Mama Needs That Pokémon
Casey:
To go back to your car analogy.
John:
That's terrible.
John:
I'm going to cut it.
John:
Well, no, but... I was going to say bad things about your analogy, but now you're just going to edit it out of existence.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I always edit jokes that don't land.
Marco:
That's the privilege of being the editor.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we should start with some follow-up, as always.
Casey:
There are approximately seven Hackintosh users on the planet, and every single one of them has written us to tell us how it's possible to get everything to work.
Casey:
Asterisk.
Casey:
Dagger.
Casey:
Double dagger.
Casey:
Double asterisk.
John:
we got some people also writing in saying oh i've had you know all your worries are founded i have a hackintosh and i ran into all the problems you described and it's kind of a pain but other people are like not a pain at all i got everything to work you just got to follow the right guides and do the right things and flash the right stuff and wait for the drivers to be updated with each update and it's not a problem i mean these are two sets of people describing the exact same situation it's just that from one person's perspective
John:
oh you just do this series of steps and everything is fine and the other person's perspective oh you got to do these series of steps before everything's fine like it's the same situation right uh it just all depends on how you look at it and if it's something you enjoy doing or something that you would find a hassle if we could kind of pick a theme of what we heard
Marco:
We were pretty much correct about the trade-offs, about it is a pain sometimes for most people.
Marco:
How much of a pain it ends up being for you depends a lot on your component choices.
Marco:
And that if you follow these guides and if you choose exactly the components they say, and if you don't have special needs or requirements, oh, I have to make this other Wi-Fi card work because that's the one I have, or whatever else.
Marco:
If you're willing to buy exactly the right components, if you're willing to buy all new components to do this,
Marco:
It's probably a lot easier and you'll have an easier time with it.
Marco:
But if you're trying to get it running on components you already had for other reasons, you might have a harder time.
Casey:
I think that's a pretty good summary, actually.
Casey:
Charles Perry wrote in and he had said, hey, you know, you guys joked about Apple Store employees not knowing about the Mac Mini.
Casey:
That actually happened to me.
Casey:
In September of 2015, I was at the Apple store, and I told the salesperson that I wanted to buy a Mac Mini, and I got a blank stare in reply.
Casey:
The salesperson had never heard of it for real.
Casey:
So that is a thing that has actually happened.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
I always wonder about the kind of training they get.
John:
I thought every Apple used to do it.
John:
They would fly you off to Cupertino and give you this whole training course, and you'd be briefed on Apple's entire line.
John:
And it's the type of thing where...
John:
You're not going to remember everything they tell you.
John:
They're going to fill your head with a bunch of information, especially if you're new to Apple.
John:
You can't remember all the details.
John:
But I would think that forgetting an entire line of computers exists, especially when Apple's Mac product line doesn't contain that many products in the grand scheme of things, would be a thing that wouldn't happen.
John:
So I think they must have dropped their training a little bit for the floor staff or the salespeople.
Good.
Marco:
Well, I mean, this is what happens with every retail place.
Marco:
The Apple stores are really big.
Marco:
There's lots of them, and they have to hire lots of staff.
Marco:
From what we've heard rumblings of here and there, it seems like maybe they don't pay as well as they used to, or whatever reason, they have a hard time attracting and or training high-quality staff consistently.
Marco:
So you end up getting like, yes, there are some people there who really know their stuff, but a lot of them don't, because that's just the reality of hiring a massive retail staff these days.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We should also talk about the crazy weird mouse that I believe John had brought up last episode.
John:
Yeah, I think it was called the ISO point track bar from outbound back from the 80s.
John:
Well, this design apparently lives on probably because they either bought the patents for it or the patents expired because it was so long ago.
John:
in contour designs roller mouse which is a thing that you can buy for your computer today apparently and it looks like kind of one of those uh keyboard wrist rest things that you should never ever actually rest your wrists on um and it's got some buttons and right along the top edge of it it's got the little roller ball thingy you can roll back and forth like a little pencil for vertical and slide left and right i'm not quite sure if the bar itself slides or if it's just like
Marco:
touch sensitive or whatever there's a youtube video of someone uh messing with it and doesn't still doesn't quite make it clear because the youtube video is not very illuminating but anyway this still exists youtube's very good at that youtube is very good at having lots of videos that purport to review a product but don't actually tell you the useful information about that product they just kind of like hold it up and spin it around or unbox it and they don't actually try it or show you or do anything useful not that i'm complaining
John:
well you need to you need to have different camera angles like what you need to do is like if you don't understand how this product works which i you know i have some questions like oh does the bar slide back and what you need like close-ups and like macro photography and cutaways and if you can't just have one continuous shot of a person sitting on a desk uh you know connecting it to their keyboard and showing it's got little feet and it's got little connectors got a little this but it's just like you're too far away i can't see what you're doing with your fingers you need to you need a multi-camera multi-shot edited sequence instead of just one big long take
Marco:
Usually when I'm looking for product reviews on YouTube for a product I'm considering buying, at least half the videos I find, I suspect I'm the first person to ever have watched them.
Marco:
Regardless of what the view count says, those must all be bots.
Marco:
I think I'm the only person who's ever watched it, including the creator.
Marco:
I don't think they've even watched it.
Marco:
Because if they watched it, they would notice all the problems, or at least some of the problems.
Marco:
Like, hey, you can barely hear what they're saying.
Marco:
Or, you know, you could have cut out this entire segment.
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
Unfortunately, most commonly this entire video serves no purpose and adds nothing to the world.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
John:
Well, Selenom have really high production values where I can tell they've really nailed the lighting and it's crisp and the audio is really good, but they didn't actually provide a good product review because they didn't have the close-ups and the other details.
John:
None of those people review microphones.
John:
Yeah, the most fun thing is when I'm looking for, not specifically videos, but usually it's what I find, for questions I have about household stuff.
John:
like how to repair the self raising like uh or how to repair a cordless blind raising mechanism thing or something or how to fix a flapper on your toilet or whatever um and if you're looking for like this specific make and model and seeing how some or even when i was doing the replacing the battery in my key fob or whatever right those are the best videos because these are not professional youtubers this is just a person who just says look i'm
John:
i've decided to film myself doing this thing and like they're holding their camera under their chin against their chest to film their two hands doing something the camera is a candy bar phone from 1997 and and they're talking really weird because their chin is holding the camera while their fingers fumble
John:
and i love these people you know why because if they didn't do that terrible video there would be zero videos on the entire internet i'm like i just want to see one other living human do this and they do it i'm like oh that explains it like it's so much better to have a video than no video so i would encourage everybody that if you're even remotely thinking of putting a video about how you repaired the specific toilet seat that you have for some specific 80s toilet do it put it up online
John:
If it has five views, it doesn't matter.
John:
If I'm one of those five, I'm like, thank you.
John:
Thank you for putting this online because it's so hard to find any information about certain things.
John:
And I love the fact that people are doing, especially about home stuff, are doing home repairs and filming themselves doing it and filming their mistakes.
John:
And I don't care that the audio is horrible.
John:
I don't care that it's all blurry.
John:
I don't care that the camera is shaking.
John:
I wish there were more of them.
Marco:
No, I mean, I'm just saying, like, if you're going to review a microphone...
Marco:
What is the one thing that somebody watching that review might be interested in that video containing?
Casey:
An audio sample from the microphone?
Marco:
Go look at, like, pick a microphone, go to YouTube, and search for a video reviewing that microphone and see how many you can find that actually contain an audio sample of the person talking to that microphone.
Marco:
Let alone what would be more useful is maybe comparing it back to back to like one other microphone.
Marco:
Maybe the one built into the camera or the phone would be good enough.
Marco:
Just compare it to something else.
Marco:
Like you can't even find samples of people talking into the mic.
Marco:
I cannot believe like, oh man, I'm in the wrong business.
John:
I'm going to take over YouTube.
John:
Well, I bet they show you the microphone coming out of the box.
John:
They show you all the different outfits you can put on the microphone.
John:
Yeah, they do.
John:
They show you all the articulations and the different points on it.
John:
It's like the toy unwrapping videos are the template upon which all product reviews on YouTube are based.
John:
And it's probably okay if you're unwrapping toys, but...
John:
probably not good for a product that actually is supposed to do something it's difficult like especially for something like an input device or a chair or something like that you it's not actually easy to illustrate in video all the different features because you do need lots of weird camera angles and camera rigs to get lighting in the right place to sort of convey the and you probably need diagrams at a certain point like with like overlaid on top of the video it's not it's not an easy gig oh
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There is another item in the follow-up, which I told myself I wouldn't bring up, but I don't want to get yelled at later.
Casey:
There's a bullet that says Casey's ongoing iMac woes, which I don't want to talk about because I don't want the internet telling me about how wrong I am about everything.
Casey:
So we can move along.
John:
Well, we already talked to you about it in Slack, but I think we need to talk about it again.
Casey:
I really don't want to talk about this.
Marco:
You need to bring in your iMac for repair and you won't.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Well, yes, that's actually the summary.
Casey:
So how can I briefly recap this?
Casey:
Let me put on my chief summarizer and chief hat.
Casey:
So a couple episodes ago, I sounded like garbage because my iMac croaked in the middle of recording.
Casey:
No, it did not involve water or any other liquid.
Casey:
Thank you, the entire internet, for making that joke.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
So it croaked in the middle of recording.
Casey:
It hard froze, rebooted itself.
Casey:
This had happened, I had noticed, from time to time, but it had never been during a recording, so it didn't really make that big of a difference.
Casey:
The only thing I lost out on was Plex couldn't see my media files because it wouldn't auto-reconnect to the Synology.
Casey:
So anyway, so this happened.
Casey:
Suddenly, I actually need to take action on things because it affected the show, and that's no bueno.
Casey:
So I...
Casey:
Tried to figure out what to do.
Casey:
I did a hardware test.
Casey:
And after much cajoling from Mr. Syracuse, it showed no problems.
Casey:
I think I might have tried one or two other things.
Casey:
But what I ended up doing was I swapped out my Mac sales RAM.
Casey:
I had gotten 32 gigs of RAM for this thing the moment I bought it.
Casey:
And I put in the eight gigs of OEM RAM, and that's what's running in it right now.
Casey:
And it seemed to me, empirically, that it'll go about a week before it has one of these locks and reboots itself.
Casey:
And up until this morning, it had been eight days since I had any such problem.
Casey:
This morning...
Casey:
I went to not unsleep it, but the screen had slept, but the machine was still on.
Casey:
So I hit the space bar on my keyboard in order to wake the thing up, and the backlight on the screen came on, but I could see nothing.
Casey:
I ended up forcing a reboot.
Casey:
I did a hard reboot.
Casey:
I looked at the console when it came back up, and it had a bazillion messages.
Casey:
I don't have it handy in front of me, but something along the lines of, I can tell that the GPU driver is not responding, and that's probably not good.
Casey:
So my hopeful and I stand by my going theory is that it's the non-OEM RAM that's pissing it off and causing problems.
Casey:
But I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to go on.
Casey:
And John and Marco both are insistent that I take this thing to the genius bar.
Casey:
But I really, really, really don't want to.
Casey:
Because it is a royal pain to bring it there, let alone have it be gone for like a week or more, only for Genius to say, geez, it never happened to me.
Casey:
Everything looks good here.
Casey:
Here you go.
Casey:
Come back if it happens again.
Casey:
So I don't want to bother with it, and I would rather just deal with the 8 gigs of RAM and then maybe start whining at Mac sales or other world computing or whatever they call themselves.
Casey:
whine at them and see if I can get replacement sticks if that really does seem to be the problem.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
If you're going to keep the OWC RAM out of the computer and it's going to have this problem occasionally... You know it's not the RAM.
John:
What exactly do you expect OWC to do about that?
John:
But like you just said, I still think it's the RAM, but it just froze when the RAM wasn't in it.
John:
How does that even work?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
It was a different kind of freeze.
Casey:
It was a very different kind of freeze.
John:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
I'm serious.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
Oh, God, I'm going to get so many emails.
John:
You are being very funny.
John:
i i understand it's a different kind of freeze but the problem is it's another thing that your mac shouldn't be doing right like especially since you're not doing anything with it you don't have any weird programs that you're running or you're not stressing it's just sitting there idle essentially and you come back to it and you can't get it to wake up and you see a bunch of gpu messages and the thing
Casey:
Yeah, but that was the first time I'd ever seen anything in the console.
Casey:
Any of the other times it locked up, it was like it was running and churning and chugging along fine.
Casey:
And then next thing you know, I see, oh, boot time.
Casey:
You're grossly overblowing the effect this problem has on me.
Casey:
With the exception of that one episode, which I do genuinely feel deeply sorry about.
Casey:
With the exception of that one episode, it has never really caused any problem for me.
Casey:
And I think that today's freeze was just a fluke of modern computing.
Marco:
No, this doesn't happen.
Marco:
That is not the behavior of healthy hardware.
Marco:
That is not normal.
Marco:
That is not something you should just consider.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
That's acceptable.
Marco:
I'm going to live with that forever.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And especially because this is going to run on a warranty at some point.
Marco:
If you didn't get AppleCare, it's going to be in, what, six months?
Marco:
This is not...
Marco:
normal this is this is not supposed to happen this is not acceptable something in there is broken and it is most likely not the ram that is not currently in the computer when this problem is still happening it was a different problem though well it might have reacted worse with that ram maybe it sounds like there's something wrong with the gpu or the logic board whether or not it is worse with the owc ram in it
John:
the fact is this problem exists without the owc ram in it so therefore that ram is not the problem that ram might be a problem but it is not the problem here i'm assuming you googled the error message because like to rule out software type of bugs where it's like oh unbeknownst to you this version of os 10 ships or mac it's still os 10 right god this transition is going to be rough um ships with uh a driver for your particular gpu that is flaky in this way
John:
usually googling for the console message will land you 100 people asking the same question on apple's discussion forums none of which are actually getting an answer but then you can kind of like ballpark like look is this a thing that's happening to a lot of people you know as judged by like whatever ratio uh you know commands people to go on to uh apple discussion forums and talk about like for every one person you see there there's probably like hundreds more who don't know where the discussions forums are but i've had situations like this and and
John:
It doesn't mean that the software problem, you see other people having it, but occasionally you'll get lucky and you'll see that.
John:
Oh, actually, I'm someone who knows whether I'm an Apple employee or not.
John:
And there's a bug in this driver for this NVIDIA GPU or whatever.
John:
It's not what you have in yours.
John:
But anyway, and.
John:
That's what the problem is, and this software update either has fixed it or will fix it or whatever.
John:
So it's still conceivable that that GPU, like that freeze thing, could be a software issue, right?
John:
The hard rebooting thing with no messages in the console definitely looks like a hardware thing.
John:
And like you said, you haven't had that with RAM out, so who knows.
John:
But either way, either of these things, I think, are a problem.
John:
So maybe you've kind of convinced me with your reticence to bring this thing in.
John:
Maybe you wait for the next one.
John:
the next freeze and see with the ram still out like do you get a repeat of the gpu thing or do you get the hard resetty type thing i still think it's weird that the ram tests would pass maybe the ram tests are not particularly thorough maybe you need to run those tests that like go through every bite of ram like hundreds of times and runs for days at a time to
John:
really test it i'm not entirely sure but anyway all this is to say that both marco and i have 5k imax and ours just don't do this so you shouldn't you shouldn't accept this as a state of being and you should resign yourself to taking this big heavy computer in three times not once because the first time you take it in if you're lucky they'll find something wrong but they'll probably send it back to you and say it's fine then you have to wait for it to happen again then you have to bring it again then they say it's fine then you have to wait for it to happen again then you bring it again and then after they've denied you three times
John:
Then you get satisfaction of some kind or you get to be more indignant about it.
Casey:
OK, well, let me just make a couple of things very plain, because apparently nobody's listening to me.
Casey:
I did the Apple hardware diagnostic test or whatever it is called when you start the computer and mash down on the D key.
Casey:
I did this with the OWC RAM in and it said everything was peachy keen.
Casey:
Everything was fine.
John:
That's what I was saying.
John:
Like maybe it runs like a wimpy RAM test because a full RAM test takes a really, really long time.
John:
So it doesn't, you know, because I'm suspicious of the RAM too, right?
John:
So maybe the Apple hardware test didn't test it thoroughly or maybe it didn't trigger the problem or whatever.
Marco:
Well, like with this kind of intermittent problem that happened, you know, you get like a weird crash.
Marco:
It used to be every few days.
Marco:
Now it's like once a week, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it used to be about once a week.
Casey:
It has happened once, which, to be fair, was about eight days after I put the stock RAM in.
Casey:
It has happened once.
Casey:
And on the surface, that looks like it's probably the same crash, but like I said earlier, I'd never, ever, ever seen any console messages previously.
Casey:
And I should add that it would always just reboot itself, and this time it did not.
Casey:
It seemed like it was fine until it powered on the backlight, and then it wouldn't show anything on screen.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't think this is the same thing.
Marco:
Either way, these are two different symptoms of some kind of underlying problem that is probably the same problem without that OWC RAM in it.
Marco:
So it probably is not the RAM.
Marco:
It's probably a problem with Apple's hardware in here.
Marco:
And normally functioning computers don't behave this way.
Marco:
Normally functioning Macs don't behave this way.
Marco:
Even Macs running betas don't behave this way.
Marco:
Tipster in the chat room says his beta hardware doesn't behave this way.
Marco:
Something is wrong.
Marco:
Whether or not the hardware test passes or fails does not say there is or isn't a problem.
Marco:
It just says whatever that is testing for is or isn't failing at that moment.
Marco:
What that means to you is that this will be annoying to get fixed, but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
Marco:
It just means the problem didn't happen during that test.
Casey:
So an appropriate analogy to this situation is my car, every great once in a while, the stereo decides to turn itself off and then turn itself back on.
Casey:
It is mildly inconvenient, mildly inconvenient.
Casey:
And then one time, one time I was in the middle of a podcast and I had no idea where I was in that podcast in terms of like the timestamp or anything.
Casey:
And then it restarted itself and I had to start the podcast over because I just couldn't find where I was in the podcast for whatever reason.
Casey:
That's this analogy.
Casey:
I am not taking my car to the shop for them to say, oh, we can't reproduce it four different times just so they can say, oh, we can't reproduce it.
Casey:
I do not have the confidence.
John:
But there's no reasonable hope that the BMW dealer would ever fix a problem like that.
Casey:
There's no reasonable hope in Apple.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
god yes no there is a reasonable hope that you will get some kind of satisfaction from apple about i know i've dealt with these problems before car dealer forget it if you have some electronic gremlin in your car there's no hope like don't even bother like maybe try the dealer once but it's not like they have they don't deal with electronics like they can fix your mechanical parts but in general unless there's some sort of well we flashed it with the manufacturer's latest blah blah they have no idea about the electronics in your car and half that stuff doesn't work right even when it's working entirely according to you know like it's working perfectly this is exactly how it's designed it's just filled with bugs that are never going to get fixed but
John:
for hardware like i had the same thing with a thunderbolt display which is really weird and flaky and i had to keep bringing in and bring it in but eventually i feel like eventually they will give you an entirely new insides or an entirely new refurbished thing or you know like you will especially when it's under warranty and it's relatively new now is the time to start going through the annoying sequence because it will be worse
John:
If you just let the slide and the warranty runs out and you're just annoyed for years at a time by this thing, and then your only recourse is then at that point is just to pay out some of your own money.
John:
Do it while it's still under warranty.
John:
With Apple, you will eventually, something eventually will happen.
John:
And there's not 100% chance it's going to get fixed, but it's non-zero and it's way higher than the car dealer fixing something about electronic in your car.
Casey:
so let me just plainly state it'll be in the show notes but the actual error on the most recent time when the backlight came on and nothing was on screen was windows server colon gpu driver appears to be hung parenthesis over five continuous seconds of unreadiness that was the actual error the only thing i could come up with on a quick google search as i'm recording is the stupid mac pro so the mac pro is haunting me you know what's really common on the mac pro gpu failures yeah go figure
Casey:
I also consider that this is my second, or remember that this is my second Retina 5K iMac, and I'm already kind of not wanting to deal with going back to the Apple store.
Casey:
And it is not that far from my house, don't be creepy, but I just don't want to deal with it.
Casey:
And there are people that are in the chat, and I'm sure there are people listening to this that are feeling,
Casey:
furious with me that i'm not leaping into my car to get this i guarantee you everybody is really mad everyone's probably yelling at their pockets come on whatever i just i have these things have a year warranty do do they not that's generally speaking how this works okay i bought this thing in like late january maybe mid-january at the earliest i can look it up
Casey:
I have plenty of time to make myself happy and let this run with my piddly eight gigs of RAM for another month and see if it crashes and how often it crashes and what the story is.
Casey:
Because if it is as simple as it doesn't crash with the stock RAM, then okay, I get different RAM.
Casey:
I either buy different RAM.
Casey:
I live with it with eight gigs of RAM.
Casey:
It actually is working just fine, to be honest with you.
Casey:
Except that it rebooted this morning.
John:
OWC will replace the RAM.
John:
OWC will replace RAM after like eight years with me.
John:
They have a ridiculously good warranty.
Marco:
No, it's not the RAM.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
Well, the RAM's not even in the computer.
John:
But anyway, if you're going to let it stew for another month, just like...
John:
uh it's going to be a kind of a pain to find this stuff in console later especially if it like gzips up the logs and everything and you have to go hunting through just make a note of copy and paste all the surrounding log lines for each reboot make a note of the date and the time because if you don't do this while it's happening it'll be a pain to go back and research it later and then you can come to the genius bar eventually be like look here's a record of all the stuff that's happened here are the console logs surrounding the events and you can plot them out and say how many days there were between them and all that other stuff that'll be very useful for you
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
And I would suspect that there will come a time that I will have to bring this in because it's just something happens that makes me think, OK, it's not the Ram.
Casey:
And yes, I understand, Marco, that you can do a mark.
Casey:
Hashtag Marco is right.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
But I am so not wanting to deal with the hassle of making this dance happen.
Casey:
four or five times to get a genius that actually understands that something's broken.
Casey:
It's just not worth it.
Casey:
To me, it's not worth it.
Casey:
If it's worth it to you, be that Marco, be that John, or random listener that is furious with me and thinks I'm an idiot, fine.
Casey:
It's worth it to you.
Casey:
At this very moment, tonight, it's not worth it to me yet.
Casey:
And I am oh so overjoyed to read all the emails about how much of a moron I am.
Casey:
So just please send them to Marco.
John:
What's it going to take?
John:
What's going to be your threshold?
John:
At what point, hypothetically, if X happened, that would be like, that's it, this thing is going in.
Casey:
I think if I see a similar crash with nothing in the console, literally there was nothing in the console, everything was going as happy as a clam, and then next thing you know, boot time.
Casey:
If that happens again, and it happens on the stock RAM, which is what's in it,
Casey:
that will probably in and of itself be enough for me to say, okay, fine, I probably have to take this in.
Casey:
And certainly, if these crashes, random crashes, for whatever reason, even the GPU thing that I saw today, if that happens consistently enough between today, the 13th of July, 2016, and...
Casey:
And around Christmas time, which is around the time that the warranty expires, I will bring it in.
Casey:
I just think it's really aggressive and premature to go through that entire frigging hassle today.
Casey:
That's all I'm saying.
Casey:
Does that answer your question?
John:
There'll be more follow-up, I'm sure.
Casey:
I'm so, so looking forward to it.
John:
We just want your computer to be happy.
John:
We want you to be happy.
John:
And we don't want to lose any more audio.
Casey:
He's got that covered with his... We've taken alternate arrangements.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I'm so looking forward to this follow-up.
Marco:
We are sponsored tonight by Hover.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Planet of the Apes.
Casey:
I almost said Planet of the Apes.
Casey:
so planet of the apps has a website now this is the um app creation show thing that apple had talked about at some point i don't remember when or where it was but they talked about it at some point said hey we're going to do like a reality show about making apps and now it has a website at planet of the apps.com and so they're starting to solicit people to uh join up and film and apparently there's going to be events and i'm not entirely clear what that means i don't know if it's like
Casey:
American Idol style casting, or if it means they're just going to go to these places, but they're going to New York, Austin, L.A., and San Francisco sometime over the next few months, I guess.
Casey:
So anyway, what do we think about this, about Apple dipping into the TV world?
John:
it's weird that apple's first original content that it is like overtly funding is about like its own stuff it's not you know a fiction show that it's about uh apps um i think that's weird for two reasons one when you think of a company funding original tv content i guess just because historically we think of like fiction like oh we're going to pay a bunch of people money and they're going to write a
John:
story and have a bunch of actors in a script and that's what all the other services have done to promote their you know their their headlining original content is all fiction stuff there's not i mean they have reality shows but that's not the stuff that we hear you know house of cards being the big first one and then you know orange is the new black and all sorts of other things so that's weird and the second thing is that it is
John:
a reality show about things that apple does and the reason i think that's weird is because in general when there's a reality show about a topic whatever it is it's fishing or baking cupcakes or like whatever it may be um i tend to view
John:
the reality show about that thing as not reflective of the thing.
John:
It doesn't have to be, it's just entertainment, right?
John:
But I would imagine that someone who is really, you know, a professional woodworker seeing a reality show about woodworking and being like, well, that's not what woodworking is actually like.
John:
This is a reality show, but which again, which is fine, but it's always a distorted view because like in reality, I don't have to make a chair with one hand tied behind my back, or I don't have to incorporate pine cones into the next project.
John:
Like,
John:
That's not what actual woodworking is like.
John:
And in reality, like these people, you know, they're cutting away and they're not showing the amount of time.
John:
And I would use a different tool for that.
John:
And, you know, like I can just imagine anyone watching a reality show thinking that this is not reflective of my profession.
John:
They may think it's entertaining and it's fun or whatever.
John:
But I think if you were Apple and you decided your first original content is going to be about developing for your platforms.
John:
You would want it to be either reflective of what it's like to develop your platform or make it look better.
John:
Whereas most reality shows make it look more difficult and more fraught and just weird.
John:
I can't imagine the view you get of app development...
John:
from watching this program being something that apple would be like yeah we want people to think that's what it's like to develop apps for our platform i know they're going to try to spin it to make it like look it's great and these people are going to get rich and they're all wonderful and developing for our platform is is really fun but that's an infomercial no one wants to watch that either there has to be like reality show drama and silly events and stuff like that and
John:
it's it just doesn't seem like a good idea to me i don't see even if it's the best show ever and people enjoy it and it's super entertaining we come to love the contestants and it's a bonding experience and everything it's i don't see how it's going to be a net positive for apple and that like before this show x number of people were into app development and now even more are and it looks even better i think it'll i think it'll make it into like a more of a circus or just i don't know it just doesn't seem like a good idea to me
Casey:
We actually spoke about this on today's clockwise, which I guessed it on clockwise number one 45.
Casey:
And basically I forget who was it brought it up, but somebody asked, Hey, are you going to watch this?
Casey:
And are you interested in it?
Casey:
And the four of us all basically said, yeah, I'm at least going to give it a shot.
Casey:
I'm curious to see it.
Casey:
I agree with you, John, that quote unquote reality TV is never that real or is very rarely that real.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I'm also curious to see how they make developing apps exciting because the actual act of development is boring as crap, or at least watching it is boring as crap.
Casey:
I think the social network, you know, the movie The Social Network did a pretty good job of making it dramatic and exciting.
Casey:
But if you think about it, there was very little actual programming going on, generally speaking.
Casey:
It was more drinking that was adjacent to programming.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear what the motivation is.
Casey:
I think you're right that it's fraught with peril and it could go wrong in a lot of ways.
Casey:
But I am very intrigued to see how they handle it and intrigued to see how they present it.
Casey:
Is it going to be a bunch of, you know, tech bros from Silicon Valley that are bro-gramming and being idiots?
Casey:
I would assume not, but you never know.
Casey:
Or is it going to be like an interesting and genuine struggle of someone trying to be an independent developer and trying to release this app?
Casey:
Yeah, what was that...
Casey:
Indie game, the movie, and, like, that Chronicle... What was that one guy who did Fez?
Casey:
Phil Fish?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Like, I was riveted by his story.
John:
But it wasn't about game development.
John:
Like, to get back to what you were saying about, like, how are they going to make, you know, application development interesting, like...
John:
When saddled with an activity that generally isn't that interesting to watch, like sitting in front of a keyboard, you fall entirely back on what normally reality shows only lean on 90%, which is it's all about the people, the characters, the stories.
John:
And only if you have an activity that is photogenic, for example, like cooking because people get hungry when they see yummy food or whatever.
John:
But even in cooking reality shows...
John:
Mostly it's about the people, the characters, the interpersonal relationships, the story behind them.
John:
Where do they come from?
John:
What do they hope to achieve?
John:
It's why they're always asking people what their hopes and dreams are.
John:
Very, very little about the cooking.
John:
And cooking is really photogenic, right?
John:
When you have something that's not photogenic at all, like sitting in front of a computer on a keyboard typing...
John:
it's going to be entirely concentrated on the people's stories and maybe the app idea because the audience can say i use apps i know what apps are like tell me your app idea kind of like in the shark tank type things tell me your business idea i don't want the details of how you incorporate and how you do accounting in your business and how you run your business from day to day i don't want but the things that i can relate to so that that is that's how reality shows work it's about people it's about relationships it's about interpersonal conflict
John:
uh they're probably not going to show a lot of programming but they probably will show here's my app idea and then programming happens off camera here's a phase of development programming happens off camera here's an idea judges look at the idea you know like which is kind of a shame because i think a lot of the people a lot of the nerds are like i would like to see the programming part are people making jokes like are they gonna have activities we have to like refactor a you know a controller or something and change your your model layer and like
John:
No, they're not going to have that.
John:
We would like to see that, but we are very small audience.
John:
You know, they can't do anything that's real programming type stuff that has to be about all about the personal drama, which I think Apple thinks maybe is going to be like, oh, it shows these people and they're they're, you know, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and they're going to become bazillionaires and they have these great app ideas and app is empower the world or whatever.
John:
But.
John:
then again, you have to have the drama.
John:
And the drama may be really entertaining and people will like the program, but I don't think it's going to make people want to become a developer on Apple's platforms.
Casey:
I know, Marco, you've been pretty quiet.
Casey:
What do you think?
Marco:
I mostly don't know what I think about this yet.
Marco:
I agree with what both of you have said that, you know, like Casey, I agree that it is a little weird sounding.
Marco:
I'm willing to reserve judgment until I see it.
Marco:
it's a little unclear as to what kind of show it is it sounds a little bit like it is kind of like a shark tank or a competition show and it sounds like the um you know like the prize is vc money surprise yeah like i mean not much of a prize i mean like it's one of those prizes that sounds like it's a prize like make it big it's like it's like you landed a record contract like for the you know american idol or the original was like
Marco:
congratulations you are assigned to a major label with a terrible deal yeah and you are chained into that deal and you think it's a big deal when you're a nobody but once you realize you're in it it's really not a great thing i think you're right john that this is mostly just going to be about interpersonal stories and and me you know depending on how well they do it hopefully they're low on like artificial drama um but i think it's mostly going to be like a long version of the
Marco:
feel-good videos they show before their keynotes, especially WBDC keynotes, where it's like you're showing these developers all over the world doing all sorts of cool things to empower themselves and the people around them and showing all this cool stuff with accessibility and diversity and everything.
Marco:
If that's going to be what it is, that's fine.
John:
I don't know how many people... That's an infomercial.
John:
That's not entertaining.
John:
That's great for an ad and it makes us feel good, but people aren't going to tune in week after week to watch that show.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so if it's going to be some kind of – if it's going to try to be a mass appeal show, like a mainstream show, they're going to have to have almost none of the development side.
Marco:
And they're going to have to just make it basically American Idol for apps or basically like Shark Tank.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't expect that to be good.
Marco:
Instinctively, my gut reaction is I probably won't like this, and I probably won't know a single person on it, but that's not to say that it won't be good for other people, I guess.
Marco:
A lot of people have asked me today whether I'm going to apply to be on it, and I don't think I will because, again, it's like the endgame here.
Marco:
What's the endgame?
Marco:
I go through all this.
Marco:
I get represented...
Marco:
somehow in a way that their producers edit it and it's not going to be like tim cook editing this you know it's going to be some other you know reality tv producer editing this i'm so you know if you apply to this you're going to be handing over control of how you are represented to the world to somebody who is probably an expert in making tv drama and in in creating drama where there wasn't drama before to make it more interesting to watch because that's probably what they did before this
John:
Yeah, I don't think any one of us wants to see the reality show character that we would become.
John:
Because everyone has like, you have the input as this person, and then the reality show editors thing is like, all right, I got to slot you in here.
John:
What kind of character are you?
John:
So it's like getting a caricature at like the fair, right?
John:
They're going to take whatever aspect of you that they think is the most entertaining or makes the most drama, and they're going to design a character with you as the input.
John:
And...
John:
if there's anything remotely weird about you and there's plenty weird about all three of us, we probably would not want to see the reality show character that we would become because we, we probably wouldn't be the one that, uh, that is the, uh, typical hero that everybody relates to and thinks is awesome.
John:
I would say maybe, maybe Casey would be, though.
Oh,
John:
Because everyone seems to love him.
John:
He's the everyman.
John:
So maybe he would be turned into like the underdog everyman until he refuses to take his Mac in when he has problems.
John:
And then it's like, no, he's got his hang up still, I guess.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Until this episode.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So honest question, Marco, and John, you as well, actually.
Casey:
So it says here, crap, I just lost it.
Casey:
Who will be the tech experts and mentors?
Casey:
And it just says, this is in the FAQ.
Casey:
We are excited to announce our tech experts and talent in the coming weeks.
Casey:
Stay tuned for more info.
Casey:
Would you be willing to be a tech expert, like someone on the judging side of the table as opposed to the more participatory side of the table, if that makes sense?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I would certainly be more likely to consider that.
Marco:
But honestly, the reality is they would never ask me.
Marco:
like i i am surely not not not even i'm not even close to famous enough for that uh not even in the ballpark it's i wouldn't even be on the like wb version of this show like not even close and so it's not even it's that's like saying like would you accept it if they if they offered you to be the new head of the app store it's like well yeah i'd probably consider that but they won't so you know there's no reason to really give much thought to it
John:
highly the app star would be a better geek though because even though being a judge is slightly better than being a participant it's not much better because you don't you're not the showrunner you don't just make editorial decisions you are just another character on the show and you have more free reign to define your own character if you're a judge but you will play a character in that role and you won't have control of the final edit you won't even have control over all the decisions that are made on the show so it is entirely like you would be a cog in someone else's machine and
John:
In that situation, Marco was really bad at being a cog in someone else's machine, so I think he should not take that even if they offered it to him.
John:
I wouldn't take it just because I wouldn't want to be on TV.
John:
I mean, I don't even do public speaking for crying out loud.
John:
You think I want to be on a TV show?
John:
But I thought... I could think of a lot of other people who I think would be good celebrity judges, like people who...
John:
are you know would fill that role well but not because they're the best you know tech expert or the best mentor because that's not what these things are about a reality show is about you have to have an entertaining cast of characters hopefully they have some skills and you know you like and have some stake in it and are genuine or interesting people not just saying they're all like a bunch of phonies but that's what makes for good television so you need
John:
uh different types to mix together like i would say that for example larry ellison would be an interesting judge and that's just because he's so like cartoonish the evil like the persona that is the public persona that he has and usually there's a spot in a reality show for someone to be like the cartoonish the evil mustache twisting villain right so he could slot right into that you know um we in the various messages that have been going around slacks and stuff i've seen a few developed people that we know consider applying as participants
John:
just as a lark type of thing.
John:
I haven't seen anyone interested in applying for judge things, but I think that's the type of thing where they have to call you.
John:
But I have a feeling that the people who would be good would also say no.
John:
So I think...
John:
their judging panel is not going to have the brightest lights ever industry in it.
John:
And it's going to be difficult to find, uh, to make interesting characters at a well-known celebrities.
John:
I think the best bet is to have three or four people who we've never heard of, but who turn out to be really good as, as judges on a reality show.
Marco:
Well, it's probably going to be people who want or need to be in Apple's good graces for Apple Music promotion and VCs.
Marco:
It's going to be that combination.
Marco:
You're going to have a couple of probably B-list celebrities or musicians who were popular five years ago.
Marco:
Somebody like that.
Marco:
You're going to have...
Marco:
a couple of celebrities, and VCs.
Marco:
And that's the story.
Marco:
With these kind of reality shows, the judges are often used to attract the audience.
Marco:
So that's why they try to get celebrity judges, because they know that people will tune in to watch those judges judge the apps.
Marco:
And then you're going to have VCs because they're going to be the ones who actually know a little bit more about the business.
Marco:
I feel like I kind of have to point out the world that Apple is going to promote here is most likely not the world that like we and our friends and the apps that we talk about on our podcast.
Marco:
It's not the world that we all live in.
Marco:
It's the other it's the entire rest of the app store where it's well not the rest of the app store but it's like
Marco:
It's the rest of the big money side of the App Store, at least, where it is VC-funded.
Marco:
It is driven by these hit-driven, usually, IAP games or things like that.
Marco:
It's going to be that kind of stuff in all likelihood.
Marco:
It's not going to be one person toiling away to really polish the crap out of one amazing productivity app and try to sell it for $10 a year.
Marco:
That's not going to be what this show is about in all likelihood.
Marco:
It's way more likely that it's going to be like, we're making a startup that's going to help connect people to do this amazing task together.
Marco:
And we're going to get 10 million users in the first year and then figure out monetization later.
Marco:
It's going to be that kind of app.
Marco:
It's not going to be drafts.
John:
I feel like I have more faith in, for example, a music executive's ability to judge musical talent to say, can I take this person and make an album with them that will sell a lot of copies?
John:
That, I would say, is a more refined and more predictable art, even though it's still difficult to pick.
John:
But like the people who are good at that, I feel like are much better than VC, which is just a bunch of people who all know nothing.
John:
In fact, almost all have exactly the wrong idea about everything.
John:
VC is like two orders of magnitude.
John:
uh more unpredictable more difficult to figure out what is going to be a hit you know and that's why vcs throw money everywhere you know throw the money at a thousand companies just hoping one of them will be your magical unicorn that makes you billions of dollars but that means you're wrong you know 999 times
John:
um and if you like i think you're right that it's going to be a bunch of vcs and there's nothing worse than hearing vcs be like you know like i can tell i'm going to tell you you know why your business is going to like they'd have no idea what's going to succeed and what's going to fail especially just a small handful of vcs forget it like it's going to be hard for me to take them any of them seriously like every time they make a judgment it'll be like
John:
uh what current unicorns did you pass on and tell me the 999 things that you funded that thought were going to be the next big thing that were all dumb ideas that fizzled out right it's a lot easier to go to a record executive and say tell me all of the people who you know who who turned out hits for you and how many people did you take under your wing that turned out to do nothing good the ratios are just so hard and
John:
in venture capital for technology companies that is going to be comical i think it's easier on like on shark tank to come up like business ideas for concrete things because in the world of apps and uh you know digital stuff and software and all that it's just it's so unpredictable and pretty much every idea that turns out to be really big is the idea that most people hate when they first hear it
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Yeah, I am not looking forward to the unbelievable complaining and moaning that will happen from our community when we realize, as both of you have said, that this show is not made for us.
Casey:
One other interesting point that's on their FAQ, will I be required to give up a percentage of equity?
Casey:
Those that appear on the show will not be required to give up equity unless they choose to accept an offer from one of the angel advisors or investors, which is just further reason to make me believe this is basically Shark Tank, but for apps.
Marco:
Well, that's good to know, though, because that means that the VC component is optional, which is nice.
Marco:
That would make it a little more interesting.
John:
But then what do you win?
John:
I guess you win prestige and promotion.
Casey:
like bragging rights and now your name is out there and it's easier for you to find funding because you're the guy that won on the show or whatever it would be better if it was just a plain old cash prize like okay those accepted will have a chance to receive this is from the about page one mentorship hands-on guidance from some of the world's best experts in tech and entertainment two funding those who make it to the final round will meet with top-tier vcs investing up to 10 million dollars over the course of the season three marketing promotion featured placement on the app store at the end of the show also the potential to reach millions of viewers around the world on apple platforms
Casey:
So that is what you're potentially going to receive.
Casey:
Participation in the show is limited to 100 of the world's most talented app creators.
Casey:
If that's you, please join us.
Casey:
And that's a link.
Casey:
So that's the playing field that we're dealing with.
John:
So they get nothing.
John:
They get featured, which happens to people free all the time.
John:
Granted, you don't have control of it, and this is a guarantee of being featured.
John:
But so what?
John:
Being featured is not going to make you a guarantee to make you a bazillionaire.
John:
You got the VC, which is...
John:
like a monkey's paw if ever there was one uh you know if you really if you really do have a good app idea you probably don't need the vc unless your business model demands a huge amount of upfront costs and you're making a deal with devil and most likely i can't imagine that the best friendliest vcs are going to be part of this thing and it's only 10 million dollars anyway
Marco:
And that's up to $10 million total.
Marco:
So each app, if you actually have these people invest in your app, you might get a few hundred thousand dollars, which sounds like a lot of money, but for VC money funding an app, that's not that much money, really.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then like, but there's no, there is no like guaranteed big, like you're going to get $10 million in cash, like guaranteed, you know, here you go.
John:
That's your prize on the show.
John:
Like getting to the end of, you know, a game show or whatever, the winner will get whatever it is, even if it was just $1 million in cash.
John:
I think that would be more attractive to more people because who is going to read this and say, I really want to go on this show and I really want to win?
John:
Only somebody who doesn't have, like, I think the reason Marco shouldn't do it is if he had a good idea for an app, he wouldn't spend his time trying to convince a bunch of doofus VCs that it's a great idea.
John:
He would just make the app and he doesn't need other people to help him make the app unless his idea is, again, one of those ideas where it's like, I can't even get this app off the ground until I have...
John:
millions of dollars because it's kind of one of those things where you need a critical mass before it becomes like uber or something if you had the idea for uber like you can't really make that up yourself because you need drivers and people to manage them and like there's much more to it to even just get off the ground to get a critical mass of like in one city can someone actually use my app to actually get a car
John:
that's like takes a lot of money just to get to that point right so the uber is an example idea that you would need vc for but for this for an app that you're going to make on a show by yourself just make it yourself so the only people i think who would be attracted to this are like i've never done this before and this seems like a way that i can become successful faster if i happen to win and who knows maybe it is but i just like that's why i think it's going to attract
John:
new people and not people who already know how to make apps because why don't they just make the app then like why spend your time arguing to the shark tank people that you have a great idea just do it if it's a great idea it'll be a great idea if it isn't a great idea it won't be a great idea their their mentorship and their advice is probably not going to mean that much because every successful app has had tons of people tell them it's a terrible idea and every app that is a dud has had tons of people tell them it's awesome so it's a crapshoot
Marco:
Yeah, I would also point out for anybody who has never dealt with the role of VC before, that when you get VC investment money, this is not a gift.
Marco:
This is not a prize.
Marco:
This is a massive obligation.
Marco:
You basically hire yourselves a whole bunch of bosses.
Marco:
who really want a certain a certain way of doing things because you're you're taking a lot of their money again not a gift you are taking a lot of their money and investing it in in your company and you are responsible from that point forward for providing them a large return at some point in the future and they're a little bit impatient about when that is understandably because you're taking a lot of their money
Marco:
So, if you take VC money, you basically get put on a track where, okay, now the next step is, first of all, you have to spend a slice of this money setting up the company exactly the way they want you to.
Marco:
Legal fees, corporate, all this stuff.
Marco:
Then you have to hire a staff on their timescale.
Marco:
They are going to tell you, we want you to do this, this, and this.
Marco:
We want you to hit these growth targets.
Marco:
And you better have a plan on how you're going to do that.
Marco:
And you better show us a plan before we even consider it.
Marco:
It's a very high-pressure track that you're put on.
Marco:
They aren't interested in investing in something that is going to bring you $100,000 a year for the next 10 years as a personal income.
Marco:
They don't care about that at all.
Marco:
They don't want to give you money out of their pocket to get that kind of return.
Marco:
They're investing in you and they want you to grow as big and as quickly as possible because there is a chance, as John mentioned, a small chance, but there is a chance that if you do that, you will get them millions of dollars in return.
Marco:
That's how their business works.
Marco:
That's how it operates.
Marco:
That is what funds it is those big hits that come along.
Marco:
So they aren't interested in your lifestyle business.
Marco:
To them, lifestyle business is a derogatory term, even though that describes everything I've ever done besides Tumblr.
Marco:
But they don't want that because that's not what their money is.
Marco:
You're too risky taking their money to just try to do that.
Marco:
They need big things out of you.
Marco:
And so the pressure will be on you from that moment forward to make your thing big and huge and grow very quickly and take over the world or at least try to.
Marco:
Their goal is to make you burn through that money really quickly because they want you to be spending it on growth, on hiring people, on scaling, on acquiring new users or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
They want you to be burning that money quickly and unsustainably because they know if you hit that growth, you can always get more VC money.
Marco:
You can raise additional rounds if you're growing.
Marco:
If you're not growing, you'll crash and burn.
Marco:
They don't care.
Marco:
They move on.
Marco:
There are advantages to the system.
Marco:
There's lots of things that require this kind of funding to really get off the ground.
Marco:
But this is what they're awarding you with this show.
Marco:
That is the path that they're trying to put you on here.
Marco:
And it might work for you and it might not.
Marco:
But if you're the kind of person like me who prefers to do things like independently as, quote, lifestyle businesses and just have things that are sustainable over long periods, this is not for you.
John:
I think the one upside potentially is that the only reason VCs are on this program is not that they have any expectation that the winner is going to return an investment.
John:
Like, in fact, I think there'll be less pressure on the winner because I think the main reason VCs are on the show is to increase their stature in the VC community.
John:
Like, oh, you were the judge on that show.
John:
And like...
John:
During the course of the judging, they're going to try to demonstrate how wise they are and how knowledgeable they are about the market and how they can judge good ideas from bad in an effort to get more people to come to them.
John:
They're basically doing it as a giant advertisement for themselves to become more prominent, more powerful VCs.
John:
And the fact that they're going to give some winner some amount of money, I think there's less pressure on them because they feel like...
John:
Even when this thing does not give me any return on investment, me starring on this show will be... That's the real return on investment I'm getting, that I get to do this fun thing for a short period of time, and it will raise my profile in the VC community, provided I play my cards right and end up not being the doofus judge that everybody hates or whatever, or it looks...
John:
Like they don't know what they're doing, right?
John:
So that little bit of return takes a little bit of pressure off the person who wins to say, oh, yeah, no, whatever.
John:
Do whatever you're going to do with your business.
John:
But I feel like I already got my money's worth by getting my name out there on this TV show.
Marco:
One thing I'm also really curious to see just creatively about this show is a lot of the challenges of app development and a lot of what makes it a really tough grind.
Marco:
is things about apple that are bad and like how how are they going to frame this exactly like how how are they going to you know are they are they even going to try to accurately portray what it is like being an app developer the good and the bad including the bad that is that is a result of apple shortcomings or or apple's policies or apple's attitude oh they're gonna paper over that like how do they paper over that in a way that is at all genuine and then what's what how valuable is the resulting show really
John:
I don't think they're going to show them submitting their apps to the App Store, but I think they're just going to say, whoever wins this thing, Apple will make sure that their app gets through to the App Store.
John:
They will work privately, individually with the winner to do whatever it takes to fix their sandboxing bugs, and that will all happen off-camera, and it's just like...
John:
don't worry when you're done your app will be up on the app store they're never going to show the process of submitting and getting your app rejected and then getting like these form letters back and trying to explain no you don't understand i'm not opening that file it's something in your framework here's a demo program sorry you're like they're never going to show that right because a it's too esoteric and b that entire part of the process is going to be just like hand waved away because like it'll just be like a sentence at the end of the thing and your app will be in the app store
Casey:
eventually because you don't you don't the apps don't need to be in the app store until you're essentially the winner right so it's not as if they need to be constantly submitting it says here in the faq how far along in the development process does my app have to be the app must be in a beta or functional state by october 21 so that does not by necessity means it need mean it needs to be in the app store so i was wrong about that well anyway that part of the process will be like
John:
it will be if you don't know what submitting to the app store is like it will seem like it's just as simple as sending something in the mail to somebody oh you just submit it to the app store like i can't imagine they would focus on rejection right and i mean unless they want to make that the dramatic part of the program to show your app was rejected because it crashed and it's like it's your fault like none of it is if they do that at all it's not going to be shown to be apple's fault any of the rejections will not be a misunderstanding apple's fault they'll just be like oh your app got rejected from the store because it crashed because every viewer can understand that oh you you did that that was your mistake
John:
Apple is perfect and nice and they would never reject your app for any reason except for because it doesn't work right or it's malicious or it crashes.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of thing where just creatively it seems like it would probably have way better chances of being a good show if Apple wasn't involved in it.
Marco:
But unfortunately, this is an Apple-produced show.
Marco:
You can look at some companies and they're able to be producers of things but still have jokes made at their expense or have themselves made look bad.
Marco:
Apple is not one of these companies.
Marco:
Apple does not have any flex on like the sense of humor about itself and its own flaws.
Marco:
Like they would never in a million years produce something like this that would show any part of them in a bad light.
Marco:
So is this really going to be watchable or is it going to just seem like an overly long WWDC promotion video?
Yeah.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
So that actually is a nice segue to what I was going to bring up.
Casey:
I noticed at the bottom of at least a couple of the pages on planetoftheapps.com, it says something about prospect productions.
Casey:
And so I did a smidge of digging, and I believe I've come up with the right prospect productions.
Casey:
And this is prospectproduction.com.
Casey:
And if you go to prospectproduction.com slash works...
Casey:
You can see some of the stuff they've done in the past.
Casey:
And much to my surprise, a large majority of what they've worked on is sports related.
Casey:
So just looking at the sections they have, there's a music video by James Taylor, but it's the Angels of Fenway, which is a baseball stadium.
Casey:
Um, there's some, there's an on the trail section, which I figured you'd be confused.
Casey:
Uh, there's an on the trail section that, that, uh, that is not sports related, but then there's legendary, which is about sports 30 for 30 shorts, which is sports, a victory journal slash power eight sports, major league soccer, major league soccer insider, uh, something unrelated ESPN Sunday night baseball.
Casey:
And so there's all sorts of sports related stuff.
Casey:
And then some stuff for the Huffington post as well.
Casey:
So their history is not exclusively sports, but seems overwhelmingly to be sport-related, which I think is a good thing because I'm hoping that they'll understand how to make something that sometimes is inherently boring, like baseball, into something exciting.
Casey:
So maybe they can make something else that's inherently boring, like development, into something exciting, which would be neat.
John:
Sports is way easier to make exciting because it's a competition and there's winners and losers and points scored.
Casey:
But there is here, sort of.
John:
Yeah, but it's artificially a competition.
John:
It's not a zero-sum game where there's a winner and loser in the App Store like a baseball game is where there's two teams face off and one is going to win and one is going to lose.
John:
Or it's going to get rained out.
John:
Sports are so much easier to make dramatic.
John:
All those long segments that run in the Olympics where they tell you the backstory and what hometown the person came from and how long she trained.
John:
And she woke up at 5 a.m.
John:
for years and she overcame this and one of her parents died.
John:
And then she's like...
John:
That's so easy to do in terms of personal drama.
John:
And because like all of it at the end is going, will they get the gold medal?
John:
Will they win?
John:
Will they vanquish their rivals?
John:
Every one of these sports has a clear like first, second, third, fourth place, you know, gold, silver, bronze app development is not like that.
John:
Like,
John:
yeah you know it's steve job said it for apple to succeed microsoft doesn't have to lose and for you to win only in this artificial reality show do your other app developers have to lose in reality for you to win you don't have to uh sabotage your other app developers by uh adding stray semicolons their swift code or whatever
Marco:
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Casey:
Quick spot of real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Listener Rob Travis has written in via Twitter, and I'm quoting, I had the same random reboot problem with a new 5K iMac and 32 gigs of OWC RAM.
Casey:
OWC swapped the RAM, and it has not happened since.
Casey:
Boom!
Casey:
That may or may not have anything to do with my issue, but I'm claiming it as fact that that's the problem.
Casey:
Anyway, let's move on before you yell at me.
Casey:
Let's talk about Pokemon Go.
Casey:
It's not Pokemon, right?
Casey:
It's Pokemon, I think, something like that.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
Are you trying to make us forget about the GPU freeze?
John:
Is that what's happening now?
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
It could be multiple issues.
Casey:
Damn it.
Casey:
Damn it, you two.
Casey:
So Pokemon Go is a new kind of augmented reality kind of not game that came out, I guess, in the last week.
Casey:
And I'm not really sure what to make of it.
Casey:
Have either of you guys installed and or played it?
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
So is this all on me?
John:
I was going to say, all three of us, I would imagine that none of us have installed or played this game.
John:
So the only thing we can talk about is the phenomenon that we observe from the outside of other people installing and playing this game.
Casey:
No, I've played it.
John:
Oh, you have?
John:
You haven't installed?
John:
That surprises me.
John:
Did you play any other Pokemon games?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
And in fact, also plugging my appearance on Clockwise 145, because we talked about this today as well.
Casey:
When I was in high school and early on in college, I worked at a Babbage's, which was kind of like an electronics boutique.
Casey:
It was basically a video game and software store.
Casey:
And this was around the time that Pokemon cards were popular.
Casey:
And this was a collectible card game, much like Magic the Gathering, which was popular, well, more popular a couple of years prior.
Casey:
And so every day when I was working, at least every weekday when I was working in the evenings...
Casey:
or afternoons that rather the phones would light up as soon as the elementary and middle schools got were let out and it it would go approximately like this bring hi thank you for calling babbages this is casey how can i help you do you have any pokemon cards nope sorry we're sold out try again in a week bring do you have any pokemon cards nope i'm sorry that was like three hours of work was just answering the non-stop phone for people looking for pokemon cards
Casey:
I don't like it when people say that they had PTSD about things that are not stressful.
Casey:
And so I won't say that.
Casey:
But let's just say I am predisposed to not like Pokemon.
Casey:
That being said, I've installed the game and I can see why it would be fun.
John:
Did you ever play the card game when you were working there?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
And I've never played the video game either.
John:
So this is your very first Pokemon game.
John:
And I'm assuming the only reason you downloaded it is because it's so popular and you're seeing everything about other people talking.
John:
And because you have a phone and you're like, hey, I can run that game.
Casey:
Precisely.
Casey:
And I was vaguely familiar with the premise of the game, very, very vaguely.
Casey:
I know you have to collect these little monstery things, and you fight the monstery things, I think.
Casey:
It doesn't matter if I'm wrong.
Casey:
You don't have to write in and correct me.
Casey:
I'm just telling you what I thought at the time.
Casey:
And so I've installed the game, and it doesn't tell me a whole lot more about what the purpose of everything is.
John:
It's like the cat game.
John:
You need Tiff here to explain it to you.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Hi.
Casey:
That was random and unexpected.
John:
John said my name, so I appeared.
John:
Perfect.
John:
I summoned her.
John:
If you say her name once, she appears.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
You say it into the mirror at night.
Casey:
I thought it was three, but it would be wrong of me to compare you to Beetlejuice.
Casey:
Apologies for being so confused.
Casey:
That was like eerily great timing.
Casey:
I was not prepared for that.
Casey:
And we were not warned.
Marco:
Well, I figured I'd replace myself with Tiff because I haven't installed the game, but she has.
Marco:
So I quit.
Marco:
Here's Tiff.
Casey:
hey okay so to set you up tiff since i presume you haven't heard much of what we were just talking about basically i just heard you talking that you um you worked in a store and there were cards and yeah yeah okay okay so tell tell me what is the purpose of pokemon go because i've played enough that i think i understand it but i probably do not understand it as well as you do
Marco:
from what i understand is that you walk around you gather pokemon and they have different points and then there are gyms at public places that you can go to and you form teams with people and once you are a certain level you're able to train at the gym and you can train your pokemon to get more hit points and then you can fight other pokemon and it's your kind of goal is to take control of the gym from other teams and
Marco:
so you can like at different types of times of day uh one team can show up take control of the gym with like a really high level pokemon if then they leave it because you can't stick around you have to be at the location in order to play at the gym and then so they leave and another team can come in and take control of the gym also so it's kind of like a locational strategy and
Marco:
Kind of thing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
My experience from Pokemon before was the card game.
Marco:
My brother played it when he was young because I was just a little bit too old for it.
Marco:
I just missed it.
Marco:
And then I remember he used to watch the TV show.
Marco:
So I do remember that.
Marco:
So I think it's kind of like the TV show.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I forgot there was a TV show.
Marco:
Yeah, it was like a cartoon.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Marco:
yeah i mean i was playing it marco got pretty pissed with me on the walk the other day because i kept stopping to catch pokemon and he is like this is the worst walk he was getting so mad i'm like you need to chill because like nothing nothing is worse than if you are trying to walk somewhere with somebody else who is playing pokemon go just once i mean come on it's not like every walk i'm running around playing pokemon
Marco:
But I was driving today seeing this kid like kind of wandering on the side of the road.
Marco:
It says right in the beginning of the game, like, please be aware of your surroundings because like people walk into poles and stuff apparently while playing this.
Marco:
And so I'm driving and I'm like watching this kid kind of like swervy walking next to the road.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, this kid's totally playing Pokemon Go.
Marco:
And I drive past really slow.
Marco:
He's reading a book, like a real book.
Marco:
I thought that was even more strange than Pokemon Go.
Marco:
Like, who's walking around reading a real book?
Marco:
But anyway.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
Pokemon.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So have you dudes played yet?
Casey:
Yeah, so I have, and apparently John and Marco have not.
Casey:
And it's funny you talk about Marco getting frustrated during the walk, because in the evenings for the last few weeks, I've been taking Declan on a walk and giving Erin a little time to herself, because she's been with him all day.
Casey:
And today I had my phone out just kind of periodically glancing to see if there were any Pokemon nearby.
Casey:
And at one point there was.
Casey:
And so I stopped long enough to catch it.
Casey:
And I hear this little voice from the stroller in front of me, push, push, push, telling me and telling me basically, would you get the show on the road?
Casey:
I'm tired of standing still.
Casey:
So even Declan was frustrated.
Casey:
So what level are you?
Casey:
Shoot, I don't know.
Casey:
Let me keep running my mouth while I look.
Marco:
Well, see, I just got to level five, so that means I get to go to the gym.
Marco:
So I'm pretty psyched.
Casey:
Oh, you are ahead of me.
Casey:
So what's fascinating, and all kidding aside, whether or not you find the game to be interesting or worthwhile, this is a collective view.
Casey:
What's fascinating to me about this game is that it's got several different very interesting components all in one.
Casey:
I am level three, by the way.
Casey:
Uh, it's got several different components that are all rolled.
Casey:
It's such a noob that are all rolled into one.
Casey:
So there's the location awareness sort of thing.
Casey:
And, and this is what Tiff was talking about earlier.
Casey:
There are gyms and there, um, what are they?
Marco:
Poke stops.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's where you can pick up poke balls or you can get eggs there.
Marco:
Um, and eggs you have to, do you know about the eggs yet?
Marco:
Like the eggs.
Casey:
I've been told about them.
Casey:
What language is this?
Casey:
This is nowhere near destiny.
Casey:
So don't even start your whining.
Marco:
But what I find great about it is that you have to actually walk to physical locations to do these things.
Marco:
And you have to be at the location for a certain amount of time.
Marco:
So just driving around, you can't hit up all of these things.
Marco:
Because by the time you're driving past it in kind of the flow of traffic...
Marco:
You have to spin the Pokestops in order to collect the Pokeballs to catch your Pokemon.
Marco:
Wait, just to clarify, when you were out driving today, were you trying to play Pokemon to test all this out?
Marco:
Not while I was driving.
Marco:
I mean, but while other people were driving, like when I went to Target with Tanya the other day, I was like, I'm totally going to try and play Pokemon while we're driving and pretend I was listening to what we were talking about.
Yeah.
Marco:
But no, I tried it and it didn't work.
Marco:
And so I put my phone away like a gentleman.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So to build on what Tiff was saying.
Casey:
So there's these pokey stops where you can, like Tiff said, you can collect items and whatnot.
Casey:
And then there's the gyms where you can get into, I guess, like Royal Rumbles with other people.
Casey:
And then as you're walking around, you can just stumble upon the Pokemon, these pocket monsters or whatever they are.
Casey:
But what's fascinating to me about this is that there's this real-world component to it that you can't... Well, okay, yes, I'm sure there's a way to cheat.
Casey:
But if you play the game the way it's intended to be played, you can't just sit there in your house and collect a bunch of Pokemon.
Casey:
And part of the fun of the game, besides this whole gym and team versus team competition, if I understand it right, part of the...
Casey:
fun in the game is collecting all these different Pokemon.
Casey:
Got to catch them all.
Casey:
You got to catch them all.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
So you, so you have to get off your butt and walk around in order to catch them all.
Casey:
And apparently the ones that are water oriented, I guess there's some like fish esque ones or something like that.
Casey:
There's some that you can tell are designed to, or they're, they're animated in such a way that they look like they belong around water.
Casey:
Well, apparently you have to go to a small body of water, generally speaking, to find these Pokemon.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Not to say you have to go to the ocean, just you have to go to like a little pond or a lake or a river or what have you.
Marco:
Tiff might have diverted our walk to go past a pool to see if that counted.
Marco:
Yeah, I might have done that.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
They also tell you, please don't look for Pokemon in volcanoes because there are fire Pokemon.
Marco:
Please do not try and go into volcanoes to find Pokemon.
Casey:
So the thing that I find fascinating, whether or not you think this is a complete waste of time.
Casey:
Candidly, I never tried the cat game.
Casey:
Everything I saw of it, it just looks stupid to me.
Casey:
Cat game's amazing.
Casey:
Shut your face.
Casey:
And hey, other people enjoy it.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
You like what you like.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
Whether or not you, collective you, think that Pokemon is interesting or fun or what have you,
Casey:
i still think it's fascinating that it has these different aspects right so it has the collectible aspect where you want to try to catch them all it has the real world tie-in that you have to go places in order to play it has the team versus team it's us against them aspect at the gyms and it's all of these different things all rolled together which is i think what makes it so fascinating and so interesting and and
Casey:
The tipster in the chat is joking, hey, Casey's learning what a video game is.
Casey:
But I used to be a pretty frequent video gamer way long ago.
Casey:
And I personally have not witnessed a game that got all of these different pieces connected together, even vaguely similar to the way this was.
Casey:
Except, apparently, what was the name of the game that was the predecessor for this?
Casey:
Like Infuse?
Casey:
No, not Infuse.
Casey:
Ingress.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Ingress.
Yeah.
Casey:
And another one of the things that I find so fascinating about this game is that it knew in the areas in which I work, for example, it knew of some landmarks that are relevant to people who know the area really well, but are completely unremarkable and irrelevant to anyone that doesn't live or work in the area in which I live and work.
Casey:
And I was wondering earlier on Twitter, like, how did they come up with these different spots for the gyms and for the Pokestops and whatnot?
Casey:
And apparently the same company that did pretty much all of the work for this game, whose name I'm also forgetting, John.
John:
Niantic.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's right.
Casey:
Niantic.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Apparently, Ingress was a very, very, very similar game that they had done in the past and involved in that, from what I'm told.
Casey:
And again, the actual particulars don't really matter.
Casey:
The gist of it, though, is that you could, as a player in the game, submit locations.
Casey:
And from what I've understood, they took all of that data and turned all of those points of interest that were made by people playing this game, local players playing this game, and turned those into the gyms and the Pokestops and whatnot.
Casey:
And again, the game, I don't know if I'll stick with it.
Casey:
It's certainly one of those, like, everyone's talking about it, so I feel like I'm missing out if I don't also participate lightly.
Casey:
I mean, you should hear the conversations at work about it.
Casey:
But I just find this combination of all these different pieces utterly fascinating.
Casey:
So I've been talking a long time.
Casey:
Marco, Tiff, John, questions or thoughts?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I want to bring up something Marco brought up in the car today when we were talking was about how perfect of a time for this game to be released, right?
Marco:
It's summer.
Marco:
Kids are off.
Marco:
It's beautiful weather.
Marco:
Like you can be outside.
Marco:
It's just, it's fantastic.
Marco:
We see a whole bunch of people gathered at different locations all over town playing this game.
Marco:
The release timing for this couldn't have been better.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Marco:
Yeah, and, like, nothing else is going on.
Marco:
There's no other major releases.
Marco:
There's no major news happening.
Marco:
No one else really has anything to do.
Marco:
Lots of people are taking vacation anyway.
Marco:
It really is an amazing time release here.
Marco:
And, like, I just want to say, like, in general, my thoughts on this, having only seen screenshots of it for a second here and there, like, Tiff tried to show me how she, like, threw Pokeballs at a Pokemon to try to Poke it into her phone or something.
Marco:
I don't know how this works.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
Put them in the ball.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
However it works, this game, just seeing what it's doing to people in the world just makes me happy.
Marco:
It's just a very delightful feeling, because seeing that it's getting these people outside, walking around, gathering together, oftentimes with strangers, and just sitting and having a peaceful, fun time, that, in real life, in person...
Marco:
That is very rare to have that kind of effect.
Marco:
And the fact that it just took off so quickly, like over the weekend, like it just boom, all of a sudden everyone's doing this.
Marco:
That's just really delightful.
Marco:
And it is like a nice, happy, like human interest story.
Marco:
And I really like seeing that.
Marco:
I mean, there are moms walking up and down the street with strollers just like you, Casey, who are playing Pokemon Go.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Like everyone is playing it and people start talking to each other about it and you notice someone else playing it and you talk to them and you're like, oh, I just caught a Pokemon over here.
Marco:
Did you see that one?
Marco:
And you know, I don't really care what I'm catching or catching them all.
Marco:
I don't really, but I don't know.
Marco:
I just kind of want to play it because everyone else is doing it.
John:
So have you guys put any money into the game?
John:
Not yet.
Marco:
I haven't.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
You get a lot of stuff just by walking around and hanging out at spots and spinning the little doodad.
Marco:
And plus, like you have to incubate the eggs.
Marco:
There's a lot to do before you have to put money into it.
Marco:
And you had to walk in order to incubate the egg.
Marco:
So it gives you a distance that you have to move.
Marco:
So it kind of keeps you busy.
John:
i keep wondering like the reason i ask about the money is i wonder what the total like the the net new trainers will be to use a businessy stat yes a lot of people are into this game now but if you are already into pokemon you don't count because you are going to buy new pokemon games wherever they come out anyway so those people are already already you know this is just invested in the franchise right if you're not invested in it
John:
um tons of people who have never played it when we have people who've never been into pokemon before try this out because it's the thing that people are doing it's a fun thing to do but i'm wondering if those people are going to be the type of people who put money into the game like i don't know how the game is structured is it structured in a way that you can if you're just like i've never played a pokemon game and i'm not like too seriously into it but it's kind of a fun thing to do and i'll just keep doing it can you just keep doing it at that pace without ever giving any money and you'll just be perfectly happy with the experience because that doesn't really benefit
Marco:
the game maker or nintendo or anyone else particularly it seems like you can though like just go on if you're playing it really casually i think what i'm seeing probably i might be totally wrong here but the people who are very much in competition for the gyms and they are into forming their teams i'm i'm feeling a lot of clash of clans
Marco:
kind of situation happening here for the people that get very serious about it.
Marco:
If you don't put in the money, then you're not going to find the rare Pokemon or you're not going to be able to train them to a high level.
Marco:
That's kind of what I'm seeing.
Marco:
So if you're really invested in a team, then you're going to feel that pressure to contribute money in order to be better for your team and then take control of these gyms.
Marco:
But I think that the casual person just walking around gonna catch them all kind of situation might not feel that kind of pressure.
John:
yeah like all these games i mean there's a balance you can strike with how how much you want uh people to be able to play before they put money in how like how much of a timer do you want to put on whatever energy mechanic to frustrate people you can tune a game so that even the most casual player is so frustrated they have to give up or give money or you can tune a game that almost no one feels like they need to give money but in the grand scheme of things historically these type of
John:
free-to-play, massively multiplayer games like Clash of Clans or whatever, make all their money from what everyone calls whales.
John:
Like that most of the money comes from a small group of people who put a tremendous amount of money into them, sometimes in like an unethical amount of money and that you feel bad that you're taking this much money from these people, right?
John:
And most people put in a piddling amount of money.
John:
And that piddling amount could still be more than the $1.99 that people might have paid for it up front.
John:
Like the piddling amount might be $5 a year, but $5 these days in the App Store is a pretty good price.
John:
when games are going for $1.99 or $0.99 or whatever.
John:
What I'm trying to gauge out of this phenomenon is long-term, how much money is this going to make and how many new customers is it going to make?
John:
How many new Pokemon players is it going to make?
John:
Is this going to build so that when next year comes out with a new augmented reality Pokemon game with a different name, will all those same people come back?
John:
Are there people out there who have never been into the Pokemon franchise that this is going to bring them on board?
John:
And I think there are because I think there's a lot of people who have never been into the Pokemon franchise because historically the only place you could play Pokemon was on platforms that these people have never owned.
John:
Like young people and old people alike, if you've never owned a Nintendo gaming system at all, which then there's plenty of people who haven't.
John:
um especially not like a handheld system where the most of the pokemon games have come out um you may have never had an occasion to be exposed to this and by releasing it on smartphone platforms vastly larger audience can now be exposed to pokemon and now maybe you're you're building that audience for the next version
John:
before they worry about their audience they have to get their servers under control because man that game crashes a lot it freezes all the time yeah that's that's a lot of you know so nintendo is very bad at online stuff they were very late to online stuff they don't quite get it they're not good at it kind of like apple
John:
Well, Apple wasn't really late, but they're just not good at it anyway.
John:
And they've been doing a lot of outsourcing to other companies like this Niantic company.
John:
Lots of different companies that they've partnered with or invested in or are working with on their games who supposedly bring the expertise that Nintendo doesn't have.
John:
Hey, you guys have already run a game exactly like this called Ingress.
John:
we want you to do that but replace all the the bs you had before with pokemon right um and you've got the servers and you know how it works and you've done it before and that seems like a good idea for a small company relatively small company like nintendo as compared to you know microsoft or sony to get this game out the door but these companies that they're outsourcing to
John:
have also never been exposed to the combination of the game they knew how to run plus the Pokemon IP that makes millions of people want to play it.
John:
They weren't ready for that either.
John:
So it's not really a clean win.
John:
And as you've noted, the servers are often down.
John:
I've seen a lot of people tweeting that the app itself has a lot of difficulties with concurrency.
John:
It's very easy to confuse.
John:
When the server is slow, you can induce race conditions where the app is just hung because it wants you to click on a button that you can no longer see or, you know, all sorts of...
John:
Simple programming mistakes exacerbated by slow server response times overall, not making for a particularly convincing or has to be said, not a particularly Nintendo like experience for you.
John:
For all you could say about Nintendo in general, their console games are not horribly buggy and broken.
John:
Their online stuff is always horribly buggy and broken.
John:
in this case the online stuff is slow and bad and also the app that talks to the online stuff is not particularly robust and yet it makes 1.6 million dollars a day so it kind of calls into question whether any of that really matters well i mean it matters in that like it's it's not a particularly good showing for the company you know like people this is a good idea and people are going to copy it right and there are other ips that can do similar things right i mean clash of clans also makes a lot of money and came before this and but that wasn't an ar type thing but anyway
John:
However much money they're making, they could potentially be making more if they weren't crashing and not letting people log on.
John:
Or having that bad reputation or having people leave the game because they're frustrated by it crashing or whatever.
John:
You can always be making more money.
John:
So it is a downside.
John:
Success hides problems and your big success of like, oh, look at all this money we're making.
John:
There are still problems to be had there, especially if this is the future of gaming.
John:
Nintendo better get a lot better at it pretty quickly.
John:
In the same way that Sony had to try to catch up with Xbox Live when they realized that the way people deal with consoles now is not just you plug it into your TV and you sit on your couch and the world outside your house doesn't exist.
John:
That wasn't the case, and Sony was later to that than Microsoft was, and Nintendo was later than all three of them.
John:
So anyway, I think Nintendo has a lot of work to do.
John:
These partnering deals are a fast way for them to get a game out that they couldn't develop on their own because they don't have the expertise.
John:
But it also means that these other companies get a lot of the money.
John:
Some people have been tweeting the various breakdowns of like, well, 30% goes to Apple and X% goes to the developer.
John:
And then the leftover 10% goes to Nintendo.
John:
I don't know if that was a legit figure to someone trying to do like, you know, guesstimations, but yeah.
John:
Like the upshot of the tweet was that Apple is making more money from this game than Nintendo is, which is also not a great situation for Nintendo.
Casey:
So I'm happy to report I've just caught an Eevee and a Pidgey as I was sitting here.
Casey:
They were on my desk.
Marco:
How the heck do you have all these Pokemon?
Marco:
Everyone has these Pokemon at their house.
Marco:
We have like a dead zone.
Marco:
There is nothing around here.
Casey:
Generally speaking, I have not seen one at the house, but apparently they were sitting on my desk.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
Wait, maybe they're the ones breaking your iMac.
Casey:
They very well could be.
Casey:
Sneaky bastards.
Casey:
I'd also like to publicly complain that after all the time I spent on Ramp Champ, I should be way better at catching these stupid Pokemon with my stupid Pokeballs than I really am.
Marco:
Is it possible that maybe, because we have a dog and you don't,
Marco:
maybe there's a reason why we don't have any pokemon left around the house deer and weird animals all over the place come on we should have some pokemon i'm just i'm just saying maybe we did have pokemon and then hops found them and now we don't have pokemon it's all the people that live in the cities all they have to do is sit on their couch and there's just like pokestops and everything you can like reach virtually anywhere and it's so frustrating we have to like go places everything's in yonkers i don't know what the heck's going on
Casey:
Oh, man, that's awesome.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I just think it's really cool, the bits and pieces they put together and the timing, to your guys' point earlier, the timing of all this.
Casey:
And I've heard plenty of stories of people from all different walks of life coming together and bonding over this really kind of silly game.
Casey:
And like I said, certainly at work, it's made quite the splash.
Casey:
And I know that people were going to lunch and
Casey:
And the driver of the car handed her phone to one of the passengers.
Casey:
So the passenger was spinning the little disc thing on the Pokestops for both himself and the driver.
Casey:
And then there's a little lake right by where I work.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
And people are going on long walks around the lake to catch Pokemon over lunch break.
Casey:
It's surprising how much effect this silly little game has had so quickly.
Casey:
And I'm also a little surprised, John, that you haven't at least tried it yet.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Do you plan to, John?
John:
no i'm not into pokemon games they're not my thing like so and the the ar aspect of it is not enough to make me get into pokemon it's not like i dislike the ar part i would be more likely to play an ar game with a different property attached to a different type of game i'm just not into pokemon so no i doubt i'll ever play it but you have so many nice places to walk where you live john like it's so easy you could just kind of go on a little family trot and you could all catch some pokemon together it'd be great
Marco:
i considered having my kids play it and like seeing if they get into it because you know i don't have to be playing it i can just be with them on the walk although marco tells me that's not a fun thing to do no don't do that i did hand my i did hand my phone to adam when marco was getting mad while he was sitting in the stroller i'm like all right you need to look at this and tell me if you see any little animals popping up and then you need to tell mommy i tried to put him to work but you know what you gonna do he's four
Marco:
So in the olden days, people would put their kids to work like, you know, plowing a field or something.
Marco:
And this is what we do.
John:
Get to work.
Marco:
Catch some Pokemon from Mama.
Marco:
Mama needs that Pokemon.
John:
Making your kids gold farm and free to play massively multiplayer games.
John:
That's next.
John:
All right.
Casey:
I think we're probably good here.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So thank you very much to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover, and Pingdom.
Marco:
And thank you very much to Tiff for joining us.
Marco:
Thanks, guys.
Marco:
It's always a pleasure.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks, everyone.
Marco:
And we'll talk to 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.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Is there anything fun in the neutral world?
Casey:
Has there been any scandals?
Casey:
Volkswagen, Tesla?
Casey:
There have been autopilot or whatever they call it issues.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know the details of any of these other crashes, but it's pretty clear to me that this is not intended to be a don't pay attention to what's going on in front of you sort of autopilot.
Casey:
You had a really great post about this a little while ago, Marco.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't see why these are happening all the time unless these are human failings on top of computer failings.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like this is kind of a non-story.
Marco:
The main conclusion here so far is that we don't really know enough yet about any of these accidents to really know...
Marco:
whether the system was at fault or whether the person was at fault.
Marco:
The big one that came out two weeks ago, whenever that was, where the guy hit the truck, went under the truck, that one, allegedly, he was watching Harry Potter, like the movie, instead of watching the road.
Marco:
So you could argue that the system should have seen the truck and stopped, but the fact that the driver might not have been even looking at the road at all,
Marco:
I think kind of excuses the system to some degree from from fault of that particular accident.
Marco:
But the main the main problem here is that the system is not fully autonomous driving.
Marco:
It is not a self-driving car.
Marco:
and people keep kind of trying to treat it like one, and that's just irresponsible.
Marco:
It is basically advanced cruise control.
Marco:
If people did the same thing with cruise control, or if they just stopped paying attention and started watching a movie with cruise control, which I'm sure people have done and have gotten in accidents as a result of, that's not a problem with the cruise control.
Marco:
That's a problem with the people.
Marco:
And autopilot is not a direct...
Marco:
comparison there because first of all i do think that it has been named and marketed in such a way to imply that it's smarter more capable than it really is but the fact is it still requires you to pay attention and they they tell you that you know when you turn it on it activate it tells you that in the dash it measures how much i think it's measuring resistance on the steering wheel because like
Marco:
When it's on, it steers for you.
Marco:
And if you steer in a way that it wouldn't have by more than a certain amount of degrees of turning the wheel, it deactivates itself.
Marco:
And it beeps to tell you it's off.
Marco:
So it has a way to measure the turning of the wheel and the resistance that you're putting on the wheel.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, it's using that to determine whether your hands are on the wheel or not.
Marco:
So if you don't provide any resistance for a while, it will yell at you and gradually slow down and stop if you don't intervene.
Marco:
Anyway, the system is in a really weird kind of like Uncanny Valley kind of thing.
Marco:
Not the Uncanny Valley technically, but like that kind of concept where like it's so good, it's so autonomous that it kind of encourages you
Marco:
not directly not verbally it doesn't come out and say it but like you are kind of encouraged to stop paying attention because you just kind of see like you know what my input's not really needed here for a while but it's not good enough that you actually can stop paying attention responsibly and safely for very long if any time at all um and some people are being complete idiots with it and like getting in the back seat with it on something i don't know those people are crazy i mean that's that is not at all safe and nobody should do that because you're gonna kill somebody
Marco:
But the design of the system is such that the system is not really helping because like it is a little bit too smart for a system that people are supposed to be still paying attention to the road while using it.
Marco:
But again, it's not smart enough that you actually can stop.
Marco:
So it's in this weird kind of gray area.
Marco:
And I also, as I said in my post, I think it should not be allowed on side roads.
Marco:
I think it should only be allowed on interstates and maybe on other divided highways.
Marco:
right now you can enable it on any road and the only thing is that when it is not on what it detects as being a highway or as being a divided highway or interstate it limits itself to five miles per hour over the posted speed limit signs so you can still use it you just can't speed by more than five
Marco:
So that's not really that much of a limit, really.
Marco:
And it prevents what people were initially doing when it first came out and people were being all crazy, trying to use it going really fast on twisty side roads.
Marco:
That was also really dumb and dangerous.
Marco:
But I think it needs more restrictions because, as I said in my post, it doesn't read red lights or stop signs or anything like that.
Marco:
So the usefulness of it on side roads is pretty limited anyway.
Marco:
It really should only be allowed on interstates, in my opinion.
John:
It takes a certain kind of person to, like, to know all that I presume all these people know about the system and yet still, like, to be so, I don't know, to wish a technology into existence that doesn't actually exist or to, like... Because from my perspective, if you know that you may be asked to take over control if the car loses track of the road...
John:
Right.
John:
You know that like intellectually, I bet all these people understand that about the autopilot thing because it tells you on the screen and like they these are probably, you know, Tesla owners who know all about it.
John:
Like most Tesla owners are into their cars because it's a very rare car.
John:
It's an expensive car.
John:
You're not just find yourself owning a Tesla.
John:
Right.
John:
Everything makes me think that these people know that they will be asked to take over control if, you know, something goes wrong.
John:
And I know because of my personality type, if I was driving in a car where I knew that I would have to be asked to take over or something went wrong, you don't know when that's going to be.
John:
That's the nature of the event.
John:
You don't know, okay, in five minutes you're going to be asked to take over.
John:
It could be at any second.
John:
How do you know when it is that you will be asked to take over?
John:
How do you know when you will decide that you need to take over because a kid ran out into the road and the system didn't see him or whatever, you know, whatever thing, like the truck that the guy went under, like...
John:
The only way you will know is if you are always continually paying attention.
John:
You can't stop paying attention for a second, just like regular driving, because you don't know when that event will come.
John:
So it seems to me that there should be zero change in behavior when driving with the system.
John:
But as Marco said...
John:
That's not how people act.
John:
And somehow they're able to square the idea that they may be asked to take over at any second with the idea that they don't have to pay attention because it seems like they'll never be asked.
John:
But you know you might be asked, but it seems like you won't be.
John:
And I haven't been asked for a long time.
John:
So your brain decides, you know what?
John:
I'm never going to be asked to take over.
John:
Everything will be fine.
John:
And then you get your head chopped off by a semi, right?
John:
Then you think you can watch a movie, right?
John:
And maybe that's just a trap for people's brains where they're like, I know intellectually that I may be asked to take over control at any moment, but my lizard brain is telling me that I haven't been asked to do anything with this car for the last hour, and I just cannot sustain...
John:
the attention right whereas if you're a paranoid person like me and you'd be like it's been an hour before since i've been asked to take over it's you know it's gonna happen at any second right you know like you're just becoming more and more paranoid but regular people i think are just that is a signal for you to stop paying attention and for you to think you know what i can probably play a card game i can watch a movie like they tell me i'm gonna be asked to take over but you know what maybe they're just low-balling it because of lawyers it's probably better than i think it is i'll probably be fine now i'm decapitated
John:
like it's not you know so i i agree with marco that like until you like this may be a trap for human nature this may be a set of rules that is not compatible with with the way humans uh work right so you have to say look
John:
you've got to steer and everything else is like radar control clues control and then there's a gap and then we do full autonomous right uh because i don't i don't understand i'm not sure that maybe habits will change if this becomes widespread but i'm not sure that this particular set of features will survive both the lawyers and the public perception and
John:
uh, long enough for people to change their habits.
John:
And it could be that changing habits is not sufficient.
John:
And this is just, it's human nature.
John:
You're going to stop paying attention if you haven't been asked to do anything in the car for an hour.
John:
And that's when you're going to die.
John:
I would never enable this feature, by the way.
John:
I would do radar cruise control because cruise control, like, you're like, oh, well, cruise control is the same thing.
John:
You don't have to do anything for hours.
John:
No, you still have to steer.
John:
Even on the road, you still have to steer a little bit.
John:
And if you're going 70 miles an hour and you don't make that tiny steering input, very shortly you will be in a ditch, right?
John:
You have to be paying attention, right?
John:
And just that little bit of realizing...
John:
This huge hurtling hunk of metal is under my control, and even though I don't have to do much, I have to do something, that is enough to keep the tiny sort of subconscious, even if it's not like fully conscious, like I'm really paying attention, the sort of subconscious driving, and that subconscious driving, if a semi pulls in front of you, you will notice, like because your eyes are out, going out the windshield, looking at the road, not looking at Harry Potter.
Marco:
And that's the thing, like, I guess I said in my post, like, the difference in usefulness to the driver between the radar cruise control that you get also and the auto steer autopilot mode is, like, the auto steer doesn't really make it that much nicer for the driver.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
you get the vast majority of the value of these features with just the cruise control part of it, the radar cruise control.
Marco:
Because it will stop and go.
Marco:
It'll maintain proper distance.
Marco:
It uses all the same hardware, as far as I know, to do this.
Marco:
It is a very advanced system.
Marco:
I've tried the one in Tiff's car.
Marco:
It's a 3 Series.
Marco:
I tried the adaptive cruise in that a few times on a few trips, and it's almost as good, but not as good.
Marco:
The Tesla adaptive cruise is really good.
Marco:
It is amazing.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The BMW one, I had a couple of little unsettling incidents where the car would start accelerating hard in traffic, and there was still a car in front of us.
Marco:
And I had to overwrite it, wait, wait, stop, and brake.
Marco:
That has not happened once in the Tesla, and I've used it way more in the Tesla.
Marco:
It is a really amazing system for the adaptive cruise control.
Marco:
The autopilot, on the other hand, is, you know, the auto steer part of it is scary.
Marco:
And I use that a lot, too.
Marco:
I've been using it more even since I published that post.
Marco:
You just kind of get an idea of like, you know, did I have the wrong impression?
Marco:
Do I just need more time with it to really get to know it better?
Marco:
And so far, no, I don't need more time to get to know it better.
Marco:
I still do use it on the highway here and there, but I still can't trust it because sometimes it does things that I consider dangerous.
Marco:
And whether academically it is dangerous or not, I don't know.
Marco:
But just things like getting too close to the edge of the lane when there's a car right on the other side or a barrier on the other side.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It does not keep you centered perfectly.
Marco:
It's doing some kind of smoothing, I think, where it tries to not jerk you too hard to keep you centered.
Marco:
So it kind of smooths you over.
Marco:
So you kind of drift towards the lines and then drift back from the line.
Marco:
It's a little unsettling a lot of times where I will get a little too close to things.
Marco:
And especially if there's a car next to you in the lane next to you that is too close to the line on their side,
Marco:
It'll still drift near that line.
Marco:
I don't know how it's detecting that.
Marco:
If it's just the ultrasonic sensors on the side, it might not be too far to detect it, which should be a little unsettling.
Marco:
It's a system that makes me nervous whenever it's on.
Marco:
It also does things like... When I'm driving on a multi-lane highway...
Marco:
no matter no matter what speeds we are going i will not hang out in somebody's blind spot i will speed up or slow down so that i am not like right next to another car in the next lane over or like right you know slightly behind them in their blind spot i will not hang out there because i know like you you know you you develop these skills as a responsible driver over time you start realizing like okay well i should minimize the chances that i'm going to get hit
Marco:
you know so like the and even if i can legally stay right here this person's blind spot for a while i shouldn't do that because they could merge and not see me if i if i hang out here for a while that's not good so i won't do it the auto steer and auto drive they don't have that kind of intelligence they they will not do things like that to to avoid possible accidents you know that that haven't started to happen yet like they won't minimize the chance of danger and
Marco:
They'll just happily go and you might be hanging out in somebody's blind spot for 10 minutes and not even know it.
Marco:
It does kind of create this expectation that it's going to be super safe and awesome and is the best thing to use and you don't have to pay attention.
Marco:
But I don't know how many of those things are true and I suspect not all of them.
John:
you're wise to get nervous too because like again when you're when you're surrendering control to the car and it's getting close to the edge of the lane what you know and that the car is not currently designed to have any awareness of is that you have just come fractions of a second closer to you know to you getting into an accident right because so if there is some erroneous steering input or the car gets confused for a moment fractions of a second matter and like you being in the
John:
if you're paying attention, as you should be, your reaction time is probably enough to keep you in the lane.
John:
You riding the line, and you're paying attention, and the car lurches to the left, it could be that your reaction time, even if you're paying 100% attention, your reaction time is not sufficient to get your car before it hits the guardrail or runs into a bridge abutment or who knows what else.
John:
Like,
John:
As you get closer to the edge at high speed, things happen really fast.
John:
Human reaction time is only so fast.
John:
There's a reason we don't ride the edges of the lanes because we know that our own reaction time is not sufficient.
John:
There's a reason we don't, you know, ride, unless we're real jerks, within a foot of someone else's bumper because we know our reaction time is not fast enough at 80 miles an hour to make that stop.
John:
No matter how slowly the person in front of us stops, there's just, you know, you can do the little timings.
John:
How long does it take for you to move your foot over to the brake pedal?
John:
Start pressing it down?
John:
Like...
John:
you distances get covered very quickly at high speed so the highway is exactly the spot where you wouldn't want that to happen you keep saying like i think it's safer to have it on this highway than the side roads at least the side roads you're going at slower speeds so if it does make a mistake you can correct it relative speeds though like the person hitting you on the highway is probably going to hit you at a relative speed of like five miles an hour
John:
It's not that they're hitting you, it's you hitting bridge abutments, you going off to ditches.
John:
That's the type of thing.
John:
Or you going under a semi or whatever.
John:
It's all moving vehicle versus stationary hazard, whether stationary hazard is a truck crossing over or whatever.
John:
Whereas everything being at slower speed, you know.
John:
Anyway, I...
John:
I would never enable it.
John:
Because as it starts to bring you towards the edge of the lane, you're like, wait a second.
John:
I would never do this if I was driving the car because I know that my reaction time is not fast enough.
John:
Why would I be riding the edge?
John:
Even if it's just debris that's going to pop a tire and pull me off the side.
John:
And that's taking out of the equation the idea that the car might suddenly get confused.
John:
and turn in a weird direction or start accelerating or decelerating.
John:
Like, that's just me driving the car into my complete control.
John:
I wouldn't ride the edge of the line because I know that's dumb.
John:
And, you know, we're coming up on a bridge now, and I'm going to take off my side mirror.
John:
Like, I wouldn't do that.
John:
And to let a car do it and to know that during that time the car is still in control and can do something weird, it's just a terrible idea to deal with the system at all.
John:
Like, drive your car or don't drive your car.
John:
And currently we don't have the option of not driving your car, so just drive your car.
Thank you.