Fitness Turd
Casey:
Where's John?
Casey:
Why do we not have John?
Marco:
I'm working on it.
Marco:
I can't get him to connect yet.
Casey:
It might be just you and me, my friend.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Can you imagine the internet revolt that would happen?
Marco:
What do you think they would hate more?
Marco:
Two hours of fish or the show without John?
Casey:
Probably the show without John.
Casey:
I think they would prefer the two hours of fish.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
Oh, hey, John's here.
Casey:
Oh, hi, John.
Casey:
What would you think people would dislike more?
Casey:
Would people dislike hearing fish for two hours more than hearing the show without you?
Casey:
Or would people dislike hearing the show without you and prefer to hear fish for two hours?
John:
Oh, I think they would prefer to hear the fish.
Casey:
That's exactly what we concluded, that the internet would find and smite, smote Marco and I, if you were not here.
John:
I don't really hear any fish, because again, I never listened to the live stream, but the few moments I remember hearing, it's like...
John:
It's not terrible, right?
John:
It's like they play guitars and bass and drums and, you know, and then someone says something for like two seconds in the middle.
John:
And then, you know, even if you don't like it, it's not like you're making people listen to, you know, scream music or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think we'll be fine.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, I think more people like fish than like us.
Marco:
It might not be these people, but in total.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Casey:
It is currently the 13th of April.
Casey:
It is a Wednesday night.
Casey:
We just released this week's episode, or Marco did.
Casey:
A few hours ago, but because John is disappearing for a little bit, we are going to be where we are obviously recording right now.
Casey:
So we expect that Apple will buy Nintendo on the 14th of April, and we won't get a chance to talk about it until I think the 22nd, which is the next time we'll be recording.
Casey:
So expect all the juicy and interesting things to happen over the next week.
Casey:
You're welcome.
Marco:
I mean, at least my car was made obsolete yesterday.
Casey:
That's true, actually.
Casey:
I completely forgot about that.
Casey:
Yeah, they hit the Tesla with the ugly stick.
Casey:
Come at me, haters.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't really regret not getting the new one.
Marco:
Because they literally just did a facelift yesterday, and my car is something like two and a half weeks old.
Marco:
But the new one, I think, overall, is probably better.
Marco:
It has better headlights.
Marco:
It has...
Marco:
It has a center console, which I had to buy a separate third-party center console to shove in there.
Marco:
It comes with one.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't realize it was third-party.
Casey:
That's interesting.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, they had a first-party one, but their reviews were terrible.
Marco:
So then they stopped selling it.
Marco:
So there's a couple of minor improvements, but nothing that really makes me unhappy that I bought two and a half weeks ago rather than today.
Casey:
Yeah, the front kind of grill fascia area, just, I don't dig it.
Casey:
And a lot of people are coming after me, and kind of rightfully so, and saying, oh, well, you're just judging it because it doesn't look like an old car.
Casey:
It doesn't look like something that blows up old plants and dinosaurs, and you're just being a stupid old man.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I might be guilty as charged.
Casey:
And maybe in a few years, I won't need to see a grill up front.
Casey:
But sitting here today, I just don't think it's pretty.
Casey:
And somebody had tweeted, I can't recall who it was, but somebody tweeted and it's been making the rounds endlessly.
Casey:
The picture of Keanu Reeves as Mr. Anderson.
Casey:
And when in the first movie, his lips disappear and his face just is, you know, it's all kind of one big flat area.
Casey:
And it is a very, very similar likeness to the updated Tesla Model S and the Model 3 as well.
Marco:
and the x because like the model it basically this all started with the x that's true i'd forgotten about that i mean ultimately i don't i don't think it's really going to be that big of a deal i think it's it's more just like we are not used to seeing cars that are designed this way and that's why it looks weird because it's unfamiliar but i think within a few months you know once you start seeing these on the road and everything everyone's just going to be like okay that's just how cars look sometimes
John:
No, no, that's not it.
John:
We talked about this last week.
John:
It's like we forgot everything we talked about.
John:
The Model 3 was the one where the Keanu lip sewing shut disappearing matrix thing was going around.
John:
Because the Model 3, what we've seen of it anyway, because again, who knows what's final, but what we've seen of the Model 3 is there's nothing there.
John:
There's no dividing line, different color patch, different material.
John:
It is just one continuous schnoz.
John:
And, um...
John:
And as we talked about last week, it's not so much that...
John:
that we demand to have a grill right it's that the car looks like it has a place where a grill should go like the that they haven't fully embraced the idea that they don't need to pull air into that spot they have built a car with a spot where a grill would go but just neglected to put the same reason a face looks weird with a big smooth spot where the mouth should go because we know that's where the mouth goes if you want to draw something that doesn't have a mouth don't draw the place where the
John:
The X and the new S, they have a grille.
John:
They have a little T-shaped thing, which I think is pretty good for Tesla T. Every brand has some sort of signature grille shape that they go with, and they change it over the years.
John:
But Audi's got that big mouth trapezoid thing they go with.
John:
Well, it does look a little bit like a creepy partial mustache, like the skinny stache.
John:
It looks a little bit like that.
John:
It looks a little bit like Alfa Romeo, too.
John:
It's not like every brand.
John:
BMW has the kidneys.
Yeah.
John:
so that is a pretty big signature there but other brands have changed their shape over the years and sometimes they stick with it for like three or four model generations and they go with a different shape anyway this tesla thing with the little t with their actual t logo inside it that's fine it's kind of like a grill um i have to see this one in person because from some angles the little little mustache they have there
John:
suffices as far as i'm concerned visually because they put a place for the grill and they put a grill on it i mean that basically is a grill it's not a big grill but it's a grill like why else have a big like opening in black air because because other internal combustion engine cars have one the model 3 has the same place for that thing to go but there's nothing there so it looks weird um and like i said last show
John:
And if they want to go with the no grill in the front because they can, fine, go for it.
John:
Embrace it.
John:
Make it look like a car that never had a grill, was never intended to have a grill.
John:
And they kind of can't do that with the Model S because they decided with Marco's car to put the big giant ball gag thing there.
John:
It looks like a big black grill, but it's just clear plastic.
John:
Like someone shoved a rubber ball into the mouth of the car and it's like... But that's...
John:
that but that you know that they made the decision you can't really reshape the whole car the other thing that's a factor is uh pedestrian safety and crash standards probably dictate uh at the very least the minimum height of the front of the car so you can't really go whole hog into a styling that totally neglects the grill so i'm not entirely sure what to do to resolve this but i know the answer is not what the three did which is make a car with a place for a grill and just fail to put one there
Casey:
Yeah, the side view, I'm looking at this post on Jalopnik, which we'll have in the show notes.
Casey:
If you look at it from the side of the car, it actually doesn't look bad at all.
Casey:
But any sort of front angle just looks it's just this this this vast emptiness.
Casey:
And it just I agree with you, John.
Casey:
It looks like a grill belongs there, but isn't there isn't there.
Casey:
And I think I prefer this to the Audi.
Casey:
I will swallow the world grill that's become so trendy for Audi these days, which is just awful.
John:
or the new lexus ones too and the new lexus and toyota oh you're right yeah the next lexus has the bow tie shape yeah it's kind of like uh goes i forgot about that that's even worse yeah and it's like the entire front of the car yeah it's so bad that's efficient efficient for cooling if they use all that space but are you talking about you're still saying you don't like the s because casey the s has a grill like that little the little mustache
Casey:
It doesn't fill the area.
John:
I see there's a big expanse under it that you feel like is a place where more grill should go and there isn't any.
John:
And they actually exaggerate it because if you look, they actually extend down like the thing that's around the fog lamps.
John:
The material goes down even farther, making room, even more room for the non-existing grill.
John:
Yep, exactly.
John:
I just don't care for it.
John:
anyway i'm sure it looks fine and once i see them in person which you know should be any day now as soon as they start selling them because they're all over here um i'll have to the render judgment of seeing in a person but i think it looks better than the three by far yeah it does look better than the three i i think so too and and i think of all their like including if you look at the x and the s and the three together i think it looks the best out of all three of them out of the current the current ones they're producing
Marco:
Although one concern I have for all three of them is that front area that is that is body color is just going to get full of bugs and chips.
Marco:
Oh, good point.
Marco:
You know, like that's always the most damaged area of any car I have because it's always just covered.
Marco:
Just put a bra on it.
Marco:
God, we start in there again.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Are we going back to this?
Casey:
God.
Casey:
Anyway, so I agree.
Casey:
I understand that this will probably at some point look normal to me.
Casey:
But today I don't care for it.
Casey:
And I think it looks ugly.
Casey:
all right so let's not talk about teslas anymore and let's start the follow-up and our first follow-up item is let's talk about teslas and let's talk about superchargers and charging at night now you're following instructions this is another thing by the way the chat room was also the chat room was also right about this last show we just didn't get a chance to pull them i meant to do it but we had moved on by then
John:
In the discussion about how many supercharger stations there are versus how many gas stations and factoring how long it takes to charge and all the other infrastructure needed if we were to convert all of the existing cars to electric with the snap of our fingers and so on and so forth.
John:
One point we didn't bring up, but again, which the chat room did, was that even though superchargers take a long time to charge.
John:
you can get you can fill up your electric car someplace other than the quote-unquote gas station you know when you drive it back to your house you just plug it in and a lot of people are saying that as long as you don't drive more than half the range of your car per day you never need to go to a supercharger unless you're going on a long trip so you need far fewer superchargers because just when you go back home you plug it in
John:
Um, and I was thinking about this when I was discussing the, uh, the charge thing last time, and it's kind of in the middle because I mean, well, Marco can tell us, but like, I recall him saying somewhere on Twitter that it takes like three days to charge his car to full capacity from the plain old wall outlet.
Um,
Marco:
Yeah, so if you only have a plain old wall outlet, it's about three days for a full charge.
Marco:
But if you're spending this much on a car, I don't think it's that much to ask to spend another few hundred to at most a couple thousand dollars to do whatever it takes to get a high-powered outlet in your garage.
Marco:
If you have a 50-amp outlet, the NEMA 1450 that Tesla recommends, that charges the entire car in something like seven hours, depending on how big a battery you have.
John:
So if you're buying a $70,000 or $80,000 or $35,000 car, maybe, but as these things come down in price, basically, I would say if you're asking people to change their home in some way, they basically become like a little charging station.
John:
That's part of the infrastructure.
John:
Part of the infrastructure, you don't have to build gas stations, but every single person who owns one of these cars...
John:
has to at least have a dryer outlet in their garage or buy one of the big supercharger things or whatever, which is fine, like you said, for people with Model S and the Model 3.
Marco:
Well, not every person.
Marco:
Like, you know, underscore, our friend underscore David Smith, he is still, you know, he bought the car like in December.
Marco:
He still just only has the regular outlet and he drives...
Marco:
few enough miles that it doesn't really matter unless he's taking a trip in which case using superchargers so and right now i still have that too because electricians in new york take a while to get back to you so i still have the plane on outlet as well and so far it's been totally fine because i just i'm not driving hundreds of miles a day it would only be a problem if i was driving like you know a hundred or more miles a day what i'm getting at is like that it's not that the math is not as long as you drive half the range it's more like if you drive a third of the range or whatever uh and the other thing is that
John:
Since these are the first round of like minimally viable electric cars to compete with gas cars, they don't have the same ranges as a long range gas car, but they're close enough that, you know, that it's fine, right?
John:
This is not like the Leaf where it's intended to be a very short range car.
John:
I would assume that the capacity of electric cars will go up as batteries become cheaper.
John:
Maybe not that much.
John:
Maybe they'll stop around a 300-mile range, like an easy 300-mile range for everybody.
John:
And so that will just only add to charging time.
John:
So it seems like some necessary part of the infrastructure of the electric car world is every home to have
John:
a little bit better charging capacity doesn't mean they need to have a big supercharger or the three thousand dollar thing or whatever probably just an extra dryer outlet and since most people i would imagine go way less than a third of the range of their electric car or even a quarter of the range of electric car they'll probably be fine and that will definitely save on the supercharger uh the number of superchargers needed the flip side of that though is the places that need superchargers
John:
Yeah.
John:
and it's just a giant corridor of a bunch of cars that need to do that and they're used to pulling off at one of the service stations getting gas you know and then just continuing on and if it takes you even just 15 minutes that's gonna you know you're gonna have big backups and snarls as you can tell if anything at all goes wrong at any of the toll stations along the way that you're sitting in traffic for hours and hours so it seems like superchargers are going to be concentrated along the major thoroughfares and then
John:
In suburban areas, maybe you can have one that covers a tremendous area because only people who are passing through need it.
John:
Everyone else just charges at their house.
Marco:
Well, also, I think another major problem to tackle is that if you don't have a house with a garage or a permanent parking spot and a driveway...
Marco:
uh it's kind of impractical to have an electric car because you have like you know so many people live in apartments or in play in you know street parking only areas where you're parking your car on the street overnight you know you don't have a drive or you don't you don't have a garage uh how do you charge you know on a on a regular basis out there that's that's trickier to solve i think inductive charging mats you just drive your car over the top of it
John:
Those exist.
John:
You never know.
John:
I know.
John:
They'll just put them in the road when they're putting the little sensors for these automated cars.
John:
They'll also put chargers at every stoplight.
Casey:
Yeah, why not?
Casey:
Marco, what's the nearest supercharger to you in terms of distance?
Marco:
Oh, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, there's one in Newburgh, which is pretty far up.
Marco:
I mean, it depends on what direction am I headed is the more relevant question.
Marco:
If I'm going upstate, the closest one is Newburgh, which is something like a half hour up or an hour up.
Marco:
If I'm going into Pennsylvania, New Jersey area, then I'm sure it's a different one.
Marco:
If I'm going through Connecticut, I think there's a couple over there.
Marco:
So it depends on where I'm going, really.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The reason I'm asking is I see there's one in Greenwich, Connecticut, which looks to my eye like it's pretty close to you.
Marco:
Yeah, that's very close.
Casey:
There's one in Paramus, New Jersey, which also looks fairly close.
Casey:
It looks like Greenwich is probably closer.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
Anyway, what I'm driving at, though, is let's suppose for the sake of discussion that
Casey:
you don't ever do anything to the home, and you only have a regular outlet, and you would have to charge over the span of three days.
Casey:
In a desperation scenario, you could drive what, to my eye, looks like half an hour or less to, say, Greenwich, and you could use the supercharger there and drive back, and that's, what, like probably 20, 30 miles, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, and that would, in a pinch, solve the problem as long as you had an hour to spare to go charge.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
I always have an hour for Granix.
Marco:
They have amazing watch stores there and a good lunch place.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
How's the chicken salad?
Marco:
I haven't had that yet.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
But anyway, you see what I'm driving at.
Casey:
I haven't been there that many times.
Casey:
Maybe you can avoid doing the home modification until the next time you do a demo on the house, which for you seems to be every couple of years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I have one of the situations, I think like Underscore, where my circuit breaker panel is full.
Marco:
And so the electrician is quoting me a couple thousand dollars to do like a – I don't need a panel upgrade, but I need a subpanel.
Marco:
And then once you throw in the cost of all the local permits and everything else, all the fees for the town and everything, it's probably going to be maybe $2,000 or $3,000.
Marco:
And that does make you pause.
Marco:
You're like, well, is it really –
Marco:
Am I really ever going to need that necessarily compared to the regular outlet?
Marco:
And I might not.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's interesting.
Casey:
You know, I find this all fascinating.
Casey:
I don't suspect that I'm going to have an electric car anytime soon.
Casey:
Not necessarily from lack of desire, but because those that are available today don't really do it for me or are exorbitantly expensive or are the Model 3 that even if I reserved one now, I won't get until Declan's graduating college.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't suspect I'm going to get an electric car anytime soon, but I am fascinated by all the differences and the different thoughts and concerns and worries that one has.
Casey:
Like, should I modify my home in order to support charging this quicker?
Casey:
That's so different than what I'm used to thinking about.
Casey:
And I just find it very interesting.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, the modification to your home, if your home is at all modern or new or has modern electric service in it, is usually very minimal.
Marco:
It's usually a couple hundred dollars to have an electrician install a high power outlet, usually really close to where your breaker was anyway, because so many breakers are in garages.
Marco:
So it's, you know, for most homes out there in the country that are fairly young, I think it would be a very inexpensive modification.
Marco:
And most people, I don't think, really think too much about it.
John:
yeah all right moving on um well sort of moving on john do you want to tell us about this next item yes i meant to look up what sae stands for but uh one of you and or the chat room will do that while i'm addressing one last point on the superchargers also brought up by the chat room also related to sae which is uh connector standards tesla's apparently got its own connector uh it's got like the two little things have like a t-shape in it i seem to remember it had like kind of a branding theme but anyway yeah i think there's four pins in there maybe
John:
society of automotive engineers uh sae stands for um they have a standard connector for electric cars which is not the same as the tesla connector so i mean we'll see how this works out in terms of you know adapters don't seem like it's rocket science if you have any kind of station that can provide electricity to cars
John:
um obviously tesla has its own brand of supercharger stations they don't care if you can charge anyone else's car there i think but i see no reason why they couldn't um i feel like that will work itself out if it turns out that tesla builds a million supercharger stations before anybody builds anything guess what the standard connector is tesla's not this sae standard um but speaking of sae standards
John:
uh as a has a standard measurement system for self-driving cars which why wouldn't they because they're sitting around all day trying to come up with standards like oh self-driving cars how about we can make up standards for things that don't exist so they did uh zero it goes from zero to five zero is no automation and five is full automation and they divided into two regions of three each because they start from zero because they're programmers um
John:
0, 1, and 2 is human driver monitors driving engagement.
John:
Basically, there needs to be a human driver, and they need to monitor everything.
John:
And 3, 4, and 5 is automated driving system monitors driving environment.
John:
I didn't read this entire PDF, so I'm not quite sure how they break it down.
John:
much farther um but again my criteria is do i need to know how to drive a car to get into this car i guess you could do it simpler as do i get to sit in the back seat because like boils down to the same thing if you get to sit in the back seat and no one is in the front seat that's complete self-driving car right all right can i fall asleep
John:
If you have to sit in the front seat and have to know how to drive a car because you may be called upon to do so, you're still in the lower range.
John:
So that's really the barrier that I carry.
John:
But it's good that the Society of Automotive Engineers has decided to come up with a scale for this.
John:
And I wonder where they would... I mean, I guess...
John:
i guess uh your tesla is on two which they call partial automation it's like no automation driver assistance partial automation conditional automation high automation full automation all standards bodies is there anything you can't standardize apparently not so anyway be watching for uh sae numbers to be quoted on your cars just like the sae engine power ratings that no one reads except you
Casey:
John, do you think, and this is Robin Malhotra that's asked us this, do you think, John, that Apple's new file system or truly autonomous vehicles will come first?
John:
Truly autonomous, according to my definition just laid out, as in you can sit in the backseat and don't have to drive.
John:
Apple's file system will come first.
John:
Easily.
Casey:
I tend to agree, but you never really know.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Cameron Palm has written in and made some interesting points about the Amazon Echo and Amazon in general.
Casey:
He or she has said, well, I'm sure Amazon Echo and Dash buttons are interesting as products are a couple of key issues.
Casey:
Number one, Amazon is a U.S.
Casey:
thing.
Casey:
It works in the U.S.
Casey:
because of cheap shipping.
Casey:
It doesn't work slash exist in most of the world, including Europe, not in the U.S.
Casey:
sense.
Casey:
The Echo is also only available in American English.
Casey:
Siri, on the other hand, and he or she provides a link, is available in many, many, many places.
Casey:
And there's a link that we'll put in the show notes for a feature availability for Siri.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
In ways that you wouldn't imagine it would be.
John:
Is there anything specific about the Echo that has to be so U.S.?
John:
It seems like they could make one for other countries, right?
John:
Maybe they just don't have enough server farms over there.
John:
They don't have the expertise to do the translation and the detection in different languages.
John:
Either way, it's always seemed kind of weird to me that such a big company like Amazon seems to have such grand ambitions with the whole, you know...
John:
EC2 and S3 and selling things all over the world.
John:
I mean, I can understand maybe not being able to sell physical goods all over the world, but for all their electronic products and network services, they should expand more.
Marco:
And I think we're seeing here a strategy tax at Amazon, which is the Echo does lots of things that don't use their storefronts at all and don't depend on their storefronts at all.
Marco:
But one of the main reasons that all Amazon hardware exists is to get you to buy more content or media or stuff from Amazon.
Marco:
And so I bet they don't want to even bother supporting it in countries and languages where they also don't have widespread store coverage for their stores.
Marco:
And Amazon is historically notoriously US-centric in their storefronts.
Marco:
So that's probably the reason, the main reason why, is that
John:
the echo couldn't do like half the things that amazon wants it to be doing yeah maybe but like you have to just think like long term like i mean because amazon like i said amazon is such a long-term thinking company i mean the ceo is making spaceships and stuff so long term if you are if china if you're not selling in china you've got a big problem because china has a lot of and india for that matter china india guess what they have a lot of people and those people are in many cases uh
John:
crawling up into the the the income class where they can buy your products like that that those countries are they're not developing countries they're like developed like you know they're entering the middle class uh type of thing they're ready to buy expensive frivolous electronics right uh and it's happening faster and faster so like if you no matter how i put it this way if you know even if amazon gets 100 of the market for physical goods in the united states
John:
uh if you just fast forward enough years the whoever gets 100 of the market in china and india is going to gobble them up because having 100 of the u.s is meaningless when when they get billions of people in asia yep all right who wants to talk about ubiquity's eight port power over ethernet switch probably marco our first sponsor this week are we really talking about a switch i am briefly go ahead sponsor you're fine
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Meh.com.
Marco:
This is a new sponsor.
Marco:
It's Meh.
Marco:
Am I pronouncing that right?
Marco:
M-E-H?
Marco:
Meh?
Marco:
Meh.
Marco:
I've never actually said this word.
Marco:
You have to sound more apathetic.
Marco:
Meh.
Marco:
You got it.
Casey:
That's better.
Casey:
That's better.
Marco:
So Meh.com.
Marco:
These are the people.
Marco:
Long ago, they founded a site called Woot.com.
Marco:
And Woot was like a one thing a day daily deal kind of site.
Marco:
And the things were like things that appealed to geeks.
Marco:
So it was, you know, like cheap, crappy little hardware.
Marco:
And what I was saying last week and the week before, like just being blown away by how cheap hardware is these days.
Marco:
And it especially costs nothing if you get it from a place like meh.
Marco:
So what they do is one deal a day.
Marco:
And this is how Amazon ruined it.
Marco:
So Amazon bought Woot forever ago.
Marco:
The team behind it, the founders behind it,
Marco:
uh eventually got fed up because amazon was ruining it they were they like made it instead of being one deal a day it would be oh now there's just a whole bunch of deals and well that's kind of just amazon at that point uh it kind of lost its personality and kind of lost what made it special so they were all unhappy with this so they just left and they went and founded a company called mediocre labs which i love and they made this site called meh and i love the attitude at this site if you read their copy this is like the best copywriting for trying to just barely sell a product
Marco:
For this ad, there's no coupon code.
Marco:
There's no tracking URL.
Marco:
I was given no script.
Marco:
They just said, just wing it.
Marco:
If you see that they sponsored Daring Fireball a lot, you can almost barely tell that they are sponsoring.
Marco:
The way they want those posts to be written, it almost seems like, wait, who's the sponsor here?
Marco:
Did they hide the link?
Marco:
They do fun, quirky stuff like that.
Marco:
This is obviously like laid back people who know that they are selling really cheap hardware.
Marco:
And it's like surprisingly cheap.
Marco:
So today, the one in there today is, it looks kind of like an Apple Watch shape, but it's actually a speaker that goes on your wrist.
Marco:
It looks, it's like, who would wear this?
Marco:
And they even say like, who would wear this?
Marco:
And it's $8.
Marco:
And that's today.
Marco:
And it changes every day.
Marco:
It changes at midnight.
Marco:
Once the things sell out, they're just gone.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
There's no like advance notice of like, hey, tomorrow we're going to have a Chromebook or whatever.
Marco:
And sometimes they, you know, so they have all this like awesome, like cheap, crappy hardware that you can't believe it's that cheap and it has anything in it that works.
Marco:
And they also sometimes have good stuff.
Marco:
Last week, they had a really impressive home theater receiver that does 3D sound, which I didn't even know this was a thing until I read their site.
Marco:
They had Apple Watch on there before, the Apple Watch Sport on there a few weeks back or a few months back.
Marco:
They have some really nice stuff as well.
Marco:
I love their copywriting more than anything else.
Marco:
I love how they sell these products just barely.
Marco:
The attitude is hilarious.
Marco:
You can sign up to become a special member, which is the very mediocre person.
Marco:
VMP, not VIP.
Marco:
There's all sorts of little benefits you can get here.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
It's meh.com.
Marco:
M-E-H dot com.
Casey:
Meh.
Casey:
That's pretty much spot on.
Marco:
Okay, good.
Marco:
I feel like I need more facial hair, to say it correctly.
Casey:
No, you just need a lot of indifference.
Casey:
You need to be overflowing with indifference.
Marco:
This is a hard ad read to do because usually I'm supposed to sound enthusiastic about the sponsors.
Marco:
Not this time.
Marco:
I love the way these people do business.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Meh.com.
Marco:
Thanks for sponsoring.
Marco:
Meh.
Marco:
There we go.
Marco:
That's how I'm supposed to say it.
John:
so why don't we talk about this uh eight port power over ethernet switch i i'm at the edge of my seat i'm so excited well last week i was talking about uh me trying to find just a simple eight port switch that has no fan is silent is reliable and uh you know just sits there my other requirement by the way is that
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
um and marco uh brought up and linked to his uh the hp thing that he likes and actually i saved the bookmark for that next time i need one i'm going to give that one to try i still have a couple of extras at home and waiting for them to dive once they die um i'll try that one well also if you just need one big one i i actually use i forgot to mention i actually use a rack mount hp switch in my garage that has it because when i when we had our big renovations done i i had the house wired for ethernet so i have something like 12 uh or 12 or 15 ports that
Marco:
that all go into this big hp i think it's an 1810 something like that so that's probably yeah something like that it's some kind of gigabit hp semi-managed or managed switch it was a couple hundred dollars and that's also been rock solid i've never like rebooted that never had a port die never had any problems with it whatsoever
John:
yeah if i had it in like a garage or in the basement or someplace like that i would just get a big rack mount one and just put it wherever the heck i wanted it and who would care uh as long as it was reliable but unfortunately due to the way i have the wires running i have lots of these little ones around i have an eight port one on my tv i have uh an eight port one in the computer room i have an eight port one next to my nas uh and stuff downstairs and so there's a bunch of these little ones many of which are in spaces where people have to be so they have to be quiet so the hp1 it's fanless if it's reliable you know i'll give it a try that sounds good but i was surprised that
John:
marco didn't suggest ubiquity because we talked about ubiquity hardware last week and you were saying how much you loved it they make an eight port switch too uh and ars technica actually reviewed it recently and it looks weird and enterprisey and ubiquity and stuff like that but i'm like hey well if it's solid and reliable is exactly what you're looking for right this is a fanless one their eight part one doesn't have any fans in it it has a bunch of fancy features that i'm not interested in like the you know all these things they can do with uh traffic shaping and
John:
uh you know management and all sorts of other stuff um but of course it's 200 so uh i pretty much noped out of that once i saw the price uh not that i'm completely unwilling to pay a lot of this you know most of the time it's like all right well if this is a good one and it's reliable i'll pay money for but just
John:
it's just so much more than like the 50 bucks i'm used to paying and i it's like well if you keep buying 50 switches you're gonna get a crappy one and they're gonna make noise and go dead or whatever um but the thing is i had these d-link switches that were attractive and reliable for a really long time like
John:
six years seven years no it's got to be longer that's at least eight years that's how old my mac is and i think i got them before that how i just want that again you know maybe i just got lucky and i found like it was i think i bought them for like 35 like eight years ago i just want that again eight years for 35 is much better than you know how long would a 200 uh thing need to last so anyway i think i am not in the market for these ubiquity switches but who knows maybe i'll get burned by enough 30 boxes that i will regret not buying this fancy managed eight port switch from
Marco:
the uh the fancy marco brand yeah and also you know a little more follow-up on ubiquity before we leave so we stopped getting email about it um apparently ubiquity also sells ip cameras and and i did look very briefly into those but amazon didn't stock a lot of them it looks like they're transitioning their model line into a new model that's like out of stock everywhere right now uh so i kind of just missed it so that's why i didn't look into that they're also a
Marco:
A few people wrote in to say that they also now have, I was talking last week about how there's this annoying Java wireless access point based controller software that you need if you have certain advanced features enabled, which I don't.
Marco:
And you also need it for initial setup of any of their wireless access points.
Marco:
And it turns out that they also sell this little kind of like one of those like Intel USB.
Marco:
It looks like a USB stick, but it's actually like a whole mini computer in there.
Marco:
You know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
The Nux, is that?
Marco:
Whatever those are.
Marco:
They sell something that looks just like that.
Marco:
And it runs their software in this little like mini computer thing.
Marco:
So you don't need to run it on one of your real computers if you don't want to.
Marco:
But those things are also sold out everywhere.
Marco:
But when they're in stock, they're supposed to only be like 70 or 80 bucks.
Marco:
So you can pay $70 or $80 to avoid installing Java somewhere, which I would probably do.
Casey:
And what was the name of that product?
Casey:
Do you remember?
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
It doesn't matter because it's out of stock everywhere.
Marco:
It's Ubiquiti.
Marco:
It's like some kind of cloud controller or something like that.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Bakuti makes routers and Wi-Fi access points and IP cameras and switches.
Marco:
They also make long-range Wi-Fi antennas.
Marco:
So if you want to beam Wi-Fi from one building to a whole different building that might be far away, they make a whole bunch of stuff to do that.
Marco:
That also costs suspiciously little, but everyone says it works very well.
John:
It's like this company is everywhere.
Marco:
Yeah, well, I think they, you know, it turns out there's a pretty big business in taking something that's controlled by a very small number of very high margin companies and doing the same thing for a lot less money.
Marco:
I'm glad Casey got my joke.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm here for you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So right after we recorded the last episode, Smile Software ended up changing some of the stuff about the new pricing for TextExpander.
Casey:
So what it basically amounted to was, well, most of the things are the same.
Casey:
We're going to give you a little bit of a discount if you're already a customer and we'll keep the old thing around for some undetermined amount of time.
Casey:
Is that a relatively fair summary?
John:
Well, I think the most important thing is that they did something because that was what we were talking about last week.
John:
Like, oh, let's see what they did.
John:
Let's think maybe they meant this.
John:
Maybe they meant that, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it's like, all right, well, we see what their announcement of Texas Banner 6 is doing to the market.
John:
Now we wait to see...
John:
is this what they wanted to do because a lot of the discussion last show was like well this is what they did and it doesn't seem crazy to expect to have these results come out of it surely they must have thought of this um but on the other hand maybe they've made a huge mistake and we'll find out if uh they do anything about it like oh no we hear your feedback we're gonna and that's exactly what they did it was faster than i ever thought they would so it's so clear that whatever it is they thought they were doing
John:
they did not expect the reaction they got because there was what was like two days after the announcement one day it was very quickly afterwards they have this post that says no no no all right we heard your feedback blah blah blah and now we come to the announcement did they hear people's feedback yeah is what they've done uh actually addressing people's concerns and i'll let marco say because i know he has a pretty strong opinion that they're not addressing the concerns really
Marco:
Well, it's, you know, I mean, honestly, I don't care that strongly about this topic in general because, as I said, I'm not really a text spender user.
Marco:
And also, I am a developer who sells something that's subscription priced.
Marco:
And so, I do sympathize with their economic needs here.
Marco:
However, you know, what they announced is basically that, you know, they moved this product that was a traditionally sold, like, you pay $40 or something for this product.
Marco:
Every time you do a major upgrade, you might get an upgrade discount or whatever.
Marco:
But for the most part, it's like,
Marco:
You pay a decent amount up front and then you can use it as long as you want.
Marco:
And then when we make new ones every couple of years or every year, you can choose to upgrade or not.
Marco:
And they've moved it from that model to it's now a web service with a required $5 a month subscription.
Marco:
with these client apps that are now free.
Marco:
And so the people who used it were very angry for basically two main reasons.
Marco:
Number one, as we discussed last episode, a lot of people just don't like subscription pricing, especially for things that they don't expect it on or that they don't see the value in.
Marco:
Whether or not it's there, it's what people expect for pricing models.
Marco:
I don't want to pay per month for a USB hub.
Marco:
It's just a USB hub.
Marco:
It does its job, right?
Marco:
Why should I need to pay per month for that?
Marco:
Some people view software that way, even though it kind of isn't in practice.
Marco:
But anyway, so there was that complaint.
Marco:
And if you have that complaint, the new announcement, which is basically, we're dropping the price on the subscription for people who had the old version.
Marco:
And we're going to keep the old version updated for an unspecified amount of time.
Marco:
And so if you had the objection that this thing should not be subscription priced, period, this will not affect you at all.
Marco:
You will still be upset about this.
Marco:
If you had the opinion that, well, I'm upset about this not because it's subscription priced, but because I will end up paying a lot more than I did before –
Marco:
Then this will probably make you happy because now it has removed, I think, most or all of that complaint.
Marco:
I haven't done all the numbers, but it's something like, you know, I think you'll end up paying roughly the same that you were paying before if you upgraded every few years.
Marco:
So it will address some of the complaints and the ones that were primarily about just like total price over time.
Marco:
But it will not address the people who are really upset that they are moving to this model.
Marco:
And also, they also have this other problem where they removed their sync features.
Marco:
Because one of the ways they're justifying the new subscription service is you can now sync through their web service.
Marco:
In fact, you have to sync through their web service.
Marco:
uh before test expander which works by having full keyboard access so it can read every keystroke it has to read every keystroke you're typing so it is functionally a key logger and before it didn't need internet access because before it supported sync through lots of different means basically like it would store its data in a file somewhere and you could sync that file through many different means i think dropbox was probably the most common one people used from from people who i know who used it um so
Marco:
Before, this keylogger, effectively, didn't need network access.
Marco:
Now it does.
Marco:
And so there's also the concerns about the security around this.
Marco:
It's kind of tricky to combine something that has full keylogging access with something that has a network connection to third-party servers that you don't control.
Marco:
And then there's a question around whether they are encrypting the snippets that you are storing there.
Marco:
And of course, I'm pretty sure the answer is that they're not, but they're just relying on the other security measures around just your login and stuff to protect them.
John:
so there's a whole bunch of concerns here that people had a whole bunch of objections that people had to this new model and they have addressed one of them which is the total price over time but that's all they've addressed so far what about text expander 5 uh their their change on that said we will continue this from their press release we will continue to sell and support text expander 5 for os 10 and text expander 3 plus custom keyboard for ios for those who need it
John:
and they don't don't give any time scales we will continue to sell and support continue for how long forever a year a month a week five days when if text expander 5 is not compatible for the next version of os 10 uh will it be updated so many questions that again i have to think they know these questions like they've been getting tons and tons of feedbacks huge number of those questions must have said how long will text offender 5 be supported
John:
Will you update it?
John:
How long will your old versions that didn't do the subscription pricing, how long will they be supported?
John:
Will you continue to update them?
John:
And they just didn't answer it at all.
John:
And you have to think it's because they think people won't like the answer, not because, oh, it didn't occur to us to address that question, because they must have got that question thousands of times already.
Marco:
Yeah, because the answer is, you know, if you think about it, just think about it from their point of view.
Marco:
They're not trying to be, like, greedy or evil or anything.
Marco:
They can't support an old version of this app forever.
Marco:
There's going to be, on an infinite timescale, there's going to be an end to the support for this version of this app.
Marco:
So, and, you know, when are they going to do that?
Marco:
What they've said in this post, it really just, I think, honestly makes the problem a little bit worse because it implies that this will be supported indefinitely.
Marco:
But in practice, there's going to be an end, and I don't think we or they know when that end will be yet, but I think they're creating an unmaintainable expectation here.
John:
yeah like they've to the naive person reading this someone's going to read we will continue to sell and support text expander 5 and be like oh i'm so satisfied this press release made me feel so much better thank you smile we love you right but what they have in their head is and i'll continue to use text expander 5 forever like and eventually text expander 5 will not work and they're going to be so angry then because they're going to be like but you put out this press release that said you will continue to sell and support text matter 5 and then that's going to be like well
John:
we continue to support Texas matter five, but unfortunately, Texas matter five is a product that is only compatible with versions X, Y, and Z and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And I'll be like, but you said, and like, people aren't reading like lawyers.
John:
They're not reading for the nuance.
John:
They're not, and they don't know, like, why should you expect a customer to understand, uh,
John:
what is involved in maintaining an application across multiple releases of various os's like there is something especially for like a system-wide utility like text expander whether it's on ios or on os 10 there's always going to be stuff you have to do to maintain it it's not as simple as just a standalone application that you just run it and then it quits even that needs to be maintained so i don't know if they're setting themselves up for failure but like if i think about how much do i think they're going to support text expander 5 well
John:
they don't want to support two different versions of their product.
John:
Like, who would want... Like, the whole point of the... They want to have sustainable development.
John:
It's the whole point of subscription pricing.
John:
You can't say, okay, now we're going to have two teams, one that's just maintaining the old versions and one's maintaining the new version.
John:
Nobody wants to do that.
John:
So my gut reaction as someone who's seen a lot of software is that Texas Banner 5 and Texas Banner 3 for iOS...
John:
They'll probably work with this version of OS X and this version of iOS and the next version probably, but when they break, I don't think Smile will invest too much in fixing them because they'll be like, look, you had your time.
John:
Now it's time to move on to the other one, to whatever, six or seven or whatever they're up to now.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And in Smile's defense, you know, I this is why I don't want to like gang up on them or be, you know, or attribute malice to them.
Marco:
But there are these problems with every way you choose to take money.
Marco:
You know, if they continue doing the old way of here's a paid app, you buy it once and then in a couple of years you might buy an upgrade.
Marco:
that method also has to cut off support for old versions eventually.
Marco:
And when that happens, that also angers people.
Marco:
And so no matter what you do, no matter where you choose to take money, it will anger somebody.
Marco:
And a lot of somebodies, if you have a good customer base, if you have a good-sized customer base, it's going to anger a lot of people regardless of what you do.
Marco:
If you don't charge for anything, that'll anger people who are afraid that you're going to sell their data.
Marco:
If you put ads in, that'll anger people who don't like ads or who don't like what they're doing.
Marco:
No matter what you do, you're going to anger people.
Marco:
I don't envy the position that smiles in here because what they're clearly saying, if not directly than employing, what they're clearly saying is we need to get more money from TextExpander.
Marco:
This isn't working for us.
Marco:
We need more revenue from it somehow.
Marco:
And the way we're going to do that is going to have this short-term pain for somebody.
Marco:
And it seems like they're trying to address people's concerns, but ultimately they're not able to.
Marco:
They can't because they have to make money somewhere.
Marco:
So there's always going to be people who are mad about this, and they're going to have to choose to make some of them mad.
Marco:
I think the only two good options here are either that they continue doing the subscription model, which honestly I don't think is a good idea.
Marco:
It seems deeply flawed for the kind of product it is and the kind of audience that it had, as far as I know.
Marco:
But again...
Marco:
i'm not them i don't i don't know who their customers are so i could be wrong so that's one option is to just go whole hog in this in the subscriptions the way they were before and just be honest like look you know support for five will end after next os 10 version or something like that uh you know set a date or set a version where it'll just say all right it'll stop after this and then you're on your own and you got to move to our service now or or not or completely bring back the old model of licensing what you know whether they continue doing the subscription model also or not i don't know
Marco:
But the alternative here is you bring back the old model where, okay, now TextExpander 6 is a regular software release that you can buy for $40 or whatever, and you can own it with no monthly fees after that until you decide to stop using it or until it breaks with some distant future OS X version.
Marco:
I don't see another option here.
Marco:
What they're doing now is trying to bridge the benefits of both.
Marco:
They're trying to please people who want both.
Marco:
Without giving up their subscription idea.
Marco:
And because, you know, this is obviously like they've obviously invested a lot into setting this up, migrating their product over to this kind of system.
Marco:
Somebody's using it.
Marco:
So if they kill the subscription service now, they're going to anger the people who are using it and who do like it.
Marco:
So like this is not an enviable position to be it.
Marco:
And I don't want to make light of this because, as I said, this is all hard stuff.
Marco:
And in the current software landscape, it is incredibly difficult to make a healthy profit selling software today.
Marco:
It's just hard.
Marco:
And they have a staff they have to support.
Marco:
And you can argue, oh, well, maybe software should be free or maybe there's a lot of competition or maybe they should lower their costs or whatever.
Marco:
But none of those things are easy things to address or easy things to actually follow through on and often have uncomfortable side effects.
Marco:
So this is not... The solution might just be... It's kind of like when the minimum wage goes up... I'm sorry for going political here.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Here we go.
Marco:
When the minimum wage goes up, one of the problems that economists cite when that happens is it basically prices out a whole bunch of jobs from being doable because now...
Marco:
If the minimum I have to pay a legal full-time employee or legal employee is X, then any job that costs less than X, I just can't pay somebody to do that, really.
Marco:
Or any job that's only worth something below X. That kind of problem happens now with software, which is like a lot of software that could be created and that could have value to people...
Marco:
just is not going to do well enough in the market, or people won't pay enough for it for it to be sustained.
Marco:
So a lot of that software just won't get created, or it will get created and then get abandoned.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of economic, uncomfortable truths about this.
Marco:
However you think about software pricing, however you think things should be priced, or whatever you're willing to pay for them, it's a very tricky area, and I don't envy Smile at all for the position they're in right now.
Casey:
Yeah, I certainly don't either.
John:
yeah like i kind of think of like adobe when they went through a similar transition of like uh i mean i think adobe was making plenty of money but they said you know what we think it would be better for us financially uh if we could if you could pay for our applications on a subscription basis rather than us selling you a box with software in it or selling you a download or whatever and for the most part they made a transition to that and microsoft is going through the same thing now trying to sell office 365 subscriptions and
John:
everything like that um smile obviously is much smaller than adobe or microsoft looked like it was trying to make a similar transition and it's almost it's almost like i feel like ripping off the band-aid and just plowing bravely forward certainly from the outside that would be a cleaner situation but from the inside it may be like no that wasn't even an option like we would have died the product would not be viable we tried it it's not working too many people are angry we're not selling enough subscriptions we have to immediately do an about face and so i guess you know
John:
better now than six months from now or whatever but anyway this is surely not the way they hope this transition would go um and i think their attempt to to fix it with the discount and the vague uh promise of support for the old versions i don't know if it makes it worse but um
John:
boy like i i don't know if it gives them a higher chance of success either like i i just feel like they're signing all they've done is deferred the anger to to a later period um the discount i think i think is is probably fine because that's i think a discount is actually like maybe the mistake they just made was making the subscription price too high they could that could have been something they decided to oh we're getting all this angry feedback we're not selling enough subscriptions and
John:
again i'm speculating here um maybe the price is just too high like if you told people they could use tech expander you get it for free and you have to pay a penny a month everyone's fine with that suddenly it's not suddenly it's not some sort of philosophical objection to subscription pricing i don't want to pay a penny a month it's too much no everybody's fine with that it's below their level of concern right but five dollars a month or whatever it is was above people's you know so the 50 discount for life
John:
um if that brings it down below people's threshold then then we'll see like margo said do they really object philosophically to subscriptions period or is it merely that the price is too high the promise for text expander is like and also we're not even really sure the subscription thing is a good idea so you can have this thing for some undefined period of time but probably it will go away but you probably don't know that and
John:
Oh, it just makes me depressed.
John:
But, you know, anyway, we'll see how it works out for them.
John:
Like Margaret said, it's difficult.
John:
But the final part is you can't somehow can't get your way out of a press release without something terrible appearing.
John:
And I feel like it's I'm not a PR person.
John:
I don't know how to do a PR person's job.
John:
I'm not going to say that I could have written this better.
John:
But as someone who reads a lot of press releases, reading this does not make me feel better about the company.
John:
And I imagine that's what press releases are supposed to do.
John:
The last part of it was this is supposed to be like, you know, person to person, like have empathy for us, so on and so forth.
John:
This was a big change.
John:
There were a number of things we could have done better.
John:
All right.
John:
This sounds like the start of a paragraph where they're saying basically like acknowledging, OK, our bad, you know.
John:
you are angry at us and we have to at this point acknowledge that you are angry at us with reasons there are things that didn't turn out the way we wanted them to you know we're sorry you're mad we acknowledge your anger like that right seems like it's going fine so far we genuinely want to bring you the best text spanner experience we can unfortunately not all the accents have the intended effects still so good so far for example comma
John:
We staggered our customer emails over three days to ensure a smooth server capacity so that everyone would have a good initial experience with the service.
John:
The server held up, but many customers learned of the new text expander from news sites, Twitter, or Twitter rather than from Smile.
John:
That is not an example of the bad things that people are yelling at you about.
John:
Like, because they found out the news from a site other than you, as if somehow if they found out from you, they would have choked it down and it would have been more palatable.
John:
They're angry about what happened.
John:
finding out what happened from news sites rather than from you there's a component of that maybe you're like why do i gotta hear this on twitter instead of from you directly smile but substantively if you're gonna pick the thing that people are angry about that's not it this whole press release was addressing their issues none of which were i found out about this from twitter instead of smile don't end your press release like that it's like it's like you know what is your greatest weakness oh i'm a little bit i'm a hard worker sometimes or i'm too honest you know like
John:
that's not they were they were so close they were right there but it's for example and the example they gave is not what people are angry it's not even in like the top three that people are angry about so close yeah i have a feeling the story is not over yeah we've heard you and actually it's going to be 25 of the original price for life and texas banner 5 will be supported indefinitely and we're canceling texas banner 6 but wait we heard you texas banner 6 users you want to keep all right
John:
i give them i give them one yeah you know they're allowed to you try something doesn't work you react fast good if they come back again with another press release then we're just gonna have to have a dedicated texas matter podcast i guess all right well we have one more quick piece of follow-up and then we can move on to some other stuff these weren't the topics they were we're in that gray area um it's not gray area texas matters follow-up so is apple
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
John, you finally got your wish.
Casey:
You got your bleeps and bloops.
Casey:
And how's that going?
John:
Not my wish.
John:
I wanted a bleeps and bloops theme song that we had in one episode way back when.
John:
But Marco took it upon itself to add bleeps and blutes before and after the ads.
John:
I think because he listens to too much Hello Internet or some other reason.
John:
But anyway, we've gotten a lot of feedback about that.
John:
And I thought Marco should explain what he's doing and why.
John:
We've gotten like three people who don't like it.
Casey:
It's more than that.
Casey:
But man, the people who don't like it.
Marco:
I mean, I can say the sky is blue and more people will tell me I'm an idiot and wrong than what we've heard about this.
John:
Well, that's also true.
John:
Well, people don't like change, so that's obvious, right?
John:
But what I'm more interested in is why did you add them?
John:
Not why do people not like them, but why did you add them?
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
So first of all, you can quibble over the choice of sounds.
Marco:
I chose old Mac sounds.
Marco:
I wanted to do the Windows XP USB device plugged in and unplugged sounds, but I knew John would not allow that.
Marco:
Is that correct, John?
Yeah.
John:
I don't even know that sound, but no, that would be terrible.
Marco:
It's like boo-doom, boo-doom.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
No?
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Anyway, so that's what I wanted to do, and I knew John would object, so I chose old Mac sounds instead that kind of just... The actual origins of them are kind of funny.
Marco:
One of them's a crash, and one of them's a reboot of some old Macs.
Marco:
I didn't pick based on what computers they belong to, specifically in the old Apple lineup.
Marco:
I just picked based on which ones I thought sounded right for this purpose.
Marco:
I was thinking about using something like this for a while because it allows me a lot more flexibility in editing of when I start the ad and when I end the ad.
Marco:
It also saves time in the episode because it removes...
Marco:
All the transition lead-in from Casey saying, all right, before we cover this, Marco, why don't you tell me something?
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
It removes the need for a lot of that.
Marco:
So it does save time, I think.
Marco:
And it also just gives me the flexibility to place the ads wherever I want, really.
Marco:
Wherever there's a natural break in conversation, even if we didn't say at that point in the show, all right, let's do a sponsor break now.
Marco:
So it allows flexibility in editing, basically, and it makes everything shorter.
Marco:
It also helps differentiate when the ad has begun and when the ad has ended.
Marco:
It forces you to figure that out too, which is not always easy.
Marco:
Yeah, it forces it to be like a firmly defined boundary, which I think is better editorially, even though I think we were pretty good about that already.
Marco:
But this does help just a little bit.
Marco:
Like last week, you talked, John, about Blue Apron after after I had finished doing my script.
Marco:
And so if I wanted to integrate that into the ad read, I had to move it in.
Marco:
And I did.
Marco:
And so I actually rearranged the ending of the ad to move that into the ad read explicitly.
Marco:
And then once the sound played, the ad was over.
Marco:
So I think that helped also.
Marco:
And so that's why I did it.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The reason I started two weeks ago is because all three live reads I did that recording, I hated them all.
Marco:
And so I recorded them all the next morning.
Marco:
And when I do a recording after the fact, which I occasionally do if I mess up a read too badly or if I just don't like the way it turned out, I will, of course, always sound slightly different from the way I sounded the night before.
Marco:
Just because people's voices change throughout the day.
Marco:
And throughout each day, you might have different voice today than yesterday by just how tired you are, whether you're sick, whether there's allergies, whatever.
Marco:
So I didn't like all three of the ads I did two weeks ago.
Marco:
I replaced them all the morning after and decided this would be a good time to use these sounds because it would help people not notice that I sounded different in the ads.
Marco:
And these did, as far as I know, these did originate.
Marco:
Like the idea of ad bumper sounds, I first heard it on Hello Internet.
Marco:
I don't know if they invented it, but that is certainly where I first heard it.
John:
They did not invent it, just like Underscore didn't invent exploding dinosaurs, yes.
Casey:
Didn't I heard it first on Core Intuition, I thought?
Yeah.
Marco:
i think it's probably from the radio the invention of radio yeah i mean that well within podcasts yeah radio yeah it's everyone does it a little bit differently but the idea of just like kind of like a a quick opening and closing sound effect i first heard that on hello internet so they get full credit because they are awesome and they are still my favorite podcast i don't know i'm just going to assume they stole something from us at some point and we'll call it even and uh yeah that's about it
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by FreshBooks.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They support all sorts of payment gateways from their own to yours.
Marco:
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Marco:
And if you do transactions in person, if you're some kind of in-person worker and you have to invoice people in person and get paid in person for what you just did, they have a mobile card reader to accept credit cards right there.
Marco:
And so again, helping you get paid faster.
Marco:
They also offer lots of little convenient features that way too many to cover in an ad.
Marco:
One of the things they offer is overdue payment reminders.
Marco:
Now, every time I've ever sent an invoice, I've wished for this because invoices, you know, they get lost, they get delayed, they get put off.
Marco:
you always have people who are late to pay invoices.
Marco:
And it's great when FreshBooks can automatically, customizable by you on both the interval and the text, but can automatically send people late payment reminders so they don't come from you.
Marco:
You don't have to think about it.
Marco:
You don't have to do it.
Marco:
It kind of helps avoid the uncomfortable conversation.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks to FreshBooks.
John:
unlike smile we need to uh actually uh wrap up addressing uh the various complaints of the bleeps and bloops so collecting collecting the bleeps and bloops complaints one one category of complaint is i don't like change that's like the meta category which you know you can't dismiss out of hand because who wants their thing to you know you kind of get used to a certain structure you don't like change right listen to episode one and tell me you don't like change
John:
yeah so i'll put that aside for now um but it is a thing people said uh the other one surprising number of people uh listen to the podcast i don't know how we should take this while drifting off to sleep or to help them or this help them get to sleep like i mean great if like i i'm happy to make a product that you enjoy for whatever purpose you know you want to use it for if that's how you want to use it that's fine but apparently the bleeps and bloops are
John:
Harshing their mellow and jangling them out of the slumber that they were drifting into.
John:
So perhaps toning down the volume or picking different sounds could help out there with those people.
John:
But again, a surprising number of people said that.
Marco:
Yeah, that seems to be, I think that's the only complaint I would consider valid that we've received so far.
Marco:
And again, like you, I'm not sure how I feel about people complaining that they're having a hard time falling asleep through our podcast.
Marco:
But that is a semi-valid complaint.
John:
If that's how they're using the podcast, then we're helping make their life better by helping them drift off to sleep.
John:
More power to them.
John:
So maybe the volume down.
Marco:
Can you imagine people who hear us as the last thing they hear before they go to sleep?
Marco:
Like, what?
Marco:
Is that mentally healthy?
Marco:
Like, that's fine.
John:
We'll give them awesome dreams about USB hubs.
John:
USB hubs and new Mac Pros.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Those are nightmares, my friend, not dreams.
John:
Yeah.
John:
My complaint is I don't like the sounds.
John:
Like, I know you went through all the lists of sounds, but because you have no sort of background of what those sounds are, where they came from, it is weird to hear the sounds that you picked in there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
so i i feel like better sounds could be fine i like that they're max sounds but i don't like that one of them is a crash sound and of all the star beeps you pick you pick that one not not my favorites um so i think there's an area where we could potentially improve to try to make because you know all the reasons you cited for the sounds sound good to me like i think they're all good and um
John:
We just need to tamp down the negatives, I feel like.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
So, you know, if the issue is just like the volume of the sounds, I thought I had a good balance.
Marco:
I did reduce the volume on them from like their stock configuration, like from like the raw sound, just because it didn't match the levels really well otherwise.
Marco:
But if I have to reduce them further, that's fine.
Marco:
As for the choice of sounds, it's tricky when you're choosing sound effects for a podcast.
Marco:
I know this is really inside baseball.
Marco:
I'm sorry for everybody who doesn't care.
Marco:
You can just skip over this chapter.
Marco:
um when you're when you're choosing sound effects to go in a podcast i learned this in the early days of neutral because i would use to to delineate the ads in neutral i would use oh wait a minute that was before hello internet say they stole everything from us all right so i i we used the bmw uh chime from the from like the the e whatever series whatever that yeah whatever the pleasant little chime is when you like leave your door open or start the car or whatever
Marco:
I recorded one of those from my 3 Series and we used that as our ad bumpers.
Marco:
And we got complaints from people.
Marco:
This is also why when I bleep the sound effects, or when I bleep a swear word, I don't use the horn honking sound.
Marco:
There was a couple early episodes of Neutral Wire where I would use all sorts of car sounds.
Marco:
And I've settled on just using a handbrake or a trunk slamming sound because when you're in a car and you hear that sound effect, you don't, it kind of throws you off.
Marco:
You don't know whether like, is that a real horn honking outside?
Marco:
Like that's, it kind of scares you or jostles you out of, out of what you're supposed to be paying attention to.
John:
Is that the sound of my engine, or is that... No, it's MP3.
John:
Never mind.
Marco:
Nice.
John:
Nicely done.
John:
So, anyway... They'll never get old.
John:
Did you know other car makers are doing that now, by the way?
John:
Not just BMW?
John:
I think I read... I forget what it was.
John:
Maybe it was Volkswagen or some other.
John:
But, like, just non-luxury, non-fancy brands are doing it.
Marco:
Anyway, it's terrible.
Marco:
BMW leads the way in lots of things, good and bad.
Marco:
Anyway, so I learned, like, you got to be careful not to... Basically, not to use, like, current sounds.
Marco:
So, when I chose these sounds, I chose them specifically...
Marco:
So that they wouldn't sound like the more recent Mac sound effects.
Marco:
So I didn't use the current Mac startup chime, which has actually been in use for quite some time.
Marco:
I didn't use that because I didn't want people to think that the computer behind them was rebooting.
Marco:
And they were like, oh crap, did it kernel panic?
Marco:
I don't want to freak people out.
Marco:
So I had to pick sounds that were not recent.
John:
and it would be funny to troll the windows xp users with the usb sounds and they are also quieter and simpler and they wouldn't annoy you because they would match each other john it's not the non-matching it's just that i know those sounds from history and life and they you know i think everything you said is a good idea not to use modern sounds don't use sounds that could be confused with car sounds like all all good but just these particular ones i don't they just just don't work for me like on uh reconcilable differences merlin has a little guitar jangle he does at the beginning and end and
John:
Obviously, that's probably not appropriate for us, but on that show it works, especially because it fits in with the sort of intro theme thing.
John:
Anyway, I think we can do better here.
John:
Here's the other angle on this that no one brought up for the people who don't like change and stuff.
John:
Having things like this, no matter what sounds we end up landing on and what volume they're at or whatever...
John:
Having regular features of the show, like the song in the middle and the little ringy things and the car door opening and stuff like that, that stuff is incredibly addicting.
John:
Like Pavlov with ringing the bell and making the dog salivate.
John:
This is like a literal bell.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So for all the people who it's weird for you because we're changing it, totally understand that.
John:
But for the people who are just starting to listen to the show now or for people a year from now after we've been doing this for a while, that will become such an integral part of the show that if we ever took it away, people would flip out because humans are just silly little monkeys.
John:
you know so what i'm saying is hang in there eventually you will come to love the bells maybe not these particular chimes so we'll we will get we feel like we will get the kinks work out and version two and three of these sounds or whatever uh eventually you you won't be able to live without them yeah and i mean this is that's one of the reasons we have our theme song so jonathan man the author of our theme song he we did the first few episodes without a theme song or i forget how many we did beforehand but it was it was a few
Marco:
and like one time we complained that we didn't that we didn't know how to end the show and everything so he wrote this theme song and at the same time i had actually asked merlin mann uh like a week or so earlier if he could write us a theme song because because he all those like musical things like like i think i'm pretty sure that's just him playing guitar or playing on garage band or something like he he is a musician that's him you know back to work that seems but that theme song was like his high school band or whatever high school band i hope he's not listening what it may i was it was it after high school i don't know anyway
Marco:
They're a serious band, you know.
Marco:
I bought their album.
Marco:
Anyway, it's Bacon Ray, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I think that one is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I actually asked Merlin, before Jonathan wrote what is now our theme song, I asked Merlin to write something for us.
Marco:
And then when Jonathan wrote his theme song...
Marco:
We were like, this is so good.
Marco:
It was getting stuck in all of our heads all day.
Marco:
And we were like, I think we have to just use this.
Marco:
It's too good.
Marco:
We have to use this.
Marco:
It's so infectious.
Marco:
It gets in all of our heads so much.
Marco:
We don't have a choice.
Marco:
So I went to Merlin.
Marco:
I'm like, look, I'm sorry.
Marco:
If you've started anything, please stop.
Marco:
And fortunately, he hadn't gotten to it yet.
Marco:
So it wasn't a huge deal.
Marco:
At least I don't think Merlin hates me forever for that.
Marco:
Because that was like three years ago, and I think we're still friends.
Marco:
uh yeah like we we knew like when we when we heard the jonathan man song we knew we had to do it by the way quick plug for jonathan man he is uh launching a new podcast called songonauts on the truth one of the radiotopia shows you know the truth uh it's a big podcast on radiotopia anyway so look check out uh songonauts by jonathan man which i think is launching shortly or might have launched by the time we air this show anyway quick plug for jonathan because we like him a lot because he wrote a theme song
Marco:
So anyway, that is why we we do fun stuff like this, because it gets in our heads and it becomes part of the personality of the show.
Marco:
And I do.
Marco:
I like, John, your statement of basically like, oh, just stop your whining.
Marco:
You'll get used to it eventually.
Marco:
It's not stop your whining.
Marco:
It's
John:
You will not just get used to it.
John:
You will come to crave it.
John:
You will need it to be there.
John:
We will become a comforting regular, as any sort of routine, as any parent of a toddler knows, regular having a routine.
John:
This is the time when we do this.
John:
It is comforting to have a routine, to know that no matter what crazy stuff goes on during the show, at a certain point, there's going to be these little jingles that demark the ads, and there's going to be a song, and maybe there's going to be a car sound.
John:
Those regular things, those routines, those traditions become comfort.
John:
You will come to love them, as long as we don't pick terrible sounds.
Casey:
or as long as we don't charge you five bucks a month yeah all right so you want to talk about a topic or do we just want to end here we have one more sponsor to do if you want i'm kidding um we talked last week see this is even a great topic this is like halfway between follow-up and not um we talked last week about apple's 40th birthday and we went on a journey together through our
Casey:
are finding the Mac and finding Apple.
Casey:
And we didn't talk much about the iMac, or at least not enough for John.
Casey:
So John, tell us about Apple turning 40 and the iMac.
John:
yeah we were running over in our 40th thing so i kind of cut that out of where i would have talked about my stuff but i think it is an important part to acknowledge and maybe you guys can relate to it because maybe you have opinions on it or looking at it from afar but so the imac was 1998 and steve jobs had come back to apple um and that people don't remember they usually think of the ipod as the important turnaround product but the imac was just as important if not more important
John:
uh for apple as a company not particularly for the industry because in the end they're like oh whatever it was just a computer people have made computers before uh the important thing that the iMac did for apple is it seemed like from the outside that it gave the entire company like a little measure of pride back like that it made them believe oh yeah
John:
We can make cool things that people like that we're proud of because there was, you know, especially with Apple being near death in 1997 and going through different CEOs in the years before that and running out of money and having layoffs and having products that people weren't particularly happy with and not being able to feel the next generation OS after repeated tries and Windows 95 coming and just stomping all over their face.
John:
And Marco feeling bad for people having Macs.
John:
It was getting harder and harder to be proud to be an employee of Apple.
John:
And so Steve Jobs and his typical what would become his typical thing of having a secret group work on a secret project that no one knew about and having Johnny Ive make this amazing design for it that nobody saw, including the people who are working on it.
John:
uh the rumor mill the mac rumor mill which was definitely still a thing back then um i remember them thinking it was a set top box because i think the people working on the hardware they didn't get to see what case it would go in so to them it just looked like a little flat box um and so the rumors that came out was like apple's making a television set top box which by the way they did at one point um
John:
and and do now but it's not much of a set top it's more of a set top coaster anyway um the segregation of the teams working on this and the big dramatic reveal of we made a new computer all right so what apple you made a new computer you know you made a new mac so what there's a million macs uh and it is both uh
John:
uh minimizing and maximizing this to say that what was most important about it was the way the thing looked it looked weird for a computer it was teal the color of blue was the name of a beach that i'm not going to pronounce after a long flame war on a slack channel i did not want to get involved in but it was a particular kind of blue
John:
uh and it was translucent and it was cute like the original mac and it was a super important product both for apple because it made i feel like it made them proud of themselves again and set them on the road to greatness uh and also for the entire industry because with that product the fact that there was such a reaction to it when despite the fact that it was mostly just a run-of-the-mill mac and yeah they ditched legacy ports and did other important things for apple like we're setting that aside for now but
John:
uh it convinced the world essentially that the way computers look is a factor which sounds so stupid it's like saying oh this was the first car that convinced the world that cars should look good we just everyone accepts the cars have to look good everyone accepts there are ugly cars and pretty cars and so many people factor in how a car looks and their car buying decisions and cars cost thousands and thousands of dollars more than computers in most cases um and yet somehow we're always okay with cars having that for our lifetime right
John:
it took apple to say these computers you should care they look too because who wants an ugly one and for years apple had been making nice ones but they were still somewhat constrained by the orthodoxy of the industry in terms of they were off-white or black or gray like they weren't grape colored
John:
Right.
John:
You know, there was there was still within the limits of the computer as defined by by Apple itself in the early days of, you know, the Apple II and everything and and all the other companies that made computers big and small.
John:
They sort of defined a boring aesthetic and it took Apple to break out of that on the mass scale and say, well,
John:
we think this is cool and you know what i think customers will be tickled by the idea of a green computer and we'll sell them to them and they will buy a green computer and they will love it because it's green and it's just that that doesn't sound it sounds like such a stupid thing in the age where we sell everything based on colors and all you know our phones uh come in different colors and all sorts of you know in cases and everything like that
John:
But back then, that was a very important revelation.
John:
So in the big timeline of Apple 40 years, you have to credit them along with the bringing the GUI to the world, to the mass market.
John:
You have to also credit them.
John:
And again, it's not they weren't the first one, the only one to ever do this, but they essentially brought the idea to the mass market that it is important how computers look and people will enjoy our products more if they like how they look.
John:
which again sounds so stupid in retrospect, but was super important for the entire industry and led the way for everything that came after it.
John:
It's the reason you had translucent teal irons and canopers and stuff following the iMac because people have got the wrong idea of like, oh, we just need to make everything translucent and teal.
John:
It's like you're taking the wrong... I like that you're enthusiastic.
John:
Good enthusiasm.
John:
You may be taking the wrong idea from this or maybe you're just trying to cash in on the iMac trend.
John:
Either way, the whole industry of consumer electronics I feel like has...
John:
circled out uh from rippled out from that iMac in that people are no longer afraid to do interesting things with their hardware even if everything isn't as exuberant as lifesavers like obviously they went to an extreme to make a point you know uh but today the variety of shapes and textures and and yes even colors of electronics uh is much greater uh thanks no small part to apple
Marco:
Yeah, I remember, I mean, I was in college from 2000 to 2004.
Marco:
And, you know, it was like a full-time college kind of thing.
Marco:
So we were in a dorm room.
Marco:
And everybody else in the dorm had appliances that they had purchased for their dorm room that were, you know, designed in 99, 2000.
Marco:
right after the iMac came out and made this big splash.
Marco:
And so they were all, as you mentioned, like the translucent plastic microwaves and phones and like old, you know, corded and wireless phones, not like cell phones.
Marco:
Just any kind of appliance you could buy that was relatively inexpensive.
Marco:
Also, the other computers.
Marco:
I mean, the look of like compact towers at the time and, oh God, e-machines...
Marco:
they would just snap they would just snap on a face plate like they had the same beige box but like all right the one piece of this is plastic can we just mold that piece of plastic out of colored translucent plastic done it's like no it's still a beige box with a thing stuck on the front yeah i mean it was it was really it was like the very first time i think in a while that the entire rest of the industry copied what apple did at a remarkable pace and did so so poorly and
John:
as you know totally missing the point of why this was good and what what parts of it made it good and yeah everyone else just kind of copied like the the high level design brief the service details which is which is not like i mean that's something because it lets them not have to redesign everything it lets them not have to have a design department like apple does right uh and it lets them cash in slightly on people who who have a vague notion that they saw a cool teal computer and they wander into best buy but uh in in the subsequent years i think companies are way better now
John:
at copying not just apple but anyone and that everybody i'm continually impressed by these formerly very you know sort of boring and uninteresting and uh risk-averse pc makers all of which are obviously hiring their own design departments to make
John:
interesting computer designs i may not like them but they are way more interesting they used to be like the uh microsoft surface is interesting with that weird hinge thing that hp one that's super slim with the little shiny chrome hinges and everything there's no way that the pc industry of the 90s those companies would even have a clue how to do that so they're not just taking their existing computers and tacking a bunch of face plates onto them even when they were copying apple by saying we're going to make uh silver aluminum laptops to look exactly like apple's ones
John:
They still did a better job of that than they did of copying the iMac.
John:
At times of the iMac, they didn't know their butt from their elbow.
John:
They had no idea what they were doing.
John:
They were just like, put something teal on it.
John:
Are we done now?
John:
I think so.
John:
Good.
John:
Ship it.
Marco:
It was literally just bolted on.
Marco:
They already had the regular mid-tower that they were shipping, and they just shoved this giant bulbous faceplate on it that had this little translucent section you could pop out and replace the color if you really wanted to.
John:
like i wow it was it was a really dark time for pcs yeah but at least they got they got the message the message was and it's not like the imac was selling so much it's not like the imac was selling millions and millions and millions more than they were selling they were still selling more than apple especially in those days it's just that they saw the splash it made it's like
John:
why don't people care about our computer like they care about that?
John:
Are our computers boring?
John:
Do people want their computers to look nice?
John:
Like it was this strange awakening of, again, things that sound so stupid and obvious to us now.
John:
But back then, if you didn't live through it, it may seem crazy to think that so many of the most dominant computer makers in the world, this kind of design was not even on their radar.
John:
And as far as they were concerned, a Mac 2CI was exactly the same as a PCXT case, which...
Casey:
This is tangentially related, but Marco talking about college and people with iMacs and not having iMacs and whatnot made me remember that.
Casey:
Marco and I are the same age, so we went to school at the same time.
Casey:
And when I was at Virginia Tech...
Casey:
They had, and I believe still do, a very, very large off-campus computer lab called the Math Emporium.
Casey:
And it was specifically suited for math-related work, but it had, at the time, a gazillion Macs in it.
Casey:
And I remember two things vividly about the Mac Emporium in terms of the hardware there.
Casey:
Number one, the hockey puck mouse is the worst mouse that's ever been created in the history of man.
Casey:
Number two, I vividly remember there being G4 cubes all over it when I was there.
Casey:
There were like hundreds of them.
Casey:
And I remember going to this place and thinking, wow, that is a very peculiar design for a computer.
Casey:
But man, that's kind of cool.
Casey:
And I remember also VNC-ing into my full tower desktop that I had in my dorm room.
Casey:
And I thought I was the coolest kid in the world because a guy down the hall showed me what VNC was.
Casey:
And the fact that I could log into my computer from somewhere else, it was mind-blowing.
John:
Oh, that was amazing back then.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
You didn't have the X window system on your college campus?
John:
You could run programs on a different computer and have the result displayed on your computer.
John:
Like it was a terminal for the X window system.
John:
We call it an X term.
Casey:
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Casey:
And actually, I think that the math emporium was largely running on some sort of Citrix setup, which is a similar idea.
Casey:
But yeah, I just remember just a C of G4 cubes.
John:
I wonder where the I'd never seen a like I'd seen people who had been suckered into buying a lot of various kinds of computers, not suckered, but, you know, like a computer that later turned out to not be a particular popular popular model sort of faded away.
John:
Like one I remember is that Rose Hellman, which is a small college somewhere that a friend of mine went to.
John:
The Next salesman visited Rose-Hulman and convinced them that Next computers were the best thing since sliced bread.
John:
And honestly, they were the best thing since sliced bread.
John:
So they sold Next computers to Rose-Hulman.
John:
They were everywhere.
John:
And then Next was not so much into selling hardware pretty shortly after that, which must have felt bad if you were the one in charge of buying hardware for Rose-Hulman.
John:
But on the other hand, if you went to Rose-Hulman during that time...
John:
everybody got to use like next cubes and next labs which is which was like living in the future really because even though it was kind of boring and gray and a lot of the the uh displays were gray scale instead of uh full color uh next step was still pretty amazing that hardware looked awesome i got a bunch of it in my attic
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John:
I think we found bumper sounds.
John:
Why don't we just have all of us make sounds with our mouth and then Parker will just put them in.
John:
It will solve the problem of like, this is too jarring because I just want to hear your voices.
John:
This will be our voices.
John:
It won't be a familiar sound in a car or of a modern computer.
John:
And it's royalty free, right?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I might run a royalty on mine.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
One of us might change our minds.
John:
Now that you're a recording artist, the vocal stylings of Marco Armit.
Marco:
Yeah, does that change the licensing of how we can use clips?
Marco:
Do I have to go through ASCAP or whatever?
Marco:
Yeah, that's right.
Casey:
So a few days ago, as we record, actually just a couple days ago, I wrote a post coming to the defense of the Apple Watch.
Casey:
The post was entitled, Poor Apple Watch.
Casey:
And I just feel like lately it's been very trendy to poop all over the Apple Watch.
Casey:
Oh, it's a piece of crap.
Casey:
It's so slow.
Casey:
It's too fat.
Casey:
The software doesn't do anything useful.
Casey:
It's not cool.
Casey:
Look at me.
Casey:
I'm going to get either a mechanical watch or not use a watch at all.
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
You know, if that's fine for you or for Merlin or for Marco, that's fine.
Casey:
Do what you got to do.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I feel like nobody was coming to the defense of the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And so I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I will come to the defense of the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And I just wrote a post saying that, you know what?
Casey:
I like my watch.
Casey:
And it is fat.
Casey:
And it is slow.
Casey:
And the apps are pretty much entirely useless.
Casey:
But for me...
Casey:
That's okay.
Casey:
I still like having the smart features of my smartwatch on my wrist.
Casey:
I think a lot of this may come from the fact that I leave the house to go to work.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that to be snarky or smug.
Casey:
I'm saying that genuinely, that I have appointments and meetings and things that happen throughout my day.
Casey:
obligations throughout my day that have to happen at certain times.
Casey:
And so having my next calendar appointment on my watch face is very convenient.
Casey:
Additionally, I don't get to leave the building at work and occasionally the house if Declan's awake.
Casey:
I don't get to leave where I am whenever I want, just on a lark.
Casey:
And so having the temperature on my watch face is really nice.
Casey:
And on top of that, I like having the activity rings, particularly the stand ring, because as we all know, I happen to be a blue ring stud.
Casey:
So, yes, there's a lot to dislike about the Apple Watch.
Casey:
Full stop.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
The apps are useless.
Casey:
I never use them.
Casey:
I really never use glances for the most part.
Casey:
I wish we had custom watch faces.
Casey:
I would love to be able to do more with complications, either have more of them on the screen or...
Casey:
or maybe have them be more intelligent somehow.
Casey:
I'm not even sure how.
Casey:
But all in all, I still really like my Apple Watch.
Casey:
And I'm looking around, and I'm starting to feel like I'm the only one.
Casey:
John, are you wearing yours?
John:
No, we talked about this a while ago.
John:
But yeah, I bailed on using it mostly because I found myself going through entire days without having any meaningful interaction with it.
John:
including checking it for the time, which is not a habit I had.
John:
And I'm not a watch wearer and it annoys me to have a thing on my wrist.
John:
So I have, I have built in negatives in that anything you put on my wrist has to overcome my aversion to ever having anything on my wrist ever.
John:
And I don't have any habits built in for watches.
John:
So I needed a positive to offset that.
John:
And when the positives evaporated, I stopped wearing it.
John:
And the positives were the positives were like, you know, I like the notifications.
John:
I like the texts and I like the activity tracking, but that wasn't enough to overcome my desire to not have something on my wrist.
John:
Although now that I'm about to travel, I'm going to bring my watch with me and probably wear it when I'm on a vacation because if I'm walking around a different city, it is convenient to be able to, for example, set a destination on your phone and then put your phone in your pocket and not have to take it out again and just walk there and have your wrist tell you which way to go.
John:
Same thing for driving.
John:
I kind of like that.
John:
you know, I don't need it when I'm going to and from work every day, you know, there's no directions I need to have, but if you're an unfamiliar place driving around, it's nice to have that.
John:
So, um, I still think it has value.
John:
Um, I still like it.
John:
I still like how it looks.
John:
Um, I still don't like wearing a watch.
John:
Uh, so yeah, that's, that's pretty much where it is.
John:
It spends most of its time on my dresser.
Casey:
Do you hate having something on your wrist because of your shag carpet arm hair or just because you hate having something on your wrist?
John:
I think it's mostly because of RSI, actually.
John:
It's the same reason I stopped wearing my wedding ring is that I'm very sensitive to have anything in that area as I'm sitting there and typing all day.
John:
Just everything about it is sensitive.
John:
I don't want any pressure on it.
John:
I don't want anything grabbing it.
John:
I don't want anything rubbing against it.
John:
Even the wrong kind of sleeve cuffs when I wear long sleeves can bother me.
Yeah.
John:
uh yeah and and that i don't have any ingrained habits of like i'm always looking at my wrists i just like again i think we discussed this before last time i wore watches like middle school when i just became old enough to have a watch and wanted to try it out and i wore it for a little while like some plastic little digital watch and decided it wasn't for me so i'm just not a watch person
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I wanted to save you for last, Marco.
Casey:
Do your worst.
Marco:
Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's not a very good argument to say, like, well, it seems trendy to hate this thing right now.
Marco:
You know, that's just whoever you're reading, which includes people like me who are not, you know, who are cooling or have cooled on the Apple Watch.
Marco:
I think what we're seeing here, I mean, there's a number of factors here.
Marco:
i don't question the apple watch utility for a lot of people but and in fact you know i found a lot of utility that when i wore it as well it just you know the the downsides of it just bothered me too much and i found that i preferred regular watches rather than you know like i went from no watch to an apple watch to oh i like watches turns out but most of what i do is tell the time and regular watches just do a way better job of that for for my purposes um because they're always on and you don't charge them etc and
Marco:
What I found that, you know, I think if you look kind of like globally, if you step back from, you know, what any individual's personal needs are and personal opinions about the Apple Watch are, I think you can step back and you can you can see this product as really a really mixed bag as a 1.0 product.
Marco:
And there's a few things that exacerbate this, one of which is that it's going more than a year as a 1.0.
Marco:
I mean, we talked about this before, so I don't want to go too far into it, but it's looking like we're not going to get a good successor to it for at least now, which is now is like a year after it came out.
Marco:
We're at least not getting it now.
Marco:
We might not even get it until the summer or the fall or even next spring.
Marco:
We don't actually know when there's going to be a second generation in
Marco:
and where the second generation will be very good or very much of an improvement in the areas that any person thinks that it needs it.
Marco:
So we are still judging this thing on Generation 1, but Generation 1 is not only longer than these things usually are.
Marco:
Usually they're a year or less.
Marco:
So it's not only being a long Generation 1, but also I feel like the Generation 1 hardware and software were both pretty mediocre on the scale of various Apple first-gen products.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Certainly, not every Apple first-gen product is a great product or is a huge hit, but I think as they go, especially in recent years, as they go, I think the watch has been a pretty mediocre one in terms of bugs, performance, limitations, things like that.
Marco:
What we're finding with Apple, I've talked before about this issue with the low-hanging fruit has all been picked everywhere.
Marco:
And so what we have now is the kind of baseline products, the Macs, the iPhones, to most of a degree, the iPads.
Marco:
These things are mature.
Marco:
The innovation on them has slowed, but they're pretty awesome.
Marco:
They have great performance.
Marco:
They have great physical characteristics, a great balance between size and weight and battery life for the most part.
Marco:
Very few exceptions.
Marco:
These are all very mature products.
Marco:
But Apple is a company that depends on trying to sell its customers more devices and trying to sell devices to more customers.
Marco:
so it is apple's job as a hardware maker to just try stuff in the market to say you know hey you know everybody has a phone a lot of people have computers most people have computers does everybody also need a tablet let's try does everybody also need a watch let's try does everybody also need a tv box let's try you know they that is their job but all these mature things that are like the core of things you know basically the computers and the phones and maybe the tablets that covers most people's needs and
Marco:
So we are accustomed to judging Apple and their products based on those products, those core products, mostly the computer and the phone, which is like, yeah, sure, almost everyone could use those.
Marco:
And so it's easy to look at that and say, well, if Apple makes a computer or a phone that sucks for me, then that kind of sucks for everybody.
Marco:
And why do they do it?
Marco:
And whether that's true or not, it's easy for people to look at it that way.
Marco:
with the watch i feel like we went into it with that kind of expectation and a lot of people bought it based on expectation of like it's a it's a new high profile apple product line of course it's going to be for me of course it's going to be for everybody and of course it's going to be good and
Marco:
And I think what we're seeing is it's hard to find new things that are for everybody in technology.
Marco:
New things that are going to be potentially as big as phones or computers or tablets or anything else.
Marco:
These are hard problems.
Marco:
And the watch...
Marco:
Because of the incredibly strong demands, the conflicting demands of that kind of product, you have severe size constraints, severe power constraints, severe cost constraints.
Marco:
It's just very hard to get a good smartwatch product on the market.
Marco:
It's just really hard to do.
Marco:
And I think what we're seeing is this is an Apple product that we thought was going to be for everybody, but just isn't.
Marco:
You can look at any kind of watch and no kind of watch is for everybody.
Marco:
Not even Rolex or Omega.
Marco:
Omega people, sorry.
Marco:
Not every watch is for everybody.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch has not replaced all watches and has not replaced everybody's phones or anything like that and never will.
Marco:
Uh, it is, it is a product that is going to work for some people, but it's not a home run for everybody or even the people who it works for.
Marco:
It's not even a home run necessarily for them.
Marco:
It's just decent maybe, you know, but it's, it's hard to make new stuff that is going to be really great anymore because so much of it's already been made and has already matured in these areas and the areas of technology and, you know, things like this that, that people are, um, people are, you know, working on in this industry.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So I don't think it's bad to say the Apple Watch isn't for me.
Marco:
And I don't think it's a sign that the watch has failed if a lot of people think it's not for them.
Marco:
But I also think that the watch as a 1.0 product was really done with a lot of mediocrity.
Marco:
And it is not unfair to criticize that.
Marco:
These are real shortcomings it has.
Marco:
It has real problems, real shortcomings, really...
Marco:
you know real design question marks and and missed opportunities and weird choices that they made and all of this will probably be fixed over time i hope it is and maybe someday i'll go back to it as a product that i that i use on a regular basis because there are things about it that i do miss you know like i i think i mostly miss it while driving that's like you know to have like the quick glance of like why did my phone just vibrate in my pocket while i'm driving uh which is probably unsafe and i probably shouldn't even look at the watch but that is when i miss it
Marco:
And so overall, though, I think, again, these are hard problems.
Marco:
And we are in an era now where the new things that Apple makes are not going to be guaranteed to be mass market.
Marco:
And that's probably okay.
John:
I think the watch was a good bet for mass market, though, because wearables have a much broader appeal than computing devices, because many more people spend more time wearing things during the day than they spend using computers.
John:
I'm not saying everybody's a watch wearer, but just wearables as a category.
John:
Like, if you had to pick a category of areas that Apple should get into...
John:
They're kind of on the cusp of like, well, we mostly do computery things.
John:
And we're getting to the point where you can have a computery thing that's part of clothing or jewelry in some way.
John:
Does that mean glasses like Google was doing?
John:
Does it mean watches?
John:
Does it mean like a little fitness turd like Fitbit is doing or something else?
John:
As a category, I think this was a very smart bet for Apple to get into.
John:
their first entry in the category you know they'll learn they'll move on i hope they don't abandon it because if you're looking for another mass market thing uh thing the categories they're looking at are all potential winners lots of people watch television or watch a video so something having to do with tv is a good idea
John:
uh lots of people have cell phones that was a good market for them uh lots of people wear things also a good market and as computers get smaller and lighter weight and the power requirements go down and so on and so forth that that entire category will only become more viable so
John:
If I had to look like broad strokes, long term product strategy, I think it was really smart for Apple to get into wearables.
John:
And I really hope they do stick it out, learn their lessons, make better products, keep iterating and innovating.
John:
Because these type of products play to all their strengths, miniaturization, mass manufacturing of beautiful objects, especially the ability to make things that are appealing to people visually.
John:
They were just talking about with the iMac.
John:
That's important when you're wearing it.
John:
uh and apple has shown with their watch bands and their watch designs within the constraints of the tech available they're actually pretty good at that part of it too yeah they just have to figure out how to make the product part of it and and if i think about the first ipod it was pretty crappy too it's just that the first ipod had such a huge positive to outweigh its negatives and the watch is like that's some positives to outweigh some of its negatives but net it is not as compelling a product
Marco:
Yeah, and ultimately, I think what gives me concern about the watch is the apparent slow pace of progress.
Marco:
And, you know, we will see what happens the next time there is a substantial update to either the hardware or the software.
Marco:
We'll see, you know, this could totally change my tone about it.
Marco:
But right now, it appears to be moving pretty slowly.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't outright disagree with anything you just said.
Casey:
But if we really step back and think about it, first of all, as someone who works in an office building like John does, I see so many Fitbit, bracelet-y, watch-y things.
Casey:
I can't even count them.
Casey:
And I concur with what John said, that wearables are a market that I think it's going to be a bigger and bigger market with time.
Casey:
And I think that Apple playing in this market is a wise choice.
Casey:
Recently, it was a day or two ago.
Casey:
I watched that classic Louis C.K.
Casey:
video when he was on Conan about people getting pissed off about not having Wi-Fi in their flying tube.
Casey:
People getting all upset about the fact that they're in an airplane and don't have Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And this is not the same as people getting upset about their watch.
Casey:
But at the same time, I have a mini computer on my frigging wrist that can, with limitations, connect to almost all the known information on the planet on the Internet.
Casey:
that's pretty freaking amazing and i agree that there's a lot that's frustrating about my watch i never use apps for several different reasons number one of which it's so so slow to do anything and it's infuriating um but nevertheless i have this device that tracks my heartbeat it tracks
Casey:
how much I'm standing, how much I'm moving.
Casey:
It tracks when my next appointment is.
Casey:
Like John was saying, if I'm in a city that I'm not familiar with and I'm walking around, I can do so without having my phone out screaming, I'm a tourist, please rob me.
Casey:
There's so many things for me that I really like about this and that impressed me so deeply about it, especially given the unbelievable engineering constraints that this product was made under.
Casey:
To me, it's such an impressive product.
Casey:
There is so much that could be done to make it better, Marco.
Casey:
You're absolutely right about that.
Casey:
I mean, I can't argue with that at all.
Casey:
But for me, it's still something that adds value to my life, and I still like it.
Casey:
And I just feel like...
Casey:
I think the thing of it is, is that it was like a switch flipped and suddenly everyone was talking about how much they don't want to wear an Apple watch anymore.
Casey:
And that in and of itself, that's fine.
Casey:
But it just seemed weird to me.
Casey:
And I felt bad for the poor little Apple watch.
Casey:
And I still feel bad for the poor little Apple watch.
Casey:
It's a cute little feller.
Casey:
And and I feel like somebody needed to build it up a little bit.
John:
I don't know enough people who are not tech nerds who have an Apple Watch know how it's playing in the non-tech nerd crowd.
John:
Because obviously we're all talking to other tech nerds and they're the ones writing things about how they're not using their watch and whatever.
John:
And yeah, it did kind of all come together because I think people slowly stopped wearing them.
John:
And then the people who needed to tell the world that they slowly stopped wearing them had to write stories about it.
John:
And then other people saw the stories and it felt safe that they could now admit that they slowly stopped wearing them, which is fine.
John:
That's how the press cycle goes.
John:
But it's still all within just the sort of
John:
tech nerd circles um and i'm sure the watch is selling outside tech nerd circles you can tell by the huge spike in sales that they seem to have from everything we're able to understand from apple's uh closely guarded secrets about how much how many watches they're selling exactly uh during the holidays uh because tech nerds don't save their spending for the holidays they buy it as soon it's released
Marco:
No, I've actually, you know, anecdotally, I've seen since the holidays, I've seen a lot more Apple Watches in the real world, oftentimes on, you know, non-geeks or at least people whose geek status is unknown to me.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
They must be selling them.
John:
It's just I don't know those people.
John:
So I can't sort of get a read on like none of my family or friends who are not tech nerds have an Apple Watch.
John:
So I would love to know what regular people think of the Apple Watch.
John:
It's just still kind of unknown to us.
John:
Surely Apple knows because it's their job to know.
John:
i can imagine regular people not being as picky about it but also not becoming eternally addicted to it like they were once you started selling ipods to regular people once it wasn't a 400 accessory that only worked with max like once you know you had the the mini and stuff people love their ipods man they love them like do people love their apple watch or do they say it's pretty cool and it was a good christmas present that i got uh
John:
but i don't know if they are so incredibly in love with it as they were with their smartphones or their uh their ipods or whatever so we'll see next christmas and uh how they iterate on this i'm i'm entirely open to the idea that uh apple can try other kinds of wearables whether it's a fitness turd or you know an earring or a ring or something involving glasses uh and there was discussion on twitter today about apple a cable sasser of panic was disappointed that apple wasn't
John:
anywhere on the radar when it came to vr and if you wanted to do vr you had to basically build a pc because no mac we already discussed this no mac you can buy is viable for which isn't entirely true because the mac is technically capable of doing a vr experience but the current vr products the the pioneers of the vr industry are either
John:
You know, you need a gaming console or you need a PC.
John:
And no matter what Mac you have, forget it.
John:
And so Cable was concerned that Apple is missing out on this, that they are watching this one go by.
John:
And again, we've talked many times about the supposed rumored VR things that Apple is surely toying with internally.
John:
But as far as I'm aware, there's no credible rumors about Apple fielding any products in that area.
John:
uh i think they should be experimenting with it and same thing with wearables i think they should be experimenting with everything having to do with wearables not just watches and some people some feedback we got recently was like you guys say that apple is spread too thin but on the other hand you're always saying apple has to be checking out everything uh there's a difference between
John:
Fielding a product at a platform or investigating like Apple's job is to try everything to see, you know, not in the market, but like try it out internally, make sure someone is working on VR, make sure someone's working on this, that maybe not cars, right, but but everything that's close to their industry.
John:
be don't let it catch you by surprise and then figure out out of all those things is this some place where we can sell a good product you know can we can we uh you know make a significant contribution to this market how big is the potential market like that's what they should be doing internally you can't do is actually say we need to be in every single market like microsoft in the 90s we need to make if there's a technological thing that can run software we need to make one of them and we need to sell it as a product and we need to support it forever because then you just end up with too much crap so
John:
It's being spread too thin is when you do more than you can do externally.
John:
And then doing due diligence internally is saying we need to be looking at everything.
John:
We need to not be caught by surprise.
John:
We need to, at the very least, be making an internal determination of...
John:
It's not time for us to enter that market, but we'll continue to look at it because it's so much cheaper to just continue to investigate internally.
John:
It gets really expensive once you say, and you know, we're going to make a product.
John:
That's one of the rumors about the car, by the way, is someone inside decided we can innovate in the car space, whether it's with electric cars or self-driving cars or whatever they're going to do, right?
John:
And the rumor I heard was that Apple had essentially said they're willing to spend a billion dollars on development of a car and then walk away from the entire project if it doesn't look like it's working out.
John:
So that's like, you know, again, it's just a rumor.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But that's the mindset you have to go in with, because how do you know whether you can do something good in the car space?
John:
You can think about it all you want, but at a certain point, someone has to say, all right, I think we can do something here.
John:
Let's give it a try.
John:
And if you have budgets the size of Apple, you can say, all right, we'll put a billion dollars into this, and then we'll revisit.
John:
And we'll say, once we spend a billion dollars, what do we think, guys?
John:
Is this ready?
John:
And gals, this is so...
John:
a lifetime of sexist language cemented in my freaking brain anyway uh what do we think of this is this going to be a product worthy of apple should we release it and that's where marco comes and yells at you and says you know what maybe the watch wasn't a product worthy of apple quite yet we think wearables are great but when it's time to give the go no go maybe let it bake a little bit longer anyway um or maybe it was the wrong approach yeah the rumored attitude with the car i think is the right attitude is get while the getting is good you've got a
John:
just because you put a billion dollars into it doesn't mean you actually have to ship a car you could put a billion dollars in and say we thought we could do something really interesting here and it turns out we can't lesson learned move on that's doing your due diligence if they're doing that in vr we've been looking at vr for two decades we've had people doing ar and vr internally we've been investigating it for as long as we've been investigating anything any of the technologies that we actually released like touch screens and voice recognition and all these things that we've been doing in labs forever and ever in apple
John:
and it's time to come out with a product when we feel like we can make a contribution we will and until then we won't so that's why we always just assume here on the outside well of course apple's looking to vr and then sometimes in our darker moments you think right right apple you're at least experimenting with it doesn't mean you need to feel the product today doesn't mean you must compete with the oculus rift today like
John:
there's so many questions about vr to still you know we still don't know what's going to happen there but we just hope that apple as the richest technology company in the world at the very least is investigating all these avenues and for wearable same thing you can wear a lot of technology things on your body uh and a lot of people wear things on their body every day and if apple could sell them something that makes their lives better that would be perfect
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Math.com, FreshBooks, and Betterment.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Marco:
we can talk about that uh that uh mac os thing or oh yeah i didn't get a chance to read what are all these what's john's mongoose californian what the hell is that it's been on our show notes for like three years it's a bike yep it should stay there because i can talk about it sometime but not today why not today because i'm not prepared for it
John:
not ready the whole uh you know what the whole purpose of this show is you know what i mean it's not like i need to i just need to know that it's a thing we're going to talk about tonight no the macos thing is is good idea because i forgot that was there and i did look at that page
Casey:
Yeah, so I didn't get a good look at it.
Casey:
I looked at the picture zone.
Casey:
I really liked them.
Marco:
I mean, that's a lot of it.
Marco:
So, yeah, so there's this blog post by Andrew Ambrosino on Medium called MacOS, M-A-C-O-S, the lowercase mac way that we think they're going to rename it, colon, it's time to take the next step.
Marco:
And he basically outlines a number of substantial changes that he thinks should be done or he proposes might be good to macOS in things like design and interface changes and really kind of making it... He was originally responding a little bit to Steve Troughton Smith's claim back in his WBC wish list post a couple months back or a couple weeks back.
Marco:
He was saying...
Marco:
Steve Trouton-Smith said that he really believes that OS X is a dead platform and kind of elaborated on that.
Marco:
So Andrew here basically kind of took that further and was like, well, you know, what does OS X need to kind of take the next level, to remain relevant, to go the next step?
Marco:
And there's a number... If I could summarize it, he basically makes the interface look a lot more like iOS apps that are kind of being windowed in a regular OS X environment.
Marco:
So basically, it's a significant design refresh around a more iOS-y style for lots of apps in the system, rather than what we have now, which is kind of like mostly AppKit styles, and then some apps like Photos are more iOS-y.
Marco:
And then he proposes a few other things like a new file system ding and a few other things.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
What do you guys think of this?
Marco:
I think it's really interesting.
John:
I think it does not look as much like iOS as you think it does.
John:
And I also think it doesn't take much to get a designer's juices flowing.
John:
I think all you need to throw them is the, again, mostly agreed upon by the people out in the outside world renaming.
John:
of the operating system to match iOS and tvOS and watchOS to have a lowercase m on macOS that we've been talking about for months and months.
John:
I think that's basically all you need.
John:
You could just put that little grain of sand in the mind of a designer, and they immediately want to design screenshots of what this OS will look at, starting as this one does with the about screen.
John:
if you don't think that changing the capitalization and naming of an operating system can lead to a visual design you don't have much of a designer in you because it doesn't take much to get that ball rolling and i i like these screenshots but they remind me a lot of what i see whenever there is a new mac operating system coming designers want to say this is how i would make it look and i have to say that most of them i feel like
John:
are doing a surface treatment they are re-skinning without rethinking any of the paradigms because they have a dock on the bottom a menu bar on the top they have windows with windows widgets and toolbars and search fields and sidebars and and master detail views and
John:
you know table views and scrolling lists of thumbnails and it's like that's not rethinking anything that's exactly what the Mac operating system is now and what it has been for years and years and just because on your video player you put a big circle kind of like there is on the iPhone camera does not change the interface of dealing with video on the Mac at all like a real paradigm shift would be
John:
away from some aspect that has defined the the mac and the basic desktop gui operating system whether that's you know in the modern era the dock uh but really just movable resizable windows with widgets and toolbars and a menu bar on the top of the screen like when you come down to it um and i'm not saying that needs to change but anybody who's like this needs to be we need to have a rethink of the mac because it is stagnating and then they show a reskin type of thing
John:
that's there seems to be a disagreement between the spirit of the text and the actuality of the images even though i'm sure these images are exciting to the person who drew them and they do look kind of cool even if they do look a little bit like the uh current uh look and feel the system maybe just dressed up a little bit um
John:
yeah if you're if your pitch is in the text that needs a radical rethink then the screenshot should be a radical rethink and i don't think these are on the other hand if your pitch is uh you know as we talked about the past shows that the mac should be uh
John:
take advantage of its maturity and just decrease the number of bugs and increase performance and stability over and over again until it is just like rock solid super responsive like a game console in the olden days when there was no such thing as frame rate drops and just everything happens because the screen can handle it sprites on the screen at the time and they're always perfect and there's never any drop in frame rate and everything is perfectly responsive and stable nothing never crashes because you can't do a software update because it's on a cartridge and nothing's ever going to change
John:
anyway i like not that not that it has to be a nostalgic type of thing but like that is that is another route you can go with the mac not going to radically rethink it make it the best version of the current mac operating system that it could possibly be as in the same paradigm resizable windows scroll bars window widgets menu bars uh that is a powerful paradigm that has lasted us a long time and you can do amazing things with it and there's nothing really particularly broken about it for the current customers of the mac but
John:
Plenty of things broken out for the mass market who would much rather use their smartphones.
John:
But again, setting that aside for now, if you're going to take the Mac face value for what it is, who wouldn't love a Mac that reacted to your input faster, that did everything faster, that never crashed, that never stalled, that never did anything weird?
John:
Can you do that?
John:
And it's easier to do that if you say that's all we're going to do with this thing.
John:
We're not going to try to come up with big, important features every single time we're going to say if there's a big, important feature crying out to be implemented, by all means, we'll implement it.
John:
But if there's not, we will not feel ashamed to spend an entire year just polishing the hell out of the Mac operating system.
John:
I know I would love that.
John:
And I know a lot of the existing customers would love that.
John:
And maybe you could say that defines a dead platform because stability equals death.
John:
But that is one possible route to go to make the people who use the Mac now love it even more.
John:
And I think to extend its life, because in order for the Mac to continue to be viable, it has to continue to offer things better than iOS.
John:
And iOS is getting better all the time.
John:
And if the Mac operating system is not also getting better, eventually those lines in the graph will cross and there's no more point for having the Mac.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think it really comes down to, like, you know, is the Mac being treated, you know, platform-wise, software-wise, is it being treated like the MacBook Air, which is kind of like, you know, we're going to keep selling it for a while until it becomes irrelevant or dies, and then we're just going to kind of stop?
Marco:
Or is it an active platform that Apple wants to keep going indefinitely?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think it's the latter.
Marco:
I think we've heard comments to that effect from Craig Federighi and I think maybe even from Phil Schiller.
Marco:
And so it does seem like that is the idea, that the Mac is not dead.
Marco:
It's not just in maintenance mode until it gets subsumed by iOS.
Marco:
It does seem like they want to keep moving it forward.
Marco:
It really just needs maybe the resources to do that.
Marco:
And maybe they're doing that already.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But if they're going to keep it going as a platform, I think I'm about to make a John argument here.
Marco:
But they have to eventually make massive jumps in certain areas.
Marco:
Eventually, whatever we know as OS X, there's going to be Mac OS 11 or whatever...
Marco:
whatever it's going to be called.
Marco:
Eventually, there's going to be the next big jump forward on this platform, or at least there needs to be, if it's going to remain relevant.
Marco:
And it's hard to tell whether it's getting the resources and the attention it needs internally to be on track for that or whether they're mostly focused on iOS right now.
Marco:
But I don't know.
John:
Yeah, maybe the naming, like, is their way of doing this.
John:
I always wonder if they're going to reset the version numbers.
John:
They start from 1.0.
John:
This is MacOS 1.0.
John:
And under the covers, of course, they would still be like, you know, 10, 12, whatever, just for software, backward compatibility, kind of like how...
John:
windows has the crazy versioning number that got skewed off because they continued where they continued the nt versioning numbers i think after 2000 yeah anyway um i can imagine that they're doing something like that that's not the big reset we're talking about this was the other direction is like all right then radically rethink it radically rethink the mac operating system do do another mac os 10 style transition um
John:
that can be dangerous too because you could just be annoying the remaining customers you have and they say forget this if i'm going to go through a big change i'm just going to learn how to use an ipad pro um i don't know but at the very least renaming and reskinning can actually go a long way towards getting people excited about a platform again
John:
even if it's all service details if you also do some other things right that like that's another free gimme like do you want to do a make things faster and fix bugs release but make people think it's a feature release just change how everything looks they'll be like whoa this new mega operating system it's crazy when all they did was all they did was change graphics and then they spent the whole rest of the time fixing bugs increasing performance and as someone who writes software and someone who likes software updates
John:
i'm obviously more excited than normal people are about this i love when a new version of a software product that i use comes out that they tell me something and it is faster i love that because you know as a programmer i love doing that i love you know deleting code that no longer has executed on every you know frame of animation or on every time this thing happens like i love better algorithms that scale better with large amounts of content and
John:
handles huge numbers of photos better like you know even just something as simple as better responsiveness during scrolling or like uh you know loading things like performance i love things when they get better like that and regular people don't don't really care about that but they feel it they you know if you do that consistently
John:
people have sort of this intangible feeling that your product is better than others in ways they can't explain simply because it react.
John:
And in the same way that if you give someone the original iPhone and then gave them another touchscreen phone, another contemporary touchscreen phone, everyone could tell you that the iPhone was way better.
John:
Even if they don't know, like, oh, I recognize this is a superior product because the hardware is nicer or the stupid thing actually reacts to my finger.
John:
Like, they don't have to understand the nuances of finger reaction, but...
John:
The general public immediately saw that, oh, this is different than the touchscreen that I hate on my ATM.
John:
This touchscreen is awesome.
John:
The ATM's touchscreen is terrible.
John:
And I don't need to tell you the technical reasons why.
John:
I just recognize it.
John:
So if you make a product that is more stable, more reliable, and faster and more responsive...
John:
and you keep doing that on a regular basis, customers will react.
John:
They will love your product more.
John:
And those of us in the know will also react.
John:
You don't need to win us over.
John:
The real win is everyone else who will feel that.
John:
But boy, I love products.
John:
Any product that has in their release notes, bug fixes are good, performance improvements.
John:
And I get the feeling, speaking of dead platforms and everything, that people seem to think that
John:
there's nothing in the mac applications they use it from day to day or the operating system itself that can get faster like well this is just how computers are and i just reject that notion entirely like everything on my computer can and should be faster even just on the software side like ignoring that yes i think they should be faster cpus faster storage faster graphics card yes that should all continue to happen as best as apple can right yeah but just even within the same hardware
John:
there are things you can do to make the software faster so many things can be done like that that poor guy i see on twitter who just spends all day trying to make ns user defaults faster i love that guy just yes please do spend an entire year making ns user defaults faster please you should because you know if that's used by tons of applications and you make it just a little bit faster you'll save us all a lot of time my computer will be better so keep making things faster