I’ve Seen This Train Before
Casey:
So where's my new MacBook Pro, man?
Marco:
It looks like we're not going to get it this year.
Marco:
I think if we haven't gotten it yet, like they just did this iMac update.
Casey:
Yeah, I feel like I've been hearing from various sources that it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming any second, any second, any second, any second.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, the 15-inch MacBook Pro is... It's such the workhorse of the industry.
Marco:
It gets so little attention, relatively speaking, in media coverage and people like us talking about... Well, not us, but most other podcasts talking about it, talking about laptops and everything.
Marco:
Everyone's talking about the new MacBook or new MacBook Airs or whatever.
Marco:
But when I go to conferences and events or I go to somebody's office and I see other developers working...
Marco:
by far the most common machine in use is the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Completely agree.
Marco:
It really is like the quiet workhorse of the entire industry.
Casey:
Yeah, basically, if you're doing something that requires any more horsepower than a MacBook Air can give you, then immediately jump directly to 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Do not pass Go.
Casey:
Do not pass 13-inch.
Casey:
Do not collect $200.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Marco:
Last week, I brought up, I think, and we all talked about the thing where the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus CPUs were being manufactured by two different companies, Samsung and TSMC.
Marco:
And some early benchmarks at the time were showing that the TSMC one got significantly better battery life than the Samsung one.
Marco:
It was something on the order of like 15% to 20% better battery life under certain CPU stressing benchmarks.
Marco:
And this briefly became a thing and Apple kind of squashed it by issuing a PR statement to a bunch of websites that basically said... It was the most Apple-y statement ever.
Marco:
It basically said...
Marco:
Nothing about whether it was true or not, but it sounded like a denial.
Marco:
And the reality of what they said is that, yes, there is a difference, but they say it's within 2% to 3%, not 15% to 20%, under their testing.
Marco:
And that the testing that revealed this larger difference was considered invalid or unimportant because it only showed...
Marco:
basically maxing out the CPU.
Marco:
And so if you are doing things that max out the CPU, then there is a noticeable difference.
Marco:
If you are not maxing out the CPU, and most people are not maxing it out most of the time, then the difference still exists, but is smaller.
Casey:
I haven't seen enough really honest-to-goodness data to make me feel strongly one way or the other.
Casey:
John, what's your take on all this?
John:
I'm still kind of interested in where the difference comes from.
John:
I don't know enough about the Geekbench thing, and of course Apple's statement is not very specific.
John:
They pooh-pooh that benchmark by saying that it spends an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state.
John:
Now, do they mean CPU as in the whole system on a chip?
John:
Do they mean just the CPU part of the system on a chip?
John:
I don't know if Geekbench is exercising the GPU at the same time.
John:
um like what could account for the large difference if it's only two to three percent in regular tests is that just because you know in regular regular usage you aren't maxing the cpu all the time uh some people brought up games like what if i'm playing a game that is close to maxing the cpu the entire time i'm playing then does it come back into the 20 or 30 range or does that not matter because the game
John:
uh stresses the gpu and it turns out the one with the good you know there's just not enough details here what i was trying to think i was like maybe one is better uses less energy coming from and going into a low power state or you know spinning parts of the ship up or down and the other one uh you know is better at sustained high cpu usage but if you were to throttle on off on off it would get worse for i don't know
John:
It's mysterious.
John:
All we have is Apple's word to go on.
John:
I don't think anyone has done any real world test yet.
John:
You would think if it was 20 to 30 percent in real world, we would know about it.
John:
Not from someone running a benchmark, but from actual people saying, boy, my iPhone success is terrible.
John:
And someone else saying my iPhone success is great.
John:
And I mean, people are saying that anyway, but they probably all have the same CPU.
John:
Anyway, it's mysterious.
John:
Apple is not going to really give us any information on it.
John:
as apple says in this statement you know every chip we ship meets apple's highest standards blah blah blah like i said they're gonna you know they're gonna make i think it is literally true that in apple's testing the worst chip like the bad one or whatever in the geek bench test passes apple's criteria it still means that perhaps the other ones exceed apple's criteria and if you get one of those you're kind of lucky and so it is still kind of like a lottery but
John:
Without more information, and I'm not sure how we're going to get more information, without more information, I don't even know if you're lucky.
John:
Unless you spend all day running that benchmark, how lucky are you if you get the quote-unquote good one?
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
Their statement really, it wasn't actually, everyone was kind of treating it as confirmation that this is wrong.
Marco:
But in fact, it was confirmation that it's right, that there is a difference, but you probably won't notice it in average use.
John:
And it wasn't techie.
John:
They didn't go into the details.
John:
It's essentially... First, the fact that they made a statement at all is interesting.
John:
But second, what their statement said is, like, we feel we are covered.
John:
We feel everything we've said is true, even though there's a difference.
John:
We think the difference is small in real-world usage.
John:
So you're right, it's basically just a confirmation of the thing, but they're not going to go into super techie detail.
John:
And bottom line, as long as the iPhone 6s gets okay battery life compared to what the 6s got, which it probably does because everyone's 6s are like a year old, right, who gets a 6s.
John:
Most people aren't going to get a 6s a month after they get a 6s.
John:
uh it's everything seems to be fine yeah so it's it's a non-story but from a technical perspective i'm still very interested in how exactly this synthetic benchmark found this you know this weakness in this one cpu
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So, big week for Marco.
Casey:
You released Overcast 2.
Marco:
I did, yeah.
Marco:
I even stopped saying the .0 in my marketing materials because I thought it sounded better without it.
John:
so delightfully appley of you like when they leave the sense off menus at fancy restaurants or basically all restaurants now they don't even give you a dollar sign it's just like 12 yeah exactly that's uh it's experimentation has proven that that makes people more willing to buy overpriced meals
Marco:
Well, it looks fancier if you give it like a nice serif font and you just have the description of the item with as much white space around it as possible, with as many words on there as possible that you can't understand.
Marco:
And just off to the right somewhere, it says like 12.
John:
Yeah, it just says peanut butter and jelly sandwich space space space 34.
John:
And you're like, all right, whatever.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, we'll talk about overpriced things here in a minute.
Casey:
But why don't we start with one of the marquee features of Overcast 2.
Casey:
You finally got streaming working.
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, there's not that much to say about it, I don't think.
Marco:
I talked here before about all the different times I tried to get it working in the past.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I just tried so many different approaches, and I tried the correct approach multiple times before actually getting my side of it right.
Marco:
This is using Apple's low-level audio file stream API, and it's incredibly low-level and incredibly unforgiving and also pretty sparsely documented.
Yeah.
Marco:
So the core audio style of their documentation is to be really conservative with the words.
Marco:
And so if there's some minute little detail, you have to kind of read it like a lawyer.
Marco:
and you know to really understand like oh what is this exactly you know what this says audio sample what kind of audio sample is that or what kind of time stamp is this what time space is this in things like that it's really tricky to get right but i got it right uh eventually and and with with one exception which i did not uncover in any of my testing and my beta did uncover it either
Marco:
And that is, it doesn't play AAC files where the header is at the end of the file.
Marco:
So I'll go over it quickly, why it does this and why this is going to be tricky to fix.
Marco:
But basically, the API is a streaming API.
Marco:
So I give it bytes.
Marco:
And I tell it, okay, I'm at this point in the file.
Marco:
Here are the bytes from that point.
Marco:
And I just stream it in.
Marco:
And then it tells me, okay, we got the header.
Marco:
We got the properties.
Marco:
We got anything you need to know.
Marco:
And now we're ready to give you samples.
Marco:
So here's the audio samples.
Marco:
And then as you come through, as you pave through the bytes, it gives you the samples for it.
Marco:
The problem is that requires the header data about the file, which tells you really important things like the sample rate of the audio.
Marco:
How many channels?
Marco:
Is it mono or stereo?
Marco:
you can't really decode the audio properly until you have those basics with mp3 it's fine with mp3 it puts everything important at the beginning of the file and also the beginning of every header of every little chunk of the file so with mp3 you can basically decode an mp3 starting from anywhere in the file you just kind of skim ahead for a certain byte pattern and there's a frame and then you can just start it's amazing it is so mp3 is so simple
Marco:
If you want to have embedded metadata or chapters, all of that is shoved up front in the ID3v2 block on an MP3.
Marco:
So you can just read the first couple kilobytes or a couple hundred kilobytes if there's artwork in there.
Marco:
MP3 is amazing.
Marco:
It's a great format, and the patents all expire in a couple of years.
Marco:
Most of them already have.
Marco:
the last of the patents expire in a couple of years uh mp3 is great unfortunately uh about i think last time i checked it was something like three to five percent of podcasts that overcast has indexed so whatever i know about in the whole directory um about three to five percent of episodes use aac format or m4a or mob it's all the same format
Marco:
The QuickTime MOV slash M4A format is less ideal than MP3 on the reading side.
Marco:
It is this incredibly like architecture astronaut design format where you can contain anything and you can embed anything and you can have all these arbitrary tracks and abilities.
Marco:
It's a much more versatile format than MP3 because it's like this kind of grand container format, but it's really hard to read in a way without having the whole file.
Marco:
You read it, and it gives you this tree structure of atoms, and within each atom is more atoms and more structures.
Marco:
And the biggest problem is, well, first of all, the chapters are a disaster.
Marco:
Chapters are interspersed throughout the entire file, so you can't easily stream them.
Marco:
And the other problem is that it is possible to write all the audio data up front and then to write the headers at the end.
Marco:
So without reading the end of the file, you don't know things like what format the audio is in, so you can't decode it, which means you can't stream that.
Marco:
So if you've ever seen on a file export dialog, if you've ever seen those little checkboxes that say something along the lines of,
Marco:
optimize for internet or make it streamable or fast start something like that what those do is they set they tell the encoder to write that header up front don't wait till all the data is written and then write it at the end write the header up front or at least go back and rewrite it up front after you're done so that it's not sitting at the end of the file so then people can stream it
John:
There's not reliable support for byte range support for byte range requests so you can grab the end of the file?
Marco:
That's a separate issue.
Marco:
I can grab the end of the file, but the Audio File Stream API is not compatible with this at all.
Marco:
So I actually do byte ranges for seeking, but the way I do it is I read the beginning of the file every time.
Marco:
to get the headers and then once i've gotten the headers and the audio data starts then i jump ahead and send a second byte ring request for the part i actually need if it's for if it's further ahead um so the problem is this this audio file stream api literally just does not support this at all like this this layout of having the header at the end even if i jump ahead get it and then give it back to this api even if i have the whole file on disk that api does not support that
Marco:
So my options to fix this problem, and I'll get back to Byte Rangers in a minute, my options to fix this problem are either to just, well, not support those files, which is not a great idea.
Marco:
I've already heard from a few people who listen to some shows like that that are very unhappy and that's understandable.
Marco:
Or I can run those through a different API entirely.
Marco:
The old API, I was using the ext audio file API.
Marco:
That supports them, but that doesn't support streaming.
Marco:
So I can have these two different code paths of this pretty major part of the player where I'm running it for certain files, not others.
Marco:
And by the way, I don't even know which one I need to call yet until I have a big chunk of the file.
Marco:
Or I can do my third option, which is what I'm probably going to end up doing, which is actually fix the file on disk and then play it.
Marco:
which is not a great option aren't you downloading it then yeah i mean i will probably end up just not streaming these because it would be a lot harder if i make it because then if i stream it then i have to actually like go one level deeper in the api and then and like decode the format myself for both of these and then that's and then like feed raw data into a converter it's very i would really rather not go into that level if i don't need to
John:
I'm surprised you're not going for the server-side solution, where these problematic files get downloaded once to your server, and then you put in the metadata for them, and when you encounter one in the wild, you just ask the server for the chapter info, which you already fetched, you know what I mean?
Marco:
Well, this isn't just chapters.
Marco:
This is actually like playback.
Marco:
I can't even play the files that are arranged this way.
John:
So you can't give it some... What I'm saying is download it once on your server, get all the information you need about the file, whether it's chapters or how to play it or whatever, and then when you encounter that file...
John:
Rather than reading the information about how to play it, just ask the server for information about how to play it and it will tell you and you don't have to bother reading the end.
Marco:
Well, first of all, anything involving like a server cache of the file has other problems.
Marco:
So, you know, mostly it's if I have one, if I do one approach, which is to cache the file myself and reserve it from my servers to the app.
Marco:
Podcast publishers don't like that, and I wouldn't like that.
Marco:
Yeah, no, you're not going to serve the file, just the metadata.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So then the question is, what happens if the metadata I'm serving is out of date because the file has changed?
Marco:
You know, then that's a problem.
Marco:
You know, I could e-tag it and everything, but then what if I don't have the data I need?
Marco:
You know, it's a problem.
Marco:
I'm going to have to come up with some kind of crazy fix.
Marco:
It's probably going to end up doing a temporary hack just to get these files playing again in the next few weeks.
Marco:
And then longer term, I'll probably have to go to that lower level API.
Marco:
But I really don't want to do that.
John:
I think the server side one is going to end up coming back.
John:
Obviously, you can do solutions that involve downloading it.
John:
But if you actually want to stream it, someone's got to download it and get all the info about it, right?
John:
And then it's just a question of, you know...
John:
like you can always fall, once you have the download path in there, you can always fall back to that.
John:
So you're like, well, if I couldn't get the information or this is a rare podcast that no one has looked at or whatever, or the information is out of date because the file has changed or whatever, then you fall back to downloading.
John:
But I can't think of another way that you can successfully stream something.
John:
I mean, I guess you're saying the lower level API, you can just do the jump ahead to the end, get the header and jump back thing and just have a little delay.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's and of course, that's if it supports byte ranges, which and that's a separate thing.
Marco:
So as as I'm developing this, I've learned a lot of things about what servers support and don't support.
Marco:
I also love the if range header.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
Whoever designed that is awesome.
Marco:
The problem with byte reading support is that podcast CDNs only support it fairly loosely.
Marco:
So some of them support it every time.
Marco:
Some of them never support it.
Marco:
And some of them, like Libsyn, which powers most of Overcast's most popular podcast, Libsyn supports it sometimes.
Marco:
So the way Libsyn works, as far as I can tell, is that they are the front end to multiple backend CDNs.
Marco:
And when you request a Libsyn URL, you're redirected to just a random backend CDN, as far as I can tell.
Marco:
And you don't get the same one every request.
Marco:
So you can make a request for a file that supports byte ranges, then make a second request, and it won't support them.
Marco:
So you never know when calling a Libsyn URL whether the request you make will support byte ranges, regardless of whether the previous one to the exact same host did or not.
Marco:
If I build the UI and everything, assuming that byte ranges will always be there, I can't assume that, basically.
Marco:
So I have to also, in a case like this, I have to cover the case where I have to download the entire file first before I can even start playing it, because that might be the only way to get it from the server.
John:
So how did you not encounter this until after Overcast 2 was released?
John:
You just never downloaded one of these podcasts for testing?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I honestly didn't download a lot of M4A podcasts or AAC, whatever you want to call the format, because all the podcasts I listened to are MP3 format.
Marco:
And so I went and found some that I was using for testing for things like AAC chapters and everything, the enhanced AAC stuff.
Marco:
But none of those happened to be encoded in this way with the header at the end.
Marco:
So I didn't test the entire catalog.
Marco:
Maybe I should have written some kind of script to do that.
Marco:
That would have been wise, but I didn't.
Marco:
So now I have a bunch of test cases.
Marco:
But basically, it's going to be a lot of work to support what is a very small percentage of downloads.
Marco:
But that's the job.
John:
Since you've got all this server-side data, you could actually, in the interim, use the social engineering solution where you find the most popular podcasts that are like this, take their files, rewrite them losslessly if possible, and send them an email and say, hey, your files don't play on my player because you didn't optimize for streaming.
John:
Here's versions of your files that do.
John:
Could you swap them in for the old ones?
John:
You're not even asking them to re-encode.
John:
You're not even telling them that going forward, you're basically doing all the work for them.
John:
I don't know how many it is, but maybe if you do that with three podcasts, does that cover 90% of your problematic files?
Marco:
Well, if you're going to go a social route, the easier social route is that all the people who are encountering these podcasts are yelling at me on Twitter and copying the people who publish them.
Marco:
And some of the people who publish them have already said, oh, I didn't realize that.
Marco:
I've now converted the files with this different checkbox option that doesn't do that.
John:
Yeah, they'll probably do it going forward if people complain.
John:
But like, anyway, if you did it for them, there would be even less work because it'd be like, here's your stuff on the platter.
John:
And I don't think you can't do it for everybody.
John:
But if I don't know what the stats look like, but there's a real big like peak of like this is these three podcasts count for 90% of the problems because they're popular.
Marco:
that would also give you some breathing room yeah i mean i i it's really been a very small number that i've heard about um so i'm not that concerned i really do think the the the right solution is just going to be to make the thing in the app that just downloads the whole file and then you know rewrites it to be correct and then feeds it into the parser because then i then i have way fewer code paths and you know then i only have the one parsing code path
Marco:
I can stay with that high-level API and not do a whole bunch more work.
Marco:
And then just those files won't stream.
Marco:
They have to download all the way.
Marco:
But that's kind of how they work already.
Marco:
That's how Overcast worked constantly until last week.
Marco:
And because it's such a very small number of these, I think that's an acceptable trade-off.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I could change my mind.
Marco:
We'll see.
John:
So that was it as far as 2.0 bugs as far as you know?
John:
Any other minor things?
Marco:
I broke the entire Watch app.
Marco:
That was fun.
Marco:
And you didn't realize it?
Marco:
Oh, good thing nobody uses that, huh?
Marco:
I don't even use it.
Marco:
It's kind of embarrassing, but I don't use my Watch app.
Marco:
I hardly ever touch it.
Marco:
The main reason that it broke is even more embarrassing...
Marco:
Relatively late in the process, I changed my artwork downloader to use a different URL session API because the old URL connection API was deprecated.
Marco:
I forgot to check the box in Xcode for that one category file that said to include it in the linker in the watch kit binary.
Marco:
So I had a missing symbol.
Marco:
When that function was called, it would just throw an exception and crash.
Marco:
And the reason I didn't catch this is because I wasn't using the simulator to test this.
Marco:
I was using my actual watch.
Marco:
And my actual watch, turns out, has been very buggy recently.
Marco:
And one of the ways it's been buggy is that I thought it was installing the new versions, like the newest build.
Marco:
Whenever I put a TestFly build or a dev build onto my phone of Overcast...
Marco:
I assumed that it was working the way it always has worked before, which is that it was also copying over the watch binary at the same time, or, you know, a few seconds later.
Marco:
Turns out it wasn't.
Marco:
And the overcast build on my watch was like a month old and was before this change.
Marco:
And so I was testing on my watch and I thought it was fine.
Marco:
additionally none of the beta testers caught it possibly for similar reasons of test flight being buggy possibly because none of them use the watch app i don't know doesn't matter nobody caught it i didn't catch it no one else did app review didn't catch either which means after you didn't even try the watch app because it literally wouldn't launch
Marco:
I have a fix in for that and for a playlist editing bug where the very first time you would create a playlist, it wouldn't save any of your settings, which is really embarrassing.
Marco:
I don't know why I didn't catch that, but I didn't.
Marco:
Now it's fixed.
Marco:
And a couple other little things.
Marco:
But really, that was it.
Marco:
It was very minor besides the WatchKit app.
John:
It's kind of surprising that AppReview didn't even launch the Watch app.
John:
What kind of things can you sneak through now that you know this?
Marco:
Yeah, I was also surprised by that.
Marco:
Probably not worth pushing the boundaries on that, but that's interesting.
Casey:
Well, the number one thing you sneak through when you realize you have a loophole in AppReview is some sort of tethering backdoor.
Casey:
Isn't that the rules?
Casey:
I thought that's how this works.
Marco:
That is standard protocol, either a tethering backdoor or an NES emulator.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
One or the other.
Casey:
To go back to streaming just for a minute, I had a couple of minor questions I wanted to ask you about that.
Casey:
I feel like you've probably already answered this, but what was the hardest part?
Casey:
I mean, it sounds like the hardest part is yet to come, which is figuring out this AAC stuff.
Casey:
But is there anything else that was really hard that that's worth noting?
Casey:
And this kind of works its way into the follow on question, which is what are you most proud of specifically within streaming?
Marco:
The hardest part was really just like getting all these pieces to work together because there's a whole bunch of like weird conditions, weird concurrency, potential pitfalls, different, you know, different, a lot of different states that all the different pieces can be in.
Marco:
when you when you start downloading the file like i mentioned i have this like initial request and then i can do a range request so like which state are all those different requests in once you have that data as i'm passing it to the decoder you know what happens when i run against the end of what i've downloaded and i have to send the decoder a partial block or do i wait till i have a whole block and then what is the decoder in has it you know has it found the header yet do i have what's necessary to decode yet um has it reached end of file what happens and all these other things reach end of file do i
Marco:
Do I actually play to the very last sample, or do I cut it off somewhere, you know, because I messed up a buffer somewhere?
Marco:
All these little things.
Marco:
You know, that's the hard part.
Marco:
In addition to the, you know, the aforementioned hard part, which was...
Marco:
Just figuring out how the heck to use this API, which is very this low level C API, which and, you know, like most of core audio is extremely unforgiving and gives relatively unhelpful error codes.
Marco:
So it was just really, really tough just getting all that stuff right.
Casey:
What lessons did you learn while you were doing this?
Casey:
Use AVPlayer.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
My biggest lesson is don't do this if you're starting from scratch.
Marco:
However, I am very happy I did it because now I have... The whole reason I had to do this, for a quick review, anybody who wasn't familiar, the whole reason I had to do all this craziness and not just use AVPlayer is that AVPlayer, as far as I'm aware, and I've checked into this numerous times and tried numerous different approaches...
Marco:
But AV player, as far as I know, cannot do smart speed.
Marco:
So in order to do smart speed, I had to write this whole audio engine at a lower level than that.
Marco:
And I didn't want to just have like a version that does smart speed and a version that can stream so that you can only have smart speed while you're streaming.
Marco:
I didn't want to do that.
Marco:
You know, I wanted to have every feature available, whether you were streaming or not.
Marco:
It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.
Marco:
Assuming I can fix this annoying little AAC limitation.
Marco:
I think it was very much worth it.
Marco:
Because now, even people who never thought they would use streaming, which I count myself among those, it is really nice to have.
Marco:
Even if you set it to automatically download everything when it comes out.
Marco:
you will still, at some point, run into a situation where, oh, something just came out.
Marco:
I want to listen to it right now.
Marco:
And you can just tap it and it just starts playing immediately.
Marco:
You don't have to wait for it to download.
Marco:
And that's really nice.
Marco:
And this was holding up a bunch of other possible features.
Marco:
Things like making inbound sharing links better.
Marco:
Like now, I haven't done this yet, but I can make it so that...
Marco:
If you tap an Overcast share link in something, I can pop up a little player in the Overcast app and have you preview that or play that right there.
Marco:
Or just simpler things like when notifications come in for new episodes, I can have a play button on them instead of just dismiss and wait for it to download.
Marco:
Simple stuff like that.
Marco:
It's just really nice to have all these options.
Marco:
So now I have the foundation that lets me actually do it.
Casey:
What lessons did you learn while doing all this other than testing the watch app and AV player?
Casey:
Anything else?
John:
You learn to play one of each kind of podcast that you know exists out in the wild, right?
John:
So one MP3, one AC with the headers at the end, one AC with the headers at the beginning, one high bitrate, one low bitrate, you know, just... Yeah, I mean, basically what I learned there was... I was already doing that, but what I learned there was there's another type that I forgot about.
Marco:
That should have been included in the list.
Casey:
It's funny to me that you have yet to mention that you learned that unit testing may not be so terrible, but I know that's a tree that it's not worth barking up.
Casey:
Any other interesting stories about the development?
Casey:
Because it's been about a year, right?
Casey:
What version of the streaming engine are we on?
Casey:
Four or five?
Casey:
Three or four.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So it was about a year.
Casey:
Any other interesting stories worth sharing before we talk about business-y things?
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
I mean, it was, you know, I did a few other things.
Marco:
I converted a lot.
Marco:
A lot of things were previously firing notifications to tell various other parts of the app to update.
Marco:
And now I'm doing all those.
Marco:
I'm doing a lot of those as KVO using Facebook's KVO controller instead of all this notification hell.
Marco:
So that was actually a nice thing.
Marco:
I've serialized database access onto the main thread, which is crazy sounding to some people.
Marco:
And I know this is very technical and very boring, so I'll go over it very quickly for people who don't want to hear it.
Marco:
Basically, my previous version was using a version of my FC model layer that had a background queue for database access.
Marco:
And there was...
Marco:
There was a number of challenges with this and potential bugs when things were happening on a background queue and then the UI tries to update them.
Marco:
And then what version of it does it get?
Marco:
And does it update at the right time?
Marco:
Does anything accidentally get called in the background thread that's touching UIKit, which you can't do?
Marco:
So there's all sorts of these little possible bugs, some of which became real bugs.
Marco:
And the new version serializes all database operations on the main thread.
Marco:
You're typically told not to do this for a lot of things because, you know, that is performance problematic.
Marco:
Like if you have a big database operation that's using the database for a couple of seconds, the UI can't update.
Marco:
In practice, if you have an operation that's that long, the UI gets blocked anyway if you have it on a background queue because at some point the UI calls into the database queue and the operation is ahead of it in the queue that's blocking it all up.
Marco:
So I found in practice any large operations that were large enough to take a noticeable amount of time on the database would block the UI anyway even if it was on the background thread because something in the UI would call into the database and have to wait.
John:
You don't have a readers aren't blocked by writers kind of isolation or a separate queue for read and write?
Marco:
You know, I don't have that.
Marco:
I could add that at some point to FC model.
Marco:
In practice, I really haven't needed it.
Marco:
In practice, having everything on the main thread is both way simpler.
Marco:
As I mentioned, all the possible bugs that you get from having it on some other thread, all those bugs are gone.
Marco:
And also, it hasn't really been slower.
Marco:
In fact, many things about it are faster.
Marco:
So I have I have found no downside to this in the kind of in the ways that I actually use the database, which is, you know, every I'm never doing like a table scan, whatever SQLite calls a table scan.
Marco:
I'm never doing that in the UI.
Marco:
Everything that I'm always that I'm querying is always indexed.
Marco:
And the data set really isn't that big, relatively speaking.
Marco:
So, yeah, that's fine.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
One final question before we talk about something else that's awesome.
Casey:
What's next on the roadmap?
Casey:
Anything you're willing to share?
Casey:
One benefit that we, well, air quote, benefit that we get being on the ATP emails is that we also get about a tenth of your overcast support requests that somehow end up in the ATP inbox.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I've seen a handful of people very perturbed about the lack of authenticated feeds in Overcast.
Casey:
Do you plan on doing that?
Casey:
Or is there anything else you'd like to talk about with regard to your roadmap?
Marco:
So right now, you know, I crawl ATP once for all subscribers to it.
Marco:
And then I, you know, I collect that data and I distribute it to the people.
Marco:
So, okay.
Marco:
Suppose you have a password feed.
Marco:
Do I crawl it once and then reserve that to other people?
Marco:
That's obviously not great for security and, you know, kind of defeats the purpose of password feeds and could be like a piracy venue avenue.
Marco:
So, you know, I don't want to do that.
Marco:
Do I crawl the feed separately for every user that's subscribed to it with their username and password?
Marco:
That is like the most semantically correct way to do it.
Marco:
But that's also incredibly wasteful and resource heavy on my crawling servers.
Marco:
Suppose a really popular podcast went with password protected feeds.
Marco:
And then I had, you know, 60,000 people in my podcast app trying to download this one thing with 60,000 different passwords.
Marco:
Then that adds 60,000 crawling feeds I have to do to every interval that I'm refreshing the feed.
Marco:
And that's both a burden on me and a burden on the other server.
Marco:
So I don't know of anybody who does server-side crawling and supports password feeds.
Marco:
But I could be wrong.
Marco:
I mean, as I said, you could do it.
Marco:
But I think at scale, it starts to become problematic.
Marco:
And so that's why I've been hesitant to do it.
Marco:
It's also just, you know, among all the different feature requests I get, it has been pretty low on the priority list simply because not that many people request it.
Marco:
And I think most podcasts these days that are going to do the password model...
Marco:
Generally speaking, I think that's fairly outdated in that many of them are switching to just having their own apps to play them back in.
Marco:
And there's various reasons why I don't love that approach, but that's the reality of the market.
Marco:
So I don't have immediate plans to do this, but I could do it in the future.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Any other interesting things planned for Overcast 3?
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm not even thinking about 3 yet.
Marco:
No, I mean, honestly, I don't have any remaining massive ideas.
Marco:
I have a bunch of small ideas I want to do, little things I want to do, a bunch of things that would be worthy of 2.1, 2.2, that kind of update.
Marco:
But I currently have no concept of what 3.0 would be or when it would come out, if ever.
Marco:
I can take the 2.x line going for a long time.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
All right, why don't you tell us about something that's awesome.
Marco:
They are professionally designed templates that you can customize to your heart's content with no coding required.
Marco:
So regardless of your skill level, you can customize the look of your website.
Marco:
And if you want, if you have a lot of skill, you can jump in there and inject custom CSS, custom JavaScript, whatever you want to do to customize the site template.
Marco:
These are all, of course, responsive.
Marco:
You can also embed commerce functionality.
Marco:
Every website comes with free online store capabilities for both physical or digital goods.
Marco:
All this is supported 24-7 via live chat and email.
Marco:
If you have any questions or need any help, 24-7 support.
Marco:
All of this is state-of-the-art technology, which powers your site to ensure stability and security.
Marco:
This is trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world.
Marco:
All of this starts at just $8 a month.
Marco:
If you sign up for a year, you get a free domain name.
Marco:
And this is great.
Marco:
I mean, there are so many cases where this is the right answer.
Marco:
For example...
Marco:
Earlier today, I was at one of my favorite coffee shops and the owner of the coffee shop said, hey, I need to update my website.
Marco:
You know about computers.
Marco:
You know, what should I do?
Marco:
How should I do?
Marco:
And I said, just here, look, I wrote down Squarespace for him.
Marco:
He hadn't heard of it because he doesn't listen to podcasts apparently ever.
Marco:
I wrote down Squarespace for him.
Marco:
I said, here, do this.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
This is all you need.
Marco:
and uh hey i'll let you know how that went you know when i i gotta go there about once a month so uh we'll follow up in future sponsors on how that went but i'm pretty sure it's going to work out well uh this is a perfect example of exactly what you need squarespace for so anyway check it out start your free trial site today this is what i told him to do no credit card required at squarespace.com use code atp to get 10 off your first purchase when you sign up squarespace build it beautiful
Casey:
Alright, the business model changed for Overcast 2.
Casey:
What once was not free is now free.
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
Marco:
So before the model was a free app with an in-app purchase for $5 one time to unlock all the features.
Marco:
So there were limits, certain features were not available, and you could pay once to unlock them all.
Marco:
And it worked fine.
Marco:
It wasn't amazing, but it was fine.
Marco:
The problem was that, of course, as these things go, it's a one-time purchase.
Marco:
And so average revenue per month was going down, as these things tend to do.
Marco:
And I had this major new update, and I had so many people asking me, is it going to be a paid upgrade?
Marco:
There were people on both sides of that.
Marco:
About half the people who asked were hoping the answer was yes, and about half of them were hoping the answer was no, because they wanted to give me more money to make sure the app survived.
Marco:
not because they like it a lot so i had so many people who wanted the free update so many people who wanted to give me more money and i evaluated all these different options and the other problem was that you know by having the app that has limits about 20 of the users actually paid to unlock it and as far as in-app purchase rates go that's incredibly good like that's an that's a great conversion rate most people with like a free thing with a paid conversion they would love a conversion rate of 20 uh so i i have no complaints about the conversion rate there
Marco:
However, that still meant that 80% of the users were getting this limited, terrible version of the app.
Marco:
And I wasn't using that version.
Marco:
I wouldn't use that version even for a day.
Marco:
It was annoying to even have these different code paths to test them.
Marco:
And I knew that 80% of my users were using a terrible version of the app.
Marco:
So I switched to a voluntary patronage model.
Marco:
So basically, and this is not actually that new.
Marco:
It's very, very similar to what I did with Instapaper about halfway through its ownership.
Marco:
So you basically, the entire app is free.
Marco:
Instapaper was paid, but that was a different story.
Marco:
But the entire app is now free.
Marco:
All features are unlocked.
Marco:
And you pay, if you want to, to support ongoing development.
Marco:
And you pay a dollar a month if you want to do that.
Marco:
And so far, that's working.
Marco:
I haven't matched my previous income yet.
Marco:
And I don't expect to for a while.
Marco:
But I've gotten something like 40% there already.
Marco:
I mean, after less than a week.
Marco:
and the feature as it as it is right now is incredibly to a fault unintrusive like it's buried it doesn't like if you just launch the app and use it normally you never even see it uh it's only in the setting screen if you if you go to the setting screen then you will see it otherwise you don't see it at all and and over time like that's mostly because i just haven't gotten around to making things that like
Marco:
promote it more like you know i was thinking maybe at the very bottom of the podcast list screen putting like a little thing there saying we're supported by you know if you aren't a monthly patron putting a little thing there saying here this is what we do or like you know when i uh when i do when i add more features i can put like welcome thing up saying here's what's new and here's how you can do it if you want to support this so there's stuff like that i can do but i haven't done it yet so having having done a really invisible update and to already be about 40 towards my previous revenue after less than a week
Casey:
is i i consider that a success that is that is a faster uptake rate than i would have expected um so i'm very happy with that so far good why uh why free i mean don't you want to make money man i mean i heard what you just said about how you've got a pretty good uptake on on this but you know you said you haven't quite reached your old monthly revenue and that seemed to be working okay so why mess with the system
Marco:
you know it's and you know part of it as i said was like the reasons of you know satisfying i mean now everybody gets the good app right uh so all my customers now are using the best features and you know that's to me that's important like things like smart speed and voice boost this is why my entire custom audio engine exists this is why i had to write all that this is why i can't just use av player and it's a big reason that differentiates overcast from the built-in podcast app
Marco:
So when you're telling people, like, you know, you should use this app, well, why?
Marco:
And, you know, I have other competitors, too, and that's fine.
Marco:
But the biggest competitor, by a long shot, is the built-in Apple Podcast app.
Marco:
By a mile.
Marco:
And that comes in, it comes with every phone.
Marco:
It comes pre-installed.
Marco:
As far as, I don't even think you can delete it.
Marco:
I think it's always there.
Marco:
So the question is, like, how do I make anybody use my app instead of the built-in Apple Podcast app?
Marco:
And a lot of the features that I locked behind that paywall before, Apple gives those away for free.
Marco:
So that really, it was not very competitive with Apple's app.
Marco:
And so before I had the scheme where the app was free for, you know, some of the app and then you pay to get everything.
Marco:
So it was always free for most people and pay for some.
Marco:
And now it is still free for most people and pay for some.
Marco:
But I've just changed what they're paying for and why.
Marco:
And the result of that is a much simpler app that's much better for everybody.
Marco:
So that's why I think it's a win because it was always free for most people and I make money somewhere in there.
Marco:
And now it still is that.
Marco:
It is still free for most people and I make money somewhere in there.
Marco:
Again, I've just changed the specifics of how that's done.
Marco:
But it's still making money.
Marco:
It's still profitable.
Marco:
And over the long term, it's probably going to be just as profitable, if not more so.
Marco:
Because, as I mentioned, this is not my first paid app.
Marco:
I've seen this train before.
Marco:
That's not a saying.
Marco:
Now it is.
Marco:
I've seen this train before.
Marco:
I know how this goes.
Marco:
After my first year where I did this big thing and I keep giving free updates, average monthly revenue goes down because I start to reach saturation among my existing audience of like the people who bought it last year when I launched it.
Marco:
You know, over time, I'm not making any more money from those people.
Marco:
And I'm still giving all these new features for free.
Marco:
If I do a paid upgrade that has other problems, people generally hate those.
Marco:
Over time, if I would have stuck with the old model...
Marco:
That was a downward slope of the revenue.
Marco:
It was slow.
Marco:
I was still doing okay, but the trend line was clearly slowly going down.
Marco:
And that happens to every paid app that I've ever seen.
Marco:
So with this, first of all, with this, I think the trend line will slowly go up.
Marco:
So that's a huge improvement right there.
Marco:
And it also kind of levels it out a lot more.
Marco:
It's more predictable income and it gives people a way to give me more money if they want to.
Marco:
And so it really does solve a lot of problems.
Marco:
And I don't think it's any... I don't think it's that crazy.
Marco:
When you look at it as how I described it a minute ago, it was free for most people and some people pay before and now it still is.
Marco:
Just what you pay for is different.
Marco:
If you look at it that way, I don't think it's that crazy.
Casey:
Well, yeah, but that's all fine for Marco, right?
Marco:
Oh, God, this.
Marco:
Yeah, you know, this was all Twitter and blog drama this morning.
Marco:
I don't want to get really into it on the show.
Marco:
But the short version is that anytime I do anything, I hear from people saying...
Marco:
Well, that's fine for you.
Marco:
Copying the old, that's fine for Merlin joke.
Marco:
Well, that's fine for Marco, but I can't do that because I don't have X. Whether it's as many Twitter followers as I do or the brand recognition that I do or whatever the case may be, the PR that I get when I do things.
Marco:
Always these arguments of, well, everything I do is unique and invalid to apply to anybody else.
Marco:
And that's just not true.
Marco:
And the fact is people are going to convince themselves of that no matter what I say.
Marco:
So it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
It's not really worth arguing.
Marco:
But the short version is the path I took.
Marco:
The result that I'm at now of where my career is now, my audience, what people expect of me, what people want to see from me.
Marco:
Yeah, that's hard to replicate in five minutes.
Marco:
But I've been building it for like 10 years.
Marco:
And the ways I have built it over 10 years...
Marco:
are generally accessible to other people.
Marco:
If you also blog for 10 years and podcast for five years and make a bunch of apps along the way, then you have a better chance of getting the kind of launch attention that I can get, etc.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
that launch attention is fleeting it's one time that's it like launch attention alone does not carry things if it did everything i did would succeed but in fact most of the things i do don't succeed that's why i stopped doing them you know like the the magazine did not succeed uh the the launch was i think a couple days after the launch was the most subscribers it ever had
Marco:
And then it just went down from there.
Marco:
The magazine did not succeed.
Marco:
Bugshot did not succeed.
Marco:
Nursing Clock, of course, was kind of a joke that it didn't succeed.
Marco:
Even I was having trouble keeping Instapaper afloat when I sold it.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons I sold it because it was just not doing that well anymore.
Marco:
The fact is the things I do don't succeed by default.
Marco:
I am afforded the luxury of a stronger launch than many people can get.
Marco:
But the value of that launch, as I said, is temporary.
Marco:
And if... I mean, look at our friends who made Vesper, right?
Marco:
John Gruber, Brent Simmons, Dave Wiskus.
Marco:
These people had massive audiences, especially John Gruber.
Marco:
These massive audiences.
Marco:
And yet, Vesper hasn't taken over the world.
Marco:
Obviously, the size of your audience is really... It helps, but it's not all you need.
Marco:
And it's not a guarantee.
Marco:
So the people who really need to hear this won't hear it.
Marco:
So it doesn't really matter what I say.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
If there's anything to take away from this, it is that...
Marco:
Almost nothing that I've done is unique.
Marco:
And, you know, there is a road to take here to increase your chances of success, but it might take you 10 years and a lot of work because that's what it took me.
John:
Yeah.
John:
One of the things you've mentioned in the past was like...
John:
wanting to get your app i think you mentioned it in your your blog post your pragmatic pricing blog post that we'll put in the show notes uh wanting to get your app into the hands of as many people as possible like you're going from market share over profit like rather than selling a 99 artisanal handcrafted podcast app to 17 people you want your app to be in the hands of most people possible as a hedge against uh
John:
What did you say?
John:
Big money?
John:
Was that what you called it?
John:
Yep.
John:
Coming in?
John:
You didn't want podcasts to become proprietary or Facebook-ized or owned and controlled by a single company, so you wanted to get your application out there to the broadest audience possible.
John:
And that is in line with your original pricing model, which was free within-app purchase because...
John:
you reduce the barrier to someone tapping the little button in the store and getting it on their device and now again uh same thing you know if you want it on your device you can tap a button you don't have to give any money uh and only now it's a better app when you download it so there's more chance that people will tap the button
John:
Um, so that all works, but one of the, uh, complaints from people about your new pricing model has been revolving around, uh, what effects your new pricing model may have on the other podcast clients, uh, that are for sale now, I guess not including apples because like they don't care what you do and maybe not including the big guys that can afford to give away their pod.
John:
I don't know if there's any other big guys like that, but basically other, uh,
John:
smallish, independent podcast clients.
John:
Do you think your new pricing model will have any effect on the fortunes of those clients?
Marco:
I don't think it has any more effect than it did before, which is I don't think it has any more effect than what the Apple client has.
Marco:
All of us are at a severe disadvantage because the Apple client is built in and pre-installed and free and has most features that most people need built in.
John:
And it's reel-to-reel, so the audio quality is better.
John:
It has that warm sound you just can't get from vinyl, Casey.
John:
Hi, guys.
Marco:
and also like you know the um when you do a search in the app store for podcast or podcasts it shows this giant banner up top for the built-in podcast app to promote that to basically divert your attention back to that to dissuade you from getting another podcast app if you actually search the app store and you can't even delete you can't even delete that app off your phone so it's not as if you need to download it from the store like you have it
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So there's a reason why.
Marco:
I mean, by most estimates, I think the Apple podcast app has something like 60 to 90 percent market share, depending on who you ask.
Marco:
I mean, it's a massive, massive player.
Marco:
And that market share number, as far as I know, is not going down.
Marco:
So that's a huge disadvantage for anybody entering the market.
Marco:
so mine being, being mostly free in the sense that, you know, I still, I'm asking people for money, but just, you know, now you can get all the features for free.
Marco:
It's a valid question that like, you know, am I, you know, killing these smaller apps?
Marco:
I don't think I am.
Marco:
I don't think I'm, I think I am.
Marco:
First of all, I'm competing and this is something that they can do if they want to.
Marco:
Um, by most estimates that I, that I've been able to piece together from like rank data, um,
Marco:
I think they're all making more money than me doing what they're doing.
Marco:
So they've been outgrossing me, I think, for the year, or at least coming very close or being very close.
Marco:
So I think they're doing fine.
Marco:
When you have this giant built-in app that is built into the phone, free, very full-featured, look at the iOS Notes app is another good example of this, or the iOS Weather app, any of the built-in iOS apps, calculator, reminders, all this stuff.
Marco:
There are markets for all of those apps in the App Store, for third-party versions of those.
Marco:
And they're often very healthy markets with many different competitors.
Marco:
And even if Apple's app takes, like, you know, the 80% or whatever, that still leaves a lot of people.
Marco:
And I had this problem with Instapaper, with Reading List.
Marco:
And as far as I could tell, Reading List never really had much of an effect on Instapaper either way.
Marco:
It didn't seem like a negative or a positive.
Marco:
Because the thing is, when you're making an app...
Marco:
the the especially something as complex as a podcast app the sum of all your little decisions along the way which is tons of little tiny design decisions the sum of all those decisions is what makes the app fit people or not fit people whether it whether it kind of matches with the way you think about things or whether it conflicts with the way you think about things whether it's a design you like or you don't like before you even get to features or price those are all considerations the
Marco:
And because people have different preferences of what they want, how they want it to look, how they want it to work, what features they need and don't need, that creates tons of market potential for other apps in every category, even categories that Apple already has a built-in thing up front for.
Marco:
The fact that I come into this category and I give my app away for free, I think it's the same calculus.
Marco:
I think it's the same situation that the apps have always been in before.
Marco:
Apps that provide something that people want, that do things a little differently than the built-in one or now than mine, those will find audiences the same way mine did.
Marco:
They will find audiences regardless of how much my app costs.
John:
Alright, so next question.
John:
If it turns out that changing your pricing in this way did reduce the, you know, the sales of the competing applications to a degree that maybe one or two of them drop off or whatever.
John:
How how does that fit in with your goals of trying to make sure big money doesn't come into podcasting?
John:
Is it does it not affect it at all?
John:
Is it negative?
John:
Is it positive?
John:
And how would you feel about it?
Marco:
Well, I would feel pretty bad if I actually killed someone else's app, but I have seen very little evidence to suggest that that kind of thing has ever happened in iOS or any software market, for that matter.
Marco:
That's not really how things tend to go.
Marco:
Usually, apps...
Marco:
die or become unsuccessful or non-economical to continue because they themselves just kind of didn't do that well maintaining their own app or keeping their own users around.
Marco:
When I had Instapaper, I learned this pretty well, too, that I was always worried about my competition.
Marco:
I was always worried.
Marco:
I talked about this at XOXO.
Marco:
I was always worried about what if somebody comes in tomorrow and takes all my users away?
Marco:
And that never happened.
Marco:
Lots of new competitors came around.
Marco:
Some of them very big.
Marco:
Some of them completely free.
Marco:
In fact, most of them completely free.
Marco:
Some of them are from big companies.
Marco:
Some of them Apple.
Marco:
And it never seemed to make any difference whatsoever because people had chosen me for lots of reasons.
Marco:
And my app was kind of mine to screw up.
Marco:
Or it was mine to neglect or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
So if a podcast app goes away, if it shuts down, which Instacast did this past, I don't know, six months ago maybe, Instacast did.
Marco:
But I talked to the creator of that in the past, and I think he was having trouble for a while keeping it up.
Marco:
So I don't think I had anything to do with that really.
Marco:
If an app goes away, yes, I would feel bad if it was my fault, but I would have a really hard time believing that it was really my fault.
Marco:
Furthermore, if being free up front for this past year, if that was really a big deal, my market share would be bigger.
Marco:
But it isn't.
Marco:
Pocket Cast is the greatest counterexample of this.
Marco:
Pocket Cast has way more users than I do.
Marco:
Way more.
Marco:
They make way more money than I do.
Marco:
By a large amount.
Marco:
They are on both platforms.
Marco:
They have a staff to maintain it.
Marco:
Pocket Casts is, by all objective measures, kicking my butt.
Marco:
And they're paid up front.
Marco:
And they've been paid up front the entire time that I've been free.
Marco:
And the reason why people choose Pocket Casts is not because this is...
Marco:
four or five dollars or whatever they charge i don't even know what they charge whatever it is it's not because of that it's because they just like it better or it does things that mine doesn't do or it serves platforms that i don't serve like it's for other reasons so i think i think people are putting way more emphasis on this pricing model than i think it's warranted
John:
So for the big picture thing, though, ignoring whether you are the cause of it or not, is it better for keeping podcasts from being Facebook-ized or whatever?
John:
Do you want to see lots of third-party clients out there for podcasts, or do you not really care as long as the overall market share between podcasts
John:
the you know the big money and the little guys is the same even if that the the the little guy share is divvied up between five people seven people 12 people two people uh you don't really care my goal here is diversity in the ecosystem
Marco:
So from that point of view, a large number of smaller clients is better.
Marco:
However, we've had a large number of small clients for years, and we haven't made meaningful inroads into getting significant market share overall for the independent category.
Marco:
The winners have always been Apple's podcast app,
Marco:
And then, you know, down a while, then Stitcher, and then things like iHeart and TuneIn that are kind of not quite podcast players.
Marco:
Now you have things like Spotify, getting into podcasts, and that's only going to continue.
Marco:
Diversity is important, but you also need some big players that can be big enough to attract people away from those other ones.
Marco:
And that's what I'm trying to be.
Marco:
You know, Stitcher, I think by most measures had something like 5% of the entire podcast player market, but that's a lot.
Marco:
I'm trying to reach that kind of level.
Marco:
I know I'm not going to have like 50% or more.
Marco:
Like that's crazy talk.
Marco:
I would love to reach 5% and I'm nowhere near it, but I'd love to get there.
John:
Isn't Apple kind of a good guy in this scenario?
John:
Because even though they're big and have all this money, everything, their sort of vague disinterest in podcasts means that their player just reads RSS feeds, right?
John:
They're not trying to open up peg walls.
John:
They're not trying to grab copyright or insert their own ads into people's podcasts.
John:
They seem pretty sort of...
John:
benign kind of doddering it's the built-in app it works okay it works better now than it used to but it's a straight up podcast app right there's no there's not even any weird itunes drm shenanigans in there right oh correct um but i don't like the podcast i don't i don't like theirs all right right so the app isn't good but i'm saying like in terms of the openness versus closeness like you can totally see how like stitcher in your scenario like something like stitcher is more the enemy in terms of
John:
they want uh you know i don't know if they want control but anyway their view of the podcast world is like through the lens of stitcher right it is it is a different kind of deal than well people just put up rss feeds and this is just a client app that crawls them and it lets people listen to things like that that's what you're trying to preserve essentially what we have now which is hey so you want to put up a podcast it's just an rss feed with a bunch of attachments anybody can do it
John:
If you want to get listed in the big popular directories like iTunes or I don't know what else is out there, there's no barrier to that entry.
John:
Apple is not like the gatekeeper.
John:
They don't charge you money or require that Apple ads be put in front of your stuff or whatever.
John:
It's all pretty open and straightforward, kind of like blogging used to be.
John:
Well, we'll talk about Medium in a little bit.
John:
But anyway, like blogging was in the old days where it's very open.
John:
And it seemed to me that what you're trying to guard against is
John:
the new world where it's like well if you want to have a podcast you have to go through stitcher and stitcher gets x percentage of your profit and kind of like the app store and uh they're the gatekeeper for everything involved um and they reserve the right to insert their own ads into your things and to resell your content i don't know like i'm making up i have no idea what stitcher's deal is but
John:
the idea that uh or like facebook like where also you want your articles to be shown in facebook facebook controls what gets into facebook facebook can copy your stuff and republish it and uh facebook instant articles are a thing that you have to write to it's not like they just pull your stuff anyway or like apple news like that's am i correct in trying to get a handle on what it is that you're the doomsday scenario that doesn't yet exist but you're trying to avoid
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So to go back to Stitcher for a second, the thing I don't like about Stitcher is that they have their own proprietary directory.
Marco:
And so it's not a general purpose podcast player.
Marco:
You can only play their podcasts.
Marco:
And if you agree to be one of their podcasts...
Marco:
They call your feed.
Marco:
They get updates.
Marco:
They download your episodes and re-host them themselves.
Marco:
So you don't see the download numbers.
Marco:
They insert their own ads between them, which is weird and conflicting, possibly with the ads that you might have.
Marco:
They transcode your audio quality to be terrible.
Marco:
And last time I checked, they actually required you to promote Stitcher on your shows, which would be why you always hear podcasters saying, find us on iTunes and Stitcher because they have to.
Marco:
And we decided with this show early on when we got a couple emails saying, why aren't you on Stitcher?
Marco:
I can't listen to you.
Marco:
We decided early on that based on the apparent volume being fairly low, that we didn't think it was worth being on Stitcher because we weren't very happy with those terms.
Marco:
And so we decided, you know, it's not worth it.
Marco:
We don't want to do that.
Marco:
And the only reason we had the option to say no is because Ditcher's market share was only like, you know, 5% or whatever.
Marco:
If they got any bigger than that, it would be really hard to say no.
Marco:
So imagine what if they had 15%, 20%.
Marco:
That becomes real numbers.
Marco:
And so imagine big publishers like Gimlet or Slate or Radiotopia, big publishers.
Marco:
If some players in the market like that and they start dictating terms like that, they basically have to agree to them.
Marco:
They don't have the luxury to say no to something that's controlling possibly 15% or 20% of the market.
Marco:
That's a huge, huge problem.
Marco:
A player doesn't have to get to a majority stake, 50%.
Marco:
They don't have to get that big to be able to dictate terms.
Marco:
And I don't want to reach that point.
Marco:
We've come dangerously close a few times.
Marco:
I really don't want to reach that point in this medium.
Marco:
It's even worse.
Marco:
Facebook is way worse, obviously, because they have... I think most publishers would tell you that more than 50% of traffic comes from Facebook.
Marco:
It's crazy how much traffic Facebook drives.
Marco:
So we, at least in this medium, we have the freedom that we don't have those middlemen who can dictate so many terms to us yet.
Marco:
However, Apple is one.
Marco:
And granted, most podcast apps, you can subscribe to any URL.
Marco:
Any URL that's an RSS feed, you can subscribe to it and the app will play it.
Marco:
But Apple runs the iTunes podcast directory.
Marco:
And that directory is the center of all knowledge of podcasts for...
Marco:
a vast majority of podcast players apples and otherwise and apple has rules like i think they disallow like adult stuff and stuff like that but anyway right now apple is pretty hands-off with their directory right now you know they have this giant market share in both the directory side and in the in the player app side
Marco:
But they've mostly been hands-off, as you said.
Marco:
They've mostly kind of ignored it.
Marco:
But what happens if they don't?
Marco:
What happens if they start using that power they have and making changes?
Marco:
They probably won't because podcasting, the reason why they haven't really touched it much so far...
Marco:
as far as I can tell, is because it just was never that important to them relative to everything else they do.
Marco:
They're this giant company with these giant products, these giant initiatives.
Marco:
Podcasting was always so small that it wasn't really worth them messing around with, really.
Marco:
But podcasting is growing.
Marco:
And Apple is getting...
Marco:
I don't know, possibly a little bit desperate in relevance on the music side.
Marco:
So that might change.
Marco:
Not only do I want to make sure that nobody else comes in and gets enough market shares to be able to dictate terms to every podcast publisher, but I also would like to eat away at Apple's share a little bit because I'm not comfortable with anybody having that much power over a market, even when it is Apple and they've been pretty good about it so far.
Marco:
The other side of this is, suppose you want to do online video.
Marco:
Online video is just YouTube these days.
Marco:
You might as well just say YouTube because that's what online video means to most people, YouTube.
Marco:
It is so dominated by one company and also that company is constantly messing with the terms and constantly changing the way it works.
Marco:
They are really not a great owner of that entire medium because they have shown over and over again that they're willing to change things around for their own benefit and to be opaque and to make changes that might not be in your own best interest as a publisher and things like that.
Marco:
But if you try to publish video really anywhere except YouTube, it's very hard to get any viewership.
Marco:
So I don't want podcasts to ever reach that point.
Marco:
Right now, they're vulnerable to that with Apple's market share.
Marco:
Apple is not the kind of company that would do that generally.
Marco:
But things change.
Marco:
People change.
Marco:
Companies change.
Marco:
Anything can happen.
Marco:
So ideally, I would like to diversify the market so much that...
Marco:
not only does nobody get the power to dictate terms, but that Apple doesn't have that power either.
John:
You don't have to post your video to Facebook or to YouTube to get a good viewership.
John:
You can just post it to Facebook.
Marco:
Yeah, there's that issue as well.
Marco:
Maybe it's a duopoly.
John:
Choose your poison.
John:
Exactly.
John:
The two giants fight each other over who has monopulate.
John:
I think we're all thus far protected by podcasts being such a drop in the bucket, but...
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
Every time I see these stories about new podcast initiatives, the whole serial thing, and even that friend of yours, Gimlet Media or something like that.
John:
Anyway, anytime those stories go in, when podcasts get rediscovered by the mass media briefly on the two or three year cycle that it's on,
John:
people get excited about it being a thing but then it's kind of like then it quiets down and i'm not sure if it ever crosses the threshold into a real mass media i'm not sure if it even crosses the threshold into like reading like as in books or you know paper books or ebooks which i still think is just a massively larger business than podcasts will ever be
John:
um so it could be that this ecosystem is never interesting enough for apple to wake up and try to rest control of it but if they did yeah i don't know what the hedge is against it the hedge is is the hedge you and your little my sequel database with a bunch of podcasts in it is that it is that all we've got is it just you know i don't or stitcher that's not you know oh god no i mean like ideally the hedge is lots of other people
John:
Who has a directory?
John:
I mean, you have your own directory, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I have my own.
Marco:
But I will still search iTunes as a fallback to get stuff if I can't find anything.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, so who else has their own directory at all?
Marco:
Microsoft has one.
Marco:
I don't know how big it is, but they do have one.
Marco:
I think there's like one or two, whether it's around.
Marco:
I know Google, I've heard many very, very strong rumblings that Google is working on a major podcast initiative.
Marco:
I don't know anything about it, but I know they're working on a major podcast initiative.
John:
I bet it involves ads.
John:
Almost certainly.
John:
I don't know anything about it, but hmm.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And again, how much power do you want Google to have over this medium?
Marco:
The more diverse we can get it to be, the less they can dictate terms.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This is not going to stay still.
Marco:
Podcasts are becoming big.
Marco:
They're getting lots of attention.
Marco:
We have to be very defensive and skeptical about how this is going to go in the future.
Marco:
I think it's really worth fighting for this because we lost video long ago, right at the start.
Marco:
We lost text mostly now, these days.
Marco:
I don't want to lose podcasting to these big, private, centralized, proprietary things.
John:
It's probably protecting podcasts right now is the incompetence of car makers, because I feel like that's still kind of the linchpin.
John:
When we were kids, radio dominated because cars had radios in them.
John:
I think in the home, the advent of television replaced radio for a lot of things, although people still had radios at work or whatever to listen to.
John:
But
John:
for, for, you know, terrestrial radio has been all screwed up or whatever.
John:
And the replacement of, you know, podcasts are the replacement.
John:
They're independent.
John:
You can get what you want.
John:
They're, you know, free.
John:
Uh, they're all internet powered.
John:
And once our cars can all play podcasts using their ubiquitous internet connections and their apps and their Apple CarPlay, that's been such a mess.
John:
Like it's clearly not there yet.
John:
If you could snap your fingers and say, starting now, every car you buy anywhere in the world can play any podcast.
John:
Um,
John:
And it's like, wow, podcasts have really made it now because then people who have never heard of podcasts, they just grow up in a world where you go into a car and you somehow search for, you know, this American life and it plays it whenever you want.
John:
And you don't know how it happens in the same way that you grow up in a car and you press a little preset button and the radio station comes on and you listen to music, right?
John:
That is the...
John:
the final form if you will of podcasts and that it is the true replacement for radio only it's on demand and it's diversified and whatever but you can get that if facebook owns podcasts or google owns podcasts in fact it may come faster if one company owns podcasts or whatever um i'm trying to envision a world in which a car makers get their acts together to actually you know sort of i don't know it's not like agreeing on a standard but like
John:
if you get everyone in a room and say we all agree right podcasts are just an rss feed and that's where they come from and and no one is going to support any particular company uh but if one of those companies got big if it was google or apple or microsoft or even if stitcher gets big or something and somehow you know like kind of like uh xm radio and sirius got their claws into the auto industry for a while there where like it used to be you could get radio in your thing and then you get satellite radio and it was one of two companies and then they merged
John:
um they'd merge right those two yeah one one bought the other one out um luckily satellite radio is terrible so not to worry too much about that like technology wise there are limitations there that aren't gonna uh you know go big but the final iteration of cars is hey if cars had internet connection then cars could listen to music and they could listen to you know music is already
John:
proprietaryized whatever the word is and you know it's spotify it's apple music it's audio it's all these other things so there's no hope of that being like oh if we just add support for this protocol anyone can publish you know that's already proprietary podcasts have a chance have a chance a slim chance of remaining in this sort of neutral open state long enough for cars to get their app act together such that all cars have some crappy podcast player in them and
John:
and once the ball starts rolling on that if it gets going it could end up being like like the web i guess is the best example of like the web got out the door before anyone could really get control of it microsoft tried and basically failed but you can make something with the web browser now and it can browse the web you know the web browser engines are open source you can make one of them it can load a web page that's not owned and controlled by a single company podcasts have a chance of that but right now
John:
i think the expectation is that if a person buys a new car that car cannot play a podcast except perhaps through a bluetooth integration with their iphone using an application i think that is still too complicated for most people most people just want to go into a car and like have a preset button that's their favorite podcast and press play and start plays the next episode or something like that um
Marco:
The example of satellite radio, I think, was the best counterexample to this, which is that satellite radio, you're right, came in.
Marco:
It got great integration into cars, where now almost every car that you buy, in the U.S.
Marco:
at least, has an option for satellite radio.
Marco:
Many of them, it's even bundled into other packages that you might get anyway.
Marco:
So it's very common.
John:
But you had to pay for it, which is a real killer.
John:
Obviously, podcast integration wouldn't be like, oh, you have to pay X dollars a month.
John:
Right.
Marco:
But either way, the hardware was there, and it still hasn't caught on.
Marco:
And I think what will protect podcasts in the car from that kind of big integration deal kind of world is the same thing that has made satellite radio even less relevant today than it was before, which is, I always say, don't bet against the smartphone.
Marco:
The smartphone is what is killing satellite radio, finally.
Marco:
I mean, satellite radio has been kind of half-dead for a long time.
Marco:
I mean, forever.
Marco:
But the smartphone will kill it for good.
Marco:
The fact is, internet-connected cars... I think this is...
Marco:
This is probably like a half step.
John:
Well, through your phone.
John:
Like, obviously, I'm not saying you're going to pay.
John:
That would be a payment thing, too.
John:
You're going to pay for your cell access, and then you're going to have your phone with you when you're in your car.
John:
But I feel like it's not there.
John:
Like, as someone who owns probably the lowest-end possible car you can get that does connect to your phone and play audio, it works.
John:
But...
John:
it is not the type of thing that i would say just get this car and it will just you know you won't have to do anything and it'll just figure it out and it's it's really slow sometimes the bluetooth doesn't connect this ties into gruber's new theory that bluetooth is the worst thing uh ever and preventing the the future of uh the internet of things or whatever but but honestly like sometimes it doesn't connect to bluetooth audio sometimes takes a long time you can't tell if it's working sometimes you gotta toggle bluetooth on and off
John:
when it does work there's enough of a delay that you're not quite sure whether it's working so you have to decide whether you sit there and wait for the audio to switch over whether you start driving and hope that it will like it's not as seamless it's still i feel like it's still a nerd experience but you're right that's the way it has to go no one's going to pay a separate monthly fee for their although boy don't tell verizon but they would love that they could charge it anyway no one really wants to pay a separate monthly fee for their card to have internet access and if you're going to have your phone with you anyway uh
John:
We really just need, you know, good car integration.
John:
I mean, getting back, like I said, CarPlay, Android, you know, good smartphone car integration.
John:
Once that becomes... I think we're all... Do you think we're there with audio for iPod car integration?
John:
We kind of had that nice period where it was like cars had 30-pin connectors in them or a USB type thing, and you would have iPod integration.
John:
I felt like that worked pretty reliably, but that was obviously...
Marco:
a pre-wireless technology i mean i think we i think we are really pretty much there now for bluetooth audio uh and which is even better bluetooth is so much better and bmw's now i either even other cars like if i get rental cars i try it i know other people who try it usually bluetooth audio is not perfect but most of the time pretty good
John:
Yeah, the audio is fine.
John:
It's just the connection.
John:
Because I have Bluetooth audio.
John:
That's what I'm talking about with the integration.
John:
You need more sophisticated integration for podcasts if you want to actually put up an on-screen display that gives you more than just metadata as if it's a music track.
John:
You'd like to be able to... I don't know.
Marco:
But that's all you need.
Marco:
When you're playing it in a car, that's all I need.
Marco:
One of the reasons why I haven't explored options like making a BMW app for it
Marco:
One of the reasons why is because the Bluetooth integration is just good enough and it's really, really convenient that you just get in the car and the phone can stay in your pocket.
Marco:
You just get in the car and a few seconds later, it starts playing your podcast right where you left off on your phone.
John:
Much more than a few seconds in crappy cars, and sometimes never, because it inexplicably doesn't connect.
John:
What I'm saying is that I think that's not there yet for regular people.
John:
It's not the type of thing where you can just assure somebody, do you have a smartphone, period?
John:
When you buy a new car, any car...
John:
you will be able to listen to podcasts in the car, and there's nothing you'll need to do, and no manual you need to read, and no futzing you'll need to do, and no caveats about, remember, don't start driving until the audio plays, because it may not be connected to Bluetooth, and you better take care of that before you start moving, otherwise you'll be trying to use your touchscreen while you're moving, and you're going to run over a kid.
Casey:
You know, John, maybe it's just time for you to buy a nicer car.
Casey:
i'm saying like most people are buying cars like this and most people buying cars don't have any bluetooth integration at this point so it's i think it's starting to get really true i don't know a lot of very very cheap cars like my brother-in-law just got a uh a brand new civic and admittedly they're cheaper cars than the civic but i think the civic is kind of a decent barometer for what a reasonably priced car is these days and his has what i would call comfort access it has you know the proximity key
Casey:
I believe it has Bluetooth.
Casey:
It has a humongous touchscreen on it, which I don't think is navigation.
John:
Those are options.
John:
Those are all options.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
But I mean, I don't know a lot of people that buy a truly stripped car.
Casey:
I mean, you didn't buy a truly stripped car, right?
Casey:
You didn't get the best package.
John:
My first car didn't have a passenger side mirror.
Casey:
I'm talking about today.
Marco:
Had to roll up windows.
Marco:
I'm surprised it was legal to not have a window.
Marco:
I mean, a mirror.
Marco:
That's crazy.
John:
He's very old.
John:
The car was really small.
John:
And honestly, once you get used to it not being there, I don't know.
John:
What I didn't like about it, obviously, was the asymmetry.
John:
It's upsetting that this doesn't have the right... Anyway, it was fine.
John:
um it also had the cool like a little joystick to control the mirrors like instead of power mirrors at the little everything was manual nice anyway uh this is all getting off track of the podcasting stuff but anyway i i feel like that is the what with this podcast stuff like oh these stories in the paper and podcasts are big and there's lots of money involved and there's vcs and there's cereal and blah blah i feel like we're not over the hump yet with podcasts um
John:
We did like, and to give an example, we got over the hump with like digital music.
John:
iPods are everywhere.
John:
iPods swept away, you know, digital music swept away.
John:
Digital music on plastic discs was swept away by digital music on little tiny hard drives and eventually flash chips and stuff.
John:
So,
John:
That revolution happened.
John:
The podcast supplanting radio, talk radio for most people, I feel like has not happened.
John:
Talk radio, as terrible as it is, I think is still the dominant form of people listening to other people talking.
Marco:
Yeah, but I do think podcasting is replacing it.
Marco:
It's not happening rapidly, but it is happening.
Marco:
If you look at most podcast growth graphs over the last few years, it doesn't appear to be accelerating rapidly.
Marco:
It's just going up slowly and steadily the way it always has.
Marco:
And I think that's going to continue.
Marco:
You know, it is slowly, steadily getting more popular.
Marco:
It is not really ever going down.
Marco:
And so over time, it will replace talk radio for most people.
Marco:
Just it'll take a while.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of people still read newspapers, right?
Marco:
I mean, but that's not a growth industry, you know?
Marco:
So I think we are really in the early days of a transition that is definitely happening.
John:
All right, well, we should move on to your intentional destruction of the open blogging platform on the internet.
John:
But first, don't you have one more sponsor?
Marco:
Our final sponsor this week is Lynda.com, an easy and affordable way to help you learn with high quality, easy to follow video tutorials.
Marco:
You can instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design, and more.
Marco:
Go to Lynda.com, that's L-Y-N-D-A.com slash ATP to see for yourself.
Marco:
They offer courses for all experience levels, whether you're a beginner or advanced.
Marco:
And every Lynda.com course is produced at the highest quality.
Marco:
This is not like the inconsistent homemade videos on YouTube or whatever.
Marco:
Courses are broken up into bite-sized pieces so you can learn at your own pace and learn from start to finish.
Marco:
Or you can just jump in and find a quick answer with tools such as searchable transcripts.
Marco:
You can search for what they're saying in the video.
Marco:
You can see right there.
Marco:
It highlights as it moves along.
Marco:
You can jump to any point you want just by clicking the text.
Marco:
It is really quite amazing.
Marco:
They also have playlists, certificates of course completion.
Marco:
You can publish to your LinkedIn profile.
Marco:
You can even learn while you're on the go with Lynda.com apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Marco:
The way this works is you don't pay per video.
Marco:
You don't pay per course.
Marco:
You don't pay per subject.
Marco:
You can watch whatever you want in their entire catalog.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They have all sorts of courses that you might love, from app and web development in many different programming languages to productivity apps, creative pro apps like Adobe's Creative Suite, Logic, and Final Cut, and even professional skills like management and negotiation.
Marco:
So Lynda.com is so useful that 30% of colleges and universities, including most of the Ivy League schools, offer subscriptions to their students and faculty members.
Marco:
So this is really quite impressive.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
I've seen it.
Marco:
They are great.
Marco:
Lynda.com is offering a 10-day free trial with all course access.
Marco:
So watch whatever you want for 10 days in their entire catalog.
John:
all that for free free trial if you visit lynda.com slash atp once again that's a 10-day free trial with access to all courses at lynda.com slash atp thanks a lot so you don't like uh the open blogging platform you decided to post your which one do you one of the ones about uh the new version of overcast on medium yes a proprietary platform only controlled by a single company i cross-posted does that make it better
John:
A little bit.
John:
All right.
John:
So why did you decide to do that?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So my latest post on my site, I posted on my site, and also I posted a copy of it on Medium.
Marco:
Medium is really big now.
Marco:
I wanted to understand it.
Marco:
And there's only so much understanding you can do of a blogging platform, really.
Marco:
It's a glorified social blogging platform.
Marco:
um there's only so much of understanding you can really have without actually blogging on it at least once like you have to so this company is so big i i think it's unwise to be unfamiliar with it especially as you know they aren't
Marco:
the biggest company on the web but they are incredibly influential and incredibly popular among people like in our circles among like the tech people the early adopters um the kind of tech media space it is disproportionately popular among that crowd so i wanted to understand it why is that do you think why is it popular with that crowd
Marco:
So having used it for one post, which is not a lot of experience, but that's a lot more than you have, right?
Marco:
So having used it for one post, I can say that the editor is fine.
Marco:
Everyone says it's amazing.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It doesn't support Markdown, which is unfortunate, but it's fine.
Marco:
it was nice having social feedback right there like people doing the highlights and people doing um the little recommend or like i'm still not clear whether it's recommend or like or if those are two different things i don't even know but you know getting all the feedback right there to see like all the different people people you know who would heart recommend like it or whatever um and then you know just the little little highlights and everything and
Marco:
Yes, a few of the comments were kind of interesting.
Marco:
So it was nice to have that level of instant feedback.
Marco:
It was like the way Twitter provided instant feedback when you tweet things.
Marco:
It was like that, but, you know, different and more of it and directly on the blog post.
John:
Or like Tumblr at the little bottom where it's like who, you know, re-whatever.
John:
Tumblr has a similar thing, right?
John:
It doesn't have the inline ones on the right margin, but you could post something on Tumblr and immediately see a bunch of little people's avatar icons appear on the bottom.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So very similar to Tumblr, but focused on actual blog.
Marco:
On Tumblr, you can use Tumblr for a 12-paragraph blog post, but very few people will read it because that's not really the mode you're in.
Marco:
When you're browsing Tumblr, you're in a skimming mode because all the rest of the content is skimmable stuff.
Marco:
So nobody wants to stop and read some giant long post.
Marco:
Whereas Medium, that's the whole point of the service is to read people's text.
Marco:
That is the whole point.
Marco:
And so it's normal to go there and see something that is 12 paragraphs long.
Marco:
So I decided, yeah, I wanted to try.
Marco:
I wanted to see what it was like.
Marco:
And the feedback and the community aspects of it do seem pretty nice.
Marco:
In the past, I've been critical of Medium because I've said, which I still agree with, that you are not writing for yourself.
Marco:
You're writing for Medium.
Marco:
In the same way, when you give Twitter a whole bunch of your content there, you're really doing Twitter a big favor.
Marco:
Yourself, it's of mixed value.
Marco:
The reason why you might want to publish on Medium...
Marco:
I said this before, is that if your goal, if your primary goal is not to become a writer, necessarily, or to develop your own audience, but to spread a message...
Marco:
to spread some idea, to spread a post.
Marco:
If your main job isn't writing and you're writing it for some other reason, like to make an argument or to promote something or whatever the case may be, it is really good for that.
Marco:
And so I kind of wanted to try it from that point of view.
Marco:
I'm writing this post that is...
Marco:
It is an idea.
Marco:
It is kind of to promote Overcast, or at least that's an ancillary benefit of it.
Marco:
My site has been pretty slow recently.
Marco:
That's totally my fault, of course.
Marco:
So the idea of taking any attention away from my site, there wasn't that much attention on my site to begin with.
Marco:
So it wasn't that big of an expense to try it.
Marco:
It also wasn't exclusive.
Marco:
They don't require it to be exclusive.
Marco:
So I got to have all those benefits of all that attention there.
Marco:
while not taking away from my site.
John:
Why does Medium get you more attention than you posting it on your own site?
John:
Those are just two URLs on the web.
John:
Why is it that when posting it to your site and posting it to Medium, why do more people see it on Medium?
Marco:
That is a very good and very relevant question.
Marco:
I don't know the overall answer to that.
Marco:
Certainly, you can tell on the web today it is pretty hard to get good traffic to a blog post.
Marco:
It is much easier to get good traffic in social environments.
Marco:
The fact is...
Marco:
You got to go where the readers are.
Marco:
If you want something to spread like that, you have to go where the people actually are, where the consumers are.
Marco:
And for the kind of things that I was writing, Medium has a whole lot of those.
John:
Yeah, but I mean like physically, mechanically speaking, how are the people there?
John:
How does anyone find your post on Medium other than seeing you link to it from your blog?
John:
Like, I don't understand.
John:
Obviously, I don't use the service.
John:
So I don't understand.
Marco:
Well, there's like social recommendations and there's like, you know, top voted in this time period or among your friends or whatever.
John:
So it's kind of like tech meme or whatever.
John:
You think people are browsing the front page of Medium?
John:
I know there is a follower thing because I always get emails saying people follow me on Medium and I feel bad because...
John:
I don't think I've ever written anything there.
John:
But anyway, so you have an account and you have followers.
John:
And presumably if I ever posted something to Medium, my 17 followers on Medium would see that I posted it.
John:
But are people, I guess, like using it kind of like Reddit where you go to the front page of Medium and look at the top things, top voted by people you follow or something?
John:
i suppose i i mean i haven't been using it enough to know i mean i mean none of us are doing that obviously right i mean whenever i see a lot of medium posts you're right but when i see them i see them in tweets basically that's where i see links to medium and in that in that context from my perspective that could just as easily have been a link to marco.org and i would have seen it just as much but maybe other people are using medium differently and they're going to it like they go to reddit pages and just or like tech meme or anything like that and just going to the what the hell is the front page of medium let me go look
John:
It's like editorial collections of stuff, I think.
Marco:
So in recent years, every time I write a post on my site these days, I also tweet about it.
Marco:
And the main reason I do that is because the fact is way more people are reading Twitter than subscribing to my RSS feed and checking my RSS feed regularly.
Marco:
And also Twitter provides feedback mechanisms and ways for people to spread it with retweets and links and reblogs or whatever.
Marco:
There's all these values that Twitter brings me in my publishing.
Marco:
Medium is another one of these venues where there is a lot of activity happening there.
Marco:
There's a lot of people reading it.
Marco:
There's a lot of people recommending and sharing stuff there to other people there.
Marco:
And so the idea of cross-posting major posts there doesn't sound that crazy to me anymore because now, as I said, I don't think Medium is a good idea if you have – like John Gruber shouldn't be publishing his main articles on Medium because he has already a giant audience for his site, and that is his business.
Marco:
That is his main business.
Marco:
My site is no longer my main business.
Marco:
It never really was.
Marco:
But the ads on my site are decreasingly necessary for my business.
Marco:
Meanwhile, the ideas that I'm talking about, the things I'm linking to, the things I'm promoting, my apps, my own brand, all these things are becoming more important to me over time relative to how many people go to my blog.
Marco:
And if the people who use Medium are going to be reading my stuff in Medium, the alternative, I think, is not that they would come to my site and read it necessarily.
Marco:
I think the alternative is more likely that they just wouldn't read it.
Marco:
So I don't really see the harm in people who have the kind of goals I have, which is not to develop a giant following on my site only, but to maintain my site and to write things on something I own, but to also go to where the people are.
Marco:
Because the things I'm writing have more value to me, the more people read them.
John:
I guess I'm the Marco in this scenario because I would I'm also I'm also not trying to my my site is not a business that does not have ads on it never has it has no readers like but I would still never put anything there on medium.
John:
And I maybe it's because I also don't care if people actually find it and read it.
John:
You know, I just feel like I don't why would I give them something that I wrote unless they paid me unless I'm like freelance writing is like, hey, well, someone wants to pay me to write something for their site.
John:
That's the same deal that I would do with any other side.
John:
Sure.
John:
You know, if I'm if I'm in the mood to do freelance writing and someone, you know, I pitch someone an idea or they pitch me, hey, would you want to write this?
John:
I'll either say yes or no.
John:
But outside of the realm of freelance writing, if I just had an idea and wanted to write it,
John:
I would put it on my blog that nobody reads and I would never put it on medium for free.
John:
But I guess, I mean, I don't have anything to promote.
John:
I mean, you do have something to promote there.
John:
Like I'm, I'm also, I guess I'm not concerned with trying to get my message out, but I think that's the main difference.
John:
Like I don't think it matters whether it's my, you know, it's not a business at all for me.
John:
um but that doesn't weigh in my decision i guess this has to go down to do you care about getting this to the widest number of people it's the same reason i don't post links to my stuff to facebook i bet that would get more people to read it but that's just not what i do yeah you don't want facebook people well you know i wouldn't see their feedback anyway because my site doesn't have any comments
Marco:
So basically, I think there's a spectrum of what is right to do and what feels right for you to do.
Marco:
Cross-posting significant posts to medium, I think, is somewhere along the spectrum, but further along it, of course, than linking to everything you write from Twitter.
Marco:
They're both ways to go where the people are and to try to build value for yourself somehow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
in the case of linking from twitter that's better for you because you're pointing them to your site uh but and you're not giving someone else your words to either you're not saying because i'm i don't know what the deal is when you put it on medium but i'm sure they have some rights to it once you paste it into that text box sure i mean they have to at least have the rights to like display it and you know move it around and copy and stuff like that so show ads against it god knows what they're doing
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So the question is, what are your needs for what you're writing?
Marco:
What are you going for?
Marco:
If you're going for maximum spread, I would say it is wise to cross-post things there.
Marco:
If you're going for building up your own site...
Marco:
then it probably isn't but it depends you know it might be a way to help you get started to bring people possibly maybe to your site although i don't think a lot of people would but who knows but it is a tool that's on the spectrum and i wanted to understand it better and that's why i did it and i don't know if i'm i don't know if i'll do it again um it is annoying to have two different versions of what you write and have to mess mess with your google juice
John:
Yeah, like Google might view is duplicate content or maybe it thinks the medium one is the original and yours is the duplicate and downgrades your site because it's like your copy paste, you know, duplicating someone else's content, even though you're the same person.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So again, I don't know if I'm going to keep doing it.
Marco:
I might keep doing it for major posts like things where like I really want this to have maximum audience because again, it's a tool to do that.
Marco:
I am happy I did this with this post because I
Marco:
It really did help me understand Medium a lot better.
Marco:
I understand why somebody like me would even want to use it.
Marco:
So I call it a success.
John:
So what was... Do you want to share numbers percentage-wise?
John:
Did it get twice what your market.org thing, 10% what your market.org thing got?
John:
What was the spread of hits on...
Marco:
um hold on i don't even know if it tells me how many hits i got i know i have about 400 recommendations and 15 balloons comments i don't know what wow so they don't even tell you your hits so you don't even know how much it's spread here i mean for all you know that that means you've got 400 people to read it
Marco:
yeah i don't know but i mean 400 recommendations that's a lot i think like that's wow no like like to have to have like a basically a like action on something to get 400 likes on something is a lot i mean it would be a lot if it was faves on twitter but it's not a lot for taylor swift uh well
John:
i'm not teller swift i don't know what the ratio is of readers to to likers on medium you know it may be a different it's a different social space that either i think i have a good handle on what the ratio is on twitter but on medium i really don't know and i read a lot like i said even though i don't write anything on medium i read a lot of medium posts and every time i read one i'm like what made this person write this on medium and why are these comments in the margin
Marco:
Well, okay, so next time you write a post in about three years, cross-post it there.
Marco:
Try it.
Marco:
Never.
Marco:
I'll never join you.
Marco:
It is, I think, useful to understand it if you're in the business of writing on the web.
Marco:
You don't necessarily have to constantly post everything there or switch to it, but I think it is worth understanding.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
The problem I have with it is, like John, I've read a bunch of things on Medium, and I cannot remember a time that I've paid any real attention to who wrote it.
Casey:
So if the exercise was just to understand Medium, then sure, call it a success.
Casey:
If the
Casey:
then it's probably a success.
Casey:
Granted, in this case, the particular post you made was heavily about your own experience and most people know who you are in this context.
Casey:
So I guess maybe this is an instance of that's fine for Marco, but I feel like...
Casey:
For a normal person, it would certainly propagate content better than just putting it on your own website.
Casey:
And I include myself in that.
Casey:
But I don't think anyone would remember a Medium post I put up that wasn't about me as being written by me.
Casey:
I don't feel like there's that ownership in the brand sense that there is on your own website or even your own website.
Casey:
like tumblr account because at least on a tumblr account you're you've presumably styled your your site your blog in such a way that it is in some way unique and yes i know that there's a lot of cookie cutter tumblr themes but it stands to it seemed to me that a lot of tumblr if not most tumblr sites are visually unique whereas every medium post just looks like a medium post
Marco:
I would say it's similar in that regard to Twitter and Tumblr.
Marco:
Like, you know, you have your little username and your avatar.
Marco:
But, you know, when you read tweets, like if you see something that was retweeted from somebody else, you know, how much are you really seeing their name?
Marco:
And, you know, it's like it's very similar to those things in that regard.
Marco:
So it is nothing like having your own site.
Marco:
but it isn't you know there are things that we already have that are like this you know and we can see like kind of how that works on tumblr and twitter where like you know if you if you see somebody's name come up more than a couple times you'll probably remember it and like oh yeah that person you know i've i've been i've been seeing their stuff a lot maybe i'll go follow them you know it's very similar in those regards
Marco:
Not like blogging, but again, I think it's worth understanding.
Marco:
Whether you choose to use it or not is certainly up for debate, and I don't even know if I'm going to keep using it, but I'm glad I understand it a little bit better now.
John:
Marco has to release all these applications to make the internet angry, and it means we didn't even have time to talk about the new iMacs.
Marco:
We could have an iMac after show.
Marco:
That's about how exciting they are.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Lynda.com.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Tech podcast so long.
John:
I think they're exciting because I'm angry about things.
Casey:
You are angry?
John:
You're angry about it.
John:
We're all angry about it.
John:
We're all angry about the 5400 RPM drive, even though none of us are going to buy that model.
Marco:
That is worse than 16 gigs.
Marco:
That is so bad.
John:
I don't know what's going on there.
John:
I don't understand how this...
John:
The old Apple would never do that just because putting SSDs in all of them would let you charge more money, but the low-end one is like $1,000, but it's a rip-off at $1,000.
John:
No, it's $1,500.
John:
No, no, the lowest, lowest end, the smallest one.
Marco:
Oh, non-retina?
Marco:
Let me see.
Marco:
I just had the page up.
Marco:
The low-end retina is $1,500, but it's...
Marco:
I mean, first of all, let's do the preschool method.
Marco:
We're going to start by saying something nice.
Marco:
I like that much more of the lineup now is retina.
Marco:
By throwing in this mid-range iMac and by getting rid of some of the non-retinas, I'm very happy to see retina spreading very deeply into the lineup.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy about that.
John:
um it has nice cpus not the best possible ones but nice ones um and it looks pretty okay now for the bad um yeah the 1500 one also i see what you're saying so yeah i was talking about the the bottom of the line one has the 5400 rpm drive but so does the the very first retina one the 4k 21 right
Marco:
so i mean the very bottom of the line one that's the one that has like the macbook air internals uh and that's that is not new like we've had one like that for about a couple of years now i think a year something like that um that's fine you know if you want a super super cheap apple desktop the cheap imac is very slow but it works but is it fine because the air at least has an ssd like i feel like this is such a fundamental change to the experience of using a mac that i that an air is going to stomp all over this thing in subjective performance
John:
That's the thing.
Marco:
And they also, by the way, they made Fusion Drive a little bit worse, whereas now the one terabyte Fusion Drive went from having 128 megs of flash caching to 24 gigs.
Marco:
I mean, 128 gigs to 24 gigs.
John:
That one, I almost kind of give them more of a path on.
John:
It's chintzy and it reeks of bean counting, but it's conceivable that they know that 24 gigs is enough to keep the working set.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I don't know what the working set is for the average person in terms of keeping the stuff on the fast storage.
John:
Maybe 24 gigs is hard for me to believe that that would be viable, but I can believe that 128 might be overkill for most people for the working side of what they do.
John:
Maybe they have more intelligent shuttling of things from the fast storage to the slow storage.
John:
I'm not sure how much that would affect things, but just having no SSD and a really slow 2.5-inch drive, it's like going back in time.
John:
It's like using...
John:
Yeah, I have one of those on my desk right now.
John:
The non unibody aluminum Mac MacBook Pro has only a spinning disc in it.
John:
And it is just super painful to use.
John:
It's like you think it's broken.
John:
It takes so long for things to happen.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That's my personal machine.
Casey:
This old high res anti glare MacBook Pro with a 720 gig platter drive in it.
Marco:
And but you know what?
Marco:
I bet your platter drive is at least 700 RPM.
Casey:
You know, I don't recall offhand, but you're probably right.
Casey:
But it is so impossibly slow that genuinely I have wondered numerous times, just like you said, is this broken?
Casey:
Because there's no way it's trying to accomplish something.
Casey:
However, on the plus side, I don't need any sort of monitoring tools in my menu bar because I can just put my ear close to the drive and hear it go.
Yeah.
John:
You don't need monitoring tools in your menu bar, period.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
John:
All right.
John:
I mean, that's kind of silly because we're not going to buy that machine.
John:
But it's like we're thinking of it from the perspective, just like the 16 gig phones, even though we're not going to buy them, that potentially if we just send a friend or relative into an Apple store to buy a computer and they buy the cheapest one, they end up with a machine that we think is...
John:
is it's like not even like you should if you if that's the only one you can afford you should not buy a mac you should buy a pc or an ipad or something else or a different mac yeah well you know but again if that's the if that's the only one you can afford is the bottom of the bottom of the line not ran to imac it's just not a good machine with that drive in it and the bottom you know the bottom line 4k imac it's not a good machine with that drive in it and
John:
i don't know if people like people shouldn't have to be tech savvy enough to know there's lots of good maxi you can buy at every price point but just make sure like in the old days just make sure you you get more ram because that will really affect your experience and now it's just make sure that you at the very least get the fusion drive which won't be as good as an ssd but it'll be worlds better than like the slowest hard drive made in the last decade they're putting inside these things
Marco:
And this is also going to have a strategy tax for them in the sense that we've heard rumblings here and there that they're working on possibly a new file system and that such file system would be based on SSDs, that it would only run on SSDs because if you know that all of the computers that a file system will run on will have an SSD, you can make certain assumptions.
Marco:
You can design it a certain way to take advantage of the properties of SSDs.
Marco:
The longer they keep selling computers with spinning platter hard drives, the longer they either can't ship that or have to restrict it to only certain models of their computers and therefore only a subset of their users get whatever benefits it brings.
Marco:
The same thing with the iPhone lineup.
Marco:
Shipping those A5 chips for so long, that holds back developers, including Apple developing its own platform.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
So it's that kind of move where the nickel and diming of the low end of their supply chain is actually going to impede the progress of Apple's software teams and to impede the progress that all of us can make in the software moving forward.
John:
I even wonder, at this point, are we just like, oh, they're trying to save money by giving this cheap drive?
John:
Is a 5400 RPM 2.5 inch drive actually cheaper than the equivalent flash at the volumes Apple buys flash?
John:
Is it a supply issue that they want to save that flash for the other more profitable computers?
John:
It's just, it's really getting to be the situation where like at a certain point, it'll be like antique and retro.
John:
Like who is still buying spinning hard drives?
John:
Like every...
John:
You would think that the first company that would go SSD everywhere would be Apple, but no, they're dragging their feet.
John:
They're just holding on to the past.
Marco:
That isn't how Apple works anymore.
Marco:
Steve did a few moves like that where he would cut off this old crazy thing.
Marco:
We're only doing the new thing.
John:
USB everywhere on the iMac, right?
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
Steve did moves with that sometimes, but I try to keep some perspective in thinking maybe this is just a crazy part of Tim Cook's Apple.
Marco:
The fact is, when Steve Jobs was running the place, they also had very stingy low-end configurations on a lot of their computers.
Marco:
But you're right, things like RAM.
Marco:
But I feel like with Tim, it's been made worse.
Marco:
So, neither was perfect in this regard.
Marco:
And maybe Steve would have done the same thing, given the same situations.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it does seem like they are off on this with a balance that needs to be struck between the low end that they offer and making a healthy profit on the high end stuff.
Marco:
I feel like they're off on that.
Marco:
And the 16 gig phone is one of these examples and a lot of the base configurations of some of the computers.
Marco:
But this is the greatest example I've seen recently.
Marco:
Here is a new, by all accounts, the non-retina one is a low end product.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
The Retina 4K is a mid-range product, maybe even a high-end.
Marco:
I mean, to most of the world, a $1,500 computer is high-end.
Marco:
Let's put this into perspective here.
Marco:
This is a high-end product for most people's standards.
John:
And it looks high-end, like all that was published to that credit.
John:
It looks like a fancy computer.
John:
It does not look like a bargain bin, like just slapped together thing.
John:
It looks like you're buying something expensive.
John:
And when you get, I feel like the experience of using it is so far out of whack with everything that you view and touch on the computer.
Marco:
Yeah, so you have this product, and Apple's brand is supposed to be about premium quality and about making great or at least good products.
Marco:
And there is no way a computer sold in 2015 with a 5,400 RPM hard drive is even a good product, let alone a great one.
Marco:
And so, again, customer set could be a problem here.
Marco:
I don't see how...
Marco:
Obviously, I guarantee you, just like 16 gig phones, this is not about profit margins on that model.
Marco:
This is about creating upsells to the next model to raise average selling price.
John:
Does it work for an upsell if people don't know?
John:
though like i don't even know if it works as an upsell because that would mean that every some people involved in the sales process would have to be aware of the huge performance cliff represented by that 5400 rpm drive it is super esoteric where people don't even know the difference between solid state storage and discs let alone the rpm of the disc nobody knows those numbers so unless unless the sales people are saying by the way you don't know this but this number here means this computer is crap and you should buy the other one but that's not a sales tactic that i've ever seen used in an apple store that kind of like
John:
let me tell you why this machine is crappy you should buy the other one apple has mostly in my experience been like these are all great products pick whichever one you want if you have questions i can answer them like so i don't the 16 gig model i feel like even people don't know what a gigabyte is that i think people are used to buying smartphones with a single number associated with them especially apple phones and that number is like the amount of stuff that the phone holds and so i think there's more of an argument for being used as an upsell there but on computers the rpm of the spinning disc i don't know
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
And it wasn't until, I don't remember which machine it was, but it wasn't until I finally started using an SSD myself years ago now.
Casey:
Maybe it was in my previous work computer before it just got upgraded.
Casey:
But anyway, it wasn't until I had one myself that I realized, oh my God, what everyone is saying, it's not true.
Casey:
It's even better than what they said.
Casey:
Because I just had never experienced it before.
Casey:
And admittedly, I should have listened to all these people like you and Marco that were saying, oh, my God, SSDs are the only way to go.
Casey:
But until you really use a computer that is your own, that has an SSD, you don't understand the difference it makes.
Casey:
And so I can absolutely imagine me back then not having used an SSD thinking, ah, it's just it's not worth it.
Casey:
It's not that big a deal.
Casey:
And so I feel like some amount of forced guidance or compelling people to get this better machine is what it's going to take in order to move them away from these platter drives.
Casey:
And the way you do that is you don't off the platter drive in the first place.
John:
Well, but the customer sat won't be affected if the people who buy this computer have never had an SSD, because maybe they just think this is how slow computers are.
John:
Like if they've never had the faster experience on a Mac and they buy this one, it's probably about the same speed as their previous Mac or probably faster than their previous Mac with a spinning disk.
John:
So those people, their customer sat will be fine.
John:
I bought this new computer.
John:
It's fancy.
John:
The screen looks really nice.
John:
It's better than my old computer in a bunch of different ways.
John:
And it's faster.
John:
So they don't know what they're missing.
John:
Right.
John:
So maybe their customer sat will be protected.
John:
I just feel like Apple is not giving the best possible experience that they could be giving to their customers.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Well, the customer sat will be good.
Casey:
It won't be great.
Casey:
And we all like to think that Apple aims for great.
Marco:
If they wanted to actually offer the best product they could at this price point, they would have thrown in that stupid 24 gigs and made it a Fusion Drive for what I can best estimate a total cost of maybe $20 to them.
John:
Yeah, just add $20 to the price at that point.
John:
Like, you know, take zero profit margin on the 24 gigs of flash, but add $20 to the price.
John:
Right, but instead, they charge $100 for that option.
Marco:
If you want two terabytes, that's $300.
Marco:
Now, a two terabyte, two and a half inch drive at retail is about $100.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So they're charging $300 for something that's going to cost them about $100 plus the $20.
Marco:
And they've always done stuff like this, like overcharging for some of the options.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I felt like a few years ago they started to get better.
Marco:
The RAM started to become a lot less outrageous and stuff.
John:
Yeah, storage is the new RAM.
John:
It used to be that RAM was the thing that Apple overcharged a ridiculous amount for.
John:
And then they got reasonable-ish RAM prices.
John:
But now it's like storage prices have no relation to reality.
John:
as usual the options are not priced well but it's but i don't mind that like i feel like to get to move on to for off of the low end thing like i'm thinking of getting one of these to replace my wife's thunderbolt display and macbook air set up to replace your mac pro no
John:
i'm still i'm still holding the dream alive 2016 mac pro thunderbolt 3 external retina display could conceivably happen anyway exciting that aside for now the the big one looks good and i'm you know again i'll i'll pay whatever you know i'll check the stupid
John:
$700 one terabyte flash.
John:
I understand.
John:
It's an expensive product.
John:
It's the high end.
John:
You're paying through the nose for the premium stuff, but it looks and acts like a premium product.
John:
I have faith that their one terabyte flash drive will be fast.
John:
I have faith that the screen will look really good because, Marco, you said you really like your screen, and this one is...
Marco:
uh supposedly even better yeah they did a wide color gamut that's one thing i i really do kind of regret not having i mean i know how you can fix that no i'm not gonna do i'm not gonna get one yes you are i'm i'm really not all right all right all right this down
John:
how long does this take before marco has one of these well tiff might just need one for photography but i'm getting one i might as well anyway yeah but yeah so this does look like a really nice computer it's kind of disappointing that it doesn't have the usbc and my open questions as i posted on twitter are what's the deal with the gpu is does it still like thermal throttled inside there because what i
John:
i'm not deciding that brother really whether we should get one or not it's basically should i bother getting the high-end one or is it pointless because the high-end one is just going to make more noise and more heat without any real big boost in performance or should i get the lowest end gpu and just resign myself to the fact that this is never going to be remotely good for gaming and just get the one that makes the least amount of noise so i'm waiting for some people to either buy this and tear it apart or test it and do all you know i want to see
John:
gaming benchmarks i want to see noise levels stuff like that and i want to wait for the first bunch of suckers to get the first ones off the assembly line and then eventually probably i'll order one of these yeah i mean it's and and i will say i mean yeah like the the wide gamut display is that's a great improvement that that's the kind of improvement that like
Marco:
they didn't need to do the market was really not demanding it in significant quantity but i'm really glad they did do it because long term that is better for everybody if that filters through the lineup so that is great i'm very happy again that they went retina i'm very happy that the big one finally got sky lake although it didn't it doesn't have like the cool usb3 thunderbolt thing uh with usbc it doesn't have that uh so that's unfortunate but uh maybe we'll get there in the spring who knows
Marco:
And also, the price is a little bit lower.
Marco:
When you deck it out with the options, previously, if you maxed out all the options, it was $4,400.
Marco:
Now, maxed out is $4,100.
Marco:
So, somewhere, the options are getting a little bit cheaper.
Marco:
So, overall, decent machine.
Marco:
If I was buying a new Mac today, I would get a well-configured 5K 27-inch, of course, again.
Marco:
I've been using mine now for a year and absolutely love it.
Marco:
The fact that I'm not really itching to find an excuse to upgrade should tell you in one way how good this thing is.
Marco:
It is incredible.
Marco:
The screen on mine is the best screen I have ever seen.
Marco:
They made the new ones even better.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy about this.
Marco:
I'm happy they keep pushing the line forward.
Marco:
The high end is great.
Marco:
The low end is a shame.
John:
Yeah, and I don't mind, like, the missing USB-C, like, it's kind of a shame, but, like, you recognize when you're buying.
John:
If you're buying a Mac now, you realize you're buying in the middle of Apple transitioning its line to a USB-C.
John:
It's going to be a while.
John:
If Retina's any judge, it could be a really long while, so just, like, what are you going to do?
John:
I'm going to wait for the next iMac that has USB-C.
John:
Well, then you're not going to get a computer for six months to a year, so...
John:
I know I'm going to be OK with that, mostly because whatever, like I don't I don't see any big need for USB-C for the thing that's replacing this ancient MacBook Air.
John:
It'll still be a huge upgrade.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the mouse and keyboard are next.
John:
I guess we can quickly hit those.
Marco:
i am happy that so okay let me say something nice first i'm happy that they're doing stuff like this like i'm happy that the mac and and in particular the desktop macs are still important enough for apple to put significant work into because not only are they obviously mostly an ios device company these days
Marco:
But also, among the Mac line, the laptops tend to get the most attention because they sell most of the laptops.
Marco:
I mean, I heard, I think Jason Snell and Upgrade said that they sell 75% of the computers they sell are laptops.
Marco:
And the desktop isn't even all iMac.
Marco:
That's going to be some Mac Pros, some Mac Minis.
Marco:
So, you know, the fact that they're putting effort into things like
Marco:
making also new iMacs but also things like new keyboard or mouse designs when the previous ones worked fine you know even though i don't like the direction they took with the keyboard yet i mean i haven't tried one yet from what i from what i hear though it's very macbook one like so you know i'm i'm not i'm not crazy about that but i wouldn't use it anyway because it isn't a split natural keyboard and i i always use the split ergo keyboards so
Marco:
It doesn't matter for me.
Marco:
So I like that they're still doing this.
Marco:
I feel like maybe this is Phil Schiller.
Marco:
I feel like of all the top execs, I think he seems to like the Mac the most.
Marco:
It seems to be kind of his baby in that way.
Marco:
He always seems to care a lot about the Mac things.
Marco:
He always gives more public statements about the Macs than any other exec.
Marco:
Maybe that's just his job to present them.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it does seem like he cares a lot, and that's comforting to know that he's so high up and seems to really care about the Mac.
Marco:
So I'm happy that the Mac, and in particular desktop Macs, are getting meaningful updates and meaningful attention.
Marco:
Even when I don't always agree with the direction they're going, I'm at least happy they're getting updates.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I was sad to see that the Magic Mouse didn't seem to get... It doesn't aesthetically look that different.
Casey:
I know it's taller, or excuse me, not taller, but I guess longer is a better way of phrasing it.
Casey:
I'm happy to see the batteries go away.
Casey:
I am one of the suckers that bought the Apple battery charger because I hated throwing away double A's all the time.
Marco:
Not even I bought that.
Marco:
You know, other battery chargers exist.
Marco:
Yeah, they do.
Marco:
Yeah, and they're better.
Marco:
Well, it was a gift.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I had a friend who claimed his Hanson CD was a gift in middle school.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I mean, I believe it was a gift.
Casey:
I probably would have bought it anyway, because the only thing I ever use it for is my magic mouse.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is, I still think that ergonomically this has a way to go.
Casey:
I wish it was more bulbous, but, you know, you can't win them all.
Casey:
But I like that it's got rechargeable batteries.
Casey:
I like that it's charging via lightning.
Casey:
I think that's smart.
Casey:
I think any excuse, as many have said, to get another lightning cable in the house, you can never have enough.
Casey:
We probably have 20 or 30 at this.
Casey:
No, maybe not that many, but we have a ton, and there's still not enough.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It would be neat if they did something a little different with it.
Casey:
I'm not sure what.
Casey:
Maybe somehow, someway supporting force touch.
Casey:
I don't know enough about how this is all held together in a hardware perspective that maybe that's a ridiculously complicated and stupid idea.
Casey:
But yeah.
Casey:
I would have liked something more than just a slight rev, like even the keyboards that wasn't revolutionary what they did, but it was more than just a basic rev.
Casey:
And, and I'm sad that the magic mouse only got the basic rev and, and I fear that my mouse using days are running out and eventually due to force touch, I'm going to have to get a track pad.
Casey:
And I know that a lot of people are completely in love with their magic track pad, but
Casey:
I personally don't care for trackpads unless I have to.
Casey:
I will use the one on my Mac, the onboard one, if I am in a pinch and it's not reasonable for me to set up a mouse.
Casey:
But I prefer a mouse if at all possible.
Casey:
And I prefer a multi-touch mouse specifically.
Casey:
The other thing I really do like is the pairing by way of the USB connection.
Casey:
I think that's extremely smart.
Casey:
It's another one of those really great Apple moves where it's like, oh, yeah, if you're going to plug it in anyway, why the crap wouldn't you do that?
Casey:
But I don't know if I would have thought of it, you know, if I was designing all this.
Casey:
So I'm kind of excited about the new keyboard and the new mouse, more the keyboard than the mouse, I suspect, because I have one of the old, old, old Bluetooth keyboards that takes three batteries, which is completely barbaric, obviously.
Casey:
So I'd love to see, I'd love to get my hands on a keyboard and a mouse, but geez, they're expensive.
Casey:
How much are they?
John:
Well, they come with your computer if you buy a new computer, right?
Casey:
Well, they come with your new desktop computer.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I don't typically buy desktop computers as we've talked about.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to the different keyboard is $100, trackpad is $130, mouse is $80.
Marco:
Standalone.
John:
Do you have a choice of a real keyboard?
John:
Let's see.
John:
Yeah, you do.
John:
Still, Apple keyboard with numeric keypad.
John:
So you can pick the extended one still.
John:
I mean, that's why I'm not interested in this keyboard.
John:
I like, well, like the keyboard, like the mouse seems to, and the trackpad for that matter.
John:
It's a refinement of what Apple seems to think is the platonic ideal of these devices.
John:
So, Casey, you were disappointed that the mouse didn't make more of an evolution.
John:
Apple has decided for the next several years that this piece of sushi is the mouse, and all they're doing is refining it.
John:
And Apple has decided for the next several years that this aluminum keyboard...
John:
that's the way a keyboard should look and they're just refining it and how can they refine it barely can we can we pull in the edges even more can we make keys a little bit bigger can we make them more stable maybe we'll tweak the layout but bottom line is like they want it to just disappear they want it to be very simple it's it's beautiful to look at but i don't like the key layout i need i want my inverted t arrow keys i want page up page down home and end where i want them
John:
i would like a space between the numbers and the function keys uh but that would make the keyboard bigger even though it would be easier to feel your way to the difference between the numbers and the functions i would like control to be or not control whatever i would like the key in the lower left corner to not be fn not be the fn key right because that's where control is by default if you don't swap it with caps lock um these are all things you can do on a full-size real keyboard that you can't do on apple's
John:
super aggressively minified keyboard but this is i guess this is the way i mean i feel like the desk real estate it's good to conserve desk real estate but one of the luxuries of a desktop computer is you don't have to fit it on an airline tray table like you can make the keyboard a little bit bigger you can give it a little bit of breathing room would it kill you put some space between the function keys and the number keys or is that extra five millimeters going to impinge on the giant desk where you have your gigantic imac
John:
i don't know anyway this is i i disagree with their design direction for their keyboards especially since they don't seem to even offer like an extended version uh except for the old one i'm assuming when you pick that extended version you get the old one that i'm sitting in front of right now which i like but i would like i would like the new key mechanism i would like the new larger keycaps you know i would like san francisco font on my keycaps and by the way uh who said this i think this was on uh dalrymple's site the uh the macbook one keyboard has half a millimeter of key travel uh
John:
uh the old aluminum keyboards that i'm sitting in front of now have the old desktop ones have 2.1 millimeters key travel and the new one has one millimeter so it's right in the middle it's a 0.5 two and one millimeter so it's not going to feel like the macbook one but it's also half the depth of the old keyboard so i'll have to try that to see how i like it again not that i'm going to be using this thing anyway
John:
the the consensus so far from reviewers seems to be that it feels more like the macbook one keyboard than like the old one and it might be because of the stability of the keys a little bit too that not as much tilting involved and also the reduced travel i don't know the magic trackpad i think is the only one of these accessory revisions that i think is a clean win all around because the magic trackpad
John:
there's not much to it except for a place where you slide your fingers around so and they made the place bigger which is what i was hoping for in terms of you know you have all the space in your desktop why not make it bigger it's also it seems to be more proportioned like the screen which is kind of nicer in terms of not that it's a one-to-one mapping but anyway if you're going to make it if you have to decide what shape your trackpad should be making it the shape of the screens that you sell is a good idea
John:
And it's white, which I like.
John:
I'm assuming it won't get all disgusting with your fingers because I'm assuming it's glass up there and everything.
John:
It doesn't have the little feet, which were super clever, but obviously don't work in this forced touch age.
John:
So I actually do have a Magic Trackpad.
John:
I used one on eBay for OS X reviews, so I had something to do gestures on.
John:
And so I guess at $130, I'm not buying one of these on a whim.
John:
It's super expensive, but that is my favorite new accessory out of the group by far.
John:
oh and then finally the uh the fact that the lightning charging port on the mouse is on the bottom i i don't i saw a couple people trying to think of reasons for this like don't hurt yourself it's because if you put it someplace else it'll be ugly like that's it
John:
yeah oh yeah that's totally done and done and i i don't also don't think it's a big deal because the thing the charge lasts so long and you charge it so infrequently it is a little bit awkward it's kind of one of those it's the same as those compromises that apple has made in the past it fits right in with the let's put the ports in the back of the imax so they're not in your face but now it's harder to kind of get at them or the you know like
John:
things that make your product look good but as soon as you go and try to use it part part of the functionality the infrequent part like you're not plugging and unplugging things all the time but when you do do it it becomes awkward so this mouse looks good all the time when you do have to plug in i guess you leave it on its back like a turtle
John:
at night you know and then it just lays there in the back and you won't flip it over why aren't you flipping it over casey anyway i'm flubbing that quote you're not going to get that reference anyway i just had to throw it in um but that's going to look weird it's going to look weird to have your thing charging overnight with the wire sticking out of it at an awkward angle it'll look weirder than it would if the thing plugged in where the cord is on a regular old style corded mouse because then it would just sit on your desk the cord will be there you unplug and it'll be fine but
John:
The whole rest of the time you're using the mouse, Johnny Ive would be restless at night knowing that there's this gaping lightning port poking out of his beautiful piece of sushi somewhere that people can see.
Marco:
Right, and it would be... If they did it right and put it on the front edge where every other mouse has its cord coming in, you wouldn't even see it in use.
Marco:
It would be facing away from you.
Marco:
It would be facing the wall.
John:
People walking towards you at your desk, your beautiful glass desk at the reception area, they would see the lightning port hole and it would fill with lint.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But yeah, that's...
John:
you don't i don't think you need to think hard about it that's why it's on the bottom because it's less ugly that way and i and in the end i think that is a reasonable i think it's a more reasonable compromise than putting every single port on the back of the iMac let's put it that way yeah well and you know if you're going for maximum functionality you're probably not using this mouse to begin with i mean i like it but no one else seems to casey is using it for maximum functionality because it's the only swipey mouse it's the only like high quality multi-gesture multi-finger gesture mouse so that's the functionality the reason he's using this thing
Casey:
Well, that's mostly true.
Casey:
That is why I'm using it, but I'm told that Mike's beloved MX whatever mouse that is giving him tremendous RSI issues, that, I guess, has physical buttons you can press that will mimic a lot of the gestures that I do.
Casey:
But to me, that seems kind of a hack and kind of kludgy, and I'm not that interested in it.
Casey:
But strictly speaking, I could accomplish the things I want to accomplish with other mice.
Casey:
with more buttons buttons are always the answer aren't they