal world.
This is reality.
And in reality, when you have an app that is free up front and that the most you can ever hope to make from somebody is $3.50 before tax, it's really hard to justify spending a ton of time on answering individual emails.
And I knew that going into it.
I knew that from Instapaper.
So the entire app is designed in such a way that it sets expectations accordingly.
You'll notice in the app, nowhere does it say support.
It only says feedback.
And on the feedback link, first, before it lets you email it, it shows you a page with an FAQ and known bugs and what's being fixed in this version, what's being fixed in the next version.
It shows you this page to try to address what you're about to tell me.
So maybe you don't have to tell me.
Maybe you can help yourself.
Maybe you can save yourself the time of sending me the email.
Certainly it saves me the time of having to read it or answer it.
And it's and it says right there, I will read every email, which, by the way, even that takes a lot of time, a lot more time than I would have expected when I wrote that.
I read every email and I say I will read every email, but I also say I'm just one person with limited time.
And so I cannot guarantee a response.
And the result of that is I respond to almost none of them because I literally don't have the time.
I would so much rather spend that time fixing the bugs and making the app better for everyone than responding to one person.
And I know that sounds cold and I know that sounds harsh, but that's the reality.
That's like when you're paying so little for apps, that's kind of part of it.
That's kind of what you have to expect from that.
That's all involved in this.
And so...
The reason I don't answer my email most of the time is because it's not because I'm a jerk, at least in my opinion.
You can make your own evaluation of that.
It's not because I'm trying to be a jerk.
It's because I've decided it really is just an incredibly bad use of time.
And I know that's not going to please everybody, but I think it will please the most people overall for me to be doing things that make the app better for everyone rather than spending three hours a day answering email.
I don't remember if I've ever told the story publicly, but I feel like I have.
I have a couple of thoughts.
First, I remember vividly that when you and I kind of got reacquainted, so to speak, because we were old friends, kind of fell out of touch, not in an angry way, just fell out of touch.
And then we were starting to get back in touch.
And I would send emails to you periodically.
And this was when Tumblr was really starting to take off.
And
And then Marco Arment was starting to become like a thing more than it was just a person.
And I would send you emails, Marco, and I would never get a reply or I would get a reply really, really late.
I remember one time Aaron and I were on our way to New York when this was when you were at Tumblr because we ended up visiting you at Tumblr.
We were on our way to New York to visit.
And I think I tweeted about it or something like that.
And you were like, wait, you're on your way to New York.
And I said, yes, I emailed you about that like two months ago.
You said you did.
And so, and God, did it annoy me so much at the time.
But then fast forward a few years and suddenly I'm on a podcast and we get email.
Oh, do we get email?
In fact, we even got an email about how we tell people not to send us email, which actually made some really good points, but I couldn't help but laugh at the irony of it.
But anyway,
Um, and, and so I, it's, I don't know how to explain it other than however email, however much email that you, the
there's a decent chance that those of us on the show get more than that.
And Marco gets more than that still.
And the other thought I had is how many shows on across how many podcasts have talked about how email is such a problem.
There was that wonderful episode of hello internet.
I think Mike and I have talked about this on analog.
God knows that Merlin has talked about this constantly.
And for good reason, the,
The reason everyone complains and moans about email is because email is kind of an inherently selfish thing that nobody really deliberately signs up for.
And it just kind of happens to them.
And and so how you deal with that, you know, you do the best you can.
And that's what Marco's doing.
Yeah, that's really it.
Again, I'm not trying to be a jerk by not responding to most of the email I get.
It's almost like a defense mechanism.
I have to defend my time and attention because if I did respond to all that email, all these bug fixes and improvements and things I'm making would all take longer to come out and I wouldn't be able to do as much.
You could spend your entire day just doing email because remember that email, once you respond, now you're engaging with that person.
And like from that person's perspective, it's just them and you.
And from your perspective, you're holding now 200 simultaneous conversations, maintaining state in each of those conversations, remembering who that person is and what they said previously.
Basically, imagine, you know, you get, you know, 200 emails to support emails today, if you responded to all 200, then those 200 send the response back, then tomorrow starts, and you get another 200 and you start responding to that, like, you will spend 100% of your time conversing over email for with people who have problems with your $5 application, right?
And you are just one person.
And someone in the chat room says, I'm describing a CRM system.
Yes, when you have a staff of people, you can do that.
But for a small business, there's with one person doing all the work.
If that one person said, I really need to support my customers.
That's all that one person would ever do.
They would never fix a bug, never write a new version of a program, never create a program, never do anything else, never do a podcast, never have any sort of extracurricular activities.
They would just spend all their waking hours conversing with individuals over email about the problems they're having with their application and never have any time to investigate them.
And so maybe you could say, well, you should expand your company.
You shouldn't have a one person company or whatever.
But like the origin of this question is about hypocrisy.
How can you say, how can you be so angry about Apple doing something that you yourself do?
It's different context.
The conditions are entirely different.
Therefore, the conclusions are different.
Absolutely.
And the input that the email gives me is very valuable.
Like by the emails alone, the emails kind of help me decide, like if I have a few big features that I want to do next, the emails decide what comes first.
And the emails decide things like, for example, I've mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, my big feature plan over this winter was to do streaming.
And I started streaming a little bit last fall and I haven't worked on it since for two reasons.
Number one is that there just keeps, there keep being other things that keep coming up, bug fixes, sync issues, watch kit, stuff like that.
But then number two is that by reading the email and by reading all the tweets, which is even more, you know, even more big stuff coming in that way, I can see very clearly that streaming is not what I should be doing next.
What I need to be doing next, which is what I am doing next is,
is auto-delete control.
Right now, the app just deletes an episode when you're done with it because that's how I listen and I don't care.
Once I'm done with it, I never want to hear it again.
That's it.
I'm done.
I thought that's how the app could always work.
It keeps things very simple with the different states an episode can be in and things like that.
It keeps a lot of things very simple.
That is by far and away the number one request, the number one complaint, and the number one reason people choose not to use my app is that I don't have the finer control over whether something gets deleted or not and when it gets deleted.
By far, that's way more important than streaming based on what people are telling me and what they've been telling me for months.
And so I wouldn't have known that had it not been for the email.
At the same time, I get, I would say, literally 40 emails a day about that.
And again, for a while, I was replying to all of them.
It took hours.
It takes long enough just to read them.
Even that, like, and I said I'll read all my email.
I'm not necessarily sure that will always be the case.
I can definitely see a future in which I say I can't even keep up with reading it all anymore.
But even that, like, reading it takes probably...
probably an order of magnitude less time than responding to it.
And even that's hard enough to keep up with.
That's how monkey mail I'm talking about.
All right, let's talk about something that's a little more positive than how much email we all get.
Do you have any ideas, Marco?
Well, it's not email.
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Now, they emailed me something earlier today.
This is kind of cool.
So I guess the Super Bowl is coming up pretty soon.
That's correct.
Yeah.
So that's football, right?
It's also Sunday.
They have winter there, right?
Oh, God, I hate you.
So, you know, Jeff Bridges, the dude, he has partnered with Squarespace to bring his project to life.
It is dreamingwithjeff.com.
That's dreamingwithjeff.com.
This is an actual project.
This is not just like a PR stunt.
It's an actual project created by Jeff Bridges with his friends in various locations in LA.
He created an album of unique and relaxing sounds, guided meditations, and stories designed to lull you to sleep.
This includes tracks such as A Glass of Water, Ikea, and Hum.
I don't know.
I haven't listened yet.
I literally just got this right before the show.
You have to listen.
You can listen to the tracks on the website.
Go listen to them.
Yeah, I've heard it's quite good.
So anyway, you can listen to it for free on the site DreamingWithJeff.com.
If you want to download it, they have a pay-what-you-like streaming system in place.
This is all based on Squarespace.
You can do all this Squarespace.
The publishing of the site, the listening, the buying, this is all Squarespace.
You can bid on one of these box sets.
It's like a limited edition box set.
You can just pay it to pay what you want to download the thing.
Jeff Bridges is the face of No Kid Hungry.
This is a charity group that the main mission of it is that no child goes to bed hungry in America.
All proceeds from this album will go to No Kid Hungry, this wonderful charity.
So really, this is not a joke.
This is not a PR stunt.
This is really Jeff Bridges.
Work with Squarespace to make this happen.
Dreamingwithjeff.com.
Check it out.
And you can watch the Super Bowl on 2-1.
I assume that's this Sunday.
Do I have to tell anybody besides myself what date the Super Bowl is?
You have to tell me.
I didn't know which Sunday it was.
You guys.
Oh, God, you're so bad.
Anyway, so they've worked with Squarespace.
I guess he's going to be involved in their Super Bowl commercial.
They're doing a Super Bowl commercial again this year.
I think they were the first one last year.
So Jeff Bridges is going to be in the Squarespace Super Bowl commercial, all worked in with this DreamingWithJeff.com project.
So check it out.
Watch the Super Bowl.
I'm reading an ad to tell people to watch the Super Bowl.
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Did you look at the songs, Casey?
No.
You should.
I looked at my phone on the mobile site, and I have this cool little tape player thing, and little music players embedded in it, and they are absolutely crazy.
Good crazy?
It reminded me of something that John Roderick would make, because they both have a similar kind of voice, they're both a little beardy, and just...
How does one vocally sound beardy?
There is a song called Hmm.
Because he talks over them and there's this music.
Listen to them and tell me if you don't picture John Roderick doing it.
Anyway, it's all for charity.
You should go do it.
Spend some money.
Wow.
So we had another piece of feedback from Alberto.
And John, would you like to talk about this?
Sure.
This is a question.
Well, we get lots of questions in the same vein.
Most of the questions are like, I'm just starting out in field X and you people have some experience in field X. How do I get started?
So on and so forth.
This is a little bit of indirectly related to that.
This is from Alberto.
He says he listens to episode one on one.
uh about how marco just quote went and learned unquote a new computer language and he was wondering how you go about learning something complex so complex by yourself in a short time do you just sit there with a textbook and start reading you open up a compiler and try it and see what's what uh albert says he wants to expand his very simple programming skills and any tips you will give will help this whole vein of uh
feedback where people want advice on how to get better at something they think we know how to do better than they currently know how it's always very difficult people always ask me for recommendations of things to do or books to read and i wish i had to go to answers for them but i don't but for this specific answer i'll just let marco answer it i think there is an explanation of how marco was able to pick up go in such a short period of time
Well, can I interject before that happens?
Notice I didn't wait for your answer.
We get this question constantly.
We get this question, I want to learn to program.
Where should I start?
Or alternatively, I'm about to start iOS development.
Should I learn Swift or Objective-C?
And we get this question so darn often that I actually wrote a very short blog post about it.
And
It's only a couple of paragraphs.
We'll put it in the show notes.
But suffice it to say, I think the key phrase in that blog post, which conveniently is in bold, is find a problem to solve and then solve it using the most appropriate tools.
And that's really all it comes down to as far as I'm concerned.
And I think that Marco is about to tell you that that's kind of the path that he followed when learning Go.
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
So, I mean, first of all, if you only know one language and if you're new to programming or if you don't know any programming languages yet, this sounds like a bigger deal than it really is once you know a lot.
Like when you've been programming for long enough, you start realizing, especially if you're exposed to a lot of languages, you start realizing that they're a lot more similar than you think.
There's a lot of overlap.
usually the the differences are really relatively minor and come down to like minor syntax details and then the available libraries that are built into the language or that are available for it so like the names of things you're calling might be different the symbols that you're using for certain things might be different but you're kind of doing the same kinds of things or at least at least there's a lot of overlap and you know the concepts carry over and so learning a new language
really is uh it's it's it's nothing like learning a new human language i mean i know they have similar concepts too but there's a lot there's a much higher learning curve for like human spoken languages there are more keywords yeah yeah the vocabulary is much bigger they're a lot more complex like going between programming languages is a lot simpler than it sounds if you if you're not a programmer or if you're new at it you know it sounds like it's a lot but it's really not
And yeah, it's basically what Casey said.
The way I learn, and I don't know if everyone does this, but the way I learn is basically I have a problem that I need to solve in a language that both the language is well-suited for and that I'm very motivated to do.
uh so you know when the app store came out i learned objective c and i learned the the frameworks around coco and ui kit because i really wanted to make the instapaper ios app and that's the that was the only way to do it so i did it and i just i plowed through and what that looks like and same thing with go like i i figured out i had these problems and you know before i tried node and i did the exact same way basically just a little bit smaller learning curve because i already knew javascript somewhat but uh
I had this problem that my existing toolkit was not very well suited to solve.
And I knew that many other languages would have been way better at it, as we discussed in the show.
I had heard good things about these, so I picked them.
And I just started kind of plowing through.
So Go has a pretty good online tutorial at golang.org.
We'll put it in the show notes.
There's a pretty good online tutorial.
And actually, the problem that I was solving of basically being a feed crawler, one of their examples on their site is a web crawler.
Nice.
And so my design of it is actually based on that.
And it's not very long.
It was pretty easy to base on.
But a lot of the concepts of like, oh, how do I make it like, you know, print status every second to the log file and stuff like that?
You know, how do I track what it's doing?
Like managing the concurrency aspects, like all that stuff, that all came from that example first.
And then, you know, I built on that and I kind of made it my own.
But...
But honestly, in general, the way to start a new language, like you said before, is really just have a project that you're motivated to do in it.
If you just say, I want to make an iPhone app, just in general, and you don't really know what – you don't have a specific app in mind.
You just want to make an app because you heard making apps makes money or it sounds interesting.
That's going to be harder to get into.
It's much easier if you have a specific idea of something that you really want to see, something that you really want to make.
That's way easier to start with because then you're motivated to basically just start, just plow through it.
And that's exactly how I do it.
I didn't read a book.
I just plowed through.
When I used to learn languages, I used to read books like when I was in high school and college.
Now, there's so many great resources on the internet.
There's tutorials online.
There's places like our second sponsor, Lynda.com, which I'll get to in a second because this ties right into that.
There's all sorts of online documentation.
There's walkthroughs.
There's just so much available online.
And Stack Overflow has been amazingly helpful in this regard.
Uh, there's, there's just so much available online now that you can just kind of start, just like start plowing through, like start with a tutorial and just start building it into what you want it to be.
And that's, and you'll, you'll pick up a lot along that path.
Like you'll learn as you go.
You can do it the other way.
You can read a book.
I've never found that very helpful, but a lot of people do.
It just, you know, it depends on how you learn.
But in general, the way to learn is to just start plowing through.
Yeah, the only thing I'll add is that the specific question of how we go about learning something so complex in a short amount of time.
Both of us have been programming for a living for a long time now.
And the way we do it in such a short time is, as Marco said, we recognize the similarities between programming languages.
And so we have a leg up on someone who's like programming.
What's that?
Yeah.
We don't have to relearn the concepts of, you know, what's a variable, what's a loop, what's a conditional, like stuff like that.
We don't have to relearn anything about functions or, you know, now that we all know something like blocks or whatever, the closures and stuff like we don't have to relearn those concepts.
It's just how are those concepts implemented in this particular language?
If you're starting from zero,
You will somehow have to learn these basic concepts, right?
But your second language, you'll be able to learn quicker than your first.
And your third language, you'll be able to learn even quicker.
So that's how, basically, it's not like a technique of how do we go about learning something complex.
It's because we already know a bunch of similar things.
So it's very fast for us to pick up something.
And what Marco and Casey were both talking about is like, all right, well, assume you can pick up the language.
It's still not going to stick in our brains unless we use it to actually solve a problem because it'll just be like,
I mean, I don't know about you, but I can read an entire book on a language.
which I've done in the past, but if I don't use it to write a program of any significance, that just leaves my brain.
And it's like, yeah, I can recognize it when I see it.
And if you remind me, I'll like be like, oh yeah, but it doesn't stick unless you use it.
So, you know, it's like, what's the trick?
The trick is be a programmer for 10 to 20 years first.
Then you'll be able to pick up new languages fairly quickly, unless it's a really weird language and you don't know the concepts.
Like if we tried to learn something, like I probably don't know a lot of the concepts that are involved in Haskell.
So my first job there would be like, I can't just pick that up because I have no analogs.
I need to first learn concepts that are not in any other language that I know that are in Haskell or Erlang or something.
And then once I get that concept, then, you know, it becomes easier.
Yeah, it's entirely true.
And kind of building on what you were saying, I'll read, say, NS Hipster.
And as of late, NS Hipster has been entirely in Swift.
And I have barely written any Swift in my life, but I can still read it reasonably well because I can pick out bits and pieces that remind me of other languages and kind of infer...
what, what this stuff is doing.
So I can look at, I can look at Swift and say, oh, that looks a lot like JavaScript.
That's probably what they're doing there.
Or, oh, that looks a lot like C sharp.
I know exactly what's going on here.
And of course that looks like objective C. Well, I know what that means.
And so you, you can take this really nice and broad foundation, especially as you get more and more experience and apply that to all these other things and you can do it quicker and quicker with time.
All right.
What else is cool these days, Marco?
Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, if you're looking to learn something new, you should check out our second sponsor, Linza.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.
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So Apple made a little bit of money last quarter.
I'm shocked.
I know.
I thought they were on the ropes.
I thought that Apple was doomed, but seemingly not.
Yeah, so Apple made a metric butt ton of money, is I believe the official measurement that I've been quoted.
I don't even know really what to say about this.
It's a tremendous amount of money, and...
And Apple is doing really, really well.
And I don't know what to make of this.
Even as someone who is very new to the Apple ecosystem, as we've talked about very recently, in fact, it's odd for me to see Apple doing this well.
Like what's not going well financially for them these days?
Anything?
Yeah.
i mean even even a a tiny part of apple's business like the ipod business for instance even that is doing amazingly relative to many other companies yep you know it's like and i people mentioned um apparently like the the amount of money that they lost due to uh currency fluctuations this quarter was like google's entire quarterly profit something like that it was like
They just make an insane amount of money.
I mean, honestly, I don't think this is that interesting from the money perspective.
I think what's more interesting, and even then only mildly, but what's more interesting is kind of looking at the trends of how well things like the iPhones and the iPads are selling.
What does the growth curve look like?
Are they accelerating?
And I think what we're seeing right now, we're seeing that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were just massive hits.
And I think we all kind of knew that already, but to see it officially recorded in the totals here is really something to see.
They have made very strong inroads into other markets, Asia, places like that, and also into the Android market with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
I think these financial stories are mostly interesting in the ways they sort of...
highlight apple's impotence uh not that that's the main story now that's the main story like the main story we hear the main story is like oh they're making a lot of money then everyone you know group does his claim chowder uh and everyone makes fun of the stock analysts who thought they weren't going to sell things and then we look at the trends how are the macs doing how the ipads doing like i i think i've seen all those stories um and there have been some good ones about that but what i always think about when well two things when companies when apple or any company has these big earnings uh
One is the old Ed Catmull quote that success hides problems.
And so when you see massive success, you think, boy, that much success can hide a hell of a problem.
You know, like you can have just dinosaur-sized problems.
$18 billion, like what kind of problem could $18 billion not hide, right?
And so that's what I think about.
And the second thing is the frustration of, it's kind of like in those, you know, not SimCidious, I don't play that enough, but any of those sort of like,
simulation games with an economy where eventually you break the game and you essentially have unlimited funds right and yet there are things even with unlimited funds there are things you can't do because the usually because the game world doesn't allow this is where the analogy breaks down but when i think about apple with all this with all this money is
All this money is not enough for them to buy their way to whatever you want to pick, to do network services as well as Google or Amazon or even Facebook, to be able to hire and retain the world's best talent.
there there are some problems that throwing money out of them just will not solve right and that must be frustrating because it's like how do you get how how do you get uh these things that we need to get what do we need and most companies it's like oh if we only had more money but at apple it's like no we have all the money in the freaking world why can we not turn this money into insert thing that apple feels that it's lacking and from the outside we there are many things that we feel apple is lacking and on the inside i bet the main thing i think they're lacking is
How can we get people – how can we get really good employees?
Because we all know what it's like at Apple or any large organization.
Everyone can't be in charge at Apple.
Some people have more of a say in what the company does than others.
It's a hierarchy.
Every corporation is a hierarchy.
And so how can you get –
all of the world's best people you can only get all the world's best people who want to work for a company and only a certain number of those can ever rise to a position in apple where they're in charge or anything and really smart people want to be in charge of something because they're really smart people so that's why people come to apple get experience and if they're really awesome they leave and start their own companies or do their own things and maybe they come back like it's frustrating to to see talent leave you and go to other companies or go to startups but that's kind of the nature of the business and so that's why it makes me think about all this giant mountain of money
is if i was at apple like how do we transform this money into improvements in our products and services and we all we do on the show is talk about all the areas where apple is weak and i think of every one of those areas and almost all those areas money may may you know be necessary but it is clearly not sufficient because if all it took was money they would be great at everything because they
have all the and this is not like they had blowout quarters before they just have massive amount of money in the bank they have a massive amount of money like they could you know it's like why not just pay all your employees five million dollars a year apple could be like done and then all your employees leave because they retire on their five million dollars in the first year and you're like well we just destroyed the company with money that was a really bad idea guys uh so it's actually it's kind of like brewster's millions a reference that neither one of you get because you weren't born but that's a good movie nope um everyone go watch brewster's millions to understand
the problem that Apple has.
Yes, Apple is Richard Pryor in this analogy.
Oh, I love Richard Pryor.
Oh, see, now I actually want to watch this.
No, I think you're right.
I mean, as you said, there's just a lot of problems that money either can't solve or makes worse or isn't sufficient enough to solve.
And most, I mean, I would say looking at what we identify as Apple's problems from the outside and assuming that they're at least partially true,
it seems like apple's two biggest problems are getting and retaining good talent number one and number two just like organizational inertia of like the way things are set up the way like you know departments are structured the way the incentives are um like i i honestly i i think anyone interested in in the
quality problems or perception of them whether you think they're real or not I think you should listen to this week's episode of Debug which is Neaton Ganatra and Don Melton part three and they talk about this they talk about like these accusations of quality issues and
It was interesting to hear.
Partially, I think they were actually, especially Neaton Ganatra, I think they were actually quite defensive.
I had mixed emotions listening to it, but it gives a lot of insight into the way things are done at Apple.
They don't work there anymore, but they were there fairly recently, and they were there for some fairly recent releases.
They
The way things are done, it sounds a lot like all the high-priority bugs tend to get fixed, but there's not a lot of time left for the less high-priority bugs.
Well, this is how every company works.
I haven't listened yet.
It's in my queue.
But they're probably defensive because what they're not saying, whether they realize it or not, is...
You don't know what it's like, man.
To get anything done inside the company, you have to do X, Y, and Z. And when you're telling me that I should be doing this, it's like, well, but you can't because like Apple, the structure of Apple becomes the fixed thing.
And it's like to get anything done within the structure, you have to do this.
Maybe that means within the structure, the only thing you can do is get the high priority Bugs Fist because
then you can get someone higher up to pay attention to you and you can make a priority for your team and you can get it done.
And anything lower priority, you can't work within the system.
So really what they're angry about when they're being defensive is they're angry at the system into which they are placed and then they're put into the system and told, now get things done.
And
They would like to do what they think is the right thing, but within the system, you have to work the system, right?
And who gets to change the system?
This gets back to, you know, who is in charge?
Are the people in charge the best people to be in charge?
You can't have a company where people move up the ranks over many years and then someone realizes, like...
That guy has no idea what he's doing.
Get him out of there and bring someone like people don't like it when you hire new people and above them.
They don't like when they bring in new people that say all the current people there don't know what they're doing.
Change like that takes time because egos get bruised and people have to be kicked out of the company.
And like and if there's too much churn, it seems like a volatile place and it's not fun to like all the problems of any human doing anything in a group.
are magnified in a corporate setting.
And that is the main sickness of all corporations.
And I would say Apple has done better than any other company to fight against the sort of corporate malaise to actually produce good products.
And they're rewarded with buckets of money.
But even those buckets of money can't cure all the sicknesses within the organization.
And no amount of money can make it so that
Uh, people who want to be chief suddenly want to be your Indians.
Uh, so you're never going to have all the best people.
They're always going to leave and do their own thing.
They're always going to be restless and do something else.
And, you know, I still say like the most practical thing that Apple could do with this money is address its shortcomings that can, that the money has the most effect on, for example, prioritizing, uh, network services and infrastructure.
Uh,
You can throw money at that.
If people learn that Apple was going to spend $300 billion trying to catch up to Google and Amazon and Facebook and network infrastructure and data center expertise, a lot of people who have network infrastructure and data center expertise would go work for Apple.
But right now, those people don't want to work for Apple because the idea is that Apple is a place where those things are not prioritized and all the glory people are working on UIKit or whatever.
Right.
I mean, it seems like the two biggest problems in that area of what frustrates the people who are there are the way the system is set up and the stress of working within that and the deadlines of what you have time to work on and what you don't have time to work on.
Right.
From what I've heard from so many people in and out of Apple, those are the two biggest problems.
A lot of people there are very happy doing what they're doing, but there's a lot of people there who can't get the time or the staff to fix the problems they want to fix.
And there's a lot of people there who are fighting the good fight and working on things that need to be worked on, but they don't get the support from above or the resources from above.
I guess it's kind of the same problem.
where like it's just not a high enough priority for the company or it's kind of stuck in this weird division somewhere where like it kind of maybe should be somewhere else or or you know there's some like some roadblock in the middle of the hierarchy that's making it hard for them or something like that like there's there's like these organizational challenges and you're right like every company is going to have problems like this uh that doesn't make them non-problems
And really, I mean, I think you've got to listen to this debug.
It really encapsulates this so well.
And even when Nitin Ganatra was attempting to argue against this point, he was proving this point unknowingly.
Because he was saying... His point of view is that he thinks this is like...
I think you said it's like it's probably like six P1, which is the highest priority, the P1 is six P1 bugs.
And then we'll all forget about this.
And then they proceeded to talk about how the P2 bugs hardly ever have.
Everybody wants to work on the P2 bugs, but they're hardly ever allowed to because of the release cycle leaving so little time.
And everything's just about like, is it high priority?
Fix it.
If it's not a high priority, we can't afford to work on it right now.
And so I'm not feeling, when I say I'm feeling a lack of quality here, I'm not feeling six P1 bugs.
I'm feeling 6,000 P2 bugs that have accumulated over the last five years and aren't being fixed.
Yeah, I agree.
I was going to say that the success side problems thing, the reason you can't get prioritization from your boss to fix the P2s or whatever, and the reason you think that's not a priority, these are the priority, is because if you were to ever be able to make your case...
what you would say is, we need to do this because of, and you lay out all these reasons, and what they would say is, well, I don't think we need to do this because X, Y, and Z, and you'd have this argument, and eventually what you'd come down to as you move your way up the ladder is like, well...
obviously my priorities as the boss are the correct ones because look at how successful Apple has been.
And the higher you go up in the company, the more the person can say, well, I understand the people below me might believe X, Y, and Z should be done, but I believe it should be Q. And history has shown that I've been pretty right because Apple's been doing pretty well.
And like, it's these sort of,
That's the ultimate success-hides-problem thing is that when you get into an argument about what people should be doing, that you need more staff to address this, that, and the other thing, everybody can't be in charge, again, for the millionth time.
There has to be people who are in charge.
And the people who are in charge always have at their back, Apple is the most successful company in the world.
We make the best products.
We have 100% customer set.
Everybody loves us.
We make a bazillion dollars.
Everybody's buying iPhones.
They always have that sitting right behind them.
And so no matter what argument you make based on reason, in the end, in the end, the leaders might kind of be right.
It's like, well, what do you want?
We're the most successful company in the world.
Do you think the priorities I'm setting as your boss or your boss's boss's boss or as Tim Cook, are those priorities the wrong priorities?
In what way are they wrong?
Look how successful we are.
What criteria should we be judging ourselves on?
pick a criteria pick a metric we are the best and you're saying oh it's not good enough because you can't get people to fix your p2 bugs right that's that's success side problems that's what you run up against and if you're one of the lower down people and you can't convince the uppers it's like either you agree that they kind of have a point and you become a company man and you argue that apple doesn't have reliability problems on podcasts or you leave the company and say well these people are never going to listen to me and whether they're right or not this is not the environment i want to be in and so you leave
Yeah, you know, speaking of podcasts that we haven't listened to yet, or at least I haven't, a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, was on the talk show this week.
And one of the things that I noticed in the notes was them talking about Apple employees who have gone on sabbaticals and then come back.
And I know that both of you guys were mentioning that a minute ago.
And then with regard to the P2 bugs that Marco was talking about, I know I brought this up a couple episodes ago, but the Andy Matushak interview on Objective CIO, he talks about that indirectly.
Just talks about how the incredible pace and the priority of just getting new hardware and other super important things done prevents them from working on kind of the not as showy issues.
Right, or major changes over time.
Right, right.
So both homework assignments if you're bored.
All right.
Anything else on earnings other than that I want the bank account numbers for the $170 or whatever it is billion dollars?
I haven't heard the call yet, but I read in many places that –
Not that they gave a breakdown of six versus six plus, but they merely just said the six sold better than a six plus.
Did you guys read that as well?
Yeah, that's what they said, that the six was the top seller in the line, but they didn't say what the ratio was.
And they don't usually break down the ratio like that, so I don't think we'd ever get good info on that.
I'm mostly interested in, I'm always interested in not so much what they don't say, because they don't say pretty much anything, but what they do say.
What...
what value is there or what would motivate them to tell us that the six sold more than the six plus?
Right.
I don't know.
I mean, it doesn't, I can't, I can't even think of like a cynical, like faking out your competitors.
Like,
Maybe they just, I don't know.
I don't understand why they would say that.
And all I can think about is like, why did you tell me that?
Like, I assumed it.
I assumed it before the phones were even released that the 6 would sell better than the 6 Plus.
You're not telling me how much better.
So it doesn't give me any actual information other than like 6 sold more than the 6 Plus.
But why are you telling me this?
I don't know.
You know, it's funny.
I actually asked on Twitter, why wouldn't they say that?
Because I was having a dunce moment.
And it was like, well, why not?
Who cares?
We're all friends, right?
And immediately I got a thousand replies, very gently telling me I'm an idiot.
But...
A lot of the responses were, well, don't give your competitors anything.
And that makes sense.
And gosh, there was one or two others that were really good.
But it basically boiled down to what you're saying, John.
Why share that information?
What benefit does Apple gain from sharing it?
Yeah, I mean, I guess Apple breaks down things that it doesn't have to all the time.
But like product mix is one that Apple is almost never broken down.
I've always assumed there's lots of reasons, like you said, people give you good responses.
I always assume the reason they don't break it down is because they don't want to tell their competitors.
sort of like this is this is the mix of demand for these products so if you're going to make a line of phones this is roughly how many big ones this size and how many small ones this size you want to have right exactly like they just you know that that's that's not the reason that's just the reason reason i always think of they're actually probably even better reasons but then that was making like why i mean someone in the chat room said they were answering our question yeah but the the
press ask questions all the time at these conferences and apple just says no we're not going to tell you that it's dude all the time right uh why why decide to say that the sixth earns more it's not even anything they're not even bragging about it it's not like a thing that you're bragging they're not countering a story i don't think is there a story out there that the i don't i don't know i can't i can't figure it out but uh you know maybe they're just
You know, they decided to throw the press a bone and tell them this because it's another bullet point for a story.
But I don't think it puts Apple in a particularly good or bad light.
Anyway, I haven't listened to the call yet.
We'll see what it was really like.
All right.
So there's been a little bit of rumblings lately, which I was not aware of until somebody else pointed it out.
And in this case, Wes Dart from Australia, he or she said, it might be worth revisiting the new photo app for Mac.
I remember you guys were pretty excited about it.
I have a daily Google alert for all news about it.
It seems Apple have been removing references to it from their website.
That doesn't instill a lot of confidence, does it?
I mean, that's probably not a good sign.
And it also was funny to me, semi-related, that somebody pressed Tim Cook on whether or not, on the earnings call, whether or not
The Apple Watch is really going to be released early in 2015 because it's apparently coming out in April.
And Tim said, from what I gather, well, the way we think of it is the first third of the year is early.
The middle third is just the middle third.
And the last third is late.
And so sure, why not?
It's still early, right?
We're all friends.
And I don't know.
It just struck me as funny.
So are you guys concerned about the fact that that photos apparently may not be the photo app may not be a thing anymore?
Well, it seems like reading the tea leaves here and hearing a few rumblings here and there, I think the answer is not that the Photos app is canceled or anything.
I think it's just late.
I thought the initial release date was last fall, but I think somebody else corrected me recently and said it was also early 2015.
Yeah, it was always next year.
I think it was always supposed to be 2015 sometime.
Okay, so if that means by the end of April 2015, and they're suddenly removing all these references to it, it really does sound like, based on a few rumblings here and there, from what I can tell, it's just delayed.
It's not late.
It's not canceled.
Yeah, and like I always wonder with these stories with the sort of, you know, implied like Apple's removing references of the photo map for the Mac, dot, dot, dot.
Those stories like will never say this means Apple is canceling it because the like that's the implication.
But they only want to imply they don't want to say it right.
And or even speculate about it, because my question would be, all right, if you're saying this because you think the photo is out for the Mac is canceled.
Is that really a thing that you think would happen, that Apple would cancel both iPhoto and Photos for the Mac and there would be no... And Aperture.
Yeah, and Aperture, and there would just be no photo management for them.
I mean, I suppose that could be a thing.
Like, by all means, make that argument.
Tell me why Apple does not want to be in the business of making...
you know, first party photo management applications for your Mac anymore.
I would love to hear that argument, but they will never make that argument.
They will just say that it's being pulled from the site and let you just worry about something.
So in the absence of someone making a compelling argument that Apple no longer wants to make photo apps for the Mac, which I bet, you know, and if I had to make that argument, by the way, I would say,
history has shown over the past several years that apple's not great at making fun of her management apps and if apple didn't make one and give one away for free that would open up the market to third parties but then that's third parties would have to work with the the photos in the cloud and if apple doesn't have an api for that blah blah anyway i'm not saying it's totally ridiculous it could happen right uh but i don't see anyone making that argument so then it's just like oh well late software is late right you know that what else is new and you take it off the site just because it's kind of embarrassing to have it up there for
a long time and not have it available and maybe you know it was on the website too soon you're showing screenshots of something that doesn't exist that people can't get why are you enticing them to say same thing with like still selling aperture when it's canceled like that's not a good move either and so this just seems like a correction if this photos app doesn't come out to next year i don't care just make it freaking work
That's the thing.
Photos on your Mac, that's such an important thing.
That's not something you can mess with.
If it was a beta, I wouldn't install it.
I don't know if I'm going to even install the final version.
Seriously.
I barely trust iPhoto with my photos.
This new system, whatever it is, I'm going to run it in parallel with iPhoto for a long time before I trust it.
Yeah, I mean, like whether I use it immediately and whether I like kind of trust it with everything immediately will entirely depend on whether I can read its directory structure.
If I can read it back out and I can back it up with Time Machine and all that stuff that we talked about months ago when they announced this, I'll be comfortable using it.
If it doesn't have all those things, it's going to be a tough sell.
yeah anyway uh we didn't actually get a third sponsor this week so instead i decided to uh kind of throw this one to uh two conferences that are run by our friends and are really nice um both happening in march both happening oh boy i gotta consult the cgp gray video is ireland the uk i think i think the bottom half is anyway
That's how they refer to it, I think, the bottom half.
I remember seeing that on that video.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, so anyway.
Oh, God, you're going to get so much email.
To review, the two largest islands in the British Isles are Ireland and Great Britain.
Ireland has on a two countries, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while Great Britain mostly contains three, England, Scotland, and Wales.
These last three, when combined with Northern Ireland, form the United Kingdom.
uh anyway uh ns conference uh at ns conference.com is an awesome conference that is in oh boy leicester i think it's leicester oh it's like the boston style you just kind of delete the middle of the word we can get some help from this in the chat there was a good video i saw of uh of americans pronouncing uh british place names i should find that for the notes leicester leicester like a creepy dude leicester uh yeah sure my bad uh here it was i was so smug i thought i really nailed it but i was wrong
Anyway, all right.
So that's March 16th, 18th, nsconference.com in Leicester in the UK.
Speakers to this include some of my friends, Jesse Char, Daniel Jockett, Paul Cofasas, Laura Savino, Jamie Newberry, and a bunch more people who I don't know quite as well, but it's a very, very good list.
And I will be speaking there as well.
I tend to speak at about one conference per year, and I've been wanting to do this one for a while, and the scheduling just never worked out until this year, and I'm very happy to finally work this out.
So check out nsconference.com.
And also, Ool, I apologize to Casey because he really wants to go and probably won't go because baby stuff is hard.
And so not that I blame you.
So anyway, it's Ool, U-L-L dot I-E.
This is March 30th and 31st in Killarney, Ireland.
Speakers to Ool include lots of people we know, Jason Snell, Guy English, Dalrymple, Georgia Dow,
uh dave whiskus serenity renee uh some guy named john or jonathan gruber i think he's an economist uh and more go to uh ul ull.ie because that's pretty cool anyway uh yeah so ns conference and ul wanted to give them a nice shout out since we didn't have a third sponsor this week
Anyway, what else?
So we're going to get so much hate mail, and I'm not looking forward to it.
Anyway, I wanted to quickly talk about a tweet that I had seen retweeted by my friend Andre Arco.
This tweet is by Gary Barnhart.
It says,
And the first thing I thought of when I read this tweet was Marco's insistence on sticking with PHP forever up until a month ago.
The difference, though, in Marco's defense is that you acknowledge your ridiculous insistence on this ridiculous language rather than just stick your head in the sand.
Although I guess maybe I should have thought of John first.
But since I don't feel like there's any.
Why were you thinking of me first?
Pearl is fine.
Why do you need to learn any languages?
Pearl is the best language.
I know a whole bunch of languages.
I learn new ones all the time.
When Go and Dart comes out, when Go comes out, when all these new languages come out, I read all the documentation for the languages.
Yes, but the only one you really need, like Marco said, is Perl.
Just dollar signs for everyone, John.
I think it's JavaScript is the only one you ever really need.
No matter where you work, you will find yourself writing JavaScript.
That's true, actually.
JavaScript, the worst language everywhere.
Yep.
That should be the slogan.
Oh, you guys.
I don't really have much to say other than that I thought the tweet was cool and it reminded me of you guys.
Yeah, that's true, not just of programming languages, though it's true of anything.
Again, with any sort of group organization with a hierarchy where people are in charge, there's going to be an attachment of the people in charge to the things that they are familiar with.
And since they're in charge, they get to impose that on everybody else.
And any attempt to change is met with resistance from the people who are attached to the thing that they're familiar with.
There are specific instances in programming it, whether it's specific language or technology or a particular code base that people get attachments with.
In many cases, specifically with tech,
What's required is somebody who's not a tech person to make a decision and impose it on the tech people.
That's how you get situation.
That's how you get essentially, you know, Mac OS 10, right?
Because Apple had all sorts of next generation operating system initiatives within its walls.
And there was, you know, none of them were focused enough and they were put under very difficult constraints and they just couldn't get the job done.
So the only way they could break out of that was they had to someone who is not a programmer, who has no attachment to the Mac toolbox or to anything involving classic Mac OS to come in and say, we're doing something different because none of the people who are there in the trenches are.
We're going to do that because all those people were experts in the current Mac operating system.
And they may have had ambitions to make a new operating system, but they certainly had an attachment to the current one.
And it takes kind of an outsider.
And usually an outsider is not a tech person.
In this case, the outsider was the CEO of the company who decided to purchase another company that came along with Steve Jobs.
And he did a little inside out takeover type thing.
Those are the people who decided that Apple's next generation operating system was built on Next Step.
Nobody...
you know inside the company working on a new kernel or whatever decided uh that next step was going to be the thing so like there's a way out of this how do you deal with that emotional attachment you have a you get a decision made by somebody who has no emotional attachment to those things uh
And, you know, who I don't even know who it was.
Gil Emilio then was the CEO.
I can't even remember the friggin CEO progression in Apple.
He did not have an emotional attachment to classic Mac OS.
So the idea of, you know, using the Windows NT kernel or buying Next or buying B or any of those things, he is not burdened by any emotional attachment to technologies or languages or anything having to do with the current technology stack.
um that was kind of a crisis tunity though because if your company's going down the tubes the person can the person can in charge is empowered to do that and again the success hides problem things who at apple is empowered to make them massively change their priorities for network services uh anyone who has that sort of ability like there's no crisis causing it to happen at this point because
for all the noise we make talking about apple and their problems like then they turn these financial numbers and it's like tell me again why i have to totally change the way we do things or otherwise otherwise what what happens if we don't we have another record quarter hmm well you know blackberry was doing great in 2006 i know i know it's hides problems right up to the point that it doesn't right and apple especially because if apple misses its fantastical earnings by just a little bit it's like oh
god apple is doomed they only made 16 billion and last year they made 18 if they make 16 billion this you know the same quarter next year are they doomed no they made 16 billion dollars in a quarter they're fine right so it's but people will still go crazy over it so i guess that's kind of the upside i guess no one really talks about this but the upside of the crazy apple blogosphere and the pundits who are like apple is doomed no matter what apple does they they're about to be destroyed by whatever their competitor is
that is actually that sort of manufactured crisis tunity that's like it's not real it's a phantom oh i don't want to say it all right it's it's not a real problem uh but the perception that there is a problem is the only thing they could ever give anybody inside apple any sort of clout to make a you know to have a crisis that leads to an opportunity right because otherwise if there were any other company it would be like nothing ever changes uh we're doing great
I don't understand why I would ever listen to you.
Everything is fine.
Yeah, and just to put a little bit of nuance on this, when I complain about Apple's quality problems or what I perceive as those quality problems, I'm not saying Apple's doomed.
They're not.
Apple's going to be fine for a long time.
Apple's going to be, even if they have a bad patch,
It's going to be a little bit like Microsoft is today, which is like Microsoft is, you know, I think by most of our estimations, they're going through like their worst period ever right now.
They're still making tons of money and they're still fine.
And, you know, they're not making as much money necessarily as they could be or maybe as they were in the past.
I don't know about that, but...
you know they're still like even in this state of them producing things that don't do well on the market and things that tend to suck a lot or fail at least they're still as a company and financially and everything so fine it's not even funny and so you know apple even if they had a colossal series of terrible moves and terrible products that flopped in the marketplace which doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon but even if that happened
They have so much money coming in.
They're still going to be selling to so many people.
They're still going to have such great success relative to the market as a whole, relative to other companies, relative to Xero, that they're going to be fine.
So I'm not saying they're doomed.
I'm not even saying that they're going to start making less money.
I don't know that.
You know, who knows?
I do think, though, that following the theme of success hides problems, you can be selling tons and doing very well in profit, in market share, in any kind of money metric you want to measure, and still not be making stuff that's good enough.
That is a different metric.
Similar to how I said you can lose the functional high ground without losing it to somebody else.
You can just lose it yourself.
You can still be doing very, very well.
You can still be making tons of money.
You can still be the market leader in whatever metric you choose to be.
And despite that, your stuff might not be as good as it could be or should be.
That is a totally separate measure that often does not correlate to your market success.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about you.
I was talking mostly about like, you know, like this bad assumptions article by Ben Thompson.
who may or may not be in our chat room.
It's the analysts who are like, Apple has to come out with a network, or the competitors are going to crush them.
Their lower-priced phones are going to destroy them in China.
All these people who just don't understand Apple or their business, they're the people who are manufacturing the drama on the stock market with their price, like why Apple's PE ratio.
is not what it should be according to almost any rational thought.
It's just like, you know, as this big article says, we'll put it in the show notes, like Apple is eternally, and I think Asimko has said similar things, Apple is eternally like on the edge of doom.
Like I think this was...
I think this was an Asimco thing.
I said, like, they're constantly... They're constantly falling to Earth.
They just keep missing it.
So basically, they're in orbit, right?
Like, it's just... And it's not... And this is from, like, the people who, like, matter, like, in the financial markets and everything like that.
And everybody hates that.
And you have whole websites dedicated to just, like... I mean, the Maclope, like, all he does is just...
He or she is just take down the these people who just have no idea what they're talking about and constantly are talking about Apple and seemingly having people listen to them.
But there is a benefit.
And the benefit is if that chatter gets loud enough, it can be fuel for things to happen inside the company that otherwise wouldn't.
I mean, and the other fuel is what Marco talked about, that any good company and especially Apple knows.
don't let yourself be blackberry right don't let yourself be microsoft don't miss the mobile revolution don't decide that a hardware keyboard is the way forward damn it like you can always get blindsided um and if i had you know an apple to its credit and perhaps better than anyone else has been really good over the past decade or so about
trying not to let that happen to himself not resting out like that's that's what the watch is all about is the watch the right thing is apple tv the right thing like these are things that apple is trying they don't try a million things but they know we're gonna you know we're gonna be the iphone company forever that is not a viable strategy you will end up as a blackberry eventually no matter it'll you know it may take a while but it eventually happened like if i had to pick out something that is dangerous to apple right now i would pick out like vr or something
maybe vr will be a fluke and it's not a big deal but apple should be worried about it apple should have contingency plans apple should be working on vr like maybe it's not a big deal maybe vr comes and goes and it's like you know we didn't need to be worried about it but doesn't vr come and go every seven or eight years i know like you don't know like but you never know what's gonna what's gonna take maybe it won't take now if you had said like
tablet computers you better be worried about that apple when like pen for windows came out or like the the the grid pad or whatever oh my god apple you better be worried about this they'd be like what what if they said no we don't need to worry that's stupid and then it went away and you're like see we were totally right that whole thing with like tablets that's pointless no one's gonna be that stuff is useless i'm a pollen was out all you better do in this pda space
We tried the new and it was crappy.
Nobody wants to have like a smart device with a touchscreen.
That's stupid, right?
If Apple kept having that attitude, they would have never made the iPhone, right?
And so VR comes and goes, like you said, and it's like, see, we were right.
We didn't have, no, you have to.
You absolutely have to explore every avenue.
Maybe nothing comes of it, but you have to be on the lookout for it.
I think Apple has that going forward, that it's always going to be on the lookout for what the next thing that's going to blindside it and trying to stay ahead of it.
But the more difficult thing is
When you don't have anybody who's competing with you in terms of product quality, profits, customer set, anything like that, what do you have to motivate you to be better or to change the way you do business?
Because any argument you make about changing the way you do a business can eventually end in
What is it that you think, how could we do better in some way?
Which metric that we can measure would we do better in?
Would we make more money?
Would we have higher customer satisfaction?
I guess maybe you could say we would have more market share, but then they have a counter to that.
You know, like if you sold a lower price phone, you would increase your market share.
And then Apple said, yes, but we don't care about market share.
We care about making the best products and making a lot of money, possibly in that order.
All right.
Still waiting for that Sega VR headset.
Okay.
Let me know how that works out for you.
Sony's making one.
You got the Oculus.
You'll be able to get a VR headset someday.
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Lynda.com, and I guess Jeff Bridges.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss.
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco Arment.
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did enough.
What else is going on?
Anything fun?
I mean, at this point, I think we're never going to watch the Microsoft thing, right?
Because we all forgot to do it for two weeks in a row, right?
Oh, were we supposed to?
I'll probably watch it a little bit.
I read articles with highlights and I know more or less what was announced.
I just want to see it.
I guess.
I mean, sometimes when I watch those things, it very quickly becomes not about what's been announced, but about how it's being announced.
Yeah, yeah.
And sometimes that could be good, and sometimes it can be bad.
If it's really long and boring, then it's bad.
But you can always be surprised.
Like, I would remember one of the best Microsoft things I watched in a long time was that...
When Windows 8 Metro was like announced and it was like the UI guy explaining the UI philosophy behind the Metro interface.
That was really good.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I've heard so many people talking about this Microsoft thing and various things about it.
I think the biggest red flag for me is that all these features that are designed for... It sounds like they have basically one continuous UI between phones, tablets, and PCs, and convertible laptops and everything.
Rather than the Windows 8 environment of these two separate environments and Windows RT, which I think no one's even really mentioned yet recently with this stuff.
I think they canned that, didn't they?
I think so, but I don't know if that's been confirmed.
I think it's just been implied.
But all that stuff.
The problem is that whole system of, oh, it'll be wonderful.
You can have these apps that run the same on all these different platforms.
You can have things being handed off, all that stuff.
you have to not consider what happens if you have all the microsoft devices because that's not going to happen like that's unrealistic that so you have to instead you have to instead be like all right so what happens if i only have one or two of these what maybe i only have the laptop and the xbox or maybe it's just like the tablet and and the laptop or something like that like
no one's going to buy the windows phone anytime soon so like you know what happens then in like a mixed environment where this where i don't where i'm not totally bought in is this stuff still compelling if it works at all you know is is still compelling that i think is is uh i i hope microsoft is is smart and practical and humble enough to recognize they need to that they need to be worried about that and they need to make sure that works well
I don't know yet if they are.
In general, the new Microsoft is moving in that direction of being more pragmatic and honest about their position in mobile.
But we'll see.
And then HoloLens, I mean, HoloLens, from what everyone says, is a really awesome tech demo that everyone hopes will come out sometime soon with some kind of reasonable hardware that performs something well and works with some kind of mystery software.
But that's...
That's a whole lot of ifs.
That's a big line of pretty big problems to solve before this thing is truly compelling.
And so I hope it succeeds.
I think it'd be cool.
I think it would be cool to kind of shape things up in the industry and to have Microsoft be at the front of it again is kind of exciting because they haven't been for a while.
So I think that would be interesting.
I think it'd be cool.
I hope it works.
But...
There's so many ifs, and people are comparing it to the original demos of Kinect back when it was still called Project Natal, I think, right?
That was what that was?
Sounds familiar.
Yeah, yeah.
So people are saying the original demos of that were like...
insanely awesome ridiculous stuff and then the real thing came out and it wasn't nearly that good in reality and so like that could happen here but you know from what everyone has said who has tried the hololens at the press event everyone said like it was really good like it was actually really good but of course it was all prototype hardware prototype software uh pretty far from reality pretty far from release so yeah but like i saw some people who were normally skeptical say it was really good too but it's like
really good like a fun amusement ride but like what problem is this solving for me like in gaming it's easier because like gaming is an amusement ride that's the problem that's solving for you it's entertainment right but for right for something that's not a gaming system the demo could be amazing because you didn't know the things you're experiencing were possible and it was a super rock solid implementation of these ideas but then it's like
If you gave this to me and put it in my house, what would I use it for?
Games are easy.
I would use it to have fun, right?
If it doesn't make me sick and it's fun and novel and interesting and it makes new gameplay thing like it's just fun.
So that's all you need out of that.
But for like they kept showing people like 3D modeling and stuff.
Are you kidding me?
take someone who uses Maya all day and tell them you're going to do everything with HoloLens it could get there eventually maybe you have to do but like those applications are fiendishly complex they just they're like the UI looks like the dashboard of a 747 right you're going to try to do that by waving your hands around in space what is it making easier that like what is it making possible or easier for people in those complex are you going to use a reward processing are you using web browsing like maybe I don't know but like
It's up to Microsoft to figure that out and putting a bunch of people in these little things and having them be wowed by by technology is it's a start, I guess.
But, you know, the Apple thing is you have to come up with at least one thing that you think this thing can do better than something else.
And you have to be right about it.
And I don't know what that is yet.
Yeah, there was a good discussion about this on Rocket, our friend's new podcast by Brianna Wu that she was talking about, you know, like three, like she does 3D work all day and she knows and other people who do it and she knows like that's not really how people do 3D work and everything.
I think, too, you know, we've seen as, you know, tablets have gotten big and phones and everything, and we've seen, you know, all these, like, weird peripherals that the computing industry has tried over time.
Yeah.
I think we've mostly figured out the things that work really well for most tasks.
And I'm not saying that we can never do anything different or that we can never find better ways, but a lot has been tried and a lot has failed.
And I think when you look at to get a lot of work done, a lot of precise, complicated work done, a keyboard and a pointing device and a screen is really, really effective.
and again that might not be the most ideal solution but we have a lot of inertia behind that solution well you just got to wait until it it becomes the it becomes the best way to do it like touchscreens we had touchscreens forever people hated them people just hated touchscreens how long have we had touchscreens my whole practically my whole life we've had touchscreens and universally reviled right and is that does that mean touchscreens are a bad idea it's like no someone eventually has to do them
right enough that you go oh yeah touch screens apple happened to be the one that got there right and so vr is the same way we've had vr forever every time we've seen it's like mate half the time wasn't even good as an amusement like those big giant heavy things you put on in the 90s in a video arcade it wasn't even fun right
We're probably at the point now where you can make fun games with it if they can work out all the problems.
But, you know, we'll know it when someone finally crosses that threshold.
And it's like it's not like VR is a bad idea.
The reason people keep trying is because it's an amazing idea.
You just got to be the first one to do it right enough that people go, oh, yes, every other.
And people will say every other previous effort of VR or AR sucked.
And this is the one that's good.
And you won't even have to convince people because no one needs to be convinced now that touchscreens are a good thing.
And people born in the, you know, sort of the post-smartphone error will never believe you.
And we said, well, for all my life, touchscreens were terrible and everybody hated them.
And it's like, well, what was different about them?
They were slightly less responsive.
Like, that's it?
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Some of them had to press real hard.
Some of them were a little bit less responsive.
Like, it doesn't take much, right?
You know, so that's why people are excited about Oculus because it seems like
And again, I haven't tried it myself, but it seems like they've crossed that threshold into no longer sucking for games.
And we'll see.
I've tried an Oculus Rift.
Which one?
I have no idea.
As soon as I tweeted about it, everyone was like, which one, which one?
I have no freaking clue.
But I tried one.
I genuinely don't know which one.
I'm not trying to be funny.
I tried it for two minutes.
And it was cool as hell.
And I was playing like one game where I was flying around and like shooting at something or other.
And I played another game where basically I was just, well, I don't even know if it was a game, to be honest.
I was just walking around like a balcony on the edge of a cliff.
Yeah.
It's freaking trippy, man.
It is weird.
I am not typically prone to motion sickness, so I didn't get any and I only had the headset on for a couple of minutes.
But I would assume since there is even the slightest bit of potential latency between real world and it that, John, you would vomit profusely.
But I mean, I thought it was spot on.
I thought it was really cool.
Well, I think that that's the challenges they're taking.
One of them is motion sickness.
Can you make this so that a reasonable percentage of the population does not get motion sick?
And you just have to keep trying to make it, you know, reduce the lag and, you know, make it because most people don't get motion sick just walking around all day in a 3D world.
Once you put that thing on your head, any disagreement.
between what your inner ear is telling you and what your eyes are seeing is going to be interpreted by people who are prone to motion sickness as you know maybe you've eaten poison you should vomit that up now um so like that's the problem they're working on essentially you know what they're saying is oh we're looking at latency displays and reduce tearing and reduce latency but that all that builds up to is this something that a large enough portion of the population can use and will find fun because that's the goal you want people to buy it right and
It seems like they're getting closer to that threshold, right?
But that's just for games.
Microsoft, nothing so far that I've read or seen, and I've read a lot but not seen much, has convinced me that they have reached the iOS moment, the iPhone moment for touchscreens.
This is a thing that everyone will want to use.
It's not just an entertainment.
It is actually a better way for you to interact with software because of recent XYZ, and I haven't seen that yet.
Yeah, it seems like a very good technical achievement in the labs so far that might make for a very good product, but that no one has quite figured out what's the killer app.
What will make it worth spending $500 or $1,000 on one of these things and possibly changing the entire way you work physically or your desk setup or whatever?
What will make it worth all of that cost and change?
that's so much better on this thing than on what you have.
That's such a, you know, you sound old killer app.
That's what people used to say of like, well, it's great and old, but you need the killer app for your platform.
But like the touchscreen did not have a killer app in the sense of like, you know, an application made touch.
Like the whole, the whole thing, the whole experience of a handheld thing, it's mostly a screen.
Yeah.
That was essentially the quote unquote killer app.
But like that, that phrase was back from the days when it was literally a single application, like, oh, you need a Mac because it has page maker, right?
Or you can get Photoshop or whatever.
Like that was a killer app that was attractive for your platform.
The killer app for touchscreens was touchscreens are better for everything on a phone, practically, maybe borderline keyboard, but there's so much better at everything else that the tradeoff is worth it.
I think, I mean, one of the biggest challenges they might have with this, and I know this sounds really superficial, but trust me, it will matter, is portability.
You know, the reality is, I think most people today do their work on a laptop.
Desktops are really a dying breed.
And again, they're never going to be dead.
But certainly laptops are the default computer for most people.
And mobility matters for a lot of those people.
Not all of them, interestingly, but for a lot of them, it matters.
And if this thing is something that goes on your head and has these screens or whatever, that actually might not fold nice and flat and skinny and light into a bag.
HoloLens is actually better than Oculus because Oculus is like giant ski goggles, right?
And so they seem to actually be... Because they're AR, not VR.
You can see through the lenses.
You're wearing glasses that you can see the real world in and they just overlay images onto it.
VR is completely covered.
You can't see anything outside, which is why it's...
Mostly better for entertainment where you don't need to see the outside world, but not so good for an office setting where you'd have a bunch of people who are essentially blindfolded.
Well, also, I would expect, not knowing anything about this, admittedly, I would expect that AR is probably a lot easier to work out the motion sickness problems for.
Yeah, probably because you do have the visual cues of everything else.
But then what that does is it reveals all of you.
That's what people were saying about the tech demo.
Like it reveals any latency or miscalibration you have is revealed because the real world is, you know, it stays perfectly steady.
And they would say, like, I looked at a coffee table and there was a Minecraft structure on it.
And they pretty much say...
it looks solidly stuck to the table i couldn't when i wiggled my head the minecraft structure didn't like well it moved you know move from side to side or jiggle like or or it looks like there was a hole in the coffee table and there was like a thing down and like then right now i looked at that hole it still looked like a hole and never sort of lost track of where the coffee table was and accidentally drew it a millimeter to the left then to the right because that takes you out of the illusion it's like bad special effects like oh okay well the coffee table's real
But the little castle on top of it isn't, you know, ignoring like photorealism and light and just to have it connected to the world.
And that's that's one of the big problems in AR.
And it seems like Microsoft has solved that pretty well.
But it's like, OK, now what do you do with that?
Besides put Minecraft castles on tables.
Why wouldn't you?
I have one.
I put it in the after show.
I have sad TV news before we go.
Oh, no.
What happened?
It's sad.
Sad, sad TV news.
It's sad on multiple levels.
So I've got my fancy TV that I like.
It's a Panasonic Plasma TV.
I know all about plasma TVs and their limitations.
I take very good care of my television, or so I thought, encouraging all the kids not to leave television shows paused, making my children watch 4x3 live-action television shows stretched out into 16x9 just so I fill the entire screen.
But recently, I recently got a PlayStation 4, and I've been playing a lot of Destiny on it.
And that turned out to be a mistake.
We got about maybe 80 hours into Destiny, split between me and my son, and we both really liked the game, despite its flaws, or perhaps because of its flaws, I'm not sure anymore.
But Destiny has one feature that I should have paid more attention to and didn't.
And in the lower left corner of the screen while you're playing Destiny is a heads up display that shows a 100% yellow line and 100% white silhouettes of guns.
And when I was flipping inputs the other day, I noticed that I could still see the yellow line and the little silhouettes of the guns in the corner of my screen.
And I said, no.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
So this is sad for multiple reasons.
Now, one, some quick Googling led to a giant jackpot of people begging Bungie to make the HUD transparent or to make it optional.
This is something that most games are good about.
giving you away all you need to do is make it a little bit transparent because the background is constantly changing right the problem is when you make something opaque then it never changes and it's just there for just hour after hour and it's terrible bungie hasn't done that yet i saw one acknowledgement that they acknowledge that they've heard this complaint before and they can't give any timelines and blah blah blah but that was back in november so there hasn't been a patch yet to fix this and the second thing is uh regarding plasma tvs
There is image retention and burn-in.
And the only difference is, as far as I can tell, that burn-in is considered permanent and image retention is considered not permanent.
Is what I have permanent or not?
Many stories from people who have played past games on their plasma TVs, not just Destiny, but many other games, say, I stopped playing the game and it took months for it to go away, but it eventually did.
Other people say it never went away.
And so, like, the people who say it never went away, they had burn-in and the other people had image retention.
And there's different debates over if your plasma TV supports 3D, it's more susceptible to either image retention or burn-in or whatever.
Anyway, my TV has a screen wipe feature that puts white bar across the screen that's supposed to help.
But the bottom line is, from what I've read, the best cure is to just simply continue to use your TV as normal.
Don't play that game anymore.
Wait several months to a year, and maybe it will go away.
I think it has faded already.
But the worst part of this is now Destiny is banned from my television until they pass that to the thing, which means that I can't play Destiny, which also means that my son can't play Destiny.
And that is the worst part of this.
Well, second worst.
I think if that thing stays on my screen, I'll be super pissed.
No one else at this point, I think no one else would even notice it unless I pointed it out because it is actually fairly faint.
But you know me.
So my my solution to this is I'm buying a gaming monitor 1080p gaming monitor and I'm going to move the PlayStation 4 into the computer room and play it there instead of on the television because we got to play our destiny you know these guns these guns aren't going to level themselves.
Wow.
So let me ask you a serious question.
I'm not trying to troll you.
You bought this TV, specifically a plasma TV.
If I understand things correctly, because the blacks are better, but otherwise it's mostly the same as any other TV?
No.
Pretty much everything about it is better.
It handles motion better.
The color accuracy is better.
The blacks are better.
It is better than...
any television you could buy except for the possibility of OLEDs, but OLEDs, by the way, also have burn-in problems.
Well, anyway, what I'm driving at is you bought this TV for a difference that probably only your robot eyes can see.
No, anybody could see it.
Anybody could see it.
Put them next to each other in a showroom.
You will pick my TV as the better looking one.
Yet you can't use the TV to do the one thing you want to do with it, which is play Destiny.
No, because Destiny, like for video games... Oh, it's all the game's fault, right.
No, no, well, the motion is an important thing in gaming, right?
But...
The thing I really want a good picture for is for television and movies, like live action, because games, they're limited by the graphics that are in the games.
They're not photorealistic.
And I want to watch my favorite movies and television shows and all the other stuff on my nice, fancy screen.
I'm perfectly happy to move my gaming to a little 23-inch monitor in the computer room, right?
But I am not happy.
I wouldn't be happy to watch like my Studio Ghibli Blu-ray on a little tiny computer screen or to, you know, watch Godfather movies on a little tiny computer screen or to watch the next season of Game of Thrones on a little tiny computer screen.
So I'm still what I'm trying to do is preserve my my TV for its intended purpose, which is watching television and movies.
Its intended purpose is not gaming.
And in fact, the monitor will probably have a much lower input lag and lower latency.
than my television does for gaming i tried to get a tv that has low input lag as possible to make it acceptable for gaming but it'll probably be much better on this monitor that i got all right well i'm sad to hear that yeah and i i worried about it for other games too like zelda games have huds and stuff too but all you need is a little bit of transparency and you know it has not been a problem with any and i've gamed a lot in that like hundreds and hundreds of hours i've gamed on this tv and on my my previous tv
So, someone in the chat room is complaining that stretching 4x3 is a crime.
I'm not saying I watch shows like that.
I'm saying I make my kids watch shows like that.
They're watching Full House.
It's standard def.
I make them stretch it.
They watch Full House?
Yeah, they're reruns for it.
The show looks awful in any aspect ratio.
Oh, come on.
Cut it out.
No.
Oh.