An Atheist or a Howard Stern Fan
John:
Everyone should pull up pictures of the Ferrari 4888 for the after show.
Casey:
We actually are probably going to do an after show neutral because I have... What did you say?
Casey:
4888?
Casey:
Ooh, first turbo.
Casey:
Interesting.
John:
You're just hearing this news now.
John:
You didn't look at it.
John:
Drance was tweeting about it and I was going back and forth with you.
John:
You guys don't pay attention.
John:
I was watching.
John:
I was watching.
John:
You guys don't deserve Ferraris.
John:
Forget it.
John:
No Ferrari for either one of you.
John:
That's it.
That's it.
John:
Did any of you guys add anything good to the topics list?
John:
Because I don't see anything exciting on there.
John:
I added one thing.
Marco:
This is going to be a boring show everyone.
Casey:
This is going to be a great show.
John:
I just realized that I hadn't added anything other than one little measly item and I guess we have some leftovers from before.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
So here's my crappy story I wanted to tell.
Casey:
It was either today or yesterday.
Casey:
I was fiddling with the CSS for my website.
Casey:
And you have to understand, if you think of the person in your life that claims to be a developer but is the worst that you can possibly be at CSS, I'm like five times worse than that person.
Casey:
So anyway, so I'm fiddling with CSS, trying to do a media query, which is pretty bitching for my god-awful skill level.
Casey:
And I remembered that you can actually have Safari reach into...
Casey:
whatever the iOS simulator Safari app is to do the inspector.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The inspector on what's being shown in the iOS simulator, which I thought was freaking cool.
Casey:
And I know this is not new news, but that was the first occasion I had to actually use it.
Casey:
And I thought it was amazing.
John:
It's amazing when it works.
John:
Last time I used it was like two years ago, but boy, was it flaky.
Marco:
It works great.
Marco:
I mean, I've used it a lot, and it's always worked great recently.
Marco:
I think it came out in iOS 6.
John:
Yeah, I think I was using it when it was brand new, and I was so excited I was able to do it.
John:
It was like, this is going to make everything so much easier, and it does, but it would lose its connection to the remote browser thing all the time.
Marco:
No, now it's pretty solid.
Marco:
I use it all the time.
Marco:
And it works with any web view in the app.
Marco:
So not just mobile Safari.
Marco:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
That's one of the great things about it.
Marco:
If you have a web view in your app, it'll list all the active web views that are currently attached to the window.
Marco:
And you can DOM inspect your web views, which is really handy.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that's the main reason it's there.
Marco:
And it's so useful.
Casey:
That's extremely cool.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, and it's like I said, it's kind of silly story, but I just thought it was neat.
Casey:
So go try that if you're a web developer and or terrible at CSS like I am.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And for those of you who don't know where it is, if you launch, if you're running the simulator, go back to Safari and under the debug menu, it'll list any web views that are found in the running simulator.
Marco:
So in the Safari developer or debug menu, whatever, whatever it's called.
Casey:
that's desktop safari just to be absolutely yeah it's called oh it's called develop okay yeah so if you go to develop it's listed there all right any other crappy stories before we get into follow-up i can tell you about some dreams i've had recently maybe maybe some uh some travel stories i've heard that that boston's gotten a wee bit of snow you and your beloved winters we're not talking about snow
Casey:
It sounds like we are.
Casey:
Hey, you love winter.
Marco:
Did anything happen in the industry that we can actually talk about?
John:
No, not really.
John:
It doesn't seem like it was that big of a news week.
John:
We have follow-up first.
John:
We're not on the topics yet.
John:
Although I didn't put either one of these follow-up items.
John:
I think it's all you, Casey.
Casey:
So let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Daniel Sherson has said, about handwriting recognition, text input is still kind of hacky for languages with more than 30-ish letters.
Casey:
And that was a tweet that he had posted.
Casey:
We'll put that in the show notes.
Casey:
I just thought it was an interesting point because I can imagine in a situation where you have 11 gazillion characters, that may be kind of difficult.
Casey:
That being said, hot off the presses earlier today on Wednesday, my friend Will Haynes, who I believe I brought up on the last episode or if not an episode or two ago,
Casey:
put together a about five minute video of how you can enter text in iOS 8 in various different languages.
Casey:
So again, Will is Australian born, but lives in Tokyo and has for a while now.
Casey:
And so he put together this video and it doesn't require audio, which is kind of nice if you want to be listening to like music or something else.
Casey:
But what he talks about is the various ways that you can type text.
Casey:
In both Japanese and actually Chinese as well.
Casey:
And that includes the Romaji keyboard.
Casey:
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Good try.
Casey:
So do you know the actual pronunciation?
Casey:
No, but I always say Romaji.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Well, there you go.
Casey:
Like Jumanji?
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say.
Casey:
I could be wrong too.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So that apparently the way that works is you basically use what I would call an English keyboard in order to start typing the English language equivalent of Japanese words.
Casey:
I'm already probably going terribly wrong.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
And then he also showed a couple of the other keyboards, one of which is set up like a numeric keypad, which is kind of interesting because
Casey:
Um, and apparently because Japanese specifically only has, but so many sounds that kind of works and it's a combination of typing and swiping, which is what he had actually shown me at the beer bash WWDC.
Casey:
And then I had confused my own story and I had thought he had shown me a handwriting recognition, uh, keyboard, which he didn't.
Casey:
But in this video, he does take the liberty of showing you how a handwriting recognition keyboard would work for Chinese and
Casey:
So you don't have to watch the entire video.
Casey:
Well, obviously, you don't have to watch any of it.
Casey:
But I thought it was a fascinating and very succinct look at how you can enter these very different languages or type in these very different languages in really wild and different ways than the traditional keyboard that we're all used to.
Casey:
And I just thought it was really neat.
Casey:
Did either of you guys watch this?
Casey:
I assume that, Marco, you did not because you don't believe in homework.
Marco:
I'm actually very heavily medicated right now, fighting off a horrible cold.
Marco:
So I did almost nothing to prepare for this show.
Marco:
I literally, I printed out my little three pages here of sponsorship reads.
Marco:
We'll talk about your printouts later.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's literally all I did.
Marco:
I just opened up Chrome after I started this call to look at the notes.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
John, did you happen to watch this video?
John:
The main thing I came away from our feedback about this is that, like, people all over the map.
John:
Some people were like, nobody uses handwriting recognition.
John:
Everyone's just used to typing it in.
John:
Or only old people, whatever, use handwriting recognition.
John:
Other people who are like handwriting recognition is so much better.
John:
In fact, it's better than it is in Western languages because there's an sort of an order that you're supposed to do the strokes and a direction and everything.
John:
It's very regimented.
John:
And if you, you know, everybody learns the same way.
John:
uh you know letters in the english language that different people draw in all sorts of crazy different ways and in different orders and everything so uh i really don't know what to think in fact one of the weird things i guess this isn't weird but i think it seemed like the majority of the feedback we got were from people who were not from the region like i'm from australia or the uk or germany and i moved to the far east and you know i guess they're giving like a westerner's impression and then i would imagine all the people who were born there can't understand a word we're saying because they you know most of them don't know english
John:
um so i don't know uh oh yeah and a lot of people were showing us the the built-in handwriting recognition that's in ios now under the accessibility things and everything um and saying oh apple doesn't need to do anything it's already already built in there and you know i i remember back in 2002 i think it was when apple added handwriting recognition to os 10 do either one of you guys remember that no
John:
Yeah, I put it in my review because I got to show off my terrible handwriting.
John:
I tried to write Hello World like seven times, and then I showed what OS X thought I was writing.
John:
Sometimes it guessed correctly, Hello World.
John:
Other times it was way off.
John:
But in all these cases, it's like this is sort of an optional extra buried in some way.
John:
You know, it's not universal like.
John:
When Apple added speech recognition, pretty much any place you have a text input field, if you can bring up the standard keyboard, there's the little, you know, microphone, and you can use it there.
John:
Handwriting recognition has not been raised that level, mostly because Apple doesn't ship any devices with a stylus and doesn't really, you know, have its own stylus that it supports or anything.
John:
So I think that's what we're all waiting for regarding the stylus and the iPad.
John:
Will Apple do for handwriting recognition what it has already done for...
John:
text input with a keyboard and for uh audio input uh speech to text cool so you it's is this even still an os 10 no i think so i mean i should pull out my tablet and connect it and see if it happens so they called it ink or something you don't see the ink well yeah you don't see the preference pane unless you actually attach a tablet that you know so until you do that it doesn't appear i guess you could just go into the preference pains directory and look to see if you see the handwriting recognition or ink thing in there
Marco:
I have a Wacom tablet in the closet I could probably try with this week and report back next week.
John:
Yeah, that's what I used for the review.
John:
I think I borrowed a tablet and just plugged it in and a little thing appeared.
John:
I'll find that link for the show notes at some point.
Casey:
Eschatologist is in the chat saying to us that it's still there.
Casey:
So we'll assume that that's the case.
Marco:
Yeah, you know, I have been looking for ways to slow down my computer input and make it less efficient and more annoying and take up more desk space.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to trying this.
Casey:
There's a designer at work, and he has a Wacom, Wacom, Wacket, whatever it's called, tablet-y thing.
Casey:
And not only that, but he also has a Magic Trackpad, and I believe he also uses a mouse.
Casey:
So he has all three manners of pointing devices on his desk.
Casey:
um at all times which i think is a little bit crazy but you know designers are kind of a little bit crazy well he currently has the same number of input methods on his desk as i have headphone amps on my desk so i can't i can't really complain or say anything about that fair enough all right any other uh follow-up that we have or are we uh good to go on that i feel like we're forgetting something but i don't know what
Marco:
Well, yeah, you're forgetting to follow up on my email.
John:
People complaining about, oh, yeah, we can talk about that.
Marco:
No, no, that was a bad reference.
John:
Never mind.
John:
Anyway, it reminded me of last week when Marco told everybody that he hates them.
John:
And this week, we got all the angry email from the people whose feelings are hurt by Marco's email policy.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
There were a lot of hurt feelings.
Marco:
Were there?
Marco:
Because from the responses that actually got to me via Twitter and email, it was overwhelmingly positive.
Marco:
There were certainly some people who were like, yeah, you probably shouldn't be doing that.
Marco:
Or I'm personally offended.
Marco:
You should not even be in business.
Marco:
One guy got really bent out of shape.
Marco:
But for the most part, the response was not nearly as bad as I expected.
Marco:
It was overall mostly in agreement or at least understanding.
John:
I think that is fair.
John:
I think even the people who are angry understood.
John:
They were just like.
John:
The people who are angry didn't like the idea that your policy left some people feeling bad, like especially if it was them, like they would say, I understand the effects of your policy in terms of.
John:
how you allocate your time and return on investments, like the business type things.
John:
But they would say, but I think overall it's not a good strategy because it leaves some of your customers feeling bad.
John:
And sometimes they would say they were one of the customers who felt bad.
John:
And some of them would say, I don't personally mind, but I can imagine that some customers feel bad.
John:
So therefore, the overall effect of your strategy is negative or could be better if you did suggestions X, Y, and Z.
Marco:
What I thought was interesting is that I actually heard from a handful of other people with some degree of internet fame or some sizable audience who also have similar quick skimming and very little replying policies, or some of them you don't even read the emails anymore.
Marco:
So I heard from a number of people, a few people who were in a similar situation and who did basically the same thing, but you can't really come out and say that publicly a lot of the time.
Marco:
It's kind of like saying you're an atheist or a Howard Stern fan.
Marco:
There's a lot of them out there, but no one's talking about it, really, because it can be politically unwise to say this in public to everybody all the time.
Marco:
But you'd be surprised how many people do the exact same policy or a very similar one or an even more ruthless one.
John:
You have to.
John:
Otherwise, like you said, you'll spend a very large amount of your time conversing with people.
John:
And a lot of the people who...
John:
thought it was an overall bad policy because like the despite the the good parts of it which they would acknowledge in terms of how you manage giving you more time to do other things they would say here are the bad parts and here's why like it doesn't balance out they would suggest alternatives like it was the same thing you get with feature requests if only you would just if only you would just and then whatever uh and all all the if only you would just
John:
Didn't seem like they would solve the problem.
John:
If only you would just would solve that person's problem.
John:
If only you would just tweet about the problems.
John:
Which, by the way, I do.
John:
I know.
John:
Although you've done more recently than in the past.
John:
If only you would just have a blog about the problem.
John:
If only you would just have a mailing list.
John:
If only you would just have a public book tracker.
John:
If only you would just have a blog, right?
John:
But each one of those things, this person would be like, well, I don't use Twitter, so you tweeting about it doesn't help me at all.
John:
I don't want any more email, so a mailing list isn't going to help you.
John:
I would never join up.
John:
I would never find your blog or I don't like to read your blog.
John:
So if you put updates there, it's not going to... That's what it comes down to with all of these sort of centralized places where you can communicate to your users because everybody has something they do or don't want to do.
John:
I don't want email.
John:
I don't read Twitter.
John:
I don't want to read more blogs.
John:
I don't want to do this.
John:
I don't want to do that, right?
John:
To get them all, you would have to have all of those things.
John:
A Usenet group, a mailing list, a set of forums, a Twitter account that's kept up to date, a separate blog for it.
John:
And even then, someone would be like, oh, I don't use any of the things.
John:
Do you have an RSS feed?
John:
Oh, I don't use an RSS feed.
John:
You will forever chase the individual people who have their specific needs of how you're going to communicate with them.
John:
And at that point, it's like, well, now this is taking more time than just replying to the email.
John:
There is... It's like the person who wants a feature and a piece of software.
John:
Like, I don't need all the features in this program.
John:
You can cut every single feature except for these three and then everyone picks a different three and there's, you know, 3,000 pictures in it.
John:
So it's...
John:
A lot of people were trying to say, from your perspective, I see how this works out.
John:
But from my perspective, an individual user, it sucks.
John:
And I see that.
John:
But it's like, if you look at the other side of it, you can't make it not suck for everybody.
John:
It's always going to suck for somebody.
John:
And sometimes that somebody is going to be you or you or you.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And so it's...
John:
It's not like a no-win situation, but people looking for a solution that's going to make everybody happy, I just don't think it exists.
Marco:
The alternatives that people suggest, those all take time.
Marco:
And if it comes to support tools, any kind of CRM thing, any kind of support service where it sorts your emails into threads for you and has multiple people working on it and stuff like that, any kind of email ticketing system...
Marco:
Those all take work to plow through.
Marco:
You're just moving the work to something else.
Marco:
Forums, bug trackers, public pages of any kind.
Marco:
Somebody recommended GitHub tracking.
Marco:
That's crazy because regular people have no idea how to use GitHub and I don't blame them.
Marco:
You should have a Facebook group.
Marco:
I do have a Facebook group.
Marco:
I posted zero times to it.
Marco:
And Facebook keeps telling me how people are engaging with it and that they want me to pay them to let them engage more or something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
I don't know how to use Facebook.
Marco:
I even have a Pinterest group.
Marco:
I don't know how to use that either.
Marco:
But, you know, I have these channels.
Marco:
The only one I really use is Twitter to communicate with the users.
Marco:
I don't even have an Overcast blog.
Marco:
And if I had one, nobody would read it.
Marco:
I have the Twitter account, and I will tweet things in the Twitter account of current status updates, things I'm working on, known bugs.
Marco:
And then I'll have people tweet at me.
Marco:
So I know they're using Twitter.
Marco:
I know they know about the account.
Marco:
I'll have them tweet at the account like three hours later.
Marco:
as if they had not seen what i posted three hours ago because they didn't because they didn't because they don't read their whole timeline so could you just could you repeat your tweets on the hour every hour but not so much of the people who do read their timelines are annoyed by them exactly so so twitter is not a good medium for keeping people updated uh but it like everything else that's out there would take more time it would be one more thing to do two more things to do more things to update and
Marco:
Overall, probably more work, and there would still be hundreds of people who would blow right by that, not see it.
Marco:
I mean, look, on the part of the app where it lets you email me, it is surrounded by reasons why you don't need to email me anymore.
Marco:
Here's FAQs.
Marco:
Here's what's coming up in the next version.
Marco:
Here's what's in this version.
Marco:
Here's the bug fixes.
Marco:
Here's the known bugs.
Marco:
That's all right there on that page.
Marco:
No one reads it, and everyone just clicks the email and emails me things I already know about.
Marco:
that is that's the reality like no matter what you do you know no one's going to read everything you put out there no one's going to be aware of everything you put out there no one is going to is going to be able to look and say like oh well i have now checked all the official overcast communication channels read back in the history by a few weeks to know everything there is to know it's currently going on now i will email them no that doesn't happen and i don't expect people to do that that's ridiculous
Marco:
So no matter what you do, you are always going to get support email.
Marco:
And there are things I can do to reduce the amount of support email.
Marco:
Number one thing you can do to reduce the amount of support email is to get rid of the bugs they're complaining about.
Marco:
So that's what I'm doing.
Marco:
Like by a long shot, that is the best thing you can do to reduce support email is...
Marco:
Get rid of the problems they're talking about and give people ways to help themselves.
Marco:
Now, the latter is worth discussing.
Marco:
So give people ways to help themselves.
Marco:
Password resets.
Marco:
Make that easy.
Marco:
Any kind of basic account management thing that they would have to email you for, make that easy.
Marco:
And I still have a little bit of ways to go on that.
Marco:
I don't currently have a way to...
Marco:
change your password except by resetting it i don't currently have a way to change your your registered email address just i haven't built them yet and like hardly anybody ever asked so it's kind of a low priority compared to other stuff i have to fix um so there's things like that that i get occasional emails about
Marco:
Then there's the big stuff.
Marco:
Hey, there's a sync bug.
Marco:
Or, hey, you know, if you really give me a delete preference, that's the stuff I need to tackle.
Marco:
And my time is so much better spent doing that than setting up a support ticketing system and a knowledge base and a forum and a public bug tracker and all these and letting people vote on bugs.
Marco:
Like, that's crazy.
Marco:
That's just so much more work and overhead and more things to manage and maintain.
Marco:
That's not really helping.
John:
Well, that gets back to like the value of those things.
John:
A couple of the people who were upset basically said it takes it takes me time and effort to isolate these bugs, to screenshot them, to find out how to report them, to make a bug report and to send it.
John:
And then I spend all that time and effort doing what is essentially help.
John:
I'm helping you, Marco.
John:
I'm spending my time to help you.
John:
And then you're not even going to send a reply.
John:
It makes me think that your time is more valuable.
John:
You're saying your time is more valuable than mine.
John:
Um, and you know, the,
John:
But fact of life is the amount of effort you put into something does not equate to its value.
John:
You can put a tremendous amount of effort into something and it just turns up not being valuable.
John:
Like you could try really hard to to make a fancy meal and you just burn the whole thing.
John:
It's like, but I work so hard.
John:
It's like, yes, but the end result is just a burn thing.
John:
So if you work really hard to make an awesome bug report, unprompted, by the way, it's not like you're demanding people send you bug reports, but you do this.
John:
You work really hard to make an awesome bug report.
John:
You send it.
John:
If you are the 900th person to send that exact bug report, the value of your bug report is very small.
John:
It is really just sort of a tick up on a counter.
John:
So Marco knows a lot of people are seeing this problem.
John:
You put a lot of work into it.
John:
Maybe if you were the first one, there would be value.
John:
you know when you start multiplying it out it's like if you want if you want any you're never going to get a commensurate reply marco is never going to spend as much time responding to yours as you spent sending it because it's not just a one-on-one relationship between the you know one person makes the software and one person uses it it's one person makes it and lots of people use it right so you can't marco doesn't get 10 000 days to reply to the email that 10 000 users send in one day
John:
right and then your value of your of your email it really depends like maybe it is super valuable and i bet if it was super valuable like oh i've never i never could reproduce this bug and i didn't understand what people are seeing and now you sending me all this stuff let's be put in i bet marco would reply to that even though he says he doesn't reply to email no i said i don't reply to most email i i do reply to things like that and so i've been doing this beta test this past week where i have about 800 beta testers through apple's test flight thing
Marco:
And I'm getting tons of email from those testers.
Marco:
And I'm answering as many as I possibly can out of that group because I know that's like a separate group.
Marco:
That's like I ask people to beta test.
Marco:
They are taking the time to install a relatively untested version on their device.
Marco:
And they are writing up bug reports and sending them to me.
Marco:
And I am actually doing a lot of responding on those.
Marco:
It's way above my regular rate of responses on that.
Marco:
It's probably over 50% that I'm responding to on those.
Marco:
And I honestly feel bad about the ones I'm not responding to out of the beta group because that seems like it should have a higher standard.
Marco:
Well, that's like 800 people.
John:
But when you did the beta on Glassboard, it was like, you know, I don't know, 20 people or whatever it was.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
And you were responding to all of them because you kind of could 20 to 1, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The value of the first 20 people ever to use the application besides Marco, their reports are much more valuable than the 700th person to send a sync book.
John:
It doesn't mean there's no value to that thing, but you're never going to get a reply that makes you feel like the effort you spent
John:
wasn't in some ways wasted.
John:
Because in some ways it was wasted.
John:
You don't know whether it's going to be wasted.
John:
You don't know if you were the very first person to send this bug report or the 900th.
John:
How can you know that?
John:
You don't know what other people are sending, right?
John:
So I don't think you can have expectations about this sort of many-to-one relationship because you don't know what's going on on the other end of it.
John:
And it feels bad
John:
When you send a bug report that you worked hard on, you don't get any kind of reply at all, which is why people are begging for just something, anything, an automated reply.
John:
They're not asking you to spend the amount of time they did, but they just want something.
John:
They're just desperate for something.
John:
Of course, if you gave them that something, they would say, I just need something a little bit more.
John:
Automated reply makes me feel like you don't care about my email.
John:
Maybe just an impersonal note, because I spent so much time on this.
John:
I think that relationship is never going to work out, where you want a response that...
John:
That makes you feel good about the effort you spent.
John:
And it's like, well, then fine.
John:
I won't report bugs like that's a problem.
John:
Marco has to deal with.
John:
If suddenly no one reports bugs anymore or he gets only bad bug reports, then he will actually have to take time to address it.
John:
But that's you don't know what's happening.
John:
You can't say that Marco has to do that.
John:
It seems like he's getting enough bug reports and feedback.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I already lost the exact words you used, but you said something along the lines of you can't have expectations for what Marco did and the relationship between you and Marco is just some random, you know, bug reporter.
Casey:
And I think that's absolutely true.
Casey:
And one of the things that one of the more common themes that was angry that I saw of the feedback that all of us got was how could you not respond to this?
Casey:
It only takes a moment to fire off an email, be it automated or whatever.
Yeah.
Casey:
And what I don't think people understand, and this was the point in me bringing up that story about me going to New York and me not understanding why Marco didn't remember having read that email I sent him, was I didn't understand the sheer volume of email that someone in Marco's position can get.
Casey:
And it wasn't until I got a lot of email through this show that I started to understand it.
Casey:
And maybe some of these people that wrote us very angry about this do understand it.
Casey:
But I suspect that unless you're in a position where you're getting hundreds of unsolicited emails a day that are not outright spam, they're emails that you should probably be reading, then it's hard to pass judgment on what any one of us, particularly Marco, should do.
Casey:
Because I find it...
Casey:
challenging to keep up with just ATP email.
Casey:
And that's a drop in the bucket compared to what Marco is getting from Overcast.
Casey:
So I think you're absolutely right, John.
Casey:
In any case, we should talk about something that's awesome.
Casey:
And if I'm not mistaken, this is a particularly awesome something that's awesome.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
This episode is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Marco:
Now, they didn't want us to read a typical sponsor ad.
Marco:
What they did instead was send John a toaster.
Casey:
This is really happening.
Casey:
I cannot believe this is really happening.
Marco:
So John, all they wanted to do for this ad read was for you to review this toaster compared to your, you know, the toaster.
Casey:
Well, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Can we set the stage here since this is the first one?
Casey:
What is the toaster?
John:
and how and what is the particular reviewed toaster there's already not enough time for me to review this toaster in a typical ad read slot so i don't think we can go too much into context so i think when i save for the after show i will talk more about this toaster but okay the context is that i did a podcast a while ago hypercritical one episode i talked about my difficulty finding a toaster that i found satisfying and
John:
In response to that episode, a bunch of nice people got me as a sort of joke gift at WWDC a fancy toaster that I probably would not have bought myself.
John:
And that's the one I'm using right now.
John:
That's the context of it.
John:
That's why it's funny to apparently send me toasters to review.
John:
So I have received a toaster.
John:
It is the Black & Decker...
John:
T, capital O, 1303SB.
John:
I just want to note that the model number has both... Catchy.
John:
The model number has both a capital O and a zero in it, which is great.
John:
This is a four-slice toaster.
John:
And by the way, these are all toaster ovens.
John:
Please do not send me things about I should get a slot toaster.
John:
I know about slot toasters.
John:
Again, on the episodes, yes, I know all about them.
John:
Slot toasters do not double as ovens.
John:
I'm only interested in toaster ovens.
John:
You may be interested in slot toasters.
John:
That's great.
John:
Get a slot toaster.
John:
They're really nice.
John:
Anyway, toaster ovens.
John:
This one, let's talk about the good things first.
John:
It toasts bread reasonably evenly.
John:
This is a big thing because a lot of them have like hot spots and you'd get, you know, one side is pale and one side is over toasted.
John:
It toasts them in about the same speed as my fancy toaster.
John:
We'll have the model number of my fancy toaster and a link to it in the show notes as well.
John:
so speed wise it's good um capacity wise it is a smaller toaster but you know size like it's that's not a fault for it takes up less room on the countertop it's also small on the inside that's fine uh it is relatively quiet you'd be surprised that the noises toasters make particularly when you just turn them on they make kind of like a transformer whine kind of like meh
Marco:
Is that what that is?
John:
Because, yeah, they all kind of, like, have that buzz.
John:
It's not.
John:
Someone, Dr. Drankin writes and tells what it is.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe it's an inverter or something.
John:
Whatever it is, the sound gets lower as the thing heats up.
John:
So it's only the beginning.
John:
But this one is admirably quiet.
John:
This one does have a thing that ticks, sort of a ticking countdown thing until it gets to the end.
John:
Like a bomb?
John:
Yeah, basically.
John:
Like, you know, listen to the hypocritical episode of me complaining about the ticking thing.
John:
But this is at least a very quiet tick, right?
Yeah.
John:
And, you know, the oven... I use this thing for toast and for warming stuff up and for cooking things.
John:
The oven part seems to work fine.
John:
Overall, it's pretty good.
John:
But the bad things about it are some of the same bad things about most modern toasters.
John:
This thing has three dials on the front of it.
John:
And to toast anything, you have to put the top dial to toast.
John:
You have to put the middle dial to toast.
John:
And you have to put the bottom dial to the amount that you want to toast it.
John:
And dials... Oh, these are not good dials.
John:
Dials... These dials are...
John:
are completely smooth and and have like a little you know a thing showing you where it's supposed to be pointing on the top of the dial but they're raised like an inch off so you can't tell where quite where it's aiming and that's important because anything with a dial you have to turn it to a degree that you memorize 36 degrees 37 degrees 38 whatever it is that the amount that exactly toasts the bread to the darkness that you want and every time you toast a piece of bread you have to turn the dial that exact amount if you're off by a little bit it won't be toasted enough or it'll be toasted too much before the thing goes off
John:
This is a terrible design for toasters.
John:
Remember when they used to be when we were kids?
John:
You would have a darkness knob that you could set, and then you would press a little thing down, and then it would pop up when it's done, right?
John:
Like the little thing?
John:
Yeah, so you could set the way you liked it and be repeatable.
John:
Right, and then it's just like one after that, or down, down, down, down, down.
John:
This thing with the knob,
John:
just not good at all and then having to set the other three knobs if you have the top knob set to the wrong thing or the middle knob set to the wrong thing you can turn that toasting to the right degree but it won't do the right thing because oh you didn't realize it was on bake or something and if you want to use the bake thing you've got to turn the bottom dial to the stay on setting and then do the top two dials it's like how freaking complicated can you make this they only have a little bit of an area for ui like
John:
I don't know how you can go this far wrong with the toaster interface.
John:
So performance wise, this toaster gets the job done.
John:
In fact, I was really nicely surprised by how well it did all the jobs as well as my big fancy toaster.
John:
But user interface wise, this is not good at all.
Marco:
And it's worth pointing out, too, that this is on Amazon currently.
Marco:
It's $43, which is very inexpensive for a toaster oven brand new.
Marco:
You know, the fancy ones like the one you have are about $200.
Marco:
So for $43, that's a pretty good buy.
John:
And I would say the build quality of this $50 toaster embarrasses my $200 toaster in some areas.
John:
So Black & Decker does make very solid, like even the dials, which I don't like because they're smooth and don't have a way for you to tell like where you're pointing because the pointing thing is so far off the surface.
John:
The dials on this one feel better than the dials on my $200 toaster, which I complained about when I talked about that toaster, right?
John:
There just shouldn't be this many dials and it shouldn't be this complicated to use this thing.
John:
what's your final verdict he loved it uh it i don't i mean how many toasters have i had in my life i'm not the wire cutter here i've had my old toast i've had my old toaster that i replaced with the fancy toaster i like my fancy toaster better than this but my fancy toaster is like four times the price so damn well better be better than this my fancy toaster is probably not four times better than this but you know of all the toasters i've used in my life this is the second best but the interface is still terrible
John:
Well, thank you very much to Cards Against Humanity.
Marco:
This is entirely their idea.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Oh, God, such a funny idea.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Casey:
Are we done?
Casey:
Is that it?
John:
I think that should have been the sweet home, not the wire cutter.
John:
Sorry, I'm not good on my brand.
John:
Real-time follow.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
No one in the chat room caught it.
John:
Someone in the chat room did say, I don't understand why he's not using a slot toaster.
John:
For crying out loud, how much of a preamble do I have to give for people not to?
John:
I understand what a slot toaster is.
John:
I know all about it.
John:
We're not talking about... I just... I can't... You cannot get... The slot toaster people are just unstoppable.
John:
Why would you want a slot toaster?
John:
I don't even understand.
John:
They're fine if you want a slot toaster.
John:
It's good, but you can't.
Marco:
No, they're worse at everything.
John:
They're better at toast.
John:
You can toast faster, and they have a thing that you press down.
John:
If you just want to make toast, I think slot toasters are better.
Marco:
And as long as you never want to toast anything that is crumbly or thick or non-symmetrical on both sides, you know.
John:
Yes, you would have to have a toaster oven as well.
John:
But if you have a very large kitchen and with a lot of counter space, you know, then you can have a toaster oven, a slot toaster, a convection oven, a microwave oven, dual ovens in the walls, like whatever.
John:
I do not have that kitchen.
Marco:
Seven ovens, various shapes and sizes, many different knob types on the front.
Casey:
I love that all these people in the chat room are going berserk about the slot toasters.
Casey:
Yes, they may be plainly superior for toasting, like John said, but I— I still—I won't concede that point.
Casey:
Well, I'm not saying that's true, but if—let's take it as writ that that is true.
Casey:
Even if that is true, there's so many gazillions of things you can do with a toaster oven that you can't do with a frickin' slot toaster.
John:
If I had a big kitchen, I would have both.
John:
But I do not have a big kitchen, so I don't have both.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
This show took a turn that I wasn't expecting.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Do we have any actual topics for the week?
John:
Who just added this?
John:
Did you just add the neutrality thing?
John:
Marco did.
John:
I hope one of you knows something about it.
Marco:
Well, I just have an incredibly under-informed opinion like usual.
Casey:
Oh, well, nothing changes.
Marco:
So the FCC released an announcement of some kind of what exactly did they do?
Marco:
Just an announcement of what they want to do?
John:
Or that's why I didn't pay enough attention to it, because like, A, I still cynically assume that we're being screwed just now in a more hard to detect way.
John:
And B, I didn't I didn't think this announcement had anything to do with like, we would really like this to happen.
John:
And then the political realities will kick in and nothing will actually happen.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So basically, to give some very under-informed background on this topic, the FCC, which is responsible for regulating U.S.
Marco:
telecom and broadband and stuff like that, they have previously classified broadband as a... I think it's a data service rather than a telecom service, something like that.
Marco:
And basically, for telecom services, like the phone lines to your house, there's much more strict regulations over...
Marco:
How much control the carriers are allowed to exert over that, how much they're allowed to basically screw people and put limits and controls and interfere with what's being telegraphed over the lines, things like that.
Marco:
Internet service, by almost any kind of common sense definition, sounds like that.
Marco:
If you ask people, like...
Marco:
should internet service be regulated like phone service in these ways?
Marco:
Most people would say, yes, that makes sense.
Marco:
Of course it should be.
Marco:
And it hasn't been yet.
Marco:
And the FCC has tried a couple of little things to kind of like half-biss it a little bit, like to say, well, we want you to have net neutrality most of the time, but we're not going to go all the way and classify you as this.
Marco:
And then they get sued by the ISPs, and then they have to roll that back.
Marco:
So generally speaking, the FCC has been very weak on this.
Marco:
And even like six months ago, recently, the chairman, Tom Wheeler, basically came out and said that he didn't think they need to reclassify it the way phone lines are.
Marco:
A few weeks after that, President Obama made some statement about it, about how he was basically opposing the FCC chairman, who I think ostensibly he appointed, right?
Casey:
Sounds right.
Marco:
Obama basically politically overrode, not legally, but he politically said, I think differently on this, very publicly.
Marco:
And of course, the geek population like us is very strongly against the FCC's previous position.
Marco:
We want it to be regulated the way phone service is.
Marco:
Title II is... And I don't know all the details of what parts of Title II, all of it, none of it, but anyway...
Marco:
So you had the situation where the FCC says one thing, Obama a few weeks or months later says another thing, and then it came up again in the State of the Union address last month where Obama talked about again how he was on the side of net neutrality, which was directly contradicting the FCC's most recent statements.
Marco:
This week, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler comes out and says, oh, I changed my mind.
Marco:
We're going to seek this classification now.
Marco:
And this guy, he has previous ties to the cable industry, and it's up for debate to what degree that is, but he does have some previous ties to the cable industry.
Marco:
Wasn't he a lobbyist for the cable industry?
Marco:
It was a little bit less severe than that in practice, but there's some kind of connection there.
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, he comes from the cable industry.
Marco:
So having him be the head of the FCC is kind of suspect.
Marco:
Well, why wouldn't he just fight for the rights of the people who previously employed him and will probably employ him in the future?
Marco:
So anyway, you know, that's the whole revolving door thing.
Marco:
That's a big problem.
Marco:
Anyway, the problem is he said one thing, you know, last year or whenever.
Marco:
All of a sudden, the president says, I disagree.
Marco:
A few months later, oh, the FCC is now seeking something else.
Marco:
This feels a lot like just posturing and just empty promises.
Marco:
Because Obama said that, whether he believes it or not, he said it because it was popular among his base.
Marco:
He kind of had to say it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
He had to probably put pressure on Tom Wheeler to kind of get in line with him and his party and everything, because it's kind of weird if your appointed SEC chairman is directly disagreeing with the president and his policies.
Marco:
That's kind of weak.
Marco:
So it feels like posturing.
Marco:
It feels like putting on a good show for the voters.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Nothing's going to change tomorrow.
Marco:
What's going to happen is the FCC might pursue this in some way.
Marco:
It's going to be going back and forth for months, if not years, of drafting what the rules will even be, and then trying to put them in place.
Marco:
And then Verizon, Comcast, all the big ISPs are probably going to sue the FCC or sue the government to try to get these rules overturned.
Marco:
And that's going to go through courts for months or for years and possibly go to the Supreme Court eventually.
Marco:
This is going to be a long process.
Marco:
This is how the legal system works with this kind of stuff.
Marco:
It's going to be a very long process.
Marco:
And Tom Wheeler can say whatever he wants today.
Marco:
He can say, oh, we're going to seek this, we're going to seek these rules.
Marco:
But over time, those are going to be negotiated and weakened and possibly overturned by court decisions.
Marco:
So it's hard to say this really means a lot right now.
Marco:
This might turn into something good down the road, but it's going to be a very long time before, in all likelihood, before anything really can come of it, if anything comes of it at all.
Marco:
And what will probably happen, which is what happens most of the time with these kind of moves,
Marco:
is it'll probably be watered down or completely thrown out before it ever takes effect, and the public won't notice because we would have moved on to some other stupid PR thing.
Casey:
So you're looking forward to it and you're sure it's going to work.
John:
Yeah, that's it.
John:
I'm so cynical about these things because, like, just even if you don't know any of the details...
John:
the broad strokes are in your thing are roughly, you know, are roughly correct.
John:
Like that the person Obama appointed to the FCC chairperson did not like he campaigned on the idea of like, don't, you know, it was against the revolving door.
John:
Don't take people from industries and then appoint them to regulate the industries that they came from and are going back to.
John:
That's a bad thing.
John:
It's the anti pattern to use our lingo.
John:
uh we shouldn't do that and then did that ostensibly did that same thing with the fcc chairman although uh mtw in the chat room says that this is not the case at all and i don't know what we're getting wrong about that but like it was an industry person right doesn't mean all people who are in the industry are bad or evil or whatever it just means like it's kind of one of the things like if there's an appearance of impropriety just like try to avoid even the appearance of
John:
Rather than, you know, going on an individual basis, like just, you know, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, so, you know, the optics of this were bad.
John:
You took someone from the industry and you and you put them in charge of something that has a big influence on the industry.
John:
You say, well, this person is upstanding.
John:
They're not going to be influenced.
John:
And even if they do go back to work, the industry doesn't make a difference.
John:
Like just the appearance of it is not good.
John:
Right.
John:
So that starts off on the wrong foot.
John:
And then to see that person say things in that position that make the telecom and, you know, cable industries happy.
John:
Like if you are regulating an industry, if you're doing things that make the industry you're regulating happy, you're probably doing your job wrong.
John:
No matter what it is, like if you are in charge of regulating the food safety industry, if you're in charge of regulating trucking, if you're anything like no matter what you are in charge of regulating, if the companies or the industries you're regulating are happy about what you're doing, it is almost certainly the wrong thing to do.
John:
Unless maybe you're rolling back another regulation that was like went too far or whatever.
John:
But like if they're happy, you know, especially with these giant industries that have near monopolies like telecom.
John:
if they are happy something is wrong because they are never happy about things that help consumers they're always happy about things that make them more powerful and that screw consumers so that like you don't even need to get into nitpicky details and like theories about the free market or whatever all you have to do is say uh is verizon happy is at&t happy do they love this then it's almost certainly the wrong thing to do now you have to balance it you say like well you're not going to make them miserable but like
John:
you know you can't just regulate them to death and strangle the industries but believe me no one is strangling telecom like like now we can't have any telecom companies all telecom companies have closed up shop they're just leaving their wires hanging in the trees and just no one's going to use them anymore because it's over regulated no the direction everything has been going in this country has been
John:
decreasing regulation, which has good size and bad size.
John:
And again, you can talk about the details, but just as a general rule of thumb, you don't even need to look at consumers.
John:
Don't say are consumers happy?
John:
Consumers don't know what's going on.
John:
These things all happen behind closed doors.
John:
Consumers have no idea that it's happening.
John:
Consumers have no idea what the effects are, but if the industry loves it,
John:
stop stop and look and say wait a second they love this what the hell are we doing our job is what they should hate us our job it's like being the principal at a school like or the assistant principal like if everybody loves you you're not imposing enough discipline right now everybody doesn't have to hate you but if everyone's like yeah everything you do is awesome woo like you know that's that's not a regular same you know or parenting like
John:
If your kids love every decision you make, you're probably failing them as a parent.
John:
Or you have a perfect child, which could happen.
John:
Anyway, that's how I feel about this thing.
John:
So that's why I don't get too caught up in the details.
John:
Maybe I'm too cynical about it.
John:
I think I did...
John:
You know, every time this comes up, I do do whatever things they have online to like, oh, send a letter to your congressperson, send, put a comment on the, you know, request for comments.
John:
I do all that stuff.
John:
So I'm not so cynical that I think I can't participate in the process and everything.
John:
And of course, you know, I vote and the people I vote for are as close as possible to being in agreement with me on positions like this.
John:
But it's in many cases, it's just simply impossible because of a stupid two party system to find any candidate who agrees with you even remotely on some issues like this.
John:
you do what you can but anyway uh i don't know i guess we'll just wait and see
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's move on real quick.
Casey:
Uh, we hear that Apple may or may not be involved in a mapping service.
Casey:
Uh, do you want to talk about this, John?
John:
I put it in there because it was on, uh, loop insight and, uh, it wasn't Dalrymple that said it, but like, so when I saw these stories, it's like, Oh, someone has some random spy shot of a van with crap on top of it.
John:
And they say it's from Apple.
John:
Uh,
John:
And then, you know, I saw that story.
John:
I'm like, yeah, whatever.
John:
I don't, you know, I don't really pay attention.
John:
And then I saw that the loop had it.
John:
And I went to it hoping it would be Dalrymple giving one of his yep or nopes.
John:
And I was expecting it to be a nope because I don't think Apple is working on self-driving cars.
John:
But he didn't even write it.
John:
So there's no thing one way or the other.
John:
But I feel like he would want to write that.
John:
Was that Sean King that did that one?
John:
I feel like if he knew, he would have grabbed that one and thrown in a nope.
John:
But he didn't.
John:
um and but the story did point out and i think it is a much more plausible theory this is not apple self-driving cars this is just apple's answer to street view which we've talked about in many past shows the episode numbers of which i absolutely cannot remember about things that apple's bad at and one of them is the audacity to do something like google street view where it's like we have overhead maps and everything but wouldn't it be great if we could have
John:
street level views of stuff and like well how are you going to get street level views or anything well what if we just put cameras on top of cars and drive them on every road in the entire united states and that's something that would come up in a google meeting they would say all right let's do that and by the way let's scan every book in existence but anyway get those cars on the road and driving it you know whereas apple apple is not an organization that does things like that that conceives things like that and that executes them um
John:
But when they took on the job of doing Maps, it's like, well, it's going to take you a long time to catch up to Google Maps if you ever do.
John:
And you don't have anything like Street View.
John:
And if you want something like Street View, Google's not going to give it to you.
John:
You're going to have to do what they did, which is really hard.
John:
So I desperately hope that that is an Apple equivalent of Street View car piloting a program that's going to use some of that $178 billion to drive on every road to the United States and eventually every road in the world taking pictures of everything.
John:
And that their pictures will be higher resolution than Google's because they do it later with better technology and all that stuff.
John:
I desperately hope that's what it is and not just some cleaning van with weird stuff on the roof.
Marco:
Yeah, me too, because it's unfortunate that there are these handful of major areas where Apple and Apple's customers are still really dependent on Google for things.
Marco:
And obviously Apple does not really want it to be that way if they can help it.
Marco:
And some of these web search, general purpose web search of find this phrase on the entire internet,
Marco:
I don't think Apple's going to tackle that.
Marco:
Somebody posted there was a job posting for Apple search on some Apple job site.
John:
They just want you to be able to find a game on the app store instead of keyword spammers.
Marco:
I don't think the Apple search thing was about web search.
Marco:
I think it's just like searching other things that Apple needs to be searchable.
Marco:
But, you know, the certain areas of maps and street view is probably the biggest one.
Marco:
You know, the mapping data is pretty close now.
Marco:
Obviously, this will vary depending on where you live.
Marco:
But I have found Apple's mapping data to be pretty good.
Marco:
The biggest problems I have with Apple Maps that still exist today are lack of street view and that the business listings are pretty weak compared to Google's.
Marco:
The Googles are not perfect.
Marco:
A lot of people say like, oh, well, Apple's business listings once brought me to some terrible out-of-date listing of this thing that didn't exist anymore or wasn't there or had moved or whatever.
Marco:
Google's business data is not perfect either.
Marco:
This is kind of like when people try a different cellular carrier and they forget how bad their other one was or how spotty or inconsistent it was in certain areas.
Marco:
And they run back and then forget about how bad it was.
Marco:
It's kind of like grass is always greener, but with a little bit longer term memory involved.
Marco:
Just like no cellular carrier, including your beloved Verizon everybody, is actually consistently great everywhere.
Marco:
Similar to that, no mapping data for many of these services is consistently perfect.
Marco:
And no business place name data is consistently perfect from these places.
Marco:
Certainly, I think Google's is still better.
Marco:
Again, neither of these are perfect.
Marco:
Google's is still better.
Marco:
And anything Apple can do to close that gap with the business data and to provide the missing features like Street View, that is very beneficial to them.
Marco:
strategically long-term, I think they need to do things like that.
Marco:
They need to get total independence from the need for Google services on their devices.
Marco:
And they've come very far.
Marco:
They're almost there in many areas, but there's still a few things that they're really kind of stuck with.
Marco:
And I think Street View and good map business place data is probably up there.
Casey:
Do you think that the people who are zealots about slot loaded toasters are the same Verizon people that won't shut up?
Casey:
You know, people with slot loaded toasters are so bad.
Marco:
You can't reheat a slice of pizza worth anything in there.
Casey:
Yeah, that's so true.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about something that's cool?
All right.
Marco:
Our second sponsor this week is Fracture.
Marco:
Fracture prints your photo in vivid color directly onto glass.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com to hear more about that.
Marco:
I have Fractures all over the office.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
I have, let's see, five.
Marco:
Yeah, I have five within view right now.
Marco:
These are great prints.
Marco:
So they're a photo printer.
Marco:
and they print the photos on these squares or rectangles of glass.
Marco:
And it just mounts directly to your wall, however you want, or it can sit on a desk or whatever.
Marco:
They include even the wall anchor for you or the little desk stand, whatever you ordered.
Marco:
They include everything you need in the box.
Marco:
Print quality is great.
Marco:
It looks fantastic.
Marco:
And my favorite part is that it doesn't need a frame or anything.
Marco:
If you're an adult and you're decorating a room as an adult,
Marco:
You don't want to just, like, pin a poster on the wall.
Marco:
You want it to look nice, right?
Marco:
And so, you know, generally, the way you do that is by putting it in a frame.
Marco:
You can do custom framing.
Marco:
That's very expensive.
Marco:
And with Fracture, this is great.
Marco:
Fracture prints, like, they're borderless because it goes edge to edge with the picture printed on the backside of this, like, thin piece of glass and then mount it on cardboard.
Marco:
Anyway, so it looks like the picture is just right there on the glass because it is literally printed on the backside of the glass.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
fracture prints look so good you don't need to have them framed in fact i don't even know if you could um and for for the price of the print for what you're getting for that it's an incredibly good deal compared to a nice frame a very very good deal and it includes the print and it's all right there in the box everything you need it looks clean it looks modern it looks great i get so many compliments on these on these prints i really i can't say enough good things about fracture that's why i keep ordering from them uh anyway
Marco:
Uh, prices start at just 15 bucks for a five by five inch square, which, and that's, that's the size I use for my app icon prints, which I've mentioned before.
Marco:
So I actually, for the, for the icons or icons of the apps I've worked on, I have little fracture five by five inch prints of those hanging on the walls, like this little like trophy row of what I've done.
Marco:
Anyway, every Fracture print is handmade and checked for quality by a small team that runs Fracture in Gainesville, Florida.
Marco:
It is the thinnest, lightest, and most elegant way to display your favorite photo.
Marco:
Get 15% off your first order with coupon code ATP15, which also lets them know that you came from this show.
Marco:
So 15% off your first order, coupon code ATP15 at FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
I just want to pipe in real quickly that we talk so often about the 5x5 sized ones, but we've gotten a couple of the, I think they call them regular size.
Casey:
It's pretty wide.
Casey:
I'd say like a foot, foot and a half wide and maybe a foot tall.
Casey:
And those look beautiful as well.
Casey:
It's not just the tiny ones.
Casey:
So don't feel like you should limit yourself just to those.
Casey:
But they really do look amazing, like Marco said.
Marco:
Yeah, I have the big ones.
Marco:
I have two of the big ones above my monitor.
Marco:
I love them.
Marco:
I just love them.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I forgot those refractures.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a good call.
Casey:
All right, so we had a question from listener Ben, which I thought was kind of interesting.
Casey:
And he said, would really like to hear more about the overcast back end someday.
Casey:
as an example of what it takes to run a modern app beyond what you upload to the App Store.
Casey:
There's a lot of places to learn about how to design and code an app, but most examples are standalone, and Overcast has some really interesting infrastructure behind it, and it seems like it could be a good example.
Casey:
For example, where do you host the VPSs and why?
Casey:
How much will the Go switch end up saving?
Casey:
Although I think you've talked about that a bit.
Casey:
And what other tools are in use?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go too far into this.
Marco:
It's probably going to be boring.
Marco:
But I host at Linode.
Marco:
And I've used a lot of web hosts over the years.
Marco:
A lot.
Marco:
I mean, I've been hosting stuff on web hosts since 2000.
Marco:
So it's over the years, you know, web hosting business has a lot of companies come and go.
Marco:
Technology changes over time, you know.
Marco:
So I've probably been at 10, 15 hosts over that time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And through big and small, through my own personal site all the way up to Tumblr scale and a lot of things in between, Linode is overall the best host I've used.
Marco:
And there are certain areas in which other hosts are better.
Marco:
But Linode, this past fall, they did a major hardware upgrade where they upgraded the speeds of all their base systems and their networking and they changed their plans a little bit.
Marco:
And it is now an incredibly good deal for the power that you get.
Marco:
Before that, it was a decent deal, but it wasn't amazing.
Marco:
Now it's really a very strong value.
Marco:
So Linode, compared to other kinds of hostings, Linode is VPSs only, and I think they're all unmanaged.
Marco:
I don't know if they offer unmanaged servers.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
I use unmanaged, so it doesn't matter to me, but...
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
And Rackspace at the time, I mean, this was 2006, 2007, so I don't know how it is now.
Marco:
At the time, they were really considered the best of the business for managed servers.
Marco:
And I think they only sold managed servers at the time, so they were very expensive.
Marco:
It was like $800 a month for a server, for a mid-range server, which was very expensive.
Marco:
Even back then, it was very expensive.
Marco:
We had managed that.
Marco:
And what I found overall, what it promises is things like, well, if your disks fill up, we'll notice that and we'll go in there and clean it up.
Marco:
Or if your database is being hammered by some runaway process or some terrible query on something, we can go in and optimize it for you and fix it.
Marco:
and in practice that was spotty it that was very inconsistent the quality of service we got from that was inconsistent most of the time it was ultimately on us to fix the problem you know it was like well they could tell us oh well your problem is you have a lot of requests coming in it's like well yeah thanks
Marco:
So most of the time, it wasn't particularly useful.
Marco:
And maybe that's just because we were programmers.
Marco:
So we knew how to do the basics of system administration.
Marco:
We didn't need them to install Apache for us, stuff like that.
Marco:
We could figure that out on our own.
Marco:
So it depends on what skill level you need.
Marco:
These days, if you need more hand-holding from them and you need them to do more things for you,
Marco:
These days, you're probably not looking at servers at all.
Marco:
You're probably looking at managed cloud services, which have higher abstraction and everything else.
Marco:
That's kind of another story.
Marco:
The industry is very different these days as it was in 2006.
Marco:
But basically, I use Linode because it has a very, very good value and a surprisingly good control panel.
Marco:
Man, web hosting control panels are kind of like non-Igloo intranets.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Web hosting control panels are usually so awful.
Marco:
And it seems like every web host in the world is just totally incapable of making one that is remotely usable and even has ever been slightly thought out of how people actually use it.
Marco:
with a very small number of exceptions, and Linode is one of them.
Marco:
DigitalOcean is decent, but Linode is still by far more fully functional.
Marco:
I've tried other things.
Marco:
I've tried DigitalOcean.
Marco:
I've tried a couple of other ones.
Marco:
I keep coming back to Linode because it is just a really fantastic value for what it is, which is unmanaged VPSs.
Marco:
So if you need some other kind of server, some other kind of service, some other kind of hosting that's not under-managed VPS, I can't really help you because I haven't bought those.
Marco:
I don't really know what the market is like for those.
Marco:
The reason I do what I do is because I know enough about system administration that I can run my own servers.
Marco:
I know how to do it in a way that does not put a lot of burden on me.
Marco:
It's very low maintenance.
Marco:
I'm not being woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a server problem.
Marco:
I know how to do it now, so that doesn't happen.
Marco:
And honestly, it isn't that hard these days because servers are so freaking fast these days.
Marco:
And I use old boring tools like MySQL.
Marco:
So MySQL, for all the crap it gets, I have never had a problem that was MySQL's fault ever in all of Tumblr, all of Instapaper, everything I've done on the side between and since then, and now all of Overcast.
Marco:
I have used MySQL, and I've said this before on the show, I've used MySQL so heavily in so many different configurations.
Marco:
I've never had a problem that was MySQL's fault.
Marco:
I've never had MySQL wake me up in the middle of the night.
Marco:
I've never even had it crash in use.
Marco:
I've never seen the MySQL process crash.
Marco:
Like, that's, it's incredible.
Marco:
Like, so if you are fairly conservative with your tools, if you use boring stuff like CentOS Linux and MySQL and PHP or Python, like, you know, some kind of, like, boring language that's been around for a while, you can be pretty good.
Marco:
You can be pretty safe.
Marco:
And it can be pretty low involvement over time.
Marco:
You know, you have some time to set it up and then you're done.
Marco:
And modern VPSs have these great tools for, like,
Marco:
making custom setup images, cloning, point in time, backups and branching and recovery, all this crazy stuff you can do now with all these cool virtualized services.
Marco:
It's way better than it used to be.
Marco:
It's way easier than it used to be.
Marco:
And it's way, way cheaper than it used to be.
Marco:
So the reason I do it,
Marco:
even though there are all these cloud services that are also available now, is for that cost.
Marco:
I send my own push notifications.
Marco:
If I had a service that sent push notifications, it would cost thousands of dollars a month for the volume I send.
Marco:
Thousands.
Marco:
So much.
Marco:
For me to do it online, it would cost like $40 a month worth of server time, maybe at most, probably less than that.
Marco:
I mean, it's a massive deal.
Marco:
And it took me a day to figure out how to send them in code myself.
Marco:
It wasn't that big of a deal.
Marco:
So much of the stuff I feel like people shy away from because... And these are developers.
Marco:
You're able to make an app.
Marco:
which is not easy.
Marco:
It's easy in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
It's easier than doing manual labor all day.
Marco:
And it's easier than solving cryptos or whatever.
Marco:
But in the grand scheme of things, if you can figure out how to make software of any kind, you can administer basic stuff on a server.
Marco:
It's really not that hard.
Marco:
It might just be unfamiliar to you.
Marco:
But just like any language or platform or new API, you can learn it.
Marco:
It's not that big of a deal.
Marco:
You can save so much money and you can do so many powerful things once you are open to the idea of, you know what, maybe I will let myself run a web service.
Marco:
The doors it opens for you, to me, are usually, the vast majority of the time, usually worth it for the time and stress and expense of running your own servers.
Casey:
I have nothing to add to that.
Casey:
That's pretty straightforward.
Casey:
Now, would you mind recapping what the Go savings were when you changed the feed crawler to Go?
Marco:
Yeah, it was a couple hundred bucks a month.
Casey:
That's significant, for sure.
Marco:
Yeah, my total Linode bill is... I gotta look.
Marco:
I'm still moving stuff around with images and everything.
Marco:
So one thing I do with Overcast is... Because every podcast has the album artwork image that it defines in its feed.
Marco:
iTunes wants those to be 1,400 pixels square.
Marco:
So they're huge.
Marco:
And because we're dealing with arbitrary podcasts from arbitrary people, many people, many podcast producers, don't particularly optimize that file.
Marco:
So you might have this album artwork that's a meg, or it's a PNG when it's actually a photo, so it compresses very badly, or something like that.
Marco:
Or it's a JPEG that they just saved on 12 quality.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Sometimes you have these massive files.
Marco:
And in the context of Overcast, I don't really need those.
Marco:
I need them only really as the iPad artwork.
Marco:
And in every other context, things like search results, even just downloading things, you don't need the files to be that big.
Marco:
And a lot of times, like people who subscribe to a lot of podcasts, they might have like hundreds of megs worth of album artwork to download.
Marco:
And that's no good.
Marco:
So what I do as part of my hosting is I proxy and serve all album art images in Overcast through my own infrastructure.
Marco:
I resize the images to correct sizes that are actually needed by the app, and I serve them through a CDN.
Marco:
So that's why when you search Overcast, if you do a search for like ad podcast, type in a keyword.
Marco:
those thumbnails will load incredibly quickly, way faster than if I was pulling in the full-size, mostly uncompressed versions from all the different feeds.
Marco:
I'm doing all that just to make things better.
Marco:
And again, this is another advantage I have by having some kind of infrastructure in place.
Marco:
I can do that.
Marco:
So right now, I'm in the process of moving some stuff around.
Marco:
That used to be on my own servers.
Marco:
Now I'm trying out ImageX, but it's costing me a fortune.
Marco:
So I'm moving it to something else and probably back on my own servers soon.
Marco:
So my costs are all in flux.
Marco:
But generally speaking, the Go transition saved me a lot of money.
Marco:
And my next attempt for the image resizing is actually going to be based in Go and using this library called Vips, which I don't know anything about, but apparently it...
Marco:
destroys everything else in image resizing performance so if anybody knows anything about the vips library for resizing images let me know fair enough you're not going to try to install image magic image magic is just it is fine i've used it a lot in the past um i built most of tumblr stuff against image magic for the second revision when i added the when we added the the ping and gif support
Marco:
it's okay image magic is okay modern gd is okay um there are some bindings in php some bindings and go you know it's it's it's okay but overall image magic is just not very fast that's the biggest problem and vips promises to be really really fast like i've seen a few a few benchmarks and uh it seems amazing and so i don't know what the trade-offs are maybe it's terrible quality i don't know yet i'm looking into it that's because it's not image magic or gd both of those things are like forgetting
John:
how well they work when you use them just getting them installed it's just so it's just like such a nightmare and it never got better over the decades of me having to install those two things you're like well they'll work it out and it'll be oh god so painful so painful
Marco:
yeah and i don't know if this is still the case but we at tumblr we had a lot of issues with like image magic would increment the version in some minor way and then all of a sudden it would be 10 times slower in certain cases because they were like playing with multi-threading and things and something wouldn't work right or it would lock things weirdly and it was it was unstable for a while there it's probably better now but anyway this is pretty boring um our final sponsor
Marco:
Harry's.
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Marco:
Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg for shaving.
Marco:
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Marco:
This is actually an old blade factory they bought in Germany.
Marco:
I love German stuff.
Marco:
Germans are so good at making stuff.
Marco:
So Harry's went and bought an old blade factory in Germany.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Harry's offers factory direct pricing at a fraction of the big brand prices so Harry's blades run by my math roughly half the price of the big brands and plus you don't have to actually go to the drugstore to buy them you can just order them online they ship them directly to your door for free you don't have to deal with like going to the drugstores getting that out of the shoplifting case and all that stuff it's just so much easier to just order it online
Marco:
So they have the starter set.
Marco:
Starter set's an amazing deal.
Marco:
For $15, you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, your pick, and three razor blades.
Marco:
When you need more blades, they run about $2 each or less depending on how many you buy.
Marco:
So an 8-pack is $15.
Marco:
A 16-pack is $25.
Marco:
They sent me a sample a while back.
Marco:
I tried it.
Marco:
I went through the whole thing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I would say they are very comparable to the Gillette Fusion blades without the ProGlide strips.
Marco:
So the ProGlide strips are a little bit smoother if you like that.
Marco:
But overall, the Harry's blades, I would say, gave exactly the same quality shave as the Gillette Fusion non-ProGlide blades.
Marco:
And the best price I can find on Amazon for those Fusion blades right now is a 12-pack for about $41.
Marco:
12 Harry's blades are $20.
Marco:
So it's less than half the price for what I would say is exactly the same shave quality.
Marco:
So they have also amazing packaging, very classy designs.
Marco:
And what I like about Harry's too, they have this nice heavy razor blade, or I mean razor handle.
Marco:
So it's this classy metal thing.
Marco:
It kind of looks like Mad Men era, or at least what we like to romanticize Mad Men era as being.
Marco:
Really nice, like this nice metal, shiny or chrome blades, or I mean handles.
Marco:
These nice quality blades that are great bargain.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It is really a fantastic deal.
Marco:
harrys.com, use promo code ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about family sharing, John?
John:
Oh, there was a David Sparks thing that we've had in the notes in forever.
John:
Yeah, he has a lot of complaints about family sharing.
John:
My expectations, I guess, were just way lower.
John:
What I was looking for for family sharing is...
John:
An officially sanctioned acknowledgement from Apple of the structure of our family unit, which this more or less gave.
John:
I talked about the caveats in my Yosemite article where it's like, well, what if you had already sort of kind of given your kids Apple IDs, even though they weren't supposed to have them because they're too young?
John:
which I did, uh, they introduced this way for you to add like child's Apple IDs.
John:
And I said, well, my kids already have Apple IDs.
John:
Can I convert them to child Apple IDs?
John:
And Apple said, well, so you can't actually convert an Apple.
John:
You can't merge Apple IDs.
John:
You can't convert them.
John:
And so I have to give my kids fake ages and wait until whatever, like that's annoying, but at least I can have, you know, an organizer for the family and another adult in the family and two children in the family.
John:
And so,
John:
Just having Apple, having me be able to input that information in some place where Apple knows it gives me hope that future applications, future services, other future things that Apple does, maybe even third-party things if they expose that, could recognize the structure of my family and use that to do non-stupid things like working the way that we would want the applications to work for our family.
John:
I have dim hopes that Apple's photo stuff was going to do this, but whatever.
John:
Um, and the second thing I wanted out of it was I wanted my kids to be able to buy things on the app store with their own Apple IDs with me having some control over what they buy.
John:
And so then they could have their own, you know, if people, if people get them iTunes gift cards for their stocking or something that can go into their own Apple ID, it'll be their own money.
John:
They can spend it on the games that they want to spend it on.
John:
And then I can still see what they're doing.
John:
Uh, and this feature is,
John:
has worked spottily which you would expect for most of these features but sometimes it works it's like it's better than this feature not existing now all the complaints about this is like well what if they download an application that you bought on your apple id but the but the in-app purchase doesn't transfer over there so they have to redo the in-app purchase a lot of the the the annoyances of family sharing
John:
caused many people, including me occasionally, to go back to what we were all doing before, which is just designating a member of the family as the designated, you know, App Store Apple ID person.
John:
And then everybody is signed in with that Apple ID to the iTunes store.
John:
And I've said this before, to Apple's credit, despite the fact that they're so terrible at recognizing how families work.
John:
They have made it relatively easy to have different Apple IDs for all the different things.
John:
You can be signed into one Apple ID in iCloud, to a different Apple ID in the App Store, and I think even to a different Apple ID in Game Center, and maybe a different Apple ID in iMessage.
John:
I don't know, but there's a whole bunch of different places where you can have Apple IDs.
John:
If it was all one thing, nothing would work because that would just totally...
John:
have wouldn't allow people to even do workarounds but the workaround everybody i know does is oh that's the apple idea we buy everything on everybody in the family gets to use it which is nice from the bad old world of like you had to get a license for each seat and maybe have two computers you can only use the software on one or whatever
John:
So now, you know, in yesteryear, you would spend $200 on a program and you had to spend another $200 if someone else wanted to use it.
John:
Now you spend 99 cents and your whole family can use it.
John:
So maybe we're all spoiled by that.
John:
But whatever the policy is, we all have a workaround which is just use the same Apple ID for everything.
John:
And the quote unquote correct way to do it with family sharing is
John:
Even if it doesn't work and even if it has limitations and even if like iTunes matches and integrated with it and everything, it is a start.
John:
And I've waited so long for them to have any kind of start.
John:
I'm like, finally, they realize we have family.
John:
So maybe in another decade, everyone in the family will be able to take pictures and put them into one big family photos pool and not have to have one computer designated as the iPhoto computer or one Apple ID designated as the one family Apple ID.
John:
But baby steps.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, for whatever it's worth, I've now set up Apple family sharing on two families, on me, my wife, and my son, and then also on Tiff's parents.
Marco:
So they together can each be their own people and have their own iPads and share purchases.
Marco:
And, uh, for, for both of those cases, we didn't do it the way everyone else did it before where we, we didn't have like one account that we just bought things from and then we'd have our own accounts.
Marco:
Like, no, we, we, we were always separate before because Tiff and I just don't buy a lot of the same things.
Marco:
It was never really a big problem.
Marco:
And, uh, Tiff's mom just got an iPad this Christmas.
Marco:
So it was after family sharing existed.
Marco:
So we could start kind of clean on, on those.
Marco:
And, uh,
Marco:
And so for us, using it the way it's intended, the clean way that Apple thinks everyone does, even though almost no one does except us, but using it that way, it has worked incredibly well.
Marco:
I don't think we've had a single issue with it.
Marco:
It has really been flawless.
Marco:
I think the challenges people are having are migrating between the old way of having one shared account, if you were doing that, which you're right, a lot of people do, migrating from that into this new system.
Marco:
But if you kind of come to the system on its own terms and do it the way Apple thinks you should be doing things today, then it works very well.
John:
Then you have separate pools of photos.
Marco:
that's true yeah the photos are not really a soft thing yet and you know and adam's not old enough to be buying his own things on the app store but soon he will be and so then you know well no but that that actually works so he we have it set up like he has his own little iphone that's an old iphone of mine and and uh and he has like these games on it and we set him up his own his own child account for through the new child account system and uh so it has his real age in it like you don't have to like you know pretend he's 13 or whatever
Marco:
has an actual real age in it, and his purchases are charged to my account.
Marco:
And then me or Tiff have to authorize those purchases before they are made.
Marco:
And it pops up.
Marco:
It works great.
Marco:
And on Tiff's mom, we had hers doing what you were saying with the cards, where we gave her the iPad and we gave her an iTunes card to start it up with.
Marco:
And Tiff's dad has had one for years, so he has all this existing stuff, and his payment information is already in his account.
Marco:
And we made them a family account, and we added the prepaid card only to hers.
Marco:
And it separates it out.
Marco:
So whichever member of the family adds a prepaid card, it gives them that credit, not the first person or the owner or whatever of the family.
Marco:
And so everyone else's purchases don't draw from one person in the family's credit account.
Marco:
So it actually does the right thing there.
Marco:
It works very well.
John:
Now, the reason I said it works spotty is because I've had other people in my family set up their family things and then just never be able to get the notification.
John:
You know, the thing that says, do you want to approve this thing?
John:
And as with so many other iCloud problems, once you confirm that the setup is correct, yep, you've got a family.
John:
Yep, it's structured correctly.
John:
Yep, people are signed in with the right Apple IDs for all the various things.
John:
All right, now make a purchase or try to make a purchase.
John:
and now you should see a notification on your thing nope don't see it yeah there's nothing you can do right and then you got to do dance okay well i guess we all sign out of our app ids we wipe our devices we do this we just do this silly dance and just if it doesn't work you're like i don't know and so that still happens uh and it's it annoys me that that happens every time it does happen you just feel like powerless and it's like look see they got to work or there's got to be a way for me to debug it and debugging it doesn't mean
John:
doing the only things that have buttons.
John:
Sign out, sound back in, delete all data, restore data, and just...
John:
It's very frustrating.
John:
I've had good luck with it here, but I've seen it not work.
John:
Actually, I think the first time I tried, it didn't work for me either, but then it did start working.
John:
What changed between the time it didn't work and it didn't?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I still find that frustrating.
John:
But really, the thing I'm most excited about is the fact they have that metadata, because I hope that once they have that metadata, that it can be useful for something, that it will encourage them.
John:
Because if you think about it, anyone designing some kind of application or service inside Apple,
John:
If it's like, you know, oh, we can do this thing for families like, oh, but I don't want to set up a thing where people have to sign up their family.
John:
I just want to make an app.
John:
No one wants to do the infrastructure, right?
John:
But someone eventually the infrastructure finally did get done as a separate thing.
John:
Family sharing is a separate thing.
John:
So now that infrastructure is there.
John:
Anybody making an application, at least with an Apple for now.
John:
Doesn't have to be like, oh, we can do this cool thing with, oh, but I don't want to have a thing where people have to enter their families and that's not part of my application really or whatever.
John:
It's like, no, wait, we've already got that.
John:
It's already, you know, that information is there and presumably there's some way for us to get it and then we can leverage that.
John:
In kind of the same way, like I hope they leverage it more like, you know, the little VIP things.
John:
Oh, when your phone is on do not disturb, allow calls from VIPs and mail has VIPs and stuff like that.
John:
Now that it knows who the family members are, you can say things like allow calls from my family, you know, or automatically put things from my family in a separate bin in Apple mail instead of just the VIP thing like...
John:
you know and this is just immediate family they can go to extended family and you can like they can slowly start to model the real world so we can do things with in the same way that siri can say you know call my wife like
John:
The relationship, trying to map the relationship between you and other people and having sort of these smart assistants in there that are aware of these relationships.
John:
And more than just like, I don't know, how do you do the spouse arrangements?
John:
Is there a field in context where you say what their relation is or is it just a note field?
Casey:
No, there's a field in context for relationship, I believe.
John:
But is it like freeform?
John:
Like you can write any text there you want?
John:
Or is there some like... Is it complicated an option?
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Like, you know, to give some kind of metadata that is not just arbitrary key value pairs, but that has meaning and that the meaning is understood by the program so they can... So, you know, even just... Even if it's just like quickly doing something like...
John:
pulling up a picker where everything is just like your most recent contacts or your most recent whatever but there's some kind of picker where it makes sense for you to uh have the spouses being the default thing or have immediate family as being the default or trying to make reservations and it guesses that you want your whole family like i don't know like there's lots of things that you can do and i don't get into sort of a creepy like oh google they know too much about me or whatever i'm just like this is information that i enter and i want like my photo management application to know about my family who the members are
John:
how i might want things shared and stuff like that so this is just the very first step to the possibility of doing that
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, I am not seeing a relationship field after all.
Casey:
I could swear it was there, but I am not seeing it.
John:
Yeah, like, the information's got to be in there.
John:
But, like, in the family sharing, you don't set relationships like that.
John:
You just say, like, this is a family, there's an organizer, and there's adults, and there's children, which is fine.
John:
Like, you don't need to be prescriptive about, like, the structure of a family or whatever.
John:
Just like, I just want to connect the lines and say, here is the structure, and here is the hierarchy.
John:
Adults, children, you know, like, whatever.
John:
Just...
John:
That information, I can imagine being so useful, but nobody who wants to write an application that would take advantage of that information also wants to sign up for gathering, storing, and managing that information.
John:
So it's an infrastructure thing that Apple needs to be doing and now is finally doing, but apparently not particularly well.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Cards Against Humanity, Fracture, and Harry's.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
John:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-
Casey:
We have a lot of important stuff to talk about, and it looks like we need to get through some BS first.
Casey:
Isn't that the usual formula for our show?
Casey:
Very good point.
Casey:
So to weed through this BS as quickly as possible, can we talk about your PS4 setup and Destiny UI woes?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I ordered that monitor so I could play Destiny on it instead of on my television, and it got delayed by two snowstorms, so it was kind of frustrating for all involved.
John:
Eventually it did arrive.
John:
I set it up.
John:
I've been playing it now.
John:
I had to do...
John:
My son hasn't learned trigonometry yet, so I tried to give him sort of the approximated version of trigonometry to convince him that a 23-inch monitor, the distance he's sitting from it, is actually twice as big in his field of vision as the 55-inch television at the distance he was sitting from it.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I was just doing that as a ratio of distance to width of the screen rather than going through the angles and the fields of view or whatever.
John:
I think he mostly bought it.
John:
Um, and you know, how old is he?
John:
How old is he?
John:
10.
John:
I mean, like if you don't even, I tried to gloss over and say all you need to know is the ratio, like how far, you know, anyway, he, he found it fairly convincing hooking it up and playing it like that.
John:
It's, it's nice.
John:
Uh, the one thing I realized, which kind of makes me sad is that the black levels on this display are nowhere near as good as they are on my TV.
John:
I mean, I knew this, like I knew I'm getting, you know, it's like a super cheap LCD screen.
Um,
John:
But it's shocking to me how non-black everything is on this screen coming off of my TV.
John:
But what can you do?
John:
But anyway, it does fill more of my field division.
John:
It makes it easier to get headshots.
John:
I've been trying out a little bit of hand cannon stuff because everyone tells me it's good.
John:
I'm not a total convert, but I've been using a little bit.
John:
Anyway, the other thing I want to talk about with Destiny is the UI...
John:
Like the toaster, there are some UI problems in Destiny.
John:
Most of the UI in Destiny is actually you can tell that they playtested it a lot because the things that people do frequently in Destiny usually have nice ways to do them.
John:
So it shows there must have been a really long playtesting period where you have a lot of crap to manage.
John:
And if you ever played a game that makes a management difficult, you're just going through screens and menus and back and forth and it's super difficult.
John:
This system seems weird at first, but when you use it for a while, you realize it's very efficient.
John:
lots of things are done on mouse over uh lots of things you do frequently like comparing the equipped weapon to another one can be done easily with a nice you know the ui is actually a great lesson in how to make a game ui that's efficient for the things that people do when they're playing the game but there's one area where i think they fell down uh and that led me to my other sad destiny thing i was in this in a little vendor trying to look at different things that i was thinking of buying and i pretty much decided which thing i was going to buy a particular helmet but i just wanted to check one more time back at the other one
John:
and I went over to the other one to hit what I thought was the button for details, which is triangle, to say, let me just look at this one more time to be sure that I'm buying the right one with the right perks or whatever, and I accidentally hit X instead of triangle, and that immediately purchased the item.
John:
Spending...
John:
things in game which i don't want to get into that take a really long time to get i'd spent a long time building up this currency and there is no undo like i'm still in as far as i know no one to call tweeted at me to correct me there is no undo there is no going back it's like but but i'm you know i haven't used it i haven't equipped it i haven't i just bought it immediately i just want to immediately say undo unpurchase refund go back it's like the app store like sorry all sales are final
John:
And it was so disappointing.
John:
I bought the wrong helmet.
John:
And so some purchases make you hold down the button as does dismantling.
John:
And in fact, the, if you dismantle something super valuable, like an exotic, it will make you hold it down even longer.
John:
Like that's good UI to make it.
John:
So you don't accidentally do something.
John:
One little tap of the X button, boom, like three weeks of work to build up what it took to buy this thing gone.
John:
Uh, I found that very sad.
John:
So now I have an ugly helmet with the wrong perks.
Casey:
I have no idea what any of that means, but I am sorry for your loss.
John:
Well, you know, it's just general design things.
John:
If an action has large consequences, make some kind of undo for it.
John:
Or even just sell back.
John:
Actually, I understand that it's really hard to do that.
John:
I don't think this is a trivial change.
John:
This is a massively multiplayer game where there actually are
John:
stocks for the vendors and other people buy things like it's not as simple as like it is really complicated undo they have to kind of build it in from the beginning because you can use it for exploits you know you can imagine all sorts of ways that being able to buy something and immediately refund it can be used to break the game and can screw with like keeping track of what inventory is there and like just it's super hard to do which gives me almost no hope that it will ever be done i guess the best thing they can do instead of undo is just
John:
make it a long press to buy things but then people are annoyed because like every time I buy something I got to hold down the button so I don't know I think they just need to do something and that's the extent of your destiny woes for this week yeah that the fact that I never get any time to play and my son is way ahead of me because he has more time to play
John:
Still want to do raids.
John:
I need ascendant shards.
John:
Please send ascendant shards.
John:
I need like 20 of them.
John:
I mean, do you want me to like rescue this conversation by talking about headphone amps some more?
John:
I mean, no, we got it.
John:
We got to move on to your printouts now.
John:
What's wrong with my printouts?
John:
Why are you printing things on paper to read for sponsor reads?
John:
You were sitting in front of a computer with a screen.
Marco:
A few reasons.
Marco:
A, I have a printer and a lot of paper.
Marco:
What else am I supposed to do with it?
John:
You've got paper burning a hole in your virtual pocket.
John:
I need to spend it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
I mean, I have this laser printer that I bought when paper still mattered slightly more than it does now.
Marco:
And it can print like thousands of pages before running out of toner.
Marco:
And so, hey, what else am I going to do with it?
Marco:
That's part of it.
Marco:
Also that my microphone is angled.
Marco:
I can't actually talk ideally optimally directly into the mic while looking at my computer screen without having it not be perfectly you know not be as well isolated against echoes and stuff like that in my setup though I have I have here why don't you move your mic
Marco:
I mean, I could do that, but it works better this way for me right now.
Marco:
And then mostly it's just because my computer screen is full of windows, despite the way you think I work.
Marco:
I know you think I have one window, and then I close it, and then I open up another one, and then I close that.
John:
I retweeted that guy who was like, oh, Marco can't have it on a screen because there'd be too many windows, and you'd feel overwhelmed.
Marco:
I'm going to move on from that.
Marco:
I didn't tweet it.
Marco:
Someone else did.
Marco:
I just retweeted it.
Marco:
It's easier for me to manage it, for me to see it, for me to read from it, and for me to keep track of which ones I have to do and which ones have been done.
Marco:
And then at the end, to be able to glance at all three and be able to read them back as the thanks to these sponsors.
Marco:
We'll see you next week.
Marco:
It's just easier for me to do that all on paper right now.
Marco:
I thought about maybe doing it on an iPad because that has a lot of the same benefits where I could hold it right in front of my face behind the mic here and stuff like that.
Marco:
But I just haven't gotten around to trying that.
Marco:
I mean, it's no big deal to do it on paper.
Marco:
It's really not a big deal.
John:
The main reason I actually want to talk about this is because this not because I, you know, I think it's kind of silly, but on the other hand, it reveals something that I'm constantly complaining about, which is people are, you know, are have the ability to deal with things to deal with real things in their hands.
John:
uh in ways that they can't do on a computer screen and if you want to take advantage of those skills like the fact that you can manage those three pieces of paper you can look at them you know where they are and everything it's not that you have to approximate the real world but you have to leverage those same abilities like it shouldn't it shouldn't feel so much more comfortable for it it's not just you tons of people have this it shouldn't feel so much more comfortable to deal with a physical thing than it does in the computer it's always going to feel a little bit more comfortable and on the other hand there's always going to be things you can do on a computer screen that you can't do in the real world but
John:
Anytime I see someone saying, well, I could do that on the computer screen, but it feels better to do it in real life.
John:
And it's something that, like, does not seem... It seems like a reasonable thing for a computer to do, like, say, show a screen full of text.
John:
Like, it's not, you know, obviously, like...
John:
kneading dough or something obviously you need to do that in the physical world is harder to do on a computer right that's like that's like a failure of the interface and whatever it is it's a failure of like is the interface too complicated is the is the uh the mouse not as good as grabbing a piece of paper for you is um
John:
to keep track of things do you like you ever see people who who take notes in meetings with a notebook even though like an actual paper and pen even though they have a laptop and an ipad and everything like that is it just old habits because people are you know grew up doing it a certain way like it's difficult to suss out exactly what the problem is but i think there is still an element of computers feeling sort of less tangible which sounds stupid because obviously it's just a
John:
in the figurative sense, instead of the literal sense that they can't get a handle on something unless they have it literally in their hand and it feels better.
John:
Uh, so anyway, that's like, I think no one is immune to that.
John:
Even people who use computers all day to do complicated things that occasionally is just more convenient.
John:
Even if it's just simply like out of band, like I know these are separate, like there's the show and then there's the sponsors and the sponsors are separate and they'll never accidentally get mixed in with my other windows and I'll never lose them and I'll always have them available.
Marco:
And I can always tell in the corner of my eye, like, how many more sponsors do I have for the show?
Marco:
Like, how many do I have to do?
Marco:
Whereas if they were Windows, I think I think they might get lost a little more easily.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you have blue index cards, you could throw them behind you through a window that doesn't have any glass in it.
John:
They can make a glass crashing sound.
John:
Nobody.
John:
You guys are too young to stay up that late.
John:
All right.
John:
That's fine.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have more BS to go through, although I have a feeling this might be worth it.
Casey:
And then I'd really like to talk about cars for a few minutes.
Casey:
So tell us, John, a little more about this toaster that you were given.
John:
So things to know about toasters, like how I'm sort of rating them.
John:
Because again, I haven't had a million toasters, but I sort of know the rough outlines of the features that they may or may not have.
John:
I always look at toasters in the stores.
John:
I don't buy them, but I look at them.
John:
A few things that I think most toasters get wrong, especially the cheap ones.
John:
The things that make the toaster hot, the heating elements, if they don't have anything covering them, that's just asking for trouble.
John:
Because no matter how careful you are with your toaster, you always end up getting something in there and it drips a little piece of melted cheese or whatever.
John:
You're not really supposed to put things in there that are drippy, but everybody always does eventually.
John:
you do not want that dripping directly on the element because it burns and it's just awful there should be some kind of other guard above the element sometimes that guard gets almost as hot as the element and sometimes the guard has openings in it that let stuff get down to the element anyway and sometimes those guards can block the heat from the element if it doesn't have a reflective thing of load like there's it's difficult to get the balance right between the elements and the guard but anyway i look for that if i see bare elements on the bottom
John:
I think it's not great.
Marco:
Mine has that.
John:
Yeah, well, if I see only one little skinny element in a gigantic toaster, I'm thinking that one element's not going to be able to heat things up enough or it's not going to have even heating.
John:
So if it's a really big toaster, I want to see two elements top and bottom.
John:
The plugs, nobody seems to care about this and maybe it's just my old ancient crappy kitchen, but...
John:
they give you these plugs that are like three-pronged plugs, heavy-duty, and they stick out like an inch.
John:
They're just huge plugs.
John:
And if you have the type of kitchen where the plugs are down at the same level as the toaster and you only have a little tiny spot where you can put the toaster and the plug is right behind it, and the toaster has a tremendous depth because they're all made to...
John:
Put giant deep dish pizzas inside them, whatever the hell they're made for these days.
John:
You if you plug in the toaster, you can't push it up against the wall because the plug sticks out from it.
John:
And if you jam it right against the plug, A, you're kinking the cord and B, the hot back of the toaster is pressing against the you're going to melt the little rubber coating on the back of the thing.
John:
i think every toaster should come with a low profile plug that sits flush against the wall so that you can shove the toaster right back up against it and it should have little stops in the back of it to keep you from pressing the hot back of the toaster against the cord and melting through and electrocuting you and your whole family so that's an area i think all toasters could get better even my toaster doesn't have that the fancy one i had to i bought a low profile plug extension cord and did this little thing to make it all work otherwise i couldn't even have a toaster there
Marco:
Mine does have the standoffs that prevent you from putting it right against the wall, and it only has a two-prong plug, but it is a regular straight plug, not a corner plug.
John:
Yeah, they usually have some kind of standouts for safety reasons, but when the plug sticks out, the standouts don't hit, the plug hits first.
John:
And I guess maybe people have the plugs that are either higher up.
John:
I don't even know what code dictates it.
John:
All I know is that my plugs are way down low, and I have very little space, and the plugs are right behind where I need to put both of these filters, in fact.
John:
um how hot does the toaster get on the outside some toasters get absurdly hot on the outside and people stack all sorts of crap on top of their toasters like
John:
I wouldn't put anything on top of a toaster, because I know it gets hot up there, but people do put things up there, but some of them get so hot that you're basically cooking stuff on the outside of a toaster.
John:
Or even if you just have something next to it, like within an inch of it, and it slowly bakes that over time.
John:
That's not great.
John:
This used to be a standard feature that seems to be only on the super high-end ones now, and I don't understand why.
John:
Because all you need is a freaking metal hook.
John:
When you open the door, the little thing that pulls the tray out a little bit, that's convenient.
John:
Everyone should do that.
John:
Why do they not do it?
John:
It's two little metal hooks.
John:
Just do it.
John:
You know, some of them use magnets, some of them use fancy things.
John:
And the final element is that I see all the time is how robust are the things inside it?
John:
Like the little wire thing that you put the toast on.
John:
Sometimes that wire is like as thin as a hair.
John:
It's like, what are you trying to save money on?
John:
Give me a nice, big, thick, you know, it doesn't need to be so thick that the heat can't get through it, but it shouldn't be
John:
easily bent or like the type of thing where it will slowly deteriorate and just crack or like just the heat will work its way you know it should be it should not feel cheap it shouldn't bend easily the tray that you put stuff in shouldn't be like the thinnest possible metal you can get so that it slowly bends and warps and dents just again it doesn't cause you know there's a difference between a cheap toaster and a good one just make those things a little bit thicker so that's that's how i'm going to be judging any toaster that comes into my life
John:
That's amazing.
Casey:
Can we talk about cars for a few minutes?
John:
We can.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I drove an M4.
Casey:
Wow, that's great.
Casey:
So, yeah, what's that about?
Casey:
So, a friend of mine, Keith, he just traded his E92 M3 for a brand new M4, which I drove.
Casey:
It is the DCT, which...
Casey:
uh is not my preference but i have to admit it's pretty damn nice um i probably would not order one with the dct however it's really nice and oh my goodness the m4 was so nice like i i don't mean this in a genuine sense but my car is ruined um i i
Casey:
So the M4 was loud, which was surprising.
Casey:
And then, of course, Keith pointed out as we're driving around, I don't know how much of that is the speakers and how much of that is the car.
Marco:
Well, the M cars are all loud.
Marco:
They're intentionally loud.
Marco:
Although I'm still not seeing an M4 in real life except for a few seconds on the highway going the other way.
Marco:
But from what I've seen in videos and from those few seconds on the highway, it did seem louder than usual for M cars.
Casey:
Yeah, it was surprisingly loud.
Casey:
A little bit of turbo lag, which I was surprised by because my car has virtually none.
Casey:
And this had a little bit, which I guess makes sense if you have a bigger turbo or pushing more boost or whatever.
Casey:
But it certainly surprised me that the number was more than zero.
Casey:
The interior was bigger than I expected, which is probably silly because it's a three series, so to speak.
Casey:
Yeah, obviously it's an M4, but my point being that it's the same size as your average three series, just with one less or two less stores, but it was bigger inside than I expected.
Casey:
The the driving experience, though, was just amazing.
Casey:
God, it was so good.
Casey:
And it was extremely quick.
Casey:
I feel like it was and I haven't crunched numbers or anything, but I feel like the power to weight ratio of your car, Marco, in this car were approximately equivalent to.
Casey:
in so far as you stand on the gas and you are hurtled forward at an uncomfortable rate of speed.
Casey:
And he was well within breaking.
Casey:
I think the car had like 300 miles on it or something like that.
Casey:
So I was coming off throttle at 5,000 RPM or something like that.
Casey:
But, oh my goodness, the thing was amazing.
Casey:
And now I kind of want an M3.
Casey:
Well, not that I didn't before, but I want one again.
John:
What color was it?
Casey:
I forget the name of the blue, but the bright, bright, bright blue, which is not my favorite and was not his favorite either.
Casey:
But it looked better in person.
Casey:
Not too dissimilar from the orange 1M.
Casey:
I forget what actual color that is.
Casey:
Marco probably knows.
Marco:
Well, that was Valencia orange.
Marco:
I prefer the secure orange.
Marco:
It's on the newer cars.
Marco:
Because the Valencia orange, I think it's still on the X1, or at least it was on the X1 before.
Marco:
It's very pale in person.
Marco:
The secure orange is almost red.
Marco:
It's a nice, like, bold, darker.
Marco:
So I prefer that one.
Casey:
I mean, to be fair, there are no good colors on the modern M3s.
Casey:
I can't speak for the M5.
Casey:
I haven't looked in a long time.
Casey:
But the M3 and the M4 have no good colors.
Casey:
There's black, there's white, and then there's a bunch of crap.
John:
I've seen the M4 in the dog vomit color.
John:
There's one of them around here that I see a lot.
John:
The yellow one?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, it's so bad.
John:
I've only had one dog, but that's what color dog vomit is.
Marco:
Mine's a little more orange.
Marco:
Mine's closer to the secure orange color.
Marco:
It's actually more like the Valencia orange color.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And Kyle Cronin points out in the chat, and I believe he's right.
Casey:
It's Yas Marina blue is the blue I'm talking about.
Casey:
I mean, it was OK.
Casey:
I lamented numerous times that I actually did not want to get a white 335.
Casey:
I preferred to get a Le Mans blue 335.
Casey:
And this and I was reminded of how much I should have gotten that color.
Casey:
When we were at WWDC this past year and a jury had driven by and I am almost sure that his 335D is in fact Le Mans Blue, which is really annoying because it's freaking beautiful.
Casey:
But anyway, the M4 was amazing.
Casey:
I kind of want one.
Casey:
I'm going to sell the two of you in order to buy one.
Casey:
It's been great working with you.
Marco:
So a few questions.
Marco:
First of all, which do you think is a worse color collection overall?
Marco:
The colors available for the M4 or the colors available for iPad cases?
Casey:
I would actually say the M4 probably, but it is a tight race.
John:
The M4 definitely, because things like iPad cases, you can have in kind of fanciful colors and it's not a big deal.
John:
But the car, boy, that's a lot of color.
John:
Like it's a big thing.
John:
It's a big expensive thing.
John:
And especially in the case of BMWs where like the non-white and black paints are like magic and have fairy dust in them and cost $10 bajillion, right?
Yeah.
John:
that's that's a way more important thing to worry about the color of than an ipad case an ipad case is like well you could have two ipad cases in different colors you could swap them like this is an intrinsic part of a super expensive thing that you're you know investing a lot of your yourself and your image and your desires in so it's much worse for cars to have bad color selections
Marco:
I love this secure orange color.
Marco:
It was available on the M5.
Marco:
I chickened out.
Marco:
I would love this color for a couple of days a month.
Marco:
And then the rest of the time I'd be like, it would feel like too much.
Marco:
Also, it's a big car.
John:
It would stick out like a
Marco:
right it would just be ridiculous like if i ever got like a small fun car again i would be much more likely to pick a color like that on a small fun occasional driver but not like my daily driver my big four-door sedan i'm probably gonna just want that to be black most of the time or something close to black like one of those dark grays or whatever um because like for for like your everyday car for this thing this thing you're gonna have for years like it's you're right like i i'm not willing to take a risk on some kind of like bright out there color um
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's made for people who will take that risk.
Marco:
But that's not us.
John:
I forgot one toaster thing before we move on to that.
John:
With the actual toaster I reviewed, the crumb tray doesn't slide out horizontally.
John:
You can't just pull it straight out.
John:
You have to tilt it and then get it out.
John:
And of course, when you tilt it, there's a chance that the crumbs that are on the crumb tray will go skittering off the crumb tray into the thing that you're trying to take them out of.
John:
That sounds delightful.
John:
That is not a good design.
Casey:
All right, Mark, are you going to ask me?
Marco:
So a couple more questions on the M4.
Marco:
Did you feel any slippage?
Marco:
Like, was the car putting out more power than what you could reasonably put on the road?
Casey:
I didn't when I kept the car pointed in a straight line.
Casey:
And so as you and I learned at M school, you should really only be getting on the gas with any sort of urgency.
Casey:
And especially I learned at the M school coming off the skid pad, you should only be getting on the gas with any sort of urgency when your wheels, your front wheels are pointed straight ahead.
Casey:
And when that happened, when I did kind of stand on it, when the wheels were pointed straight ahead,
Casey:
I did not notice any slippage, but to be fair, I was giving it, you know, a whole bunch of throttle for very little blips at a time, typically not in the lowest possible gear because this car is brand new.
Casey:
It's not at a break in, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
It's not yours.
Casey:
It's not mine.
Casey:
I have a feeling that
Casey:
if I were to put myself in a situation where I wanted to move forward with the utmost of urgency, then yes, it would probably slip.
Casey:
That being said, I did take a sweeping right hand 90 degree turn with some serious quickness and I gave it some gas probably before I should have.
Casey:
And I did not notice the traction control cutting in by way of
Casey:
obvious loss of power.
Casey:
Like it was clear that I was not moving forward as quick as I wanted to, but it wasn't one of those situations where all of a sudden the car hits a brick wall, so to speak.
Casey:
However, I did see the traction control light going berserk on the dashboard.
Casey:
So it clearly was not happy with me that I was getting on the gas with urgency coming out of a 90 degree turn.
Casey:
And as much as I also did not want my 335 to be all wheel drive, I would have preferred rear wheel drive one.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And this is the reason why I'm very excited about the prospect of an all-wheel drive M5.
Marco:
A lot of the purists are really upset about this.
Marco:
I really want that because these cars put out so much low-end torque ever since they've been turbocharged.
Marco:
They put it so much low-end torque that they can't put the power to the road.
Marco:
They are too powerful to be just rear-wheel drive and to be able to use most of that power.
Casey:
Yeah, and you and I have gone back and forth about this, and I still find it a little weird, the thought of having an all-wheel drive M car, but as I just said, and as you just said, there are absolutely advantages to it without question.
Marco:
Right, and you know, Mercedes has them, Audi has them, like this is not a new concept, like just BMW is like the one holdout that refuses to make all the drive versions of their super sport cars.
John:
Let me get Porsche and I think Lamborghini too, right?
Casey:
Porsche does have the GT3.
Casey:
Porsche has the Carrera 4.
John:
Yeah, but I think Lamborghini has, isn't the Aventador a four-wheel drive?
Casey:
Most Lamborghinis are four-wheel drive.
Casey:
The turbo, to your point, was always four-wheel drive, but the GT3 was always, wasn't it the turbo motor, but without four-wheel drive?
Casey:
I'm probably getting that wrong.
John:
four wheel drive.
John:
I don't think it's necessary as evidenced by all of the two wheel drive supercars.
John:
But if you are for, if your driving skills are not up to that task, four wheel drive is certainly more kind of point and shoot.
John:
Like it is more forgiving.
John:
So for a consumer car,
John:
It's probably a better trade-off to spend some weight making it four-wheel drive just so the average person can drive it without constantly breaking the rear end loose.
John:
Have a higher chance of doing it.
John:
Now they can break all four tires loose, and that's hard to do.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
And as I've said numerous times in the past, perhaps my favorite point-and-shoot car that I've ever driven was my friend Brian's Volkswagen R32.
Casey:
And it had a absolutely terrible dual clutch transmission.
Casey:
However, you stood on the gas at any speed with the wheels pointed in any direction in any gear.
Casey:
And you were going to move with a quickness in the direction the car is pointing.
Casey:
And that there was you know, that was nice.
Casey:
You didn't have to think about it.
Casey:
You could be completely ham fisted and the car will sort itself out, which was pretty neat.
John:
So you want you want a GTR then?
Casey:
Yeah, kind of.
Casey:
I kind of do.
Marco:
So we have to address the steering question.
Marco:
So to introduce this topic, all of the recent 3 Series and M3s and M4s have electric power steering.
Marco:
And this is different from the old hydraulic systems, which everyone knew.
Marco:
And they're more efficient.
Marco:
The main complaint about electric power steering in general is that you don't feel the road really anymore, and it kind of has to artificially simulate it to some degree.
Marco:
You're not feeling the direct pressures that the tires are feeling, the vibrations the tires are giving back to you, and so it doesn't feel natural, and you have a lot less feedback of what the tires are doing.
Marco:
Different EPS systems have come out over the last few years that all claim to be improving in this regard.
Marco:
They all claim to be better and more precise and giving more feedback back to the driver.
Marco:
I have never heard anybody, though, say that the EPS system in a car they drove was as good as hydraulic steering or better.
John:
There was one recent review in Car and Driver where they said that they preferred the electric steering over the one with the hydraulic.
John:
I tried to remember when you tweeted that, and I couldn't remember what the car was.
John:
It was a couple of months ago.
John:
And actually, in the most current issue of Car and Driver, they have an entire multi-page spread talking about the different kinds of electronic assist for power steering.
John:
I haven't read it yet, but I wish I could remember what that car was.
John:
But it's basically what you're saying is right in generalities, but I think there was at least one.
John:
In one car comparison, they said this one, even though this one has electric steering, it has better feeling steering than the other one that has hydraulic.
John:
But that is we're just getting to the point now where I think very few of the very latest electronic systems start to approach that of the hydraulic system.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the one in TIFF's 3 Series GT, that one is really not good.
Marco:
That is the biggest thing that would keep me from buying a current 3 Series, is I really, really hate the current 3 Series EPS.
Marco:
It's really bad.
Marco:
It feels incredibly just numb and disconnected.
Marco:
It does not feel natural.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
This isn't just a sports car driver complaint.
Marco:
Every driver can feel the difference in this, and a lot of people don't like it because it doesn't feel like previous cars.
Marco:
It has a very different feel in the way it feeds back.
Marco:
It doesn't feel the way you expect a steering wheel to feel in use.
Marco:
So all that is to say, so the EPS system in the new M3 and M4 is allegedly supposed to be a good one.
Marco:
And the reviews on it have been generally positive, but slightly mixed.
Marco:
Casey, what did you think of it?
Casey:
So the most clear and direct way for me to answer this question is to tell you I didn't think about it until Keith asked me.
Marco:
Okay, that's good.
Marco:
That's similar to when you asked me about how the engine noise simulation was in the M5.
Marco:
I said the same thing, which is like when I was driving it, I didn't even notice or think about it until like the end of the trip when I remembered, oh yeah, it has fake engine noise and I haven't noticed it this whole time.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So to be clear, I took the car out on surface roads.
Casey:
So I was accelerating from almost not moving to probably a smidge more than legal speeds very, very quickly.
Casey:
But I wasn't exactly going around a track or anything like that.
Casey:
Furthermore, you know, I was getting off the gas quickly.
Casey:
And with regard to turns, there were always cars in front of me.
Casey:
So the best I could do is slow up a bit and then take the turn at probably, you know, either the speed limit or a hair above it.
Casey:
And I wish I could tell you that I'm just saying that so I don't get myself in trouble, but that really was the case.
Casey:
So in other words, I didn't get the chance to like really beat on the car.
Casey:
Um, but I didn't notice any issues with the steering.
Casey:
I thought it felt heavy, which isn't by necessity a bad thing, especially on a sports car like that.
Casey:
Um, I don't recall the specifics of what steering mode it was in.
Casey:
I know I was in the most, the most fierce, um, gear shift on the DCT.
Casey:
There's a term for that.
Marco:
Right, so you're in like S3, and then whether you were in comfort or sport or sport plus on the steering is a different story.
Marco:
Generally, the pro move is sport plus on everything except steering where you put that in comfort.
Casey:
Right, and what I did end up doing very briefly toward the end of the trip is hitting the M button, but I didn't notice any discernible difference in the way the steering felt.
Casey:
But, you know, like I can't stress enough that you should take this with two silos full of salt because I was in the car for maybe 10 minutes or something like that.
Casey:
And again, it was on surface roads, suburban roads.
Casey:
It was not a particularly wonderful test.
Casey:
But I didn't notice it.
Casey:
The one thing I did notice, however, speaking of the gearbox was, man, when you have that thing on S3 or whatever the most furious shifting mode is, that thing shifts hard, like surprisingly hard.
Casey:
Not to the point that I would say it was like uncomfortable, but it was quick and it was rough.
Casey:
There was no slippage whatsoever.
Casey:
Additionally,
Casey:
I've programmed myself over the years that when I'm driving a car that has only two pedals, when I come off the brake, it will roll forward.
Casey:
That doesn't happen in these cars.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
That's why I like DCTs because they behave like sticks.
Casey:
But that's so – I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
And I think once I got used to it, I would absolutely prefer it.
Casey:
But having driven my car like two hours prior to come to work and then my friend met me at work.
Casey:
We just drove around real quick.
Casey:
To go from that – from my car, which is a normal clutched car –
Casey:
To this car, which, because I see only two pedals, I think of as an automatic.
Casey:
When I took my foot off the brake, I'm waiting for it to creep, and it didn't.
Casey:
And it took me a second to realize what the crap was going on.
Casey:
At first, I thought I was in neutral.
Casey:
But, hey, but...
Casey:
But as soon as I realized, oh, wait, this is a DCT car.
Casey:
It's probably not disengaging the clutch, reengaging the clutch.
Casey:
I always get that backwards.
Casey:
But it's not manipulating the clutch until I give it a little bit of gas.
Casey:
But it was reasonably smooth.
Casey:
It stop and go traffic kind of speeds, just like your car is.
Casey:
I mean, this is nothing that particularly different.
Casey:
It might even be the same box.
Casey:
It very well could be.
Casey:
It was seven speed.
Casey:
Is yours a seven speed?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Oh, OK.
Casey:
But yeah, I love the car.
Casey:
I thought it was excellent.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
As time goes on, I still think if I if I were to hypothetically buy an M3 tomorrow, I would tick the six MT, you know, give me the clutch gear checkbox.
Casey:
But that being said, if what's the Simpsons line, you know, I for one welcome our DCT future DCT overlords or whatever it is.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
I'm sure I butchered that.
John:
Hail ants.
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
That was part of that quote, wasn't it?
Casey:
Because it was like ants coming in to take over the world or something.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
That was the sign behind him.
Casey:
Just go on.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So the point being, if my future is dual clutch transmissions because the traditional clutch transmission goes away, I'll be sad, but I think I'll be okay overall.
Casey:
I think it'll work out.
John:
You should get ready for one pedal driving.
John:
I wish I had a chance to try that.
John:
I was a passenger when someone was doing that, but that is the future.
John:
Just as you get used to dual-cut transmissions, it's going to be one pedal driving.
John:
You're talking about like a Tesla?
John:
You can basically drive the car with one pedal in most conditions if you're careful because...
John:
not only does you know not it doesn't creep forward like an automatic but when you take your foot off the gas it acts like it's braking like as you as you let up on on the accelerator it goes into regenerative braking and everything so it's like so you can literally drive it with one foot most of the time and you only need to actually use the brake brakes that pinch little discs inside the wheels for stopping you know not not just emergency stopping but stopping uh faster than you would normally want to stop probably
Casey:
But that's been true for as long as the Jeep Wrangler has been around, because I assure you, you put a Jeep Wrangler at 60, 70, 80 miles an hour at highway speeds, you take your foot off the gas and that box is going to stop.
John:
Or it's going to roll over and explode.
John:
I'm not talking about like, yeah, you get a minivan, the wind resistance will slow you down.
Yeah.
Casey:
Did you see, by the way, that Elon Musk tweeted like a week or two ago that they were increasing the zero to 60 time of, I believe, the P85 by doing an over the air update?
Casey:
Did you see the videos of people's reactions as passengers?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
That was fantastic.
Marco:
Well, because that's seriously fat.
Marco:
I mean, it's what, 3.2 seconds, 3.1 now?
John:
I think the most shocking thing about it is that it feels more like an amusement ride because it's not accompanied by... First of all, the torque curve is different than on any kind of gas engine.
John:
The second is it's not accompanied by sort of any clamor, you know, any sort of roaring engine or any of the car noises.
John:
So...
John:
the best analogy I can think of is those amusement park rides that, that have a thing that accelerates the entire roller coaster from a dead stop up to high speed.
John:
And it's not an engine, you know, it's something else.
John:
It's just kind of like, and so, yeah.
John:
It would seem like it would be shocking, but I would prefer the sound of an engine in a sporty car.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The Tesla, especially with the P85D now, the all-wheel drive crazy one, I would love to drive one of those.
Marco:
I've never driven a Tesla.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
If I'm going to drive one, that's the one I want to drive, of course.
Marco:
I would love to try that out sometime.
Marco:
It's not really possible to.
Marco:
Is it still the case where it's a test drive when you have to give them five grand to get on the waiting list?
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have heard that story.
Marco:
But anyway, so I am really curious to drive that just to see how it is, how it compares to like a really sporty gas car.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, like I totally get the appeal of like keeping your sporting needs basic.
Marco:
And to that end, I was I spent a lot of time on the couch this week because I've been really sick.
Marco:
And so I started looking into the Porsche Cayman.
Marco:
And so the GT4 was announced today, right?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So, but I've actually been looking at Cayman stuff a couple days ago because they meant they had it on that Top Gear thing.
Marco:
And I know our friend Matt Panzarino likes it.
Marco:
And a bunch of our car friends think well of the Porsche Cayman.
Marco:
Porsche?
Marco:
Porsche?
Marco:
What am I supposed to be saying here?
Marco:
Porsche.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
You'll find out if you buy one.
Marco:
So I've also never driven a mid-engine car.
Marco:
I think if I was going to buy a small, fun car again, which I probably shouldn't because last time it was a pain in the ass, but if I was going to buy a small, fun car again...
Marco:
I think what I would buy would be the previous generation of Cayman.
Marco:
And I think even just the S, not like the super crazy GT-S, whatever.
Marco:
I don't know much about their lineups and how the differentiation goes.
Marco:
But what I would want would be a six-speed with hydraulic power steering,
Marco:
in a relatively simple lightweight car with a good amount of power and i think the the like 2010 to 2012 cayman s is that like i think if you're gonna have a small sporty fun car going like the purest route with just rear wheel drive six speed mid-engine i think that's a really powerful combination that's why everyone loves it so much
Marco:
I think that would be the way to go not like super technical like the new M3 M4 not even really the new modern Caymans that have like you know the EPS they have more advanced everything more you know more expensive of course but just like everything more electronic more advanced like just the old style just six speed a real physical parking brake you know like that there's a lot of appeal to that I think what would you guys do
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's a tough call.
Casey:
On paper, that's probably the right answer.
Casey:
I've always fancied an S2000, which is lower class than what you're talking about, but I've always liked them.
John:
Well, still very widely regarded, though.
John:
That is a Marco-sized car.
John:
Because I can't buy an S2000.
John:
Neither can you, Casey.
John:
Have you ever tried to sit in one?
Casey:
I've driven one.
John:
They're not size for us.
John:
It's like being in a car a half size too small for you.
Casey:
That's very true.
Casey:
But I do like them.
Casey:
I wasn't prepared for this question.
Casey:
I'd have to think about it.
Casey:
I have a few friends like the guy who owned the R32.
Casey:
He still has an E36 M3.
Casey:
which with not a lot of work can be a phenomenal track car or just that sort of car.
Casey:
Even if you don't turn it into a track queen, just with a little bit of work, it can be reasonably quick and just handle unbelievably well.
Casey:
There's something to be said for the Toyota Beru.
Casey:
They're absurdly slow, woefully slow, almost so slow that I wouldn't ever be able to drive one slow.
John:
That's what I was going to say about even his choice of the Cayman.
John:
It's kind of weird for your fun car to be slower than the one with the car seat in it.
Marco:
That's a good point.
Marco:
In practice, I would probably never actually get another car because I don't like having multiple cars.
Marco:
I like having one good all-arounder.
Marco:
You know, rather than having like family boring car and small fun car, I'd much rather have the one all around her.
Marco:
And that's, you know, especially if they make an all the drive version of the M5, then that's it.
Marco:
Like, that's just that's it.
Marco:
Unless see.
Marco:
And what I'm basically hedging against is if they ruin everything.
Marco:
so like you know if if they bring in the new eps system the next generation m5 which they will almost certainly do you know do i have to have a terrible eps system to get this fun car that's all-wheel drive like if so it would be a lot less satisfying to me most likely so i'm always worried that like that all the new stuff is going to ruin everything i liked about the old stuff so i better get get an old one quickly and you know be able to save it for forever which of course doesn't really work
John:
I put the picture of the Cayman that I thought Marco was talking about.
John:
It's just kind of weird to me, too.
John:
But, like, the model, I think the Cayman is a good idea.
John:
Like, in that sort of range, it's, you know, it's the simple mid-engine sort of pure sports car thing.
John:
They're just ridiculously expensive.
John:
But what I would get is the generation.
John:
I don't know if this is, like,
John:
the first generation that took the rear little spoiler thing and pulled it into the headlights as you can see in that picture like where the where the you know that little thing is sticking out of the end of the car and it actually goes into the headlights and it's also like a little ridge on the headlights themselves the first generation they did that that's the one i would get uh i think that's the one marco was talking about
Marco:
Yeah, I read this good article on Jalopnik.
Marco:
I just put it in the show notes titled, how much better is the new Porsche Cayman than the old one?
Marco:
And they compare the new one, which is the Model 981, versus the old one, which is the Model 987.
Marco:
Yes, the numbers go backwards.
Marco:
It's weird.
Marco:
So that's what I'm talking about.
Marco:
The 987 is the one that actually, like the way they're describing it and how it looks and how simple and traditional it is, that appeals to me.
Marco:
Whereas the new one really doesn't.
John:
Oh, so you want the one where the spoiler does not go into the headlights.
Yeah.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Yeah, that's that's the black one.
John:
That's the black one in this article.
John:
I think I don't I don't like how that one looks quite as much.
John:
I don't know about the other attributes of it.
John:
I think you'd have to test her.
Marco:
But either one.
Marco:
Do you mean the taillights?
John:
Yeah, the taillights.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
Oh, OK.
Marco:
That makes a lot more sense.
Marco:
Yeah, I was also confused for a second.
John:
Was I saying headlights the whole time?
John:
Yes.
John:
I'm looking at the picture of the tail, the back of the card.
John:
I mean, I don't think the back of either of them look very good, to be honest.
John:
I'm just saying, like, this is just how I'm choosing to identify the generation when they redid the styling for the new generation.
John:
That is the most distinguishing feature of the easiest way to tell the new one from the old one.
John:
Because you can tell from the whole car, right?
John:
But the easiest way to say is just look at the taillights.
John:
Does the spoiler go into them or does it not?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the one I like is the older one where the spoiler does not go into the taillights.
Marco:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
I don't like the styling of that one as much.
John:
Not that I love the spoiler going into the taillights, but that's, again, just my signifier for the overall car.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
They're both good choices.
John:
But like I said, it would be weird to buy... This isn't small enough and fun enough to be an excuse.
John:
If you wanted to get something that's more like a go-kart, I don't know how to say Ariel Adam, because I think that actually is faster than your M5.
John:
Oh, very much so.
Marco:
Because there's not really a car there.
John:
I know, but I'm just saying like an engine in a seat.
John:
If you're going to get something slower than your M5, it should be significantly lighter, significantly smaller, significantly different experience.
John:
Whereas I think the Cayman starts to push up into like, well, it is actually kind of luxurious inside and it is actually not as light as, you know, even something like...
Marco:
obviously the ariel atom but i think the the like the alpha 4c is interesting right but all the reviews say that it's a lot of fun but that the interior really sucks it's also ugly as sin yeah yeah i've it has it has its bad days
John:
Yeah, I would test drive the Caymans and see how much fun you think it is and how much more tossable and small and nimble it feels.
John:
Like, because it's also a pretty wide car, too, you know?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, again, the reality is I'm not really looking to buy another car right now.
Marco:
Like, I'm perfectly happy with the setup I have now.
Casey:
Well, that actually begs one of the questions I wanted to ask you, which is you are two thirds of the way through your lease.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I got to pick out something new this winter, this coming winter, like in almost a year.
Marco:
Or decide to buy this one out.
Casey:
So sitting here now, and obviously a lot can change in a year, even in the car industry, what do you think you would do?
Marco:
I've said in the past, and I will continue to say that if I had to replace my car today, for whatever reason, if it's like stolen or something, if I had to replace it today...
Marco:
I would get basically the exact same thing.
Marco:
I would tweak some of the options, but I would get basically the exact same car.
Marco:
I love this car.
Marco:
I don't have any reason to look at anything else.
Marco:
Every other car I've ever owned, all of them, even the 1M, every other car I've ever owned, as I've owned it, I've looked at other cars and been like, oh, I would really like that instead, or I would really like to upgrade to that.
Marco:
There was always something about it that really, something about every car I've owned, there was always something about it that I wasn't really happy with.
Marco:
With this car, that's not the case.
Marco:
This is the first time, and I mean, God, it better be, right?
Marco:
This is the first time where I have no major complaints.
Marco:
I even have very few minor complaints.
Marco:
My current idea is, absent any new information about when an all-wheel drive version might become available, I would probably just get another one just like it, except change a couple of the options.
Marco:
But that's really it.
Marco:
I don't...
Marco:
I'm not motivated at all to look around at other models and change up the situation here.
Marco:
It's a freaking amazing car.
Marco:
It's perfect in every way that I really need it to be.
Marco:
Even the all-wheel drive.
Marco:
I don't really need the all-wheel drive.
Marco:
I'm doing fine without it.
Marco:
I should probably just buy this one out.
Marco:
The M cars used and maintaining an M car out of warranty...
Marco:
is not a great use of money.
Casey:
I remember looking into getting an extended service plan for my car, and I talked to the BMW dealer about it, and they had a really helpful whiteboard sitting on a chair in the finance manager's office,
Casey:
And it was a plot, if you will, I guess a table of here's all the regular maintenance services one would need, you know, brakes, oil, clutch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And I remember vividly that for each of these line items, and I'm making up numbers now, it would say oil, $150, M, $300.
John:
clutch two thousand dollars m four thousand or whatever the numbers may be and it was insane so a new feature they have in car and driver these days is uh showing you used cars that you you know how much they've come down in price and like what things to look out for like oh in this car like the struts always crack and check for this and check that doesn't have you know and so the one in the back of uh the most recent issue was a ferrari 355
John:
uh and they give like kind of the maintenance numbers of what you can expect to pay those are the worst thing like so you have bmw then you have the m car and then you have these these supercars it's just like another another doubling of the price of everything forget about oil changes everything which is just as ridiculous as you might think
John:
Then it's like, you know, the tires are expensive.
John:
Fine.
John:
These tires last, you know, 5,000 miles.
John:
They're 700 bucks each.
John:
Whatever.
John:
It's a high performance tire.
John:
You understand that.
John:
By the way, you can't get them changed in regular things because regular tire changing equipment will damage the magnesium wheels.
John:
So you have to get them done just at the Ferrari dealer.
Yeah.
John:
everything costs a million dollars.
John:
And the one that really got me is like, they were talking to an owner, like how much money should you set aside for this?
John:
What is it now?
John:
Like 10, 15 year old car, 20 or I don't even want to hold it is.
John:
Right.
John:
How much money should you set aside for yearly maintenance?
John:
He said, just set aside five grand a year.
John:
And you're like, Oh, that's not so bad.
John:
I guess five grand a year.
John:
Right.
John:
But then one of the line items at the bottom was every three years, you need to change the timing belt and it's seven grand.
John:
Oh God.
John:
Because they have to pull the whole engine out of the car.
Right.
John:
to change the timing belt yes every three years and and by the way someone had brass valves and if they had brass valves that caused the the manifolds to overheat and those like 900 bucks each and it's just like everything on the nothing on this car is under 500 like the floor you know well the floor mats are always over 500 i was like and it's like and every three years seven grand thing in addition to the five grand you set aside per year for an ancient ferrari so yeah you can have a lot of money on one of these cars
Marco:
Yeah, and the supercars, like, you know, like, you're not getting 100,000 miles out of that clutch.
John:
Oh, yeah, so the wheels, like, the front wheels will last 15,000, the back wheels will last about 5,000, and each wheel is 700 bucks, and so enjoy that.
Marco:
Yeah, so, I mean, you know, M cars are not nearly that bad.
John:
They're much closer to regular cars, but... And you don't have to pull the engine out of the car to do maintenance on it.
John:
Like, that's the thing with the mid-engine cars.
John:
That's where you have to look out for the Cayman.
John:
It's a lot of things, like, a lot of things that, a lot of regular maintenance...
John:
Does have a lot more labor just because it's so damn hard to get at the engine.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
We should talk about my car now before we go.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Bring us back down to earth.
John:
No, I mean my Ferrari.
John:
Eyes on the prize here.
John:
So yeah, your turbo Ferrari.
John:
What is this?
John:
My car is always the sort of entry-level mid-engine Ferrari, and it started with a 348, and I've sort of followed it through the whole range of things as it's gone with threes and changing to fours and so on and so forth.
John:
And as I mentioned to Drance on Twitter...
John:
every time they introduce a new one, starting from the 348, the 365 comes out, the 360, the 430, like the whole way up the chain, there's always something weird about the styling of the car that when I first go in, I see it, I go, what did they do with whatever it is?
John:
And then it always ends up growing on me.
John:
And so here is the Ferrari 488, which is replacing the 458.
John:
It looks a lot like a 458, just like the, you know, it's less of a departure than the 458 was from the 430.
John:
But it's got some weird stuff in it.
Marco:
Honestly, this looks pretty good to me.
Marco:
I'm looking at the Wired article on it.
John:
So the shape of the car is great.
John:
I have no qualms about the overall shape of the car.
John:
That's why I always like this car.
John:
That's why I like it better than the front engine.
John:
The current thing is the F12 and the 599.
John:
I like it better than the supercars like the F50, F40, LaFerrari because they always kind of look alien.
John:
This is the car I like because it's the balance between... I like the mid-engine shape and I like...
John:
I like the fact that it's not super-duper exotic, although I do always kind of admire the super top-end Ferrari cars, which is why I want to see.
John:
LaFerrari on Top Gear.
John:
But the weird aspect on this one, I think, is the little hip inlet treatment.
John:
And that seems weird to me.
John:
And again, these cars always look so different in person.
John:
Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
John:
So I think I'll have to wait until I see one of these in person.
John:
But I do really like this overall shape.
John:
I think I like the overall shape even better than the 458.
John:
But...
John:
I don't know about the little shoulder inlet, the hip inlet, whatever you want to call it, above the rear wheels.
Marco:
I think it works for me.
Marco:
And overall, the front end and the back end, I think, are both very good as well.
Marco:
I would say, overall, this is one of the better-looking Ferraris I've seen in the last decade.
Marco:
Because I have not liked most of the way most of them look.
Marco:
Most of them, to me, have looked either bland or completely ridiculous.
Marco:
And this one, I think, kind of falls in the middle.
Marco:
It looks like a normal, nice, fast car, and it has some strong accents, but it doesn't look totally ridiculous to me.
John:
I would agree.
John:
It's going a little bit into Lamborghini territory, where it starts to look more masculine than feminine, you know?
John:
and so like that's what i've always loved about the ferrari cars is they always are kind of like smooth and nicely sculpted and they don't do the thing where they want to feel they feel like they look like a transformer right that's why you know uh little kids bedrooms they have lamborghinis on the wall because they look like crazy they look like you know a gillette razor handle right crazy fins and slats and stuff like that whereas the ferrari ones were always much more elegant like even if you just look like you know the test roaster the 348 yeah they have the whole side strakes and everything but it's
John:
it's a more elegant treatment than, you know, like the Aventador, which totally looks like a transformer, right?
John:
And this one has little element of the sort of techno-futurist transformer kind of things, even more than I think the LaFerrari does.
John:
LaFerrari is a little bit smoother than this, but like I said, the overall shape and proportions, where the wheels are, where the overall shape of the car, if you just drape the whole car and covered all the inlets, I really do like that.
John:
I like how they've refined the front end of it to look.
John:
Now, the turbo engine...
John:
that's you know it's another one of those end of the era it's like when they got rid of the big uh you know ball shifter with the metal gate on it right you know yeah you know the time comes and goes and you know i understand like can't deny the turbo but i assume if you look at the things that ferrari concentrates on in its cars it seems one of the things they're not willing to compromise thus far is that it has to sound like a ferrari and i can imagine quite a
John:
go towards yeah but this sounds better right because that's part of the whole experience of owning the car the turbo is going to change how the car sounds but i'm hoping if any manufacturer is going to have a interesting nice stirring engine noise from an engine with a turbo it'll ferrari will figure out a way to do it but
John:
this may be the end of that that sound i love to hear that makes my head turn whenever i'm driving around here i can pick it out from a mile away that's the sound of a ferrari engine naturally aspirated v8 just revving up some crazy person whether they're behind me in front of me or in oncoming traffic i can i always hear it before i see it and that's the sound i want when i get mine which will never actually happen
John:
buy me a separate house that i could keep my ferrari just take down the damn tree and a staff to uh to maintain it yeah you gotta like you gotta like also buy a dealer to put next to your house to service it yeah because you can't just take it to anybody yeah and everything costs everything costs a bazillion dollars that's why people don't drive these freaking things like don't you realize if i drive it i'm getting inching closer to the next scheduled 10 grand maintenance on my
Marco:
ferrari yeah it's like like you can take it to the grocery store and that's like you know total cost of ownership of a thousand dollars for that trip you know it's crazy yeah it's it's it's consumable like everything in it is consumable yeah the whole car yeah i mean and you know every car is consumable but they take it to another level in the supercar territory here yeah because like the wheels are like well you know they're
John:
They're going to be gone shortly, and each wheel is super expensive.
John:
I wonder if you can get a Ferrari.
John:
Will they sell it to you with all-season tires?
Marco:
Maybe a cargo net for the hood trunk, wherever that is.
Marco:
Is there even any cargo space?
Marco:
Yeah, the front.
John:
yeah but they they've scooped it down to make these big like you know like like a viper almost these big like done for error reasons i'm sure there's a fitted set of luggage you can buy yeah for another 10 grand yeah no every every supercar has a fitted leather luggage that goes into the little cubbies that they give you for
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
This is ultimately why, like, I don't fantasize about owning a supercar because none of that sounds appealing to me at all.
Marco:
Like, I thought it was even too annoying to have the 1M in the 3 Series.
John:
But this would be your fun car.
John:
Like, if you were to get a fun runabout car, this would not feel intimidated by your M5.
John:
It would be like, yeah, the M5 is my regular kind of boring car.
John:
And then when I want to have fun, I hop in this and I only do that, like, put, you know, 500 miles on it a year.
Marco:
The whole reason why I like the M5 is because it is a really amped up version of a normal family sedan.
Marco:
And so my thing is, I don't really do anything unique or fun with my cars.
Marco:
I don't go to tracks.
Marco:
I'm not driving along mountain roads or anything, for the most part.
Marco:
I'm doing very boring things.
Marco:
I'm driving around the suburbs going grocery shopping.
John:
Yeah, but even just doing boring things in this would be different than doing boring things in your M5.
Marco:
The reason I like the M5 is because my life is doing extremely boring things in a way that's really fun to me.
Marco:
And so the M5 is... I love doing boring things in that car.
Marco:
If I had a supercar like the Ferrari, I would first of all feel infinite stress about it.
John:
This Ferrari is not really a supercar.
John:
The LaFerrari is a supercar.
John:
I know they want to call it a hypercar and that these are supercars, but I think we should not allow this name inflation to take place.
John:
The entry-level Ferrari, I guess you're going to call it California the entry-level.
Marco:
Isn't this like $240,000 or something?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I would say this is not a supercar.
John:
Right.
Casey:
I've picked a different... Yeah, I don't know about that, John.
John:
The McLaren... Put it this way.
John:
The McLaren P1 is a supercar.
John:
The MP12 whatever C thing is not a supercar.
Marco:
The MP4 12C?
John:
That's not a supercar.
John:
The P1 is.
John:
It's not?
John:
The top of the line of the supercars.
John:
They kept trying to change the name.
John:
Like, oh, those are hypercars.
John:
What, is every Ferrari a supercar?
John:
No.
John:
I don't think I'd buy your argument.
John:
Anyway, yes, it's very expensive, but it's the same thing as if you got a convertible.
John:
If you got a convertible, you can get a convertible version.
Marco:
No, I can't.
Marco:
I'm bald and I burn easily.
John:
I know.
John:
But that would be a different driving experience.
John:
The experience of driving is, even if you drive it in the same way, the sensations and sounds of driving the exact same distance and speed in this car would be so different.
John:
Not to mention the whole idea of the view out of this thing and the view behind this thing and just...
John:
it's a different experience driving this car than it is driving something that's like it feels like a different type of you know like that's what you're looking for is there a view behind you can you see anything out the rear barely right but that's that's part of the experience like it will feel different and it's kind of the same way you had the the one m like that that it's giving you a different experience that's why like i think a super cheap convertible anything would be different enough from your m5 that you may consider it the fun car and then you could say well yes it's
Marco:
half the speed of my m5 but it's a convertible that makes it very different yeah that's fair this is like that's why you know like like the the slightly older cayman is an interesting option to me because so it's smaller lighter mid-engined lower whereas something like but i think the problem like when i had the 1m the problem was i never wanted to drive the 328 anymore like it was i didn't i couldn't balance it
Marco:
I only wanted to drive the 1M, but because I have family obligations and space reasons, and I was stressed out about ever getting a single little scratch on it because it was this irreplaceable, unique, limited edition car, it stressed me out too much to own it, and it was always kind of a struggle to balance that.
Marco:
That's why I think my ultimate best choice is to just keep buying really nice four-door sedans.
Marco:
Plus, I never liked sitting basically on the ground.
Casey:
You already are on the ground.
Casey:
No, this is lower than that.
Casey:
I was talking about Marco's height.
Marco:
No, any of these, including most likely the Caymans, you know, any of these, like you're basically sitting on the street.
John:
You can just get a phone book and you can sit on those phone books they deliver to your house.
John:
Now you have a reason to use them for something.