10,000 Hours of Coughing
i'm gonna go go to bed and put my parmesan cheese back in the fridge yeah good idea i would recommend that how's things still coughing but you know it's winter and i have a kid so that's that's a given right uh every ounce of my being wants to get smug about how oh come on i never get sick you can't you must be just you know weak of immune system but i know that i will be paying this price in two to three years one year try one year probably that's true
So my office has opened a San Francisco, well, strictly speaking, an Oakland office, which I guess is different enough from San Francisco that people from the area get perturbed if you confuse the two.
Those California sensitivities.
Indeed.
Well, they've opened a Oakland office.
And the other day I was trying to get something accomplished with one of my coworkers out there.
And he had said, oh, I have to go for a long lunch because all the executives are in town.
And so, you know, always on vacation in California, blah, blah, blah.
And then I finally caught up with him after his long lunch.
This is already like roughly quitting time for me.
And he says, oh, you know what?
I can't do a Google Hangout with you to work through this issue because we're all going to the Tesla factory for a tour right now.
And I'm jealous.
And I wish I could have gone.
And I'm sad.
They don't get free cars, you know.
They just, you know, see other cars being made.
I loved the BMW factory tour so much.
It was almost, if not, it probably was one of the highlights of that trip.
I thought it was phenomenally cool.
Yeah.
Did you see that video that I think Greg put on Twitter of the...
It's like a lathe, you know, metal milling machine lathe thing.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
With the coolant coming out the center of it?
No, not that one.
He showed it.
It was, you know, a lathe is just a thing that spins an item and usually you bring a tool close to it as it spins and you can shave off parts of it.
But this was a thing where the item spun and also the cutting tool also moved in and out and up and down.
And it was making basically a crankshaft for an engine, which, you know, it's not just.
I totally missed that.
yeah it was really cool because it's got you can imagine what a crankshaft looks like you can't just lay it out it's not uh rotationally symmetrical so it has to cut all that stuff like it's rotating the piece imagine just trying to cut like part of the part of a crankshaft that connects to the piston right while it's while the crankshaft is rotating along its normal rotational axis the thing that cuts the piston it has to trace that to make like it was amazing amazing looking
I don't know if that's how all crankshafts are made, but I'm like, geez, if this is what it takes to make one crankshaft, no wonder internal combustion engines cost so much money.
Seriously, was this Greg Koenig?
Yeah.
I am thoroughly intrigued by this, and I follow Greg, so I'm surprised that I didn't notice it when it flew by.
Maybe I declared bankruptcy that day or something.
Ah, fair enough.
How's everything else?
So Marco's sick.
John, you alive?
Yeah, I'm okay.
I'm too busy worrying about my children's health.
My son has had a cough for a month now, somewhere in the middle, more than a month, somewhere in the middle of that.
After several weeks, we took him to the doctor and they're like, no, he doesn't have, you know, bronchitis or pneumonia or any other thing that we can do anything about.
and they just gave him an inhaler and sent him home and it's like he's still coughing so now we're trying like zyrtec just like allergy medication on a theory that like somehow he's allergic to the change in seasons and i don't know anyway i spend most of my time worrying about them but i'm doing fine fisherman's friend oh is that that cough like crazy cough drop thing that you like sucking on gross tasting things cures all colds
So, okay.
Basically, yes, they are my crazy gross cough drops.
The Fisherman's Friend original red labeled variety.
You can get them on Amazon even, which is nice.
They basically have the most menthol and the least sugar of most cough drops.
The problem with cough drops is basically that they only really work when they're in your mouth.
Once they're gone, they stop working almost immediately.
Okay.
But they do work while you still have them.
And so you kind of tend to have a lot of them.
When you're really coughing a lot and you kind of have to make it all day, you tend to have a lot of cough drops in one day.
And if you have the regular, like, you know, Big Square Ricola kind or things like that, your mouth just gets so coated in sugar.
It's just disgusting.
Your teeth get all slimy.
It's just really gross in your mouth after not that long of a time.
Whereas Fisherman's Friend, they're incredibly strong, like very dense menthol flavor.
And and there's a lot less sugar in them.
And they look gross and they taste gross.
They also but they do they come in a convenient little like a little Ziploc pouch.
You can just keep that pouch in your pocket so you don't have to like be unwrapping cough drops.
And then what do you do with these two wrappers that come around each one?
And you got to have like a whole pocket full of spent cough drop wrappers like it avoids that whole problem, too.
So they're good.
Yeah, a friend of ours, a neighbor slash friend, swore by whatever it is, the fisherman's friend that I guess you had recommended years ago, because he has like a seasonal cough that just won't go away for months.
And yeah, he told me that it's the real deal, that those are the only things that can get him from hacking, to keep him from hacking constantly.
Yeah, I mean, it's just menthol cough drops.
There's no secret ingredient.
It's menthol cough drops.
But menthol works.
And as far as I could tell from the basic research I did a couple years ago, there doesn't seem to be any kind of horrible side effect to using a bunch of menthol cough drops when you have a cough.
So it seems like it's a pretty good bet.
It is very effective.
When you have this kind of bronchial irritation...
Nothing else really works to stop it.
Treating it with an inhaler and things can solve the long-term problem, but if you are coughing, over-the-counter stuff like DXM syrup does not really affect this kind of cough.
I'm an expert in coughing in the last few years.
Only in the winter.
10,000 hours is all it takes, right?
Just 10,000 hours of coughing.
Yeah, right.
I'll get there.
Give me a few more years.
All right, so this is the video, John?
Yeah, so if you go to like, you know, three quarters of the way done, it's starting to take shape.
Because what you really want to see is how does it carve out the little parts that connect to the pistons?
Because those aren't along the rotational axis.
And then you see the thing rotating and the tool at the same time.
It's crazy.
Oh, my.
I mean, if you just want to watch the whole video, it can be kind of meditative to watch a 15-minute video of machine building another part of a machine.
Oh, God, that's intense.
Wow, that is pretty damn cool.
I want one of these for no reason.
Just I want it.
I think it's bigger than your house.
Oh, I'm sure it is.
There's no doubt in my mind that it is, but I kind of want it.
God, think of all the cool things I would never be able to figure out how to build.
This is why Greg just has one of the niftiest jobs in the world.
When you're a software developer, anybody who builds physical objects just blows your mind.
It's so true.
We don't make anything.
We just make bits move around.
We make nothing.
And so the physical world baffles us.
It's this mystic world.
We don't know how these things get here.
They just get here, and we can complain about them.
Don't include me in this.
I know how things get here.
I know where food comes from.
Here we go.
That's why you are royal and I am servile.
Food comes from square packages.
All right.
So we should probably start with some follow up and try to get this train back on the tracks.
So Alex Howell wrote in to tell us about the Nintendo 3DS.
So I believe that's your job, John, to tell us about this.
yeah last show when we were talking about nintendo switch uh i was questioning whether we were all questioning like what does this mean for the 3ds for apple for apple for nintendo's portable line i did that mistake like three times in the last episode too saying apple instead of nintendo easy to get them confused until they buy each other um anyway uh and i said you know i haven't been following this so if someone knows please send the links ox howl did it's an interview with
The president of Nintendo, who I still realize in my mind, I keep thinking is Iwata, but he died, sadly, his untimely death, I think, last year, or maybe it was already this year, I don't remember.
Anyway, there's this new person whose name is Tatsumi Kimishima, if I'm pronouncing it correctly.
uh kimishima yeah i'm close um it's an interview and the question from the interview is in bloomberg question will you discontinue the 3ds answer from the president of nintendo thanks to our software the 3ds hardware is still growing so that business still has momentum and certainly rather than being cannibalized by the switch we think the 3ds can continue in its own form
Which is a perfectly business-like answer that completely fits with Marco's suggestion on the last show, which is that they're just going to keep it going.
If the Switch takes off, they can can it.
If the Switch doesn't take off, then they'll be glad they kept it going.
So that seems like what they're doing.
Fair enough.
Is that all our follow-up?
yeah you guys are slacking off on the follow-up i mean it was a lot of yeah it's all on us this is the only this is the only oh the other follow-up i have item on the switch is some random thing that i read that i don't have a link for um was about uh the switch when you you know so you you pick it up and it's like a little thing you hold in your hand it's got the little controllers that slide on the side but if you're going to sit on your couch and do it you put the switch but it looks like a big you know 16 by 9 ish screen you put that in in like a docking station and
Looks kind of like a napkin holder, right?
It's like a little upright vertical thing that you slide the switch into.
And something I read the other day was that when you put the switch in that docking station, one of the advantages to being docked, aside from obviously not running down the battery because the dock will be connected to power,
is that the switch itself becomes more powerful because the docking station provides additional cooling, allowing the internals to be at max, you know, to run at full tilt without hitting thermal limits, which is really weird if you think about it.
So it basically means when it's handheld, it won't be as powerful or as good.
So does that mean, like, this frame rate will suffer, or will it...
crank down the detail and that's part of the game maker's API or whatever but anyway all the more reason for you to just keep it plugged into your TV and pretend like Nintendo was still making TV connected consoles instead of making really weird much more powerful portable systems that you can also use on a TV
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John, tell me what's going on with your keychain.
Sounds like there's trouble in Syracuse County.
Yeah, so Sierra situation.
I upgraded my wife's iMac, 5K iMac to Sierra pretty quickly after release.
And I think I mentioned on the show a few weird bumps with keychain stuff.
And I'm like, well, that happens when you just did the upgrade and apps need to be reauthorized because they think something's different or the Apple built-in apps have, you know, updated themselves.
And now, you know, whatever.
Like, it's a common thing that happens after you upgrade that you have to do some stuff involving keychain.
But here we are, I don't know how many months after Sierra was released, and I'm ready to call this a persistent problem issue.
that i can't attribute to data related things because it happens on we all have accounts on our 5k it happens on my account there and it happens on her account i don't know if it happens on the kids account but they probably don't have much stuff in their keychain and this is what happens so we'll all be using the computer you know people go up to it and switch to their account and do their stuff and my son goes and changes his account and plays minecraft and my wife comes and changes to her account and does stuff you know
Whatever.
Use the computer for a while.
Everything is fine.
At a certain point, I think it's probably multiple days because we never turn this computer off.
It just goes to sleep, but it's never actually off or restarted.
After a couple of days...
You get a little notification in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Usually, again, I see it on my account or my wife's account, but that's probably because they're the one it's on most often.
And it says, you need to create a new iCloud security code.
And the buttons on the notification dialog are create and later.
If you hit later, it goes away.
If you hit create, it opens the iCloud preference pane and then does nothing.
Like, it doesn't do anything in the iCloud preference pane.
It just sits there.
Um, I actually have gone through the motion of, okay, I will create a new iCloud security code.
Even, you know, I know how to do it.
I'll go into the thing and click on the thing, blah, blah, blah, and enter a new code and blah, blah, blah.
That appears to have no effect.
You can do it, but it doesn't matter.
A couple of days later, you're going to see that dialogue.
And when you see that dialogue, what it's trying to tell you, like what you will find out later, if you just continue to use your computer,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is not getting passwords out of the key chain.
If you try to log in somewhere and enter a password and then try to save the password, it will say, sorry, couldn't say couldn't find the system key chain or couldn't find the login key chain or something like that to save your password.
And if you launch key chain access and look at it, you see a bunch of black blank icons in the sidebar and a little text that says read only mode.
like it's like your keychains are all gone they're all still there if you look in your library you know keychains thing they're all sitting there the files are there they're perfectly fine as far as i can tell but keychain access won't even show their icons let alone any of their contents and it says everything is in a read-only mode and the only way to fix this is to reboot and when you reboot everything's fine again for a couple days all your passwords are still there nothing is corrupted they removed the keychain first aid menu item i have no idea what the hell it did but it made me feel good i would have tried that if
if that option was still there but it's not but it's totally inexplicable to me i keep looking in activity monitor to see like is there some sec d you know demon that has hung or something and i'll see it showing up as red because it's not pulling events off or you know what i don't like is there something i can restart but i i have not figured this out and because it's one of those every few days type of problems sometimes maybe only once a week and the cure is a very fast reboot like
i my my motivation to troubleshoot it has been low but it's increasing but i don't really know what to do people are saying to you know uh disk util reset user permissions on everything or you know the equivalent of uh repair permissions and stuff like that like the permissions all seem to be fine uh and i don't quite know what is going wrong after days of using the computer that suddenly the keychains just go away like it's not corrupt files it's not corrupt data because then just nothing would work ever um
um and i don't even know whether to attribute this to sierra i keep hoping there'll be a point update to sierra and like well whatever this will be some you know glitch and then it will go away in a point update but the point it dates to sierra don't seem to be coming out very quickly i know there's one in flight right now but i'm not on the beta train maybe i should get on that and see if it changes things but uh either way all this is to say is that it has prevented me one of the many things that has prevented me from upgrading my technically incompatible mac pro to sierra it's like well
I don't want to deal with that.
My Mac Pro works the way it's supposed to and I don't have any of these problems.
So why would I want to bring them on?
It could be related to my iMac.
It could be related to the specific data on there.
Who knows?
It could be something corrupt in iCloud.
It's one of those things that's very difficult to know what the deal is.
But half the reason I'm mentioning it on the show is because I've been stewing on it for a long time.
uh and it's you know worth getting out there in case other people have any problem but really selfishly i'm hoping someone's going to tell me how to fix it because i just haven't had time to dive into this and figure out what the deal is and googling for it is not turning up anything maybe i'll actually you know you know you're really desperate when i'm thinking of filing a radar like just because what can you even say like after some weird amount of time usually a couple days this happens and i'll just send them like screenshots of keychain access showing everything is blank and reboot and it fixes it
So I don't know.
Sort of tangentially related.
I don't remember when it was, but it was easily a couple of years ago.
I used to very frequently get this weird bug with my magic mouse.
And I don't remember it happening with the trackpad on my laptops, but maybe it did.
But certainly with Magic Mouse, if I would use the one finger, say, left to right scroll in order to go back a page in Safari, the active page would move right maybe 50 points, 100 points, and then it would just freeze.
And Safari would be like freaking useless until you quit it and restart it.
And just in the last day or two, this has started to come back.
And it happened, I believe, on both my work and personal machines, which was super creepy and really weird.
And it's only happened a couple of times and I haven't had it happen since.
But this was infuriating when it was common a couple of years ago because I would have to quit Safari constantly.
And it actually also happened in Chrome once.
which was also super weird.
And I don't need to hear anyone emailing me about how I should use Chrome and not Safari or about how I should use Safari and not Chrome.
My web browser choices are my business.
Thank you very much.
But it was certainly very weird and very not reliably reproducible.
So similarly, I'm not sure what kind of radar I should file other than, hey, look, the window is frozen with me 100 points into a back animation.
That's weird.
Totally sounds like a laptop bug.
Everyone has laptop, always has like core graphics bugs related to like their GPU drivers or weird GPU issues, especially with a dual GPU switching, stuff like that.
Could be.
My favorite thing is that the bug is syncing itself helpfully between your work and home computers.
Right, exactly.
Unlike your keyboard shortcuts or whatever.
I was just about to say that.
Get out of my head.
I was just about to say that.
My damn keyboard shortcuts are still lost in the ether.
But hey, this bug is syncing just great.
Thanks, iCloud.
One more thing about my keychain thing that I remembered.
Many times, I don't know if this is related or it's separate, but many times since upgrading to Sierra, the computer will get into a state where it cannot go to any website using HTTPS, you know?
you know tls ssl all that like if you try to load one of them it will say sorry couldn't make a secure connection or whatever whatever weird error screen to the browser doesn't matter the browser sierra uh you know safari chrome i think i even tried firefox once like it just can't do it in this a lot of these symptoms are all explained like oh your time your clock is off because
many things will get screwed up if your clock is off a lot of like certificates and expiration things or just uh agreement between the two ends of a connection about what the hell time and date it is uh so almost all of the googling that you do about this is like oh you just need to you know your computer's clock is wrong that's why you can't do anything involving keychain or that's why you can't do anything involving secure sites so i can't tell you the number of times like it's happened and i immediately look at the clock and say is that clock right is that today's date you know
what year is it it's like a time traveler but and i've turned off ntp and turned it back on and just as far as i can tell every time this has happened the time and date have been exactly correct and toggling that stuff does not restore anything to a working state and again the solution is always to restart and it comes back like nothing is wrong and everything is perfectly fine
You remember when we used to make fun of the Windows users for restarting their computers constantly?
That was awesome.
The thing is, as somebody who was a Windows user a lot until 2005 or 2006 or so, I generally only had to restart my Windows computer about as often as I restart my Mac.
And that was partly because I got on the Windows NT kernel early.
I started using Windows 2000 since it's a beta in February 1999 and dropped the 98 kernel by the wayside as quickly as I possibly could.
Even I couldn't print for a year, but it was worth it.
It's fine.
Generally, if you treat your computers well, if you know what you're doing, you don't usually have to restart Windows or Macs more frequently than the other.
It is, though, a little concerning that, like, oh, man, there's so many bugs in macOS now.
It's really kind of sad.
It makes me sad.
You know, we get feedback telling us to stop complaining about Apple because for some reason we aren't allowed to.
But it really does make me sad to see my computing platform of choice that I love so much.
There's a lot of bugs now.
It's not like massive showstoppers like John's Passport thing most of the time.
Most of the time, it's more little stuff.
The other day, I've been using Apple's new Notes app since it was launched in iOS 9, whenever that was.
I think that's right.
I've been using that for all my little Notes.
I'm a pretty light Notes user in general.
I never heavily used the Dropbox editors before that.
I have something like...
50 notes maybe it's it's not like a large number of them and i'm not they're not like always open like i'll open it check one thing and then and then close it and it's worked perfectly for me until last week now like notes just basically don't sync reliably between devices anymore like and i've tried logging out iCloud log back in it doesn't work like it's just nothing can make my notes sync reliably to certain devices anymore like my laptop is
Logging in, logging out worked.
My iPad, logging in, logging out didn't work.
I never had to do this stuff before.
And it's just like, come on.
And this is what makes iCloud bugs and iMessage also.
People have these problems with iMessage since the beginning.
so often the the answer that you get if you if you ask people or even if the answer that if you can get apple to tell you anything the answer that you get is usually like well just like sign out of iCloud clear everything off sign everything back in and it's like that's not a solution like that that should never be the answer that is never good enough that's like telling somebody restore your phone and you know and don't restore from backup like start cleaning from your phone you erase everything you just lose everything but that's that's not an answer that that is not a good solution and there's just so many bugs now
that come up seemingly for no reason in not even edge case usage.
I feel like now you're in edge case if you don't have one of these bugs hitting at least one of your various Apple Sync services.
Actually, outside of my damn keyboard shortcuts, which in the grand scheme of things are not that important...
I actually don't really have any of these problems.
Like for the longest time when people would complain and moan about iMessage, almost everyone had a horror story.
I might be an iMessage unicorn because I cannot recall a time that I've had more than just a very brief hiccup.
Not this like continual non-delivered messages or out of band messages.
You don't have split conversations where you send a message to me and then like I reply to you a day later, but it shows up in a separate conversation.
So now you have two conversations that are just me and you.
yeah but that makes perfect sense like i i it's an unfortunate scenario sense at all sure it does no no so the problem this is particularly bad with group messages but i believe the problem to be that somebody say like let's say it's the three of us and i send an i message to john's phone number and marco's email address yeah i know i know i know the source of the problem but we're the same people like this is not you know oh you sent it to my apple id and not to my phone number like we're the same people it's the same icon in the application combine them don't make them
No, no, I agree with you.
I totally agree with you.
But at least that problem kind of sort of makes sense.
And really, and like there is no solution to that because it's like, you know, you have to make sure – even if you make sure all your devices are set to when I send a message, I want to send it from either my phone number or my Apple ID.
Like if you make it all consistent on your end, it doesn't matter because you can't control how people contact you.
And it's just – it's chaos.
You will never be merged.
You can just – you just got to hope that –
People will reply to the same thing that they got it on on a device that is configured.
Like, it's intractable.
It's not good.
They need to come up with a solution to this.
See, this is why the unified timeline is bad, because it gets you spoiled.
Spoiled by consistency in a series of events, one following the other.
Incredibly confusing.
Right?
I know.
It's ridiculous.
No, but all I'm trying to say is that outside of my damn keyboard shortcuts, which drive me absolutely bananas, I actually don't really have any common bugs that I feel like I hit on a regular basis now that my RAM is actually working.
But I do feel that the one-off bugs, like, for example, I had a kernel panic earlier today, which is something I haven't had happen in a long time.
That's got to be the RAM.
No, it was my work computer.
It was my work computer.
Nice try.
I haven't had a kernel panic.
I average about one kernel panic per year over all my devices at this point.
Yeah, that's about right.
And I go multiple years without any, and then they cluster in a year.
Whenever I see one, I think something is wrong hardware-wise at this point.
Talking about how often you reboot, like in the bad old days of the Macs in the 90s, you would hear the bongs, the little bongs that Marco will insert into the podcast at this point all over the office all the time from poor developers on classic Mac OS trying to use Adobe products to get their work done.
And it was just inevitable that you would get a whole system freeze at some point, probably averaging like one point something per day for them.
If you knew what you were doing,
And had a limited set of non-Adobe software, essentially, like I could go days and days with just my BB editor and, you know, IE5 running or whatever.
But eventually, you know, if you were doing anything complicated or stressing it and weren't just staying in this little groove.
you know no no memory protection is like the same reason marco got off windows 95 and 98 and on to 2000 because you just want to get out of that world so things are still way better than you know in living memory and my very vivid living memory of how bad it used to be and you know the kernel panics like in terms of what is the stability of the core system and this is one of the things i emphasized early on in my os 10 reviews uh then called mac os 10
they they did a really good job with the like does the operating system crash but as a user you don't care basically if the kernel crashes because if the if the entire ui freezes and the only way to get out of it is like you know kill login window and send you back to the login screen it might the kernel might as well have crashed because everything you were doing is hosed it's like oh the operating system is fine like the kernel is still running it just
killed a bunch of processes and it came back but basically like ui freeze versus operating system crash it doesn't matter from the user's perspective but technically speaking i would say that mac os 10 specifically and ios to some degree although i can tell you about some of my ios weirdness after this but the core os is very solid like to have used mac os 10 for how many years you know 10 years 15 years 17 whatever the hell it is
kernel panics are just not a thing in my life and like you said marco if you see one you immediately think hardware problem that's how reliable the core os is things above that might start to get flaky and by the way the uh the suggestion from the chat room which i'm definitely going to try because it smells right to me from atp tipster for it to solve my problem
is turn off iCloud keychain, which I have turned on.
Because anything that involves iCloud could be like locking my files in some weird-ass way.
It's like, fine, I will just turn that feature off and not have the stuff sync and see if that solves it.
Because everything that we've listed so far is like, if it involves iCloud, that means it involves something other than the bits on your computer and is very often buggy.
But anyway, I think the stability...
and reliability of everything not having to do with cloud services on the mac has pretty much gotten better over time it's a lumpy path there are regressions and everything it's not a straight up you know upward line it goes up and down and up and down but in general the trend is good um so i'm thankful for that uh every day and it makes me appreciate all the more my
beautiful 2008 uh power mac which is just at this point because it's running like the very latest version of lcap and i mean it's just it's just incredibly solid i can't remember the last time i had any kind of problem with it which is yet another reason i'm not motivated to upgrade it it's a good machine
All I was trying to say earlier is that outside of these one-offs here and there, I do think that things are pretty good.
And this is what you were saying, John.
Things are so much better than they used to be.
And I don't want to perpetuate the, oh, all the three of us do is complain idea.
But because things are pretty darn great as long as you're not trying to sync keyboard text replacement.
Other than that, we're okay.
I have literally never used that feature.
I have never created or deleted any of these things until earlier last week when I was setting up my new laptop and I noticed I was going through all the preference windows.
It was the first clean install I had done in a long time.
And in this text shortcuts was about 16 copies of the default on my way entry that's there.
like that's delightful like oh great that's i've literally never touched this feature and somehow i have 16 copies of this like obviously there is no effort being put into this feature well the reason that feature always comes up in our circles is because it is like it's like the easiest toy example of sync like the amount of data is so small and it's all just text and it's a lightly or unused feature it's almost as if like
If you wanted to do a demo application of like CloudKit and the syncing services, the modern syncing services, you would say, let's just pretend we're syncing, you know, keyboard shortcuts where it's just, you know, name value pairs, all plain text.
Like it can't get any easier than that.
And if that doesn't work 100% rock solid reliably, what hope in the world does anybody have to build a reliable syncing engine for an application with actual complicated data on top of Apple's cloud services?
So...
that's why it always comes up like it's not it's not just because we're all obsessed with tech shortcuts it's because it's like a canary you know it's like if they if that doesn't work then you know as a developer a don't even bother trying to build like your your sophisticated application on top of the syncing engine and and if that doesn't work uh then as a user it makes you less confident in any of apple's own more complicated syncing things
Yeah, I mean, that's why notes having a problem for me this past week is really concerning for me.
Because it was reliable for the last year and a half or whatever it's been since they launched it.
And then all of a sudden, now it's just not.
And I've tried the basic debugging technique of like, oh, log out, log back in, clear everything, restart.
It's like, that doesn't work.
It's like, well...
okay now what you know it's that's not a debugging technique that's just like the only thing you can do exactly but notes is actually notes is actually surprisingly sophisticated like it's not just text shortcuts like because it does do like try to do like merging of changes and simultaneous accents for shared notes do you share notes like do you have like a shared like grocery list with you and tiff where you both have access to the same note to read write you know google doc style thing
i've only ever done that with one note and it's no longer there yeah so i mean we we take it for granted like with the fact that we sit here and edit this google doc that has our show notes in it have we ever had data destroying bugs or things that have caused it to be corrupt or casey write something and i say casey did you write something i don't see anything
That has literally never happened.
Google Docs, whatever they're doing, it just always works.
Is it the greatest app in the world?
No.
Is it possible to get weird things?
Like when I was trying to select some text in case it was writing earlier, my selection moved because the text was going under it.
But you just stop selecting and you try again.
That's one of the reasons I have such faith in Google and their cloud service stuff, plus or minus privacy stuff, which, you know, use your own judgment.
is that the the basics you know google docs can multiple people edit a text document at the same time doesn't get screwed up proof is in the pudding yes they totally can whereas if we had gone with marco's one time perhaps a sarcastic suggestion to use like a shared pages document i have little faith that it would have been as successful
i never said shared pages i would never have suggested that someone one of you suggested we try like iwork.com or something i don't know it could have been a joke yeah we did try there there was like there were a couple of other web services uh that we tried uh that people had recommended and none of those really worked out for us either and so we just came back to the google docs because it's google docs is basically like the the windows of online collaboration it's like
That's too harsh, I think.
When it comes to shared text documents, reliability, I mean, it's not a bad application.
It's not great.
The UI could be a little bit weird, but it works all the time, and it more or less has the features we need, and none of us ever think about it.
I don't think we spend time worrying about how Google Docs is working.
That's true.
And that's ideal for a tool you're going to use for this purpose, just like
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My iOS issues.
It's the same as last time.
I just want to give an update.
This is like a whole bug complaint show.
No, I don't want it to be.
I'm trying to bring it back, but we all have too many new pieces.
It's bug complaint slash desperately try to crowdsource solutions to your own personal problems by using your position on a podcast.
In theory, you could be helping other people, too.
So this should have been a follow-up, but too late.
I was talking about plugging my big, fat, ugly lightning-connected ear pods into my iPhone 7 and how occasionally it doesn't work.
And I described some scenarios where it doesn't work.
I come up with a new scenario where it doesn't work, where I pick up my phone.
I don't know what order I do things.
Maybe I probably already unlocked it and Overcast is the front-most app or whatever.
I plug in my headphones, put the ear pods in my ear.
I hit the big honking triangle play button overcast and sound starts coming out of the speakers in the phone.
Yeah.
And there's a long time between the time when I plugged in the headphones and the time.
And like when that happens, it's like it's like getting on an escalator that's not moving.
You're like, wait, wait, what?
Like, what?
I plugged in the headphones like seven seconds ago.
Sometimes you plug in the headphones then, go to Springboard or go to Overcast or eventually you get there, go to the podcast, you hit the play button.
The earpods have been in your ears for what seemed like forever and you hit play and it starts playing audio out of the phone speaker and you're just like...
you just shake your head at the phone like what is what are you doing like this is your basics like none of your previous iphones had this problem i plugged in the damn headphones and hit play on an audio app the sound always came out of the headphones like always did like a hundred percent of the time i've run this experiment many times on every single ipod touch and every single iphone every single ipod shuffle when i hit play comes out because the headphones are plugged in where else is it going to come out like this is a and so that that infuriated me
yeah something's wrong with that it happens it happens to me in my car also like like when the car bluetooth captures the the output about once a week it'll just play through the phone speaker still even though the car thinks it's connected the the phone thinks it's connected to the car but it still plays out through the phone's internal speaker instead but bluetooth never works like i'm not in a car no bluetooth
Bluetooth usually works.
Yeah, I agree.
My Bluetooth and my Honda is incredibly unreliable, and I have all sorts of situations like that that I'm used to dealing with.
But headphones, like the reason it's so disturbing to me is like headphones are just, you know, I'm just in my kitchen, right?
This is previously 100% reliable technology.
So I'm really, my opinion is going downhill fast.
Well, it was never, the way iOS handles audio routing to different devices has never been 100% reliable.
I think in different releases, as they update and change certain subsystems to enable new things or whatever, certain OSs are better than others.
And I think iOS 10 is particularly bad in this area of selecting the right output device reliably.
But almost every iOS version that comes out, like almost every beta, betas one through five of almost every iOS version every year have some massive problem with audio routing.
I don't know why audio writing is just always messed with.
I assume all the changes in iOS 10 were to accommodate the AirPods and all the different... Because that's like Bluetooth audio got really messed up for a while in the betas, and I'm pretty sure that's why.
But whatever they do, it seems like they're always having to mess with the audio stack in weird ways that leave it very unreliable.
And one of the very frequent problems I've always had with phones...
Every once in a while, you will tell your podcast to play, and it'll think there's no speakers connected to the phone of any form.
It'll show nothing in the source list from the AirPlay icon, or it'll show iPhone as the only entry.
and usually you have to just reboot when that like there's nothing you can do you just reboot at that point but that's been a long-standing ios bug and again like almost every ios version has something like that that's going wrong with it every so often have you but have you ever plugged in plain old headphones into a plain old headphone jack on an ios device and then played audio and not had to come out the headphones i've literally never had that experience until like this week
that's a good point i know you're i have not had that happen to me but now every device is is a is whatever class of device that that like bluetooth and car things get like now headphones are like that too because of progress and courage yeah now they got their own little computers in there
Yeah, so the other thing that I saw, which is, I'm sure related to this, but it was really weird because I've never seen this one.
You know, iOS occasionally freaks out.
iOS, for the most part, is incredibly reliable.
Like, I don't reboot my iOS devices.
They just run and run and run and run, and that's the way it's supposed to be.
But recently on my iPhone 7...
again plugging in the headphones i plug in the headphones and then i hit the play button i think it might have still been on the lock screen because you know the little the media controls are still on the screen i hit the play button to play and it doesn't play anything like well fine whatever doesn't play anything let me just unlock the phone well first let me unplug and plug replug the headphones which is usually the first thing hit the play button nothing happens and i'm like wait is the play button even activating let me unlock the phone and actually go to overcast and hit the play button there so
And I noticed that I can't unlock the phone.
I'm like, oh, is it the stupid fingerprint?
Is that the problem?
Oh, forget about the fingerprint.
Let me just press the home button so I can do the, you know, my, enter my password so I can unlock my phone, which I never do because I use Trot City all the time.
And I can't get the password screen to come up.
And then I hit the home button and nothing's happening.
And I hit the power button and the phone doesn't go back to sleep.
And so I'm hitting every physical control and semi-physical control.
I'm pulling out the headphones and putting them back in.
I'm hitting the non-moving home button.
I'm hitting the power button and literally nothing is happening.
The screen is just sitting there staring at me.
It is not turning on.
It's not turning off.
It is not unlocking.
It's not presenting me with an unlock screen.
i i tried to do what i think i don't know what this is if this is the case but i'm trying to go from memory like oh what's the what's the new like you know hard reboot thing so i'm doing like volume up and the power button i think that's wrong i didn't you know volume down yeah well anyway i tried various combinations of buttons probably all of which were wrong none of which did anything i think if i had correctly found the one that that kills it i'm assuming it would have just you know turned off like the equivalent of yanking the plug right but i didn't find it right um
And I'm doing this for, you know, I don't know, a minute, two minutes.
And then eventually things start happening and I realize it is catching up with everything that I've done over the past several minutes.
I've seen this happen.
It happened to me once too.
And all of a sudden I see the volume changing and going up and down and the lock screen coming and just... And then it was fine.
And then everything freaks out.
The Apple Pay screen pops up because you kept hitting the home button.
Yep, yep, yep.
It eventually got all that out of its system.
I'm like, okay, well, it's back to normal.
And bottom line is I didn't reboot the thing, but that whole time when it was freaking out...
uh you would seem to be kicked off by me plugging in my headphones but who the heck knows and anyway that was that's very anti-social behavior that also makes me concerned about my iphone yeah that happened to me if like uh a few maybe a couple of months ago and i tweeted about it and i got a lot of responses and people saying that happened to them too and and so it seems like that's a that's not that uncommon um but yeah oh geez like sierra ios 10 is new so like i just want more point releases not that new i
well i guess but like sierra still sierra has not had a lot of point releases what is it up to is it just the 0.1 still yes 10 12 1 yeah although dot 2 is is i believe in pretty late beta at this point but yeah it's all the rumors about the uh new polaris gpu drivers with making people think about mac pros in there but anyway i i'm ready for point releases because every point release i'm like well maybe they fix this annoying thing so
uh and 10.2 they're saying around there on beta 7 of 10.2 i mean obviously they're more cautious with the ios releases so it's taken a while for 10.2 to appear but it was like 10.1 they don't do the the three digit numbers on ios versions yeah they do but it's only ever for bug fixes and for the last digit yeah anyway uh hopefully when both of these os's both mac os and ios get their next point releases some or all these things will improve
All right.
On that happy note, tell us about Amazon Go.
So Amazon, as chief summarizer in chief, Amazon has come up with a, hey, look what we're building video that is only a couple minutes long.
It's worth watching.
And basically it's taking Apple's easy steal to the next level.
And the general premise is you scan a, I think it was like a QR code that's on your phone as you walk through a turnstile on your way in and
Then you grab whatever it is you want to purchase and then you walk out.
And between like computer vision and presumably like weight detection or something like that.
RFID, I would imagine.
And RFID, yeah.
No RFID.
What?
Oh, did they say it wasn't RFID?
I'm surmising that.
Oh, okay.
So what are the catchphrases they use?
Computer vision, deep learning algorithms, sensor fusion are the three things they say.
We just know you bought a tin of Altoids.
You always buy a tin of Altoids.
We just assume you're going to buy one every time at this point.
They'll speculatively charge you for things that you're going to buy in the future in Minority Report style.
A bunch of bald people in bathtubs know what you're going to buy.
Which is probably not far from the truth, minus the bathtubs and the people.
They know what you're going to buy.
That's why Target sends you the thing with the baby supplies before you know you're pregnant.
They call that big data.
That really happened, kids.
I'm not going to put an article in the show notes because it'll take me three days to find it, but that really did happen.
Anyway... It'll take you three seconds to find that one.
Maybe, but...
But the point is, you walk in, you scan a QR code on your phone to identify who you are, you buy some things, then you leave.
And there's no checkout.
You just walk right out.
And in principle, this sounds pretty neat to me.
We should probably have a moment to mention Humans Need Not Apply, which is a great video by a friend of the show, CGP Grey, about how when things like these automations happen, that means that eventually humans will not have jobs, which is a problem.
But...
That horrible dystopian future aside, this sounds pretty cool.
So here's what I think about how this works based on this video.
And the store, by the way, isn't open yet.
There's going to be one location in Seattle.
It's not open yet.
So all you've got is a video and a page that has a bunch of information on it.
So it shows there's no turnstile, by the way.
That would be barbaric.
You walk in through these little... They have little dividers that you scan your QR code, but it's not as if you're going through a subway turnstile or an amusement park turnstile.
So you just walk through...
the qr code is scanned now the thing knows you're in the store and i think one of the key technologies is the video says and then just put your phone away like it's not like you're scanning things with your phone like on apple's apple store app or whatever once you scan your qr code and enter you still have to have your phone on you but you can just put it in your pocket it's not involved in this you're not you're not tapping products with your phone you're not scanning them with your phone and your phone's camera is not seeing them like it's in your pocket right but they do have
I think one part of this is proximity.
Like it knows roughly where you are in the store, probably using those eye beacons or similar type of technology.
It knows like your phone has to be on.
So it knows where it knows that you're in the store and knows roughly where you are.
And the computer vision thing, like if you look at the video, every product that people are getting is kind of like they're inside a giant vending machine where things like slide down, like the candy bar slides down and a little twisty corkscrew.
Right.
And the next one comes like everything is in a single file lane.
Right.
where you grab the product at the front, which, by the way, I would never do because you always got to pull from the back or middle, right?
But anyway, and I assume they have cameras all over, plus like you're saying weight sensors and any other things like sensor fusion, of knowing someone has picked a product off of this shelf.
You know which product it is because you know which row it came in.
It's not like they're haphazardly shelved or just some employees like shelving them.
They're in precise rows.
And when you pull one off, they know you pulled one off.
And they know it was you based on proximity of where your phone is.
Now, what if you are shoulder to shoulder with three other people who are also pulling things off?
I suppose if you're all reach over each other and all three grab things out of the same aisle that you're standing in front of, it's possible to confuse the thing.
But what I'm getting is I think it's not RFID.
I think there is no there are not RFID tags on every single one of these things.
I think there's plain old containers.
There's nothing special about the containers.
Everything is about sensing where you are with the phone and figuring out when people pull things out of these very specific, restricted little columns of food.
And the food that you're getting, it's not like your supermarket where you can go buy, you know, a loaf of bread, mayonnaise, you know, some ground beef, like just...
it is more like prepared foods in little tins, like in the prepared food section of Whole Foods or whatever, plus maybe a couple of staples like milk and butter and stuff like that.
But it is not a full-fledged grocery store with everything you expect to see there.
I think partially because it would be hard to get all that into this format, into this little slidey-down, you know, whatever, like these little rows of food and neat little containers that are all uniformly sized, because that's not how real grocery stores work.
And then finally...
The idea is that you grab the food and you just take it with you and you just leave.
There's no scanning of your items as you leave.
You don't even have to scan your QR code on the way back out.
You just walk out of the store.
It doesn't care what you put the items in.
You don't have to put them into a special bag.
You just take the crap and you leave.
And they say...
you know we'll we'll charge your account for the amount that you bought you know because it's amazon they have all your information your credit cards or whatever and you if you're interested in looking at the receipt you can look at it right in the same app that you scanned on the way in you launch this free app this amazon go app and it says oh
You just bought these five things.
Right.
And when I saw that and I had my wife look at this, too, and I knew what her reaction would be to some degree.
And when I saw it, what I thought of was like, oh, no, you know, no, no checkout lines, no waiting in line.
But if everybody who used this was like my wife, which I don't think everybody in the world is, but there are enough of them.
What would happen instead of people waiting in checkout lines is everybody would exit the store with their stuff.
And as soon as they got the door, they would be staring at their phone, stopped in place, staring at their phone to make sure that the receipt in the app exactly matches everything that's in their bag, to make sure they weren't overcharged for anything, right?
And so what would actually happen is the entrance to the store would be clogged with a bunch of people who were all frantically checking their receipt to make sure they didn't get charged for 500 cans of Hellman's mayonnaise when really they just took one or whatever.
And then going back into the store and trying to correct it like you have to have for this to work.
It has to be like the people in the video where it's like, I just walk out of the store and I'm fine.
Like, I don't even need to look at this receipt.
Maybe later when I'm doing like my bills, I'll look at the receipt.
But I trust that it's fine.
But people who...
are i don't know very careful about money spending want to know immediately have i the same reason you check a paper receipt like are you are you guys paper receipt checkers like after you go to the grocery store do you look down the receipt or do you watch the like the scanning to make sure that everything is being scanned for the right price and that you know all those supposed to be two for five dollars and you know do you check the receipt to make sure that they didn't charge you for something you didn't buy and that you got the right prices not usually never
yeah well some people are receipt checkers um i'm definitely a scan watcher because what else do you have to do during that time i watch the items being scanned in case if they like you know scan uh the you know the potato five potatoes i have and it comes up as like some ridiculous price because they thought it was you know uh you know seven pounds of saffron or something right you want to be watching for that stuff if you're not one of those people and you can go la-di-da and just leave but
I think there's enough receipt checkers.
Like if you're just to watch people leaving who just at least glance over the receipt, you know, make sure the total makes sense.
Make sure if you saw something that you bought because they were two for $5 and that was a discount that you actually do get them for two for $5.
Um, and it's not like real grocery stores are clogged with people checking their receipts, but yeah,
that anxiety that like this magical system like can i trust this magical system initially that's going to be there now if it works really well eventually people will just let go and say oh i don't need to keep checking that uh it's more reliable than humans it's more reliable than you know than self-checkout it's more reliable than having a real cashier which i think
will be a real challenge because a really good supermarket cashier is way better than that's why self-checkout sucks when you check yourself out you realize an experienced cashier who knows exactly what code to enter for these particular kinds of green beans just you know like the things that don't have codes on them a good human cashier is worth way more than we pay them and you don't realize until you either have to check yourself out or you get a bad human cashier but anyway um if the machines can ever match that we'll we will be happy and we will stop obsessing with it but i think we have
a long way to go we get there and in the meantime the possibility being overcharged is one thing and the second possibility is that the stupid thing will miss a bunch of stuff and you'll get a lot of free food so that's that's a possible reason to check out the flagship store because i would imagine there's going to be at least an equal number of situations where it doesn't keep track of something and you just got some free food
and if you're not a receipt checker you're not going to know or care and you're going to eat the thing and then later at the end of the month when you reconcile stuff you'll be like hmm everything was pretty cheap oh i guess it keeps missing that uh those bunch of bananas that i take from the store every week and it hasn't been charging me for them because there's no one there watching so i don't know someone who lives in seattle should try the store out and then uh right into the show
How many bananas are you buying where you would even notice whether you got them for free or not?
Because they don't cost a lot.
I mean, it's one banana, Michael.
What could it cost?
$10?
I don't know.
You get a lot of bananas.
You make a lot of banana bread.
That's a staple around here.
We get a lot of bananas.
And if they go over, they get too brown for people to want to eat.
Banana bread, banana muffins.
It's like, you know, bonus.
kind of sounds like you're buying too many bananas on a number of fronts here can never have too much banana bread i don't think that's possible oh amen amen couldn't agree more i don't know i'm interested in this i think it looks pretty neat i suspect that it won't be commonplace for years um we discussed this briefly on clockwise today which i happen to be a guest host on um
We'll put a link in the show notes.
And I think this is the indication of the future, but I don't think we're quite into the future yet.
So we'll see.
But it looks very cool if it works and if it's reliable.
And this is the type of thing I like to see Amazon doing.
Amazon does lots of things, a lot of which don't seem to be part of their core competencies or only tangentially.
It's arguable whether...
Everything that would eventually become Amazon Web Services, you know, S3 and EC2 and all that stuff, is that part of Amazon's core companies?
Don't they sell books on the Internet, you know, in the 90s version of them, right?
But, of course, they have to run their own servers.
But then they weren't really running their own servers on their web services for a long time.
But then eventually they want to be.
So you can argue that, like...
It may not seem like this is a core part of a company that sells you things over the internet, but it is because this is how they run their business.
And then they do stuff like the Fire Phone and the tablets, and you can kind of argue about that.
And like, well, it kind of works in with giving you an easier way to buy things and so on and so forth.
But this one seems very straightforward to me.
Amazon at this point is a place that sells you anything that can be sold to people, like physical goods.
And...
people think about Amazon physical stores, like how funny that is.
Ah, they, you know, they drove all the booksellers, the brick and mortar booksellers out of business.
And now, now that they're all dead, they'll buy up all the retail space that they vacated and start their own stores.
Ha ha.
Um, it's kind of morbid, but a store where you sell things, uh,
this is an Amazon way to do that.
Selling things is Amazon's core competency, right?
If anyone's going to figure out how to sell things better, uh, it would be Amazon and selling things like without having to pay cashiers or anything like that.
Like basically a, you know, a store that is just like a big place that you go into and grab stuff.
and Amazon figures how to efficiently extract your money, that's Amazon's core company too, the king of the stupid one-click patent.
Like, Amazon wants to make it so you buy things when you sneeze.
Like, you accidentally buy things.
And it's so easy to buy things, it is harder not to buy things.
Like, you can't even look.
It's like, don't look at the Amazon webpage.
You'll accidentally buy something with your retinal buying thing.
It sees your gaze lingering on something.
Like, that's, you know, anyway.
And most people like it.
Like, it's the reason we all use Amazon.
Like, they...
despite all the things we may not like about their labor practices and all sorts of stuff like that the draw of their product making it convenient to buy things is a real thing and so
If anyone's going to bring this to us, I give Amazon a fair shot because this is definitely in their wheelhouse.
And I want to go to a store that's like this.
I want them to work on this store over years and years and iterate and iterate and iterate.
I don't want them to give up on it like the Fire Phone or whatever.
I want this one to work so that five, ten years from now, there's one near me that we can just go into and you don't have to wait on checkout lines anymore.
I hope they don't put all the other supermarkets out of business and I doubt they will.
But I'm really rooting for this because I think this is... And it's not like implausible future, like...
you know hoverboards or whatever not the fake ones the real ones um i think that we're close to this kind of technology unlike what i've said about like true self-driving cars which i think are farther off than everybody else thinks they are but that but real people really just don't have the same definition as me about self-driving cars anyway i think this is close enough to work the first one's going to be disaster whatever but like work out the kinks give it a few years stick to it and i'm excited for this
i would i would love it if it would ever come to the suburbs where i live but i think that's unlikely it'll definitely come to where you live because rich people the core market for this they totally want to buy you know if someone's like prepared foods like can you imagine how much this stuff's gonna cost you know go into whole foods and try to buy like a you know a tiny cup of cut up fruit it's like each one of them is made out of dollar bills that's true the most expensive food items per pound in the universe
Two thoughts here.
First of all, I love John making fun of Marco for being where the rich people live.
I'm in where the rich people are, too.
That's where these stores are going to be.
I'm pretty sure your neighborhood is more upscale than mine, for the record.
It's not.
You live next to Batman.
I live next to the people who work on Batman's staff.
My word.
Wow, that was a pissing match I did not expect to be a part of.
But anyway, the other thing I will say, which is now not nearly as funny, but one time I was at work like two years ago and I'd forgotten to bring a lunch or maybe I didn't bring a lunch because I thought I was going out to eat.
And so I was without a lunch.
I was lunchless.
And I thought to myself, you know what?
I'm going to treat myself.
I'm going to go to Whole Foods.
I'm going to get me one of those boxes where I go to the hot bar and I put a whole bunch of stuff in there.
So I went and I got the – I think like a little thing of ribs.
Don't go for the hard-boiled eggs.
They weigh too much.
Salad bar tricks.
It's funny you say that because I made the critical mistake of getting mac and cheese, which is like 18 pounds of mac and cheese for like one bite.
And I went and I went to check out and I put my –
box of goodies on the scale and it was like literally $18 something like that I was about to guess $80 as a joke price I was going to guess $27 but I have a gauge on exactly how much food you're piling into there but yeah prepared foods that's the thing about prepared foods like A they're really expensive and you can kind of understand how they're really expensive you start doing the math on they have to pay for the raw ingredients they have to pay for the people who prepare them and they must have a huge amount of waste because all that stuff doesn't get sold every day and they got to just dump it or give it away or whatever right
So I understand why it's expensive.
But B, it doesn't taste very good.
No.
If I was paying a lot of money, if I was going to a restaurant and paying $18 for lunch, I want something that tastes good enough to be worth $18.
But that stuff that's sitting in there under heat lamps or whatever...
i don't like it is it is it doesn't taste good to me so i i will never buy that i will i will sooner buy just the plain ingredients to something and make myself a sandwich out of the loaf of bread and the three ingredients that i got then buy one of the prepared things maybe i'm just allergic to prepared foods and i i want i want it to either be freshly made or something that doesn't need to be fresh like a you know
I don't like a thing of yogurt or something where it's not like they're making it right there, but it's, you know, it's a, it's a sealed prepared food versus they made something for you at some point in the, hopefully not too distant past.
And then just sits there waiting for you to buy it.
It seems like they don't know that salt exists at most of these prepared food bars.
You should never be going.
You should just be going to a deli.
You have actual delis.
You can just go there, and they'll make you a sandwich out of the ingredients.
And those ingredients that are sitting there in the thing, like my beloved egg salad and your beloved chicken salad, it's the same deal.
Someone has to prepare that, and hopefully in the not-too-distant past, and there's a lot of waste, and they get rid of it.
But it's a difference between the chicken salad sitting in a tub, or even whatever, and...
chicken salad sandwiches sitting there in a case waiting for you to show up.
When you show up, they make you the chicken salad sandwich with the chicken salad sitting at the top, but they make it right there and hand it to you, and that is so much better than if the sandwich was sitting there.
Oh, totally.
I mean, you're talking now, just like our previous discussion about Subway, and it's like, now you're in the category of airport triangle box sandwiches, and those are just always soggy and never good.
Whole Foods is hopefully a little bit better than that, but there's nothing you can do about that.
You can't have...
How long has that rotisserie chicken been sitting under the heat lamps?
And that's a pretty shelf-stable thing where it's not going to get too gross, but it's gross enough not to be worth the $18 that Casey's paying for the thing.
I will say, though, so I don't usually participate in the prepared food bar at grocery stores because, as you pointed out, I typically have more options around.
I can just go to one of those.
uh however i my my crazy indulgence is the pre-chopped vegetables uh that come like in the produce section the lazy person section yeah it's like like if i'm if i have to if i have to cook a meal like i don't buy everything pre-chopped but things that are really tedious i will often go that route just grab it just fine this is fine it's good enough i'll save 10 minutes it's worth it's worth the extra do you not look at the price so you can sleep at night because that it's brutal
some of them i look and i'm like all right even i can't do that i cannot justify you can't stomach nine dollars for the chopped walnuts just put them back well nobody would use walnuts because walnuts are terrible and they would never cost nine dollars because walnuts are worthless because they're terrible i heard about your walnut hate no they're just the worst nuts ever they they cost nothing because nobody likes them and yeah anyway they also look like brains
But if somebody pre-chopped an onion that I'm going to throw in anyway, or a whole bunch of peppers, that's going to save me time.
And I also hate chopping onions because they make my eyes crazy.
So it's like, all right, I'll pay an extra $2 premium for that.
Wait, wait, do you get pre-chopped onions?
Not every time, but if I'm making something that night... I have to draw the line of that.
Because once you break the cell walls and that stuff starts reacting, it changes the nature of the product.
You have to do it at time of preparation.
You can't have those sitting there.
If this is going on a frying pan, who cares?
No, but you know how long they've been sitting there?
As soon as you chop an onion, the reactions start.
You've got everything mixing with the air, producing that sulfuric acid with the water in your eyes that's causing you to tear up.
That reaction starts as soon as you cut that onion.
So I don't want that to start three hours before I prepare my meal so I can pick up the things.
The limit of our prepared food laziness is, and I've never done this, but it has been done and I have accepted that it has been done.
buying pre-shedded parmesan cheese i would rather shred it myself because it's because the pre-shedded adds like five dollars a pound or something obscene to the price of the already very expensive parmesan cheese i buy that um you buy the yeah of course it's some kind of like fancy like imported
age no it's just parmigiano reggiano there's only one thing it's it is a it is a specific product this is what you should buy if you want well there's different grades though like there's different age lengths and there's like whether you get like dop official one or some crazy one no only the official one everything else that is not stamped on the outside as the real thing is
I don't think Helplows even sells it and nobody should sell it and nobody should buy it.
But just the question is whether do you bring home a big chunk of this hard cheese and grate it yourself or do you buy it pre-grated?
And the pre-grated adds tremendously to the cost.
And I don't like how they grate it.
They grate it too fine.
I like it to be a little bit thicker little pieces than them.
um that's that's as far as i'll go nope i buy the pre-graded i think it's i think it's something like 12 bucks a pound no it's way more than that way more ungraded is uh 15 to 20 a pound ungraded do you want me to go look go ahead go look all right one sec this is really happening what is the show turned into i don't know the price of many things but i know the price of parmesan cheese it is a staple in our house the same as uh as milk and butter and eggs
Parmesan was the cheese you had me shred for the pizzas, and then you utterly shamed me for my inability to shred.
Can you not identify cheese?
No, that was mozzarella.
That was mozzarella, wasn't it?
Yes.
My bad.
What I tell the kids is pizza cheese.
I was so scarred by the experience of you shaming me for my inability to shred appropriately.
All right, I'm back.
I'm going to predict $19 a pound.
That is exactly right.
It is the Ambrosie brand Parmigiano Reggiano D.O.P.
graded, imported from Italy, $19 a pound.
Really fine graded, right?
Really fine?
Yeah.
Like their tiny little wispy things?
That's too fine for me.
I'm sorry.
I want to like a little bit thicker than that.
But yeah, but sometimes if you're in a hurry and you realize you don't have it and it takes time to do it...
someone will come and arrive and with a pre-treaded thing and i always keep it separate from my real cheese which is in you know the dedicated tupperware container in the fridge i don't want to mix them together but sometimes you know you got to do what you got to do with that but that's it pre-cut vegetables no pre-cut onions definitely no my wife gets to pre-cut fruit all the time which i can't stand i just try desperately not to look at the price and i'm just like i want to peel it off without looking at it so i just don't see like 12.99 on this like tub of like sad looking watermelon and cantaloupe pieces like
12 99 really really yeah i mean like certain things it works better than i was like watermelon i i don't buy pre-cut because it is so expensive and and whole watermelons cost basically nothing right it's kind of shocking how little whole watermelons cost per pound you're like how did these even get transported here yeah as soon as you cut it into cubes it becomes like gold it's dipped in printer ink
The only substance on earth more expensive than pre-cut fruit at Whole Foods.
Certain things are actually worth getting pre-cut, and certain things work better.
One of the things, if you need shredded Brussels sprouts for a salad or something like that, they sell those in a little box now, and it's pretty good.
You can't tell.
They taste just as good as if you would have chopped fresh Brussels sprouts, and it takes way less time, and here you have shredded Brussels sprouts, and it isn't that expensive.
Certain things, it's worth it.
But obviously not everything, not watermelon.
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not to ruin the accidental food podcast but uh late breaking news microsoft is bringing windows desktop apps to mobile arm processors so this is sort of kind of windows rt but not windows 10 on arm this is from the verge is arriving thanks to a partnership with qualcomm initially microsoft will support the qualcomm snapdragon 835 processors and laptops are expected to be the first devices we'll see in the market next year
Microsoft is enabling Windows 10 to support ARM chips directly by building an emulator into the operating system.
Devices will be able to run x86 Win32 applications, but it will not support x64.
This is part of that story we had on a past show, and the rumor was that it was going to be ARM64 would emulate x86-64 stuff, and that was going to be in the future.
I don't know if this is a separate story where they're doing 32 now and 64 later, but...
The power savings that they get from having laptops with ARM processors in them is not going to be helped by emulating x86.
It's so true.
Interesting, though.
It's certainly interesting because, I mean, we've been talking on and off about the Macs on ARM.
And, in fact, I should plug Upgrade.
had a wonderful episode this week where Jason Snell made some really fascinating points on ARM Macs and kind of what the position of the Mac is.
I won't try to summarize his position, but I really agreed with a lot of it, and you should take a listen to that show.
Agreed.
That was excellent.
Yeah.
But this is somewhat interesting news because Windows RT, from everything I understood, was kind of crappy because nothing was cross-compiled for it.
So, yeah, in and of itself, it was fine.
And maybe the battery life was good.
And I think maybe those were the Surfaces, Surfi, that didn't have fans, if memory serves.
Surfi.
But anyways, but nobody could run any apps on it because nobody cross compiled for arms.
So this could solve that problem.
But I also agree with you, John, that it's not necessarily going to help things in terms of battery life if you're emulating in x86.
Yeah.
i think they want people to compile their apps for windows for arm like that's what they want to happen that's what they tried to get that move windows rt and it didn't and so it's like all right try number two what if we have emulation then more people will buy them because they won't feel like you know they're trying to solve the chicken egg situation people won't buy it if there's no apps and people won't make apps if no one buys them so like all right we'll put the emulation in and hopefully that will trick people into buying them i don't want to say a trick but like hopefully that will motivate people to buy them oh yeah no you can totally run your existing copy of office
It'll be fine, really.
And then once we get everyone to buy them, then app developers will say, your app can run better on their cool ARM-powered Ultrabook thing because yours will be compiled natively for ARM and that will give you a selling advantage.
I don't know.
Do people still buy software on Windows other than Adobe software and AutoCAD?
Anyway, should make fun of that because they probably have a more robust professional application ecosystem than Apple does at this point.
Probably.
But yeah, so this is a pretty smart attempt to solve this problem.
Now, why Microsoft is so seemingly desperate to get Windows off of x86, I don't know.
Maybe this is the slow divorce of Wintel, right?
Where Microsoft...
wants to be everywhere on all platforms and intel cpus are expensive compared to arm ones of supposedly equivalent ballpark power and microsoft's not making its own arm cpus at this point but maybe partnering with qualcomm is a different power balance than partnering with intel and i don't know but this is definitely seems like a very slow change happening over in a mostly
unwatched corner of the market because you know everyone's looking at mobile like you know phones and stuff and not many people are looking at laptops and pcs these days except to be depressed about them but uh i wish them luck because anything that sort of changes the existing fairly boring status quo is good or even if it just motivates intel to do a better job that helps everybody
I think this is worth thinking about.
It's like we've talked forever about what about our Macs?
And the idea here is that, well, Intel is not doing what Apple wants it to do fast enough or achieving enough efficiency or whatever, and that maybe ARM chips that Apple could make itself would be better and everything.
And it's interesting to see basically now Microsoft –
seemingly possibly making the same hedged bet here of like you know intel's not really working that well for us either which actually just means you know intel's just not working that well period well they're working but they charge a lot of money like the the intel is still able to charge pretty big margins compared to what the you know the the arm uh vendors charge for their things and
um like it's one of the reasons people always say that like the mac laptops cost so much because if you people do these silly like bill of material things where they're adding up you know the retail prices which is not how this stuff works but anyway they try to add the price and they realize price wise the intel cpu is a surprisingly large portion or the you know the the chips from intel are a surprisingly large portion of the price of a laptop um
and that was more it was more pronounced when there was more parts inside a laptop at this point there's not much in there anymore except for intel cpus some supporting chips a big battery a screen and half of a keyboard that's all that's all that's left in these things but there used to be all sorts of other stuff in there was you know the hard drive and even the ssd thrown into the mix but i think it's still the case that intel's margins are would be the envy of any arm vendor and especially in the
apple is doing the design essentially they've got the arm license they do the design they pay someone to fab it for them that relationship is much more straightforward and it's what apple is used to like working with a supplier to build a thing i'll tell you what to build you don't you don't you know you don't have to design anything you're going to build this and here it is and give them you know the their chip design and they just fab it for them and i know there's more to it than that it's not a matter of just like taking a design and printing it like there is more to it but
that is that is a relationship where you don't have to pay for the margin that intel is charging you for like we designed this whole chip and we designed all these things and we're not just a dumb fab we're selling you this value-added chip someone put in the chat room that intel has 60 gross margins which are which is pretty darn good for someone who sells physical things instead of selling software so um
i don't think intel is not doing its job and i think they are trying to serve apple's needs but they're still charging more and there's and you know from apple's perspective they're apple can't control their schedules to the degree that they control their own schedules for their a series chips so that that's you know there is a definite reason to go in that direction uh long term anyway
Yeah, I just thought that was interesting.
We'll see how it goes.
So here's a question.
One of the concerns I have with Apple, sorry to turn this back into Apple complaints, just for a minute, I promise.
One of the concerns I have with Apple is that, obviously, I think everybody, even people who think they're doing fine, can generally agree that they're also stretched very thin and that a lot of their products are having to take a backseat to something, right?
Whether it's the car or the idea that the iPhone is progressing really fast, even though it seems not to be, or whatever else.
It's like everything seems to be taking the backseat to something.
So my question is, when the next big shifts happen in important markets to Apple, so things like computers, phones, tablets...
when when big shifts happen like for instance if everyone moves to arm processors for for their pc computers like you know not just tablets and phones but like for full-size computers and laptops uh in apple's current state where it's kind of like their immune system is strained like they're like they i mean it's not a great analogy but like
They can barely hold together what they have now, keeping things on their current path because they're doing so much.
And obviously, there's a lot of resources being devoted to some other future projects, but stuff like the Mac, it seems like it's just barely holding on.
And there's the awfully concerning rumor today that the next iPhone...
might just add a red color and still have the exact same general case and design as the 6.
Now, weren't they saying that it was also going to be out at the same time as the new all-glass thing?
Or was that trying to say, like, next year, just a new color, and a year after that, the all-glass one?
I believe it was the latter.
But anyway, which would be concerning.
But anyway, we have one thing that said that, so who knows.
But anyway, so given the way it appears as though Apple is having a hard time keeping up with other product lines already as it is,
when the next big shift happens do you think they will be able to to to go with it to write it to adapt it or are they going to fall behind because they won't be prepared because they won't be devoting enough resources to these areas like microsoft right now doesn't have a successful phone business to worry about uh or to manage or or to to to take forward so like
Microsoft is pouring everything they can into what they do have, which is PCs.
They do well there.
They're pouring everything they have.
That's where we're getting interesting new developments, like the Surface Studio.
Who knows which of these things will take off, if any, but they are there.
They are ready to adopt whatever comes out now.
But Apple isn't.
Apple is...
seemingly like keeping the mac kind of coasting for the most part and not doing a whole lot of new stuff with it and not really keeping it up to date not really keeping competitive kind of just like sitting back and and letting off the gas and and this isn't just the mac i would say this this definitely applies to the mac it it sort of applies to the ipad although there's not a lot of direct competitors anymore really unless you count laptops which i'm not sure i would anymore
And on the iPhone, it seems like they might be letting off the gas a little bit, honestly.
Obviously, we'll see what happens next year.
But it certainly looks so far that things are progressing more slowly than before.
Will Apple be ready for the next big shift?
And will they actually do them?
Or will they lead them anymore the way they have been for the last decade or so?
Or are they too busy building cars and stuff?
I don't know about any of that.
I think basing your thoughts on the premise of they're stepping off of the gas, I understand how you come to that conclusion.
I wouldn't be so fast to come to that conclusion.
Um, I would, in fact, I would almost go so far as to say that a lot of silence from Apple may even be indicating that they're standing on the gas harder than they ever have before.
Now, truth be told, it's hard for me to make that argument with a straight face, given what's been going on with, say, the Mac Pro.
But, uh.
one point does not align make.
And obviously none of us know one way or the other.
It very well could be that you're right, Marco.
But if I were to take a read of the tea leaves, I would say that it is quite possible that big things are afoot and we're just not hearing about it because guess what?
Apple never tells us about these things until it's all over.
so about the specific shift that you were talking about like what everyone goes to arm uh that for that specific change i think apple would be fine because if that happened apple would see it as an efficiency you know it would it would be the last little bit apple needs to get to kick it over the line to say okay i guess we will transition because we always talk about all the things that are keeping them from transitioning like is the mac even worth this big expensive transition and this disruption to users and the dev tools and like
like is it even worth it to do that for the little old mac probably like that's probably one of the biggest things stopping our macs at this point is that the mac itself is not worth that kind of investment but if everyone else switches over anyway suddenly is the mac even worth it like well everyone else is going that way anyway and so we might as well just get on that train and we're already designing new a-series cpus every year we're already really good at it and we're going to make that cpu anyway and the cpu for the next iphone is going to be plenty powerful for all but the most powerful laptops and if you just add more cores to it you know like
It's an efficiency that they're ready to grab and a control that they want anyway.
Any little bit that kicks them over into doing that, I think they would see as, okay, well, now that decision has been taken out of our hands and they would leap at it because they do get efficiencies out of it.
Now we don't have to deal with two things.
We just have one architecture.
We control our own destinies.
All the advantages of the ARM stuff come in.
So for that specific change, I think they would be fine.
For all the other changes...
You said, you know, they're stretched thin.
Well, as we discussed in the past few shows, they're stretched less thin than they used to be.
They're not making Wi-Fi routers anymore.
They're not making screens anymore.
They're not making the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini anymore, apparently.
So they are condensing.
And all these, you know, all the dark matter that Casey was talking about, like we have no idea what the hell they're doing except for the self-driving car stuff.
you know their augmented reality thing is that related to the car thing where they're displaying stuff on the dashboard or whatever like the way to be ready for an apple the typical apple way to be ready for these changes to be the one that brings them on so presumably app has all sorts of experiments going on with ar and vr and uh machine learning and self-driving car stuff and you know like
Those all those efforts are exactly what they should be doing to be ready for the next change and to perhaps be the one that initiates the change.
But that doesn't help us out here because we don't know about that stuff except for like, you know, the car project.
It's too big to hide at this point.
And that is, you know, the rumors about it just being about self-driving technology.
I think the most concerning about thing about all this projects is that I've said this a million times and I'll say it again.
they increasingly rely on integration with cloud computing and apple still is crappy at it and they're getting better really slowly probably not even keeping pace with everybody else so there are very few precious few things that you can do that don't involve some kind of cloud thing and apple's just not shown to be good for that so the next big thing is cloud machine learning in the cloud it's hard to envision apple even keeping up with the joneses let alone being a pioneer in that field because you know they're
um maybe they'll again maybe they'll surprise us with a brand new version of siri that's way better but i think they're mostly getting their butt kicked in this area um self-driving cars and that type of tech does also does not strike me as something that's in apple's wheelhouse i don't really think i would not be comforted by self-driving car software written by apple being installed into my thing especially considering you know i mean all they've done is car play and it hasn't you know it's fine whatever but
the gap between that and also drive the car for me and do a cool ar display on a hud on my windshield such a huge gap but whatever you know like whatever the next big thing is apple should be out there trying to find it and the act of trying to find it appears invisible for a company like apple we have no idea what it is um the stretch thin feeling comes from you know
you know do that r&d do that experimental thing investigate things kill a project if it doesn't like it's working out do all that stuff but you also have to have one eye on the rest of your business and we mostly complain about the max we like the mac i think they are definitely not stepping off the gas on the iphone in all areas except for perhaps industrial design and that could be just because they keep grabbing for that whatever the next all glass phone is but
If you look at how the internals of the iPhone have improved after generation, we would kill for that kind of improvement in the Mac.
Every A-series chip is so much better than the past one.
The cameras get better.
The battery life gets better.
Plus or minus Apple needs to thin stuff down.
Like...
They are, you know, the iPhone is so clearly their main product and they improve it in ways that we can only dream of in the Mac world.
So I think that's doing fine.
I think a lot of it is superficial.
Like, oh, you're going to make it the same shape again.
That's boring.
That's a problem.
That's a marketing problem.
That's a PR problem.
That's a problem for being able to sell these things to people.
But if you view it as like, how much money did they invest in making the iPhone better?
just because they don't have a new case because they keep trying to go for that cool wireless charging all glass whatever magic phone like they can't get it year after year.
I gave them a pass on that because what's inside the phones is just getting better so much faster.
So I'm not concerned about the iPhone business, not even concerned about the iPad business, except for the fact that they don't seem to be willing to field any competitors to something like the Surface Book, whether that's an iOS device or not.
But it just gets back to us whining about our Macs, but we're all...
That's true.
Now, did you guys, I didn't have a chance to read this, but I saw some headlines and the chat rooms brought this up as well.
Quartz had a piece entitled Inside the Secret Meeting where Apple revealed the state of its AI research.
And I guess there was a invite only lunch at an industry AI conference where Apple showed a bunch of slides, a couple of which or a handful of which Quartz got their hands on.
And so one of them says machine learning research summary.
And there's several different segments that Apple's apparently looking at.
Health and vital signs, volumetric detection of LIDAR, which to me means self-driving car, prediction with structured outputs, and there's a picture of cars driving, image processing and colorization, intelligent assistant and language modeling and activity recognition.
And then later on, I didn't get a chance to read into this much, but there are a couple of graphs where, at a glance, it seems to hint that Apple's GPUs are being used for machine learning and are considerably quicker than equivalent Amazon AWS offerings.
Now, again, I've only glanced at this.
I might be butchering the details, but it certainly seems that...
at least in an academic sense, maybe Apple's machine learning chops aren't so bad after all.
Now, to be fair, that has to get applied and executed upon.
And certainly, here we are giggling, but also crying about keyboard text replacement.
And so you do need to apply all this machine learning at some juncture.
But the academic R&D stuff seems like they might be keeping up, maybe even making improvements.
The historic complaint about all their this type of academic research stuff at Apple is that academics want to publish because it's vital for their continued career as an academic and Apple doesn't want you to publish.
And so the fact that they're presenting this is maybe a change in.
you know a slight lessening of apple's incredible drive for secrecy that you can't get the best academics to come work for you if you won't let them do stuff like this because it's vital for their career to be able to do this you can't just take them and hide them away like they do with the industrial designers who johnny ive only lets out once a year and the rest of the time they spend in that room they sleep under black sheets right and then in the morning they just come out anyway uh
it's difficult to get people to work for you if you do that google has a much more open environment google is probably the leader in this because they have so many freaking phds and they put the stuff to use in the magic that is every google thing that you just type something into and it figures out what the hell you mean i mean google search being the best example i i still it is still not worn off to me that i can type in queries and google finds
results and like it is i've long since gotten past the point where i where i can even understand how google figured out what i was talking about and gave me the thing i wanted but it's like it's the magic of big data it's the magic of you know they're doing it for real um and apple all we have from them to demonstrate their chops is siri which
has its ups and downs but charitable yeah yeah like it's not no one no one except someone who works for apple is going to put it as the leader in this they're all kind of silly all those voices are kind of silly but siri had such a lead and everyone caught up really quickly and google just seems to be on top of this stuff so i hope i hope it's true that apple is doing it because i think it is table stakes in the future to have competency in this area so apple has to just be doing this just to keep up
I don't know if this means that there's something going to be the leader in it or whatever, but it seems like they're learning what it takes to attract those people to come work for Apple and put them on projects.
And hopefully, like Casey says, something comes out of it.
You have to make a product eventually.
Doing this research is important, and if you don't do this research, you'll never be able to make a product because we're in that phase now with machine learning where it's not commoditized at this point.
You have to have your stuff in-house to do it.
I'm not entirely sure that...
the best application of all this technology is self-driving car tech which seems to be the path they're going which is a hard problem and someone's gonna be first and maybe it will be apple and maybe they'll be known as the company that puts self-driving software into all of our cars uh but for now we just have rumors and a lot of money spent and uh
You know, no announced anything from Apple, and all this stuff could be canned at any time or used for an entirely different purpose, like, you know, Google Goggles or some other weird AR thing.
Who knows?
So from this article, machine learning scientists have long criticized Apple for its reluctance to contribute back to the research community.
During the presentation, which served to bring a small select group of researchers up to speed with Apple's efforts, some individual salic...
I'm sorry, I didn't practice that before the show because I didn't know I was going to be talking about this.
A prominent AI researcher himself at Carnegie Mellon said that Apple would begin to publish its research and make a greater effort to work with the research community according to attendees.
Just like you said, John.
Additionally, Oliver Cameron, who is self-describing as the lead of the self-driving car team at Udacity, had a series of five tweets, which we'll put in the show notes, which begins with him saying, hey, this article, this Quartz article deserves more attention.
uh he says apple's clearly 1000 working on autonomous vehicles powered by machine learning uh see volume and volumetric detection of lidar in that slide uh they may be building custom gpus for machine learning perhaps only internally they also have a custom image data set twice the size of image net which i'm not entirely clear what that is but i'm assuming it's a public set of images for training neural networks to recognize things
There you go.
Thanks.
They benchmarked MXNet, which is Amazon's framework of choice, on their GPUs and custom image data set and not TensorFlow.
So TLDR, this is again still Oliver, TLDR, the new Apple is catching up fast in machine learning.
And this is from someone who theoretically doesn't have any vested interest in saying such things.
it's phrased as catching up fast not vaulting to the lead or leaving the competition behind but it's it's it is it is the minimum bar that you have to meet because it's so clear that this type of technology is coming to the point where it can do useful things um and if you don't have this capability in-house if you just wait around until it becomes like until until amazon is essentially vending the seventh version of this as part of their web services offering or whatever like it until it becomes commoditized it's a big advantage to be able to do it in-house and
in some respects, like this is part of the thing that made Google into Google is they, they had a good idea for a search algorithm and they eventually were faced with the problem of scale of how to build their data centers and, you know, how to do all this stuff.
And they did a lot of stuff in house that for a long time,
gave google abilities that other companies didn't have to scale out to worldwide data centers to give good performance to everybody to do these really complicated things right and they had to build a lot of that in-house and they had to figure all this out and eventually it started to become commoditized uh
to the point where Google itself is vending some of its cloud services and of course Amazon has its web services and so many things are built on that and so now it is no longer really a competitive advantage or at least not as big as it used to be to be really good at setting up your data centers and having a strategy for redundancy and being close to everybody in the world and dealing with large volumes of data because
It's been figured out enough that if you want to get off the ground, you can bootstrap yourself onto one of these things and not not have to have this in house.
But machine learning is still the point where if you want to do this, you want to participate in this at all.
You have to do it in house because nobody has got it figured out and commoditized to the point where it's no longer an advantage.
So Apple has to do this.
Microsoft has to do it.
Google has to do it.
And Amazon, you know, they all have to do it.
um and facebook for that matter uh and it's kind of a you might think it's like isn't this like duplication of effort but that's just called competition so they all have to be doing it and if if apple wasn't doing it we should be really concerned so there's degrees like if they weren't doing it at all we should be super concerned well we're concerned about now is okay they're doing it but are they doing it well enough to keep up with the big boys and it seems like probably yeah but again the proof will be in the products they may be keeping up with the basic race research but
When does that translate into making Siri better?
Or is this all just for self-driving car tech?
Because that's a big bet.
Even the bet that Apple will be involved in all of that, because it seems like Apple's not making its own car.
And if people who do make cars don't want Apple's technology, then all Apple's work is pointless.
Because if...
The car companies don't want it.
Tesla doesn't want it.
Honda doesn't want it.
Ford don't want it.
Then who is the customer for this?
Apple will have this great self-driving car technology and they can use it to power the shiny white go-karts that you use to go around the spaceship campus.
Great.
That's it.
You've got to get this into a car.
And if you're not going to make a car, you better convince somebody that they should buy your thing instead of... Because it's not like the car companies are sitting on their hands waiting for a technology company to offer them self-driving tech.
They're not waiting on Apple.
They're all doing their own things.
So...
That concerns me a little bit.
So which Mac do you think all this AI and GPU development, which Mac are the people using who are developing those?
I'm sure they're doing it on PCs.
You don't think they're doing it on a MacBook Pro?
Well, if they are building their own custom GPUs, then, you know, it's like rack mounted servers.
It's not like they're using X serves or whatever.
But as they're sitting in front of their computers, you know, at a certain point when you're doing research, all you're using is a fancy terminal window to connect to the bigger computers where all the real action is happening.
True.
And I imagine that's the case.
Because you're not connecting to a computer.
It's like the giant Mesos clusters or whatever.
So it doesn't really matter.
They could be using a MacBook 1.
The computing power of the thing you're sitting in front of doesn't matter as much.
Well, they are typing, though.
Yeah, they are typing.
But I don't know.
Maybe they have people to do that.
Isn't that what graduate students are for, the typing?
Wow.
All right.
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Pingdom, Automatic, and Betterment.
We will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
I've got nothing for the after show.
Well, I still haven't watched New Top Gear episode two because you told me not to.
Neither have I. Yeah, you totally bummed me out for watching it.
Did you watch three?
No, not yet.
So are you suggesting that I skip two and watch the rest of the season and then go back and watch two?
You'll miss out on all the continuity.
I don't even know what's happening in episode three.
There is actually a little bit of continuity, as it turns out.
But that being said, if you're pressed for time and or don't want to get briefly depressed, skip episode two.
And then episode three, actually, I think, has been mostly a return to what's right in the world.
It's like the only podcast where I'm not talking about Westworld, because I guess neither one of you are watching it.
nope that's a show yeah hard to believe and it was a game or a movie yeah no you you should uh don't you have yeah you have the hbo thing you should you and tiff might want to try it like the season's over it's all 10 episodes just sitting there waiting for you to see it there's not gonna be a new season for like a year so sometime during the winter if you're bored and want to try a new show i don't know i go this is not really up your guys alley but i mean whatever i thought it was science fiction might as well try it
It is.
It's sci-fi.
Well, yeah, that's not going to work.
The main problem is that anything on HBO Go right now, we basically can't watch because the Apple TV app for HBO Go has decided to just not work anymore.
That's great.
So that's why you were air-playing from your iPad before when you mentioned it, right?
That's why.
The reason you're doing that is because the Apple TV thing doesn't work.
Yeah.
Like, oh, man, the Apple TV is such a mess.
I don't want to complain anymore about Apple stuff today.
So I'm just...
if you don't have anything nice to say you don't say it at all so i'm not going to be talking about the apple tv in this after show i love mine mine works great now i don't i don't do terribly complex things with it but plex works great the photos like screensaver works great the screensaver works great that's it does i'm serious no i'm serious because it doesn't on my mac that's a nice screensaver i've got that hey we can we can get that out of the show notes it's been in the show notes for what two years now
Oh, I deleted it.
Did I delete it?
Yeah.
I had in the top of our document for maybe two years, maybe more, a link to be able to download the Mac OS version of the Apple TV screensaver.
yeah yeah which is really cool looking i mean it's not you realize when you see it on a 5k screen that all the all the movies and images are not enough resolution like they look great on your tv but they don't look great on your 5k iMac uh but it's a cool screensaver and if you want to have that screensaver on your mac and why wouldn't you uh it is available someone like ported it like ripped it out of the apple tv and ported it to github because it's really just a matter of getting the correct urls to pull the movies down and then having them you know just
you know, play on the screen.
Um, so if we can resurrect that link and put it in the, I have it, I have it.
Yeah.
It's called aerial, I think.
Yep.
Yep.
That's right.
And that's actually not what I was talking about on the Apple TV.
I was talking about the thing where you point it at a photo, uh, what am I trying to say?
The, uh, a shared album, your photo library from photos.
So you can see your kids and stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
And that works great.
Now, that being said, this aerial screensaver, that's what I use on my work computer.
Uh, and it's fantastic.
I can't recommend it enough.
real-time follow-up the chat room has informed me that i have hbo now not hbo go i know i know i've given up correcting you just auto corrected in your head at that point yeah yeah yeah so whichever hbo thing i have doesn't work anymore on the apple tv and so i'm not really sure why i'm paying for it installing and uninstalling and rebooting i haven't tried reinstalling yet wow
Oh, God.
I just want things to work.
Why is this so much to ask?
It's great that we have all this new stuff.
I just wish it worked better.
Well, you just use the new single sign-on feature, and it'll work fine.
Yeah, it supports so many providers.
Honestly, though, I keep using the Apple TV because I have tried the other things before.
I've tried the Amazon whatever.
I've tried the little Roku whatever.
I haven't tried the Google thing yet because I like real remote controls and don't use Android, so it kind of doesn't offer a whole lot for me.
But the other things are worse, and that's why I keep using the Apple TV because the Apple TV really is better than what's out there for many things that I want.
But I just wish it was better than it is.
Like, it's... Like, why, when I pick up the remote, when we haven't used it in a few hours, why does it not respond immediately?
Why does the remote take, like, 10 to 15 seconds before, like, swiping back and forth on the trackpad actually works?
Like, what... Maybe it's asleep to save power when I'm not using it, but, like, how long does it take to wake up
Why, when it boots up, does it seem like it's been asleep the entire time and has literally updated nothing about anything ever?
It's plugged into the wall.
It can update whenever it wants, but it doesn't.
Why, when it wakes up, does it always tell me there's no internet connection?
Even though there always is.
It's hardwired.
It always has an internet connection.
I don't understand why this product...
is the way it is.
And it's frustrating, just like many of Apple products, it's frustrating that it has these flaws because it is still the best in the market for me.
I still like it better than the alternatives, so I'm going to keep using it.
I just wish it was better.
And it seems like really basic stuff.
The design of the remote aside, I've already worn that to death, but why doesn't it just work better?
Why do I occasionally have to reboot it?
It makes no sense to have these kind of shortcomings in this kind of product in this year.
I remember when Marco wasn't going to complain about Apple TV.
Do you remember that, Casey?
I do remember that.
I do remember that fondly.
That was a wonderful moment.
Seems so long ago.
I'm known for changing my mind.
Oh, man.
That was a great day.
uh yeah i don't know it's i mean i have the same feelings about it i say one good thing and you're mentioning the apple tv remote one good thing about the apple tv remote that battery life is amazing like this is not a big remote that's true battery can't be that big in there i'm trying to think i think i've plugged it in to charge it
once ever for this for this apple tv like one time ever in my entire life so i have the big apple tv like the one that's too tall so whenever that came out i bought it exactly when it came out and i plugged it in once so that's good everything else you said you know it's totally true although my apps all work on the apple tv for the most part i still have the same problem of like waking it up and why does it take so long and why it's not all the time and like
you know all those things happen but uh and also i'm constantly cleaning the gross stuff from my kids fingers off of that trackpad because my kids are gross but yeah uh when it plays video successfully i consider it a victory and i just you know walk away but do you is it just me do you guys have these problems with yours mine like i have like you know sometimes it will get like uh
Can't play your iTunes video because of some like whatever weird iTunes server error.
And I get the sluggishness and that it's not reacting to my things and stuff like that.
But for the most part, it plays video eventually and plays it through successfully without dying in the middle.
When it's being non-responsive or when it's being seemingly very heavily loaded with background tasks, what is it doing?
Because it doesn't support background operation of apps.
It has a few things where you can refresh certain feeds for things that appear in the carousel up top and everything, but it's really very few of those things.
And it's fairly decent iOS hardware inside there running a nice stripped-down version of iOS software that doesn't have a whole lot to do.
And it's plugged into the wall and has a constant internet connection so it can do things whenever it wants to in the background.
I just don't understand what it's doing.
I assume it's File.io because anything I can blame on HFS Plus, I will.
It's got to be File.io because...
it's not doesn't have fast storage like the storage you know it's it's it's flash storage but it's not fast flash storage and if you know and because hfs plus is still single threaded and only one process can be accessing you know writing to the file system at a time that's a potential bottleneck and if you've seen anything having to do with ios devices like when if you hit update all on a bunch of apps that if you're still an old person you manually update your apps like i do
you know that will cripple your phone you know like you can let it update stuff but as it's doing anything having to do with like pulling down things and messing with your file system everything is going to be super slow during that time um so that's my guess for what it's doing like what it's doing in the background is doing something having to do with lots of file io uh and that just bogs everything down
I guess.
APFS will fix all this for you.
It just... I just wish it was better.
Again, like, why?
Why is this not better?
Just get better.
Because you're not working on it, Marco.
No, I occasionally have a little bit of unresponsiveness from the remote when I first grab it, but I've taken to... And to me, I don't find this as unreasonable, but I presume that, Marco, you're going to find this completely egregious.
I just mash down on the... And click the trackpad...
or the home button, either one.
I tend to click the trackpad because it's a bigger target.
But yeah, the home button or the trackpad, I'd smash down on that like five or six times.
And then as the Apple TV is starting up, and usually as my TV is also starting up, which although I have a fine TV, like it's a reasonable TV, but it takes an eternity to turn on.
So anyway, as I'm waiting for all these things to turn on, usually the remote has woken up.
There's been a couple of occasions where it hasn't, or maybe the remote has gone into sleep mode before the
But if I mash on a button for a second, it starts working.
Like, I don't really have any problems.
And the only apps I typically use on my Apple TV are Plex, which is probably 90% of the time.
It's an AirPlay receiver for Spotify, not unreasonable amount of time, and Netflix.
And...
For those uses, which admittedly, I'm not trying to say these are terribly complex uses, but for those uses, works pretty darn reliably for me.
I did get the big one because it was a gift from Erin, and she wasn't sure if I would want the bigger one or the smaller one.
I doubt that makes a difference, but for what it's worth, I do have the higher capacity one.
But yeah, I mean, it definitely has problems from time to time, but generally, I found it works great.
I do the same thing.
When I know I'm going to be watching on the Apple TV, the first thing I do is I hit the home button on the Apple TV.
Not because I expect it to do anything, like the little one that looks like the TV button, but because it will turn the Apple TV on.
So I do that first, then I turn my TV on, then I turn my receiver on.
don't tell me about you know those remotes i'm turning it to casey here i know all about them but anyway everything is essentially ready at the same time but i have developed that habit because if i do it the other way and get everything all turned on and then switch to the apple tv input and then grab the apple tv remote the apple tv is asleep and my apple tv is plugged into the wall like everyone else is it's connected to gigabit ethernet i would love for it to be doing more my playstation 4 both of them
will download entire multi-gigabyte games when they're quote-unquote off.
Like the fan is not spinning, right?
It's still plugged in.
It's still in its sleep mode.
But while it's in its sleep mode, it will download game updates for me.
It will charge my controller.
It is doing so much more work for me than that stupid puck that apparently does nothing until I turn it on.
I should also note that when I grab my Apple TV remote and the TV is off, HDMI CEC, I almost said C and C, as in like the... The music factory.
Yeah, exactly, or the music factory.
The point being, I mash down on the button and then the TV turns itself on.
Now, I will say that the TV does not always switch to the right input, but with 99% reliability, the TV does indeed turn itself on when the Apple TV comes on, which is nice.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm just a special snowflake.
No, I mean, this is what's frustrating.
This stuff works like 90% of the time.
It's really frustrating that it's not 100%.
And I know it's really hard.
I know it's really complicated.
But certain things that don't work just seem like they really should.
Like the responsiveness of the software and the remote.
A lot of it is the trackpad itself.
I always feel like it would be more responsive, but part of it is the awkwardness of swiping that little thing.
It just doesn't feel...
Like that's why I often use it as a D pad.
I don't do the swiping.
I will hit, I will click the edges, which is in itself is a strange motion, but I find it, I find it more reliable that I know I've done the motion than, especially like up and down flicking with like your thumb.
And it's, it, I don't know.
I'm, I, I'm not a trackpad person at all.
And I feel like, I feel like a disconnection between them, uh, between those motions and the thing, even just like whoever came up with the idea of,
that selection state is going to be represented by by making some of the rectangles bigger i don't think it's a particularly successful idea because very often i have to double check you know by looking at the screen to make sure the rectangle i think is selected is selected like a big hunk and blue outline would certainly be uglier and less elegant but it would let me know
better than and you know it's obvious in a screenshot like you can't tell what's selected look at this rectangle it's poking out in front of everything else it's overlapping them clearly it's the one that's selected but it's it's not obvious enough i think to you know like the the elegance benefit of it and the aesthetic benefit is outweighed by the the usability thing i wish i wish there was more of like a glow or a prominence about it um and then when i'm trying to use the swiping to move around to get to the netflix app or whatever um
overshooting and having to go back one is definitely a thing um and that's frustrating and i don't like hitting the d-pad going left left left down down down that's frustrating too because i see it and i could just i could get it with a mouse instantly and if it was a touchscreen i could touch it immediately having to go left left left down down is a pain but at least i can count the number of less than the number of downs and i know i'll land on it having to go swipe is the bottom of the barrel where i have to go swipe swipe swipe down down but i don't know how many times i have to swipe because momentum may bring me over and then i have to correct and it's just not a pleasant experience i'm
and when i talk into the remote like i've almost given up on that because siri really frustrates me and they're like when are you ready for me to talk siri and they keep changing it like oh it's always listening just start talking but often i start talking then it goes boom in the middle of me talking and i know it's not it didn't catch half of what i said and when i tried talking to the remote i hold down the the microphone button and oh i never always wonder when it's safe for me to talk do i have to wait for the little rainbow colored thing to show up can i start talking now and very often it takes two or three tries and it's often still better
than the alternative of navigating to an app but yeah i'm ready for the next version of that i'll keep buying these apple tvs the same reason you do oh the other reason i have that marco perhaps doesn't is i'm essentially out of inputs at this point right so if i want to try something else i have to evict something and i've locked myself into the apple ecosystem with all the itunes like movies and stuff that i bought so i have to have an apple tv so i'm going to keep buying them and i'm ready to buy a new one anytime apple wants to make it better