Feature Photos
All right, so a lot of OS updates these days.
Yeah, like all of them.
Yeah, like everything.
I definitely sat down at 7.15 to upgrade my work Mac, which is the one I'm recording on, to El Capitan.
Still hate that name.
You upgraded to a .0 release on your podcasting machine a few hours before you had to podcast from it?
Less than three.
Okay.
I knew not to say anything to you guys, nor the internet, until I had at least gotten on the call and that much had worked.
We'll see if I have actually recorded anything by the time this is all over.
But yes, in theory, everything's going well.
So typically, the rule of audio setups...
and this applies to a lot of things, but especially in audio setups, the rule is once you have something that works, don't touch anything ever.
Just leave it there.
Don't touch it.
And of course, you know, in practice, this is harder to do.
You know, if you had to like, you know, oh, one time had you something different, then you got to, you know, change the snob, change the setting, you know, maybe change the wiring around for something.
Then you got to change it back and it's a pain.
And then, of course, in the age of...
computers and software it's even worse and it's like well you know some people have to like try to keep around an old machine running an old version of the os because the software doesn't work on anything newer or they just don't want to risk it breaking so there's a balance to be struck here because obviously it's very hard to hold on to old versions of os and old versions of software forever and as time goes on i think it's getting harder to hold on to old versions of things
But at the same time, it worked and you touched it.
So I think there's a balance to be struck here and you did not strike it.
It probably is okay for me to upgrade as long as I don't have any drinks near the machine.
I think that's a fair compromise.
All right.
You want to do some follow up?
Talk about why people are upset about Marco pulling peace.
And one of the things that I think Marco brought up and we were trying to Google for the name of it was loss aversion.
Joshua Pollack points out that another term that might fit is endowment effect.
The hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.
So once you've got peace, it's super important that you have peace.
Before you had peace, it wasn't super important that you get it.
So once they've got the $3 application and you pull it, it's much worse than him never having launched it, even though the effect is the same.
uh anyway people are weird uh thanks joshua for the follow-up in summary people are weird oh good times we can summarize much of our follow-up that way yeah all right uh what else do we have here um daniel melitz uh has a short anecdote about visual effects which which i think has been in the follow-up for about 12 years now but um would you like to tell us about that john
It's actually related to the iPad Pro and pen stuff.
He says he works in VFX, which is visual effects.
And he says, by my rough estimate, somewhere around 50% of compositors use a Wacom or Wacom tablet instead of a mouse for RSI reasons.
And I see that a lot too.
People using a tablet, not just to do drawing stuff,
But to do everything in the computer, like they're using their tablet basically as a mouse to select menus, select tools from palettes, to move icons around on their desktop and the finder, whatever it is they're doing.
And that's relevant to the iPad Pro because recently Michael Johnson, Dr. Wave on Twitter,
uh i think it was him tweeted a picture of a bunch of people at pixar trying out the ipad pro apparently apple visited pixar and deposited some ipad pro hardware in front of the pixar artists and they got all got a chance to try it out and their reviews were pretty good uh i mean it's just tweets so there's not like some big article that you can uh read about the the uh
trial run of these things but the one thing i remember is they said that the palm rejection was really good which means like when you rest your hand on the surface of the tablet and then try to draw with the pen because you want to sort of steady the pen it doesn't think that your hand is a touch and suddenly draw things underneath where your hand is or move stuff around or whatever it just knows to take a look at the pen so anyway i am still looking forward to trying out this pen even though i don't really do any kind of illustration just because it looks neat uh and uh who knows maybe i'll get one someday
All right.
Let's see.
So Monty Good also wrote in.
He said, conventional wisdom seems to be that the only people currently using ad blockers are nerds, which is to say a subset of Internet users.
So I'm not understanding why the doomsayers think that an upcoming tweak to iOS, which is now here, is going to cause legions of people to do something that they are already not doing.
This is something I wanted to talk about, but then Marco had to go and call all the drums, as they say.
So we had to have a whole show about that.
But yeah, more broadly on the topic of ad blogging, I put this in here way before iOS 9 even came out, just because, like...
All of the discussion about ad blocking and the ethics of ad blocking and the possible effects in the publishing industry or whatever, I hadn't seen anyone really nail down what they expected to happen in terms of the number of people who run ad blockers.
Obviously, introducing this feature to iOS is really important because iOS is a big platform.
A lot of people use iOS, especially a lot of people who buy things use iOS.
and adding the ability to have blockers where once there was no ability to have them, at least with the built-in browser, is significant, but you're still left with the question, how many people do we think are going to install an ad blocker?
It's way easier to install one now.
You can install it by tapping a couple of buttons on your iPhone, but iPhone users are only, what, 20% of the smartphone market or 30%, less than that of the overall phone market,
And so even if you say 100% of iOS users are going to install an ad blocker the day iOS 9 comes out, which is totally not true, I'm going to say it's under 100%.
But even if 100% did, does that destroy publishing?
100% of desktop users can install an ad blocker right now.
What percentage of desktop web browsing people actually do install an ad blocker?
I don't have much experience with this except for reading things on the web.
And even I think like the nerdiest sites are only around like they're still under 50 percent ad blockers for like the very nerdiest, most paranoid, most privacy concerned readers.
Even those sites seem to only get around, you know, 50 percent or less of people installing ad blockers.
I would say for the general web on the desktop, it's well under 20% of people install ad blockers.
But I don't know.
I'm just pulling numbers out of my butt.
Anyway, in the spirit of pulling numbers out of our butt, what do we think is going to happen with iOS?
What percentage of iOS users are going to install some kind of ad blocker?
I would guess 10% to 20% closer to 10%.
Yeah, that sounds high.
If you say what percentage of iOS users will install anything, it's such a broad base of people.
Yeah, that's true.
I would say 10% would be a pretty good optimistic high estimate.
I mean, think about the most popular app on the phone is probably the Facebook app, the most popular third-party app.
Most likely Facebook, right?
If not YouTube, but probably Facebook.
Then how many people have that installed on iOS?
What percentage of iOS users have that installed?
Maybe half?
I don't know.
Maybe more?
I don't know.
I have no idea what to expect there.
But that's a massive app right there.
To reach half of iOS people, that's huge.
So yeah, I would guess...
on the order of 10% is reasonable to be an optimistic goal.
I think it will be a little bit higher than that eventually, mostly because it's not one app like Facebook or YouTube.
It's basically a category.
Do you have any kind of blocker installed?
And I think word will spread among the people who care about this stuff at all that, like,
get a blocker or whatever like you know pick a brand name or whatever brand name people is traveling around in people's social circles and like you need to install x because it makes stuff faster on your phone i bet people are going to be saying you need to install x because it makes facebook faster like the facebook app which is probably not true i don't think facebook actually uses any uh
web views that would honor the content blocker but either way right that's that's a big problem though that's a big problem in in regular people's expectations of what this will do and won't do so keep in mind content blockers can't block anything that is not displayed in a safari view controller which people like twitter and facebook and everything are unlikely to use at least anytime soon if ever um especially as facebook is pushing more towards their own news format that shows in a custom way in their own app that isn't even a web browser
So that's problem number one.
Problem number two is you sell somebody an app that says this will block ads on your iPhone, but it doesn't block in-app ads, like ads that are not in a web view in an app.
It only blocks ads in Safari and Safari View Controller.
And as more and more browsing is happening in apps that aren't Safari...
And in some of these apps that have their own custom stuff that aren't just launching Safari view controller, the percentage of ads that, that people on mobile see that can be blocked by this is probably going down over time, not up.
Well, sure.
They're going to work around it, but I don't think it matters whether it actually blocks it.
It only matters that this, this sort of, it's kind of like quitting all your apps.
This sort of information slash misinformation starts traveling.
Yeah.
Think of the force quitting all your apps, which we've talked about many times before.
That travel has traveled pretty well.
It doesn't matter what effect it does or doesn't have.
All that matters is that people think it does something.
So I'm going to guess that the idea that you should install a whatever on your iPhone is
because it will make whatever better that idea has legs and that idea will get around and i think people will install a blocker and won't be able to tell whether it does anything and won't ever bother to uninstall it so i'm going to say that the percentage might be as high as like 20 like i'm willing to go up around that range
Keep in mind also, before I move on from this point, though, keep in mind also the process of enabling a content blocker after you've installed it is so buried and complicated that it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of those people you just mentioned install it and never actually turn it on.
That's a good point.
I'd forgotten about that part of the process.
All right.
So I guess we have to modify it to not how many people will install one, but how many people install it and also turn it on.
All right.
Now I drop my estimate down again.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I think 10% is optimistic.
All right.
Anyway, but all of our numbers that we're throwing out there are well below 50%.
And this is what I'm getting at.
And all the discussion and hemming and hawing about content blockers and all the New York Times articles or whatever, no one seemed to say, oh, and by the way, all this thing that we're kicking up a fuss about, 90% of the people aren't going to install one anyway.
So that, I think, is one of the most important underlying premises of any argument about what ad blockers are or aren't going to do to the economics of the web or whatever.
And I understand sites don't want to have 10% or 20% of their people not seeing their ads and that this is a problem or whatever, but it's not the sort of Armageddon doomsaying about ad blocking.
It's a little bit overblown unless the same people who are speaking doom and gloom are also going to boldly assert that
Doom and gloom is coming because X percentage of people are going to install it.
And because that percentage is, you know, equals doom and gloom.
Right.
And no one seems to ever want to nail it down.
No one's going to say all these bad things are going to happen.
And by the way, I think all these things are bad are going to happen because 5% of people are going to install ad blockers.
And guess what?
5% is enough to wipe out all publishing life on earth.
No one thinks it's going to be 100%.
And I think it's going to be a pretty low.
And I think this is an important move.
And I think it will have effects.
I'm not saying it's not going to do anything.
But every time I think about this issue, we're just guessing this way.
We're trying to figure out.
Uh, how many people are going to do this?
Uh, and I'm thinking meme wise, best case scenario, it spreads as far and wide as the force quitting your apps thing spreads, which is surprisingly far.
But even that one, I bet is less than 50%.
I bet if you just, you know, picked a 50% random iPhone users from the world, put them in a room and say, do you even know, like show them force quitting apps?
You can't say words because they won't know what force quit or whatever, you know, it's Mac lingo.
Show them the thing and say, do you know what this is?
Have you ever done this?
And I bet more than half will be like, I don't even know what you just did.
I don't know what that is.
I don't know why I would ever do that.
The other half would say, yeah, you do that because it saves battery.
I don't know.
I see a lot.
I'm not saying you're wrong about any stretch, but I see it a lot.
And just the other day when we were at a football game.
the person in the row in front of me would open an app, do his, his thing, then go to the task switcher and force quit the app every single time.
And it was maddening because I want to just be like, no, stop.
Apple needs to like, I don't know what Apple can do about that.
It kind of got away from them.
Like what can they do to stop people from doing that?
I think a fun thing to do would to make, make the app switcher.
I don't know.
Like,
make it make the the application disappear when you switch away from i don't i can't figure it out like once people know that it's there and they just like doing it just it's kind of like the same as the people who don't put their ios devices to sleep but shut them down every time they're done using them and then like five minutes later they boot it up again then they shut them down there are people like that yep then they boot them up and they shut them down and they're they're annoyed by how long it takes they got to see the apple logo it takes so long
oh man what do you do to stop that like you can show them the other way or you can try to convince them and they'll just like they'll just say i i like doing it this way i like it to be off i like it to be completely off i don't like the idea of that it's on i don't know anyway um yeah so this is this uh i have more to say on ad blockers but i think we've talked about them enough on past shows maybe we'll circle back to it
Later on, when we get to I mean, because I think we're going to eventually start getting numbers like the second round of stories about this are going to be like, so iOS 9 has been out for six months.
And here's a bunch of popular websites.
And here's what they say about iOS users using iOS 9 or percentage, you know, like we'll get numbers on it.
So we'll circle back then.
Well, speaking of, our friend Ben Thompson is in the chat and has said that over 50% of Stratechery, he did embrace Stratechery, right?
It's no longer Stratechery.
Anyway, over 50% of Stratechery users have ad blockers.
Now, to his own point, it's a very geeky audience, but he got these numbers apparently by comparing Google Analytics numbers versus server logs.
Well, I wouldn't say that's a great comparison because of various JavaScript things and bots and everything else.
But that's maybe a ballpark.
But I think also what we're going to see is we're going to see a really big spike in those percentages if people have been tracking them temporarily.
Because...
For the last few years, mobile traffic has been dominating so much that it's pretty common for typical sites to have over 50% of their traffic being mobile.
And for all these years so far, there really haven't been mobile ad blockers in any meaningful numbers.
So all of a sudden, 50% of your traffic is now able to get ad blockers where it couldn't before.
Well, it's not 50%.
If it was 50% mobile, then that was like half Android and half iOS, depending on what kind of website you run.
And the Android people, I'm assuming, have always been able to get ad blockers.
Is that not the case?
I don't know.
I don't think... I should have researched it.
From what I've heard, I don't think there's like a standard reasonable system way to do it besides like some kind of like rooted thing that like interferes with DNS at the system level or something like that.
But I don't think there's like a common way that people do it.
Well, there probably will be if there isn't already.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't think Google will necessarily be leaving those hooks all over the place.
Yeah, but anyone can ship anything on Android, right?
I don't know.
We should ask the people on an Android podcast to find out.
But anyway, all we're talking about is iOS.
And again, in the circles we travel and in the friends we have, a lot of them run sites where the vast, vast, vast majority of people who are coming on mobile are coming on iOS.
And the vast majority of people who are coming on desktop are coming on Macs.
Yeah.
it's a strange little world when i was talking about sites that i thought like barely started to push over to zero i'm talking about as mass market as you can get like a i'm gonna say slash dot and feel old or whatever but you know ars technica slash dot uh you know slash dot was never mainstream but yeah back in the day it was it was all we had um sites that sites that are are bigger than like an individual person's blog like even just like daring fireball would be considered in the small camp because yeah it's big for a one person thing but it's not like uh you know
an institution with lots of writers and 15 articles a day and, you know, so on and so forth.
All right, one last quick piece of follow-up, and then let's talk about all the new things that happened today.
Ruggedized phones.
Yeah, this was in response to a couple of shows ago.
I was trying to articulate for the millionth time this thing that I should have written down in a blog 17 years ago.
The idea that product manufacturers can gain fanatical loyalty by making their products excel in a few ways and really sticking to that over the years.
And one of those ways is...
uh rugged design uh durability uh it doesn't have to be look fancy doesn't have to be the best doesn't have to be the cheapest but if you have something that is reliably rugged whether it's fisher price toys getting a reputation for like you buy this toy and the kid won't be able to break it or i use craftsman although people say craftsman has gone downhill or whatever
over the years if you really stick to that core value you can you'll get very loyal followers um and i said it's a shame that was no one's doing that for phones because all the phones are pretty delicate and elegant and you know they're going for something different like stylishness and chicness and plus they got to make millions of these things so they're not gonna you know so where is the the uh narrow focus manufacturer that's really concentrating on ruggedized phones it's certainly not apple
uh well so here's one example that someone sent in sorry i lost the name since this was a feedback from a while ago this is sonim or sonim and the example products is a sonim xp7 uh which is a phone it looks like a rugged phone it's just an android phone with like tons of crap all over it but it's like the things they claim about a long battery life uh usable with gloves on drop and impact resistance oil and chemical resistant temperature resistant extreme pressure resistant protection from microparticles
with powerful audio waterproof and puncture resistant so here is a you know if you're going out in the woods and you want to have a smartphone with you uh and you don't want to try to get an iphone with like a screen protector in a case someone is actually making ruggedized phones uh this is a little bit more extreme this is a little bit like those tough book things or those laptops that people make for the military and stuff like that i'm thinking more along the lines of like ll bean or whatever where it's regular person clothes
But they have a reputation for, if not durability, then at least standing behind their stuff.
And with like a zipper rips on your LL Bean jacket, you can get it replaced because they basically think that should never happen.
And if it does, come to us and show us and we'll give you a new jacket or whatever.
Now we're going to hear from those people.
Yeah.
the all being people i don't know anyway um i'm glad that uh i mean this is another advantage of android ios is like whatever apple decides to make and if apple decides they don't want to make a smallish phone that's a little bit thicker that has longer battery life tough luck you can't get one with ios like that but android uh has room for people to make different kinds of products and so here someone decided there's a market for ruggedized phones and they're using android to do it
i think most people just use cases to achieve these kind of goals well you can't i mean look at the goals like you can't achieve these kind of goals with just cases you can get pretty close cases can be surprisingly good yeah i mean i guess you just encase the phone in a loose side brick or something like then you're good to go but uh this is trying to be integrated where it doesn't just look like uh a phone with you know i don't know how good these phones are i've never tried them or whatever but i'm i'm glad it's out there and uh it's good to see the market trying to find uh
some way to to fill the needs that a small group of people have but i still think it would behoove all like the major manufacturers whether it's google or apple or samsung or whatever samsung was actually doing pretty good too but they were one of the first ones the big vendors to to tout the fact that they make waterproof phones but they didn't look waterproof they were
uh and now people are taking iphone 6s's and dunking them in water and saying it's kind of waterproofish anyway don't put your phone in water don't put your iphone in water if you can help it our first sponsor this week is cards against humanity and as usual cards against humanity rather than doing an ad read has asked us to have john review a toaster
around about this time i think i should have uh jason sneller somebody sing toaster or not because something arrived at my house and it was a very large box and on the outside of the box it said microwave and convenience oven toaster or not toaster or not
I gotta say that this box was not any bigger than the biggest toaster boxes I've gotten.
So it was like comparably sized to the large toasters.
And the picture on the outside of it looked like, I don't know what that is.
Maybe it's like a toaster microwave combination.
I've already got, had a toaster oven slot toaster combination.
Maybe this is one of those things.
This is, how do I get the model number here?
This is the LG LCSP1110ST.
I know that model.
Of course.
The LCSP11110ST.
It's the best.
Yeah.
I'll put the link in the show notes.
You can take a look at it.
Oh, my God.
It's huge.
It's really big.
I mean, I gave the inch measurements, but it is really big.
It looks like a microwave with a cash register, cash drawer below it.
Exactly.
So it's a microwave on top.
You know, the microwave door and a bunch of number pads and all that other stuff.
And then underneath the thing is a silver sort of pull-out handle tray thing.
and what you know before i unpacked this thing i had one idea about what it might be and then as i unpacked that i realized what it actually was is literally just a plain old microwave with like a little rotating dish and all the other stuff and some really bad ui on the controls and then underneath it is a very very flat sort of miniature oven that you couldn't put anything in that's any higher like the whole thing it's had about is you can put pizza in there or chicken nuggets but that's about it like
You pull out the drawer and it's maybe an inch or two of clearance in there.
Put something in there.
It's got like a little pan that you have to use.
I guess you could put something else that's not on a pan in there.
But anyway, you can't see anything when it's inside there.
You just slide it in that little slot thing.
gets really hot really fast because it's a small area but this is not a toaster you can't really make toast in this it doesn't claim to be a toaster it's a convenience oven although this convenience oven is the least convenient oven ever because the only thing you can really cook in it is things that are very flat or frozen pizzas and the controls are like the controls are inscrutable i don't want to dwell too much in the controls because i have one other thing i really want to yell about about this thing that is not related to the functionality and
But the controls are like, press this one button repeatedly, and each one of these buttons corresponds to some kind of weird preset.
So, like, press it once, and it'll be this temperature.
If you press bake once, it's 425.
If you press bake twice, it's 400.
If you press bake three times, it's 375.
If you press bake four times, it's 350.
Like, A, you would never guess that.
And B, I mean, it has the display, and it shows you.
But B...
You've got a number pad for crying out loud.
Why are you making me hit like, it's got like auto bake, auto defrost, press the pizza button.
Yeah, it has an auto pizza button.
Yeah, and you press that multiple times for different kinds of pizza.
It's like, seriously, just, it's all just voodoo.
Like you really just want, at least a microwave works normally.
The microwave, you punch a bunch of numbers and it's start and the numbers are like, you know, fill the thing with minutes and seconds and that works in a straightforward way.
So anyway, the microwave part of it is really small.
It's only about one cubic foot.
inside the microwave part uh but the overall device is very large i removed my other microwave to make room for this thing and it barely fits it's much taller than my other microwave and about as wide and as deep but the inside is smaller so it's very space inefficient you really have to be getting a lot of use out of that slide out drawer miniature pizza oven thing to make this worth your while
i you know i i can't think of anything that i'd ever want to use it for uh and the microwave is only what is it uh 1100 watts which is pretty wimpy for a microwave the oven part is 1400 watts i just i should have done this i didn't try running them both at once i probably would have blown the circuit breaker no maybe not i don't know anyway um so i'm gonna i'm gonna declare this not a toaster it is not a toaster oven it is not a slot toaster uh and i'm not entirely sure who this is for and holy cow
300 200 and something dollars 289 dollars that is i mean it's not a bad microwave we can use it to warm up dinner tonight it's fine like it's small uh but it's the microwave part of it is fine like i said the ui is not too messed up but the oven thing why is that even there maybe if you have frozen pizza a lot it will heat up faster than your big oven but you better hope your frozen pizza is small to fit in that drawer if it's a family size frozen pizza it is not going to fit i just think this is a bad
It's not a refrigerated toaster, and it's still probably slightly more practical than the hybrid slot toaster oven, but this is not a toaster oven.
It doesn't really make toast, so I give this a thumbs down.
But all that aside, there's one other thing that I think is the strangest, worst thing I have ever seen ever.
It's in my entire life for people like me and perhaps for people like you took this thing out of the box.
Right.
And on the front, if you're looking at the picture of it on the front of it, there's like a brush stainless steel part and had that like static cling plastic on it.
You know, they put over stuff so it doesn't get scratched up in shipping.
And I'm peeling off the static cling plastic and it's a little bit difficult to peel off.
And I'm like, oh, maybe it's got stuck in the drawer.
So I pulled out the drawer and it turns out the static cling plastic had sort of like been tucked under the lip.
So you had to kind of pull the drawer out and pull the static cling plastic off of the inside of the lip of the drawer and stuff.
And that was a little bit annoying.
And then I looked at the top of it and there was a big sticker on top.
And I am I'm going to say I'm a person who always wants to remove stickers from everything.
But I'm going to go so far as to say everybody should remove stickers from everything.
If you buy something from the store, like a dustpan or a broom or a vacuum cleaner or anything, a garbage can, and it has a sticker on it, take the sticker off.
It's not there.
It's not supposed to be there for the next 30 years, as this garbage can says in your house.
The sticker is just like to advertise at you in the store.
It's not part of the product.
Please peel it off.
Manufacturers, please make that easy to do.
Anyway, there's a sticker on top and I start peeling it off and it's difficult to peel.
And I read the sticker and it's in like three different languages.
It says this product is coated with a clear vinyl for protection during shipping.
You must remove this vinyl before using the product.
Otherwise, moisture will build up inside and bad things will happen and blah, blah, blah.
now i'm looking around on the thing i'm like well i just peeled off all the static thing stuff from the front and that was a little annoying is that what they were talking about but then it says no start peeling on back right edge and i looked on the side and there's vents in the side of the thing and the vents like i put stick my fingers in there's no plastic blocking the vents so it's not as if the entire vents were blocked up but i was concerned because the bottom pizza part gets hot like when you use it it heats up considerably um so i didn't want to like have some plastic slowly melting to the thing and that would be gross and
So I go to the back right bottom edge and I find the little edge of it.
I'm like, oh, this entire like top, you know, it's all silver all around the whole thing.
The entire top and sides is coated with this peel off clear plastic.
It's really hard to peel.
And I start sort of getting the edge and starting to peel the thing off.
I think it's going to be like one of those big things like a cable sassers.
What does he call it?
Competitive peeling where he likes to peel off the big protective films in one big thing.
So anyway, I'm peeling the thing off and I realize what's happening here.
The top part of this oven thing, I don't know if you can see it in the pictures, this entire sort of silver top back case had this clear vinyl stuff stuck to it before assembly, like on all edges.
Oh, no.
Then they assemble the thing, and now they want you to peel it off.
And as you peel...
it's impossible to get off cleanly because it's tucked in, like, as the pieces meet together, the vinyl is tucked inside it.
So if you're trying to peel this thing off, there is literally no, and if you are sort of an anal retentive or obsessive compulsive person or like a neat, I'm using those words, those are not the technical correct terms.
If you are the type of person who likes things to be neat and tidy,
You are either doomed to have a thing in your house that annoys you forever or to spend 17 hours with tweezers trying to pull this plastic crap out of the seams.
Please, appliance manufacturers, never do this.
It's cruel.
It is cruel and unusual.
Oh, my goodness.
either either people aren't going to pull the vinyl off they're going to ignore that sticker and it's going to be there forever and it's probably fine because like i said there are holes put in the vents i don't see how it could have been a big deal or once you start peeling it and you realize what you're in for you're like oh no like and so the thing is like this clear and it's all i can do every time i go over that it's to stop trying to pick one of those little things start picking of course as you pick it out and it stretches and it rips all it does is make the thing so small that you can't grab it anymore like the little tufts and oh
The worst... I believe this is the worst thing... The worst thing that's ever happened to me from an appliance unpacking experience.
If I had bought this, I would have returned it immediately.
Not that I ever would have bought this.
Anyway.
LG, I don't know what you are thinking.
Like, I just... And never mind the fact that if there's any part of this that gets hot, like the parts that are down near the bottom, it's going to slowly melt that plastic that's caught between the seams.
Holy cow.
I should take... If I had better, like, macro photography skills, I would take a picture of this thing.
It's just...
It is the worst.
So anyway, not a toaster.
Terrible vinyl wrapped around the whole thing.
Giant thumbs down.
Is it a robot?
Not.
Toaster or not.
Thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring our show once again.
All right.
So today was it, I believe?
It was today within the last day or two as we record this.
The Apple Music free trial ended for those of us who are day one adopters.
Did you guys renew?
Yes or no?
I did not.
I did.
I'm still on the fence, but I still use it occasionally.
I probably don't use it $10 or $15 a month worth, but I do use it occasionally.
What about you, John?
Did you even do the trial?
I did.
I did the trial, and for the most part, I was enjoying it.
I've never used a streaming service before.
Casey, you were in the same boat, right?
No, you used Spotify, right?
That's correct.
I used Spotify.
Anyway, I'd never used a streaming service before, and so just the novelty of like, oh, I can go listen to any song I want whenever I want was interesting.
And that part mostly worked.
And I did look at the recommendations and a little for you section and tried to do some discovery stuff there.
I kind of enjoyed wandering through their playlists and laughing at their playlists.
I did discover Lana Del Rey, who I had never heard of before through these lists.
And I what I did when I discovered an artist that I like is I just bought songs because I, you know, I didn't want to just say, oh, add these in my collection and then have to figure out later when if I didn't renew.
Like, you know, so anyway, I just found the songs and I bought them the old fashioned way, like for $1.29 each.
Uh, and so now when I didn't renew Apple music, all those songs were still there and I didn't renew, not because I didn't like it.
It's just because I didn't like it, whatever it is, like $15 a month worth.
Like it was not working out economically speaking for me because I do like a way to discover music, but you know, realistically speaking, uh,
You can discover music.
You can search for it anywhere.
You can use some other streaming service.
You can just ask friends and then go illegally download a song and then buy it when you find the artist that you like.
There are other ways to do music discovery than Apple Music.
And Apple Music wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either.
I don't know.
I kind of like the idea that I could play whatever I wanted.
It's just a little bit too expensive for me.
the bugs that everyone complained about i didn't get hit by any of those but i was wary of them always mostly because i think my music collection doesn't suffer from the things like a poor jim dalrymple who's got like 50 versions of the same song from different albums and album music gets all confused i generally don't have that problem if i do have lots of copies of the same song they're like from cd rips and i name them differently and itunes is not confused by them because it can't make heads or tails of them so just going by my metadata which is all distinct
um and apple music really just maybe it's because apple music like i said uh early on when we were talking about the service just doesn't have enough of the obscure stuff that i like like it's it's selection of it's selection of mashups for example is not great because most of those are illegal uh and it's selection of video game music is not really that great or movie soundtracks it's a little bit better with but anyway i would like to continue to do it but i'm i've just
i couldn't justify the class i almost did it i almost said you know what i'm you know i like it i do like it but just i just look at the price and i say i do not like it 15 a month worth i just don't i like itunes match 25 a year worth easily so i'll just keep renewing that until they cancel the program and then i'll be sad um but
No, didn't didn't renew it.
But through no real fault of Apple Music, I tried Spotify back in the day.
I'm just not the way I listen to music.
It just doesn't lend itself to getting a lot of value out of streaming services because I'm very particular and I want to sort of pick the songs that I like.
And occasionally I want to go out into the wider world, find new songs or new artists they like, and I just bring them back to my collection and I listen to them there.
So.
sorry apple music but uh you know and it was a little bit annoying when it was expiring because it kind of let me still use the ui and it kept bringing up this dialogue that says apple music is expired i'm like well fine hide it from the ui for me why do i have to go on why do i have to go on ios and say show apple music yes no once it's expired stop showing it i don't know anyway they're just trying to get me to resubscribe but
uh i i'm glad i had successfully done figured out how to stop the auto renew because a few times i was paranoid about that this auto renew really off is this going to auto renew i you know it didn't auto renew everything was fine yeah they don't make that incredibly easier clear but i don't know i i think apple music on the whole is i i wouldn't necessarily say it's quite this bad but it's kind of like apple's surface
where they really tried to have this no compromises, everything all in one thing with iTunes and your local music and iTunes Match and Apple Music and throw in the Kinect thing, which I don't know if anybody's using that, like all the social stuff.
So they're trying to throw all this stuff into one product.
And the usability, I think, suffered tremendously, first of all.
Even if everything worked properly all the time, which it doesn't, but even if it did work properly all the time, it is a design disaster.
It is really, really hard to use, to figure out, to know what mode you're in and where your music is and whether you have your music or not.
It is really tough.
And it's part of that.
I think it's a really big problem to be solved and no one could have designed it well.
But
They also didn't design it that well.
I think it could have been designed better, but even in the best implementation, it wouldn't have been great just because the problem is too weird and complex to cram into a good design.
But it is very confusing.
It does have a lot of functionality, but it's very hard to find it, and it's very unreliable.
In my experience...
playing playing songs off of it like i'll play through a whole album and every third or fourth track will either be skipped or it will stop in the middle and then it'll advance to the next one like it's very unreliable for me is that over cellular no that's on my desktop at home
So I didn't have that problem.
Like, I tried it over cellular a few times, and I'm always in these zones where I get, like, one dot on my stupid cell signal, so I blamed it on that.
But desktop, it's always more or less worked for me.
I haven't had any big delays.
The songs start playing immediately.
Never skipped, never did.
Maybe I was just lucky.
I'm obviously not a heavy user, and I have heard people reporting what you said, but that's the thing with, like...
things that have that are uh largely or in this case like primarily a server-side phenomenon depending on what the weather is like in iCloud you know like if it's bad weather when you're trying to do it it's a piece of crap and nothing works right and if it's good and again it goes back to like the bits on your disk are the same as the bits on my disk but depending on what the weather is like an apple server farm that day it could just totally not work and be a piece of crap and then when i do it everything could be fine because it's a different time and it's you know
The servers are responding now.
They're actually, you know, or maybe I'm getting different ones because it's like, you know, GYP routing for a different CDN or whatever the hell it is.
That's the frustrating and inscrutable thing about cloud services.
It's like it's not just one thing that you can get your hands on.
It really is more like the weather.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of problem where Apple historically has done very badly.
They really aren't as good as the other tech giants at making sure that things that are dependent on internet infrastructure and CDNs and everything being different in different places, making sure that works well for the most number of people.
Apple traditionally is not very good at that.
Netflix does it way better.
amazon and google do it way better um facebook i think is you know their own their own universe over there they do it fine i mean it just seems like this is the kind of thing that apple does not do very well uh and they haven't it's an insidious problem because you can imagine complaining to like an apple executive like hey i tried to use your thing and it didn't work or whatever and
They could be like, I'm totally going to fix that for you.
That's unacceptable.
I've got to have that work.
And so maybe they'll try it themselves and it will probably work.
And they'll go back to the team and they'll be like, this person said this thing happened and, you know, whatever.
And they'll be like, well, you know, what are you talking about?
Everything's fine.
Like, it's always fine when you look like after the fact.
And if it was just bad weather that day, they're like, well, you know, if you're not if you're not really obsessive about everything,
metrics and and measuring measuring the actual experience of all of your users it's very easy to convince yourself and others inside the company that everything's fine because look at our uptime it's like this number of nines and we are we are always up and we're always responding and our response times are good and so on and so forth it's like uh what is the end user experience
maybe your servers are up but maybe your network routing is messed up or maybe for some point there was some corrupted cdn that was giving bad uh data that was causing the thing to repeatedly retry or whatever if that stuff isn't visible to you you can think everything is great you can think all your all the metrics all the things that you're measuring are great every time an executive gets angry and checks for him or herself everything is fine uh but then when you go to the engineering team they're like
Uh, you know, and you try to tell them what the problem is like, well, show me, show me what's wrong.
And every time, you know, every time an active executive does it, it works great.
Right.
Or maybe it doesn't work for a second, but they try it again and it works.
I'm like, Oh, I guess everything's fine.
It's so easy to convince yourself that there's nothing that needs to be done because you don't have the same experience as someone else had, or you have it for a second and then it gets better.
And it's like, well, I guess this is fixed forever.
I never need to look at this again.
Um,
Um, it's, you know, server side stuff, you have to have a different philosophy than you do with like making products is making products.
You look at them, how they come off the line and they measure like return rates and stuff.
And I think they have a handle on how to figure out whether they're making quality products in that way.
But for server side stuff, I think they just don't have, I feel like if they had the metrics, um,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because there are lots of things that are awesome about Apple and iOS devices, and we all love them.
But that can hide the fact that, as Marco has said, and I think as we all kind of feel, they're a little bit behind everyone else in the cloud stuff in terms of reliability.
Not a lot.
It's not a piece of crap.
It works, you know, most of the time.
In fact, the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it's like...
But when it doesn't work, it is just so infuriating.
And you can only do that a certain number of times before people are like, you know what?
I'm just going to use Dropbox because Dropbox failed me once in the three years I've used it.
And this has failed me once in the one year I've used it.
Therefore, you are bad.
Like, what do you mean?
Once in the year we have five nines where blah, blah, blah.
It's like, yeah, but Dropbox seems more reliable.
And I don't know.
That's that's the world of server side.
It's tough.
You know, to come back to why not renew Apple Music, in my case anyway, I loved the Siri integration.
Being able to say, you know, Siri, play such and such album or play songs by such and such artist.
That was awesome.
Really, really liked it.
I also kind of liked being able to say, you know, I really like this album.
Just treat it as though I own it.
And I know that's a very polarizing approach.
Some people love that.
Some people hated it.
I liked it.
But what I kept coming back to was, I just didn't care for the way in which you find music within iTunes.
And I know it's so obvious to complain and moan about iTunes, and so I'm not going to go on about it.
But suffice to say, I just really didn't care for the interface in iTunes.
And I really like Spotify's UI.
I mean, it has its own problems, for sure.
But
if I want to find and play a piece of music in Spotify, it's very quick and very easy.
And I found an Apple music on both the Mac and on iOS.
Maybe it's just, I think differently.
Maybe this is another example of Twitterific versus tweet bot.
You know, in that sense, I come down from in the tweet bot camp.
Twitterific is somewhat inscrutable to me.
And in this case, I come down in the Spotify camp.
It doesn't mean that Spotify is by necessity better.
It's just, it works better for my brain.
And so that's why I'm not renewing.
um plus i'm kind of the dj for the house so i didn't need to worry about family things aaron very rarely listens to music that isn't on the radio so and in beats one was not her thing so that's why i did it but there's certainly a lot to like with apple music for sure and i don't want to lose sight of that because there's it is pretty damn magical to say play songs by you know bill withers or something and next thing you know you're listening to some pretty good uh pretty good music so there's stuff like just wasn't for me
I like the aesthetics of Apple Music better than Spotify.
The one time I tried Spotify maybe six months ago for an extended period, I don't know if it was their weird icon or the color or the way the UI looks.
It just looked like it was like a weird non-native web.
So I guess all the stuff on iTunes is webby stuff.
Anyway, just taste-wise, it seemed it didn't match my taste as well as the Apple Music stuff does.
Functionality-wise, it was fine, but it seemed a lot like I was using like...
I don't know, like a weird... It was like a GUI made with Linux or something.
It didn't look right, it didn't fit, and it was not pleasant to look at.
Apple stuff is always pleasant to look at, but a lot of it I would struggle to find the UI, or I'd say, like, all you've got is a big giant play button on this recommended...
playlist for me it would be nice to have more functionality here until i click into it or whatever but i thought whoever did like the sort of it's basically web design whoever did the web design for apple music did a pretty good job they have a lot of nice artwork uh and most of the things they present you have i'm always surprised the amount of sort of custom artwork they have available for for artists and playlists and stuff uh
They did a lot of work to basically a graphics for even the most obscure artists, not just album art, but also background images, pictures of the artists and stuff like that.
So and color themes and all the other stuff they do.
It's actually something inside iTunes that I think looks nice, which is a nice change.
All right.
Any other thoughts, Marco, or are you good?
No, I think I'm good.
I mean, I'm going to keep using it because I do like... When I want to go explore and find new artists, I do like being able to go and play their entire album straight through, or at least most of the songs, or the first half of most of the songs before they die and cut out.
That part is very frustrating.
But I do like the idea of being able to play through an entire album before I buy it.
That being said...
It's just so half-assed.
All of Apple Music is so half-assed.
I feel like I should probably try something else instead.
And ultimately, unfortunately, Apple Music has really destroyed the iOS Music app.
It hasn't done as much damage to desktop iTunes.
Desktop iTunes I can still use my way and it mostly doesn't get in the way.
If canceling my membership to Apple Music would restore the iOS music app to the way it was before, I would do it in a heartbeat.
It seems like Apple Music is here to stay and it's going to keep taking prominence in Apple's stuff because it is an important business interest they have.
So the business needs of Apple Music are going to keep influencing the direction of music and music integration on all of their platforms.
And they've shown repeatedly that they're very, very happy to destroy iTunes and iOS music app usability in the name of promoting the new thing they're doing in music.
And right now it's Apple Music, and that's probably going to be the thing for a while.
I wish things were better there.
I wish either that they didn't destroy it in the name of Apple Music or that just Apple Music was better than it is.
And maybe over time it will get better.
I hope it does.
We're still ripe for, as we talked about when Apple Music was announced, we're still ripe for a photos-like simplification and unification of music.
They're close to it now.
They're lurching towards it with iTunes Match and Apple Music.
They've done a reasonable integration of like, hey, if you sign up for Apple Music, you have the access to all this music.
and you can say whether you like it or not, and like Casey said, you can add it to your collection, and now it's like your music, and you can actually also still buy it so that if you, like I did, so if you unsubscribe from Apple Music, these songs don't go away because you actually bought them, but you discovered them through Apple Music.
They're close.
It just doesn't need to be 17 different plans all integrated with each other.
It just needs to be one unified interface where...
Every single song in the world is either part of your music, part of your music that you own or go like, I mean, it's it's basically conceptually the same as what it is now.
Like, I'm just describing exactly what the situation is now, but it's complicated now because it is there's iTunes with nothing.
There's iTunes match, which you pay for separately, and there's Apple Music, which you pay for separately.
and there are separate tabs that you go to that are specific to Apple Music, then there are ones that are just your music, then there's a hybrid.
Like, I'm not subscribed to Apple Music anymore, but I still have the hearts next to my things, and I can click on them, and it encourages me.
It says, yeah, click on more hearts, because that will tell us what kind of songs you like.
I'm like, you're not going to recommend anything to me anymore because I'm unsubscribed from Apple Music, and there's still iTunes... Oh, I forgot about iTunes Genius.
There's still iTunes Genius, or maybe is the genius using the hearts?
That's still there?
There's a lot... I don't know.
There's a lot of crap in there, and so I think they've got all the functionality.
It just needs to be like...
you know history eraser button clean slate and say okay we're finally admitting that music collections live in the cloud like photos uh we keep the the canonical copies you can tell your mac to download all them like basically what they did with photos only with much much better performance please and fewer bugs um but like they have conceptually they have everything that they need they finally agreed that
the files on your disk aren't the canonical copy that they can kind of do you know itunes match itunes in the cloud matching things and they just need to get better about like the sort of keeping track of everything they did hey we found this this file on your computer on this date and this was the file and we're never going to get rid of it we're going to preserve it forever but by the way if you would like to replace it with this drm free 256 you know kilobit blah blah song you can but if we did the wrong matching for us tell us you can get your old one back like
i feel like anybody who's used any of these features can spec out everything that they want and it's a massive simplification if you just say this is not seven programs and 15 features this is one thing they should have just called it apple music just like it's called photos or whatever it's one thing and there are different things that you can pay for for different services and it is completely unified and it's just like a cloud-based music library uh with streaming features and all those stuff so
I don't know if that also has to come with an iTunes rewrite.
I don't know if that has to come with a back end rewrite as they slowly unify, you know, iTunes genius, iTunes match and all the other stuff.
But I think we are going in the right direction.
We're just we are in a transitional phase now.
Our second sponsor this week is Harry's.
Go to Harry's dot com and use the promo code ATP to save five dollars off your first purchase.
Harry's offers high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of the big razor brands.
Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg.
They went and bought an old razor factory in Germany, modernized it all up, and made these high quality, high performing German blades that they now sell to you at a fraction of the price of the big brand prices that respect your face and your wallet.
So Harry's offers factory direct pricing.
This is about half the price of the typical big brand blades like, you know, like the Gillette and everything.
It's about half the price.
Plus, you just order them online.
There's no going to the drugstore, having the person unlock the stupid shoplifting case and walk you to the register like a criminal.
There's nothing like that.
You order online and you get free shipping.
So the starter set is an amazing deal.
$15 gets you a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, your choice, and three razor blade cartridges.
When you need more blades, they're just $2 each or less.
So an 8-pack is just $15.
A 16-pack is just $25.
I would say these blades, in my experience, are very comparable to Gillette Fusion blades.
And if you look at these prices, 8 for $15, 16 for $25, Gillette Fusions are roughly double the price.
Harry's, literally, it's half the price, or less.
And I've been a huge shaving nerd before.
I've used double-edged safety blades from Feather and all the fancy companies that make those, all the way up to Fusion and Fusion Proglides and the various vibrating gimmicky ones.
I would say Harry's blades are the best value in the business, bar none.
They are just as good as Gillette Fusion blades, and they cost half as much, simple as that.
It is so affordable that, to me, you can actually do what I consider the holy grail of shaving, which is you can have a brand new blade every time you shave.
and it's not that unreasonable of a price to do that really check it out that this is the kind of thing that can really change your life to you know to have like a non-itchy face all the time great deal uh and all this is available right from harrys.com with free shipping and it's all really classy designs too this is like nice looking razors looks like it's right under the set of mad men like you know nice classy designs they're heavy they're weighty they really feel like quality not like these like you know plastic transformer things that you get at the drugstore
So check it out.
Go to harrys.com.
Once again, you get for $15 a handle, three blades, and shaving cream shipped to your door.
And if you use our promo code ATP, you can save $5 off your first purchase in addition to that.
So go to harrys.com.
Use promo code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.
Thanks a lot to Harry's for sponsoring our show once again.
Real-time follow-up.
You can get rid of what Apple calls loves.
They're not likes because like is not passionate enough for a company like Apple.
Apple loves music.
And also probably Facebook has a trademark on likes or whatever.
Anyway.
I think Eddie Q loves music.
Yeah.
So in iTunes, preferences under the general tab and preferences.
as a pop-up menu for ratings you can pick stars loves or stars and loves so i guess i can go to it and change it back to stars and not see the loves anymore but wait what's the difference oh the stars are the one through five i see yes and the loves are the hearts and the hearts are relevant to apple music i was doing that when i was you know going through their playlist and saying well i like this like that and so it can it can recommend songs for you and it encourages you says good keep clicking those hearts because that lets us know what you like and we can make better playlists for you but now that i'm not subscribed to apple music it's not going to be making any more playlists for me
unless itunes geniuses is still in there but it probably isn't i was disabled itunes genius because it always made itunes either crash or gobble up memory until memory was exhausted on my machine which was always fun and it would just i'd watch it in the process thing it would grow by like a gigabyte a minute right and that that has bad effects after not too many minutes um and the only way to get it to stop back in the day was for me to just uh uh
So deactivate genius.
I've had it off everywhere.
Like every time I launched iTunes, it'd be like trying to send genius data.
I'm like, no, stop.
Don't don't do that.
Whatever it is you're doing, you're not going to do it.
Well, stop.
Anyway, iTunes is confusing.
All right, then.
Do you know what?
Do you want to wear the pajamas with stars or would you prefer the pajamas with cars?
Read that book all the time.
What?
It's a Sandra Boynton book.
It's a reference.
Don't worry about it.
I know a lot of her books.
I don't know that one.
Night, night, little pookie.
Anyway, moving on.
So I received an iPhone 6s, and Aaron received an iPhone 6s.
Marco, I presume you and Tiff both received iPhone 6s.
That's right.
That makes everybody in the world except John.
That is correct.
I'm going to have one in the house eventually.
My wife's going to get one.
Just think of all the things you could be force pushing in the meantime.
Oh, I know.
I get to try one at work.
I was excited by it.
This is the big story, I think.
Now that everyone has their successes, you guys have it, and everyone else in the world who ordered on day one has their thing.
The word on the street is that 3D touch, please don't call it force touch anymore, is the bee's knees.
I would agree with that with an asterisk.
I think it's very cool.
I think it's going to be even cooler.
The problems I have with 3D touch, the biggest one is I forget that that's a thing.
And so I don't think to try it.
And the other problem is a lot of third party apps just haven't embraced it yet, which I mean, it's not third party developers faults.
They barely had any time with it so far.
But, like, when I discovered it in Instagram, I just thought it was the most amazing thing ever.
And I've been 3D touching all the things, which is kind of funny because most of the touch targets in Instagram that do have a 3D touch affordance are fairly small because they're text.
I really like the 3D Touch.
I think it's very, very cool.
I'm very anxious and excited to see what third-party devs do with it in the future.
And what was very interesting to me was somebody retweeted somebody else that I retweeted.
We'll put the link in the show notes.
Apparently, it's available via JavaScript as well.
So you can do this on the web as well.
I don't know if that's going to be useful or not, but I just think that's kind of cool that it's exposed, whether or not anyone ever does anything neat with it.
Yeah, I have a similar problem as you where I keep forgetting that it's a thing I can do.
But I'm sure over time that we'll all get used to it and consider it a really cool shortcut.
There is a significant discoverability issue with it where there's really no way to tell that something can be forced to touch without just pushing all over the place and just seeing what happens.
And I kind of worry that it's going to be a little bit like the early days of Siri where we're going to try it on a bunch of stuff, most of it's not going to work, and then we're just going to forget to try it again for a while.
Yeah.
you know like i like that happened a lot with siri at the beginning um where you know it would it would fail a couple times and you're like well i guess i'm not going to try that again but even siri like i think uh 3d touch has the same the same effect as siri and that people were like well siri's messed up and doesn't do what i want but i still use it to set timers but i still use the set reminders like everyone found like the one really really easy thing they can have siri do so maybe people are going to like 3d touch everything not not find any new places to use it but the two places where they do use it they're going to use it there all the time siri still can't start the stopwatch
i know i know i also can't set reminders for i for what is it 10 minutes whatever its frequency is it drives me nuts sorry i can't set something that frequent why why can't you do it wait what do you have to be reminded of every 10 minutes stir the sauce man of course remind me to stir the sauce every 10 minutes and siri's like sorry i can't do that like you don't care about my sauce siri you just want it you just want it to stick you just want it to burn on the bottom i'm so glad i asked
So seriously, that is my use case for it.
And so then what I have to do is in 10 minutes, remind me to stir the sauce in 10 minutes.
And then it does.
And then I got to set another reminder for the next 10 minutes.
I don't understand how this is better than setting it every 10 minutes.
Speaking of iOS things that are good, I guess maybe they're the only thing I can think of is like.
then it's going off all the time and people don't know how to stop it or whatever uh that's the only logic i can think of or maybe they're afraid it's going to hurt battery life i have no idea anyway uh i had someone today who had a problem with their iphone and wanted to uh come over and have me look at it and see if i could fix their iphone i'm like oh what is this going to be maybe they
got their thing wedged or they're going to need their whole machine re-imaged or they're going to have to do an iTunes backup locally and then restore from the backup or force an application to download or do something like that.
Uh, no, what actually happened is they had triple tap the home button and enabled voiceover.
And they're like, it's like, all it does is say everything that's on the screen.
It was iOS six.
Anyway.
Uh, yeah, I, I turned that off for them.
Uh, but yeah, I guess that's the thinking behind the, uh,
not every 10 minutes but uh anyway so we'll circle all you back to 3d touch uh yeah i think that's as i said in past shows the lack of discoverability is going to be a detriment especially in the beginning when uh apps haven't implemented so you have to experiment like boy i wonder you know the first update comes and they say they have 3d touch support i wonder what the hell they did or does this app have 3d touch support i'll just start shoving things um but the you know
The benefit is that if you're not into 3D Touch, my brief experience with the successes of friends that I've tried and from talking to people is that if you don't know 3D Touch exists, it doesn't bother you.
Like, it doesn't get in your way.
It is not an essential feature that you have.
Like, the lack of discoverability is a feature and a detriment.
it's a detriment to people like us who really want to be like power users and make sure we're using things and in the most efficient way and so we're going to be shoving our fingers into the screen to find out where we can use it but for everybody else if they don't know 3d touch exists it does not bother them at all and so it is completely invisible it's a feature that is a benefit if they know it's there and it is not a detriment uh
If they don't know it's there, which is the best kind of thing, because I can imagine someone will have a success for like a year and then someone will show them 3D touch on the camera or they'll do it accidentally once and be like, wow, that's great.
Although the default settings, I was surprised at how hard I had to press.
I don't know if anyone would do it accidentally.
The first time I tried to 3D touch something, I long pressed it and all the icons started wiggling because I wasn't pressing hard enough.
That's the defaults.
I knew it was there.
So it was a three settings like soft, medium, hard or whatever.
Also in the 6S, the Taptic Engine.
Really like it.
Can't really tell you why.
I just like it.
I feel like it's much crisper vibration.
I caught myself constantly mashing on the TweetBot icon on my home screen just to get that doo-doo-doo.
I find it so entertaining.
I don't know why.
It's the silliest thing in the world.
But I really enjoy the Taptic Engine.
I think it's well done.
It's worth a little bit of extra weight because that's what everyone's been saying, right?
That in the 3D touch sensors is the added weight over the 6.
Is that right?
Yeah.
uh some or maybe it could also just be the shell like the shell got thicker and a little bit heavier and stuff so yeah it's a little it's not it's only a handful of grams anyway so i think it's probably everything but i would imagine the screen is the majority of it because the the taptic engine is mostly air and it's probably less dense than the battery that it replaced
Yeah, that's probably true.
I did, when I first got the phone, I did immediately notice that it was, it felt substantially heavier.
I think that's unfair.
I think it was just heavier enough that I noticed it versus the 6.
Now that I haven't held my 6 in several days, I don't feel like it's any different at all.
I put the 6S in the Apple leather case that the 6 was in, and that seemed to be just fine.
It seems a little tighter, but nothing egregious.
So thumbs up for 3D Touch, thumbs up for the Taptic Engine.
Live photos, two thumbs as high as I can possibly reach.
I think it's extremely cool.
And the thing about live photos that I think is going to be really cool is looking at a live photo in a year or in two years or in three years.
Because, you know, I'm a very loyal user of Picture Life.
And...
As with many of these sorts of services, including the Photos app on iOS, if you 3D touch that on the home screen, you can look at the pictures you've taken a year ago or two years ago or six years ago or 10 years ago if your library goes back that far.
And I always love seeing those pictures.
When I wake up in the morning, that's one of the first things I do is go to the Picture Life app and look at those pictures because I always get great memories from them.
But there are definitely times that I will look at these pictures and have no frigging idea why I took that picture or what it was of.
And granted, live photos doesn't guarantee that that problem will be fixed.
But it certainly helps.
And seeing a picture of Declan just kind of sitting there looking adorable...
But then giving it a little push and seeing the context of that picture, it's just genuinely magical.
And I love it.
And the problem I have with live photos is that I love it so damn much that it almost makes me give pause to picking up my beloved Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera because I don't want to give up on that context on these pictures.
Aren't you annoyed by the low frame rate and low resolution?
Not really.
You will be in a decade.
Oh, absolutely.
I will.
But today, no.
And I think it's because I understand that we just well, I'm assuming I should say that we just don't have the grunt to be able to do all that at once.
But but yes, in a decade, I will be annoyed by it.
But I would probably still just appreciate having that context over having no context at all.
Yeah, I think it's maybe the grunt, but probably even more of a factor is the size.
If they cranked up the size, cranked up the frame rate, assuming this was technically possible, cranked up the quality of the compression or whatever.
then you know people take a lot of pictures if you turn all those pictures into three second videos that really adds up especially on 16 gigabyte phones anyway um yeah i think that has to be a factor i'm just thinking of like when my kids were born in babies and stuff i was recording them on mini dv tapes on my camcorder camcorders in standard def and they look awful i mean like that's that's just you know my my childhood pictures are like an
16 millimeter or whatever eight millimeter or whatever whatever size film as in you know video film type stuff was so yeah you can't help that that's going to be uh you know his ways but the thing about live pictures is it's going to be a gorgeous 12 megapixel photo surrounded by really low resolution sub 30 frame rate uh video so yep better than better than nothing and kind of uh neat but actually i'm casey i'm wondering how you decide
uh is it just a toggle on off like do live pictures all the time or is it on a per shot basis how do you decide what to make live pictures or do you even have that choice so in settings i think there's a general is it even available setting if memory serves um well it's it's just like hdr where it's it's a thing you push on during the capture screen and you can turn it on you can leave it on or you can turn it on and off shot by shot but it's it works just like hdr does
Yeah.
And that's what I was driving at is that there's a little kind of like button on the heads up display in the photos app that will let you toggle it on and off.
But I could have sworn I had seen that there was a live photos.
I guess I'm crazy.
I'm looking now and I don't see it anymore.
I thought that I'd seen just a general.
Can you do a live photo?
Yes or no in the settings app?
I think I'm wrong.
And what I was going to say is what Marco just said, that as you're taking a photo, as you're in the camera,
At the very top, there's what looks almost like a target.
I'm not really sure why this is the live photos icon, but it's on the top dead center, and that turns live photos on and off.
So what do you do?
Do you have it on all the time?
Yes.
No, it's on all the time.
I think also, by the way, I think I saw this on the web.
I haven't tried it myself, that even if you take everything in live photo mode, you can selectively, is this right, decide that after you've taken the live photo, you just want it to display as a regular photo in your collection.
i think that's right um seems like it'd be a simple thing to do it basically just saying just just show the picture ignore the live photo part of it even if it was recorded i don't think it deletes the live photo part of it i think it just toggles it off either way uh i that's that's a like auto hdr and other settings that are up there and the weird swipey interface in the apple camera
i imagine people are probably going to either have live pictures on all the time or turn it off especially in the beginning if they turn it on all the time and they fill their stupid 16 gigabyte phones with hundreds of tiny videos then maybe in their consultation with the apple genius and their frustration it'll come up and say well one way you can save space is to not do all these live pictures every time or maybe people will find it annoying because here's the other aspect of live pictures that i'm speculating about because i'm not using a phone that has them
If you have it on all the time, there are there is the high potential for situations when taking photos of adults where the before and after three seconds of video is not flattering.
And not that you don't want it, but I mean, some people are weird about having the picture taking at all.
You want to capture the instant when they're smiling, the instant before and after when they're making a weird face.
They're not like kids where they're cute all the time.
Like maybe they're not happy that you have those one and a half seconds bracketing the reasonable picture.
Right.
So I wonder if that's also going to be like a social issue.
If you have live photos on all the time, are people going to be wary when you're taking pictures of them that they they don't just have to be pleasant and smiling for an instant.
They have to make sure that they're not making a weird face three seconds on either side.
I don't know.
I mean, yeah, you make a fair point.
But I think in the end of the day, it's just going to be awesome to be able to, as I keep coming back to, have that context around the photo.
And even if it's somebody giggling beforehand or making a funny face, in some ways that almost makes the picture better.
So you have the still life posed picture, but the goofy face that led up to it or what have you.
I don't know, Marco, you haven't said much about it.
What do you think about all this?
So, Tiff sent me my first received live photos today.
She and Adam, she went to pick them up from school and they were out playing in a muddy baseball field near our house.
And she sent me a live photo of Adam stomping in a giant mud puddle.
And it was pretty cool to watch.
I kind of got it then.
I was like, oh, this is kind of nice.
Yeah.
It wasn't a video, really.
I mean, it was a very, very short video clip with a photo that previewed it, basically.
So an actual video would have done a way better job of showing the moment if it was intended to be in motion.
But it's a lot like the debate between, like you were saying, between using the iPhone camera versus using your fancy mirrorless.
And when you have your phone camera versus some other type of camera...
One thing that is relevant, that is important, is what are you going to actually use?
People say the camera that you have with you is the most important camera.
What are you actually going to use?
If you're actually going to take a picture and think about it and get out your mirrorless camera, great.
It'll be way higher quality than what you can get with your iPhone.
But the fact is you're not going to have it all the time, and so you're better off not missing a moment.
And just capturing it with something rather than waiting until you have the better camera out to capture it.
And so with live photos, I think it's going to be a similar kind of thing where it's like, yes, you are better off switching over to video mode and capturing a 4K video if what you want is to capture this moment in time in a moving format.
Like video, an actual intentionally shot video is going to be better at that for most cases.
but with live photos on, you can kind of, you can get like half of the benefit of a video with every picture without really having to think about it, without having to choose that mode.
So that I, I think you're going to get a lot more like, there are so many moments where you want to take a picture and then like, you know, afterwards, like, Oh, I wish that was, I wish I had a video of that also.
Like that happens a lot.
And so this does solve that.
And yeah,
I don't think it's the best implementation.
There's a number of implementation details that I would nitpick about.
The quality is a big one.
The fact is, it's good enough when you're looking at it on a phone.
And that is how most people are looking at most pictures these days, which is unfortunate because as technology gets better, as phones get bigger, as screens get better, these might not age very well compared to what they could be if they were higher resolution and especially higher frame rate would be nice.
uh but you know well well i assume we will solve that over time i really hope that that the the low resolution and low frame rate were decided for technical reasons of like this is what the sensor can do rather than we don't want to take up more space on our 16 gig phones that we keep selling i really hope that was the reason um so i don't know
I don't feel as bothered by the low frame rate nor the low resolution.
I agree with both of you.
In a perfect world, it would probably be better to have both.
But it just really doesn't bother me.
In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that part of the charm of it is...
is that it's really a picture that has a little motion around it and i think you hit the nail on the head marco that if you're trying to catch motion a live photo is not the right way to do it a live photo like i was saying before is to capture a single photograph that gives you a little bit of context around it
And if you really want to capture video, again, I couldn't agree more that the right way to do it is to capture video.
But I think the low frame rate and even to a lesser degree, the low resolution is kind of, I don't know, adorable in its own way because it's kind of janky in a kind of fun way.
I don't know.
That probably sounds really contradictory, but I kind of like it.
It's like Instagram and the filters.
You want it to look like old 70s type photo.
Yeah.
Right, except that you don't have the high-res original saved to your camera roll.
Yeah, fair point.
And also, it's not hearkening back to any real past that actually existed unless you're considering, like, remember what video looked like in 1990?
Digital video, it was low frame rate and crappy res.
Anyway.
It's almost vine-like.
Like, when you watch it, it's almost like a vine.
I mean, it's a lot shorter, and that's noticeable.
But the benefit of it, and you can kind of loop it a couple times, like, it is kind of vine-y, and I like that about it.
Did you know, is this an OS feature?
I was messing with my thing the other day.
I think it was in Twitterific, maybe.
And I was swiping my finger on the screen when an animated GIF was playing, and you could scrub back and forth on the GIF.
Is that an OS double feature for displaying GIFs in Safari, or is that an app feature?
I didn't think so.
You can go... It isn't just pausing it.
You can actually go back and forth?
Yeah, no.
I move my thumb back and forth, and we go forward, back, forward, back.
You know, it was a neat way to do it.
Anyway, yeah, that is another... That kind of...
that's not really an aesthetic that's an accidental aesthetic gif animations that that someone should do a phd thesis if they haven't already about gif animations how how we got to this point because like the history of gif the the dawning of gif resolutions the dormant phase and then having it come roaring back because every single freaking browser could play it it's like you know what i'm done with dealing with embedded video or flash i'm just gonna do everything as gif to
but it's 256 colors doesn't matter i'll use a different 256 every frame of animation but they're huge doesn't matter they play everywhere and that's all all that matters is it plays everywhere and it's just this incredibly backward stupid archaic format that nevertheless swept across the internet like a like a fire in the plains filled with dry grass and uh now we're kind of stuck with it anyway
uh just think uh in an alternate universe where apple was more a jokey company there would be animated gifs surrounding your 12 megapixel photo so uh thank goodness for small favors right at least it's only a low frame rate h264 video instead um so anyway the most important question that you guys might not know the answer to is what's the default you get an iphone 6s out of the box is live photos on by default or off by default i believe off
that's kind of a bummer because i feel like this is this is a i mean i guess it's easy to turn on but i i don't know how many people know how to use the i think it's not particularly intuitive the whole weird swipey interface to to you know going from videos to photos and turning auto hdr on and off i've seen a lot of people be confused with that i know how it works and i've accidentally switched modes a few times and had to you know take that extra second switch back and i find it frustrating i don't really like that ui
but it's kind of a shame live photos isn't on by default right neither is 4k video by the way that's good that shouldn't be on by default that's like well if you really want it you have it but this is like a they're gonna have tv ads for this that i'm never gonna see maybe they already do have tv ads for this showing hey live photos this is cool like people you know people with babies and teenagers will love this adults who don't want their pictures taken might not love it so much and you're gonna sit there with your dead photos and not enjoy the fun
Exactly.
You're dead.
Yeah, that would have been the political way to do it.
We're not going to call ours live photos.
Everything else is a dead photo.
We'll call them feature photos.
Right.
Feature photos.
Good grief.
Real-time follow-up, the gif thing you were talking about, as Jelly said in the chat, and as I confirmed by using his wonderful app, GifWrapped, that is not a system thing.
That must have been a Twitterific thing.
um moving on touch id super fast in the new phones i wouldn't go so far as to say instant i feel like most people that i've heard talk about it have said it's just so fast it's instant and i wouldn't say that i mean it is really really freaking fast noticeably fast or faster and so fast that i am extremely pleased by it every time i use it
But I wouldn't say instant.
One thing I did want to say, though, very quickly about that is I found an odd behavior.
And I'd be curious if those who are listening have heard this as well.
Feel free to tweet at me.
Don't worry about John and Marco.
I had the I had my iPhone plugged in my new success plugged into the wall via I believe it was an iPad charger and extension and then both Apple and not Apple USB to lightning cords.
And for whatever reason, I couldn't get my touch ID to work.
I couldn't get it to work.
Couldn't get it to work.
Tried relearning several different fingers.
Couldn't get it to work.
Couldn't get it to work.
In fact, it wouldn't even relearn the damn fingers.
And I was starting to get really bummed out because I thought, man, I've got a lemon.
And then for whatever reason, I unplugged my phone.
I don't know what possessed me to do this.
And everything started working instantly.
Okay.
I didn't think much of it because that was the only time I'd had it happen.
And then earlier tonight, Aaron had the exact same problem on her phone, which is also a success.
And I don't know if it's this particular charger.
I don't know if it's gross power coming into our house.
I wouldn't think so, but who knows?
But one way or another, this is two times now that we've had this issue where Touch ID just would not recognize our fingers.
until we unplug the phone.
So I don't know what that could be, but if you did have that experience, I'd love to hear about it.
So tweet me at Casey Liss.
That's Apple's new cord protection plan, subtly discouraging you animals from using your phones while they're plugged in because this is why your cords get destroyed.
At least that's one possible theory as I continue my streak of never having broken a 30-pin or a lightning cable in any way.
I've broken some 30 pins.
I don't know that I've broken a lightning, though.
I'm getting worried about our couch charging cable.
The end is starting to bunch up where it meets the stress boot.
It's starting to wrinkle.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of pictures of that phenomenon.
Do you ever use it plugged in when you're there?
um i i usually don't but um tiff and more importantly adam all the time do kids destroy everything yeah my son has bent the uh like he's got an ipad 2 that he uses and picture this way put the headphone into an iphone 2 put an apple earbud headphone to an iphone 2 and then slam it on the ground headphone and damn
uh so the headphone is bent now like it still works but if you hit the headphone in it it is bent just at the part where where you know it goes into the device does not not a good look this is the kind of and the the smart cover is slowly delaminating too so yeah kids destroy everything that's no good
All right.
Anything else on Touch ID?
Marco, you were pretty effusive about it.
And I mean, not that I'm not, but would you say I am being ridiculous or would you say that it's damn near instant but not quite instant?
I agree with you.
I wouldn't say instant.
It also depends a lot on how precisely it recognized it.
It seems like...
If it has a really solid match, I think it can recognize it faster than if it kind of has to think about it for a second, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the claim that Apple makes, which is that it's about twice as fast, I'd say that's accurate.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Again, I don't want to sound like I'm poo-pooing it.
It is definitely way, way, way faster.
It's just...
I had read or heard some of the early rumblings about it as being like instant.
And it is instant.
It is not.
But gosh, it is close.
And I love it.
I really do.
Related to that is this.
These are the links I put in here.
Daniel Jalkit's thing about how Siri is always listening.
This was we knew this from the keynote.
And I think people looking at Apple tech stocks or whatever anyway.
the m9 chip is uh related to siri and people are asking why how does that m9 chip that tracks when you're stepping or whatever how is that related to siri um all this gets down to having features on your phone constantly doing something constantly sensing the outside world whether it's sensing whether you're shaking the phone up and down or sensing whether you're saying hey or whatever without killing your battery so that means you can't have the main cpu and the big beefy cpu gpu ram everything big combination of
running all the time or waking up every two seconds to say did the user say hey did the user say hey siri that kills your battery so people this is kill us for this yeah maybe i'll have to bleep it seriously people just turn this feature off on your phone or give you can you give your phone a different name yet there's another thing you can do
Well, the 6S actually does a voice training thing where during the intro setup, when it has to enable Siri, it forces you to actually train it.
And it kind of teaches you to say, hey, Siri, in your own voice.
And it forces you through this process.
So now it seems to be matched to your voice.
In practice, I don't know how tightly it is matched to your voice.
yeah it would be nice if you could rename it but anyway that that problem of having a battery powered device always sort of listening always sensing but not killing your cpu is why the little m9 and the little step counter thing is there uh the thing that apple does is they make dedicated hardware with its own little dedicated local buffer i mean i don't know how it looks it works inside but i'm imagining this is a super lower power chip that has this one job that just spools crap up and it
uh you know if it if it senses something that it thinks is significant it will then wake up the big cpu and say hey by the way the thing just said hey siri and by the way here's the audio i recorded starting when they said hey uh you take it from here like i'm just entirely speculating about how this actually works but the bottom line is custom hardware that it takes way less power than the actual cpu to be sort of the guard the guard post like listening listening for anyone to say hey siri or you know counting the steps is even easier because they can just sit there and
tick up a counter and then when the actual cpu wakes up it's like by the way while you were just sleeping over there this many more steps took place or here's the step data or whatever um so that is that's that's smart use of hardware features like that are coming all the time touch id is kind of like that i don't know to what extent it's already completely independent where the touch id sensor and its little secure enclave and everything can work entirely independently of the cpu and then just pass on the information that must be true to some degree just for the security implications but
The way you get these things to be more responsive is not like, oh, we need the A10 CPU.
No, it's, you know, custom hardware to say the main part of the system is not involved in this process at all.
This is like a sense organ that, you know, relays and buffers this information.
And the faster you can make those little sense organs while keeping them low power, the better this is going to get.
So...
marco's pegging it at about uh twice the speed just like apple said if they can do that twice the speed for another two or three years uh it really will be instant pretty quickly because i don't think there's any particular limit on like the sensing like once you're touching it you're touching it it's not as if you need to like it needs to like do this incredibly big computation you could just dump the raw sensor data out um
once you're touching it and then it's like the processing and the matching or whatever but uh yeah the the if they can double it in one year i'm optimistic that uh this will eventually actually be instant
All right.
Anything else on the hardware?
I have one other quick thought about the 6S, but anything else on the hardware?
How's the battery been for you?
For me, I'd say it's about the same.
I'd say it's about the same, maybe marginally worse, but I also wonder if it's all in my head because I've been looking out for exactly that.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, it's hard to know.
Well, if it's about the same, that means it's worse because this is a fresh battery versus your one-year-old 6, right?
So it should be better than a one-year-old 6, so...
Yeah, I mean, it is not dramatically different, but but I wouldn't I would definitely not say it's better.
And I'm skeptical that when I say it's worse, it really honestly is.
It may just be me thinking it is.
You're also playing with your phones more.
Maybe like you just got the success, your force touching things, the live photos and all that other stuff.
So it'll probably settle down.
But anyway, it being a wash seems reasonable.
Yeah.
My final thought about the success, and I tweeted about this a few days ago, it was interesting to me that anecdotally, based on zero facts whatsoever, I saw a lot less kvetching about, oh, my phone wasn't available.
Oh, my phone wasn't available.
I really wanted this in such and such color and such and such capacity, and it wasn't available.
And I did see some of that for the rose gold pretty quickly.
Yeah.
But, you know, last year, my recollection anyway, was that by 315 in the morning in in the one true time zone, which is Eastern Time, a lot of people are already starting to say, oh, my God, my thing is sold out.
Oh, my gosh.
And.
I didn't see much of that this year.
And in fact, somebody, I can't remember who it was, said to me they pre-ordered like two or three days before the launch day, and they were still able to reserve one for launch day.
And I just found that surprising.
And so I was theorizing, this was right before the numbers came out, that, well, maybe they didn't sell as many or, you know...
Maybe it's just that it's easier because a lot of these components are similar.
And then I got to thinking, well, not all that many of these components are that similar.
And as it turns out, the numbers were through the roof.
And I didn't realize at the time I had talked about this, but apparently the S years are always better.
So I don't know what to make of this.
Maybe it's just that Tim Cook's ops are really getting that much better or just getting more mature, if you will.
But I was impressed by how few inventory problems we heard about, with the exception, perhaps, of the rose gold.
Well, one aspect of that that we have here in the show notes is that the A9 is being made by two different manufacturers.
I'm not sure if that was the case with the A8.
I think this is the first time they've ever done that.
Yeah, so it's Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung are both making the A9.
And the most interesting thing, I think, is that they're both making slightly different A9s.
I guess they just have different transistor layouts.
Maybe they're actually different sizes, different feature sizes on them.
Anyway, we'll put a link to the chip work story that they actually opened these things up and sliced open the chips and
Took a look at the actual little chip that's inside the package, and lo and behold, two different things.
So that helps with inventory.
You know, we talked about, like, what is the thing that is most supply-constrained on these phones?
It's usually the thing that's hardest to make, and that's usually either something having to do with the camera sensors or something having to do with the CPU, GPU system on a chip thing.
And this year, it looks like they were able to make a lot of them.
i i told my wife this hey people aren't getting sold out and you could have just you didn't have to wake up at 3 a.m and you could just walk up in the morning or whatever and she's like great i'll be able to get my thing right away and then i went to the apple website or whatever and it's like three to five weeks for the model she wanted um so maybe that was just a fluke and by the time he does buy it there'll be plenty of inventory but
uh it's not it seems like it's not a bottomless pit it seems like they did uh demand did actually uh exhaust supply eventually i haven't looked in recent days i'm hoping by the time her contract is up and she goes for her other phone it'll we can just walk into an apple store and there won't be a line of people there and we can just get the phone that she wants
All right.
Our final sponsor this week is Backblaze.
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP to learn more.
Backblaze is online backup.
It's easy.
It's affordable.
There's no gimmicks.
It just works.
Unlimited, unthrottled online backup.
Trust me, you need and you want online backup.
It is such a great little insurance policy.
It can really save your butt if...
If something happens to every copy of your data that exists in your house or in your office, it can really help you out.
It's also a nice failsafe for things like if you get hacked or if you get malware or whatever.
Or if your RAID array dies because RAID is not a backup.
It is such a nice safety net.
And it is unlimited storage.
So you pay $5 a month per computer.
And it will back up everything inside the computer and any external drive that is plugged into it.
So you can plug, if you want to plug in a 10 terabyte RAID array to your computer, it will back up 10 terabytes.
It will back up anything that is directly attached to your computer or attached via iSCSI.
So anything, it can do everything, everything connected to your computer, you can back up via Backblaze, all for that one low monthly price of $5 per month per computer.
So between me and my wife and my Mac mini server, which is hopefully connected to iSCSI for my giant NAS, we have these three computers.
We pay $15 a month and we have something like 7 or 8 terabytes backed up.
It's a lot between the three computers.
She's a photographer.
I'm a geek.
And the NAS has all sorts of stuff on it.
So it is so good.
Their client is good.
It's native.
Here's the thing.
El Capitan came out today.
Backblaze works on day one, and it worked through the entire beta.
It is just there.
It works.
They are responsible.
It's a native client.
They are very Mac-friendly, very Apple-friendly.
You can also look at your Backblaze files on iPhones and Android phones.
You can restore.
Let's say you're on a trip or something, or you're out, and you want to get one file off of your computer at home.
You can do that through Backblades, either through their iPhone or Android apps or through their website.
You can log into the website and you can just pull one file off.
This is so convenient that actually 25% of their restores are just one file like this.
It's really great if you left a file at home and you want to get to it on a trip or something.
If you need everything back, if you have a complete failure, you can order a USB hard drive with everything on it.
Or you can download it all from their website.
This is a really great online backup.
I use it.
I've used it before they were a sponsor.
I can highly recommend Backblaze.
Stop putting off online backup.
You need online backup to protect all your memories and all your data and all your important stuff.
It is really worth having.
And Backblaze is the best one I've found.
Believe me, I've tried them all.
Backblaze is the best one I've found.
Check it out today at backblaze.com slash ATP.
Just $5 a month per computer for unlimited, unthrottled online backup.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
So you mentioned just a moment ago El Capitan.
God, I still hate the name.
El Capitan came out today.
We were discussing before the show that I installed it on the machine that I'm presently recording on starting at about 7.15 this evening.
We started recording at 9 this evening because basically I'm an idiot.
But it worked out okay.
So I'm a genius.
In any case, initial impressions, already really like the split view, whatever they're calling it, for having two apps side by side and full screen.
I think I like San Francisco.
I feel like every platform I see San Francisco on, my first reaction is,
and then over time I end up really liking it.
Um, my site does indeed support pin tabs, which I'm really exciting, excited about because I had no idea if that was working or not.
Um, I didn't run any of the betas.
This is all brand new to me, but, um,
so far so good i uh i really like it and uh i did not lose my mouse yet but uh ren's in the chat asked and the mouse jiggle is very creepy and kind of delightful all at once so that's my initial impressions um any other initial impressions from you guys well i should we do is there going to be an official john syracusa review of lcap on our show or will you kill me for even saying that
I haven't even installed the GM yet.
God, look at you.
You really kicked back.
I know you've graduated and suddenly it's like, whatever, man.
Yeah, no, it's like being spoiler.
It's like my new change in philosophy of trying to be relatively spoiler free for the new Star Wars movies.
Whereas with episode one, I wanted to know almost everything about it.
uh and now i'm trying an opposite approach so for os 10 it's like you know i installed the betas i filled around with it but i was like you know what i'm just gonna do this like a regular person i see the keynote i installed the betas i played around with it but i don't know everything about the os i haven't been obsessively using it and searching around for it and trying all sorts of things so i'm gonna read people's reviews i haven't even gotten around to reading their reviews yet but i have a lot of them saved away i'm gonna read reviews and i'm gonna learn stuff
and that's a novel exciting experience for me to you know to find out new things about the os um so i'm looking forward to installing it because i have used the betas and you know a lot of my betas are on a separate hard drive and a fresh install or on a computer they don't use so it always feels faster because like wow with nothing installed everything is faster and snappier but i'm looking forward to performance improvements and the new feature and you know the new fonts and all the other stuff uh i'm
somewhat dreading dealing with the system integrity protection stuff but i'm hoping most people have got that stuff worked out uh unlike casey i did not rush to install it i did start downloading today i've got about half downloaded i have it paused um but i haven't even updated skype skype's been wanting me to update for months and uh and as marco talked about with not changing stuff and audio setup i'm like
why am i updating skype again is there something wrong with skype now is it not working now that i need to do this update no well there's kind of always something wrong with it i know but like everything is working fine uh so i have been saying no no no but i'm going to say yes now because the why would i might update because i would imagine that if there's going to be any lcap compatibility differences like i need to install the latest skype before i upgrade the os i have to go through the whole ritual of making umpteen backups and then making every single sure every single one of my apps is up to date for
the version that is compatible and then doing the os update it's not that i dread it i'm gonna upgrade you know by this weekend i'll have all the computers in the house upgraded probably i'm usually pretty uh gonna know about these things i did the same thing uh for mavericks everything was fine uh and yosemite everything was fine your mileage may vary um but yeah i don't have anything particularly deep uh and insightful to say about it because i just haven't used it enough to uh
to know those things.
But as they come up, I'm sure I will mention them on the show, but don't be expecting like, there's going to be like one episode where I just like recite 30,000 words with a review.
That's not going to happen.
Did you miss writing it at all?
Didn't miss writing it.
I missed a little bit having, uh, written it.
I, like I tweeted, it was kind of weird going to Ars Technica and seeing an OS 10 review and seeing that it wasn't mine.
Like, like it's like it happened, but you know, I didn't need to do anything.
And this review appeared in Ars Technica.
That's great.
It's like magic, you know, I just, it's like, you just go to sleep, you wake up and then there's a review in our segment.
How'd that get there?
But yeah, uh, people wrote it and that's how it got there.
Um, is it kind of like, like if you go back and like visit an old job and you see that like, you know, there's just somebody else doing your job and everything just went on without you.
Yeah, it's fine.
Again, I haven't read it yet.
I looked at it.
I saw there's some good techie parts.
One person who tweeted about this that I retweeted said that they're really enjoying the Ars Technica review, including the traditional middle part that they only vaguely understand.
So I'm looking forward to that.
Those are the parts that I enjoy.
I didn't enjoy the fact that the terminal examples where they showed terminal text had light text and a dark background.
This is what happens when you stop doing it, someone else gets to do it, and they get to make the choices, and that's just the price I have to pay that someone else is making choices about.
The aesthetic tiny details of the review, they probably didn't even put in any references to all my traditional sources, but...
That's what happens when someone else writes it.
So anyway, I'm looking forward to reading it.
I'm looking forward to learning things.
I'm looking forward to reading all the reviews that I have in there.
And I'm looking forward to installing it and trying it out myself.
And I'm sure I will have things to say about it.
I hope so.
I really do.
Because it is...
Other people write these reviews now.
And other people will always step in.
And I'm sure they are good in their ways.
But I do miss having it come from you.
I do miss your review.
Because what we got was...
a review, but we didn't get your review.
Yep, I would agree with that wholeheartedly.
I read maybe two-thirds of the ARS review so far, and it is very good, without question.
And I think it is definitely done in the spirit of a Syracuse review.
But the tone is just different.
And that's to be expected, of course.
But the tone is just different, and it doesn't feel the way it used to, just like you were saying, Marco.
And I miss that.
That's not an attack on the...
People who wrote it, by any means, they did a fine job.
And God knows I would never have wanted to be the person to follow John Syracuse.
But I miss that Syracuse tone and that kind of flair that you would put in that I didn't see in this one.
Well, that's like any kind of review type thing.
I think the thing people may are most familiar with, like movie reviews, where over time, if you, you know, read a particular movie reviewer for years and years and decades, whether you agree with the reviewer or not, you start to get a feel for the reviewer as a person.
So then you can say what I know of Roger Ebert combined with what he said about this movie lets me know if I'll like it.
um and so having sort of insight into the person uh becomes like a comfort level whereas if a new person writes that you're like okay well i have the review but i don't know that much about the person so how do i how do i figure out what i'll think of it i know what this person thinks of it but i don't know enough about this person to know if what they think of it is how what they think of it relates to what i think of it so that that's
I understand that.
You just don't have the same comfort level with the reviewer because you don't have a model of the inside of their brain yet because you haven't been reading them for years or decades or whatever.
but that'll change and there's plenty of people who have never read anything by me anyway uh and so i was just another random person um trying trying to do all the little jokes and references and trying to keep it entertaining it's challenging when you're writing about an operating system i can tell you like it's not it doesn't lend itself well to anything except for really bad puns which i tried to avoid mightily like
We all know the puns I'm talking about.
Like people like to make I'm not going to name any particular publications.
I think this is perfectly fine.
You want to do it.
You can do it.
It is an epidemic in the tech industry.
Very sort of simple, obvious puns that people just absolutely cannot resist.
I resisted them as much as I could.
I still did them, especially early on.
I was doing them all the time.
But as time wore on, I'm trying to, we used to be trying to keep it lighthearted and keep people engaged in what is usually a pretty dry topic and eventually not even all that exciting when people were much more excited about iOS than OS X. So it's a, it's a, you know,
it's not an easy task uh but you know someone else has got to do it and someone else is doing it and like i said from skimming through it it looked like it looked like something that i would want to read because it looked like it covered a lot of the features and it looked like it did get down and dirty into a few specific areas that's what i always did i didn't cover everything in super depth it's just like oh this one feature is actually an interesting feature and let me dive really deep on this one thing
And I was like, why are you diving even that one thing?
You didn't even talk about this other feature.
That would be a complaint I always got.
I totally understand that.
And that's what the ARS review looks like.
So I'm looking forward to reading it.
It's pretty good so far, like I said.
So you said that you had run the betas, John, but you did not run them full time.
You ran them on a second partition or whatever.
Yep.
All right.
What about you, Marco?
Did you run the betas?
I've been running it on my laptop for a few weeks.
And I really like it.
Yeah.
And it's fine.
I don't use my laptop full-time, so it's hard for me to really say, oh, it's amazing or, oh, it's terrible in these ways.
It has been perfectly fine for me on my laptop.
I've run into no issues with it, as far as I can remember.
Certainly none that felt like it was because it was a beta before.
and uh it's been fine i i like san francisco a lot um i've i've been using ios 9 all summer so i was more used to it um but i like as a font i like it a lot and uh i think it's it's good it's fine yeah i i have no complaints so far but we'll see when i install it on my desktop i'm a little worried that i i know during the beta there were some issues with audio especially usb audio
And earlier, I was asking the tipster in the chat if that's been fixed, and he said basically no.
So I'm a little worried about messing with my audio setup.
That works by installing LCAP on my computer.
But I got to install it pretty soon just to keep up with the dev tools and everything.
I'm going to want to install it fairly soon.
Yeah.
I'm probably just going to install it maybe at .1 or maybe even sooner than that.
I don't know yet.
But it seems like from what I've been hearing from people and reading today, it doesn't seem like there are any massive problems with it.
Does that match with what you guys are seeing?
Well, that's not true.
Merlin said that 1Password was having issues on his box, but it seems to be working on mine.
As I said, talking about the reviews in the past, and there was like a couple of threads online talking about this, like, oh, OS reviews, you know, why bother reading them?
They didn't tell us about all the problems that are in Yosemite and stuff like that.
Like, day one reviews are never going to tell you that.
They're just never going to.
You find them out when millions of people start using it.
No matter how many, like...
First of all, no reviewer that I'm aware of has like a giant lab with every model of Mac and every combination of software and hardware.
So they can't do comprehensive testing.
Even Apple probably just can't test every combination.
Right.
And so there's no way a day one review is going to tell you that if you're reading a day one review to find out what is the.
long-term compatibility and stability of this going to be like over the next year you there's no way to know that there's not even a way to know whether the gm will work and everyone's setup the only way you find that out i mean the public beta is supposed to be helping with that the only way you find that out is mass massive number of people using it and so
that's just a job that a review that comes out on the same day as the os cannot do period and so i long ago gave up basically doing that if there's something egregious or if like if i said this you know like leopard i remember uh being really flaky like was always flaky and even the gm is flaky and it's clearly flaky uh like if you get a negative result of i don't know i'm using negative positive anyway if you get a result that says there are problems
you can communicate that and like, I've never gotten this to work successfully, even in the GM on any of the computers I've tried.
There's probably a problem, but if everything works fine for you, that doesn't mean everything's going to work fine for everybody else.
All it means is that the problems haven't yet been discovered.
So if you're wary about, uh, LCAP, uh,
wait uh so the advice i always gave was like wait for the point one if you're nervous but if you waited for the point one in yosemite that wouldn't have solved the discovery d issue either it took a long time for them to fix that uh you'd never know what's going to happen so if you are nervous at all wait six months read the web you'll find out if there are problems uh if you don't want to wait six months then upgrade with the rest of us and just cross your fingers right
Okay, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Cards Against Humanity, Harry's, and Backblaze.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
We need to talk about the TiVo Bolt.
What is that thing?
We need to talk about this because... Wait, so I know nothing about this because I've never owned a TiVo and don't give two craps about one.
So where is there a decent two-second overview?
Just go to the link in the show notes.
does it not sit flat yes that is the first thing you need to know about the people the second thing the first thing you need to know about the tivo bolt is the new box from tivo tivo makes dvrs right i like them and i've owned tons of them and i'm somewhat obsessed with them anyway the tivo bolt the second thing you need to know about it is that rather than being a sort of rectangular solid with rounded corners what is this it is bent it looks like a bent iphone
Ever so slightly bent so that it does not lay flat.
And so that the top of it is not flat.
It's like it's bent upwards.
And so there's a little space underneath it.
It's not even symmetrically bent.
It's not bent in the middle.
It's bent like two thirds of the way down.
It's a stylistic choice.
It looks like an interesting type of sculpture or whatever.
It is a terrible decision.
Do not bend things that are going to go in someone's AV stack under their TV.
The only place that can possibly go is on top.
But...
realistically speaking you know people are going to stack stuff on this and it's going to look awful people are going to stack it you can't stop them they're going to do it and they're going to wedge stuff underneath it and they're going to put pencils and books or they're just going to have everything be tilted and slowly slide off their entertainment centers this is a terrible choice and by the way it's white a second terrible choice i know you want to stand out and everything black is better for things that go underneath your tv and your cabinet black is the standard if you're going to have a white one like a console give a choice for black
bent like that is it just I just would love to have been in those meetings when someone's like but don't you understand it's distinctive and people will remember it or whatever no just no just make it flat you have to be able to stack it's like the PS3 did the same thing like making the George Foreman grill thing out of it I have to give game consoles a little bit more leeway because like look something's got to be on the top of your AV stack and if it's going to be a game console maybe it has a top loading CD drive back in the old days or whatever you had to do it that way
I don't really give Sony a pass either, but only one thing can be on top.
The PS4, they learned.
It's flat.
It's stackable.
This is the worst box that TiVo has ever made, or possibly that anyone has ever made, because I'm not aware of anyone who's ever so egregiously thumbed their nose at the idea of stackable AVO components, because it's not like this is just like a little bit off or whatever.
They're intentionally going, guess what?
Yeah, we screwed you.
You can't.
anyway it's white the remote is white it's ugly all right that's enough complaining about the box uh there are other things to talk about this uh some interesting things uh related to the bolt the features they're touting the first one that i want to talk about is uh smart speed but they're not calling it smart speed because marco would sue them
well it's not it isn't smart speed because they're it's just a speed up well they can't do real smart speed because there's video and they can't just skip silence right because you have to watch the video part when they're silenced too uh but it's the thing it just speeds up the video with ball with the without pitch shifting so people don't sound like chipmunks it's a way to watch things in less time they say 30 faster um all right that's a 1.3x playback mode so it's you know that's interesting that's useful not particularly novel maybe in the set-top box space but like you know
No, I mean, it's the type of thing where you think, why didn't they have this years ago?
Right.
Well, I'm pretty sure the PS3 can do that.
Obviously, computer play, like, you know, QuickTime can do it.
I'm sure VLC probably has an option somewhere to do it.
But in the set-top box industry, I think that's pretty unusual.
So that's interesting.
yeah um i just mentioned it because smart speed like it's smart seats for your tv so save time watch your stuff in less time if that's what you like i would never do that anyway it's there the other thing is uh commercial skipping they've always had 30 seconds skip and you know fast forward scan and stuff like that now they're gonna have a button that will let you skip commercials how does it do that how does it know where the commercials begin to end have they've done some amazing machine learning
No, they have a bunch of humans taking the most popular shows and marking where the commercials are.
So you can't do the skipping feature until the show has aired.
And TiVo's Legion of Actual Humans has put in the metadata for commercial start here, stop there, start here, start there.
And of course, it will only work on the shows they do that for.
And they're going to do it for the most popular shows.
And I imagine...
the the relevant the the stakeholders as they say in the business world uh of advertising and television may be a little bit miffed by this so this could lead to legal battles and grumbling and who knows what else but in the meantime you can buy this and in theory if you don't watch the show live uh and if you allow you know if you watch it the next day or maybe an hour later i don't know what the lag is going to be you will be able to skip commercials with one button press at that point like why even make them press the button
I mean, I think the reality here is that so few people are buying TiVos anymore that no one's going to even care.
Yeah, it's possible they won't care, but you'd be surprised what they care about.
But anyway, I buy TiVos, so I care.
So I would like to try that feature, even though I'm a 30-second skip wizard by this point.
I'm really good at it.
That's why I hate when they're not responsive, because it throws off my game.
Yeah.
but it's got that feature those are the the big things they're trying oh yeah and 4k video which is mostly irrelevant because the only thing that's really broad like you know they have their netflix client will get 4k from netflix and you can record in 4k and it's good they're cranking it up uh you know they're gonna have to go 4k eventually so it's good that they get some practice oh and
How long do you think it is before their UI is 4K?
Yeah, no, supposedly almost all, not all, because that would be impossible.
Almost all of the UI is now in HD.
TiVo, for people to know, historically had a standard definition set of menus and everything.
And even long after the TiVo device started recording HD video, the menus were still standard def.
And slowly, slowly, more and more, the menus became high def.
This year, has high definition come entirely to TiVo?
almost it's like they're asymptotically approaching an hd user interface so now only a few screens are standard def and most of them are high def which is kind of embarrassing and stupid but that's life um but yeah the 4k support the 4k support matters is that it means that they're putting in beefier hardware and supposedly this one has more memory faster cpu faster video decoding it can handle 4k like these are all good things i want this to happen thumbs up please
TiVo, if you made a $1,500 box, I would buy it.
I'm afraid to give you money.
Why?
Because I love TiVo and I just wish it was way faster.
I don't understand.
I don't watch maybe as much TV as you do.
Aaron and I have maybe five or six shows that we watch religiously, but...
To me, our really shitty Verizon DVR box is plenty fine.
It's terrible.
I will be the first to tell you.
But we are using it to navigate between shows for maybe 15 seconds any given day.
Like, I don't need the most robust, whiz-bang, awesome experience.
And by the way, our menus are entirely and exclusively in HD.
So I'm not saying you're wrong, but gosh, I don't understand what could make a DVR so magical today.
that it warrants all this money, including a service charge, right?
Like a monthly service fee or whatever?
No, I buy them outright.
You can pay a whole bunch up front and there's no monthly fee.
I do that because I keep them forever.
So there's no monthly fee.
I already pay a lot for these things and what I'm saying is I'd be willing to pay even more.
What I'm paying for is...
The responsiveness, the features, you know, like my TiVo has applications like Netflix and Hulu and stuff like that.
The Netflix app, how long does the Netflix quote unquote app take to launch?
How responsive is the Netflix?
Like when I'm waiting for the Netflix thing on TiVo to launch, which I've been doing, by the way, because my Apple TV has been flaking out to now actually using the Netflix thing on my TiVo.
I don't like waiting for things to launch.
Like the iOS app launches faster.
Why is it slow on the TiVo?
Because the TiVo is recording six shows at once and doing a bunch of other things and doesn't have enough memory and the CPU can't.
Whatever the problem is, I don't want to wait.
I want everything to be instant.
I demand it.
And I'm willing to pay for it.
And so maybe I'm not TiVo's big customer.
But when we're navigating to figure out what show we want to watch, that's pretty damn instant.
When it starts playing back, it's pretty damn instant.
How long does the TiVo client take to launch?
Or not the Netflix client take to launch?
Oh, I don't have Netflix on my DVR.
That's why I have a Fire TV stick or my Apple TV.
Well, how long does it take to launch on those?
I actually haven't watched Netflix since House of Cards went away, so it's been a while.
And how long does it take for the thing to come up and to navigate to the thing that you want?
Netflix is usually good about picking up, like, oh, play the next House of Cards episode, but I don't like waiting.
When I was a kid, television was instant because it was all analog, and that's what I want.
I mean, your point is fair, and I'm confident that whatever weighting you do is less than the weighting I do.
But I guess our priorities are just so different, and that's fine.
I mean, that's what makes the world go round.
But never in my life have I looked at my very crappy cable issue or Verizon Fios issue DVR and said, you know what?
My life would be better if this thing was replaced.
Well, here's the thing.
It's like one of those things where like, yeah, it's fine.
But if I gave you a high-end TiVo, you wouldn't be able to go back to the other thing because you just get used to it.
Yeah, you're probably right.
Especially if I gave it to you for free and there was no monetary thing.
It's just much more pleasant.
And this type of thing, before you have it, it's not a big deal.
You're fine.
And after you get it, it's not that big of a deal.
But would you like to go back to the old one?
No, not really.
This new one is better.
There are plenty of things to annoy about TiVo as well.
But anyway, the other thing I'm paying for with my big fancy TiVo is the thing that TiVo Bolt doesn't provide.
TiVo Bolt only comes, as far as I'm aware, according to TiVo's site right now.
Maybe they'll expand it out.
in a sort of a wimpier model.
It's not their high-end model.
So the TiVo Bolt can come with a 500 gig or a terabyte hard drive and four tuners.
The high-end TiVo Romeo, which is their previous high-end product and still a high-end product, comes with a three-terabyte hard drive and six tuners.
and mine is like 70 full so i could go you know they make six terabyte drives now the bolt uses a 2.5 inch drive i think which is why they've scaled things down but again what would you pay the extra money for i would pay for a six terabyte drive i would pay for two three terabyte drives sure throw them in there like the hard drives are fairly quiet uh you know i would pay for an ssd to make it smaller enough you know i'll this is the type of thing i'm willing to pay for do you need six tuners sometimes i use all them is four enough
Yeah, probably, but I'd rather have six.
So the Bolt is not their high-end product.
But right now, the Bolt has a bunch of features the other things don't have.
The skipping, the fast-playing mode, the skipping they could bring to any of them.
So the software update could bring that to my model.
if it doesn't i'll be kind of disappointed because that's entirely like a metadata service thing it has nothing to do with the hardware maybe my model doesn't have the hardware support or fast enough innards to do the fast playback thing but i don't care because i would never use that feature my netflix app takes a while to launch and there's little spinners and i gotta wait is that ever going to be faster on mine probably not because the cpu is so wimpy and the ram is not getting any bigger or whatever so
uh this tivo bolt thing is not a replacement for my like it's not like i'm i would never replace it i would storage capacity alone means i would never replace it with this but i'm assuming the tivo bolt innards the faster cpu gpu video decoder 4k support all that stuff i'm assuming eventually there will be a high-end model of that i just hope that it is not bent like this thing and i also hope that it's not a white even the remote is white for crying out loud i know people like white i kind of like the white ps4
but if you have kids like you should see the crap that goes on please just don't make don't make the remote white don't make the box white it would be the only white box besides my wii and my entertainment center i need everything to be black i need it not to be bent tivo so excited by the uh the interesting new features and the increased performance and the increased cpu grunt everything else about it is super annoying to me