Technical Countermeasures
Casey:
I was working on something right before the show started and I paused for the show and now I'm like in that annoying mode where I'm thinking about that thing I was working on and not thinking about what I should be thinking about.
Casey:
Now when you say pause.
Casey:
Jason Cipher everyone.
John:
Yeah I feel like we should all like kiss our fingers and plant up to the sky now or something.
Marco:
Oh god.
Casey:
Is this a reference I'm not getting?
Casey:
me and casey the reference getters right casey yeah totally uh that's among other things you could call that a sports ball reference i couldn't even tell you which sport you're talking about no it's every sport marco every single sport and the grammys and the oscars everything it's a reference to everything it's a reference to life yeah
Casey:
A while back, this was easily two or three months ago, I was fiddling around and tried to teach myself React, not React Native, just straight up React, and wrote a showbot in React.
Casey:
It is at showbot-r on the web if you'd like to see it probably die in a terrible, awful fire.
Casey:
But it is presently working, which is exciting.
Marco:
Now, John, I assume you're going to have an opinion on the different placement and coloring of the upvote arrows on the Showbot R compared to the regular Showbot.
John:
Everything was not correctly aligned, like, along the center line of the page, so I had to close the window.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Jesus Christ.
John:
Also, you know, if any web application framework should have an exclamation point at the end of its name in the grand tradition of Yahoo, it's React.
John:
It should be React.
Casey:
So it's 165 lines.
Casey:
That's including blank spaces, comments, etc.
Casey:
On the React version, it is 180 on the straight jQuery version.
Casey:
So I've saved 15 lines.
Casey:
Woo woo.
Marco:
that's worth rewriting the entire thing yeah totally i didn't teach myself react and the funny thing is i'm looking at this code i'm like what the fuck is this stuff doing i have no idea what's happening anymore because it was like two months ago and i've not touched it since well one of us has to play with new things on a regular basis that's certainly not gonna be you two old farts definitely not me john has a chance maybe i do any chance i get new versions of pearl yeah all sorts of new things
John:
exciting new versions of jquery that uh leave ie8 behind oh i didn't realize that was the thing now it's a thing the best is like uh you know so it supports ie9 and above but even in ie9 you have to convince ie to pretend that it's a good browser by like forcing the you know like a meta tag for like edge turn make sure edge mode is enabled because like the first time i loaded i'm like what the
John:
I thought this thing works in IE 9.
John:
What is it complaining about?
John:
Oh, I have to tell IE, don't be stupid.
John:
Edge mode, please.
John:
And then, okay, yeah, now all of a sudden, stupid.
Marco:
Anyway, web, fun.
Marco:
Do I have to be testing in edge?
Marco:
Is it different enough that I need to care or not?
John:
No, it's like edge mode in IE 9.
John:
I'm not talking about the actual browser.
John:
There's IE 9, there's IE 10, I think there's even IE 11, and then there's that whatever the hell that other thing is.
John:
I just, I really...
John:
yeah i i've the i fought a long a long time and uh i don't know if i fought but anyway the path of my career has been you used to i used to be a thorn in our side but you just have to deal with it because everybody had it and eventually we came to this place where we can develop do our web application development
John:
for a set of modern browsers and then only at the very, very end see now what kind of disaster is this in the various versions of IE that we support and then sort of like spackle over them and try to make it better.
John:
It used to be the reverse.
John:
You had to make it work in IE and everything and then you could see if there were some nice things you could do in the modern browsers.
John:
Now,
John:
develop everything against chrome firefox or safari or i suppose even opera and then at the very end when you're done and you're happy with it it's like all right now let me load it in ie and you just just grit your teeth and you're just like oh is opera still did they switch to webkit i think did they still maintain their renderer or is it all webkit now i don't remember i remember that sounds vaguely familiar to me but i have never had a job where i have had to support opera
John:
ever no nobody ever has maybe someone who people who work for the opera you know the company that makes the opera website maybe maybe do you think even they use opera yeah someone's gotta oh we're gonna we're gonna get so little email
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
But all three devout users that also happen to listen to this show are going to be very upset.
Casey:
Extremely.
Casey:
Good thing about that feedback.
Casey:
Anyway, we should probably do some follow-up.
Casey:
And we have some follow-up.
Casey:
And I would blame this on John, but this is not John's fault.
Casey:
I have actually added a bit of follow-up.
Casey:
And I'd like to start with a bit.
Casey:
Et tu, Casey?
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Marco.
Casey:
By the way, that's a reference to Shakespeare.
Casey:
I believe Julius Caesar.
Marco:
I don't think it's just Shakespeare.
Marco:
I think it's Julius Caesar, like period.
Marco:
I think that's just like a thing that was most likely true that he most likely said something to that effect possibly.
Marco:
Fine, fine.
Casey:
Everyone's a critic, right?
Casey:
So David S. wrote in, and he wanted to tell us that the TrackPoint mouse, which we discussed a lot last episode, has been scientifically proven, well, by IBM, to be more accurate than a trackpad.
Casey:
So David S. writes,
Casey:
But they're also known for having invented the trackpoint.
Casey:
So, of course, as part of that development, they did lots of tests on the ergonomics of the trackpoint.
Casey:
The results are very interesting.
Casey:
As I recall, people were both faster and more accurate when using a trackpoint compared with a trackpad.
Casey:
I believe the difference was small for people who were novices on both devices.
Casey:
But they also found that people got much better with some experience on the trackpoint and that a week of experience made a big difference.
Casey:
um blah blah blah blah because the accuracy uh differences were small for novices and because the track point interface was a little easier to figure out initially people actually tended to like the trackpads more at first um or for example when using a computer in the store and then he has provided a link to microsoft of all places that has what appears to be a scan of this research paper so apparently is it has been scientifically proven that track points are better if you believe ibm
Marco:
Well, also, like, IBM, the maker of trackpoints, did one study that proved that trackpoints were slightly better than the trackpads of 1990s.
Marco:
You know, and that's like, trackpads, when they first came out, really were terrible.
Marco:
And they really did get a lot better in the early 2000s.
Marco:
And, you know, throughout the 2000 to 2010 interval, like, as mostly, let's be honest, as Apple made them better, because the PC industry's trackpads still usually, as we said last time, really suck.
Marco:
compared to anything good and usable modern trackpads are with the exception of the force touch way way way better than what they were probably testing against whereas track points probably have not really changed since then because there just isn't that much to change about them
John:
if they tested uh like a series of tasks where you have to involve typing and mouse cursor that's where the track point really shined because that's its big advantage especially for people who are good typists or touch typists so you don't have to relocate you can sort of keep your hands in the same position and have ready access to cursor movement and clicking buttons and typing all at the same time so you i assume that they would do well there but yeah the trackpads of the 1990s were just these little tiny things that like it was barely enough room to move your fingers like
John:
an inch and a half by an inch and a half, like very small.
John:
So you're trying to navigate a screen.
John:
The screens weren't that much smaller.
John:
The screens were still like 15 inch laptops existed.
John:
Trying to move a cursor around a 15 inch screen by swiping your finger on a little plasticky two by two square
John:
Uh, not, not very fun, but I would imagine that, uh, the track pads would do it.
John:
Anyway, everyone should use mice at the end.
Casey:
So you two beat the piss out of me because you say that it's scientifically proven that vinyl's better.
Casey:
Here it is.
Casey:
I give you a scientific, uh, scientific study that track points are better and oh no, it's not good enough.
John:
Well, I mean, it's one study.
John:
It's done by the company that invented the track point.
John:
So it's perhaps a little bit biased.
John:
And unlike vinyl and CDs, trackpads have changed since the 1990s.
John:
Vinyl, not changed since the 1990s, only to perhaps get worse.
John:
And the knowledge of how to correctly master them gone away.
John:
So that's the only thing that has happened to vinyl.
John:
CDs, the format is exactly the same.
John:
The specs are exactly the same.
John:
Nothing has changed related to CDs since the 1990s.
Casey:
Screw you guys.
Casey:
I'm going home.
Casey:
That's a reference, by the way.
Casey:
In other news, speaking of inferior pointing devices, there are so many tap-to-click wizards in our audience.
Casey:
Who knew?
John:
So many self-proclaimed tap-to-click wizards.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
Everything has a caveat.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, no, I'm saying like they I believe that they they believe they are self tap to click wizards like the basically that they don't they don't perceive any impairment to using tap to click.
John:
That is the way they prefer to do it.
John:
They are never frustrated by it.
John:
It is not a compromise that they're dealing with.
John:
They don't accidentally make any clicks.
John:
It's just, you know, they're they are tap to click wizards, according to my definition of like, you know, we're saying I was saying that I'm not one because whenever I turn on tap to click, I find myself inadvertently
John:
doing things i didn't intend to do and that pisses me off and it makes me turn that mode off right but these people tap to click wizards no problem with it whatsoever does it mean they never make any kind of errors or do they make the errors it doesn't bother them either way they're basically tap to click wizards because it's the way they prefer to work none of them expressed any sort of caveats about like well i i used it all the time and it only annoys me a little bit they were like nope i'm a wizard so i guess those guys can start a club
John:
oh goodness i demand to see proof and a scientific study no no they they are they they are tactical quizzes i just didn't think there were that many people who basically don't have any like there's no downsides for them for using tactical and it's probably people who like learned on it you know who never who just like once they found out that was a mode and like the first you know day that they got their laptop turned it on and like that's how they use their laptop and that's how they've trained themselves to uh to use they don't have any other habits that they're breaking
John:
right they're just this is the this is the way they've built their habits right and maybe maybe they actually just accept that a certain degree of unreliability is just part of using a trackpad i'm willing to believe that a large part of them actually don't have accidental tap to clicks because that gets to the the next uh feedback from ml whose name consists of two capital letters separated by a space i don't understand how you would accidentally click with tap to click uh if you put a finger down and leave it then it's not a click if you put a finger down and lift it back up then it is a click
John:
On the last show, we used the wrong terminology in terms of like how much force you apply.
John:
But that's basically, you know, there's no force sensor.
John:
It's basically, oh, there wasn't back in the day.
John:
It's timing based.
John:
And the reason I personally accidentally do clicks is all my habits around trackpad use is
John:
involve don't involve making sure that i don't accidentally touch the surface like briefly or brush against it with some other finger or whatever that leads to the other trackpad setting that we didn't talk about last time which is what the hell is it the phrasing of it like uh ignore unintentional it's been phrased different way ignore unintentional taps or that one is infuriating because what the trackpad is trying to figure out what's an accident and what's not
John:
and it will go into this mode where it's like, oh, I'm going to ignore that because it looks like an accident.
John:
Then you try to do something legit and it ignores you and you become furious.
John:
You're like, no, accept my command.
John:
My finger is moving.
John:
But anyway, all my habits were not designed around the idea that I have to be cognizant of how long my finger is in contact with the trackpad because if it is in contact with the trackpad too briefly, that counts as a click.
John:
And so that's just not how my hands work.
John:
And I have years of using trackpads without tap to click
John:
Before I, you know, before tap to click became even a thing, probably it was certainly before I ever tried to turn it on.
John:
So I'm accidentally hitting the trackpad because during the course of using a trackpad, my fingers briefly come in contact with the trackpad in ways that register as clicks.
John:
But I'm not intending to click at all.
John:
It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough that I find it infuriating.
Marco:
Right, because if you need to do a very, very small, fast cursor movement, like if you need to move the mouse over one or two pixels on screen, it is very easy for that to be misinterpreted.
Marco:
Because the way it differentiates is not just how quick the tap is, but how much it has moved during the touchdown time span.
Marco:
Because obviously, if you mean to tap to click...
Marco:
then it's going to be effectively unmoving, but of course there's going to be a very small amount of movement a lot of times just because of imprecisions and the way people work.
Marco:
So it has to determine in software the difference between an intentional small quick movement of the cursor and a tap.
Marco:
to click and and that is not a perfect science and it never will be there's always going to be some little you know flex margin of error there where it's going to get wrong sometimes and so if you're doing certain things that require small fast cursor movements you will probably hit this problem more often than if you're not doing that kind of movement
John:
And they have no choice but to put that in.
John:
They can't demand that you precisely put your finger down and precisely lift it up without moving it because that would mean it would become very difficult.
John:
They just have to build in that margin to make it comfortable for people to actually use tap to click.
John:
But that same margin is what makes you accidentally activated.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i think the reason you know control freaks like me are so uh against tap to click because a we have this error rate and b the error rate is potentially very like we have dialogue buttons with dialogue boxes with buttons in them the buttons are close to each other if you were to move the cursor over from one button to the other that's not very far and if it actually registers a click that did cancel or okay when you want to do the opposite that could be a data destructive operation like there's not that you'd be hitting dialogue buttons with uh mouse cursor anyway but yeah anyway i'm
John:
a bad click in the wrong place at the wrong time even if it's just accidentally having a bad click that you didn't realize uh put the input focus into a window uh into the window you didn't think you were typing in and get one of those wrong window situations like data loss wrong window stuff i just yeah i don't like it
Casey:
All right, then.
Marco:
That's the final verdict.
Marco:
I don't like it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what does Rich at the Pond have to say?
Casey:
He was giving a defense of track balls.
John:
And the idea behind this is if you're due to old age or if you have any other sort of motor problems, sometimes it's difficult to – I've seen people with this problem in real life –
John:
to position the cursor over something and click without moving the cursor again and when the button and the thing that moves are separate like they are in a trackball you move the ball you're moving the cursor you take your hands totally off the ball then you can press the button at your leisure usually the buttons are very large and they are separate from the ball and you can be sure that where you're clicking is where the cursor is so
John:
It's better for people with motor impairments.
John:
Trackpad is similar when they have the button on it, but, you know, the physical button, that's gone now.
John:
And now, like, you know, you move the cursor on the trackpad to get where you want, and then you can kind of take your hand off and just go vertically down and click and be sure, you know.
John:
But anyway, a trackball with a separate button and a separate ball does have that advantage.
Casey:
uh let's see oh next right so i'd asked at the end of the last episode toward the end of the last episode hey what's the deal with apple sim and i had asked kind of without having done any research on it lady whimsy who is a retail employee weighed in on this and also provided the official link which we'll put in the show notes
Casey:
I'm a retail employee.
Casey:
AT&T is the only carrier that locks the SIM.
Casey:
Verizon opted out of Apple SIM in its entirety, and you can swap SIMs.
Casey:
So if you're going to get Verizon service, you have a completely segregated Verizon SIM.
Casey:
And then if you want to use the Apple SIM, you can use T-Mobile and I believe Sprint and AT&T.
Casey:
But the moment you engage AT&T, that SIM gets locked.
Casey:
So she continues, when AT&T is selected as the carrier, a pop-up warns you.
Casey:
But you can always purchase an additional Apple SIM for $5, which I didn't know, and that's really cool.
Casey:
And additionally, a Verizon SIM is free at her store anyway.
Casey:
You just have to ask for it.
Casey:
all of that was extremely useful information i was very glad that lady whimsy uh reported in and like we said we'll uh we'll put a link to the official documentation in the show notes about this does this set a new record for the cheapest thing you can buy in an apple store that might be i was gonna say it's cheaper than ipod socks and the the ten dollar uh magsafe adapter
Casey:
I just bought another one of those, actually.
John:
Although, if we're going to go by volume or weight, it may still be more expensive than the MagSafe adapter.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
These things are, well, they're not heavy by any means, but they're a heck of a lot heavier than one of the micro, nano, whatever SIMs.
Casey:
I always get them backwards.
John:
Can you fold the $5 bill to be smaller than a SIM?
John:
I don't think you can.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Not these new SIMs, at least.
Casey:
But anyway, that was extremely useful feedback.
Casey:
And there were some other people that wrote in as well.
Casey:
And so thank you to everyone who provided some of that information.
Casey:
But it sounds like, you know, obviously the easiest answer, which I don't know why I didn't even think of this, and Nathan A. reminded me in the chat room, just use the same darn Sims.
Casey:
Like, why not just do that?
Casey:
It just completely escaped me.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
But if I weren't to use my existing SIMs, I can potentially get two Apple SIMs, one for AT&T, one for T-Mobile, and then a Verizon SIM as well for, it looks like, maybe five extra dollars, which is a pretty slick setup.
Casey:
Moving on, we got some feedback about domestic carriers, one by Chris Niles.
Casey:
He said, as a genius, the number of iPhone users I see for cellular issues are mostly Sprint, then T-Mobile and Verizon and last AT&T, meaning that AT&T was the best of all.
Casey:
This is from three different markets, he said, the Bay Area, Seattle and Denver.
Casey:
And then we got some really long feedback from someone who I believe wanted to remain anonymous.
Casey:
Which one?
Casey:
The signal strength one?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
One of the points that a lot of people brought up, we were asking how you get such a good signal inside Moscone or whatever, is they have indoor antennas that are just for the people inside the building.
John:
And so you're competing with only the people inside the building instead of everybody out in San Francisco and the antenna is really close to you.
Yeah.
John:
And the person who sent us the email about spectrum and stuff had some tips for switching to 3G when everyone else is on 4G because sometimes you just can't get the attention.
John:
You can receive the signal plenty strong in a stadium or something, but your send signal is interfering with everyone else's send signal.
John:
So if you switch to 3G, you might actually have a better experience.
John:
That was a good letter, but it was also very long and probably doesn't really fit into follow-up.
John:
And the next section of the follow up here is all people telling us about why carriers might have changed the way you buy phones as opposed to subsidized phone model where you pay a certain amount for a phone.
John:
The carrier pays Apple the rest of the price of the phone and then you pay a monthly fee to pay back the subsidy and then some going with the model where.
John:
There is no subsidy, and basically the price of the phone is spread out over the course of your bills.
John:
And so Benjamin Glickman's got the first theory here.
John:
Well, does he have the first one?
John:
I think someone else.
John:
Maybe someone moved it.
John:
The first theory, oh, here it is.
John:
Derek, yeah.
John:
Derek Beachy, yeah.
John:
Derek from Veristablium, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is the big thing that we're missing is that the upfront costs for a big, fancy, expensive phone is $0 that it's not like, oh, well, I used to be able to get the top of the line iPhone for $200 and then a monthly fee.
John:
And now I'm going to realize the full giant cost of the iPhone is actually like $700, $800.
John:
It's now that the cost of the phone is $0 because they just take whatever the cost of the phone is divided by 12 or 24 and then add that to your bill.
John:
And so it seems like from the customer's perspective, it has the advantage of being like, oh, you know, every phone is a free phone now, even though you're paying the exact same money or possibly more.
John:
It's just spread out into your various bills.
John:
There are a lot of theories that...
John:
This will increase upgrade frequency because you get the same monthly payment.
John:
And I mean, this goes kind of goes against what Marco was saying was like these these thing where you spread out the cost of the phone over multiple months will end.
John:
And when it ends, you don't have to pay for the phone anymore.
John:
And so one side of this coin is, oh, well, then people will just keep upgrading their phone as soon as the payment ends.
John:
And the other side of the coin is what Marco was saying.
John:
People will be like, oh, my bill decreased and my phone is still good.
John:
So why would I get a new phone?
John:
So I don't know which one of those behaviors is going to win out when people start signing up for these things.
John:
Presumably the entire rest of the world knows because, as stated on the past show, this is how a lot of the rest of the world pays for the phones already.
John:
But there are two sides to that coin.
Marco:
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see whether more people now will choose the bigger storage tiers based on this new pricing.
Marco:
And if anything, this gives Apple even less of a reason to drop the 16 gig because now it's even easier for people to spend more money on the higher models.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's roughly my opinion of that as well.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Jeffrey says the new plans cost significantly more for less, as in the carriers are going to charge you more for the similar size plan, and you either won't notice or won't care, because they'll be adding the phone price into it, and it'll just be all confusing.
Marco:
Yeah, he's like, are the rates...
Marco:
Is it actually going down without the subsidy?
Marco:
If I buy my phone outright, just get it unlocked or whatever, and then own it outright, am I actually going to be paying a lower bill after moving to this system?
Marco:
I tried to find this out on AT&T's site, and it's very confusing, and I couldn't figure it out.
Marco:
But as far as I could tell, I'm actually not going to be paying any less money on the bill.
John:
you have to have a big spreadsheet and keep it up to date because they change the numbers all the time you can get special deals depending on where you're coming from you just have to keep redoing the math like has it ever been cheaper to buy an unlocked phone and then pay a monthly fee uh is it cheap you know which is cheaper if they'd still done the subsidy or if they just take the price of the phone divide it by 12 or 24 and add it to your bill what bill are they adding it to is the bill they're adding it to bigger than it was before so the total comes out you just got to do the math yourself at the bottom here's the bottom line with all this stuff in the u.s anyway what are you going to do about it you got like
John:
two three choices if you're lucky one of those choices is probably super crappy so really you've narrowed it down to two and like the the amount of sort of unspoken collusion in these industries and the huge barriers to entry mean there's very little connection between the value of the service you're getting and how much money you pay and so we just we're all screwed um so like worrying about this is it's almost academic um
John:
um r&e has another theory about this saying it was uh he says it's primarily motivated by the fcc that was pressuring cell phone companies to get rid of their early termination fees because they had really high fees for like if you bail on your contract early and so the cell phone this this theory is the cell phone company's way around this is all right we won't have early termination fees anymore what we'll do is we'll give you a phone for zero dollars and we're essentially loaning you the rest of the money for the phone that you will slowly pay back over the course of your plan and
John:
But if you bail early, of course, you have to give us back the money we loaned you to buy your $800 phone.
John:
So instead of an early termination fee, it's like, oh, and by the way, you got to pay us.
John:
It's like a loan.
John:
And then you sort of exit the contract.
John:
And it's like, well, you got to pay back the loan because you've been using the phone.
John:
You've got the phone.
John:
So that's their way of getting around the early termination fee while still making sure that if you leave the plan early, you got to pay a whole bunch of money to them, which motivates you to stay.
John:
We have a bunch of links to various FCC complaints and things related to this for the show notes.
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Fracture.
Marco:
Go to FractureMe.com and use promo code ATP15 for 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Now Fracture prints photos in vivid color directly on glass.
Marco:
You know, we all have all these photos that we take these days with these awesome phone cameras or my crazy new camera, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
We all have lots of photos these days.
Marco:
There's more photos than ever.
Marco:
People are taking more photos than ever.
Marco:
And that's really, really good.
Marco:
The problem is that back in the old days, you'd get photos printed and then you'd have this physical artifact and you could store it away somewhere.
Marco:
You could display it.
Marco:
You could flip through.
Marco:
You could show it.
Marco:
You could see it more often.
Marco:
Nowadays, we have more pictures than ever, but we look at them less than ever.
Marco:
because they're all just buried in our camera roll, or they're put on social things, and then they just kind of fall off the timeline, and we never see them again.
Marco:
I think we really need to take advantage of things that can take our pictures and show them back to us, or display them, or let us share them with our loved ones in a less fleeting way than just posting it on Facebook or whatever.
Marco:
so fracture lets you print photos and this is this is like the most modern kind of print i've ever seen photos that are printed on a glass surface so you have this nice thin lightweight piece of glass the ink is on the back side of it but it's so thin it looks like it's right on the surface and then there's like a thin layer of foam board behind that so the foam board can then hook onto a picture hanger or it can stand up on your desk for the smaller sizes they have like a desk mount option or like a desk stand option
Marco:
um but for the most part i get the big ones and i and i i uh i hang them on on little photo nails and they're huge and they're beautiful and they're light so it is like no stress to put this thing on your wall and they also have small ones too and the small ones are really affordable uh i actually i have i have a number of the small ones as well uh they have small squares that start at five by five inches for i think it's like 15 bucks it's really it's really affordable plus that's before our coupon code atp15 for 15 off your first order and
Marco:
And these things look fantastic.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
These are real vivid photos printed directly on glass.
Marco:
The quality is great.
Marco:
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Marco:
You don't need to frame them or anything.
Marco:
They are their own edge-to-edge awesome glass print.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot.
John:
I'm glad I kept forgetting to make the fracture order I want to do.
John:
I decided I'm going to, since I don't have app icons to the bottom of the wall like Marco, I figure I can put up the logos of all the podcasts that I've been on or associated with in some substantial way to make fractures of all those and line up.
John:
But I kept forgetting to do the order, so now I'll use our code.
John:
Although I haven't decided what size I'm going to get.
John:
What size are your icons?
Marco:
If you have the little one that we made of us in the Macworld studio, that's 5x5.
John:
yeah no it looks kind of small on my wall i don't know if i well it depends on how many icons there are i i gathered up all the high-res artwork from all the people who are associated with the shows who would have access to that so i think i have i can go a little bit bigger but i don't know yeah it depends on like your viewing distance to you know where you're putting them and everything yep but yeah it's it's great all right moving on what's next
Casey:
It's Notebook Xeons, which is something I could not possibly care less about, but I know you too.
John:
Oh, no, that's not true.
John:
You should care.
John:
Everyone should care about this.
Casey:
All right, tell me why.
Casey:
Tell me why.
John:
Well, so the announcement is another one of these Intel half announcements where they're like, they announced that they're going to make Xeons with power specs so they can go in Notebooks.
John:
But they don't have all the details on them quite yet.
John:
Kind of like how they announced all the Skylake stuff, but we have to wait for IDF for all the details.
John:
Anyway.
Marco:
Intel is so good at half-assed announcements.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I don't know why they do that.
John:
But anyway, we'll find out when we find out.
John:
But we know enough.
John:
I think we know enough to be kind of excited.
John:
It's kind of exciting in a dumb way.
John:
Because we talked about it in the past.
John:
What is the difference between a Xeon and the rest of the Intel chips?
John:
And there's things to be said about, well, like they're more conservative and they're lagging behind the other things.
John:
And maybe they give you the ones that are, you know, that have fewer manufacturing defects or something like you can do this hand wave, become like these are the fancy expensive ones.
John:
But the things that count are they spec them out with way more PCI Express lanes, which is why they can go in the Mac Pro.
John:
uh perhaps not for the xeons and the notebooks but that remains to be seen uh and the second big thing is that they have ecc ram and can usually support more ram and those two things i think are super important um in apple's quote-unquote pro laptops you can get a pretty large amount of ram is it still just 16 or can you get 32 in the big one i forget i believe it's still 16 but i will double check that's correct
John:
Either way, by the standards of just a handful of years ago, a 16 gigabyte notebook is huge.
John:
We keep putting more and more RAM in these things.
John:
And the error rates surrounding RAM, maybe they're getting better, but probably in as fast as RAM capacity is increasing.
John:
It's kind of like data integrity on the file system.
John:
where you we keep we keep getting bigger and bigger discs but the error rate for the things we're storing them on aren't getting that much better or not getting it better faster in some cases might even be getting worse and so if we have we have all these bits and the error rate is one in a million bits or one in a billion bits and we have like you know
John:
millions and millions and billions and billions of bits that means you got errors there um and so ecc ram is ram that checks your uh checks for hardware faults that cause you know a bit to flip here and there and it can fix you know some kinds of errors and at least report the other kind
John:
uh and that's one of the reasons i've always loved uh the mac pros because they all come with ecc ram which is more expensive but i mean again maybe it's voodoo i think people have done some studies on the ecc ram actually is a benefit but it just seems like the hardware cost of ecc ram is not the big of a deal but intel has always segmented its product line by saying oh only our fancy pro chips get ecc and so if intel is going to be stubborn and they're not going to bring ecc ram down to their consumer chips
John:
The next best thing is to say, fine, we'll make notebook chips with the Xeon feature set.
John:
So again, we don't know if they have more PCI Express lanes.
John:
We don't know if they're like the higher quality processors or the ones with a more conservative manufacturing processor or whatever.
John:
We do know they're going to have ECC RAM and they can support up to 64 gigs of RAM.
John:
And who wouldn't want a 15-inch Mac Pro with 64 gigs of ECC RAM?
John:
That sounds like an awesome machine to me.
John:
Finally, that sounds like, I mean, you know, going back to the old 17-inch days, that sounds like a truly pro MacBook Pro, as opposed to just like, well, it's a MacBook, but it's a little bit bigger and fancier, especially now that they're all aluminum and everything.
John:
So I have no idea if Apple will even use these things.
John:
Oh, and the other thing that advertises that it's coming with Thunderbolt 3, but so do the desktop ones.
John:
It's just a question of whether they have Thunderbolt 3 integrated into the controller for it, or is it just like you have to buy the controller chip if you get the Xeons in their chipset?
John:
But anyway...
John:
I don't know if Apple will use these.
John:
I don't know if they're worth using this first generation of things, but I like the idea of ECC RAM and more RAM capacity come to Apple's Pro Notebook line.
John:
So fingers crossed.
Marco:
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Marco:
I mean, what they announced, I believe it's only going to be the Xeon E3 line.
Marco:
And the E3s are...
Marco:
even closer than usual Xeons.
Marco:
They're even closer to the consumer line.
Marco:
They don't have extra PCI Express lanes.
Marco:
They do support ECC, as you said.
Marco:
They do support the higher RAM counts on certain chipsets.
Marco:
Our tipster in the chat room is basically on fire right now because he's saying that you can get ECC on the consumer chips as well.
Marco:
I don't know about that.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
But the Xeon name on the E3 line doesn't mean much.
John:
Yeah, it's all marketing.
John:
It's all marketing segmentation anyway.
John:
But like, fine, if you want to do this marketing segmentation, I don't care what it's called.
John:
All I want is a laptop with ECC RAM because it's crazy to have 16 gigs of non-ECC RAM in a supposedly pro thing.
John:
And I think that the laptop should go up higher ramp.
John:
I'm not saying Apple's going to sell one with 64 gigs, but...
John:
maybe they could sell one with 32 with the super expensive top of the line like i think people would buy that because it's especially now that the laptop cpus are practically as fast and sometimes faster and single threaded than some of the you know supposed pro cpus from years past that if you have a top of the line 15 inch laptop and you can just put more ram in it you could probably do some pretty amazing things with that on the road um so
John:
You know, whether it's just a silly marketing thing and whether the E3s are not all their crackups, I mean, you don't get any extra PCI Express lanes and Thunderbolt 3 is available everywhere anyway.
John:
And you could just buy a different controller chipset to get ECC RAM on the desktops.
John:
The bottom line is Apple hasn't done that.
John:
They continue to sell their laptops, even their super top line ones without ECC RAM.
John:
And maybe this will change that because maybe they'll have a nice can solution from Intel that will they won't require them to get some different extra chip to make their RAM ECC.
Marco:
On the other end, the Xeon line is always really holding back what the Mac Pro can do with things like ports and chipsets and everything else.
Marco:
Because the Mac Pro uses the higher class of Xeons, the E5 series, with the extra PCI lanes and a couple other things.
Marco:
And those tend to lie behind in chipsets.
Marco:
I don't know, do the E3s...
Marco:
use more consumery chipsets because like it always holds back the mac pro with things like how like how soon it can support thunderbolt or usb3 or like you know the new whatever new port specs come around uh the mac pro is always like the last thing to get that support because intel's xeon chipsets uh that that support the xeon cpus at that level are so they just lag so far behind the consumer stuff
John:
And they don't need to because they're going to go in servers and no one needs Thunderbolt 3's ports on like a rack server somewhere, you know?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so why would Apple want to tie another one of their product lines to the delayed chipset and platform support of the Intel Xeon line?
John:
Well, you know, if it's the same number of PCI Express Lanes, it doesn't make a difference there.
John:
But I think the ECC RAM is the thing that ATP tipster says that you could get ECC on the desktop things, but not on mobile.
John:
So this is a first for Intel or a first in recent history that you can get a laptop chip from Intel with ECC RAM support.
John:
I just think it's like data integrity.
John:
It's like it should be everywhere.
John:
It should be all RAM should be ECC RAM.
John:
If it was spread across the entire industry, the small additional cost of making the actual RAM chip support ECC and all the controllers and everything doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
John:
And I think it's like it's literally the least we can do as we add a ridiculous number of bits to all of our machines and the RAM category that we're just not.
John:
We're just like, well, I'm sure it'll be fine.
John:
I'm sure every single one of the bazillion bits that we send through this thing will always come back exactly as we did it.
John:
And a couple of small one bit errors here and there, you can get kernel panics, you can get corrupted data, you can get everything.
John:
Like, if you can't trust your RAM, what can you trust?
John:
Not your file system.
John:
Yeah, forget that.
Casey:
Is this really going to trickle down to anything that I'm going to buy anytime soon?
Casey:
No, you just got a new laptop.
John:
work got a new laptop i didn't i i have i would say what do you think the actual odds of apple using any of these chips at all ever in any of its products like i think even that is maybe 50 50 i think low i'm gonna give it 50 50 because i i hold out hope that someone is like you know what we could sell a laptop for way more money than we do now if we just position one as like the suit but that's what they used to do with the 17 inch it was like it's like well
John:
This is barely a laptop, but certain people need it, so we're going to charge them an arm and a leg, and here you go.
John:
There should be one of those, shouldn't there?
John:
Just like the Mac Pro?
John:
Yeah, 4K screen.
John:
Sure.
John:
Why not?
John:
21-inch laptop, go.
John:
PowerBook G5, we are ready, finally.
John:
Liquid cooling.
Marco:
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It's really, really nice to have an off-site backup of some kind that is not tied electrically directly to the computer it's backing up.
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:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They've never worked for me, though.
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Marco:
It's a lot.
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Marco:
So as I said, unlimited space, there's unthrottled upload speed.
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Marco:
And the client that they give you, it's real native code.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I don't have to worry, oh, what if Backblaze doesn't update immediately?
Marco:
Because they will.
Marco:
They always have.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
They probably already work on the betas.
Marco:
And then once you have your data backed up to Backblaze, you can access it from anywhere.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
So I have an announcement to make.
Marco:
ATP is now numbers.
Marco:
We've now bought all numbers.
John:
Apple would sue us for that name.
John:
You've got to think of it.
John:
I know you have difficulty with the names.
John:
I'm not surprised you came up with numbers.
John:
Integers.
John:
We are buying all the integers.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
Yeah, we couldn't get integer.com or the integer Twitter handle.
John:
So we're just going to go with integer with a lowercase l inside of the i.
Marco:
Where we're going in the clouds, it doesn't matter whether we can't get the Twitter handle.
Marco:
We'll just buy Twitter and we'll make it integer number 45.
Marco:
This is getting bad quickly.
John:
So to summarize this news, I don't know if it's even possible to sound so stupid when you say it out loud.
John:
Google decided to rename itself Alphabet.
John:
and then divide up its businesses, divide up all the things that Google did before.
John:
Some of the things that Google did before are going to be under a new subsidiary of Alphabet called Google, and that's going to be like Search and Android and web ads and I don't know what the heck goes under that name.
John:
And then a bunch of the other stuff that Google does is going to go under someplace else.
John:
Is it just directly under alphabet?
John:
I forget.
John:
But anyway, it's not under Google anymore.
John:
It will be all that stuff they do with self-driving cars and giant balloons with Wi-Fi access points on them and biomedical stuff and contact lenses that check your glucose level and
John:
Google does a lot of weird stuff, like a lot of sort of R&D type stuff.
John:
And so this is a reorganization under a new name, Alphabet, that is just saying like within Alphabet, which is still the same company that Google was, they're dividing up their businesses in different bins.
John:
The super confusing part is that their stock symbol will still be G-O-O-G on whatever that is, NASDAQ or whatever.
John:
Like their stock symbols will still look like Goog or Google or whatever, but the name of the company will be Alphabet and Google will just be a subsidiary, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet.
John:
uh larry and sergey uh sergey i don't know how to pronounce his name are um staying in charge of everything but now they're in charge of alphabet and they appointed a new ceo of the google part of alphabet uh it's not the same guy who did google plus right no it's it's sundar pichai uh i hope i'm pronouncing that correctly and the guy who did google plus left right wasn't that um yeah i can't keep track of the the drama involved in this but uh anyway he left
Marco:
And, uh, and so Sundar, from what I've understand, everyone likes Sundar a lot.
John:
Yeah, he's good.
John:
I think I've seen him in presentations.
John:
He's always seems like to, he seems like he's, he's a good presenter anyway.
John:
I have no, no, nothing, no, nothing about him except seeing him on stage at IO, I think.
Marco:
yeah so i don't know i mean to me you look at this move and first of all it's it's odd and it's kind of like head in the clouds kind of you know spacey new age larry sergey type stuff is it spacey the name is the name spacey because i think the actual move despite being super confusing is less head in the clouds because it's finally recognizing that they're this company called google does two kinds of things
John:
crazy things like self-driving cars and and hot air balloons and all stuff like just maybe they're good ideas maybe they'll be dead ends like kind of you know freewheeling research kind of you never know what's going to hit or whatever and then very solid predictable same business that google's been doing forever with the web ads and the search and all that other stuff and and
John:
having them both under the umbrella of the same company that i think is more kind of hippy dippy head in the clouds like we're just like a company we're just like we have a campus and you play volleyball and we give you free food and some people try to figure out how to monetize web ads and other people are trying to figure out how to save the world one whatever at a time and we're all in the same family it's like how would you feel if your job was doing analytics on like uh keyword search return on investment and someone else's job was like
John:
you know, self-driving cars or something like it.
John:
Is that really the same company you're recruiting for that company just the same way across the board?
John:
So I think it it is a little bit more concrete and a little bit more down to earth to say we really need to divvy this stuff up.
John:
So it's clear that
John:
who's working for what and what the goals are.
John:
And then Google can be Google and then everything else can be its own thing.
John:
And we don't have to like mix them together.
John:
I don't know all the financial implications.
John:
Like, does it help them with reporting?
John:
Does it help them with, with hiding profits and losses and making themselves look better and not having the crazy, you know, it's like alphabet or whatever they is.
John:
I wish I knew I read, I read all these press releases and I've already forgotten because it was too long ago.
John:
You know, it was only a couple of days, but yeah.
John:
is all the new researching stuff under just plain old alphabet or do they make another subcompany i think it's just under alphabet well there and there's x there's like the x labs whatever yeah but but those things are basically cost centers and those don't look good on on google's balance sheet right so if you could get them off into another subsidiary then you can kind of do more hand wavy stuff
Marco:
Yeah, because what's interesting is they didn't spin out things like YouTube or Android out of the new division called Google.
John:
That fits with Google, don't you think?
John:
YouTube is a fairly concrete, established thing.
John:
It is not like glucose-sensing contact lenses.
Marco:
But so is Nest, and Nest is spun out.
John:
Yeah, but Nest is still kind of like, can you make money selling nerds a really expensive smoke alarm that goes off at the wrong time?
Marco:
You know, to me, whenever you see a company like Google, which has...
Marco:
They have a spotty record of BS in their statements.
Marco:
Let's say that.
Marco:
They're not totally awful, but they're not perfect either.
Marco:
And Apple does a lot of their own BS, too.
Marco:
I'm not trying to be all weird about it here.
Marco:
But this is the kind of thing that it's worth sniffing around to see, like, is there a cynical take on this that is plausible for why else they might have done it?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Because, you know, there's so much like floaty language here.
Marco:
And the cynical take is, you know, what you said is like, it sure looks like they're moving a lot of cost centers out of Google and leaving Google, the thing that is named Google,
John:
now as a more focused and most likely more profitable kind of entity that's not cynical that's just isn't that just good business isn't that kind of like not letting the two things like they're just it just seemed very different culturally and what their goals are and what their priorities should be and combining them into one thing just like confuses like they're they're separable enough because it's not like
John:
oh we should spin off uh mac painted mac right into claris sorry to use old references for the young people listening like because that will let them like that was a core competency of apple those that need to be spun out but like hot air balloons man like that that's not the same company right so i think i think it's it's one of the things that i've always admired about google is that they're willing to do all these things like people ding them for it it's like what are you doing out there trying to make these self-driving cars like
John:
If not them, then who?
John:
They have a bunch of smart people.
John:
They have a lot of money.
John:
I'm glad they're trying to do these things.
John:
And I think those projects will be given more air to breathe and be under less pressure in a separate company.
John:
And yes, the flip side of that is the other part of the company will probably look more focused.
John:
It's not like it looks more focused to investors.
John:
You're still buying the stock in the big overall company.
John:
I just think
John:
It's just better organizationally.
John:
So I'm not... I don't think there's any real actual cynical interpretation of this, except for the one that I heard, which sounds like total BS to me, is that Sundar was going to leave, and they were like, oh, we better make him CEO.
John:
It just totally does not...
John:
pass the smell test for me at all but this will be like the stupidest reason ever to reorganize this big giant company but everything else about it seems straightforward and a reasonable thing to do i just really don't like the name but i don't know marco what do you think
Marco:
I'm with you for the most part.
Marco:
Believe me, if there was an obvious cynical take on this, I would be the one to make it.
Marco:
I don't think there is a clear one.
Marco:
There is possibly the looking better on the investment type of divisional stuff that we don't know enough about to really talk about.
Marco:
There's possible issues with taxation that a lot of people have pointed out.
Marco:
This might be like a tax dodge.
Marco:
I think those are definitely going to be benefits of it.
Marco:
They
Marco:
probably were not the cause of it.
Marco:
And they were probably not, you know, not the driving thing that, you know, that drove this decision with them.
Marco:
I think this actually is mostly about what they say it is.
Marco:
I think this is actually something that they're saying, honestly, that, you know, because you're right, it does make sense organizationally to separate out these really, really disparate things into their own divisions that, you know, things that have nothing to do with what else the company is doing or have very little to do with what else the company is doing.
Marco:
it does make sense to separate those out.
Marco:
That being said, this is all still Google.
Marco:
Putting a new name on it will have some PR distancing benefits to it, kind of like the joke that is intellectual ventures doing things through LODsys.
Marco:
This is a thing that is created to imply that there is artificial distance or disconnection that isn't really there.
Marco:
So this is really still the same people running it.
Marco:
It's still the same company.
Marco:
Right now, it's even installed in the same buildings and everything that are all labeled Google.
Marco:
So this stuff is all still Google stuff.
Marco:
So Nest was spun off from Google.
Marco:
If you weren't comfortable with Google owning Nest and having the data from your house about your Nest thermostats, if you weren't comfortable with that before...
Marco:
You shouldn't be comfortable about it now either because it's the same thing.
Marco:
It's all the same people.
Marco:
It's important to keep the perspective on this that it's not like how AT&T was forced to split up and they had to make actually separate companies.
Marco:
This is like, no, this is still all the same people who all are working together, really.
Marco:
Different divisions, but this is all still what we know as Google.
John:
Maybe that's the one cynical take I heard.
John:
I think it was from Horace Didu or someone related to his conversation, maybe a commenter.
John:
It was basically like Google makes the money and sends it over to Alphabet and Alphabet takes the data, takes the money from from the Google part and feeds back into Google data that it collects from whatever crazy things it's doing like.
John:
scanning the entire earth or every book in existence or whatever so it's an exchange of money and data so it's like yeah it's all it's all entirely it all in the family there's no wall being built between these two things it's just like now we can be free to have different reporting chains different cultures different priorities in our meetings like i imagine they can concentrate on what they're doing and not worry so much about what the google side of things are doing it becomes more like they can pretend within this little universe little google verse
John:
They can pretend they're two separate companies that communicate with each other like two separate companies would, even though they really are the same company and they both have the same boss who can just tell them what to do if they really want to.
John:
But at this point in Google's history, I think the two founders still are exerting kind of like personalized idiosyncratic control over the company that they founded.
John:
They don't need any money.
John:
They care about money only insofar as, as far as I can tell, only insofar as it helps them achieve whatever goals they're trying to achieve.
John:
So I am even more inclined not to believe that it's like some kind of like clever financial maneuvering because really they just want like, why aren't we making better progress on our research projects?
John:
You know, why and why is Google, the Google proper distracted by all these research type things?
John:
We should really reorganize to so both groups can better achieve their goals because that's what they want to do as the founders of the company.
John:
Um, I don't, I really don't think they're motivated, but like we could become even more rich.
John:
I mean, they're not Larry Ellison, right?
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
Um, I was sitting here thinking to myself, like, what are the, um, what are the different stops on the journey from, um,
Casey:
A dictatorial CEO that kind of does whatever and doesn't care what anyone thinks, perhaps maybe like Jeff Bezos, Bezos, whatever.
Casey:
And somebody who just tows the company line like probably every Hewlett Packard CEO that's ever been.
Casey:
And I feel like Larry and Sergey are no Jeff Bezos, but certainly closer to that side of the spectrum than someone who just tries to get shareholders as much money as they possibly can.
Casey:
And it's this seems to me like you guys are just saying, you know, let's let's try to reorganize the company in a way that makes a little bit of sense.
Casey:
And let's try to remove any shackles perceived or real that prevent us from doing this change the world kind of stuff that we really want to be doing.
John:
Yeah, and I think the line is like if you feel ownership of the company, if you were one of the founders of the company or at least were there super early, you feel like you have a right to just do whatever you want with the company.
John:
And, you know, investors be damned, Wall Street be damned, you know, obviously.
John:
To some degree or another, a lot of times founders don't have full control over the company.
John:
They lose control.
John:
And so someone else, you know, but like if you're one of the early people, you're like, it's my company.
John:
I do what they want with it.
John:
But if the company has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and you are like the 17th CEO, it's harder to feel like you have the that you should just be like, you know what?
John:
What do I want Google to be?
John:
i'm the ceo because the ceo and most companies have been around that long is beholden to a board of directors and they don't have the control and they didn't put everybody on the board so they really aren't in charge or whatever but as founders and founders who are wise and very carefully managed to retain majority control over the company they founded they feel like this is my toy this is my play thing i'm gonna do what i want with it and i think that's a great way to run a company i hate the other way where they run a company where you're like
John:
The CEO is like a steward for two or three years.
John:
And whatever happens to the company doesn't matter as long as they get their golden parachute and their bonus.
John:
And they go out and someone else comes in.
John:
And it's like completely rudderless, no actual leadership, short-term thinking.
John:
But companies that are huge and have huge revenues and huge impact on all the people around them and the people who buy their stuff.
John:
And that's the worst.
John:
So I fully endorse this modern style of...
John:
ambitious very strange unconstrained by conventional thinking leadership of companies even if in the end it ends up doing in some or all these companies in the long term Apple so far I think is the only one that's in the second phase because it's founder leader is gone now and leadership has been passed over does Tim Cook feel the same kind of ownership over Apple that Steve Jobs did maybe not but I think he's still doing the same kind of things what is Tim Cook like you know
John:
The environment, human rights, diversity.
John:
Yeah, all those things that Steve Jobs was not... Steve Jobs was not steering Apple in that direction, at least not to the degree that Tim Cook is.
John:
And so Tim Cook has put his stamp on Apple.
John:
I feel like he is not...
John:
embarrassed to do that or doesn't feel like it's not his right maybe it's because he was there with steve the whole time anyway we'll all be dead by the time uh apple finally is on its 17th ceo and that will probably be just a big mess but for now uh apple is still doing well in this area and i think this move by google aside from the name and marco that's what i was asking before aside from this name which i think is really terrible uh this move makes sense to me it is an exceptionally bad name
John:
You should have called it the alphabet, right, Marco?
Marco:
I... Wow.
Marco:
Yeah, that wouldn't have helped either.
John:
But, like, who will ever say the word alphabet?
John:
Because, like I said, even the stock symbol is goo.
John:
We're just gonna... Like, I think we should all agree on this show.
John:
Not that we're, like, trying to be contrary or being stubborn or whatever, but...
John:
I'm just going to keep saying Google, and I think most people are going to keep, even when we're talking about the self-driving cars, it's going to be like Google self-driving cars.
John:
Are people going to say Alphabet self-driving cars?
John:
I don't know if Google is really committed to, or if it could even, do the kind of rebranding necessary to turn
John:
God, I don't know this chain, but it was like AT&T, Atlantic Bell.
John:
You ever see the diagram of a chain of names after AT&T was broken up that eventually we have these different other names and they recombine into the monster that is Verizon and the new AT&T?
Mm-hmm.
John:
yeah anyway uh that kind of rebranding usually only happens when the previous name is so incredibly hated that the value of it is zero or negative so you make up a new word and people like well i hated bell atlantic but this verizon company i've never heard of this maybe they're better it's like singular is terrible yeah but 18t is pretty good yeah anyway
Casey:
You know, I've heard some wonderful things about Xfinity.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
That's where people see the chain.
John:
I guess people see the chain entirely.
John:
But anyway, Google is a name that people like that has positive value, that is a very strong brand.
John:
And I don't see Alphabet ever eclipsing that.
John:
And so I hope people just won't actually use that name except in like official documentation and like actual press releases and people who have to be journalists.
John:
But casually speaking, I'm until until it seems incorrect based on common usage.
John:
I'm just going to keep saying Google for the whole thing.
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:
casper mattresses with this combination they are resilient they are supportive and they are very very comfortable it is a hybrid of latex foam and memory foam and then so all this is available and now this is incredibly comfortable now casey you have one of these right that's right and it is very very comfortable as i've said numerous times on this show before
Casey:
I actually don't care for memory foam very much.
Casey:
I think it's weird.
Casey:
I wish I could describe why, but I just don't like it.
Casey:
And it is really true that this is memory foam-ish, but in a way that it actually is super-duper comfortable to sleep on, even if you're not a memory foam kind of person like me.
Casey:
So, yeah, I definitely recommend Casper mattresses.
Casey:
They are excellent.
Casey:
And even if you didn't want the mattress, if you just wanted to, say, donate it or something, it is almost worth the money just to see how it shipped to you because it is ridiculous.
Marco:
So it comes in this really relatively, compared to a mattress, this relatively small box, and it's just kind of compressed in there.
Marco:
And you open it up, and it inflates itself into this big, full, normal-sized mattress.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
right and you're definitely not getting it back into the box but if you need to if you want to try this thing out they have a hundred day return policy so a hundred days try it in your home and if you don't like it they will arrange a painless return for you so it really is no risk and these mattresses are made in america obsessively engineered and the pricing is incredibly good
Marco:
So, they price at just $500 for a twin-size mattress.
Marco:
And the prices go up all the way to either $750 for full, $850 for queen, and $950 for king.
Marco:
Now, if you try to get a premium, comfortable foam of any sort or even just a good spring mattress...
Marco:
a king size premium mattress for under a thousand dollars is unheard of like it is it's crazy that is that is about half of what you would pay or even even better than that it's even less than half for a lot of these really good mattresses and again these are made in america it's hybrid memory foam with latex foam to really provide the best of both
Marco:
It is awesome.
Marco:
And you can even get $50 off your purchase by going to casper.com slash ATP and use code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Obsessively engineered mattresses at shockingly fair prices with just the right sink, just the right bounce.
Marco:
Casper.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, you wrote a perhaps contentious but probably not really contentious post about ad blocking.
Casey:
Would you like to tell us why you're such a jerk and why you hate anyone who writes for the web?
Marco:
So this was interesting.
Marco:
I wrote a post basically defending modern-day JavaScript blocking, which will, of course, rule out many ads and many, many trackers.
Marco:
I was actually really afraid to publish it.
Marco:
because I have so often published something and had it blow up in a way I didn't really expect or want and really regretted it afterwards.
Marco:
And this, in which I, as a fairly prominent voice in some circles, am advocating basically for many modern ad and tracking blockers, I thought, knowing as many people as I do in publishing, this could be a problem.
Marco:
And so I showed it to a bunch of friends ahead of time.
John:
It was like five hours ahead of time.
John:
By the time I saw your link to like, hey, take a look at this, it was already posted for real.
John:
So I'd say more lead time next time.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
I actually got direct feedback from a few friends who read it faster than you did.
Marco:
I didn't see the link until much later.
Marco:
Whose fault is that?
John:
i am i am a slack completionist in most of my channels so i did read it but i i should look at what this timestamps are anyway it wasn't that long but yes you did solicit i'm not a web publisher so i can't give you the feedback you're looking for anyway or just tell you to pick different words right right right so
Marco:
Anyway, so I actually really did sanity check it with some friends ahead of time because I was afraid to say this.
Marco:
And so the gist of my article here, it's called The Ethics of Modern Web Ad Blocking.
Marco:
And this is a lot of stuff that we actually talked about on the show here in the past.
Marco:
We have to be very careful with the web because if you just follow a link...
Marco:
then your browser will just load that page and everything on it without giving you a chance to kind of say, oh, you know what?
Marco:
No, thanks.
Marco:
I don't agree with everything this page is trying to do.
Marco:
When you follow a link that somebody sends you or if you find in a search or whatever, you load all the trackers, all the ads, all the code that page wants you to execute.
Marco:
You just load it and run it in your browser.
Marco:
That's just how modern browsers work.
Marco:
All the collection of your data they're doing.
Marco:
If you find something on the page offensive or if it's tracking you between multiple sites through cross-site trackers like ad networks and Google Analytics and stuff like that, you're giving all that data up without really being asked first.
Marco:
They take the data and then you can maybe go and try to disable it later.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that whole model has been so abused by web publishers and advertisers and scammy and legitimate companies alike.
Marco:
It has been so abused that now, like, everything you do on the web is watched like a hawk, tracked.
Marco:
You have massive privacy violations happening constantly, like...
Marco:
and this this came to a head a few weeks ago there was you know not only the safaris you know i e thing but then like there was uh people calling out uh the verge for their and the verge calling out mobile web for sucking and everyone's like well look at your page it's full of like 15 000 trackers and eight megs of javascript and all this stuff and and gruber called out uh i more for you know because they have great writers but they have this site that's full of these really crappy ads a lot of the time and then renee ritchie from i more wrote this post explaining about how basically how bad ad networks are and
Marco:
How they kind of don't have much control over the matter.
Marco:
And so there was all this discussion around this.
Marco:
But really what it comes down to is, I think now, in the same way that pop-up ads got so crazy in the early 2000s, that pop-up blockers became basically required usage and then became integrated into the browsers themselves and turned on by default...
Marco:
My argument is that now JavaScript tracking and cross-site tracking and some of the ads, but it's honestly more problematic with the tracking, have gotten so bad and so abused that it is now time to take technical countermeasures
Marco:
to reduce or eliminate that tracking if you don't want it.
Marco:
The same way that we took technical countermeasures to block pop-up ads 15 years ago.
Marco:
And I really thought this was going to be, as I said, I thought this was going to be very controversial.
Marco:
I thought a lot of people who were in publishing, which includes a lot of my friends, would really be offended that I'm suggesting ad blocking, basically.
Marco:
And it wasn't.
Marco:
The guys from The All were really upset with me, but I don't really know them and I don't really care.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Nobody else was.
Marco:
I thought there would be a huge divide.
Marco:
That's why I said I was a little afraid to publish it.
Marco:
Instead, I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of responses.
Marco:
and links and just hundreds of people telling me yes finally yes i agree that's exactly right including many of my friends who are publishers including many publishers i am not friends with maybe i am now we'll see uh i i was shocked at how positive and supportive and how much in agreement the reaction to this was i mean
Marco:
I can go on my blog and I can post, my name is Marco Arment, and I will get more disagreement on that than I will from this article.
Marco:
It is crazy how much people will argue with me over anything else I ever say.
Marco:
And this, that I thought was going to be incredibly controversial...
Marco:
It turns out a lot of people think this, and even publishers know.
Marco:
It's not like publishers are evil, devil corporations.
Marco:
Publishing is hard.
Marco:
As I learned when I tried to do the magazine, and as I've seen with my other efforts with ad-supported media and trying to do stuff online that makes money...
Marco:
It's hard.
Marco:
And especially if you have to have a staff, then your costs are way higher than individuals like me or John Gruber publishing on our own sites.
Marco:
Having a staff is incredibly expensive.
Marco:
And so it is very, very hard for publishers to make enough money to stay afloat.
Marco:
And we see so many publishers shutting down or downsizing.
Marco:
It is incredibly difficult to make it work.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
They have been kind of forced – some of them have been forced by financial situations.
Marco:
Some of them have just been greed.
Marco:
But they've been – whatever the cause, publishers, many of whom are well-meaning, have been, quote, forced –
Marco:
to adopt really terrible ads and integrate really terrible tracking.
Marco:
And there's, of course, this whole obsession between lots of people about metrics and tracking everything everybody ever does on a webpage or on media or in an app.
Marco:
And apps are a whole separate discussion.
Marco:
We'll get to that, I'm sure, in the future.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
And there's all this tracking going on and all this abuse from ads.
Marco:
And publishers often just say... And like Renee said, this is like often they'll get a report of some ad being bad or inappropriate or over the line in some way.
Marco:
And they have to go like, you know, well, they have to go to the ad network to serve it to them and try to report it.
Marco:
And that's often very hard.
Marco:
And, you know, you're just inserting code on your page that will call to an ad network...
Marco:
and just have them run arbitrary code that some advertiser entered in some system somewhere on all your viewers' computers.
Marco:
And so you, as the publisher, really don't have a lot of control over that.
Marco:
The ad network barely has control over that, and they have even less incentive to care.
Marco:
And so you have this terrible situation where...
Marco:
there's really nobody kind of policing the store in a way that will be effective.
Marco:
And so you have to do it as the user yourself.
Marco:
You have to adopt technical countermeasures.
Marco:
My term, it's like you have to...
Marco:
Start considering installing ad blockers or tracking blockers.
Marco:
I mentioned I use Ghostery.
Marco:
I know there are others.
Marco:
Please stop telling me about the others.
Marco:
I'm happy with Ghostery.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I think now is the time to do that.
Marco:
What's extra frustrating is that a lot of the problems with this...
Marco:
A lot of the problems that have led to this are things that are inherent to the way web browsers work, like how they request things, how cross-domain requests work, how cross-domain cookies work, how JavaScript includes work, and what they have access to.
Marco:
And over the last 20 years that this kind of stuff has been possible and has developed, web browser manufacturers and standards committees have...
Marco:
added all these capabilities to the web that add new things web pages can do and new ways.
Marco:
Now the new thing is to make web pages, to give them more of the abilities that were previously exclusive only to apps and to sort of make web pages more app-like.
Marco:
But meanwhile, the core problems that enable all this terrible tracking and privacy invasion and horribly slow JavaScript and everything, those have not been addressed very well by the web development and standards communities.
Marco:
And so, like...
Marco:
Why have they not addressed that?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
The recent years, you're right up until maybe a year or two years or three years ago when browser vendors, especially the Chrome and the leading-edge modern browsers, really started turning the screws on...
John:
Things that are mostly security-focused, but they end up affecting advertising.
John:
Anything related to cross-site scripting, the doors have been slamming down on things related to accessing DOM elements and other frames or accessing anything happening in JavaScript that was served from a different domain.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's kind of a pain in the butt if you're doing web development, especially if you own sort of a fleet of your own domains.
John:
They're all like something.foo.com and you want them to all cooperate.
John:
That used to be easy because that just worked normally.
John:
But then they started pulling things down.
John:
It's like, oh, I got to add cross-origin request headers to everything.
John:
And like the wildcarding is crappy.
John:
You can't do star.foo.com.
John:
You got to either do star or the exact domain names.
John:
And if the domain names don't match up, maybe something will work, but you can't get your JavaScript stack traces.
John:
And it's like...
John:
that is like i said it's mostly security related like well that's not related to advertising advertisers can still do what they want because they make you serve it through your own proxy or do something else that gets around all this stuff um but it does end up limiting the privacy invading things you can do in the bad old days once javascript got on your page you could read all your cookies you could read things in other frames even an embedded iframe and now the restrictions are much greater than they were before so
John:
I think that is like you talk about technical countermeasures.
John:
The most important countermeasure is what you mentioned, uh, before, like the, the platforms and the browser vendors, they have much more power than individual nerdy users because we are few.
John:
And, uh,
John:
in the grand scheme of things not that important but as soon as you know pop-ups everyone hated pop-ups and pop-unders and all that stuff browser vendors correctly realized that there is almost no downside to and a big upside to putting pop-up blockers in your browser so it's practically overnight they just slammed the door shut on that entire thing like that was they were an epidemic pop-ups were everywhere and it was like everyone just said nope that's not happening um
John:
uh was there any sort of lengthy negotiation and hemming and hawing about putting the websites we love out of business doesn't matter it was in browsers it was on by default that's the end of that right there was a little bit of arms race fighting like see how we can like if you when you click on this link i'll count that as your intentional click to pop up a pop thing but for the most part
John:
Putting that feature in the browser made pop-ups way less prevalent than they were before.
John:
Like I still see them.
John:
They still, they can still trick you into clicking and doing something like that.
John:
That is a super important technical countermeasure.
John:
Same thing with Apple, allowing you to do, what do they call them?
John:
Content filters or whatever in, in iOS.
Yeah.
John:
You couldn't do that before.
John:
Apple has opened that door.
John:
And I think they made the same calculation.
John:
They're like, we know if we do this, the first thing out the gate is going to be a million ad blockers.
John:
We're going to make it super efficient.
John:
We're going to make it faster.
John:
Because they want people to, you know, download those ad blockers and use them to make their experience browsing the web on their iPhone better.
John:
So that's like the... I almost feel like we are not as involved in the struggle as...
John:
As we like to think that we are, that it really is a negotiation between the platforms, the software and the websites only as nerds who know about what a what a Chrome extension is and are shopping around for these, you know, ghostery and disconnect all these other and, you know, the gold ad blog and all that stuff.
John:
Most people don't run those things.
John:
or don't know how to install them or someone installs them for them but then they break some websites or whatever like navigating that is is mostly a nerd concern but since those are the circles we travel in i understand your concern about like if i post this and i endorse this i know everyone who's reading it knows how to install these things probably and so now by my endorsing it am i encouraging other people to install it and then uh you know am i reducing the revenue to to sites for people i know work for or whatever
John:
And when I think about that, like, just sort of our own little microcosm, not in the sort of grand scheme of things for the wider web, when I think of that, I think, well, it's, you know, it's the same negotiation we've always had between sites.
John:
Like, it's not so much...
John:
You have to decide.
John:
You have to do the calculation.
John:
Do you like reading this website?
John:
Yeah, I like the website, but I don't like this other part of it.
John:
All right, well, you can decide.
John:
I'm going to continue to read the website, but I'm going to do something that will make it a better experience to me.
John:
Are you going to block all ads?
John:
Most people know that, yeah, if you block all ads...
John:
probably you are making less money for the site, but you're just one person.
John:
And maybe you think, well, even if me and everyone I know blocks ads, and even if all the nerds block ads, it's only X percentage, so I still feel okay with that.
John:
So maybe you're fine with it.
John:
You just have to decide.
John:
Like, there are consequences to everyone's action.
John:
Like, should I block pop-ups?
John:
Oh, what if I'm stopping?
John:
The revenue that these guys were getting from these obnoxious pop up ads.
John:
If I want the site still to exist, I better enable pop ups.
John:
Well, some sites did go under because they couldn't be supported without pop ups.
John:
But other sites didn't go under.
John:
They found another way to make money.
John:
If everybody's blocking pop ups, advertisers just find another way to advertise.
John:
So I'm sort of on this on this battle between users and websites and browser vendors and whatever.
John:
I try to, in my actions with the own stuff that I install, try to make them reflect, you know, the sites that I care about are like a whitelist.
John:
The sites that I care about that have just become too obnoxious, I feel like I have to send them a signal.
John:
Like, I like your site.
John:
I like reading these things.
John:
But autoplay video is just not happening.
John:
So I'm going to install things.
John:
I'm going to install things that are going to stop that.
John:
And that is my signal to you, the site.
John:
that if the only way you can exist is with autoplaying video, then I'm sorry, but I don't want you to exist.
John:
And I don't, you know, speaking of ethics and morals and stuff, I think that that is not like, there's no obligation on either side.
John:
They, they, they put something listening on a port and an IP address and,
John:
And they welcome the entire world to make requests for it and receive that information.
John:
And we can do whatever the hell we want with that information.
John:
I can redirect it to a file.
John:
I can run it through links.
John:
Or I can show it in a web browser but just not request any of the Flash and not request any of the JavaScript trackers.
John:
That's the negotiation.
John:
There's nothing ethical about it.
John:
It's purely practical.
John:
It's like, if you understand the consequences of what you're doing on your end and how it might affect revenue and how it might affect the existence of things on that end, also how it might motivate them to change their website.
John:
If everybody blocks pop-ups, then...
John:
the sites go, well, we'll have to come up with a different strategy.
John:
And maybe that strategy involves a million JavaScript trackers that are not as invisible as pop-ups, but they can end up paying more when we track your habits.
John:
And if everyone installs something to block that, you know, they'll have to find another way.
John:
I'm pretty comfortable with this negotiation.
John:
I don't lose any sleep over the give and take.
John:
I think that's just the natural way things work out.
John:
The thing I'm mostly frustrated with is,
John:
For the longest time, it seemed like the browser vendors were kind of afraid to take that extra step.
John:
Like, you know, browsers could come with built-in ad blockers, for example, or built-in JavaScript.
John:
Like, they don't.
John:
They just kind of like, well, we have an extension framework and people can write whatever they want and the nerds can install it and whatever.
John:
But browsers do come with a built-in pop-up blocker.
John:
it seems like we're ready for the next round of kind of platform owners and browser vendors to take the next step.
John:
Uh, because I think leaving it entirely to third parties, even how iOS is doing is going to create a little bit of confusion.
John:
There's a potential for the ad blockers and the anti-tracker things to themselves be scammy.
John:
I think someone pointed out the ghostry is produced by an ad company.
John:
The good old ad block extension is also, uh, lets people pay it to whitelist their ads.
John:
Like, uh,
John:
scamminess finds a way it's like uh you know life in jurassic park uh so we still have to be vigilant but i think i'm ready for the next round of like you said technical countermeasures from all parties involved to renegotiate the contract because there's nothing there's nothing that says like that you that the only way sites can make money is to have increasingly scammy ads if nobody can have that much trackers and that much stupid javascript if it ends up being wildly blocked
John:
they'll have to you know find a different way hopefully a more tasteful way to advertise this is the negotiation they put out content but if we find it annoying they have to you know provide something that we like and not annoy us too much and if they're annoying us too much we'll do something back and like they have to figure out a way to make something that people enjoy that also pays money uh and that's why i think the whole thing of like if you block ads you're a criminal you're you're taking foods from people's mouths you're trying to put sites out of business
John:
There's no obligation on either side of this.
John:
We all have to come to a mutual agreement and we feel like we have a beneficial relationship where I enjoy the things that you're writing and you enjoy me coming there to see it and seeing your ads or whatever.
John:
That's the negotiation we're all in here.
John:
it's not as if one party is just obligated to just choke down whatever the other party does nor is like on the other side of the coin sites that say you can't come read our site if you run an ad blocker and like arstechnica has various times done various detections to see hey are you blocking ads nope sorry you're not allowed to read our site they can do that too like that's the negotiation oh yeah yeah because because arstechnica as historically i would imagine i don't remember the exact numbers
John:
a higher percentage than normal of ad blockers because it's read by a bunch of nerds.
John:
Right.
John:
And so it's like, well, you can't have 50 percent of the people running ad blockers.
John:
It's just not viable for our business.
John:
You are reading our site.
John:
You obviously enjoy the content.
John:
We'll try to keep it tasteful.
John:
We don't have autoplay ads.
John:
We don't have video ads like we don't have a lot of ads on the page.
John:
If you block ads, you can't read the site.
John:
So that's that's the thing we're going through here.
John:
And I'm I'm ready for the next round of of of.
John:
Oh, God, I almost quoted the phantom ass.
John:
I won't do it.
John:
Everyone knows what I was going to say.
John:
I actually don't.
John:
Me neither.
John:
I know.
John:
The rest of the audience does.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Now I'm depressed.
John:
I don't like that popping into my head.
John:
Damn you, George Lucas.
John:
How many times have you seen The Phantom Menace?
John:
I've only seen it like twice.
John:
Too many.
John:
I did a podcast about it.
John:
I don't want to talk about it.
John:
Let's move on.
John:
It's a dark time.
John:
That was from one of the good movies.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should potentially be done here so John can get himself a tissue and cry.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Fracture, Backblaze, and Casper.
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:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
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-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C
Casey:
john let me make you happy how is not doing a review this summer
John:
Pretty good.
John:
Pretty, pretty good.
Casey:
See?
Casey:
Just like that, you're back in it.
Casey:
Let's do another hour and a half.
Marco:
Another reference.
Marco:
You want to watch Star Wars with all your new time?
Marco:
How about, let's start at episode one.
John:
What's that again?
John:
There's a couple of weird things about not doing the roof.
John:
Like, obviously, yeah, free time, less pressure, it's more relaxing, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But the other thing is that, you know, of course, I have El Capitan installed.
John:
And, well, the thing that's annoying me about it is,
John:
it seems like like first i have it installed but i don't use it a lot because it's on my main computer i don't want to reboot and i don't have a reason to go into it and then every time i reboot into there's like two new updates but rather than just installing like the latest version on top of it i have to go through the update like two times like i'm a windows user it's like upgrade to beta 5 upgrade to beta 6 upgrade to beta 7 with a reboot in between each it's like just just bring me right to beta 7 guys i don't
John:
anyway um i don't know much about using the operating system because i'm finding myself not using it so the other thing exciting thing is going to happen here is like it's going to come out and i'm going to have to read reviews to find out what the hell i mean i think i know most of the stuff but all the little intricate details and the deep dives and stuff i'm not doing that myself so i basically don't know i don't know what i i don't know what it's like to use that as my main operating system for any substantial period of time because i just haven't been it's
John:
I've only booted into it.
John:
Every time I boot into it, there's two more updates.
John:
And then I do all the updates and I wander around and I enjoy the fact that I don't have to take any screenshots.
John:
And then I fiddle around with it and play with various options and look at things.
John:
And then I reboot it into my regular OS.
Marco:
It'll be interesting to see when it comes out and as you have to then turn to other people for their reviews...
Marco:
you're probably going to have some very conflicting feelings of probably immense relief that you didn't have to do it, but also immense dissatisfaction with the job everyone else did in your absence.
John:
I'm fine with it.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
I'm excited.
John:
I'm excited to use the new OS because like I see, you know, it's hard to tell as you reboot into a clean OS.
John:
You're like, wow, this is so much faster.
John:
There's nothing installed on it.
John:
It's like even a different Apple ID and it's all, you know.
John:
it seems smoother and cleaner and nicer they've done minor refinements to the look that i like i think all the changes they've made to look i endorse even on my crappy non-retina screen here it looks a little bit crisper and cleaner and tighter less kind of low contrast faded and and edgeless um
John:
And yeah, I like everything about it so far.
Marco:
I like the suggestion from Chloe Diggs Pipe Wark in the chat room who says, we should pool our money to get John out to California so he can review the actual El Capitan.
John:
Like the mountain.
John:
I don't know how I would review the mountain.
John:
I don't like being on top of the, what is the, caldera or whatever that's going to explode and destroy the entire West Coast.
John:
Sometime in the next 50,000 years, guaranteed.
John:
Or something like that.
John:
wow oh my goodness so is there any one particular review that you're looking forward to or you know do you know who's doing it for ours is ours doing it yeah ours is doing it i will read theirs i'll if vatici does one i'll read it uh i'm or i'm sure i'll read um jason will probably do one for mac world at this rate i'll read that one like oh you know i read them all anyway but like now i'll reading them and i'll be like learning things
Casey:
And I'm with Marco that I can't wait until all this comes out, and then you quietly tell somebody, one of us hopefully, oh my god, I cannot believe the job that these people have done.
Casey:
Like, they did a great job, but— Did I ever say that before?
John:
No, it's fine.
Casey:
Like, it's fine.
Casey:
They got most of the way, but—
John:
unless there's like some obvious pop culture reference that nobody managed to make now i feel like i will miss you know i really i was needed that annoyed me about the google alphabet thing where they made like the period a link to the hooli thing did you see that yeah yeah yeah and it was like oh my god it's the best easter egg ever like seriously a period link
John:
amateur hour well i think it wasn't even underlined like it because like this they styled it in such a way that it text decoration none whoa advanced technology yeah all right anyway my my uh my pointless uh html easter egg genius will go unrecognized in my lifetime clearly i'm sorry john who's gonna make all the simpsons links references
John:
Yeah, the worst thing about Easter eggs in HTML is you just view source and you can see them all, right?
John:
I was never clever.
John:
I was never doing the job.
John:
In this age of right-click inspect, you can't even hide stuff in the DOM anymore.
John:
Maybe if I did it with Shadow DOM.
John:
But anyway, I didn't even try to hide.
John:
It was just out there in the open.
John:
So it seems like all the Easter eggs and all my references should have been found by now.
John:
But most people just don't even care, so they just go right by it.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't click.
Casey:
I would at least hover on all of your links, but I didn't click on a lot of them because I knew, if I'm honest, I wouldn't understand the damn reference in the first place.
John:
Sometimes I give you the hover.
John:
Sometimes I don't.
John:
Depends on the reference.
John:
Depends on the thing.
John:
But period links.
Casey:
Let's just say that I did not read your review on Expert.
Casey:
I read it on Amateur Hour.
Marco:
Yeah, I wouldn't even follow most of the things because I was reading on iPads usually because that's how I would prefer to read, like, you know, to sit down, concentrate, not, you know, not sitting in front of a computer, but, like, sit down and actually read, you know, reading mode.
Marco:
And to me, for me, that's an iPad or an iPhone.
Marco:
And so I would always read it on an iPad.
John:
I could have done some cool, like, gesture recognition Easter eggs, but never got around to it.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
So what are you doing this summer other than traveling a bit?
Casey:
Like, do you feel like you have time to fill?
Casey:
I mean, I assume the answer is no, but...
John:
It's more relaxing.
John:
I mean, I'm podcasting more this summer than I was because I've got the two regular podcasts now, even though one of them is every other week.
John:
And so that actually does make a big difference.
John:
And plus between all the vacations, it's like at least two podcasts every week.
John:
So that is taking up more time.
John:
And then...
John:
yeah being on vacation and not stressing about things and just you know the nights when i'm not podcasting i can actually just relax and watch an episode of orange is the new black and not worry about what i have and haven't written and not worry about retaking screenshots or pouring over details of the os or trying to get in touch with apple pr in the three days before i have to publish my thing relaxing
Casey:
I am glad.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
I'm glad that things are going well and that you are relaxed.
Casey:
So are you relaxed enough to do it for whatever ridiculous name they come up with next year?
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I'm out.
John:
I'm out.
Casey:
So you're not Michael Jordan.
Casey:
This is your one and only retirement.
John:
No, I'm going to go play baseball.
John:
Come on.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
Just ask him.
John:
I'm already reviewing toasters, kind of.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
And bless you for doing it.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
They have a door yet?
John:
No.
John:
Cool.
John:
See, home contracting work is never done.
John:
Yeah, like the goal was to have this done this summer.
John:
I think we'll probably still make that, but, you know, it could be into September, whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Marco, how's your new child that arrived about a week ago?
Marco:
Ah, yeah, the camera.
Marco:
Good?
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I've only had it a week so far.
Marco:
I knew going into it that I would not be happy with the battery life, that the battery life on all the Sony mirrorless cameras, at least the full-frame ones, is awful.
Marco:
And they have continued that tradition.
Marco:
The battery life is indeed terrible.
Marco:
They have partially fixed that problem by just shipping it with two batteries.
Marco:
Seriously?
Marco:
Yes, they ship it.
Marco:
This is the first thing I've ever bought that comes with two of its own batteries.
Marco:
so and they give you they give you an external charger also and it can charge via usb when you plug it in so it's hilarious but uh so yeah so they we have multiple batteries and it's fine and uh the picture quality is just stunning i mean it's just ridiculous what i especially like about it so this is i'm talking about the a7r2 i don't know if i actually said that earlier i think i forgot to
Marco:
What I especially like about it is that my hit rate or my keeper rate, like the percentage of pictures I shoot that end up being good and good enough to keep and not just delete because something was out of focus or whatever, my hit rate is extremely high, way higher than it's ever been with any other camera I've ever used, including an iPhone.
Marco:
And I think there's a number of possible reasons for this.
Marco:
Number one, I think, is just that it has a really, really good autofocus system.
Marco:
Most mirrorless cameras don't have phase detect autofocus.
Marco:
And phase detect, that's what Apple called focus pixels in the iPhone 6.
Marco:
And it's the way that SLRs have always focused.
Marco:
The alternative is contrast detect where you just read the image off the sensor and you move the focus motor forward and back until you see, you notice like there are more high contrast edges at this focal length than this focal length.
Marco:
That's most likely in focus.
Marco:
And that's why you see cameras kind of going in and out of focus as they try to find that point.
Marco:
That's called hunting and it's more prevalent in contrast systems.
Marco:
And so for a while, mirrorless cameras only had those, and many of them still only have that, but a few of them have phase-detect autofocus, and this is one of them.
Marco:
And the previous Sonys, with the exception of the a7II, the previous, like the a7I line didn't have phase.
Marco:
So this results in way faster and more accurate autofocus.
Marco:
It's almost SLR speed.
Marco:
It's not quite there, but it's almost SLR speed.
Marco:
It's the closest I've ever seen in a camera that wasn't an SLR.
Marco:
Or for my usage, I think it's close enough.
Marco:
It's a little early to say that definitively, but I think it is close enough to be very similar to a good SLR.
Marco:
The system in the Nikon D750 that I rented is well regarded.
Marco:
It's another very, very well-liked, very advanced autofocus system for SLRs.
Marco:
I don't think it's the best in the world, but I think it's certainly up there.
Marco:
And I would say this is actually very close to that.
Marco:
It's very, very close focus speed-wise.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
contributing to my percentage of pictures that are good being high is that really good focus system.
Marco:
That the percentage of pictures that I'm shooting that the focus is correct is very, very high because it's just fast and accurate.
Marco:
And the other thing that I like is...
Marco:
there there's this and and the sensor like you can crank the iso sensitivity on the sensor up like crazy because it's just really really good like like most modern sony sensors uh which includes the ones in nikon cameras most modern sony developed full frame sensors are just stunningly good with with keeping low noise at high iso sensitivities um so
Marco:
What's good about this camera is that not only does it have that, but it has a feature that is only in a ridiculously small number of cameras.
Marco:
I don't know why this is such a rare feature and such a relatively new feature where you can set it on auto ISO and then you can customize what your minimum shutter speed is.
Marco:
So you can run the camera in aperture priority mode.
Marco:
And you can set the aperture whatever you want, and then you can say auto ISO, but keep the shutter speed above, say, 1,250th of a second.
Marco:
Because 1,250th, you know, you can freeze most motion with most lens lengths around that, you know, so that's a good minimum.
Marco:
So if you're shooting inside at f5.6 and trying to keep 1,250th of a second, the ISO has to crank really high, up to the 10,000 to 25,000 range.
Marco:
Really high ISOs.
Marco:
And this camera, it just looks good.
Marco:
It still looks good at those crazy ISOs.
Marco:
And again, you can get this in modern Nikons as well.
Marco:
Not to say this is exclusive to Sony, but...
Marco:
To have this in such a small camera with so many advanced features.
Marco:
So the combination of the focus system being so good, the auto ISO with the minimum shutter speed, making it so that you can basically shoot anything in any light and have it be sharp as long as you're willing to tolerate some noise at the extreme high ISOs.
Marco:
And also it has a stabilized image sensor.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So, you know, just similar to the iPhone 6 Plus, this has sensor shift technology.
Marco:
So it can shift the sensor around to do image stabilization no matter what lens you put on it.
Marco:
So even when you're using a really short lens, like a 35 millimeter, which it's very hard to find short image stabilized primes generally.
Marco:
Not a lot of manufacturers ever make those because there's a lot less demand for image stabilization in short lenses like that than there is like for telephotos and zooms.
Marco:
So you can have like...
Marco:
very, very short distance, image stabilization, shooting really fast, high ISO.
Marco:
So the combination of those things just incredibly improves the hit rate of what you're taking.
Marco:
So rather than shooting like 200 photos in an afternoon of doing something and then trying to pick out the 20 good ones, I'm shooting like 40 photos and picking out the 20 good ones.
Marco:
It's incredible.
Marco:
The difference, the time it saves, and I'm even considering turning off RAW.
Marco:
Because the JPEGs that come out of this camera are so good and do such a good job with dynamic range capture.
Marco:
And there's a bunch of options I still can play with that.
Marco:
It's just incredible.
Marco:
Even RAW is becoming a lot less necessary.
Marco:
And therefore, like I'm using the Photos app and Lightroom kind of in parallel right now because the Apple camera RAW system doesn't support the RAW files for this yet.
Marco:
So I'm only dealing with the JPEGs in the Photos app and only seeing the RAWs in Lightroom and the
Marco:
I like the JPEGs better than the color I can get out of Lightroom.
Marco:
And they don't look worse for the most part.
Marco:
I'll go to the RAW if I have to pull up shadow detail really high or something, but that's rare.
Marco:
So yeah, overall, it's great.
Marco:
It's a really great camera.
Marco:
So I'm extremely happy with it.
Marco:
I have three lenses, and I don't expect to get any more in the near future.
Marco:
I have a 35mm f2.8, a little 35mm.
Marco:
I have a 55mm f1.8, which is...
Marco:
possibly the best lens i've ever seen and i have the 90 macro which is really ridiculously sharp and it's awfully close and it's massive and heavy but for like product shots for my blog and stuff like that i'm greatly enjoying that so uh yeah overall three thumbs up nice
John:
Every time I think of buying one of these super expensive cameras, I remember a that I'd rather spend the money on a Mac and be that where I take where I take most of my pictures during each year is standing waist deep in ocean waves.
John:
And I really wouldn't want to be holding a two or three thousand dollar camera in my hand while doing that.
John:
So far, I haven't dropped one.
John:
And I don't know how many years we've been going on a vacation to the beach and me taking pictures of kids in the waves.
John:
But like at least, you know, six, seven, eight years.
John:
Haven't dropped the camera yet, but it's going to happen eventually.
John:
And when it does, I want it to be like a $600 mistake.
John:
I really don't want it to be a $2,000 or $3,000 mistake.
John:
I did fall this year with it, but only on the sand.
John:
And the camera was held safely in the air.
John:
i wish i'd seen that i can only imagine the acrobatics you went through to save the camera what i was what i was actually saving was my sneakers because we were just like it was after a run and like i didn't have like you know i had actual sneakers on with socks and it was just yeah i wasn't going to go in the water but like the waves you know come up and like one wave started coming up and it was caught me by surprise and i started to run backwards up the hill and the sand to keep my sneakers out of the water and lost my footing and
John:
Went onto my butt, but the camera stayed in the air and no water on the shoes either.
John:
Sand on the butt, but otherwise nothing.
John:
And that's, by the way, this is my, you know, for people who do not have super expensive cameras, let me give you the most important photography tip.
John:
Take your crappy camera and take pictures in ridiculously bright sunlight.
John:
They look really good, because everything is lit up, and your crappy camera that does not very lie sensitive with a tiny little sensor, it's fine.
John:
You can capture any kind of motion in the bright light of a sunny summer's day in mid-afternoon.
John:
They look really good.
John:
Oh, yeah, just put your iPhone in a plastic bag.
John:
Done.
Marco:
well i'll go that far bright sun is uh yeah pretty much any camera like that's why the the iphone like whenever there's a new iphone and they're talking about how great the camera is and they show like this is a real picture shot on an iphone it's always like this bright sunny beautiful scene in california it's like no that's that's not or it's like a close-up of a flower in in the midday sun yep uh that will always look good that's with my cameras the cameras i buy i don't even bother taking pictures indoors at this point like there's no point
John:
like they're just they're always going to be terrible there's just it has to be outdoors and it has to be sunny uh which is fine with me um there's plenty of times when those conditions are met and i can get lots of pictures of uh family and things we still get professional photos taken now i think we're down to once a year uh just to have someone else take them so we can all be in the picture and have family photos and the professional photographer uses a fancy camera so they look better than ours but
John:
I think we are adequately documenting our lives at this point.
John:
As long as it's all backed up, we'll be fine.