Everyone’s on Vacation
Casey:
Is your shopping done?
Marco:
I think, but I haven't wrapped everything yet.
Marco:
And so that always leaves me wondering, like, maybe I forgot something or somebody or I didn't get enough for somebody or something.
Marco:
So it's always a baseline level of stress because I'm always very worried about not having gotten somebody something or enough.
Casey:
That's why you have a spreadsheet to track these sorts of things.
Marco:
That would be wise if I was thinking that far ahead.
Marco:
Yes, I agree that that's the kind of thing I should do.
Casey:
I assume John has just a series of parole scripts to figure out what to buy people.
Marco:
No, I don't do anything.
Marco:
I was thinking maybe you would have just a large number of windows.
Marco:
I think that would be more you.
Marco:
Maybe one window that has 15,000 tabs right in it that was just one tab for every person you've ever known for each gift that you might someday maybe want to get them, plus the ones you did get them, plus the ones you got them in the past for comparison and reference.
Casey:
Actually, that does make a lot of sense.
John:
You need a burndown chart for a number of gifts you have to buy other people.
John:
What is a burndown chart?
Casey:
I was about to say there's no way Marco knows what that is.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I assume this is another business thing.
John:
yeah well it's a software development thing but also a business thing what happens in a burndown chart i mean it sounds really fun i'm guessing it isn't no it's not so you're looking for i think it's because they look like flames if you have like a layered uh bar chart but you're trying to make it go down to zero like you're trying to make all these different things it's like how many of x how many y how many of z and little bars over time that what you're trying to do is drop them all to zero so you're not buying anybody any gifts that's the goal
Casey:
i'm in the midst of reconciling our visa bill which is making me mildly upset because it's the holidays like during the podcast you're doing i'm almost done i only have a few if you want we can we can discuss watching paint dry i was about to say i know this is hugely entertaining we can we can walk through a sort algorithm on the air and just like an example data set of like how a sort algorithm sorts it that sounds super fun yeah i use this app called money well which is what a name just chuck your money down a well
John:
I think their icon was like a well at some point, too.
Casey:
Right now it's a bucket full of money.
Casey:
But anyway, so I'm like four transactions away from reconciling my Visa bill and then I get to pay it, which is super delightful because it's the holidays and now I'm broke.
Marco:
Well, the fact that your holiday purchases are already on a bill you've received means that you are way more ahead of the game than I am usually at the holidays.
Casey:
Well, we should start with, this is a monumental, so this is a Christmas miracle, to the best of my knowledge, and I am not presently looking at the notes because I'm finishing reconciling my visa bill, but to the best of my knowledge.
Marco:
How long do you think it'll take?
Marco:
Should we just sit here and wait?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Wait, watch this.
Casey:
And well, you can't watch because you're not seeing anything.
Casey:
Boom.
Casey:
Reconciled.
Casey:
Done.
Casey:
How does it feel to be reconciled?
Casey:
So great.
Marco:
Except now I got to pay this not cheap visa bill.
Marco:
But you are reconciled.
Marco:
That is so it's like closure for all of your money.
Marco:
You're saying goodbye to all of your money in a fully closed state.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
You could say I have some reconcilable differences.
John:
But you've reconciled them.
John:
You have reconciled differences.
John:
I was waiting for that.
John:
I was waiting for you to artfully work it in, but I guess you just gave up.
Casey:
You didn't think that was artful?
Casey:
Thanks a lot, jerk.
Casey:
I was pretty proud of that.
Casey:
Anyway, what the crap were we talking about?
Casey:
I already got a sidetrack.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Do we or do we not have follow-up?
Casey:
I should take a screenshot of our show notes where there is the heading follow-up, there is a single bullet, and there is nothing else.
John:
yeah everyone's on vacation i think we had a couple other shows where there was nothing and then i like made something up on the fly but i don't even have anything to make up because everyone is off everyone's watching star wars and they're on vacation and they're not sending us follow-up uh to that end can we establish that i have not seen star wars and i presume marco hasn't either and so i do not wish to talk about it and i do not assume marco never will so that's true
Marco:
Well, actually, I wanted to start this episode with a bit of a game, with three truths and a lie.
John:
See, Marco knows things from corporate America.
John:
That's an icebreaker they use.
Marco:
So here's three truths, three statements of these are true, and one of them is a lie, and you have to figure out which one is the untrue statement.
John:
Are any of these things Star Wars spoilers?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Number one, I wrote my first Swift code.
Marco:
Not possible.
Marco:
Number two, I played Journey.
Marco:
Number three, I went to see Star Wars.
Marco:
And number four, I started using Pinterest.
John:
I went to see Star Wars is the lie because Marco doesn't see things.
John:
Casey?
Casey:
I would concur with that, but it's hard to vote against you actually writing.
Casey:
There's no way you've written Swift.
Casey:
You're such an old man that there's no way.
Casey:
But I would have to agree with John that that is the lie, that you have not seen Star Wars.
Marco:
You should have gone with your instinct, Casey.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
You saw Star Wars and I didn't?
Marco:
Tiff and I went today to a movie theater to see Star Wars.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
Whose idea was that?
John:
I'm flabbergasted.
Marco:
It was actually my idea, but she was also planning on wanting to go and going anyway, so it was kind of mutual.
John:
Did you do this just so you could read the internet without worrying about spoilers?
John:
Or maybe Tifted was worrying about spoilers if you weren't?
Marco:
Well, part of it was because I basically have no podcasts left in my podcast player that I can play without being about Star Wars.
John:
Everything that I have to listen to this week is about Star Wars, and I've listened to everything else.
John:
So you were actually concerned about hearing Star Wars spoilers, that means.
John:
Otherwise, you'd be like, whatever, Star Wars spoilers, I'm listening, I don't care, I'm never going to see it.
Marco:
Well, so the greatest thing is, all of you Star Wars fans have been trying so hard to avoid spoilers, to go into ridiculous lengths.
Marco:
I successfully avoided any spoilers about the movie simply by just not really caring about the movie.
Marco:
I didn't put any effort into avoiding spoilers, but I went into the theater today knowing nothing about it and being pleasantly surprised by everything in it.
Marco:
See, funny how that works.
Casey:
Yeah, I have...
Casey:
I would say I've been avoiding spoilers, but I haven't been going to particular lengths to do so.
Casey:
It's just if I see a tweet fly by that looks like there might be a spoiler in it, then I'll just skip over it.
Casey:
And I haven't been reading reviews or anything like that.
Casey:
I've asked friends that have seen it, do you like it?
Casey:
And that's all I've asked.
Casey:
And I've gotten some hints as to the quality of the movie.
Casey:
But I've not seen it.
Casey:
I'm hoping that Aaron and I will be able to see it, maybe even tomorrow, actually.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But I am still avoiding spoilers.
Casey:
And I think my time is running out because I think the internet has kind of collectively decided, from what I can tell, that shortly after Christmas, all bets are off and everyone's going to talk about everything.
Marco:
And that's part of why I went to see it, because I'm fine ignoring major cultural events.
Marco:
I've never seen any of The Lord of the Rings, never seen Harry Potter, never seen Twilight, anything like that.
Marco:
Most of the big movie franchises, I've either never seen or I've seen some a long time ago and then never again.
Casey:
Let me help you.
Casey:
Lord of the Rings, big waste of time.
Casey:
Harry Potter's pretty good.
Marco:
Reverse that.
Casey:
Please email John.
Marco:
Anyway, but this one felt very, very important to my circles, more so than those other ones did.
Marco:
And also, I have seen the other Star Wars movies.
Marco:
I did enjoy them.
Marco:
I am a Star Wars fan.
Marco:
I'm just not a massive Star Wars fan.
Marco:
But I am a Star Wars fan in general.
Marco:
So I did want to see it at some point.
Marco:
I was planning on watching it when it came out to video maybe or something or I could get on Netflix.
Marco:
But I figured it's going to be talked about so much and it's so important in the circles that I live in that I figured I kind of had to go see it in the theater.
Casey:
I should have gone with my instinct because, you know, in retrospect, the lengths you would go to to prevent yourself from writing any Swift, that should have been the obvious answer.
Casey:
I mean, you have gone through some serious mental gymnastics in order to get to the point that you can justify not writing Swift.
Marco:
I didn't say I'm never writing Swift.
Marco:
I'm saying I'm not writing Swift yet, but that I do intend to learn it probably when 3.0 comes out next year because they're doing a bunch of big changes to lead up to that.
John:
well you had just changed your mind about it recently like in the past show you're like oh i did that you know that podcast and i was like oh i'm not gonna do swift for a while but then the open source thing came out and kind of turned you around so you were primed to do swift but the real tell was that the fact that we were talking about star wars and that prompted you to do the uh truths and a lie thing so because i mean i already had the list i mean i already i knew you played journey uh and the other ones were easy so it was just down to the swift and the star wars it just seemed so uh crazy for you to actually leave the house and go to a movie theater
John:
The Pinterest thing didn't?
John:
You didn't have any pause about the Pinterest thing?
John:
No, I know you did Pinterest.
John:
How'd you know?
John:
Yeah, how do you know?
John:
Tiff told everybody you have puppies.
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
Marco:
She did.
Marco:
Yeah, so I started a Pinterest account so I could collect pictures of puppies, watches, and things I want to buy for the house, like pipe heating wrap and the icicle melting zigzag wire that you put on the roof.
Marco:
Exciting stuff.
John:
If you find good pipe heating wrap, whatever you're going to call it, tell me.
John:
Because I have stuff around my... This is like stuff you put around the pipes to keep the heat from just leaking out into the areas where the pipes go through, right?
Marco:
No, it's to prevent them from freezing if you have a pipe in an uninsulated space.
Marco:
Never mind, then.
Marco:
So it's like... We have one in the garage from forever ago.
Marco:
It's like this ancient two-conductor cable that's just like a heat wire that wraps...
Marco:
in a coil around a pipe that runs through a garage because it's not insulated so that could freeze that is that has burnt out and no longer heats so i'm looking at new solutions to that and they're all basically scaring me into either not doing it or having an electrician do it because it all basically says that these things are insanely dangerous and you will start fires and they all require insulation around the pipe and everything and yeah so i'm probably going to actually outsource this job but we will see
Casey:
You know, living in the Northeast is the best because you have to worry about BS like this.
Marco:
Well, because we have winter.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
Well, what you have really is months of depressing, evil, terrible winter-like season, whereas I have this brief respite from wonderful weather with slightly less wonderful weather, and then it's back to wonderful weather again.
Casey:
But you continue being smug up there in your tundra, and let me know how that works out.
Marco:
Yeah, it was wonderful there when we went there in July.
Marco:
That was really wonderful weather you had there.
Casey:
Yeah, it was warmish.
Casey:
That's not true.
Casey:
It was very hot when you guys were here.
Casey:
Even for us, it was extremely hot.
Marco:
I also ordered a Tesla this week, but we'll save that for the after show, I guess.
Marco:
It was a big week.
Casey:
Big week for Marco.
Casey:
And you killed the web font on your website, which, by the way, I don't really agree with.
Casey:
I think that whatever font you have going on now, not making me happy.
Marco:
No, I don't think I found the right solution to that.
Marco:
I'm experimenting with killing a web font.
Marco:
I might at least do a different web font because the service I was using, the Heffler & Co.
Marco:
font, because I like their IdealSans font, there have been a few benchmarks done by people that have shown that typically their web font serving is not as fast as Typekit or some of the other big web font services and not as fast as self-hosting and stuff.
Marco:
And they don't allow self-hosting, but they do kind of a weird thing where they...
Marco:
You have to go through their CDN, but then it redirects to the font files on your server with no cache headers so that you're making the clients make two requests.
Marco:
One of them is going back to your slow server and not to their CDN to actually get the big files, you know, the big like 300 kilobytes worth of font files.
Marco:
And the only reason I'm there really is because I really like this one font they have.
Marco:
They have very nice fonts over there at Hefler.
Marco:
But I'm going to look at other options now because it was just too slow.
Marco:
If you look at the network timeline in the Web Inspector of time it's taking to render this page, it's just insane.
Marco:
And you could argue – I mean, I've heard many counterarguments for why I shouldn't worry about the speed of my web font loading, most of which boil down to either that I should async load it and then either pop it in or save it for the next load and put it on the next load.
Marco:
Both of those, I think, suck.
Marco:
Neither of those, I would say, are good options.
Marco:
Just for user experience-wise, why would I want to do either of those?
Marco:
The other answer was, why do you care?
Marco:
It's just a blog.
Marco:
It doesn't matter how quickly it loads.
Marco:
And that's BS, because not only does it matter quite a bit how quickly pages load to whether people complete the loads, but when you're talking about loading a 300 kilobyte resource that requires two requests to be made before the page can even begin to load, this is like in the head, on mobile, and when you have bad connections and everything, that does matter.
Marco:
That really does add up to a significant delay when loading a page.
Marco:
It isn't like when you embed a big image because that can load after the page loads.
Marco:
When you're on a mobile connection, that really matters.
Marco:
And it turns out that my traffic, like everyone's traffic, is mostly mobile these days.
Marco:
And you have to think about that.
Marco:
When you're a blog or any kind of content site, especially a tech content site read by tech people, you're going to see a large portion of traffic on mobile.
Marco:
Many of those people will be on cellular at the time they are loading it.
Marco:
Yes, it would be nice if I didn't have ugly fonts on my site.
Marco:
But it would also be nice if my page loads very quickly.
Marco:
So I think I have to balance those things.
Marco:
I think maybe doing Typekit might be a little bit better because it's just a faster web font host.
Marco:
Maybe doing self-hosting would be a little bit faster because then it could optimize the connections a little bit better than going off to a different host.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I'm going to play with it.
Casey:
What led you to do all this?
Casey:
Because no disrespect intended, it seemed to me that you've kind of not abandoned, but avoided writing posts for a while now.
Casey:
I mean, you'll write your link posts to this show, to Under the Radar, but I haven't seen a whole lot of real writing from you in a while outside of when you had headphones or podcast mics or what have you.
Casey:
So what inspired you to just start paying attention again?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I was inspired by being forced by Dropbox.
Marco:
Oh, right, right, right.
Marco:
Basically, I use a Dropbox blogging engine that I wrote that nobody else should use.
Marco:
Please don't use it.
Marco:
It's terrible, but I like it.
Marco:
It's good for me.
Marco:
And they ended support for the version that was probably ancient, the Linux client that I was using for Dropbox on my ancient server running its ancient distribution of CentOS, I think 5.5 or something.
Marco:
So running an old stack, an old version of their thing, and I couldn't update it without upgrading some pretty big things like libc.
Marco:
And everybody was basically saying on the internet, never upgrade libc on a Linux system if you can help it.
Marco:
It's kind of a problem.
Marco:
So I migrated my whole blog to a new server.
Marco:
I love Linux.
Marco:
Every Linux is basically like, yeah, rock solid, runs forever, it's great, but you want to upgrade it?
Marco:
Forget it.
Marco:
Please don't do this.
Marco:
You really shouldn't do this.
Marco:
You should never upgrade a Linux server, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
Never upgrade the distribution.
Marco:
They all say that.
Marco:
Don't do that.
Marco:
The solution to upgrading a Linux server is to abandon it and make a new one.
Marco:
So that is what I did.
Marco:
So I was already like in there mucking around with the guts of it and setting up everything new and clean.
Marco:
So I figured while I'm here, let me also take this opportunity to modernize it.
Marco:
So I switched over to HTTPS and everything is now HTTPS.
Marco:
I dropped the www prefix, you know, all this fun stuff.
Marco:
to modernize the site and so part of that was let me i'm thinking about dropping the web font for a while it was actually about to it bills annually and it was about to bill me again 160 bucks so i'm like you know maybe this is a good time to reconsider whether i want to keep using this font so let me try without it
Marco:
All that being said, you are right.
Marco:
I have barely written anything on the site of any consequence in a long time, in months, really.
Marco:
And part of that was because the last time I wrote stuff about app pricing, it went very, very badly.
Marco:
And so part of that was just I need to kind of rethink what audience I want to be writing to.
Marco:
Who's reading this?
Marco:
Do they really care?
Marco:
Do I want to be taking the risk of some of the things that I would want to say?
Marco:
to risk getting all the feedback from it and having my name dragged all over the internet in horrible ways and starting a bunch of drama.
Marco:
And most of the time, it's just not worth it to me, honestly, anymore.
Marco:
It's just not worth it.
Marco:
I do want to keep writing, but I'm going through a process where I want to try to figure out what I want to keep writing on the site.
Marco:
Because having the kind of potentially controversial tech topic discussions, I think, are better here where it's more human and people know me better.
Marco:
And you guys are here to rebut and to provide your own answers to things so that I'm just not going off the deep end going crazy and getting trash because I said something horrible without any kind of rebuttal.
Marco:
And the developer help things...
Marco:
I would rather do that on Under the Radar, the other podcast that I do with Undercover David Smith.
Marco:
And anything that doesn't fit there, anything that is kind of helpful to developer economics, I think I'm just not going to reveal anymore because it has proven not to be worth it.
Marco:
And then I have lots of other things I could blog about.
Marco:
I can blog about headphones and coffee and microphones and stuff like that.
Marco:
I can blog about lots of other things without being that controversial or at least controversial in those ways that I've been kind of burned by.
Marco:
So I'll figure it out over time.
Marco:
I have noticed that not writing anything of substance in a while is not making me feel good and is actually making me a worse podcaster.
Marco:
Because as you can tell by this long rambling thing, not only do I have more to say because it builds up in me all week and then I spew it all out at once in a podcast and that's no good.
Marco:
But also my arguments on the podcast are getting less coherent and less organized than
Marco:
I think that is because partially because I've been sick for like three weeks and partially because I think not writing is actually making the arguments in my head more weakly structured and more weakly organized, if that makes sense.
Marco:
Just write it and don't publish it.
Marco:
That's one way to do it.
Marco:
Or a private email list or something like that.
Marco:
That might be a good idea.
Marco:
I'm not sure if it would be as good.
Marco:
If you only surround yourself with people that agree with you or that want to read it, or if you're writing for something that is such a small audience, possibly of just you, then I think you lose the ability for people to improve you in constructive ways.
Marco:
And I think that would be unfortunate, and it would not give the writing as much value to me as it would if it was in public.
John:
I was going to give you a constructive improvement, but I just realized it might just be Chrome.
John:
Let me just check.
John:
Reload.
John:
I didn't change the name of the CSS.
John:
If you reload, I think it's... No, it's just Chrome.
John:
Never mind.
John:
I was going to complain that the new font you've chosen apparently didn't have a good emoji glyph for the cloud icon that you use next to the streaming heading in the overcast 2 post, but it's just Chrome.
John:
It's a black cloud.
John:
It looks like a little turd.
John:
But it's just Chrome.
John:
Never mind.
John:
Carry on.
Casey:
I don't understand why everyone loves Chrome so damn much.
John:
It loads t.co link successfully, so it's got that going for it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, see, I turned off, I think Renee Ritchie may have found it.
Casey:
Somebody had found a way to do a defaults write for TweetBot, which I know is not what you use, John, but to do a defaults write to just direct to the actual URL instead of a tco link or whatever we're calling them.
Casey:
And and that that made everything a million percent better.
Casey:
And all of the issues that so many people seem to have with Safari, I genuinely like never run into them.
John:
You haven't got the one the new one in El Capitan where the the entirety of the window Chrome becomes inert.
John:
Like you can't put the insertion point in the address bar.
John:
You can't click the window widgets.
John:
You can't click any toolbar buttons.
John:
You can't use the scroll bar.
John:
I get that one twice a week now.
Casey:
No, but remember that I have a sane amount of tabs open.
Casey:
I don't have 3,000 windows and 4,500 tabs.
John:
That's not why.
John:
I get it with two browser windows open, and then one of them is dead.
Casey:
Again, I'm sure that these people who say that Safari is a piece of crap, I'm sure they're saying that for a reason, but darned if I know why, because my experience does not match with that.
Casey:
And I just I mean, I don't think that Chrome is bad outside of the piss poor, just awful emoji support.
Casey:
I don't think Chrome is bad, but I don't I don't feel like it brings anything to the table that I care about.
Casey:
And again, I'm sure that, you know, there are all sorts of Chrome like diehard Chrome fans that are firing up email clients right now.
Marco:
No, they're not.
Marco:
They're using Gmail.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Probably using Gmail to write me some sort of nasty gram about the things that Chrome does better than Safari.
Casey:
And maybe that's true.
Casey:
I'm not saying that they're wrong.
Casey:
But in my personal experience, I have never thought to myself, you know what?
Casey:
I really wish I could use Chrome for this because it does whatever better.
John:
I still run both.
Marco:
I use Safari as my primary.
Marco:
I used to use Chrome.
Marco:
I used to use one at work, one at home.
Marco:
So I would always be up to date on both.
Marco:
And now I've just been using Safari now for a while as my primary.
Marco:
And Chrome is my flash isolation area.
Marco:
But anyway, my flash quarantine.
Marco:
But Chrome is...
Marco:
It has always been very consistent for me with performance, with reliability and everything.
Marco:
Safari is all over the map with every new version.
Marco:
So, you know, sometimes Safari is great for a while.
Marco:
Sometimes Safari gets slow or buggy or inconsistent or crashes or something for a few releases.
Marco:
And in my experience, Chrome is just way more consistent.
Marco:
Also, I think Chrome has the better web dev tools most of the time.
Marco:
um so we'll see anyway we will hear from all the chrome people and and what they think because chrome i i believe has more market share than safari uh in pretty much every minute you know by anyone's metric i'm pretty sure it's it's substantially ahead of safari now uh so the the world has voted just like they used to vote for compact and dell computers that those are the best
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So not speaking of things that are awesome, why don't you make us happier after mentioning Compaq in Dell and tell us about something that is awesome.
Marco:
There's this company out there that I have just talked about for the first part of this podcast quite a bit, and it's called Linode.
Marco:
Or Linode.
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
So it's Linux, Linus, Linode.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I say Linode.
Marco:
It's a web host.
Marco:
It's been around for a long time now.
Marco:
And I have been a Linode customer myself for quite a long time.
Marco:
I think maybe like six or eight years at least.
Marco:
I've been there a while.
Marco:
I have done a lot of web hosts in my time.
Marco:
I've used a lot of them, big and small, from stuff as big as hosting the first four years of Tumblr at a huge host.
Marco:
all the way down to hosting little private sites for myself and my friends and everything.
Marco:
Over the years, I've liked Linode so much and they've gotten so good that I now host everything at Linode.
Marco:
I think I have one dedicated server left somewhere else for some auxiliary tasks only because I haven't gotten around to moving it to Linode yet.
Marco:
It is such a great host.
Marco:
And they can't pay me to say this.
Marco:
I'm saying this honestly as me.
Marco:
I was hoping to get them as a sponsor because I've used them forever.
Marco:
And I really do genuinely like them and recommend them.
Marco:
In my opinion, it is the best value in web hosting today.
Marco:
They did a major upgrade about, I don't know, two years ago now or a year ago when they switched everything to SSDs.
Marco:
So it's all fast, all SSD, modern CPUs.
Marco:
More recently, they switched their hypervisor software from Zen to KVM.
Marco:
The latest Unix benchmark showed that it is 300% performance increase moving to KVM from Zen.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We have some news in the Apple executive lineup.
Casey:
John, do you want to kind of give us a synopsis as to what's been going on there?
John:
Oh, so long ago, I can barely remember.
John:
That was the news.
John:
It was like right after we recorded last week's podcast.
John:
We're like, wonder what news they're going to dump at the end of the year.
John:
uh the news was i think a fairly tame reorg where uh phil schiller got control of the app store stuff uh the app store stuff that used to be uh under edq edq still has like the whole media thing and apple music and all that stuff i think and they named uh what's his name uh jeff williams uh coo but he was already doing that and not a lot of exciting things there
John:
But the thing that developers got excited about is the moving of any app store responsibilities from one person to another.
John:
And I guess people are getting hopeful just because, hey, it's a change and things are bad now.
John:
So change has the potential to be good.
John:
But Phil Schiller has been in charge of app review.
John:
Marco can correct me if I'm wrong.
John:
uh for a while now right it's not this that's not new i believe since the start yeah he's just getting the rest of the app store and so app review is one of the things that developers complain about a lot and phil schiller has always had that so he's not exactly your uh sort of savior of the app store if you're if you've been disgruntled about app review stuff that's phil schiller and now he's got the rest of it the hope is i guess that phil schiller's organization i don't know like
John:
will improve the tech parts of it better, like make iTunes connect nicer and let Mac developers use test flight and fix the, uh, Mac app store sandboxing for people.
John:
So people can actually test their apps in the sandbox before.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like that's the hope that Eddie Q seemed to not be able to roll out the, the features like the software and server based features, uh,
John:
for developers as quickly as developers wanted and it's somehow phil show would do better i have no idea if that is the case um but i have to admit i'm also slightly optimistic just because things have been kind of not great limping along for a really long time and i like to see some kind of shake up even if it's like the world's most minor shake up
Marco:
So, yeah, I mean, just to fill out what you said, basically, the developer ecosystem of Apple has always been under these three different divisions in the company.
Marco:
There's the engineering division under Craig Federighi.
Marco:
They make all the APIs and new OSs and everything.
Marco:
And then there's the...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that decides what apps to be featured and how the store works and running the store backend and everything.
Marco:
I would imagine it also involves the store apps themselves.
Marco:
So to have this under three different divisions, you could always tell in the past where there has been some kind of miscommunication or friction in the past.
Marco:
So for example...
Marco:
you would have an app that was featured by the App Store editorial team under ADQ because it was doing some new cool thing.
Marco:
And then the app review team would call them up and say, oh, sorry, we're not going to allow this.
Marco:
You got to take this app down while it's being featured by the other department in the store.
Marco:
And so you have these kind of like weird miscommunications or disagreements between the divisions that have caused some friction or some clumsiness in the past.
Marco:
The engineering side is still going to be under Federighi, still totally separate.
Marco:
Obviously, that makes sense.
Marco:
But the developer relations and the App Store is now together under Phil.
Marco:
And interestingly, as our friend Ben Thompson pointed out on Stratechery, and I think this was one of the private members-only things, but if not, I'm a link to it.
Marco:
A lot of people aren't paying a lot of attention to the fact that Phil Schiller has actually lost a big chunk of his responsibilities in this as well.
Marco:
um, what, what corporate people call Marcom, uh, marketing communications, which I think that's, that's like advertising and stuff, right?
Casey:
Oh, it beats me.
Casey:
I know nothing about that stuff.
Marco:
Anyway, that used to be under Phil.
Marco:
And now they announced the new hire whose name I forgot.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
The new hire is now taking over marketing communications from Phil and reporting directly to Tim Cook.
Marco:
So this, this stuff has been removed from Phil's plate, it appears.
Marco:
Um, and, and then Phil has gained the app stores.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And logically, I don't know how this works internally.
Marco:
There's obviously a lot of implementation details here that we don't know.
Marco:
Like, the big one to me is, how do you separate the app stores from the backend that they run on, which is all presumably still under ADQ's division?
Marco:
There's going to be some weirdness there, I would imagine.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
High level, it certainly appears that Phil has lost his responsibility of running the advertising part of it and gained the responsibility of running the app stores, whatever that includes.
Marco:
Because he already ran developer relations and app review, that makes some sense.
Marco:
So, John, I'm with you in that I am optimistic about this.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to see meaningful change to the App Store policies.
Marco:
Any kind of rule that you can't do now, any kind of controversy over app review, I wouldn't even expect improvements to app review, at least on iOS.
Marco:
On the Mac App Store, having these occasionally very long review times, I hope they fix that because that's just messed up.
Marco:
I mean, that's bad.
Marco:
That's embarrassing.
Marco:
And that's obviously not the way it's supposed to work to have your app sit in review for a month.
Marco:
But when it is working, like on iOS, when you typically get a seven or eight day review time, I don't think we're going to see any major changes to that system.
Marco:
The system of app review as we know it today.
Marco:
That is here to stay for a long time because the person who is at the very top of that organization just took control of the entire app store.
Marco:
Obviously, they're not looking to change that.
Marco:
But the things that I think that I'm optimistic about here are that, first of all, I
Marco:
I can't get a great read on Phil, but the more that I know of him or the more that I hear him talk or that I hear stories about him, the more I think I like him.
Marco:
I think he has sensibilities that line up with mine more so than most of the other high-up Apple executives.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And more so that are in the interest of the old Apple.
Marco:
And that comes with some good and some bad.
Marco:
That's why AppReview I don't think is going anywhere.
Marco:
Because it's like the old school Apple.
Marco:
But overall, this is a good thing, if for nothing else.
Marco:
Because as you said, John, it is a sign of a pretty big change.
Marco:
And if you look at things that stagnate or have problems in Apple...
Marco:
many of them, I would say possibly even most of them, fall under that services division.
Marco:
That is clearly a place where they have had a lot of problems in the past.
Marco:
And we keep hearing that they're getting better.
Marco:
Some of the things they're doing are better, like the new CloudKit stuff, the new Photosync.
Marco:
Some of that stuff is really good.
Marco:
And so I think they are getting better.
Marco:
And we're hearing stories about them running Linux servers now and doing this Apache Mesos thing.
Marco:
And now this is probably where Swift on Linux is going.
Marco:
And
Marco:
We're seeing lots of rumblings that this department is getting better, and some evidence of that is coming out to the consumers.
Marco:
But even if they start doing really well, they also seem dramatically overloaded, and they seem like they have a lot of trouble making progress, especially on multiple fronts.
Marco:
So the App Store has basically done nothing.
Marco:
The App Store has gone almost nowhere, has improved very little, or has changed very little since its inception in 2008.
Marco:
If you look at the App Store today versus the App Store in 2008, it really is not that different.
Marco:
Yes, some things are better, but not what you'd expect for, what is it, seven years?
Marco:
Seven and a half years?
Marco:
Not what you'd expect for that amount of time.
Marco:
So to move a big chunk of this division out of it under new leadership in a different division of the company, to have that be the app store, the thing that controls so much of my living, many people's living, the modern computing landscape, so much of this is dependent on the app store and the way it's run and its policies...
Marco:
To move that to another executive is a big change, I think.
Marco:
It seems like it would be a big change.
Marco:
I don't think this is just some paper thing.
Marco:
So I hope that this is a sign that they are finally going to change the after.
Marco:
They're finally going to improve it
Marco:
to start making meaningful changes.
Marco:
And again, I don't think it's going to be in regards to app review.
Marco:
I think we're stuck with that for a long time, but it could be in regards to many things that could use improvement.
Marco:
Things like, you know, if you want upgrade pricing or trials, that's the kind of place, you know, this is the kind of change that would happen.
Marco:
If you want improvements to the Mac app store or better, I mean,
Marco:
If you look at the health of the app stores, pretty much all of them except the iPhone one need help.
Marco:
They're not in great shape.
Marco:
The iPhone one is doing okay simply because of its massive volume, but it could still use some improvement.
Marco:
All of that now is kind of... We have renewed hope that the app store might finally get better because they just did this seemingly substantial sounding move.
Marco:
I have high hopes for that, especially to be under Phil.
Marco:
He cares a lot about the Mac, about the product quality, and they wouldn't have moved this for no reason.
Marco:
There was nothing pressuring them to move it.
Marco:
There was no reason they had to do this, so they clearly want to do this, and this move has to have been for a good reason.
John:
I think there is some kind of pressure because when I it's hard, it's always hard to tell why things are happening inside Apple, because obviously the press release isn't going to tell you.
John:
And all I can do is look at the experiences I've had in the companies that I've worked for when they've shuffled people around.
John:
And the only real underlying thing other than stuff you don't know about, because there's so much information you don't have, like for all we know, like maybe someone, you know, is going to retire soon or, you know, maybe someone has expressed an interest in doing something different.
John:
Right.
John:
You don't know about stuff.
John:
It's not in the press release.
John:
But usually,
John:
If some top executive, like the CEO or whatever, is not getting something they want out of some subdivision of the company, they usually let that slide for a while, but eventually it's like, I've wanted X for two years now, and this person hasn't delivered it.
John:
It's time to give another person a chance.
John:
Sometimes there's the, you know, give the really hard job to this one executive who's great for...
John:
you know dealing tackling tough problems and that person bounces around like the problem solver or the fixer or the the you know like the uh what do you call it silver nsx casey oh it's a movie reference you won't get it uh the wolf the wolf is definitely a fixer anyway it could be that but like either way it's like someone is not getting what they want out of insert thing and it could be is someone not getting what they want out of marcom and that's why uh a new guy has to come in to take it is someone not getting what they want
John:
out of the app store we don't know because it could be say say the marketing stuff seems stagnant you know like apple's marketing message isn't evolving and for a while we wanted to change and phil doesn't seem capable to get out of the rut so what we're going to do is we're going to bring in someone new they're going to take over to marketing and communication but since phil is such an important person you can't take away that from him without giving him something else and eddie's got a lot of stuff so give it over to him all right so that's one plausible scenario another one is the one that we're all thinking of which is like eddie for years we wanted x out of you know this app store stuff
John:
it hasn't been happening so we're going to take that away from you and give it to somebody who is more yeah i don't know who we think is going to do a better job i don't know phil schiller is the person who's going to do a better job with that particularly like there's just so much we don't know but the bottom line is these things don't happen without a substantial reason because top executives hate having a responsibility taken away from them it's it's not a demotion but it's seen as like you know so it
John:
Phil Schiller is not really, you know, he got a bunch of responsibilities taken away, but he took the mantle of something else.
John:
So I feel like this is, you know, in the political org chart of Apple is a little bit of a down arrow on ADQ and a little bit of an up or sideways arrow on Phil.
John:
That's just the way it
John:
feels to me from the outside and what i think about is what you know assuming this theory is corrected a little a little bit down our adq what what is it that uh that top executives might have wanted that they weren't getting out of adq and that's makes me think of the success heights problem things where in the beginning when adq had the itunes store and the app store and everything was going gangbusters hey the app store is super popular everybody loves apps they're installing stuff and like every year every quarter
John:
He, you know, at every meeting and he could be like, look at these crazy numbers.
John:
Look how many apps we have.
John:
Look how many people are downloading stuff.
John:
Look how many developers are signed up.
John:
Like every metric that he could possibly, every chart he could put up, every number he could throw in someone's face was like, I'm in charge of the app store and the app store is awesome.
John:
but but as you pointed out marco at a certain point like those numbers not that they level off it's like yeah yeah we heard lots of apps lots of whatever but what's this i'm hearing about you know developers don't like this or it's hard to search in the store or this we bought this company to redo the store but it kind of looks the same and people don't think it's that much better and just just from regular like you don't have to be plugged into this community just tim cook can go to the app store on his own phone to try to find something and notice that there are problems and
John:
And bring that up two years ago at ADQ, and he'd be like, oh, yeah, no, we'll take care of that.
John:
No, we're working on this, working on that.
John:
And at a certain point, it's like, it doesn't, you know... Again, things that someone who's not plugged into the developer community, just Tim Cook on his own phone, using the App Store, can be like, you know...
John:
Doesn't seem like, regardless of whether I think this is good or not, and your numbers are great and your reliability is great and you're making a lot of money or whatever, it just doesn't seem like it has gotten that much better over the past several years.
John:
So maybe it's time for a change.
John:
Now, this could all be delusions based on our perspective as outsiders and people who know a lot of developers.
John:
It could be something entirely unrelated, but...
John:
to me that's a plausible scenario that that not that adq was coasting but that like when when you're on the fun part of the hockey stick it can hide a lot of stuff and at a certain point either the hockey stuff levels off or that stuff becomes old hat and you need like what have you done for me lately you know what what have you done to the app store lately because the complaints are there and the feedback is there and you know people leaving the mac app store and
John:
long review times i don't know if that's even involved in that and you know like features and itunes connect and just it just seems like at this point no matter how distantly you're removed are from the developer community you can do what marco just said and say look at what the app store was like five years ago and look at what it's like now and think is that five years worth of progress in the app store and you just have to say no and so that's why that that feels like the strongest reason why there might be a shake-up related to the app store regardless of what you think of it it's just that it's just not progressing and advancing the way you would hope it would
Marco:
And also, as I mentioned last episode, I think you can look at their recent product launches.
Marco:
The Watch, the Apple TV, and the iPad Pro.
Marco:
In all three of those cases, you can very clearly point to the app ecosystem and the app stores themselves as holding these products back significantly.
Marco:
The TV app store is frankly embarrassing.
Marco:
There's so little in it.
Marco:
It is so hard to use.
Marco:
It is so hard to find anything.
Marco:
There's no public links for TV apps.
Marco:
If you hear about... Badland 2 came out this past week or sometime recently.
Marco:
I wanted to get it on my TV or at least find out if it was available on the Apple TV.
Marco:
I could not find this information out anywhere except going over, walking over to the TV and typing poorly Badland 2 into that horrible text entry field and finding nothing.
Marco:
And I wasn't sure, like, is search just bad right now or is it really not here?
Marco:
And it turns out I don't think it's out for the TV yet.
Marco:
Had it been out for the TV, I would have no way on my computer or my phone or any other device to have clicked buy this app and have it show up on my TV.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
There are simple things like this where the store is really not helping.
Marco:
It's really hindering things.
Marco:
Not to mention the way bigger challenge of developer economics and making it worth developing for these platforms, which is a whole separate discussion.
John:
but is related to this who's in charge of that like who like just to give one example upgrade pricing like developers have wanted upgraded pricing for a long time who is of all the the people at the top execs we know at apple are the people saying no to upgrade pricing and are they still in charge of that decision
Marco:
Well, I think it was kind of a combo.
Marco:
I mean, that kind of thing before would have been like, you know, if you look at the app review rules, there are many app review rules related to pricing and what you're allowed to do with your pricing and what you're not.
Marco:
What has to be free?
Marco:
What has to, you know, not break or not have limits on it or whatever?
Marco:
So a lot of that is under app review.
Marco:
But then anything related to things like upgrade pricing would have had to be implemented by Eddie Cue's division.
Marco:
So that kind of thing spanned both divisions.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen so little change of that type, because it would have involved these two divisions working together, which was probably problematic or at least burdensome.
John:
They implemented bundles, which seems like so much more complicated than upgrade pricing.
John:
I mean, they did in-app purchase and they did bundles.
John:
Two features that are fairly complicated.
John:
So it seems like when whoever is the head of this snake wants to change to the economics, we want to make bundles possible.
John:
We want to make in-app purchase possible.
John:
That's going to involve your team, Eddie, because you've got to handle all the bundle and the pricing or whatever.
John:
And in-app purchase is going to be like a back-end that we're going to talk to or whatever.
John:
but it just seemed to me that those efforts weren't coming from edq's team and i'm just wondering like who you know i just pulled upgrade pricing out of the hat but just in terms of these economic issues somebody is setting the policy i feel like in an organization like apple still if somebody high enough up said you know what we're going to do upgrade pricing it would happen like regardless of who's in charge of implementing it maybe it would be cruddy and maybe like the interface for it and itunes connect would be bad and maybe it would be buggy to begin with and maybe be difficult for developers to test all those things you can blame on idq or whatever but
John:
like i just i always wonder where the decision is made like do they have a meeting where i said should we revisit this upgrade pricing or just does it never come up like do they decide once back when steve jobs was still alive that upgrade pricing is good for developers but bad for users and let's never revisit that decision despite you know what what how the ipad pro may change that equation or whatever
Marco:
You have to also look at how important is this thing that's very important to us?
Marco:
How important is this relative to the division it's in, then the company it's in?
Marco:
And so relative to all of Apple as a whole, I don't know how important they consider things like the App Store and developer happiness with the App Store and everything else.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Well, but they see the tertiary effects.
John:
It's like, why aren't more people buying iPad Pros?
John:
Why are people leaving the Mac App Store?
John:
Why aren't all these awesome apps that we know it's possible to build appearing on the iPad Pro?
John:
Why is Adobe not making a full-fledged version of Photoshop for the iPad Pro?
John:
Like, all sorts of questions about why aren't people taking advantage of our platform?
John:
And one answer to that is we haven't sold enough hardware, but it's kind of a chicken-egg situation.
John:
The other answer is, what is it about, specifically for the iPad Pro, like,
John:
What is it about our platforms that, you know, we all know the answers that lends itself to applications that a bunch of people write and support while they can still make money and then abandon like there is no sort of 10 year 20 year application because you can't get any more revenue from them unless it's like an in-app purchase type of thing where you're constantly, you know, fleecing people for money.
John:
in-app currency or whatever you know like other than those models like why why is there no model for sort of professional applications that people buy on a regular basis i guess they could do subscriptions but then you know like we we all know what the the the app store policies are there that that make it difficult to have a sustainable
John:
High end software package that continually is upgraded on Apple's iOS platforms.
John:
And it's because all the tools people are used to either don't exist or have a 30% tax.
John:
It's just mostly untenable like Adobe loves their subscription revenue.
John:
Adobe would love subscription revenue a lot less if Apple took 30% of it.
John:
Right.
Marco:
And there have been so many unimplemented or lost or canceled ideas and services and products because of that 30%.
Marco:
I mean, that is not a small number.
Marco:
That is a number that makes or breaks people's business models in a lot of cases.
Marco:
Going back to Eddie Q, to his division, if you look at what else that division had to do while the app store was under them, that's all of iCloud.
Marco:
That's all of Siri.
Marco:
That is all of the stores, the other stores, the music stores.
Marco:
That's Apple Music.
Marco:
The streaming television plan that still hasn't happened.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it's all the content deals.
Marco:
It's negotiating and dealing with all these content companies also.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Apple has not done well in that area recently.
Marco:
And I don't know if this is just Q doing his job badly.
Marco:
Probably not.
John:
It's probably more complicated than that.
John:
It's more like people have Apple's number now.
John:
The first one was easy.
John:
And then people learned their lesson from iTunes.
John:
And it was like, no, we're intentionally giving our business to Amazon to check your power, Apple.
John:
So now it's much harder to go because Apple doesn't want to come out with a plan.
John:
Well, as far as I know, nobody has a plan that is a convincing replacement for Apple.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And this is another thing where... Kind of what I was saying last week about how Apple doesn't really seem to know how to be in a negotiating position of not just absolute power.
Marco:
I think that... Last week, I was talking about developers.
Marco:
But this week, I think that applies very equally to the content problems, the content deals.
John:
Well, I'm willing to say here that in this negotiation between Apple and television networks...
John:
i i'm willing to put money that the television people are being more unreasonable than apple like it feels like a safe bet like every time like less moonvest makes a public statement i'd be like i don't envy i don't envy apple trying to negotiate with these guys because i think that they don't get it and apple is trying to explain it to them so i really like i i it's hard to fault
Marco:
apple and these things maybe they are being a little bit stubborn but but geez they're they're trying to pull an industry's head out of the sand and it's it's slow going no and that's fair but that industry i think is still doing really well without apple and so the the dynamic is differently one of the reasons apple was able to have so much power in music and get such great deals for music is because the music industry was was kind of naive and also pretty desperate and
Marco:
And in this case, today, that's not the case anymore, especially with TV industry.
Marco:
The TV industry is still doing very well and still making tons of money.
John:
Apple should have been Netflix, but it wasn't.
John:
And Netflix got there first, right?
John:
And then now everyone... It's a bigger mess.
John:
You're right.
John:
I don't know if music was more desperate, but music was smaller and more tractable, and nobody knew what was going to happen, and Apple just steamrolled everybody.
John:
And then everyone saw what happened, and everybody who basically lost power to Apple in that...
John:
was like no we're not doing that again so every other industry from ebooks television to movies to everything was like if apple comes calling look at the music industry as a cautionary tale and negotiate differently and find another way and we're gonna make our own streaming apps and we're gonna make deals with netflix and you know who knows what we're gonna do but yeah it's a more complicated world like yeah and i do wonder like
John:
I don't know anything about EDQ other than I see the guy on stage and hear him talk.
John:
We know he's not a big fan of buttoning a shirt.
John:
Yeah, well, it keeps getting lower.
John:
But I always wonder what his core skill set is.
John:
He's not an engineer, right?
John:
He's not an ex-programmer or anything.
Marco:
We've always heard that he is the negotiator.
Marco:
That he is really good at these content deals, apparently.
Marco:
I've also heard that he has a reputation of being the fixer.
Marco:
Getting things done.
Marco:
But honestly, I don't see it.
Marco:
Not an iTunes kid.
John:
no well and look i mean itunes connect is the least of developers problems i mean well all things all things associated with like test flight integration and you know the process your visibility into the app review process and the ability to contact a human about the your thing and all that stuff
Marco:
The problems with the App Store go way beyond the iTunes Connect web interface.
Marco:
It goes so far beyond that.
Marco:
iTunes Connect is good enough for what it does.
Marco:
It's not great, but it's fine.
Marco:
It's like the admin panel that we all make for our websites.
Marco:
No one's admin panel is nice.
Marco:
iTunes Connect is not nice, but I don't need Phil Schiller to fix iTunes Connect.
Marco:
We need Phil Schiller to fix a lot bigger problems than that.
Casey:
Eddie Q got a bachelor's in computer science and economics from Duke.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I can't get a read.
John:
It was obviously at this level of the hierarchy.
John:
You're not doing anything.
John:
You're telling people who are telling people who are telling people to do things, which is fine.
John:
It's management.
John:
It just...
John:
i'm trying to think like things that either things that were put under edq that saw substantial improvements or they got better or that you know like he's got a lot of sort of stars on his you know whatever you call them on his lapel right like itunes and the stores and the app store especially in the initial part there's lots of big important good numbers you can put up there i bet he got a lot of big bonuses in a lot of those years and you know because everything looked good
John:
But just lately, not that it doesn't look good anymore.
John:
It still looks good.
John:
But like I said, it's like, what have you done for me lately?
John:
What improvements have you made to the system?
John:
Yes, it's a system.
John:
People can upload apps.
John:
They can put them on stores.
John:
We have multiple stores.
John:
We have multiple things.
John:
But it just doesn't seem like it's progressing.
John:
We've all been hearing the exact same complaints from the developer side of it.
John:
for so many years and so like just set that aside because a lot of people listening like who cares about developers i don't care about developers apple should only care about users you know users should come above developers and i think that's right users do come above developers and should because there's many many more of them but but it's it's related because like you know like as a user you might be like i don't care what developers think about pricing on the app store and then at the same time you might be like i just got this ipad pro why isn't there more software updated for it
John:
yeah or why is this thing that i downloaded this throwaway app that no one's ever going to support that doesn't work right and but but like but i'm saying set that aside for a second just you know because i totally believe in the importance of that but just set it aside i really do feel that from the user's perspective the app store as experienced by the user you just talked about it marco the app store as experienced by users of apple tv or you know just as a user going to the app store finding stuff if
John:
feeling feeling good and confident about the things that you find there i i think that is has not progressed and the sort of cesspits of it have gotten deeper and more dangerous the cesspits of free to play um you know all those mechanics that are taking money for people um and the cesspit of at this point sort of single use
John:
unsupported applications that are clogging up your search results uh and make it much harder to find the the one or two good apps among because like they always brag about how many apps they have once that number got to like six or seven digits it stops being a plus it starts being a minus i don't want 10 million applications i don't want 1 million applications even 200 000 applications like seriously can we you know those all can't be winners right
John:
Right.
John:
There's a lot of, right.
John:
So not that I'm saying Apple should reject more things from the store or whatever, but like at a certain point, the number of applications you have becomes Apple's problem to solve, not their thing to brag about.
John:
And their problem to solve is, you know, Amazon has probably millions of products, but I find it easier to find decent things on Amazon, you know, because their review system is better than Apple's because they're people who like this, like that is a little bit better.
John:
You know, like all the parts that have to do with dealing with lots of products and presenting it to users.
John:
that part of the experience of being a user of apple products has you know again regardless what you think it just hasn't gotten that much better in years and years and years and so that that is an area where i feel like no matter what you think about it you have to say we are not progressing fast enough i don't know if competitors are nipping at their heels or whatever but if you can make that experience better as they show up at the app store to begin with if you can make that experience better that can do really big things for your bottom line and for your customer sat and for your developer satisfaction and
John:
you know letting developers be able to respond to reviews or contact people anonymously or like it's just those are that's low-hanging fruit it's not even that big a deal and it's like well that's you know we can't do that the app store just came out it's been years like one give me one of those a year for five years and it would make a much bigger difference i know they did things i just mentioned the bundles
John:
um and in-app purchases arguably are an important thing and subscriptions and opening the the stuff that used to be newsstand only up like they have done some things but it just it just feels like stagnation and it it you know i don't i don't feel good going into the app store these days unless i know exactly where i'm going um and if i can't get a direct link like on the tv i don't know what i would do
Marco:
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Casey:
So also in the last week, 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose did a, not really an interview, but a feature on Apple.
Casey:
And they were afforded a little bit more access than most TV crews are afforded.
Casey:
Have you guys seen this?
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Of course not.
John:
I did, but Stupid Football pushed it off the end of my TiVo, so I had to watch the rest of it on CBS's, or whatever network it is, their terrible website that made me watch more ads.
John:
But I did eventually watch it all.
Marco:
I can do that.
John:
I can just go to their terrible website.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If stupid football pushes the show out and your TiVo doesn't correctly adjust because stupid football ran long, not enough time for TiVo to get updated guide information, then you can watch as much as you can watch in TiVo.
John:
And then I just always assume I can go to the website of the television show and watch the rest of it.
John:
And lo and behold, I could as long as I was willing to watch like 17 of the same commercial before I could move the little playhead up to the point where I left off.
Casey:
So what do you think about football?
Casey:
I'm not going to take this bait.
Casey:
I'm not going to take this bait.
John:
It's not bait.
John:
I'm just saying, like, is there a TV schedule or isn't there a TV schedule?
John:
I feel like if the football runs long, it should switch to the football overflow channel.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Anyway, all right.
Casey:
I'm still not going to take this bait.
Casey:
So the feature, it is worth watching, although I don't think any, like, revelations came from it, excepting apparently Reddit seemed to think that a...
John:
macbook that was shown in the background for four seconds was some new mac which it wasn't which uh supposedly it wasn't or if it was like this is the best part of that theory let's assume that it was so what happens now like let's just stipulate for the purpose of this conversation that there was a there was a different macbook in the background now what happens
Marco:
nothing happens it looked like a laptop like it opens it closes it has a screen and a keyboard can you buy one do you know what's in it nope pointless all right go on plus we already know what they're doing like look sky lake is coming out in the spring slash winter slash summer slash god knows when sky lake is coming out soon it comes with a huge power savings the retina macbook pro design is going to be about four years old by the time it comes out
Marco:
They're going to take advantage of the power savings, and they're going to make the stupid thing thinner.
Marco:
And it's going to be fine.
Marco:
I'm going to complain about the keyboard and the battery life and the 4Strux trackpad, and then I'll end up buying one.
Marco:
And they're going to be the same laptops we have now, but thinner and cooler looking, and maybe in space gray and gold.
John:
or not or or or they could have amazing features that but none of them would be visible on the screen it looks like a laptop it's a screen and a keyboard to attract it like i just like to you know just arguing about it's like i will agree right now that that was a brand new unreleased product in the background and now what what happens do we just sit here and smile like i don't even understand anyway go on casey we interrupted you
Casey:
Yeah, so there wasn't that much that I thought was really remarkable about the piece, but I thought we should at least note that, well, two-thirds of us have seen it.
Casey:
The one thing that I thought was really interesting was Dan Riccio saying, and I'm going to butcher the quote because I don't have it in front of me, even a tenth of a millimeter of thickness is sacred to us.
Casey:
And this was with regard to the MacBook One, but...
Casey:
Probably pretty telling about Apple's attitude about these sorts of things in general.
Casey:
So that's a thing.
Casey:
That's the thing that we've been lamenting for a while.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that.
John:
The quote that stuck out to me was when they were talking to Johnny Ive and he was getting into his his Johnny Ive mode where he is very passionate about things.
John:
And I think the question was.
John:
uh something about like did you feel like that apple could become complacent or insular or something like that and his answer was basically like i like all the things and say these are answers that anyone who follows apple has heard before um just repeated in a new context and it was the the john ai of answer from his uh folio which which i believe is the truth it's not like bs it's just that he has to answer the same questions a million times like every you know
John:
every famous person has to and his answer to this one is we're not really looking at what like we're not satisfied with what we do like so we're not going to be like oh just sort of you know lean back and uh just uh phone it in or whatever and we're not comparing ourselves to
John:
What else is out there and other people's products, what we're comparing ourselves to is always this ideal, this perfection that we have in our own mind.
John:
So we're chasing, we're chasing perfection, our own internal, you know, intrinsic motivation, the ideal that we have in our mind, and that's what we're chasing.
John:
And
John:
I believe that because it shows in their products that seem to be chasing some ideal that is inside their minds and don't involve certainly too many looks at what other people are doing, which is fine, but also maybe not too many looks at how people use these things in the real world.
John:
His answer makes sense, but it hinges entirely on what is that ideal that you're chasing and
John:
as articulated through many white background movies over many years, the, the ideal that, that Johnny Ive has always said that he's chasing has good and bad aspects of it.
John:
The good one is like, it has to look obvious.
John:
It has to seem like it's not designed.
John:
Um, it shouldn't, you know, it shouldn't be designed for design sake.
John:
Uh,
John:
But we can see in the products that he makes that he, you know, he favors simplicity and symmetry and purity and beauty.
John:
And it can be argued that those things... Thinness.
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
And it can be argued that those things have a psychological effect on the user's products that benefits their bottom line.
John:
But there are practical considerations as well.
John:
And the balance between chasing that ideal that, again, may be beneficial to the company, but may not be beneficial to the product, and also...
John:
doing things that you kind of have to do whether it's uh more reliable strain relief on cables or you know or more grippy surfaces for things or you know thickness and battery life and all that stuff i haven't seen a lot of interviews where that balance has been
John:
brought up and really pursued and i'm not expecting like in 60 minutes interview you know basically it's going to be people you know if you follow up a lot it's going to be people you've seen before being asked questions they've been asked a thousand times you've seen them be asked these questions a thousand times and you know what their answers are going to be because you've heard them give the same answer a thousand times
John:
And they dotted each one of them, like labor practices, parking money overseas, popularity of products, secrecy, the new Apple campus.
John:
I mean, there's just nothing new there.
John:
But it is interesting that they, you know, you get to come in the lab and see the tables draped with stuff and you get to see our milling machine running and whatever, you know, you can peek at it in that way.
John:
And it's interesting to see the people.
John:
give the same answers and see if they change but what i always want is you know i think what we all want as people who are either on or listening to this program is deeper questions like so uh i think gruber's interview with schiller pursued this a little bit on the whole like i forget what he was talking about then maybe he was also talking about battery life or maybe it was developer relations but anyway you're like
John:
to pursue to have follow-ups to dig a little bit like to bring up this because i'm sure donnie it's not like this is news to johnny if he knows about the the balance between you know practical features i'm sure all the engineering people in the manufacturer is telling him practically speaking you need to do this and he's like no can we figure out a way to do this like that's that's why uh he was talking about uh you know fractions of millimeters there there is a tension between what can be done what is able to be manufactured what is economical what is beautiful what is ergonomic
John:
Is there something that's both beautiful and ergonomic and obvious and durable and stays beautiful for a long time like this?
John:
This is that's what design is all about.
John:
I would love to hear an in-depth discussion with Johnny just about those tradeoffs, about how he figures out where that balance is, not in vague terms, but getting into specifics, because that, I think, is the most interesting thing about design.
John:
and johnny ive never talks about it maybe he's never going to because secrecy type thing he doesn't want to give you a cute you know a window into his mind but if he retired and i could get him on this podcast i would spend the entire show just like trying to figure out how they how they did that balance and what factors do we not understand that are involved in this and and
John:
Are there problems that we see that he doesn't and other problems that he knows are legitimate issues that we never see and take for granted?
John:
And that would be a much more interesting interview than what was on 60 minutes.
John:
But then again, it's 60 minutes.
John:
So what do you expect?
John:
I think my expectations for that were even lower than my expectations for Star Wars.
John:
Why were your expectations low for Star Wars?
John:
People had been saying good things about it.
John:
The people involved were good.
John:
Everyone likes J.J.
John:
Abrams.
John:
George Lucas wasn't involved.
John:
It seemed like your expectations should have been at least middle of the road.
John:
Well, let's just say the last three Star Wars movies I saw were not the best.
John:
I know, but there's a whole different set of, maybe you don't know, but it's a whole different set of people here.
John:
The old people are out.
John:
It's even bigger than the Eddie Q, Phil Schiller thing.
John:
Old people out, new people in.
Marco:
Well, I'm like the average consumer.
Marco:
I wasn't really in that world of paying attention to all that stuff.
Marco:
I didn't expect much from it because the last few Star Wars movies I've seen have been terrible.
John:
They fixed that.
John:
They didn't just shuffle things around a little bit.
John:
Complete change of hands, new people in charge entirely.
Casey:
Everything on the internet comes back to Star Wars these days.
Casey:
That's what you have to see.
Casey:
Just go see it tomorrow.
John:
How are you the one who hasn't seen this?
John:
Somehow Marco has seen it and I don't understand what's going on today.
Casey:
Bizarro world.
Casey:
It is bizarre world.
John:
It's a Christmas miracle.
Casey:
This is our Christmas miracle.
Marco:
Next you're going to tell me that Hop saw it.
Marco:
I should have brought him.
Marco:
He would have enjoyed it.
Marco:
oh god no no dogs in theaters uh no we need we need a babysitter because we have like a baby now we're all like old and boring i know but you have family close by you can make this happen yeah put your kid in preschool actually the theater i went i went to an alamo draft house which is like this kind of like hipster theater chain but i inadvertently booked a baby showing because they do they do like baby okay showings where like they allow people to bring babies and if they cry oh well
Marco:
tiff was really not happy that i booked this but it turned out not to matter there was like one baby in the whole theater that cried like once but it didn't matter but that might exist near you if you can find that that is the kind of hipster thing you would have around that area around me yeah no no there's no alamo draft house anywhere near here i think it's like at least an hour away
Marco:
Well, at any rate, look at local theaters to see if they have any baby showings of movies because I think some theaters are starting to do that now.
John:
I went to a nerd showing.
John:
It was great.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
What does that include?
John:
It's like only nerds allowed, you know, either people who are dressed up or people who think seriously about ever dressing up or people who conceivably be friends with someone who dresses up.
John:
Very respectful nerds.
John:
That's how I saw it.
John:
It's the only way to do it.
John:
Did they market it that way or is it just... No, but it just happens naturally.
John:
We congregate.
Casey:
I clearly am not a card-carrying nerd because I have no idea when that would be.
John:
If you saw it on the 17th, and especially if you saw it at either the very first showing or a ridiculously late showing that no insane person would ever go to because you end up getting back to your house at 3 a.m., it's full of nerds.
John:
It was the best.
Casey:
So I guess we're done talking about the 60 minutes thing then, huh?
Casey:
To be honest, I have nothing else to add.
Casey:
I mean, it was interesting to watch.
Casey:
It's probably worth the 20, 30 minutes of your time.
Casey:
Assuming that you live in the United States, I saw something fly by on Twitter that it's...
Casey:
It's locked down to the U.S.
Casey:
because reasons.
Casey:
But it is worth your time.
Casey:
Don't expect anything monumental.
Casey:
I also watched their, what are they called, 60 Minutes Overtime segments, which were not that particularly interesting nor worthwhile.
Casey:
The one thing I will say is that I was happy to see Angela Aarons come out from the shadows.
Casey:
They spoke to her a few times, and I was very impressed with her.
Casey:
I thought she was really, really good, which is what one would expect, given that she was once the CEO of
John:
They did have one.
John:
There were some tidbits in there.
John:
Maybe I just don't know about this, but one of the things is they were showing the model Apple Store, like, oh, this is where we tested our ideas for Apple Stores, and there was one wall that had a bunch of foliage on it.
Casey:
I noticed that.
Casey:
That was very weird.
John:
And I'm assuming no real Apple Store has that, but I'd love to see that.
John:
They try out all sorts of ideas there, right?
John:
I would love to see that idea make it out of the model and be just going to the Apple Store and like...
John:
have one wall have a bunch of green vines hanging down and also the ones where like they had cases and you like the case was the pull on the thing lots of wacky ideas there so that was that was interesting to see for two seconds and the other the only reason to watch it this will make you simultaneously angry about 60 minutes uh but interested in in seeing this is you get to see tim cook get fired up about uh apple keeping their money overseas and our stupid tax laws and labor practices and stuff he gets kind of uh angry sounds like a fun time
John:
not angry like so they they ask them the same questions you always ask him and they don't like he probably gave like very substantial thorough answers to them we've heard him give those answers before like on apple's earnings calls and and uh the you know the things he has for the meetings he has for stockholders and everything but in 60 minutes you get three sentences that they cut out of your big long comprehensive answer and the three sentences when tim cook is the angriest and they don't explain anything and then they move on to the next topic so it was
John:
really garbage from a uh you know a perspective of like giving insight to anybody who doesn't know about these issues all you get the idea is that we say this leading question apple angrily denies it i don't know what the truth is not enough information now it's time to ask about something else but it was interesting to see tim cook leaning forward in his chair and getting probably the most sort of worked up i'd ever seen him in a in a public uh scenario like that
John:
I also would have loved to have heard what Steve Jobs would have said to those same things.
John:
I think he would have had his smirk, more of a smirk and less of an earnest sort of anger.
John:
Either way, there was no information.
John:
Like you couldn't draw any conclusions from that.
John:
Like Tim Cook, I'm sure, gave a good answer, but 60 Minutes just is not going to air it, which is a real shame.
Marco:
I would love to see you interviewed on 60 Minutes, John, and to just see how the heck they would edit that.
Marco:
That's the word.
John:
I feel for those guys because they're getting interviewed for half an hour, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, and they're going to take literally five sentences.
John:
And that's what they're going to air.
John:
Five sentences.
John:
Five of the most dramatic-sounding sentences with no surrounding context.
John:
And there's nothing you can do about it.
John:
You can't explain yourself before.
John:
You can't explain yourself.
John:
It's like they're just going to pull them out, and that's what people are going to see.
John:
And just...
Marco:
like why would they even agree to it why would they agree to be because they have no control over what those sentences are i don't like it i mean this is honestly this is why i haven't rushed to watch it because i figured like you know tv interviews are so low density you know like i feel like you know like there's so little content in them there's so much padding and time wasting in them there's no smart speed and just like wow it's just so low density there is a my tivo
Marco:
Yeah, of course there is.
Marco:
Simpsons did it and Opera did it first.
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Casey:
So a long time ago, we wanted to talk about something that came out of nowhere.
Casey:
And it's a new service, product, company, startup.
Casey:
It's a new thing.
Casey:
And it's called Up There.
Casey:
And it has a lot of ex-Apple people in it.
Casey:
And John, I think this was kind of your baby.
Casey:
So what do you want to tell us about Up There?
John:
yeah bertrand surlay used to be in charge of apple software stuff in charge of like os 10 and everything back before there was ios and even a little bit after i think uh and he retired from apple uh a while ago that's when craig federighi took over basically um and he disappeared to i don't know go on vacation and do whatever he wanted to do but pretty quickly after he left apple there were rumblings like oh what's bertrand's next thing i guess you don't ever really leave i guess you would just leave and become like
John:
I don't know, a venture capitalist or support other technology things.
John:
Anyway, the whole the rumor was that he was involved in some kind of startup and they were doing something having to do with computers.
John:
And that's all anybody knew about it.
John:
I didn't pay too much attention to it.
John:
I figured he'll surface at some point.
John:
And he did surface a couple of months back with this company called Up There.
John:
And when I went to their website at first, it was like pretty impenetrable because like they say, you know, if you had a cloud to butt translation on your
John:
on your web browser.
John:
It was like a lot of butts going on here.
John:
It was like they're doing something in the cloud and there are computers and it's like, well, what is different about this company?
John:
It seemed like they were saying they were going to store a bunch of your stuff on their servers so you wouldn't have to store it on yours.
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, I have looked at this.
Marco:
It's been in the show notes for like two months.
Marco:
I've looked at this every so often before the show and I cannot figure out what it is and why I need to care about it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And like the quote I pulled from the CEO, who is not Bertrand Serlet, by the way, he's just one of the founders.
John:
But the CEO, Roger Bodamer says, we'd like the word backup to vanish from the dictionary.
John:
We built a consumer cloud from the ground up.
John:
Oh, here we go.
John:
We questioned everything.
John:
Literally, we experimented a lot.
John:
We want the cloud to be the primary place for your data.
John:
So this is a fairly succinct summary.
John:
The whole idea is like, you know, it's kind of like a Chromebook.
John:
You don't back up a Chromebook because there's nothing on it that isn't already on Google servers somewhere, right?
John:
And up there, the whole idea is don't worry about what's on your phone or on your Mac or wherever you want it to be.
John:
That's just like a local cache.
John:
That's not where the stuff is.
John:
Chuck your phone into the ocean.
John:
Who cares?
John:
There was nothing on it anyway.
John:
You're fine.
John:
All your stuff is up there in the cloud.
John:
uh and the the bit from here is like uh from the second vote is we experimented a lot they've been in stealth mode as they say for a long time so who knows what they've been doing behind the scenes but they do have a beta program and i'm on the beta and uh it's a public beta program you just sign up for it you know um and they have a couple of applications there's a mac application and there's an ios application those are the ones i use
John:
and you launch them and it's like hey we're this cloud thing sign up they already have two-factor authentication which i thought was really nice um you know out of the gate because if you're going to be a cloud thing like you don't add that like in your fifth year or something it's important enough to have it now
John:
And then it wants you to put stuff into their cloud.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, they have like an easy button press.
John:
It's like, hey, do you want to put your photos library into the cloud?
John:
And it's my photos library, not like the family one.
John:
So my photos library only has like 10,000 photos in it or something.
John:
So I'm like, sure, here you go.
John:
Take those.
John:
You know, like, I mean, a lot of this is going on.
John:
I'm just trusting Bertrand Serlet.
John:
This is not a shady company or whatever.
John:
um and you can upload it and you can drag files into it or whatever just like whatever fine so i told it to pull up my photos library and just let it do its thing and then it eventually uploaded my photos library and then on the ios application i can go and i can browse through all of my photos in my photos library and only like 10 000 or so um there was some weirdness in that for to get the phone totally synced like uploaded them from my mac and then to get the phone totally synced
John:
it uh there was the best way to do it was to have the phone in the application launch as like an option that says don't let don't let your phone go to sleep when when the application is in the foreground because i guess it uploads better or faster when the application is running and in the foreground and i didn't even know that was an option but apparently it is but anyway they got everything uploaded there they have a camera application as well which is kind of getting more into how this is supposed to work uh
John:
it's a camera for your phone and you launch this application instead of launching apple's camera application you take pictures but instead of the pictures going onto your phone the pictures go directly into the cloud and the pitch there is you'll never fill your phone with pictures you know and that's that's a real thing that a lot of people who have smartphones do is they take pictures take pictures take pictures and then they fill up their phone and iowa storage management is such that there's not a real easy way out of that without oh you need to have an icloud photo library oh do you have that turned on do you have
John:
uh a mac and like you know the up there thing is we're never going to fill your phone because we don't put the pictures on your phone you take the pictures and we immediately upload them now obviously everything about up there is predicated on you having a network connection and that network connection being somewhat reliable and somewhat uh you know having a reasonable amount of bandwidth so it's a forward-looking play um where it's like the future is not going to be
John:
doing stuff locally and figuring out how to sync it the future is going to be pushing everything up and that's that's a pretty safe bet what it all comes down to though with this that's why everyone hears about this and reads the website and thinks that it's like well whatever you're like uploading stuff to a server somewhere who cares what it all comes down to is execution how well does upload stuff to the server does it the sync ever get stuck does can i actually scroll through all 10 000 of my pictures how long does it take for the
John:
And I don't know what exactly they're doing tech wise because the website is not illuminating.
John:
I would imagine since they've been a stealth load a really long time, what they're trying to do is come up with a better interface than like the application uses POSIX APIs to do synchronous IO to your local disk.
John:
And then some daemon process wanders the file system and like Dropbox or whatever and finds things and opens an HTTP connection and shoves the files one at a time to our servers.
John:
Like that's the old way of doing things.
John:
I don't know if they're doing exactly that or if they, you know, I'm imagining sort of more interesting abstractions where instead of going through a POSIX file IO API, they have their own file IO API that does intelligent things like better support for streaming and batching of multiple things and like...
John:
you know handling failures better and being asynchronous instead of synchronous by default and being multi-threaded and being able to use multiple connections and handling you know like that's what I'm imagining is behind the scenes but the bottom line is it uploaded all my pictures and when I scroll through them
John:
i can scroll through all of them and the thumbnails load and you know pretty fast and when you go to the ios usage screen to see how much disk space the up there applications are taking up it's like nothing it's like 90 megabytes so i think it really is streaming all this stuff in real time from the cloud as they say um
John:
and like the pitch on their website is storing our entire digital lives photos video music and documents in a single place that is always accessible growing evolving and ready to share their sharing stuff is even better than apples already it's better than apples you can make like something they call loop where you can have multiple people putting their putting their photos into a single bucket right and so like you know you could do that with a family photo library where the whole family could have camera applications and every picture they take could go into one giant shared thing where people can contribute and it's like
John:
it just seems like a forward-looking uh way to do everything and is the implementation good just because they have five beta testers and all five of us are are connected to their super fast servers and it will be terrible when there's a million people could this scale to be the size of like apple music or iCloud photo library i have no idea all i know is that whatever the heck they're doing it's working and apple should buy them because it's better than everything apple is doing even though there aren't a lot of features yet i'm just going by like
Casey:
did it upload my pictures yes can i see them all yes can i scroll through them quickly yes is it storing any files on my on my phone not as far as i can tell so it does what it says on the tin and it's pretty impressive i i have been on the beta for like a week or two now because i didn't get a clear read on what the intention is for the app in fact you describing it has given me a much better understanding than than the very little bit of documentation i read and
Casey:
I didn't really know what to make of it.
Casey:
And like the Mac app, it has some tabs on the left.
Casey:
It has Flow, which I guess is just kind of like a newsfeed sort of thing.
Casey:
It has photos and videos, music and documents.
Casey:
And it's not, I mean, I understand what those words mean.
Casey:
I understand that it's presumably, I'm supposed to just start chucking things in these buckets, but...
Casey:
It wasn't entirely clear to me what the long-term play is here, and I understand that a lot better.
Casey:
It seems to work well, like you said.
Casey:
I mean, I haven't really tried much with it, but there's plenty of stuff there, and it certainly is streaming things from the cloud, like you said, very quickly.
Casey:
So initial impressions by me were confusion, but happy confusion, if such a thing exists.
Casey:
Now that I've heard you talk about it, I'm very interested to play with the iOS app, which I had never bothered to download.
Casey:
Maybe that was half my problem.
Casey:
I'm very interested to play with that and see how it goes.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It wouldn't surprise me if this was in some ways just an acquisition play to see if Apple is feeling desperate to get away from web objects and hire a team that can solve this problem once and for all.
John:
Well, presumably like that it's a tech play, that it's not just that they've done, like I said, that they're doing exactly the same thing everyone else is doing.
John:
you just using HTTP connections with standard libraries and doing local file IO and just like doing that slightly better than, you know, 1% better than everyone else.
John:
It seems like the only reason this could ever be a startup is someone has some good ideas about how to abstract the file system and the network and,
John:
in a way that accounts for the modern world, that it is not, like, backward-looking, like, to some degree, like, even Dropboxes, that it's just a bunch of local files on disk, and this is other process that watches them and moves them up and down.
John:
When I think about, like, the thumbnails, like, surely it is not loading each of those thumbnails one at a time.
John:
Surely it is either chunking them up or streaming them down, or, like, it's not making a new connection for everyone, definitely, right?
John:
How is it dealing with, like, the size of the thumbnails and, like, just...
John:
and and how is it how is it keeping up with my scrolling and knowing which things it wants to to load and stuff like that and i mean right now like it's a beta whatever like i'm not putting anything nothing is only in up there because that would be ridiculous like my entire you know photo library they're really smart to say there's a one button press you launch a thing it's like do you want me to upload your photo library
John:
all right i mean you don't use photos so you didn't see that button or wouldn't be useful to you but for me i'm like fine go ahead because it's it's just reading from the photos library and it keeps in sync with it and everything too and same thing when i when i take photos with the regular apple camera app it like a million other apps like remember they did dropbox camera app or whatever we'll try to see when you take pictures with your photo app
John:
What I'm basically using it now is a toy to play with every once in a while to see what the performance is like and try to figure out what the heck they're actually doing behind the scenes.
John:
And yet another free backup for all of my photos.
John:
You know, the small photo library, not the big one.
John:
I thought about...
John:
signing up my wife for it and trying to put the big library up to the thing to see if it would choke on that because 10 000 is not that big of a challenge what about 60 or 70 000 now can you but and maybe i'll do this a torture test but i would never bring it only anything only and up there and you know business model i don't know it's all free and beta so who knows what they would charge for this stuff so it's still a big question mark pricing is a pretty big question mark though like that that matters a lot to how how many people will even bother trying to adopt it in the first place
Marco:
because photo libraries can be quite big and if once you start once you're talking about like storing all my stuff up there or all my documents or even many of my documents plus all my photos plus you know other kinds of media like that gets very big very quickly especially if you have any video shooting but their explanation and the people behind it make you think like obviously they would take that into account that their whole idea is that the old way of doing things
John:
The way that everybody else is doing them was sort of using 80s and 90s tech to solve like a problem that's really in the future for this future world where everybody has ubiquitous fast connections, which is, you know, getting closer every day that they are coming at it from that perspective.
John:
So, you know, they must have.
John:
smart solutions for not just the api and how to write applications into this back end but how the back end works how it's hosted how it's scaled how you know what the economics are how much does it cost for us to host x amount of data can we undercut everyone else's prices by using better technology because we can more efficiently store like i have again they don't tell you it's their secret you know whatever i have no idea what they're doing behind the scenes but
John:
All I can look at is the front end, and the front end seems to work more smoothly than every other front end I've tried, whether it be Dropbox or Microsoft's OneDrive thing or Google Drive.
John:
We've all tried all these different things.
John:
What was that one?
John:
BitCasa.
John:
There's been so many different services that are like this.
John:
And, you know, there are good ones.
John:
I use Dropbox all the time.
John:
Like they're not they're not bad.
John:
But this impressed me with just how sort of no nonsense and smooth it is and how I don't even know how they're doing it.
John:
How like how is it that I'm able to scroll through 10,000 photos and the thumbnails like they're not there instantly.
John:
There's little white squares initially, but they come in pretty fast.
John:
Whole screens full of thumbnails.
John:
I have no idea how it's doing that, but it's it's pretty impressive.
Marco:
Assuming that this actually becomes a thing and launches to the public with some kind of business model or something, would you... Obviously, they don't want to be your cloud backup service.
Marco:
They want to be your primary storage and possibly your only storage, therefore, because...
John:
is there even an easy way to like maintain a local copy of everything or do they really not want you to do that well that's what i'm getting at i don't know like maybe that's their long-term play obviously but right now they are perfectly willing to be omnivorous they will pull in content and say like you don't have to manually say oh i took some new photos with my phone like they every time you launch the app it will sync up any new photos you've taken anytime i add anything to my phone i'm just using photos i'm not using up there at this point but up there is every time i launch it is pulling all that stuff in so
John:
But it's a great sort of on ramp like they want to make it easiest for people to launch this app and say, we know you have your stuff elsewhere and probably you want to keep your stuff elsewhere and probably you're only going to deal with elsewhere.
John:
But we're here, too.
John:
And they would have to sort of get you into the flow by saying.
John:
uh we're cheaper than your other hosting we're more reliable than photos eventually become trustworthy i mean realistically speaking they'll probably be bought by somebody before any of this happens but because the tech does look impressive but you know i don't see any reason why they what you're getting at i think is like would you event would you ever like put your stuff in there
Marco:
Would you trust it as primary storage?
Marco:
Because they're trying to get rid of backups.
Marco:
I don't know that I could do that.
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
I mean, it's aspirational.
John:
Obviously, you can't get rid of backups because if a meteor hits your data center, I need my stuff.
John:
So we're always going to have my online backups and my time machine and my clone.
John:
And the question of can you have locally copies?
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
If I just keep using photos and I have...
John:
one of the macs set to always have local copies of the photos and i have 17 backups of that including online like that's the way i would continue to go but uh i could see for example not enabling the the thing that lets you not whatever it is icloud photo library that lets you see your entire library on your phone because it's too onerous or maybe and enabling it but never going to it like for example when someone says uh i like i like having access to all photo libraries someone asked a question like what you know what did one of your kids look like when he was three years old right
John:
I like being able to launch a thing on a phone and go to the year and say, you know, I have access to every single one of my pictures here.
John:
But it's slower to do that with iCloud Photo Library than it is to do that with up there.
John:
Just because it is.
John:
Like, I can go to the year, I can launch it faster, the thing will load faster, and, you know, like...
John:
that's that's a win for me if that takes over that role where i no longer go to photos to look at my photos i just go to up there because the same things are in both places and it has nothing to do with backups or whatever it's a long road from there to the aspirational goal of like
John:
Hey, we keep all your stuff.
John:
But I truly believe in that end state, not the end of backups, but maybe the end of backups for regular people, like where they can get it to the point where it's reliable and redundant enough that you won't be up.
John:
Because think about it now.
John:
You're obsessing with people like...
John:
have you ever backed up your phone have you enabled iCloud photo library if i run over your phone with the car or chuck it into the ocean did you just lose the pictures of your infant child who's now five years old because you've never emptied your phone before the whole problem of filling your phone with photos like all those concerns i would like to be addressed and go away i think android is better at addressing the now and apple's catching up with the iCloud photo library and up there is trying to say we're out we're way out here at the extreme and
John:
uh and where you guys want to be uh and uh i'm just looking at it as a competition between implementations really at this point and their implementation looks pretty good thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week linode fracture and harry's and we'll see you next week
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
I do love the Cloud to Butt plugin.
Marco:
That is quite good.
Casey:
It's magical.
Casey:
You spent, well, maybe you didn't spend any money this week, Marco, but you committed yourself to spending some money sometime soon.
Casey:
You want to tell us about that?
Marco:
I spent some.
Marco:
There's a deposit.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Yeah, so I ordered a Tesla, and you lost the bet.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I knew already that I lost the bet, but nobody else did.
Casey:
The bet was, and the winnings were just bragging rights, the bet was that Marco would absolutely get the performance version of whatever Tesla that he ended up buying.
Casey:
And that's because Marco doesn't typically know how to do halfway on anything.
Casey:
As it turns out, I lost the bet and you did not get a P90D or a P90 No-D or whatever it is.
Casey:
I forget the different permutations.
Casey:
What did you end up getting?
Casey:
Why don't you run through the setup with us?
Marco:
I got the 90D.
Marco:
So it is approximately M5 speed and maximum range available in a Tesla today.
Marco:
It's white because it's the only color that cars can be in.
Marco:
No, just kidding.
Marco:
It's red.
Marco:
This is going to be my first non-dark colored car ever, really, and my first non-black car in a decade at least.
Marco:
So red Tesla 90D is coming in late March when my lease is up.
Marco:
But I ordered it now to take advantage of some discounts they were running before the end of the year.
John:
What wheels did you get?
Marco:
The 19 Silver Cyclone wheels.
Marco:
I know in the pictures... So on red, you can argue that the dark colored wheels would probably look better.
Marco:
And in pictures, they do.
Marco:
First of all, I think up close...
Marco:
They look a little bit flat, like they almost look like painted plastic.
Marco:
I know they're not, but just like the finish on them is kind of like flat and a little bit dull.
Marco:
They also, because it is just like, you know, a thin color coating on top of a regular, I don't know, what are these made out of steel, aluminum?
Marco:
What are they usually made out of?
Marco:
What metal?
Casey:
It depends.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
So whatever metal it is, probably aluminum, the dark-colored wheels, any kind of curb rash, any wear, any scratch whatsoever on them, that bright-colored metal below it just shines right through.
Marco:
And you can see it from a mile away.
Marco:
And sure enough, whenever I'd be at a Tesla dealer looking at these things, there would often be customer cars parked in the lot, just getting serviced or people visiting to, I don't know, look at new Teslas or whatever.
Marco:
And every car I saw in person that was a customer-owned car that had dark wheels on it had very visible scratches on them.
John:
Those people just can't drive.
John:
I went past a black Model S today with the big dark-colored wheels at the supermarket.
John:
They're red brake calipers, too, I think.
Marco:
And there were no scratches on them.
Marco:
Yeah, if it has the red calipers, that is a P model.
Marco:
It was tempting to spend $20,000 extra just for red calipers, but I did not.
Marco:
It wasn't really tempting.
Casey:
Well, you get a lot more than red calipers, but point noted.
Marco:
Well, but honestly, so you get the red calipers and you get the faster rear engines.
Marco:
The D models have the two engines.
Marco:
The rear engine is faster.
Marco:
But those are actually the only two differences.
Marco:
Plus, you get less range.
Marco:
But the suspension is all the same.
Marco:
Everything else about the car is the same.
Marco:
I've confirmed this with multiple people from Tesla, but they always say the same thing.
Marco:
In my drive, anecdotally, it certainly seems that way.
Marco:
The only thing different is the engine, the red calipers, and you get the option for a spoiler on the back that I hate.
Casey:
So you got red, you got the 19-inch Silver Cyclone wheels.
Casey:
What other options?
Casey:
You said 90D.
Marco:
Yeah, 90D, black interior, sunroof.
Marco:
I got autopilot, range upgrade, premium interior, the big next-gen seats.
Marco:
I did not get the smart air suspension.
Marco:
I was going to, and I did some reading and did some research, and it sounds like the air suspension really does make the car feel more like a Lexus, like a cushier, softer ride.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I did not think that that was even what I wanted, let alone worth $2,500 extra on the purchase price, even though I'm leasing it.
Marco:
But still, I would pay probably half of that.
Marco:
So I didn't get smart air suspension because I want a more firm, sporty ride.
Marco:
And I did not get the ultra-high-fidelity sound because I did a back-to-back test of those in the showroom and could tell very little difference in the two sound systems.
Marco:
And neither of them sounded great to me.
Marco:
They both sounded, honestly, pretty mediocre.
Marco:
Um, so I figured I might as well not spend extra money on mediocrity.
Marco:
I did get the subzero weather package because I live in a place with real seasons and I did not get the rear facing seats because for the next three years that this lease will cover, uh, my wife and I decided that we would probably not be comfortable with our kid in those seats during this age period by enough to make it worth getting them for an extra $3,000.
John:
What did you get as the interior trim accent?
John:
You can get carbon fiber looking?
Marco:
That was actually a tough call.
Marco:
The carbon fiber looks decent, but kind of hurt my eyes.
Marco:
And Tiff's opinion here matters a lot because she, as the passenger usually while I'm driving, she sees the trim way more than I do because there's this big strip right in front of the passenger side.
Marco:
And in the driver's side, you don't really see much of it.
Marco:
Um, so she didn't care for the carbon fiber.
Marco:
So I, you know, that was fine.
Marco:
Um, the two woods, they just have like a, basically a glossy and a matte wood.
Marco:
I didn't like the look of the matte.
Marco:
Um, so I was basically deciding between the glossy wood and the piano black, um, the piano black.
Marco:
My current car has that.
Marco:
I know I like it.
Marco:
It is very nice.
Marco:
That being said, it shows fingerprints and scratches like crazy, but I decided ultimately I would rather have fingerprinted piano black trim because I just like it better.
Marco:
I would rather have that than perfect glossy wood trim.
Casey:
Are you stoked?
Marco:
I am, yeah.
Marco:
I'm actually looking forward to something new.
Marco:
I mentioned before, I've loved having the M5.
Marco:
It's been great.
Marco:
I do, however, miss all-wheel drive.
Marco:
Yes, I know they're adding it to the next model, but it isn't there now.
Marco:
I also mentioned earlier that I really want a quieter car.
Marco:
BMW does not currently sell a quieter car that has all-wheel drive, that has a transmission that I would tolerate.
Marco:
Except maybe the... Is 335X drive still available on stick?
Casey:
You know, I don't know.
Casey:
Well, it's a 340 now anyway, but I honestly don't know.
Casey:
I would think not.
Marco:
I think it might be.
Marco:
That would probably be the only option.
Marco:
The 5 Series is totally out because the 5 Series, you can't get a stick with all-wheel drive, if at all, anymore.
Marco:
And you can't get a DCT on any of the 5 Series.
Marco:
And I will not drive the Sport Auto.
Marco:
Yes, I've driven it.
Marco:
And no, it is not the same.
Marco:
so yeah you know the tesla is in some ways it's not as good as as the m5 and i'm not expecting it to match it in like the luxury feel features um like the the bmw interior is more luxurious feeling no question um i'm very much going to miss the heads-up display uh and the top-down parking camera that thing is the best uh real-time follow-up you can get a 340i x drive with a manual transmission transmission
Marco:
Okay, so that is the only other car BMW makes that I would consider getting right now out of the new lineup.
Marco:
But that also, I really don't like the F30 3 Series, honestly.
Marco:
I don't like it.
Marco:
I don't like the steering system.
Marco:
I don't really care for the way it looks.
Marco:
And I think the interior has actually gotten lower quality in certain ways than the previous 3 Series.
Marco:
And the lack of the all button on the climate control just kills me.
Marco:
yeah that is really insane i don't know why you're not shopping mercedes at this point you never talk neither one of you ever talk about mercedes but like marco just bought a tesla he's now safely within the mercedes uh you know market i i did i on a recent trip i actually i rented a mercedes because i i was on a trip about a year ago and i had to rent a car and i rented a uh is it the e-class their version of the five series the middle one yeah
Marco:
Yeah, so I rented an E something something.
Marco:
It was like the V6, roughly 300 horsepower, like basically their version of the 535.
Marco:
Well, I wouldn't say that, but yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, so I rented that and I drove it for a few days.
Marco:
And it was a really nice driving car, but definitely not for me overall.
Marco:
I think, first of all, I don't care for Mercedes' designs very much.
Marco:
I think they're a little bit dated for me.
Casey:
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
When you say that, you mean exterior design?
Marco:
Yes, absolutely.
Casey:
Oh, see, I think they've gotten pretty lately.
Casey:
Although that being said, the brand brand brand new ones are very bubbly.
Casey:
And I'm not as into that.
Casey:
But up until about this year, the year prior, there was like a five year stretch where they went from really, really, really boring to actually very pretty.
Casey:
But for me, it's a nonstarter because they don't believe in three pedals.
John:
i know but like but he doesn't have three pedals anymore anyway and he hasn't he hasn't for two cars i understand like but i feel like a mercedes s-class is like when you come back from your electric hangover you should you should you should look at the s-class because by then the s-class might be electric it might be i don't know but i also i i really don't care for the mercedes um media system well those change every year no they don't not these not mercedes well every five years whatever but yeah no they're all they're all terrible i understand
Marco:
I'm not saying I'm going to be Tesla forever.
Marco:
I'm saying I'm going to be Tesla for the next three years.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons I lease cars.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to trying something new, to trying electric, to it being truly different.
Marco:
Honestly, as I said when I drove them, to it really feeling modern, really feeling like today.
Marco:
In three years when I have to choose my next vehicle, whether I get another Tesla or something else...
Marco:
by that time, there will probably be more all-electric options or more compelling electric options from the other luxury brands.
Marco:
Right now, there really isn't much.
John:
There will definitely be, yeah.
John:
They've all got the Tesla fighters in the works.
Marco:
Yeah, like that Porsche concept looks really nice, honestly.
Marco:
I don't know if that would pan out into something, and God knows how much it will cost if it does, but it does look really nice, on paper at least.
Marco:
We'll see what happens with Mercedes and BMW and Audi and even Acura.
Marco:
Anybody else, we'll see what happens in their electric department.
Marco:
Right now, as I have to make a decision right now, Tesla is by far my favorite option of what's available right now.
Casey:
Well, I'm excited for you.
Casey:
This should be really awesome.
Casey:
It's going to be sad to not have you personally in the BMW family anymore, but at least your family will still be a BMW family.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
I'm sure at some point we'll be back, to be honest.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There is a lot about the way BMW does things that I do prefer.
Marco:
I do prefer not having a giant tuck screen, I think.
Marco:
Again, we'll see what happens when I get it.
Marco:
But I do think I'm going to prefer still having hardware knobs to giant tuck screens if given the choice.
Marco:
I do certainly like a heads-up display.
Marco:
And I do like the BMW quality interior that's in the 5 Series.
Marco:
So maybe eventually there will be an all-electric 5 Series that will be really compelling.
Marco:
That will be nice to me.
Marco:
Because that will eliminate the problem I have with the regular 5 Series of having a transmission I hate.
Marco:
If they can move to not having a transmission, that does solve the problem.
Marco:
So yeah, we'll see what happens.
John:
Did you ask the Tesla people if the Model S is designed for short trips?
Ha ha ha ha!
John:
will this can this get egg salad or will it is it not designed for that chicken salad john sorry chicken salad i'm thinking with my stomach i prefer egg salad why what yeah this is worse than the windows thing what what i mean i'm not against chicken salad i like chicken salad but my go-to was i would get a cinnamon raisin bagel with egg salad on it wrapped up in wax paper and then cut in half through the wax paper
Marco:
as you know as is proper okay there are so many things wrong with this could occur first of all a cinnamon raisin bagel does not belong with any of the salads that is a that is a that is an illegal combination you're wrong you are so wrong about that you don't know what you're missing
Marco:
John, you're out of your mind.
Marco:
Second of all, egg salad only belongs on bread, not bagels, because it is such a soft filling that you bite into a bagel and it squeezes out.
John:
No, I understand the difficulties.
John:
The magic is getting that right.
John:
it seems like it shouldn't work it seems like it should be a disaster that you would bite down and that all it would do is cause the bagel to choose the egg salad shooting out the side and you would just be left with an empty bagel but no it can be done we have the technology oh my god the wax paper is key you know you know the wax paper i don't know if your local delis do that but you know the wax paper thing it holds an enduring cutting basically
John:
Right.
John:
But they wrap it really tightly and hold it in during cutting and you can move the wax paper back and eat it and it won't come shooting out the sides.
John:
And if the bagel is fresh and it's not like a stale, big, hard brick type thing, you can actually bite it and not lose all of your egg salad.
John:
It's a delicate balance, I understand.
John:
I haven't had a good one of those, I don't know, in how many decades.
John:
Ever?
John:
Because it's a terrible concept?
John:
Agreed.
John:
It's a great concept.
John:
And you don't know, here's a little advanced technique for you if you want to make a bagel sandwich at home.
John:
For example, say you want to have peanut butter and jelly on a toasted bagel, which is fabulous, by the way.
Marco:
No, I was about to say, because in high school I worked at a bagel shop, and it was always a disaster whenever somebody would order peanut butter and jelly on a bagel because that squeezes out like crazy.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
So I'm going to give you some tips here.
John:
Peanut butter and jelly on a toasted bagel at home.
John:
How can you possibly make that work?
John:
It seems like it shouldn't work at all, right?
John:
You don't.
John:
no no you do we have we have ways all right so you toast the bagel and then one half of it you sort of dig a trench for the jelly to go in you don't pull out all the insides leaving just a shell but you dig a trench then you put the jelly in the trench the peanut butter is that legal the peanut the peanut butter will stay on its own for the most part then you assemble it you can eat that sandwich nothing will squirt out the sides
John:
If assembled correctly, nothing will squirt out the size, and what you have is a toasted peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwich.
John:
The things I do with bagels, I understand.
John:
These are advanced techniques.
John:
Advanced?
John:
I'm not sure that counts, first of all.
John:
Oh, it counts.
John:
It counts.
John:
You can do that with tuna as well.
John:
When I put tuna on a bagel, it's key to hollow out some part of it.
John:
And you eat the part that you take out.
John:
It's not like you're just throwing it away.
John:
The trick is not take so much out of it that you're just basically left with just a crust, right?
John:
You have to take out just the right amount.
Marco:
well tuna has enough you know tuna is very similar to chicken salad and texture like it has enough strength internally to tolerate you bagel usage but you can get more you can get more in there anyway you don't always have to do with tuna you're right it can hold together more like chicken salad i like tuna salad and i like bagels and i like bagels with tuna or chicken salad on them at no point have i ever had a bagel with tuna salad or chicken salad and thought i need to find ways to shove more of it in here oh well i i've thought that
John:
Because you can fit a lot in the regular way.
John:
Yeah, it really depends on how stiff your mixture is, you know.
John:
This is the worst.
John:
John.
John:
Anyway, these are all good things and I'm getting hungry even thinking about them.
John:
You're so wrong.
Casey:
You're so wrong.
John:
What am I wrong about?
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
These are all delicious things.
John:
These are all delicious things that you can make in your own home.
Marco:
These are terrible.
Marco:
They're terrible things.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Yeah, everything you've just said has been wrong.
John:
yeah i concur first of all i'm not gonna take any any input about what's proper way to eat uh bagels from uh someone who lives in virginia second of all i'm also not going to take that input from somebody who just recently moved to new york oh which one of us is in new york right now oh recently moved to new york yeah like eight years ago did not grow up there now what oh i know it's i already got egg salad i i'm just i'm so i can't get past are you against egg salad is this an some anti-egg salad egg salad is delicious
Marco:
In general, I think I am against it.
Marco:
And I've eaten a lot of egg salad in my life.
Marco:
Oh, now the truth comes out.
John:
Against egg salad.
John:
Mark Arment.
John:
Against egg salad.
John:
Bad for America.
Marco:
This is why I can't blog anymore.
John:
That's right.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
You write your blog against egg salad.
John:
You'll see what happens.
Marco:
No, see, to me, egg salad is not worth it when you have other options that are similar to it.
Marco:
So if all you have in a store is egg salad, fine, I'll eat egg salad.
Marco:
But if right next to it is tuna salad and chicken salad, those are both way better.
Marco:
So I can't think of any context in which I would choose egg salad if chicken salad or tuna salad or cream cheese or any other sandwich topping were available.
Marco:
Oh, no.
John:
I mean, I like all of those things.
John:
Those are all good.
John:
I feel like you just have to mix it up.
John:
You don't have the same thing every day.
John:
I mean, maybe your place makes better chicken salad than they make egg salad, but a good egg salad.
John:
You cannot turn your nose up with that.
Marco:
I have never had egg salad that was good enough to overcome decent chicken salad.
Marco:
yeah like i've had i've had egg salad where i've tasted like oh yeah this is fine but that's like the most i've ever thought about egg salad is it's fine in other forms like i love deviled eggs which are very similar really you know deviled eggs have a lot of similarities in taste and ingredients to egg salad just in a different shape and preparation uh but you know i i love eggs in other forms just egg salad is ah it's just so mediocre compared to the other options that it's usually next to it's good stuff
John:
If you like eggs, it's good stuff.
Marco:
Egg salad is the sesame bagel of the salad.
John:
Oh, you're going to come out against sesame bagels now?
John:
Forget it.
John:
Forget it.
John:
sesame bagels what do you have against sesame bagels they are one of the greatest bagels what i have against them is similar to what i have against egg salad it's not worth it when you have better options nearby so it's like a sesame bagel is fine i've had many sesame bagels in my life they're fine it's chocolate cake for every meal why would you have anything else if you're gonna have chocolate cake for every meal you gotta have this sesame john john you've been out of new york far too long you've lost touch
John:
it's over no i am the only one here who is in touch we've got you got you who's in virginia and we've got him who's coming from the world outside of bagels who was only recently being introduced and he's trying to find his way which one of us goes to a bagel shop every day in new york oh that's right i i'm saying like you're you're coming from ohio or wherever just trying to figure out this crazy new world and making it up as you go along i'm telling you i'm telling you the way it is
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Why would you... Yeah, go get a sesame bagel with egg salad.
Marco:
Against sesame bagels and against egg salad.
Marco:
This is not a position you want to stake out.
Marco:
Compare that to an everything bagel with chicken salad, which is right next to those.
John:
So you can't... That's the whole thing.
John:
You're going to have everything on it.
John:
You're always going to have it on everything.
John:
Not that everything bagels are great, right?
John:
But the whole idea that every single time you have it, you have the most, you know, the best topping, the bagel with the most stuff on it.
John:
It's like sometimes you got to have...
John:
You know, there's a certain place for the poppy seed bagel, the sesame seed bagel.
John:
Sometimes you can have the plain bagel.
John:
Why would anyone ever have a plain bagel?
John:
People do.
John:
It happens.
John:
Sometimes that's the right combination.
John:
oh my god oh my god you know you didn't i thought i thought you turned around by not getting the really expensive tesla but you're still getting the everything bagel only with chicken salad because you can't bring yourself to have anything that you consider lesser but they're not lesser they're just different no i mean i i have different bagel orders like i love a toasted bagel with butter and if you're gonna have a toasted bagel with butter everything is a good choice but so is rye or pumpernick why would you have rye if you could have everything
Marco:
doesn't make any sense anyway because those things are actually good sesame seed bagels are good like they like i would say a proper a proper toasted rye bagel with butter is just as good as a toasted everything bagel with butter but a sesame bagel is like you have the plain dough so the dough just tastes like any other plain dough flavored bagel and the topping is included in everything and itself has almost no taste it's got everything it's already there
John:
Let's try to find some common ground here.
John:
Caraway seeds and everything bagels, yes or no?
John:
No, what?
John:
All right, good.
John:
Just making sure that some people want that.
Marco:
No, everything bagels require five things.
Marco:
Sesame, poppy, garlic, onion, and salt.
Marco:
If it's missing any of those things, don't leave out the salt, Midwestern people.
Marco:
If it's missing any of those things, it is not a proper everything bagel.
Marco:
some people like the caraway seeds i gotta say no to that also some people put sunflower seeds on them which is illegal no forget about this california people just forget they shove an avocado on there i just i can't handle this conversation john you're so out of touch it's just it's it defies description i'm not out of touch i'm the only one who's in touch i'm the only one with authentic bagel experience you up there in connecticut have got nothing and marco is a tourist
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
Bagel-eating world.
Marco:
Email John this week and tell you which of us is variety.
John:
There's no bagel-eating world.
John:
It's not a democracy.
John:
It's the people who live in the New York metro area and everybody else.
John:
And everyone else is wrong, and we are right.
Casey:
Wait, wait.
Casey:
You don't live in the New York metro area.
John:
I did.
John:
I lived there.
John:
I'm from there.
John:
It will never leave me.
John:
You can take the whatever out of New York, you know, complete the saying yourself.
John:
Yeah, but you left it, and I'm here.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
you're upstate my god i can't i can't handle this i can't it's a christmas miracle oh god i hate you john so much right now you're so wrong this is terrible this really is worse than the like 90 windows thing
John:
i don't know i know i can't believe you come out against sesame bagels seriously there's gonna be protesters outside your house a sesame bagel with egg salad it's terrible it's so boring no i don't i have sesame i was not see i i have certain it's like pairing you know pairing wine with meals no it's not you know that that's that skill oh yes it is yes that's where you're wrong you don't even understand you don't even know this is a skill that you can have let alone have the skill it's like pairing lightly flavored water pairing the bagel type with the thing you put on it is a skill
John:
I agree.
John:
I just don't think you have it.
John:
Well, your answer is everything goes on an everything bagel.
Casey:
Not necessarily.
Casey:
I will fix this.
Casey:
Marco, do you or do you not put lox on a bagel?
Marco:
Well, I don't like fish and I don't like lox.
Casey:
You're all right.
Marco:
But I recognize that many people love putting lox on bagels.
Marco:
And were I to choose a bagel for lox, everything would be pretty high on the list.
Marco:
Because I know people like that kind of salty garlicky onion flavor with the lox.
Marco:
I know it's a very common combination.
Casey:
John, would you do lox on a bagel?
Marco:
I also don't eat fish.
Marco:
You know that.
Marco:
Finally, we agree.
Marco:
You too.
Marco:
So ignorant.
Marco:
It's not ignorance.
Marco:
We just don't like fish.
Marco:
That's the way it is.
Marco:
But see, I've tried it.
Marco:
I know what I'm missing.
Marco:
Every time I say I don't like fish, for years, Tiff would be like, you just have to have good fish.
Marco:
Everyone would say, oh, you have to have good fish.
Marco:
Same thing, I don't like sushi either.
Marco:
There's some overlap there.
Marco:
And everyone's like, oh, you haven't had good sushi.
Marco:
And eventually, somebody brings me to a place where they say, okay, this is good X thing I don't like.
Marco:
And I try it, and I give it an honest shot, and I hardly ever end up liking it.
Marco:
But I can at least say that, okay, I at least know what I'm missing now, and I have confirmed that I honestly don't like this.
Marco:
But I've had the good thing.
Marco:
Maybe I can see why you like it, you know, but I can't see why anybody would ever order a sesame bagel for anything.
John:
That's why I try Marco's coffee when I'm there.
Yeah.
Marco:
just in case it seems like if you were going to get a sesame bagel you might as well just get plain or if you if you want if you want flavor and stuff you get an everything can all agree on sesame only you are agreeing on sesame me and the rest of the new york metro area who's not upstate
John:
The sesame bagel, that's like the Dell computer.
John:
Sesame bagel is one of my favorite kind of bagels.
John:
I like them all.
Marco:
What do you put on it?
Marco:
So in your expert bagel pairing experience.
John:
Things that pair well with sesame.
John:
Sesame bagel with butter on it, toasted, is very nice.
John:
Sesame with tuna, very nice.
John:
If I had to get chicken salad at your deli, I would probably go with sesame.
Marco:
Oh, that would be an insult.
Marco:
No, it wouldn't.