Hateful Game of Frogger
John:
i'm running i'm almost at the bottom of my window with slack you know the little like the column of icons i'm pretty much almost full like all the different slacks you're on yep my god i'm in three destiny slacks alone just for destiny even before you go like podcast tech friend my work has one now i think my work has multiple ones but only in one of them slack proliferation is a thing so you aren't in all the ones for work but you are in multiple destiny slacks
John:
I'm not on all the Destiny Slacks that exist.
John:
I'm just, yeah, people can't get their acts together with their Destiny Slacks.
Casey:
Alright, so we want to actually talk about something that's relevant tonight.
Casey:
Do we ever, really?
Casey:
Not really.
Casey:
What is relevant?
Casey:
Important follow-up that's not really follow-up.
Casey:
I guess we could even call it follow-out.
Casey:
You have a new show.
Casey:
No, we couldn't.
Marco:
Yeah, I started a new developer podcast with our friend underscore David Smith, who is the app developer and podcast indexer extraordinaire.
Marco:
He and I talked about it last summer at WWDC.
Marco:
Well, this summer at WWDC.
Marco:
I talked about doing it and then just, you know, life got in the way for both of us.
Marco:
And now we finally...
Marco:
Got it together and are doing it.
Marco:
And we published our first episode today.
Marco:
So, so far it's doing well.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
It's called Under the Radar.
Marco:
And it's basically, you know, he had his show Developing Perspective.
Marco:
And he has now basically ended it to do this.
Marco:
This is kind of the successor to that.
Marco:
I, back in the day, did Build and Analyze.
Marco:
And so this is kind of the combination of those two shows.
Marco:
It is kind of like the successor to Build and Analyze and Developing Perspective.
Marco:
It's really a developer-focused show.
Marco:
This show is kind of more general Apple tech world.
Marco:
That show is really developers.
Marco:
And it's limited to only 30 minutes.
Marco:
So it's a quick 30 minutes a week.
Marco:
So it's not too time costly to subscribe.
Marco:
So go check it out.
Casey:
That's excellent.
Casey:
It's for developers, developers, developers.
Casey:
So at this point, it is unequivocal that all of us have shows on RelayFM.
Casey:
I mean, I know you had top four before this.
Casey:
And so this is, at what point do we join Relay?
Casey:
I mean, at this point, we're pretty much there.
Marco:
People have asked.
Yeah.
Marco:
Honestly, it's worth talking about briefly if anybody actually cares about the answer.
Marco:
The answer basically is that we didn't start on Relay.
Marco:
As much as we love Relay, we don't really have a lot of reason to move ATP there because it's already going on its own.
Marco:
It's already independent.
Marco:
We already have our own ad sales and hosting and everything set up already.
Marco:
So there's just not much reason to move it in.
Marco:
But starting a new show, David and I, we didn't even question, of course, we're going to start on Relay just because...
Marco:
And I've talked about podcast networks before, and I've been against them in certain ways and for them in certain others.
Marco:
And the reality is a podcast network is a tradeoff.
Marco:
You lose control, you lose some of the money, and you lose some of the branding.
Marco:
But what you get is you have to do a lot less work to make the shows.
Marco:
And so depending on what you need the show to do and what your priorities are and how much time you have, that can determine kind of, you know, where you fall on that.
Marco:
And so for this new show, given where we were, we decided a network was the right move for our needs right now.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
And folks at Relay are really awesome.
Casey:
And they're all good friends of ours.
Casey:
We really enjoy them.
Casey:
So, yep.
Casey:
I mean, I think if ATP were to start tomorrow, it probably would be on Relay.
Casey:
But at this point, don't fix what ain't broke.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So now that we're done with follow-out, asterisk not Syracuse approved, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Somebody wrote in, Dusto, that's got to be pronounced wrong because there's a fancy strike through the O. Masterson wrote in to us.
Casey:
It's Dust Zero.
Casey:
Dust Zero, that's true.
Casey:
That is actually how I write zeros.
Casey:
Anyways, this individual said, another thing about the Facebook app thing, it autoplays videos in your timeline and even muted videos take over iOS's audio.
Casey:
This is, if you remember, because Facebook claims that, oh, it was just an accidental bug that we had videos that played and never released the audio session.
Casey:
And that's why we were backgrounded for forever.
Casey:
That still strikes me as a little weird and a little aggressive for them to autoplay videos.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It seems like everyone's kind of starting to believe that this is really their ineptitude and not nefarious actions.
Casey:
Is that what the going theory is now?
John:
Well, the fact that they autoplay, that was brought up by a couple of people.
John:
I just put this one in there because like, like, hey, I didn't watch a video on the Facebook app and it's still eating my battery.
John:
Well, you didn't probably watch a video as in intentionally tap on a little play button.
John:
But if you just launch Facebook apparently and scroll through your timeline, it, you know, it considers it will start playing it.
John:
It will grab the audio session, even if I guess even if you just scroll past it or whatever.
John:
So a lot of people are sort of unknowingly, uh,
John:
implicitly playing videos merely by launching the app and scrolling through a timeline, which would further explain why, you know, this audio session bug thing is biting lots of people, even people who don't have any recollection of ever watching a video.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jeff Strobel wrote in and told us that he knows how to have Spotlight index his Synology 1815+.
Casey:
I don't remember which one of us was talking about that because it wasn't me.
Marco:
I was.
Marco:
Yeah, because I was saying one of the reasons why I like Direct Attached or iSCSI over regular network shares...
Marco:
is that regular network shares don't have the spotlight integration.
Marco:
They don't have like system integration.
Marco:
And I just hate how slow it is to connect to and browse network shares still in 2015, even over wired gigabit networks.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So Jeff has the appropriate commands that are sitting in our show notes, which are not helpful to the listeners.
Casey:
And reading this out will also be not helpful.
Casey:
So we will link to something, some way, somehow that explains this.
John:
like stack exchange question that answers this i remember doing it back when spotlight was first introduced like one of the bragging rights is oh we'll even index your network this was back in the afp days we'll even index your network shares uh i don't know what the status of that is like if it doesn't do it by default anymore or whatever but it's bottom line is this command line tools where you can force it to is the mdutil command line and the mdimport command line if you just
John:
read the man pages for them you can figure it out we'll try to put a link to the stack exchange question in the show notes so you can follow through it and figure out how to enable it yourself um i don't know what what it will be like i'm not even sure how it keeps up keeps track of what has been updated there does it periodically rescan the whole drive anyway um maybe you just have to run it on a schedule to rescan the drive uh but if you this is something you want to do you can try it
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And Rich Knight wrote in to ask us some questions about Google and Stitcher.
Casey:
He says, it seems that the biggest issue that you guys have with these apps applies equally to Google and Stitcher is that they rehost your files.
Casey:
That impacts your stats and you lose control over quality, making changes, etc.
Casey:
My question is, why do they bother?
Casey:
Let's imagine Google built the exact same app, but without re-hosting.
Casey:
If they want to inject ads at the beginning or at the end, they can still do it client-side.
Casey:
They could still build interesting things like full-text search that John had mentioned by simply downloading your file once to index it.
Casey:
It wouldn't tick off the publishers who would still have control over their files and download stats.
Casey:
Bandwidth costs shift back to the publishers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
This is all good for them.
Casey:
So what's the big benefit of re-hosting in the first place?
Marco:
So this is, again, the podcast thing specifically, Google's podcast thing with Google Play Music they announced and Stitcher, the podcast thing, re-hosting people's podcast files before serving them and then therefore requiring publisher approval and denying publisher stats and everything else.
Marco:
The main benefits are really – it comes down to control and consistency.
Marco:
If you re-host the files yourself as the intermediary service provider, you can, first of all, you can guarantee that they will be there and they will load quickly.
Marco:
Because if you just rely, you know, Overcast doesn't work the way.
Marco:
Overcast and most podcast apps, they get the files directly from the publisher's server, which could be a terrible little web hosting box.
Marco:
It could be a nice CDN.
Marco:
It could be something very far away or very geographically close.
Marco:
So there's a wide variety in transfer speeds, download speeds for podcast files that just come directly from publishers.
Marco:
So if you're running a service like Google Play Music or Stitcher, you want some kind of big integrated experience, you don't want to take the risk of wondering whether someone else's server will actually be able to serve you the file at the moment that that user requests it.
Marco:
So that's the biggest reason.
Marco:
And you don't know how quickly they will serve it, too.
Marco:
So that's the biggest reason why they want to do this.
Marco:
There's also, you know, there's other additional things you can do.
Marco:
For instance, like, you know, Rich mentioned that Google is most certainly going to do the transcription thing that it does YouTube videos for search.
Marco:
And you could indeed fetch the file once, transcribe it, and then continue to send people to the original to download it.
Marco:
But then you have to manage, do I still have the most up-to-date copy?
Marco:
You have to pull it periodically to make sure you still have the most up-to-date copy.
Marco:
Then you have to update it if it's changed.
Marco:
And you never quite can be sure necessarily if the people are going to get the exact version you got.
Marco:
Additionally, and this is actually one thing that might be a problem for Play Music...
Marco:
One thing that's really taking off big time in big podcasting, like the public radio kind of shows, the big name shows that we get lots of downloads and stuff, is dynamic ad insertion, where every copy of the file they serve has a different set of ads in it.
Marco:
And the idea here is they want to capture... So suppose they sell an ad for a certain number of downloads.
Marco:
They want to make sure that once those downloads have happened, they can put a different ad in there that they've sold separately.
Marco:
And for lots of reasons, I honestly don't think this is a very good idea.
Marco:
But regardless of what I think, people are doing it.
Marco:
This is where a lot of the market is moving.
Marco:
And so if you make some secret requests to the same file on some of these big networks, you will get actually different copies of the file with different ads that might even be slightly different lengths.
Marco:
So you can't even link to a timestamp in the middle of the file because it might be a different timestamp depending on who downloads it.
Marco:
Anyway, all of that is kind of messed up by systems like this that cache the file and everything, but it also kind of throws a wrench in anything like Overcast that assumes that the file will be generally the same if you go to fetch it a second time.
Marco:
So there's justification on both sides for why you would re-host the files as a service provider versus why you would want to pass them through.
Marco:
Neither side is perfect.
Marco:
as a publisher i greatly prefer that they pass them through to to to us you know but that is not necessarily their goal that makes sense speaking of ad insertion have you heard about uh people who put different ads into like their archive shows like they'll put their archive shows up and then like a year later they'll go through and change all the ads in the year old shows
Marco:
It's exactly the same platform.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly the same thing.
Marco:
And that's one of the ways they can justify it.
Marco:
We don't really do a lot of archive downloads because we are a topical news show most of the time.
Marco:
But there's a lot of shows out there, kind of like the magazine style, like human interest kind of shows, that are fairly timeless.
Marco:
And so those shows tend to get way more archive downloads than a show like ours.
Marco:
Sometimes those are even the majority of their downloads for certain kinds of shows.
Marco:
So they have different needs, really.
Marco:
If they tell an advertiser, we generally get this number of downloads, you want to sponsor episode 200 or whatever, and then episode 200 ends up in the archives getting five times as many downloads as usual because it has longevity there, then those publishers want to get more value out of that.
Marco:
I honestly think this is a bad idea because I think that those surpluses that happen here and there are actually already priced in to the premium CPM rate that we are able to get as podcasters compared to other media.
Marco:
So I think this is actually a terrible idea that this surplus has already been priced in and that we are actually eroding that by doing systems like this.
Marco:
And therefore, I think it will almost certainly result in a noticeable drop in podcast ad CPMs.
Marco:
But that's just me.
John:
I think about people listening to old episodes of Hypercritical and I wonder, like, are some of those companies that we had at Salesforce still in business?
John:
You know, eventually that's going to be the thing.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And they aren't always, you know, like that.
Marco:
Like there there's obviously like there is an argument to be made that you should be kind of re monetizing.
Marco:
That sounds terrible.
Marco:
Re monetizing these old episodes after a certain number of views or after a certain amount of time.
Marco:
You can make that argument, but I think it will have negative effects that I'm not sure people are fully thinking through.
Marco:
But it doesn't really matter because if enough of the market does this, it will erode the CPMs anyway.
Marco:
And so even if you aren't doing it, it will be affecting you.
Marco:
So you might as well do it.
John:
Yeah, I like the idea of when you watch old television programs, the most fun is watching the period-appropriate ads that run on them.
John:
Eventually people are going to be going back, oh, remember Squarespace?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Gosh, that would be crazy.
Casey:
All right, any other follow-up that we need to talk about?
Casey:
John, do you have any other follow-out that you would like to cover?
John:
Don't even know what you're talking about.
Casey:
Marco, why don't you save me and tell me about something that's awesome.
Marco:
Well, we're back to John because our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity.
Marco:
And rather than doing a sponsor read, they asked John to review another toaster oven.
John:
So, John, what is this week's toaster oven?
John:
this toaster oven is this this week's toaster is something this is i think nostalgia is actually the name brand but anyway it's the nostalgia electrics bset 300 the retro red uh variant three-in-one breakfast station before i continue with this i'm going to put the link in the show notes uh or in the chat room you two should look at it
John:
So I don't have to try to paint you a word picture of this monstrosity.
Casey:
Holy mother.
Casey:
Oh, my.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Amazing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If you are if you're listening to this and you are not driving or not in a situation where you will put people in danger by taking a moment to look at this picture, then please take a moment to look at this picture because this is amazing.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
So it's like it's like a toaster oven.
John:
And it's red.
John:
I like the idea of these things being interesting colors because they're boring when they're gray or black.
John:
So this one is a nice kind of fire engine red.
John:
The toaster oven part of this thing is actually pretty small.
John:
They show two slices of bread in it.
John:
That's kind of optimistic.
John:
Again, miniature bread for the pictures.
John:
But that's not all there is to this thing because the toaster oven part is...
John:
in like the right side of the thing above the toaster oven is a non-stick griddle or what they call a non-stick griddle i'll get to that in a little bit uh in the picture they show eggs cooking on it and sausage cooking on it to the left of the toaster oven again this is all one unit these are not three separate things it's just like a steve jobs iphone intro um
John:
is a coffee maker, like a filter drip coffee maker with a little coffee thing.
John:
And so in the same appliance.
John:
Yes.
John:
The idea is that in this one thing, you can toast your bread, make your coffee, cook your eggs and your sausages.
John:
That's why it is a three in one breakfast station.
John:
the first thing to point out about this is when you look at the picture you it looks crazy but there's i know they put things in the picture like the miniature bread and the eggs and the sausage but there's really no sense of scale here if you think that coffee that drip coffee mug it looks like you know a typical like you know 80s kind of office drip coffee thing before everyone had the k-cups and everything it is not a full-size thing it's like a doll's uh coffee thing
John:
That container holds maybe like a cup and a half, two cups of hot water or coffee in it.
John:
It is not a full-size thing.
John:
And I guess this is good because if it was a full-size coffee maker, the thing would be huge, right?
John:
And same thing with the griddle, all very small.
John:
So it's strange and it's like maybe if you live alone and you just want to make yourself coffee and you want to make yourself drip coffee with like little filters and everything, that's what you can do with this thing here.
John:
So the controls, it's got...
John:
With all this functionality, this is the one toaster that said, you know what?
John:
We don't need three knobs.
John:
Two knobs is plenty.
John:
So there's a switch on the bottom, and the switch on the bottom, it's like a toggle switch, and that just turns the coffee thing on or off.
John:
It's like, basically, do you want me to heat up the heating element that heats the water for the coffee, or do you not?
John:
So that's independent.
John:
The top dial is a thing that lets you turn on and off the elements.
John:
The thing's got four guarded elements, two on the bottom, two on the top.
John:
You can say only bottom, only top, or top and bottom, or off.
John:
those are your settings there and then the the second knob is temperature and the temperature knob is fairly hilarious if you can zoom in on the amazon thing you can see that the light medium and dark settings for toast are are within like three degrees of each other on the dial
John:
Like, the whole rest of the dial is for all the other stuff.
John:
And this is not an accurate dial.
John:
Like, if this was a surgical instrument, maybe you could say, am I between medium and dark?
John:
There's so much slop on the dial.
John:
Like, the three dots are within the margin of error of, like, the slop on the dial.
John:
All right.
John:
But here's the biggest problem with this device.
John:
And I actually, I don't drink coffee, so I just made hot water.
John:
That's so sad.
John:
Of course.
John:
Well, what am I going to do?
John:
I don't want to dirty up with the filters and everything, but...
John:
So the idea behind this seems to be that rather than, you know, for space savings and to have like all your stuff happening in one spot, if you have like a small kitchen or you just want to do like, why waste all this space?
John:
You know, you can do this thing, right?
John:
There's a lot of problems with that theory.
John:
First is there's not a lot of room on top of a toaster, depending on how low your cabinets are.
John:
The distance from the top of this toaster to the bottom of your cabinets may not be that big.
John:
And you really don't want anything that's going to put off steam or like,
John:
spatter from from sausages or it really just like there's a reason they have vents on top of your cooking services you don't want there to be like a an eight inch or one foot gap between your cooking sausages in the bottom of your counters because it's going to coat them with grease but it turns out that's not that big of a problem because the way this thing works is like there's no separate control you just pick like which elements do you want to turn on so if you want all the elements on the top and the bottom ones and you turn the dial turn it on
John:
Those four heating elements, that's it, except for the coffee thing.
John:
And they have to fulfill the job of toasting the bread and also heating the griddle on top.
John:
They're not up to that task.
John:
Wow.
John:
You blow a fuse?
John:
No, they didn't blow a fuse.
John:
They're just not up to the task.
John:
Basically, my bread that I put in to get toast out came out as baked bread because it's just too slow and it just slowly heats and dries and heats and dries the bread and eventually kind of sort of browns it.
John:
And by the time you get them out, they're like little bricks.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, it's not a good toaster.
John:
It takes a really long time, and they don't toast.
John:
You want them to be toasted and crispy on the outside, but not, like, totally dehydrated, right?
John:
And the second problem is, the only things that are heating the griddle part are the top two elements.
John:
And they're not enough.
John:
They just, you know, the instruction guy's like, oh, you should preheat it for five minutes.
John:
I don't want to preheat.
John:
If I'm doing that, I'm losing the whole convenience thing.
John:
So I cooked an egg on top of this thing, and it was the worst.
John:
Like, it just did not get hot enough to really cook the egg.
John:
And by the way, the surface on the top of this is like...
John:
Like a pillowed quilt, you know, like a bunch of little rounded rectangle lumps all over it.
John:
I don't understand what the pillowing is there for.
John:
All it does is make it more likely that your egg is going to stick because it has more sort of nooks and crannies to go into.
John:
Maybe it's for the grease from your sausages to drain out or something.
John:
Anyway, terrible for cooking eggs.
John:
Just does not get hot enough fast enough.
John:
Doesn't get hot enough, period.
John:
And I don't see any extra convenience.
John:
And the coffee maker thing is totally disconnected from the toaster and the griddle.
John:
It might as well be separate because it's just like, well, this is a very small, low capacity thing that heats hot water for a drip coffee.
John:
So just like the thing that was a slot toaster in the toaster oven, this multi-function device does none of its functions.
John:
Well, maybe I'm going to say maybe it does the coffee thing.
John:
Well, maybe it is a good single serving drip coffee thing, but I really doubt it.
John:
All I can say is that it does boil the water in a reasonably timely fashion because, hey, it's only boiling like one cup of water.
John:
Probably isn't boiling.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
And it did.
John:
Well, yeah, probably not.
John:
And it did.
John:
It didn't blow a circuit or anything, but it really should have because it just was not getting hot enough.
John:
The top, if you're wondering how the hell you wash this thing, the griddle top thing comes right off, which seems weird to me because if you take it off and turn the toaster on, you've got hot heating elements on it.
John:
It opens the air.
John:
Anyway, it comes off and you can clean it easily.
John:
That's about the only good thing I can say about this.
John:
The door...
John:
and the other thing i say about it is that it's cute like this is a cute nostalgia thing the fact that it's red and it looks kind of like i don't know i thought it was this was a cute appliance so it would look good in the background of a uh of a movie or sitcom but don't actually use it to heat up any of your food to make it better to eat i cannot recommend even at its bargain price for three different appliances the combination of only 70 dollars doesn't seem that ridiculous
John:
I wouldn't spend $70 on this because you can get a good toaster for less money than that.
John:
This is not a good toaster.
John:
It's not good at anything.
John:
If I had this in my house, I don't know what I would use it for.
John:
I would use it for nothing.
John:
If I paid you $70 to keep it on your counter, would you?
John:
No, I don't have that kind of counter space.
John:
Oh, and I forgot to mention, there's also a lid that goes on the griddle thing on the top, and I can only assume that's like, look, we know this thing doesn't get hot enough, but if you put the lid on, it will steam your eggs at least, and they'll actually kind of cook.
John:
Awesome.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
My final question on this is that this is from this brand called Nostalgia Electronics, and they appear to have a whole different line of things, but was this kind of thing ever a thing that people use?
Marco:
It kind of implies that this is an old appliance that they're bringing back, hence Nostalgia, but was this kind of appliance ever really used by anybody ever?
John:
um i think i assume the the nostalgia brand is only loosely connected with the theme of actual nostalgia and i'm guessing based on the appearance that just the idea is make it look like appliances look to them not that there was a specific appliance like this and it does like with the script lettering and the the red metal and everything it does look like a little bit of a throwback but it's got this big plastic thing on top of the coffee maker that doesn't quite look right but it does kind of fit in with the
John:
sort of 50s 60s sci-fi like the kitchen of the future automation and you know it does fit in even if they never made one of these things it totally fits with that theme uh especially with the the fact that it doesn't work worth a damn just like every one of the kitchen of the future things they made up in the 50s and 60s
Marco:
they should have just called it sad electrics because i think like there is no way to use this and not be sad somehow either either just you're using it because your life situation somehow led you to buy and own one of these things or you are sad because its performance is so bad that you are sitting there eating your baked bread and undercooked sausage and just makes you sad
John:
People in the chat room are posting the positive and negative Amazon reviews.
John:
I can't believe there are positive ones.
John:
They must be like shills from the manufacturer.
John:
I just cannot believe anyone would find any part of the satisfactory.
John:
Except, like I said, maybe I wanted a drip coffee maker that only made enough coffee for one and a half people and finally I found one.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, a Keurig isn't sufficient.
Casey:
They really want that drip coffee.
Casey:
Yikes.
Casey:
Well, I did not know what toaster this was going to be before the show started, and I am glad I didn't because that is magnificent.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And before we wrap up the toaster things, two things in this.
John:
One,
John:
uh i finally people have been asking me and have been asking for this entire run of ads what do i do with all the old toasters old toasters and my answer for a long time had been nothing uh we don't have any plans to do anything with the old toasters eventually got to the point where i had just too many gigantic toaster boxes in my house and i needed them to go away and so now the toasters have gone away i don't know where they went but a nice person came to my house and took 10 toasters and
John:
jammed into a giant truck and took them away from my house so they are gone i no longer have them when i was taking these 10 toasters and sending them away i found this box unopened i hadn't realized that it had an extra unopened box this is like finding the strange treasure like wait a second this one's still sealed up did i never open this one and i opened it and this is the unholy thing that came out
John:
So I don't even know when I got this toaster.
John:
Maybe it got filed away with the rest of the toasters, like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
John:
At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which does not have an Indiana Jones prefix.
John:
See what you've done to me, Steams?
Marco:
Now, by any chance, did you have a coffee maker box near them?
Marco:
I'm thinking maybe there was some hanky-panky going on and this came out.
John:
Wow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, so this is the second to last toaster of this run.
John:
We've got one more left this year, I think.
John:
And I'll have to get rid of these toasters anyway.
John:
So that's where they go.
John:
They go away from my house so I can fit my car in the driveway.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Marco:
Well, thanks to Cards Against Humanity for sponsoring our show once again.
Marco:
Wow.
Casey:
Should we just end here?
Casey:
I mean, we have other things to talk about.
Casey:
We have other sponsors, but where do we go?
Marco:
I mean, it's all going to go downhill from here.
Marco:
How do we top that?
Marco:
What can we really do?
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we do have things to talk about.
Casey:
And most specifically, we have some Apple TV things to talk about.
Casey:
And I don't know how much I can contribute to this because I'm holding strong and not buying the Apple TV that I'm sure I'm going to buy sometime between now and Christmas.
John:
You didn't even order it?
John:
I thought by now you would have surely ordered it at least.
Casey:
No, I think I'm going to try to hold out for Christmas slash Hanukkah gift, but we'll see how it goes.
John:
The Plex app is out, right?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Plex is out, which is why I am not really holding too strong on this.
Casey:
And I've heard it's really good, which is not helping me.
Marco:
Keep in mind also that the way Apple's product release cycle and pricing works is that you're not gaining anything by waiting.
Marco:
If you're going to buy this model of Apple TV ever, you should buy it now.
Casey:
Yeah, you're right, but I mean...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I figured, like I said, it's holiday time coming up and this is the sort of thing that I do kind of want, but I really don't feel like spending money on in part because I really don't want to mess with my audio setup that we went through last week.
Casey:
And yes, there are options like the little kooky box that we found last week, but I don't want to mess with my setup.
Casey:
A lot of people, maybe this is completely reasonable and I'm a weirdo, but a lot of people wrote to me via Twitter and were like, dude, just leave your old Apple TV exactly where it is.
Casey:
I don't have to do that, man.
John:
Didn't you see the thing where you can use your old Apple TV as an AirPlay speaker for your new one?
Casey:
That's exactly what they're saying.
Casey:
And I'm just like, why?
Casey:
That seems so crazy to me that that's the best course of action is to leave this old Apple TV that I really will almost never use anymore.
Casey:
Leave that plugged in because that's the best scenario.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's unreasonable for Apple to take away my optical connection, which is the thing that I'm all upset about.
Casey:
They probably did the right thing here.
Casey:
It's probably silly to leave that optical connection on the new Apple TV, and that's why they pulled it.
Casey:
So I hope I don't sound like one of those people that's like, oh, well, they changed that one thing I needed, and they're wrong.
Casey:
No, they're not wrong.
Casey:
They're right.
Casey:
I'm the one that's crazy.
Casey:
But I'm crazy, and I like having my optical connection.
Casey:
So in any case, I'm sure I will get an Apple TV.
Casey:
I'm sure it will be in 2015, and we'll see if I end up paying for it myself or just getting it as a gift.
Marco:
You've got to stand strong with the Sony Philips digital interface.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Is that what S-P-D-I-F?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I didn't know that's what it stood for.
Marco:
You ever see it written S slash P-D-I-F?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's Sony slash Philips digital interface.
Casey:
I did not know that was the acronym there.
Marco:
Yeah, because Sony and Philips, they work together in all sorts, like the CD and all sorts of digital audio stuff.
Marco:
And so they standardized this thing forever ago.
Marco:
It's really old.
Marco:
And yeah, so Sony Philips Digital Interface.
Casey:
Today I learned.
Casey:
Anyway, so what do we have to talk about with this?
Casey:
Or what do you guys have to talk about with this?
John:
I got my Apple TV today, actually.
John:
So I unpacked it and set it up in a bit of a hurry before the show.
John:
But and I also had seen it in the Apple store before that.
John:
So I actually have some real world experience with this thing.
John:
And I have to say, after reading everybody's stories and listening to what they had to say about the Apple TV, specifically the setup experience, I was prepared for the worst.
John:
Like I was prepared for like Wii to Wii U migration level of nightmare setup.
John:
So one of the things this thing does, I don't know if the open did it as well.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
is when you take it out of the box and plug it in, it wants you to bring your iPhone near it and make sure Bluetooth is on on your iPhone and just hold it near the thing and it will sort of figure out what Wi-Fi network your phone is on and connect to the same Wi-Fi network and use the same password and all that other stuff so the Apple TV can get on the same network.
John:
And that part worked for me.
John:
I plugged the Apple TV in.
John:
I brought my phone over to it.
John:
I unlocked my phone, waited a couple seconds, tapped a little dialog box on the phone, and it found my network, which doesn't really matter because I haven't unplugged into Ethernet anyway, so it seemed like kind of a waste.
John:
But anyway...
John:
that part worked um and then i at some point i signed in with my apple id password and i had to use the terrible keyboard that everybody hates which is not so much a keyboard as a key line because it's got a through z in a single horizontal strip
John:
and there's another row punctuation another row with switch to capital or lowercase and by the way if you hold down the button on the remote you can get capital letters without having to switch from capital lowercase that is very painful to use i'm not entirely sure if it's more painful than the old way where you had to hit like because you have a swipey pad you can swipe quickly from left to the right and skip multiple letters instead of having to go a b c d e f like you can go swipe once and go be all the way into like j or r or whatever
John:
um so i don't i think the touchpad is useful for that i don't understand why they made it a strip it's not like there's not enough room on the screen they got the whole rest of the screen there maybe maybe with the rest of the ui and apps it was better that way anyway um because i only had to enter my apple id well i had to invert a couple times but not an obscene number of times it didn't seem that uh ridiculous to me so i entered my apple id i went to netflix i had to sign in with my netflix id and
John:
It's kind of a shame that it couldn't get all this information from the previous Apple ID or from iCloud Keychain or from any other place that in the Apple ecosystem that it supposedly has secure storage or username and password.
John:
This seems like is the main thing people were complaining about.
John:
They got asked about their passwords too often, that the passwords are hard to enter.
John:
And if you haven't read these articles, you may be wondering, why don't they just use the iOS remote app?
John:
That doesn't work.
John:
The iOS remote app does not work with the new Apple TV.
John:
Does it not work yet?
John:
Are they going to make it work?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It doesn't work now.
John:
So it doesn't help you if you're setting up your Apple TV now.
John:
And that's a legit complaint.
John:
Like it's a regression from the old version of the product.
John:
It's a pain to use any kind of on screen keyboard.
John:
And the on screen keyboard they have seems pretty stupid.
John:
I find with a little swipey remote, it's hard for me to swipe up and down.
John:
I don't know why it's not registering.
John:
It just it takes it as if I'm going across like when I want to swipe down to the next row of things or something for the punctuation.
John:
it just doesn't you know it feels like it's stuck a lot um you can also by the way if you have the new apple tv you can tap on it like it's a d-pad not press it all the way down so it physically clicks but just tap like touch the surface as if it's a virtual d-pad and that works as well in most places in the apple tv there's a little bit of a learning curve i feel like with the apple tv i spent a while with the remote
John:
and tried to discover all the possible sort of combinations where you click on the left side of the remote and click on the right side, tap on the left, tap on the right, swipe up, swipe down, swipe from the top, swipe from the bottom.
John:
A surprising number of interesting inputs, all hampered by the fact that that remote is really too small and awkwardly shaped and not the best thing in the world to hold on to.
John:
But...
John:
All this is to say that my setup experience wasn't that bad, and I was mostly pleasantly surprised by the variety of ways that you can interface with this thing.
John:
The speed, it felt faster to me to navigate around than my old Apple TV.
John:
That could just be because it didn't have to use IR and Bluetooth has less latency than that.
John:
It could just be because it's a much faster CPU or whatever, but...
John:
It felt pretty good to me.
John:
Maybe I was like primed to like with all the better views, I was expecting the worst.
John:
But I got to say, I would much rather have this than my previous Apple TV any day of the week.
Casey:
Well, that's a much more positive review than a lot of what I've heard.
Casey:
I haven't read any to my recollection, but I listened to this week's talk show with John and Guy English, and they seemed like it's good, but it's got a lot of problems.
Casey:
This week's upgrade with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley and Joe Steele, they were in various levels of frustrated to furious, I'd say.
Casey:
And I don't know, it just looking at it from an outsider's point of view in the sense that I don't have one.
Casey:
I haven't done hours of research into the specifics of what it offers, because really the only thing I care about for the most part is Plex.
Casey:
I feel like I saw an inordinate amount of grumbling on Twitter.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it seemed like everyone, everyone was really, really grumbly about it.
Casey:
And maybe that's my own biases that are surfacing.
Casey:
And maybe it's not that bad.
Casey:
But, you know, Jesse Char earlier today was saying that it's really a great device and everyone's just being a bunch of curmudgeons.
Casey:
And that very well could be.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
From the outside, it seemed like with the watch release, everyone was like, hey, this is cool.
Casey:
You know, it's got some issues, but it's cool.
Casey:
And with this, it seemed like, oh, man, this is nothing but issues to almost everyone.
Marco:
Well, I wouldn't say that.
Marco:
I mean, this is different.
Marco:
So many of us, people who have been fans of the Apple TV so far, we've been using the Apple TV for years, and it's been pretty much the same.
Marco:
Most of it has not really changed much, at least since the introduction of the second gen one, and a lot of it even from before that.
Marco:
It's been really the solid thing.
Marco:
And for me, the Apple TV is by far the most common device that we use for the TV.
Marco:
It is our TV.
Marco:
Because we don't have cable or cable cutters or those annoying people.
Marco:
The Apple TV is our everything.
Marco:
I have...
Marco:
an amazon fire tv on the front tv and i have a roku on the back tv and we never actually switch to those for almost any purpose except the amazon one will switch to to use plex so far now we won't need to do that anymore but the fact is it's different you know the remote i think has some issues uh it is it is unquestionably more capable in general it you know it can do more things and
Marco:
And some of the big ones, obviously, are Siri and the volume control.
Marco:
But it also, you know, it has accelerometers, it has the touchpad, which can be, you know, more different levels of input and more different kinds or directions of input than just a regular D-pad could be.
Marco:
But I do feel like, in my opinion, it is a step back from a D-pad in general usability of the things we've used the TV for so far.
Marco:
So who knows where the apps and stuff will go in the future?
Marco:
We don't really know that yet.
Marco:
Time will tell whether apps really take advantage of it being a touchpad and not just a directional control.
Marco:
But today, using the Apple TV the way you've always used it before, it feels very imprecise.
Marco:
And one of the problems with the key line, text input, is when you're typing things on this keyboard...
Marco:
There's a high cost to mistyping anything because you have to like, you know, then go find the delete key or if you hold it down, there's one on the hold down menu, but it's kind of hard to do, especially if you're new to the control.
Marco:
So you need to be very precise on that keyboard because the cost of making an error is annoying.
Marco:
But that's the first thing you really need to do when setting this up is type in your password a few times.
Marco:
And that is the time when you have the least experience with the new remote.
Marco:
So your very first interaction with this thing is set up to make you basically hate the remote and hate inputting text into it.
Marco:
And who knows what they could have done to fix that.
Marco:
I think, obviously, better integration with an iPhone to use the iPhone keyboard like the old remote app did would have been nice.
Marco:
I hope they do something like that in the future.
Marco:
It's not there now, and that is unfortunate.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For me so far, when you pick up the remote, let's say the remote falls on the couch, you pick it up.
Marco:
It is incredibly hard to pick it up without accidentally seeking the video that you're in.
Marco:
Because you pick it up and if your finger brushes that touchpad area at all, you seek the video that you're watching.
Marco:
And so there's little issues like that of accidental input.
Marco:
There's issues with the key line and navigation of just imprecision because it's a touchpad.
Marco:
Honestly, if they made this remote with a regular up, down, left, right, D-pad kind of buttons like the old one as an option in that top area instead of the touchpad, I would choose that option, no question.
Marco:
And maybe, again, maybe in the future, if apps start really needing the touchpad and taking good advantage of it, that might change.
Marco:
But right now,
Marco:
I think everything with the new remote that you think of as things you do on an Apple TV, things like navigating, things like Netflix and iTunes and everything, those kind of things, in my opinion, are made worse by the touchpad, not better.
Casey:
Have you tried to use your old Apple TV remotes with the new Apple TV?
Casey:
Because my understanding is it does have an IR receiver and that does work.
Marco:
Yeah, you can.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And which is nice because like we have a universal Logitech Harmony thing.
Marco:
And so that can control it also because it works.
Marco:
It'll accept the old kind of input from all the older modes.
Marco:
So that's nice.
Marco:
But then you don't have things like Siri.
Marco:
So like you kind of miss out on some of the new features.
Marco:
So again, time will tell how this all shakes out.
Marco:
Chances are we're probably obviously going to get used to it and it'll probably blow over.
Marco:
But I don't think that takes away from that there are downsides.
Marco:
You know, it's very similar in so many ways, very similar to the Force Touch trackpad, which I finally got to try the full size one yesterday in the Apple store.
Marco:
And it actually was not as bad as I expected.
Marco:
And neither was the keyboard.
Marco:
I actually like the keyboard better than the trackpad.
Marco:
And if that's the future keyboard of Apple laptops, which I assume it will be, then that's not that bad.
Marco:
the and the trackpad though like all the force touch stuff it's always like almost good enough but in my opinion as i've said many times before it's it's not quite there so it is kind of a step backwards in reliability and and precision and i think the touch feel sucks on the force touch trackpad and the full size one no different i tried all the different settings in the apple store uh it feels in my opinion the click feels awful on it even worse than laptops i think it's terrible feeling click
Marco:
But they've made this thing thinner, more advanced, more complicated, and they've achieved something that is almost as good as the old one.
Marco:
I think that's probably what's going to happen with the touchpad remote, is that they've added all these capabilities by making it a touchpad, even though it isn't force touch.
Marco:
I don't want to confuse those two.
Marco:
But they've added all these capabilities by making it a touchpad instead of just up, down, left, right buttons.
Marco:
But the basics of, like, you're operating this thing imprecisely, often in the dark, often without looking at it, it's less reliable.
Marco:
And that, I think, is always going to have a baseline level of slight frustration for a lot of people and more frustration for geeks like me who are very picky about such things, even though it will offer us more capabilities.
John:
On the previous shows, I complained about all the things that are still wrong with this remote before I had laid eyes on it or before I touched it.
John:
That's all still true.
John:
It shouldn't be shaped the way it is.
John:
It's way too small.
John:
It's not made to be easy to grip.
John:
Marco talked about accidentally touching the touchpad.
John:
uh it's symmetrical more or less uh it's symmetrical uh you know the buttons are kind of in the middle so you can't even feel your way to which way is the right way to pick it up and if you try to feel which side is right by perhaps feeling the different texture of the touchpad and the other thing if you happen to feel around and it's the touchpad side yeah you're going to move the video all that stuff is stupid it shouldn't be shaped like this it should be bigger it should be something
John:
that acknowledges that people are going to grab it with their hands the buttons should be different sizes and shapes and textures and positions and all that is true but specifically on the issue of of the touchpad versus the d-pad thing like i said i have trouble i don't understand why this is maybe it's just because of the way i'm moving my thumb i have trouble doing up down
John:
Left and right, I can mostly get it to do it every time, but up, down, I have a little bit of trouble.
John:
But here's the reason I think it's better than a D-pad, or better than the previous Apple remote, let's say.
John:
First thing, the previous Apple remote did not have a D-pad in the Nintendo sense.
John:
It had a circle, and I hated that damn circle because I could never feel my way towards what was exactly up and left and down and right.
John:
And yeah, so you're like, well, you're feeling the edges of the remotes.
John:
Don't you know that left is perpendicular to the left edge and right is, you know, like...
John:
very often it just didn't feel secure to me as an actual d-pad was the actual d-pad that's a cross a cross shaped piece of plastic you can feel where the left where the right as long as you make the d-pad big enough not like the stupid tiny one on the gamecube controller which was impossible to uh tell which direction you're pressing even though it was a cross anyway
John:
I didn't like that circle, but setting that aside, even if you're comparing it to a full-size good D-pad, the most important thing this touchpad has, despite the fact that the remote is the wrong shape, despite the fact that it's kind of hard to reach to the touchpad area over all the buttons and everything and safely get to it without accidentally swiping when you pick it up.
John:
The most important thing it has is gets you out of the nightmare realm of controlling anything on your television, which used to be right on Apple TV and on your actual television.
John:
And I've never used the Roku remotes or anything like that, so I don't know what they're like, but
John:
for the longest time doing anything on your television all you had was button presses and so anytime you were faced with anything that had a lot of stuff on the screen and you wanted to go through it but you wanted to be able to select any one of those things whether it's letters in the alphabet list items in a big list or anything like that you don't have to go next next next next next right right up up down down left left for you to do the contra code to try to get to the thing that you want on your screen
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
is incredibly freeing because if you see something that's at the very top or the very left or the very right, you can flick over to it.
John:
And yeah, it's not going to be precise, but it's so much better than having to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
John:
Mentally, even if not speed-wise, even if you were to stop watching me and it was actually slower, mentally speaking, it feels better to me not to be stuck in this like...
John:
hateful game of Frogger or Crossy Road where you can always go hop, hop, hop, hop, hop.
John:
Now, the touchpad they chose to do it on, the shape of the touchpad, the fact that it bends down, the fact that the whole top of the remote is made of glass, the feel of the physical click and everything, all that is bad.
John:
But I'm here to defend the concept of finally divorcing the television from a discrete single step or single page at a time interface because you finally have more than just buttons.
John:
um and the sort of advanced things that i was talking about marco you should try this it doesn't help with the accidental swiping for scrubbing because that's all terrible but uh use it like a d-pad don't try to do the swiping eventually i gave up on getting my thumb to correctly swipe up and down to get the apple tv to register it just use it as if it's a d-pad i like it because you don't have to press all the way down because i really don't like that click like trying to play crossy road speaking of on the thing
John:
or or alto's adventure i didn't like having to press down and already click i wish these game developers had accepted a tap instead of a click because i don't like hearing click click click it's pretty noisy and it doesn't feel good doesn't feel good as a game controller at all it feels laggy and it doesn't you know i don't like it but anyway uh just touch the touchpad on the left go left touch the touchpad on the right to go right touch the top of the touchpad to go up touch the bottom of the touchpad to go down don't click it just touch it um if you if
John:
If you want to go, I'd rather go right, right, right, down, down, down.
John:
You can do that much faster if you don't have to actually physically depress a button.
John:
So I am pro having something I can swipe to navigate, and I am pro having something that registers my touch to do interesting things.
John:
The particular implementation on this remote is not ideal, but I would still rather use this remote than the old one.
John:
Uh, it's not a humongous win, but it's a big enough win that I would never like, because, you know, I still have my regular Apple TV remote with the circle on it, which I'd never use.
John:
I would never swap that for this one.
John:
And I probably wouldn't swap the Tivo remote that I was using with my old Apple TV with this one, because, you know, like Marco said, you're missing the Siri button.
John:
But even just, I just, I just enjoy not being in the business of hitting a button repeatedly to go an integer number of screen items away from where I was.
Casey:
I can't wait for all the tweets and emails you get about the Konami code being referred to as the Contra code.
John:
No, that's a valid alternate name for it.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
But you know the nerds are going to come out and they're going to be angry.
Marco:
No.
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Marco:
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Very similar in shave quality to a Gillette Fusion, but they're only $2 each or less per cartridge.
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Marco:
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Marco:
Now, usually Gillette Fusion Blades, which I would say are the most comparable, they run about $4 each, maybe $3.50 if you're lucky.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So any other thoughts on the Apple TV?
John:
I do have more.
John:
So many thoughts from just an hour of using this thing.
John:
I am surprised.
John:
A lot of people have asked me about the video scrubbing.
John:
I've talked about my anger with how video scrubbing works in most television attached devices.
John:
And these days, also with many things that are in web pages or on iPhones, I
John:
And I have heard a lot of good reports about the Apple TV, and I'm happy to say they all seem to be true.
John:
This does scrubbing exactly the way I always wanted it to be done.
John:
And this is another instance where the little swipey pad comes in handy.
John:
One of the worst things about video scrubbing, if you just have buttons, is, you know, like...
John:
If you go to the end of the movie and you're like, what was that scene in the middle?
John:
I want to look at that thing again.
John:
All you can do is perhaps press the, you know, rewind button multiple times to go like one X speed, 10 X speed, 20 X speed.
John:
And then it's going really fast.
John:
Then you have to hit the pause button so you don't overshoot it or you try to slow it down.
John:
Like it's difficult to drive the little the playhead in that way with with a series of buttons.
John:
And the other difficulty I've always complained about is if you want to go to the middle of the thing or jump back half an hour or something like that, very often attempting to navigate it all just causes the whole thing to freeze and essentially do the television app equivalent of beach ball where it's trying to load the video where the thumbnail or wants to show you a frame of video and you're like, just go to 30 minutes in.
John:
You feel like you wish you could have someplace where you could just type three zero colon zero zero.
John:
Go to that offset now.
John:
Don't do anything else.
John:
Don't try to show me the video sliding past.
John:
I don't care what you do.
John:
I just want you to move that little playhead to 30 minutes.
John:
And the Apple TV, at least playing like all the things that I tried, mostly like television shows and movies from iTunes, maybe it's up to other apps to do the same thing.
John:
I think I tried HBO and Showtime and Netflix as well, and they seem to do similarly well.
John:
But anyway, certainly for the Apple things.
John:
uh while you're playing as marco found out if you swipe the little touchpad it moves the playhead and it moves the playhead no matter what immediately if it has video to show you it will change the little thumbnails and stuff if it doesn't have video to show you the thumbnail will be whatever the last frame was but it moves the playhead it does not wait it does not beach ball it just goes where you want it it shows you the time offset and it is glorious it's like
John:
finally finally they understood that that is the most important thing all the other stuff i don't care like if you can do it fine because i did i loaded like a an episode of legend of core or something to get all the you know a small episode so it had all the things it will show you live thumbnails as you scrub around if it can but if it can't it always prioritizes moving the thumbnail and then when you hit the button to play from that position maybe it takes a little while for it to get the video and start playing it at that position it's fine whatever um when you're watching you can tap the you can click the left side of the touchpad and
John:
this is another good ui type thing if you rest your thumb on the left side of the touchpad it puts a little 10 second rewind icon uh on the screen letting you know hey if you were to press here it would go back 10 seconds you haven't actually done the back 10 seconds yet but it's telling you and same thing if you would just lay your thumb on the right side of the touchpad it says you can go forward 30 i wish those numbers were adjustable i'm not sure if they are but anyway if you tap those buttons you can go forward and back 30 seconds of course we've all seen the cool siri demos of what did he say and then it goes back some amount of seconds
John:
turns on subtitles shows you what you just saw and then turns the subtitles off automatically which i think is a very clever feature the only difficulty of it is if you miss an entire conversation i don't know how it picks how far to go back i don't know how it picks when to turn the subtitles off they had to make a compromise there it seems like a reasonable compromise but anyway uh you can swipe down from the top to pull the the menu item down to turn on off the subtitles another thing that was a little bit annoying to do if you didn't know the secret shortcuts with the old apple tv
John:
um you can fast forward and rewind scan it's still not as capable at fast forward rewind scanning as like a playstation 3 is where you have from like 1.5x with pitch adjusted audio still playing to all up to like 120x the reason the playstation 3 needs 120x is because it doesn't have flicks scrubbing through the whole thing that's not a problem on the apple tv
John:
i can go right to the middle of something or right to the end or right to three quarters through very easily whereas on the playstation i would have to go to 120x mode and move over to it or whatever but anyway big thumbs up on the video scrubbing they finally did it right as far as i can tell if applications do it wrong i will at least know that it is not the fault of the hardware or the os is only the fault of the people influencing those applications not doing it the way apple does it
Casey:
I'm impressed.
Casey:
I really thought you were going to find something to dislike about this, but sounds like we're good to go.
Casey:
That's excellent.
Marco:
No, I mean, really, I've heard only... I haven't done much video scrubbing with it myself because I'm not much of a scrubber, I guess.
Marco:
But I've heard only great things about it from people who care more about these things or use it more than I do, like John.
Marco:
I mean, I think that is one thing.
Marco:
Almost everybody has agreed that the setup process can be very bumpy with the number of times you have to enter passwords on that terrible key line.
Marco:
But almost everyone also agrees that the video seeking behavior and that whole engine that is in there is incredibly good.
Marco:
And also, I mean, this is just good hardware.
Marco:
You know, this has the A8.
Marco:
It has 2 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
It's fast.
Marco:
I am optimistic for the future of this platform just because of what everyone else is going to do with it.
Marco:
You know, what Apple does with it is still a big question mark.
Marco:
and and apple stuff recently has been inconsistent i would say you know like some stuff they nail pretty well some stuff is pretty half-baked even well after launch um so apple stuff i i think will be less consistent but third-party stuff i think there's a lot here to do there's a lot of hardware to use there's you know and we'll talk about gaming in a sec maybe after the next sponsor break because there's so there's a lot to talk about here but uh
Marco:
I do think there's a lot of potential here for developers.
Marco:
I mean, I did start... I don't know if I'm going to actually finish and release such a thing, but I did actually start porting Overcast to it just to see, like, you know, how much work will this take?
Marco:
Do I have to really make a lot of special cases?
Marco:
Is it going to need a whole lot of work to do, or will it need relatively little...
Marco:
And so I've been playing with the SDK and playing with the hardware a little bit, and it is really, really nice.
Marco:
Interface challenges are going to certainly be there, but it is really nice to develop for because it is basically iOS minus some stuff.
Marco:
But most of iOS is there, and the hardware is very capable.
Marco:
And this is the baseline.
Marco:
And in five years from now, developers will be complaining they have to go all the way back and support the A8.
Marco:
But right now, a new hardware line where the A8 is the minimum is pretty nice.
Marco:
And also, it has AC power.
Marco:
So you can be as power inefficient as you want.
Marco:
So you can do things that really crank that CPU hard.
Marco:
So it is going to be a really, really nice developer platform.
Marco:
I do have concerns about whether it will be worth developers doing a lot for it so soon.
Marco:
And that, I think, remains to be seen.
John:
yeah the app i went to the app store first thing to you know i was surprised when you load the thing up like it looks empty like where are all the icons because the old apple tv it would just start off with like tons of icons on your screen and new icons would appear whether you wanted them or not you'd have to turn on like the whatever the parental controls to make them disappear and stuff this thing comes out and there's the apple icons for the apple stuff and settings and search and that's it uh so immediately the first stop is always oh i gotta go to netflix go hbo showtime
John:
You know, all these other different apps that and I went in to get those and you know, I I don't know if this was just the top list or whatever, but on this the first screen first screen or screen or two in the App Store was all the things I wanted.
John:
I got, you know,
John:
alto's adventure crossy road netflix hbo showtime fx usa abc mbc cbs like they're all there the sort of basic to restore my apple tv to its previous level of functionality including only the apps that i actually or the user that the kids use was pretty easy to do when i went to download this i think this is the second time it asked me for my apple id password and i answered it in once
John:
And it asked me, do you want to have to enter that?
John:
Like, do you want to have to enter this every time you make a purchase?
John:
And I said no, because I really don't want to enter it every time I make a purchase.
Marco:
I accidentally clicked the yes on that because I just misused the trackpad.
Marco:
It was another one of my many errors.
Marco:
So then I had to go dig around in settings, enter it again.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I'm a little bit wary about that because I mean, really, it should have integration with Touch ID.
John:
Really, the remote should have a Touch ID sensor.
John:
There's so many gimmies here.
John:
That's, by the way, with the negativity about this, all the people complaining about the setup process.
John:
They're right.
John:
It's bad.
John:
And it's like it feels like an unforced error.
John:
It was like, come on, Apple, you know how to do this.
John:
This is not your first Apple TV.
John:
You have name brand technologies across your whole product line that solve all of these problems.
John:
You had an existing iOS app that worked with the old one that gave you a keyboard.
John:
You've got Touch ID.
John:
You've got iCloud Keychain.
John:
You've got all... You've got, you know, iCloud Photo Library.
John:
You've got all these things.
John:
They're all just sitting there and...
John:
it that's why it feels so bad it's like this setup experience is worse than the apple norm for what seems like no good reasons theories i've heard i think jason snell feel this theory like that the apple tv was actually done a long time ago and wasn't launched because the they were waiting for the content deals and eventually they said well content deal schmontent deal we're shipping it and so that's why it doesn't have support for technologies and things that that are old hat as far as we're concerned but they weren't old hat when this work was actually done on the apple tv team
John:
And that the Apple TV team was more or less disbanded and sent to do other things while the Apple TV just stood there.
John:
I don't know if there's any truth behind that, but that's what it feels like.
John:
So that's why people are complaining, because it can be really bad, like it was for Jason, where he's got to accept the new terms and conditions, and he's got to do that on his Mac, and you're entering your stupid long password a million times with that terrible keyboard, and the whole time you're just grumbling, well, I won't let you use the iOS app.
John:
That is all terrible, and that's definitely worthy of complaining about.
John:
But if you power through that crap, kind of like I powered through that stuff with my Wii U to Wii U transfer experience, and you come out the other side, you're left with a product that I think is clearly better than the old Apple TV.
John:
in many many ways and that shows promise and like and the promise is frustrating too like you talk about i i love the fact that there's a touchpad in the remote i hate pretty much everything else about the remote like i would like a good remote with a touchpad and one other thing i would throw in with a touchpad uh on the remote when you go to the app switcher which by the way people might not know it's there you double tap the the home button which looks like a big picture of a tv on your remote it will bring up an ios like app switcher which that shows all your apps like kind of like the old style app switcher the ios 8 app switcher
John:
shows each screen next to each other when you go between them you have to basically do the equivalent of a d-pad input swipe swipe or tap tap i would love it if i could touch my thumb to the touchpad and as i move my thumb the things move on the screen tracking my thumb
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, in other words, more like an iOS scrolling type thing where, yeah, you can flick.
John:
But if you flick, you're flicking like you're flicking the screen in iOS, as opposed to what this thing looks like it's doing is I'm waiting to get a gesture that I interpret as go left one.
John:
And it's not quite that you can swipe past more than one at a time, I think.
John:
But anyway, it just feels a little bit off to me.
John:
A lot of that is because the touchpad is too darn small.
John:
But anyway.
John:
Yeah, a lot of negativity about the setup process, all of which I agree with, all of which should be complained about, and all of which were just really angry at Apple because they just seem like unforced errors.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, once you have it set up, it seems like a pretty nice device.
Marco:
But again, we're all hitting this right now, and there's going to be a lot of people who are hitting this this holiday season as they get their first new Apple TV, possibly their first Apple TV ever.
Marco:
And I do think that...
Marco:
It seems like they rushed it out to make this holiday season, but it doesn't seem like it's ready.
Marco:
There's so many little exceptions.
Marco:
It really does seem like it could have used six more months of polish.
John:
See, it's not like the features that are there aren't polished.
John:
It's just they just aren't there.
John:
Like, why the hell can I not enter text on my phone?
John:
Like, that's not a polish issue.
John:
That's just a plain feature thing.
John:
And maybe the other things you could say is polish.
John:
Like, oh, because Apple recently updated the terms and conditions for the App Store...
John:
if you haven't agreed to those or if your credit card is expired or you have to enter your credit card code again or something anything involving purchasing from apple that is messed up the television doesn't have a way to do it for you to fix that apparently you have to go back to your mac and try to do it in itunes which feels really weird
John:
kind of the same thing with this is not apple's fault entirely but like activating the hbo go app if you're a subscriber to hbo like i am they all have a thing that says like oh go to your web browser and go to hbo go.com slash activate and enter this six letter code and you try to and you go to the hbo go website and it wants you to log in with your cable providers uh login credentials and it pops up a little iframe and now you have verizon iframe inside hbo go which is all to try to get your apple tv to work and
John:
That is all gross and is going to confuse many a person on Christmas morning or whenever during the holidays.
John:
There's only so much Apple can do to fix that, but surely Apple can fix the equivalent of those experiences in its own ecosystem.
John:
And so that maybe is an area of polish, but...
John:
yeah just like i i felt like if if this the story of them having it done and then disbanding the team waiting for content deals if that seemed remotely true that's silly because they just should have left those people on it and said uh just maintain this and keep pace and so when we introduce a new technology or a new thing um make sure it's integrated and by the way while you're there find those corner cases for the people who haven't agreed to the new itunes terms and just put a ui for that in the in the thing or whatever
Marco:
I mean, if I had to guess, I'm guessing that the biggest reason why there's so many rough edges around entering your password, logging into the store, different store issues, is because this crosses departments within Apple.
Marco:
This goes, like, you know, from the engineering department into the, you know, EDIQ-led store infrastructure area, right?
Marco:
And so, like, that...
Marco:
Crossing those lines has always been very messy in the products.
Marco:
That's always where people hit a lot of issues and errors and bad user experiences.
Marco:
And I've heard so many things from various people inside and outside of Apple, some of which conflict, but most of which tend to agree differently.
Marco:
Anytime the other teams need something from the store team, it's hard to get, or it's a problem in some way, or it takes too long, or something.
Marco:
There seems to be a lot of friction there, and I don't know whose fault it is.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
The result is that when the products reach us, the consumers, we see that friction.
Marco:
In the same way that, as Microsoft was so famous for infighting back in the day, I don't know how bad it is now, but back in the day, they were famous for it between Windows and Office, and a lot of times...
Marco:
those infights would affect customers negatively and really affect the whole company negatively as a result.
Marco:
We see that in Apple in the way that the software products have to interact with the store backend and anything that uses the store backend.
Marco:
And again, who knows?
Marco:
I'm sure there are lots of smart people working on that, but whatever the cause, things that need to interact with that tend to work worse than the rest of the stack.
Marco:
And the Apple TV as a product...
Marco:
So, yeah.
John:
yeah it's not all aspects of the store either it just seems to be the things that have to do with like account management so for example once i entered my password and i was downloading all those apps when i tapped them a little install or get icon i don't know why sometimes it said install sometimes it said get or whatever anyway they downloaded really fast like i was just basically going through tap tap tap like it felt fast a little circle progress indicator filled really fast and all the maybe they're all tiny apps because they're all tv ml and they're just tiny little bit but
John:
everything about that felt fast and yet when you had to deal with anything having to do with hey am i signed into my account have i done any sort of administrative bookkeeping stuff related to my account do i need to enter the little three-digit code from the back of my credit card again is there a ui to do that in here all that just felt like it was lacking and they just punted that and said well there's 17 other ways for you to do that you can't do that on your apple tv we're just going to throw up something in front of your face that says go do this someplace else and then come back here and everything will work
John:
Uh, and even with the weird sign and stuff, like going to the HBO thing and signing in through Verizon and all that other stuff, it's like, okay, well, your device is activated now, uh, go back to your TV and it should be activated.
John:
And I always walk into the next room to go back to my TV, dreading the fact that I'm going to look at the TV and it's just going to be sitting there saying,
John:
please sign it you know like they won't that the dots won't connect um if that happens like what the hell do you do you just go back and try it again but every time i did it it actually worked and maybe i just uh lucked out on it but that that is not a seamless experience dealing with apple's own store is still not a seamless experience but some aspects of it are good the video downloads fast the apps download fast the apps launch fast it this thing feels faster than my tivo which is ridiculous considering my tivo costs like five times as much literally than this
John:
um but it feels faster and things everything about it like i can kind of tell that it has two gigs of ram because i like i went to the app switcher and i went back to a game that i had played like a half an hour ago and the game was still in memory sitting in the place where i left off uh that is a sort of premium quality tv box experience uh so you know it felt good but yeah it's just embarrassing the setup stuff is just embarrassing and i still think the remote is kind of embarrassing because i
John:
i can't imagine like maybe people will eventually come to appreciate what i was just describing the swipiness versus the tapping but that may be more of just a personal thing where i hate waiting for the machine to do anything and i hate the fact that i have to i know i'm going to have to depress and release this little rubberized button to to operate a mechanical switch seven times to get to the seventh item that probably doesn't annoy other people as much as it annoys me and in
John:
feeling that physical click seven times to get from place to place so i don't think they're going to pick up on those you know the things that appeal to me about the remote may not be the things that appeal to other people and everything else about those remote is just terrible as discussed in previous shows it's just too small it's the wrong shape it's it doesn't feel good it doesn't look good it doesn't light up it's not easy to find it falls down couch cushions if you dig for it you're going to accidentally scrub your video and be pissed off
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
So let's talk about Apple TV gaming.
John:
okay wow that was a long that was a long pause so john i'm assuming that your gaming experience has been has been limited in the short time you've had it well here's what i played i played crossy road i played also's adventure two games that i've already was already familiar with i thought crossy road was well i thought also's adventure was the best uh test because it only has one button modulo the wingsuit activation and some other stuff but for the most part
John:
You're just tapping a button.
John:
And that's why I said before that I think that the remote isn't like the touchpad that you press.
John:
The touchpad actually bends.
John:
The tip of it goes down.
John:
That's not a good button.
John:
Like if that's going to be the main button you press, like to start doing a flip or jump or whatever in Alto's Adventure, it just doesn't feel good as a button.
John:
It does not feel like a controller button.
John:
It is.
John:
I mean, it's big.
John:
It's easy to find.
John:
It's not like, you know, it's good to be the primary button.
John:
It just doesn't feel good.
John:
It's a pretty loud click.
John:
It feels more like I don't know what it feels like.
John:
maybe maybe clicking a mouse button it's as if uh every time you want to make mario jump you click an old style mouse button it just doesn't it doesn't feel like an a button essentially right yeah and this this this seems like a lot of travel on it and it just it feels kind of like there's a little bit of lag i know there probably isn't lag i don't know what i'm feeling maybe i'm feeling like the fact that my thumb has to go through a lot of travel i don't know i've i've spent a lot of time using all sorts of controllers this a doesn't feel like a controller and b doesn't feel good which is
John:
kind of a shame um that's why i was wishing like if they just did tap or whatever crossy road similar crossy road i feel like is a little bit better because it's kind of more deliberate i guess where you're going hop hop hop but even that um and then crossy road of course you have to do the side swipe and the up swipe to do the directional changes and i found that the directional change is frustratingly inaccurate in the ios games where you're swiping on the screen i don't know if it's because i'm trying to
John:
It's kind of like playing Zaxxon, you guys don't remember that, but sort of isometric view of a game where I could never quite, my hand-eye coordination connection could never quite get on the same page in terms of, okay, so am I pressing up to the left, like northwest,
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
those problems seemed lessened somewhat by using the swipey remote for the television i don't know why i did like on my first couple runs on crossy road i hadn't played in a very long time i did really well with the television so i guess the control scheme is pretty okay for that but the button is still pretty terrible performance wise it performs like an a8 so you know and those games are not challenging
John:
The games launch fast.
John:
They launch faster on a lot of our iOS devices because I don't have many iOS devices that are as fast as an A8 in the house.
John:
I can't imagine playing a quote-unquote real console game with that remote.
John:
I don't even like playing with the Wii remote sideways, and that has a real D-pad on it.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Gaming-wise, the kids seem interested in it because they play a lot of iOS games, and they're excited to play them on the TV.
John:
We played two-player Crossy Road, and that was a little fun twist as well.
John:
I don't know if I'll do a lot of gaming on it.
John:
I guess it depends on what games come out.
John:
But I know I would be more inclined to take it seriously as a gaming device for my gaming needs if it had what we know Marco already bought, which is a third-party controller that looks like a console controller.
Marco:
Yeah, so about that controller, I haven't used it yet.
Marco:
It's charging up on my desk, and I'm probably going to try it out tomorrow night.
Marco:
But it feels, you know, it's $50, which I guess is in the realm.
Marco:
I mean, what does like a PS4 controller cost, like $40?
John:
They're more expensive than you think.
John:
Right.
John:
$50 is a reasonable price.
John:
You should say what make and model this is.
John:
It's the Steelcase Nimbus.
John:
Is this the only one so far?
John:
I think it might be.
Marco:
You can use any.
Marco:
I think you can use any made-for-iPhone controller with it.
Marco:
Okay, so anyway, it's not a great feeling controller.
Marco:
We'll see how it goes in practice, but just like pushing the buttons just without it being plugged into anything, the D-pad does not feel very good.
Marco:
The buttons don't feel very good.
Marco:
It feels kind of like, you know, like back in the day, I don't know what the current market for these things would be, but back when I had a Sega Genesis growing up,
Marco:
You'd occasionally be at a friend's house where they didn't want to spend the full $12 to get the name brand Sega controller as their player two controller.
Marco:
So you'd be player two and you'd have like the like, not the $12 nice one, but the $7 crappy one.
Marco:
And it was like a third party kind of cheap knockoff that tried to be as good as the real Sega one, but never was.
Marco:
This feels like one of those.
Marco:
Like, compared to the other... Compared to, like, real Sony or Microsoft controllers or Nintendo controllers that are actually, like, good, this just feels like a third-party knockoff kind of controller.
Marco:
And it doesn't feel, like, terrible.
Marco:
It just doesn't feel good.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
All that aside, there was a great article.
Marco:
I put this link in the show notes that I wanted to bring up.
Marco:
There was a great article on Polygon today, I think, that came out that was all about what are the best games on Apple TV.
Marco:
And it talks about how many of them actually change noticeably if you're using this controller versus just using the Siri remote.
Marco:
And Rayman, it becomes...
Marco:
A lot of these games, like in Rayman, they give the case where apparently, normally, if you just use the Apple TV remote, the player kind of just runs at a fixed speed and you're just controlling jumping and stuff.
Marco:
And if you plug in a controller, then you have full control over the player.
Marco:
So it's like the games change in pretty substantial ways if you use one of these controllers.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
in general uh i think there's going to be two main problems that that this faces number one these aren't going to be triple a quality games just because the economics are not going to work out for people for a while if ever well they could be shovelware rayman that we talked about i'm pretty sure is shovelware like that is that is a high profile multi-platform console game that they ported to ios and now apple tv if it's the game it's rayman legends right
Marco:
It's Rayman something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't played it yet.
Marco:
But it doesn't matter.
Marco:
So there's going to be obviously a lot of shovelware from iPad and iPhone games, of course, because it's easy.
Marco:
So there's going to be issues of the games aren't going to be that great from just the budget perspective because they're not going to be able to make that much money.
Marco:
Compared to selling it for $60 on a console, they're not going to make as much money on this device that...
Marco:
you're lucky if you can get $10 up front for a game or do some kind of terrible in-app purchase scheme.
Marco:
And the install base for the Apple TV is going to be smaller than the game consoles for a while.
Marco:
Probably in the long term, it'll eventually surpass them.
Marco:
But for at least a few years, it's probably going to be smaller.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens there.
Marco:
To me, I think what we're going to see here, I think it's kind of like YouTube versus HBO of games, if that makes some sense.
Marco:
The big budget AAA games, that's like the HBO in this analogy, those are going to go to the consoles and the PCs because that's where they can charge the most money and really reach the most hardcore enthusiasts who are willing to pay a premium to play those games and to really get into them and to appeal to game enthusiasts and everything.
Marco:
Whereas YouTube is kind of like, well, anybody can throw some stuff up here and most of it's going to be garbage and some of it's going to be good.
Marco:
That, I think, is going to be more like what the Apple TV gaming scene becomes, where it's going to be a lot of garbage, some good stuff.
Marco:
It's probably never going to be the quality that you'd get out of a AAA studio, AAA release on a console.
Marco:
but there's going to be a lot more stuff and it's a lot more casual and the bar is a lot lower.
Marco:
And because programming for iOS is easy and distribution, despite all of our complaints in the app store, is still way easier than trying to ship a console game.
Marco:
So, you know, I think it's going to be more like that.
Marco:
And that isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's just different.
Marco:
This is never going to be a competitive gaming console in what we think of as a gaming console.
Marco:
But it might be a thing that people play games on, if that makes sense.
John:
Yeah, real-time follow-up.
John:
Apparently Rayman Legends is not on iOS.
John:
It's called Rayman Adventures.
John:
I'm not sure how much it shares, but Rayman Legends is on PlayStation 3 and 4 and the Wii U and 360 and Xbox One and the Vita and Windows, but not on iOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I like I I have some hope for the people who are good at making iOS games will become good at making Apple TV games.
John:
I'm really disappointed about the rules surrounding controllers.
John:
I'm disappointed Apple doesn't make a first party controller.
John:
What you said about third party controllers is still entirely true with the one possible exception.
John:
of controllers made for esports which cost more and are presumably higher quality and better feeling but the consumer third-party controllers always gross like even as recently as uh i think the last one i actually bought was maybe for the gamecube but i always play with them in stores you would think
John:
how how can it be that much worse like it's just it's a pad with buttons and if you look at pictures of them you're like actually the third party ones look better like they're better shaped they're better suited to my hands they're a different shape i like what they did with the controls and yet you just press the buttons and you're like what have you guys done what did you do it's just a button how can you screw it up why does it feel so why does it feel so different or bad right like like a super nintendo controller would feel better than this
John:
yeah and and i don't know what magic first party controllers have or just you know you could say it's just that you're used to the first party controller you get the thing you use the player one control for a long time then you can you cheap out and you get the third party one and it feels different and you don't like it but there is no first party controller with the apple tv there's just that silly remote so it's not like you're comparing the nimbus steel case thing to apple's first party control that feels really good you're comparing it to nothing and you still find it doesn't you know feel good to your hands so
John:
I totally believe that.
John:
I don't know what it is that makes first-party controllers so much better, although I have to say that I've been playing Destiny in my PS4 controller for a long time, and the L2 and R2 triggers squeak when I hold them down, and it bothers me a little bit.
John:
have i destroyed it by playing 500 hours of destiny maybe i don't feel like i'm being that rough on the thing i just feel like it's not up to nintendo's quality standard i guess the gamecube triggers did squeak a little bit too but compare it to the wii u pro controller which feels as solid as a rock um even though the thumbsticks are in the wrong place anyway
John:
I may be interested enough to buy a real controller for my Apple TV, depending on how much my kids get into playing it and how much I get into playing it.
John:
But your review so far of the Steelcase Nimbus is not making me run out and buy that particular model.
John:
So maybe I'll just wait.
Marco:
Honestly, I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of these.
Marco:
I honestly wouldn't.
Marco:
I don't think the market can really support a lot of them.
Marco:
I think it can support one to two, really.
Marco:
If this wasn't sold in the Apple store, I wouldn't have even considered it.
Marco:
But I was there to get a second Apple TV because I wanted one for my desk to develop on so I can use the nice remote and not have to use the terrible simulator remote.
Marco:
So anyway, I was there and I got one kind of impulse buying.
Marco:
But if they weren't in the store, I don't think I would have gotten one.
John:
Apple could be doing the wait-and-see thing, too.
John:
Like, hey, if people really start making console-quality games, there's no reason Apple can't make a first-party controller and ship it with the next Apple TV, other than the fact that it would destroy the poor people who designed the packaging.
John:
They'd be like, ugh.
John:
i have to put this in the box it destroys my whole box design it's supposed to be a cute little apple tv and you have this little cubby with the remote and and the wire and everything fits so neatly and now you got to give me this control it's bigger that entire box combined i gotta run someplace to put this it just seems like a shame like that part of me thinks it's like half the reason they don't want to sell a controller is because it necessarily would have to be so much larger and everything about all their packaging their products is like how small can we make the box how many of these can we fit in a shipping container how little waste can we make uh environmentally speaking uh
John:
And there's just no getting around the fact that if you want something for adults to hold with two hands, it has to be a certain size and you have to make a bigger box.
Marco:
No, honestly, I think that that is probably a really big part of the reason why they don't make one.
Marco:
They seem to do a lot.
Marco:
I think this is kind of like what I mentioned last week about how I feel like Johnny Ives influence is slightly too strong in the organization.
Marco:
There needs to be some adjustment there.
Marco:
I feel like the influence of packaging size is so strong right now that they do things like that, that it's optimizing for the size of the box when it actually has noticeable ramifications on the product.
Marco:
So there's some things that they could use, I think, some rebalancing.
Marco:
But regardless, yeah, I wouldn't expect Apple to make a game controller that's any good, even if they did make one for themselves, because...
Marco:
For all the same reasons, everything that is making Apple's products compelling and good today, hardware-wise, of making these thin, sleek things that are... By the way, did I mention thin?
Marco:
By the way, it's really thin.
Marco:
What is required to make a good game controller goes totally against Apple's hardware design in recent years.
Marco:
I don't think they are capable of shipping one that is good.
Marco:
It would never get out the door.
John:
yeah because it's the same reason you know the remote is the best example if they can make a good controller they would have made a good remote exactly they just it just doesn't and i kind of like packaging is kind of silly because there are like legit reasons for the packaging to you know to make a minimal packaging regardless of the size of the product you do want to make minimal packaging for economics and for environmental reasons both of which are are good to go but
John:
You just look at the Apple TV and the size of the remote and you have to think these two were designed as a pair and they are in scale with each other.
John:
And it's ignoring the fact that human beings are not in scale with the Apple TV.
John:
I don't care how big the puck is.
John:
Don't size the remote based on the size of the puck.
John:
size it based on hands you know shape it and size it based on hands uh and there's not too many things that apple makes that you that you grip in that way like obviously the phones and the pads and stuff they just they want to be like you know thin as thin as light as possible until they're you know until it becomes a non-issue and you're holding like a
John:
a completely clear piece of lexan that weighs almost nothing that magically has an image appear on the screen apple would be all for that right but they they make keyboards that you touch and those they've been trying to shrink down but at least the keycaps are still full size they make the sushi mouse which you touch but in a weird way and maybe if you hold it that way it's good but if you don't hold it that way tough luck i still like it yeah me too and they don't yeah i mean it's fine like if you use that way but they don't make many things that you that you kind of
John:
grip and hold and use in the same way that you would grip and hold a remote or a game controller because there's nothing on the remote or the game controller that you look at the Wii U gamepad aside it's purely a thing that you hold with buttons on it that you're not staring at when you use so it has to be sort of
John:
tactile and you have to be able to tell which way is what way and where the buttons are and yeah there's not there's not much like that they make and their their aesthetic doesn't lend itself well to that because you know the negative space formed by the gripping human hand is ugly
John:
And there's no getting around that.
Marco:
Ergonomics are ugly.
Marco:
Like things that are well designed ergonomically are not going to be as visually attractive as a thin bar of soap remote that they can make.
Marco:
But, you know, it might not work as well, but they are willing to make that trade off.
John:
specifically things that you grip because like grip in this type of way because you can make a very ergonomic and beautiful door handle right or or a lever or shift knob in a car or steering wheel or anything like that those can be both beautiful and ergonomic but once you're wrapping your hand entirely around something like a controller that you're gripping with two hands or remote that you're gripping entirely with one hand then you're just all around the thing and it's like you can't get around the fact that
John:
that hands don't want to go around a rectangular solid they don't want then it's hard if it's a little tiny sliver of a thing it's hard to kind of grip that at the same time as manipulating the top surface what are you even holding on to the little edges of the like yeah that i feel like the people from oxo need to parachute into the industrial design headquarters at apple and go all right guys listen everybody on the floor you know just like strap them to their chairs and just go over although oxo discontinued the good cheese grater too so maybe they're losing their way as well
Marco:
So going back a sec, so I said that there were two challenges that I see for Apple TV games and I only named one.
Marco:
The other big one is, it's what I always say, never go against the smartphone.
Marco:
All the Apple TV games so far, again, I assume this will change, hopefully quickly, and hopefully to such a degree that this statement sounds ridiculous in retrospect.
Marco:
But so far, I haven't seen anything on the Apple TV game-wise that was substantially better than just running that same game on an iPhone or an iPad.
Marco:
That's going to be a problem for a lot of games.
Marco:
Because, you know, we've been... Everyone who's developing iOS games so far and mobile games so far has been doing it on these platforms where certain things apply.
Marco:
We know all these SDKs and everything.
Marco:
People who are making games that can be played nicely on a TV with a controller...
Marco:
have not really been in this business because this business has not really allowed them to thrive.
Marco:
So we need to either attract those kind of games into the business, or we need to have our game developers start making games that actually make sense on TVs more than they make sense on just running it on an iPad or an iPhone.
John:
i wouldn't say they're not substantially but it all depends on how you how you qualify substantially because i think even these two games that are totally ios games like you know alto's adventure and cross your road both designed with the control scheme of a smartphone or a touchscreen in mind it's very you know alto is like how can i make a fun game with very minimal controls most of the you just tap anywhere on the screen right same thing with cross your road mostly you just tap anywhere with a little bit of swipes they're they're totally designed for the very limited very primitive input
John:
input precision and style of a touchscreen device but i think both of those games benefit enormously from being on the tv screen for the first reason that your hands aren't blocking any part of the screen which is for console gamers part of the thing that annoys about ios games is that if it doesn't have an interface that totally
John:
demands touch like flight control where it's like okay that's not working anywhere else you know it's got to be a finger or a mouse uh and finger kind of makes it more fun but those type of games i like not having my hand blocking the screen it always the reason i always play alto on my ipad is i don't like how much of the screen my two thumbs potentially block when playing alto on my iphone 6 or even worse on a 4-inch ios device i like seeing the whole screen and
John:
games that look good and i think alto does look pretty good or even crossy road they look really good on a big tv big bright beautiful colors again none of it blocked by your fingers i think that is a big enough win that i like if you if i was going for a high score in crossy road or alto i would now do it on my television like i would i would not try to do it on my ipad or on my iphone because i feel like i would
John:
i would do better it's like it's better suited to even this really super simple kind of game it's not like i'm saying well it's a game that takes advantage full advantage of a controller and you couldn't play it at all on an ios device uh i think that's a win now is that a big enough win that people care they're like oh cross your right i've already got them my phone probably not because from what i've seen with my kids they're fine playing that like they they experience those games for the first time on their ios devices they're fine playing them there i don't
John:
think they would feel the same way i do about getting my fingers the hell away from the screen so i can see what's going on um but we'll see like my son is now he downloaded some first person shooter for ios and i'm like you know for for like a phone size device who in the world is trying to play a first person shooter on a phone screen well he's doing it he seems to be enjoying it it's not like he doesn't know the other experience he plays minecraft on on you know the on the mac so we've got the mouse and keyboard controls there he plays destiny on on the uh
John:
the ps4 so he knows what it's like for console control and here he is tilting the thing and shoving his little fingers into different parts of the screen to try to make the guy walk forward and jump and shoot and i'm like oh that's that's no way to live but he seems fine with it so you may be right the market as a whole is not going to see a significant differentiator for these same games on the television uh but i certainly do so at least maybe for old people who know what it's like to be able to see the whole screen there is an upside
Marco:
The other thing, too, is like TV screens are way worse than modern smartphone and tablet screens.
Marco:
The graphics that you see on TV, the resolution, anything involving text.
Marco:
And I totally agree with with Joe Steele on upgrade this past week about how like.
Marco:
There's so many like blurs that use these gradients that between colors and you see noticeable banding on my TV and probably many TVs to the point where it doesn't seem like this interface was designed for TVs.
Marco:
You guys got to get better TVs.
Marco:
Anyway, so.
Marco:
In many ways, when you're used to gaming on iOS, gaming on a TV again is a step down in many ways.
Marco:
And I totally agree.
Marco:
There are so many kinds of games where a controller with real D-pad and real buttons or real analog sticks, whatever your case may be, a controller with physical buttons is so much better than touch controls for so many kinds of games.
Marco:
Not all, but so many kinds of games.
Marco:
And yet playing games on a TV, once you are used to casual gaming on iOS devices, it really does feel like a big step backwards.
John:
Another type of game like this, this is one of the games that was in the top.
John:
It was presented to me on the first screen of apps and I almost bought it.
John:
It's a game that I never bought on iOS because I looked at the game.
John:
I'm like, oh, well, that's a console game.
John:
There's no way I'd want to play that on an iOS device.
John:
What is it called?
John:
Someone in the chat room will tell me Oceanhorn or something like that.
John:
It's a Zelda clone.
John:
Basically, it's a it's Zelda, but not without Zelda IP.
John:
And that's a traditional console game.
John:
yeah the chat room says ocean horn you run around and you do zelda like things with a character who is totally not named link and i assume there's a princess who is not named zelda and beautiful graphics and it looks nice but i'm like i don't want to play that kind of again maybe it's because i'm old i don't want to play that kind of game on a console or on a phone or ipad i want to play that on my television holding a controller because i can't do that i'm never going to buy it now when i saw it come up on my apple tv screen i'm like you know what
John:
Maybe I would play that.
John:
Maybe it's just, again, the context that I feel like certain types of games that you're going to spend hours and hours going on like a quest and a game with continuity and saves and adventure and inventory that I would just rather do that on a television.
John:
I don't know if that's the common case for people who...
John:
grew up with ios devices but i definitely felt that when i saw that icon that same game that i know is a quality game that i've seen lots of things about that i would never in a million years would buy and play on my on my uh ipad or iphone i was tempted to buy uh on the television
Marco:
I was just thinking also one thing that this would be awesome for that would make my gamepad purchase worthwhile is if good emulators exist, like for old NES, Genesis.
John:
We haven't had a good NES or MAME breach in the App Store in a while.
Marco:
Yeah, there was that one.
Marco:
There was somebody open-sourced one back when the dev kits first shipped out, and I have it bookmarked somewhere in one of my many tabs in my many Chrome windows, John.
Marco:
No, just kidding.
Marco:
I think I'm pinboard somewhere.
Marco:
Anyway, so I wanted to try to run that because this really could be a really nice emulator machine, but getting the software on there through the App Store stuff is probably going to be a problem.
John:
Yeah, I think my last NES emulator probably crashes on launch now in iOS 9, which is kind of a shame.
John:
My main one might still run.
John:
In the early days of the App Store, for people who weren't around back then, very frequently someone would manage to get some kind of game emulator onto the App Store briefly before Apple would pull it.
John:
So if you purchased and downloaded it during that window of time...
John:
apple wouldn't remove it from your device even though it's gone from the store so a lot of us have these emulators from like the ios three or four days still sitting around of course they're not maintained and the developer can't release update so eventually a lot of them just start crashing on launch and don't work but some of them still do real time follow-up uh thanks to jellybean soup which sounds disgusting uh in the chat uh i know you're one to talk mike and ike man
Marco:
uh the emulator that i was referring to for apple tv is called provenance and uh so we'll link that in the show notes i will try it somewhere i have like a dvdr a dvd sorry a dvd plus r disc uh with like the entire nintendo and genesis catalogs on it and roms but who knows
Marco:
i gotta dig this out because yeah that could be really cool and that could be like a fun thing to do with my kid who's now like getting into games you know because he's almost four so yeah that could uh that could be fun and if that if that does work well then i will not regret the purchase of this controller at all so one final thing on apple tv uh and you'll notice if you've seen any of the screenshots the old apple tv appearance was basically a black background and
John:
with light-colored things on it.
John:
A lot of the icons were also kind of dark.
John:
But anyway, the background of the whole thing was black.
John:
I like that for a lot of reasons.
John:
I don't like bright white screens in my face, but also because I have a plasma television that does not like to show a full white screen, and also because I have a plasma television with various regions of the screen with burn-in and other image retention artifacts on it from the Kids Watching Cartoon Network and the stupid CN logo burning into the side...
John:
the destiny had burning into the left and so on and so forth obviously this is a problem only for me and the seven other people who still own plasmas but uh i bet if you own a plasma and i've heard from a couple people already have done this and you think you don't have any image retention launching uh something like say uh crossy road and having a big giant uniform uh teal background when the hipster whale comes up you will notice hey wait a second that big giant teal background is not uniform i
John:
I can see the logo of the channel I watch all the time in the corner.
John:
I didn't know that was there before.
John:
And same thing with the menu screens where it's like you just have this big sea of icons on a big, it's not pure white, but on a big light colored background that's supposed to be uniform.
John:
But then you start seeing the little things burned in.
John:
That makes me feel sad.
John:
I don't think it's a reason for Apple not to do it, except the only argument for Apple to go back to a black background is just in general, staring at a television with a white background is not fun on your eyeballs.
John:
especially if you have if you don't have a plasma you have an led backlit lcd those can go really bright and having a full bright screen even if the room is not dark having a full white screen with icons on it not great for television so i wish both for selfish reasons and a few minor practical reasons that they would tone it down a little bit and go back to black background with uh light icons on it instead of the other way around it and it also kind of feels more tv-ish i mean i think plexus ui is like that case you can tell me if i'm wrong
Casey:
Well, Plexus UI in general tends to be, I don't know, it is TV-ish, but I've not seen it on the new Apple TV.
Casey:
I've not even used the new Apple TV yet, so it beats me in that capacity.
John:
So you think it's conceivable that that would also be a light background with dark text on it instead of what I'm used to seeing, which is black background with light text?
Casey:
The pictures I've seen, I thought it looked very much like the home screen of the Apple TV in that it was a very gray background with white-ish text on it.
Marco:
They're using a lot of the layout templates that you get from TVML, so it does appear that it's going to be a general light theme.
Marco:
And I'm with you, John.
Marco:
Honestly, I didn't realize.
Marco:
I had forgotten what this looked like in the event.
Marco:
So when I got it and plugged it in, I'm like, oh, everything is really bright.
Marco:
And I also have a plasma, even though it's an ancient one.
Marco:
But I admit I would prefer a dark theme for TV stuff.
Marco:
It just kind of feels...
Marco:
like that is the the color scheme for tv is black with you know color where necessary rather than what we have with this which is just everything is just bright and full of banded gradients all over the place well they do vibrancy too that's that's the thing i actually do think kind of works they do a vibrancy effect where like the new app fades to the foreground or sometimes when you're on like a setting screen you can see behind it this sort of
John:
like you can in ios where they put a sheet up over it and you really can't see through it but there's kind of these weird colored blobs it's not straight translucent it's vibrancy like it's that effect that you've seen everyone else they do in the television and that i don't mind so much because it does tend to be darker at least but the it's it's the thing that it's covering up that having a darker gray thing over some icons looks okay but when it goes it slides away again and you're like light gray icons on light gray or white it just it just doesn't doesn't feel right to me
Marco:
yeah well there's different vibrancy modes one of them is super light and one of them is middle one of them's dark so it's really up to developers to to choose but i think by default and and kind of like the the norm on the platform is going to be things that are fairly light and i and i i agree with you that's probably a mistake but and so you can look at these screenshots of the plex app that we'll put in the show notes uh it looks like it does the vibrancy thing and like for example they're showing a thing from louis here
John:
Is this the FlexApp or is this everything else?
John:
Yeah, that's the Louis app.
John:
Again, it's using all the built-in templates from TVML.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Anyway, since Louis has a picture of Louis C.K.
John:
with like a blue sky and some clouds, the whole background of the page is kind of like a blurred, smeared version of the, you know, it does auto-color theming, right?
John:
Like Breaking Bad is like greenish gray, and so the whole background is greenish gray.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that Apple Music does similar things like Apple's been doing this for a long time trying to sort of have algorithmically algorithmically generated color schemes that match the thing you're seeing but still find a way to make the text legible on it is very difficult to do and they seem super determined to be able to do it.
John:
and i think they do a pretty good job here i like the fact that every one of these screens isn't completely black with white text on it like it used to be on the old apple tv sometimes you get a bum color scheme sometimes things are hard to read so maybe you could say hey apple like just pick one theme that looks nice that you can read text on but i am not as vehemently anti-vibrancy as some other people um
John:
I think they go too far with it.
John:
I think it's a little bit silly.
John:
But for a television interface, I think this gives Apple a branding because they're the only company that's going to go through these kind of pains to stick to this, what seems like a very stupid idea for how to color theme things algorithmically.
John:
And they're just going to keep working at it until they get it to work.
John:
And, you know, they've done it and it makes it look different than everything else.
John:
It's when you go all the way back to the menu screen where it's like, well, now you're at the bottom.
John:
And all there is is a very light gray background with some drop shadows on it.
John:
That still feels wrong.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I think we're good.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Harry's, Cars Against Humanity, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
John:
When you get your Apple TV, you will have things to talk about, too.
Marco:
Well, honestly, Casey, now you have to get one so you can tell us about Plex on it.
Casey:
I've learned enough about myself to know that I'm going to get one.
Casey:
It's just a matter of will I hold out for the holidays or not.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
This optical thing is really chapping my ass.
Casey:
And it's stupid.
Casey:
Conceptually, I know it's stupid and I know it's not that big a deal and I can get over it.
Casey:
But it's really...
John:
real just get one of those 30 boxes it's not worth this fretting the 30 box might break but it might not if it breaks so what return it get a different one if it doesn't break problem solved you can get two of them for the cost of the game controller yeah that's true it's all i know i'm being crazy like i said earlier there's no doubt in my mind this is a casey issue and i'm just being weird but i don't know it really grinds my gears that that that's the way that that is
John:
It shouldn't bother you that much, because like you said, it makes total sense to drop that optical.
John:
Oh, it does.
John:
You just need to get a new receiver.
John:
And you don't have the same excuse that Marco does, where you're not allowed to get one that's above a certain height.
John:
So, interesting follow-up about that, by the way.
Marco:
It turns out... So, to recap...
Marco:
My issue that I brought up last time was that I really want dynamic range compression in my audio for my TV, but due to household balance issues, I'm not allowed to have a big receiver that does not fit in this really, really narrow spot in our TV stand.
Marco:
And I have not found any receiver that is short enough height-wise to actually fit in here, even the Morant Slimline ones, which are almost there but not quite.
Marco:
And then I also later on asked what the heck a soundbar was because I keep seeing soundbars everywhere and they seem to be the new cool thing.
Marco:
And I wondered what the heck is a soundbar?
Marco:
Why do people keep buying what appears to be a big row of tiny little speakers?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Turns out the answer to what I want probably is a soundbar because many of them include range compression as a feature of the soundbar, which is a wide, skinny speaker that can fit pretty much anywhere in the kind of shaped shelf that I have our TV on.
John:
Like we said, everything comes with it.
John:
The Apple TV comes with it.
John:
Everything has it.
John:
Everything except for your television and your current speakers.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so it turns out the Apple TV does, in fact, have built-in range compression.
Marco:
So that is also going to be something that will be a possible answer.
Marco:
But I've actually... A very kind manufacturer of audio equipment has actually sent me a soundbar to test that arrived today.
Marco:
I haven't had time to hook it up yet.
John:
I don't know if you're going to like it, because like I said, it does sound different than stereo.
John:
And it's trying to...
John:
find a middle ground it's not going to sound like stereo but like you know better sounding it's going to sound different because it's trying to say trying to be like it's just like a 5.1 system so it's going to do crap by bouncing sound around your room that you may find weird so it'll be interesting to see how you how this if it actually is pleasing enough for you to keep using it or if you say you know what that's just too weird i'd rather have either just plain stereo or 5.1 than this thing
Marco:
I'll have to look at the settings.
Marco:
There's probably different modes and settings.
Marco:
If I can tell it to just try to make it sound 2D and to not boost up the depth simulation as much, maybe it won't sound weird.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'll let you know how it goes.
John:
Yeah, well, that's the other thing with the surround systems.
John:
One of the reasons that people tend not to like them is pretty much every receiver comes with all these weird modes like pretend you're in an opera hall or you're in a stadium or whatever.
John:
Just do not ever use any of those.
John:
They're pointless.
John:
I guess they're there to wow people in showrooms or something.
John:
Pretend they don't exist.
John:
And so with the soundbar, I think what you're probably going to end up wanting is...
John:
please just play the center channel out of your center speakers, the right out of there, the left out of there, and just have it go straight.
John:
But even that can sound weird if the speakers are angled behind the grill in weird ways because a lot of the time they try to bounce the back channels off of the side wall and the back wall.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And if they're in an angle like that, they're never going to be going right at you.
John:
I feel like
John:
Like I was saying before, don't run a 5.1 mix out of less than 5.1 speakers because some sounds are only on a certain channel and you will literally not hear them.
John:
And so you won't understand what someone is replying to.
John:
It's like you're not hearing the whole movie.
John:
So you have to play those speakers, but you just want them to play like just play the sound like if they could reroute them to the left of the right channel or just play the sound straight at me because I'm not interested in feeling like I'm surrounded.
John:
I just want all of the sound coming straight from me.
John:
Anyway, well, I can't wait to hear your review of the soundbar.
John:
Thanks.
John:
Does it even fit, though?
John:
That's another thing.
John:
I would love for you to unpack this thing and realize it doesn't fit either.
Marco:
I measured, and it should fit, but yeah, should is different from does in practice.
Marco:
We'll see.
Casey:
And FYI, I have my car back for a week until it goes into the body shop.
John:
Why does he need to go to the body shop?
Casey:
So the area in which my house is and in between my house and work, there's a landfill.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
And one of the main access roads to the landfill is one of the roads I drive on.
Casey:
There's probably more than one landfill in Virginia, Casey.
Casey:
Well, in the Richmond area, I genuinely don't know how many there are that are accessible to the public.
Casey:
So what happens is people who perhaps live in like extraordinarily rural sections of this area, which there are some, but they're relatively far out.
Casey:
Or if you just don't feel like paying for trash service, you can bring your trash to the landfill.
Casey:
And and you can dump it yourself.
Casey:
Well, the problem is nobody actually secures their trash as they're driving up this main access road.
Casey:
And one day I was driving to work and apparently was daydreaming.
Casey:
I wasn't on my phone hand on heart.
Casey:
I wasn't on my phone.
Casey:
I wasn't fiddling with the radio.
Casey:
I was just apparently not paying enough attention to the road.
Casey:
And I must have clipped like a piece of wood or something.
Casey:
And I heard this tremendous like crash or bang or something.
Casey:
And, um, and I discovered a day or two later, cause I went looking around the car, didn't see anything.
Casey:
And I discovered a day or two later that I had apparently kicked it up with my rear passenger tire and it impacted on the fender, like on the very edge of the fender.
Casey:
And so there's like this really bad, like impact on the fender.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
It's going into the body shop next week for apparently a week's worth of body repair just for that one fender issue to the tune of $1,000 that thankfully insurance has already paid for.
Casey:
But yeah.
Marco:
Yikes.
Casey:
Yeah, and then you have had some car problems as well, I hear.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So fortunately, I have an appointment to go get my snow tires installed and get whatever BS I'm supposed to get at this mileage next week already.
Marco:
But so yesterday, my trunk stopped opening.
Marco:
So I don't have a trunk for the time being.
Casey:
Well, just use your... Oh, wait, never mind.
Marco:
There is literally no way to open it.
Marco:
So it's one of those electric lifting trunk gate things.
Marco:
So there is no mechanical way to open the trunk.
Marco:
You have to... It has to invoke the electric motor that controls it somehow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and there's three different ways to do it.
Marco:
You can do it on the key fob.
Marco:
You can grip the button that's under the trunk lid where anyone else would have put a latch.
Marco:
There's a button there that you just push, and it opens.
Marco:
Or there's a button in the driver's side footwell.
Marco:
None of those work.
Marco:
You just pull them, and it just does nothing.
Marco:
And I don't think you can get to it from the cabin, because I think the whole point of those various locks that are on the fold-down seats in the back, I think the whole point is that you aren't supposed to have access to the trunk without going through the trunk.
John:
Well, if you had, if it was mechanical and mechanical cars, you have a key thing very often in the backseat.
John:
So you put the key, actual physical key, which you, do you even have a physical key?
Marco:
Oh, you know, yeah, it's buried in the key fob.
Marco:
I think I actually might have one of those little key slots in like, in like the ski pass through.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
and and then if you get to that what you can do is get to the one that they they have to put in there probably by law for like if you get trapped in the trunk you have a way to get out you know that little thing yep yep yep yeah little pull handle thing yeah so if you send adam in send him in through the send him in through the ski thing and say okay adam pulled a little red handle he says daddy i'm scared and then you say just pull it anyway eventually
John:
You'll open up the trunk.
John:
But I think the first car I ever saw that did this was Agri-CL.
John:
I remember looking at it and noticing that the trunk lid had no place to put a key in and no handles whatsoever on it.
John:
Like, I think they did it for aesthetics.
John:
Like, oh, it looks so smooth and sleek just to have this trunk thing that comes down and you don't have...
John:
any of these silly key openings or handles or whatever i assume it was still mechanical and you'd pull the little thingy in the you know the driver's foot well or whatever but what i thought was well that's stupid it's like johnny ive type move purely for aesthetics you don't provide a mechanical latch or a place for stick your key in margo's thing is more like we want little tiny electric motors and circuits that will fail because apparently electronics and cars are an impossibility
John:
um instead of having a latch but on your car there's a place like you said that would be where you would put the latch you wouldn't see it it would be fine it would work but they say you know what no all all motors and if the motors fail just forget about whatever's in the trunk yeah and this is one thing like so i i got the electric trunk because it was part of a package and i kind of had to get it if i wanted a bunch of other cool stuff
Marco:
Since the beginning of having this, I have said this is stupid and I would prefer the car to not have this if given the option to just delete that.
Marco:
Because everything about an electric trunk is worse than a manual trunk.
Marco:
There is literally no benefit.
Marco:
So first of all, it has the cool feature where you can just wave your foot under the bumper and the trunk opens.
Marco:
Yeah, you know how often that works?
Marco:
Yeah, you're just standing there doing the BMW dance.
Marco:
Waving your foot.
Marco:
Yeah, waving your foot under the bumper and cursing at your trunk because it's not opening.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing you try twice, maybe, and you're like, all right, I'm never doing this again.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
Those things just don't work.
Marco:
They work frequently enough that you can tell it's not broken, but infrequently enough that you never want to do it.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
Problem number two is that
Marco:
the electric whatever whatever mechanism raises and lowers this is kind of permanently engaged so that if you want to like manually close the trunk there's so much resistance you you actually kind of can't do it or you have to push really hard and it goes really slowly like it isn't it isn't like a like a bike gear where it just disengages when it's not applying pressure like it is just always engaged you're like pushing down really hard to try to manually close if you ever need to
Marco:
That's no good.
Marco:
So you kind of always have to use the motor, which is probably my problem right now.
Marco:
The reason I can't open it was something has failed and there is no manual way to open it.
Marco:
So there's also no manual way to close it.
Marco:
So that's annoying.
Marco:
And it's slow.
Marco:
Like if you have a regular trunk lid, a regular mechanical trunk lid, you can close it and open it way faster than the people with these stupid electric ones like me.
John:
That's the one advantage of it is that you can't slam your hand in the electric one because it goes so damn slow and presumably has a back off thing that if your hand was stuck in it, it would be like, whoa, I'm getting too much resistance.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
It does.
Marco:
But I mean, I've I've been driving a long time.
Marco:
I've never had that happen.
Marco:
Have you ever had that happen?
John:
The only place.
John:
Well, it's for like little kids to get in their hands caught and stuff.
John:
The only place electric thing makes any kind of sense is for minivans, where very often the lift gate in the back is so high that short people can't even reach it to close it.
John:
And if you can reach it, it's sometimes difficult to get enough weight or leverage if you are a small or lightweight person to pull that giant lid all the way down.
John:
And it's the same thing on minivans with the sliding doors with kids getting in and out of it is a big getting your hand caught threat.
John:
So those are electric as well because it may be hard for a kid to pull that big heavy door closed.
John:
And it's very easy for people to get their hands caught because kids are stupid and fight around doors and shove their hands in gaps to try to stop doors or whatever.
John:
And the electric one solves that problem and those things.
John:
And the final reason that it makes sense for minivans is...
John:
A lot more minivans are sold than BMW M5s.
John:
And any type of thing like this, any kind of car-related technology, we talked about this with the Tesla Model X gullwing door things or whatever, you do not want this feature to only be on a low-volume car.
John:
You want this to be the 900th iteration of this feature that sells thousands and thousands of copies every single year so they can get the kinks worked out of it.
John:
regular trunk lids and and that they put on like a honda accord or you know a toyota camry or toyota corolla you can be damn sure that if there's anything wrong with that trunk closing mechanism the next revision of the camry they will work on it and you repeat that process for 15 20 years they pretty much have the stupid welded gooseneck manual trunk lid things and latch down to that point
John:
How many – I think the electric closing thing in your BMW F5 trunk lid is probably a beautiful bespoke mechanism made only for this year's M5.
John:
And the total number of electric closing BMW trunk lids sold in the history of BMW is probably less than the number of Camry sold this year.
Casey:
Bruce S. in the chat pointed something out to me or to us, which got me thinking.
Casey:
And so a little bit of real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Well, let me start by reading page 39 of your owner's manual.
LAUGHTER
Casey:
Manual operation.
Marco:
This makes one of us who has read it, by the way.
Casey:
I'm sure.
Casey:
In fact, I think I cracked the PDF version open before we went to Germany just because I'm that much of a nerd.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
You did.
Casey:
Manual operation.
Casey:
In the event of an electrical fault, manually operate the unlocked trunk lid slowly and smoothly.
Casey:
To close it completely, push the trunk lid down lightly.
Casey:
It is closed automatically.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
What does that even mean?
Marco:
That kind of makes it sound like if it's stuck open, you can close it carefully.
Casey:
Very weird.
Casey:
Anyway, but to continue on, the thing that Bruce S. brought up, which I had forgotten about, in my glove box, but apparently in your center armrest, there is actually a segregated lock switch specifically for the trunk.
Casey:
So you might want to run to your car.
Casey:
Feel free to do that now if you'd like.
Casey:
We'll hold on.
Casey:
Run to the car and just double check that this switch is flicked the appropriate direction.
Marco:
I might actually.
Marco:
Do you actually want me to do this and wait here?
Casey:
Before you go, let me just send you a screenshot of the relevant portion because I want to make sure you see what I'm talking about.
Casey:
Now, I'm not going to be able to put this in the chat room because I don't use like Dropler or anything like that, but I'll put it in our little robot here.
John:
He does have a little GoPro on his head so we can see the Marco cam as he goes.
Yeah.
John:
That's right.
John:
I think I've seen that.
John:
All right, let me try it.
John:
Hold on, I'll be right back.
John:
What kind of person doesn't read the manual for their car?
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I don't get it.
John:
Cause you'll never discover the UI so bad.
John:
You'll never discover.
John:
Oh, if you press and hold this button, it does some feature that you always wanted on your car.
John:
I guess it's better be easier with onscreen controls.
John:
I found with my cord, even for as terrible as the, as the infotainment system is at the very least it was menus.
John:
So I could find, Oh, there is an option to make it.
John:
So you only have to press the remote once to lock all four doors instead of having to do it twice or whatever.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Right.
John:
Or unlock all four doors instead of having to do it twice.
Casey:
um i'm with you though i've read my manual at least once cover to cover yeah you have to see the hilarious things that they tell you about engine braking and stuff like seriously that's never gonna happen any car any car i've owned if memory serves they're like don't do not engine brake that's what the brakes are for and i always engine brake no i mean brake in not not oh yeah you don't did your manual say no engine braking i still do it
John:
They do it because I always felt like they're telling you to do it because they want you to go through your brake pads faster.
John:
I'm like, no.
Casey:
Well, and I think the thing is, if you're going to put pressure on anything, why not put pressure on the thing that's easy to replace, right?
Casey:
But with that said, I still engine brake constantly.
Marco:
Well, it's a calculus.
Marco:
You put pressure on the engine if you're leasing.
John:
but no like i the pressure on the engine maybe it's it's for finicky more finicky cars but i have never i keep my cars for 10 years plus engine brake all the time all the manual never any engine problems that could conceivably be attributed to engine braking unless engine braking causes my radiators to rust out my my water pump to die
John:
Which always happens around 60,000 miles.
John:
But I feel like what's going to happen?
John:
Your head gas is going to blow?
John:
Like, what are they afraid?
John:
Is it going to mess with the valve train?
Casey:
Oh, I'm with you.
Casey:
Well, my valve train is now brand new.
Casey:
I'm with you.
Casey:
Oh, by the way, apparently this is actually fun.
Casey:
And I want to get to what Marco discovered.
Casey:
But when they did my valve train, they said that I should get the sheet out.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
But suffice to say, when they were pulling the injectors, which apparently was part of this process, they had to apply too much torque to get the injectors out.
John:
Yeah, I saw that.
John:
That's just fancy language for them that they broke something.
John:
That's all they're saying.
John:
They were trying to pull something out, it's hard to do, and it goes, and then, well, you broke it.
Casey:
You very well could be right, but according to the service advisor, who I do actually trust, they apparently pitched all six injectors and gave me new ones, which I thought was interesting.
Casey:
Anyway, Marco, what did you discover?
Casey:
it was locked no this is annoying because you're the one that's going to do this edit and we will no one will ever hear this so live listeners this is this is a pact between all of us that you you can remind marco anytime you want that he doesn't know how to work his own car because he didn't read the manual yep who reads the manual
John:
uh both of us we're just discussing that while you were gone i always do like because otherwise i was saying to casey otherwise you don't find these uh old these obscure features in your car because the ui is so bad you would never guess that you have to press this button or hold this button or whatever activates this thing uh better with on-screen controls because you can read stuff but if you don't read the manual you just won't know how your car works you won't know where all these little things are
Marco:
i certainly i mean it was right in the center armrest thing which i have you know there's like change in there there's a tin of altoids there's an iphone battery well so yeah so who's going in there did you basically accidentally bump it with your tin of altoids or whatever that is most likely what happened yeah like i mean i don't know but it is that is most likely you know accidental bumping of the switch which is right in there we saved you an embarrassing trip to the dealer
Casey:
Yeah, well, it was a combination of us and Bruce S, actually, because I'd forgotten about that.
Casey:
And as soon as Bruce S said, oh, that thing in the glove box, I was like, yes, that's right.
Casey:
I completely forgot.
John:
I think the last time we were looking in the manual for Marco was to try to find his battery.
John:
I have no idea what the battery is.
John:
Other people are reading Marco's car's manual, but him not so much.
John:
Clearly, I don't need to.
John:
Yeah, he's crowdsourced it.