Chain-Link-Fenced Garden
Marco:
Happy birthday, Brady Bala.
Casey:
First things first, did anyone here buy an Apple TV?
Casey:
Now, Marco, you got a developer unit, is that correct?
Casey:
That's correct.
Marco:
And I also bought four more.
Casey:
Are you being serious?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Oh, I was like, who are you buying them for?
Casey:
I thought maybe you were already doing Christmas shopping, Rene style.
John:
They're some great stocking stuffers.
John:
Yeah, they fit right in there.
Marco:
I actually might end up buying roughly that quantity depending on how gifting goes this holiday season, but I wanted to at least try it myself first.
Marco:
Once the general release comes out and the store opens it up for those apps and I can actually download the apps to it and spend meaningful time with them, then I will judge it as a product.
Marco:
But right now, I just had the developer one.
Marco:
For the people who are curious in the chat, the developer one, I believe, is the 32GB one.
Marco:
Even if I were buying one today for myself...
Marco:
I still might not get the 64 because I, you know, just like everyone else has said, I don't think Apple has really shown us if and why and when we would need the 64 over the 32.
John:
You think that because you're not looking at the notes.
John:
That's why.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Also, I think I really am not crazy about investing more money than necessary further in a 1080p setup when I know in the next few years I will most likely want a 4K setup.
Marco:
So I'm guessing I'm going to be buying another one of these Apple TVs in a year or two that will support 4K.
Marco:
So I don't want to dump a whole bunch of money into version one before I even know if I'm going to use these features.
Marco:
And I don't see myself installing a bunch of games or anything.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I'm guessing anything more than 32 would be wasted on me.
Casey:
All right, so what's in this follow-up document, John, that you wanted to talk about with regard to capacities?
John:
Well, actually, before we get that, I ordered my Apple TV and I ordered the big one.
Casey:
Oh.
John:
And Casey, did you get one?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And I'd like to talk about why, but let's get through this capacity discussion first.
John:
Yeah, so this is from Brian Powell who pointed us, first one to point to us, to Apple's website, where they did actually offer a rationale for, like, why would you bother buying the 64 or the 32?
John:
We talked about this on past shows.
John:
We had theories, Apple's explanation.
John:
matches what was our best guess which is everybody's best guess which is if you plan to use your apple tv this is right from apple's website primarily to stream movies tv shows and music or play a few apps and games you'll probably be fine with 32 gigs of storage if you plan to download and use lots of apps and games choose 64 so they mention apps and games mentioning games and uh you know is maybe hinting in the direction that they're the the kind of applications that are most likely to have large content but that's what it comes down to
John:
um not much of an explanation but at least it's something uh we talked about how this seemingly makes less sense when the applications themselves the initial download from the store is so limited i think it was 200 megs or something but the applications can download whatever the hell they want after that up to a very large limit so you could fill a 32 with a bunch of big games why did i buy the 64 i don't know it's pretty cheap uh i just want to get the big one
John:
Who knows if it's if I'll ever use that space or it'll just sit there going unused.
John:
Who knows if the software update in the future will bump up the minimum size, even if it just uses that space to buffer video so that when my kids want to watch a movie that they watched three months ago, that it's still on the thing and they've watched like 17 movies and television shows since then.
John:
That's worth it for me.
John:
Like basically, if they give me if they give me a device with lots of storage and it's a reasonable price, I'll buy it.
Marco:
so as usual you have rushed to order the the most expensive item on day one it was like 200 bucks like come on it's only a little bit more than a magic trackpad it's a fair point no i mean i guess the price difference is so small i guess i would probably recommend ordering the big one if you don't really you know if you can spare what is it 50 bucks i don't know
John:
i wouldn't recommend it necessarily in fact this is one of the cases where i would feel good about recommending just get the cheapest one because it's probably fine you know what i mean but for me and since i'm so obsessed with tv stuff i just want to give myself the best chance of having the best experience and it's you know i don't really care about it so i'm i'm excited to try it i'm also excited to move my old apple tv up to a different tv in the house because it's always kind of been annoying when you get you
John:
Kids fighting over what they want to watch on TV or someone wants to watch this.
John:
So you can only watch that downstairs because it's on Apple TV and we have no way to watch anything off of, you know, an iTunes DRM encoded thing on the upstairs TV.
John:
This will even out our viewing choices once again.
John:
So both TVs are uniform in terms of media access.
John:
And that will bring slightly increased peace to the household.
Casey:
So I did not buy one.
Casey:
And that's partially because I'm cheap and partially because I get to be that guy now.
Casey:
And I'm defining that guy as that guy who whines about the one thing that's gone away that nobody else cares about.
Casey:
And that's optical output for audio.
Casey:
So the way we have our home theater set up, which is probably wrong, but I don't care.
Casey:
It's the way it is today.
Casey:
We have, of course, HDMI coming out of our Apple TV.
Casey:
I think it's the third gen, whatever the latest one was before this.
Casey:
We have HDMI coming out and that goes into our television.
Casey:
And then there is an optical out from the TV back to the receiver.
Casey:
But especially when you have a little person in the house who loves looking at screens that are lit up and
Casey:
Sometimes it's nice to have the Apple TV on and playing without the TV on.
Casey:
And so we also have optical out going from the Apple TV directly into the receiver.
Casey:
So I can grab the remote, mash on a button a couple of times to wake the thing up because it never seems to wake up unless I do that.
Casey:
And then airplay something to it and leave the TV totally off.
Casey:
And everybody's happy.
Casey:
Declan isn't looking at the TV, which makes me happy and Aaron happy.
Casey:
And we're all listening to music, which makes all of us happy.
Casey:
And it's great.
Casey:
And this new one does not have optical audio out.
Casey:
And that makes me super sad.
Casey:
Now, I guarantee that I will cave and eventually buy one.
Casey:
But for now, it's not really filling any need that I currently have.
Casey:
Um, so I'm just going to wait and see how it goes.
Casey:
I am extremely interested to see how the Plex app that supposedly is coming out day one, um, how that is.
Casey:
And if that gets really good reviews, that is probably going to be enough to get me to cave.
John:
So does your receiver not have HDMI support?
Casey:
It does not.
Casey:
It's that old.
John:
Ah, yeah.
John:
Well, there's your problem.
Casey:
Yeah, and I mean, that's a fair point, that I could just upgrade the receiver, but I mean, it's working in every other capacity, so it seems a little silly to replace it.
John:
You might as well, like Marco's doing, you might as well just wait for 4K to upgrade your receiver at this point.
Casey:
I can't tell if you're being snarky or not, but I'm thinking you're not.
John:
I'm being truthful, although I think it's going to be later than next year.
John:
Next year, I think, still will be early adopter time for 4K, and you, unlike Marco, are probably better off waiting until 4K is old hat.
John:
But at this point, I don't know.
John:
It really depends on how much you use that Apple TV as an audio device interface.
John:
You can get a pretty decent, cheap receiver that will do everything that your current receiver does just as well for not too many hundred dollars.
Casey:
Yeah, you're probably right.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's one of those things where because I don't feel like it's necessary and because I don't really...
Casey:
And that doesn't really rev my engine, so I'm not looking for an excuse to spend that money.
Casey:
And because of that, I'm just kind of meh about the whole thing.
John:
So what are you going to do when you get a new one?
John:
You're going to lose this music ability, right?
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
Well, there's probably some kind of $30 mono price thing that can split out the optical into its own thing.
John:
There is nothing for $30 that you connect an HDMI cable to that is reliable.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm pretty sure in the entire universe.
John:
I remember when I was looking, when I didn't want to buy a receiver, I was just looking for an HDMI switcher to make it for the fact that televisions now come with an incredibly small number of HDMI inputs on them.
John:
And my extensive research led me to conclude that there is no such device.
John:
In fact, the best, you know, in terms of functionality, the functionality to cost ratio is
John:
for multiple hdmi inputs an entire giant receiver is the best ratio which is sad but true so right seconds after i said that the atp tipster in the chat linked to a 28 little thing on amazon that does exactly this i'm sure it does sometimes i'm sure i'm sure it does that sometimes
John:
you can also find similar switch boxes for similar prices with similar strange names and plastic cases and they all claim to do what they do and now let us all scroll down to the reviews and read the comments and see what people have to say about this thing it's four stars splits audio but really lags bad pastor didn't work one star verified purchase quality felt a bit shabby optical out didn't work runs rather hot that's concerning oh this is magnificent
John:
Like, I mean, there is.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, some people have good luck with them.
John:
I had to say with the switching thing, I gathered lots of, you know, experiences people have and they're like, I bought this $15 piece of junk and it's been sitting connected to my TV for eight years and it works flawlessly.
John:
Right.
John:
But you never know like how many, maybe you'll get lucky or maybe you'll have to buy seven $15 pieces of junk for it.
John:
So I wanted a known quantity.
John:
um and like there was no as we've talked about with usb hubs you could get one and it could be a champ for years and it's great right and you spent like two bucks for it right or you can keep buying ten dollar ones and they keep breaking and frying and flaking and driving you crazy and causing bugs that you don't realize are due to your hub until you've tried to debug it for six months thinking it's a software problem right stuff like that and you're like where is the apple of hubs where is the company that makes the expensive solid well-built reliable hubs um
John:
Uh, and it doesn't really exist.
John:
I have some good ones.
John:
I have one of the ones that was recommended to me sitting right now.
John:
I have USB three hub sitting on my desk that is connected to USB two, because that's all I have, but it seems to be solidly built.
John:
I'm also just using it as a, as a charging station now, because that's one of the other benefits is that it's good for charging stuff.
John:
um so i think there are good usb hubs out there or better ones anyway but i never found anything like that for uh hdmi switchers wait which you gotta tell me this usb hub first of all and then i have a question i gotta hang out let me just go lean over my desk and see see what the brand is the amazon seems to recommend the who to and uh what's the battery company yeah i got nothing anchor yeah it's way it's way in the back it is mine mine is who too it's black and it's got like a rubberized outside on it and it's plastic it doesn't get a whole bunch of usb 3 ports on it and it's been
John:
pretty solid i mean to be fair the really super crappy i think it was literally like seven dollars uh plastic usb2 nice powered hub that i have here that i bought when i first got my 2008 mac pro also still very reliable but i've had a series of hubs before these two hubs that have not been reliable and that have caused my computer to wake up and caused me to try to debug sleep wake things for a long time and cause all sorts of wonkiness with input and mouse cursors to stop functioning and yeah so
John:
yeah the more i experience various hubs and things the more i just want to buy future things in thunderbolt versions even though it's probably a mistake and expensive yeah i don't know how how great that is although i have to admit that i haven't had any problem with any firewire peripheral i've ever bought yeah you're just you're hoping that it's like the companies making these are have such have high enough profit margins they can actually use reliable hardware but then again i've also never bought a firewire hub
Marco:
that i don't think it could exist anyway firewire switch a place where you plug in multiple firewire cables because it's not a hub-based network but such things like that do exist um so before we leave the the home theater topic i have a quick question can one of you explain to me what a sound bar is i can did this thing exist five years ago what what is this category is it just a line of speakers like what what makes it different from it speakers
John:
I actually considered getting one of these.
John:
Here's what it's for.
John:
You're trying to have a home theater thing, but you are essentially space or infrastructure constrained.
John:
So you can't do the 5.1 or 7.1 where you have a center channel left and right and two back and maybe side channels.
John:
However many channels you have.
John:
You just have no way to either no way to place those speakers, no way to run the cables for them, or your room is just not the right shape or whatever.
John:
But you don't want to use the crappy built-in speakers on your TV, and you also don't want plain old stereo with a bass.
John:
You don't want a 2.1.
John:
You want something sort of like surround.
John:
So a soundbar is a big long strip of speakers that...
John:
it fixes the space problem by essentially being a similar you know going underneath your tv basically either directly like where the stand is so it's low enough profile that doesn't block any of the screen or like in an entertainment center it's not maybe not as wide as the whole screen uh but very long very you know uh wide and low to the you know not very high
John:
And behind the little shield in front of the speaker are a bunch of speakers of various sizes pointed in different directions.
John:
And some of them also have some processing and some also act as their own little mini receivers.
John:
So you can plug things right into them and they will do sound processing to try to bounce the sound around the room.
John:
Either, you know, do no processing and just shoot the sound out of their speakers or do a little bit of processing and mess with like delays and stuff.
John:
to try to simulate a 5.1-ish sound field by using speakers that are all right in front of you on the TV.
John:
So that's what a sound bar is for.
John:
It's a compromised thing for people who don't have a lot of space but want to have better sound than they would if they just used stereo.
John:
Better in terms of getting closer to a real 5.1 surround where things sound like they're behind you, like in the movies.
Marco:
And does that actually work better than just like having stereo speakers would?
John:
It sounds different than stereo speakers does.
John:
Obviously, it's never going to actually sound like the speakers are behind you because they're not behind you.
John:
They're in front of you.
John:
But some of them, depending on the room shape and depending on the environment, can do a surprisingly good job of providing a...
John:
I want to say more convincing sound field, but coming closer to making the sound sound like it's not all coming straight from the TV.
John:
Uh, now is that accurate?
John:
Is it what the filmmaker is intended?
John:
Is it even pleasing to you?
John:
That all depends on what you think.
John:
You know, you can listen to them in a store and they definitely sound different than stereo, whether they sound better or not, it's kind of up to you.
John:
In the end, I decided not to get one mostly because a lot of them either expect you not to have a receiver or
John:
or kind of they're competing with the receiver in terms of functionality of how they work.
John:
And I also eventually found a way to get the speakers around my room.
John:
My speakers are all in the wrong places, but I just did the best I could.
John:
And I figured, you know, if I'm going to get a receiver with multi-channel sound support, I'm going to try to get the actual sound field experience.
John:
And so that's why I went.
John:
But, you know...
John:
sound and also trying to figure out how to place the sound bar in my setup was a little bit weird too because i'm not quite sure where we'll go with the television anyway um i decided against it i don't think they're entirely crazy if you have a small apartment and are into movies and want a little bit of that movie theater sound
John:
and you don't mind whatever the hell the soundbar is doing to try to make it sound like that it's it's reasonable you know even if only just for the center channel where you can crank the center channel up so you can hear the dialogue better that kind of balance you don't get in a stereo setup if you just have a right and left and a subwoofer it's hard just to turn up the dialogue but in a movie with a 5.1 mix the center channel has a dialogue and you can crank that higher than the rest of them to help you know you or other people with low hearing who are always saying what did that person say and you don't want to turn the subtitles because they ruin the picture and make you read the whole time
John:
It's a reasonable choice for that.
Marco:
I've been looking for a while, and I have not been able to find what I'm looking for.
Marco:
What I basically want is a Dynamics compressor in a small enough package that it can fit behind my TV or in my very, very, very narrow TV stand.
Marco:
Because I would love to have...
Marco:
I don't care about your movies where everyone's talking really quietly for dramatic effect.
Marco:
And no, I can't hear what you're saying.
Marco:
And if I turn it up, then it'll blast and it'll wake everybody up in the house when a car drives by or something blows up.
Marco:
So I would love just dynamic range compression without having to buy an entire receiver because my TV stand only has something like three inches of height for this for something I'd be allowed to place there.
John:
And there are literally...
John:
Allowed by the historical commission that runs the television stand in your house, I'm aware of this commission.
Marco:
Yes, and there is literally, I've looked, for every receiver, even they have, there's one, I think it's Marantz, has like a really slimline one, but it's like a half inch too tall to fit.
Marco:
Like it's terrible.
Marco:
So what what's what I have now is just like, you know, stereo speakers that I decided long ago that I think of surround sound the way most people now, including you, John, think of 3D movies, which is I just I'm not into like I had it for a while.
Marco:
I had I had a 5.1 system for a while.
Marco:
And then as we'd move between different apartments, I would like set up less and less of like first I dropped the rear speakers and I just had the 3.1 or whatever.
Marco:
And then eventually I stopped connecting the center speaker and just had the left and the right and realized I liked that a lot better because it was just simpler.
Marco:
And, you know, I didn't care about the surround.
Marco:
So eventually I just I've now switched.
Marco:
um but i would still like a receiver and right now it's just being driven by this little tiny new force amp that has no controls um but i would love if anybody knows of like just a basic home theater range compressor uh i please tell me pretty much every every receiver even the super cheap ones i know as it has a name brand like they go on a bunch under a bunch of name brands some of them might be like dolby where they're like
Casey:
either patent encumbered or proprietor or whatever but they all have a way to do exactly what you're saying like i don't think you can buy one without this feature anymore so i wanted to echo your sentiment about the surround sound system my parents had gotten me years ago now so it's probably ancient by today's standards a
Casey:
uh receiver 5.1 surround combination box from like costco or something like that it might have even come with a tv and dvd player but anyway um that's a receiver we're still using from probably mid to late 2000s and as we moved from apartment to apartment and eventually to the house we also did the same thing and dropped the rear speakers after like one of those moves and so now i am still key i've still kept the center channel and i still have the subwoofer connected
Casey:
But I haven't had a rear channel in easily six or seven years now or something like that.
John:
You shouldn't do that.
John:
You should either do stereo, which is fine, or stereo with the subwoofer, which is fine.
John:
But don't do 5.1 and then disconnect some of the channels because you're literally missing some of the sound.
John:
In some movies, they could be mixed such that a line of dialogue only comes from the back speakers and you literally won't hear that line of dialogue.
John:
So please, just use...
John:
Use all the speakers of whatever sound is coming out of your system.
John:
If you're going to put out sound for two speakers, use two speakers.
John:
If you're going to put out sound for five plus a subwoofer, use five plus a subwoofer.
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Casey:
So we have a handful of various links and things to talk about.
Casey:
This begins with Tom Bell, who wrote in to tell us that smaller iMacs came with a 3.5-inch 7200 RPM drive until 2012 when the tapered edge began.
Casey:
Then they changed to a 2.5-inch 5400 RPM drive with the Fusion upsell.
Casey:
So apparently that's the history of that.
Casey:
Moving on, Chloe de Guzman, I probably butchered that.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, Chloe, shares from Tom's hardware data, on average in two and a half inch drives, 5,400 RPM drives perform just as well as the 7,200 RPM drives.
Casey:
Increasing the spindle speed just increases power consumption and heat with little to no gain.
Casey:
5,400 wins overall, which includes power.
Casey:
So we will put a couple of links in the show notes about that.
John:
The caveat I put in there, which includes power is in this test in Tom's hardware, it wins overall, but only it's kind of like in car and driver when when some car wins overall because of like they factor in price, you know, every other stat that it's not the best car, but because price was a factor and one car is like 30 grand more than the other, it wins and then people send angry letters.
John:
So the 5400 wins overall because they include power consumption.
John:
Obviously, the 5400 is going to it's going to boost the scores, the 5400.
John:
So you can take a look at these benchmarks.
John:
The Tom's hardware does break down the benchmarks into the individual benchmarks.
John:
So you can say, what if I care about this?
John:
What if I care about that?
John:
But the bottom line is that modern 5400 RPM drives with the, you know, the perpendicular magnetic field, whatever things in the higher density are much better than they used to be.
John:
Uh, all this is kind of in the weeds and the details, but it's worth pointing out, uh, because our main objection is the idea that this thing has no SSD and any spinning drives, just astronomically slower in random access, especially than any SSD, because it's got to spin a little disc and wait for the point to come under the heads and move the little heads.
John:
And all that takes a huge amount of time compared to putting signals on different addressing lines and a bunch of flash chips.
Marco:
yeah this this to me like i don't think anybody needs to waste any breath trying to defend the benefits or drawbacks of particular rpm hard drives in 2015 it like it's just completely irrelevant it's if you need a bunch of cheap space you get hard drives and if you if you don't need a bunch of cheap space you get an ssd period like that's it yep pretty much all right why don't you tell us john about mac gpus and noise
John:
This is the info I've been waiting for on the new 5K iMac and wanted to know what the GPUs were like.
John:
Is it worth it for me to get the fast one?
John:
What is the heat like?
John:
Has the previous one had some problems with the GPU getting really hot and sometimes throttling down?
John:
Same with the CPU and the fan noise.
John:
So Barefeet's, which is not spelled like you think it does.
John:
Check the show notes for the link.
John:
Did one of their typical tests, and their conclusion was that the new top-end GPU is only a little bit faster than the old one, and it gets just about as hot.
John:
They said it, you know...
John:
the old and the new both got to 100 degrees celsius and the fan was running really fast in both of them and the noise meter uh looked like about the same in both cases so no you know it's like it's not worse but it's not better um
John:
And that was kind of depressing.
John:
I mean, it's not bad news, but it's not really good news either.
John:
But then a couple of people pointed me to this YouTube video by Max Uriev.
John:
And he does a whole bunch of tests and has a bunch of stats.
John:
I've never watched any of this guy's videos.
John:
And this one had a small number of views.
John:
But I think everyone can just go look at this video because I think it's very well done.
John:
And he talks...
John:
like at a nice pace very clearly he's clearly prepared everything's gonna do he's got infographics and everything i thought it was really good i was impressed by his youtube video maybe it's because i don't watch enough youtube videos and if he's super famous that i don't know that sorry but this video only had a few thousand views so i figured this is not uh mkbhd this is uh some less known guy but anyway his conclusions were different he had more detailed things he said
John:
in the uh well the overall conclusion was that in the new model the fans ramp up earlier than the old model just to try to keep the temperatures down rather than waiting for things to get really out of hand temperature wise and then turning on the fans it turns on the fans faster sooner which noise wise isn't great but temperature wise is good in the gpu tests
John:
it seems like the new one can keep the gpu within whatever apple sets as the tolerance like they want to keep it under 100 degrees celsius or whatever whatever they set as the limit the new uh 5k mac according to max's tests can keep the gpu within that limit with the fan going slower so in these in these gpu tests it's like well they're both the gpus are a similar temperature but the rpm on the new model is way lower so i like that especially you know for gaining thumbs up um and the cpu tests
John:
The new 5K iMac didn't do any CPU throttling that I could see.
John:
Like the old one would throttle the CPU down when it got too hot.
John:
The new one didn't.
John:
It kept the CPU at lower temperatures.
John:
Sometimes it had slightly higher fan speeds, mostly because the new model has a higher max speed for the fan.
John:
And some stats I threw in here.
John:
After 15 minutes of their CPU testing, the old iMac had throttled down to 3.3 gigahertz, and it was 100 degrees Celsius, and the fan was going 2,700 RPM.
John:
And the new iMac was not throttled.
John:
It was at full 4 gigahertz.
John:
It was 10 degrees cooler at 89 degrees Celsius.
John:
and the fan was going about the same speed 2650 rpm so max's video made me excited about the new iMac because it seems to basically it seems to keep the innards cooler and he also did a manual override on the fans and said if you do crank the fans up the new iMac can keep both the cpu and the gpu ridiculously cool so really it's just a question of how much noise you're willing to tolerate how much temperature you're going to tolerate so i'm feeling better about the iMac than the old one as many people pointed out we're not going to get any real substantive
John:
improvements in gpu in particular until they change the process size i think one of this one is also 28 nanometers just like marco's model but bottom line i'm probably going to get one of these iMacs i'm probably going to get it with the with the best gpu also some real-time follow-up from kim alberg in the chat uh it appears as though the new apple tv might have built-in dynamic range compression
Marco:
I thought you were going to say I might have a built-in fan.
Marco:
I'd be like, no.
Marco:
No, remember the famous iFixit teardown that got them kicked out of the App Store?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, so we know there's no fan, but it appears that it might have dynamic range compression built in, so I'm looking forward to trying that.
Marco:
Is it on by default and you can't turn it off?
Marco:
Because that'll annoy me.
Marco:
in the screenshot posted here which it looks like it's from one of the videos or no it's from somebody's dev kit there's an option in the audio menu like within a movie like where there's info subtitles and then there's audio and it says full dynamic range or reduce loud sounds
John:
That's a nice way of putting it.
John:
I like that rather than branding it as one of these weird words that every company uses for their dynamic range compression, the first option is not great.
John:
But the second option, what people will do, I'm hoping that default is full dynamic range, and they'll watch a movie, and they won't be able to hear what anyone's saying, and they'll crank the volume, then something will explode, and they'll be pissed.
John:
Then they'll go to the subtitle manual, and they'll say, yes, reduced loud sounds is exactly what I want, and they'll pick it.
John:
So that's some good copywriting.
John:
They could have called it Voice Boost, except I have a trademark.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about the adjustable iMac and monitor stands?
Casey:
I'm assuming this is John.
John:
Yeah, a lot of people wrote in to tell us that they thought we didn't need to put our monitors on top of anything because we were confused about the correct height of monitors.
John:
I'm not confused.
John:
I know the top of the monitor, according to all the ergonomics experts, is supposed to be roughly aligned with your eyeline and everything like that, that you shouldn't be looking up and all these other things.
John:
I know that.
John:
Remember, I have a 23-inch monitor, so it has to be on a stand to be up like that high.
John:
And also, if you're...
John:
If you don't have a keyboard tray, getting your keyboard at the right height means your desk has got to be much lower than you think, or your chair has to be higher than you think.
John:
But anyway, we are aware of the ergonomic, at least I am anyway, I'm assuming Marco is, the correct height of all the things.
John:
It's better to have options, and if it means stacking a bunch of books or a piece of Lucite or whatever to make your monitor the right height, that's what you should do.
John:
But a lot of people also pointed out that the real solution to all of these, my monitor is not quite at the right height thing, is to either get your Mac monitor or your third-party monitor or your iMac itself with a Visa mount.
John:
Then you can put it on an arm or any other kind of adjustable thing that accepts Visa mounts.
John:
And I believe this is the case and has been the case for a while now.
John:
If you want that, you can't just buy an iMac and say, great, well, I'm going to take off this little L-shaped thing and put on a Visa mount.
John:
You have to order it that way.
Casey:
from apple and they will give you the imac that you can mount with a visa mount i don't know if that's true of the thunderbolt displays but no one should buy them anymore anyway okay and we have some supposed answers with regard to the faceback of faceback the facebook app usage battery gate thing
Marco:
Yeah, so pretty shortly after we published our episode last week where I basically said, this is no bug.
Marco:
This is deliberate.
Marco:
They are jerks about this.
Marco:
Right afterwards, like a half a day afterwards, they posted a thing on Facebook.
Marco:
Somebody's, I think one of the lead engineers or something.
Marco:
They posted a thing saying, this was indeed a bug.
Marco:
Here's the bug.
Marco:
And it seemed like it was a couple of bugs.
Marco:
So they are claiming it was a bug.
Marco:
I honestly haven't looked into it.
Marco:
John, do you know, have you looked into this at all?
John:
All I did was read the press release but last week when you were like they're doing this on purpose because they're terrible people and so on and so forth I didn't really push push back that much on it but I find it entirely plausible this could have been a bug and the corroborating evidence that I use other than my general attempt to have faith in humanity.
John:
uh and belief that uh engineers wouldn't do something like this unless uh someone made them um is that some people have said now that they mention that uh i've seen that like where if i have watched a video in facebook then it sucks my battery but if i've used facebook but not watched a video it doesn't suck my battery so there's some vague anecdotal evidence that makes me think that their explanation sounds plausible but like i said realistically speaking the reason i was struggling last week was like why would they even do this what is the advantage to facebook
John:
It just seemed like a bug to me.
John:
So I am willing to believe that this was a bug.
John:
I do not think that Facebook is actively evil unless there's some really good reason for them to be actively evil.
John:
And I can't really think of a super good reason to make their app suck everyone's battery down.
John:
I came up with a few.
John:
I'm also willing to believe that it still could have been intentional, but I was never as sure about it as you were.
John:
And given this explanation, I'm willing to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt and say that they just had a bug.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I see this both ways because I do think they're fairly evil.
Casey:
But, you know, who was it?
Casey:
Was it you that said, you know, never attribute?
Casey:
What is the line?
Casey:
Never attribute to malice.
Casey:
What could easily be explained by stupidity or something like that?
John:
Yep.
John:
John invented that.
John:
If I invented it, I would have quoted it correctly.
John:
fair enough but you were the you were the person that reminded me of it but uh speaking of john we have uh important john related news uh the long national nightmare is over john can you update us on your star wars tickets yeah shortly after the show last week when i was in the midst of struggling to get star wars tickets and being sad about the fact that my wife had accidentally purchased 3d tickets no fear uh this is all cured now i have
John:
gotten rid of my 3d tickets all of my star wars tickets are now 2d uh i believe all of them are also reserved seating but maybe one set of them is it and you say how many star wars tickets do you have yes i'm going to see it multiple times those tickets are already bought for the multiple times i'm going to see it with various groups of people so fear not i will not be watching it in 3d i may actually watch it in 3d after i've seen it a few times in in 2d assuming i like it and i want to see it like a fourth or a fifth or a sixth time maybe i will try it at imax why the hell not
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
And so what you can do if you run your own server, which honestly, I don't recommend if you can help it.
Marco:
But if you run your own email server, you put this in front of that.
Marco:
If you use a service that just like a standard IMAP service like FastMail, you can put it in front of that.
Marco:
You point your domain name at it and then it just starts filtering spam for you.
Marco:
And the spam filtering is so good.
Marco:
I have never seen spam filtering this good.
Marco:
You know, a lot of people have said, oh, Gmail has the best spam filtering.
Marco:
And then I've heard from Gmail people who have tried this and they say, oh, actually, MailRoute is better.
Marco:
And I've never used Gmail, but I can tell you that anything I've tried before MailRoute, including the built-in fast mail spam control and everything, I've never been able to match what MailRoute gives me with its just regular default out-of-the-box settings.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
I see almost zero spam.
Marco:
It is very rare to see a spam message come through.
Marco:
It is also extremely rare to have non-spam get caught in the spam filter.
Marco:
And when it does, they keep kind of a list called the quarantine of mail that they think might be spam, but they're not 100% sure.
Marco:
And then every few days, they email you that list.
Marco:
And so you just get like this digest of here's all the subject lines and senders of the last couple days worth of this stuff with one click in that email.
Marco:
You don't have to even log in.
Marco:
With one click, you can whitelist and re-deliver any of those messages that are not actually spam.
Marco:
So it is very, very handy.
Marco:
They even have an API and all sorts of enterprise-y features that I have no idea what any of these things mean, because thank God I've never had to run an email server.
Marco:
But if you know what they mean, it's things like LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, mailbagging, outbound relay, all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
So check it out, mailroute.net slash ATP for a free trial and 10% off for the lifetime of your account.
Marco:
That's a huge savings.
Marco:
10% off for the lifetime of your account.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to MailRoute for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So Apple had their quarterly earnings, and this was the fourth quarter.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Who knows?
Casey:
Well, whatever.
Casey:
It was a quarter, and they had their quarterly earnings.
Casey:
And I think most of it was as expected.
Casey:
iPads are down fairly significantly.
Casey:
Sorry, Federico.
Casey:
Macs are up, which was slightly surprising.
Casey:
But there are a few things that somebody who did their homework, whose name is not Casey, put in the show notes.
Casey:
I'm assuming it was John, who shouldn't be doing homework.
John:
somebody has to yeah right china iphone sales are up 120 percent um i don't find that terribly surprising but that's a lot and keep in mind i think this is because they didn't launch the six in the same quarter in china last year so this year they did launch a success in china to be counted in this quarter or something like that so this isn't all just like hey wow apple's doing better in china it's also that they're they're getting better with simultaneous launches and that shows up in the thing but anyway
John:
China, as everyone says, is super important to Apple, Apple becoming increasingly important and they're growing fast there.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then there's a lot of enterprise-related things that I thought we could spend at least an hour talking about, John.
Casey:
I'm sure Marco won't mind.
Marco:
Not at all.
Marco:
How about those new Mac Pros?
Marco:
Oh, God, you're evil.
Marco:
Well played, sir.
Casey:
There are 30,000 Macs inside of IBM, adding almost 2,000 a week.
Casey:
And IBM is claiming that it saves them $270 per machine versus a Windows computer due to lower support costs and better residual values.
Casey:
That's pretty cool stuff.
John:
I like the residual value as a factor, which I wouldn't have thought of because I'm not thinking like a corporate bean counter.
John:
But as most of Mac owners know, Macs do hold their value better than old crappy PCs for whatever reason.
John:
I mean, just try to buy used Mac mini, for example.
John:
Um, and that is a factor in how businesses account for them.
John:
And so the fact that three years after you buy it, it hasn't lost as much of its value as a Dell, uh, is good.
John:
Uh, these support things like, boy, I should send these back in time to the, the, uh, 13 year old version of me and say someday IBM will
John:
We'll publish something saying that having Max having Max and the cooperation is better because they require less support.
John:
I mean, it's just it just boggles my mind that that is actually still true.
John:
I mean, who knows?
John:
I mean, they're our partner with Apple.
John:
It's it's, you know, obviously, they're going to say that it's like IBM saying the track point is awesome, right?
John:
You have to take all this with a grain of salt.
John:
But that was the old story, which was like the old Mac versus PC days.
John:
It's like, yeah, but Macs may be more expensive.
John:
But if you buy a Mac, your support costs will be lower because they're not as crappy as Windows PCs.
John:
And it's like, oh, you'd like us to think that, but a computer is a computer.
John:
And then they'd have all these stories from the Pro Mac people saying, oh, we bought Macs and our support costs have gone down.
John:
You know, this is still a story.
John:
This story is evergreen.
John:
Like at this point, everyone was like, well, everyone agrees that Windows is exactly the same as OS X. Like modern computers don't have all those weird things used to have like, you know, IRQ conflicts and DLL hell and all that's gone now.
John:
Everything's all plug and play and they should be about the same.
John:
And Macs have problems, too.
John:
It's like it's all a wash now.
John:
And who cares anyway?
John:
Because we're all looking at mobile.
John:
Who cares what the hell is going on in Windows and OS X?
John:
and then here is ibm and you know i believe they actually are saving money not maybe because macs are easier to manage or because um that the mac users need less help but it's like self-selecting anyone who maybe who's interested enough to to demand a mac is a mac nerd who already knows how to use it needs less support that's got to be a factor in there somewhere but i'm also willing to believe as i always have been willing to believe because i you know i think it's the truth
John:
that because there's a less variety of Mac hardware and software, that your support costs can be lower.
John:
There's just fewer variables.
John:
People want to think about, it used to be ease of use, like Mac versus DOS or whatever.
John:
But the bottom line today, I think, is
John:
There aren't that many Macs in the world, and there are tons of different weird PCs, and Windows has to account for all of them, and Apple only has to account for the Macs that it itself has made.
John:
So good job, IBM, and it's a crazy world where IBM is buying 2,000 Macs per week and has 30,000 of them already.
Casey:
That's weird.
Casey:
I mean, as I think I've mentioned several times in the past, I am the child of a almost lifelong IBMer.
Casey:
And I mean, I was never that big into the IBM versus Mac debate.
Casey:
I mean, I was to some extent back in the day, and I clearly was on the side of IBM.
Casey:
But man, this is weird.
Casey:
It's super weird.
Casey:
Like my entire childhood was defined by ThinkPads.
Casey:
And to see them...
Casey:
basically abandoning their own product which yes i know is lenovo and has been for a few years but you know abandoning that thing that they came up with to to go towards app max that's just man that's weird and to uh quickly address gareth in the chat room i was not forced to use os2 i chose to use os2 warp it was magical sure it was it was unbelievably good
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
And the Hanson CD was a gift.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
No, that was totally me.
Casey:
So anyway, so speaking of IBM and the enterprise, Apple says that they have earned $25 billion in annual revenue in the last 12 months from the enterprise, which is apparently a little over 10% of the total revenue for Apple and is up 40% year over year.
Casey:
My goodness.
John:
Yeah, for a company that isn't interested in the enterprise, that IBM partnership seems to be working as intended, which is like Apple doesn't really want to deal with this crap, but they'll gladly partner with somebody who will deal with the grunt work and just make them the money.
John:
And, you know, 10% of your business shows that Apple still is not an enterprise company to the degree like Oracle or SAP or something is, or even Microsoft for that matter.
John:
But 40% year over year is big growth.
John:
So apparently their enterprise, it's like, think about what has Apple done related to the enterprise other than the IBM deal.
John:
It's not like Apple has suddenly rededicated its entire product efforts on the enterprise.
John:
They're still doing what they've always done to support the enterprise.
John:
But I think the IBM partnership is helping.
John:
Hell, just sales of Macs to IBM itself alone.
John:
Forget about IBM helping other people to buy Macs and recommending them and supporting them.
John:
um with all their neat ipad apps and stuff like that so thumbs up on this partnership it seemed like a good idea at the time and still seems like a good idea because i still do not see any area where like unlike microsoft and ibm's partnership where ibm is cleverly maneuvering to stab apple in the back it just seems like win-win so far yep i agree and uh finally let's make federico sad the ipad womp womp
John:
is it a really womp womp like i like the when we all knew the ipad was you know if you look at like the graphs i forget i think this was in jason's six colors thing we should add that to the show notes but uh he had graphs of like the sales of the different products and there are different lines there's the lines for the phone which is in one section of the graph and has its own slope and actually kicks up in recent years and then there's the sections for the mac and the ipad and the mac the ipad curves look like they are siblings like yeah they're way down here the volumes are lower they're kind of just sad little droopy you know they're
John:
They're going up.
John:
They're not really going down that much.
John:
Maybe the iPad dips a little bit, but they're reasonable.
John:
But the iPhone is in a different category.
John:
So if you take the iPhone out of the equation and look like Benedict Evans tweeted this thing earlier and look at just the curve of desktop laptops and tablets,
John:
if you visualize it in a particular way as he has done here what it basically looks like is that laptops are being replaced by tablets so the laptop sales are dipping a little bit and the tablets are continuing the curve you guys looking at that uh that tweet photo that i find pretty convincing and it may be that like it doesn't change the reality that the ipad is not going to be the next iphone we all know that um
John:
It could just be, you know, in the same way that Apple wants to introduce products that cannibalize its own products, that the iPad and especially the larger iPads are the future cannibalizers of desktop and laptop computers and not going to cannibalize the phone at all because it's untouchable.
John:
yeah it seems reasonable that's all how you view the thing like this graph is could be misleading but it really you look at this graph and like oh totally i see exactly how that's going but you could visualize the same data in a different way but i like i gotta get the jason snell in there because i like the one graph that showed how the lines are separate universes from each other and the other graph that shows you know and it's not big growth like the max and everything like the growth of that sector of the market is small and then apple is growing slightly
John:
And most other companies selling desktop laptops are contracting slightly.
John:
So it's all just off as a kind of like, I wouldn't call it a hobby yet.
John:
But it's, you know, it's a lot of money because everything that Apple does is a lot of money.
John:
But the iPhone is just so ridiculous now that you almost have to like have two separate earning calls.
John:
Let's talk about the iPhone.
John:
Let's talk about everything else in the universe.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, so in summary, Apple has more money than your deity of choice, and it's all stored away in various bank accounts, and things are going well.
Casey:
So I'd like to change tune quite a bit and talk – what do we call this?
Casey:
Follow out?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
I'm all confused now.
Casey:
Yeah, which is different than follow-up.
John:
We're already into topics.
John:
Follow-out is at the end.
John:
These variations of follow-up are not officially sanctioned.
John:
Not, you know, like, what is it, like, made for iPhone, MFI?
John:
I need to make an official stamp of approval program for variations on follow-up, and these are not.
John:
These are all bootlegs.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
That's fantastic.
Casey:
So this unofficially sanctioned or unofficially and unsanctioned follow out is with regard to the podcast upgrade with our friends, Mike Hurley and Jason Snell.
Casey:
And Mike and Jason were talking about on this week's episode what to do with regard to large long term on premise storage.
Casey:
And Mike had said, you know, I've heard a lot of people talk about whether or not having a NAS is worthwhile.
Casey:
And then if you do get a NAS, he's heard, you know, half of his friends say, oh, you should absolutely without a shadow of a doubt get a Drobo.
Casey:
And then he's heard the other half of his friends say you should absolutely without a shadow of a doubt get a Synology.
Casey:
And he wasn't sure what to do.
Casey:
He wasn't really keen on the idea of network attached storage to begin with.
Casey:
So then the question is, well, do you not do it network attached?
Casey:
Do you do something more physically attached?
Casey:
Oh my God, what do I do?
Casey:
You know, says Mike.
Casey:
And I know we've talked about this a lot in the past, but it's been a long time since we've talked about this.
Casey:
Marco has been almost burned by some iSCSI software at least 34 times in the last year.
Casey:
So I thought we'd at least briefly revisit this and kind of talk about what we recommend and what our thoughts are.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to kind of kick this off?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
So, I mean, so we all, Synology was graceful enough to give us all Synology units back, I don't know, what, about two years ago?
Marco:
It was a while ago now, year and a half, something like that.
Marco:
So we all have this, I think the same one, right?
Marco:
The 1813 plus.
Marco:
So we all have the same giant eight bay Synology.
Marco:
And this is like, it's no longer their current model, but at the time they gave it to us, it was a very high end model.
Marco:
And as far as I know, we've all had great stories with them.
Marco:
We've all had great success with them.
Marco:
They've proven to be very good.
Marco:
The problem with NASAs, though, for me, is complexity and backup.
Marco:
Those are what always get me.
Marco:
NASAs offer a whole bunch of features, because they are just like little computers, really, running specialized, usually Linuxes.
Marco:
And
Marco:
There's a lot they can do.
Marco:
You can have them serve Plex sometimes, maybe, depending on your transcoding needs, like Casey will probably talk about.
Marco:
You can have them download BitTorrent stuff for you.
Marco:
You can have them host cloud files for you when you're out.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff you can do with a NAS.
Marco:
I do none of it.
Marco:
I just do not use those features at all.
Marco:
All I really use it for is archival storage, just long-term bulk file storage, things I don't usually need to access even.
Marco:
That is all I use it for.
Marco:
And so all those features are wasted on me.
Marco:
And I think that's, honestly, that's probably what most people really need.
Marco:
I don't think most people really need to be managing this whole other mini specialized server in their house.
Marco:
I think what they really just want is more space for their computers.
Marco:
I think that's the main goal here.
Marco:
And it's great because if you're going to move to something like a NAS or even a Drobo, which I'll get to in a minute, you gain the ability to use 3.5-inch hard drives where you can basically spend nothing and get many terabytes of space.
Marco:
It is crazy how cheap storage is.
Marco:
And compared to our world of modern, at least the decent computers that have SSD storage, we're fretting over whether to go with the 512 or the terabyte or whatever.
Marco:
Meanwhile, you can get a 4 terabyte desktop drive for what?
Marco:
200 bucks, 150 bucks now?
Marco:
The desktop drives are so cheap now.
Marco:
And they aren't that fast compared to SSDs, but it doesn't really matter when you're doing archival storage.
Marco:
So a NAS is a great way to get a whole bunch of archival storage somewhere in your house.
Marco:
And if you want, like me, if you want to avoid noise at your computer, external drives don't really help there.
Marco:
But you can put a NAS anywhere in your house where you can run a wire.
Marco:
So that gives you a lot of options there for noise and location and everything like that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There are a lot of benefits to NASes, but the complexity of basically managing this little server in your house has always bothered me a little bit, and also the question of backups.
Marco:
My preferred cloud backup is Backblaze, and I should disclose they've sponsored this show many times, although I was using them before they sponsored, and
Marco:
I like Backblaze a lot.
Marco:
I have tried CrashPlan before, and I've had nothing but terrible luck with it.
Marco:
I've tried running CrashPlan on a Mac, trying to back up the Synology.
Marco:
I've tried running the actual client that can run directly on the Synology.
Marco:
I've tried running that.
Marco:
I have tried CrashPlan, I think, at least three times over the last few years.
Marco:
And every time it fails, it just slows down to a crawl and eventually fails.
Marco:
And people point to various Java heap limits and stuff like that.
Marco:
And I've tried so many different things that people have said, oh, just change this configuration setting in this file or whatever.
Marco:
I've tried so many different things, and it just fails every time.
Marco:
It seems like it just cannot keep up with a many terabyte backup with tons of files in it.
Marco:
So I have had terrible luck with CrashPlan, but CrashPlan is the only one that will back up a network drive or will run directly on the Synology, whereas Backblaze will only back up locally attached things from your Mac or PC.
Marco:
So what I do now, my Synology in the Closet...
Marco:
Two of the disks it uses for Time Machine, and it uses those normally as its native file system.
Marco:
All the other ones, it's serving a giant iSCSI volume.
Marco:
That is then mounted on my Mac mini server using a terrible iSCSI initiator, because there isn't one built into Mac OS X. I used the Addo one, but the Global Sam one was worse for me and was less reliable.
Marco:
They're both terrible.
Marco:
And those are like $200, right?
Marco:
So there's more money down the drain there.
Marco:
And so I use giant iSCSI volume on the Synology with its crazy RAID setup.
Marco:
Mounted with iSCSI onto the Mac Mini as a local disk.
Marco:
That fools Backblaze into thinking it's local because it's iSCSI.
Marco:
And so then Backblaze backs it up and it's formatted with HFS+, because it kind of has to be for that to work very well.
Marco:
So it's this big, complex setup when really...
Marco:
I think I would be perfectly fine these days.
Marco:
I don't need 10 terabytes of storage.
Marco:
I think I would be fine these days, honestly, just getting rid of it at some point and just getting a few either 2 terabyte laptop drives in little USB enclosures, little fanless enclosures.
Marco:
and just tolerating the little amount of noise they make, or just getting 1TB SSDs and putting them in little USB enclosures.
Marco:
Because a 1TB SSD is now $300, and that's only going down over time.
Marco:
So I wouldn't need that many of them.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It drives me nuts how complex my current setup is.
Marco:
And I'm only not changing it right now because it is currently working.
Marco:
But as soon as I need to change anything about this setup, I think I'm going to dump it entirely.
Marco:
Because I just the entire value of a NAS is lost on me and I don't need this giant, you know, this giant box making all this noise in my closet all the time.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
You guys seem like you're better at it than I am.
Casey:
Well, let me just before I talk about myself, if you were to do it all over again, what do you think you would do?
Casey:
You would do something physically connected or you would just how would you handle the problem of long term storage?
Marco:
i mean a good nas is is you know often near a thousand dollars uh sometimes more if you need if you need like you know the eight bay version um for the same price or less i think i would probably just do what i said just like you know get like three or four one terabyte ssds try to find an enclosure that could that can run fanless and can hold all of them it probably doesn't exist i haven't
Marco:
tiff has on her computer she has a similar kind of setup like this with the owc thunder bay mini 4 something like that it's the two the one that takes two and a half inch drives and that one does not run fanless i mentioned in a previous show i replaced the fan in it for a quieter one but it still has noticeable fan noise and the reason why is not because the disc run hot because it has this thunderbolt chip on it like this controller chip that runs incredibly hot to the touch if you don't fan it
Marco:
And there's no heatsink.
Marco:
It's just a bare chip, and it just runs insanely hot.
Marco:
I have no idea why, even when the drives are idle.
Marco:
It's just crazy.
Marco:
Anyway, so what I would do now is probably buy external drives.
Marco:
And even if I spent the money to make them all little SSDs so that they would be totally silent,
Marco:
That would probably be cheaper than a NAS, and it wouldn't be nearly as much space, but I would argue I probably don't need that much space because my NAS has literally had 10 terabytes free for the last few months.
Casey:
I totally sympathize with what you're saying, but I don't have the same complaints that you do as you expected.
Casey:
I have, of course, the same DS-1813 Plus that you do.
Casey:
From what I can tell with Synology model names, the 8 in 1813 means it's 8 Bay, and 13 means it's the 2013 model.
Casey:
So the modern version of what we have is the DS-1815 Plus.
Marco:
Oh, that's why they skipped the 14s.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't realize that was a thing until somebody pointed that out on Twitter.
Casey:
I wish I remember who it was.
Casey:
And I was like, whoa, mind blown.
Casey:
Had no idea.
Casey:
So anyway, so the DS-1815 Plus is the modern version.
Casey:
But I freaking love my Synology.
Casey:
As Marco said, it was comped.
Casey:
It was comped not only the box, but all the drives in it.
Casey:
We have eight 3TB hard drives in these.
Casey:
I love this thing.
Casey:
It has its own – I'm going to call it operating system, although that's a misnomer.
Casey:
It has its own web interface.
Casey:
Let's use that.
Casey:
It has its own web interface, as many NASAs do, and it lets you do all sorts of things on it.
Casey:
I use mine as a VPN server all the time, particularly lately since I've been working out of a client's office.
Casey:
And for my Mac, I like to be on a VPN, and I might as well be on my own.
Casey:
It has a BitTorrent client, if that's your thing.
Casey:
It has a news group client, if that's your thing.
Casey:
It has really great file sharing.
Casey:
So if you have a stupidly large file that you want to send to somebody and maybe you don't want to use, what's the Apple thing that just came out in the last year?
John:
the apple watch funny no i meant the thing where they that lets you send huge files icloud sharing or something no no that's not right oh does that actually work i've never actually seen it i've never tried it mailbagging oh i've used it that wasn't this year that was the year i my last review had that so that must have been in uh yosemite but yeah i've used it it's a nice way to not if you if you use the apple mail app obviously
John:
Or I think the web interface, you can send an attachment without regard to how big the attachment is because it automatically uploads it to a cloud server.
John:
It basically does the same thing as like cloud app or one of those things does, but automatically and with no ads and for free.
Casey:
It's something drop as per the chat room, perhaps mail drop.
Casey:
In any case, so if you don't want to mail drop, you can use your Synology to do that.
Casey:
None of these things are unique to the Synology.
Casey:
Oh, it'll also be a Plex server, although my model, the 1813 Plus, it
Casey:
Did not have a strong enough CPU for doing live transcoding.
Casey:
And we've talked about this in the past.
Casey:
I'm not going to go on about it, but suffice to say it didn't work well for me.
Casey:
But what does work well for me is having my personal Mac, which is effectively a desktop server, even though it's actually a 15-inch high-res anti-glare.
Casey:
That's the Plex server, and I just have it look at the Synology to get all its media.
Casey:
And so it's wonderful having a server in the house if you're at all geeky.
Casey:
A network-attached storage does not need to be that server.
Casey:
You would probably perhaps be better off with a Mac Mini if you can afford or have such a thing, or if you have, say, a 5K Retina iMac and you just want to leave it on constantly.
Casey:
That would also probably work just as well, if not better.
Casey:
But for me, I just really like having some sort of box that's kind of a server that I can offload those weird tasks.
Casey:
Like if I do want to download a torrent of some legal software or open a free movie or what have you, I can offload that onto the Synology.
Casey:
If I want to share files with friends or family, it makes it very easy.
Casey:
And the other thing that I love more than anything else is that because I have
Marco:
um six of the eight drives in synology hybrid raid which is one drive redundancy so one of these drives can explode and i'll be okay which is insanely slow is it i mean i don't notice oh yeah well it's like it's like any of those like raid 5e kind of things i mean rate true raid 5 is also very slow um because i believe it has to write every block to every disc um so yeah very slow on writes and okay on reads um nobody uses raid 5 for performance and then so there's
Marco:
Synology Hybrid Rate is very similar to what people know Drobos to do, and we'll talk about those, I guess, which is basically you have a software-managed volume where it manages the whole file system for you because it has to resize itself.
Marco:
That way, you can use an array of disks of different sizes, and then you can actually expand the volume by replacing disks one at a time.
Marco:
So it's a cool setup if you have expanding needs over time, but you do pay a penalty in performance for sure.
Marco:
And with some of them, like Drobo, there's a question of reliability.
Marco:
Drobo in particular has had a pretty spotty reliability history, which is why I've never ventured into that area myself.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
If you ask Drobo owners, many of the ones you talk to have been fine.
Marco:
They've had no problems whatsoever.
Marco:
It's been rock solid for them.
Marco:
However, you will hear a lot of people telling you all their horror stories from Drobo's.
Marco:
And so it just never... And the reviews kind of back this up.
Marco:
If you look on Amazon or whatever, or you read tech sites, it really does seem like they have a spotty history of liability.
Marco:
And that's why I would not, I don't think, want to try one.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
You never say never in this business.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, so yeah, to wrap it up, I love having some sort of server-like thing on the network in the house.
Casey:
And I really love my Synology.
Casey:
And yes, I got this for free.
Casey:
If I were to have paid for it, it would have been over $1,000 with all the drives in it, which is absurdly expensive.
Casey:
But they have other versions.
Casey:
Like I think they have a 1515 this year, which would be a five bay version.
Casey:
There's there's two two bay versions.
Casey:
So whatever you think is right for you, get that if you can be a Drobo or Synology.
Casey:
But just having effectively infinite storage is a life changer because I used to have to worry about, you know, oh, like as an example for all these episodes of let's call it highest gear.
Casey:
um for all these episodes of that show you know do i burn them to dvds so i can get them off my mac so i can have all that space back oh i don't ever want to download the 1080 versions because um i don't want to take up that much space now don't care whatever it is i'll take it i got plenty of room and that is magical so i've gone on marco's gone on john what's your take on all this
John:
Well, getting back to what kicked us off with Mike and his questions.
John:
At this point, despite what all of us have said, or what you two have said, or what I'm going to say and have said in the past about our particular setups, what this comes down to is one of those conversations that used to be more common surrounding things like computers, or even smartphones a little bit, but mostly computers, where
John:
If you're known as like the computer guy or gal in your family or in your town or in your group of friends or whatever, you get questions from people who say they're just like if you're if someone knows stuff about cars, what car should I buy?
John:
What computer should I get?
John:
How should I configure the computer that you get computer questions like this?
John:
And I'm sure each of us has been the resident tech nerd many times to many people.
John:
and in most cases you have to turn it into like uh an interview where you have to say all right well what do you actually want to do what is your budget what are your needs what's important to you and then you can recommend something you can tell them what the trade-offs are which may make them change their minds about oh i didn't realize that and now i'm going to prioritize this or that i didn't realize how much that costs or how cheaply i could do this or whatever but in the bottom it's like a back and forth we're like okay well
John:
if you you know if you don't want to use any sort of like if you don't need a home server you don't want to manage another thing you just want it to be a dumb box disk but you do need a backup but do you subscribe to a cloud backup service that you not want to subscribe to one what kind of backup things you know it turns into this big long complicated interview where i think all of us if anyone asked could lead them to the optimal solution for them there is no optimal solution for everybody it just really depends on what you want
John:
uh and thinking about that and mike and his questions like i think we could all do that for him and kind of have a little bit in the slack where we all hang out um but the fact that you have to have that conversation and the fact that you need all this expertise and experience to guide in the right direction shows that this is sort of an unsolved problem that it's annoying that you have to and this also came up in the slack that it's annoying that you have to
John:
do all this have these expertise and sort of cobble together these systems like that it's not something you have to think about it it's much better than it used to be i mean and again i believe i said in one of my old os 10 reviews that time machine was the best feature apple ever added to an operating system because
John:
prior to time machine getting anyone to do backups ever was just not happening and time machine didn't make it so easy that everybody does it but boy did it lower the barrier to entry massively lowered it and still there is a massive barrier yet to go because it's like okay they made it so much easier great that was great from 10.5 right
John:
But then you got to buy an external hard drive.
John:
And how do I attach it as a USB or as a firewire?
John:
Do I back up to a NAS?
John:
Can you do time machine over the network?
John:
Are the time capsules flaky?
John:
Can I do time machine to a third party thing like a Synology?
John:
Like it is still the backups in general are still way, way too hard.
John:
And yeah,
John:
Lots of people think, like, this will be solved when everything is network backup.
John:
Well, in this country, anyway, if we are all waiting around for everyone to get network connections fast enough to back up the amount of data that they produce and store on their computers, we're all going to be dead by then.
John:
Like, other countries may have better network infrastructure outlooks for the next 50 to 100 years.
John:
The United States does not have very good outlook.
John:
So...
John:
i think it's it's kind of a shame that this is still not a solved problem and apple for the most part has punted on it they did a time capsule uh which i wish worked better than it did because it seemed like the ideal solution um maybe when they get time capsule when they rededicate themselves to time capsule with their new os that's coming out any day now i'm sure uh not new os new file system
John:
new file system with data integrity protection that can efficiently send diffs and i don't know you can imagine a scenario where time capsule starts to become a much better solution than it is but today we're all talking about buying enclosures and sticking bare drives in it and marco's like well i'm gonna buy some ssds and find a thing but like nobody's gonna do that it's just too darn hard so i think the take home from this is
John:
there's probably a solution if you're listening to this there is probably a solution that fits your needs to back up what you want we don't know what it is because we don't know what your needs are and in general this is way too hard like this this should not this is one of the last remaining bastions of computers are annoying and difficult to manage and problematic and there's no easy good choice that i can recommend to everybody you know
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's really unfortunate because you're right.
Marco:
This is way too complicated for people.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why people have often no backups.
Marco:
Because so many people, I'm sure we've all seen people like this, where they will have an external drive enclosure on their desk that they call their backup drive.
John:
but it actually isn't a backup it is just more space yeah or they time machine to it but like you ever see the message that says time machine is not backed up in 10 days right oh time machine does at least tell you that because i think a lot of people think they're running time machine but they're not because it's so unobtrusive and if they get that message i can imagine them dismissing it and going i'm sure that'll fix itself
John:
This is why one of my very early, like when I started my what was then called the Fat Pits blog at Ars Technica, one of the various articles I wrote, I think it was called The Case for Raid or something like that, where I was just desperately looking for some way to actually to keep climbing up that stupid back uphill like Time Machine.
John:
Great.
John:
Thumbs up or whatever.
John:
I don't even know if Time Machine was out by then.
John:
um but it's like it's too hard for people to back up like even even with time machine i have to my own battles to convince my relatives to buy an external hard drive try convincing someone they have to spend any amount of money to get a box with wires that connects to the big expensive computer they just bought they're like why what why do i need this what it's like if someone gets a tv and say well you got the cable box i guess so that's not a good example but anyway
John:
people don't want to do it they don't want to buy an extra thing and then they have to you know the power supply and it dies or they it makes noise they don't need to be turned on and off they don't understand disc mounting and unmounting because it's complicated i what i was looking for apple which is you know the old apple is like can you just build in twice the storage in every single computer like sell computers that say they have x amount of storage but really have them always have 2x and have them essentially do you know i think again i think it was pre-time machine having them essentially do incremental backups from one drive to the other
John:
right i mean they kind of did this recovery partition saving the os but that doesn't save your data at all and it's all in the same mechanism what i basically wanted was i mean again phrasing it as raid it's not really raid you know although raid one would still be better than nothing even though it's not a backup but like the only the premise was the only way you're ever going to get people to back up is to just lie to them and just over provision and give them twice the storage they have and pretend they have half that storage and just do incremental backups for them no choice of every single because that's what people want they just want a computer you plunk down like a phone
John:
They want a phone, you want to plunk it down.
John:
Phones so far have been able to get by on the fact that the data does not accumulate on phones fast enough to make it impossible to do a cloud backup.
John:
And so with the cloud backup, again, setting aside the pricing stuff, I think phone backups are in a better state than computer backup.
John:
Not the best because we all hear stories about people who go into an Apple store with a bum phone and that have never backed it up anywhere, whether on the cloud or on iTunes, and then they're sad because they lose all their photos to their entire family.
John:
So still ways to go there, but...
John:
that that kind of you know that that blog post throwing out you know raid or just like just the idea of like apple your computers are so expensive anyway just put twice the storage and all of them because literally is really just a cry for help like we're never going to solve this with current technology there's no way to solve this without essentially making it not an option and we're still not there and the uh
John:
The new the new slightly more price conscious Apple that is putting spinning hard drives in the new 4K iMac and the cheapest 4K iMac is definitely not putting twice the storage and everything.
John:
So we're still waiting.
John:
Bottom line.
John:
And then one more thing on this.
John:
We talked about our market talk about crash plan backing up network drives and backblaze not backing them up.
John:
A lot of requests into Backblaze of that, and sometimes they say, well, we're thinking about it, we've heard that request, so on and so forth.
John:
I don't know anything about why Backblaze doesn't back up network drives, but based on what I know about the most efficient way to know what needs to be backed up on OS X...
John:
Uh, the, the, the most efficient way you can do that is to use the various APIs in OS 10 that let you know, Hey, since the last time you asked me, I can tell you that things have changed in this directory, that directory in that directory.
John:
And maybe even like, here's what the changes are, right?
John:
That's what you need to be able to do.
John:
Otherwise, if you're trying to back up literally 4 million files, which is not an unreasonable number of files for someone with a lot of data.
John:
uh every time you run the backup the first job it has to do is say since the last time i backup which of these four million files have either been added deleted or changed since the last time i did a backup and without a more efficient method you have to basically scan the entire drive and ask every one of the files how you doing how you doing are you still there are you a file have you been updated what it can compare its date to the last time you backed it up or whatever that is massively inefficient uh
John:
So you want to do a more efficient mechanism, and OS X offers several more efficient mechanisms, but most of them require, pretty much all of them, I think, require the efficient mechanisms, require the I.O.
John:
to that drive to go through the kernel of the operating system.
John:
So if you have local storage, like if it's mounted like a local disk, whether you're lying and it's not really local like iSCSI, or it literally is a local disk connected through FireWire or Thunderbolt or USB or SATA or whatever...
John:
if the io to that disk meaning you wrote the file by sending the io through the kernel running on this mac and same for all the other operations uh the then the os 10 will have a log of all those events in this little fs fs events log and it has apis for you to ask it what happened since the last time i asked and it can give you the answer really quickly and efficiently without scanning the entire drive you can't do that for a network drive because a network drive people could be doing io2 on other macs
John:
going through their kernels and their IO system and your kernel and your OS has no idea that that's happening.
John:
So there's no way to say, hey, what happened to this network drive since the last time I asked?
John:
Because it doesn't know.
John:
You just don't know.
John:
So if Backplace did do network drive support, they would have to do what CrashPlan does, which is every time you do that, I got to rescan the whole freaking network drive and find out what has changed since the last time.
John:
Because there's no more efficient way to ask about it because other people could be updating the drive at the same time.
John:
It's not locally attached storage.
John:
So...
John:
you know price wise or not wanting to do network drives because they're potentially large or whatever there are technical reasons why even if backblaze added support for network drives it would be crappier than backblaze's support for local storage i don't know for for crash plan i don't know if it does the good apis for local storage even because i see it grinding my disk a lot and uh the other thing on crash plan news is recently they announced that there's a new version of crash plan coming out that does not use java
John:
on os 10 and that's another thorn in our side about uh crash plan is that it is a java application you have to install the jvm for it and it doesn't feel native and it's you know as opposed to again backblades which is native application all of that stuff so a native version of crash plan is supposedly coming out maybe that will improve what matters but it certainly won't improve the fact that it just can't know what changed on network drive without scanning all the stuff uh all the stuff on the drive i get around that in my personal setup briefly touching on that by
John:
mostly storing on my uh network attached storage either large files like the sparse disk images i think those are broken up into like two gig strips or whatever but basically large-ish files um or things like video files that are also very large so it is a small number of relatively large files and that's it's faster to scan that scanning takes scales with the number of files that you have to scan so i have not so many files not so many directories but those files are very often hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes or larger um
John:
So that's how I back up my Synology.
John:
I have CrashPlan backing out my Synology.
John:
And even though it does the incredibly inefficient scan of the entire disk because it has no choice, because it's network-attached storage, it works in a reasonable amount of time.
Marco:
All the things you mentioned about network drives having all these limitations based on the fact that they could be accessed through in shared means by somebody else, I hate browsing network drives.
Marco:
First of all, Spotlight does not index them.
Marco:
So if you have files on a network drive, Spotlight just can't find them, as far as I can tell.
Marco:
And then number one thing is I hate having to connect, you know, hit connect on the side.
Marco:
I don't know if things can auto-connect reliably these days.
Marco:
What year is this?
Marco:
But for whatever reason, it seems like that can't happen, right?
Marco:
So I have to, like, go to the server, hit connect,
Marco:
Go to the drive.
Marco:
Watch the spinner while it loads the list of files.
Marco:
Open the directory I want.
Marco:
Watch the spinner again as it loads the list of those files.
Marco:
It's so stupid.
Marco:
And I mean that in the sense that it is not smart.
Marco:
It is just really simple in a primitive way.
Marco:
And it is just terrible.
Marco:
I don't think it's that unreasonable to want all my stuff to be available quickly.
Marco:
Really, even though it results in a desk covered in enclosures and wires and possibly noise issues if you don't go all SSD, I really do think that just a couple of external drives is by far the best choice most of the time, as long as that can fit what you need to fit.
Casey:
And it's probably the right answer for Mike, because I don't think he wants any sort of management thing.
Casey:
Like all the stuff that I really get jazzed about in my Synology, being able to offload file downloads or file uploads, being able to have a VPN endpoint, I don't think Mike wants any of that.
Casey:
And so I think you're right, Marco, that just having one or more enclosures physically hanging off his computer is probably, from what we can tell, the better answer for him.
John:
Here's the other angle on that.
John:
We mentioned that we got our Synologies for free.
John:
And it's kind of like, for me, it was the ultimate gift.
John:
You always want to buy people gifts that they wouldn't buy themselves, especially people who seem to just buy themselves or whatever they want, whose names might be Marco.
John:
very difficult to know what to get them because it's like well if they wanted something it would have already bought it for themselves but it's usually something that somebody won't buy for themselves because they think it's a frill or they don't think they need it or whatever but if they got it would actually enjoy it and really good gift buyers and i'm not one of them can figure out what those things are well anyway sinology's pr department actually turned out to be a really good gift buyer for me because i've been thinking about nasa's for a long time but i'm like oh they're expensive and
John:
They don't have data integrity and I don't want to manage another server and all sorts of other things.
John:
But because I got one for free, it's like, whatever, I'll throw it down there and see what it's like.
John:
And I have to tell you now, if this thing broke, I would buy another NAS.
John:
Whether I would buy another Synology or not, I don't know.
John:
Synology is literally the only NAS I've ever owned.
John:
So I have no way to compare it to other NASs other than stories I've heard from people.
John:
But...
John:
I would buy another one because now that I have it, I do what Casey does.
John:
I love having another I love having a huge amount of storage that is in a different room.
John:
I love all the little server management things like, you know, it's been totally reliable to me.
John:
I let I let everything auto update.
John:
I let the apps I don't even let the apps auto update on my phone.
John:
I let them auto update on the Synology.
John:
i let everything auto update on it everything's always been fine it's always up it sends me email if like it goes on to ups power so i can tell when someone is overloading a circuit breaker in the house and i can tell when the power goes back on um i download torrents from it so i don't have to leave any of my computers running to just download torrents and stuff like that um it it also the video that my kids watch integrates with my tv my tv can read it can play video right off the synology with nothing just the tv and of course every other device that i have can also play video off of like my playstation and
John:
the apple tv in theory if i got the uh what do you call it the the plex app and stuff like that all this stuff that i would thought would be a frill and that the ui is like kind of gross and linuxy and it is um i use it all the time and i love it and so had i not been gifted this thing i wouldn't i would still be saying like nah nas i don't need something like that but now that i have it i would totally get another one maybe not an eight bay one because like marco i have a lot of free space on the thing at this point but uh but i like it so i wouldn't be so quick to tell somebody
John:
uh especially someone who has never owned an ass that you totally don't need an ass because you may end up like marco and say you know what really what i really want is just a bunch of really silent uh you know ssd storage right on my desk that's at native speeds or you might end up like casey and i and be excited by the possibilities of your nas and uh love it every time you get to copy something to or from it over your local gigabit network and the i was really fast because it's a bunch of multi-gigabyte video files and you don't have to hear the discs and they're far away and it's great
Casey:
Yeah, I would like to double down on everything you just said, John, particularly about, oh, yeah, I don't think I need a NAS.
Casey:
I've been ruined for life because now that I have the Synology, I will never, ever, ever not have another NAS.
Casey:
And unless something just goes horribly wrong with the Synology all of a sudden, I will probably always buy Synologies from now on because I freaking love this thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Really, these are beautiful prints directly on glass.
Marco:
They are thin.
Marco:
They are lightweight.
Marco:
They look incredibly modern.
Marco:
They are edge-to-edge prints.
Marco:
You don't need a frame or anything.
Marco:
They basically are their own frame.
Marco:
You get everything you need to hang it right in the box, and they're easy to hang because they're these nice big sheets of glass, but they're very lightweight because they're very thin.
Marco:
um they they just look fantastic i always get compliments on the fractures whenever anybody visits and they see my office and oh are those the fractures uh everyone always asks about them or people who don't know like oh what are those those look great so everyone loves these things they also make fantastic gifts uh now with the holidays coming up because these are all handmade and hand print and hand assembled and hand checked they can get backlogged pretty easily during really heavy peak periods and
Marco:
And you might start seeing the ship date start to slip.
Marco:
And they'll tell you right up front before you order.
Marco:
We predict this will ship on this date.
Marco:
But the problem is with the holidays, everyone has figured out that these things make great gifts.
Marco:
And they really do.
Marco:
I've given them as gifts a number of times.
Marco:
People love them.
Marco:
The problem is the holidays, everyone tries to get gifts at the same time.
Marco:
So if you want a holiday gift fracture...
Marco:
Put those orders in now, really.
Marco:
Don't delay.
Marco:
Put it in now because everyone's going to buy it and they want to make sure you get the things in time.
Marco:
So go to fractureme.com.
Marco:
That is where you get them.
Marco:
That is where you learn more about them.
Marco:
You can upload photos.
Marco:
You can preview them.
Marco:
You can see all the different sizes they have, square or rectangular.
Marco:
They are great.
Marco:
And use the coupon code ATP15, one word, ATP15, to give you 15% off your first order at fractureme.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
All right, so Google has entered the podcasting ecosystem.
Casey:
What is this all about?
Marco:
So we don't know a lot about it yet.
Marco:
So they basically made a blog post and they did a couple of interviews that I listened to.
Marco:
And so the short version is that Google Play Music, which is their music streaming service, I guess.
Marco:
I really don't know anything about it.
Marco:
But Google Play Music is adding podcasts to itself.
Marco:
And it's going to start out Android only, but for the most part, I believe they say it's going to go everywhere soon at some point.
Marco:
So assume it's going to be everywhere soon-ish.
Marco:
This is basically Google's big play in podcasting, as far as we can tell.
Marco:
They used to have a really basic Android player, I think, but I think it was discontinued a long time ago.
Marco:
Anyway, what this means for podcasting is still a big question mark.
Marco:
The idea is they are going to be blending podcasts in with music in this one unified Google Play Music service.
Marco:
And then they, I guess, again, I don't know too much about it, but I guess the whole idea of Google Play Music is to kind of select what you want to hear right now based on all the stuff Google knows about you, which is a lot.
Marco:
So it's like, you know...
Marco:
If you're going to be at the gym, they're going to pick gym music for you.
Marco:
If you're going to be in the car, they're going to pick... That's the idea.
Marco:
It automatically can select and play stuff that they think is going to make the most sense for what you're doing right now based on your activities and taste.
Marco:
And so they're mixing podcasts into that.
Marco:
And so it used to be all music.
Marco:
Now it's going to be music plus podcasts you like or something.
Marco:
It's unclear to me whether it's going to be like, you know, whether you subscribe specifically to things or whether it's just random or whether it's both.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
And the implementation details are fairly important here.
Marco:
This is not open, of course, because Google is not open, despite what they say.
Marco:
This is not an open standard.
Marco:
This is neither open nor standard.
John:
Well, it's better than Facebook Instant Articles, or Apple News for that matter, where they make you write some weird format.
John:
They just read your RSS feed, right?
Marco:
Yes, but that's a one-way transition.
Marco:
So here's what happens.
Marco:
And this is, by the way, very similar to Stitcher.
Marco:
I don't know if Stitcher still works this way.
Marco:
I haven't looked at it in a while, but very similar to how Stitcher at least used to work.
Marco:
So you can't subscribe to anything you want.
Marco:
The podcaster has to opt into this because Google is not just reading RSS feeds and then going to your server for each person who plays the file.
Marco:
Like the way Overcast does it and the way most podcast players do it is everyone publishes RSS feeds anywhere.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
This is the open web.
Marco:
You can publish your RSS feed wherever you want.
Marco:
And then the client apps, the players, like Overcast or Apple's podcast app, they go download the file directly from the publisher.
Marco:
And that way, the publisher, first of all, is on the hook for things like bandwidth and everything.
Marco:
But also, the publisher then gets stats.
Marco:
The publisher can control that.
Marco:
The publisher hosts the file and can serve exactly the file that will be served to people.
Marco:
They can make sure...
Marco:
Give me this exact encoding with this exact metadata.
Marco:
But, you know, this is my file.
Marco:
And they know what they're serving.
Marco:
They know how many times they've served it to how many people, where they are, you know, roughly with IP geolocation and stuff like that.
John:
And they have, you know, logs.
John:
I think that's something people don't realize about iTunes is that when you buy music from iTunes, Apple is giving that to you.
John:
They host the files.
John:
When you buy applications from the App Store...
John:
Apple is giving you those files.
John:
They host the applications.
John:
But when you do a podcast, which are in the same place and look very similar, Apple is not hosting podcasts.
John:
Those are coming from the individual podcaster servers, which is why they're so slow half the time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, what Stitcher came out with a few years ago with their service was basically like it was a very similar thing where like you, you as a publisher would have to opt in.
Marco:
Well, at first you didn't, but that was a mistake.
Marco:
And then they changed it.
Marco:
You, as a publisher, have to opt in because what they were doing was basically re-hosting your files, first of all.
Marco:
So they would read your RSS feed, and then they would automatically download all your files and basically be their own cache for them and their own CDN and serve their copy of your file to all their listeners.
Marco:
So they kind of ate the cost and the bandwidth there, but they also got all the control and all the stats.
Marco:
And they also would transcode your file down to a lower bitrate to save space and to save bandwidth and to make it stream better for people.
Marco:
And to make it sound worse.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And of course, it would make it sound worse.
Marco:
So Google Play Music is doing all of those things.
Marco:
It is exactly the same kind of thing.
Marco:
So you, as the publisher, you go and agree to their terms and you submit your feed.
Marco:
So if we decide that we don't want to do this, you just can't play ATP and Google Play Music.
Marco:
Like no matter how much you like the app, you just can't play it because it isn't based on the open web at all.
Marco:
And whatever show, if a brand new show launches, you want to go check it out, it probably won't be there.
Marco:
We'll see what happens over time.
Marco:
But anyway, so you go and subscribe to the show and then you are getting their copy of the file.
Marco:
So your download won't show up in the publisher's main stats system.
Marco:
Now, Google is saying they will offer publisher stats, like if you go into their dashboard and you look at their stats.
Marco:
But most podcasters who care about stats, which is anybody who serves ads, they already have their own systems for that.
Marco:
So this won't integrate with that.
Marco:
This will be a separate thing you have to opt into and then go and check and then manually add into your stats system somehow or make some kind of API thing if there even is an API.
Marco:
But there usually isn't for modern Google services because they're so open.
Marco:
So anyway, they're going to, you know, copy and then transcode your file, possibly reduce the quality.
Marco:
And of course, they're going to reserve the right to play ads.
Marco:
Fortunately, not in the middle of your show, but between shows.
Marco:
So, you know, because I think they can play ads wherever they want between any song because I think there's a free tier with ads, something like that.
Marco:
So that part is a little odd and uncomfortable for podcasters.
Marco:
But, you know, that's the reality of free streaming services.
Marco:
At least they aren't cutting into the middle of our show.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's the deal for podcasters.
Marco:
Basically, they're doing it the Google way, where they know best.
Marco:
They don't want to deal with you peons.
Marco:
You deal with their system, and that's the way they do it.
John:
Well, the other aspect that is very Google-ish, but not evil, to use the old Google thing, is that once they have your files and your data...
John:
They will almost undoubtedly serve them up faster than what the random individual podcaster is going to do.
John:
And they will also probably everyone is assuming I don't see why they wouldn't run them through something that translates the text into speech, provide full text search for them, like trying to obviously underscore David Smith for finding things like.
John:
maybe that won't be on day one maybe it'll be on year three or four but surely like basically once google gets data and they're getting data by essentially reading your rss feed and pulling all those files they are transcoding them they are processing them i'm sure they they will if they have any kind of algorithms that do anything useful related to search to audio files and i'm sure they do they're going to do that to podcasts and that uh you know marco you're talking about it from the
John:
um but from the perspective of a user if like they did with google photos if google can provide something that appears magical like you can just type the word teacup and see a bunch of pictures of teacups or you can just type some words and find podcasts where those things were spoken using the magic of google that is an attractive feature to users because there is nothing equivalent in any of the other podcast systems including probably stitcher because i imagine they don't have all the data analysis uh tools that google has at their disposal so the potential upside to google's own little uh
John:
google reader reader style uh not going to call it a walled garden that's called the chain link fenced garden is that they can provide features to users by sucking in all this data that other people who are either less interested in podcasts because apple seems to be like well they're they're right they're whatever they're there um or just don't have the tech like stitcher those companies can't do that so uh there is potential user upside of this service and that scares me a little bit because i don't want
John:
podcasts to i don't want google play to become the equivalent of itunes like we said in past shows the fact that apple is kind of mildly disinterested in podcasts is good i like that i like it because it keeps it it keeps it open it keeps podcasts as a thing that anyone can have and apple's like whatever as long as it's not porn doesn't have you know too much objectionable material we'll we'll put it up in our directory and you host the files and go ahead
John:
I like that.
John:
I like that better than a Google Reader scenario where eventually the only way anyone ever listens to podcasts is through this Google thing.
John:
We are forced to do this Google thing and have ads inserted between our show.
John:
We are forced to have our show transcoded and have no control over.
John:
We are forced to add up numbers from two different locations.
John:
Long term, that's not good for anybody.
John:
Short term, we're all saying as producers, we don't like it that much, but...
John:
If everybody starts going through Google Play, we'll be forced to put our stuff up there.
John:
Otherwise, we're going to cut our audience by 50%, 20%, 90%.
John:
In the end, Google Reader was all there was in RSS.
John:
And then when Google Reader ran away, there was a big power vacuum and a few other things like Feedbin and stuff came up, but it's just never been the same.
Marco:
Yeah, so that to me, the whole what if this becomes so big that we all have to play ball thing, that is the biggest risk for publishers.
Marco:
It does seem, on the face of it, we kind of decided early on that we didn't want to be on Stitcher.
Marco:
And most of the reason we didn't want to be on Stitcher was all of that.
Marco:
There was also, the way I read the terms, there was a promotional requirement to promote Stitcher on the show.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why you hear so many people at the end of their podcast saying, find us on iTunes and Stitcher, because they had to.
Marco:
And we did not agree to that.
Marco:
So we didn't do it.
Marco:
The only reason we could say no to that was because it was so small.
Marco:
By most people's estimation, Stitcher is 5% or less of the listener base.
Marco:
So it wasn't big enough to make it worth those downsides.
Marco:
But this might become that big.
Marco:
And right now, podcast listening in general is very, very lopsided right now towards iOS.
Marco:
Libsyn occasionally will discuss stats, and I believe the ratio is something like 8 to 1 in favor of iOS among all shows Libsyn hosts, which is a pretty wide range of shows.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
the total podcast listenership is still very iOS-heavy.
Marco:
And that might continue to be the case for quite some time, in my opinion, because if you look at what podcasts are popular and what kind of people listen to podcasts, I think there's a lot of overlap with the kind of people who traditionally have listened to public radio.
Marco:
And that does tend to skew upscale, younger, smarter, richer, more liberal.
Marco:
And those are all, I think, demographics that are more likely to have iPhones than Android devices also.
Marco:
And I'm not trying to say that to be inflammatory.
Marco:
I think that's actually true.
Marco:
I think that's actually borne out by stats.
Marco:
But feel free, if I'm wrong, feel free to tell John.
Marco:
So this might not matter in the sense that maybe Android people just aren't that into podcast listening enough to take over the whole market.
Marco:
I'm not going to say there aren't any, but it's not going to be a massive proportion of the market right now.
Marco:
But who knows what will happen in the future, right?
Marco:
I don't want podcasting to be like YouTube.
Marco:
Right now, if you need to make video online, it's basically just YouTube.
Marco:
You don't really have a lot of other choices that have any reasonable number of viewers.
Marco:
If you want to reach the people who watch videos, you basically have to publish videos on YouTube.
Marco:
I don't want podcasting to ever become that.
Marco:
I'm a little worried about this from that point of view.
Marco:
The only thing that gives me hope is that it doesn't seem like it will be that big.
Marco:
It seems like the kind of thing they're doing because it isn't that much work for them to do in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
They're trying to boost Google Play Music, make it appeal to more people.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple ended up doing something similar with, like, blending podcasts into Apple Music in a similar kind of way, because these services are both trying to beat each other over the head and attract people with podcasts.
Marco:
Spotify, didn't they do the same thing, or they talked about doing the same thing?
Casey:
I thought they talked about podcasts, yeah, but I don't, I mean, I use Spotify several times a week, if not daily, and I don't recall having even stumbled onto a podcast section of Spotify.
Casey:
Now, it doesn't mean it's not there, I just haven't noticed.
Marco:
The way they're positioning this as just something that will start playing when you want to hear a podcast or something, we'll have to see how this is implemented in practice.
Marco:
But that, to me, sounds like this is a system developed by people who hate podcasts.
John:
or don't understand them because they don't understand it's like a tv show you don't you know and when we were kids or when i was a kid anyway you could watch any episode of different strokes and it was fine because there was no continuity but podcasts most popular podcasts and certainly something like serial there's continuity you gotta start at episode one you gotta go through them in order you can't just be like okay play a podcast you what are you doing interleaving 17 different shows with random episodes it won't make any sense
John:
Or even just interleaving podcasts with music makes no sense also.
Marco:
Yeah, a three-minute song and then a two-hour podcast.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
It doesn't make sense.
Marco:
So I'm hoping they're going to be smarter about it than that.
Marco:
But upon first glance, this looks like... In the same kind of way that the App Store, in many ways, you can tell by what Steve Jobs thought of third-party software...
Marco:
You can kind of tell the App Store was designed as a marketplace for software by a CEO who really didn't like software.
Marco:
The whole thing with calling them apps, it kind of trivializes it.
Marco:
It's kind of like talking down to it in a way.
John:
That's not my take on apps.
John:
You think it's talking down?
John:
I think it was branding and it was brilliant and it was trying to make application software something simple that everybody can use.
John:
Where I agree with you is that implementation-wise, it was so clear that they just repurposed all of the software and services and everything they had related to the iTunes store for selling music and just said...
John:
doll it up a little bit and voila it's a store for selling apps that part is definitely true but i don't think the diminutive app or the attitude towards software is recognized it's merely recognized that apple's not very good at services and the one thing that it had they can sell they can send you bits sell you bits get take money and give you bits and keep track of what you purchased was a thing they had built to sell music and they just adapted that to sell apps it looked like that from the outside but i think i think steve jobs likes software
Marco:
Well, I think there's really a combination there.
Marco:
I think it is some of that kind of condescending attitude and also very similar to the problems Apple has with gaming, where it's a little bit of the condescension and also just, as you said earlier, just not understanding it very well.
Marco:
And so anyway, I look at what I see from this so far.
Marco:
And I heard there was a great interview on the actual Libsyn podcast, which I'll link to.
Marco:
I forget the name of it right now.
Marco:
But there was an interview of one of the managers or something, some kind of manager title of this team talking about it.
Marco:
And if you can get through the corporate speak, which is not easy, and all the really painfully scripted talking points that the guy just kept hitting in response to every question...
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Is that how people talk in California?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Anyway, that was rough.
Marco:
But if you can get through all that, you can kind of get the idea of how they see this.
Marco:
And it does kind of seem like this is Google's version of apps and Game Center.
Marco:
This is like that for podcasts.
Marco:
It seems like this is designed by people who...
Marco:
They want to have podcasts in there, but it just seems like, at least the way they were talking about it and writing about it so far, again, this could all be wrong when it launches.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
But it does seem like this is a weird system designed by people who don't get and maybe don't respect podcasts.
Marco:
But we'll see what happens.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Yeah, I think I think we could be wrong about their understanding and just not of podcasts, because I imagine that like many things in Google, the only reason it's happening at all is because somebody actually is really into podcasts and wishes they were part of a thing.
John:
The fact that it has to be part of Google Play, that's a strategy tax.
John:
You know, it's like, well, you know, percentage wise, many more people listen to music than podcasts.
John:
We already have this music thing.
John:
Why can't you integrate that?
John:
They're both audio, yada, yada.
John:
So that's kind of a shame.
John:
But I think there is some understanding within Google of how people enjoy podcasts, which is the reason that this project is seeing the light of day at all.
John:
It's just a matter of how welcome they integrate it.
John:
Can they take this thing that's supposed to be music streaming services and integrate podcasts in a way that is actually useful for people who really like podcasts?
John:
I'm sure they're going to try to.
John:
But the saving grace here may be exactly the same as the saving grace with Apple in that
John:
google's really interested in the play music thing podcasts are just so nice to have they're never interested enough in it to ever attract a large enough percentage base i mean they weren't interested in rss either but google reader got big kind of like organically on its own and just slowly swallowed up everything and then they but they never really did have interest in it and they're like you know what forget it and they shut it down and so hopefully this will not grow organically like that that it'll
John:
it'll be there it's good that it's there some people will use it people will complain that we're not in it just like some people complain that we're not in stitcher but hopefully it won't ever actually be a big deal because google corporate is never like you know what the next multi-billion dollar uh thing is podcasts like people are into podcasts because it's the next multi-million dollar industry but for a single company it's not like selling music seems much bigger to them than podcasts do at this point i think that will probably always be the case so i'm hoping yeah that podcasts will always be weird enough like you know like talk radio has always been you know
John:
narrowly focused enough even though it's also massively popular but in the grand scheme of things it's not as massively popular as video games and movies and music right exactly so yeah we'll see what happens I mean for from a publisher's point of view you can ask like you know what's the downside of putting yourself in here
Marco:
i don't short term immediately i don't think the downsides are very big you know yeah it kind of sucks that that they rehost the files it's probably going to sound worse than your files if you care about quality like i do who knows if it'll do things like strip chapter metadata out who knows um but for the most part the downside seems limited to well we'll have to go somewhere else for stats and we'll have these people who hear our show in in a less than ideal way
Marco:
But I think long term, the downside is that strategy problem of like, do we really want to be encouraging and supporting a system that is trying to privatize and make proprietary the currently open system of open web podcasting?
Marco:
And to me, the answer there is pretty clear.
Marco:
I would really rather not do that.
Marco:
But if this becomes so big that you have to do that, then I'm going to not be happy about that.
Marco:
I don't think it will become that big, but we'll find out.
Casey:
Yeah, me neither.
Casey:
I think that does it for tonight.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, MailRoute, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I got some Apple TV stuff to end the show here, even though we talked about enough in the thing.
John:
The reviews are up now.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It looks like the embargo lifted right as we started the show, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I just saw the one from Mashable.
John:
Christina Warren did, I think.
John:
That was the first one I saw on Twitter.
John:
But then I saw someone else send me the Walt Mossberg one from Recode, specifically this section of the review, where Walt Mossberg and his typical old man not understand anything.
John:
Sorry, Walt.
John:
um that's an unkind characterization because i'm an old man now too anyway he says the remote can now control the volume of your tv with no setup in most cases and with an obscure setting on some newer tvs it can even turn them on and off and change to the right input you know that's the hdmi cec thing that we talked about last time next sentence in parentheses this latter benefit worked for me for a day or two then stopped working
John:
nice well we have lots of cec unicorns that he can talk to who wrote into us yeah tell us it works perfectly for them but not for walt mossberg uh but you know it almost works work for a day or two then stopped and i'm sure walt is spending a lot of time figuring out why it stopped um the solution as always is to disable cec everywhere