Procedural Marriage Mistakes
John:
It's the special episode time.
John:
I was doing a special episode of Rectives.
John:
What was the topic?
John:
I don't know.
John:
What the hell is the topic ever on that show?
John:
Your libido.
John:
A mosquito.
John:
Your libido.
John:
Yep.
John:
That was Smells Like Teen Spirit for those keeping track.
John:
Smells Like Team Spirit was a band.
John:
No, it wasn't.
John:
What?
John:
It was a song by the band Nirvana.
Casey:
I'm aware of the song.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And in that song, there were lyrics that rhymed a lot.
John:
And I said one of them.
John:
And that was a reference.
John:
John is explaining Nirvana to us.
John:
I made the reference.
John:
You had no reaction.
John:
Then I explained where the reference came from.
John:
Still no reaction.
John:
So I feel like I have to go deeper.
John:
I didn't think it was funny enough to react to.
John:
Music is like a series of sounds that people find pleasing.
Casey:
Is this how this episode is going to go?
Casey:
Is this how it's going to start?
Marco:
It is August.
Marco:
We just recorded a show two days ago, and we're recording again due to this time as my vacation schedule for once.
Marco:
Nothing really has happened.
Marco:
I mean, some things have happened, like in the world, but nothing really has happened in tech, with the exception that we have some Twitter update that's kind of interesting.
Marco:
But other than that, what else is going on?
Casey:
Can we dig a little deeper in this vacation thing you speak of?
Casey:
How do you know whether or not you're on vacation, just whether or not you wake up in your own bed?
Marco:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
See, that is how this episode is going to be.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So let me rephrase by saying I'll be out of town.
Marco:
Well done, sir.
John:
So yes, I will be out of town next week.
John:
Are you taking Adam with you?
John:
Because that's how you can tell, right?
John:
Actually, that's true.
Marco:
And the whole family is going, including Adam and Hopps.
Casey:
Oh, and Hopps.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
And Hopps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
All kidding aside, are you willing to share where you're going or would you rather keep that close to the vest?
Marco:
We're going to the beach for just like what everyone else does.
Marco:
We figure it's not hot enough here.
Marco:
We need to go somewhere a little bit hotter.
Casey:
Yeah, I can tell you all about hot these days.
Casey:
Actually, today wasn't terrible.
Casey:
It was only about 90, 95, and I don't know what that is in Celsius because I believe in units that make sense.
Casey:
Anyway, we should probably start with some follow-up now that I've given everyone at least a little bit of grief.
Casey:
Marco had just dropped a hint a second ago.
Casey:
Twitter has enabled the quality filter for everyone.
Casey:
And as far as we can tell, it's the same quality filter that verified users get.
Casey:
But I don't think Marco and I noticed this, but we have just confirmed it.
Casey:
I think John is the one that noticed this.
Casey:
It is on by default, which is super interesting and not the case for verified users.
Casey:
So verified users who have not turned this on, they...
Casey:
wouldn't have this on.
Casey:
And Marco looked at the Overcast account, which is verified, and your quality filter is not on.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Yeah, basically, like, if you had the setting before, it will keep your setting, even if you never touched it.
Marco:
So it's not like a triple state, like, you know, one, zero, or null kind of thing, where, like, null would just be the default.
Marco:
It's not that.
Marco:
It's actually like if you had it before and you didn't set it, you have it off now.
Marco:
And it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
Anyway, so this is great news because this is exactly what we were complaining about last episode and last time we talked about this also.
Marco:
Why wouldn't you have this available for everybody?
Marco:
And last episode, I even said like, you know, I'd even go as far as to say that this should be on by default.
Marco:
And when I was saying that,
Marco:
i had no hope that they would actually ever do this uh both making the making the feature available for everybody and also making it on by default either of those things would have shocked me so to have them both happen and to both happen very quickly it's a pretty major step and first of all it's a little bit of a slap in the face that like apparently there was no reason really why they couldn't have done this for everybody already
Marco:
like before this but okay well let's you know set that aside for now we have it now so you know positive thoughts we have it now this is very good this is way better than i expected this is a sign that maybe maybe twitter is starting to take their abuse problems and their trolling problems and they're just general jerkiness problems maybe they're starting to take that a little more seriously and you know honestly maybe not this could be just like an easy quick fix they just threw out there because they had it ready and
Marco:
But even doing this is a big step.
Marco:
And if it bodes well for for future steps in this direction and additional steps in this direction, that's good, too.
Marco:
So I I'm hopeful about it.
Marco:
I'm kind of I'm a little bit reserved on that, but I'm hopeful that Twitter is starting to really care about this problem and take steps to to improve their service for everybody and not just celebrities.
John:
yep john your thoughts uh the verified thing is still out there like the idea that if you have an account that frequently people are impersonating you and stirring things up by tweeting things that pretend to be you that people then retweet and screenshot and think you said and come back you know like the whole the idea of verifying that yes this is the i am really the person with this name and this you know picture and there's all these attributes um that should still be open even though the quality filter is open to everybody so there's still a ways to go with that and
John:
like the quality filter.
John:
It's the type of thing where they totally could, like it already, the feature already exists.
John:
Uh, in some ways it's easier to enable for everybody's in some ways it's harder because there is that human component of verifying your identity or whatever.
John:
Um, and as we said in the past, you know, find charge money for it or something like that, but it verification continues to be the app store of Twitter where rejections don't make any sense and no one can figure it out.
John:
And it's all mysterious.
John:
Like what we recently, the ATP FM account got rejected for verification.
Um,
John:
And I saw a couple other puzzling rejections.
John:
But on the other hand, other people are getting verified, so no one knows how it works.
John:
Anyway, I guess that's the next stepping stone in easy things Twitter could have done a long time ago but didn't.
Marco:
Yeah, and also, you know, to give them credit also...
Marco:
The whole verified status is problematic, as we've discussed before, and one of my core arguments about verified being a problem was it was more okay when it was only about identity verification and
Marco:
And it starts becoming increasingly problematic as features or status are tied to it.
Marco:
And so what they've done here is they've just removed a major feature that was exclusive to verified people before, and they made that available for everybody.
Marco:
So it has taken a big chunk out of the problem.
Marco:
The problems are still there.
Marco:
There are still lots of other problems with verified status being what it is and bringing what it does and
Marco:
having this weird inconsistent you know subjective review process but removing a major feature of it as an exclusive and making it available to everybody is a big step in the right direction yep that sounds excellent uh john you are poorer in the last few days than you were the few days prior would you like to tell us about that
John:
yeah i finally bought a camera i know we had lots of discussions about it on past shows no big surprise about the camera that we that we've been talking about the camera that i had tested for a week uh the camera was pretty much a no-brainer for me you know because like i i and as many people as soon as i mentioned cameras all the camera people wrote in and tell me all the different cameras that they like and it was good to hear different people's stories about what they liked about their camera some people were trying to sell me a micro four thirds some people trying to sell me on the aps-c fujis and
John:
you know the availability of lenses and how cheap they are and how good quality they are and this lots of different arguments on on all sides but the you know the sony is the is the devil i know sort of and it has several attributes that i really like specifically in terms of first photos for action shots and how good it is at finding focus uh very quickly we should point out once again you have again failed to mention the model number it is the sony a6300 right i i've mentioned that before yes yeah 6300
Casey:
I'm not on this episode.
Casey:
I was sitting here waiting to add it to the show notes.
Casey:
Waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.
John:
You guys should already know it already.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the small size because a lot of the other APS-C cameras are like, oh, it's also an APS-C.
John:
But the Sonys are really very small.
John:
And that counts for how I want to use it because I'm not quite ready to...
John:
sign up for the big giant camera sony lenses are the situation is not as great as other cameras i acknowledge that so that was my most difficult part i knew i was going to get the body i got the body without any lenses i knew i didn't want the kit lens because i had it and it's not great um and so i had to decide what i was going to get the easiest and the first lens purchase i i got was the uh
John:
50 millimeter 1.8 that sony sells because i had rented that i'd used it i'd usually take pictures of people's face people's faces indoors with low light and i've gotten a lot of good pictures out of it and i really liked it and yes as many people point out 50 millimeters is a little bit close you have to get the back up a lot to get people framed the right way and indoor environment but
John:
That's somewhat problematic, but the thing is two parts of this.
John:
One, the Sony 35 and the other 35s I saw were all not as good lenses as the 50 in terms of optical quality and, you know, if it has stabilization and all these other things.
John:
So the 50 was the, you know, they were not as good lenses and they cost similar amounts.
John:
So you're going to spend $350 for a worse 35 millimeter.
John:
I'd rather spend that $350 on a better 50.
John:
And the second part is I like to get candid shots.
John:
I don't like pose shots that much.
John:
And having a little bit of extra zoom, even indoors, lets you get a nice, good head and shoulders portrait of someone laughing in a natural way when they don't know you're taking a picture if you're not right in their face.
John:
So I like the 50, even if it is slightly challenging in some situations.
John:
And I really like the pictures that come out of it.
John:
And then the next one I got and I waffled this over a long time, but I eventually pulled the trigger is the really flat 20 millimeter pancake lens.
John:
Nice.
John:
Which is not a not a great lens.
John:
And it's pretty expensive for what you get.
John:
But in the end, I had to say, look, you can't argue with the size.
John:
It makes the camera much smaller, much lighter.
John:
And it's not a bad lens.
John:
It's just it's not probably worth the money I paid for it.
John:
But I got that.
John:
And I also got a bunch of lens protectors, which is not a thing that I had thought about before, but I read a couple articles and like, oh, you should always get a lens protector.
John:
And I'm like, you know what?
John:
It is easier to clean a lens protector than it is to clean the lens.
John:
I imagine there, if there's dirt on lens protector, that's worse than if there's dirt on the lens.
John:
So maybe I'll come to regret this, but they're cheap.
John:
So I bought them and, uh,
John:
I'm going to give that a go.
John:
And I've been taking pictures just trying to find excuses to take pictures with the stuff around the house and everything.
John:
I've been playing with the eye autofocus on this.
John:
Do you have that assigned to one of the buttons on your camera, Marco?
Marco:
I have not assigned to a button.
Marco:
My camera does have the eye focus.
Marco:
I tried it for a few days up front.
Marco:
I ended up turning it off because...
Marco:
Sometimes, like most autofocus systems, if you're holding the trigger button down and it doesn't have focus, it'll wait until it does have focus before it shoots the picture.
Marco:
And there were a couple of instances where I missed a shot that I could have gotten because it had focused distance-wise, but it had not found the eye in time.
Marco:
And it was just like a second too late finding the eye, and that made me miss a shot.
Marco:
So I turned it off, and I haven't experimented with it since then.
Marco:
That was a long time ago, and there have been a number of firmware updates since then, so maybe I should try it.
John:
So mine, and probably yours as well, you can adjust that of what has priority.
John:
Should I take the picture when you push the button, or should I not take the picture until you have focus?
John:
And there's like three or four settings in that range.
John:
The extremes of the range are, look, when I press the button, take the picture, regardless of whether you have focus.
John:
And the other extreme is never take the picture until you have focus.
John:
And the other thing with eye autofocus, it's weird on this camera because it's not assigned to anything by default.
John:
So you wouldn't even know the feature existed unless you custom assigned it to a button.
John:
And I assigned it to a button and you have to hold down.
John:
So I'm half holding the shutter and then my thumb is pressing the eye autofocus.
John:
And if it doesn't find an eye, I just let go and go back to regular portrait thing.
John:
Because you can tell the green circles on their face, it's in like, I found a face, I'm going to take a picture of it.
John:
But if I push down the little eye autofocus thing, if it doesn't immediately find an eye, then I'm like, all right, well, forget about that.
John:
But if it does immediately find an eye and I keep that held down, it will track that eyeball as the person moves.
John:
It's pretty amazing.
John:
And the other feature of this camera I find hilarious.
John:
Again, yours probably has it too.
John:
is uh facial recognition and ranking so you take small pictures of everyone in your family like their face looking at the camera and the camera remembers them and if all three of them are in the frame it will prioritize them in the order that you select of who's going to be in focus wow it's pretty grim when you think about it's like sorry sorry second child you're not as important you have to pick an order right but if you think about it it's actually
John:
you shouldn't think about it in terms of taking pictures of your family think about it like taking a picture of like you go on a trip to new york city you want to take a picture of your kid on new york city street it won't accidentally grab focus on a stranger who's walking by right it will always prioritize your kid looking at you and never accidentally grab focus on someone else so lots of cool software-based features that are all really fast and really good that's probably why this thing eats batteries
John:
Um, uh, and so, yeah, I really do.
John:
I really am happy with the, uh, the body of the camera.
John:
The lens situation is a little grim, probably going to rent a zoom for my wife's vacation.
John:
Uh, and if we like it, we'll probably buy it, but no zooms out there are calling out to me in terms of price performance.
John:
I think what I'll end up with is a way too expensive, like that, uh, that 17 to whatever it is, 17 to 70, uh, thing that's not a great lens, but it's very compact and very versatile.
Um,
John:
And then maybe something with like a 300 millimeter range that's just actually a crappy camera, but it gives the max zoom range on it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I think I bought off camera crap for a while.
John:
So it's all sitting here on my desk and I'm taking pictures of mostly taking pictures of my family playing Pokemon Go because that's what they do when we're all home is they'll go out for walks and capture Pokemon and taking pictures in the supermarket and generally being annoying to all my kids and just trying out the camera.
John:
But it's lots of fun.
John:
I'm happy with it.
John:
And like I said, in three or four years, I'll just buy a full frame camera.
Marco:
So a couple of notes.
Marco:
First of all, good call on the pancake lens, the 20mm pancake.
Marco:
I wish that lens was available in full frame, but it's not.
Marco:
So I can't really use it.
Marco:
But for our 5D Mark IIs that we've had as our big camera for a long time, ever since they came out until I got this camera, a couple years back when it came out, we got the Canon 40mm EF pancake.
Marco:
And that is a great lens.
Marco:
And it's like $150.
Marco:
And it's a really good quality lens.
Marco:
And it's incredibly small.
Marco:
And the effect that a very small light lens has on the way your camera feels and just how you handle it, where you bring it, how often you bring it, it's a massive difference.
Marco:
And so I strongly suggest if anybody has a camera and you don't have any really small pancake or pancake-like lenses...
Marco:
Just get one and try it because you will bring your camera more places.
Marco:
You'll be amazed how much of a difference it makes.
Marco:
If you have a Canon, I think they recently made a second pancake.
Marco:
I haven't been paying that much attention.
Marco:
I think there's a wider angle one like somewhere in the 20s.
Marco:
But there's the 40mm pancake that's fantastic.
Marco:
And whatever... Pancake lenses have become popular in the last five years or so.
Marco:
So whatever system you have, look for the pancake lens in a somewhat wide focal length and use it.
Marco:
And you'll be very surprised how good it is and how easy it is to carry your camera around with it.
Marco:
And in fact, for that reason...
Marco:
My camera, like I have the 35mm f2.8 prime, the 55mm f1.8, and the 90mm macro in the Sony FE line.
Marco:
And I almost always have the 35mm f2.8 on there because it is just so small.
Marco:
It is not a pancake lens.
Marco:
It is not quite that short distance-wise, but it is still very small.
Marco:
And just the difference that makes on how the camera feels is just immense, as I've been saying.
Marco:
definitely get a pancake lens if you can.
Marco:
Secondly, I will point out also that I'm kind of surprised you picked this camera based on our discussions because for what you wanted, which is like you basically wanted a super zoom replacement and
Marco:
And this isn't that.
Marco:
Sonya has the RX10, and there's many other brands that have super zooms as well, many of which are very good.
Marco:
And all of our listeners wrote in to say that Micro Four Thirds, and I think some people might have pointed out Fuji X for this attribute as well, but especially Micro Four Thirds was very good for zoom lenses because of the smaller sensors and therefore being able to have smaller lenses and less complex lenses for big zoom reach.
Marco:
So I am kind of surprised you didn't go with that for that reason.
Marco:
All these systems have these different pluses and minuses, as we've discussed.
Marco:
Micro Four Thirds, it really excels in things being generally a little bit cheaper, lenses being a little bit cheaper, a lot more lens choice because they've just been around for so long and so many different brands make the lenses for it.
Marco:
Sony really excels in sensor quality and recently in focus advances, autofocus advances in mirrorless.
Marco:
But overall, Sony really especially excels in having really amazing sensors, getting lots of megapixels with very low noise and incredible dynamic range being able to be captured.
Marco:
Sony just kicks butt in that area.
Marco:
And where Sony falls short...
Marco:
is some of the kind of pro e type handling stuff and also lens like zoom lenses in particular like sony the the primes that are available for sony cameras especially the full frame ones are generally amazing they're a little expensive but they're generally amazing
Marco:
zooms are have always been sony's weak point that the sony lineup has had fairly mediocre zoom lenses in it most of the time they're like there's now very recently there's been a couple of extremely high-end ones that are huge heavy and very expensive in the new sony g master line but basically everything below that has been really hit or miss mostly miss so i am a little bit surprised you picked it given all that
John:
Well, so like I said, I looked at super zooms first before I was even considering all this like better camera thing because that's all my wife's thing.
John:
Like, hey, she wants a better camera, right?
John:
I was just like, well, my super zoom is getting kind of old.
John:
Maybe look at another one.
John:
And I looked at all the super zooms that are out there and they all seem like...
John:
worse overall than my camera like they were better in many ways but also worse in ways that i didn't like either the zoom wasn't as big or like the rx10 like that thing is gigantic do you realize how big that is it is huge and again that was one of my things i didn't want it to be too big um i didn't want to spend uh 1500 for a non-interchangeable lens camera it just seemed weird to me and uh and you know i still have my panasonic it still works i i can still use it but the thing that was the real convincer and you know the reason i'm glad it is is i rented it and i took it for the
John:
That the one time a year I take the most pictures like I take pictures, you know, throughout the year, probably not as much as I should.
John:
But when we go on our vacation to Long Island, I take literally thousands of pictures.
John:
Right.
John:
That is the most pictures I take all year in the most demanding circumstances of the most different people in the most different environments.
John:
And the super zoom for the waves thing, you know, taking pictures in the waves.
John:
Like I said, I brought both cameras to the beach, used the super zoom a lot.
John:
But by the end of the trip, even when we were at the ocean, I was using this camera.
John:
And yeah, I couldn't get up as close.
John:
And it probably helps that the days that I was doing this at the beach, the surf was in close.
John:
So maybe it would have been different if it was farther away.
John:
But like I said, I still had the other camera.
John:
And even with these things zoomed out, I was happier with the zoomed out pictures from this camera that I could crop with the crappy zoom lens that I rented.
John:
Like I didn't rent a very expensive zoom lens, like a $400 zoom lens or something.
John:
um and the range on it was you know half to a third of what it is on the super zoom and still this came out ahead and as i said the reason i don't want to get expensive cameras once you take pictures indoors without a flash with a decent camera like you can't go back to the other way that's why i don't like to hold marco's cameras it's
John:
It's depressing.
John:
You know, you don't want to think about it.
John:
Like, and that's why I don't want to go micro four thirds.
John:
Like the whole reason I'm spending money is I want a bigger sensor that can get more light.
John:
And yes, that means the lenses are going to be more expensive and I could get better zoom lenses for the micro four thirds.
John:
It was like, this is what I want.
John:
I want, I want a big sensor.
John:
I want pictures that I couldn't take with any other camera.
John:
Can't take with my iPhone.
John:
Can't take my super zoom because there's just not enough light.
John:
And this is what that gives me.
John:
And can I use it for all of my Zoom things for that one week a year when I need Zoom?
John:
The answer is apparently yes.
John:
Like, it's a different set of compromises.
John:
But I do take pictures indoors and other things when I'm on vacation.
John:
And, like, you know, the proof is in the pudding.
John:
I had both cameras there.
John:
I used both of them.
John:
And, like, if you watch the ratio by the last trip to the ocean, it was like, I'm not even taking that one out of the bag.
John:
I'm just going to use this one for everything.
John:
Just because everything was so much better about it except for the Zoom.
John:
So...
John:
So I'll keep my eye out for super zooms.
John:
I don't rule out later if Panasonic, for example, makes another camera like mine that is just updated in all the ways, but maybe even a little bit more compact and maybe optically a little bit better with the same zoom range.
John:
I'll probably buy it, right?
John:
Because those are cheap.
John:
They're like $600 or $700 compared to these interchangeable lens cameras or other things, a billion dollars.
John:
So I'm pretty happy with it then.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, you'll pay that much for a good zoom lens at least on the camera you have now.
John:
Way more than that.
John:
For a crappy zoom lens with a short range, it's $1,000.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
So it's rough.
John:
And I'm just thinking about day-to-day.
John:
I think this will make me take more pictures, just normal stuff of my family around the house and going out and taking walks and stuff because I'm not going to attach a big zoom.
John:
We'll probably just have a little pancake on there.
John:
But it's nice when we go out after school and after dinner when it's kind of dusk and it's dark that I can actually get usable pictures.
John:
uh, you know, of my family walking under the streetlights with this camera without a flash.
John:
And that just wasn't, there was an environment where I would take any pictures before I wouldn't try my phone and I wouldn't bring my super zoom because the super zoom is actually, it's not heavier than this, but physically dimension wise, it's bigger than, than this camera with the pancake lens on it.
John:
Right.
John:
So,
John:
I feel like this is a good compromise for me now, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot using it.
John:
And then, you know, we'll see where we go from here.
Marco:
I think these days, so many photographic needs are solved so well by just your iPhone.
Marco:
And the progress that iPhone cameras have made has been so remarkable.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The areas that they will never be able to match standalone cameras in are areas where you just need a large, advanced, and expensive sensor.
Marco:
iPhones have a lot of constraints on that camera.
Marco:
Obviously, size is the most obvious one, but also cost is a big one.
Marco:
That camera module, the entire camera module has to cost, what, like $30 or something?
Marco:
I forget what the component breakdowns show it as, but it's somewhere in that range.
Marco:
It's not a ton of money that goes into that.
Marco:
And so you have no space, you have very little money, and you have to be able to mass produce a ton of them.
Marco:
That's always going to be more limited than what you can sell in a dedicated high-end camera for $1,000.
Marco:
And that can have this big body around it and have this big sensor that's way bigger than the phone sensor and this giant lens sticking off the front of it, giant relative to phone sensors.
Marco:
And phones are going to always be able to have more advanced processing and software and tricks they can do with the software to make up for some of these shortcomings that they have in their just tiny little cheap optics.
Marco:
However, I think one area where they are always going to struggle against big cameras is in low light sensitivity and in dynamic range a little bit too, but especially low light sensitivity just because...
Marco:
that is something where the physics are just working so much against them.
Marco:
And that's probably never going to change because phones are never going to become these two-inch thick things that have this $1,000 sensor and an amazing glass in front of them.
Marco:
The market, that's just not where they're going.
Marco:
So I think if you're going to buy a camera that is not just your phone, it benefits you a lot to get one that is exceptionally good in low light just to really maximize the difference and the justification for having a separate camera at all.
John:
Well, again, you can't ever say never because I always picture like a phone that's like this, you know, magical thin thing where the entire back of the phone is basically one giant sensor plus this amazing computing power to somehow combine all the light hitting that sensor without a lens in front of it to figure, you know what I mean?
John:
Like light gathering, the task would be I will gather all the light for you and then magic computers will figure out all the light hitting it.
John:
Like maybe there's things that can tell what angle they hit the sensor at instead of just levels of light.
John:
Like you do have enough surface area basically for...
John:
to imagine a future phone using an as yet undetermined technology where you would gather all the light hitting the back of the phone and that's plenty to have amazing the light photography but that technology is uh no nowhere on the horizon but i just you know like it's not we won't always be stuck with pinholes is what i'm saying so in the distant future uh that could be solved but for our lifetime i think we're probably everything you said there holds
Marco:
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Marco:
We got a couple of people asking us, or I think it might have just been the same person twice, asking us why we didn't mention DSLRs at all in these camera discussions recently.
Marco:
And I have my reasons.
Marco:
Do you guys have any reasons before I jump in?
Marco:
Too big to carry.
Marco:
That's a good one.
Casey:
I'm serious.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
One of the biggest reasons I went Micro Four Thirds, it was less about cost, so that was a small factor, but more I knew I was already going to have something bigger than I really wanted that I had to carry.
Casey:
And if I'm going to do that, I want to try to make it as small as possible.
Casey:
And like John had talked about earlier, to my requirements, the Micro Four Thirds was a really good, happy medium.
Casey:
And I didn't want to go as big as a DSLR, although I went back and forth and back and forth about it.
Casey:
And in fact, I think I bothered Underscore and Marco a lot asking them, well, what about this?
Casey:
What about this?
Casey:
What about this?
Casey:
What about that?
Casey:
And eventually ended up on Four Thirds just because I didn't want to carry it.
John:
yeah for me it was size but also like i mean you know we've known for years even just tangentially you know uh not really in the camera community but just like touching on it because i would like read things in dp review and that's you know that's how i figured out which super zooms again everything you just see which way the wind is blowing and the wind was blowing away from dslrs for regular people um and i had a 5d mark ii uh borrowed from a particular source for my brother's wedding that i used to take pictures so
John:
I know how big they are and how heavy they are.
John:
I know how the little mirror flappy thing and all the other business like it just it just seems like it's kind of like Marco with his BMW versus his Tesla.
John:
The mirrorless one seems like, oh, this is clearly the future.
John:
And even though because the market has been for so long, the DSLRs are the high end.
John:
I'm not sure that will always entirely hold.
John:
And it.
John:
It was way outside.
John:
The mirrorless camera I brought, the whole selling point for me is that it's so small, that the lenses look comically big on it because it's so darn small, and you can't get a DSLR that big.
John:
There's not enough room.
Marco:
The main reason why I don't have a DSLR anymore is what you guys said.
Marco:
It's mostly about size and also about the way the wind is blowing.
Marco:
One of the things that swayed me... We bought the 5D Mark II when it came out in 2008.
Marco:
And Tiff and I used a pair of those for all of her pro photo stuff.
Marco:
It went through all that.
Marco:
It went through a lot of our high-end hobby and, of course, all of our family stuff until about a year ago when I got my A7R II.
Marco:
and when i one of the reasons i upgraded finally i mean first of all a camera that run that that is in common use from 2008 until 2015 is pretty good that's a pretty great run and that kind of shows like one of the reasons it was able to go that long and it's still a great camera just you know it's falling behind on a lot of the tech areas now but
Marco:
um when you get a really high-end full-frame professional grade camera it lasts similar you know similar to john's mac pro uh which is at the same age actually but um anyway the thing with slrs though is you know yeah they are really big like you you can't
Marco:
just casually throw a full frame slr into your bag like that you you gotta really decide to take that with you you know they're they're big they weigh a lot the lenses are big they weigh a lot i didn't i wasn't that convinced that the size difference would matter that much until i lived with the sony for a little while and then i picked up tiff's camera to do something with one diamond i was like oh my god like
Marco:
It felt like I was picking up an aircraft carrier.
Marco:
Like, what is this thing?
Marco:
Like, how did I possibly use this for that long?
Marco:
But that being said, though, there are still differences.
Marco:
And mainly, while the mirrorless cameras have all the action going with a lot of the tech advances these days, and in particular, a lot of the lens advancements these days,
Marco:
I would still hesitate to call them professional cameras.
Marco:
Because pro, obviously it's a very loaded word in a lot of markets, and it is mostly used for marketing in most places.
Marco:
And it goes both ways.
Marco:
Companies put the name pro on things that aren't necessarily, quote, professional grade, and a lot of people who aren't professionals buy pro gear aspirationally.
Marco:
And so there's a lot of vagary in what that means.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
when you're shooting things with a pro camera, you need certain attributes that I don't think any of the mirrorless vendors offer.
Marco:
Certainly Sony doesn't offer them.
Marco:
First of all, you need the battery to not be as much of a problem as it is.
Marco:
I mean, that's number one with the Sonys is they are awesome in so many ways, but the battery life is terrible.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And part of that is because you have to drive this LCD screen in the viewfinder and in the back display so often, you know, and SLRs get away with only having the back review screen and having optical viewfinders.
Marco:
So you don't really, you know, you're seeing through the lens, you're not lighting up a screen for all that looking time.
John:
i think i recall seeing like a battery case for your phone or for somebody's phone have you seen those things through the camera you mean yeah like it's just a big big giant battery yeah i mean there's battery grips and and they they basically like they like shove this protrusion into the battery port and have this big base in the camera that usually holds two or three batteries
Marco:
And that's, you know, that that's something it obviously makes this camera a lot larger and heavier.
Marco:
And that reduces a lot of the advantages it has over an SLR.
Marco:
But also, you know, SLRs are just larger in general.
Marco:
So SLR batteries can be physically larger.
Marco:
They can have way more capacity.
Marco:
And on top of all that, they're, you know, they're doing less because they aren't lighting up two screens all the time.
Casey:
so hold on how often are you charging your sony though because my micro four thirds i charge once a month and and even when i was at the beach snapping a ton of pictures it i i might have used maybe 50 of the battery and it has you know two lcds just like you're describing are you charging your sony like every day when you're on a vacation or when you're taking a lot of pictures you have to god that's terrible
John:
Well, well, see, like I was I was worried about the the battery life because on DP review, they always give like number of shots for your battery capacity.
John:
And my Panasonic is actually pretty good.
John:
I forget what they had it rated as, like 400 something or 500 something.
John:
But when I think like, oh, I take a lot of pictures, like I would always bring I have a spare battery.
John:
I always bring the spare battery to the beach with me with my Panasonic.
John:
I never needed to use it.
John:
I think maybe one year.
John:
because i forgot to charge it at night the night before i needed to use it right for the sony its number was lower on dp review i'm like it was it's like it wasn't that bad but it was lower and i was like i looked at the physical size of the battery i'm like really this looks so small because the battery is physically smaller than my panasonic's battery so i felt like oh this is a bad sign
John:
So I had two batteries with me and I always, you know, charge every night and put the fresh one in and put the other one there.
John:
Like I was all ready to go.
John:
Every time I went to the beach, I had two batteries always lasted all day.
John:
I don't think I got below.
John:
Like I, maybe I went below 50% sometimes, but I was pleasantly surprised about the battery life, but forget about more than one day.
John:
If you were actively shooting a lot of pictures,
John:
the end of the day you're gonna have to charge that thing and i don't mind like that's all i wanted i like can it do my most demanding day fine like marco's right that it's not if you were like doing a sporting event and taking a bazillion pictures it would probably just burn through the battery completely and you'd have to be swapping the batteries but for my use having two batteries and having knowing that one can basically last through almost anything that i have done and you know i don't mind carrying another one of these little batteries because they're not big they're not heavy and if a battery runs out i just swap it and it's not a big deal so i would like it to be better as with many things and i feel like there's more room in there maybe for a battery but
Marco:
it wasn't as as bad as i thought it would be but it's definitely not like your micro four thirds where you're charging it once a month forget about that no i mean because yeah because sony's in general like the battery life is a little bit worse mine is worse than yours i'm pretty sure because the full frame has the even more stuff to do electronically inside the images are even larger to process all you know all this stuff my battery life is probably among the worst in the in the camera industry right now
John:
do you do you have the same battery as me that's what i was thinking do you actually have the same model of that like it's like the whatever np whatever whatever 50 yeah that the same battery i have so that so that's why your battery life is getting worse because your camera is is a bigger sensor bigger screen like everything about it is going to use more battery than mine does and you have the same actual physical battery in it so that's no good
Marco:
so battery life is one of the things that differentiates pro pro camera gear but another one is just like just handling durability speed support you know professional doesn't always mean that it has the best features or the fastest whatever the fastest hardware or the the highest end hardware the highest specs that is not what professional means that often you know results in that uh but not always what
Marco:
professional means that you can use it to get your job done and it's not going to fail on you so that's why you know like if you look at you know a topic that we are near and dear to toasters now oh god all of the toasters that john has tested and loves so much well with varying degrees of love so much um
Marco:
If you actually tried to use one of those toasters in a bagel shop where they need a toaster a lot, like this is like a commercial duty rule.
Marco:
If you used any of those toasters, even like the nice like $300 ones, they would burn out and die in like two months at most, you know, because they're not made.
Marco:
They aren't made for a heavy workload.
Marco:
They aren't, you know, they would overheat or they would have problems like they're not made for that.
Marco:
And if you look at like a toaster that's in like a bagel shop, you have one of those like belt drive toasters.
Marco:
Those are like a thousand dollars.
Marco:
And you look at it and you're like, that's stupid.
Marco:
This toaster I can get at Macy's or whatever is like $40 and has way more features than that.
Marco:
But that $40 thing will die shortly and you can't do all this toast at the same time with it and everything else.
Marco:
And that $1,000 really basic belt drive one at the bagel shop is going to work for a long time.
Marco:
Pro gear is, you know, this is a metaphor for most truly professional gear.
Marco:
And if you look at what the mid-range and high-end SLRs are like,
Marco:
And I'm really talking about Canon and Nikon here.
Marco:
I don't think anybody else is really in this game anymore.
Marco:
Canon and Nikon, and I think Canon owns quite a bit of it.
Marco:
These are machines that are designed to do work and never fail on you.
Marco:
As much as I love my Sony camera, I would be surprised if it still works perfectly eight years from now.
Marco:
Whereas the Canon does because that's a pro grade camera.
Marco:
The Sony is a really high end feature and spec camera, but it does not handle like a professional camera.
Marco:
It doesn't feel like a professional camera.
Marco:
It doesn't feel like it has the longevity and the ruggedness.
Marco:
And I think generally speaking, I think people's experiences online have backed that up where the
Marco:
You'll hear about like pro photographers who took a Sony A7 series camera like to Antarctica and it failed or something like that.
Marco:
Like, and you can do that with other cameras because they're made for like hard use, extreme conditions.
Marco:
They're always ready.
Marco:
They're like, you know, I mean, you know, within reason, of course.
Marco:
But like, you know, they're generally just more rugged and they're also just, you know, they're faster.
Marco:
They have more physical buttons.
Marco:
And yeah, they're larger and clunkier and heavier to get you all that stuff.
Marco:
But, you know, that's all there.
Marco:
They have dual card slots because that way you can have a backup in case one card fails or whatever else.
Marco:
There's so many affordances there.
Marco:
And if they break, there's generally better service available for pro gear.
Marco:
Not always, but usually.
Marco:
And that's another area where Sony has been criticized as having kind of shoddy service for pro kind of use.
Marco:
all these mirrorless cameras, like, they really don't handle, like, pro cameras.
Marco:
They don't have the strength and ruggedness and durability of pro cameras, and they don't have, really, like, the design workload of pro cameras.
Marco:
And that won't change.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
And I honestly, when I do handle an SLR these days, there are parts of it I do miss.
Marco:
I miss how incredibly responsive they are.
Marco:
I miss how just how fast I can snap off shots and have it be no problem at all and see everything.
Marco:
I do miss a true optical viewfinder sometimes.
Marco:
And there are certain things that as I'm using it, I miss about my Sony.
Marco:
Like as I'm using it, I'll miss things like focus peaking, which I don't think you can do at all in an SLR because of the way the system is designed.
Marco:
There's all sorts of things that you have the luxuries with mirrorless cameras that you really can't do with SLRs.
Marco:
But if I was going out shooting an event again, like I used to do with Tiff when I was her second shooter, I would pick an SLR still, and probably for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
Because for actual pro use, where every shot matters, you can't have any delays, you can't have anything fail, you can't worry about the battery.
Marco:
I mean, when we were shooting with the 5Ds,
Marco:
Tiff and I shot a bunch of weddings together because she's a wedding photographer and we would shoot together.
Marco:
I think maybe I worried about the battery level once in all that time.
Marco:
Usually we'd fill up the cards before the battery would run out.
Marco:
You just never had to think about the battery because it was so big.
Marco:
With the Sony, I'm thinking about the battery almost every time.
Marco:
Almost every day I shoot with the Sony, I have to watch that battery level and then it goes down to 20%.
Marco:
I got to take the extra out of my pocket.
Marco:
It's not a professional piece of equipment.
Marco:
It produces very incredible photos.
John:
but it is not pro gear and slrs not all of them are but many slrs are pro quality gear and that difference i think will always be there just because of the the market realities and the physical realities of these two markets well there you go with the always again you know i'm gonna and you know i'm gonna jump on that getting back to the way the wind is blowing like uh it reminds me kind of the i mean not quite the same the analogy is not perfect but it's a i think it's a similar enough situation
John:
That it can put you into the right mindset to understand how this is going to go.
John:
When professionals all use some cameras because digital cameras were crap.
John:
We all remember that time.
John:
We're all done.
John:
Remember that?
John:
Where, of course, you know, digital cameras are fine.
John:
They're an interesting toy, but it's ridiculous.
John:
You'll never compare it to 35 millimeter film professionals.
John:
All those professional cameras from Canon and Nikon.
John:
they were all dsl not dl so they were slrs without the d in the front of them because they you know they're a professional camera for all the reasons you stated and they weren't digital because everybody knows that digital may have some weird advantages but you can't take decent pictures with it and that slowly really really slowly changed and there was a time when no professional photographer used digital and now almost all of them do unless they're real artsy fartsy um
John:
It just so happened they stayed in the same form factor, the DSLR at that point.
John:
And there's a lot of, you know, not baggage, but history there.
John:
It's, you know, even if it was universally better, it would take a long time as people have tons of lenses and they're used to the cameras they like and there's established people for, you know, know how to fix them and they're kind of familiar with the machines and the way they work.
John:
Uh, but there are still advantages to mirrorless in terms of like a continuous autofocus, uh, of a moving target that you could, you know, never do manually focusing.
John:
And then the DSLR is not fast enough to catch for very, very fast motion for things like sports photography.
John:
Um, and of course all the size advantages and all the other things.
John:
I'm not saying it's inevitable, but I feel like the main thing keeping DSLR is dominant now is because, uh,
John:
Like the inertia that manufacturers are making.
John:
There's no reason you couldn't make a professional mirrorless camera.
John:
Just so happens no one is doing that because the market is in DSLRs and they're really good and the advantages haven't shifted over enough.
John:
But I feel like this is a slow migration that gradually over time, like Sony's kind of doing it for us.
John:
The mirrorless camera was like, oh, this is a great way for consumers to get a camera that has a little bit bigger sensor.
John:
But we know consumers don't want to buy an SLR because they're really big, so this is a great advantage for them.
John:
And Sony was like, you know, we can make an even better camera like that.
John:
Maybe we can make a full-frame one, and maybe we can make it good enough that professionals might notice.
John:
And all the things Marco said about them not being suitable for the job are still true, but...
John:
you know they're creeping up on that no one no one before the a7 and the and your camera that wasn't a thing that even existed and now you know sony's probably the wrong company to do it but like all it's going to take is for you know five years from now or whatever for nikon and canon to make their first professional mirrorless camera and that's just like then you've passed the tipping point and it's just a matter of time then before they all switch over because i think the advantages are important enough that eventually people will make professional mirrorless cameras even if they're not doing that today
Marco:
That's a fair point.
Marco:
I mean, I guess I should clarify that, you know, I don't believe it's impossible to make a pro-grade, pro-handling mirrorless camera.
Marco:
There's nothing about the mirrorless component layout that prevents pro cameras from being made that I know of.
Marco:
They just aren't made.
Marco:
And even the very expensive ones like the a7R II...
Marco:
are professional in quality, but not professional in handling and responsiveness and ruggedness and everything.
Marco:
So that being said, Sony is rumored to be working on something that the rumor sets are calling the A9 that is allegedly a pro mirrorless with the A7 series sensors.
Marco:
So that could be really interesting if that's real and if it actually is pro handling.
Marco:
And all this being said...
Marco:
If I were to look at an SLR again today, I would probably end up looking at Nikon, honestly, not Canon, because Canon has just not been keeping up at all with Sony in dynamic range and high ISO noise performance.
Marco:
and nikon uses sony sensors and so like the nikon d750 is an incredible camera it's not even that that new anymore it's an incredible camera that has a beautiful sony sensor in it that's very similar to the a7r1 sensor i believe um and yeah so i would almost certainly go nikon if i was going slr today
Marco:
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Casey:
Apparently video games are still a thing.
Casey:
And I was not aware of this.
Casey:
But apparently not only are they a thing, but you have to go through like really terrible, awful other things to be able to do that thing.
Casey:
Oh, you're talking about boot camp.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So things are not going well, I guess.
Casey:
you should drive your tesla over here and pick me up i offer services in this area you're up to the job so so can we just give just a just a moment of background so you're trying or well maybe not you actually i guess it's tiff is trying to play no man's sky is that i'm not trying to troll i'm really no she's playing inside oh my bad he's such an old man casey when it comes to this i am the no man's sky
Casey:
The Pokemans.
Casey:
So anyway, so Tiff wanted to play Inside, and that is not available on OS X, soon to be MacOS, or MacOS.
Casey:
And it is available on the Xbox, but not the PlayStation 4.
Casey:
Is that fair?
Yeah.
John:
It's coming out for the PlayStation 4 soonish.
John:
Yeah, but it's not out now.
John:
Maybe it will be out by the time Marco gets boot camp.
Casey:
We'll find out.
Casey:
Okay, and then because it's not available on OS X and you guys only have a PlayStation 4, you, collective you, thought, okay, we will install Windows and we will play it there.
Casey:
Is that a reasonable summary?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, basically.
John:
He left off all the hemming and hawing.
John:
And we had the whole show where Marco explained why he's not getting an Xbox One because he has all these consoles laying around.
John:
But anyway, by the end of that show, it was like, okay, we're going to do the boot camp thing.
John:
And so now we're picking up at that point where the decision has been made that boot camp and Steam and Windows is the way to do it.
John:
And then Tiff was complaining about it, yelling at me somehow.
John:
Somehow this is my fault on Twitter that boot camp isn't working out.
John:
So I assume this is all Marco's fault so he can tell us what's going on.
John:
Syracuse!
John:
Hi, Tiff.
John:
How is this my fault?
John:
Let me just explain once again.
John:
Once again, Tiff.
John:
I decided to use Bootcamp for this game.
John:
The day I decided to do it, I spent some time waffling around and seeing how much Windows 10 costs before eventually deciding to go with the copy of Windows 7 that I had.
John:
I wiped my Bootcamp partition, made a new one, installed Windows 7, installed Steam, and played all of Inside.
John:
Everything I just described took place in one day.
John:
That's all I'm saying.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
oh god wait can you guys hold on a second i need to go get a pack of popcorn real quick i just want to play a three-hour game i just want to play it it's a three-hour game it's this is the gilligan's island of of games here you go on a three-hour tour and you end up there for your whole freaking life because you're dealing with windows nightmares
John:
so what's going wrong here how how is this not happening this has been like days week it's been a long time it's been been a long time not even counting the whole time about waffling what you should do and then even after the decision has been made that we're gonna go boot camp and still i i assume you have not played this game oh because this whole boot camp thing was pitched to us as oh it'll be no problem it's just boot camp you just put it on the disc and you have your little partition and you just plug it in and it'll be so easy you should just do it so easy
Marco:
i did this like i it's not speculation like it should be easy i i actually did it if you actually wrote out the steps it would take to have this done we totally would have just went with the initial marco idea of let's just throw some money at the problem and buy an xbox because we should have done that because the infuriation i i'm almost i'm about to break i i'm gonna kick all the computers in like in their faces like i'm so freaking angry oh windows and
Marco:
all right so here's here's what has happened um so the other night so you know we have a child he is young we haven't had a ton of time to devote to this problem so you know a few weeks ago whenever whenever we talked about it first i had created this this boot camp this boot camp installation of windows 10 uh using a real windows 10 product key thanks to a listener who graciously sent me one actually well i hadn't entered it yet we'll get to that was tonight's problem thanks
Marco:
thanks windows for your tattoo of warning signs all over everything you do if you don't ah okay keep going right so anyway anyway so uh i installed windows 10 choosing the like remind me later option on the product key screen because why wouldn't you click that uh and then
Marco:
And then I installed it on this external Samsung SSD so that we could plug it into any computer we wanted to because sometimes I might want to play a game.
Marco:
Sometimes it might be on my laptop.
Marco:
Sometimes it might be on Tiff's desktop.
Marco:
So I set it all up on my laptop.
Marco:
And figuring that I could just plug it into Tiff's iMac to play the game when she was ready.
Marco:
Because her iMac was in use.
Marco:
She was working and using it.
Marco:
And I didn't want to disturb it during setup.
Marco:
So I set the whole thing up as a bootable boot camp drive on this SSD from my laptop, my MacBook Pro.
Marco:
and i got the message of oh don't worry whenever you're ready to play this game i got it all set up we just need to plug in i could bring it here i could bring it there i could put it on this i could put it on that and you're gonna be ready to go you just let me know that's exactly how i sounded i feel like you're still yelling at me about that you realize this is your husband that was doing this not me i i live over here in this house oh and i know where that house is john i know but i didn't do this i take no blame for this whatsoever you should be angry at marco
Marco:
previous destinations in my gps and i can find you that's it that's all it takes just bring the computer with you and i'll have you set up just drive it over to tim uh no wait whose house john's house yeah drive it over to john's house yeah yeah so anyway uh so i i plugged the plug the drive into tiff's computer so you know she has like this one night set out which was a couple days ago this one night set out this is the day that she's able to play this game finally
Marco:
So put our kid to bed.
Marco:
I start shutting down her computer and rebooting the bootcamp drive.
Marco:
And of course, since the bootcamp installation was something like two weeks old, it had a software update.
Marco:
Oh, go through the software updates.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Update, update, reboot.
Marco:
A software update?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
A, just a software update?
Marco:
I think you need to fix that.
Marco:
Yeah, it had multiple software updates.
John:
Didn't you use Windows for, like, years and years before you used the Mac?
John:
Like, these are rookie mistakes that I don't even use Windows.
John:
The only reason I use is for Bootcamp.
John:
And even I know the day you decide to play your Windows game is not the day to find out you have Windows updates.
John:
Like, there's always a prep day where you install the Windows updates and make sure everything is set to go.
John:
every day you find out every day is a windows update day every day but isn't like you can you can defer them anyway you have left the prep day out of that three hour total that this took you then no that that day that i did it i did all the updates because it was a full day it was a weekend day i did i did the hemming and hawing about doing it i did the research i did the creation of the partition i did the installation i did the endless windows updates and then after dinner i played the game because it's three hours long oh my god
Marco:
All right, so anyway, so we boot up, we go through the software updates.
Marco:
Every few times that it boots, it gives the non-system disk error on boot for some reason, like that old DOS error I put on Instagram.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
Yeah, so Windows is Windows.
Marco:
It's a total pile of garbage, as it always has been.
Marco:
Because I haven't used Windows since XP, of course, it took me a long time to find certain settings and things like how do I change the resolution, things like that.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
When I first installed it, I thought, you know, just in case, because I created this installation on a MacBook Pro, but I'm running it now on a 5K iMac, just in case, let me update the... Because when we first launched the game on the 5K iMac, the frame rate was terrible.
Marco:
So I was like, all right, maybe I need to update the video driver because it didn't install the one for the iMac.
Marco:
Maybe it only installed the one for the MacBook Pro, even though it's like one package of support files for all hardware, supposedly.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
reinstall the tools you know get try to fix a stupid frame rate issue finally we get it we get it going and we get the game going and i eventually figure out the resolution i have to reboot through all these stupid updates so we're already like two hours in now like after all this stupid updating and rebooting and we only have so much time right because we have a child who goes to sleep and once he goes to sleep we only have so much time to play the game before we're exhausted and we can't stay up anymore so we had it was a limited we
Marco:
window so yeah so this this terrible like rebooting cycle and drivers and all this bs eventually we get the game finally to run and then then it's like wait there's no mouse support we got to plug in a controller because there's like a controller options like how do we do that and we try to use the keyboard just use the keyboard
Marco:
yeah well we eventually came to that but first first i'm like well we don't have any game pads for pcs but it's like but we have a ps3 controller we have a ps4 controller we have an xbox 360 controller and everything's like oh you could just plug these in they'll just start working so we tried a few of those and of course none of them actually worked um even though the xbox the xbox 360 controller came closest uh that it actually showed up in in whatever the current name is for device manager and
Marco:
uh however it didn't the game didn't recognize it for whatever reason like you they just couldn't assign things to it so oh well you know never mind so eventually we're like all right fine keyboard so we went to keyboard then tiff finally starts playing the game okay finally it's like you know it's probably like 10 o'clock it's like finally we can finally start playing this game so i leave the room because i didn't i didn't want to disturb her with light from my computer because these screens are so freaking reflective um so she's playing the game in a nice dark office i leave the office she calls me back in like four minutes later
Marco:
Uh, the game broke.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
I come in and it just like, it had quit to the status, like it had minimized itself to the status bar as if you'd, what used to happen, I don't know if it still happens in Windows Gaming, but what used to happen if you accidentally hit the Windows key or invoked Alt-Tab in any other way...
Marco:
So I got accused of, did you put your finger on a button?
Marco:
And I'm like, no, I did not put my finger on a button.
Marco:
I would know if I hit a button.
Marco:
Not smart.
Marco:
I just wanted to rule that out because, you know, it's right there on the keyboard next to all the other buttons.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
All the great buttons.
Marco:
it happens to the best of us every pc gamer accidentally hits the windows key sometimes it always happens anyway uh so so of course i see the game like minimize the taskbar um and of course once the game is minimized to the taskbar you can't get it to resume like that that's it it's over you have to like force quit it you can still hear it you can still move the character around but you can't like there's no way you can get it back full screen again because windows gaming apparently has not advanced since it was a problem in 1999 and the cursor disappears the cursor totally disappears yeah you can't even do anything
Marco:
Yeah, because the game captures the mouse cursor still.
Marco:
So you have to like alt tab to nothing else to get the cursor back.
Marco:
It's like I am shocked that Windows has not fixed these problems in the like 16 years since I first started seeing that.
Marco:
Like how really how have they not fixed this?
Marco:
Anyway, they haven't because Windows is terrible.
Marco:
So anyway, we eventually, like, you know, I get back in the game where we try rebooting.
Marco:
We try installing other video drivers.
Marco:
We're looking at the Internet for solutions.
Marco:
Of course, the Internet's full of garbage.
Marco:
So eventually I leave.
Marco:
You know, Tiff tries again.
Marco:
And we start getting this balloon that comes up that the video driver has stopped responding, but it has recovered.
Marco:
so first of all who the hell writes these messages like why why does a user need to know like what what is a regular person i mean we are experts sort of not in windows or gaming but like we are computer experts and i know what all those words mean and i still can't tell you what the hell i'm supposed to do about that maybe it's the ram marco you don't even understand you don't
Casey:
yeah you don't even understand marco the you think those error messages are bad imagine just a hex code that's all you get is a hex code and an error has occurred hex code and then you just go scouring the internet hoping that somebody has hit this before and has a fix do you remember what i told the story in the podcast but you might not remember do you remember what i had to do to get my uh video you know basically to get my video drivers to work do you remember that no
John:
like because i had i took a few runs at it where i installed the boot camp drivers i would install windows and then i would install the boot camp drivers but every time i installed the boot camp drivers it made my system unbootable like it would boot back up and it would say unrecognized do you want to try to repair and it would try to repair and it would never succeed and it would be like oh well right so what i had to do was install without the drivers then do apple's little boot camp driver installation but stop it as soon as sound works because it makes a sound when it installs the driver then i had to forcibly kill the driver installation
John:
And then install like I had three things I had.
John:
I had Windows itself.
John:
I had the the ATI drivers from the Radeon drivers, like third party drivers from the Radeon site for boot camp specifically.
John:
So AMD says these are the ones you use for boot camp for this video card.
John:
Right.
John:
And then I had the Apple drivers and the combination of three of them is I had to do them in a certain order and I had to kill the Apple one as soon as sound worked.
John:
And that is the setup that worked for me.
John:
That was like an hour's worth of futzing there.
John:
So it's never easy.
John:
I'm not saying it's easy, but I figured it was because my computer is ancient and like it would be easier on a modern computer.
Marco:
I feel like when people go through all of these steps to do something simple and they recount all the steps and the craziness and it took me a day and I did this and then I did this and then I got it to work and now it works and it's fine.
Marco:
I feel like it's like a badge of honor that everyone's wearing now.
Marco:
Look how many things that I did to get my simple task to play a game.
Marco:
Just a game.
Marco:
Just a game.
Marco:
That's it.
Casey:
It's the opposite, though.
Casey:
Let me remind everyone, I was making a fairly lucrative living in Windows and did everything in my power to leave that behind.
Casey:
Maybe that was for a reason.
Casey:
Maybe that reason might be Windows.
John:
This just reminds you of why we all have Macs.
John:
This is the reason why.
John:
But see, the trick is that if this is proposed as a solution, it's an easy way to play a game.
John:
By somebody.
John:
No.
John:
First of all, I had more faith in Marco's ability to do this.
John:
But second of all, the most important thing is Marco can have these struggles because the timeline is already incredibly stretched out because of all his hemming and hawing and trying to decide what he's going to do.
John:
you don't present it as ready to play unless you're sure it's ready to play like you don't like the making the promise like oh i've got on a drive everything's all set like you should have known like tiff should not you shouldn't even talk to tiff about this until you've you've loaded it played it for 15 minutes reset it to the beginning of the game and say okay now it's ready for you like that's when it's actually ready you don't
John:
You don't involve her.
John:
Unless she wants to do it herself, fine, then she can deal with all this crap.
John:
But if you're going to deal with the crap, don't call her in to look at it until it's really done.
John:
That's the secret to all the geeky stuff you're doing for your family or whatever.
John:
You don't want to show them what it actually takes to get this done.
John:
You don't call them into the room until the thing is already loaded in iTunes or Netflix, until it's already queuing up, until you've seen the Paramount logo appear.
John:
You know all the network connections are working.
John:
You know you're signed in.
John:
You know everything has had software update.
Marco:
the popcorn is popping they come in they sit down you hit the play button but it was already about to play like that's what you got to do the everyone who's in a relationship at of any kind would totally pat me on the back because i didn't say i told you so at that moment when he brought up it was in your eyes oh yeah well i can't keep it out of my eyes i mean i gotta show you a little bit i mean you're giving me like the look so hard but i didn't say it yeah she yelled at me on twitter instead this is transference she's just taking it out on me
Marco:
yeah so anyway so eventually it this keeps this stupid like display driver stopped responding but we figured it out but yet this is still a problem that we need to alert you with via a balloon that kills your game uh this problem kept happening and i tried you know this is like there's like an ati driver control panel so i kept opening that up and like turning down settings i tried lowering the resolution which is not easy anymore uh but you know i eventually
Marco:
dug down and found all this crap in their new interface that's even worse than the old one.
Marco:
And eventually figured out, like, all right, let me turn in all the settings, turn in all the anti-aliasing, turn down everything that I know to be complex.
Marco:
And it still kept having these problems.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, it's not like an issue of it overloading.
Marco:
So I thought maybe, just maybe, this is because I had created the installation on my laptop and I was running it on a 5K iMac.
Marco:
And so I thought, let's just try playing the game on the laptop.
Marco:
So we abandoned ship from the iMac.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So Tiff moved to the chair.
Marco:
The survivors, you know, got in the boats and we left the iMac and we moved on to the chair with the laptop.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So finally went over, finally played the game on the laptop.
Marco:
And what was the first problem you had there?
Marco:
Was that the one?
Marco:
No, I just needed you to get my pen.
Marco:
right and and we ran out of power almost and this that that was another balloon the 10 warning right yeah yeah the battery almost ran out because we forgot to plug in because it's a laptop yeah it turns out when you play games laptop batteries don't last very long what a surprise um so anyway so i go back to play the game tonight since i stayed up so late last night trying to finish the game in time but it just got so late i was i was very very tired in the ultimate insult i went to bed before she did oh
Marco:
and then alexa turns off all the lights on me which was the worst but i had her turn it back on i felt so cool that's good for mood lighting though right it's good for atmosphere for that well i had it mostly dark i just didn't want the whole house to be dark like the other rooms lights went off and i was like plunged into the you know pit of darkness so i had to have her turn it back on but anyway so tonight he's podcasting i have my game on a laptop it's portable i can leave the office i can go play wherever i want and i sit down and i'm getting ready to play and
Marco:
And a message is tattooed in the corner of this dark game.
Marco:
It says, activate windows.
John:
Go to settings to activate windows.
John:
Marco never activated it.
John:
That's right.
John:
He left that part out of the story.
John:
It's like, oh, I'll click this here.
John:
Register later.
John:
Yeah, you caught that little seed that he planted there?
Marco:
So it's tattooed on the bottom of the game.
Marco:
Everything is dark.
Marco:
And you know, if anyone has played Inside, you kind of see a lot of silhouettes.
Marco:
It's very distracting when you have big white letters right at the bottom of the screen shouting at you about activating your windows, which...
Marco:
Whatever the hell that means.
Marco:
Whatever the hell that means.
Marco:
And so I go to the settings so it could tell me and it says there's a button that says, do you want to know what the hell this means?
Marco:
And so I click the button and it tells me that I need some sort of key and I need to have this program go in and change settings in my computer in order to get this key.
Marco:
And what does that just makes me panic.
Marco:
So I'm here texting Marco while he's podcasting, asking him for a key.
Marco:
And he's like, can you wait?
Marco:
I'm like, no, there's this huge ugly tattoo all over my game.
Marco:
And then in that process, the game stops boot.
Marco:
It won't boot anymore.
Marco:
It just won't.
Marco:
It just stops.
Marco:
It's just spinning into the abyss.
Marco:
Steam doesn't work.
Marco:
Nothing's working.
Marco:
Finally, he sends me the message with the key in it.
Marco:
So thank you, whoever gave us that key.
Marco:
You're awesome.
Marco:
I put it in.
Marco:
I mistype it.
Marco:
I put it in again and it works.
Marco:
And then I have to shut down all the programs that I had open and open them again because it can't figure out what I just did.
Marco:
And so now the game is sitting on the laptop and it is running and it looks great.
Marco:
And Marco calls me in here.
Marco:
So that's where we are.
John:
i'm so glad that uh journey is only available on the console because this is like totally destroying the experience of inside which is moody you know atmospheric game you really want to just get into in a quiet house without anything to worry about and instead you're being accosted by terrible little balloons asking you to update windows tell me about it i really just should have stayed up all night last night and finished it i think i have only about like 40 minutes left
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, in conclusion, Boot Camp sucks.
Marco:
John, you were wrong.
Marco:
Windows sucks, and you suck at installing Boot Camp.
Marco:
I think that's clear.
Marco:
I can't really argue with that.
Marco:
But, I mean, it sounds, even from your experience, it sounds like...
Marco:
There's just a baseline level of Windows crappiness that you have to deal with, even if you do everything right.
Marco:
Well, even if you have a PC.
Marco:
And it seems like that is approximately, like, 75% of the trouble that we had.
Marco:
So it isn't even that much less than the trouble we had.
John:
Well, but you made bad choices.
John:
You didn't activate immediately.
John:
You didn't think about the fact that you had to update.
John:
You installed one attached to different hardware than you were going to play on.
John:
Like, these are all mistakes that I could have guided you away from.
Ugh.
John:
You presented it as a tip before you knew it was ready.
John:
Some of these are just procedural marriage mistakes, and some of them are technical mistakes.
John:
And see, when I'm doing it myself, I am both the preparer and the person who I'm playing for.
John:
I'm the most demanding customer for playing.
John:
I don't want to even begin the play session until I'm absolutely dead sure that everything is all set, right?
Marco:
John, next time you say that this is going to be fine and it's so easy, just put something on this thing and then we can play it.
Marco:
You're going to come over here first and do it for us.
John:
And then I'll play.
John:
I feel like you should bring the computer to me for this service.
John:
But yeah.
Casey:
Oh, there's a surprise.
Casey:
John doesn't want to leave the house.
John:
Nobody would have seen that.
John:
Marco just likes to drive places in his Tesla.
John:
That's true.
Marco:
If you make us pizza, we can show up.
Marco:
I'm cool with that.
John:
Yeah, I do that.
John:
that seems like anyway so here so now now that we got you both here and you've had this terrible experience like another thing you need to know is the care and feeding of a boot camp partition in steam like oh god in the future for marco this is fine there will come a time in the future when you want to use this again to play a game will there really
John:
yeah don't assume that because you played a game on it three months ago that you're like oh i already have that i'll just go into it and download the game and play it you will not there'll be windows updates there will be steam updates you might have to update your drivers after both of those happen like it's you know you have there is a care and feeding of it the longer you go the longer it takes now that's why i still usually allow for like with an existing boot camp partition like when i had xp i allowed for one day to install by the game to all the updates
John:
launch it and make sure it runs the next day would be the play the day i start playing the game which is not you know it's not that bad you just but you just have to plan for it if you go in and say okay this new game is out i've set aside this time i'm going to boot back into boot camp for the first time in three months you will not be playing that game for a long time right so you have to have the
John:
You know, if you use the Bootcamp Edition every day, this is fine.
John:
Like it'll, you know, sort of be, you know, it's like using your Mac every day.
John:
Every once in a while there's updates or whatever, but it really kills you if you just leave it dormant for months and months.
John:
So keep that in mind.
John:
And the next time a game is out and she wants to play it, get it all set up for her ahead of time.
John:
Make sure all the updates are run.
John:
Launch it.
John:
play a little bit of yourself delete the save game go back to the beginning make sure and i don't think your boot camp partition is healthy already because those button those bubbles with the the you know well maybe once you activate it on the laptop it's fine but if she's going to play it on an iMac wipe the whole thing start over reinstall on the iMac from the beginning when she's not there or something you may have to sacrifice your own sleep to do this instead of just going to bed early because you're tired from fighting with windows so what part of this is the fun playing the game which is you're supposed to let her have all the fun and you do all the work
Marco:
This is still Tiff.
Marco:
I'm still here.
Marco:
I didn't really leave.
Marco:
I just feel like that knowing that there is another way to do this where you just turn on a game and it's there and maybe there's one update is just so much better.
John:
i i think you i think you underestimate the number of updates on consoles like you got a new xbox one out of the box you're not playing uh you know inside on that xbox until you run through all the updates to the xbox system software then download the game and then whatever patches and it's not it's better it's way better i'm not gonna say it's not but it's not like oh we the xbox just arrived set that up for me and after i finish lunch i'll start playing no you won't
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
It's like we think of consoles as like the way the Sega Genesis was.
Marco:
It just literally always worked exactly the same way.
Marco:
You plug in the game.
Marco:
You turn it on.
Marco:
It starts immediately.
Marco:
It plays that game.
Marco:
You're done.
Marco:
Well, that's the way Steam on Mac works.
John:
Sort of.
John:
But you're constantly using your Mac and you're constantly updating it.
John:
And I bet Steam updates like every other time you launch it anyway, even on your Mac.
John:
It's just that you're constantly doing that.
John:
So the updates aren't gigantic and there's not seven of them.
John:
It's just, you know, the cost of doing business, the ongoing cost of just using your Mac and running the updates all the time whenever you feel like it.
Marco:
I don't think I want to pay this cost, John.
John:
Well, Marco's supposed to pay it.
John:
That's what I said.
John:
Why?
John:
He does all the work.
John:
You have all the fun.
Marco:
Yeah, why is he the one paying this cost?
Marco:
Why aren't I getting berated to learn how to do all this stuff myself?
Marco:
Come on, that's obvious.
John:
You could, but then you have to pay the cost and then you have to have the fun.
John:
Like, that's what I did.
John:
No one else in my family is helping me set up my boot camp.
John:
I pay the cost and I have the fun.
John:
I'm just saying in this situation, if Marco was going to do it for you...
John:
then you that's the arrangement you can have if you want to do it all yourself and not trust marco to do it because maybe you have exactly as much knowledge about windows as he does which is entirely plausible then you should i don't know who that's insulting marco trust me uh anyway hope this game is good you want to go finish it yeah i need to go finish this game all right i'll see you on the incomparable john
Marco:
okay enjoy thanks a lot incomparable for causing all this so what's awesome these days marco oh not windows we were sponsored this week by indochino indochino is reinventing men's fashion and a made-to-measure suit is the best suit you will ever own so suit up with indochino you can get a one-of-a-kind made-to-measure suit from indochino
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They have all these instructional videos that are nice and easy about how to measure yourself.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Because you know what?
Marco:
Regular suits that are not fit to you, they look okay.
Marco:
Sometimes they can even look good.
Marco:
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Marco:
But most people look way better in a suit that is custom tailored or even custom made to you.
Marco:
And that's what Indochino gives you.
Marco:
They give you completely custom made suits tailored exactly for your measurements.
Marco:
And when it looks better on you, you feel more confident, it is just a great idea to have a made-to-measure suit right for you.
Marco:
And normally, this used to cost thousands of dollars to get this done.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Indochino, your look, your way.
Casey:
Matthew S. wrote in and said, I've spotted a new trend whilst commuting on the London tube every day, and it drives me, all caps, nuts!
Casey:
Before returning the iPhone to their pocket or bag, I'd say probably 90% of the 16- to 22-year-olds quit all of their apps, and then flick up the control center panel and turn the brightness to zero before putting the phone to sleep.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Why?
Marco:
Because they want a thinner iPhone.
John:
That fits perfectly with the quitting all the apps, which we have discussed at length on other shows and is mostly pointless and possibly detrimental depending on what's going on.
John:
Turning the control center brightness down is exactly the same kind of like it makes kind of logical sense if you think about it because brightness must mean it uses the battery.
John:
And even though putting to sleep, I feel better about turning the brightness all the way down because it accidentally wakes up in my pocket or the next time I wake it up.
John:
it's this is a bad idea people it's like there's no end to the number of things that people will do like putting chicken entrails or in a circle around their bed at night to make their phone charge faster or whatever there is no end to the things that they will do like if if we could put more things in like control center and settings and stuff that seem to be power related before they put their phones to sleep like that's the best one because the screen is basically off when you put it to sleep and yet they still want to turn the brightness down
John:
And, you know, like the energy used by pulling up control center is probably, you know, negates the energy they save by having the brightness down a millisecond before they hit the power button to put the thing to sleep.
Marco:
But wait, there is some validity here, because if a notification comes in that causes the screen to light up, it will then be at lower brightness for those like five seconds.
John:
i know i understand yes brief briefly on and yeah i know i know but like but seriously like the amount of time they send on on the double tapping the home button and flicking those things up and the gpu cycles and energy like flick flick flick like they're it's just this is not and not to mention time which is a resource that is not renewable like this is not a good use of your time if you're doing this please stop if you see your friends quitting apps try to convince them that it's not the thing to do i really desperately hope that apple
John:
does like makes force quitting apps require like double key ignition, like the nuclear launch code type things, like makes it so much more cumbersome so that to actually force quit every single one of your applications would just take way too long.
John:
And then that will force people to stop this because I think they'll give up if it takes 17 taps and a wait and a tap and a hold and a force press to force quit one app.
John:
Will they?
John:
Yeah, I think it'll just take too long.
John:
Like, they won't be able to put their phone away.
John:
They'll have to spend 15 minutes.
John:
Then, you know, we talked about this before with the Google thing.
John:
The other extreme is to just give them a button that makes all the pictures go away but doesn't actually force quit anything.
John:
But you still legitimately need a way to force quit apps on your phone.
John:
So that has to exist.
John:
It's just that...
John:
this is such a mess this this whole interface apple is partially to blame but so are people passing around sort of uh superstitions about what you should do to your phone and yes marco i saw your dig there yes apple should make phones with more battery we all agree yeah i mean that's i'm not gonna beat that horse to death today i'll wait till they announce the new phone but if they did do you think it would stop these people from like turning their brightest down i don't think it would because it's not it's not founded it's not evidence-based medicine as they say which as we know as we call normally medicine
Marco:
well but you know if yeah you know if if people weren't always running out of battery uh they wouldn't be so desperate for solutions and even if these solutions are fake or ineffective there's still a very clear demand here that customers are saying and have been saying for a very long time my battery doesn't last long enough and therefore i'm going to seek out stupid tricks to make it last longer
John:
Yeah, well, but the bad thing about these tricks is they do them.
John:
Like, so everyone has had the battery run out at some point.
John:
And the more you have it run out, the more you're going to seek out these superstitions.
John:
So there's a truth to that, right?
John:
But the other thing is that, like, it runs out because they're out for a long day.
John:
They played a lot of games.
John:
There was a bug in the OS or a bug in some app that burned through their battery.
John:
And that triggers the seeking out of, you know, ask the other people in your tribe what you do to make this magical device not run out of battery.
John:
And they tell you all these tricks.
John:
And you do these tricks religiously.
John:
And the next day, your battery doesn't run out.
John:
And you attribute the fact that your battery didn't run out to the fact that you did all these tricks.
John:
And they'll say, well, you don't need to do all that stuff.
John:
They'll say, no, I do these things and now my battery doesn't run out.
John:
Like, they don't understand that the reason the battery ran out the day before had nothing to do with not doing those things.
John:
It was a different situation.
John:
So every time they do these, every day they go through and their battery doesn't run out and they do all this stuff, reinforces in their mind the idea that doing these things causes the battery not to run out, which is not the case, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so it's almost impossible to convince them they should stop doing this.
John:
They're like, but when I do this, it's like Lisa's rock and the Simpsons.
John:
This rock keeps away tigers.
John:
And it sounds ridiculous.
John:
How can a rock keep away tigers?
John:
And Lisa says, you don't see any tigers, do you?
John:
And then Homer says, Lisa, I'd like to buy that rock.
John:
That's how the human brain works.
John:
So it's impossible to convince people these things don't work.
John:
So I think the battery life in the iPhone...
John:
Could stand improvement, but for most people, it lasts through a normal sort of medium to light use day.
John:
Heavy use days, it's still not sufficient, which is why you have battery cases.
John:
And those are the days people run out of batteries, and those are the days that drive them to seek out these things.
Marco:
But you see, that's the problem here.
Marco:
We mentioned earlier in the camera discussion, I was saying how these new mirrorless cameras, especially the high-end Sony ones, have terrible battery life.
Marco:
and on my sony i've done all sorts of stupid tricks to try to stretch the battery life a little bit further because it just isn't good enough and i have all like you know i keep the phone in airplane mode so i don't use any of the wi-fi features i have all these like all the screens turn off really fast and you know all this stuff like all these tricks to try to save a little bit of that power because it's so scarce meanwhile i never once had to seek out a trick on how to save battery power on my slr because the battery was so ridiculously big and it didn't use that much of it that it was just hardly ever a problem and
Marco:
The solution to this problem is to fix the symptoms that cause people to seek out these solutions in the first place.
Marco:
When people say, oh, where can phones go?
Marco:
They are so mature now.
Marco:
I don't know what phones can get better at, really.
Marco:
They can get better at this.
Marco:
This is one big thing that has always been a problem with almost all portable devices, especially cell phones.
Marco:
And I think it's really time to start thinking about the problem differently.
Marco:
It's very clear that the way Apple thinks about this problem is they have the way they run these certain tests of voice usage and light web browsing and everything.
Marco:
But I think it's increasingly clear that we keep coming up with really cool things we can do with these phones and
Marco:
that use something or other that needs a lot of power whether it's the gps chip or the camera or the high-end cpu speeds and maybe using the gpu to do a bunch of cool 3d stuff using ar compositing using advanced processing whatever the case may be
Marco:
we are coming up with things that we can do with these phones that just destroy the battery.
Marco:
And along with the ones we already had, things like turn-by-turn directions, that slaughters the battery because you're keeping GPS on.
Marco:
I don't think this makes for a good overall product that the story is, the battery will be good enough as long as you don't really do much with it.
Marco:
Why should I be penalized for using all these great features that you've added and developed and
Marco:
or that I've bought in the App Store, or more likely taken in the App Store, gotten in the App Store.
Marco:
Why is this okay?
Marco:
Why is this the status quo?
Marco:
And why is this considered good enough?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, well, it's totally normal for any non-trivial use of your phone...
Marco:
Even if you just do trivial things for a long time during the day, those battery life estimates are based on very light usage of your phone and having it off in your pocket most of the day.
Marco:
Well, our phones are increasingly becoming our computers.
Marco:
That's not how people use computers.
Marco:
People use computers more all day than that.
Marco:
I feel like our standards are too low.
Marco:
Both us as consumers, our expectations, and Apple's standards in this area are too low that we need to start thinking about...
Marco:
How amazing could the phone be if the battery was not the same as it was now, was not just like 15% bigger?
Marco:
What if it was four times bigger?
Marco:
How would that change the way we can use these devices?
Marco:
How would it change?
Marco:
How many of these stupid habits would people no longer need to do if the average person, during the two years they owned their phone, never ran out of battery?
Marco:
Or maybe it happened once.
Marco:
You know, like things would change dramatically, but we are never going to get there if we keep making these little tiny incremental improvements because we've declared 10 hours wireless web or whatever to be good enough.
Casey:
Well, I think that we are there.
Casey:
It's just we're there by strapping backpacks to our phones.
Casey:
And that's why Apple made the battery case.
Casey:
That's why Mophie makes a killing with every new phone.
Casey:
I agree with you by and large that we really should expect and ask for a little bit more juice on these phones.
Casey:
And I think we've talked all three of us have talked about this to death on prior episodes.
Casey:
But really, the fix today is to strap a humpback or to turn your phone into a humpback phone and then the problem solved.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up on the real pressing issue here, which is the really ridiculous habits of the youths of Britain.
Casey:
When your phone is in your pocket, it will not light up, at least on iOS 10.
Casey:
I just sent myself a push notification.
Casey:
I had my finger mashed on the ambient light sensor, and it did not light up.
John:
Yeah, maybe maybe there's chances where it could if it's facing a certain direction, maybe different OSes did like a lot of the superstition stuff is based on like maybe the current one doesn't do it.
John:
They don't they don't.
John:
Again, it's not evidence based.
John:
They're not updating it based on current scenarios.
John:
And as we said on past shows, force quitting can actually cost you battery life if you're just going to use that same app again and you're causing it to launch from a fresh state over and over and over again.
John:
It's better to resume it.
John:
It's better to have it suspended and resume it better for your battery, the thing you're trying to save.
John:
But I think this whole topic segues nicely into actually the first item on our topic list, which is talking about the iPhone 7 rumors, which mostly is stuff that we talked about before.
John:
But, you know, another topic we visited before is like, oh, this one looks like it's going to be about the same size and shape as the iPhone 6.
John:
And I assume the insides, as they usually do, will become slightly more power efficient in various ways.
John:
So if it's the same size as the iPhone 6, the insides are more power efficient.
John:
It should get better battery life, right?
John:
Like this should be it's not like what Mark was talking about four times bigger, but it seems like it could be potentially.
John:
a change to the trend where from year to year battery life is basically the same.
John:
They just, you know, they're basically like they, they, they, uh, they have a new phone, but they make a little bit thinner and they try to, you know, the insides take less power, but they use less, but they put a smaller battery in it to make it thinner.
John:
And they try to, you know, like the iPad thing, try to keep it around 10 hours, keep their stats around the same.
John:
And it varies.
John:
Some go up and some go down.
John:
It's not a smooth slope, but, uh,
John:
For this, it's going to be the third year in a row with the same physical size phone.
John:
I have to think that this has to have better battery life, at least much better battery life than the 6.
John:
Not just like a little bump in the graph, but significantly better.
John:
And if it doesn't, I wonder what they're using.
John:
Like, have they found a new way to...
John:
suck up all that battery power because like it it may be too much to ask as we have so many times before apple please make one fat phone like yeah don't make all your phones fat but just make one fat phone why not make one fat one for the people who want lots of better and one fat laptop yeah exactly right but if they're not going to do that this may be again one of the potential silver linings of the otherwise fairly unremarkable iphone 7 from what we know from the rumors is
John:
and potentially infuriating iPhone 7 with no headphone port is, hey, it could have better battery life than the 6 and the 6S in a way that people would notice.
John:
They'll still force quit all their apps and turn their screen brightness down, but whatever.
Marco:
No, but it's... See, that's the thing.
Marco:
Like, it's not...
Marco:
The way you get better battery life is by a dramatic change in the power efficiency of the components or by increasing the battery size.
Marco:
That's how this happens.
Marco:
Not by 15%.
Marco:
If it's 15% more battery life, that's nice.
Marco:
I'll take it.
Marco:
But that's not going to change anybody's behavior.
Marco:
That's not going to be a radical shift in what we can do with these devices that we couldn't do before.
John:
It could change new users' behavior because if they never actually run out of battery, they won't seek out these tweaks.
John:
Like you said, if you never get into a situation, you run out.
John:
And it could be that for a huge swath of people, 15% more is enough to get them over the hump where like before their battery would have been dead and they would have had an hour left until they get home and put it on their nightstand.
John:
And now it lasts that extra hour and has 30 minutes to spare after that.
John:
So they feel like maybe they feel like I just made it.
John:
Maybe they have a little bit of anxiety, but they never actually literally run out of battery.
John:
I think that'll go a long way to helping.
John:
And really, like, three years, same size.
John:
Like, the components inside can get smaller, too, making room for more battery.
John:
Like, all same form factor for three years.
John:
I think if you add up all the small gains over those years, the difference between the 6 and the 7 is going to be huge.
John:
The difference between the 6S and the 7, maybe not as huge, but this is all...
John:
predicated on something we're not sure about which is who they could have done the same thing with the cpu like oh we we have a more power efficient process for and we've you know reduced the number of chips and some of our chips are made on a smaller process than they used to be like the ancillary supporting chips so we do have a power drop let's use that to crank the clock speed or let's use that to add more cores to the gpu like we have no idea what's inside the system on a chip so it could be that all everything i'm saying is not true and in fact they they basically use their budget of uh
John:
uh, extra space and extra power to make this phone faster, because that's the only thing that I've heard about this phone besides the dual cameras on the, on supposedly on the big one that makes you make someone think that it would be better than the success is like, well, it'll be faster because you know, it'll have a better system on a chip on it.
John:
And doesn't everyone like faster?
John:
And yes, I do like faster.
John:
I was just complaining about, uh,
Marco:
slow iphone last week and dual cameras might be neat but on the other hand they're taking away the headphone port and the thing looks the same so maybe that's not enough that's the thing i mean like from from what we know from rumor well no in quotes what the rumors say so far uh and what we've heard from various birdies and tipsters uh is basically that yeah it's the same shape and size uh it's a little bit lighter weight uh and it's you know faster a lot faster supposedly and there was
Marco:
There was very briefly a MacRumors repost of a story, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
It appeared in their feed and then was nowhere on their site.
Marco:
But I saved it, of course, that there was allegedly a leaked Geekbench test of the new A10 chip.
Marco:
And if it was real, it showed roughly a 50% performance increase over the A9.
Marco:
so that's cool you know if that's real and you know that kind of matches up kind of what we've been hearing so you know that's it's it is probably a lot faster and that's great uh but if if things get more power efficient apple spends it basically like any gains they get in efficiency they spend it in other places and they keep roughly the same target battery life because they they think in general they've that they have good battery life and that's where i think like no like we need to we need to work on that assumption there
Marco:
There was a great post on Six Colors a couple of years ago where Jason basically went through and graphed the battery life over time by Apple's various testing metrics of iPhones and iPads.
Marco:
And the iPhone graph varies a little bit, but they're all kind of in the same range.
Marco:
And the 6 Plus comes out, and it's like a big jump up.
Marco:
It doesn't include the S generation because it's too old.
Marco:
And then the funny thing is the iPad battery life is just a straight line.
Marco:
It's always 10 hours.
Marco:
They've changed no part of that time.
Marco:
because any advances they make in power efficiency etc they they basically spend by making the battery smaller or by increasing the power budget for things like a faster cpu so apple is clearly you know like as jason put it in this article solving for x and
Marco:
or like they've determined like a, a certain battery life to be, this is good.
Marco:
This is a good target.
Marco:
We don't really need to get much better than this.
Marco:
So let's any games we make, then we can make the devices thinner and lighter or whatever, uh, or make the CPUs faster or whatever.
Marco:
And I,
Marco:
This is the problem.
Marco:
I don't see how we get off this treadmill, basically.
Marco:
I see us continuing to make these incremental advances over here and there.
Marco:
Next year, supposedly, we're getting an OLED screen, and that'll be a big power savings.
Marco:
But is it then going to go into making the phone thinner and lighter?
Marco:
Probably.
Marco:
Or making other components use more power or whatever else.
John:
like that's probably going to happen instead because apple feels that this is good enough because if they didn't feel this was good enough they would release a thicker one that you could buy for more with more battery power the thing about those graphs is apple's controlling all aspects of them they control the product they also control the methodology of the measurement that's true and i i assume apple is adjusting the methodology because they do collect like all those stats and everything and what you were saying before is essentially telling apple apple you're you have to change your methodology and
John:
even more than you have been because people use your phones in a different way because they can do many more things.
John:
Like if people are reading Twitter, you know, in 2008, 2009, people reading Twitter on their phones, it's like it's a table view full of text and they're scrolling it.
John:
Now people are Snapchatting.
John:
That is a whole different, you know, battery use sort of profile.
John:
So I assume Apple does update its methodology over time.
John:
And based on our diagnostic data, they just say, wow, people are really using more power
John:
per minute of staring at their phone because the applications they're using as you said are doing more interesting things so i would hope that they would update their methodology i can see a scenario where they keep that graph basically level but keep changing their methodology to say normal usage is now uses way more power than it used to and i think they must have been doing that already because it's not as if normal usage in a 3gs is the same as normal usage on a
John:
on a six like they must be doing that it's just you know again we're we're all saying that they're they're off the curve like they think everything is fine and they're and they're under maybe just under maybe under by a big amount and there are many ways they can solve and they don't seem to be doing it if they're but i still feel like they're within shooting distance of it especially keeping the form factor the same for three years in a row um and the faster cpu like 50 is a big jump uh yeah
John:
So the advantage of things like Race to Sleep, where how can a faster CPU help you save battery?
John:
Because it gets done with its computation and goes back into low power mode faster.
John:
We're all speculating.
John:
We don't know what the profile of this chip is.
John:
They could burn all their extra energy on just more GPU cores, for all we know, because they love to do that, and it's really easy to add them, and they do make your games faster.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Here's the problem, though.
Marco:
So much of modern computing, and much of it with Apple devices right in the middle of it, is based on this idea that we have to just conserve, conserve, conserve, just sit power everywhere and never push anything too hard for too long.
Marco:
Race to sleep is a big part of that.
Marco:
What if we had so much power that we could actually use the CPU?
Marco:
I know this is a radical concept.
Marco:
That's called a desktop computer, and I have one.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a radical concept, I know.
Marco:
But over the weekend, this past weekend, I was getting some work done on my MacBook Pro, not playing games on it, getting some work done on the MacBook Pro, and I was running Xcode.
Marco:
And I was working on the MP3 encoder, doing some tests that we talked about last episode.
Marco:
Using Xcode, doing some builds, and then occasionally having like a one minute or so burst of all four cores being maxed out.
Marco:
And then going back to Xcode and coding and going back.
Marco:
So, you know, it was moderate to heavy use.
Marco:
I'm not even talking about like a handbrake transcode for two hours.
Marco:
I'm just talking like it would max out the cores sometimes for a minute or so and then go back to moderate use of Xcode.
Marco:
This made this laptop that is not very old and that when you're not doing much on it has like a 10-hour quoted battery life have instead a four-hour battery life.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
It totally changes how you use it.
Marco:
If I can use it around the house, which I was doing all over.
Marco:
We were upstate at my in-law's place.
Marco:
um so i was like you know lounging around not not being plugged in tied down anywhere like it was great but if you if you have to plug in like every few hours to boost that back up that's a lot less useful and it's a lot less compelling and wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that and here they are apple has basically i mean you know we'll see what the new macbook pros have in store but i'm guessing they're not going to have twice the battery life i'm guessing they're going to have about the same battery life and be thinner and lighter
Marco:
And that's what people want.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
I wish that wasn't the only option.
Marco:
Because right now, everything Apple makes is a thin and light.
Marco:
And thin and lights are great for being thin and light.
Marco:
They're only okay for battery life.
Marco:
A lot of customers have different needs.
Marco:
And this is why I really... I mean, I guess I'll stop harping on this after this.
Marco:
But I really am sad to see that Apple really keeps reducing the amount of choice we have.
Marco:
We have more and more choice in areas that don't matter, like color.
Marco:
And then we have ever, ever less choice on factors that are important to people like me.
Marco:
Things like battery life and high-end specs and things like that.
Marco:
And that worries me for my future happiness on this platform.
Casey:
Well, but you're painting your concerns as the only ones that matter.
Casey:
And Apple's clearly making these decisions based on what all of the millions upon millions upon millions of iPhone users want.
Casey:
I do agree with you that 25% to 50% more battery life, I think, would make every single iPhone user happier.
Casey:
But with that said, I don't think doubling the thickness, and maybe that's aggressive, I don't know, but even 125% of the thickness, now that we're all used to these little slivers of metal, I don't know if that would make a lot of people happy.
Casey:
And I think a lot of people would look at that and go, ugh.
Casey:
Even if the same person that just went, ugh, would really love to have 50% more battery life, the first reaction would be, ugh.
Casey:
Kind of like if they, I don't know, removed the headphone jack or something.
Casey:
But I'm torn because I think to some degree you're projecting a little bit what your personal needs and desires are and saying these are the only ones that matter because, hey, guess what?
Casey:
You're human.
Casey:
And since I have similar wants and needs for my devices, I tend to agree with you.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't think we should throw everything out and say, oh, this is BS and they're not really doing what anyone wants because I think most people do just want a thin and light phone that lasts all day.
Casey:
The problem is that I don't think many people can get to that last all day part the way it is now.
Casey:
And John had alluded to earlier or said earlier, oh, if it was 15% better, maybe that would get you over the hump.
Casey:
Well, yeah, that's probably true for a lot of people.
Casey:
But in my case, I'm...
Casey:
I'm probably at between 10% and 30% at the end of most days.
Casey:
And I think another 10% or 15%.
Casey:
If I ended the day at between, let's say, 20% and 40%, that wouldn't make me stop stressing about my battery life.
Casey:
If I ended the day at 50% all the time, like I did on my watch, then I would not be stressed about battery life anymore.
John:
I think that's a personal problem.
John:
It's a personality trait.
John:
And what percentage do you become anxious?
John:
Because we all know people who like use their phone with a little battery meter in the red and they're fine with it.
John:
And other people, when they get close to 50%, same thing with gas tanks, by the way, they get close to 50%.
John:
My wife asked me the other day, she was talking about the light in the dashboard.
John:
I'm like, what light?
John:
She's like, you know, the light that comes on when you're running low on gas.
John:
Like, I've never seen that light and neither should you.
John:
What are you doing with this car?
John:
You know that light existed.
Marco:
But Casey, I'm not arguing that Apple should make products to fit me, period, and ignore what everyone else wants.
Marco:
I do wish there was more choice.
Marco:
And even if that choice wasn't perfect for me, right now, the way Apple targets the battery life and other factors, but I think it's the big one, the way they target this, you basically have an entire product line where everything has roughly the same battery life or fairly close.
Casey:
Are we talking about the laptops or are we talking about the phones?
Casey:
Because the phones, if you really want battery life, go Plus Club.
Marco:
Not if the screen's on.
Marco:
The Plus has way better battery life if you're talking on it or if it's playing music with the screen off.
Marco:
But when the screen's on, it isn't that much better.
Marco:
I think it's a little bit better, but it's not that much better.
Marco:
So a lot of these areas where you're using the screen or the GPU, a lot of these things actually wouldn't be tremendously better.
Marco:
And that is fair.
Marco:
It is a lot bigger phone, and I wouldn't mind if my 6S was thicker.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
Apple has spent the last few years basically reducing the amount of choice we have in key areas.
Marco:
Or in something like the iPhone, where now we have more choice than the iPhone, but we have a lot of choice in ways that maybe don't matter as much.
Marco:
And one of the big things that everyone so often needs is more battery life, and we don't really have a choice there.
Marco:
The only choice we have is a crappy choice of bolting on additional battery packs to it, like external, which suck.
Marco:
um because they are they have to have you know all the all the overhead of being an external peripheral their own casing their own circuitry their own charging their own ports their own cables or connectors like all that all the crap that's overhead that isn't just the additional battery um so that is a crappy solution and i hope that is not apple's long-term only plan
Marco:
And finally, I will close this by there's a great line in our chat room a few minutes ago from Chris LTD saying, what's the point of having consumer and pro lines if the consumer and pro lines are basically the same thing?
John:
The consumer lines get updated.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Hover, Indochino, and Betterment.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
So John and I shared a private moment before the show.
Casey:
Is this something that you need to keep private?
Casey:
Well, no.
Casey:
Now I'm going to tell the whole world about our private moment.
Casey:
We used Google Duo together.
Marco:
Is that the thing where people can show obscene pictures to other people who didn't agree to it?
Marco:
Yep, that's the one.
Casey:
Yes, you could choose to do that if you so desire.
John:
The whole idea is that it shows what's on the, you know, before you even accept the call, you see video from the other person.
John:
I think there was something about that when I was doing it that, like, only if they're in your contacts already that happens or there's some.
John:
When we talked about it, it was after Google I.O.
John:
and they demoed the feature and they didn't memorize it.
John:
They didn't say anything about it.
John:
They needed to just say a sentence and said, of course, you can turn this off or, of course, it only works in X and Y situations.
John:
But instead, they said nothing.
John:
and just presented it as look isn't this great when you pick it up before you hit the button that says yes accept this video call you're already seeing video from them it's like no no one thought about it for two seconds that's terrible unless unless there's some kind of limitations and i'm not sure what they are i'm still not sure what they are because casey and i were just calling each other and we don't care um yeah but i don't think i saw you before i agreed to the call i thought that feature was android only
John:
Well, it said, there was a thing that came up on my screen that I thought, but I tapped in, like a typical computer, as you tap it away, you need to read the thing.
John:
It was like, oh, keep in mind that you're going to be on video.
John:
Is that okay?
John:
And the button was like, okay, got it.
John:
Unfortunately, we tried this just before we came on the air.
John:
Do you have your phone with you?
John:
Yeah, all right, I'll try it right now.
John:
Here we go.
Casey:
I'm going to do your little... All right, so do you want my phone to be locked, to be in the Duo app?
Casey:
How do you want me to do this?
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
I have a quick video call.
John:
I go to you.
Casey:
The phone is on.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Incoming call from John Syracuse.
Casey:
Do you see me?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I do see you.
Casey:
Do you see me?
John:
Yeah, but before you hit accept.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
No, I did not see you before I hit accept.
Casey:
I thought I was muted.
Casey:
What the hell is this?
John:
Let's see.
John:
Settings.
John:
Knock, knock on.
John:
That's what it's talking about.
John:
Knock, knock.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Let me try you.
John:
Don't hit accept.
John:
All right.
Casey:
Wait, are you calling me or am I calling you?
Casey:
You can call me this time.
Casey:
All right, let me try calling you.
Casey:
Communication.
Casey:
Smile, knock, knock us on.
John:
All right, got it.
John:
See, that's the thing.
John:
It's telling you to smile.
John:
My video is visible.
John:
Yeah, I see you right now and I have not hit accept.
John:
Oh, then I must have been a little too punchy.
John:
I can hit decline or accept and I'm going to decline you.
Casey:
all right well then wait wait go the other way one more time i want to see this now yeah so the feature totally exists um here we go this is super interesting okay so i can see you right now you can't see me nope oh interesting i'm declining you because now yeah so this is the exact feature we were talking about the fact that my mistake my mistake before casey had decided whether he wants to accept this call he is forced to see me
John:
and there is that that's that's the the the feature is called knock knock and i think if you turn that setting off it would you know anyway i mostly wanted to use it just to see how does it compare to facetime because that's that's the role of this thing it's basically cross-platform facetime if you can't do facetime with your relatives because they all have android phones or because you have an android phone and they have iphones or whatever if everybody gets google duo then you can do essentially the same stuff as facetime across platforms without worrying about
John:
Getting everyone in your family to use iPhones or getting everyone in your family to use Android or whatever the predecessor app to this was if there was one.
John:
So I think that's good.
John:
The brief time that we used it, the one feature that was annoying both of us was that the little window that shows you like shows you yourself like this is what the other person is seeing right now.
John:
It is cropped to a circle, which is infuriating because of all the things we were showing each other, I was trying to show him my Fios box in the basement and we were comparing our Fios boxes.
John:
This is what we ended up showing each other.
John:
Anyway, I couldn't tell if the whole Fios box was in the frame.
John:
Because I was holding my phone in portrait orientation, because that's basically the orientation of the Fios box, and I wanted to get the whole thing in the shot.
John:
But because the preview was circular, I could never tell if it was entirely in the frame.
John:
Now, you can tap the circle, which switches it.
John:
And now, all of a sudden, the video I'm sending takes up my whole phone, and Casey's video is in a tiny little circle.
John:
And that helps me frame things, but it's not really an improvement.
John:
Now he's in a little circle and I want to see him.
John:
So I feel like this is a solved problem.
John:
Make the preview of the video that the other person is seeing the same aspect ratio and show the full image so I know what the frame boundaries are.
John:
Because the circle is like... I felt like I was looking through a little porthole and constantly trying to...
John:
make sure he was seeing the whole thing but other than that the video quality looked good uh we didn't have any disconnections that work fine the little ringing tone that you kind of heard over my microphone depending on how much marco edits out sounds nice and pleasant so i mostly give duo a thumbs up except for the knock knock feature being on by default and possibly existing at all and the circular crop thing i didn't think it was on by default i thought i had to turn it on maybe i'm wrong about that but i
John:
thought i think maybe on first launch it says that little like i said the thing that i swiped away without even looking at it the thing i hit up was like okay got it i think it was telling you about knock knock just so you're aware this knock knock thing is on i think the only option was okay got it but i can't go through the first launch well no i
Casey:
What I saw was what you saw because I had only received a call.
Casey:
I had not placed one.
Casey:
And it was just telling you, hey, right now you're actually visible.
Casey:
So, you know, don't do anything stupid.
Casey:
But I had thought in settings where there is absolutely a switch to flip for knock, knock on or off.
Casey:
I thought I had expressly gone in there and turned it on.
Casey:
But if you don't remember doing that, perhaps I'm remembering wrong.
John:
no i definitely didn't do that at this first time actually we should see so turn knock knock off on your end and then i'm going to call you one more time because i think the setting applies to your end where like hold on let me don't do it yet settings uh knock knock don't you wish you had this installed marco
Marco:
Oh, I'm, I'm so upset that I missed this.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
I am prepared for you to knock on me.
John:
What did you just, didn't you just Instagram story?
John:
What did you Instagram story?
John:
I think you Instagram story that the, uh, the screenshot of your windows thing, not booting.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
So I'm getting an incoming video call.
Casey:
I see nothing.
Casey:
I just see a screen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So that, so basically you're, you're controlling it.
John:
Not what you send, but what you receive.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So wait, so with me having knock, knock off.
Casey:
I'm now going to call you.
Casey:
Can you see me at this point?
Casey:
I'm twisting my phone back and forth just to show you that something is moving.
John:
No.
John:
And in fact, it just shows a blank screen.
John:
Yeah, that's basically what I saw.
Casey:
So apparently if either of us has knock knock off, then it doesn't happen.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
So they just need to have that off by default or, I mean, make people more aware of it in the first launch or anyway.
John:
Who knows?
John:
I bet regular people won't mind it, but it just seems like you won't mind it until the first time you do mind it.
John:
And then you'd be like, uh, why did I do this?
Casey:
Did you know, did it quiz you after the fact as to whether or not the call was good?
Casey:
Did you notice that?
John:
It did not quiz me.
John:
No quizzes.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Casey:
I got on mine.
Casey:
What did this say?
Casey:
Hold on one second.
Casey:
I took a screenshot of it.
Casey:
This is a terrible screenshot that I won't be able to put in the show notes because I look like an idiot.
Casey:
But how's the call quality?
Casey:
Skip, unhappy face, bad, or happy face, good.
Casey:
Actually, I'll take it.
Casey:
I'll crop just that little dialogue and put that in the show notes.
Marco:
Can I skip this entire topic?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Can I put an unhappy face on it?
Casey:
If you'd like.
Casey:
Or you know what you should do is I will put this image in the show notes and you can just like sketch red circle the bad one.
Casey:
How about that?
John:
Would that make you happy?
John:
That's fair.
John:
What is it called?
John:
Pinpoint now?
John:
I forget.
Casey:
We've been talking about this for a minute and a half.
Casey:
We talked about photography for 20 minutes, more than that.
Casey:
And you're already getting grumbly.
John:
He doesn't have the app installed.
John:
He should have been installing it right now.
Casey:
He should have been a cool kid like us.
Marco:
So far, you have not given it a ringing endorsement, in my opinion.
John:
Do you have family that doesn't have iPhones that you would like to FaceTime with?
Casey:
No.
John:
See, that's the thing.
Casey:
As I've talked about many times in the past, my whole family is all iOS.
Casey:
Aaron's whole family, except Aaron, is all Android.
Casey:
And there have been times that we would really like to video chat with Aaron's mom or actually my grandmother has some sort of Android phone that's, I believe, expressly designed for senior citizens.
Casey:
So there's, I think, whatever physical buttons are on there are very large.
Casey:
And I think that it's been oversimplified and all the fonts are gigantic by default.
Casey:
Well, anyway, next time I'm around her, I hope I will be able to put Duo on her phone, even though it's ancient, and then we would be able to video chat with her.
Casey:
It's not a jitterbug, but it's along those lines.
Casey:
Just get her an iPad.
Casey:
I've thought about it, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's just one more thing for her to manage.
Casey:
So anyway, so I'm excited about this.
Casey:
I completely agree with John that the circular little porthole into yourself is freaking terrible.
Casey:
I do like that you can tap into your own image and bring it up full screen, like John had said, because there have been times I've wanted to do that in FaceTime and I can't.
Casey:
It handled rotation just like FaceTime does, which is a good thing.
Casey:
That's a compliment.
Casey:
And the video quality was great.
Casey:
Dials instantly.
Casey:
When I was video chatting with John on the show moments ago, it seemed like there was very, very low latency.
Casey:
I mean, it's all good in my book.
Casey:
I approve.
Casey:
But I would certainly use FaceTime as my default modus operandi.
Casey:
And then if for some reason I need to video chat with an Android user, then that's what Duo is for.
Marco:
I just get different friends.
Marco:
Or a different family, too?
Marco:
I try.
John:
You can pick your nose.
John:
You can pick your friend's nose.
John:
I'm going to keep it on my phone because I keep all sorts of apps on my phone.
John:
I really need to go through and clean stuff out, but I'll probably keep it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Cool.