The Girl Who Never Came Over
Marco:
Oh, John's here.
John:
I missed the beginning of the story.
Marco:
It was really funny.
Marco:
You missed it.
Casey:
Yeah, it was the funniest thing ever, and you missed it because your Skype isn't updated.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I'm told from half of the internet, I've measured it, it is exactly half.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
That there is a reduced motion option in beta 2.
Casey:
Not only is there a reduced motion option in beta 2, I'm told it works.
Casey:
I'm told it works the way John wants it to work.
Casey:
So if you'll follow along, I have...
Casey:
a little bit of cash i will it didn't you bet like one or five dollars one dollar so here that this is my one dollar and now listeners i will take this box of envelopes and i will extract that was not nearly as loud as i hoped it would be i will extract one envelope and i will place this dollar in said envelope and
Casey:
And I will address it to Mr. John Syracuse, Payne in my hindquarters, 123 Main Street, somewhere outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Casey:
And I will send it along.
John:
That'll work.
Casey:
Because, John, you are correct.
Casey:
In our gentleman's bet where we bet one American dollar.
Casey:
You have proved victorious, and from everything I am told, I have not witnessed this myself, so I'm going on faith, but I am told that your reduced motion plus super ridiculous motion and messages is a thing.
Casey:
So congratulations, sir.
John:
I was going to say you could wait until it ships, because who knows, they could pull it before the update.
John:
Eh, that's true.
John:
I'm going to say most likely, like if they've got this far, even if they don't ship it in this update, it'll be in the next one or the one after.
John:
indeed yeah i'm kind of uh i'm trying not to let this uh this newfound power go to my head but i always feel like that i should uh perhaps exercise the magic uh the magical phrasing if i can remember the magic words that i said i should try something like uh you know talking about how they haven't updated the mac pro in a really long time and say this cannot stand and then and then see what happens but john i'll bet you a dollar they don't update the mac pro next week
John:
No, no.
John:
I don't think it was the betting.
John:
I think it was the indignity.
John:
And I think I said this cannot stand.
John:
I seem to recall saying something incredibly pompous like that.
Casey:
Incredibly pompous.
Casey:
You know, all kidding aside, the funny thing about this whole argument was I listened to the last, I don't know, 15 episodes of Reconcilable Differences where you talked about this.
Casey:
And listening to you and Merlin talk about it,
Casey:
I actually think I was on your side.
Casey:
I don't know what was so different about the way you described it then and the way you described it now, or on this show.
Casey:
I don't know if I was in a punchy mood.
John:
You can blame Marco.
John:
He's an instigator.
Casey:
I think I was instigating more than him on this one, although you are correct.
Casey:
Marco is, in fact, an instigator.
Marco:
In my defense, I was kind of not arguing against John's position of wanting this feature, really.
Marco:
I was more kind of exploring and poking and be like, hey, why do you think that?
John:
That's what an instigator does, poking, yeah.
Marco:
But it wasn't in an inflammatory manner.
Marco:
To me, I view almost every one of these little accessibility additions that were added post-iOS 7, I view almost all of them as just design failures.
Marco:
because like if like if the system wasn't so incredibly heavy with unnecessary motion animations this option wouldn't need to be there just like it wasn't before ios 7 nobody was complaining about motion sickness before ios 7 and then that came out and rather than fix the design you know they they have to add these options just like you know the text was too thin and rather than fix the text they just made a bold text option buttons didn't like buttons anymore and rather than make buttons look like buttons again they just made an option so like it
Marco:
These are all kind of just papering over design flaws, really, or poor design choices.
Marco:
So I'm with you in the sense that, A, obviously, anybody who needs these for what most people would consider an accessibility reason, that's kind of a broad definition, but...
Marco:
More power to you.
Marco:
It's great that we have these options.
Marco:
But B, I think we shouldn't even need these options because the system should be designed in a way to be more inclusive and usable to begin with.
Marco:
And the fact that it keeps going away from that is kind of a design flaw, in my opinion.
Casey:
But yeah, it was funny listening to Reconcilable Differences because I had been a couple of episodes behind when you and I were getting into it, John.
Casey:
And then I caught up and I was listening to you on Rec Diffs and I was like, wow, actually, that makes a lot more sense.
Casey:
And I wish I could.
Casey:
I should have taken notes or something and tried to pinpoint what about your description made more sense to me then.
Casey:
But I remember leaving that thinking.
Casey:
Wow, I think I'm on his side.
Casey:
That's weird.
John:
You're succumbing to peer pressure because I had someone on the show who agreed with me.
John:
So you heard two people who believe the same way.
John:
And you're like, well, the crowd is doing it.
John:
I'm swayed by this.
John:
We recorded that first.
John:
That was the... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Merlin pointed out this week.
John:
That was the first episode.
John:
And then I talked about it on ATP.
John:
It's just because of the release schedules are different.
John:
So I think I was also less worked up with it.
John:
But in general, on our show, when YouTube both...
John:
not only disagreed with me but seemed to think what i was saying was ridiculous i couldn't believe that you didn't see how this was like just an incredible gap like that this cannot stand i said it and i'll say it again like it just it just seemed like a thing that's why i was willing to do the one dollar bet i mean you know me i'm not a big like gambler right but you know
John:
it seemed like you really you know first of all one dollar is not that big a deal but it was just like they just they just have to change it they just have to like it's not just like well maybe it's a little we just seem like it had to be done um and they're doing it so good and i wish i had the beta now but not enough to actually install a beta so hopefully the point release will be out soon um and i've been using my phone with reduced motion still off every time i want to send effect i go to settings turn it back on send the effect turn it off
John:
wow all right so uh john tell me about compu blur this is one more data point in the ongoing discussion of the iphone 7 pluses fake background blur thing that it does um last show we talked about the confirmation that it was not taking like a fuzzy picture from one camera and combining it with another one but was instead uh
John:
taking the background finding it and then blurring it with a particular algorithm and we're talking about how that that didn't quite look like the the same way uh an optical blur looks but most people can be able to tell and blah blah anyway um a couple people uh wrote in with a blog post exploring the various ways you can blur things to try to make them look like an out of focus picture from a lens um
John:
So we'll link to that blog post.
John:
I think that's Stu.
John:
How do you pronounce his last name?
John:
Mashowitz?
John:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
He's a filmmaker and a photographer, so he knows some stuff about this.
John:
And we had someone named Ben Gunsberger write in to say that he has worked on tools that do this for computer animation, like that make the blur of the background that wasn't actually blurred in the camera, but they want to make it look like it was.
John:
and he says that to do it properly is very cpu intensive they have situations where it would take multiple minutes per frame to calculate the blur so obviously that's a non-starter if it takes multiple minutes on what i assume is pretty beefy hardware in the visual effects world to do the blur the quote-unquote right way if apple's got to do it and they do it in real time right don't you get like a preview of the blur in the uh camera thing so anyway multiple minutes per frame is not going to happen there so
John:
Apple may be currently constrained, not only by the fact that they're faking it, but by the fact they have to fake it and do it in real time.
John:
I mean, the A10 is fast, but it's not fast enough to take an operation that takes multiple minutes.
John:
Never mind, it's also multiple minutes on, well, I don't know what the resolution is, but
John:
how many megapixels is the uh 12 to 7 camera 8 12 12 yeah that's is that higher res than than like 4k film probably higher than 2k right it's higher than 4k uh no yeah 4k is just over 8 megapixels anyway uh whole point is that doing it faking it the right way is is expensive
John:
so that would explain a little bit of the crappiness also some more funny pictures of the blur messing up were posted at various places wasn't it somewhere in the slack where you saw a picture of a person shot from like the knees up standing in front of something with his arms at his side and the background was blurred but the gap between his arms and his body the camera just didn't find and so the background was pin sharp and when you look between his arms and his body but the whole rest of the background was blurred looks really weird
Casey:
Yeah, that was Stephen Hackett, wasn't it?
Casey:
It was his brother.
Casey:
And yeah, imagine your arms are at your side, but there's a gap between your arms and your body.
Casey:
And at a glance, especially not like blown up full size, I didn't notice a thing wrong with it.
Casey:
But then as I looked closer, and I think because somebody pointed it out,
Casey:
It turns out that, like John said, the area between his brother's arm and his torso was super sharp, whereas all the area around his brother was blurred like you would have expected.
Casey:
So it was kind of funny to see.
Casey:
And I mean, this is to be expected.
Casey:
And to be fair, it's portrait mode, not entire body mode.
Casey:
And so, you know, it's not really being used as designed, but...
Casey:
But it was still a funny thing to see and a great example of where it kind of falls on its face today anyway.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Let's talk about the ceramic iPhone 8.
Casey:
There's been a – maybe not in the last week or two, but right when the Apple Watch Edition came out, there was a lot of talk of, well, if this works for a watch, why wouldn't this work for a phone?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I think there's a lot of different conversations about this and a lot of different ways this can go.
Casey:
And I think I, for one, am very concerned about droppability.
Casey:
Not to say these phones are terribly droppable as it is, but, you know, would a ceramic case like shatter?
Casey:
How would that work?
Casey:
So where do we see this going for a potential ceramic iPhone 8?
Marco:
Well, I mean, it depends like, you know, like some of the possible reasons why they would do this.
Marco:
There was this one big Quora post that I think kind of got this started or from somebody who knows about material sciences much more than we do.
Marco:
So forgive me for the details here.
Marco:
I mean, ceramic has a lot of advantages over aluminum.
Marco:
One of them is that it's radio transparent.
Marco:
So that gets rid of a lot of antenna problems.
Marco:
It's also it's incredibly, you know, the kinds of ceramics that you'd use.
Marco:
in a phone it can be incredibly scratch resistant and fairly strong you can shatter it uh it's kind of like sapphire like you can shatter it with a very strong impact but it takes a pretty pretty strong impact to do that and anything less than that is basically invulnerable to ceramic can be very very tough
Marco:
And, you know, you can mold it in different shapes and everything.
Marco:
You know, I mean, there's lots of like manufacturing details of how you would do it.
Marco:
And Apple has some interesting patents in that area, but that they appear to not have really used for anything yet.
Marco:
They probably could do it.
Marco:
I don't think any of us know enough about manufacturing to know any of the details beyond that of like that they could do it.
Marco:
For durability, though, I mean, like we also heard a rumor recently that they are that they're going back to the steel band around the outside design, like what we had with the 4 and 4S.
Marco:
you know they'd have glass on both sides is glass has many of those same properties as ceramic as you know you can make it radio transparent and you can make it glossy and you can make it pretty scratch resistant um obviously there's some durability questions there uh but i don't i mean i think apple's solution right now to phone durability to impact to drops and everything i think their solution right now is cases and apple care
Marco:
Like that's, that's basically it.
Marco:
It's like, try not to drop your phone.
Marco:
If you're the kind of person who drops your phone frequently, get a really strong case for it.
Marco:
And if you break it, hopefully you bought AppleCare because we're going to make that easy for you.
Marco:
So I'm honestly not sure that they really need to do that much more work in the durability department if it's going to, you know, make the phone hard to manufacture or less desirable or ugly or like, you know, gross and plasticky.
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Marco:
Do you think like cases in AppleCare are enough?
Casey:
It's a hack.
John:
i think they do need to work on durability um it's just like like you said they they're not willing to make the compromises that would require i mean they can make the phone incredibly durable they just made the whole freaking thing out of plastic but plastic feels gross as a screen like we all want to move our hands across a glass screen because it feels better and so they keep trying to make the glass tougher but there's only so much they can do and they spent a long time uh
John:
moving away from glass like they did the 4 and the 4s and they're like we're taking a break from that for a while because the 4 and the 4s had two sides that could break the screen could break on the front and the back you know and two parts that could shatter at least one that was all the aluminum designs the 5 the 5s 6 6s and the 7 that's a lot of phones the front could shatter backs never shattered bent a little sometimes didn't shatter scratched didn't shatter right so the rumor for the next iphone is going to be all glass as you said
John:
uh have they worked on the shattering thing do they have stronger more shatter resistant glass um i'm not sure one other property of glass that's potentially problematic is that it's not a particularly good conductor of heat compared to say aluminum and so if you've got a hot little system on a chip in there you have to get the heat out somewhere maybe it'll be radiating out of the the steel bands or something i don't know um but it's tougher for it to go through glass than it is an aluminum back
John:
The ceramics we're talking about for the iPhones, that's why it's difficult to talk about this.
John:
And you can read that Quora post if we can find a link for it.
John:
What do you mean by ceramic?
John:
Ceramic is not just one thing, especially with all of Apple's patents with like, well, ceramic mixed with a bunch of other stuff with like fibers between it or reinforcing materials or polymers or laminates or other things to try to make it not be quite so much like ceramic.
John:
Because ceramic has...
John:
I think the main problem ceramic has is that it is heavy if you make it thick enough to be sturdy.
John:
If you make it light, then it's thin.
John:
And it has, like glass, catastrophic failure mode.
John:
Really good, right up to the point where it totally goes kablooey.
John:
Anyway, we see the watch.
John:
We see that they've done the watch in ceramic.
John:
The watch is in an easier situation because people aren't dropping their watches for the most part.
John:
But they are banging them into things.
John:
But it's smaller and it's able to be more sturdy because it doesn't have any long, continuous flat areas like the back of the phone.
John:
Anyway, I think a ceramic iPhone is totally plausible as a thing that Apple will experiment with.
John:
I don't know if they're going to get it to the point where they can ship something.
John:
There are so many material choices.
John:
Remember we heard all the rumors about carbon fiber for so many years, both about Macs and about iOS devices?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
I think that's another situation where, oh, carbon fiber is...
John:
you know even better than plastic uh very light very strong has its failure modes are probably not as good as aluminum but not as bad as ceramic or glass but i think a lot of these decisions come down to how much does it cost to manufacture this can we manufacture it consistently uh and how ugly is it right because again i think like what's stopping apple from making the back of all their phones plastic i it's like it's like it's it's not going to say stubbornness but it's
John:
It's a desire not to ship a product that has plastic on the back because it's seen as and feels to be, you know, because it has so much plastic back foam, radio transparent, maybe not good for heat conduction.
John:
All right.
John:
Very light, very sturdy, really good failure modes.
John:
Right.
John:
Maybe a little bit scratchy, but like talk to someone who has a 5C.
John:
i think it holds up pretty well it's just not as sort of premium an experience as glass or aluminum or ceramic would be and so i think they just keep looking for new materials looking for different materials the same reason you got glass on the front can we plastic on the front sure it'd be so sturdy can you imagine a completely plastic screen iphone with plastic on the back lightweight sturdy drop it no problem but it would not feel like an iphone so that's their that's their struggle so
John:
i'm on the lookout for ceramic but i'm pretty sure the next one's that i'm i buy all the glass rumors just because the four and the 4s design was the one they wanted to make or at least the one that that uh i don't know if johnny specifically but it was one of the early designs for like that's what the first iphone was supposed to be and they couldn't pull it off and it took them a really long time till they could pull it off then they did pull it off and everyone dropped their phones and they shattered front and back and they said all right let's take a break
John:
Let's take a break from that.
John:
Take another run at it.
John:
And how many years was it?
John:
I counted it off before.
John:
Five, five, six, six, seven, five years they waited.
John:
And so now after five years of non-glass ones, they're going to try it again.
John:
And I'm ready to see how much they've improved it.
Marco:
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John:
One more thing on the ceramic phone before we start talking about Casey's Internet Woes.
John:
I hope the person in the chat room has posted a link to the little booklet that comes if you buy the ceramic Apple Watch edition that talks about their process.
John:
i'm i'm not following all of it because i'm trying to read it here on the air but it seems like it describes a process whereby they take a ceramic thing and bake it and then machine it after it's baked to make it into the watch case thing i don't know we'll put a link in the show notes people can read it and see for themselves but there is a reference to baking it and how much it shrinks during baking and then the reference to machining and polishing and so anyway uh this watch for all the people who are true believers in the
John:
future ceramic iPhone rumor, this watch looks to all the world like the original MacBook Air, which was the trial run of the unibody construction that would eventually go across the entire product line.
John:
So if this watch thing works out and they master this process by selling a small number of these very expensive watches to people, then maybe it will be for the fallout phone after the all glass one.
John:
But, you know, if this is their trial run, it's too late for this to be the manufacturing technique or
Marco:
Well, and also, like, manufacturing this one fairly high-end, fairly, you know, small market Apple Watch model.
Marco:
out of this material is incredibly different from making the back of every iphone with it like this the difference in scale there is immense like i don't even think this is a good enough test i think they'd have to make all the apple watches out of ceramic to have it be even close to the right kind of test uh but obviously not going to do that yet so we'll see
Casey:
You know, also building off of this, I saw a video that was linked to by a friend of the show, Ryan Jones, that is entitled The iPhone 7 I've Been Waiting For.
Casey:
And the whole video is two and a half minutes.
Casey:
And if you want to see it in its full glory, just pause us for two and a half minutes and go watch.
Casey:
You don't need audio on the video, though.
Casey:
If you're listening to me now, presumably that's not a problem.
Casey:
So what happens is this person takes an iPhone 7 and like saws off all the sides of it such that they're all flat instead of rounded and then sands them down and whatever.
Casey:
I want this.
Casey:
I want this a lot because this matte black iPhone 7 that I have, I love it.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
The more I use it, the more I like it.
Casey:
And I think aesthetically it's my favorite iPhone yet.
Casey:
But this thing is a darn bar of soap.
Casey:
And I would love I mean, obviously, I've never handled this particular gentleman's phone, but it stands to reason it would be much easier to grip with the flat sides.
Casey:
I would love to have an iPhone like this, but in black, not not silver.
Casey:
So, yeah, I want this, please.
Casey:
Can I have one?
John:
I think you only want it because you haven't seen it up close.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
If you notice, the video was kind of quick to show the phone once it was all done.
John:
It's a mess.
John:
It's got to be a mess because this is not a precision operation.
John:
It's just got to look like a phone that has been just messed up.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
It didn't look good if you tried to look closely.
Marco:
The shape looked good, but the finish did not.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
If this was officially done, I think it would be pretty impressive.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
oh yeah i think that would be neat all right so uh i talked about my phone on many past episodes and my wife's going on a uh a cruise uh mediterranean cruise and she was going to bring the fancy camera and rented lenses and we talked all about that anyway she went she's back she brought the camera back in one piece did not drop it into the ocean took a bunch of pictures with it and when i was going through her pictures getting them sorted into the photos library and
John:
uh after her return i noticed a bunch of them and she noticed too she said uh just wait there's something something in a bunch of the pictures you'll see it soon uh a dark line that appears in a bunch of pictures and the line kind of looks semi-circular so i'm like is that like a a shadow of a lens or something but then i noticed some other ones the line is not perfectly
John:
curve like a circle sometimes it changes the angle and i'm like well okay a lens aberration wouldn't do that because the lenses are all round or you know spherical they're not they're not oddly shaped like and then sometimes it would curve in the opposite direction and it would move around and so i posted on twitter can anyone tell me what's causing the vertical curve shadow lines in these pictures and posted a bunch of sample pictures and then everyone commented about where the pictures are from
John:
and whether they've been there or not.
John:
But in addition to that, a bunch of people did have guesses as to what it might be.
John:
My guess was that it was maybe something on the lens because it was in so many pictures in so many different environments.
John:
I didn't think it was what it looks like, which is a hair in front of the lens or something because, you know, your hair is under control.
John:
It wouldn't constantly be in front of the lens and the lens was a zoom lens.
John:
It was pretty far away.
John:
um i inspected the lenses and there was nothing on them um i knew there was stuff on my sensor i could see there like you can see in the same pictures some dots and i could see on the sensor there was some dust that i needed to get rid of but i'm like what the hell is this line and a lot of people had theories and one theory was exactly correct this is the magic of uh of crowdsourcing and the magic of twitter
John:
this theory was it is a hair the hair is not on the sensor the hair is not on the lens there is not in between elements in the lens but rather the hair is caught in the channel that the shutter curtain moves in and when the shutter curtain comes down it snags or otherwise grabs the hair in the channel and briefly flicks it in front of the sensor as it moves up and down and it appears and it only appears in pictures with a very small aperture
John:
Because with wide aperture, the light's coming in from too many angles and it just illuminates all behind it.
John:
You don't see it.
John:
So you see it in pictures of the sky or another thing with lots of light where the aperture has to squeeze down really small.
John:
And then most of the incident light rays are traveling in the same direction.
John:
Then you get a shadow, this one little hair.
John:
And the way I found it, after having this theory, I looked in the channel and...
John:
way down in the corner of the channel just kind of peeking out like like on an angle like cutting off the corner of like the edge you know here's the channel here's the bottom was little tiny hair and so i went in there super duper carefully with a pair of tweezers and pulled it out and it was about like a centimeter and a half long
John:
very fine non-human doesn't look like a human hair looks like a hair from like a rabbit or a squirrel or something really small and i got that out of there i was so i was like thank god because so many other theories are like oh there's something wrong with your shutter and it's dragging something on the thing or whatever or you just have to bring your camera back i was so happy to be able to actually extract a hair like yes this is the thing and then um you know of course i
John:
Had to go through the rest of the process to get rid of the dust, so I brought one of those sensor cleaning kits.
John:
And the way you do this is you take a picture of a blue sky and intentionally crank the aperture down to a very tiny opening.
John:
Or you can just put an auto if the sky is bright enough.
John:
And you take a picture of what you think is blank blue sky, and then you bring it back into your favorite photo application, and you fiddle with the contrast and see if you can see anything that looks like a dot.
John:
And if you do see something like that, there's still dust on it.
John:
And so I used the sensor cleaning kit, which was a little scary.
John:
You know, like, people keep saying, oh, you can damage your sensor, be super careful.
John:
But, like, I bought a thing specifically for that purpose.
John:
The big, like, square on a stick kind of thing?
John:
Yeah, there's, like, disposable single-use swabs.
John:
Yep, yep.
John:
specifically size for the sensor so you just just one swipe only and then you throw the thing in the garbage which is incredibly wasteful but whatever yep and you have to use two of them one with the little spritz of the stuff on it and one without the spritz of the stuff anyway and a little blower to get most i hope to just use the blower because i didn't want to touch it at all to get all this stuff yeah but the blower didn't dislodge a couple of stubborn things so i use the thing took a bunch of pictures of the sky now my sensor is clean which all which made me think that camera manufacturers could
John:
really really help with this problem by just putting something i mean i never had a dslr but i assume that the mirror doesn't actually seal up and i know it covers the sensor but doesn't actually like cover it doesn't keep dust out right no all right so a they should and b mirrorless cameras should have a little door kind of like the shutter but not the shutter that closes before you can take the lens off
John:
like why not do that you know i mean you'd still have to clean the sensor sometimes you still have to have a mechanism like you do on an sslr to flip the lens up so you can clean the sensor right but why expose it to the air at all when you're changing lenses just put it maybe there's not enough room for a door or whatever not the shutter the shutter is the shutter fine i understand it has to be high speed and fancy and so on and so forth there's a plain old boring reasonably sealed door that closes and covers the sensor when you change lenses and
John:
That would be a good idea, camera manufacturers.
John:
Anyway, moral of the story is I did not correctly convey to my wife exactly how careful you have to be when changing lenses.
John:
Not that she even changed them.
John:
She changed it once.
John:
And all it takes is once for a little dust.
John:
But every time I did it on my Long Island vacation, it was like...
John:
The lens can only be off the camera for as short as possible time.
John:
I'd have it, like, staged and set up and never pointed upwards and just, like, lens off, cap on the lens, cap on the... You know, it was like trying to diffuse a bomb and, again, never do it in a still environment with still air, never point the lenses or the camera, like, just...
John:
it's you know it's it's nerve-wracking um and you know she spent a lot of time on her vacation with this hair traveling up and down the channel on the shutter which is kind of disappointing it's i mean it's it didn't ruin all her pictures uh but enough of them have a big dark line in them that's kind of disappointing luckily almost everything indoors doesn't have this problem because the the aperture is too big
Casey:
That stinks.
Casey:
I'm sorry to hear that.
Casey:
But what a weird problem.
Casey:
And I don't have the person's name handy.
Casey:
And gosh, I only know if this is true or not, but I'm taking them at face value.
Casey:
Somebody told me that the Micro Four Thirds cameras, which is what I have, they all have optical image stabilization, or a lot of them, if not all of them, on the body rather than in the lens.
Casey:
and they were saying that this person was saying that when you turn the camera on it will actually use the ois to like shake off any dust that might be on the lens i have no idea if that's true or not but what a cool idea even if it isn't true it's a pretty common feature it doesn't it doesn't actually work perfectly but like like our exactly yeah like like our the 5d mark twos that we had it didn't have stabilization but it just had some kind of like sensor like vibrator thing that would like try to buzz off the dust every time you turn the camera off
Marco:
And so to have that just constantly going every time a camera turns off, we did occasionally have to blow something off the sensor with the 5Ds, but very rarely.
Marco:
I think in the eight years we used them, I think maybe three or four times total, whereas with my Sony when I got it last year...
Marco:
literally the first week i had it i got dust on the sensor and similar similar story just less severe like we were it was last year we were at the beach house lots of my pictures had this one big spot and eventually i took the lens off and spotted it on the lens on the sensor i was on vacation so i couldn't really i didn't have any of the cleaning things so i just kind of tolerated it and just edited it out it was it wasn't too bad to edit out of everything but uh but yeah that was the camera was like a week old and
Marco:
It happened immediately.
Marco:
You don't realize how good those automatically vibrate the sensor things are until you have a camera that doesn't do it or doesn't have it.
Marco:
The Sony, it has that feature, but it doesn't do it every time.
Marco:
It does it only on demand, and it only partially works, but I don't know.
John:
I think that that feature could help a little bit.
John:
But in my case, first of all, it wouldn't have gotten the hair because the hair is not even on the sensor.
John:
So you shake the sensor all you want.
John:
It's not going to help.
John:
That would have been there.
John:
And for the dust, the pieces that I had to eventually use the mechanical method of actually swabbing them off.
John:
The blower, the little, you know, hurricane blower, you know, shoots a very concentrated thing.
John:
That couldn't even remove them.
John:
Like, they were on there good.
John:
It wasn't just, like, instant little dust that happened to float it on there.
John:
They were so wedged on there that very forcible, very concentrated stream of air could not dislodge them.
John:
They actually had to swipe them away.
John:
So I have a little faith in a sensor shake would have shaken them off, too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But again, a door with some kind of reasonable ceiling...
Casey:
better than nothing would go a long way towards making changing lenses less nerve wracking yeah i do it the same way you do and i'm sure marco is the same as well where everything's staged ready to go the camera's always upside down i'm not as intent on it being still air but you know we do what we can um and the whole thought of this happening to me is terrifying so i'm very impressed you were able to get this done without destroying the lens or the the sensor which is what i surely somehow would have done
John:
knowing me i'd poured water on it somehow i don't know how you could like people say oh it's so delicate you have to be careful like it looks pretty sturdy down there i mean you're swabbing it it when i swabbed across it it felt like a smooth surface but the swab it's not like it has little snake like i don't understand how you go by breaking it i suppose you could scratch it in some way but only thing i'm touching it with these microfiber swabby things that i assume are safe
John:
Um, and yeah, I hope to not have to do that again, but like taking pictures of an empty blue sky and checking for any little splotches on it, you'll see them.
John:
Like you don't have to be an expert to be able, especially if you start filling with a contrast control, you will find the spots that are there because I swabbed it and I could see where the spot used to be was still a little, you know, I had actually removed the material.
John:
I couldn't see with my eyeballs anymore, but on the sensor, I could see a little spot and that's when I had to use like the cleaning, uh, stuff.
John:
And then that got rid of it for good.
John:
And now I'm just,
John:
messing with the controls trying to find any little spec and now it's like oh that's jpeg compression never mind i should do raws i guess but anyway i'm pretty sure i didn't destroy my camera uh still seems to work no more hair no more spots all right so i have a brief tale of woe and a plea for help
Casey:
On my work computer, I typically use a pair of headphones, Bluetooth headphones, I bought literally five years ago.
Marco:
And they're perfect in every way, as we've always heard.
Casey:
Yeah, about that.
Casey:
So I bought them on August 15, 2011.
Casey:
And their Arctic Sound P311s, I've espoused them numerous times because while they are not perfect, they accomplish everything satisfactorily in a satisfactory way.
Casey:
So they are sufficient.
Casey:
You know, how much horsepower does a Rolls-Royce have?
Casey:
Sufficient amounts of horsepower.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I upgraded to Sierra on my work Mac, and suddenly they are not sufficient anymore.
Casey:
For whatever reason, and I don't know why, they sound like hugely, hugely, hugely compressed earbuds.
Casey:
And I ran into this once years ago and it ended up that there was like a bit value or something like that, that you could change in the Bluetooth Explorer app, which you have to get via Xcode tools now.
Casey:
And that fixed my problem.
Casey:
Like years ago, I'd noticed that when this first happened, the symbols were terrible and super compressed and it was just awful.
Casey:
And I was able to fix it.
Casey:
Tried doing the same thing this time and didn't make a difference.
Casey:
So I unpair, repair.
Casey:
I've done all sorts of things.
Casey:
I haven't tried again after having cleared my PRAM just for grins and giggles.
Casey:
I've done everything except that.
Casey:
And I thought, well, maybe just something weird is going on.
Casey:
They're ancient headphones at this point.
Casey:
Let me just get a new set.
Casey:
So I got the equivalent set that's newer.
Casey:
And so they came in today.
Casey:
And they are also Arctic Sound.
Casey:
But these are P253.
Casey:
And we will have links to these in the show notes.
Casey:
And good news, bad news.
Casey:
Good news is they sound great.
Casey:
Well, as great as a $30 set of Bluetooth headphones can sound.
Casey:
But every time there's any audio playing of any sort, the right channel has a buzzing in them.
Casey:
which in the span of about 45 seconds drove me absolutely crazy.
Casey:
It took that long?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
How did this review possibly start out in any positive way?
Casey:
So I'm returning these headphones because did you know, like hand on heart, I did not know this.
Casey:
For some, if not all things, you could return it to Amazon for free?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Usually you have to pay return shipping.
Marco:
They'll leave off like six bucks from your return or something.
Casey:
Oh, is that what it does?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Because according to them, they were like, here's your shipping label.
Casey:
And I didn't cross compare how much the cost of the item was versus how much they were saying they were going to refund me.
Casey:
So maybe that's what it is.
Casey:
But anyway.
Marco:
It's super awesome.
Marco:
If you ever have to return it to Amazon, they make it incredibly easy on you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I am going to return them.
Casey:
But here's my predicament.
Casey:
I want, for better or worse, Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
I understand that not everyone wants them.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
I prefer Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
And I think the reason I prefer them is because convenience is a bigger priority to me than perfect sound fidelity.
Casey:
Well, then in that case, just wait for the AirPods.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, so here's the thing.
Casey:
I agree that that's probably going to be the best answer, but they supposedly only run for five hours before they need to charge.
Casey:
And I know that it will charge quickly, but I typically sit at my desk, meetings aside, for eight to eight and a half hours in a day.
Casey:
These ancient headphones with their five-year-old battery that I loved so much used to go like two, two and a half days between charges, easily, easily.
Casey:
And with meetings during the day and whatnot.
Casey:
So it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
Casey:
But you get my point.
Casey:
I think the answer is going to be get AirPods.
Casey:
But is there any, and this is kind of rhetorical, kind of not, especially for you, Marco, is there any set of Bluetooth headphones that...
Casey:
that whether or not they are perfect audio fidelity, because again, I don't care.
Casey:
For Marco's purposes, let's just assume I never listen to music on them, which is a complete and utter lie.
Casey:
But let's just, for your purposes, if you are satisfied with podcast fidelity, that will probably be sufficient for my music fidelity for this use case.
Casey:
Are there any Bluetooth headphones that have batteries that last
Casey:
about 10 hours, let's say, that don't suck.
Casey:
And here's the kicker, though, that have a bar that goes behind the back of your neck rather than over your head.
Casey:
Why, ladies and gentlemen?
Casey:
Because I am weird, and my hair kind of sticks up a little bit and poofs.
Casey:
And if I put a bar across the top of my head for eight hours, I'll have that imprint in my head always, always.
Casey:
which is not advisable.
John:
So... Why, ladies and gentlemen, you could have just said vanity.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Yes, actually, that was an easier summary.
John:
You don't want to mess up your hair.
Marco:
That's why.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
It's a hand on heart.
Casey:
No argument.
Casey:
Absolutely, absolutely true.
Casey:
there are some advantages to baldness anyway uh yeah so i i'm making fun of myself but i really honestly am asking and and maybe we don't answer it during the show but i i don't have anything against earbuds but i'd rather have an over ear or like the the ones that i had kind of dangled on your ear which i understand makes most people crazy but for me i like it it works for me so is and we'll put the links to the ones i'm talking about in the show notes is there any set of
Casey:
bluetooth headphones that's even vaguely like this that is not a total piece of garbage that i would not have to charge in the middle of the day if i have to charge them every night fine no big deal but i don't have to charge in the middle of the day i think marco you're absolutely right what's going to end up happening is i'm going to spend way more money than i want to and i'm going to get the ear pods and i'll probably love them and it'll probably be fine and i'll put them in the little tic-tac case during meetings and i'll never know the difference i suspect that's going to be the winner
Casey:
But is there any other option, preferably not buds, but buds I would maybe entertain?
Casey:
Is there anything else that you can think of that doesn't go over the head?
Marco:
So I'm going to fill you with hope, but ultimately provide no value whatsoever.
Marco:
So the problem, and this is honestly, I've been considering just stopping reviewing headphones because... Oh, no, because I want you to review the Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
Now the Bluetooth is in vogue-ish, kind of.
Casey:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
So basically, like, you know, right now, everyone keeps asking me, you know, what they should get for Bluetooth and everything.
Marco:
And with Bluetooth, there are so, I mean, the headphone market has grown a lot in the last couple years since I started my big review.
Marco:
It is so, like, there's so many models now and people have so many different needs.
Marco:
And the fact is, like, it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to buy or somehow acquire all these headphones and test them properly in a useful way.
Marco:
That's why when the Wirecutter does it, they have a whole team of people doing it, and it takes a long time.
Marco:
And that's their full-time job is to work on stuff like this.
Marco:
And also, the headphone market has gotten... Basically, as Beats came around a few years ago, a lot of people took notice of, here's a place we can make a lot of money.
Marco:
So now there are tons of headphone brands and tons of allegedly awesome new headphones coming out on the market all the time.
Marco:
And many of them are very expensive.
Marco:
Many of them are like, you know, $400 and up, basically, which is, you know, for an audiophile, that's kind of normal.
Marco:
But for a regular person, that's a very expensive pair of headphones.
Marco:
So there are so many now that almost nobody, including the Wirecutter,
Marco:
actually reviews a meaningful number of them to be able to give you a a useful blanket recommendation like if you read the wire cutter they always go through and one of the things they'll spend a few paragraphs doing is saying like here's the ones we tested and here's a whole bunch we didn't even test because you know the reviews didn't look good on amazon or what you know whatever other reasons they have because you you basically have to rule out large swaths of what's out there just to have a possible number to review and
Marco:
And with Bluetooth, everything is even worse now because now there's even more factors that matter that before you didn't have to worry about as much.
Marco:
Things like latency, whether you compare it to multiple devices or not, whether it has decent reception to the phone, whether it supports all these different codecs that are now out there.
Marco:
And then the useful things like how you control whether there's buttons on it or some kind of touch gesture controls to control pausing and volume and stuff.
Marco:
It is so complicated now.
Marco:
There are so many models from $30 to $1,000.
Marco:
No reviewer can meaningfully try a good number of them.
Marco:
So here's what's going to happen now.
Marco:
Right now, as I speak, as people listen to this, they are writing you emails telling you what they bought and saying, these are the best.
Marco:
But all they can tell you is that's what they bought because they probably have tried between zero and five other pairs out of a market with like hundreds of entries.
Marco:
There's really nothing that most people can tell you that will be very helpful.
Marco:
Even on Amazon, half the reviews on Amazon these days are fake.
Marco:
They're paid.
Marco:
They're fraud.
Marco:
It's so hard to find good information about this kind of stuff.
Marco:
So basically, how did you find the ones you have now?
Marco:
Was it just browse online a bit, look at some reviews, and just buy them?
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
That's what you're going to have to do again.
Marco:
When you're buying headphones, that's basically... And not to mention...
Marco:
Even if you found you found a place that reviewed a bunch of headphones in a way that was useful to you.
Marco:
People have such wildly different taste in headphones.
Marco:
People have very different preferences like the whole list that I made disagreed substantially a lot of times with the wire cutter and places like that.
Marco:
There are a few big headphone reviewers out there in the world that I disagree strongly with and some that I agree strongly with.
Marco:
You just kind of never know what you're going to find out there because it's so subjective.
Marco:
People always think that there's some ideal of how headphones should sound, but there isn't one that everyone agrees on.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of argument about that, but basically there is no such thing as the best way a headphone should sound.
Marco:
That's widely agreed upon.
Marco:
Basically, no one's going to tell you anything that is going to be more useful than what you're going to find by just searching places like Amazon, reading a few user reviews, and just picking one.
Marco:
And if it sucks, return it.
Marco:
Otherwise, keep it until it dies.
Marco:
So all that being said...
Marco:
this is probably a bad time to invest in a pair of Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
Because the AirPods aren't out yet.
Marco:
And even though I expect them to sound really mediocre at best, because Apple has not made a pair of headphones that sounds good, including all the ones by Beats, they have not made one that sounds good.
Marco:
They can achieve practical.
Marco:
They can achieve good enough for many people or for many roles.
Marco:
And
Marco:
As I mentioned, I listen on my pair of Bluetooth Sennheiser PX210BTs that sound horrible.
Marco:
They have the worst sound in the world, but I listen on them because they're incredibly practical.
Marco:
That, I think, is going to be the appeal of AirPods, that they are going to be incredibly practical and nice to use.
Marco:
Although I do have a very strong concern about the real-world annoyance of not being able to have clicker and volume controls on them, as we discussed previously.
Marco:
To only have Siri or to only be able to map the tap on the thing to play pause and no other commands, that I think is going to be annoying.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That being said, I think in all other ways, AirPods are probably going to be pretty great if what you're valuing is convenience over sound quality.
Casey:
Which all jokes aside, that is absolutely what I am valuing.
Casey:
For this use case, I would much rather have convenience over sound quality.
Casey:
Now, I have...
Casey:
A really great set of Bear Dynamics that I'm listening to right now.
Casey:
I have a really great set of open-air Sennheisers that admittedly are ancient but still sound phenomenal.
Marco:
They're still great.
Casey:
And I have a set of Ultimate Ears in-ear earbuds that also sound great.
Casey:
So I understand what good headphones sound like.
Casey:
I get it.
Casey:
It's just for me, this is not a time where I am worrying about perfect audio fidelity.
Casey:
And I think to your point, Marco, the answer is either going to be the Beats X, which is the kind of sporty ones that it's two earbuds tied together by a loop that goes behind your neck, which is $150.
Casey:
Or more likely, if I'm already in for $150, well, crap, why not do $160, $70, whatever it is, for the AirPods.
Casey:
And I suspect that even though I am sitting here telling you, oh, I'm worried about making it a whole day at work,
Casey:
I have enough meetings and general mucking about talking to people during the day that I'm sure I can get through the day with just a little bit of charging in the case here and there.
Casey:
And Matt Bischoff in the chat had asked me, well, don't you go to lunch at any point?
Casey:
Sometimes yes, but oftentimes I just bring a sandwich and just eat at my desk.
Casey:
And so that's not it's not there's no guaranteed time when I'm going to get up and be able to charge.
Casey:
But I suspect that I will be able to make it work with AirPods.
Casey:
And for convenience, that's probably the best option that I have.
Casey:
But Internet, if you have a a really good idea, preferably on or over ear, preferably that doesn't go over the top of your head because you're a vain, petty idiot.
Casey:
Let me know.
Casey:
That would be useful.
John:
Morning AirPods and afternoon AirPods.
John:
There you go.
Marco:
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Casey:
So Google had an event.
Casey:
They announced the Google Pixel phones.
Casey:
There's a Pixel and Pixel XL, I believe it is, which are effectively the equivalent of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.
Casey:
The phones look good, I guess.
Casey:
I mean, they look kind of iPhone-ish.
Marco:
They look kind of like somebody described the way an iPhone 6 looks like over the phone to someone else.
Marco:
And then this is what came out.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a relatively fair characterization.
Casey:
I think they look fairly iPhone-ish, but the one thing I will say is the back of them, oh, does that look rough?
Casey:
Because there's some areas that looks like it's plastic, some that looks like it's glass, and it's just, woof, no thank you.
Casey:
But generally speaking, outside of that, they seem like they're good devices.
Casey:
There's no camera bump, which they made a snarky comment about, and I don't really blame them because the camera bump kind of stinks.
Marco:
Well, I mean, to be fair, like they can't be making snarky remarks about good design when they're presenting that as their phone.
Casey:
Well, I don't think the design is bad with the exception of the back, but I mean, whatever.
Casey:
It does have a headphone jack, which of course they were super snarky about, which I'm not surprised, but kind of disappointed because it would be really neat if there was a unified front on this issue, but whatever.
Casey:
um no optical image no no physical optical uh image stabilization which i thought there was um when i was watching the keynote but it turns out there was not uh it's all in software which on the one side i'm like ha like they'll get that right but then again i've seen um the google app that does the live the what is it motion stills i think they call it yeah which is the live photo stabilization thing and by god that's the work of magic so it's possible they'll get that right
Casey:
Overall, I mean, it looks like it's decent hardware, all told.
Casey:
The presentation was okay.
Casey:
It was Apple-ish in some good ways and some bad ways.
Casey:
Way better than Apple in terms of diversity.
Casey:
I do want to call that out.
Casey:
I think they did a much better job with that.
Casey:
That being said, the presenters were kind of okay.
Casey:
I mean, I don't think any of them were great.
Casey:
And I mean, not that every Apple presenter is amazing, but I think by and large, Apple presenters do a pretty darn good job.
Casey:
And even some first-time presenters like Bozeman St.
Casey:
John did an amazing job.
Casey:
so there is a high bar in that regard but i mean all in all this isn't bad uh the back is no good the the name of the colors there's very silver quite black and really blue seriously whatever um yeah i i i can't even the uh prices are the same as equivalent iphones which is cool i mean i guess that means that that's apparently the price to hit
Casey:
They only come in 32 gigs and 128 gigs.
Casey:
There's no 256 gig option like you can find on an iPhone.
Casey:
It's pre-orderable now.
Casey:
I think it ships in a couple of weeks.
Casey:
It looks good.
Casey:
But the thing that was most impressive to me about the entire presentation, which is both good and bad, was...
Casey:
Any Google Photos user, which is presumably anyone who will have this phone, gets free unlimited storage for all the photos and video that come off of their Pixel phone.
Casey:
And as someone who is a devout Google Photos user, that is amazing.
Casey:
And I am super duper jealous.
Marco:
We haven't yet seen why we need to care about Google's phone releases because they've made phones for a while under the Nexus brand and we haven't needed to care about those yet because historically they've been pretty rough with any kind of retail presence, any kind of deals with the carriers to get their phones promoted and into stores and everything.
Marco:
It's been not one of their strong points.
Marco:
The Android marketplace has really just been, for the most part, the Samsung marketplace in recent years.
Marco:
The timing of this is interesting with Samsung having a pretty bad time right now with this Note 7 disaster and Google coming in and, hey, we have an alternative for you if you want to keep with Android and maybe going to the carriers now and saying, hey, you can integrate with us now.
Marco:
We'll put all your bloatware crap on there.
Marco:
I saw a story earlier that's saying they're doing that.
Marco:
The timing is opportune for Google to take back some of the Android inertia from Samsung a little bit, but
Marco:
I do think we still have not seen Google really show the world yet that their first-party hardware products can actually get any traction in retail and in the marketplace.
Marco:
So if they do, then great.
Marco:
Then we have another strong competitor.
Marco:
The industry will be better off.
Marco:
Customers will be better off.
Marco:
But I just don't see why...
John:
why we need to care about this yet because the based on their past the chances of this really taking off i i don't think are are guaranteed well i think for the first time they have a couple of pitches and an ad campaign that have a chance of resonating with ios users we mentioned on a couple shows ago the whole thing of like making fun of the iphone where you take a picture and it shows you're out of storage touting the whole
John:
uh you know google we take your pictures and throw them up to the cloud and our crap actually works type of angle and then this is just one step further along the same lines we're saying you get this phone not only does our stuff work to put your stuff in the cloud but we don't charge you some big monthly fee for your storage get this phone don't worry about storage anymore really don't worry about it you have unlimited storage in our cloud and so on and so forth and
John:
there's an article on the verge talking about this saying like see apple see what you have to do why don't you give people cloud storage equal to the size of their phone which was the other thing we used to talk about why don't you just get why doesn't apple just do this and i mean the answer is obvious because uh google monetizes the stuff that you upload into the cloud google
Marco:
you know anonymizes and looks at your crap and loses uses it for machine learning or advertising but like you know they're they're not as privacy focused as apple is well but that's see that's kind of a bad example though because people say like google can afford to do this because they're making money off your privacy apple can't do this but that's not true apple makes money too they make tons money off the hardware
Marco:
I would bet Apple's making more per phone than Google will.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
But it's the same business, though.
John:
You can say which company is able to make more money off things.
John:
But in the end, there's Apple to Apple.
John:
They're both making phones somehow.
John:
They're both making the operating system somehow.
John:
They're both running the cloud services stores your photos somehow.
John:
right and if apple's able to make more money on hardware and less money on services and google's reverse that's all well and good but google has one big thing that apple doesn't have that there's no apples to apples comparison for which is we have a search engine that brings us huge amounts of money through advertising and huge amounts of data to feed into our analytical engine to figure out like you know anything you can imagine wanting to do with machine learning google has
John:
so many inputs into that system that Apple has no comparison to us.
John:
Even if Apple wanted to do everything that Google does in terms of monetizing your data, they can't because they don't have as much input into the system.
John:
It's not as valuable to them.
John:
So what?
John:
We have your pictures.
John:
What can we do with that?
John:
Well, you can use it to feed your engines to figure out how to sell search ads.
John:
What do you mean search ads?
John:
We don't have a search engine, right?
John:
So Google still has that big strength in terms of monetizing your stuff.
John:
And you're right that you're saying, well, Apple's got a lot of money in the bank.
John:
Apple could give free...
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
Marco:
right like the the google model is we're gonna we're gonna somehow get you this phone and then we're gonna make money on you over time as you use our stuff with ads apple model is we're gonna make money on this phone up front and by the way they're still gonna make money off everybody with their 30 cut from the app store and everything else but you know
Marco:
even if they only make money from the phone hardware from somebody and they're and then after that point that person is just a cost center as they get all their iCloud stuff hosted for free or whatever else if they launch a plan like this you're still making money somewhere and there's plenty of profit on a phone that's priced the way these phones are priced they could if they wanted to
Marco:
just give people cloud storage in a way that would probably not have that significant of an impact on their margins.
Marco:
They just don't do it because they like making that extra little five bucks a month from the very small number of people who are going to buy iCloud storage or whatever.
Marco:
But it's setting aside how you pay for it because, again, both companies can pay for it in their own ways.
Marco:
Apple doesn't have to become this crazy ad company that invades all your privacy to have enough profit margin on an iPhone to host your photos for a couple of years.
Marco:
Google does that anyway, but even if they're selling their hardware now, even they don't need to necessarily do that if they didn't want to.
Marco:
So assuming both companies have ways to pay for it, because they both do, without changing their business models, they both have ways to pay for it, then I think Google's approach of giving you more of that hosting, that is a much more customer-friendly approach.
Marco:
It is a much...
Marco:
more likely approach to succeed in terms of getting people to use all these photo uploads, getting people to actually have their photos backed up to the cloud somehow.
Marco:
And I wish Apple would do it.
Marco:
That being said, that isn't today's Apple style.
Marco:
That's not like a Tim Cook or even a Steve Jobs Apple style.
Marco:
I don't see them doing that anytime for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
But I think that's a shame because I think not only could they afford to do it without becoming a privacy invasive company, just using the margins they already have.
Marco:
But I think it makes for a way better customer experience to just know that whatever photos you take on your phone, they're just backed up because storage is really, really cheap these days.
Marco:
especially at the kind of scale that Apple and Google are working out with their data centers and everything and their web services contracts.
Marco:
So it's not like they can't afford it.
Marco:
It's not like it's even a big cost.
Marco:
It's just Apple is using that additional photo storage as a potential center for profit from service revenue.
Marco:
And Google is saying, for these people who buy our phone, we're just not going to have that as a way to make money.
Marco:
We're going to do it some other way.
Marco:
And it's a difference of opinion of what is a reasonable place to make money from people?
Marco:
Where do you want to nickel and dime them versus give them a bunch of stuff for free?
Marco:
And again, both companies can do this, but only one of them is doing it.
John:
Well, Apple has been breaking down its margins, dividing out services separately.
John:
So if Apple was to do this, it would take the one part of their business that they keep using to try to distract you from the fact that their phone business isn't growing like it used to.
John:
The services part, hey, look at our year-over-year service growth.
John:
And it will take a bite out of it.
John:
And even though you say, oh, well, they'll just pay for that with their hardware margins.
John:
The way that becomes visible in an earnings call is service revenue was up, you know, 40% year over year.
John:
But, oh, now we did this free storage for everyone plan and service revenue is only up 5% this year or it's down 5%.
John:
Or something like that.
John:
And it's like, oh, that was supposed to be the bright spot in your earnings call because the other your other businesses are stagnant or not growing as fast as they used to be.
John:
And now even your services one is taking a hit.
John:
That would not be good because like, you know, say, oh, well, you get the same thing with the cash.
John:
We just said, oh, we're giving away storage.
John:
And the way we're going to pay for it is we're just going to burn cash to do it.
John:
Like these are all things that are possible numerically, but don't look good.
John:
to the outside world of like, do you have a sustainable business?
John:
Whereas Google, you know, all of its cost centers are running all its stuff.
John:
It's like, it's all under the same umbrella of get more people, get more of those people's information that feeds the beast that, you know, that we make money off of.
John:
And the complaint about Google is you're not making enough money off of your users.
John:
You have so many users, you have all this data.
John:
Apple makes so much more money off of every one of its users than you do.
John:
You need to find a way to monetize them better.
John:
And that's a persistent complaint about Google.
John:
But this is just more of the same with them.
John:
I was saying, OK, well, we heard your complaint, but we're going to keep doing that thing we do, which is we try to get everyone's data as much as possible and getting us to use all our services.
John:
And the more data we have, the more users we have, the more money we make, even if our margins aren't that big.
John:
And in theory, like Casey said, these phones are the same price as iPhones.
John:
They're made of the same materials.
John:
They're probably cheaper materials in the grand scheme of things because Google is not as obsessive about manufacturing and tolerances.
John:
And they didn't have to design their own chips.
John:
They're buying it off the shelf from Qualcomm, which means they have to pay Qualcomm a margin.
John:
But on the other hand, they didn't have to pay for all the R&D to develop the chip and the
John:
Anyway, in theory, Google could be making similar margins to Apple.
John:
They're just not as good at this business.
John:
They don't make enough phones.
John:
They're not as good at it as Apple, so they don't make as big of margins.
John:
And similarly, for the service side component, Apple's not as good at Google as this.
John:
I'm sure Apple's stuff costs more to them because they're not as good at doing server-side stuff.
John:
It's less reliable, less performant, less scalable, and it probably costs Apple more than it costs Google because Google is really good at this stuff and has a much bigger scale.
John:
And they have a much bigger scale because they don't just run a service that stores people's photos.
John:
They run the world's biggest search engine and tons of other crap, and they have a lot of servers and a lot of storage and a lot of...
John:
in-house hardware and software and know-how to make this work.
John:
So this is definitely asymmetrical warfare here.
John:
And anything having to do with cloud services, Google is just so much better at than Apple.
John:
This is a perfect move.
John:
When I started this thing, this is a perfect move to try to actually...
John:
get people who were iphone users to look at the other side of the fence um it's not even so much like oh don't buy a samsung because they catch on fire buy our phones it's like what about ios people all those things that you hate at ios those are the things we're great about and of course they're not going to talk in the commercials about the things that apple is better at but like
John:
we'll give you cloud storage ours will work ours will be fast and ours will be free and i honestly think that a apple should respond but b apple doesn't have a really good way to respond like again if they just did it and say we're paying for it out of our hardware margins that you know that would be good for consumers but that would be bad for apple
John:
Those would be some tough earning calls.
Marco:
What do you think is worse for Apple?
Marco:
Losing a potential iPhone customer to the Google phone or paying for that customer's photo storage?
Marco:
They make way more money selling another iPhone than they do selling a couple of iCloud storage accounts for somebody for a couple of years.
Marco:
If they offered unlimited storage for photos and videos just like Google does...
Marco:
that would remove one of the Google Pixel's largest selling points.
Marco:
It would just totally evaporate.
Marco:
I bet right now Apple probably thinks, like I said at the beginning of this segment, that Google's first-party hardware has never gone anywhere really, so we probably don't have to worry about it, right?
Marco:
But what if it does?
John:
Well, I don't think these are going to, you know, again, it's a trailing indicator.
John:
You have to wait to see, oh, are we actually losing customers because of this thing?
John:
Or is it just a thing that makes people look elsewhere, but they never actually switch because they're too trapped into the Apple ecosystem or whatever?
John:
If Apple was to offer this immediately...
John:
rather than just say just lowering the prices which they've done already a couple times right you know offer free for everything that would be seen as like like why are you reacting to this why are you reacting to a phone that sells in such small volumes why do you even care about the phone do you really think it's going to pull away customers wait until it actually does start to pull away customers and then react to it rather than giving away a bunch of money right from the services division that is your your growth darling in the absence of anything else um
John:
We've talked about storage sizes for phones and storage sizes for cloud and how Apple has not historically been very competitive there and they've been adjusting their prices to try to be more competitive.
John:
Google is doing the thing that Google is able to do.
John:
Enough about how much your storage tiers cost.
John:
Enough about Dropbox costs this much and iCloud Drive costs that much and you have to pay for this and your photos don't count but then your iCloud backups count.
John:
Enough of that!
John:
Everything free for everybody.
John:
There's not even beyond a back place where it's $5 unlimited.
John:
They're just like, everything unlimited free.
John:
And I feel like the reason Google is offering it on these phones is because they are selling them for iPhone prices.
John:
And I think a lot of the storage is being subsidized by the fact that you bought this really expensive phone.
John:
You know, as far as I'm aware, this deal is not being offered generically on the cheapest Android phone you can find.
John:
You have to buy the Pixel, right?
John:
Yeah, it isn't any Android phone.
Marco:
It's specifically the Pixel phones.
John:
Right, which is a super expensive phone.
John:
So I think Google is actually funding this with a little bit of the margins from, and granted, probably not as high as Apple, but a little bit of the margins from this very expensive phone.
John:
And as we've all learned, painfully, unlimited...
John:
I mean, it's unlimited as long as it's unlimited until it's not unlimited anymore, usually by terms in the contract that say we can end this deal at any time, or the company going out of business as in Picture Life, or the one whose name I've already forgotten.
John:
Everpix.
John:
Everpix, yeah.
John:
It wasn't very ever, was it?
John:
No.
John:
Absolutely.
John:
I don't think people really care about, like, you know, oh, it's not really unlimited.
John:
Like, get while the getting's good.
John:
Like, by all means, you know, if anyone offers this, I'm not going to turn up my nose at it and say, oh, I don't want it on your limited storage because I know it's not unlimited forever.
John:
Who cares?
John:
If it's unlimited for a year, it's worthwhile.
John:
It's unlimited for two years or three years.
John:
You're just...
John:
Take it while you can get it.
John:
Don't be like, I refuse to commit to this free product unless I'm guaranteed that it will outlast me and my descendants.
John:
Like, whatever.
John:
Nothing is forever.
John:
Just take the deal.
John:
Anyway.
John:
I'm not sure Apple will react to this.
John:
Apple needs to get better at doing cloud services.
John:
They need to have their photo storage work better.
John:
In theory, iCloud Photo Library with plenty of room should do all the things that Google's Photos does, but it doesn't.
John:
And people are frustrated by it.
John:
So they need to get better at it.
John:
They need to be able to do it cheaper.
John:
They need to adjust their pricing because whether Google sells a lot of these phones or not.
John:
they are you know they're they're moving the market they're saying this is this is the new bar if you can't meet this bar you will forever be seen as more competitive than if i just bought a google pixel or more expensive than i just bought a google pixel um so does apple lower their prices do they go free
John:
History has shown that it will take Apple a long time to be able to go free on its storage, considering how long it's taken them to offer new storage tiers and to lower their prices.
John:
They seem pretty stubborn about that.
John:
Can we all blame us on NetEQ again?
John:
Sure, why not?
John:
Let's do that.
John:
It's a fun pastime.
John:
Either way, in theory, this phone is hitting Apple where it hurts, and hopefully someone at Apple is paying attention.
Casey:
Yeah, I also love that they mentioned during the keynote, and it's on the site if you scroll down a ways, about halfway down the page,
Casey:
That they include a section that's a switch in three simple steps connect sign in and transfer connect to your old iPhone or Android device or connect your old iPhone Android device to your new pixel with the quick switch adapter which apparently is USB be whatever the normal USB receptacle is.
Casey:
to usbc which is what the phone uses sign into your google account on your pixel or create a new one and then transfer uh choose what you want to move like contacts calendar events photos videos music sms messages i messages i'm not really sure how that's working and more than sit back and let the pixel do the work and this little adapter is in every single box so they're getting aggressive and i think that's good and i think with stephen hackett amongst others that said um
Casey:
You know, this is healthy for both companies.
Casey:
When Apple is doing well, which hopefully they are, I mean, I guess it depends on when you ask us.
Casey:
And if Google's doing well, then that's a good thing because this competition makes both of our products better.
Casey:
But I'm curious to see if this really sells in any volume.
Casey:
I can tell you that of the four developers on the Android team, five developers on the Android team at my office, two of them bought the phone while they were in the keynote or while we were watching the keynote, which, by the way, was at like 1230, one o'clock in the afternoon.
Casey:
They sat there and mashed on the refresh button for like a minute and a half.
Casey:
I was...
Casey:
Super jealous.
Casey:
And yes, I tweeted about this.
Casey:
And yes, most people were like, oh, yeah, well, you know, they have five people buying these phones.
Casey:
Well, I don't care.
Casey:
It's still not in the middle of the night.
Casey:
And so I'm very jealous of that.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
I'm anxious to see these devices when they come in to my coworkers so I can see what I think of them.
Casey:
But I'm cautiously optimistic.
Casey:
Like this isn't a phone for me, but it could be if I wanted to jump to the other side of the fence.
John:
Yeah, one more thing on the Pixel.
John:
I didn't see the entire video presentation when I saw parts of it, and one part that I was particularly interested in is the Daydream VR thing that they're doing.
John:
Another one of these situations where you take your phone and you shove it into a headset, and then half the phone screen shows what your left eye is supposed to see, and half the phone screen shows what your right eye is supposed to see, and you wear a pair of goggles that makes that all focus and work out reasonably well, and you try to have a little miniature portable VR experience.
John:
which is, boy, it's something considering, you know, no serious VR development involves Macs in any way, and yet we're able to do it on these crappy phones that are not as powerful as Apple's.
John:
Obviously, the VR experience compared to a PC is very different on a phone.
John:
You are not going to have the same type of thing you have on HTC Vive or Vive, depending on how you want to say it, or Oculus Rift or, you know, even the PS4 VR.
John:
But this is the thing they're doing.
John:
And I think the most interesting part of this is their headset, which there have been a lot of these headsets, including like the Google Cardboard thing, which is the most primitive.
John:
This is another set of goggles that you strap to your head that you shove your phone into.
John:
And they spent a while trying to talk about the design of it, like the external design.
John:
They've made it out of fabric.
John:
I don't think they mentioned this specifically.
John:
They mostly just said, oh, what do we wear in our bodies?
John:
Well, we wear soft things in fabrics, right?
John:
So instead of making it out of shiny black plastic so you look all nerdy...
John:
You know, how are you going to make a VR headset not look nerdy?
John:
We made it out of fabric because that's what you wear.
John:
And when I look at it, I always thought of those sleep masks.
John:
You know, if you put like those one of those things to help you sleep at night, it's not made out of like velvety material, but it's just made of fabric.
John:
It looks like a sleep mask.
John:
But I think this is a smart thing to do.
John:
And I think other VR goggles.
John:
vendors should take note you don't have to always look like a giant robot when you wear the thing it doesn't have to be all angles and hard shiny plastic doesn't have to look like one of those droid ads you know those original droid ads where everything is a transformer um
John:
you are putting it on your body and around your head, and why not make it something soft and comfortable?
John:
It's not like, for example, headphones.
John:
They're not made out of pointy angular plastic, unless maybe they're made by Sony.
John:
Some are.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
Like the ear cup, they have patty things on the ears, like squishy things, because they go on your head and you don't want something that's not squishy.
John:
So these goggles, granted, the outside of it doesn't touch you, but they're trying to convey, like, these are squishy and comfortable and not like...
John:
like welding a laptop to your forehead right and i think that's a really good idea um and this type of casual vr where it's like low resolution low frame rate probably not even that good right it's i think this is a good place to get a foothold into the idea of like a few people will try because hey everyone's got a phone and you know these guys probably cost too much but you know people who are interested who wouldn't buy a full-fledged gaming pc and the whole setup and the whole gear um
John:
will buy maybe this thing that you that you shove your phone into and try it out and have a pleasant experience and start to associate google with vr or whatever and i don't give this thing great hopes of doing anything uh especially since who's going to develop software for this thing it's a very it's a market within a market within a market i don't know um but as someone who still has yet to even try vr i find it intriguing that google is
John:
plowing bravely forward with some interesting ideas whereas google apple is still sitting this one out and tim cook is talking about augmented reality rather than vr uh all the while leaving its own customers without either one of those things except for that app that you hold up and translate science and it's really cool but anyway
John:
i i think these goggles are neat i have no idea how good they actually are but i'm encouraged by the steady advancement in the world of vr so if they're anything like google cardboard which it looks like they're very very similar actually you should not try them all right because low resolution and motion sickness
Marco:
Yeah, I got to try one of those actually twice now.
Marco:
And wow, not good.
Marco:
I mean, I also got to try a Vive and that was substantially better for motion sickness purposes.
John:
It better be for like the tremendous extra cost that that is.
Yeah.
John:
Just need a gaming PC and this and a room and these things you can hold and walk around in.
Marco:
The problem with the Vive is that you just have wires everywhere.
Marco:
It's just wires as far as I can see, tripping over wires, having to move the wires.
Marco:
It's kind of unfortunate, but I'm sure over time we will work these things out.
John:
I'm thinking even for these headphones, even if you just use them to watch video, which sounds like, why would I ever do that?
John:
Why wouldn't I just hold my phone in front of my face?
John:
Like, you know, this is generation zero type products here.
John:
You know, it's going to get better.
John:
The resolution will get better.
John:
You know, eventually a phone will have enough power to not be embarrassing in VR.
John:
um i i have i'm not looking on this as like wow this is a game changer i'm looking on this as this could potentially be a way many years down the line that's an accepted way to just veg out and watch some video or play some casual games not like i'm in a full immersed vr experience and i feel like i'm really there maybe that's going to be longer or still require a gaming pc or whatever but um i don't know it's it just seems like
John:
i guess honestly why doesn't apple do this you know why apple doesn't do it they're not going to release a half-assed product like this and say well it's kind of neat why don't you try it guys tell us what you think right that's not going to happen um but if apple doesn't figure out what its play is here soon it's just going to pass them by it's kind of like microsoft trying to figure out what its play was in the world of mobile and then just everyone else went out ahead of them they said wait up and they never did catch up
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Casey:
i don't have an amazon echo alexa whatever it's called thing friend of the show i mike just got one and he is pretty much in love with it uh marco you guys have at least one last i heard and as last i heard you guys really like it
Casey:
I grew up with a dad who was big into home automation in the late 90s, which is to say controlling your lights from all over the place.
Casey:
This was X10 at the time, which was a home automation protocol.
Casey:
I actually put an X10 receiver in my dorm room and had rope lights wired to it.
Casey:
and i even had a movie mode that i set up no no it gets better i even had a movie mode set up so it would like dim the rope lights and turn on the tv and whatnot which would have been awesome for the girl that never ever came over oh this is worse than my car pewter yeah it's pretty bad because that's what girls are impressed by automatically controlled lights they're just like this is the man for me
John:
Right?
Casey:
I mean, how can you go wrong?
Casey:
It's perfect.
Casey:
No, but anyway, I like the idea of home automation, although I've only barely dipped my toes into it.
Casey:
And like I said, I don't have any of these automated assistant things outside of Siri when she decides to work properly.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I am not that jazzed by Google Home.
Casey:
I'm not that jazzed by Alexa.
Casey:
I'm not that jazzed by these rumors about Apple's home automation hub.
Casey:
I suspect that most of that is my own ignorance.
Casey:
And once I see like a really nice setup or once I see one of these things in use, then the light bulb will go off and I'll say, by God, I need this in my life.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I guess, do either of you care about these home automation hub rumors?
Casey:
Like, is this interesting to you?
Casey:
What are you looking for from this?
Casey:
What do you think?
John:
I care about the actual announced one.
John:
I know that you're reading the next item and the things about this home automation hub rumor from Apple, but...
John:
Google is following through on its original announcement of this, whatever, Google Home little weeble thing that they'll sell you, which looks like a squat little counterpart to the tube-shaped thing that keeps calling to the whales in Star Trek 4 that Amazon makes.
John:
And the reason I didn't buy Echo, I know a lot of people with Echo, I've tried them, like I understand the value proposition there, but I never quite wanted to get one, mostly because I figured, well, you know, that's fine and all, but...
John:
Amazon is not really that good at this type of stuff.
John:
I mean, they're not bad, but it's not really their strength.
John:
So let me wait until see what Apple or Google have.
John:
And the knock against Amazon is like, oh, you can get all these skills and they're good at integrating with third parties, but it's so specific and it's so primitive.
John:
And it's like, you got to know.
John:
what you can have it do and you got to know the specific skills and it's very fixed whereas apple is always tagging with serio or intelligent machine learning we'll figure out what you mean or whatever but of course we know when you actually use siri it's embarrassingly bad a lot of the time google when i think of the company that i can just sort of throw words at written or otherwise and have it do what i mean
John:
is the best at that very often i'm i want to do something and you can try it in siri and you could try asking amazon echo about it and you can try whatever things you have to think of to find something but very often the answer is write your actual question into a text box on google.com like don't overthink it don't try to write it in a query language just do the simplest thing one of my favorite activities is like in chat rooms and stuff like that where someone will ask sometimes even you know a fairly technical person
John:
how do you do the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah like ask some very complicated involved question and then they'll say i tried googling but i couldn't find anything then what you do is you take their original question that they typed to you in the message you copy it you paste it into the google search box and the number one hit is the thing they were looking for because what they were doing is thinking like a programmer and going like you know whatever it is like
John:
node file sync not working like just they're they're just typing they're they're using like a query engine whereas the the sentence they just sent you gets them the number one hit because that's what people put into google so when i think about is there some cylinder in my house that i can talk into the air and have the cylinder do what i want i think the highest chance of it understanding what i mean and doing something useful is for that cylinder to be made by and connected to everything having to do with google
John:
So when they announced the home thing, I'm like, that's the first thing I think I might buy to try because I'm assuming it will be better than the Amazon Echo.
John:
Better at, like, you know, understanding what I mean and doing useful things.
John:
Maybe not better audio-wise or whatever.
John:
Maybe not...
John:
Maybe Amazon Echo would be better at ordering paper towels than the Google thing is, but maybe the Google thing would be better about answering complicated questions.
John:
Or maybe the Google thing would be better about projecting things on my TV if I buy a little dinky Chromecast and shove it into one of my side HDMI ports that I'm not currently using, right?
John:
versus amazon trying to integrate with their fire puck and all that other stuff anyway and apple just continuing to be a non-combatant in this entire market despite the rumors so i am very interested in this home device the only caveat for most people that i don't really mind that much is yes of course everything that i say will be uploaded to google and all my information will belong to google but i already have all my mail on google like i'm willing to give google this information in exchange for extra convenience in my life i'm willing to give this a try um so i think i might actually get one of these
Casey:
I'm very curious to hear what you think of it when that comes in.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure what I would pick between Amazon and theoretically Apple and Google.
Casey:
But, I mean, my mail is Google Apps.
Casey:
My photos are in Google.
Casey:
My music is Spotify, which I'm sure will not jive well with Apple stuff.
Casey:
Jive well, whatever the word is I'm looking for.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Marco, what's your intention?
Casey:
Just going all in on Amazon?
Marco:
Well, I mean, I'm not really committed.
Marco:
You know, we have the Echo in the kitchen.
Marco:
It's good at a lot of things.
Marco:
A lot of times I will ask it a question that I don't think it'll answer just to see, like, you know, can it do this?
Marco:
Can I find this information?
Marco:
And a lot of times it does.
Marco:
And if I ask Siri the same question, I get...
Marco:
I can search the web for, you know, so I get a useless answer from Siri for many of these same questions.
Marco:
But a lot of people have said the opposite.
Marco:
You know, a lot of people have the opposite reaction where, like, the things they ask Siri work out well and the things they ask the Amazon assistant don't.
Marco:
It's not really consistent between one or the other, whether you can say, like, this one is universally the best one or this one is universally not.
Marco:
It really depends on how you're using it, what you're using it for, how it integrates with various things.
Marco:
I will say, though, that this is the kind of problem that I don't expect Apple's product to be very good at.
Marco:
To make a product like this really good, you need incredibly strong AI skills.
Marco:
You need a huge data set to be developing that from.
Marco:
You need constant updates, constant add-ons and new abilities and refinements to that data set.
Marco:
So you basically need a really massive, solid AI web service behind it.
Marco:
Apple's not good at those things.
Marco:
Apple can do big web services.
Marco:
They can do minor AI things.
Marco:
But they so far are still not good at large-scale, advanced AI service kind of things.
Marco:
And then secondarily, you need the ability to really be able to connect to lots of different things.
Marco:
This is where the Echo does really well.
Marco:
They have tons of integrations with all sorts of services, hardware, developer stuff through their API, tons of integrations.
Marco:
For Apple to do that, they would basically have to relax the requirements for HomeKit, and they would have to really be a lot more open and permissive with developers than they are now, and do things like open up the Siri API much further than it is right now.
Marco:
And I just don't see them doing that.
Marco:
So they could prove me wrong.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But if I look at what these companies are good at now and the way they seem to be going, I'm guessing Apple's version of this, if it exists whenever it would ship, I'm guessing it's not going to be as good as the other two.
Marco:
I think Amazon's going to own this market for the market share wise.
Marco:
But I think the Google one's probably going to end up being the best one.
John:
Google could only be canceled.
John:
Then they have a previous one called OnHub or something, and then they had a sphere-shaped entertainment thing that never went anywhere.
John:
Google has tried many in-home products that have not gone anywhere.
John:
Maybe this will be a flop, too, but what they have going for them, like you said, is they have the back end.
John:
When Apple does stuff with Siri...
John:
If they don't know exactly what to do, they're passing it on to another service, whether it be Wolfram Alpha or Bing or Google.
John:
That's not them.
John:
They're like, well, we can't make heads or tails of this, so we're going to send it to a different company that's good at this stuff, and maybe they can figure out what to do with it, which is not really a strong move.
John:
The other factor about all these cylinders in your home that you talk to that apparently from everyone who I've ever spoken to in my own personal experience got right and that I can imagine –
John:
both apple and google perhaps forgetting about is the echo is surprisingly good at hearing you and understanding what the hell you said yes now after that maybe they can't do anything with your words maybe they're bad you know they don't have a good you know you have to phrase things in a certain way or forget about that
John:
But they're good at hearing you and getting your words.
John:
And that is so important.
John:
How often have we tried to speak into our phones an inch from our face and how to get a word wrong?
John:
Whereas Amazon Echo, again, because probably because of constrained vocabulary, like those phone trees that you do, but also because they have tons of microphones and good like noise cancellation and beam forming or whatever the hell they're doing.
John:
I think a lot of the time for that stupid cylinder was spent figuring out how to hear people separate their voice from the background noise and understand what they said.
John:
and that is incredibly important it's like it's like responsiveness on the original iphone it's like oh yeah and you can tap things and they move around it's fine it's like yeah but you don't understand the difference between you can tap things and slide it around and it's fine and it really feels like it's sticking to my finger you may think you've checked the same check boxes yep we have a touch screen yep you move things around by scrolling your finger yep you tap buttons it's not check boxes it's like yes you both do the same thing but this aspect of the product is so important that you really have to get it right and amazon
John:
has gotten it pretty right like who hasn't been in a house with an echo and said something in a way that you think a human wouldn't have been able to understand you you mumble it from a room away facing the wrong direction and the echo still tells you like what the score of a game is or what the weather's going to be and you're like how the hell did it hear that
John:
yeah that's what you have to do with these things so i hope the cylinder you know the google home thing does it as well and if apple ever comes up with a product i hope they spend tons of time figuring out how the heck to hear everybody and don't be like well johnny i've said we don't have a lot of room for the microphone so we can only have these two here this this is what i'm saying like it is if apple really devoted like if they really set their minds to it if they really prioritize these services and these these product priorities and things they could probably make a pretty good one
Marco:
But I see this being like an accessory release.
Marco:
I don't see Apple taking this very seriously as a product category.
Marco:
So what it's probably going to end up being is a relatively low priority, relatively low effort product if it exists.
Marco:
And because of that, it's going to have...
Marco:
you know no meaningful service changes behind it to siri you know it's siri's not going to become an order of magnitude better because of this product you know it's if they're going to do that they're going to do it for the phones not for this and they've had lots of reasons to do that recently and they kind of haven't really done enough and this is probably gonna be a product that's that's updated maybe every three years you know hardware wise two or three years like the max now yeah
John:
but you know like basically like on like an apple tv kind of schedule uh where amazon google would be updated in there's like every year or even more often i mean amazon is relentless every every 15 minutes yeah speaking of apple tv that's a great example of a home device that people talk to granted they talk to the the remote and not the device and the rumors are that originally you were supposed to just talk to the apple tv but the remote came with better sound which kind of makes sense and you gotta have the remote anyway um the experience of
John:
Speaking to your Apple TV, this is exactly what I was saying, like the phone trees.
John:
There's a fairly constrained vocabulary.
John:
Mostly you're talking about video that you want to watch.
John:
I mean, it's a little bit broader than that, but if they wanted to constrain it, they could say, look, we don't have to understand everything in the world.
John:
We have a limited problem domain.
John:
Let's use our machine learning and the idea that we think they're going to watch a video.
John:
And granted, it's still a hard problem.
John:
Right.
John:
And try to figure out what they mean.
John:
And if you've ever spoken to the remote of an Apple TV and tried to say something reasonable to it, you realize how badly the Apple TV falls down on basic functionality.
John:
You know.
John:
like trying to get it to to you know start you know watch episode five season two of some show or show me whatever and it's like i'm sorry i don't know any shows named orange is the new black and like on the screen behind it is orange the new black floating it you know like we've all seen these siri things like on the phone where it's great makes for great screenshots where it's like try you know i'm sorry i can't launch the app store try looking for it in the app store like we've all seen that stuff
John:
like siri does weird stuff like that on the phone and it's funny because you can see it but on the apple tv when it works you feel like this is amazing it's a little friend that i can talk to who shows me the video i want and when it doesn't work it's like what was wrong with that like especially since you see the text being translated you're like it is understanding every word i'm saying and there isn't really any ambiguity but sometimes it's like i i can't do that for you or is there something else i can help you with like no just do the thing yeah it's inconsistent
John:
Yeah, that's incredibly frustrating.
John:
You don't know why it didn't do it.
John:
Did it fail on a server connection, or is it just confused about something, or has it lost context?
John:
And it's not really that responsive.
John:
Whereas, again, Amazon Echo, completely faceless, no UI.
John:
If it didn't work, there's nothing you can do to fix it.
John:
And yet, when you say things to it, it, in pretty short order, does the thing that you said in a way that makes you think...
John:
That's pretty neat and miraculous.
John:
And yeah, it falls down sometimes too, but that's why people are impressed by the cylinder because they, you know, they thought the Amazon I call be funny gimmick, but it'll be like Siri where it only works half the time and I'll never use it.
John:
But because it is responsive and hears you and generally does what you ask in a timely fashion, people start to trust it and appreciate the fact that it does work.
John:
And Siri has not yet passed that bar.
John:
I don't think Siri or whatever branding Apple wants to put into a thing that you can talk to in any of its product has endeared itself to anybody to the degree where they're like, I am much more interested in buying this product because it comes with Siri and I love Siri.
John:
I just haven't seen that yet.
John:
Whereas the stupid black plastic cylinder has done that for Amazon.
Marco:
And the thing is, if you see over time, what's changing in this market over time?
Marco:
How is everyone getting better?
Marco:
How is everything going to develop?
Marco:
Apple has had a very long time to make Siri reliable and better.
Marco:
And they have improved it over time, but just not enough.
Marco:
It is still very inconsistent.
Marco:
And you can, you can ask it the same question two days in a row and you'll get different answers or one of them will fail and the next day it'll succeed.
Marco:
Or like it, it is so inconsistent and it's very frustrating when that happens to you.
Marco:
With the Echo, I, you know, I don't use it like constantly all day, every day, but I use it, I tell it something every day.
Marco:
Usually it's controlling lights around the house.
Marco:
Every night when I go to bed, I tell it to turn off everything.
Marco:
Like it's, it's usually stuff like that.
Marco:
Occasionally music queries or timers, TIFF uses those times all the time.
Marco:
I think we've had it for something like four or five months now.
Marco:
I think in that entire time, we've had one time where it returned some kind of server error response, basically.
Marco:
Like, I can't figure that out right now or something like that.
Marco:
One time that happened in months of using it.
Marco:
With Siri, that happens every fourth or fifth time if you use it infrequently like I do.
Marco:
So it...
Marco:
where where these things are going i can see the market playing out in the most likely way already in my head you know apple if they enter it they're going to enter it with you know again some kind of like too infrequently updated probably too expensive maybe too johnny ivy designy product that won't be very competitive in the marketplace for things like capabilities price integrations and they'll have it backed by the series service which just won't be consistent enough it won't be solid enough it won't be smart enough
Marco:
Then you'll have Google making theirs, selling Google Harbor where they always sell it, which is it's going to have probably the most amazing AI behind it, the most amazing service behind it.
Marco:
But they're going to have major problems getting it in, you know, getting it sold at retail, basically getting it really into people's hands.
Marco:
They're going to have major problems promoting it and selling it and supporting it.
Marco:
Amazon is going to be relentless about pushing the crap out of the Echo line of products on their front page all the holiday seasons, selling them relentlessly, not selling Apple's thing, not selling Google's thing.
Marco:
They're going to be relentless, and they are a massive retailer, and they have a huge head start with developers, with users, with the public.
Marco:
So I really think that Amazon's really going to own this space.
Marco:
And Google, again, Google, I think, is going to have what many geeks will consider the best product, but it won't be the most successful.
Marco:
I think the most successful is going to be Amazon by a long shot with this.
Marco:
And Apple, if they enter this market at all, they will enter it with something that I don't see being very competitive, really.
Marco:
I think people will buy it.
Marco:
Some people buy it, certainly.
Marco:
But I don't see it being nearly as good as the other two.
John:
I'm still waiting for the next minor advancement in what people call people calling machine learning, which I don't like the sound of, but I like it better than AI, which is ridiculous for the level of things that are going on here.
John:
But just, you know, these things are slightly context aware, but more of that, like very often I'll be driving in the car and I'll hear my phone ding with a text message.
John:
you can't read the text message in the car but i would like the phone to read me what the text message is and there's probably some way to do that on the phone there is but i don't know the way and i know enough about siri to know that if i don't know the way it will just be an exercise in frustration for me to try to guess what i'd like to say is can you read me the text message that just came in but i know that won't work that's close it's close it's it's ahoy telephone read my messages
John:
Right.
John:
But I don't know that.
John:
And so, like, I'm just like, if I just start this conversation with the phone, it's going to try to do a Google search on having something to do with messages or get confused.
John:
This is based on my frustration with the one thing I try to use my, you know, Siri works for simple things.
John:
But then what I my stumbling block was I kept trying to use it to add items to lists and reminders.
John:
And it was just freaking impossible because it's confused about which list I'm trying to edit to or whether it wants to create a list by that name.
John:
It's like, oh, God, you don't understand me.
John:
You do not understand me.
John:
Like just a human would get this and it's not that complicated.
John:
It's a limited domain.
John:
I'm telling you about reminders and list items and don't ask me to create a list.
John:
I want it to say, no, no, no.
John:
I know you misunderstood me the first time, but forget it.
John:
I'm not trying to create a list.
John:
Take that thing and put a reminder for it because anyway.
John:
It's very frustrating and it makes me not want to use it for things that it can probably already do because I know that if I don't know how to do it, there's no way I can have a conversation with it and get it done.
John:
Whereas I think Google is at the point now, whereas, you know, in best case with this Google Home thing,
John:
I could ask it to do something, I'm hoping, and have it not understand what I mean, but have us work out through a back and forth, eventually come to an understanding about what I want to happen where.
John:
And that's like the next smaller step.
John:
Again, limited vocabulary, simpler things that you can do, but just limited context awareness to understand that we're trying to accomplish a goal here and to come closer to making it happen without requiring the user to know things.
John:
And that's just one more tiny baby step in making something that I can do with my fingers happen across the room with my voice.
John:
And we're not asking it to be my pal or to be intelligent or any way or to really do anything useful other than let me do something I can do with a remote but without a remote control.
John:
But even that step, no one has really gotten there.
John:
Not Amazon, not Google, not Apple.
John:
And I have hopes that Google will be the first one to do it.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, Casper, and Betterment, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
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.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
at work i have two i think they're 1080 monitors they're lenovo monitors they're really super shitty i have been begging for at least one 4k monitor
Casey:
Finally, I have won the fight.
Casey:
The head of IT has said, all right, we will get you the Dell 24-something-something 4K monitor.
Casey:
I forget the exact model name.
Casey:
But basically, this is the monitor that all the Mac notebook users have said, this is the one to get if you want 4K, and the equivalent Dell is the one you want to get if you want 5K.
Casey:
The 5K one is $1,500.
Casey:
The 4K one is like $400.
Casey:
So we get it in.
Casey:
Speaking of Amazon and things, we get it in today.
Casey:
I take down my two Lenovos to put this at my desk.
Casey:
I'm happy as a pig and shit.
Casey:
I turn it on and it turns right back off.
Casey:
So I unplug it, plug it back in, turn it on.
Casey:
Turns on, turns right back off.
Casey:
It was DOA.
Casey:
Sadness.
Casey:
So much sadness.
Casey:
So that is also getting returned to Amazon, although not by me because I didn't pay for it.
Casey:
But we do have an LG 4K monitor that's 27 inches that I think is too big for the DPI that it is, but it's still super nice.
Casey:
And by the way, did you guys know that you can only get a 30-hertz refresh rate on an HDMI cable off a Mac laptop?
Marco:
At any resolution or just at the 4K resolution?
Casey:
At 4K, at 4K.
Marco:
So how do you get the higher ones?
Marco:
Is it just like through Thunderbolt slash Mini DisplayPort?
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort.
John:
Okay.
John:
Yeah, don't connect monitors to a computer with HDMI.
John:
That's the wrong tool for the job.
John:
Yeah, it just feels wrong.
Casey:
So why do you... Well, no, but why... I'm not mad about this, but out of curiosity, why do you say that?
John:
That's a TV... HDMI is for a TV standard.
John:
It's not a computer monitor thing.
John:
The connector is big.
John:
It's made for television resolutions, whereas computers, you always want to have a higher resolution than that, if you possibly can.
John:
It's just not the right tool.
John:
And, you know, in refresh rates, you just got, you know, like television...
John:
it does not come in at 120 hertz or even 60 in most cases uh so yeah not if you have an option don't use it i have the only thing i have connected hdmi is my gaming monitor because that's what the the playstation puts out and so i've got a monitor that takes that in because it's kind of like a little miniature tv and i'm fine with it
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
I had no idea that that was a thing until today when we connected this LG, which is a very nice monitor.
Casey:
I really, really like it.
Casey:
Again, I think it's a few inches too big, but I like it all in all.
Casey:
And actually we're ordering a like 22 or 24 inch 4K equivalent LG monitor to replace the DOA Dell one.
Casey:
You know, if only Apple had an external monitor, if only, that would be amazing.
Casey:
But no.
Casey:
So anyway, I had no idea that you couldn't get 60 hertz off HDMI coming off a Mac laptop.
John:
I think with the newer HDMI standards, you can.
Marco:
Again, your timing here is terrible.
Marco:
It is very likely.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, don't believe it until we see it.
Marco:
But I would say it is at least moderately likely that we're going to have new laptops with a new monitor by the end of the month.
Marco:
Now, that being said, you probably can't drive it with your current laptop.
John:
well yeah you can if it has you can if it has a graphics card on the inside but i mean we'll get that we'll get that right after we get the usb hub am i right are you really expecting a monitor like i'm not i don't even have that in my dimmest hopes i'm like just feel the freaking laptops please like that's it i would guess that the 5k monitor comes with the new laptops i don't think they're going to wait for the mac pro if they
John:
There really is a 5K monitor without the Mac Pro.
John:
It's like, I guess you can hook these up to your laptop.
Marco:
Do you think Apple gives a shit about the Mac Pro anymore?
Marco:
I think it's very clear they don't, right?
John:
I mean, come on.
John:
It's just so absurd.
John:
So absurd.
Casey:
I am not particularly convinced that we will get an external monitor this month.
Casey:
However, if we do get it, I absolutely agree with Marco that it will come with the laptops and the Mac Pro will be a fart in the wind.
John:
i know i'm just saying it is so it's so weird i mean i guess that they're selling the gpu and it's like oh your wimpy laptop can't drive this mighty monitor but it's got a gpu in it so here's your solution i mean it's it's a little bit of a hack but i don't think it's weird to target the laptop as the primary consumer for this monitor because nobody buys mac pros and when those that did it's weird to hook up such a massive monitor for such a high relation to your laptop like i don't know
Casey:
I don't know why you say that because most people in – I haven't used a desktop computer at work since 2008-ish, 7-ish, something like that.
John:
Right, but do you need a 5K monitor, right?
John:
It's so like a 4K, yeah.
John:
By all means, like that's kind of the standard fancy monitor for your fancy laptop.
John:
And the big thing in my office anyway is multiple monitors, multiple smaller monitors, right?
John:
But just one big massive one, especially since this monitor is probably going to cost more than any of their laptops, the base price anyway, right?
John:
Because the most expensive thing in your desk is not the computer, but the display.
John:
It just seems like a display made for the highest of the high end, the most expensive, the biggest single screen instead of two slightly smaller screens.
John:
And that all says Mac Pro to me, but I'm old.
Casey:
Well, I think that what you're not realizing is that, like my entire company, nobody has a desktop.
Casey:
Everyone has laptops, either Lenovo's.
John:
Yeah, no, everyone has laptops in my work, too.
John:
I'm the only desktop company.
John:
Except you.
John:
Yeah, it was great.
John:
My work was asking me about, I don't know, some of their terrible spyware stuff was not correctly reporting back or whatever.
John:
And they're like...
John:
we have records that there is a mac mini with this serial number do you happen to have that i'm like don't have a mac mini uh but i'll check the serial number and it was the serial number of my gigantic cheese grater so apparently someone came to my desk to catalog this and to put the little stickers on it or whatever and wrote down my serial number
John:
and decided that this thing the size of a refrigerator is a Mac Mini.
John:
Nice.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
They don't even know what it is.
John:
They don't even know what this is.
John:
They know it's a Mac because it's got a giant Apple logo on the side of it, but they have no idea what the hell it is because everything else is laptops.
Casey:
So the reason that this became relevant and the reason I was able to sell this to the IT department was because on these 1080 monitors, if I try to use the iPhone simulator full size because it's all pixel-doubled or whatever the term is, you know, it's retina,
Casey:
it i can see like half of it on screen i actually sent the it guy a screenshot admittedly it was of a plus like a 6s plus simulator and i could see like the dock on my 1080 monitor and that was about it it's gonna run a non-native res like those iphone 6s users
Casey:
So, I mean, that's what I used to do or, well, still do right now is I would run it at like half size or whatever.
Casey:
But then what ended up happening was, especially when doing UI work, it was a total pain in the butt because I would like drop the single pixel border between table view cells or things along those lines.
Casey:
And so I'm not even seeing like a terribly accurate representation of the screen.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so that's why I said, hey, listen, I'd really like to get a retina external monitor.
Casey:
And eventually my complaining and moaning finally got heard slash he didn't want to hear it anymore.
Casey:
And so that's when they ordered this Dell.
Casey:
And unfortunately, the thing was DOA.
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, I would love to have like a couple of 22 to 24 inch 4K monitors.
Casey:
And that's what I have now is a couple of 1080 monitors, but there's just not enough resolution these days.
John:
Do you have multi-monitor problems at your office?
John:
Is there like one person in the office who has like six monitors?
Casey:
No, but one of the reasons that I had to complain and moan a lot to get this monitor was because the IT dude knew full well that once I get this new hotness, people will start smelling blood in the water and everyone will start saying, well, I want that.
Casey:
And, you know, from his perspective, it makes perfect sense that he needs to be able to justify this added expenditure over the cost of a 1080 monitor.
Casey:
And so now he's going to have these people coming out of the woodwork saying, oh, me too, me too, me too.
Casey:
And in reality, the only people it really makes sense for is designers, possibly, most likely, and iOS developers.
Casey:
And I was actually talking to one of our Android developers about all this.
Casey:
And he was like, yeah, I have no need for that whatsoever.
Casey:
I'd like it, but I have no need for it.
John:
crappy 17 inch non retina dell monitors kind of litter our hallways you step on like leaves in the fall just walking around the office and so some people who like it's kind of like people who are you know materials were scarce during the depression so they become older and they just always save their cans or whatever right these people must have lived through a monitor drought and so now they're in the land of a monitor plenty and they just they just scoop up greedily all the crappy 17 inch dell monitors and
John:
put them all on their desk.
John:
So I think the biggest one I've seen is someone who has an arrangement of six.
John:
I think it's three over three.
John:
Good grief.
John:
Anyway, crazy monitor arms.
John:
These are six of the worst monitors you've ever seen.
John:
These are not good monitors, not a good viewing angle, but there are six of them.
John:
I think someone might have broken that record before and had them in the more haphazard arrangement, but the six is the most impressive because it kind of curves around, and the thing that holds the six monitors is incredibly...
John:
impressive looking.
John:
I think it is three high.
John:
That's why it looks, you know, because it's taller.
John:
But who would, like, that's for a computer that you see in the movies.
John:
Who would actually want to look at six 17-inch Dell monitors craning your neck around and trying, like, especially since all these people use light text on a dark background in the terminal windows, with a non-IPS display
John:
With those viewing angles, you can't read anything on those.
John:
You'd have to get a stool and get head-on to the upper left corner monitor to see anything on it.
John:
Anyway, those people are punishing themselves.
John:
It's a reverse kind of... It's like, monitors, monitors everywhere.
John:
I have so many monitors.
John:
I have two monitors.
John:
Well, I have three monitors.
John:
I'm a power user.
John:
Well, I have four monitors.
John:
Well, it's just... It's a crazy arms race.
John:
It doesn't make any sense to me.
John:
Here I am sitting with my single, very small, non-retina monitor, but I still think it looks better than those other things.
Casey:
They just need a JP setup and they'll be good to go.
Casey:
That's a reference.
John:
And speaking of work hardware, I have now broken my second keyboard.
John:
If you're keeping track, this is a 2009 Mac Pro.
John:
I use the keyboard that came with it, which I like.
John:
It's the current keyboard that I use at home as well.
John:
It's the Apple aluminum extended keyboard.
John:
I like it because it has low key press effort required.
John:
It's good for my RSI.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't like the half-size function keys, but it has real arrow keys.
John:
Anyway, I like this keyboard.
John:
I broke one of them three or four years into it, got a new replacement.
John:
Today, D key stopped working, which is a surprisingly commonly used key.
John:
So for half the day today, I was copying and pasting a D from elsewhere.
John:
I'm writing variable names, and I'm getting good at writing like product, PRO, command V, UCT...
John:
That's how I spend my day.
John:
And I ordered a new keyboard.