Eat Your Vegetables
Casey:
oh goodness uh john how was your trip to long island just lovely do you like the beach i hear you're plugging your phone in i am i'm really muted when i do that when you ask me a question so now you get to hear behind the scenes i plug in my phone so it charges while i record it's exciting why why not just do that when you go to bed i do how long of a time span is it between when the podcast ends and when you go to bed usually you never know
Casey:
Vacation was good.
Casey:
Anything interesting to report?
Casey:
You rented a camera.
Casey:
Would you like to or yeah, a whole camera, right?
Casey:
Would you like to talk about that at all?
John:
Yeah, camera and a bunch of lenses.
John:
This was Marco's recommendation of what camera I should rent.
John:
And the only reason I was doing it at all is because my wife is going off on a cruise with her mother, which is a thing to do.
John:
Maybe we'll talk about later.
John:
Um, and she decided that our camera is not good enough because she's had too much, uh, proximity exposure to Marco's fancy cameras and other people's fancy cameras.
John:
And it's like rubbing off on her.
John:
So she's like, we should get a better camera.
John:
And I'm like, I don't want to get a better, she's going to go on this vacation and she wants to have good pictures and she doesn't feel like our camera is up to the task.
John:
I think our camera is plenty up to the task.
Um,
John:
uh but she disagrees so i don't want to buy a new camera but i know marco rents camera so i asked him about his the camera rental service that he uses and he gave me the url and suggested a camera that we should rent because we didn't want something as big as marco's marco's is not big it's not as big as like the 5d or like it's not like a giant uh
Marco:
full-frame slr but yeah it's about as big as a mirrorless camera can get and still be a mirrorless camera yeah it's still it's still full frame but it doesn't have the mirrors in it to add some clarity here since everybody will be asking the site that i recommended you rent from is lens rentals.com there are a couple other sites that's the one i've used uh a lot over like same here oh geez i don't know maybe over a decade i've used it for a long time
Marco:
um they've been great no complaints i've rented both lenses and entire cameras from them they've been great lens rentals.com this is not a sponsorship the camera i recommended that you rent is the sony a6300 it is sony's new high-end but still crop sensor uh mirrorless camera it runs a little i think like 1200 bucks something in that range
Marco:
uh it's it's a very very good camera it's it's about as good as you can get without being a full frame sensor uh the camera that i have is the sony a7r2 which is a full frame sensor is a lot more money but is a lot bigger and is a lot higher quality images but the a6300 that i had john rent is incredibly good and i would say if you're looking for a mirrorless camera in the like thousand dollar range
Marco:
that seems like it should be very high on your list.
Marco:
That said, I have not actually used it.
Marco:
This is all based on review info and experience with other Sony cameras.
Marco:
So, John, how is the A6300?
John:
Well, looking at it compared to your camera, I was surprised to see that there are a couple of specs where the smaller or lesser camera is better.
John:
For instance, the number of photos it can take per second for burst mode is like double, maybe even triple in the highest setting.
John:
what yours does um and i think it had i don't know what these specs mean but like the number of areas of phase detection for auto focus was higher on this thing like there's a couple of attributes make me think that this camera and this sensor came out after yours is that the case they did yeah and also when you have a smaller and yeah they came out i think it was like six months or maybe a year after mine and uh well yeah about between six and nine months i think after mine
Marco:
And also when you have a... So a full frame sensor is a lot larger.
Marco:
I think it's 60% larger by area, something like that.
John:
It's double the megapixels too.
John:
Yours is 42, this is 24, so it's close to double.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
And so when you have a larger sensor and you have more pixels, it is much harder to make the surrounding electronics...
Marco:
able to deal with the sensor dumping like 100 photos a second off of it.
Marco:
And so usually the smaller sensors will have higher slow-mo video frame rates and higher burst per second capacity simply because there's a lot less data to deal with and that has to be pulled off that sensor.
John:
yeah and the reason we weren't looking at marco's camera specifically is not particularly because it's too expensive because the whole idea was we were going to rent it but just because it's it's big and you know we're going from a much smaller it's all relative well much smaller much lighter camera non-interchangeable lens camera we always have super zooms and they're all made of plastic so they're very light and uh they're they're small and if you're going to be walking all over europe maybe you don't want to go right from a small light camera to something as big as marco which again is not as big as a as a
John:
full frame slr but it's still pretty big and the magnesium aluminum body is not as heavy as like a steel body or something but it's way heavier than a plastic one so this was a kind of a good choice for like it's going to take good pictures but it's really it's a very small body like it's so small that a lot of the lenses look comical like a lot of the sony's have looked like this like they would the nex series and all that
John:
Yeah.
John:
made of like conical sections and ideal solids and stuff instead of saying no you have to you have to make it grippy so that's why when i used marco's camera when i first saw his i was happy to see that sony has learned hey you should put grippy stuff on the part where you grip it's got like nice grippy rubber you know like camera grip stuff if you make the whole thing a smooth beautiful rectangle with a
John:
um so the a6300 is basically like a shrunken version of marcos it's very small it's still relatively heavy but most of the weight is in the lenses if you use a larger lens and lenses i got was the the silly little kit lens that it comes with which is like a i forget it was like 15 to 50 or something power zoom something like that yeah something like that it's it's it's a very small zoom range it's a very compact uh lens and it doesn't seem to be very good um
John:
And I got a 50mm Prime, and I got a, what was it, 30-40-105 zoom?
John:
All these were Sony-branded lenses.
John:
That's another possible issue with these things, is that supposedly the Sony...
John:
can take third-party lenses and do autofocus on them, but Marcos has the advantage that all of the image stabilization stuff is in the body, not in the lens.
John:
Is this correct?
John:
I'm not... That's right.
Marco:
Well, it's both.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of the lenses have it, but yeah, mine has in-body stabilization.
John:
Right.
John:
And this one doesn't.
John:
So it relies somewhat on its ability to work with lenses.
John:
But there's a bunch of adapters for the lens and stuff.
John:
Anyway, I just got Sony lenses and I used it on vacation.
John:
Normally on my Long Island vacations, I take pictures, you know, just of the family hanging around at the beach.
John:
But I also take a lot of pictures of my family playing in the ocean.
John:
And when I take those pictures, I'm usually up to my knees or my waist in the ocean, in the ocean waves, in the surf.
John:
And that's not a really good place to be with an expensive camera.
John:
I've always assumed that one year a wave will get me and I will drop my camera.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
We're going on five years, 10 years.
John:
So far, it has not gotten me.
John:
And the streak continues.
John:
But I plan to not even bring the fancy camera to the ocean because I was like, well, you know, I'll use that one for all the pictures except the ocean pictures.
John:
And also, by the way, my SuperZoom.
John:
is a 600 millimeter zoom.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
Like it helps me get when the surf is like far out, I can be up to my knees and they can be way far out and I can still get close up.
John:
So I really, I really liked my camera.
John:
My super zoom, by the way, is the Canon FZ 200.
John:
Um,
John:
But when it came down to it, I'd taken so many pictures with the Sony, I didn't want to leave it at home.
John:
So I brought it to the beach with me.
John:
In fact, I brought both cameras to the beach.
John:
I took a bunch of pictures with my other camera.
John:
And I'm like, you know what?
John:
I could probably take a few with the Sony.
John:
Maybe go a little deeper.
John:
Maybe go up to my knees.
John:
Go up to my, you know.
John:
The main thing that was holding me back on the Sony is the zoom was just not, you know, it was only 105 millimeters.
John:
It's not, it wasn't getting me close enough.
John:
It was, so some of the pictures were kind of far, but then it gets 24 megapixels compared to whatever 12 or whatever my other thing is.
John:
So I could crop a lot of them to get the,
John:
Same image quality out of it.
John:
But I kept it out of the ocean.
John:
I think I got a couple of drops of water splashed on it, but none on the lens.
John:
I'm pretty good at staying away from all that and protecting the camera.
John:
The results were really nice.
John:
Henry liked it, and she's definitely going to bring it on her vacation.
John:
The only decision I have now is whether we're going to rent it again for her vacation or just buy it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I should point out that Lens Rentals has an incredibly broad insurance add-on that you can buy.
Marco:
So that would cover, I think it would cover your ocean fears.
John:
You have to pay 10% still.
John:
I paid for like whatever the most expensive insurance was against damage and theft.
John:
But even if the worst happens, you still have to pay 10%.
John:
And I had like, what was like a $600 lens, $150 lens, $100 lens, and $1,000 body or whatever.
John:
So 10% of that is still something I didn't want to pay.
Casey:
So how many lenses did you say you rented?
John:
Just three, just the prime zoom and the little kit lens thing.
John:
Cause I didn't know which one I would end up using more of it.
John:
As it turns out, what I ended up using was I almost never used the little kit lensy thing because I had two optically better lenses with me.
John:
Uh, and the indoors I use the prime because it was the, it was a F 1.8.
John:
It was the one that took the best low light pictures and outdoors.
John:
I use the zoom, even though it was relatively huge and
John:
just because it gave me the most flexibility.
Marco:
And in all fairness, your battle between the reach of the super zoom and the quality of the nice camera, in all fairness, I did recommend that you consider the Sony RX10, which is its super zoom.
John:
But it doesn't have the same reach as this one.
John:
I'm like, am I going to get a super zoom?
John:
I'm not going to get one that stops at 400 or something.
John:
The RX10 II maybe does go to 600, but there was some other aspect of it that was worse than my camera.
Marco:
I think the most recent one actually might go out that far.
Marco:
It got a pretty big update.
John:
but it doesn't it's not f 2.8 through the whole zoom range like like this thing is no that's pretty rare i mean it basically to achieve that you have to have a very small sensor i know well then i do so anyway um like this there's not not only is there no sony super zoom that i can get at any price that i feel like has better feature set universally better than the one i have but there's no panasonic one the panasonic upgraded my camera too and made it worse like from for my purposes but anyway the that's the problem with the zoom lenses the problem with all the sony lenses is that
John:
I don't know.
John:
The lenses get expensive really fast.
John:
There's no sort of maybe I could talk to you about what lenses I should get if I actually buy this thing.
John:
But there's no reasonably expensive zoom lens above like 100 something millimeter zoom.
John:
Like forget about a 600.
John:
Forget about a 400.
John:
I mean, I think I can get like a 400 for $12,000.
Marco:
So, you know, the problem is like what you're looking at here is you're looking at a lens system that spans from prosumer to really like low to kind of mid range pro.
Marco:
The Sony full frame sensors like the A7 series have become very popular very quickly among high end users.
Marco:
And we can have lots of debates over whether they are considered pro cameras or not, but it's kind of like asking whether the iPad is a computer.
Marco:
Whether or not they are pro cameras, by some people's definitions, they are still being used by a lot of pros for professional use.
Marco:
So it doesn't really matter whether you think they're a pro camera or not, because they are just incredibly good and incredibly compelling for a lot of reasons.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
The problem is that when you have these large, very dense, very high quality sensors, you need really good lens glass in front of those to be able to resolve enough detail to really take advantage of what those sensors have to offer.
Marco:
And so you can look at your little super zooms, and super zooms, they sacrifice a lot of image quality and optical quality to be able to put a large zoom range into a relatively compact and relatively inexpensive body.
Marco:
That's not really possible to... It's like something has to give there.
Marco:
If you're going to have to serve a very large, nice sensor with lots of megapixels of detail...
Marco:
And not have a bunch of distortion in the image.
Marco:
I mean, some of that you can correct with software, but, you know, still try to avoid it if you can.
Marco:
Then you have to either shorten the range in order to have less glass that needs to be in place to get that high quality image onto this high quality sensor without distorting.
Marco:
Or you have to put just a ton of glass in front of that thing.
Marco:
Tons of highly engineered lens elements and these very expensive, very large, very heavy lenses.
Marco:
And so it's just this trade-off between all these different factors of like, well, if you want to have something that is small and light and probably cheap and also has big zoom range, it can't have good optical quality.
Marco:
And if you want something that is small with good optical quality, you should really be probably using a prime.
Marco:
If you want something large with good optical quality and you have an unlimited budget and, you know, you don't mind carrying these giant heavy lenses, the lenses you see in the new high-end Sony FE lineup, that's the market they're targeting.
Marco:
They're targeting like the Canon L series lenses and stuff and whatever the Nikon, I forget what the Nikon Pro ones are called.
Marco:
They're targeting that market of, like, pro photographers, the people you see on the sidelines of, like, sports games, the giant white lenses.
Marco:
Like, they're targeting that market now because their cameras are so good, they're starting to be used in that kind of industry, which is pretty impressive for Amerilist to begin with.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So for what you're looking for, you should probably honestly consider the RX10, their super zoom, or at least only consider using the Sony for occasions in which you don't really need massive reach of a telephoto zoom.
Marco:
Because that's just like you're looking at a market that is designed for very different needs and is optimizing for very different factors in that tradeoff of lens design.
Marco:
uh you're trying to get out of that market like of like you know a 600 millimeter lens like try to find a 600 millimeter canon l lens and you will see quite how you know quite what this what this kind of quality what this kind of market is like uh it's you know they get pretty ridiculous pretty fast i would say this is kind of like your mac pro versus gaming pc thing right it's like you kind of want the impossible out of out of this high-end thing but what you really actually need is a low-end thing
John:
No, there's no 2008 Mac Pro equivalent.
John:
This 2008 Mac Pro was perfect in 2008.
John:
It did everything.
John:
So what I learned on the vacation is that I'm willing to give up the zoom range for the better quality.
John:
Because first of all, with the Prime, this can take pictures indoors that nothing else I have could take.
John:
This is the reason I never wanted to get high on camera because you get used to it and you're like, well, now I can't go back.
John:
How can you go back?
John:
from using you know a reasonably good camera for indoor photography like you can't go back because all the pictures other pictures are garbage indoors because there's no light and your phone can't get the light and nothing else can and you know so and then at the beach when i had the choice between both cameras i had them both right there i was using both of them eventually by the the last day we were at the ocean
John:
I just didn't even take out the Panasonic the whole time.
John:
I used the Sony the whole time, you know, and by that, then I was brave enough to go in the water with it.
John:
And I didn't mind the fact that I was a little bit farther away because the, you know, had more megapixels and I could crop them if I really needed to.
John:
But in the end, even if I was a little bit farther away, the increased image quality was, was worth it to me.
John:
I mean, so maybe like a little bit bigger zoom and maybe I can, you know, I'll shop around, but like I'm looking at Sony's lenses now, they're 500 millimeter.
John:
You're right that the signal is,
John:
when the lens is white run away it's probably like a rhyme when the lens is white the price is not right the 500 millimeter f4g ssm whatever those letters stand for twelve thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars so i don't think i'll be skipping that lens there's also the size of a truck like it's also a bad sign when the lens itself is the thing that mounts to the tripod and not the camera because now the camera is just hanging off the end of the lens these are all bad signs for your budget
John:
um oh a 300 millimeter one for only 7 500 anyway i'll probably just end up getting this camera with the kit lens and a prime and then save up for a zoom um because i mean i enjoyed it that much like it was it was heavier but not that much heavier and the size wise it was okay ergonomically and ui wise i still think cameras have a long way to go like
John:
I recognize this is a big improvement over the old Sony's because, again, my brother had an older one.
John:
This is better.
John:
It doesn't have a touchscreen, which would help, but camera manufacturers need to get over the idea that the best way to arrange all your options is...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
organized in any logical way of them like these are the camera settings these are the ones under gear these are settings but not camera related set it's just it's a terrible organization uh but at least they've gotten on the bmw page and said look we put a bunch of buttons on this thing and most cameras do this but apparently sony's been bad about this in the past we have a bunch of buttons you can program them all to do anything you want we printed something next to the buttons that have little you know abbreviations that tell you what they do by default
John:
But if you don't like that, you can make any button do anything for the most part, which is another Byzantine interface.
John:
What do you want this button to do?
John:
Scroll through this list of literally 70 options and find the thing you want.
John:
It's really terrible.
John:
And then everything cameras want to do on camera, like there's a tab that says apps.
John:
Just no, Sony.
John:
There are no apps that I want to run.
John:
I want your camera to take pictures, maybe on camera convert to JPEG, which, by the way, this one doesn't even do.
John:
It's just the RAWs you have to pull off.
John:
um but everything else wait what it doesn't convert to uh you can't do like in camera conversion where you shoot in raw and then uh fiddle with it uh and then do a conversion to jpeg before you pull it off oh okay that's what you mean you can shoot jpeg plus raw you can shoot raw you can shoot jpeg but a lot of cameras have a thing where you shoot in raw and then on the camera screw with the whatever you're going to screw with to get the you know pull out the detail from the shadows and blah blah blah and then just pull off jpegs that are burned in like that
Marco:
Why would you want to do that?
John:
To save room.
John:
Because that's another thing.
John:
Now I understand my brother has the problem that he can't use iCloud Library because he has more than one terabyte of photos.
John:
And why does he have more than one terabyte of photos?
John:
Because he shoots RAW on his little Sony.
John:
And so, yeah, each of these RAWs is like 25 megs each compared to like three or four megs in JPEG and even smaller.
John:
And so I filled a 64 gig card and a little bit of another card.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, in all fairness, buying a larger SD card is probably a lot easier and they're pretty cheap now than having to fiddle with like taking up space on the camera because the other thing too is like a larger SD card is a gettable easily, you know, pretty easily thing.
Marco:
uh what is not so easy is to get these cameras batteries to last very long when the screens are on and it's been i mean that's the one thing like sony i love my camera i love almost everything about it but the battery life is embarrassing and i have like all these different power saving tips like it has wi-fi but you can put it in airplane mode turn the wi-fi i did that immediately as soon as i took this out of the box yeah
Marco:
My camera has always been in airplane mode because the battery life is so bad.
Marco:
I need all the help I can get.
John:
I had to turn the back screen on sunny day mode.
John:
I'm sure you don't have yours in sunny day mode because sunny day mode means max brightness on the screen.
John:
And guess what?
John:
I needed that because it was a sunny day at the beach.
John:
Otherwise, I couldn't see a thing and I couldn't use the viewfinder the whole time.
Marco:
Yeah, I usually, when I'm shooting, I will almost always be using the optical viewfinder just because I prefer the additional detail that I'm able to see just because it is closer to my eye and there's no outside light coming in and everything else.
Marco:
So anyway, so yeah, I mean, honestly, I recommend possibly giving up on the idea of zooms for the most part because honestly, like...
Marco:
the trade-off is so big in terms of you know quality or size and money like like you can get zooms that are you know and this is there's only very few of them that this is true for but you can get zooms that are about as good as as most primes they do exist but they're massive heavy and very expensive and there aren't that many of them
Marco:
Most zooms, you're giving up a lot of quality to get that zoom flexibility.
Marco:
And if you think about it, when you shoot with your iPhone, you have a prime on there, except for the next large iPhone Plus that's going to have the optical zoom.
Marco:
So when you shoot with your iPhone, you're shooting with effectively a 35mm prime.
Marco:
And you've been shooting with that 35mm Prime on your iPhone for the last seven years or whatever, however long it's... Well, you haven't, John.
Marco:
Everyone else has.
Marco:
It's been a while, and we've gotten used to that, and it's fine.
Marco:
And it turns out that when you just have a decent Prime in the wide to normal range...
Marco:
uh you can get pretty much all of your photography done that that way for you know most of the time and it's great and the trade-off is worth it of like well if you have a prime here then you can make this thing much smaller and cheaper and have higher quality and everything same thing is true for any size camera anybody listening if you have a an slr anything with interchangeable lenses if you don't have a prime lens which means it's fixed at one focal length you can't zoom it it's you zoom with your feet
Marco:
If you don't have a prime lens, whatever camera system you own, get the cheap 50mm prime lens for it.
Marco:
Almost every camera system has something like this where it is 50mm or whatever the equivalent is for your sensor size.
Marco:
uh usually it's f 1.8 and usually it's like a hundred bucks in that range it's it's fairly inexpensive for a lens the optical quality you can get out of those is it just kicks the butts of zoom lenses it so and you know that like like you were saying earlier john you that's the one you see you were saying you were using indoors because when you're indoors or when you're you know when it's not that much light
Marco:
You can really get a lot of light in there.
Marco:
And even when you have lots of light, the sharpness and the color and just the optical quality that you get out of these lenses is amazing because they can be so much simpler than a zoom.
Marco:
Like just there's fewer elements.
Marco:
The elements, you know, they can afford to get higher quality optics in there at that price point when you don't have all those elements to zoom things or to have a weird perspective or the extreme, you know, wide or extreme narrow.
Marco:
Primes are just so nice.
Marco:
I've found that even when I have a big camera, I spend the vast majority of my time using primes.
Marco:
And even when I've used zooms, I mostly have not liked the pictures that I get from them.
Marco:
The primes are just so much better.
Marco:
And so I urge anybody with cameras out there to consider just shooting with primes because it really is incredible.
Marco:
And there are situations where you where you quote need a zoom, but I bet there's a lot fewer of those than you expect.
Marco:
And for a lot of camera owners, you basically never have that.
Marco:
You basically never have those.
Marco:
And a lot of those can be covered by renting.
Casey:
Yeah, so we're going on a trip soon, and I have rented a lens from LensRentals.com.
Casey:
I did so a few days ago because I also use LensRentals, although probably a lot less frequently.
Casey:
I rented a 35-100mm zoom for my Micro Four Thirds camera.
Casey:
And I did that because I want to be able to be a creeper, basically.
Casey:
I want to be able to capture – what I mean by that is with my own family.
Casey:
Oh, God, take it out of context.
Casey:
That sounds terrible.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Dear God.
Casey:
No, what I mean by that is so if we're all at a beach or if we're all in a rented house together, so it's the only people I know.
Casey:
I don't want to have to get up in somebody's face in order to take a really good picture of them.
Casey:
I want to be able to be across the room where they don't even know I'm taking a picture.
Casey:
So it's a lot more natural.
Casey:
But that being said, generally speaking, the only lens that is ever on my camera is a 25 millimeter.
Casey:
I have no idea what the equivalent of that is in a SLR, but it's a 25 millimeter.
Marco:
I think it is a 50 equivalent.
Marco:
Your pictures look just like 50 pictures.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So it's a 25 millimeter F1.4 that Sean Blanc had recommended that
Casey:
And it is very expensive.
Casey:
It was like $600, but it is a unbelievably phenomenally good lens to my eye.
Casey:
And I don't know crap about this stuff.
Casey:
And if I ever take a decent picture, it's because I've gotten lucky and because of this lens.
Casey:
And I rented this zoom, just like Marco said, because I want to have something to take the pictures, you know, maybe in the surf or something like John was describing or, or take pictures from across the room.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I never bother with a zoom and I do have the kit zoom for this Olympus camera that I have.
Casey:
And it's fricking terrible.
John:
I can't give up on the zoom, though.
John:
Like the one I was using, this is a cheap zoom lens, like $600, 18 to 105 millimeter Sony zoom lens.
John:
It's for it's for the APS-C format.
John:
It's not a full frame lens.
John:
So maybe that's why it's cheaper.
John:
And I was really happy with the pictures it took outdoors in the bright sunlight on the beach.
John:
And it's the same reason Casey said I'm most of the time I like to have candid pictures and either I don't want to or can't.
John:
get close so like people are all around i can't get close to them if i do they start acting weird so i have to you know or they're far out far out on the water like they see you coming with the camera and they all turn and smile and ham it up and i like candid pictures better and so i can capture them like 100 millimeter zoom is enough for like in a
John:
outdoor gathering of people to get close enough to get groups of people as if you're right up next to them without being up next to them in the surf it's a little bit it's a little bit low but again i can i can crop um and i mean to my eye obviously the the aperture wasn't like it was on the prime like so you couldn't you know open it up super wide and get the entire you know background nice and blurred and everything sharpened and maybe that i had you know i had the little the f1.8 50 millimeter prime that marco was talking about cheap uh but good um
John:
but i mostly outdoors i use the big zoom and i thought i would be bothered by how darn big it is but it was i was able to wrangle it fairly easily and i felt like it was worth it like that's that's lens believe it or not that i ended up using the most i thought i would end up using the prime the most but i end up using this fairly large zoom the most so i don't know what i'm gonna do maybe i'll just get that same lens it's only six hundred dollars but in the beginning i'll probably just get the prime and the kit lens or maybe i'll buy the body without a lens and just get the prime for it just to save some money i don't know i haven't decided yet
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Casey:
Our days, Marco, of lording over John and feeling superior to him, I'm sad to say they're over because John now has a blue checkmark.
Marco:
I was afraid you were going to say he finally got a new computer.
Marco:
Oh, God, no.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Let's not get ridiculous.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, John, congrats on your blue checkmark, my friend.
John:
My computer's still better than yours, too, Casey.
Casey:
is it doesn't crash i was waiting for it that's why i didn't say anything because i knew that was coming before we go to the check marks what what is the status of your computer has has the problem recurred it has not and i haven't lost power for uh let's see uh six days 14 hours and 28 minutes still stock ram in it is your computer plugged into the ups yet no it's not because i don't want to reboot it that's why
Casey:
because i wanted to i wanted to keep this damn run going uh it has not lost power it's not rebooted it's it does still have the oem ram in it so i am still perhaps perhaps unfairly i'm still convinced it's the uh max sales ram okay well you should get it get on getting that replaced then did you download that mem test x64 thing that does like the super duper thorough ram test i did not x86 come on
John:
whatever it is that's what i that's what i said in my head but my mouth did something different you're such not a pc nerd every pc nerd knows that all right that's what i said in my head but the words came out differently it's pronounced 1086 no but what did i actually say you said x64 oh i was probably thinking uh you know the modern instruction set they should rename their memory test
Casey:
So anyway, the point is this is still going strong on the OEM RAM.
Casey:
And whenever this thing decides to reboot itself or I lose power next or after like two to four weeks, I haven't decided what I consider to be a long enough run.
Casey:
Then at that point, I will officially start the RMA process with Max Sales.
Marco:
Didn't you have to install the 10, whatever, 6 update recently?
Marco:
The really critical security updates with the image parsing?
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
I know what you're talking about.
Casey:
I don't recall if I did it or not.
Marco:
You should do that if you haven't yet.
Casey:
Yeah, well.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, we'll see.
Casey:
Maybe I'll just not use my computer for the next week.
Casey:
So this way I don't have to reboot it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But anyway, so to come back on point, John, you are verified.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Casey:
You are a sellout just like me.
Casey:
We are not good enough like Marco to have had received our check marks without solicitation.
Marco:
In all fairness, I did basically ask for it, just not directly.
John:
Yeah, I guess that's just the informal version of the same thing.
John:
But most importantly, now we are the fully verified podcast, obviously.
John:
So is analog for that matter.
John:
Many fully verified podcasts are happening now.
John:
Let's just put that.
John:
By the way, you know, so I got my checkmark.
John:
Fatici did not get his.
John:
Brianna did not get hers.
John:
So there is still... Rene.
John:
Rene didn't get his?
John:
Nope.
Marco:
He was still waiting.
Marco:
He just hasn't heard back yet.
Marco:
Rejected.
John:
No, he got rejected.
John:
Rejected.
John:
i don't know what the world's coming to i don't know what the hell's going on anyway there's still massive injustice in this world there is for those of us who don't actually need it on this podcast guess what we got it makes no sense oh and people are asking me if i'm going to change my bio that i complained about mostly on rec diffs about having to write this silly bio now i'm afraid to change it because i'm afraid if i change it i'll lose my check mark
John:
So I just have to leave this silly, embarrassing bio there forever?
John:
Or maybe just give it a year and then it's safe for me to change it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So do I have to be influencer forever?
Casey:
I think you can change it.
Casey:
I'm not sure if you make it go away if they'll get upset.
Casey:
Because part of what you have to do to have a checkmark is to have a bio.
Casey:
The funny thing about this whole experience for me is that I have apparently become, I don't know how to put this.
Casey:
Maybe I've become like the litmus test for like, oh, Casey got verified.
Casey:
Of course, insert person here should totally be verified.
Casey:
So I saw that about Renee.
Casey:
I saw that about Federico.
Casey:
Dude, Casey got verified.
Casey:
Of course, this person should be verified.
Casey:
So that's my new claim to fame.
Casey:
I should change my bio.
Casey:
I'm that guy you couldn't believe got verified.
Casey:
That's me.
Casey:
you just have to find someone who you think is even less deserving of being verified and then you just point to them yeah right god i don't know whatever but yeah so i get to see those tweets fly by like every every few hours dude renee didn't get his thing i can't believe that casey got one god my favorite thing is like how how when people are just like backhand insulting you like this they feel the need to add to mention you to mention exactly exactly it's so true
Casey:
Like, okay, if you want to think that, I mean, knowing me, I'll probably find it in a vanity search because hello.
Casey:
But at least have the decency not to mention me.
Casey:
So anyway, so we are the Fully Verified Podcast, and that's very exciting.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Where is Tiff these days, Marco?
Marco:
I don't know how to pronounce the more specific location.
Marco:
However, the general location is France.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Yeah, Tiff, my wife, is on a vacation for the week, so I am solo parenting this week.
Marco:
how's that gone well i mean it's only been like three days so far so for these three days it's been totally fine uh but there's four more something like that yeah so they're still a while to go i'm mainly finding it challenging that like like last night you know so last night was sunday night and uh he he's in he's in like a school day camp like just like you know day camp at his preschool because it's summertime and
Marco:
i have to pack his lunch every day and i realized last night that like a big part of what we pack is fruit of some kind like you know raspberries or strawberries or something and there was just nothing in the fridge so we had none and he was already in bed it was like 10 o'clock at night and i'm like well also marco doesn't know where food comes from no food usually comes from me going shopping for it but i can't leave the house with him asleep you gotta go shopping with the kid imagine that
Marco:
Yeah, that's what we did today.
Marco:
There's just little things like that that I had to realize, oh, when you have two parents in the house, one of them can leave and go run an errand and you don't go to jail.
Marco:
So it's...
Marco:
So it's been a slight learning experience like that.
Marco:
But otherwise, yeah, things have been going pretty, you know, like I've had him before alone.
Marco:
Just I think this is the longest span that we've ever had.
Marco:
Now see the chat room.
Marco:
See, this is a rookie mistake here.
Marco:
So Sip in the chat room has suggested that I go food shopping while he is at camp.
Marco:
That is an interesting idea.
Marco:
Sip, I thought of that.
Marco:
However, then after school in the six hours before he goes to bed, that's one less thing we could do together.
Casey:
we have a whole week here a whole week so we got any any errand that i can run with him i'm going to run with him yep i know those feels and that actually uh segues uh somewhat nicely into a brief bit of follow-up i wanted to discuss which was um a friend of the show underscore david smith came down to visit on friday evening into saturday morning
Casey:
We watched The Hunt for October together because it's one of the best movies in the entire world.
Casey:
Come at me.
Casey:
And then Saturday morning, which is I think you guys do Sunday, Marco, but in the list household, we do a Saturday morning into into nap time, daddy time.
Casey:
And Dave joined me on this and we took his Tesla to Cars and Coffee.
Casey:
It was underscore and Declan and myself.
Casey:
And we took the Tesla to Cars and Coffee.
Casey:
And it was funny because I had promised him that we would try to find the self-organizing group of Teslas that always shows up.
Casey:
There's typically three or four of them.
Casey:
I even saw a Model X there one or two times ago, which was surprising.
Casey:
but anyway we showed up in the tesla and i drove there which i was slightly perturbed by only because i felt like this was dave's big moment and uh you know here it is you know you can get out of his car and be like yes well this is so not underscore style but yes look at me in my tesla this is mine and i am proud of it uh but instead it was me instead it was me who got out of the driver's seat and of course uh we we stepped out of the job or i stepped out of the driver's seat within i kid you not 15 seconds somebody came running over to ask questions i basically threw my hands in the air and
Casey:
Wave them like I just don't care.
Casey:
No, I threw my hands in the air and said, dude, it's his car.
Casey:
You should ask him about it.
Casey:
But yeah, it made quite a splash.
Casey:
People quite liked it.
Casey:
We were backed in, as you do, because I'm not an animal.
Casey:
And I was backed in against a Maserati.
Casey:
So it was pretty interesting.
Casey:
But it was funny how many people were just completely impressed by and interested in the Tesla.
Casey:
And perhaps even more surprisingly, really loved the rear jump seats.
Casey:
They really thought the rear jump seats were interesting to the point that I think it was a kid.
Casey:
It was like 15, 18 year old, something like that.
Casey:
Asked if he could jump in the jump seats just to see how they how they felt, how they felt, which underscore because he's the nicest man alive was like, yeah, sure, definitely.
Yeah.
Casey:
Definitely feel free.
Casey:
But it was funny.
Casey:
And underscore is hysterical watching him do this because he's like the most easygoing guy.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be able to hide the fact that my, you know, my plumage had come out in full force, if you will, if it were me.
Casey:
But underscore is just like, yeah, you know, it's a thing.
Casey:
He's just so much better than I am.
Marco:
He's just way cooler than all of us.
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
What a nice car, though.
Casey:
I kind of am mad at him now because I've forgotten how much I hate my car.
Casey:
I had forgotten how much I hate my car, and then I drove his Tesla again, and now I hate my car again.
Marco:
You have a very nice car.
Casey:
Just the Tesla's better.
Casey:
I have a wonderful car.
Casey:
I truly do.
Casey:
But God, the Tesla's so nice.
Marco:
I saw a white M3 today and thought of you.
Casey:
Oh, thanks, buddy.
Casey:
A new one or an older one?
Marco:
That was the last generation, the one that you like, but it was the two door like convertible.
Marco:
I think it was convertible is at least two door.
Marco:
So it was like the weird one.
Casey:
Snap question.
Casey:
I know we're not really in the neutral part of the show, but I have to ask a friend, a friend of the show who will remain nameless has been debating between M2 and Boxster S. What do you think?
Marco:
So with the caveat that I've driven neither, I would say, I mean, those are very different cars.
Marco:
Like the Boxster is like, you know, it's convertible, I assume, right?
Marco:
Because the Cayman is the non-convertible one, right?
Marco:
So yeah, so it's convertible.
Marco:
It's probably smaller if I had to take a guess.
Marco:
I would guess the Boxster is probably more expensive.
John:
It is.
John:
Why are you waffling?
John:
There's an obvious answer here.
Casey:
Marco, finish your thought.
Casey:
Then I want to hear the obvious answer.
John:
So get the M2.
John:
That's not it.
John:
That's not the answer.
John:
The correct answer is to get, first of all, don't get the new generation Boxster, like the one with the turbo engine.
John:
Get the previous generation Boxster.
John:
If it's still on sale, if not get like a used one, that's the obvious choice.
John:
It's so much better than the M2 in every possible way.
John:
It will make you happier.
John:
Because if you're already shopping for M2 or Boxster, you're already not looking for like, oh, I need something to haul the groceries to the kids.
John:
Get the previous generation non-turbocharged Boxster.
Marco:
Well, so again, having driven none of these two cars and now the third I'm about to mention, why get the Boxster when you can get the Cayman?
Marco:
Isn't the Cayman better in every way and it has all the same advantages of the Boxster?
John:
This person wants a convertible, obviously, if they're shopping Boxster.
John:
I mean, it's convertible.
John:
The top comes.
John:
It's a big difference.
John:
If you're shopping a convertible, you're not confused about whether you want a convertible.
John:
You want a convertible.
John:
Nobody wants a convertible.
John:
People like them.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
The convertible, it's one of those decisions that you should sway people away from.
Marco:
Like, no, trust me, you don't want a convertible.
John:
Well, this person wants one, and I think it's fine.
John:
And the Boxster is just a more special car.
John:
Yes, it is more expensive.
John:
The M2 is a good car.
John:
If you were shopping like M2 versus M3, then we could have a real discussion.
John:
But if it's M2 versus Boxster, no contest.
John:
Boxster.
Marco:
Previous gen.
Marco:
I know you want to wear socks with sandals, but trust me, you don't want to wear socks with sandals.
Marco:
You don't want a convertible.
Marco:
Convertible.
John:
Convertibles are not socks with sandals.
John:
Convertibles are fun experiences.
John:
We're not talking about like Jaguar convertibles from the 80s that are going to leak water all over you and short out.
John:
The modern convertibles are fine.
John:
No, they're not.
John:
They're never fine.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Convertible is a fine car in general.
Casey:
I really do like convertibles.
Casey:
But yeah, this particular individual, let's just say that they're always on vacation.
Casey:
So it would make sense for this particular individual to be shopping a convertible.
Casey:
But anyway, yeah, I was just curious.
Casey:
Years ago, in like, I don't know, 2005, a friend of a friend had a Boxster S. And this was when they were still pretty new.
Casey:
And I drove that Boxster S. And I got in that car thinking, oh, this is just an imposter 911.
Casey:
I'm going to hate this piece of garbage.
Casey:
And oh, my God, did I love it.
Casey:
It was phenomenally good.
Casey:
I was stunned.
Casey:
I could see how the non-S Boxster would be kind of a dog and kind of boring, but man, the Boxster S was nice.
Casey:
This was way back in 05.
Casey:
I haven't driven an M2.
Casey:
There is a friend at work that has an M2 35i that I have yet to drive, but he promised me I could at some point, and this obviously is just that but more.
Casey:
But yeah, the old Boxsters anyway were super nice.
Casey:
I'm curious to see how this new one is.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Glasses should be affordable enough that they can be viewed as a fashion accessory, not costing as much as like an iPhone.
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
John:
Quick follow-up on the neutral thing.
John:
Apparently, the 2016 model is the bad Boxster.
John:
It's when they added 718 to the public-facing name, the Porsche 718 Boxster.
John:
That's the 2016 model.
John:
Don't get that one.
John:
You want the 2015 Boxster, which doesn't have a number in the name.
John:
It does have a number.
John:
981 is the number behind the scenes, but it's just called Boxster.
John:
So it's confusing, I know, because car model years always are, and they do look very similar, but...
John:
The 2016 one with the turbo four-cylinder engine thumbs down.
Casey:
So we thought the neutral part of the show was over, but turns out it's not.
Casey:
Apple has hired somebody from QNX, which is interesting.
Casey:
So QNX is a company that makes an operating system also called QNX.
Casey:
And that operating system, I understand to run a bunch of embedded systems, not the least of which is, is it the entertainment system in cars or is it the actual like ECU in cars?
John:
I don't think it's, well, it might be the ECU, but I think what it's most known for is like the reason people care about QNX at all is because it's a real time operating system.
John:
So you would never need a real time operating system to run like your infotainment because those things are slow as molasses anyway.
John:
Oh my God, so slow.
John:
Yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes about what the Wikipedia entry and real time operating system, which describes it pretty well.
John:
But basically, a real time operating system is the only situation where you can make guarantees about when things will happen.
John:
So you can say we guarantee that this thing will be serviced in a maximum of this amount of time.
John:
Right.
John:
It is hard real time and soft real time, soft real time.
John:
You know, tries very hard to to give, you know, computing time to certain things in certain intervals and hard real time is like, look, this is a part of the system.
John:
You are going to be able to service this in a certain interval at minimum and use hard real time systems for things like.
John:
space probes or flight control systems where you can't have like a space probe whizzing around the solar system and have it go to do something that has to be done with millisecond precision and then have a memory allocation happen or an interrupt happen when you didn't expect it and not have your routine serviced for an extra couple of milliseconds because there was like a little hiccup right on our personal computers those little hiccups and glitches happen all the time
John:
But in real-time operating systems, especially hard real-time operating systems, the whole design is made so that can't happen ever.
John:
And the reason this comes up for automotive things is there are some things in automotive systems that are like that.
John:
You know, anti-lock brakes, possibly also engine control.
John:
Things where you can't ever have any kind of hiccup.
John:
You always have to have things done on a certain timeline, within a certain deadline, with some fuzz on either side of it.
John:
But, like, there are limits that...
John:
You need things to happen right now, guaranteed every single time, no possibility that it could happen.
John:
So I think we talked about this when we were talking about what could Apple bring to cars with software.
John:
And we talked a lot about the infotainment systems and the UI and the things that Tesla does on its big touchscreen.
John:
And that's all well and good.
John:
And Apple will probably be good at that.
John:
And you could basically run iOS on that and you'll be fine.
John:
But for the other parts of the car, the driving parts, whether they be self-driving or just simply driver aids or smart cruise control or engine control and stuff like that, that stuff has to be real time because it's a safety issue.
John:
You can't have, you know, you can't have any like stutter or whatever that you see in regular operating systems.
John:
And, you know, operating systems like OS X do have things where they try to give you guaranteed times like audio processing.
John:
But anyone who's ever used audio on a Mac knows that, you know,
John:
It's not a hard real-time operating system.
John:
You can get it into situations where you have underflow and you have a little stutter and your disk isn't fast enough or whatever.
John:
Parts of the whole chain can fall down to give you a failure, whether it be audio or video.
John:
But a hard real-time system just simply can't do that.
John:
It has to.
John:
give guaranteed time slices to uh all the software that's running which means it's much a very different thing for you to create you wouldn't create a real-time operating system even for something like the watch it would be silly um but it's very different than anything apple has ever created to my knowledge and so that's why it's interesting to see this person who i think there was like the the founder of qnx or some that's right some big wig in qnx it's not like he's the one writing the real-time operating system but he was well in the beginning but you know what i mean like now i'm sure apple's not hiring him to write their operating system but
John:
If you're going to hire someone to be in charge of the real-time operating system effort for your car or whatever, the guy who is the founder of QNX is a pretty darn good hire.
Casey:
Yeah, and real-time follow-up from Wikipedia where everything is guaranteed to be true.
Casey:
At the Geneva Motor Show, Apple demonstrated CarPlay, which provides an iOS-like user interface to head units and compatible devices.
Casey:
Once configured by the manufacturer, QNX can be programmed to hand off its display and certain functionality to an Apple CarPlay device.
Casey:
So it seems, at least for now, that QNX will be used for CarPlay.
Casey:
But like John has described, maybe even more than that.
John:
And BlackBerry bought QNX.
John:
Like, it's not as if QNX is only useful for real time.
John:
Like, BlackBerry brought them.
John:
It's like, oh, they can be our phone OS.
John:
Like, QNX is a flexible operating system.
John:
You can make do whatever you want.
John:
But...
John:
And for if Apple's ever going to do any self-driving stuff or even just like the barrier to entry for just a basic car with simple smart cruise control and lane departure warning and stuff like that, or even just anti-lock braking systems or whatever.
John:
You need a real-time operating system to do that type of functionality.
John:
And the question was always, is Apple going to invent one in-house?
John:
Does it already have one in-house?
John:
Is it going to?
John:
I mean, obviously, it hired this guy, didn't buy QNX.
John:
I forget who owns the assets to QNX.
John:
Maybe is BlackBerry still around?
John:
I guess they still own it at this point.
John:
Anyway, this is a problem that they need solved if they're ever going to make a car.
John:
like an actual complete car instead of just like some component of a car or the software system for a car.
John:
So I think this is the first public signal that they are serious about this aspect of the car as opposed to all the rumors like, well, of course it's going to be self-driving and of course it's going to do that.
John:
This hire really only makes sense in the context of car software that does the car stuff, the safety-related car stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, and the gentleman's name is Dan Dodge, for the record.
Casey:
The unfortunate name for our car.
Casey:
Well, he ended up in automotive, sort of, so I guess that makes sense, right?
John:
I know, but Dodge is not really the brand that Apple probably wants to evoke.
Casey:
Eh, I don't know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
I'm at least in part a product of a Mopar family, so...
Casey:
Nobody's perfect.
Casey:
But yeah, it's really interesting.
Casey:
Like you said, John, I think what's most interesting about this to me is that it's a public signal that Apple is moving towards automotive.
Casey:
I mean, sure, you could interpret this in many other ways.
Casey:
Sure, QNX does seem to underpin BlackBerry 10 or the newest BlackBerry operating system, I think.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is,
Casey:
All signs point to this being an automotive-related hire and a high-profile one.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
There's smoke, there's fire, and there's ever-increasing amounts of smoke.
Marco:
It seems like Apple is kind of like decreasingly coy about their car plans.
Marco:
They're just not even denying them anymore.
Marco:
And they're just like, yeah, okay, you guys all know we're making a car, right?
Yeah.
John:
And something they could do, which is definitely an Apple move, is for the first car that comes out in 2020 or whatever, like if they're just starting their real-time operating system ever now, it's not going to be ready in time for that, right?
John:
So what they can do is release a car that's not self-driving, that merely uses third-party components for its engine control and its anti-lock brakes and its airbags and everything.
John:
it's smart cruise control these are all things that you can buy you know from various manufacturers off the shelf then apple does the car play part of the car right and ui and all the things that are not real time that are just you know ui type things and that's still a perfectly good apple car and in the meantime over the next three or four or five years they work on their self-driving thing with their own real-time operating system that it's kind of like the ipod approach of where you know they
John:
They have that PixOS thing or whatever from a third party that they licensed and use in their iPods.
John:
But when it came time to do the iPhone, they didn't port that over, although that was one of the competing options internally.
John:
They did their own thing.
John:
It takes a long time to do your own thing.
John:
I'm not sure, depending on what stage they're at now, if that's coming on board to...
John:
shepherd their multi-year running real-time operating system effort to just make sure like it's on track and to you know get it going then maybe they can hit 2020 but if they're just starting their effort now and staffing up i don't think they're going to be ready in time for a car in 2020 and i don't think they need to be because
John:
Nobody has produced a completely self-driving car at this point.
John:
They can drive on any roads.
John:
And I don't think Apple's going to in 2020 either.
John:
So it might be smart to put out a car that is impressive and good in all the ways that Apple's cars can be good, but that Apple outsources all the parts that it's not innovating in essentially like.
John:
They don't have any particular innovation to add to anti-lock braking or adaptive cruise control or engine control, and so there's no reason for them to put their own operations.
John:
In fact, it's a huge risk to do that.
John:
There are third-party vendors who make parts for the rest of the car industry that you can buy those things from, both software and hardware, and they should just do that and put all their effort into the design of the car and the UI and the parts that they're good at.
Casey:
uh all right so i guess we're out of the neutral portion of the show which means i only have one thing left to talk about and then we might have to go through the stupid tivo section i offer i can explain the mp3 file format to you if you want and why podcasts apparently aren't and maybe can't be vbr oh yeah where did that go that was in the show notes then it disappeared john demoted it right before the show oh i almost demoted the swift thing too because i don't think there's much to say but you put it there casey so what do you have to say about swift the swift update
John:
it's going to be quick to be honest mostly i just wanted to hear hear your reaction to the line about uh the the goal being to be better at regular or what was it regular expressions than pearl wait you don't even remember it i'm i'm read i'm on the swift evolution mailing list i read all these things i'm i am soaking in it there's nothing you can tell me about swift that is going to be a surprise that's a reference to an ad that was on before you were both born
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
Anyway, so tell me, John, what you think about this claim that Swift will be better than string processing than Perl.
John:
It's not a claim.
John:
It's a goal.
John:
And a goal is not a promise, if you would know if you read the thing.
Casey:
Yes, I did read it.
Casey:
I did read it.
Casey:
I'm just trying to get a rise out of you.
Casey:
Anyway, tell me about it.
John:
Yeah, no, but it's fine.
John:
So like Swift 3, it had a lot of lofty goals.
John:
Some of them they missed, particularly ABI stability they didn't get.
John:
not API, ABI, Application Binary Interface, which basically means can Apple build a library in Swift and ship it with their operating system and then people ship applications that link to that binary and then can they update that binary in the next version of the operating system and not break people's applications because the applications are linking into the library and expecting things to be in certain places and find certain symbols.
John:
How do you update that?
John:
You need ABI stability.
John:
If you change the calling convention for your libraries,
John:
and you release a new version of that library, it will break everybody's applications because their binaries expect to call into it in a different way.
John:
So Swift is still at the point where they haven't nailed that down.
John:
And they wanted to do that for Swift 3, but they didn't make it.
John:
A lot of the things they did do in Swift 3 are the reason, because they're still trying to nail down generics and some other features that affect ABI and also this resiliency stuff where it's like...
John:
if we change aspects of the language, uh, again, can, can we make a new version of the library and have the old applications still work with it?
John:
This is important for, it's mostly important for an OS vendor because that's what Apple does.
John:
They ship libraries like UI kit and many other, you know, that's an umbrella framework, but whatever, um, huge libraries that applications link against individual application developers for the most part, unless they have like a suite of applications and they have their own frameworks that they share between them, you can always as an application vendor, just statically link your whole thing, but you're going to dynamically link to the OS libraries.
John:
Um,
John:
But up until this point, everyone shipping a Swift app was sort of shipping with the entire Swift standard library as part of their application because it was the only safe way to do that.
John:
And that's sort of untenable even for applications to be shipped that way.
John:
So Apple's going to fix that problem in Swift 4.
John:
That is now their goal for Swift 4.
John:
They still have some issues to work out, leftover stuff from Swift 3.
John:
to make that possible and they're trying to do swift four in two phases one is like the important stuff and then there's like the frills interestingly the in the important stuff section the stage one of swift four was the thing that casey was talking about is that they're going to take another crack at their strings they've changed their strings a couple times already
John:
And they're going to fiddle with them again.
John:
And their goal is to be as good at string handling as Perl is, which is actually a fairly lofty goal because Perl, for all its historic weirdness, is actually really fast at dealing with strings and can do things that most other languages can't do in terms of Unicode and all sorts of cool stuff like that.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I was going to ask you about this.
Casey:
Now I am not trying to needle you.
Casey:
I'm honestly asking, what makes Perl so good at string processing?
Casey:
I know that regular expressions are, I guess, like a first-class citizen or something, but I've written very little Perl in my life, and it was a long time ago.
Casey:
So can you give an executive summary of what makes Perl so darn good at this?
Casey:
Because it seems universally accepted that it is.
Casey:
So why?
Why?
John:
Well, there's two aspects.
John:
One is string representation, which is weird in Perl for historical reasons and is actually very complicated.
John:
But, for example, in a language like Objective-C that doesn't sort of have native strings, like you've got, you know, character pointers, which are no good for you because we live in the modern world, and then you've got NSString.
John:
And then a string is like UTF-16 under the covers.
John:
And there's all sorts of methods to get what you want, but it's not a particularly efficient format.
John:
If you had to pick, like, you would never pick UTF-16 as an internal representation format because it's just not, it's not the way to do things in the modern world.
John:
It's bigger than you want it to be.
John:
It's still not fixed size because you have things that take, you know, it's not everyone, you know, you have characters that take multiple, uh,
John:
uh sets of uh bytes and you know it's not it's not uniform like an array like it has all the disadvantages none of the advantages um pearl's representation used to just be bag of bytes and they were smart enough to switch to utf-8 internally pearl can do everything every other uh language can in terms it has libraries that you could encode and decode however you want
John:
The way you want to write things in Perl is when you pull data into Perl from whatever, from the disk, from the network or whatever, that string data, you have to know the encoding, obviously, because otherwise, how do you know how to deal with it?
John:
And you want to sort of decode it into Perl's internal representation.
John:
Then all through your Perl program, you want to deal with, I don't know what you want to call them, like Perl strings, where...
John:
They are just strings that Perl understands that you don't have to deal with the encoding.
John:
And all of Perl's functions in terms of regular expressions and substring matching and all sorts of other stuff deal with them as logical sets of characters.
John:
I don't want to call them characters, but anyway, as Unicode code points, right?
John:
And when you output them, whether it be a disk file or a terminal or over the network or whatever, at that point, you decide how you want to encode it for a transmission.
John:
You turn it back into a byte sequence, whether it be UTF-8, 16, so on and so forth.
John:
And because the modern world basically uses UTF-8 everywhere...
John:
And Perl, you know, secret, secret, unbeknownst to you, uses UTF-8 internally as its internal representation.
John:
You can go through that whole cycle without ever having to encode and decode, which is not the case for NSString, which isn't a native feature of Objective-C.
John:
And every time you come from UTF-8 into NSString and from NSString back to UTF-8, it's an expensive process.
John:
So that's just like at the most fundamental level.
John:
Why is it convenient to deal with stuff in Perl?
John:
Because they picked a good internal representation format because they have a system that says...
John:
We decode on the way in our entire working with the string in the program.
John:
You don't have to worry about the representation, but trust us, it'll be efficient.
John:
And on output, you encode to whatever you want it to be.
John:
And that's a no op if it's UTF-8 through the whole way.
John:
And then after that, it's like, OK, well, then your representation is good.
John:
Your algorithms are efficient in terms of pre-allocating buffers for strings when you start appending and it realizes you're going to keep appending, so pre-allocate it.
John:
All sorts of smart things like that.
John:
Perl's regular expression engine is the gold standard of regular expression engines in terms of the number of years that have been put into both the syntax and the engine itself with all sorts of crazy efficiencies where it can look at your regular expression and figure out...
John:
You know what?
John:
I can see that there's a faster way to do this than using, you know, just a regular expression engine.
John:
I can do something simpler because I can shortcut this by looking at the anchor and optimizing it to an index lookup or use a DFA when it's faster than an NFA regeps engine because I can look at the regular expression.
John:
Like, it's very...
John:
clever optimizations to a regular expression engine in addition to all of the features um i think what they're talking about for the swift stuff is they just want their strings to be as powerful as pearl strings as convenient to deal with they have all the nice convenient methods for doing things and that when you use those methods things are fast
John:
Because you can get into trouble really fast with strings if you have to keep changing representation internally, or if your internal representation is weird, and anytime you have to do any operation, you have to walk the whole string to find boundaries between things or whatever.
John:
There's lots of chances for inefficiencies.
John:
Or even if you have a string and you're repeatedly appending and making a bigger and bigger string, that could be massively inefficient too if you're not careful about how you allocate memory.
John:
um so pearl for all of its weirdness and there is weirdness related to this that i didn't want to go into um is very fast and has like all the features you could possibly imagine some of which may be obscure but that's what swift is going for they want to be faster than ns string which they didn't list because they're not going to throw their own stuff under the bus now but faster and better than ns string native to the language
John:
uh and really efficient internally with lots of operations and then regular expressions were in the phase two where it's like that's a nice tab we just need to get the string representation and the basic features down and then we can add regular expressions at any point after that and that's a whole other project of like how do we make a really fast regular expression engine but that's that's in the phase two box the phase two is the goodies and the phase one is like
Casey:
eat your vegetables and get get our house in order get our abi stability down figure out what generic is going to be and by the way uh async stuff that's that's even farther in the history it's not even going to be in swift 4 probably no like i saw async await and i actually didn't get to use that too much in my c sharp days but i know enough to know that that's super awesome but you know what i did use a lot in my c sharp days and i'm really excited about reflection we're super stoked about that
Casey:
was that in stage one i forget was reflection in stage one stage two um so reflection is basically it allows you to it allows your code to look at itself hence reflection and make decisions about things and um i think i like it so much because it's my favorite hammer and so everything looks like a nail to me and there's certainly appropriate times and ways to use reflection and inappropriate times and ways to use reflection but
Casey:
There are some times – and I can't think of a contrived example right off the top of my head – but there are some times when reflection is a very powerful way to solve a problem.
Casey:
And I think a lot of the kvetching that was going on in the past about how Swift is not dynamic enough for some of the developers –
Casey:
particularly generally speaking the old objective c guard uh a lot of that would potentially a lot of that complaining would potentially go away with more robust reflection because there is some support in swift but it's really really crappy that's with today but it's really crappy i don't know i'm excited about uh what's coming i think um everything in this post by chris latner um which we'll link in the show notes
Casey:
All of it is worth reading.
Casey:
I don't think there's any really wasted words, and I'm really curious to see where this goes.
Casey:
It seems like they're learning from their mistakes.
Casey:
They're learning from over-promising and under-delivering.
Casey:
Or maybe it seems from their perspective they didn't necessarily promise ABI stability in three, but they didn't do a good job of stating what their intention was.
Casey:
Whether or not you agree with that, whatever.
Casey:
But the point is they're trying to be a lot better about that in the future.
John:
AVI stability was a goal of Swift 3, but as they got into Swift 3, I think they realized a couple of things.
John:
One, the appetite for syntax changes in Swift seems to be waning.
John:
Like, as in people are kind of like, I just learned Swift 2 or Swift 2.1 or 2.0, we're going to change it again in Swift 3.
John:
And so there was kind of eventually a rush to say, look...
John:
This is probably our last big chance to change syntax stuff.
John:
So everybody, if there's any other syntax crap in the language, oh, we're using equals here, or we should have used a colons, or casing of things is inconsistent between this and that, and picking new keywords, now is the time to do it.
John:
I spent a lot of time in Swift 3 doing syntax-breaking changes, non-backward-compatible changes to the language itself, to the characters that you type automatically.
John:
to make your programs because they're trying to really say we got a little bit you know a little trailing end of syntax changes and then we're shutting the door on that and we're saying not that we're never going to have them again but they're going to have to be really you know they have to be really justified there has to be a really strong reason to do them we're going to try to maintain source capability from here on so there's a big rush to get those things in
John:
And the second part is when dealing with the ABI stuff, they still hadn't sorted out all their generic system and other things that affect the ABI because they have to figure out what kind of things are we going to be calling in what ways and everything before they can nail down the ABI.
John:
And if they hadn't sorted out that part of the language, it's impossible to do the ABI.
John:
So it was kind of like they weren't ready to do the ABI yet because they had other things that they had to do first.
John:
Not like they went off into the weeds and were dancing through the daisies and doing other frivolous things, right?
John:
They realized that actually we're not at the point yet where we can do ABI stability.
John:
We haven't figured out all these things that are prerequisites for it.
John:
So they spent all their time trying to sort of get all that painful stuff out of the way.
John:
And they're still doing that and do all the prerequisites.
John:
And then hopefully in the Swift 4 stage 1 timeframe, they will have all that.
John:
I'm not sure, you know, again, they were trying to be careful and say this is a goal or whatever.
John:
Not a promise.
John:
It's still not a promise for the Swift stage 1 thing.
John:
Who knows how this will turn out?
John:
Because you can't, like, the worst mistake they can make is to rush the ABI stability and be stuck with a dumb calling convention that prevents them from adding features later.
John:
So this is like the most important time to...
John:
not rush to nail things down and set it in concrete.
John:
Because once you do that and Apple starts shipping frameworks that people link their apps against, that's it.
John:
You can't renege on that.
John:
You can't like, oh, we're breaking all your apps in this next release, recompile everything, right?
John:
I mean, they really, really don't want to do that.
John:
It's kind of like, you know, for an OS vendor, for a platform vendor,
John:
API promises are something you really don't want to break.
John:
Or if you do break them, you want to do a carbon 64 and break it before you actually ship to customers.
John:
And they're still pissed off about that because they developed their applications against it and plan their products and so on and so forth.
John:
But it's even worse if you ship it to customers and then a year later say, oh, you know what?
John:
All your apps don't work anymore when people update their
John:
operating system sorry about that so this is really a critical time in swift and it's much much better for them to continue to miss dates and to make sure they have it solid because once you set this in stone and start shipping it in frameworks that's it for many many many years
Casey:
Yeah, it makes sense.
Casey:
Marco, I know you have a lot to add on this.
Casey:
What would you like to add about this whole Swift thing?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This works pretty well for you, right?
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
I have a set that they sent me of three, and I plug them in thinking, I'll just try this out so I can talk about it on the sponsor read, then I'll go back to my actually relatively old Airport Extreme.
Casey:
And I'm looking at one of my three Euros right now because it's sitting right next to me because I like it enough that I never disconnected it.
Casey:
So the management through the iOS app is great.
Casey:
It's simple in a good way, and I really like it.
John:
i did the same thing i i hooked them up thinking i'll try them out for you know because they're a sponsor they're still hooked up there's and i also still have my other router connected i have them in bridge mode like not that i would recommend doing this really you should just get these and they will do everything but because i have all these rules in my airport router you can set it up in bridge mode so i have my previous wireless router not doing anything wireless anymore and those things do wireless everywhere and i can't go back to not having you know five little fan shape thingies everywhere in my house
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Eero for sponsoring our show.
John:
It's time whether you end the show or not, because if you try to end the show now, it's just going to be in the after show, but that's still part of the show.
Casey:
So the thing of it is, I swear to God, this is true.
Casey:
I opened an iMessage window and started writing to Marco, you should just end the show after the Swift update.
John:
I know, I know your plan.
John:
It doesn't matter if you do it.
John:
You go ahead and end the show.
John:
We're just going to do it in the after show.
Casey:
I didn't send it.
Casey:
I was going to tell him, just end the show and then we'll do it in the after show, but it'll be a funny moment.
Casey:
But then as I was typing that iMessage, I swear to God, this is true.
Casey:
As I was typing the iMessage, it occurred to me we had one more sponsor to do.
Casey:
And then I resigned myself to my fate.
Casey:
John, tell us everything that I'm so excited to know about TiVo.
Marco:
Wait, you don't want to hear about MP3 file formats?
Casey:
I would love to, but somebody had to move it down.
John:
No, that doesn't deserve the place that it got.
John:
That's down by how we handle email now.
John:
TiVo!
John:
TiVo was purchased by Rovi a long, long time ago.
John:
In April, maybe?
John:
a long time ago i tried so hard you guys let's go over the list of things that have happened since then yeah rovi is used to be uh gem star if anyone remembers them and make like uh on-screen tv guides like that big grid where you pick stuff from channels and macro vision do either you two actually remember macro vision like when it was a thing
John:
i do no it was like copy protection for vhs tapes like analog copy protection so if you bought a vhs that had a movie on it you tried to make a copy of it and didn't have the right equipment the copy would have all these little fuzzy things on it it wouldn't look good it was very silly yeah it has this had this weird like alternating bright and dark line that was in the overscan range of the tv picture so that
Marco:
It wouldn't show up on a TV, but the idea was to throw off the automatic gain control of the VCR because it would oscillate from bright to dark and show weird things in this one line.
Marco:
So it would be like, all right, well, the maximum brightness of the signal is really high right now, so turn the automatic gain control down, and then it would go back low, and then all right, now turn the automatic gain control up.
Marco:
And so if you made a copy of a movie with this with the VCR...
Marco:
you know most vcrs would try to automatically balance the brightness of the picture the movie would just oscillate every few seconds from light to dark and light to dark as it was adjusting for this line that was actually off screen yeah the copy protection has always been crappy but anyway this is the company that bought tivo it's kind of similar to how the mp3 file format works actually if you go yeah tell me more no we're not talking about that now um so the company rovi is a combination of gem star and macro vision
John:
so this is not a company that really makes products that people love like who loved macrovision i guess content owners did i mean throw in rambus and you have like you know rambus on lodsis and then you have really a favorite team here but rambus made like in theory you know their patents were used in products that people liked but yeah until they were convicted for fraud because patent dealings
John:
Did anyone like the, you know, the Gemstar on-screen TV guides?
John:
Like, the Gemstar stuff, it's enterprise software.
John:
It was sold to people who make cable boxes.
John:
And Macrovision was licensed to people who, you know, content owners for making their thing.
John:
So this is the company that bought TiVo.
John:
Just give a very, very brief TiVo recap for people who don't know what TiVo is because it's an increasingly large number of people.
John:
TiVo...
John:
was one of the original and probably the best known makers of DVRs, digital video recorders, which is like VCR, but instead of recording television onto a bunch of tapes, it records a video onto your hard drive.
John:
In the beginning, they would take analog video in and record it onto a hard drive, and eventually they worked with cable cards and digital stuff or whatever.
John:
And not a lot of people bought TiVos in the grand scheme of things.
John:
People who bought them early on, early adopters, it changed their lives.
John:
It changed our lives.
John:
We got one around the same time we had kids when we couldn't schedule your lives around like, oh, a television show is going to be on at 8.
John:
I better be at the TV at 8.
John:
That's impossible with children.
John:
So along with getting a digital camera, getting a TiVo around the same time we had kids was a really smart move because now we no longer had to be on the schedule of televisions.
John:
And it really...
John:
totally changed your life in terms of how you deal with television.
John:
Everyone who has a TiVo, especially if you bought it early on, like the fact that you could pause live television, that you record anything you want, that you could choose the shows you wanted to record by picking the shows instead of programming your VCR to say, record channel four at 8 PM and stop recording at 9 PM.
John:
And,
John:
You wouldn't have to do that.
John:
It just had a built-in guide that showed up in the shows.
John:
You could do a season pass for a show to say, I want to watch the X-Files.
John:
Whenever the X-Files is on, it's recorded.
John:
Only record the new episodes.
John:
Don't record the repeats.
John:
All sorts of good stuff like that.
John:
It just became the way we watch television.
John:
You never actually watch live television anymore.
John:
And, of course, the most important feature is the skip button where you could skip 30 seconds at a time so you wouldn't have to see any commercials because your DVR, your TiVo would record the commercials, but you would skip over them when you watch because who wants to watch that?
John:
The current version of TiVo has a series, I'm assuming a series of humans, figuring out where all the commercial break boundaries are in shows.
John:
So now when you're watching TiVo, when the commercials start, you can hit one button and it just jumps past all the commercials in a single button press.
John:
You may ask yourself, hey, why do I have to even push the button?
John:
Why doesn't TiVo just excise the commercials for me?
John:
Well, Replay TV did something like that, a competitor to TiVo, and they got sued out of existence.
John:
So...
John:
tivo is kind of dancing around that but anyway i love tivos i keep buying them i always buy the most expensive biggest best tivo i possibly can and when a new one comes out i buy that one and keep replacing them um they're fairly expensive there's either a monthly fee or you pay a huge amount of money for like a lifetime service and i usually just do that because you know we use the tivos and they just rotate around the house um i'm a big proponent of tivo
John:
For many, many years, I've complained that their software and hardware has been terrible.
John:
For the amount of money you pay, it should be incredibly fast and responsive, and it hasn't been.
John:
They've improved that in recent years, but apparently not enough to make people buy their products.
John:
So if you listen to, I don't know, Hypercritical, me complaining about TiVo, or many podcasts I've complained about, it's the same way we complain about Apple.
John:
It's a product, well, for me anyway, it's a product I love that I think is the best in the industry, but that it could be better in obvious ways.
John:
Um, and I've always complained that the company seems not to know how to be successful and doesn't understand what it's got.
John:
Like many times I was asking them to charge me more money for a higher end product that had higher margins.
John:
Like I was ready and willing to pay, but apparently they were going down market to try to grow there.
John:
Their user base.
John:
Anyway, everything they did didn't work.
John:
They were never able to really make any money.
John:
Their streaming services came and started to eat their lunch.
John:
And I was sad about that because I think, you know, until cable companies released their death grip on all the content that we all love, which is happening slowly, like a lot of increasing number of the shows that I watch are not on quote unquote TV, like Stranger Things that I just watched is on Netflix and not anywhere else.
John:
Orange is the New Black, House of Cards.
John:
uh what was that uh man in the high castles and amazon there is lots of original content coming there but there's still a lot of stuff that's only on television oh hbo now marco can get the hbo thing that he can never remember the name of but it's now the one that doesn't require you to have the uh the cable subscription right so things are happening to eventually take us out of the death grip of cable companies but
John:
For many, many years and still today in many, depending on what shows you're interested in, the only place to get this content is on television.
John:
The only place to get it in real time, in high quality, without having to wait, you know, is on television.
John:
And the only civilized way to watch television, in my opinion, is to use a TiVo, not to use the DVR that comes from your cable company, which are universally very bad.
John:
But TiVo has been bought by this company.
John:
And the question was, well, what is Rovi going to do with them?
John:
Rovi mostly licenses intellectual property and does their onscreen guide stuff.
John:
It doesn't look promising.
John:
Rovi has a lot of patents.
John:
TiVo has a lot of patents related to DVR stuff.
John:
So everyone's worried like, oh, they just bought TiVo for the patents.
John:
There were a couple of good signs when they bought them.
John:
By the way, they bought them for $1.1 billion, which is not, you know, it's not bad.
John:
That's like an Instagram and a bit, right?
John:
For a company that everyone was like, TiVo, are they still in business?
John:
It's pretty good because they have a lot of important patents.
John:
They're also taking the name of TiVo, which I thought was a good sign.
John:
Like Roey didn't buy them and say the TiVo name is no more.
John:
Now it's just Roey.
John:
And we will just stop selling TiVo will stop selling hardware to customers.
John:
And we will just stop everything about the company and just like license the patents and become like a patent troll or whatever.
John:
But the fact that they're taking the name TiVo over the new company, I thought was a good sign, at least in their initial announcement.
John:
Then they started saying, well, we don't really feel like we have to make these plastic boxes with hard drives in them and give them to customers because that seems like a loser business to us.
John:
So we're looking into other options and people are panicking like, oh, no, like when my TiVo dies, will I not be able to buy another box that does the same thing?
John:
This is my big fear because we're a TiVo household.
John:
And we keep buying them.
John:
And if I ever catch wind of that happening, kind of like with the plasmas, when I knew Panasonic was stopping making plasmas, I'm going to buy like three of these things and just hope they continue to work until, you know, they'll break, right?
John:
Aren't they dependent on a service run by TiVo?
John:
Uh, yeah, kind of.
John:
Um, I mean, I feel like that's a surmountable problem where like, I don't know what their, their commitments are illegal, uh, legally to people who bought their products to keep that service up and running for a certain period of time.
John:
But even if they stop selling the plastic boxes, I'm assuming they'll keep running the service first because the service, like if you don't pay for lifetime, you're paying them monthly fee for the service.
John:
And it's gotta be hugely profitable to just run the service because, uh,
John:
It's not, you know, whatever the fee is, it's pretty expensive, and it's not costing them that much per user to keep the service up and running.
John:
So I'm assuming they'll keep the service running for a while.
Marco:
That is very optimistic.
John:
Well, so here's the angle.
John:
The statements, the most recent statement I've seen from them is basically the new owners of the company hinting at the idea that they don't want to make the boxes, but they will gladly let somebody else make a box,
John:
And TiVo branded, which they've done before.
John:
They did the direct TiVo, which was the TiVo branded for direct TV.
John:
If you sign up for direct TV, you would get essentially a TiVo box integrated with a direct TV thing in a single unit so that, you know, from your cable company or your television provider, instead of doing the crappy set top box that they have now.
John:
They would let them use TiVo software and TiVo services to give you a TiVo-powered, TiVo-branded box that is not sold to you by TiVo.
John:
So kind of like ARM, where they would just license to them the intellectual property, the software and the hardware, and maybe they would still run the service or whatever.
John:
But that would give you a larger variety of potential TiVo boxes, all tied to the cable companies, which...
John:
If I had to pick, I'd rather them continue to make their own hardware and just be better at it.
John:
That's choice number one.
John:
Second choice of having a bunch of cable companies make TiVo-branded boxes, that's not terrible, I suppose.
John:
The worst is no more TiVo boxes at all.
John:
And I have to use the current cable company DVRs.
John:
That's my nightmare scenario.
John:
Keeps you up at night?
John:
It does, because this is literally how we watch television in the house.
John:
If it's not on Netflix or Amazon Video, it's TiVo.
John:
Or Apple TV.
John:
Apple TV is our client box or Netflix or whatever.
John:
That's how we watch television in the house.
John:
And...
John:
I'm just waiting my finger on the trigger to spend like one or two grand on a bunch of the highest Antivos before they stop making them.
John:
And if I catch wind of that, I'm going to.
Marco:
I love like your nightmare scenario.
Marco:
Like it's like one of the reasons why I criticize Apple.
Marco:
You know, we had to throw this into the show somewhere.
Marco:
One of the reasons why I criticize Apple is that I love using the Mac so much.
Marco:
And I worry like if the Mac ever became something that I couldn't or didn't want to use anymore for my work.
Marco:
I'd have to switch back to Windows.
Marco:
And the thought of that, I mean, I don't say I might even try Linux instead, like the thought of going back to Windows is so like turns my stomach.
Marco:
That's how little I want to do that.
Marco:
You seem to be having that kind of reaction with the thought of going from a TiVo to like the cable company's DVR.
John:
You can't go back.
John:
Just ask anybody who has a TiVo.
John:
They'll have complaints about it.
John:
It's not the greatest product in the world, but you can't go back to watching live television.
John:
It's barbaric.
John:
First of all, you see commercials, which you can't go back to that if you're just using never, ever seen commercials.
John:
And second of all, just losing the ability to pause live television or to skip around and let a buffer queue up...
John:
you just can't there's no replacement for that because if i said oh why don't you just do screaming well you know what it's like when game of throne comes on like there's no commercials on that to skip but like i can watch it every time whereas when their servers go down because everyone's trying to watch the episode at the same time i don't have to deal with that i'm above the fray on that like it is the tivo for all of its faults and all of its slow software
John:
passes the bar of being like as reliable for the most part as tv is supposed to be when we were growing up you turn on the television and there's a picture there right especially if you had cable unless the cable is out in which case you see nothing right but if the cable is not out you turn it on and the picture is there and you change the channel and you can see what's on that channel
John:
and it never is buffering, and it never can't find the servers, and it never asks for your iCloud password, and it never does anything.
John:
Like, it's just there.
John:
Like, it passes that level of reliability.
John:
It does way, way more, and is only ever slightly less reliable.
John:
I can't remember the last time I had any kind of crash or problem at all with my TiVo.
John:
It just sits there like an appliance, on all the time, 24 hours a day, never have to do anything to it, and it just runs.
John:
And it's an incredibly high bar.
John:
And I've been using them since the Series 2, which is not the original one, but it was still back in the analog days.
John:
And every TiVo box I've had, I've been frustrated that it's not faster and doesn't have better hardware in it, and I can't get it with a faster CPU and more RAM and a bigger hard drive.
John:
But other than that, the alternative was just unthinkable to me.
John:
So eventually, when all the streaming services get better and all the content I care about is no longer on quote-unquote real TV, but it's all on streaming,
John:
then I'll be able to leave TiVo behind.
John:
But until then, I want something like that.
John:
And back in the old hypercritical episode about this, I talked about what I really wanted Apple to make.
John:
This was back before Apple definitively closed the door on ever doing anything TiVo-like when Steve Jobs went to one of his D3 talks or something like that and basically explained exactly why they're never going to do TiVo box and made me super sad.
John:
What I always wanted was a company that's better at this than TiVo,
John:
to do what I called an omnivorous box because my idea back then was like, look, video comes from a million different places.
John:
Even back then there was Netflix and there was cable and there was over the air and there was local TV and all sorts of other places where you can get video from and iTunes and all that stuff.
John:
And it's like, I don't want to deal with all those places that video comes from.
John:
I don't want to deal with 10 remotes.
John:
I don't want to deal with 10 services.
John:
I don't want to deal with figuring out where it is and how I get it and what input I have to switch to or anything like that.
John:
But on the other hand, I realized that all the different people who own those things are never going to get together and say, we should make this easier for customers because everybody owns their different content and their different islands and has their different licensing deals for the NFL and Major League Baseball and all the HBO shows and network programming and all the different channels and cable bundle.
John:
Like, they're never going to get together.
John:
So the only way to solve this technologically is to do what TiVo did, but even bigger, to make...
John:
a box that will eat any kind of input an omnivorous box that says i will sit in front of your television and you just throw all your video crap at me and then a bunch of people will figure out how to integrate with all those services and they will make the software for it and figure out how to do all the integration and your only interface will be with that omnivorous box and it takes in all your input and it can record it locally it can stream it it can do everything
John:
And it doesn't matter where it's coming from.
John:
As far as you're concerned, it's one unified interface.
John:
And that's an incredibly hard thing to do.
John:
Google tried to do it.
John:
TiVo has been trying to do it because you can do Netflix from TiVo and Amazon Video from TiVo and stuff like that.
John:
But they're not great at it either.
John:
No one has ever made that because it's an incredibly hard problem.
John:
And every other one of those companies would be your enemy because they don't want you doing that.
John:
They don't want you being the one and only interface television.
John:
Like the cable companies want to do it with a set-top box.
John:
And Netflix wants to do that to have your client and everything.
John:
It's an incredibly hard thing to do.
John:
No one has ever even attempted to do it except for maybe Google, and they failed pretty much miserably.
John:
TiVo has come the closest.
John:
TiVo does it for plain old cable television, and they were able to do that because of the cable card thing where you can totally replace your, I don't have to have a cable box at all.
John:
I haven't had a cable box in my house ever.
John:
Maybe I had it when I was in Georgia before I had a TiVo, but...
John:
Since I've had a TiVo, I have not had a cable box in my house, period.
John:
I've only had TiVos, which is a thing you can do because of cable card, which is an FCC thing they did, which is not perfect, but it's better than nothing.
John:
And the TiVo, it's not omnivorous, but it will accept all, like, quote-unquote, real TV input.
John:
And then slowly but surely, they added features...
John:
for like Netflix clients and Amazon video clients and the ability to play video from one TiVo onto another TiVo and they added an iOS app which is actually pretty good where I can do everything on my TiVo from my phone or my iPad anywhere in the world I can delete shows I can set up season passes I can watch video on it from my TiVo anywhere kind of like sling block style I can you know
John:
Watch shows on one TiVo on the TiVo downstairs.
John:
There's little extender boxes you can do if you don't need a full-fledged TiVo.
John:
They actually have a pretty good system and a pretty good product at this point.
John:
It's just sad that they could never get enough customers to make it work financially.
John:
I really hoped that someone would buy them that had a lot of money that could do a really good job with the product, but Apple sort of put its stake in the ground and said, no, we're doing the Apple TV puck thing.
John:
We're never going to record locally.
John:
We're just going to do streaming.
John:
That's the future.
John:
Forget about the TiVo thing.
John:
And Rovi seems like their plan is we will take a piece of every cable box sold by letting your cable box have TiVo hardware and software in it.
John:
And I didn't even get talk about the remote, which is another TiVo innovation of having an actual good remote with a nice shape and distinct buttons that you can use in the dark by feel.
John:
Boy, there's a lot of things I like about TiVo and I will be sad when they're gone.
John:
And right now with Rovi owning them, it's kind of like a quiet period where nothing's happening.
John:
But I just really, really hope that I can still, I'm begging this company, let me give you literally thousands of dollars to buy the most expensive DVR with TiVo software that I possibly can that works with my cable cards.
John:
And I will keep doing that for a long, long time.
John:
Cool.
John:
I don't understand why either one of you two don't have TiVo boxes.
John:
We'll save that for the next episode and follow up.
John:
You two can both explain why you don't have TiVos.
Casey:
I can tell you right now the files box is just fine.
John:
It's not though.
Marco:
I don't have cable.
Marco:
It's a really quick response.
Marco:
In case she doesn't care and I can't use it.
Marco:
So there you go.
Casey:
Actually, all kidding aside, that is the executive summary right there.
John:
But here's the thing, though.
John:
For Casey, if you got one, you would never be able to get rid of one.
John:
It's like the Tesla thing.
John:
You can't go back.
John:
No one gets a TiVo, uses it, and then is like, oh, I'll go back to the old way.
John:
Apparently, a lot of people did.
John:
Otherwise, TiVo wouldn't be out of business.
John:
No, just not enough people got them to begin with because it was so much more expensive.
John:
The cable box is like, oh, it's part of my cable.
John:
It's only $10 a month to rent or whatever, and no one does the math to figure out that if you just bought a TiVo, you would have come out of it.
John:
Anyway, go ahead.
John:
You can end the show.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Casper, Warby Parker, and Eero.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Casey:
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, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
The files box is not good.
Casey:
As much as I'm trying to get a rise out of you, it's not good, but it's sufficient for the basic needs that I have.
Marco:
I really think the Windows comparison here is apt.
Marco:
Every DVR that's not a TiVo is mediocre at best, and that's really being generous.
Marco:
The interfaces to these things are all awful.
Marco:
unlike john i actually have used and lived with a cable company dvr before and yeah like you know they're they're horrible really however most the whole reason tivo doesn't really have much of a business left anymore is because as you said like most people don't
John:
care they will just be happy to get the one their cable company offers them for a few dollars extra a month and that's all they know that's probably the only kind they've ever seen well it's not they don't care it's just that they can't they don't want to pay more that's what it comes down to because tiwo you have to pay for the box which is expensive and then you have to pay for a monthly service on top of that that's not part of your cable bill which is the key feature right exactly and
John:
And so, yeah, they were just never able to they were never able to come up with a business model.
John:
The customers that they got, for the most part, if you did their customer sat, they'd be super happy, but they could never figure out a way to get people over the barrier.
John:
And it was a substantial barrier because the boxes have always been expensive.
John:
Lifetime has always been super expensive.
John:
And the monthly bills have also I think they've gone down, but they used to be like equal to or more than Netflix.
John:
And I was like, what am I getting for this?
John:
Like, you know, it was hard to understand what you're even doing.
John:
paying for so it's mostly just a bunch of you know rich people essentially who have these boxes and who enjoy them which is a shame and the windows comparison i would do it like this i think tivo is the windows where it's like that's good enough it's like maybe the windows 95 there is no apple that's actually good in all respects like there is no ios and then the cable boxes are i guess like dos maybe or like punch cards like
John:
And some cable boxes are better than that.
John:
I've seen a lot of these cable boxes and I've used them.
John:
Some of them have interesting technological solutions.
John:
Some of them actually, I think some companies do server-side DVRing and then just stream it to you over there, which is an interesting solution to keep hard drives out of people's houses.
John:
But the UIs are all terrible.
John:
The capacities are...
John:
Maybe they're okay for regular people, but I feel like part of the thing about TiVos and part of the reason I think most TiVo customers buy the fancy ones is the people who buy it are like enthusiasts, essentially.
John:
What is the biggest hard drive you can get?
John:
The biggest hard drive I had in my house was when they came out with a 3-terabyte hard drive.
John:
Um, this, that was the biggest hard drive for my house was the one in my TiVo.
John:
Why did I need all that capacity?
John:
Because you realize when you have a lot of room, you can do things, you can treat it differently.
John:
You can't have like, oh, I'm just going to do a season pass and then I'll watch them.
John:
You can record an entire season of a show.
John:
And just have it sitting there for like the period of time when no new shows are coming out.
John:
And then just, you know, and again, this is barbaric for people like, oh, well, you know, Netflix has the whole season of House of Cards.
John:
I can watch it whenever I want.
John:
Why do I need to have it recorded?
John:
But these are for shows that are not available through streaming or are only available through purchase on iTunes or are delayed or whatever.
John:
Like, you know, again, it's getting better.
John:
Back in the day, this was literally the only place to get a lot of stuff.
John:
These days, it's almost never the only place, but it is still often the best place.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
Marco:
I mean, the reason why Apple never runs this business is very obvious that the DVR as a thing is just an incredible pile of messy hacks.
Marco:
Everything about it is a messy hack.
Marco:
It's a beautiful hack, though.
Marco:
There is no way to make it good.
Marco:
There is no way to make it reliable and perfect.
Marco:
What it tries to do is turn broadcast TV, and whether it's broadcast over the air or cable, I'm not distinguishing here, effectively into on-demand video, but with a ton of asterisks on that.
Marco:
Well, it turns it into on-demand video, sort of, and most of the time.
John:
It does a phenomenal job with it.
John:
The only place where it falls down is, like I said, it falls down in the omnivorous thing, where it only consumes broadcast television.
John:
And with broadcast television, it does a really, really good job.
John:
They're really good at that, but it doesn't take input from any other source and treat it the same way.
John:
It's like if you want to watch Netflix, oh, you can load the Netflix client.
John:
The Netflix client on TiVo is not good, and neither is the Amazon.
John:
This is not their strength, right?
John:
So there is no omnivorous box, but for broadcast TV, TiVo got pretty darn good at it, and the number of caveats is really small.
John:
And if the alternative is just watch it when it's on or use the cable company DVR, it's night and day.
Marco:
Ultimately, it's a really complex, hacky solution to a problem that shouldn't really exist, and the world is moving away from needing to exist.
Marco:
Investing in TiVo now would be like investing in cassette tapes in 2002.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, there might still be some uses for them, but they're diminishing.
John:
It's not as bad as cassette tapes, but here's the thing about that.
John:
Apple's decision not to do it, they did their own TV thing, which is more forward-looking.
John:
That makes sense, right?
John:
But...
John:
This was hacking when it was done with analog standard def video.
John:
And if you had said, okay, well, I'm not going to be interested in that because it's not the future.
John:
That was what?
John:
10 years ago?
John:
15 years ago?
John:
Like, it's not as if like just around the corner, we won't have regular television anymore.
John:
There was a long period of time and during like basically my entire children's life, at least a decade, maybe a decade and a half.
John:
That's 15 years worth of
John:
value that they've delivered making my television watching better during that time you could be saying the whole time well this isn't the future this isn't the future it's like yeah but it's the 15 years from like i'm not gonna just throw away the 15 years i'm not talking about geological time scares i lived through those 15 years those are 15 important years during those 15 years i had a better experience of watching television so maybe if you're investing on a 20-year time scale maybe don't invest in tivo but i'm glad some company decided it's worth doing this for a
John:
a 15 i mean look at how long you know classic mac os lasted it's like we shouldn't have done that because the future is not this the future is ios well ios is not going to be here until 2007 so why don't you do something between 1984 and then and uh and maybe we'll get value out of that like because apple only turned its eye to television really late obviously it wasn't the time for them to do that um
John:
I still think they would have benefited from, for example, buying them up and buying all their patents and assets and having them perhaps design their remote for the Apple TV.
John:
There's still value that they could have extracted from the company, but whatever, they wanted to go their own way.
John:
But I'm glad TV was around for when it was, and I still think now there's a place for it.
John:
It's fading.
John:
They should be shown the door eventually, but for that to happen...
John:
Everybody else needs to get on the same page.
John:
And right now, like I would much rather watch Game of Thrones queued up, you know, 10 or 15 minutes because I couldn't get into the room in time on my TiVo because I know 100% reliably I'll be able to watch it.
John:
And then I can watch the tears of people as they weep on Twitter trying to load their HBO Now app and they can't get the video to load because lots of people are trying to stream it.
Marco:
Next week, tune in for the best cordless phone to buy for your home.
Marco:
I already did that.
John:
I think I bought the wire cutter pick and I'm not that happy with it, but whatever.
John:
seriously we did like i love that you bought a new cordless phone like now no new cordless phones plural oh that makes it so much better we have to have uh we have to have landlines because our cell signal is terrible at our house so we can't reliably just use our cell phones even though obviously we both have cell phones there are no other solutions to this problem so we have a landline but we don't it's not like we have like you know telephone wire running all over the house so
John:
uh we didn't really need new phones i think ours were fine one of them just had a dead battery but she was annoyed and wanted a new one so we got all new ones everywhere they're not getting much better that's another thing of like our phone cordless phones getting much better not really they're not really great but they're cheap and we got like five handsets and you know they're all over the house and they work fine and like we're not really talking the phone that much anyway but anyway i did the wire cutter pick and it was it was all right
Casey:
I love, John, that the same man can say, oh, I must have the best possible version of this antiquated technology.
Casey:
It's not antiquated.
John:
It's cutting edge.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Almost all the menus are in HD now.
Casey:
Are you going to be the one that's buying the Accord when everyone else on the planet has a Tesla or other electric vehicle?
John:
I'm not buying the Accord if it's only CVT, I'll tell you that.
John:
I have my limits now.
John:
We'll see.
John:
We know when I'll stop with the Accord.
John:
yeah like i said i don't have a choice for what am i gonna do it's all you shouldn't buy cordless phone you should do everything in your cell phone well if i want to hear people's voices i can't and i can't install new cell towers so you can actually install really little ones in your house the little repeated no i'm there's no way in hell i'm doing so that's the thing i have my demand is that phone be as reliable as phone and one of those little repeater things that uses internet connection does not pass that bar for me
John:
You could also just switch to a carrier that actually works in your house like AT&T.
John:
No, my carrier has the best signal at my house.
John:
There's a cell phone dead zone nearby me where a certain section of rich people refuse to have cell towers built near their house, and their reward is they get no cell signal.
John:
I'm not in the actual dead zone, but I'm close enough to it that it's dead-ish.
John:
The great thing about it is on my thing, I can hear them, but they can't hear a word I say.
John:
So they think you're just a really good listener.
John:
My wife calls me all the time on my cell phone when I'm at home.
John:
And I say, hello, hello.
John:
She talks.
John:
Are you there?
John:
Are you there?
John:
I'm like, I don't know why I bother talking.
John:
You can't hear a word I'm saying.
John:
I can hear everything you're saying perfectly clearly.
John:
It's great.