Free-to-Play Dogs
You know what those are?
Those are free to play dogs.
We got some feedback with regard to my maybe, maybe not.
No, I guess it is definitely ailing, but we don't know why, iMac.
An anonymous Apple genius wrote in, and I'd like to read, this is pretty much their entire email.
They said, I see failures exactly like the one you're describing, the hanging after waking from sleep, after swapping the stock RAM back in, not the reboots.
The reboots were almost certainly OWC RAM.
That do track back to the GPU for sure, but much more frequently it is just Apple not having its stuff together software-wise.
Also, nothing makes me sadder than someone dropping off a machine that's experiencing an intermittent issue and it just sits there for a week running stress testing or diagnostics and we have to give it back with a shrug when we find nothing.
Or worse, when people are so utterly convinced as Marco that a problem is, quote, definitely hardware, quote, that we get bullied into replacing parts anyway for customer appeasement slash theater for a failure that can't be replicated and then have that person pick up the machine and it's still having the same issue because that issue was never the hardware in the first place.
don't jump the gun be sure it's hardware before you come in and we'll be able to get it right the first time signed apple genius best of luck uh and don't listen to marco uh sunglasses emoji that is actually part of the email which made me laugh so yeah so this particular genius said it could i i may may not be crazy
And I have gotten a lot of feedback about the iMac, and I am happy to report that it was split about right down the middle.
Half the people said I was insane for not bringing it in, and half the people said I totally feel you and you're doing the right thing.
Oh, we should clarify, you know this because you made a pie chart.
I did.
I went full business on this.
Because I was curious how this was going to play out.
Can I share this pie chart?
Yeah, if you want.
I mean, you can like dropler it or something.
It was a spreadsheet, right?
You just made it.
It's a spreadsheet and then the graph is from the spreadsheet.
Is it a Google Sheets thing or whatever it's called?
It is a Google Sheet.
Yeah.
So I probably could drop this sheet in if I really felt like it, but I probably won't because it's mostly irrelevant.
But suffice to say, I have tracked just line items and I've tracked feedback as line items.
I've split it into four categories.
Procasey.
anti-casey jokes which at the beginning i thought were going to be far more frequent than they were it ended up being only three of them um but like oh did you spill water on it again ha ha and that was basically all three of them and then um neutral posts which were sometimes people saying like oh i can understand you not wanting to bring it in but maybe you should or oh have you tried using this memory testing tool etc etc etc and
And so it has been 49.5%, as per my fancy little spreadsheet, that have been in the ProCasey camp.
And between the anti-Casey and neutral posts, that's another 47.7%.
So there you go.
So I have to ask the obvious question, which is, has your iMac had any problems since a week ago?
Yeah.
It has indeed, but I can explain these away as well.
Don't you worry.
So as it turns out, it has rebooted itself twice, but I am... Hold on.
With the stock RAM in it?
Yes.
Hold on, though.
That is because... Hold on.
That's because I've had power failures both times, and the iMac is not connected to my UPS.
all right well that's not rebooting itself that's a different thing yeah that doesn't count that's why i said it's it's not it's it has had an issue but it's not its fault so that's not an issue well i mean i don't want it to reboot itself but i mean when the power is yanked there's nothing you can do so perhaps the best reason for you to bring this in for what may be one of several frustrating visits to the apple store is that if you don't every single week on the show me and marco are going to ask you
That's fair.
How is the, you know, any new issues?
Because it's been on kind of like a week interval, right?
So every week there's a potential that something could happen.
That's correct.
Although, like, these power outages are really messing with whatever the interval was.
Oh, I know.
It's the worst.
Okay, so a follow-up question, because this is the follow-up section of the show.
Mm-hmm.
You have a $3,000 high-end computer that you use as your primary computer at home.
You have a UPS.
Why is this computer not plugged into the UPS?
Well, so it's plugged into the non-battery portion of the UPS because the priority is the synology and associated paraphernalia like my Eero and my router and all that other stuff.
and it's not that big a deal to me if this thing just croaks while it's on, as we've already demonstrated.
HFS Plus, it's a big deal.
Touche.
It's funny you bring this up because I had intended to move it over to the battery side.
I just haven't had the chance yet.
And we almost never lose power here.
We've just had a couple of really, really crummy summer thunderstorms, and it's just so happened that we've lost power long enough.
It's been more than just a flash.
It's been long enough for this thing to get upset.
Yeah, so it's on my to-do list to move it to the other side of the power strip thing.
Do you have enough power left in your thingy?
Like whatever size the UPS is to do everything?
Yeah, you know, that was the reason why I wasn't there already is because I wanted to give as much time as possible to the Synology because my hypothetical here is that I'm going to be in a situation where I don't have...
the ability to turn the Synology off.
And this actually came up when we were in San Francisco together.
We were all Jason Snells and my watch started going berserk because I was getting push notifications from the Synology that the power was going on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off.
And I actually asked Jason if he wouldn't mind if I used his 5K iMac to log into the Synology and shut itself down because I didn't want it to violently die if the power had stayed off long enough.
um and so that's why i have the synology on the ups but i kept the imac off of it because i wanted all available power to go to the synology so it can hang on as long as possible in the event of a power outage like i said this has been very peculiar because generally we don't have any issues with power here and we um we used to have them relatively frequently but there was a
tree branch on the lines right outside my neighborhood and everything's in ground in the neighborhood and that tree branch was cut cut back by the power company a year or two ago for exactly this reason to prevent this from happening it's just been peculiar lately that i've lost power a lot so on my to-do list is to move the imac over to the battery side of the ups i just haven't had the chance yet why don't just unplug it right now because it doesn't seem to matter
What are you worried about with the violent death?
The Synology will shut itself down when the UPS battery gets below a certain level.
That's true.
Actually, I'm glad you brought that up because you're absolutely right.
I've never actually tested that.
And so, I don't know.
I'm just scared.
I've tested it unintentionally.
And also, instead of getting push notifications, I get emails every time we vacuum in the basement.
Uh, the Synology sends me email about going to UPS and then going back to power because it's like a flicker when you fire up the, the vacuum on the same circuit as the, yeah, my, my house is under the panel on my house is undersized for the things we have in it.
Um,
But anyway, I've tested it many times where we've lost power for long enough and it sends me the emails.
Then I think it also sends you an email.
It's like, well, I'm shutting down by and then when it comes back on, I forget if you get the goodbye email, but you certainly get the turning back on one.
And yeah, there's a setting in the thing where you can tell it when what percentage shut down or whatever.
Yeah, and I have that turned on.
Like I said, I was just scared of it.
And I should add, just for interest's sake, that the way I got push notifications was by an app called Pushover, which I'm sure there's other ones like this.
But basically, I get a unique email from the Pushover company that I have the Synology send emails to.
And then that gets forwarded.
Actually, if this and that probably does something like this.
That email gets forwarded to my iPhone and then to my watch.
So the push notification I'm getting is really just that same email that you're getting.
I'm having it forwarded on to a service that will send the push notification.
So just pro tip.
But yeah, I should definitely move this over to the battery side for sure.
I wanted to talk a little bit more about Pokemon.
After we recorded last week, there were a couple of interesting... Well, there was one trend I noticed, which I just thought was fascinating.
And I noticed two local... Well, one's a museum, one's a park.
The Science Museum of Virginia, which is here in Richmond, had posted on their Facebook page...
Looking to catch some rare Pokemon while seeing some pretty incredible hashtag science.
This weekend, the museum's PokeStops will have hashtag lure modules planted to attract wild hashtag Pokemon.
While our exhibits are filled with yada yada yada.
So suffice to say the museum, the Science Museum of Virginia, had taken it upon themselves to install lures.
in the pokestops that are or one or more pokestops that's at the science museum to try to attract uh people to come visit which i thought was really interesting and then maymont park which is a park also here in richmond and that's actually where um where aaron and i got engaged uh pokemon go catch them all at maymont and there's a clearly photoshopped picture of uh
of a family looking at one of the Pokemon, um, Pokemon, Pokemans, et cetera, uh, whatever it's called.
Anyway, uh, the point being, uh, they did an after hours exclusive event where for $10 a person, you can go to Maymont park, which is beautiful and it's free generally, but it's absolutely worth going to, um, yeah, blah, blah, blah.
Join us for an exclusive after hours, Pokemon go event.
As we activate lures in the app and explore the grounds in search of mysterious creatures that only come out at night.
Um,
$10 a person, $5 if you're a member.
Adults must accompany children ages 15 and under.
Tickets are limited to the first 300 registrants.
Oh, actually, that's happening a week from tomorrow, as it turns out.
So I just thought that this was really interesting, that these local businesses and, you know, museums and parks, which, I don't know, I have the perception of being slightly stodgy to me, even the Science Museum, have gotten on this bandwagon of...
getting people to spend actual money playing this game but the money they're spending isn't on the game it's with these venues I just I thought it was a really really clever idea and not unique to Richmond but it just popped up on my radar because these are local places I thought it was cool
What do you think the chances are that the game's servers will actually, you know, number one, hold up in that area and number two, work properly?
So like everybody would actually see the lures and everything?
A week from now, who knows?
Right now, the frustration in my household is the servers are always down.
My wife and children have taken up the game, by the way.
Ah, and what do you think having been in the proximity of the game now?
I mean, I went on walks with them.
I used my wife's phone to catch some for her.
She's into it.
They're into it.
It's a good excuse to walk around.
In fact, I think they're probably still out now, even though it's like dark because the servers were down.
They were all going to go on a walk to catch Pokemon, but the servers have been down until very recently tonight.
So they're basically down anytime you'd want to do it.
Hey, everyone's home from work and kids are home from camp or whatever.
Let's go hunting for Pokemon.
And that's exactly when the servers are down.
And I guess enough kids went to bed, the servers are back up.
Anyway, it's frustrating.
The most heartwarming story I read about Pokemon, which is on the internet, so it must be true, is that an animal shelter had a posting that says basically if you...
if you want to play Pokemon, but you're embarrassed to let people see you playing, which you shouldn't be, but, you know, if you're embarrassed to let people see you playing Pokemon, come to our dog shelter, and for $5 an hour, you can rent one of our dogs and walk it.
So it will look like you're walking a dog when really you're hunting for Pokemon.
So...
here are the results of this they now have a waiting list of people who want to pay for the privilege of walking a dog they've made so much money on rental fees for the dog so they've waived the adoption fees when people renting dogs are out walking they post pictures of themselves playing the game on facebook and instagram people are then coming to the shelter asking to adopt the specific dogs they saw in the pictures on at least two occasions people have called the shelter and said hey i didn't think i really wanted a dog but me and this dog get along really well so i'm not bringing them back and this shelter currently has no dogs available to rent and there's a waiting list
Because all the dogs have been adopted.
They're bringing in dogs from other shelters.
That's amazing.
That's great.
Even if that's only half true, that's still great.
And I hope it's all true.
Yeah, I completely agree.
The best part of that, again, if it's true, is that instead of paying people to walk, like the shelters, like we have all these dogs and we don't have enough staff members to walk them.
Maybe we give people a couple bucks.
They're reversing the cash flow.
Come to us.
Pay us to walk our dog.
It's like usually like begging for volunteers to come do it for free.
Right.
And that all the dogs get adopted away because of the magic of social media.
The dog shelter is empty.
You have to pull from other dog shelters.
Well, it's also like, you know, so often people come up with the idea, oh, wouldn't it be great if you could rent puppies?
And puppy rental is a really cool sounding idea for about four seconds until you think about the reality of what that business would actually be like.
And you're like, oh, that's horrible.
But...
grown dog rental from like a shelter where these dogs have nobody else and really need uh people um that flips it around completely like that's that takes this great sounding for a second but ultimately terrible idea and makes it something endearing and and positive and overall pleasant i i i honestly really hope it was real yeah um i i have my doubts but i really hope it's real
You know what those are?
Those are free-to-play dogs.
You can get the dog for free because they're like, you know what?
I really like this dog.
I want to adopt it.
And then you've essentially done an in-app purchase for a dozen years of paying for vet bills and dog food and all the other things you have to pay for.
It's free-to-play.
It's free-to-walk the dog, but it's a trap because they know, based on human nature, that dogs are adorable and people are going to fall in love with them and then they get the big bucks.
Yeah, and the final delightful thing is that apparently this bubble has boosted Nintendo's stock price so much that their market cap is now bigger than Sony.
Oh, that's good.
So I do wonder, do you guys think that Pokemon Go is actually going to still be relevant even in a week?
Basically, to what degree do you think this is just like a big spike followed by a big crash because it's just a fad, or do you think it's going to actually stick around as a game people play for a pretty long time?
that was my question last week it was like net new trainers um because pokemon has always been popular every time a new pokemon game comes out all the people who are rabid pokemon fans who buy every single game buy it the question is how many more of those people does this make because yeah there's going to be a drop off of like oh i play this when it was really popular but i wasn't into it enough to become a dedicated fan of the franchise so when the next game comes out you see how many of those people come back and i think it it has to add
more fans like just because it's got so much exposure to people who've never played pokemon games before it has to add more i'm not sure how much more certainly this spike is an aberration and i don't expect nintendo to keep every single one of the people who are playing now as long-term uh dedicated players of the franchise
You know, to put things in perspective, I think as recently as a couple of weeks ago, I was visiting with my parents and they were still playing words with friends.
So, I mean, these things can be sticky.
And I think this is going to be, at least in part...
a flash in the flash in the pan but i think it given the pokemon um you know the backstory and and how many people have enjoyed it so much in the past i think it'll be a lot stickier than most of these other things like for example uh draw something which was oh this is amazing okay nobody cares
Yeah.
Draw something as a higher bar to entry, but like your parents still playing that same game is not really helping the word.
It's not really helping Zynga or whatever, unless they're dumping more money into it.
Right.
The whole question for the games like Pokemon is when we come out with the inevitable improved sequel, will you do that one too?
And also, like I said last week, are, have you ever put any money into this or is all your money going to rent dogs to walk?
Like, like where is the money going?
Like, obviously there are people who are putting money into this game.
It's going to make money for all the people involved, but,
It's the money is coming from a small number of people who spend a lot and almost everybody else.
It seems like you're spending nothing so far.
No one in my family has spent anything either.
Yep.
I just, I'm really fascinated by the way in which the real world and the, you know, this electronic, this entertainment world have collided.
And I've been, I mean, there's been some crummy stories coming out of it because humans are terrible, but I've just been, I thought it was so neat and I still think it's so neat and such an interesting story.
An interesting investigation into how these things kind of come together in an interesting case study, if you'll permit me to use that terrible business term.
It's just been fascinating to watch.
So very cool stuff.
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softbank which is a japanese company are they a cell phone carrier or i don't know much about them they're like a holding company i think they do have a they're a telecommunications company they do have like a cell phone wing okay well regardless they have bought arm for 32 billion dollars haven't bought want to buy or in the process of trying to buy i think the deal is not yet finalized
uh what do we think about this this is i'm i'm not so much interested in in the details of like arm or the history of arm especially you know like that you can read a lot of stories about its origins with uh the newton and uh where this whole effort came from and all that other business i'm mostly interested in terms of thinking about how apple uh
uh implements its famous uh we want to own and control the major technologies and i figure whatever that tim cook quote is like they they want to own and control the technologies that go into their products right they they do that selectively like they do it according to their own definition so i was thinking of an example um they don't own the companies that make the really tough glass that goes on top of iphones right they don't own
dow corning or whoever makes like the gorilla glass or the variants or whatever they don't own foxconn or the companies that uh assemble their products you would you know are those the core technologies or whatever the specific wording was used in that quote
I guess not.
Right.
They do own the operating system.
They do own like the hardware designs and, you know, the whole like the product and all the other stuff.
But some parts of it, they always consider to be like, oh, we'll pay somebody else to do that.
And it doesn't really matter that much.
because if we can't get this glass from this company we'll try to get it from this other one or if this company won't assemble our phones like we'll pit suppliers against each other like they end up being just being a supplier so the question for arm arm which makes the uh doesn't make the chips but arm which owns the intellectual property to the instruction set and some of the architectural details and many many patents and so on and so forth for the cpus that are in all of apple's ios devices
Is that just another supplier or is that something that Apple needs to own and control?
And the reason that comes up is, again, as far as I'm aware, as we record this, this deal is not finalized.
Should Apple be concerned that some company that's not them and is not whoever, you know, the current ARM, people who are running ARM, is going to buy the company that I feel like, not that they rely on, but that is an integral part of their most important products?
Should they care?
Or they're like, oh, well, whatever.
You guys do whatever you want as long as you continue to give us the ARM architecture license that lets us essentially...
Build and design our own CPUs with your intellectual property at its core.
We're fine.
I don't really care who owns ARM.
Or should they be like, someone get out the checkbook.
We've got $32 billion between couch cushions.
We should just outbid them.
It's hard to say without the details of the deal that they have with ARM.
But this intellectual property is super, super important.
I mean, this is what all the A-Series chips run on, right?
So...
I'm so torn.
I would say it is not important for them to own ARM as long as they have as close as they can get to an in-perpetuity license for whatever IP they currently have.
If you look at what Apple buys and what they don't buy...
they tend not to buy component manufacturers that also supply the entire rest of the computing industry with parts.
So they don't buy Intel.
You don't see them buying AMD or NVIDIA.
They don't buy a Flash RAM manufacturer or attempt to buy Samsung because half their components come from Samsung.
There are lots of these component suppliers that make...
all sorts of you know parts that go in multiple kinds of computers or phones or whatever else not just apples and apple you know you could make an argument that apple should maybe buy intel or something like that you know as if we ever talk about the mac lineup being so stale again this episode because we talk about it every episode because it's a really big problem um you know you could look at that like maybe apple should just buy intel and run that company you know in their own interest but you know there's a reason why they don't there's lots of reasons why they don't um
First of all, Apple tends to not buy companies that large because they tend not to need to.
I would imagine they have some kind of deal with the ARM license that they have because they have a special license to be able to do their own chip designs with that.
I don't know the details of that.
We'll probably hear about it from our readers.
But basically, I would imagine they have ways to not get locked out of that forever.
So they kind of don't need to buy ARM.
And if they did ever try to buy one of these companies that also supplies the rest of the industry with major important parts,
like Intel or ARM, there would probably be regulatory issues with that.
That would probably not be great for them with the Justice Department and with the FTC, maybe, or whoever does that kind of regulatory management.
There would be political problems with that.
There might be justice problems, anti-trust problems.
So there's lots of reasons for them not to buy these companies that also supply everybody else with stuff.
What I think about is not so much who the companies supply, but could Apple get that same thing from somewhere else?
And most things I can think of, like Intel, it's like, oh, you can't get x86 CPUs anywhere else.
Well, you can't.
You can get them from AMD.
It's not a lot of choices, but there is at least one other choice out there for flash RAM, other things like that, even the glass stuff.
You could argue that no one has the specific kind of glass that they want except for Corning or whatever.
But like you can get glass from somewhere else.
But because what ARM supplies, ARM doesn't make anything.
What all ARM supplies is intellectual property essentially licensing.
Like they don't, you know, they license out designs and the right to use this instruction set and all that stuff.
I don't think you can get that anywhere else.
There is no alternate supplier for that.
So if, for example, SoftBank buys ARM and slowly transitions the company away, not that they're going to do this, but decides that ARM is going to become a company that does augmented reality games where you collect monsters because it seems like a more lucrative future.
Yeah.
apple can't i don't think apple no matter what contracts they have the best they could hope for is like you can continue to make chips according to the designs that you've already licensed but there will be no new designs and by the way you can't make your own designs without licensing these patents from us or without otherwise buying the intellectual property that underlies that like because of the weird accidents of history that x86 and amd being able to make x86 compatible chips i don't think there's any equivalent for that arm and i'm sure people will
send it in uh send us in corrections if that's not the case and we'll have follow up on the next show but i i keep thinking about it uh in terms of uh is there an alternate supplier like how how important is armed apple and what are their alternatives if something weird starts to happen there and i also think about this and speaking of max a lot of questions we've gotten about this with the arm deals like does this make it more or less likely that arms max are going to come out wwc like do any of these announcements indicate arm max
Why haven't we already seen R-Max?
And me thinking about R-Max for a while again, I thought like...
x86 max again worst case scenario you have two suppliers that you could convince to make you x86 cpus i'm i guess if you have enough money anything's possible you're like all right well someone will license us the ability to make our own arm chicks someone will license us the ability to make our own x86 like we'll just buy the intellectual property like we're never stuck because huge piles of money is to get out of jail free card so it doesn't really matter what happens over there until there are problems don't worry about it but like for the arm max like
is it apple spends a lot of money making the a you know i don't want to say ax or whatever the the a followed by a digit uh system on a chip things that are in all their devices they hired a lot of people they bought a lot of companies they do a lot of work on their own their chips are not like oh we'll just license a design from from arm and pay someone to manufacture it they do their own chip design their own integration and
it's very expensive very complicated it's a part of apple's competitive advantage is the mac line which we're about to talk about the the ongoing stagnation is the mac line worth
doing an equal or possibly even greater investment in chip design to essentially do what intel and uh amd and nvidia or whoever you know all the parts that make up the parts that go into a mac they're not simple parts they're complicated they're higher performance things that go into phones they are generally bigger they have more transistors if you are going to sign up say we're going to do our max because we can own and control the cpus that go into them and we can make them just the way we want them
That is a big investment, probably equal to the investment they're putting into the iPhone system on a chips for a line of business that is nowhere near the size of the iOS line.
So maybe the thing that's keeping our Macs away is not that Apple would like to get away from Intel, who's delaying their products and is kind of annoying, but just because it would cost so much money for Apple to make a like we spent a lot of past shows talking about.
Can Apple make an ARM chip that's competitive in Intel?
Yeah, maybe.
But.
uh it would cost a lot of money it's not easy to do that what intel does is not simple and i'm not quite sure that apple thinks the mac hardware line is worth it is worth the investment and i mean you could also argue that like things with intel aren't bad enough yet you know like and yeah this is going to bleed into our next topic a lot but
In order for Apple to switch from PowerPC to Intel, things had to get pretty bad with PowerPC for a while.
And Intel was way better.
There had to be this massive delta between the status quo of them using PowerPC and being...
Really having a problematic roadmap and pretty bad neglect and becoming very much uncompetitive with the other side.
And then having the other side, being Intel, be really compelling and have very few downsides to switching to it.
And just these massive upsides.
And I think right now, if you look at what they have with Intel versus what a possible future with ARM Macs would be,
I don't think the delta between those two is nearly as large as it used to be, you know, between PowerPC and Intel.
The delta now is like, well, Intel... Yeah, Intel is really slow to make new chips, but their chips that they do release, mostly, are really good.
Like, they... There are occasional problems, but for the most part, like, they are very competitive.
That's one of the reasons why Apple doesn't use AMD CPUs.
As you... You know, they could use... What are AMD CPUs even called these days?
Are they still Optorons and stuff, or...
I don't even know.
Anyway, AMD CPUs aren't very competitive with Intel CPUs and haven't been for some time in most markets that Apple would ship computers in.
Intel CPUs are just really good.
Yeah, they have dramatically slowed down their rate of improvement and new releases, and all these new releases always keep getting delayed and everything.
But they still use them because, for the most part, they're really good.
And it's using all these proven platforms.
You know, as John said, like...
all the parts that go into a full computer.
I mean, yeah, they, they, they do some degree of it on the phones and on the a series system on a chips there.
But like computers have all these different ports and standards they have to do and everything on a phone.
Apple can't delete ports fast enough.
Like they're just, Oh yeah, we started out with two.
We're going to have one now.
like and it'll be ours that we design like you know computers have to have like four usb ports and have all these video out standards and all this like computers have to have i mean well most computers i guess the macbook one doesn't but you know most computers you have to have all these standards that the computing industry use you have to all these like you know disk interfaces and io interfaces and you know all this stuff that you don't really have to think about much when you're just designing iphones and ipads because they don't use them or they don't need to interoperate with with with most of these devices and
So there's all this stuff that a computer needs and all this competitiveness that Intel offers that the difference between Intel now having a slow release cycle but providing quite a lot when they do finally release it versus what you'd have to do to build up an entire computer line using ARM CPUs.
The amount of work on the other side is so tremendous and the gain probably wouldn't be that big.
Yeah, and on top of that, I feel like Apple and Intel have at least an okay relationship, right?
Because it wasn't that long ago that I think it was the first MacBook Air, Intel created this completely one-off chip, the CPU, for the MacBook Air.
Am I crazy in thinking that?
Do you remember this?
Well, it was a one-off packaging.
They didn't create a whole custom chip design, but they created a custom socket and package for the chip to make the whole socket small.
Sure.
I still count it.
My point is just that they were able to ask Intel or tell Intel, whatever the situation may be, hey, we need this thing completely custom to us.
We're cool, right?
And it turns out they're cool.
And Intel did it.
And everyone was happy except the people who bought that MacBook Air because it was a total turd.
Hi, Marco.
I don't know.
I think the question is, as we've been dancing around, is this hardware stagnation that we really need to talk about again?
Because we do need to talk about it.
Is this hardware stagnation really Intel's fault or is it Apple's fault?
Before we move on to that, a few more points on ARM versus Intel.
We've talked before about the performance delta and how it needs to be big enough to be worthwhile.
And then in past conversations, we also brought up this point, which I'll bring up again, which is really it's not about the performance delta.
The reason Apple will be doing it is for increased control.
So I think the real question to ask, other than the costing, which I just brought up, for ARM versus Intel is how much more control does moving Macs to ARM give Apple than it currently has with Intel?
And as Casey just pointed out,
It's a pretty high bar because it's like, well, if Apple did their own chips, they could control everything.
They would control the schedule.
They control the features.
They would control everything that they possibly do.
But it seemed like for the past many years, Apple controls an awful lot about what Intel does in terms of...
I don't know, forcing them, but really strongly suggesting that they improve the embedded GPUs in their CPUs and making like this whole line of products, the ones that Apple buys with the Iris graphics and everything.
That whole product line just smells like Apple saying Intel for the next several generations of chips.
Here's what we want out of your chips.
And then Intel essentially doing it.
Because Apple is, I would imagine, the biggest and in some cases perhaps the only customer for these weird chips because all the cheaper x86 Windows laptop type things or whatever are just like, well, maybe we'll have a top of the line thing, but our bread and butter will be those middle of the road ones, which is another reason that Apple has to wait a lot.
So certainly Apple would have more control with ARM.
But it would cost them a ton of money to make ARM chips for the Mac.
And Intel thus far seems pretty willing to do essentially whatever Apple wants with the chips.
It's just a question of delivery.
And Apple could say, well, the increased control we would have is even though Intel is pretty nice to us and we have a good relationship and they're pretty much willing to do the kinds of things we ask for, they take a long time.
And sometimes they screw up.
And we feel like if we did it ourselves, we would do a better job.
And the second aspect of this is like...
for the performance delta and waiting for things to catch up another possible strategy again possibly mentioned on past shows is you don't have to worry about it costing so much money to make an arm chip for your mac all you got to do is wait until the ipad pro is faster than all the existing macs and then just use that chip that you've already made for your bread and butter ios devices use that in max too because at that point
like if those lines ever cross and it's like well yeah and and they're getting close like the top end ipad pro and the bottom end macbook we i mean we looked at those numbers in the past like eventually if things if the rate of change keeps going the way they are and you know the system on the chips that are in ios devices keep adding more power with a similar power envelope assuming battery technology is only increasing like five or ten percent per year or whatever
uh and that the mac ones are like their their rate of uh performance increase is not going up that fast those lines can end up crossing and it's like oh finally we don't have to do some weird extra investment to end up with arm chips that we can use in our laptop max we already do that investment for our phones and ipads and whatever and it's kind of the same way that the ipads have these chips like the only reason they have those chips is because they need them for the phones because certainly the ipad is not making the iphone kind of money so
The rising tide of the iPhone is like anything developed for the iPhone that is possibly useful elsewhere, even if slightly modified.
You get a lot of bang for the buck by reusing that huge investment.
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Never lose anything again.
So MacRumors has a really lovely buyer's guide where they go through the hardware and all the different hardware lines, product lines, and they say, hey, you probably shouldn't get this right now because Apple's probably going to release a new one soon.
And so coming up on the fall, as we are, the iPhone, for example, is labeled as caution.
The iPad Pro, neutral.
Yeah, it's probably okay.
We should clarify, this is based on actual data from past generations.
The MacRumors buying guide has been running.
You know how in whatever the biggest, well-known, oldest steak restaurant in your town, and people say, oh, that place is an institution.
The Mac Rumors Buying Guide is an institution in the Mac nerdery circles.
All right, noobs.
All right.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right, Grandpa.
Yes.
How would you like to correct us?
Let me tell you about Macintouch, okay?
No, go on.
And so this is based on...
uh you know just like they they look at how often these products are updated and so they know okay well the macbook pro say is updated on average every you know 400 days or whatever it is like they they look back on history and they know for every product line what is the average interval between updates
And that's how they can tell you with a reasonable degree of approximate surety that like, okay, well, the Mac Mini is usually updated every, what is it, like 800 days or whatever.
I don't even know what the average is for the Mac Mini.
And it's been 700 days since the last one, so you probably shouldn't buy one now.
It's that kind of thing.
Yep, the average for the Mac Mini, 438 days.
We are currently running at 643.
There you go.
So, yeah, there you go.
That's lower than I would have guessed, honestly.
Oh, so this website, this webpage, by the way, which I encourage everyone to go to when we put it in the notes, must be...
the most infuriating web page to like apple executives and probably phil schiller in particular because because at the top of this page especially when you hit like the mac tab which we'll give you the link to it shows the picture of all apple's current mac products the name of them and underneath it like you said they have these things like oh you should buy neutral or don't buy and the mac thing has shows their products right next to it with red buttons say don't buy don't buy don't buy this is exactly the opposite message that apple wants to
anywhere on the internet all of its products are arrayed in a big line with red things that say don't buy can you imagine a more sort of like viscerally upsetting web page to people whose job it is to sell max and i guess you got the green one on the macbook that says buy now but it's just it's such a weird thing to see apple's product photography next to huge red buttons that say don't buy it's it's harsh but harsh but fair
Hey, it's a good time for the Mac bone.
So there's that.
Yeah, this is really sad.
So everything, everything except the MacBook One, the Air, the MacBook Pro, the Retina MacBook Pro.
God, I forgot that there's a distinction there.
The iMac, the Mac Mini, the Mac Pro.
That's 945 days since the last release, December 2013.
And you guys were so excited.
Remember those days?
Anyway, all of this says don't buy.
And it's getting...
i don't know it's getting a little bit ridiculous right on the one side it why does one need a brand new computer like let's suppose that the the cpu was modern which it's not really these days but i mean the industrial design it's it's this unibody setup has been around for a few years like stephen hackett's um
And a video review of the kind of history of modern Apple laptops goes through this.
And, you know, they don't look that different than they have ever used to.
They've, you know, upgraded the internals, made it a little thinner, you know, improved battery life, actually.
Wouldn't be nice to get that on the iOS side.
But, you know, what do you really need from a brand new computer?
Like, if it wasn't for the fact that these chips are all getting a little bit long in the tooth, I don't think this would be that egregious.
I'm not looking for a brand new form factor in my work MacBook Pro.
Now, remind me of that when they do something amazing and I must have it.
But...
In like two months.
Yeah, exactly.
But I tell you what, man, this is sad times.
And it's just, it's gotten to the point, I mean, looking at these numbers, 281 days, 428 days, 499 days, 643 days, 945 days.
We're measuring in years.
It's unreal.
Like, what are they doing?
How is this okay?
Yeah.
To some degree, this isn't just like Santa Claus.
Santa, Apple, we just deserve new things because it's time.
There has to be something that they update the internals to.
And so you have to, again, look at that supply chain.
Look at Intel, especially, because that's where a lot of this is based.
You have to say, all right, well, is there something else that they could be updating to that they're just not?
Apple doesn't just arbitrarily decide...
you know what, next month we're going to give them a MacBook Pro update.
It's based on the schedules of the components that go into it and what they could update the components to.
In recent years, Intel has had a lot of problems and delays getting their new stuff out, and so much of this is based on that.
And we've talked about this before, so I'm going to try not to repeat too much ground here.
So a lot of these things are just the newest Intel chips are what's holding this up, and they aren't available yet, or they're not available in quantity yet.
or the ones that Apple would use aren't available, even though the rest of the family might be.
And that's the case with a lot of these.
The products that tend to sell in very high volumes, the new MacBook, the Retina MacBook Pro, and the iMac, tend to be kept up to date fairly responsibly.
If Intel has released a new generation of CPUs that is the appropriate size and cost and heat and power needs for these certain lines, Apple tends to update to them in a reasonable amount of time.
So if you're buying an iMac, the iMac has not been neglected at all.
The iMac has really been very solidly updated, I think, for a long time now.
It's been pretty competitive.
The MacBook Pro usually has been.
We've had some problems recently, but usually has been.
And again, those problems are often Intel's fault.
Where it really becomes a problem is when Apple gets neglectful of the lines that are more specialized that presumably don't sell in very high volumes.
And that's things like the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.
And it also becomes a problem on the lines that Apple is kind of slowly phasing out because they've made better lines.
That includes things like the MacBook Air and the non-retina MacBook Pro.
In these kind of areas, Apple doesn't use every generation of new stuff that becomes available from Intel.
This is what I think frustrates a lot of people is, you know, in the case of the Mac Pro, which is one of the more egregious examples of this, new Xeons that are appropriate for use in the Mac Pro only come out about every 18 months.
The problem comes that if Apple decides to skip a generation of those, if a new generation of Xeons comes out and Apple decides for whatever reason, you know, it's not worth us updating the Mac Pro to this new generation.
not only has it probably already been like 18 months since the last update, but now they're signing themselves up for another 18 months with no update, basically.
And it could be longer if there's any delay in Intel's side, which again, has been happening with increasing frequency in recent years.
When they choose to just say, you know, it's not worth updating to this, that is really a position of hubris and of arrogance and neglect of these products.
And that is what irritates me about it.
You know, if Intel has a problem and it holds up the release of something that has the last generation chips in it, like the iMac,
It doesn't really bother me as much because I know it's not really Apple's fault.
But when it comes to things like the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro, where Apple could be updating these things, there were chips they could have used and they just skipped them because they just don't care.
That is infuriating and it really shows a level of disdain for your customers.
It takes a certain degree of shamelessness and of arrogance and hubris to be still selling the same Mac Pro today.
If you walk into the Apple store, you can still buy the same Mac Pro today that you could order in December of 2013.
The price is exactly the same.
The configurations are exactly the same.
There have been no new options for this.
This computer that you said, we're betting the future on high GPU power.
and then we're not going to update the gpus for three years or make them upgradable aftermarket you finally got to my pet issue you keep saying oh there's no new cpus who cares about the cpu there are new gpus every single year there are new gpus so if you're gonna like well you would update it but there's no new intel cpus first of all you can upgrade to higher clock speeds even though there's no cpu designs maybe it's easier to get the ones that are binned for our clock speed and second of all
every year you almost every year you can upgrade gpus but that doesn't even count like it's not even a consideration and that like you're right it's the most absurd on the gpu festooned mac pro machine right i think it's also absurd on just every other line of computers like even if there is absolutely no new cpu
either lower the price or put a new gpu in it or update the chipset from you know in the olden days usb 2 to 3 or 3 to 3.1 or like there are things that you can do i mean if you want to see the things that you do what can you do to update a computer that often just look at every single pc manufacturer they always find some way to bump the specs little by little i'm not saying apple should do it like what dell does
But the idea that there's nothing you can improve in the hardware if Intel doesn't release a brand new CPU design, either a shrink or a new architecture, I don't even buy that.
But I'm willing to say, I'm willing to accept that cadence if the CPU cadence is reasonable.
But once the CPU cadence starts going out 18 months, like I said for the Mac Pro, not only should you not skip generations, you shouldn't even wait for the next generation to give it bumps.
Exactly.
And, you know, especially like for, again, like for a machine where you're going to say, this is all about GPU power and you're going to design it to always have two GPUs.
You're not even going to allow people to buy one GPU and you're going to put in these kind of like half covered and asterisk workstation class GPUs on them, you know, and then to not update the GPUs for three years and still be selling them at the same price and to not make them upgradable.
Like...
If you're really going to say the Mac Pro is all about GPU power, they have to be upgradable aftermarket, period.
And if for some reason you really insist on making them not upgradable, you have to be updating them on a regular basis every 9 to 12 months.
Like, there has to be a GPU because that's what's competitive in the GPU world.
And for that not to be happening in the Mac Pro, you know, Phil Schiller stood up there and told us about his ass innovation.
Thank you.
Can't innovate anymore, my ass.
Now there's just been nothing.
It's embarrassing.
And it really, again, I can't understate how much this... It looks like Apple just giving a middle finger to its customers on these things.
If you're a Mac Pro buyer, if you're a Mac Mini buyer, if you're a MacBook Air buyer...
Apple is just giving us the giant finger on these things for the last few years.
And the Mac Mini is, I mean, as I mentioned last time, the Mac Mini is also especially bad because the previous update, which itself was very late, in many ways made the product worse.
So if you actually measure by days since the Mac Mini has gotten universally better, it's a much longer number.
uh but you know it really is a problem here and and john i think you're right they have to find ways that they can update the computers without waiting for intel if they're going to be skipping generations and honestly they have to just stop skipping generations because you know the mac mini you know yeah it's a low-end computer for them but it isn't a low-end computer for the people who buy it it's it's like a thousand dollars at least for for a well-configured one generally if you're buying the mac mini and
unless you have some kind of special role for it, like buying it to be a server or something else.
But if you're buying it to be your Mac, that is a low-end Mac.
You're probably buying it because you need that value.
The money matters a lot to you, and you're kind of stretching to buy it.
To have the customer experience of wanting to get into a Mac and just barely being able to afford one and having to choose the Mac Mini or wanting to choose the Mac Mini for your needs, and then to have this neglected, insulting machine be the one that Apple will sell you,
that is not a way to get more people to buy Macs.
That is not a way to get people to be happy about buying Macs.
That's going to hurt customer sat, Tim's wonderful customer sat.
It's a position of arrogance that plays into all the negative stereotypes about Apple that people have had since the 90s that we keep trying to convince the world as Mac owners, no, it's not like that.
These really are great computers.
They're great values.
They're not overpriced.
Apple's not helping us at all here because they're showing this incredible neglect and selling these ancient computers
that they could have updated.
Again, I'm not talking about the ones where they're waiting on Intel.
I'm talking about the ones that they've skipped generations forever.
They have to stop skipping these generations for every product line.
Because you know what?
If it isn't worth updating the Mac Pro for a Xeon generation that comes out every 18 months, this is like a $3,000 plus computer...
If it isn't worth updating that, then discontinue the thing.
Don't sell computers that you are not willing to maintain to a basic level of maintenance here.
That is just insulting.
And by the way, one more quick thing before I forget.
Right now, there's a whole bunch of very high-end buyers that are building high-end computers with lots of GPU power because they want to use VR.
When was the last time that people really wanted to buy in large numbers, very high-end desktop computers with lots of GPU power?
I mean, yes, there's always been PC gamers, but that's always been a pretty narrow market relative to the entire PC market as a whole.
Right now, there is a surge of people who want to buy high-end desktop class hardware and big GPUs.
And Apple is completely missing out on this.
Some of those people might have bought Mac Pros if they were competitive, but they're not.
Apple's totally missing out on this wave of people buying high-end stuff.
And yeah, their numbers might not be very big, but they're very, very profitable.
This market is extremely profitable.
And Apple's just completely blowing it.
They have blown this opportunity that only comes around maybe every 10 years.
There's a lot of people who actually need high-end hardware.
For years, we keep saying, oh, well, I can get away just fine with my four-year-old 13-inch MacBook Pro because most needs on your computer are pretty basic these days with modern hardware.
VR needs every bit of power it can get.
And again, these opportunities don't come very often in the market where people actually need high-end hardware and are willing to buy it in substantial numbers.
And Apple just missed it.
Because they just don't care.
And that's really unfortunate.
And it pains me.
As a fan of this company, and as a fan of high-end hardware, it really pains me to see the level of neglect and arrogance here that Apple has shown its pro customers.
And all of its customers, honestly.
So let's assume for a second – I know you've talked a lot about how a lot of these are not Intel's fault, and I agree with you there.
But let's assume for a second that some of these are.
Don't you think – let me change how I phrase that.
Isn't there a way that Apple could kind of hint subversively, could kind of do one of their – people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that this is all Intel's fault?
Yeah.
Why hasn't Apple some way, somehow blamed Intel for this?
Even quietly, if that makes any sense.
That's not something that Apple does.
It's not an Apple move in general.
Like, if they have problems with suppliers, which they have all the time, they find alternate suppliers, but they're not going to throw the suppliers under the bus.
They don't even want us to know the suppliers exist.
And yes, we all know Intel exists, but I...
if it was steve jobs maybe and especially if they had a new supplier lined up like as soon as they switched to intel then it was all about throw power pc uh ibm under the bus but right up until that point it was like ibm g5 everything is great and you know they're gonna have it in three gigahertz and in 12 months or whatever that promise was that he made on stage it never happened i don't i really don't think it's an apple style move to
to shift the blame apple accepts responsibility of like they're they're the ones that control their product lines they're not going to
blame a manufacturer even like remember whatever that quartz plants was that was supposed to make them quartz things for some reason and that whole thing imploded and went bankrupt or whatever it was sapphire yeah or sapphire whatever they it's that happened and we know about it because it was public news but it's not as if apple is putting out press this is it's not an apple move to put out a press release that blames other companies for apple failure to deliver its products the closest you'll get is you know thoughts on flash where it's like well
we ship products like this isn't stopping us from shipping a product or changing our products but we think this technology is crappy for everybody i think that's the closest i've seen in the modern you know apple era well and also like you know apple is not going to want to admit in any kind of public way even if it's through unofficial channels like that they're not going to even suggest the possibility that the mac line is old and stale and it's a problem
yeah they don't have those status bars on their website that says hey how long has this and like that's the word like we know like it's a smart move it's an apple move to not drop the price on your products because it's all about perceived value uh not dropping the price for the whole year that's what separates you know apple from dell dell if they're making the same thing and their cost of good savings they will lower the price to get more enterprise sales and whatever blah blah blah and apple won't right not dropping the price for three years three years like who are you kidding now
like that's that stops being we're preserving value and it starts being just like marco said punitive to your customers and you're not fooling anybody no one who knows anything thinks that 2013 mac pro that they're still selling for the same price is worth anything close to that price it is ridiculous
I'm very curious to see what happens this fall, because all signs are pointing to this fall being when they right these wrongs.
I can't imagine the complete meltdown that all of us are going to have.
I would say the pundits, but I think we will all melt down, the three of us will, if there's either nothing new or extremely underwhelming things this fall.
On the flip side, is all forgiven if something at least moderately exciting happens this fall?
I mean, we all have very, very short memories and even shorter attention spans.
If they do this fancy function row OLED screen thing that was talked about a couple of months back, or something else that's new and fancy, are they forgiven?
Is that it?
We're done?
We're good here?
Yeah.
Yeah, it depends on the product line that they do it to and whether that's the one you've been waiting for as a customer or not.
By making a major upgrade to the MacBook Pro, that's good.
They should be doing that.
The MacBook Pro is probably one of their most commonly selling models.
Certainly, it's probably their highest profile model or the most common model among high profile buyers.
The MacBook Pro is a very important product and that's great and they should be on that.
They really should.
But if you're one of the people who's been sitting around waiting for a Mac Pro or Mac Mini or MacBook Air update, then that's not going to be very satisfying to you because it's like, well, okay, that's nice.
You know, MacBook Air, maybe not as much because the new one is probably going to be closer to it in size and weight.
But if you're a desktop user, you're sitting around waiting for a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, whether they update the MacBook Pro or not is not incredibly relevant to you and how happy you are with the lineup.
And by the way, I would expect neither a Mac Mini nor a Mac Pro this fall.
Mac Mini simply because they don't care and they hate their customers.
Mac Pro because it's falling inconveniently between Broadwell E and Skylake E. And I think they've waited this long, they're probably going to go straight to Skylake, which is not a bad plan.
If there's not a Mac Pro out now with Broadwell E, then...
you might as well wait for Skylake E because it's a major upgrade and you already missed the Broadwell wave.
What they should be doing is releasing them every generation, but if you find yourself in late 2016 and you still haven't made a Mac Pro update, don't make one now with Broadwell.
Make one with Skylake.
I wouldn't give that advice because, like, talk about what Casey was saying, like, it's all forgiven.
I think it's more about regaining trust.
And what would make, you know, what would bring some trust back is not just saying, oh, hey, we finally updated the MacBooks because you know they're going to, right?
And it's going to be good and people are going to buy a lot of them and, you know, everyone's going to be happy.
You know they're going to do that.
But that doesn't regain any trust because what you're looking for is a new pattern of behavior, not merely, oh, we didn't update these computers for a really long time and everyone was sad, but, hey, here's a new update.
Everything's great.
It's like what you want to see is,
a new update followed by another new timely update maybe followed by another one and then you would have your faith restored and to restore faith in something in the mac pro situation i think what you'd have to do is at the very least put out a new mac pro with the same cpus but better gpus or
put out a broadwell emac pro that you already spent time developing internally even though you know you're going to replace it with a skylight and also in the broadwell you want to have new gpus like and it's like whoa whoa whoa that's such a big change you can regain that trust as quickly as possible by saying broadwell macbook uh broadwell mac pro with new gpus skylight mac pro with new gpus those two releases would be like oh hey i guess apple's updating this computer again and now it's safe to buy and it's no longer embarrassing and that's such a turn from their current thing of like skip a generation ah
maybe skip one more because by this point the new ones are going to come out it's like you can always say it's like we've waited so long that's a good one's gonna come out too and it's like well this the sky like ones we're not really ready to do that now let's work on those and then you're working on the sky like one it's like well maybe wait another year for thunderbolt 4 to come out you can always wait you have to release new versions of the product and the way to regain trust
is to show a new pattern of behavior.
And one data point does not make a line.
You need to have multiple data points to say, not only have they revised this computer again, but because if you were to tell them new Mac pros are gonna come out at the beginning of next year, and there won't be another new Mac pro for three years, would you invest in this line of computers?
it's like i don't i don't want that cadence i don't i don't like that even if i buy all my computers now like if i get a new employee in a year do i have to buy them a year old mac pro if i get a new employee in two years do i have to buy them a two-year-old mac pro like the three-year cadence is not acceptable so they have to establish a new pattern of behavior and the way to most quickly establish a new pattern of behavior is rapid fire releases and for the mac pro it's right in front of them new gpus broadwell then sky lake
and new gpus and all those things you could do three new revisions of the mac pro between now and the sky like one and that would go a long way to show i mean that's kind of ridiculous but that would go a long way although dell would do it to showing that you are dedicated to this product line again um and for the other ones because they are kind of like on an annual cycle
Like, the Mac Mini has never had the trust, so you're not losing the trust there, other than the crappy revision that took away the cores, right?
But it was never really there.
But for the MacBooks and stuff, it's like, really?
Your laptops?
Those are your most portable Macs, and even those are getting long in the tooth?
It's not a good look.
So it's...
I wish they showed on that page not just the gaps and everything, but like a graphs where you could see that they were kind of in a steady kind of pattern.
Then here's this new aberration from the pattern.
And you have to restore that pattern to restore the faith in the product line.
Well, if you scroll down to each of the individual details, it shows recent releases.
And there's individual bar charts for each release.
So you can get a sort of hint as to what the normal is.
So you can see for the iMac, for example, the May 2011 update was 577 days since the prior one.
But every other one looks like it was about 200 to 300 days.
Do you see what I mean?
So you can get a rough guess just by looking at these graphs.
Yeah.
And a lot of these, I mean, it's kind of sad how much seemed to stop in 2012.
Yeah.
This makes me so sad.
Honestly, I know it's kind of improper to talk this simply and broadly, but it looks like Tim Cook just doesn't like the Mac very much.
And I hope that's not it.
I hope that's not the reason for all this, and I hope that's not true.
But that's how it looks.
It looks like Tim Cook doesn't care about the Mac.
It does use an iPad to do his work.
I know.
The iPad is the future of computing.
Not as if that's what he's making decisions based on, or even that's his decision.
If he was making decisions based on this, it would be purely based on how much money they cost to developers, how much money they bring in for the company, and how much potential future revenue, and blah, blah, blah.
I really don't think he's making decisions based on what computers he likes, because that just doesn't seem like his role in the company.
But...
bottom line number stuff was his bag before he became CEO.
And I would imagine that it, you know, any influence he does have in this would be related to that.
But I, I more, more likely these decisions are made down at a level below him and he just gives an okay on it.
Yeah, but it is kind of like the Tim Cook way to just keep old stuff around, just keep selling it, you know, because that still makes good enough money.
And that's how the whole Mac lineup looks right now.
And again, some of these families, that's Intel's fault, but a lot of them it's not.
It looks like Apple has made the calculus to say, you know...
we don't really need to update the Mac very often.
They still sell anyway.
And so we just won't.
We'll just let it sit there.
Yeah, but he knows that's not true.
Like, this last quarter of Mac sales was dismal, and he knew that was happening before it was happening.
Like, that's not true.
He knows it's not true.
Yeah, like, they know the numbers before they announce them to us.
That's their whole thing, is they do projections, they have estimations, they see they're not going to hit their numbers.
We find out in the earnings calls, but they know well before that.
And that is the point where maybe they have...
strategic planning or replanning meetings and saying look we're not going to even come close to hitting our expected numbers for max it's going to look bad what do we want to do and that's where they say can this product line revise this one move this project up add more funding that i don't know i'm i'm fantasizing about how things are done inside apple but like it it's the the idea that the that anyone in the company thinks that you can just neglect these lines and nothing will happen we all know that's not true by now and apple knew it way before we did
Do you think they knew it 18 months ago when they decided to skip a generation of these various CPUs and stuff?
Well, the lead time is so huge that, yeah, it's a trailing indicator, or whether, yeah, I'm using it right, I think, where you find out long after the decisions that led to it have been made, and the new decisions you make now aren't going to manifest for a while, so that's just the nature of the beast here, but...
I mean, I guess about regaining trust, we know that even if they made the decision a year ago, we're not going to see the results of those decisions for a long time.
So now we just sit back and wait and, you know, show us with your actions that, you know, which product lines you care about, which ones are, quote unquote, safe to buy, safe to invest in.
um for individual users is less important because for individual users it's like you just buy as soon as they're revised like you wait a little bit to make sure they're not lemons and there's no systemic problems with the things and then you buy it and as far as an individual is concerned you're fine as long as when you decide to buy a new computer that actually is a new one for you to buy that is different than the one you already bought but for institutions or people that buy a lot of them like i said with a company with a bunch of people doing like my on their mac pros and they staff up for a big project
they have an occasion to buy new computers and they will be sad if they're buying the same computers they bought a year or two years or three years ago for the same price uh it just doesn't seem right technologically speaking it's like oh well you know it's been three years since i bought my computer you new employee will have such a fancy computer but it'll be great like we can't afford to revise all of our computers every year but when we bring in new employees they get a new one oh you got the same exact computer i did that's great
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I have a question specifically for Marco.
You had written, probably like a year ago, a tool that will take several audio files, say, from your co-hosts and your own, and line them up so we're not on different parts of the episode at the same moment, right?
Yeah, they're synced up.
Sync them up time-wise.
I was thinking about this a week or two ago.
How the hell are you doing that?
Because we don't all hit the record button at the same moment.
And I was I was debating with myself, OK, well, how is he doing it?
Is he just looking for it?
And it's all, you know, algorithmic.
And so is he just looking for like some peak in one and then trying to find the same peak in the other?
And I wasn't sure how this worked.
And so what is this tool and how the hell did you do it?
Before Marco explains, we should also say that we don't do that embarrassing clap thing that some other podcast do.
I'm not naming any names here.
Yeah, so for what it's worth, a lot of shows when you're on the show, they'll count down and say, okay, we're all going to clap one, two, three, and then everyone claps.
And that's their peak that the editor uses to line up the two or more sides.
Which is bogus because of audio drift, which Marco will explain soon.
Yeah.
So I just, I was really curious because this is a fascinating technical problem.
And yeah, it's a little inside baseball, but it's a fascinating technical problem to solve regardless of the fact that it happens to relate to podcasting.
So how'd you solve it?
I should clarify before I start here that I didn't do any research, of course.
Yeah.
I didn't do any research beforehand on how this problem should be solved, how other things solve this problem.
There are very few audio tools that do solve this problem, but it's pretty common on high-end video recording apps.
Because the idea is, if you're on a video shoot,
you probably are recording audio off camera.
You're probably recording audio through some other device, an audio recorder or a mixer or whatever else.
So you need to then sync up the audio with the video or you need to sync multiple cameras video in editing so you can switch between the cameras and sync it all up to the master audio track.
So video apps have had, like Final Cut does this, I'm pretty sure, I don't know that much about video, but video apps have had ways to do this for a long time where they will take in, they will use audio and they will be able to sync audio and video between multiple tracks and everything.
What I wanted was a very basic command line tool to do this so that I could put it in as like part of my shell script to process all your files through FFmpeg and whatever else to normalize the formats and get them all and basically take your like, you know,
a set of fully synced and undrifted WAV files that I can just import into Logic and edit.
This is something that podcasters, if you're just recording Skype from your computer and that's it, and you use those as the tracks, you don't really need to do this because everything is all synced up.
But if you're doing what's called a double-ender method, where each person on the call records their own track locally, like we do, it sounds way better, and it affords you a great deal of flexibility in editing for shows that have more than two people on them.
But this is a problem you have, or then you have to sync up everybody's files.
Okay.
drift is another problem this is really down in the weeds and i'm sorry if this is boring to anybody so i'll try to be quick basically your audio interface you know whatever's recording you whether it's the mic or you know sound card or whatever your audio interface records a certain number of samples per second uh so you know you might have seen the numbers 44 kilohertz you know 44.1 kilohertz like that's the number of samples per second that it's recording into your wave file
The problem is that computers are not perfect.
These all come down to these little analog electronic components, and nothing is perfect because everything has to be cheap and amazing and work all the time.
And so what the computer thinks is X times per second will actually vary very slightly between different devices, between different computers, whatever is generating that clock signal to say, I'm taking 44,100 samples per second.
Every computer's clock is going to be very slightly different.
And it might be like 0.001% off of yours.
But over the course of a two-hour podcast, you could be off by like a full second by the end.
And so if you sync up the tracks at the beginning, if you say, all right, everyone clap, and then we'll sync up those claps.
Go an hour later in the podcast and...
you will hear that people are no longer lined up properly.
They'll be like a second off or something.
And that's because of this difference in clocks, in the actual analog hardware.
The thing that is generating that clock signal, X times per second, is just 0.001% off of what yours was.
My tool was designed to solve both of these problems.
Make something that fixes drift and that basically syncs the file throughout the whole file.
It syncs everything up and then just outputs these WAV files I can just import into my editor and then do nothing else too in that way and move on to the content editing.
Because I want the podcasts that I produce to sound as great as they possibly can sound.
I want them to have incredible high production values.
Because basically, I value the listeners.
I value your time.
I value your attention.
And I want to make sure the show sounds good so it's easiest as possible and most pleasant for you to listen to.
So making this double-ender recording method work well and quickly for me was very important.
So I started to make this thing that would line up all the tracks.
It slices up the file.
It looks at a whole bunch of points throughout the file, but it first starts out just in the middle.
And it tries to line up the middles so it can just get an approximate lineup for the whole file.
And it does this not by finding peaks necessarily, but it's a little more involved than that.
It uses the fast Fourier transform, FFT, to break the audio into frequencies rather than just like the up and down wave that you see like in a wave editor.
It breaks down into frequencies for each segment.
So it'll take like a certain number of milliseconds and say, what is the frequency breakdown of this?
For every little slice it takes, it makes a little hash of this chunk of the file to say, for this little millisecond slice, what is the dominant frequency?
And if you think about... Suppose it translates into ASCII for simplicity's sake.
You can say, all right, well...
this second of audio had the frequency like you know a f g you know like it has it for every little slice it takes in that second it can basically build like a string and say all right well this is the dominant frequency of this slice of audio and
And then if you can imagine just sliding that up and down across a window of time.
So if you can say these files are probably lined up within 15 minutes.
Like, did we probably hit record within 15 minutes of each other?
Yes.
So it defines a window.
And it says, all right, well, within this window, just literally slide this around, slide this hash that I've made of this little bit of audio here.
Slide this around until you find the point in this range that it is the least different from a reference track.
And the reference track is simply... It's the Skype recording, basically.
It is the recording of all of us talking.
So the reference track... So rather than trying to take these random files and say, you know, sync this to your ear, just figure out what sounds right.
All of this is...
It's based on take all these input files from each of our microphones and sync them to the reference track that contains all of us.
And then just delete the reference track.
Because then you'll have the pristine, awesome version of all of us from our microphones instead of the crappy Skype version of all of us.
So it basically uses this FFT to just slide around, build these little hashes of each segment of audio, and find out where they line up.
So first it lines up the middle with very, very high precision.
And then it goes throughout the whole rest of the file.
And it goes... I think right now I have it doing it in like 10%, just like 10% increments.
So there's nine other ones.
After the middle is lined up, go to the beginning and go to the end and go to the steps in the middle...
How far off is the synchronization at those points?
Because the thing about drift is it tends to be fairly constant.
Your clock variation in how fast your computer's clock measures that time slice, that tends to be fixed or close enough to fix during a two-hour podcast.
Then it goes to the ends of this scale.
And it says, all right, well, in the middle, we're perfectly lined up now.
At the beginning, we are like 0.5 seconds off negative, you know, negative 0.5 seconds.
At the end, we are 0.5 seconds ahead.
So that means that in this time span, we've gone from negative 5 to plus or negative 0.5 to plus 0.5
So that it basically builds, you know, based on looking at the whole file, looking at these averages of this rate, it interpolates an average drift for the whole file.
And it says, all right, well, this looks like we are gaining 0.1 seconds of drift per hour or, you know, whatever the rate is based on, you know, looking at all those different points in the file once the middle is aligned.
So then it just goes to the beginning.
It says, all right, well, at the beginning, we'll fix that.
And then throughout the file, we know how many seconds per hour or whatever we have to insert or remove to sync this up properly.
So it uses basic audio stuff to find periods of silence and use... I'm pretty good at dealing with silence now.
Use the silence to insert or remove padding at opportune times where you won't notice.
Okay.
And that's how it undrifts the files.
That's smart as hell.
And the vast majority of the time, it works.
And because it is using dominant frequencies as the way to tell whether things are similar, it is fairly immune to the volume differences.
Because the Skype track is going to have a very different volume level than whatever microphone file you give me.
It's also going to be way lower fidelity.
It's going to be weird and possibly distorted in some subtle ways.
But dominant frequencies tend to be the same regardless of how it's recorded because that's what you're hearing.
If it sounds roughly the same, it's going to match up pretty closely in the file and in the frequency hashing thing.
And then so it's just in and because it's like, I'm not necessarily looking for the exact match.
I'm just you give me a window in which I will like I'm likely to find this and I will find like the closest match.
And then I use confidence ratings and all this stuff.
So that's how it works.
i i wrote this i don't know two years ago maybe i did it a while ago and i've basically not touched it and a few a few friends of ours it's kind of in like a private alpha a few friends of ours use it to to edit their shows and i i have almost never had to touch the algorithm since writing it the only um the main reasons i have not released this yet are that there are a few bugs but it's it's not usually bugs in finding um in lining it up in fact
The rate at which it properly lines things up is shockingly good.
The main bugs are around things like, you know, well, if one file is like 30 minutes shorter than the other one, like, hey, it might not line it up or, you know, it might not undrift properly because it, like, tries to interpolate a value from part of the file that doesn't exist.
So, like, there's...
There's some cleanup work needed to be done to make this a general usefulness releasable tool.
It would also be nice if it had a GUI because most people want a graphical interface for their applications.
Most people don't want to have binaries that you can use from a shell script.
So
So that's why this is not out yet.
And the market for such a thing is extremely small because it's a tool for podcasters.
And so it's hard to charge money and make any money from that.
So I don't know how that'll go.
We'll figure that out later, I guess.
But I do eventually plan to release this because it is an incredibly useful tool for anybody who does podcasts.
uh double ending podcasting where you're recording local local tracks from people and i think the world of podcasting would be better off if more people did that and making that easier is therefore working towards that goal because one thing i i really don't like as a podcast listener uh is i should never know that your podcast is recorded with skype
And what that means is I should never hear you talking about Skype.
I should never hear a Skype dropout.
If there's a Skype dropout and you have to work through that, that needs to be cut from the show.
All discussion of Skype should be cut from the show.
I should never know as a listener that you use Skype.
And I also shouldn't be hearing Skype artifacts when somebody's connection is going a little wonky or Skype's going a little wonky and they start...
degrading the bitrate down they start sounding a little bit worse a little more telephonic you know they start going worse and worse and worse and then you hear upgrading get better and better and better like that was fine five years ago now we've moved on we know how to do things better now so podcasting should now be
I want to raise the bar.
The local recording should be the norm now in most cases.
And yes, there are some cases where you need to use Skype for more practical reasons.
Things like if you have a guest call-in show where you're having a different guest every week.
Getting people microphones is already a big pain and it's hard enough dealing with that.
You know, there's certain exceptions to this, but for the most part, like if you're doing the same show every week with the same people, I should never, ever know that you use Skype.
So that's why I made this tool.
That's why I made it to save myself time.
Hopefully it'll save more people time in the future and make podcasting better, which is kind of my overall goal for everything I do these days.
But it's going to be a lot of work before this is in a releasable state.
You know, it's funny what you said about never knowing that Skype was used, because I feel like we do a really good job of that.
Unless my iMac that I swear isn't broken breaks, in which case that's exactly why we had to use.
I guess it was your recording of me for the first half of that show.
Exactly.
And people justifiably were fairly either confused or perturbed by it.
And I don't blame them.
It sounded like garbage.
And I still feel terribly guilty about that.
And that is exactly what we're trying to avoid.
It's all your fault, Casey.
Well, I do feel bad about it.
That's fine.
It was like the first 20 minutes.
If it happened every week, I'd be mad.
But if it happens once in a three-year run of a show, it's not that ridiculous.
No, that's really, really interesting.
What was this written in?
Is this C?
Yeah, it uses Objective-C.
It's an Objective-C binary that you access via terminal.
So it has access to foundation and everything, but all the core logic...
and it uses the accelerate framework it uses all the all the cool vdsp functions for ffts and everything and of course it runs in parallel so it you know this is one of the reasons i like using computers with lots of cores because a lot of tools that i either use or make and use use grand social dispatch to work in parallel very very effectively and
and this is like this is the perfect problem to parallelize because it's like all right well take this one input file and just analyze all these different chunks and then at the end figure out which one had the best score that's so easy to parallelize so of course it does and and it makes all my fans run up and it's just awesome
No, this is really, really cool.
And as someone who works on kind of regular software, both in past jobs and my current job, I definitely get to solve cool problems, but not this kind of cool.
That's super, super interesting and super neat.
So your long-term plan, you're still kicking the tires on releasing?
I mean, I know you said you want to release it, but is that like...
Is that in the next month, in the next six months, in the next six years?
What do you think?
It is incredibly unlikely to be in the next month.
I would say six months, maybe.
Year, more likely, but I don't know.
It depends on what else I'm doing, really.
I'm already working on my production tool for putting in chapters and stuff.
This is not that app.
This is a different app.
um so there's that and i have you know i have this collection of shell scripts that does all sorts of other useful things like compress and decompress logic projects um there's all sorts of crazy stuff that i have for making podcasting easier and so there's always this kind of debate of like you know which of these things could i or should i make into a product and which of these things should just stay a shell script that i that i use and maybe give a couple of friends uh because you know there's a lot of work involved make something a product and it probably isn't worth it for a lot of these so
You know, time will tell.
But I'll probably release this thing someday.
You should release, like, the Marco Arment podcast kit.
Honestly, that's kind of what I was thinking that I might do someday.
But, you know, because, like, you could argue maybe, you know, I can just make one grand app that, like, incorporates all this stuff.
And I don't think that's right.
Or at least that one grand app would have to also be the editor.
Yeah.
And while someday that might be cool, I'm certainly nowhere near ready to tackle that kind of problem right now.
So eventually, there might be one grand app that, you know, it is the editor and the encoder and the recorder and, you know, and all this stuff.
That'd be fine.
But that we are not there today.
So it would probably be a collection of small apps maybe sold as a pack or something.
I don't even know.
But we'll see, you know.
This whole iOS app thing, it's kind of hard to make money these days.
So maybe I'll switch over to this kind of stuff.
Good luck, my friend.
Thank you.
I think we're good.
All right.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Tracker, and Indochino.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
We should talk about now is the whole there's nothing new happening in the news and why you guys are cranky about it.
All right, so to recap, a couple of weeks ago or last week, whenever it was, I made a flippant remark, I think it was me, saying there's no other news this week or something like that.
And this was during a week where there was a lot of world news and political news and things like police shootings.
And there was a lot of news happening.
But I was really just saying there wasn't tech news, but I said it was a slow news week.
I didn't say it was a slow tech news week.
So a few people were understandably concerned about that or disagreed or were offended by that.
And I think this is first and foremost a tech show.
And there's all sorts of horrible things that happen in the world.
And sometimes we do cover things that are not directly like what Apple has released this week or whatever else.
We've covered, you know, subjects such as women in technology and online harassment, things like this that are partly tech issues, but also are partly like societal issues or other issues.
In general, though, we do focus mostly on the geeky stuff.
In a world where there is so much horribleness that happens in the real world, and this stuff gets to me in real life, and the world of tech is like a vacation from that.
It's a break from that.
It is this nice little world where we can pretend like all that matters in the world is how long it's been since the Mac Pro was updated.
And if we don't cover other things, like horrible things that are going on in the world, I consider that a feature, not a bug, for the most part, most of the time.
Because not only do I need that, and you guys, you can speak for yourselves in a minute here.
Oh, definitely.
Not only do I need that as a human being.
But I feel like it's important that our listeners also get a break from that too if they want to because there's so many other places that you can get coverage of major world news and political news and horrible tragedies and everything else.
And I think it's important that people have something that's not that when all this stuff is going on in the world.
There has to be some relief from that, some break from that, some safe place you can go and not hear horrible news every week.
I'm going to give the flip side of that, which although I agree with some of the things you said, I'm going to present the opposing argument and then explain the meta issue of why it's difficult to address this period.
So like you said, we know what the show is about.
You just look at the past history of topics.
i think everyone would agree like to figure out like how this works you just go to extremes and see like what the end points are so like one extreme would be like a nuclear bomb goes off in manhattan right if we had a show that week assuming marco is still alive which he probably wouldn't be that problem would solve itself yeah but anyway if we had a show that week and didn't mention it
It would seem really weird, right?
Like, that's one extreme, right?
It's like, oh, yeah, I know this is a tech podcast, and that's why we're not going to mention the nuclear bomb, the one of them in Manhattan, because it's not a tech topic, right?
And so we won't talk about it.
Everybody, including us, would find that super weird and nonsensical, and it would stand out like a sore thumb.
So there's one extreme.
The other extreme is like, you know, a bunch of people spray-painted swastikas on the elementary school in my hometown, right?
Right.
Most of the listeners probably don't care about that.
It is not a tech issue, but, you know, I would care about it deeply.
Right.
So here's an issue that I would care about deeply because my kids go to that school and I'm super concerned about it.
I'm up at night thinking about it and it's really concerning.
Right.
But it still doesn't pass mustard to be on the podcast because lots of other people.
So I feel like those are the two ends of the chain.
Both of them are things we care deeply about because we would all care deeply about nuking Manhattan and I would care deeply about people spray painting swastikas on my kids' elementary school, right?
But one of those things, I think we would all agree, it's like, well, that's not fodder for ATP.
And the other one, I think everyone listening would agree that it would be super weird if we didn't mention it.
Right.
And so the trick about this thing is figuring out along this spectrum between the nuke and like the local issue that, you know, whatever.
Along the spectrum of issues that we're going to presume that like, you know, like Marco said, and I'm assuming Casey as well, that we all really do personally care about and think about a lot or whatever.
There are many issues along the spectrum.
And the question is, when does it become weird that we don't say anything?
Right.
secondary question is all right we have not saying anything and everyone can pick their line along that spectrum like i feel like it's weird you didn't say anything about the nuke but i don't i don't even care about your local elementary school because i got my own issues right second thing is what if you don't just not say anything but in fact you say as marco did you know because he has spoken but tech you say you assert that
This this thing doesn't exist where you say, oh, well, there is no news this week right now.
Obviously, that's not what Marco went meant.
We in context, I think it's very clear what he meant, but you could hear it and interpret it the other way.
Right.
You know, we all misspeak on podcasts all the time.
And sometimes it's not even speaking.
It's just like assuming a context that is not shared with the audience.
Right.
uh but positively asserting the absence of something is gets into the the realm of what everyone calls erasure where you're intentionally most of the time erasure is like intentionally intentionally or unintentionally creating an environment where people sort of soaking in it can how can it supports a worldview where this thing is
is not an issue or is not a problem or doesn't exist so by positively asserting that nothing was going on it is a form of erasing the struggle of like black lives matter or whatever things that uh you know that we may care deeply about but like for the people listening it's like i'm providing a safe space for you to pretend that black lives matter doesn't exist right and there's a flip side as what marco said it's like well sometimes you don't want to hear about the crappy things in the world you just want to hear us talk about casey's mac or whatever like there is a flip side to that
but erasure is a real thing and it happens all the time and so when the combination of like not being clear enough about this like there's no new tech news and really saying there's no news that reads exactly like erasure um and i think for a lot of people although black lives matter and police shootings and stuff
is not a nuke on manhattan it is close enough to the threshold of things that should be important enough that that should come up on atp for people to think oh they think it should have been included now that judgment i feel like is you know that that's definitely a judgment call whether you think it's appropriate to add but once you start positively asserting it starts looking like erasure that's a problem as well um
And then the meta problem, like I said, is say this happens, say all three of us who I presume all care deeply about these issues that we didn't mention on the show, as we do about many issues that we don't mention on the show for a variety of reasons.
And all of us basically made the judgment without, you know, that there was not going to be a topic we were going to discuss on ATP.
Just like there are so many topics that we all care about that we don't discuss on ATP for various reasons that Marco outlined.
Um,
So when we end up with a show that some people hear and it's like, oh, you know, you're not only not discussing this, but you're making it seem like it doesn't happen.
And that's bad because it happens all the time and complains to us about it.
The natural reaction is to say, well, but...
you know it sounds like they're impugning our motivations oh but we we have to say but we do care about that in fact not only do we care about that but we're on the same side as you and like it's an important issue to us and here are the reasons i didn't want to talk about it and so on and so forth you get defensive essentially and so to have a show where you come back on and have to talk about it in any way it's very difficult not to feel like you're under attack when you're you feel like you're defending yourself for something you didn't do because you totally agree with them but at the same time
there's there's no way to like you can't go back and add the the words that you didn't put there and you can't control how people interpret things because it does read like erasure to many people and some people you're just going to disagree with about what what meets the threshold from you know the the spray paint on the school and the new king of manhattan you might just have disagreements on where that line is but the debate becomes about are you a good person who cares about the issues that i care about don't you care about this or are you actively trying to erase this and so it's really difficult to come on the show
on a follow-up type thing and talk about it in a way that isn't immediately defensive, right?
Regardless of how everyone falls on the various issues.
And so I think rather than delving into the specifics of this issue, which, you know, we have new news with another topic that we didn't talk about and don't plan to like the Republican National Convention, rather than actually delving into those topics, which I still feel like are not,
appropriate for the show i think it was more important to talk about the meta issue of being aware that even though you may agree and may think things are important there are things you can do either accidentally or on purpose that can create an environment that makes it seem like those issues are less important than they are or gives people sort of a place where they can a safe haven away from those things in a bad way marco talked about the good way it's like we all care about them we all know about them makes us sad and
But sometimes I just want to, you know, escape and play Pokemon Go.
Like, that's definitely a role things should play.
But the other aspect of it is that I don't think those are actually important.
And it's a shame that they're even on the news and it's not even newsworthy.
And those people should just stop complaining.
And thank goodness I can listen to a podcast that agrees with me that those things are beneath concern because nothing interesting is happening in the news, right?
Which is obviously not what any of us meant, but it can read like that from the outside.
So...
You know, what should we do differently?
What should we do better?
if you're just aware of that issue like the next time you know someone you know one of us says something like that add the context i think that's all that's needed um and and then i guess the secondary thing is even though it feels terrible to think and talk about it on the next show do it anyway because it's better than like if we were to just not say anything on this show about it i think that would be worse because that would be like doubling down that would be like well i didn't know what erasure was and definitely wasn't doing it on purpose but now that you mentioned i'm gonna do it
Like, I'm going to pretend that nobody complained, like just being spiteful about it.
And so, you know, that's what we do an ATP as the most painful thing possible.
And then we screw it up.
But that's our way.
Yeah, I mean, I naturally agree with pretty much everything both of you guys said.
I don't know.
I...
I absolutely felt attacked when I saw this feedback.
And it was from somebody I feel like I know and definitely respect.
And that almost made it worse because I felt like it was coming from a person, an individual that I felt should have known the context.
And I felt the context was pretty obvious.
I actually thought for a long time I was the one who had said it.
And I think you might be right, Marco.
I think it might have been you.
Right.
it was marco and also tiff and like she also got defensive about it like it's totally natural to get defensive about it but like you're getting defensive about the wrong thing like the person is not impugning your motivations like everybody involved knows that they care about things it's all about like all right your motivations are one thing it's the whole you know we judge ourselves by our motivations but others by their actions you're being judged by your actions even your unintentional actions or even marco's unintentional actions like it's like it doesn't matter what you were thinking it only matters what you said and how it might be interpreted by people who are predisposed to
to look for a place where they where someone is positively asserting you know that these people don't matter you know what i mean like that's and that is a tough way to be judged and it has nothing to do with motivations and it can totally feel like you're being attacked uh but if you're not aware that that's even a thing it's hard to understand like what's the big deal like you know and i know we all know together that we care about this isn't caring enough um and you know i didn't do this on purpose and you know the context and it should be clear to people listening
All that is we can all agree on that and still say, yeah, but not everyone is on that same page and not everyone understands your motivations and knows you as well as I do.
And all we're left with is your actions and your actions can have a small harmful effect.
And just letting you know, like, maybe that's something to be careful about or think about or at least talk about on a following show, which I feel like we're doing.
And that's the right thing to do, despite the fact that we all feel like defensive and immediately about it.
It's just human nature.
Oh, yeah.
I was extremely ragey when this was flying by on Twitter.
It was the angriest I've gotten at something I've seen on Twitter that affected me personally in a long time.
Really?
You thought people were saying you're a bad person, basically.
Yeah.
And just like you've said, John, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Just because I didn't bring it up doesn't mean I don't care.
And I think it's abundantly obvious to anyone who has ever listened to the show that the assumed context for Marco's statement was in technology.
And I think it's unfair of me to assume that anyone else is coming from the same point.
But I was deeply bothered by it.
And I still am pretty fired up about it.
I feel...
so i could all my big explanation didn't help you get a hand on this because you should totally like no i mean like i i think your explanation was was very good and it i agree it made a lot of sense to me also and i and i i agree with you like you know the thing about it being a spectrum of like you know to say if you if you said like yeah like john said like if you said oh nothing happened this week and you meant in tech but a nuke had gone off in manhattan that week like that would be really outrageous to
And it's and it'll be more because there's no historical issue of erasure of nuclear bombs going off in the United States.
But there is there is a long there is a context for specific issues of like not caring about it when when black people get shot by police officers like and the idea that, you know.
that that's that it's a systemic issue that there is specific context to this and that doing it in this context even accidentally is so much more worse uh so much worse than doing it in the context of of a new going off because it would just seem super weird i was using that as an extreme but there's no history of erasure that there's no systemic prejudice against talking about that there's no history of devaluing that and saying it's not as important as other stories you know what i mean like there's so much baggage and weight behind this and
And I think all of us are just, you know, I mean, at least I know I was following all this stuff on Twitter and reading about it and it is depressing and it is upsetting.
And that could be a conscious decision not to talk about it.
But like if you accidentally end up saying something that could be read as erasure, I understand why people will be like, even if they personally know that you didn't mean it as erasure, it doesn't matter what you mean.
All that matters is what you ended up saying and how it might be interpreted.
And then you are adding a tiny pebble to this gigantic wall in the context of this issue.
Yeah.
um and it's very difficult when you do something that could have negative consequences none of which you intended or might not even understand right and so you totally would feel attacked because like how can i have done something wrong when i didn't mean to do anything wrong and i don't even understand the wrongness that i did it's still possible it's still totally possible to do something ever so slightly wrong
but not have meant anything wrong be totally in agreement with the people who are identifying the wrong thing that you did and like like that is possible it's hard to square that and so like so i think case you're still holding on to the idea that someone is calling you a bad person like nobody is right nobody's saying that they're just disappointed that we just that we you know that we fumbled and made a mistake and maybe they're being more harsh on us than you think they should but like if you spend your time trying to defend your motivations you're never going to think about your actions in a broader context and it's like
it's counterproductive like you're only you're only gonna go more distant that way rather than trying to figure out how to how to how to come closer together or whatever and if people are gonna be upset they have the right to be upset but like it's there's no reason to say well now i'm going to double down on my unintentional mistake by trying to make intentional ones right it's like you know it's like it's it's like if you learned that like a word that you used was actually like racist and you didn't know that oh yeah totally same thing
yeah it's like it's worth knowing that it's worth learning that it's worth somebody telling you that and even though you didn't mean to be racist or you don't have those feelings because you because you didn't even know the origins like it was just right but it's still it still shouldn't use it and so it's like you know that the the most so well adjusted thing is to thank the person for telling you but the human thing is to be like are you saying i'm a racist like that's how everyone feels like you should know i'm not you know me that's that's absurd and now you know like
The ultimate example of this is the word spaz, which in American English is not, or to any circle I've ever traveled in anyway, it's not derogatory.
Whereas in British English, it's hugely derogatory.
It's derogatory.
It's ableist in English.
It's a problematic, you know, it's like when I was mentioning a few minutes ago, like lame or gimp, like these horribly named open source projects.
Things that many people have never thought about, including me, until fairly recently.
Yeah, sure.
You just didn't know.
But someone pointing it out to you, depending on how they do it or whatever, it's not on them to break it to you gently.
It's on you to figure out how to separate your feelings about, are you saying I hate disabled people from the idea that this thing that you've been doing unintentionally
has an effect on other people you might not have realized.
So incorporate that into your decisions about whether you're going to do that going forward.
Right.
And that's why I've tried to remove that word from my vernacular, because I don't want to be offensive.
And it's really hard to do.
Like, as we all know, trying to remove things from our vernacular, I just hear myself doing them all the time.
Oh, yeah.
You know, trying like we know we're trying, but all people know is what we say.
So it's kind of like when someone says you accidentally let something slip, you're like, well, I'm trying, man.
I mean, that's true.
But well, but also like if if you're trying, it's still right for somebody to call you out every time you mess up.
Exactly.
Like, you know, you just have to you just have to, you know, separate constructive criticism is a two way street.
Like people can criticize you in an unconstructive way and you can take constructive things from it.
And people can criticize you a constructive way and you can, you know, not handle it well and not take it in a constructive manner.
Like so it's.
It helps if it's constructive coming in, but either way, you can mess it up on your end by deciding that your hurt feelings are more important than whatever the issue is that's being highlighted.
And I think that's exactly the pit I fell into is I personally don't think that the complaint that was lodged terribly constructively –
But I absolutely agree with you that I did and to some degree still am letting my emotions get in the way of the bigger picture, which is we should have phrased things better and or corrected each other after having misphrased them.
And the reason I didn't know it is because I have that assumed context that not everyone does.
Yeah.
what also made it even worse was this was someone i feel like i know and i felt like a bazooka was used when it wasn't absolutely necessary which here again is feelings no i mean like you know to me like you know the fact that a friend of ours said it uh is is almost irrelevant uh you know it's if anything that's what friends are for start singing the song
Yeah, if anything, if a random person who I didn't know had called us out on it, I might not have taken it as seriously as I did.
But I didn't take it in a hurtful way.
I was surprised, but it was more just like, huh, I didn't think about it that way at all, and...
Yeah, it's like when you're caught on unintentional racism or something.
It's like, I wasn't thinking along those lines at all.
But now that you mention it, yeah, I didn't really say that very well.
And so again, it's worth being told in a way that you will notice and it's worth correcting it.
and that's why you should do this to your friends because like people do take it more seriously from their friends the bad side of that is that many people when a friend does it like that's the end of the friendship and we're at war now and i hate that person i'm never speaking to them again that is not taking constructive like those people are jerks yeah you can deliver that badly on one end and it can be taken badly on the other and you can do one or like it can end badly in many different ways but
it's it's difficult but you like this is what you want your friends to do because again if a stranger lots of things that strangers say you just let roll off your back because like that's especially that's just a skill you have to have because strangers will say all sorts of awful things to you um but this is what your friends are there to do for you and if you don't have that kind of relationship with your friends in either direction like if you hang out with your friends and your friends are constantly making racist jokes and you do a fake laugh but you don't believe any of that like it's not on the same you're not on the same page with that but you feel like you can't call them on it like
i don't know that i feel like that's a that's a bad situation to be in you know it's it like express yourself uh explain how it makes you feel when your friend makes racist jokes and that's the end of the friendship like i feel like that's the appropriate course of events rather than to just you know eat that down because if you soak in that environment long enough you will become normalized and you'll be like oh it's not a big deal i have this person who's a great person loves his kids and yeah he makes racist jokes sometimes but who cares it's like that's that's how we end up where we are you can't
You can't end up with that stuff being normalized.
Yeah.
And, you know, several years ago now, I watched this thing that ended up becoming very popular.
It was Randy Pausch's last lecture.
And I probably brought it up in the past.
And it was a professor from Carnegie Mellon.
And actually, I believe it had been an instructor at UVA as well.
And he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and did this thing that was supposed to be a last lecture really for his kids.
He talked about in that last lecture, to your point, that when people stop correcting you, that's a really crummy place to be.
And as ragey as I was over this entire exchange...
I do agree with what you said, and I am thankful for the correction, even if I wish it had been delivered differently, and I wish I had responded differently.
Yeah, me too.
Although I had less of a problem with how it was delivered, and I didn't respond.
So in other words, you handled it a lot better than I did.
Well, you responded now.
I didn't respond in the moment either, also because I missed the moment when it happened.
Me too.
Actually, yeah.
I didn't even have Twitter open while all this was going on, and then I caught up like an hour later.
I'm like, oh, all this happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, sometimes not responding in the moment is the right thing to do to give yourself time to digest it and get distanced before you say things that you'll regret, more things that you'll regret.
You know what I mean?
Anyway.
Oh, yeah.
I highly recommend using an app on your Mac to automatically quit Twitter on a frequent basis.
It really does help quite a lot in a lot of ways in life.
I'm waiting for it to be available on the Mac App Store.