Waiting for the Bla-Bloop
John:
uh i like the fact that every time i start a call i have to click the button to say that i want to see the chat even though every single time i start a call i do it yeah of all of all the work they've put into skype they've never decided to make that persistent yeah god forbid an application remember anything that you do to it it's born anew every launch happy birthday
Casey:
We have important things to talk about, so we should dive right in.
Casey:
How's the Tesla?
Marco:
Not that different from my opinion of it last week.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
It's just amazing.
Marco:
I really am appreciating it more and more every day, and I already appreciate it quite a bit, so that's saying a lot.
Marco:
I'm very happy with the decision I made to go with it.
Marco:
I'm also very happy with the one I chose to get, not getting the faster one with less range for a lot more money.
Marco:
I'm just very happy with it.
Casey:
Now tell me about, you tweeted earlier today as we record that you put like this little teeny tiny USB stick.
Casey:
What is this all about?
Casey:
Is this to put like three fish songs?
Casey:
Because it's like a 30 gig stick, right?
Casey:
So that's like three or four fish songs.
Marco:
It's 128 gig sticks.
Marco:
So it's six fish songs.
Marco:
Ah, fair enough.
Marco:
I don't actually need 128 gigs of storage in my car, but it was like 10 bucks more than the one I needed.
Marco:
So it's like, okay, just in case.
Marco:
I'm sure I will have some reason to use 128 gig USB stick.
Marco:
It was like 40 bucks.
Marco:
Is that all they are now?
Marco:
Good grief.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So this is the first USB stick I've ever purchased.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
I've never really used them.
Marco:
And I've accumulated enough little ones from freebies from things here and there over the last decade that if I ever needed one for the one time every two years I might actually need one, I would just use one of those.
Marco:
But none of them were big enough.
Marco:
And if you wait until 2016 to buy a USB stick...
Marco:
usb sticks are really good and are almost free i want something very very small because this is in the it's in the center console of the car it's like in the passenger compartment so it's visible and it protrudes from from a little port so i want it to be as small as possible you know there was basically like this one and a sandisk one and the reviews of the sandisk one all said that it overheated constantly and was and like ran weirdly hot all the time and and the samsung one everyone said nope works great doesn't overheat like that weird sandisk one
Marco:
So I went with that.
Marco:
And the only downside of it, it's incredibly fast.
Marco:
It's USB 3 and it has really high quality flash in there because Samsung is really good at flash.
Marco:
I also have a Samsung external flash drive just in a two and a half inch enclosure for my computer.
Marco:
Because they make 2GB SSDs now for like $600.
Marco:
And granted, $600 is a lot of money.
Marco:
And 2GB is not an earth-shattering amount of space in 2016.
Marco:
However, a 2GB SSD that exists at all, let alone is an affordable price, is quite something.
Marco:
So I'm very happy with that because it is totally silent and very, very fast.
Marco:
And so I store all my media on there anyway.
Marco:
So this little Samsung stick, the only flaw in it is that it has this giant Samsung logo written on the part of it that sticks out.
Marco:
So I just sanded it off with some light sandpaper in about five minutes that I found in my garage.
Marco:
And it's great.
Marco:
So now it's a nice blank USB drive that is perfect.
Marco:
Turns out USB sticks are kind of useful sometimes.
Marco:
So anyway, the reason it's there in my car is because the car has the ability to, like many modern car stereos, to browse folders of MP3 files that you put on USB storage media.
Marco:
And I don't think I have to double check, but I was pretty sure that it didn't have the ability to use like the iPod music browsing interface from the iPhone when that was plugged in.
Marco:
So which is fine because I actually prefer like having folders that I can organize things in because I don't take my entire collection in the car because most of my collection doesn't matter in the car.
Marco:
uh so it's nice to kind of be able to organize it into folders and have actual like subfolders like so i have a folder for fish 2015 and then in that is like each 2015 tour and i can organize it how i want which is kind of different from what you get in like a typical ipod thing and it plays the songs in order
Marco:
which, thank God, it's amazing.
Marco:
I don't know who designed whatever system many other car manufacturers and head unit manufacturers use where whatever you insert, it plays the songs alphabetically by song title.
Marco:
Whoever wants to hear things alphabetically by song title, there are two orders that you're allowed to play things in.
Marco:
Either the order that they are on the album or shuffle.
Marco:
Nobody ever wants any other order.
Casey:
Yeah, see, I don't remember how much music I have in my car.
Casey:
I only have about 12 gigs that's available to me, I believe.
Casey:
But I almost exclusively listen to stuff on my car.
Casey:
And even though the Bluetooth stack is pretty good on my car, I find it just easier to navigate via iDrive.
Casey:
And so with that in mind, why do you not use Bluetooth on the Tesla?
Casey:
I would think, not having played with it, that...
Casey:
that being able to manipulate things on the Tesla would be a lot easier because you have that whole big display there.
Casey:
But I guess if all you really have available to you via Bluetooth is like skip forward, skip back, play, pause, maybe it's not really any different than any other car.
Marco:
You're right that having the big display there actually does make it much more useful when you're doing things like navigating a USB stick full of folders and stuff.
Marco:
So that is awesome on there.
Marco:
You are also right that Bluetooth is very limited in its interaction.
Marco:
And making this problem worse, Tesla's Bluetooth implementation isn't particularly great.
Marco:
It's an okay one.
Marco:
But there's a couple of shortcomings.
Marco:
The biggest one to me is that it doesn't display the time elapsed or remaining.
Marco:
Which is really annoying for podcasts.
Marco:
More humorously, there is some method to transfer album art.
Marco:
And many Bluetooth stereos will show album art as transferred from that.
Marco:
But I think that's actually an Apple extension to the standard or something.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
Tesla doesn't support the album art extension or whatever displays album art over Bluetooth.
Marco:
So instead, they show you the album art from some kind of central album art database of a fuzzy match of whatever title is being supplied by the device.
Marco:
So it tries to be smart, but then you end up with completely nonsensical, random, often slightly risque album art when you're listening to Back to Work.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
It makes no sense.
Marco:
The other day, I was back to work, and it was showing some girl in a bikini on some album.
Marco:
I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
Marco:
Then I'm driving around.
Marco:
I'm in my son's high school or preschool parking lot, and there's this bikini girl showing on my dashboard.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, my God.
Marco:
I've got to listen to something else.
Marco:
that's not gonna work so yeah that is very strange um i i hope tesla improves that uh shortly i i'm not i'm not you know keeping my hopes up here because i know that chances are this will just be how this car is for most of the time i have it because nobody cares about this area of the software except me but yeah well you've said you never work at apple would you work at tesla
Marco:
I mean, I don't really want to move to California for a job.
Marco:
However, I was thinking recently, would I be interested in working for Tesla?
Marco:
And I think it would be actually potentially very interesting.
Marco:
It would certainly give me pause.
Marco:
I would certainly consider it.
Marco:
Not to work on any of the fancy electrical stuff because I'm not qualified and also don't care.
Marco:
But in order to work on the in-dash software, the touchscreen software, the interface, the media stuff, maybe.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
What if you had to leave the house?
John:
Change the answer a little bit?
John:
Maybe a little.
John:
Could I bring hops?
John:
No.
Hmm.
John:
Like a job where you get up and you get in your Tesla and you drive to the office and you do your work there and then you drive back home and you have to do it Monday through Friday.
John:
And when you take vacation, you have to tell them and you get a certain number of those a year.
John:
I'm reminding you what a job is.
John:
If I can wear my slippers and if I can take naps at the office, then yes.
John:
uh slippers i don't know i think although we have some people at work who wear socks and some people work who are barefoot but uh i feel like that is not the norm do you ever rock either of those looks john no are you kidding like i mean if you've been in the if anyone has ever been in an office late in new england you see the the mice that come out
John:
like i mean you just you're just there late you look over you're like oh there's a mouse and they just hop across the carpet and then you think about all the people walking around all day with socks or bare feet in this office like nope just a big nope there
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Anonymous wrote in again.
Casey:
Anonymous does that from time to time.
Casey:
And they cleared something up sort of about Apple and renewable energy.
Casey:
And I was wondering, and I think a lot of people were wondering, are they really using renewable energy or are they just like doing an offset sort of thing?
Casey:
So Anonymous wrote...
Casey:
Apple is engaging in agreements for 15 to 25 years of power from renewable facilities by contracting with a wind or solar developer and agreeing to a fixed price of power over the term.
Casey:
So Apple doesn't physically use this power.
Casey:
Instead, they agree to pay the wind or solar operator the fixed price per megawatt hour of energy generated by the farm.
Casey:
The operator then sells the actual power into the local market or utility service area where the facility is located.
Casey:
And I don't know, John, do you want to kind of distill this whole economic bit after here?
John:
I believe this anonymous person was somebody who works for some alternative energy or works in the alternative energy industry.
John:
And I don't think they were going from any firsthand knowledge of contracts, but just like last time we talked about solar and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think some people have a vision in their mind of Apple building solar farms and connecting a big wire from those solar farms to their facilities, which may be a thing that happens in certain circumstances, depending on the geography and the available existing alternative energy sources.
John:
And then other people are imagining...
John:
Oh, all Apple is doing is buying offsets from some distant land and just saying, we'll pay you for that energy.
John:
And that offsets the energy we're taking from our local power provider.
John:
And then you give that energy to the people who live near the existing solar wind farm.
John:
And I imagine they do all those things.
John:
And this feedback had more detail in terms of.
John:
The specifics of the agreement of not just that they're paying for energy, you know, elsewhere because like there's a, you know, solar power facility miles and miles away and they're not going to like run a wire from that to them, you know, but that there is not even that they enter these contracts where they say we'll pay you a certain amount.
John:
every month for you know for each megawatt hour of energy and it's kind of like a bet between the alternative energy provider and apple because if it turns out that the price to generate that energy was lower than what apple agreed to pay um
John:
then that's good because the the you know the solar operator says we only had to pay you know two cents per megawatt hour and you're buying it from us for for a dollar per megawatt hour we get to keep the difference and the reverse is true too if it costs the solar energy provider oh it turns out this month it costs us 10 bucks per megawatt hour and apple agreed to pay us one dollar we just have to eat that nine dollars per megawatt hour so
John:
The key financial deal here, because this comes in when I was talking about how Apple can do this because they have all this money to burn, is that in a deal of this kind, there's no upfront payment for the power.
John:
If the facility already exists, all Apple has to do is enter into a contract with them and have this agreed upon price in this particular arrangement.
John:
I think, what is it called?
John:
A contract for differences, it's called.
John:
So you don't necessarily even have to have a lot of capital if you can enter into one of these agreements.
John:
And then it's just a matter of,
John:
striking a good deal based on what you think it will actually cost over the long term to generate this power from this particular facility.
John:
So anyway, the world is weird.
John:
And that is a detail that's not particularly important.
John:
It's not as if Apple's being disingenuous because buying offsets or entering into these agreements or
John:
paying for someone who lives near a solar facility to get that energy from the solar facility while you get it from the coal fire plant like it's all it all comes out in the wash we're all on the same planet it's all the same atmosphere all the same co2 and if apple didn't do this and didn't pay for these renewables no matter who is actually getting those specific electrons i wouldn't make a difference what you're looking for is total you know total co2 output uh of the planet and not you know well whether it's like right next to you or right next to someone else anyway i thought it was interesting
Casey:
All right, so have all of us switched to Purple Safari?
Casey:
I am using it on my work computer.
Casey:
I just tonight installed it on my iMac, but haven't started using it yet.
Casey:
I should note, actually, as I forgot about this follow-up, the beta of 1Password for sure.
Casey:
And at this point, they might have released a new non-beta version.
Casey:
But anyway, the beta of 1Password supports the new Purple Safari.
Casey:
So if you are having the same woes that I was, you can run the beta.
Casey:
Additionally, there's a switch in preferences that a couple of people wrote in to tell me about.
Casey:
And forgive me because I don't have either your names or the preference in front of me.
Casey:
But even on the regular version somewhere in like the advanced preferences where they have a little Yoda or the little Jedi looking person on the right hand side or the robot or not.
Casey:
There's a switch that says you can override the security checks on the browser.
Casey:
But anyway, we're not here to talk about one password.
Casey:
We're here to talk about Purple Safari.
Casey:
So have you guys been using it?
John:
I've switched everywhere.
John:
And last week I was worried that switching that I have to somehow disable my regular Safari or it would like get launched by like an Apple event somewhere or, you know, whatever.
John:
But after using it both at home and at work for a week, my fears were unfounded.
John:
You switch the default browser in the Safari preference panes for either version of Safari.
John:
You know, pull the other one off your dock and it's purple Safari all the way from there and it works fine.
John:
The only annoyance I found is that it, unlike Chrome, which will like sink your extensions everywhere, I had to sort of reinstall all my Safari extensions and a lot of them I had to kind of track down and find the original websites where I mean, I could have just dug them out of the folder, but I was trying to, you know.
John:
it was a good time to just get them from the web again or go through the you know maybe get the the later version if i had a bad update url but anyway i had to reinstall my extensions rearrange all my icons on my toolbar re-import the options like i have the safari keyword extension lets you type stuff in the address bar and do searches i had to export those from safari and import them but anyway once i got everything set up
John:
I'm all purple Safari now, and I think I'll just stay this way unless I have some compelling reason to switch back, like purple Safari suddenly starts crashing.
John:
But so far, so good.
John:
I recommend people trying it out if you're interested in maybe having a little bit faster Safari or if you're interested in any of the many new web technologies that are introduced in it, like if you're a web developer and want to try them out.
Casey:
Yeah, I did feel like it was faster, although that very well could be a placebo effect.
Casey:
But I remember thinking to myself, wow, this feels fast.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
But do you feel like it's been quicker for you as well?
John:
Purple is faster.
John:
Everyone knows that.
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
I don't know what that reference was, if it was one.
Casey:
Anyway, so there's been a pretty considerable kerfuffle going across the Internet over the last couple of days about TextExpander 6.
Casey:
TextExpander is an app that have they sponsored us in the past?
Casey:
I believe they have.
Marco:
They sponsor so much stuff.
Marco:
I think I'm pretty sure like I mean, I think PDFPen sponsored my site a while back, which is also Smile.
Marco:
So at any rate, they've probably sponsored our stuff.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So TextExpander 6 is new and it is moving to a subscription model.
Casey:
And it previously was somewhere between like 10 and 20 bucks, depending on the platform, I believe.
Casey:
And they tended to do an update about once a year from what I gather.
Casey:
I am actually not a TextExpander user, but that's the general gist of what I've understood.
Casey:
And they've announced that, hey, they're going to switch to subscription pricing.
Casey:
It's about 50 bucks a year, give or take.
Casey:
And you can get sync through their own servers, kind of like what 1Password is doing now with 1Password for teams and 1Password for families and actually day one as well.
Casey:
So you can sync via their servers and you can have collaborations or you can have a shared platform.
Casey:
text expander snippets across teams if that's something that you're interested in but by the way we are not supporting Dropbox based sync anymore basically it's either use the old version until it doesn't work anymore or give us money and we'll give you the new hotness
Casey:
And a lot of people are flustered.
Casey:
And we'll put a link to MJ Sai's blog, which, as always, is a really good summary.
Casey:
This is one of the longer ones I've seen, actually, but a really good summary.
Casey:
And it kind of goes through a lot of different reactions.
Casey:
And I think the general summary is those who are developers or no developers completely understand it and...
Casey:
And are probably willing to pay for it.
Casey:
But those who are just users or can kind of put on their user hat, it's a tough sell.
Casey:
Because unlike 1Password, they're kind of taking something away.
Casey:
1Password will continue to let you use Dropbox, at least for now.
Casey:
And it seems that Smile's taking away that option for any future versions.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't really have a lot to say about this because, like I said, I'm not a TextExpander user, but it's certainly a tough thing because how do you make money in the App Store these days?
Casey:
I mean, it's not easy, is it, Marco?
Marco:
No, it's really not.
Marco:
I mean, you know, my view on this is...
Marco:
certainly colored by my own experiences in the app store.
Marco:
And I have some distance from it because while I did purchase the most recent version of TechSpender before this, when I was thinking I could actually answer support emails, I don't currently use it because it turns out I can't answer support emails.
Marco:
So I'm not an active user of it.
Marco:
So I'm not really invested in it either way.
Marco:
And at the same time, I also now sell an app with subscription pricing, sort of.
Marco:
I see why a lot of people are mad about this.
Marco:
What I've seen from my own experience is that people get mad when they sense that you're like double dipping or unfairly charging in whatever their view is of unfair.
Marco:
Or if you charge them or if you ask for money or if you put up barriers in a way that they are not accustomed to that breaks their expectations of like, I've never had to pay this way before or I've never had to pay for this thing before or I thought I already owned this thing outright.
Marco:
And this is all very, very tricky these days because the reality is people's expectations of software where you buy it and then you can use it for a while until maybe there's an upgrade a few years down the road and then you buy the upgrade, maybe at a discount.
Marco:
People's expectations of that kind of software is that you pay once and then you have it.
Marco:
And at the same time, though...
Marco:
They also expect updates to it.
Marco:
They expect you to be fixing bugs, to be providing compatibility for new versions of the OS, and possibly even adding features all within that same initial price they paid.
Marco:
Somewhere along the line, that doesn't work.
Marco:
The people are thinking of the benefits of the software and the responsibility of the software makers as a service that is constantly provided over time for their one initial purchase price.
Marco:
But of course, they get really mad if you want them to pay on a subscription basis for what they're really getting, which is subscription benefits.
Marco:
It's kind of hard to not do that in some way or another if you're the software vendor.
Marco:
You are having ongoing costs.
Marco:
You're having costs as a service.
Marco:
Whether you're running servers or not, it's like you're having costs of just ongoing maintenance of this app and advancing it, moving it forward, keeping it working, improving it, etc.
Marco:
So there is this disconnect between what people are willing to pay for, which is they want to pay once and own it forever, but also that if you don't give them constant updates, they will hate you even more for that.
Marco:
And they certainly don't want you to go out of business.
Marco:
They really hate when you do that or when you pull a product.
Marco:
They really hate that.
Marco:
So that's worse.
Marco:
So they want you to be there and to be providing updates on a regular basis and to fix any bugs that crop up and to improve the product and to make it work whenever there's a new OS.
Marco:
They want that, but they don't want to pay more than that one time up front.
Marco:
So obviously something has to give here.
Marco:
So I don't begrudge the idea of subscription pricing.
Marco:
I do think, however, that this particular case, I don't think they did a very good job with it.
Marco:
And I'm not too close to it.
Marco:
So maybe I'm wrong.
Marco:
But I think the reaction of a lot of their customers that I've been hearing about from today that might back it up that I'm right is
Marco:
What TextExpander has done is they've transformed from a... What was the price of the app?
Marco:
Like $35?
Marco:
Something like that?
Casey:
I don't know, to be honest.
Casey:
I thought it was closer to $20 originally, but I very well could have that wrong.
Marco:
Whatever it is.
Marco:
I think it's somewhere in that range.
Marco:
It has transformed from that into a required $5 a month service.
Marco:
So it's a pretty substantial price increase.
Marco:
as well as the justification for this service being something... They justify it by saying, oh, well, now you can share your snippets with coworkers or family or whatever else.
Marco:
And it's like they took away the problem or the solution they had for syncing for your own personal stuff between your own computers, which was syncing via Dropbox or BitTorrent Sync or whatever other options they had that you could sync pretty much any way you wanted to.
Marco:
But I think a lot of people did Dropbox syncing.
Marco:
So they took that away.
Marco:
And now they're saying, now you have to pay us a lot more than you were paying before, but you will get these benefits.
Marco:
And the problem is those benefits were things that most of their customers, at least who we're hearing from, and I don't know if this applies to their entire customer base, but the customers we're hearing from don't really want those benefits.
Marco:
They don't really care about those benefits and they're not going to use those benefits.
Marco:
So the reason everyone's mad is because not only have they changed the model in a way that a lot of people don't like, because a lot of people just don't like subscription pricing.
Marco:
And again, I totally get why people don't like that.
Marco:
I don't like it either.
Marco:
But I also don't like software that goes out of business or that can't afford to keep updated or anything else.
Marco:
So it's hard.
Marco:
I recognize the way that software developers really need to have some model that provides recurring revenue over time for users who are using it all the time.
Marco:
Whether you do that via occasional upgrade to upgrade pricing, or whether you do it via a monthly subscription, or some other scheme, or whether you do it with ads.
Marco:
Somehow, you need to have some way to make money from people over time, not just once up front.
John:
I don't think you need to be deep in the development community.
John:
Like, you know, the mindset, you know, certainly Marco's coming from and all of us, cause we know developers and we talk to developers and like, we have that perspective.
John:
But I think for this particular change, I think you could take just anyone from business school and throw them at this.
John:
And even if they don't understand what software is, I think it, it looks like so many other business decisions.
John:
So from my perspective, um,
John:
What they're doing, and it explains a lot of the anger that Marco just talked about from the customer's perspective at the very least, is they have a customer base now that uses their product.
John:
If you were to survey those customers and say, how much value do you get out of using TextExpander?
John:
A lot of them would say, you know, maybe I get $45 worth of value additive over the lifetime that I've been using it.
John:
Some of them would say, maybe, you know, it's like asking, like, how much would you pay?
John:
If we say, take tax expander away from you, and to get it back, you have to pay some money.
John:
Obviously, if someone...
John:
like uses it to answer support email for example or like does a lot of repetitive emailing or uses very sophisticated features where you fill in the blanks and everything like that they're gonna say oh you know this is the main tool i use to make my living like it is an essential part of my workflow if texas banner was gone i don't know what i would do with myself it is incredibly valuable for me the fact that i paid 45 for it last year is like the steel of the century like this is literally how i get all of my income
John:
uh and the dream of any business school major is like can i charge that guy like three thousand dollars and then charge the guy who's only going to use it twice a year like five bucks like can i charge every customer the maximum amount they're willing to pay for this software yeah the answer is you can't do that because we don't know how much it's worth or whatever um but what you can do and what it seems like takes a smile is trying to do with this one is say we've got all these customers and
John:
For a lot of them, they're getting like $45 worth of value or even less out of the software.
John:
But there are some users who get a tremendous amount of value because Texas Banner is very powerful.
John:
If you do the type of things that Texas Banner is made to do, this is like best in class, like very sophisticated features.
John:
It makes a very polished workflow, a mature product, stables.
John:
It's not just like my first text expander type thing.
John:
This is a very substantial product for the people who do this all the time.
John:
And
John:
You can say, I would rather just sell to those people for a much higher price in a way that we can continue to sell to those people essentially forever as long as those people exist because they're doing it for their job and we're going to provide them this tool to do their job in the same kind of like Photoshop type arrangement.
John:
Like...
John:
you're a graphic designer you use photoshop to make your living uh and we will give you the tool to make your living and so you will subscribe to photoshop because it's a bargain to you to pay you know whatever it is 100 200 bucks a year to make thousands upon thousands of dollars as a graphic designer every year and if we took away photoshop it would seriously impair your productivity because you have to learn a new program and so on and so forth so it's like text expander is saying thanks for all the participation casual text expander users but we would much rather
John:
sell to the heaviest text expander users at a price that they find justifiable and that we feel like is the most sustainable the most profitable like whatever you know we're we're going to make it up in lack of volume essentially it's the opposite of we're going to make it up in volume i just want the good customers the ones who the power user customers and so why people are mad is text expander basically saying to them not really but basically saying you
John:
we're not that interested in your business anymore if text expander was only worth 45 and you want to use it for five years uh that's not the type of customer that we want to serve maybe it's because they feel like they can't serve it maybe you know like i don't know what the what the motivation for it is but even if they were doing great they could say we're refocusing our business on the pro text expander market right and so everybody who wasn't a pro text expander is like but
John:
but I like tax expander.
John:
Like I don't use it that much, but I really like it.
John:
And now you're telling me I've, I've been priced out of this market, like, because you want those other customers and that can definitely make people mad.
John:
But what I keep thinking is the, do those people getting mad?
John:
Does that affect tax expander at all?
John:
Like, you know, that's, that's the business.
John:
You try a business model and you see, are there enough people who are willing to pay 50, 60 bucks a year for tax expander?
John:
to make up for all the people you're losing who wanted to pay you know 45 once and use it for three years that's the experiment they're running i think it is a perfectly valid experiment to have but a necessary side effect is the sort of the disenfranchised become angry about the fact that previously they had access to this very powerful utility that maybe they only used occasionally or used a fraction of the power of
John:
And now they can just use the old version until it eventually stops working.
John:
They've been cut out of that market and they have to look elsewhere so they could be annoyed by it.
John:
But I can't feel like I can get particularly mad about it just because...
John:
i think it is a it's a reasonable strategy for trying to make your business both more profitable which you know like oh they just want more money yeah that's how business works like more profitable and more sustainable because if you get if you ever hit that critical mass like apparently adobe has many other companies are tried to of
John:
these users use my tool to make their living they're willing to pay this much every single year and that amount that they pay every single year with the number of them there are is enough to sustain development you can do that essentially indefinitely like as long as you know a competitor doesn't come and steal your thing or your product doesn't become moot because everyone uses mind control or you know so many other things can affect you but at the very least you've got you've got the basic inner workings of a sustainable business model there which is a refreshing change after the sort of boom bust uh
John:
you know, viral hit throwaway application, you know, things that the app stores have brought on where it's like, I got to make a new app every year and it's got to be a big hit.
John:
And if it isn't, we're going out of business.
John:
It's so much more comfortable to be able to have loyal customers who pay for your product and they're paying for your product every year, pays for your development.
Marco:
And you just do that.
Marco:
you know if that really works out for them if they end up making more money from this that's fine i i think there's a couple angles to this to reconsider though first of all and i know you didn't say this but for people thinking this you can't just say oh they just wanted to make more money it might be that they were declining in revenue and they're trying to sustain this business or to keep this product going well that that is making more money that is making more money more money than they were previously making because the previous amount was not enough to keep them in business like they need to pay the bills and get the lights on
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But you can look at it as a pure greed angle if they were doing fine before and now they just want to juice it even higher.
Marco:
But it's also possible that it was going down before and now they're trying to just bring it back up to where it was.
Marco:
And if you read between the lines and some of the statements they've made, it sounds kind of like it wasn't making enough money before for them to justify working on it.
John:
But do you draw a distinction between those two cases that you just outlined?
John:
As in, previously we were sustainable, but we felt like we could make more money with this model.
John:
And previously we were unsustainable, so we have to do something to avoid going out of business.
John:
Like, do you think those are really any different?
John:
Like, is there...
John:
Is that a distinction that you make as a customer?
John:
Certainly, it's a distinction you can imagine making just as kind of like a human being where if it looks like they're going to go out of business, you feel bad for them.
John:
You have empathy.
John:
You're like, I like those guys.
John:
I like their product.
John:
I don't want to see them go out of business, both for self-restrictions, like you said, because I'm a user of their product and I want it to continue to be developed, right?
John:
And also because you feel bad, like, oh, they've been doing a good job.
John:
Their job is to write programs.
John:
I think they're good at their job.
John:
And I would like to see them succeed because, you know, just basic human empathy.
John:
And therefore, you're more willing to sort of, you know, allow for changes in their pricing model to sort of help them out versus...
John:
they had a sustainable business and they just want more money.
John:
And that suddenly that, that is, it's villainous to do that.
John:
Like that, that you should never, that as soon as you have enough to, to pay your bills and not go hungry and pay for food and shelter, you should never want more because wanting anything more is entirely like, is essentially evil.
John:
And that's, that's the greed.
John:
And,
John:
I don't see a hard line between those things.
John:
I know a lot of people do.
John:
But it's like, where do you draw that line?
John:
What is enough money?
John:
Like, I have enough to have payroll and enough to pay my mortgage, but not enough to save for retirement to send my kids to college?
John:
Is it okay to make more money then?
John:
If you start breaking that down, it starts to be nonsensical.
John:
So I'm personally willing to give wide latitude to figuring out ways to make more money with your labor.
John:
If you're good at writing software and the software product you have made and polished over the years is TextExpander,
John:
and you find a way to make more money from that product i don't attach any moral judgment to that um at all even if it means that a whole bunch of your previous customers are no longer in your customer base for future versions but i know a lot of people do and i and i think i think a lot of that like what you just highlighted marco explains a lot of the anger that people really do draw that line of like you were making enough money to not to not live in the street already and now you want more forget it you're evil
Marco:
Believe me, I hear from them.
Marco:
A lot of people draw that line, and I'm not one of them.
Marco:
But I think that could be something to consider here.
Marco:
If you're getting angry at Smile for really dramatically raising the price of this app in a way that you might not like, it might be because they had to.
Marco:
But also, you have to look at the competitive landscape here.
Marco:
There are lots of similar utilities that do the same basic job and just differ in the features they offer on top of that.
Marco:
So there's lots of alternatives to this.
Marco:
And honestly, today's probably been a very good day for them.
Marco:
However you feel about this with whether you're a customer or not, looking at it from Smile's perspective, I think this was a mistake for them.
Marco:
And time will tell.
Marco:
Obviously, I don't know the market at all.
Marco:
Time will tell.
Marco:
But they have basically discarded a big part of their existing customer base in an effort to either get more money from the part that's left and or to move into a more business-oriented one where there will be allegedly businesses who use synced snippets and everything from Texas Commander.
Marco:
And
Marco:
That might be a big business.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I wouldn't have guessed it would be a big business, but I'm wrong all the time.
Marco:
So that might work out for them.
Marco:
If it does, that's fine.
Marco:
But I don't think this is going to go well because what I see mostly happening here is...
Marco:
You can make a move like that when you are in a position of strength, when you're the only game in town and people depend on you to get their work done.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, that will be true.
Marco:
But I don't think for enough people, because for a big part of the customers who are now faced with a big price hike and removal of features they used versus other choices, they have lots of other choices.
Marco:
There's all these alternative software things that do this.
Marco:
for substantially less money now.
Marco:
Before, they were much more competitive.
Marco:
Now, they're in a high-competition environment.
Marco:
So I think one way to do this, one way to resolve this, if they wanted to make more money or needed to make more money from this, you can either cut the costs that you're putting into it, or you can charge more.
Marco:
Both of those are going to affect your users negatively in some way.
Marco:
The question is, which one can you get away with better?
Marco:
And I'm not sure they chose correctly, but I don't know how many choices they had.
Marco:
I don't know anything about their business.
John:
The natural consequence of this, if you just keep playing it out, is that, you know, it's like someone gets the idea.
John:
We could be enterprise software.
John:
We could charge minimum five figures for any installation of our thing.
John:
Like, why not sell TextExpander into, you know, the sort of large...
John:
Email based support networks of like where if you if you if you're a very large company, you just have to hire like literally hundreds and hundreds of people to answer your support emails and everything.
John:
You'd want to give them tools to do their job well and sort of standardize on basic snippets and templates and so on and so forth.
John:
you can imagine i'm sure there is really terrible enterprise software that already does that and tech expander perhaps sees that market and say i would rather sell five million dollar installations than you know a million five dollar apps right like that we want to actually become enterprise software and so as we've discussed in many past shows enterprise software can be tempting and can be lucrative and you can be protected from uh
John:
competition by the fact that it's a pain in the butt to sell enterprise software you have to hire salespeople and there's a high barrier to entry and you have relationships and make deals on golf courses or whatever the hell it goes on but enterprise software is absolutely poison to the quality of your products and it makes you vulnerable to anyone making anything worth a damn because eventually you know the enterprise software the my definition from many years ago was like when the person who buys your software is not the person who uses it and that is a totally misaligned incentive and it leads to software that is very uh
John:
very attractive to buy but terrible to use like it's like igloo stays in business like you really you really want to you are vulnerable to someone who actually makes a product that the users like because eventually even enterprise users start to revolt and bring their iphones to work or bring their macs to work or bring whatever product they think
John:
is not a piece of crap and use that instead so not that i'm saying text expander is suddenly a terrible you know oracle or sap type company but that is if you just keep playing that out and say instead of mass market low price let's do uh you know much smaller market much higher price and it could be like you said mark if it's a crowded market for a text expander type products how does text expander differentiate what do they have that the other ones don't maybe what they have is we have a very sophisticated feature set we want to be the pro text expander product
John:
We're going to leave the consumer market to our competitors and let them fight it out for, you know, the thousands and thousands of people who want to pay, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 bucks.
John:
And we want to move up market and just keep the sort of high end, the people who are willing to pay more for a better, more sophisticated product because it's part of how they do their job.
John:
I don't know how to handicap it either.
John:
Like you said, Margo, neither one of us knows the intimate details of the text expander market landscape or whatever.
John:
I have the same feeling that this doesn't seem like a power move to me.
John:
This seems like something they would do because they were having trouble sustaining.
John:
I do agree that the alternatives you laid out are there.
John:
Maybe you just lower your costs.
John:
Maybe they had hired too many people.
John:
I have no idea how big they're.
John:
their staffing is there um but that's one way to go but the other way is to you know like i said make it up in lack of volume can we make more money by selling to fewer people for a higher price and that seems again with total vacuum of knowledge to me if i had to make a bet i would say that that has a higher chance of failing than not because it's really really hard to do that i mean it's hard to do in either direction hard to say hey if we if we cut our price in half will we get more than double the customers and
John:
Especially in the App Store market the way it is, that has worked for many people more often than, hey, if we double our price or triple our price, can we get more than half or a third as many people?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, this is business.
John:
again i understand why people get angry about it but like that's how it works they decide a price and they say we are offering you the server for this price and customers decide whether it's worth it for them if it's not worth it they don't buy it and that is a signal to the company that you need to change something and if it is you know and maybe the signal they were getting with a 45 one-time purchase product was people will buy it but they don't like upgrades and we can't pay to maintain the software um so
John:
Uh, I think we just, you know, we'll come revisit this in a year and see how it worked out for them.
John:
But I think going on market is a viable strategy.
John:
I just feel like they might have to go even farther up market, uh, than this.
John:
And, and I agree with everything Marco said about, it's kind of like the, you know, the things we talked about with, with overcast is like perception wise that, uh,
John:
You being cut out of the market in a way makes you feel bad.
John:
Like, I liked the previous deal I was getting, and now they've altered the deal.
John:
And Casey can finish that reference for me if he remembers it.
John:
And they're sad about it.
John:
uh and they also think there's no reason for it but i don't think they're looking at it from the perspective of text expander why should they they're just the customer but from the perspective of text expander it's like maybe maybe text expander doesn't want you as a customer anymore it's like what do you mean they don't want me i've been such a loyal customer i love their product why wouldn't they want me anymore why can't why can't they just continue to make the product that i've been using that syncs with dropbox why can't they just keep making that forever uh and the answer is because you don't want to pay for it again
John:
I'm like, oh, I do want to pay for it again.
John:
I'll pay you $45 right now.
John:
Would you?
John:
Suddenly you're ready to pay $45 if they came out with a new version of TextExpander and you bought six months ago.
John:
You'd be excited to pay $45 for a new version.
John:
I don't know if you would.
John:
Anyway, even if you would, maybe there's not enough other people like you.
John:
And so they have to come up with something different.
John:
It's not personal.
John:
It's just business.
Casey:
I made passing reference to this earlier, but I think it is important to reiterate that 1Password changed, well, maybe not changed their model, but augmented their model by this 1Password for Teams and then 1Password for Families.
Casey:
And the thing that made me cool with 1Password for Teams and 1Password for Families was it didn't change the way things were.
Casey:
So it was not a change as, like I said a second ago, it was an augmentation or an addition.
Casey:
If one password hypothetically had said, you know what, if you want to sync between your own devices, leave aside other people, leave aside the team aspects and the family aspects.
Casey:
If they had said that, hey, if you want to sync your passwords between your devices, guess what?
Casey:
You have to sign up for $5 a month.
Casey:
I would be...
Casey:
fairly upset because I would feel like I got hoodwinked.
Casey:
I would feel like it was a bait and switch.
Casey:
And I freaking love 1Password.
Casey:
I consider it like you were, I think it was you, John, describing earlier.
Casey:
Maybe it was Marco, but it is essential for me to get my life done.
Casey:
Not even my work, but my life.
Casey:
I love 1Password and I would probably pay $5 a month for this hypothetical sync-only service, but I would be pretty frustrated with it.
Casey:
And I would perhaps go from saying, I freaking love 1Password to, yeah, I like 1Password and I use it.
Casey:
As it turns out, because they didn't take away what I already had, and additionally, they added this new family feature that's $5 per family per month.
Casey:
And a family is defined as, I don't know, five or so people.
Casey:
I forget exactly the specifics.
Casey:
I've signed up on 1Password for Family, and that was actually the impetus I needed to get Aaron using 1Password as well, which we haven't actually done yet, but it's on our to-do list for the weekend, is to get Aaron finally using 1Password.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And that, to me, is the right way to handle this.
Casey:
But just like you guys said, you know, I'm making I'm making all these proclamations in a vacuum and I don't know what what smiles dealing with.
Casey:
I don't know what they're up against, but taking away what's already there in that in that they're saying that they're not going to support Dropbox and other sync methods.
Casey:
Man, that's hard not to feel burned by that.
Casey:
Even if you're sympathetic to them, it's hard not to feel burned.
John:
But you wonder if it's like intentional, like we'll see in the coming days if they change course, because it could have been like one one password.
John:
It was essentially expanded their market.
John:
Like they said, we have all these customers that use our product.
John:
We think some of these customers would be willing to pay more because it is really important to them.
John:
So if we give them this one extra feature, this family sinking or whatever.
John:
We're going to leave all the existing customers with the product they have.
John:
It's the same product.
John:
It's not, you know, we're not excluding them.
John:
We just want to expand the market with this new little bump in our little, you know, the blob that is the market, put another little bump that's, and these people are willing to pay five bucks a month.
John:
Everyone else keeps what they've got, but we can, we can extract more monies from our customers for a certain subset of the customers by giving them a little bit more and charging them a little bit more.
John:
If that's what Tech Spanner was trying to do, it doesn't seem like they did it well.
John:
Because what they did instead was took the blob that is their market, sliced off most of it, and then the remaining part is the people who are willing to pay $50 a year.
John:
If that's not what they intended...
John:
then you'll see scrambling a week from now oh we've changed our mind and in fact you can use text expander sync with sex expander six with dropbox syncing or you can use text expander six with no syncing for the old price or whatever like we'll see like i'm basing my you know looking at what this move as if this is intentional
John:
Because we all see the effects that it's having.
John:
I think they see the effects that it's having.
John:
If that isn't intentional, I think they will backpedal and say, what we really meant to do was actually just get more money from the people who use it a lot, but not lose all those other customers because we totally need them.
John:
So we'll see if they change their mind based on the first week or two of...
John:
you know sales and returns and complaints about it but i think both of those strategies are viable like one is not i mean one of them makes casey sad you know obviously if you're in the market that gets cut off by that strategy it can be you know not good for you but in the end it doesn't you know from the company's perspective it doesn't matter except for perhaps long-term brand loyalty decisions but again if you're going towards the high end or enterprise
John:
the enterprise people may love you even more.
John:
If you add all these super power user features, like hell yeah, I'll pay $50 a year.
John:
You know, this is how I make my living.
John:
Sure.
John:
You know, sign me up.
John:
And especially if they, they realize the year after year that this means new versions come out regularly, bugs get fixed, you know, better or whatever.
John:
But yeah, as with all things, you can't assume omniscience on the part of either party here.
John:
So it's possible that they just didn't anticipate the backlash.
John:
And I guess we'll find out in the next week's shows or the week after.
Marco:
We are also sponsored tonight by Ring, the Ring Video Doorbell.
Marco:
Go to ring.com slash ATP to see the Ring Video Doorbell.
Marco:
Now, video doorbells are pretty cool gadgets, and there's lots of reasons to have them for convenience, of course.
Marco:
You can see who's at your door.
Marco:
You can respond.
Marco:
And what's really cool is there's advanced motion detection here.
Marco:
This alerts you
Marco:
Whether or not somebody actually rings the doorbell or not, if there's just like a person who walks up to your door, Ring will alert you about that too.
Marco:
It's like caller ID for your house.
Marco:
Like no matter whether somebody rings the doorbell or not, they alert you to it.
Marco:
Regardless of whether you're home or not, because it uses your phone in addition to your actual doorbell like ringer.
Marco:
So if you're not home, you still get notified and you can respond through two-way audio through the Ring doorbell.
Marco:
So you can pretend like you're home.
Marco:
The advantages here are not only your convenience, but also safety for your home and your possessions.
Marco:
Because Ring has found over 95% of home break-ins and burglaries happen during the day.
Marco:
And burglars usually start by ringing your doorbell to see if somebody's home.
Marco:
And of course, if they're home, they generally move on, right?
Marco:
So with the Ring video doorbell, it can actually be a security benefit as well, not only showing you when people walk up to your door and having a record of that, but also it can help deter people.
Marco:
First of all, they know they're being watched once you respond, and they'll think you're home, and so they'll move on.
Marco:
So in addition to all the incredible convenience features of having a video doorbell, it's pretty great for home security as well.
John:
You missed the essential feature of this.
John:
So we talked about home security and, you know, if you're not in the house, the key one is for the ultra lazy.
John:
You can answer the door without getting up on your couch.
John:
You can send away solicitors.
John:
You can, you know, tell the delivery guy to just put it on the doorstep.
John:
You know, you could like you can see who it is and decide to pretend you're not at home all while you just sit in your living room watching TV.
John:
I love that.
John:
That's what you took away from this.
John:
Yes, this is a laziness enabler.
John:
You don't have to get up from your couch.
John:
You can just pick up your phone and go, no, I'm not answering that.
John:
Nope, sorry.
John:
I'm not interested in whatever you're selling.
John:
They're only robbing the Civic.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
yeah no so check it out today it can work with your existing wiring for your doorbell or they also have a model that uses a battery so you don't need to wire it go to ring.com slash atp this is widely recognized as a great gadget by time magazine usa today to name a few listeners get a free uh extra shipping rate by using our code so go to if you go to ring.com slash atp you get free fast shipping check it out today with the ring video doorbell you're always home go to ring.com slash atp now thanks a lot
John:
This actually segues into our next topic, slightly unbeknownst to Marco, although he's probably the one who wrote it there, because I think this is a good time to bring this up, what with me having my iPod stolen out of my car.
John:
By the way, speaking of my iPod being stolen out of my car, one thing I forgot to add when you guys were talking about your various ways of trying to play fold-ish old MP3s like it's 1994 in your cars.
John:
So why do neither one of you do what I had been doing, which is take one of the many old iOS devices that is no longer useful for anything and connect it through USB to your car and just leave it in there permanently, aside from the fact that you're afraid it's going to get stolen out of your car.
John:
Setting that aside, if you do that...
John:
you will get all the things you talked about, like a real interface to playing things, hopefully reasonable album art, not worry about it accidentally doing things alphabetical.
John:
If you park your car close enough to get Wi-Fi from your house and your thing has iTunes in the cloud thing synced, you won't even have to bring the thing back in to put your new music on it.
John:
Your new music will just sync to it silently when you drive your car home and just let it sit there, right?
John:
It seems like it would solve all of your problems assuming you had a place to store
John:
The connected iPod and all that.
John:
Is that not something you guys are interested in?
Casey:
No, definitely not.
Casey:
I don't want another thing to manage.
Casey:
I would either use the stuff that's built into the car like I was describing earlier because I actually don't have a problem with it.
Casey:
Or if it's not already in my car, then I would just use Bluetooth on my phone.
John:
but what are you managing though because like literally my thing is just it's plugged in in in a closed compartment and i never even see it and like i said now that i park within a wi-fi range of my house uh it gets my new music on if i buy a new song that song is on my car like the next time i drive it there's nothing to manage you don't need to recharge it because it charges when you drive your car i get all the features that you would expect like on my on-screen display showing the artist the album the whole thing it even shows
John:
you know unicode characters and the titles correctly like everything just works and this is a honda accord i'm assuming all your fancy bmws and teslas have the same ability the only downside is you got to have an ios device which is way larger than the little tiny thumb drive that marco has so it turns out tesla actually does not support ipod usb interfaces oh like they only support either usb folders like usb file browsing or bluetooth they're preemptively spiting the apple car
John:
Maybe.
John:
Going to compete with us, Apple?
John:
Rumored to be possibly in the future competing with us?
John:
No USB support for iPods.
Marco:
I mean, it also could be possible that either A, they haven't gotten to it yet because they're a little bit new, or B, they just probably think the future is Bluetooth anyway for that kind of role for most people.
Marco:
So it probably isn't worth the trouble to build that into a car that you started the media system platform only a few years ago.
John:
Yeah, I mean, you could also do the same thing.
John:
Like, my iPod that I have plugged in with the USB interface, I could leave it plugged into USB just for charging purposes and then have that connect through Bluetooth.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, anyway.
John:
Anyway, sorry for that derail.
John:
The topic that's related to the Ring doorbell is...
John:
quoting the show notes here presumably written by marco marco's recent experiments in home automation surveillance and general madness i'm adding that last part yeah this was my grab bag of topics if we ran out if we ran out of time or ran out of topics today and we wanted something else and you moved it up we didn't run out i actually i shuffle i shuffled it upwards because i've seen i see your tweets about like
John:
Can anyone tell me how to find a replacement for three-way light switches that will respond to voice commands to my Amazon Echo?
John:
And it sounds like you're really going off the deep end, as is your way.
John:
So I actually do want to hear about it.
Marco:
Okay, so let me preface this by saying, and I think I said this last week, that earlier in...
Marco:
I forget when it was, whether it was our Thanksgiving episode or whether it was after the New Year.
Marco:
Sometime we were in a positive mood and we were expressing what we're going to do in the future or this year or whatever.
Marco:
And one of the things I said was because I had been having trouble getting...
Marco:
Excited about a lot of stuff coming out of Apple recently.
Marco:
I decided that I wanted to start exploring more outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Marco:
Just other stuff, other platforms, other exciting things happening in technology that aren't from Apple.
Marco:
And so the Tesla obviously was contributing to that quite a bit.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
um i've recently decided you know what let me let me explore past uh siri and everyone's saying the amazon echo is really good so you know what what the heck i'll try you know our friends have had one for a while and whenever whenever we're over there i always would think like you know that that's kind of really awesome like you know you just talk to it and plays good music and it just see and like the voice activation was really good and fast and always worked and
Marco:
And we're like, that's kind of incredible.
Marco:
I'm going to try to not make the negative about Apple, but just being accustomed to Siri from Apple, the Amazon Echo, by comparison, is extremely fast to recognize what you're saying and can recognize it at a seemingly much higher success rate, for me at least, and in the environments I've seen it.
Marco:
And even in conditions that you would think would be hostile, like while it's already loudly playing music in a loud room and you are 12 feet away,
Marco:
it can still recognize you most of the time.
Marco:
So it's actually surprisingly good.
Marco:
If you've only ever used Siri as your voice control baseline, it really is surprisingly good.
Marco:
I would say, in many ways, substantially better.
Marco:
Probably not every way, but in the ways that I use it for, it is substantially better.
Marco:
Anyway, so we got an Echo.
Marco:
I decided, you know, what else can this thing do?
Marco:
And it turns out when you're not in, you know, similar to what I discovered with USB sticks, when you're not in the Apple ecosystem, nothing costs any money.
Marco:
You can get a ridiculous number of, like, smart objects and things with ports or Wi-Fi in them for almost nothing.
Marco:
So, for instance, one of the things we just got was Amazon Dash buttons, which it seems ridiculous.
Marco:
For $5, which becomes a $5 credit once you use it, so for basically free, you get a little button the size of a keychain with a sticky back.
Marco:
And it comes assigned to a certain brand's products.
Marco:
Things like Charmin for your toilet paper or Bounty for paper towels or razor blades or whatever.
Marco:
There's just a button on it.
Marco:
There's no screen.
Marco:
It's just a single button.
Marco:
You stick this wherever you store these household objects.
Marco:
And when you are running low, you hit the button.
Marco:
It automatically orders more of that thing, whatever you've assigned it to order from that brand, from Amazon.
Marco:
And it comes in a couple days.
Marco:
So I have one for paper towels and I have one for toilet paper.
Casey:
Wait, now let me interrupt you right there.
Casey:
Genuine, genuine question.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
If there are like 84 different flavors of Charmin, so to speak, do you like specify what one it is that you want?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And you can go on the site, and with each dash button, there's a little green thing.
Marco:
It looks like a banner ad, and so you miss it the first few times.
Marco:
But it's not a banner ad.
Marco:
There's a little green banner right below the item description on each dash button.
Marco:
And it says, view what this button can order.
Marco:
And you can click on that, and that'll show you before you even buy it.
Marco:
You can make sure that it can order the version of it that you use.
Marco:
And when you set it up, it's kind of crazy.
Marco:
So it's this little button thing with no screen and with some kind of long-lasting battery.
Marco:
It's a permanently installed, I think, battery.
Marco:
It's a Wi-Fi device, so it has to be pretty hefty, like lithium something or other battery in there.
Marco:
anyway how do you pair the thing normally these things they you know many of these smart objects they will create their own little ad hoc wi-fi network and so you launch the app on your phone you join your phone to this stupid things wi-fi network and then it auto configs with the app it tell you know the app tells it your real wi-fi network's password and then you you click back over and it sucks huge you know clunky process that i hope apple gives some kind of method of improving with like
Marco:
you know, multi-mode Wi-Fi, something.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure things like that exist.
Marco:
Anyway, you know, those kind of like temporary ad hoc Wi-Fi networks don't take over your main Wi-Fi, whatever those are called, that like, you know, camera things can be used to.
Marco:
Anyway, please, Apple, add those things.
Marco:
Anyway, so the way the Amazon Dash buttons work is you place the button next to your phone and the phone like emits like static pulses out of the speaker via audio and the Dash button has a little microphone in it.
Marco:
And it just, like, communicates via these static pulses the Wi-Fi information to the dash button.
Marco:
And then it's just like, all right, after a few seconds, you hear this little weird static.
Marco:
And then it's like, all right, done.
Marco:
It's just so cool.
Marco:
And all this was for $5.
Marco:
I know this is all just shameless consumerism to honor the god of Amazon and make you buy even more things from Amazon.
Marco:
But that is still remarkable from a technology perspective that that works and costs nothing.
Marco:
Like, that's kind of incredible.
Casey:
I really looked into recently, and I think this is just fascinating.
Casey:
Somebody has like reverse engineered how all of this works.
Casey:
And there is actually a node module called node dash button that you can use to have a dash button instead of calling phoning home to Amazon.
Casey:
It just tells a node server running on the local network, the button has been pressed.
Casey:
And so what I was really looking into, but I couldn't quite make it work, just the other side of it work.
Casey:
I really wanted to buy a dash button and then stick it on like the bedside table and then have that call down to my internet connected garage door opener, my Chamberlain MyQ.
Casey:
And if the garage door is open, close it so that my bedtime routine would just be to smack this dash button that has nothing to do with Amazon anymore and
Casey:
And if the garage door is open, it'll automatically close.
Casey:
I could never get it to work.
Casey:
But I think it's really cool and fascinating that people took this $5 device and are now like hacking it such that it can be used for something entirely different.
Casey:
And I just think that's fascinating and super cool.
Casey:
And it's for reasons like this that I really want to start figuring out how the hell Raspberry Pis work and what that's all about.
John:
Yeah.
John:
My question about these buttons is like the reason I when they came out with them was like, is this like a joke?
John:
Is this like an April Fool's joke?
John:
You know, like they came out like last year or the year before or whatever.
John:
It just seems so ridiculous that you're going to have talk about a, you know, Alton Brown angering unit tasker.
John:
You can't have a big, shiny red button in your house.
John:
And all it does is order paper towels.
John:
My fear and why I'd never want to have that thing.
John:
And it's like I'm the same type of person who was always afraid to enable one click ordering is.
John:
I know that I and everyone else in my house would forget when we hit that stupid button.
John:
We would notice, oh, we need paper towels, and I would click the button.
John:
But I have no idea if someone came into the same room and came to the same conclusion an hour ago, and so now we have two orders of paper towels coming.
John:
I know someone else would, you know.
Marco:
It turns out they thought of that.
Marco:
Once somebody hits it, it doesn't accept an order for another one until that one has been delivered.
John:
That's pretty good.
John:
I mean, that's what I was thinking.
John:
Well, rate limiting and debouncing.
John:
And here's the other secret thing.
John:
If it doesn't order until it's delivered, but you have small children in your house, you figure out how these buttons work.
John:
They wait for a package to be delivered, and then they go around the house and press every other button.
John:
Because essentially, it is allowing anyone with physical access to your home to spend your money.
Marco:
Yeah, but it's not like ordering an iPod.
Marco:
Well, the iPods are pretty cheap.
Marco:
It's a bad example.
John:
Just wait for the iPod buttons, the iPhone button.
John:
It'll put it in your house and in Gruber's house, and as soon as the keynote's over, you just slam your fist down on the button and it orders one for you.
Marco:
That's the new method of trolling is you go visit somebody's house and when they're in the other room, you go pushing all their buttons to order all their paper towels.
John:
So these dash buttons, these are entirely independent of the Echo other than the fact that they're all made by Amazon and hook up to your Amazon account, right?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
That was just totally an aside that I'm now giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt and trying some of the stuff that they're doing that's all crazy and bad.
Marco:
After the Fire Phone and after some of the really crappy Fire tablets, it's easy to write off Amazon's hardware efforts.
Marco:
But they're getting better.
Marco:
And they're kind of getting remarkably better at some things.
Marco:
And I think writing them off completely is not wise.
Marco:
Because they are going to keep making a lot of duds, I'm sure.
Marco:
But not everything they make is a dud.
Marco:
And some of the stuff they make is actually pretty cool.
Marco:
Anyway, so I have some Belkin Wemo switched outlets that I'm using to switch some lamps.
John:
Yeah, can you explain that to me?
John:
Because I understood that you were trying to make it so you could say words into the air and cause lights to go on.
John:
But I don't know anything that connects those things other than the Amazon Echo is listening to you and then presumably what happens after that?
John:
The Amazon Echo hears you and what does it do?
John:
What does it communicate with?
John:
Is this like an open standard?
John:
Are they all Amazon products?
John:
I don't understand this world.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't know that much about it.
Marco:
I haven't looked that much into it.
Marco:
You know, you go on Amazon site and it tells you like, here's all the things that work with the Echo.
Marco:
Some of the things require like a smart devices hub.
Marco:
Some of them don't.
Marco:
I've been only getting the ones that don't so far just because why not?
Marco:
I bought a couple of Wemos switched outlets because they're the better way to do lighting is if you can swing it to use Wi-Fi light bulbs like LIFX or Philips Hue, that kind of thing.
Marco:
I haven't used any of those yet because the LIFX bulbs are too large to fit into the lamps in question.
Marco:
And the Philips Hue bulbs are not bright enough.
Marco:
I like nice bright bulbs and even LEDs.
Marco:
I like to get the ones that are like the 100 watt equivalent rather than the more common ones that are more like a 60 watt equivalent.
Marco:
So they're just not bright enough.
Marco:
Anyway, so the way I do this is I keep my fancy bulbs and I just switch the outlets the lamps are plugged into.
Marco:
Again, I don't know how any other system works, but the way Belkin's Wemo thing works is all just local Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And there's probably a way to connect to a web service.
Marco:
I don't really care.
Marco:
There is.
Marco:
But right now, I'm doing it on local Wi-Fi only.
Marco:
So you use their app to configure the things using the stupid join the Wi-Fi network thing.
Marco:
But then once it's configured, the Echo knows how to talk to it directly.
Marco:
so you know the echo just has support for whatever local protocol it uses over the local wi-fi network and then you you go into the alexa app to configure the echo it shows all your compatible devices and you can create groups so you can say like alexa turn off all lamps and it and it will and it just says okay and turns them all off and that's it sorry for anybody whose lights i guess turned off
Marco:
it's really cool.
Marco:
Like it, what's really cool about it is that it's fast enough and it works enough of the time that it's actually convenient.
Marco:
So part of my nightly routine, you know, you were saying about your garage, like trying to like, trying to like eliminate steps from your nightly routine.
Marco:
Part of my nightly routine is, you know, we, we're done watching TV for the night or whatever.
Marco:
So I go around locking all the doors, turning off all the lights, taking, taking hops out, you know, one last time in the backyards and more lights go on and off, go on and off and then come in, lock, lock, lock.
Marco:
any step I can remove from that process will save me like 15 seconds a day.
Marco:
And yeah, it's stupid to be talking about 15 seconds a day.
Marco:
You know, this is obviously a position of like first world privilege here, but that's convenient.
Marco:
And when everything is so cheap, it's actually kind of compelling.
Marco:
I've effectively cut 30 seconds out of my nightly routine just by automating some light switches and being able to tell the Echo, turn everything off at once.
John:
Will the Amazon Echo tell my children 8,000 times to brush their teeth and get their pajamas on?
John:
because i maybe i'll just say amazon echo uh do the bedtime routine and then amazon echo will say uh do you guys have your pajamas on yet or have you brushed your teeth have you brushed teeth yet have you have your pajamas on and you find them in their room an hour later playing with lego without their pajamas on have you put your pajamas on have you brushed your teeth
John:
That's the service I need.
Marco:
You could probably bring that up with IFTTT or something.
Marco:
I bet you could.
Marco:
I bet there's something like that.
Marco:
The thing is, and this is why I really am enjoying the Echo and why I do worry for Apple's presence or lack thereof in this market.
Marco:
In order to make this market succeed, what makes the Echo so good...
Marco:
is a combination of having what seems to be a pretty awesome, solid, big data web service behind it, which is not something Apple's good at.
Marco:
You know, Apple can do things like, you know, keeping notifications running, keeping iMessage running.
Marco:
When it comes to a kind of web service that uses big data and AI type stuff...
Marco:
Apple is not as competitive as other entrants in the market.
Marco:
And it seems maybe that will change over time, but they're just not there.
Marco:
And they've been not there for so long after it began to matter that it does seem like they're not capable of it, or at least they don't prioritize it.
Marco:
It seems like this is the kind of problem that other companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, just do big data services better than Apple does.
Marco:
And what also makes this so powerful is all this integration with third-party stuff.
Marco:
And so Apple has HomeKit, but HomeKit is a much less successful program, I think, than what it needs to be.
Marco:
Whereas the Echo doesn't really care.
Marco:
The Echo is kind of all-inclusive.
Marco:
It'll work with everything.
Marco:
They talked briefly about this on Connected this week on Relay.
Marco:
They were saying that there was some kind of hardware requirement for HomeKit devices, and Belkin's kind of balking at it.
Marco:
Amazon doesn't really care.
Marco:
Amazon works with everybody.
Marco:
Siri launched in 2011.
Marco:
It is 2016.
Marco:
There is still no Siri API.
Marco:
There is no way for third parties to integrate with Siri at all.
Marco:
The Echo comes out not that long ago.
Marco:
What, a year ago?
Marco:
Last June or something?
Marco:
Almost a year ago?
Marco:
It is already full of third-party integrations.
Marco:
There's an API for a lot of what it can do.
Marco:
Not everything.
Marco:
There's still no music API, which means I can't make Overcast for it yet.
Marco:
But I'm hoping there will be soon.
Marco:
So it has but it has tons of integration with all these third party things.
Marco:
Anybody can go in and make like a speech response API to it.
Marco:
And it integrates with all this different hardware from all these different vendors.
Marco:
Amazon, I feel like they're in a better position than Apple is to to really take over this kind of thing, because this is so dependent on both the big data web service and also tons of third party integration.
John:
Yeah, Apple had the foresight to, you know, to purchase the, you know, the Siri research project company or whatever they were like that they that they understood very early on that something like this could add value to their products.
John:
And, you know, I forget when they bought them, but obviously it was before it was actually released to the public and released to the public.
John:
with the exception of google like they i don't know if they were in the lead next to google but they were at the very least seemingly neck and neck with google in terms of we recognize this is going to be important thing for the future and maybe our thing is kind of crappy when it launches because siri certainly was um but at least you know at least we're not ignoring this market like and in fact we're out ahead of a lot of our competitors but like marco said like
John:
and then what happened it was like the mac pro all over again well we'll make siri better and siri certainly hasn't gotten better but there's no reason apple couldn't have done something like amazon echo years and years ago because they had like their and google has been expanding google now and you know to make it much more sophisticated and complicated than siri and we even have like just random apps like this third-party hound application that merlin was raving about a little while ago like
John:
Like lots of other companies are, you know, it's not early days anymore.
John:
Everyone is like, oh, some kind of intelligent agency you can talk to is basically like speed recognition has kind of crossed a vaguely good enough barrier and an understanding of speech and breaking it down into meaning and figuring out what you mean and not just like translating into text and doing a Google search or whatever, you know.
John:
that's getting more sophisticated and it just takes a little bit more stuff to put it together into ways that allow like the community essentially the community of like nerds and hackers to come up with more uses of this thing so like that was on echo and all that stuff definitely seems like much more you know nerd uh you know
John:
hacker friendly if someone who wants to just toy with it and figure out what kind of cool things to do with it i'm like sure whatever build whatever on you want it's a pretty open protocol you can reverse engineer it like just go because they don't know like you know their approaches like let's do stuff and see what sticks right apple is just totally absent in this market and you said that makes sense because apple doesn't make sort of like tinker products for people who just want to hack on things and you know if apple wanted to have this product it would be like no no no it has to be
John:
beautiful and elegant and integrated and blah blah blah but if the end result is they just aren't in the market at all or know what you know they do home kit and they said we have these strict requirements because your your products must must meet these stringent standards that we at apple and blah blah in the meantime amazon is just like running off with it and they're going to wake up one day and say
John:
We could have had a substantial chunk of that market, and we just waited too long for perfection and didn't just start releasing and iterating.
John:
Again, that's not the Apple way to do it, but I feel like in many other... Siri was like that.
John:
It was like, Siri's not going to be perfect initially, but it's important for us to get this out there because we feel like in the future...
John:
You telling your phone to do something is a feature that we need to have.
John:
And they were right about that.
John:
Every every cell phone you buy now has some feature where you can speak to it and have it do something either while you're driving to tell it to play a song or if you're just lazy and don't want to go find an icon and tap something just to run a search or whatever.
John:
They all have that.
John:
And Apple recognize that.
John:
not saying they have to be in the amazon echo market but i'm just thinking like vr where we all assume apple is secretly doing things behind the scenes i hope they don't stay secret for too long either if vr turns out not to be a bust um apple doesn't want to just be sitting there waiting for their perfect entry in that market either and i think like the watch as much as we've all talked about it and had complaints about it i think it was important for apple to do a watch even if the watch they did has problems rather than saying
John:
we're not entirely sure we figured out every aspect of what makes a watch good like the only way you're going to figure out is to make a product right that's that's and you can't you can't hold back from it and how if they're making a freaking car surely they can make an amazon echo type competitor and i think they could do a reasonably good job for it if only because it would force them like like margot was saying force them to work on their back ends more as siri has like they have all those presentations of like look we're using these open source
John:
uh you know data processing backends for siri and we're all impressed by it and we're talking at conferences like siri forced them to do that um because it wasn't simple enough to to use whatever they were using before it was complicated uh what is it mesos someone just wrote in the chat room having a product like siri forces them to get better at that stuff having a product like amazon echo would also force them to get better at this type of thing
John:
as home kits should be forcing them to as well but if they're if they're going into the same situation where they're making you know very onerous demands of the third parties and the result is few third-party products they're you know they're they're not they're not winning that battle uh so yeah it's it's kind of it's kind of disappointing and with amazon their challenge is always going to be it's easy to do the beginning part we're just very open and we'll try lots of things lots of people go in
John:
how do you develop it i've been waiting personally i know enough people who have an echo that i've been like i'm kind of interested in that i'd like to try it but i would like to wait for the echo 2 to come out the the one that is nicer and smaller and faster and more reliable and has more features i know they came out with that little tiny one that doesn't have the speakers and stuff like that but i want like the full-fledged echo version 2 if amazon doesn't make an echo version 2 for three years i will have you know they will be again pulling a mac pro it's like you were right there why did you stop
John:
um i don't think they will i think they will continue to iterate just look at how many freaking kindles they've come out with and there's about to be another one they're hyping up next week i have more kindles to mail you and they're hyping up next week they're gonna they're gonna make another one that's that's even thinner awesome yeah and we have no idea how many kindles they've ever sold because they never put numbers on their graphs but they continue to plug away at that so i i fully believe that amazon will continue to plug away at the echo
John:
If only because it just has such a natural synergy of like, make it easier for people to give us money.
John:
All right.
John:
Thumbs up.
John:
This is a good product for Amazon to make, especially since the hardware costs don't seem that big.
John:
It's like it's a speaker with Wi-Fi and a whole bunch of microphones and a little bit of software.
John:
They'll make that up the first year alone with people with people accidentally ordering things by saying Alexa, buy paper towels or whatever your kids are saying when you're not in the room.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm enjoying this thing.
Marco:
It's not perfect.
Marco:
There's lots of things about it that are not perfect.
Marco:
But overall, it's really cool.
Marco:
I would say if you're on the fence, if you've been tempted by the Echo, if you're on the fence, just get it.
Marco:
Just order it now.
Marco:
If you're already thinking you might enjoy it, you probably will enjoy it.
Marco:
And you should just try it.
Marco:
Because it really is quite good.
John:
what does adam say to alexa he gets very mad that she doesn't recognize him he doesn't enunciate well enough that yeah basically you ask her to define words multiply numbers play music convert units of measurement when cooking so many things you could do setting timers by voice while cooking is so useful
John:
like that's it always drove me nuts with the apple watch it was it was so slow and somewhat unreliable to do that because when that works it's so useful it just doesn't work enough with the apple stuff but it works all the time with the amazon thing it's or you have to push a button like activate siri and if you don't have hey siri enabled you basically have to take your dirty you know cooking fingers and touch some ios device and then have a go bloop and figure out do i talk before the bloop or does it not do i have to wait for the bloop
John:
and then you say, set a timer for five minutes, and then you wait, and then you see, and then sometimes it misunderstands you.
John:
It seems to me from all the people I know who have Echoes that you can basically just yell it into the air with a reasonable expectation that it's going to get you, and if it doesn't, you yell it again, and you're not ever waiting for a loop.
John:
And the Echoes plugs in, right?
Marco:
It's not just battery-powered?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They have one that's battery-powered, but the one that's battery-powered is the tap, and that one doesn't listen all the time.
Marco:
You have to push it to listen.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not good.
Marco:
So if you want to be listening all the time, you need to plug it in.
John:
Is that the one I'm thinking of?
John:
I thought the one I was thinking of is a very short cylinder.
John:
It doesn't double as basically a Bluetooth speaker.
John:
That's the Dot.
John:
Great names.
Marco:
The Dot does also plug in and is always listening.
Marco:
The Dot is basically just like the Big Echo, but without the big speaker.
Marco:
So it sounds substantially worse if you're playing music through it.
Marco:
And the big Echo, as a speaker, is also a Bluetooth speaker.
Marco:
As a speaker, it is merely decent.
Marco:
It is not an amazing speaker.
Marco:
I have a Sonos Play 1 right next to it, and the Play 1 is a way better speaker, by a mile.
Marco:
For music quality, volume, tone, the Sonos system has way better speakers.
Marco:
But the Amazon Echo is really convenient, and that often wins.
Cool.
Marco:
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Marco:
FreshBooks can do that too, and you can help categorize your expenses that way.
Marco:
FreshBooks also offers, for your invoices, online payment.
Marco:
So they have their own gateway, plus you can integrate other gateways if you want to.
Marco:
Your clients can pay you online, which usually means you end up getting paid a lot faster.
Marco:
In fact, they even have a cool thing that I think really broadens the appeal here.
Marco:
You can even, if you do something in person, if you're, let's say you're like an electrician, you go to somebody's house, you perform a job, they have a credit card reader that you can use with your phone in person.
Marco:
It integrates completely with their system, with their invoicing and everything.
Marco:
So you can actually accept payments in person with your FreshBooks invoices.
Marco:
They also have overdue payment reminders.
Marco:
So let's say people take a long time to pay their invoices, which is often the case in the invoicing world.
Marco:
They can automatically help send kind of robotic reminders so that you don't really have to have these awkward conversations and keep bugging people.
Marco:
It does it on your behalf and you can customize what the message says and when they're sent and everything.
Marco:
It's really nice to avoid those awkward conversations about, hey, you know, you haven't paid me and this is due six months ago.
Marco:
um so check it out today this is only a tiny sliver of what fresh books can do uh to fill the full force of the fresh books effect totally free for 30 days just go to freshbooks.com slash atp and make sure to enter accidental tech podcast in the how did you hear about us section once again freshbooks.com slash atp thanks a lot to fresh books
John:
i'm starting to think about why apple why apple is the way it is about third-party integrations they it's not as if apple says oh we have to do everything ourselves almost everything apple does that has a reasonable place for third parties to be part of it there is a place for it to do it like their their apis they make apis for third parties to write software for their platforms and
John:
They have programs for hardware vendors to make accessories for all their various hardware devices.
John:
They have, especially for hardware, they have compliance programs.
John:
You have to fulfill these requirements in terms of size and voltage and reliability and, you know, whatever, like all sensible things, especially in the hardware realm.
John:
There's no,
John:
shortage of accessories for ios devices you can buy even for the watches you can buy watch bands you can buy cases for your ios devices you can buy docks for them keyboards like everything that apple sells for its devices there's tons of choices for third parties so it seems like they know how to foster
John:
an open ecosystem of third parties selling things for their products and in software on application on the application front they're they're okay at that like you know we've talked about the app store and the problems it might have but it's not as if people have the impression that if you buy an apple product you're stuck with apple software they know lots of people make software especially for ios devices and most of those people are not apple that make them
John:
And yet, for things like this, where they're connecting to web services, or they're sending you to someone else's store, or they're integrating with someone else's line of products for your home, that seems to be like Apple's kryptonite.
John:
Anything having to do with the web, certainly.
John:
Anything having to do with money, like giving other people money or becoming their customer...
John:
those seem to be areas that Apple is not willing to sort of open the doors and make connections.
John:
And they're precisely the area that you would want anything having to do with home automation to connect.
John:
Because imagine if Apple sold something like this, but you couldn't use it to buy things from Amazon.
John:
Apple's not a retailer of physical goods other than its own products.
John:
It's not technically a competitor to Amazon in this way.
John:
But can you imagine Apple selling products and say, oh, and doing a keynote demo and say, look how easy it is for me to order new paper towels because they don't care about ordering paper towels.
John:
Their customers have to order paper towels.
John:
They are not going to endorse Amazon unless they can extract some money or some deal from Amazon or whatever.
John:
But that would be a perfect third party integration.
John:
If they made a product like this and made an open API, surely a third party would make an integration for their favorite brand of, you know, Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs or their favorite retailer or a Raspberry Pi thing or an integration with the ring doorbell that we just talked about or whatever.
John:
Those are the things that you have to do if you're going to try to break open this market and be like this sort of de facto central speaking into the air in the middle of my house hub for home automation.
John:
And it just seems like Apple and even companies like Nestor still have the idea like, no, we're going to own the whole freaking house and we're going to tightly control our hardware vendors and they're going to comply to our specifications.
John:
And in the meantime, Amazon using the old PC strategy of just we're completely open, do whatever the hell you want.
John:
And we'll just look at it a couple of years later and see what worked so far is the only thing that has had any measure of success.
John:
Even though it's a very small matter of success just among nerds who are willing to pay $180 to have a weird black cylinder of the house so that they can ask how to spell words.
Marco:
Apple has always had this part of its corporate personality reflected originally by Steve and by a lot of the people who are still there, I think, and who are still making important decisions.
Marco:
They've always had these parts of their personality where sometimes a little bit too much greed shows and sometimes a little bit too control-freaky shows, if that makes sense.
Marco:
And that often holds these things back.
Marco:
So for instance...
Marco:
The 30% in-app purchase rule on iOS apps.
Marco:
One of the reasons why you can't buy Amazon books in the Kindle app for iOS is this rule that Apple won't let Amazon sell them directly without using in-app purchase.
Marco:
And if you use in-app purchase, Apple takes 30%.
Marco:
And that is a very, very high commission to take on sales that you're kind of not much of a part of.
Marco:
But they do it, and it works, and it's the only game in town.
Marco:
If you want to be on this platform, which really matters a lot, you basically have to play by those rules or avoid them like Amazon does and just don't sell anything there.
Marco:
And that kind of attitude goes way beyond that rule.
Marco:
That kind of attitude also extends to things like 16-gig devices.
Marco:
the price hike in the iPad cases, Apple has some greed there.
Marco:
And depending on our discussion earlier about whether you consider that offensive or not, or whether it's just business, but they do oftentimes prioritize profitability of things over making everyone else happy.
Marco:
And that is often good business, so I can't really fault them for that.
Marco:
But it does hold back certain kinds of advancements from the products.
John:
Or they're going for an ideal.
John:
Sometimes they have a vision in their mind of how it's going to look, and third parties will just screw up that vision with the crap that they add.
Marco:
Right, and so that's the other side of it, is the controlling part of it, where Apple's very opinionated in a lot of ways and very controlling.
Marco:
So, for instance...
Marco:
One of the more recent dust-ups around Apple's decision-making was in the early betas of 9.3, they stopped letting the Apple Pencil navigate the entire iPad interface.
Marco:
So the Apple Pencil came out in November or whatever with the iPad Pro.
Marco:
It could navigate the whole interface for its first few months.
Marco:
And then in the early betas of 9.3, they removed that ability.
Marco:
The official PR statement on it was kind of BSE.
Marco:
What we've heard from people who are better informed on the matter is that this was actually an intentional decision because it was not being used the way they thought it should be used.
Marco:
They didn't want it to be used to navigate the whole interface.
Marco:
They wanted it to only be used for artistic purposes or drawing or whatever.
Marco:
It was just being used in a way that Apple didn't foresee and didn't think was proper, but wasn't really hurting anything.
Marco:
And Apple almost removed that ability.
Marco:
And it was only, I think, only by a decent amount of public shaming and outcry over this during the beta period that reversed their decision.
Marco:
they were being a little too overreaching in their control, their desire for control.
Casey:
I don't know if that's so true, though, because there was no obvious reason for them to get rid of it today.
Casey:
But what if something's coming in the future that would conflict with this, the pencil is equivalent to your finger approach that Mike and Gray love so much?
Casey:
It certainly seems to me like they should have some sort of happy medium, like there should be a switch for it or something like that.
Casey:
But I think it's a little bit bold of us to assume they're doing it just to be jerks.
Casey:
It very well could be that they're doing it to set themselves up for something in the future.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, it might not even... I don't want to say that they're being jerks, necessarily.
Marco:
It's that they're being controlling.
Marco:
We see a lot of this with AppReview, too.
Marco:
And whenever there's an AppReview controversy, a lot of times it's because Apple doesn't want us to do things a certain way.
Marco:
Or like what happened with the disaster of various rejections around today widgets, with calculators and drafts and everything else, where PCALC, in today view...
Marco:
And it's like, no, well, you can't have buttons there because we don't want people to do calculations or to do work in the today view.
Marco:
I was like, okay, that's kind of weird.
Marco:
And maybe there might have been a technical reason for that.
Marco:
But it seemed from Apple's statements to the various developers who were affected by those things, it didn't seem like it was a technical limitation.
Marco:
It seemed like it was just like an ideological thing.
Marco:
Like, no, this is not right.
Marco:
They should be using your app for this.
Marco:
All this is just to say there are these areas in the company that still show these negative personality traits that I think do hold them back in some ways.
Marco:
And sometimes it's the right move, but a lot of times it's not.
Marco:
Sometimes it leads to better products, but a lot of times it doesn't.
John:
i brought up the ipod and everything because i feel like they do this so well in so many areas like they strike the right balance in terms of you know the reason we buy their products is they're opinionated and we like their opinion if you don't like their opinion you buy different products right but if you like their opinion you like the fact that they're you know designed and as you know again especially in the hardware carefully designed for the particular look and feel and the features they put in them and just you know the whole iphone itself like when is it when is uh what is the iphone when is when do we make a touch screen that apple feels like it's good enough what are the aspects of like the whole you know
John:
That's how you end up with something like the iPhone, that you have taste and opinions and you are controlling about it and you slowly open it up.
John:
But if I look at the market of iOS devices, especially on the hardware side, they're striking such a good balance in terms of having the products they want to have.
John:
selling accessories that they want to sell but also having this huge ecosystem of accessories from other people every kind of case you could possibly imagine including ones that apple surely thinks are ugly but they're not forbidding those to be made or forbidding an integration we're not going to let our iphone be docked into this uh you know docking device because we think it's gross or we don't want it you know we don't want you to be able to
John:
plug this thing in with the usb cable and control this other thing like for the most part within the constraints of their programs they have a hands-off type of attitude you want to make a weird keyboard case that folds onto your ipad six years before we come out with a hardware keyboard for our ipads it's not bluetooth
John:
fine we're not going to be like oh well we want to forbid that because we haven't decided whether we're going to do a keyboard with a thing even styluses oh we we don't want you to we won't give you a made for you know ios uh stamp of approval on any styluses because we don't want to have a stylus like for years you had those little fake finger styluses there was a million of them right apple's willing to just let that go and i think that was an important thing because it showed them
John:
Like, especially if they sell any in their stores, boy, a surprising number of people buy these super terrible, you know, stylus things that they pretend to be fingers.
John:
Maybe there's something to the stylus thing after all.
John:
And eventually they came up with their own solution, which, of course, didn't have to emulate a finger and was much, much better.
John:
And they did a really good job.
John:
But that I feel like that falls out of the having a big open market.
John:
And it's just.
John:
certain kinds of products they have a blind spot about that with even you could even say apple tv has that for so many years not having apps on it which just seems crazy because they had learned how important apps are and even now having the apps and having them be limited in all sorts of ways because apple has an idea of what a tv app should be like and they're necessarily fencing off whole
John:
ranges of possibilities even going down to you know my own particular pet peeves about 24 hertz output or whatever like that's a whole class of applications that could flourish or not on the apple tv but because apple has this narrowly defined you know you get 200 megs you download stuff on demand you can have games but you have to support their remote just like they're just they fenced it in so narrowly they're not allowing uh
John:
that ecosystem to expand in the ways that some of their other ecosystems have been allowed to expand.
John:
And it's, um, I, and I think it's just, it's just not the right balance.
John:
Like I think that's what, what Apple is always looking for.
John:
And what I'm looking for Apple to do is not to be completely open, not to be completely closed to find the right balance for each product line.
John:
And it's, and the way we see when Apple hasn't found the right balance is competitors, competitors show us because they say, if Apple's dropping the ball here, then we can do better and show you, uh,
John:
something and then you look at it after the fact and you go boy apple had all the pieces they had all the technology and they just didn't they just didn't do it or they were their own worst enemy and i see that i see that the most for every product that apple does that has anything to do with sort of the open web and web services not that apple is against the open web or web services but it just seems to be a big blind spot for them that they don't realize the inherent power in that um and amazon echo i think is the is the most recent and most glaring example
Marco:
Alright, thanks so much for our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Betterment, Ring, and FreshBooks.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
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:
It's accidental.
Casey:
So Tesla came out with a new car, which means your Model S is effectively old and busted.
John:
yep totally obsolete no it isn't because his car is still better than the the previous car in so many ways it's better so tesla came out or debuted with the the the model three i like the emphasis on the master plan and the presentation like oh so many years ago i had this master plan about what we're going to do if you're making a master plan maybe that's the time to come up with like a naming scheme for your cars that's sensible like so many other like
John:
you only got three cars it could be model one two and three model a b and c you know four six eight like there are many possibilities that you could draw from what or name them after your favorite cities or whatever but i don't think anybody drawing up a master plan would be like roadster s x and three like in your first outing that's a ball drop anyway but we don't care about the name
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So for those who are not aware, this is their cheaper sedan, their kind of mass market car.
Casey:
I did watch the presentation, which we'll have a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Elon had said, hey, the Roadster was to kind of get really, really, really rich people to spend money on something stupid.
Casey:
And then that would let us bootstrap the car.
Casey:
which would let well-to-do people spend money on something that was less stupid, which in turn will let us do what we really want to do, which is the mass market Model 3.
Casey:
And they opened pre-orders for the Model 3 the day of the announcement, but I think really, really early in the morning in whatever your local time was.
Casey:
and by the time of the announcement, they had over 100,000 pre-orders.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
110, I think, yeah.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
And so the pre-orders, you have to put $1,000 down, but it is refundable.
Casey:
So that means 100,000 people had given Tesla $1,000 apiece, and I think they're up to like a quarter million.
Casey:
Something like that, yeah.
Casey:
But what's interesting is, you know, the first half of those people did it sight unseen.
Casey:
They knew nothing about the Model 3.
Casey:
Other than that, it was going to cost around $40,000.
Casey:
And it should have around the same range as the Model S, give or take.
Casey:
And then they did the reveal, which it was clear that Apple employees spend a lot of time practicing their presentations.
Casey:
Not only those in the keynote, but those are like dub-dub.
Casey:
Because, man, Elon Musk was not built for this sort of presentation.
Casey:
And that's okay.
Casey:
I mean...
Marco:
Yeah, he could have used some rehearsal.
Marco:
It seemed like he didn't rehearse it once.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But the presentation, nevertheless, was impressive.
Casey:
And the Model 3, on the whole, I like it.
Casey:
I think, aesthetically, it's got a little bit of problems on the outside.
Casey:
I think John takes more issue with the outside than I do.
Casey:
On the inside, I have major issues.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But a $40,000 plus car-ish that has 200 miles plus-ish of range, that's pretty damn appealing.
Casey:
And supposedly they're going to ship the end of next year.
Casey:
This is sounding pretty good.
Casey:
I'm definitely interested.
John:
I wouldn't call this mass market, though.
John:
I understand the progression.
John:
You go from $100,000 in practical car to $70,000 or $80,000 very practical car to a $35,000 still pretty practical car.
John:
Mass market is $25,000.
John:
They're doing everything they can.
John:
The batteries cost a lot of money.
John:
They're building this big factory or whatever.
John:
They're driving the price down.
John:
Eventually, you would expect, if Tesla is still in business 10 years from now, that they will have something in the
John:
honda civic category or whatever so they're working their way down i like the progression i like what they're doing as for the specifics of the product i was never really impressed with the roadster because it's just the you know the what do you call it uh lotus lotus elise yeah uh yeah but you got to do what you got to do i never i i you know it's
John:
It was sort of a minimum viable product type thing.
John:
But as a car, I was like, all right, fine, whatever.
John:
The S, I was generally impressed by the styling because I think the overall shape of the car is good.
John:
They didn't get the details very right.
John:
But practically speaking, having both ridden in Model S's and driven one,
John:
it's a good car like when you're talking about this war like it's not it's not just a good electric car it's a good car i mean and you'd imagine well it better be for the price you get but they successfully made a good car which is no small feat because not a lot of new car companies have come out and made a good car in in our lifetimes right um
John:
And it seemed to have enough of all the components together that even if you have complaints about certain small areas, that it's not a big deal.
John:
I totally expect the Model 3 to do the same thing.
John:
To be good in all the same ways that the S is good.
John:
Because, you know, they can use the same foundation.
John:
Battery, electric motor, wheels, suspension, steering.
John:
everything it i see no reason to believe that those aspects of the three won't be just as good as the model s the only place you're saving any money is i imagine this car is smaller lighter has less batteries in it and so that's how you and they're made in the big gigafactory and economies of scale and blah blah all the sorts of reasons why why does this car cost less than the model s
John:
mostly it's because they're getting better at building these cars and have the big factory building the batteries and there's fewer of them and it's smaller and all that other stuff but i can imagine for instance the interior of the model 3 giving the model s a reasonable run for its money mostly because the model s is not super luxurious to begin with but like that's not where the money is in these cars like the money is all in that freaking battery um and just you know general raw materials and assembly like the electric motors aren't super expensive in the grand scheme of things certainly not compared to an internal combustion engine
John:
Um, where I think the three falls down for me is I feel like it should, it had the opportunity to learn from the S class and exceed it in all of the few areas where it falls down.
John:
So is the interior going to be better than the S?
John:
Probably not.
John:
Design wise, having that big screen in the middle doesn't strike me as a, we learned a lot from the, uh, the model S. Uh, and so now we know how to make a better interior other than the fact that they learned that bigger screens are better.
John:
But my biggest complaint about the outside is what they've done with the front end treatment.
John:
And in some respects, it's obvious what they're going for.
John:
It's like, hey, guys, we don't have to have a place where air goes into the front of our car because there's not a giant exploding internal combustion engineer that we have to blow air on.
John:
Otherwise, it overheats.
John:
We don't have to do that.
John:
So we should not be constrained by the styling of internal combustion engine cars.
John:
We have all this freedom.
John:
Let us now reimagine what the front end of a car can look like.
John:
because why should we make it look like an internal combustion engine that's a good spirit and that's a good idea and they should pursue that but i feel like what they did was took the front of an internal combustion engine car and just erased the grill in photoshop there's a place for the grill it is shaped like a car with a grill would be because marcos does the same thing the model s has a place for the grill and they just put a thing there that is a different color and it looks grill like but there's no holes in it it's you know because you don't need air to go into there right um
John:
That at least like visually from a distance, like, oh, that's a car with a grill, but it's not really grill.
John:
This car clearly has no grill, but it has shape wise the place for the grill.
John:
So I would encourage them to pursue this avenue of styling.
John:
further not like that they went too far they didn't go far enough that they didn't sort of reimagine the front end of an electric vehicle that does not need to suck air through a big opening in the front they didn't do it enough and this is not i think this may not be the final design they have they could conceivably change it and add other little trim things to to mess it up so front end is a mess as far as i'm concerned and then the overall shape
John:
i get why they made it this way they're touting like the interior space the headroom or whatever but its proportions are just not as nice as the s the s is a bigger car the bigger car allows it to have nicer proportions to look more aggressive to look less kind of hunchbacked and and dowdy and like like a droplet of water or whatever i suspect the three will look better in person than it does in pictures i really hope it will look better in person than it does in pictures um
John:
But if I were Marco, I'd be feeling pretty good about my purchase because he still has the best looking, largest, best performing and prettiest Tesla and will for it seems like a long time now.
Marco:
Well, yeah, I mean, I don't have any buyer's remorse, you know, if for no other reason that this probably won't even be out until my lease is over.
Marco:
They're saying this will allegedly ship by the end of next year.
Marco:
So about 18 months from now, I would be surprised if it shipped on time.
Marco:
And also there are 200,000 pre-orders and they currently can make something like 50,000 cars a year.
Marco:
Obviously, not all those pre-orders will turn into real orders because it's a refundable deposit.
Marco:
So a lot of those people are going to cancel.
Marco:
But even if like a quarter of them end up actually going through with it and accepting their cars and buying them.
Marco:
And even if there are no production delays, which is unlikely, it would still put it out in like three years roughly before I could even get one if I wanted one instead of my Model S. And it turns out I probably won't because I like big sedans and I like the additional features of the Model S. I like the additional space.
Marco:
I like the additional luxury that it will almost certainly continue to offer over the three years.
Marco:
Cost-wise, the Model 3 is, from the info we have so far, none of it is final.
Marco:
But from the info we have so far, it is substantially decontented or deoptioned from the base model, Model S. And the cheapest you can get a Model S right now, I just went and configured it, 70-kilowatt-hour battery, and you turn off all-wheel drive.
Marco:
You get the cash price down to $70,000.
Marco:
And the cash price for this is allegedly going to be $35,000.
Marco:
And they've said this enough times and been really sure about it enough times that they probably really can't go back on that PR-wise or at least not by much.
Marco:
So in order to cut the cash price of the car in half, it's going to have to come with less than what the S comes with at its base model.
Marco:
So they've already said it's going to have things like it's not going to have supercharging built in by default.
Marco:
Like you'll have to pay extra for that if you want supercharging.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of stuff that comes standard on every Model S that the Model 3 probably will have to not come with just to hit that price point.
Marco:
I'm guessing that there's going to be a major difference between these two cars.
Marco:
And part of the reason they had to make it so much smaller and make it kind of these weird proportions is to help set it apart, I think, from the S. Because the S is kind of competing in a different bracket here.
Marco:
But overall, I think from what they've shown so far, we can have quibbles about the dash, which I do.
Marco:
But even Elon said on Twitter, it's not even the final steering wheel.
Marco:
And the final steering wheel is going to be amazing like a spaceship.
Marco:
So that kind of might take care of the weird issue with not having any display in front of the driver.
Marco:
But overall, I think this looks like a really potentially awesome car, but there's still a lot of question marks over whether they can actually deliver and whether they'll deliver on time and what you'll actually get for the money.
Marco:
Because I suspect there's going to be a lot of things that we think you'd probably want that are going to be optional add-ons at that price point.
John:
Real-time follow-up of the whole chat room and my memory says that actually they said that they will have supercharging in all models.
Marco:
They will have the capability to, but Elon said on Twitter to somebody recently that it might be an additional fee to activate it, just like the old Model S was.
Marco:
So they will all have the ability to.
Marco:
Same thing with the autopilot.
Marco:
They will all have the hardware to do it, but you won't necessarily have that enabled unless you pay extra.
John:
It's an in-app purchase.
John:
In-car purchase.
John:
Yes, it really is, basically.
John:
I have some faith that the only wildcard I feel like in their ability to deliver on this in terms of schedules and pricing and everything is the battery factory.
John:
Because, you know, many things can go wrong there, and it is a very large endeavor, as they emphasize in the keynote.
John:
But everything else about this car...
John:
they've already done on the model s it doesn't have any weird falcon wing door bs it is essentially a smaller s everything in it they they have substantial experience doing in the s they know how to make cars with doors with door handles with mirrors with wheels suspension steering the of the motors
John:
if they can get the battery manufactured at the price they want working the way they want and sticking in this car i totally believe they will hit their delivery dates because this is this is the kind of iteration i would expect i feel like the x is a weird boondoggle uh with those you know much larger size and the weird doors that like it's its own worst enemy this is the natural evolution down market uh of of the s and
John:
how did they make it cheaper i still feel like the way they make it cheaper is i i feel like it's going to have a smaller battery than yes because it's a smaller car and you can get away with uh equal or range or whatever the target with like 215 range i think 250s was the rumor but i think they announced 215 yeah it's officially specced at 215 and for reference that the 70 the model s 70 kilowatt hour one specifies 230 and that's also a much bigger heavier car like if you look at the at the ratings compare between the s and the x
Marco:
The X ratings are lower per kilowatt hour because it takes more energy to move the larger, heavier car.
Marco:
So I'm guessing with the S having 230 miles out of a 70 kilowatt hour battery, I'm guessing they could put maybe a 50 or 55 into the Model 3 to hit that goal.
John:
yeah i don't the other thing the wild card i don't know about is how much is this going to weigh because you obviously it'll weigh less than the s but how much less and the only way you get it to weigh a lot less is to use a much smaller battery because those things weigh a ton or to use lighter materials are they replacing steel with aluminum is there any like magnesium or other weirdness going you would imagine it can't get too exotic because it's 35 000 car but aluminum at the very least could be in the mix
John:
to try to uh lighten the car and obviously the base model i would just assume i don't remember if this was announced you know one motor in the base model right that not that the motors are again not as expensive as internal combustion engines but if you want to save money like that's the beauty of electric cars and the sort of the curse is
John:
there's not much to them there's electric motor like more or less directly attached to your wheels through a fixed gear ratio uh there's suspension there's steering there's some pumps and compressors there's a giant battery and then there's a living room that you put chairs in right and that's it that's all there is in the car there's some venting i guess for for blowing air on you like there are so many fewer components than the giant mess that is under the hood of internal combustion engine cars where
John:
Just like the little villages on, you know, all around the engine in terms of keeping the engine cool and keeping the oil flowing through it and things going up and down and firing sparks and wires.
John:
And it's just there's just so much extra stuff there that just isn't in this car, which means that if you want to make the car for cheaper, you can reduce your component costs or you can use less of something that's expensive.
John:
but there's not much else there like i really don't feel you know that's why i say on the interior i guess they have to make it not as nice as the s just to like to to differentiate their lines but how much money are you really going to save by using different seat materials like you could save a couple hundred bucks here and there but the big ticket items are that stupid battery uh all the big steel parts that make up a car that you can't get rid of because you need suspension and wheels and a body and crash protection and stuff like that
John:
Uh, and I guess the, you know, one motor is cheaper than two and then that's it.
John:
Then, you know, so they're, they're wise to go after their big cost center, which is the battery is like, how cheaply can we make them?
John:
Can we build like this giant factory and make pretty huge capital investments so that we can churn out at the first year, 250,000 of these batteries and put them into cars that we can sell for $35,000 and at least break even or come close to a product.
John:
I mean, that's the sort of meta thing that we're not really talking about here is that
John:
you know tesla is regardless of what you may think as a car guy about their individual products they're actually doing the thing that so many other car companies have failed to do which is build electric cars build a business on them and make them good cars that people want to buy like that is just you know it's it's it kind of goes without saying we don't say we're like oh i have complaints about this particular car but like
John:
nobody else is doing that hell the biggest car companies in the world sometimes have difficulty making a car that people want to buy and they're making internal combustion engine cars sometimes they miss that target tesla is making electric cars that people want to buy but hundreds of thousands of people will order sight unseen so they're you know they're they're quite a phenomenon regardless of the quality of their individual products and this is like they're
John:
third car or whatever i'm willing to give them wide leeway to continue to fourth to continue to figure out how to do cars if they're still in business which i really hope they are you know when my grandkids are driving uh they should be making pretty amazing cars for prices that hopefully anybody can afford
Marco:
I think, first of all, being in business all the way out there, I think someone's going to buy them.
Marco:
Apple tried, right?
Marco:
I suspect a car company's going to buy them.
Marco:
But, well, maybe Apple's a car company.
Marco:
Good point.
Marco:
Would Elon sell to a car company?
Marco:
I think they had to assassinate Elon first before...
Marco:
But I'm thinking like, you know, worst case scenario, if they're like desperate and if they're going to go out of business, I think they're going to get bought rather than just shutting down.
Marco:
But anyway, it's really quite something like to see the amount of enthusiasm and energy and momentum behind this launch of this car that we know almost nothing about.
Marco:
And even before we knew anything about it, how many orders there were.
Marco:
I mean, it's this is really we're on the cusp of something big here.
Marco:
And it's happening now.
Marco:
It's not like this is like, well, in the future, cars will be really nice and they'll be all electric.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Today, cars are really nice and all electric.
Marco:
They're just really expensive right now.
Marco:
But they're here.
Marco:
They exist.
Marco:
They're selling... I think they have something like 150,000 Model S's already out in the world.
Marco:
So they already sell these cars in decent volume.
Marco:
And yeah, that isn't as much volume as the entire world driving population or some other big brand cars.
Marco:
But that is like real...
Marco:
volume that that counts for something you know like the these things already exist today and they're only going to become more of them in the future it i don't think this is a temporary fad i think this is like this is the like and once you drive one you realize like oh my god this is amazing why doesn't everybody have this and of course the answer is because it's very expensive right now but that seems to be a temporary problem
John:
I'm kind of confused about why some of them have L-shaped door handles, and at least one model, I presume, the base model doesn't.
John:
Is that like a value-add feature?
John:
Well, if you buy the base model, you get straight door handle like Marco's crappy car.
John:
But if you buy the upscale models, your door handle is slightly L-shaped.
John:
They probably just haven't decided which one it is yet.
John:
They built one with the yells and built the other one without them.
John:
Oh, that was the nice thing when they drove the cars out onto the stage.
John:
It's another one of those electric car moments when you realize they don't have to worry about filling the room with carbon monoxide as they drive the cars out onto the stage.
John:
And they also don't have to worry about the noise of the engines running.
John:
Just drive them right out.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, that was pretty wild.
Marco:
Really, every time I drive this electric drivetrain, I'm just like, oh my god, this is so good.
Marco:
If you can get one of these, if you can both swing the price and if it fits within your lifestyle with range concerns and everything...
Marco:
And those are two big ifs.
Marco:
But if it fits, why wouldn't you get it?
Marco:
Once you drive it, that's honestly how you feel because it's so good.
Casey:
If you have the means, I highly suggest picking one up.
Casey:
I have to tell you, though, the interior is so unbelievably bad to my eyes.
Casey:
It's got a dashboard-ish.
Casey:
It has a thing that looks like a dashboard, but all it has on the dashboard is a steering wheel and a touchscreen.
Casey:
And yes, I'm aware that all of this is in flight, but it looks like they didn't even try yet.
Casey:
Like, oh God, I don't like the floating display.
Casey:
It just looks fragile to my eyes, which I know is a Casey problem, but I don't like it.
John:
and i definitely do not like having any sort of gauges behind the steering wheel i just think that's a terrible idea yeah a lot of other cars have tried that like and there have been various theories i mean the economic one is like we'll make a world car that's symmetrical so we can do right and left hand drive and just put the tash cluster in the middle i'm not sure how much i buy that as as a reason but it's something you can see and think about the one of the reasons they gave was like uh
John:
it's better to not have to change your focal distance as much from looking out the window where your focal distance is way off down the road to looking super close to you but like the gauge cluster so let's do like a two level dash or put it in the center so it's you know difference between focusing at four feet versus two feet i'm not sure i buy that because i don't know i mean i i can understand maybe the focal distance you don't want to go from really close to really far but
John:
How much farther away from you can you get that dashboard when it can still have it inside the car with you?
John:
It can't make that big of a difference.
John:
And I just think consumers have voted with their feet to say every car that has tried to do this, and there have been many of them, the feedback has been...
John:
universally negative not massively negative but enough negative that in subsequent models they change it every car that's done a two-level dash where you have one set of gauges close one set of far every car that's had a bunch of gauges in the middle um has eventually gone back to a more conventional arrangement or like that model has you know faded away and a new model is replaced i think maybe the toyota echo still has that arrangement as the as the the lone stalwart but uh
John:
it baffles me why people want to do that in anything other than a concept car and the wild card is and of course we don't know is like fine do you have another solution maybe it's all heads up display they have an amazing hud all right fine i'm i'm you know all i'm just saying is like somewhere where the driver doesn't have to turn his head you need to be able to see things like how fast you're going and you know other information about the car is your turn signal on are your headlights on like without having to look elsewhere i feel like that should be
John:
Easily within the driver's vision without requiring it.
John:
That's why we have gauge clusters.
John:
So I really hope they have some solution to that that isn't just look at the giant screen, the giant 17 or 18 inch screen that we've stapled to the front of the dashboard.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
I understand it's not the final design, but God, I do not like it at all.
Casey:
It just looks so boring.
Casey:
And it's just this vast emptiness there.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
All in all, I am very interested in the car.
Casey:
I am not interested enough to have put down a pre-order.
Casey:
And at this point, there's no point in putting down a pre-order because Declan will be out of college by the time they would deliver on that pre-order, like Marco was saying.
Casey:
But but I'm really intrigued and I'm really pleased that they're moving.
Casey:
I don't know if down market is really the right way to describe it, but certainly into a larger segment of the market.
Casey:
And having driven underscores Model S, it kind of ruined me for life.
Casey:
I mean, it electric cars done right are phenomenally cool.
Casey:
And and I'm really, really anxious to see what this looks like when it's all said and done and when it's actually released.
Marco:
What I also want to see is how does everyone else respond to this?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What happens when this eats into a big part of sales of the BMW 3 Series?
Marco:
How does everyone else react to this?
John:
Well, they've all got electric car projects in the works, like all of them.
John:
I mean, BMW's already got, what is it, the i8 and the i3, and Porsche's got their electric car product.
John:
A lot of people have essentially Model S competitors in the works.
John:
in various stages of development i think now it's just a race of who can get their cars to market soon enough because if tesla beats them to market it's going to be a real problem because as we've seen people are just going to buy whatever whatever good electric car is available they're going to buy it if porsche beats the model 3 out i mean the portions are kind of already lost as the model s has been out like there was something was brought up in a recent article i was reading porsche's target for their electric vehicle was like oh it's gonna have a 3.5 second zero to 60.
John:
The car that's already out now beats that.
John:
The Model S already beats that.
John:
And this is a car you're going to come out with in three years.
John:
That's not good planning, right?
John:
Especially if your name is Porsche and you're going to sell it for Porsche level prices.
John:
Tesla is a strong competitor and has a lead.
John:
But I feel like every car company they're competing with, even like the new Audi A8.
John:
was designed from the beginning to be this is a this structure this chassis this this you know underpinnings of this car accepts both an internal combustion engine and a full electric setup will they do a good job will they will they be as good as tesla who knows but all everyone else has woken up now and said you know we have to do this and now it's just a race to see who uh who gets there first i really do feel like the the only edge the established car companies have
John:
is i feel like they're better at styling and they're better better details and interior and just general kind of like the the intangibles because the teslas for all of their their good looks and everything still they haven't i don't know they haven't really defined a strong visual language i know that's you know they kind of have because you can tell a tesla looks like a tesla but they all kind of look more generic and lozenge like than
John:
The fairly distinctive personalities of the other car lines that, you know, if you see an Audi, you know, it's an Audi.
John:
If you see a BMW, you know, it's a BMW, you know, like there's there's family resemblances that change over the year.
John:
And I think Tesla is, to my eyes, having trouble establishing Tesla.
Marco:
anything outside the sort of generic putry looking car aesthetic in the early days of the ipod apple had a really really strong advantage over the rest of the market that not only were they often first to some of those form factors they would negotiate rates with the flash memory and they would they would consume so much flash memory production in the world and
Marco:
That other manufacturers were not even able to match them on price or to even get enough flash memory or to get the best kind of flash memory because Apple was consuming it all and had locked up all the supply.
Marco:
What if Tesla has that for lithium-ion battery production?
John:
Yeah, they're not buying.
John:
They're making themselves.
John:
What I fully expect to happen is, as part of Tesla's financial viability...
John:
if they have any excess capacity they will sell batteries from their gigafactory to audi and bmw and mercedes or whatever because because why wouldn't you like i mean it's the same reason toyota sells the the what do you call it the prius electric drivetrain to so many other car manufacturers they're not afraid of people competing with the prius because they feel like that's the whole package but they'll sell you their system at a at a you know at a profit
John:
licensed it essentially to you to use in your car so you're not that interested in it um one other thing i'm recalling is that you remember the the fateon the volkswagen fateon however you pronounce it it was like their attempt to make a high-end vw which is weird because a high-end vw is called an audi but anyway it's a vaguely confused product but anyway the uh the reason i'm recalling is the the new audi a8 about the option of electric drive train my understanding is the new phaeton is only electric
John:
So that's going to be the Volkswagen.
John:
What is the Volkswagen Model S competitor?
John:
Everyone seems like they want to have one.
John:
It's not so much that there's secret tech that Tesla has unlocked.
John:
It's that Tesla has proven that if you just do a really good job with modern lithium-ion battery technology and put some electric motors, people will buy that car.
John:
If you were told...
John:
any car manufacturer told audi several years ago just sell a car starting at 70 grand that's electric and get like if you gave them the specs of the model s they'd be like no one's gonna buy that that's ridiculous why don't we just sell them the cars we know how to make for exactly the same price that's better in every possible way like that was their short-sightedness they didn't see that this they didn't see the advantages of this product it's not because they said we have no idea how to build that because in so many respects building a pure electric car is so much more straightforward than hybrid
John:
which is all of them we're doing like oh hybrid systems and we'll go back and forth and the motor will charge the battery and this that and the other thing um like like the chevy vault and everything once tesla was so smart to commit early no just electric that's it like no hybrid no internal combustion engine it makes everything simpler we are completely focused on this and they prove that people will buy this product and now i feel like the other auto manufacturers have woken up to that market possibility and i have to think
John:
that there's enough in-house car design expertise.
John:
All they need is the battery and electric motor expertise that if they can't develop in-house, at the very least, they can buy.
John:
So I think all the established car makers are going to make good electric cars sooner than we think they are.
John:
It's just a question of whether Tesla can continue to outrun them.