Making Sausage-Making Glamorous
i was just feeling out to see whether you're making a legit mistake or trolling and use trolling i am a trolling are you guys using your airpods anymore i still am i am not uh tiff uses them more than i do uh now because did you get one pair or two pair
I got one pair, which is two AirPods.
You got three AirPods.
How many ear holes can you fill with the AirPods that are in the house?
Two.
Okay, that's what I thought.
Okay, so you have a single pair, like you said, and Tiff is using them more than you.
Yeah, she uses them actually often with the Apple TV.
Like when I'm podcasting, she can watch TV.
Yeah, it isn't as nice as using it with other stuff, but it does work.
And there's a couple of niceties.
Like when you use the volume up and down on the Apple TV remote with AirPods connected, it does the volume to them instead of like your speakers.
So it doesn't do like the auto pairing thing the way it does on iOS devices.
But once you have it paired, it works nicely.
so how does that i'm not trying to be funny how does that work then do you have to like go into settings in the apple tv and and say connect to the airpods every single time um i don't i forget if we do it every single time i i think it was just the first time i don't know usually she just does it uh i think once they're paired as long as you don't pair them with something else though right that's the issue and and so we've actually i've actually seen this a number of times like i was doing i was trying to do testing between like
The phone, the TV, iPad, watch, a Mac, testing all these different things.
And I found that AirPods are a little bit frustrating in trying to share between different devices and having it not quite always do what you want.
um like even though the old way of doing bluetooth where you just have to like unpair from one device and pair to something else that's also terrible uh but the way airpods do it is not quite flawless um but how do they do it that's my question because i have used my airpods with my phone and my ipad right those are two two devices yeah uh is something supposed to happen other than me going to settings and tapping bluetooth and tapping airpods because that's what i've been doing
My favorite thing is occasionally I'll put in a single air pod and I'll be in like the bedroom and I'm listening to a podcast or something like that.
And then I'll put in like five or 10 minutes later, I'll put in another, the, the other air pod and it will go to connect.
And for whatever reason, it will semi consistently connect to the iMac, which is in the next room over in the office.
And so I have one air pod connected to my phone and one connected to my iMac and
And so I'll double tap like the one connected to the iMac, which I still haven't changed to do play pause.
So I'll hear Siri out of one year and then like whatever podcast I'm listening to out of the other year.
It's actually quite funny.
And I can see how that would be really frustrating to someone who isn't like a developer perhaps or who doesn't think about how difficult it is to implement all this.
But to me, I just find it to be hysterical.
Yeah, I still get some weird audio sync problems sometimes.
But overall, they're still winning just because I guess my hatred of cords and snags has defeated everything else.
I find it very frustrating that I can't change volume.
And I have all these crazy schemes on how to adjust the volume by reaching into my pocket and feeling for which side of the phone is face up.
So I know whether I have to reach for the side with the power button or the volume thing.
Especially with gloves on and stuff like that.
Slow down.
Are you talking pant pocket or jacket pocket?
Jacket.
Oh, okay.
Then I, then I, I, winter jacket and you, you know, reach around there to change the thing.
Or like when I do it in the kitchen, like I said, I don't even put the phone in the kitchen.
The phone is in the dining room.
Uh, so if I want to change the volume, I have to like take a few steps into the other room and on the little sideboard thing, hit the volume up or down.
But,
i'm living with it and apparently you know proof's in the pudding i'm people hate it when i say that because that's not correct but deal with it you know what i mean um uh that i i'm i'm now using them despite the fact that uh double tapping my ear is uncomfortable and despite the fact that double tapping works weirdly inconsistently some people have suggested the triple tap to try to you know have a mulligan in there if one of them doesn't register and
sometimes i blame overcast and or slash ios for taking overcast out of memory so that it has to launch again before it can start playing and then i question whether it uh it registered my taps and it just hasn't started playing yet sometimes it's so far out of memory that it starts playing music despite the last thing the fact that the last thing i was listening to was a podcast very confusing but anyway uh all that said i'm still using them instead of my wired ones the only place i've used my wired ones recently was
watching my iPad in a case where my AirPods were downstairs.
And it's like, well, I've got the wired headphones here and I'm not going anywhere when I'm just watching something on my iPad on my bed or something.
I mean, like the wireless I'm totally sold on.
And as I mentioned earlier, like I love the idea of the AirPods is just how incredibly small and pocketable they are.
They don't fit me comfortably and they don't really work for my life as a result.
And so that's why I'm not really using them and why typically using them more than I am.
But that being said, all those limitations about what you can and can't easily control from them, like volume and play pause being finicky and stuff like that.
when i switch back to my beloved old sennheiser px 210 bt when it has its giant you know this little like you know on-ear bluetooth set that i've had for a couple years now uh that i walk my dog every day with uh and it just has these big plastic buttons on the right ear cup and i can play pause volume up and down seek back seek forward next track previous track all with these five buttons on the right ear cup and
it is just so convenient and every time i try other headphones for a little while to review them or talk about them on the show or whatever else whenever i go back to my crappy little sennheiser bluetooth headphones i am so happy with the amount of control and convenience that i have for them even though they sound like crap and they're pretty ugly and they are you know still like over the head headphones even though they're compact ones um so they don't fit in any pocket really
they'll fit in jacket pockets but not not in like a pants pocket and it is just so nice to have those and i it i've tried now i still haven't done a review i keep meaning to maybe do video reviews and i keep putting that off because it turns out video is a lot of work but uh i've tried now many high-end bluetooth headphones and
including the AirPods, but also including all the $400 crazy ones from B&O and B&W and Bose and all these other headphone companies.
And the convenience of my relatively cheap Bluetooth headphones that just have big plastic buttons on the side cannot be beat.
They are so convenient for everyday use.
That's why I use them for podcasts.
And I would never recommend them for music because they sound like trash.
They just have the worst sound for music ever.
But for podcasts, it's totally fine.
And, oh, man, it's just so nice having those physical controls right on the ear.
I can operate it with gloves on.
I don't have to use any voice assistants.
They work every single time.
Like it's just reliable physical controls.
And they're not sexy and they're not cool, but they work.
And it's really hard to beat that for me.
Yeah, if only there was a device you could, I don't know, strap to your body somehow that would give you all of those physical controls and also let you get a text message and also let you reply to a text message and also let you get other notifications.
Wouldn't that be awesome?
Anyway, let's do some follow-up.
No, actually, remember I said that it works every time.
The ear cut buttons work every time, not 80% of the time.
And I can use them with gloves on.
And yeah.
Speaking of that, I keep forgetting to try that.
That was suggested so long ago and still hasn't occurred to me to try.
I should give that a try.
Although I really try using the watch as an example of like having a physical volume control is easier than reaching into my pocket and finding my phone's volume button and stuff like that.
Truth be told, finding the volume button is probably easier, but this is a solvable problem.
It's just that you don't want it to be solved the way it has been solved.
Sounds like me and cars.
Let's do some follow-up.
There's actually a solution.
I already have it.
It was really cheap a few years ago, and it works perfectly every time.
And the newfangled solution is both something like four times the price and worse.
So, no, this actually is a case where the old solution was totally fine.
And the good thing is, this is one of those areas where, as you, Casey, have been an advocate of for so long, cheap Bluetooth headphones are plentiful these days.
Tons of people make cheap Bluetooth headphones.
And they're largely pretty decent.
They're not good, but they're decent.
And for their price, they're usually fairly reasonable.
And these headphones were, at the time, I bought them kind of expensive at something like $100 or $110.
They're not worth more than that.
If you see them for sale, don't pay more than that.
But they're not even worth that really these days.
However, this is like a five-year-old pair of headphones.
This is one of the areas where the higher-end wireless headphones,
are nicer in certain ways.
They are possibly more portable like AirPods.
They are better sounding like some of the high-end ones from B&O and stuff.
They are better noise cancellation and maybe more comfortable because they're larger on-ear things.
However, for practicality of just like...
Wireless, wearing them while walking or running or around the house doing stuff like John cooking.
The cheap ones with plastic buttons on them are actually better for almost all purposes for that kind of use than the high-end expensive ones.
I mostly agree with you.
If you ever need to flip between devices, then the AirPods or anything really with a W1 chip start to make a lot more sense.
But if you are consistent with one machine, for example...
My $25 Bluetooth headphones I bought literally five years ago, I believe, that are still kicking.
I just don't use them because of my AirPods.
I only ever used those with my work computer, and it was great.
The sound was acceptable, and they had buttons on the side if I really needed them, although I had the keyboard right in front of me.
Yeah, they work just fine.
And I do agree with you.
I freaking love my AirPods.
But nonetheless, if you don't feel like spending $160 on a set of little earbuds, you can easily spend between $20 and $100 and get something that's nearly as good as long as you're not switching between devices frequently.
As long as you don't mind a giant thing.
Like, I would never trade my AirPods.
I would go back to wired earbuds before I would go to a big thing that goes over my head with a big band and puts two big squishy circles on my ears.
Like, I want the buds.
That's what I want.
And so wired or wireless, those are my choices.
A distant third would be okay.
If I can't have any kind of earbud, then I guess I'll go an over-ear thing.
Fair enough.
All right.
Let's start the show and do some follow-up.
John, why don't you tell me about phone contracts and other ways that you can make people buy iPhones?
this is much more interesting thanks yeah last week uh talking about the different tractors that make people uh feel like they need to get a new device on a on a faster schedule than people apparently and or supposedly get new ipads and i i was bringing up the idea that phones get dropped and break more often than ipads just by their nature uh so that could be one thing that will make people turn them over
A couple of people wrote in to bring up the idea of contracts, which are less prevalent now than they used to be in the US.
It used to be that the phone was like, oh, it's, you know, $200 for this phone on a two-year contract, blah, blah, blah.
And they were just typical money hiding schemes where, you know, human nature makes you not see the upfront cost and you don't do the multiplication in your head.
So it seems like a cheaper deal.
These days, it seems to me, as someone who does not buy a new phone that often, that the shift is more towards
you've bought a new phone exactly once yeah well no you know i've i i suppose i bought my track phones too um that uh the move is away from contracts and more towards buying them up front unlocked i don't know if that's a just an iphone thing or just a my personal experience thing but either way uh historically that has been a big motivator to get people to buy a new phone every few years because it seems like a good deal because they hide all the costs from you in a way that makes your your
silly fallible brain feel like you're not spending the money that you are spending can we pause here for a moment am i supposed to be paying less on my cell phone bill now that i buy my phones outright because i'm not no you shouldn't be but that's what it is well it depends on how bad of a deal you got but the strange thing about the deals now is that they psychologically seem more expensive
No, mine just is more expensive.
So I have AT&T, and I started buying my phones outright and not taking their subsidies anymore, and the plans are all still the same prices.
I'm just spending more money now on the phone.
No, you should be spending a little bit less.
I'm logging into AT&T right now, but what happens is the plans cost the same.
However...
They give you a very peculiarly – peculiar named discount once you're no longer subsidizing a phone.
And it's going to take me like three hours to figure out where in my bill this is listed.
Yeah, they did – I remember hearing the same thing from my wife who wrangles the phone contracts that –
Sometimes you have to call them to remind them to give you the better deal once you're off contract and then that deal gets – I don't know.
Discount for access, which is on the main line $25 off your total cost.
What a great name.
Because discount for access – actually, it's on both lines.
It's $25 off.
Because when I think discount for access, I think this is offsetting the subsidy cost, don't you?
Yeah.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, but it is an interesting change that they're getting brave enough to reveal the price in a way that will register with consumers brains in the way that, you know, it's much scarier than the old way of like, oh, every new iPhone is $200.
Now every new iPhone is $800.
And you're like, whoa, $800.
It's like you just didn't do the math before.
um so and the other factor that people wouldn't talk about for getting new phones that's going to make you get a new phone before you would get a new ipad or even a new you know laptop is battery life which you think would make a difference because ipads and laptops have batteries too but phones batteries are really really small and they're much closer to the ragged edge of acceptable in terms of battery life so when the tiny little battery that probably is subjected to much harsher environmental conditions than your ipad or your laptop in terms of
putting it in pockets or maybe leaving it in cars and stuff like that like i feel like in the same way of dropping the phone goes everywhere with you so there's more variability even just being in your outside jacket pocket during the winter which i'm guilty of i mean when i'm shoveling snow i have my phone in my jacket pocket that can't be good for the battery to deal with those temperatures anyway when the phone battery starts to go south
uh it's a bad scene you can deal with a many years old ipad battery because then it drops from 10 hours to five but because of the way we use ipads that's okay but if your phone drops from making it until 6 p.m into making it to only 4 p.m that's a no-go and you're going to be like oh i need a new phone because my battery sucks so more hardware-based reasons that people want new phones sooner than they want new ipads
Also, there's the Apple whatever upgrade program.
I forget what it's called now, but I feel like several like normal people that I know have started doing that.
What is that called?
Is it just upgrade iPhone upgrade program?
But anyway, I feel like that's yes, iPhone upgrade program and that and there are equivalents with each carrier that are roughly the same money.
So I feel like that's what's going on is it's you're sort of kind of leasing your phone now.
Honestly, this is really a better system.
Most of the rest of the world outside of the US were doing systems that were more like this long before we were.
You literally just bought the phone outright and then paid cheaper plans.
It does make more sense this way.
Things are a little bit more honest, even though, as usual, America has taken a straight, normal, honest system and has twisted it in such a way that it's really confusing and complicated and tries to hide all the actual costs still.
It's called capitalism.
That's called something.
But yeah, I mean, I think this is long term a better system, even if it is somewhat confusing in the short term as we have made this transition over the last few years.
All right.
John, tell me, if I take a photograph of you flashing me the peace sign, is that a problem?
This is related to the idea of biometrics and how accessible the features of your body may be to other people.
Because once they have them, if you use them as a means of security on your devices, then you've got a problem.
Because as we established that show, your face is indeed your face and your fingers are your fingers.
And so I was talking about how it is easier to get pictures of someone's face than it is to get pictures of their fingerprints.
uh two articles related to this one from japan where cultural custom is to flash the peace sign two fingers up in the air in photos and if you do that obviously you're facing two of your fingerprints right at the camera get good enough lighting get enough megapixels you can lift your prints off of that so there's an article about uh
that happening and being careful about it because you are literally showing them your fingerprints here they are and you know technology is amazing we can lift fingerprints from that and then the second article was in a more challenging scenario can we pull fingerprints from a photo where someone's not flashing a peace sign but we just happen to catch their finger at the right angle at the right time whether it be video or still photos and the answer is yes you can do that as well if you
leads to the idea that especially for public figures or people who expect to be photographed or people who have access to things that are highly desirable as opposed to just like your personal email account but if you are someone who's a head of state or something and you're using your fingerprints for something important then people are highly motivated to get them uh so yeah be careful out there don't show people your fingers or your face i suppose yeah just never be photographed in any capacity ever yep
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Continuing, John, can you tell me about Chromebooks and Chrome OS and how that relates to ARM Macs?
We talked about the ARM Mac rumor idea from Slashdot as a more lockdown Mac type system.
And a lot of people brought up Chromebooks, which we have talked about in the past, as an example of a very similar type of thing that has existed for a while.
It's taking it more to the extreme, and not only is the Chromebook obviously locked down in the way that this fantasized slash rumor ARM Mac was, but also it shifts everything to network, which this rumor did not mention anything about the Mac being.
But it all boils down to the piece of hardware being...
more robust in the face of user indifference like i don't know how to phrase it like you don't have to know how to you can you can know less about using a personal computer and be successful with it in the same way that you don't need to know as much about personal community to be successful with an ipad or an iphone as opposed to a macbook so chromebooks there are far fewer places where you can get into trouble software installing software is more straightforward the number of
The overall system is simpler.
Obviously, Chromebook and Chrome OS are a far cry from the Mac operating system with a heavy focus on doing stuff with web technologies through a browser, with many things being put into the cloud.
And I think that simplification, in fact, is a big advantage Chromebooks have over any of Apple's devices.
The aggressively cloud centric focus that this thing you're holding your hand is nothing.
Everything you do, if you have access to the network is saved to the network aggressively so that pretty much at any point when you're working on a Chromebook, you can do a five count and then throw the thing out the window into a lake.
And then go get another Chromebook from the back room and sign in and resume where you left off.
You cannot do that with any Apple device, right?
That's the dream of the Chromebook.
I've always thought it was a brilliant idea, perhaps not very well executed.
But every time we talk about iPads or Macs, especially as they relate to education...
people come out of the woodwork to tell us how chromebooks are kicking apple's butt in education because what a dream machine you know educational institutions do not want to deal with wrangling computers or software anything like that you have a bunch of computers that you're going to put a bunch of students in front of that's just you know they're going to do everything they can to mess those things up and even if they don't
The computers like eventually will mess themselves up, especially if they're, you know, if it's Windows and we're in a decade ago, I assume it's better now.
Chromebooks are very resilient.
So your iPads for that matter, but Chromebooks even more so in that they they are resistant to slowly degrading and or being compromised by devious students.
And there's lots of good tools.
for managing fleets of these things and for having multiple students sign into them and apple's made some strides here with their weird multi-user sign in and out sync everything from icloud things they've been doing with the ipad lately but um chromebooks almost always went on price because you can get cheap crappy ones and you know cash strap schools love that and they're doing very well in management um and i always wonder
if apple cares that much about that market or do they just like the rest of the many markets they just want the high end of that market they just want to sell ipads to the rich schools and let everyone else have chromebooks or something but uh i worry that the value proposition represented by chromebooks in the ideal if not in in actuality is uh
not falling on deaf ears at apple but is not valued by the people inside apple as much as it should be because talk about future of computing many of the aspects promised by chromebooks and many of them delivered by chromebooks definitely feel more like the future of computing in terms of having to worry less about managing the machine and having to worry less about the machine itself because in a network connected world
Yes, you can work offline, but it would be great if the source of truth was someplace fast and reliable that is not sitting in front of you.
Well, this is part of what last last week when we were talking about that, that rumored slash dot comment locked down next generation arm Mac.
Even though, again, disclaimer already, that was very unlikely to be true.
However, one thing I forgot to mention during my rant about how good that might be is that that might address the Chromebook market pretty well, too.
Like, that wouldn't have to be a high-end hardware device.
That could run on iPad-class hardware and be passable.
And so they could, if Apple wanted to address this market, which, you know, as you pointed out, they might not want to.
Although I think it's... I'm with you.
I think they should address it if they reasonably can.
Which is not to say definitely yes or no, but I think if they reasonably can address it, I think they should.
Because having...
Mass numbers of students growing up using all Google services on all Google computers is probably not good for Apple long term.
But that being said, if Apple could take that kind of next gen Mac on ARM concept and make a very low end hardware device that was basically like, you know,
mid-generation iPad-level hardware.
Suppose that OS is two years away.
They could take today's iPad Air 2 hardware, sell it in two years in this little MacBook One-sized case for $400, maybe?
That could actually get them a lot of the way there.
And that OS's additional lockdown-ness and easy management and easy security and everything would all help in that regard, too.
So...
I think one of the things that made me consider that comment as possibly interesting and possibly plausible is that Apple has to be feeling their... They have to be feeling the hurt a little bit from the massive success of Chromebooks in schools.
They have to be feeling that on some level.
Whether they choose to address it yet is another question, but I think if they're going to address it,
that hypothetical lockdown our Mac would be a really nice way to address it.
Because obviously, they can try pushing iPads.
They have as much as they want.
And they have gotten decent numbers of iPads sold into schools.
But there's a reason why those Chromebooks keep selling so well.
And a big reason is price, no question.
And again, it's a question of whether Apple is willing to or should compete on price to that level.
But also a big reason for that is that a lot of...
schools and students do prefer working on some kind of laptop shaped device with a laptop keyboard and like yes you can put keyboards on iPads but we all know from trying that like that's not really what they're great at that's not really what they're designed for and if you're trying to manage a fleet of student devices the last thing you want is detachable expensive accessories you know you want it to be one integrated unit that you can manage as one integrated unit so
That actually might be part of their strategy to combat Chromebooks long term.
And if it isn't, I think it might be worth considering whether it should.
So this is yet another time we have to bring up that one of the big advantages Google has in terms of management is the fact they do do everything server side.
And that is Google's strength and historically has not been Apple's strength to have very robust cloud services where the source of truth is in the cloud, not on the device.
In the same way, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be web-based tools like Google Docs and stuff, which, by the way, is an extensive use in schools.
I'm using it at work now, too, and we've mentioned this before.
We use it for our show notes.
It's to the point where...
like i'm waiting for it to unseat microsoft word in the entire corporate world i know that's going to take so freaking long but among certain wings of large corporations it is possible to displace word and everybody is happier and seeing my kids do everything in google docs is like marco brought up if you're if you grow up doing that you just think oh word processing equals google docs and how does google docs work you need servers the servers need to be reliable they need to be fast they need to be always up they need to not lose data uh google is really good at that apple
So that's one weakness Apple has in doing that.
And the other reason I think Apple should be thinking about this market where Chromebooks are giving them a run for their money with iPads and everything is...
like it is a demanding environment uh public schools with a bunch of kids messing with your stuff is demanding physically speaking it's demanding from a management perspective because you have a lot of devices you have people managing them who perhaps are not the most technically savvy because that's not their job like teachers have to deal with them and they don't they want to be teachers they don't want to be like it managers right um so the easier it is to manage the better uh
But making a device that is successful in that environment, that is very hostile, much more hostile than corporate IT, much more hostile than an individual user's house who buys the thing and posts an unboxing video and treats it like a little perfect baby, right?
Schools are brutal.
But in the same way that OXO Good Grips, a company that I believe, I don't know if it was founded on this or was aimed at this originally, but the story I've always heard, and I like it so I'll keep repeating it as if it's true,
uh was that they were making tools for people uh with arthritis and other sort of motor difficulties with their hands if you have trouble operating a regular can opener try the oxo can opener because i know i know you can't like it hurts to turn a regular can opener but here we have one that has very grippy material and a big rounded uh turny thing with lots of leverage and so you know
and it turns out good old turns out everyone loves it uh if you make tools that are easy that are easy for people to use who have hand mobility or strength problems people who do not have hand or mobility or strength problems also love them because they're just better tools they give you better mechanical advantage they work more smoothly so if you make something for an environment that is demanding in some way oh our customers only have this amount of hand strength and the average adult has
five times that can you make a can opener that works for them if you successfully do that you haven't made oh this is only a niche device for people who have mobility problems with their hands no what you've made is an amazing can opener so if you make a laptop that can survive and continue functioning and be manageable by teachers and students in a public school environment you just happen to have also made an awesome laptop and
that you can put into the guy's house who's going to treat it like a perfect little baby and always do everything nice with it and read articles about it and do all that stuff, they'll love it too.
Because guess what?
It's just easier to manage.
It works more often.
There are fewer problems.
That is just a better product all around.
So I would never want to see Apple surrender this market, if only because it acts as a crucible for testing the durability of every part of your product, from the hardware to the software to the management to the whole nine yards.
Let's talk about Enno Relling who writes, I bought my first MacBook Pro for work last year.
Since my job is web development and thus the target is obviously Linux, I chose to go case sensitive to avoid trouble as much as possible.
I've been burned by Windows case ignorant file system in the past.
Given how long OS X and HFS plus ding have been around, I expected that most modern software would run on either setup.
But now I've learned that both Steam and Adobe Creative Suite will not run on my machine unless I reformat it.
Oops.
I would love to hear your opinion on the state of this and who you think is to blame for this mess.
John, as our file system expert.
humans are to blame as always uh so yeah the case sensitive versus instance of the h of s plus and h of s before it uh and mfs i believe um we're all case insensitive and then you could not have two files whose file names differed only in capitalization and there's a whole bunch of unicode normalization rules uh revolving around that but let's just talk about ascii
capital and lowercase letters if you had a file named my file all caps you could not have a file right next to it in the same directory called my file all lowercase because guess what h of s plus does not distinguish between those uh which is mostly a human factors choice on the original mac because regular people don't consider those different things like find me the file name jerry uh no not the one with the lowercase j the one with the capital j uh
being able to not having files that differ only in case because people will type the wrong file names in and think they didn't save and stuff like it so it is an important user interface thing but they implement it down at the file system level which means not only does the interface present in that way but you physically can't
save files that differ only in case now why would anybody want files different case sometimes case it contains information if you have acronyms or abbreviations or other type of things in your file names and they happen to spell out words like a and d or something and you happen to have another file name that has the lower case because they wanted the thing and you know case does have meaning in some cases but the most important reason that case insensitivity the historic multi-decade case insensitivity on the mac uh
is potentially a problem is if you ever change your mind if you ever say actually we've decided for the future is this people don't really deal with the file system that much anyway say on your phones or on your ios devices where people don't see the file system uh we don't need that extra complexity because it is an extra complexity every time you look up a file you have to see if there's any variation on that file's case and the same thing for writing a file you have to make sure no files exist with any variation of that file name's case uh
And practically speaking, lots of software made for other platforms, like, say, Unix software, open source software, has files that are part of either the source code or the actual operation of the binaries in practice that differ only in case.
And if you can't store them on the file system, you can't even, like, untar, you know, the source of an open source tool and build it because it's got .lowercase c files and .capital c files because someone thought .capital c was great for C++, you know, many decades ago.
And it will...
either puke or just randomly overwrite files and you will have things that don't build there there's plenty of open source software that has plain old source files foo.c and capital f o o dot c in the same directory that this happens it's a thing and if you can't deal with it at all you have to make like disk images or virtual machines and all sorts of stuff like that
But the real whammy is for decades and decades, the Mac has been like this.
And human beings have been writing software for the Mac.
And those human beings have put file paths in their software.
They've written code that reads things from the file system based on their path.
And a surprising amount of time...
those file paths that the software is trying to read from the file system do not match the case of the files on disk and nobody notices when you run it on a case insensitive file system because if you were looking for you know uh you know file.conf where the where the f is capital but on the on the file system is actually lowercase your program works fine because it says open me file.conf with a capital f and it says i here i found it and it opens lowercase file.conf and you're good to go because that's how all the apis work
you try to run that NK-sensitive file system, and the wheels fall off the wagon.
All of a sudden, the thing doesn't work, can't even start up.
You're using it, it does weird stuff, and it doesn't function correctly.
And Steam, which isn't even that long on the Mac platform, I guess it's been a few years now, but Adobe Creative Suite has deep roots, lots of complicated software,
inevitably has some part that either assumes case insensitivity as like a foundational assumption of some section of the code or accidentally assumes case insensitivity by looking up files based on paths that don't match the actual case of the files on disk or you know very more complicated variations of that where
one part of the thing will write a file and the other thing will read it but they won't agree on the case and it's just there are so many places where things can go wrong and this is where the conventional wisdom goes that if you format your mac as case sensitive be prepared for a whole bunch of your software not to work and for your only alternative to be to reformat as case insensitive to get stuff working you might say well why doesn't everybody just fix their software well it's a chicken egg thing they don't need to fix their software because nobody runs case sensitive hfs plus on their macs and
no one runs hfs case sensitive hfs plus in their max because none of their software works and so they're in an impasse there uh ios devices have been case sensitive from day one which is a wise choice so there's there are not a bunch of ios developers out there writing applications that expect to read files with paths that don't match the case because guess what they wouldn't work so that's great um but with apfs i'm not even sure what they're going to end up doing on the mac because the apfs is not officially released on the mac it's only on ios um
but it one way to solve the chicken egg thing and say, Hey, guess what?
APFS is case sensitive only.
I can't imagine them doing that because as we can see, Adobe creative seat and steam wouldn't work.
And those are not obscure applications.
So yeah.
Um, so sorry, uh, bad news.
You probably have to reformat your desk as case insensitive to get your software to work again.
Uh, inscrutable humans got you again.
do you know by the way i guess marco i'll say does marco have any mac apps it's like it's a good thing if you write a an application or any kind of software for the mac to find out do you have these kind of problems in your software because you'll never know it if you just run a regular mac all the time but you'll be surprised they're lurking i probably have them in my stupid blog system that i used to publish my blog once a year because i've only ever run it from a case insensitive file system there's probably in that tiny little piece of code someplace where i do something stupid about case with file paths
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so john happy birthday to you your birthday was actually what a month and a half ago but the gods have delivered you the ultimate birthday present sort of what's uh what's going on on kickstarter these days john
My favorite Twitter client has been from the moment I started using Twitter, Twitterific, which I think was the very first Twitter client.
Certainly it was the first thing I ever used Twitter with.
I did not sign up for Twitter based on their terrible website.
I only signed up for it once Twitterific was out and like, all right, this is a good thing to do.
if it wasn't truly the first app that used a twitter api it was at least the first app that anyone ever used that used the twitter api and it was by far the first app that mattered yeah and so it was an ios app and there was uh but before that there was a mac app i think the mac app came first anyway um
Yeah.
So Twitter clients have had a bumpy road.
A couple of years back, Twitter decided that it didn't really want third parties to make apps.
And it started this whole thing where you can only make apps if you have these special tokens.
And there's a limited number of those.
And some apps were grandfathered in.
Oh, and by the way, a bunch of new features were rolling out can't be used by third party clients because we really don't like you third party clients.
And it's made the market for Twitter apps very difficult for third party Twitter apps very difficult.
uh twitter for ios has continued to be updated nevertheless it's gone through many major revisions and if you were to go buy it on the app store today which i recommend it is a great twitter app i've never i've never wavered despite also buying many other twitter apps and having them installed
I love Twitter because of its unified timeline where it makes everything that has happened on Twitter related to the people you follow a single list sorted by time.
Mentions, tweets, direct messages, your own tweets that go out, just all ordered by time.
That's it.
You can view them separately if you want, but I like it to just be one big list.
That's the unified timeline.
Anyway, the Mac client, on the other hand, has not been updated in many, many years.
because it just hasn't been economically feasible to update it because the market for third-party mac twitter clients is just not sustainable anymore the market for third-party ios twitter clients is basically barely sustainable because so many people use the official app and there are still features that you could only do in the official app i hate the official app even though i have it installed um oh it's the worst i don't understand how anyone uses it
it's confusing to me people people use their twitter in all sorts of different ways um so i happen to know uh some of the people who work at icon factory who make twitterific and for many years i have been begging them half jokingly to fix twitter for the mac which by the way i continue to use despite the fact that it is slowly crumbling like you know when they added the thing where the tweets can be longer uh than you would have expected and uh
It doesn't count the mentions or everything towards the URLs or mentions towards the character count.
Some change related to the length of tweets.
And if you don't support the new longer tweet thing, what you get from the old version of the API is a tweet that is truncated and it goes towards the end of the tweet.
It just goes dot, dot, dot and then has a URL that you can click on to read the whole tweet on Twitter's website.
That's what long tweets look like in Twitter for the Mac.
And yet I still continue to use it.
I can't do so many things from the Mac version of the client that I can do from the iOS one.
But I still continue to use it because I like it.
And every other Mac client that I've tried, I dislike strongly in some way.
So I really wished for Twitter to come back to the Mac.
But I understood, like, look, you can't, you know...
if it's not a viable market it's not a viable market even though i offered to pay obscene amounts of money for twitter for the mac in fact i believe it was only last week or the week before that you said i would pay a hundred dollars for an updated version of twitterific for the mac i've said that many times and i may or may not have been saying that because i may or may not have known about this project ahead of time but anyway um
now there is a kickstarter like everything the thing that we've joked about for so many years like how much money would it take to fund the number of developers who need to make this application let's just do a kickstarter and if enough people want twitter for the mac they will fund this thing and they will make this application like it's it's an easy way to know that yes you will have the money to pay for the development of this project because you get the money up front ish in exchange for the application um
So I have backed this Kickstarter.
I'm not going to tell you how much money I pledged, but it was a lot.
The goal is $75,000, but I want you all to ignore that because the real goal is $100,000, the so-called stretch goal, because...
the stretch goal includes all the features that i want including fairly essential things like direct messaging so i really want this kickstarter to get to 100 000 and if it doesn't it will just be proving what icon factory has been saying all along is there's just not enough people who want this who are going to pay for it even though some of us are paying very much more than five dollars for the privilege of having this application um so you may or may not like using twitter on the mac period because many people just don't use it on the mac at all maybe use the website or whatever
But if you are using an existing Mac Twitter client and don't like it or it seems like it hasn't been updated in a while like Twitter for the Mac or it doesn't work the way you want it to, this is an opportunity to get a shiny new Twitter client.
from a company that really knows how to make twitter clients uh for for only as much money as you could possibly afford so please please back this it's up to 35 000 now and it has been open it's got 28 days to go and it's 35 000 out of a goal of not 75 ignore that goal 100k please everybody make this happen because i want this twitter client
But if we don't make it happen, does that mean we will finally break you of your ridiculous insistence on the unified timeline?
No, I will never.
I'm going to use Twitter for the Mac until it doesn't launch anymore.
After that, I'm going to I'm going to beg my friends at Icon Factor to give me a special build that does launch.
I'm just giving you a hard time.
I know some of the folks from the Icon Factory, we all do actually, and they're great people.
So definitely check out this Kickstarter and throw them a few dollars if you can, because it would make John happy and it would make the folks at Icon Factory happy and they're good people.
and you get good swag they have t-shirts they have little uh you know vinyl ollie dolls ollie is their little the blue twitter bird um you should read some of the history i think on the icon factory website i don't say link to it the history between icon factory and twitter many of the things that you associate with twitter were in fact invented by icon factory terminology iconography so much icon factory is like practically part of twitter only not in the financial sense because they do not have thousands of employees and bazillions of dollars of uh investment
Didn't Hockenberry come up with Tweet?
Was that him?
No, it was his co-worker.
Is that right?
I think so.
Something like that.
I forget the details.
I mean, a lot.
I believe they were the first ones to actually use a bird as part of the logo.
The word Tweet.
They might even have invented at replies.
I don't know.
They did a lot.
A lot of Twitter standard things and practices and mechanisms and everything were invented by Icon Factory or by their developers for their apps.
And Ollie, the blue Twitterific bird, is along with Panic's transmit truck, one of the most ripped off icons in the entire internet.
You see it everywhere.
It's like, that's just a generic representation of Twitter.
That's Twitter's logo.
Nope.
Nope.
Not Twitter's logo at all.
In fact, Twitter's logo is worse than Icon Factory's logo.
They should have just paid them to make their logos for them, but they didn't.
Cool.
Well, good luck.
I don't know if I should wish you good luck, John, if I should wish the Icon Factory good luck, I guess a little of both.
You should do them either.
You should pledge money.
That's what you should do.
Here's why you should all pledge money.
So, A, this is great software supported by great people doing great things.
Agreed.
B, Twitter needs more diversity in software, and...
And Twitterific is one of the very few clients that got grandfathered in with a very large amount of user tokens.
And so they actually can make, they're like one of the only companies that can make a widespread Twitter client.
And C, if this Kickstarter doesn't fund, John gets to keep all of his money.
and so we want john we want john to have spent a ridiculous amount of money on his twitter client so i could say it's like the second most expensive application of my computer after photoshop exactly exactly we want john's copy of twitterific to be the this ridiculous investment he has made and so please everyone go fund this so that his pledge will go through uh it really is just all the money that it would have spent on a new mac pro it's just being funneled into for software kickstarters
Oh, my goodness.
All right.
Moving on.
Let's see what we have here.
Planet of the Apes.
Oh, God.
Can we start with – before we start talking about this show, can we start with someone – maybe we have a lawyer in the room.
How can they get away with calling it Planet of the Apes when it sounds like Planet of the Apes?
Is there any – does it fall under the, like, parody where, like, it's referencing a thing but in a joking way?
So it's –
it's almost like trade dress like i don't know i don't know the uh the legal things about this it just seems too weird to me that they can get away with planet of the apps without paying somebody who has the right to planet of the apes so follow up for next week someone tell me what the deal is yeah i mean three things like a we aren't trademark lawyers b they might have paid someone to license it and c they might just not care and just accept if anybody threatens them then they will just settle it
because the luxury of being apple and exactly the top of a mountain of cash so high you can't even hear the people yelling at you exactly like it's probably we will buy the planet of the apes franchise from universal or whoever the hell owns it you know when we sneeze and the money falls out of our pockets yeah exactly like and it's probably i mean you know as as amateurs here it does kind of seem like it might be considered like
generic enough or clearly clear enough parody or satire that it might not be a clear-cut case of actual infringement uh the humor the humor angle is the strongest one but i'm like it's not that funny no it's not apple's not good at being funny i was like how bad does your pun have to be before it stops being humor
I think one thing that, you know, I don't want to bash Apple too much about this, but I do think that one very clear difference between Apple now versus Apple under Steve is that Steve was a cool person.
And not in all ways.
And he knew the ways in which he wasn't cool.
And he kind of played off of them.
But he was fundamentally a pretty cool person to the people who follow Apple and to Apple customers.
Yeah.
and i don't think anybody at apple now is cool uh at least in the senior leadership uh but i'm not sure they know that it actually kind of seems like they don't know that and are actually under the opposite impression cfed is cool come on what is not no no cfed is is he is like the dad joke but he knows that and he plays that so he actually does a he does a pretty good job of managing that but he's he's not much in the public eye
uh i i mean i get like i i don't know like tim i think is profoundly deeply uncool but is under the opposite impression he doesn't think he's cool yeah i agree he's he's just he's comfortable his own skin you're thinking of eddie q who well no yeah eddie's a whole different level
But but yeah, I mean, I I wish like basically Apple today is run by a bunch of middle aged white men.
And it seems like that is showing a lot recently.
and and it's unfortunate um and that isn't to say that they can't still make good stuff but i think some of their decisions are a little odd um you know in in context but anyway uh well before we get off the name though like just to defend uh or the opposite to condemn steve job's coolness remember that he wanted to call the imac mac man
we all have bad days remember that talked out of it by advertising executives mac man i believe my memory is correct in that someone can google and correct me if i'm screwing it up but thank goodness for imac yeah to be fair that was a long time ago i know but it's just like you know name and taste like and steve wasn't as cool back then in in the mid 90s steve wasn't as cool
1998 iMac.
Anyway.
All right.
So there was a trailer for Apple.
Well, really, I guess Apple Music's TV show.
So the Apple Music TV show.
I don't know.
It's a little weird.
It's like music television.
Yeah, I see what you did there.
So it's called Planet of the Apps.
I only saw the trailer once.
It's like two and a half minutes.
So at this point, if you listen to the show, feel free to pause and watch it.
So I have mixed feelings about this.
It is clearly, unequivocally not a show meant for the three of us.
And that's okay.
Like in and of itself, that's not a bad thing.
The idea is, if I understand this right, a bunch of app developers or potential app developers come in and do an escalator pitch.
So they are on an escalator.
And as the escalator is moving down, they have like 60 seconds to make a pitch to Will.i.am, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, and Gary Vaynerchuk, who I guess at that point get to choose if they want to tutor.
any of these teams, and then I guess there's a competition at the end.
And if you win, among other things, you get a special placement in the App Store, which most people would probably give an appendage to get.
Wait, can I first start out with the escalator pitch thing?
Yeah.
As a brief diversion here?
Okay, so I have a question.
Now, obviously, I have never pitched to a VC.
I've been around VCs.
I've been in board meeting with VCs.
I've interacted with a lot of VCs, but I've never actually pitched to one.
That was always done by
by david and other people who are around me um that being said i'm familiar with the concept of the elevator pitch where the idea is you're in an elevator with the vc and you only have like until you only have like the elevator ride to pitch them on your idea and then you got to convince them in this short amount of time and it's supposed to be like a minute or something like that however how did this come about because silicon valley has very few tall buildings
That's an interesting point.
There aren't that many elevators there to begin with, and the ones that are there are probably going over like three floors.
So the elevator ride... They are lazy people, and they have elevators in two-story buildings.
But still, that's not like a one-minute pitch.
It's like an eight-second pitch.
Like, where did this idea come about?
Maybe in New York, taller buildings.
But Silicon Valley money has always been West Coast VCs.
There are very, very few New York VCs that actually fund Silicon Valley or tech projects.
I think elevator pitch predates Silicon Valley.
But going back to Steve Jobs again, remember the story about being trapped in an elevator with Steve Jobs and he has enough time to fire you in there.
So for you to say the wrong thing and for him to decide that you're fired.
Well, he was remarkably efficient.
Wow.
I think elevator pitch predates Silicon Valley, but if not, it's metaphorical more than it is actual.
But you got to the heart of it.
The idea is that if you have to sum up your idea in a short amount of time, you should be able to say something that's compelling instead of just...
rambling on for 20 minutes and people not knowing what you're selling you need to have an elevator pitch and people in the the chat room are like don't you mean uh when we said escalator pitch did you misspeak did you mean elevator pitch no just like planet of the apps get it apps instead of apes
You think it's going to be an elevator pitch, but you see what we did there?
As someone who we all know would say, they took it and they turned it.
It's not an elevator pitch.
It's an escalator pitch, which makes even less sense because were you to accost somebody on an escalator, that would be super weird because you wouldn't even be facing them.
You'd be either above them or below them.
And the second thing is an escalator ride takes even less time than an elevator ride.
So it is ill-conceived in every possible way except for one.
And that one way is...
Is that an idea that fits him in the reality show?
Answer, yes.
Well, and it's easier to film an escalator moving towards the hosts or the VCs or whatever than it is an elevator moving up from the basement.
And I guess the four sponsors, hosts, whatever, are looking at a video feed until the participants arrive.
It's just weird.
Anyway.
The name Elevator Pitch reflects the idea that it should be possible to deliver the summary in the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately 30 seconds to two minutes, and is widely credited to Eileen Rosenzweig and Michael Caruso while he was an editor for Vanity Fair for its origin.
So presumably this well predates Silicon Valley.
So believe it or not, Silicon Valley, the world did not always revolve around you, truth be told.
So this show... So I mean, I don't...
intrinsically have anything against reality shows in fact i watched some truly and utterly atrociously terrible reality shows not often competitions but be that as it may i have watched seasons of american idol in the past so i i have seen my fair share of reality shows i've seen the voice many times i have one reality show friend
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
This show does not speak to me at all, and I find it to be fairly preposterous, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing because I don't think this show is really for me.
because it's too, I know too much about how the sausage is made.
And this is not a show about how the sausage is made, despite how they're pitching it.
It's a show about making sausage, making glamorous and my, have I killed this analogy, but be that as it may, uh, I don't like the sausage anymore.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah.
Right.
So, I mean, I can't watch it.
I presume because I do not pay for Apple music.
I never have.
I, I used it for the free trial and then never paid for it.
Um, uh,
I would probably watch it if I could for an episode or two just to see what I thought.
I don't expect I would like it, and I don't think that's a problem.
Marco, what do you think?
I mean, obviously I've had similar reactions to most programmers looking at this of just like, wow, this kind of looks awful from the trailer.
It is very clear that it's really meant as a ripoff of Shark Tank and whatever the original version of Shark Tank was called somewhere else, probably in Europe because we steal all their TV and rename it and everyone thinks we invented it.
But it might be an entertaining show.
Like, what was that?
Not Freaks and Geeks.
Beauty and the Geek.
It was like this horrible dating reality show.
Oh, I think I saw that, and it was delightful.
It was terrible, but it was delightful.
Yeah, and as a geek watching that, you saw all the ridiculous holes in the show, but it was still fun to watch as a fun garbage TV show.
And this could probably be that, too, for anybody who is remotely familiar with software development and building apps and building businesses.
This might be that kind of thing, too.
It might be a fun garbage watch.
It's fine.
I think a lot of people are reading a lot into this.
I wouldn't read much into this.
There's a lot of arguments against it that Apple maybe shouldn't be doing this or that it's going to cast app development in a bad light or it's going to distort people's view on apps.
And I think most of those things are both true on some level, but not a big deal in reality and all likelihood.
They're not going to be enough of an effect on anything to really matter because chances are this is going to go not very far.
It's going to be watched by not that many people and it's going to make not that big of a cultural impact of any sort.
So it's probably just going to be fun garbage TV for some people to watch.
I think it's weird that it's in the music app everywhere and it's only on Apple Music.
A lot of people are going to have trouble ever even knowing it exists as a result.
Those people who do know it exists are going to have trouble finding it.
So that's all going to hurt viewership probably.
But anyway, the actual show itself, it's a garbage reality TV show.
The hosts of it have, I think, limited knowledge about the reality of app building.
Gary Vaynerchuk, I like a lot.
I think he really...
He is the person on the show that I'm most interested to see.
I followed his work back in the day.
I met him a couple times.
He's super nice.
He is the real deal.
He knows what he's talking about.
Not necessarily in app development, as far as I know, but he's more of a business consultant.
What I wanted to get to, though, is that that's more what the show is about.
It's called Planet of the Apps, and it's focused on apps because Apple's funding it and making it and promoting it.
So Apple wants it to be all about them and the world that they think they created.
So, of course, they're focusing the marketing and the naming and everything else on apps.
And all the app developers are saying, this is crazy because this isn't how apps are made.
But the show really isn't about apps.
It's like if the show was called Planet of the Websites.
And, you know, it's like the website is like an interface to the business.
And you don't go around saying, hey, I'm making a new website.
Like, no.
You did in 1993, let me tell you.
Well, yeah.
But the point is, like, for the types of things that most people launch today that would be entertaining to watch at all,
No one is going to watch a show about you making a bespoke notes-taking app or something like that.
They're going to watch a show that's kind of like Shark Tank or America's Got Talent or stuff like that.
That's what people actually want to watch these garbage reality shows for.
And so they want to hear the big business idea.
Because this is a show... I made a tweet about it.
This is kind of like a show for idea people.
Those people who always accost app developers at gatherings and stuff.
I had this great idea for an app.
Will you not tell anybody?
You can't steal it.
You got to go 50-50 with me.
I'll be the idea guy.
You make the app, okay?
Here's my idea.
And they tell you some ridiculous idea that is usually impossible and or terrible.
This show is for those people to watch kind of like aspirationally because they think that could be them someday.
That's who this is actually for.
Or people like us who just want garbage TV to watch sometimes.
But the point is like...
This is not going to reflect what it's like to be an indie app developer, because not only do people not really want to watch that, but most app development isn't indie app developers.
Most app development is in-house employees or contractors for bigger businesses, where the app itself is not the business.
The app is just an interface to the business.
In the same way that 10 years ago, the website was the interface to most businesses that were made in our industry.
So we want this to be some other thing.
People like us who are complaining, we want it to be this beautiful story about app developers.
And it's just not going to be that.
It's going to be...
The exact same thing that would have been 10, 12 years ago, people pitching VCs about ideas that were based on web apps and web services and social networks.
It's going to just be that, but where the interface to it happens to be an app in the app store.
It's not going to be great, you know, academically.
It's not going to be a high-quality TV, but I don't think it's going to meaningfully impact the app business or people's perception of it for lots of reasons, not least because I don't think many people will watch it.
But also, just as I said, I don't think it really has much bearing on what most of us actually do, but I also think it doesn't really purport to because what most of us really do or what we think we want to do with indie app development is
It's such a very, very tiny sliver of the world of app development as a whole.
Thinking back to when we first talked about this and we had this, you know, there was so little information like Apple's making a show about app development, something, something, and then a few like celebrity names attached to it.
Yeah.
of a show about app development but of course like when the show comes out it's not about app development as marco pointed out it is it is basically like a subset of shark tank imagine shark tank except the only thing you can pitch are businesses that are represented by an application you're making your own bad pitch right well that's what it is okay i have this great idea for a show are you ready i'll be the idea guy you make the entire show okay it's like shark tank but for apps
Yeah, but only apps.
If your business isn't like... Instagram would be a business represented by an app, but all sorts of things would be like, is the app the standard bearer for your business?
Is that how people deal with your business?
Is it through an app?
Then you're fine.
But if you have any other business idea...
No, sorry, you got to go in Shark Tank, right?
So it's a narrow slice thing, and presumably Apple does this because, hey, they're the app company, and so there's some kind of synergy there.
But this brings up a tweet that our friend Cable Sasser from Panic posted today or yesterday, I forget.
He was arguing with Gruber about something, and his reply was...
You can't just say, well, that's reality TV.
He's using, well, that's reality TV as a verb.
So I'm going to try to read this in the way that it says.
You can't quote, well, that's reality TV, a thing from Apple.
Does that sentence make sense to people?
That's what he wrote.
I'm trying real hard here.
Not an actor.
It's from Apple.
The experts of good taste now get a free pass for junk.
Like, the idea is that you can't just say, oh, well, it's reality TV or whatever.
Because it's from Apple, we have some expectations of taste, which, you know, planet of the apps, perhaps not getting off on the right foot right from the title.
When I saw the tweet, I was thinking, like, we talked in past shows about Apple getting into the content market, and I still think that makes sense because if they are going to try to compete with the Netflix and Amazon and stuff, and Netflix and Amazon are doing original content,
Apple should be doing original content, too.
But the thing about content is if you're doing original content well, not I'm saying you can't, but probably you shouldn't.
imbue that content with any of the sensibilities from your company which sounds like well isn't that an apple's whole thing isn't everything they do imbued with the sensibility of apple but content is different there is nothing particularly about stranger things or man in a high castle that makes me think of netflix or amazon like there's no none of their corporate dna in those shows creative content especially entertainment has to be true to its genre um
So if it's a sci-fi show, make a good sci-fi show.
If it is a family drama, make a good family drama.
If it's a wacky comedy, make a good wacky comedy.
It doesn't matter how well wacky comedy, family drama, or sci-fi fit with your corporate branding.
And it's weird because Amazon and Netflix and Apple are these tech-based companies that do fairly different things with some overlap, but none of them have anything to do with creativity.
But I think Netflix and Amazon have shown if you get the right people involved,
Basically, like, what is being supplied by Netflix and Amazon?
Obviously, there's a venue for viewing, but the most important thing is money.
Here you go, people who know how to get creative things created by creative people.
Here's a bucket of money.
Can you make a good show?
And out pops House of the Cards.
Answer, yes, if you throw enough money at it and you hire the right people.
Netflix, a company that delivers plastic discs and streaming video to people's houses, you know, used to plastic discs,
can make good content and same thing with amazon the place that you buy stuff from they deliver for you in boxes can make original content so if apple has decided and you can debate the merits of this that they're going to make a reality show
I think we're getting a little bit confused by the fact that it involves apps.
The bottom line is, all right, if you're going to make a reality show, what are reality shows like?
And can you make a good one?
And I'm going to defend reality shows as a longtime viewer of reality shows from the very beginning.
I still watch and enjoy many of them.
That there is such a thing as a good reality show and a bad reality show.
Oh, yeah.
But within the genre, like, there is a genre.
And if you look at this trailer, you go, that's a reality show.
Like, it is clearly recognizable as a reality show.
And I think it could be a good reality show if done well.
Because it involves...
people with a skill and an ambition and a dream or whatever.
And they are going to, you know, in all these scenarios where you have the panel of experts has to pick them on them, that can be very bad or it can be good where they're trying to encourage people after the initial, like, let's make fun of the other people who are really bad, you know, sort of American Isle type thing like that.
I feel like it's a bad aspect of it.
But either way, once you get into the human story of like, I want to do this thing,
You don't need to know what the details of their struggle are.
This won't be about application development, probably.
It'll mostly be about starting a new business and business ideas.
And in the end, unlike, for example, American Idol, in the end, there is much less ability to make these people into superstars.
I mean, even American Idol had trouble eventually, but like Kelly Clarkson.
had a reasonable expectation that if she won this reality show, she would have a viable recording career a because the people picking her are going to pick people based on talent and B because you get an in with the recording industry, which is way more monolithic.
And actually back then had even more power than it does today to make you a star, uh, because they control distribution and so on and so forth, much less so than they used to in the old days, but still it was a thing.
But for this, for the app show, uh,
I don't particularly trust that the four people on the expert panel have any idea what is going to be a successful app beyond like any four random people that you picked in the tech industry.
And furthermore, I don't particularly think that even Apple itself by featuring you in the app store and heavily pushing you is going to turn your idea into a viable business for the long term.
um but i think none of that matters for reality shows because at this point we are perfectly willing to accept that winning a reality show is its own reward and whatever they promise you we go yeah yeah yeah you'll be rich and famous forever or i'll forget you by next season because that's not what it's about it's an entertainment program and you want and like i said it can be done badly and exploitively or it can be done in a way that people enjoy where you get to see plain old human drama and people with skills trying to apply those skills in a
And the sponsors are supportive and encouraging and it is a positive type of program with good production values that treats its contestants well, that has smart, funny and interesting and charming judges.
I believe a good reality show is possible.
I don't know whether this will be one, but I think the fact that this reality show involves apps is a distraction and a thing that skews people's thinking about it.
I guess the only thing you really debate is should the first major piece of original content that Apple made, not counting Carpool Karaoke, which was an existing franchise, should it be a reality show?
Maybe, maybe not.
But again, I don't think by judging it based on that, you could say you shouldn't be trying to figure out how well does reality show fit with Apple's ethos?
That's not the question at all.
The question is, are reality shows popular?
Yes, they are popular.
So if you were picking a genre, and it's also different than what other people do, they're not doing a...
sci-fi uh a retro sci-fi show or a show based on uh you know sci-fi books from a well-known author right that that has been well trod territory they're doing a reality show is their first thing which is a little bit different they're not doing a superhero thing or anything like that um so i think that's a reasonable choice and at some point someone convinced them if we are doing a reality show there's a little bit of synergy if we do it on apps but
um i'm willing to give this show all the benefit of the doubt even though i certainly won't watch it and i'm not interested in it i don't watch shark tank either um all the benefit of the doubt but what i would say is if apple is serious about content i hope it doesn't only do reality shows because there's no reason apple can't do original content in any genre that it wants because it has that same thing that amazon and netflix have mountains of money and if they are wise and hire the right peoples and you throw mountains of money at them they can make a good
video content in any genre that you can imagine and i love that that's happening with amazon netflix and i would like that for that to happen to apple because what the hell are they going to do with their money if they're not making a car or whatever so i'm all for it even if it is weirdly connected with apple music and even if i will never ever watch this show
Yeah, I mean, I understand why everyone was perturbed about it.
And I understand that it's like, oh, this is a distraction.
Maybe for some of Apple, but I mean, for the developers that are doing the sorts of things that the three of us really care about, I don't think it's much of a distraction at all.
Well, and it's not like the people who are making this show...
we're not taking off new mac pro hardware to make this show yeah exactly yeah that involved the mac pro hardware team is busily assembling the escalator right exactly and i don't even think it's a distraction because apple is in the tv connected box business and they're in the streaming video business like they have been you know from like this is not a new venture where they will sell you or rent you movies and video like and everybody else who's in that business is doing original content and
And I think that's been shown to be a model that works.
So they are latecomers to this.
All they are doing is continuing to compete in a market they were already in.
It's not like, why are you making TV shows?
You're distracted.
No, they were already in that market.
They've been selling Apple TVs of various kinds for a long time.
They've been selling video over the iTunes store for a long time.
That's a market they're in.
They're just competing in it.
People should be encouraging them like we're encouraging them to compete in the personal computer market.
Yes, by all means, look at what your competitor is doing and try to make your product more valuable and desirable.
Good job.
Not a distraction at all.
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Awesome.
I don't even know how to pronounce this.
Kavo?
Kavo?
Kavo.
That's it.
That's exactly how you have to say it.
Oh, all right.
Good.
I'm glad I got it.
It's scratechery.
Nicely done.
Nicely done.
I always feel bad about that and primer.
You guys, I don't know, you don't listen to The Incomparable enough, but you don't know the movie either, do you?
I'm aware of it existing.
Hey, I'm going to take that as a victory.
Is that the one with the... Hold on, is that the time-traveling one with the box?
Yes.
Like the refrigerator-sized box?
Yes.
Yo, I have seen that, actually.
I know.
That's it.
Anyway, the title of that movie is P-R-I-M-E-R, and the person who made that movie initially expected people and preferred people to pronounce it Primer.
But eventually gave up because everybody who saw that word pronounced it primer, which is an alternate pronunciation of that word with a different meaning.
And so the creator of the movie had to go.
And Stratechery, same situation.
I believe the original logo had a bar over the E to try to tell you it's a long E. It's a Stratechery.
Right.
That's correct.
But that didn't work.
And the public has spoken.
And now the creator of that site says Stratechery.
Truth.
Sorry, Ben Thompson.
Anyway, I have no idea what this is about.
So tell me about Kavo.
A lot of people were tweeting this with the idea that this is the omnivorous box that I talked about on Hypercritical and earlier on earlier episodes of ATP.
It's such an old idea from like 2011 or whatever the hell Hypercritical was.
Um, that was back when I was complaining a lot about TiVo and what I wanted was someone to make a box.
It would be nice if it was Apple that sat on my TV and had a whole bunch of inputs.
It took video from all the places that I pay for stuff back in 2011.
I was like, Hey, I pay for cable.
and i also pay for netflix and i also have a you know a blu-ray player or a playstation you know all these different places that i can get video into my tv i would like all those inputs to go into this thing that i called an omnivorous box because it would consume anything and then i wanted one cable coming out of the omnivorous box into my television and one remote that controlled the omnivorous box and
And I would be able to, through a single interface, have access to all the video that I pay for.
I pay for a cable subscription.
Cable has TV shows.
They come on.
My TiVo records them.
I want access to all those shows, both live and recorded.
I pay for Netflix.
And, you know, if there's a Netflix client either on my television or on the Uninverse box yourself or on an Apple TV or something, I want to be able to see that stuff.
I have a Plex server running and that's, you know, or a PS3 media server back then.
uh and that has can play files from a hard drive somewhere in my basement i want to be able to watch that kind as well and i want it to be one big unified interface so when i look through the shows available for me to watch it does not express to me in any way where this stuff comes from it's just like yes this video comes from many different sources but i give you a unified interface to it it's just a series of
Things that you can watch, things that might come on in the future, things that haven't come on in the past, things that you can stream right now.
Just one big, contiguous, clean interface.
And that is a super hard problem to solve because all of those people who distribute that content, cable companies, Netflix, even PS3 media server people, do not want you to make that box.
They want you to use their box and their remote and all that other stuff, especially cable companies.
um that making that box is would be famously difficult many companies tried google gave it probably the best run with its absurd google tv thing with that crazy remote remember that um yep there was like two google tvs ago i forget which thing yeah it was remember that that was one that eric schmidt said was going to be in every tv right no that was the second one this was the one before that i think
yeah anyway it's a really hard problem both technically because how would you even solve that technical problem and business wise because everybody whose input is going into your nervous box does not want people to get their content through your nervous box and they will fight you on it like they will make it so your box stops working on purpose because they don't want you to be the middleman it's like no they don't want that at all and so no one ever did make that box tivo came the closest because tivo takes the cable input because of cable card which is the thing
that happened when there was a brief moment of semi-sanity in our lawmaking institutions in this country that allowed third-party products to accept cable signals with some caveats.
So that's why I can even use a TiVo and why I don't have to have a cable box.
So we could get cable television and record that.
And then eventually TiVo added some fairly grim streaming video clients to their platform so you can watch Netflix through your TiVo and Amazon through your TiVo and all.
And I think it was a Plex client.
I forget.
Anyway.
not quite omnivorous because you can't watch itunes content through there and you can't watch my blu-ray player through there and you know all sorts of other stuff like that so omnivorous box never came to be enter cavo with two a's and no bar over any of them um this is a set top box that takes a whole bunch of hdmi inputs and has one output um and it tries to do something like what i described that you have one cavo remote you use that remote and
And with it, you can see all the video that is available on all the different devices that are plugged into it.
And you can watch video from any of them.
It is not, I think, really an omnivorous box because one of my requirements for omnivorous boxes is it provides one interface that doesn't make you have to be aware of where stuff comes from.
And one of Cabo's primary interfaces is a series of boxes that say Roku, PS4, Amazon, Apple TV, DirecTV.
and when i first saw it i thought this is a glorified hdmi switcher it's like great all your hdmi things go into one box and then out of that box it connects to your television and then when you turn it on with the one remote you can pick which thing you want to do and then you just get the interface to that thing but that's not quite how it works we'll link in the show notes to this video from the verge which is very long kind of boring but just scrub through it until you see them start actually using the device uh of the creators of this thing talking to who they're talking to
walt mossberg uh i only recognize because of his silly beard and uh someone else um and they give demos of the product and it tries to do more than that it tries to give you an interface to all the things that are available on all the devices it's not particularly pretty to look at but it will try to say hey here the show is available for you to watch without expressing to you where they are from uh it it has
amazon echo integration so they keep doing this demo of like you know watch stranger things and uh you have like a preference list of like when i say watch stranger things and you determine that stranger things is a show that's on netflix and i have three boxes connected that can all do netflix i i want you to prefer to use the apple tv for netflix for whatever reason um so we'll start playing stranger things from netflix through the apple tv
If you say Watchmen in the High Castle, it will determine that that is only on Amazon and you have an Amazon streaming thing connected somewhere.
And so it will start playing it from that for you.
So the voice control interface is like, you know, one level up from what each of these devices do individually.
Same thing with the remote.
The remote, you're controlling the cavo box.
The cavo box is controlling the inputs.
I wonder how they're doing, the unified interface.
It doesn't look that great.
It's mostly just text.
It's not a particularly rich interface.
If you were to go to the interface to any of these boxes or services, it would look better and have nice pictures and more metadata and stuff.
But at least they're trying.
I think this box faces the same challenges as a real omnivorous box would in that the companies that they are sort of...
trying to insert themselves between you know the customer and these other boxes those boxes aren't going to like that and if they don't intentionally break them they'll accidentally break them especially if their means of control involves i mean like are they doing screen scraping are they trying to use apis documented or otherwise how are they even doing this do they have separate metadata somewhere that's like in the cloud so it's not actually uh
looking at the content over the hdmi thing so i don't know i don't know how they're doing it it doesn't look that impressive but at least they're giving it uh it uh you know giving it the old college try the most interesting thing about this demo are the things that are probably the least technically cool in that
you know calling this a glorified hdmi switch is kind of mean but calling it a glorified receiver less less mean uh but if you if you have a receiver or any other box that takes a whole bunch of hdmi inputs and sends one output to your television you know that uh strangely one of the challenges is aside from having a million different remotes and having to switch inputs um that's that's cumbersome so one of the demos they give is
what if someone comes over your house and they don't know how to use the 17 remotes that are on your end table right or even the one logitech harmony remote that you have because that is generally complicated and the example they gave in the demo is like what if someone comes over your house and they see you have a playstation 4 because they see the controller sitting on the end table and they just pick up the playstation controller off the end table nothing is you know they just come into the room nothing is turned on they just pick up the playstation controller and turn it on any reasonably good receiver
should be able to notice that hey i was sitting here and everything was off but i noticed that the playstation came on and started sending me video output so i am going to through cec or some other thing that's supposed to work but doesn't turn on your television switch the input to the you know switch my input as the receiver or whatever i am to the ps4 thing and so now merely by pressing the
playstation on button on the playstation controller there it is on your screen you don't have to know oh if you want to play playstation pick up the receiver mode switch to input number two then turn on the tivo or then then turn on the playstation make sure you do it in that order if you want to hear it through the receiver speakers also turn the receiver on but if you don't it'll go through the television you know you don't have to know how to do that
And then if someone comes along and they turn the Roku on, it'll notice, even though the PlayStation 4 is already on, because you just activated the Roku using the Roku remote, because maybe all you know is the Roku remote.
You don't know what the hell this Cabo thing is.
You don't know the PlayStation thing.
You see, oh, Roku remote.
I know what a Roku is.
And you just turn the Roku on.
The Cabo Box will see it.
Well, even though PlayStation is on, someone just turned the Roku on, so I'm going to switch to the Roku input and let you control it with the Roku remote.
That type of functionality should be in every decent receiver and probably is in a lot of decent receivers.
But to me, that was the most impressive because that's like, yes, that's how all receivers should work.
And I'm glad that someone...
has realized this and tried to build it into a box so i i started off thinking this is a glorified hdmi switcher receiver and i ended up thinking this is a really good hdmi switcher slash receiver um now now for the bad news the bad news is it's 400 dollars
all right and this 400 does not include any of the boxes that you connect to it which isn't a problem because i already have a million tv boxes but like the idea is you buy this box and you and it's like you get nothing it's like it's like buying a synology with no discs in it it's like yeah it's there it's ready for you to plug things into but it's no good to you until you plug inputs into it so 400 and then
hundred dollars for every box depending on what you know i guess the apple ones are expensive you know 60 for a chromecast 60 for a cheap ruko roku 100 for a good one whatever um but if you already have all those boxes and maybe if you don't have a receiver um oh and also it's pretty big and it's weird and it's wood and it's probably not going to be available to consumers until 2018 so
All those caveats.
Besides all that, it's great.
Yeah.
They're going to sell 5,000 of them sometime this year.
You can pick three different kinds of wood, three different kinds of ugly wood to be on top of it.
Oh, now that you tell me that, I'm in.
You're really not doing a great job of selling this, Joe.
Yeah, I don't think this product is really going anywhere, but I was excited by the idea that someone has tackled some of the very basic problems of this terrible, terrible television age we live in, where we all have way too many pucks or other kinds of boxes connected to our televisions, and...
Very frequently, watching any video content involves switching inputs and possibly also switching remotes.
And all the solutions that try to make it easier are bad in some way, including this one.
But in the absence of a true omnivorous box, which can probably never exist for the same reason, OpenDoc can probably never exist.
Business reasons on top of technical reasons equals death.
Yeah.
Wow.
I like the fact that someone is trying to push the envelope forward, and I hope somebody buys this company and incorporates their good ideas into their own products.
Like TiVo, I assume?
No, they're... Come on.
Come on.
I just want TiVo to stay in business.
They're not buying anybody.
Please, TiVo, don't waste your money buying these people.
wow apple could buy them make their apple tv better apple could have made a box like this of course they never would but like the type of the type of functionality of just like can we stop people from having to do uh switch inputs that would be good like can it just do what i mean can it just notice because i turn the playstation on i probably want to play with the playstation just switch to that input automatically it's nice ah
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
We have an odd note in the show notes.
It says, John's Mac throws some more RAM.
with more in parentheses too yeah throws is in there's a failure throws is in it ejected it it it spit it like a loogie across the room some kind of exception handling we've talked about this before that's why this is this is a second the second time this has happened i think on the run of atp and i think i used the same language last time the analogy i'm trying to make here and failing obviously
Is when a horse throws a shoe.
Do you know that expression?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
You know, I was raised in Ohio where we had lots of horses.
No.
What?
No, I don't know what that means.
A horse throws a shoe.
My understanding, I was not raised with horses either.
Either.
Disclaimer.
Disclaimer.
Disclaimer.
You know, horseshoes.
You know, the little metal bendy U-shaped things you put on the bottom of horses.
Yeah.
I know that part at least.
Yeah.
And they're attached somehow with like these weird looking spikes or nails or something.
It's scary and I don't understand it.
Anyway.
the horse is galloping along those little metal u-shaped things are supposed to say on the bottom of the little feats but sometimes when they're galloping along one of them goes flying off the foot and that's bad because now your horse has lost its shoe and it needs it to walk comfortably or whatever the hell horseshoes are for um and it's throwing as in like it could go flying because as the horse is galloping the shoe goes flying so basically while like doing something strenuous like encoding a video your mac pro forcefully ejected one of its ram sticks from its slot
that's what i'm hearing or not strenuous as the case may be so my mac pro is very old the ram is also very old uh it's 2008 mac pro now it is a good solid eight years old pushing up on nine i forget when i bought the thing um throwing some ram means i have eight sticks of ram in there and every once in a while
one or two of them stop working and it's like my horse threw a shoe my mac pro threw some ram so i came in the other day and tried to wake my mac pro from sleep and the fan spun up but the screen did not turn on and the power light on the front of my mac pro was blinking in a very concerning way and
and uh unlike later mac pros including even the 2009 but i don't know how far forward they went my mac does not have a little set of red leds on the banks of dims to tell you which ones are bad all i knew is that i had a computer with eight dims of ram on two daughter cards four on each that would not boot
uh it just wouldn't post wouldn't do the chime wouldn't do anything because you know there's some bad ram there and this has happened before multiple times i think i brought up when casey had bad ram that i had a owc ram in my thing and that despite the fact that my computer is so many years old every time it throws it throws a dim if it's an owc one that is the problem i just call them up and they send me a new one
And it would be better if they didn't break, but after eight years, if it throws a dim and I get a new one for free, I still consider that pretty amazing in the age of two-year warranties and hard drives or whatever.
So I had a fun afternoon of...
unseating daughter cards removing dims putting them back in in every valid configuration to by process of elimination find the pair of dims because they have to be in pairs find the match pair of dims that don't work and even with the pairs all i can tell you is that one of the two doesn't work i don't know they might both be bad so eventually after many many boots and i'm good at this now many many uh exercises of seating and unseating which is actually kind of satisfying with the little clips they have on them and everything and how you shove them in um
i eventually did find the pair of dims that was bad they were owc dims and i am they are sending me new ones for free nice so i'm down i'm down either two gigs or four gigs of ram right now
Still doing okay.
Let's see.
What do I got here?
14 gigs of RAM.
So I should have 18.
So I think I'm down four.
Okay.
Dear Apple, if you are still listening to this somehow for some reason, please put this computer out of its misery.
Okay.
give john a new mac pro to buy so he can finally stop using this ancient one please the terror that fills my heart when i think is this the time that it's just like that it's just dead like that the motherboard is dead you know that it's just not gonna boot right because then i think about like i would have i would have to buy an iMac or should i just like buy the cheapest laptop i can do what would i do with all my data and
i just it's terrifying so what you know i was afraid i got down to this point where i was like maybe it's just not going to boot because i got it down to like just just two dims you know the two dim configuration of the two that i thought were like the newest and most reliable ram and it still wouldn't boot and the trick i learned this time is occasionally you also need to do an smc reset to make it happy not
not all the time but occasionally because i was in one ram configuration and it would not boot and then i did an smc reset and it did boot with the same ram configuration and so once i learned that trick then that was the easy way to make sure i was
you know uh actually testing the dims and i eventually did narrow it down and found the two that were bad so yeah so this is what i've got in my in my thing in one bank i've got two gig two gig four gig four gig and the other bank i have one gig one gig empty empty it's such a motley collection of ram some of it apple some of it purchased from owc in like three different shipments and some of it replaced over time yeah my word oh can't kill this machine though
takes a licking and keeps on ticking oh god please apple please just let john replace this please meanwhile it was like is it gonna be short slower than the apple watch by the time yeah like by the time the new by the time the new mac pro comes out if it ever does your mac pro is probably going to be slower than every mac for sale at that time
Oh, iOS devices.
I think the iPhone is already faster than it, isn't it?
I believe.
At least it's single-threaded.
It passed it, I think, two generations ago.
Multi-threaded, I think it still hasn't.
But it's close.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I've got to watch for the watch to start lapping me.
Yeah.
I mean, at least if you limit it just to single-threaded performance, you're really looking bad compared to all the iOS devices.
Yeah, but I have more RAM than the iOS devices, and I have one terabyte of flash storage, so take that, iOS.
Yeah, but their RAM works all the time.
Oh, sick burn.
Well, you don't know that until you've used it for eight years.
How's the RAM doing on that iPhone after eight years?
After eight years, the thing won't even turn on and it's not plugged in.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that.
As someone who's lived through RAM problems recently, that is no fun and I feel bad for it.
You see how much quicker I diagnosed it and dealt with it rather than pretending it doesn't exist?
I guess you can't pretend it doesn't exist when your machine doesn't boot, but addressed immediately.
Problem solved.
Yeah.
And also, like, ODBC wasn't open.
Like, their phone line wasn't open.
I normally just call them and deal with the nice people there and just read them my serial numbers, and they're like, okay, we'll send you a new RAM.
I did it through chat, which it worked fine, like, because their phone lines weren't open, but the chat was.
But chat I find infuriating, like, customer support chat, because...
I don't know why it takes so long for there to be a response.
Because you're like, hello, my name is blah, blah, blah.
How can I help you?
And then I paste in my prepared sentence of what my problem is that is formatted in a way that I know there will be no follow-up questions.
It contains all the information.
here's here's the problem here's why i think this is the problem how long does it take you to compose that sentence three days i can do it on the fly it's very easy very concise right but it contains all the information right here's here's my problem here's why i know it's my problem putting enough information to let them know they don't need to take me through troubleshooting steps and crap right and here's what i want to happen i want you to send me a new ram right like in a nice way but like all the information is there and then you wait literally 10 minutes for the reply
and the reply is can you give me the order number serial number blah blah which of course i have ready for them but i didn't want to confuse them within the original message and i paste that in 10 more minutes 10 more minutes of that chat window just off the side to the credit of the chat thing at owc it has like a chime that lets you know when they reply because you can't just be sitting there wait like there's not even a typing indicator like just just 10 minutes like are they just chatting with their friends did they go for a coffee break uh
They're surely not spending this time typing, especially for the first message.
There was no thing for them to be looking up in the system.
Oh, the system is slow.
We're looking up your order.
They didn't even have my order number at that point.
I just told them what the situation is.
Bad RAM.
Want new RAM.
Here's how I know it's bad.
Don't ask me to blow the dust out of my socket, basically.
you know 10 minute reply on that and then so it just it took an incredible amount of time but during that time i was like browsing the revenue reading twitter while waiting while waiting for them to reply sometimes i forgot that i was still in the middle of the chat like you know it's long when you've forgotten like a little boop goes off i'm like oh that's right i'm a customer support chat to get new ram so hopefully that will be on the way soon
I'm surprised at this point you don't just call them up on the phone and just be like, hey, it's me again.
They're like, all right, how big?
Two gig?
Four gig?
Two?
All right.
Just send it out.
I mean, because they have this lifetime, maybe people don't know, don't realize.
You buy RAM from OWC.
If it goes bad, they'll just keep replacing it forever.
like i think that's how it works like you do have to pay to ship your old ram back to them but that's cheap it's very lightweight right so it's a couple bucks to ship old ram back is why by the way i save the boxes i never throw out the boxes the new ram comes in i just you know i'll just keep i keep getting new ram forever for this machine and it's fine with me right if and i think it's like every every two or three years it throws a dim and you know i'm okay with that it's like casey's uh bmw every once in a while you know 60 000 miles the water pump's gonna go like it's okay
It would be like after two years, you just lost two CPUs.
Well, the CPUs, yeah, that's what I'm always afraid of.
I mean, RAM, like, I could just say, I'm always afraid that the slots are going to go bad.
But even if that did, I can get by with 14 gigs of RAM instead of 18.
Like, I'm okay.
I've had such a motley collection of RAM in this machine.
Like, weird amounts and weird combinations.
But as long as I'm in the teens, I'm okay for what I do with the snack.
I'm trying to predict, like...
During which year will you stop using this Mac?
When it dies, that will stop me, right?
So if it actually dies, what am I going to do?
But if it doesn't die, my current plan is, look, this is the year.
Wait to WWDC.
There's still no Mac Pro if it's an iMac Pro.
Either way...
Like, if there's a Mac Pro, maybe, maybe not.
But if there is no Mac Pro, then I'm getting an iMac.
And if there's an iMac Pro, I'm getting an iMac Pro.
So my wife says, why don't you just get an iMac now?
It's like, I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to buy something that looks for all the world like a 5K iMac.
And I'm pretty much okay with that having used hers a lot.
It's like, whatever.
If they're not going to make a Mac Pro anymore, what the hell can I do?
The next best thing is the 5K.
i'll be okay with it but i'm not going to buy it now i have to wait to see at wwdc what the thing is is there going to be another mac pro is there going to be a special imac for pros either called imac pro or not that's when i make my buying decision but the thing of it is is you had a new mac pro what was it 15 years ago now when when the trash can came out you had a new mac pro and you didn't want that one so what makes you think you're going to suddenly decide that this one's okay
If I had to reconsider... Well, the problem with knowing what I know now is I also know about the reliability issues of that one.
Like, when it came out, the reason I didn't buy it was like, well, this doesn't quite suit my needs.
Like, I don't need that much GPU, and the GPUs aren't that great, and it's super expensive, and so on and so forth.
But...
all our conversations about that were with the expectation that i'll wait for the next mac pro like when they revise it right like and it wasn't such a crazy assumption i thought that that would happen i mean they they even did that for the cheese graters even though like the you know the fake new one for this show was founded on like it was still a revision it was still like they they changed some stuff i i none of us i think could have predicted that like they would literally not release another version of the machine like ever
like just no no for one year two year three like they just won't do it and that was not in my head so it was like me passing on that mac pro i feel like you know it's the first one like wait for the second revision like kind of like i did with the 5k mac i didn't buy the first one like marco did even though it was a good machine it was like the second one came out okay this is the one to get it seems like it's you know everything's settled down there's no big problems it's got the p3 screen that's totally what i was expecting to do with the trash can they just never made another one and so you know what can you do
Did you make any progress on your car decision?
We had a lot of feedback on that.
Oh, did we have feedback.
Can I just do this for you, Casey?
Please.
Casey wants a stick shift that was apparently not emphasized enough in the past show.
In the past 18 shows and the entire run of Neutral.
Right.
He hasn't been keeping it a secret, but people keep forgetting.
Or people say, I know you said you wanted the stick shift, but have you considered not a stick shift?
Yeah.
Have you considered that, Casey?
Have you considered not a stick shift?
Because I know you said you wanted one, but think about this.
Not.
Oh.
You don't know that you put it that way.
When you put it that way, I see.
So not a stick shift.
Is that what you're saying?
Not the thing I want.
Right.
Also, a pretty close number two on that list was not front wheel drive.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of people are saying, oh, don't worry about that.
Don't worry about a stick shift.
Don't worry about front-wheel drive.
You know, I got a perfect front-wheel drive automatic that I'd love to sell you.
A paddle-shifted car for you.
That's what you were looking for, right?
It seems like that's exactly your criteria.
That's exactly it.
They were arguing, you know, they were saying most of the people were like, you know, some people just plain forgot because I would like they were doing a whole email about the car that you should get.
But other people were pitching you.
They're saying, here's why you should consider front wheel drive.
It's not your father's front wheel drive, blah, blah, blah.
And I mostly respect those pitches, but maybe they just don't know your stubbornness.
Now, would you call that an elevator pitch or an escalator pitch?
I call it an email pitch.
And I think people made some, I have to say, though, I have to think a lot of people made good arguments.
Like if you were going to try to talk you out of a stick shift or a rear wheel drive, people had some good arguments based on their actual experiences driving these cars.
So I think there was good quality feedback in there, but I'm not sure how much it helped you.
My other favorite was everyone in the entire world, I counted, it's true, telling me you should buy a WRX.
In fact, in the chat room as we speak, two different individuals are telling me to buy a Subaru or a WRX.
No, I won't allow it.
Well, so here's the thing.
I tweeted within a day of the show coming out because I was already getting inundated by it.
Two things.
I said, you know, number one, I think the WRX isn't cushy enough.
I want something that's a little bit less boy racer.
Secondly, this is my past Subaru, and it's a picture of my legacy GT.
Now, this was after I sold it, and I think we might have discussed this on the show, but it was after I sold it.
And it literally died in a fire.
You know that phrase that I love so very much?
It died in a friggin' fire.
Are you attributing that to the car, or is that the owner?
I see that picture, too, but because you didn't own the car, you don't know how that happened.
That's true.
However, let me remind you that that car smelled of gasoline slash petrol for most of the time that I owned it.
The wheels all stayed on it, though, unlike in other cars.
This is true.
This is true, which was an improvement.
It's a low bar.
So...
so yeah we have casey gets a car wheel falls off next car dies in a fire bmw is doing pretty well all things just consuming its engine parts in a hail of metal occasionally yeah no big deal right what's the common factor here casey maybe you drive really weirdly
I guess.
I don't know.
But I had a few people reach out with interesting ideas.
I had a handful of people reach out and say the Gulf R is just as good as you think it is.
I had a handful of people with various degrees of aggression say, stop fighting with this, just lease your damn car.
Which I think...
I understand that, and there's probably some truth to it.
In fact, Marco, you made a pretty good pitch for it.
I don't remember if that was on Slack or on Twitter, but regardless.
Leasing would surely fix many, if not all, of these problems, but it creates other problems, which is, you know, I'm just throwing money into a pit.
I'm borrowing a car.
But you're doing that now.
Which I don't really care for.
Fair.
Any ownership of a car is throwing money into a pit and only borrowing it.
no matter how you do it that is the result it's only a difference of of like mechanics of how that actually happens and on what time scale and in what pattern and like what i like about leasing which i've said before i'll just go the very quick summary um you know it is not the absolute least money to spend on a car like the least money to spend on a car is to buy a lightly used honda or toyota and drive it until it doesn't drive anymore that is by far the cheapest the cheapest way to own a car
But if you're going to go the route of nice cars, and in particular, if you're going to go the route of buying new, usually a lease is really nice for that because it is predictable and fixed.
And you put the risk of market fluctuations, the value of your car, whether it ever gets in an accident or anything like that, you put the risk of all that and the eventual resale value back on the manufacturer.
and so you have a very predictable guaranteed fixed three years of here's what this is going to cost me every year or every month or whatever and then at the end it is done it is over you don't have to worry about am i going to lose a lot of resale for this little scratch i have over here or whatever else and like and all the maintenance is included so like
It's a way to just take this weird, severe, up-and-down, spiky expense pattern of owning a car and just make it flat.
Make it flat but expensive.
But financing new versus leasing new, it's kind of a toss-up.
It depends on the incentives and the interest rates of the current month and that brand and the configuration looking at.
Sometimes leasing is actually cheaper because what a lot of the brands will do is they will use lease incentives and lease specials to help them reach earnings for this quarter at their own expense, basically.
They're kind of like borrowing against their own future.
Actually, the best deals in the car industry usually are, for new cars at least, usually are lease specials for that reason, that you're kind of taking advantage of the manufacturer's need to boost their numbers in a certain time span or whatever.
But that's going to be less applicable to the kinds of cars you're looking at, honestly.
But anyway, that's why leases are good.
They're fixed, they're predictable, and they're kind of like, if your usage pattern, if your mileage-driven is
fits within what a lease can do, which yours does, then it really makes a lot of sense, especially for the kind of cars you are looking at, which are fast cars, sports cars.
And it's one thing to lease something more conventional and more low-key with a lower-key, not as tweaked-up engine and not high-performance brakes, not high-performance parts.
That's one thing.
But the kind of cars you're looking at, as you know too well now, are very expensive to maintain.
So you're going to have that problem with any way you look at this that still involves you having a soul.
So because of that, that's why I think you should just go to leasing because, again, you're losing a bunch of money no matter how you do this.
With leasing at least, it's more compatible with the kind of like high-powered sporty cars that you're looking at.
And it allows it to be predictable.
There's no more surprises.
And I tell you what, that is a freeing decision.
Because I've done now every method of owning a car.
I have bought used, I've bought new via financing, and I have leased.
And...
leasing is the only one of those i did more than once and there's a reason for that because my experience doing the other two were both very poor when i bought used i had a maintenance nightmare when i finance new i lost a killing on on resale value because at one time i had to get a door panel replaced not my fault the car was parked and somebody backed into my door
And I had to get the door panel replaced.
And they saw that when I went to resell it.
And they could tell that it had been repainted from... They could look at the edge on the inside and kind of see, oh, yeah, this is a repainted panel.
Even if it looked perfect from the outside.
But anyway, yeah, I lost like $5,000 off the resale price on that car.
It was horrible.
And it just sunk all... That was my accord.
And all the calculations I did to say, is this the best value car?
That best value was destroyed because of that resale loss.
So everything that I thought I was doing right was out the window because I had bad luck.
Similar to what you're seeing now with your BMW.
Everything you thought of your calculation of what you were going to spend on this car is being thrown out the window because weird stuff is going wrong and you just happen to have bad luck with the maintenance on this one.
That can happen with any car you get, no matter how reliable it is.
This is all to say, this is why I like leasing so much.
She was with leasing.
You get the new car.
And yes, you're paying a cost for a new car, right?
And that's never going to be cheap, no matter how you do it.
But if you're going to get a new or new-ish car with a lease, you pay every month.
You get the car brand new, exactly the spec you want.
You custom order it exactly what you want.
You get every option, every color, whatever you want.
Your stick shift, you don't have to wait and find one.
You can get exactly what you want.
Three years later, you turn it into the dealer and you get something else.
And you don't have to worry during that time.
If you get a scratch in month six of a lease, you don't have to look at that and say, A, am I going to have to look at the scratch for the next 10 years?
And B, is this going to kill my resale value?
Or do I have to go get this fixed somewhere really expensive?
Because you know what?
Leases have scratch lot and it's built in.
you don't have to pay anything unless it's a really huge dent or something like, and it's just fine.
You just turn it back in and they, you have a certain allowance and it's just fine.
Like it's, it's just so much easier.
There's, there's so much less also like if you're kind of unsure about whether you want, like one of the reasons I got a red car this time,
I'm not sure.
Having never owned a car that was a bold color before, I wasn't sure I would like it.
But I'm not buying this car for 10 years.
I'm leasing this car for three years.
So I can take a bit of a risk.
Same thing with the M5.
I wasn't sure if I could deal with a rear-wheel drive car in a place that has winters.
And if I was buying a car for 10 years, I'm not sure I would take that risk.
But because it was only a lease, I knew that it was a much shorter commitment.
And so I did it, and it worked out great.
Now I have my red car.
That's working out great.
So you're able to take more risks with the choices you make because it isn't a long-term commitment.
And the psychology is so much more relaxed because you know it's just a lease.
And the time that you're giving it up is fixed.
The value that you're going to get out of it is fixed.
What you're paying every month is fixed.
And at the end, you just repeat.
You just order something else and the process repeats.
And every three years, you have a chance to stop doing that if you want to.
But honestly, once you start, it's kind of hard to stop because it's really, really nice.
Casey doesn't want a three-year stand with a car.
He's looking for a long-term relationship.
I mean, to be fair, you can also get four- and five-year leases.
I don't know if anybody really does, but you can.
But every choice that you have presented in front of you, you're going to have to make some kind of major compromise on what you would ideally want, right?
No matter what choice you have in front of you, you have to compromise on something.
You have to make one big compromise to avoid making a whole bunch of other smaller ones, right?
If you choose leasing as that compromise to make, because I know you object to leasing, seems like mostly a moral standpoint.
It's less about whether you could afford it or not and more that you just don't like the idea of it.
If you can compromise on that, everything else you can get exactly what you want.
Yeah, sort of.
I mean, I guess that's true.
But the only things that that would give me access to really is BMWs.
And I could just buy a used one or a Cadillac.
And I don't think I want a Cadillac.
I won't let you get the Cadillac.
Well, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is I don't know what – leasing doesn't really open any doors, I don't think, that aren't already in front of me.
It just solves the maintenance problem because everything will be – I will forever be under warranty.
What's next, Marco?
Are you going to recommend a three-year marriage?
No.
That's what you're suggesting to us car owners.
That's right.
We'll have three years marriages and five year marriages.
It's great.
Try it.
It's like, no, that's not.
You don't understand the relationship between a man and his car.
No.
And John, you are doing one of my other recommended plans.
Not quite.
I would recommend if you're going to do the maximized value plan, I would recommend buying a just off lease Toyota or Honda and then owning that into the ground.
You're doing almost that, which is buy a new Honda and own it into the ground.
That is also a totally valid way to do it.
You know why I can't do the leases?
For two reasons.
One, try finding a stick shift on a car to the lease.
It's hard enough to find someone who will sell you one from the factory.
They do not exist.
And two, I like having a new car.
I like having a brand new car.
Brand new cars are awesome.
And you get that with the lease too, right?
Brand spanking new.
That's one of the great things in life is getting a new car.
I would never forgo that for like a one-year-old.
I will eat the 5K in depreciation.
That's very surprising to me.
Who doesn't like a new car?
Come on.
I love a new car.
But so my perfect scenario, like if I could just invent the perfect scenario, I would get like a one or two-year-old car that was exactly the build I wanted.
That was used by Tiff Arment, driven 500 miles.
Yeah, exactly.
No, it's true.
And truth be told, that was my BMW.
Now, it had been driven many, many miles, but the only way those miles could have been accrued in the time in which the first owner had it was on the highway.
And so on paper, my car was perfect.
It was a relatively decent deal.
It turns out he was a mailman.
Well, I think my understanding was he was actually an insurance agent.
Stop and go, stop and go.
Yeah, it could be.
But no, my understanding was he was an insurance agent or something like that.
But Marco will probably unjustifiably cut this from the show.
But as you guys were talking, I went to Autotrader and quickly amassed the list of makes that are reasonably easily available to me in the United States.
And I will run through them alphabetically.
So everyone will know the options in front of me.
And the answer is that there are almost none.
Acura.
Acura does not believe in a stick shift anymore.
Alpha.
Volvo, no sticks.
Done.
Any other questions?
A couple other quick notes.
First of all, Porsche is theoretically an option, which I had forgotten.
But A, it's way too expensive.
B, have you seen the Panamera?
It's freaking hideous.
There's no four-door sticks.
The Panamera doesn't come a stick, does it?
You know, now that you say that, you're probably right.
Secondly, Inkette, and this individual is not the only person who has said this, but, oh, you're too picky.
Well, fuck you.
This is what I want.
I mean, I don't care.
This is what I want.
I am allowed to be picky if I'm spending between $20,000 and $80,000.
I am allowed to be picky.
So, sorry, tough noogies.
I would probably get a used Gulf R. And then as I thought more about it, I thought, you know what?
I don't know if it's really even worth just trading this in because why would I spend 30 to 40 to, if Marco has his way, $80,000 on a new car when I can just continue to feed my car from time to time and just call it a day.
And so what I think I'm going to do is just suck it up and deal with the fact that my car is always going to be in the shop.
Casey's BMW is my Mac pro.
Yeah, actually, you're right.
And that makes me absolutely sick.
We should just go to OWC, see if they can send you a new water pump.
There you go.
Because every time it dies, they'll just send you another one.
You just have to pay to ship the old one back.
It's fine.
No big deal.
I was morally offended last week.
But as I got thinking about it, and I actually got a couple of offers of one person I know and one friend of a listener that had said, oh, I'm getting an M2 soon and I have a Golf R that I'm looking to unload.
Yeah.
And we started lightly negotiating on it.
And then I thought to myself, I don't know about this.
Like I haven't told this individual one way or the other, but my current thinking sitting here now is why would I throw $30,000 to $40,000 at a problem that's happening every few months for $1,000?
Like that doesn't really fix my problem.
For the privilege of driving around at a Volkswagen Rabbit.
Right.
All I'm doing is being a petulant child at that point.
If you didn't already have a really nice 335, like if you were starting from nothing, that'd be another story.
But because you already have something that is good, yes, it is a maintenance headache.
But if you're looking at pure value for the money, maintaining a BMW is going to hurt your soul, but it will actually be cheaper.
Right.
Right.
And that's the thing is that my soul is damaged, but I know my wallet is thanking me.
The problem with the Golf R, like aside from the whole rabbit thing, there are two critical problems with the Golf R. Number one, the trunk really isn't that big with the seats up.
It's not tiny, but it's not that big.
Secondly, and this is going to sound silly, and this is just getting even deeper into the, oh, you're so freaking picky, which is accurate.
This conversation sounds silly.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah.
There's no sunroof.
And I freaking love sunroofs.
I love them.
I use mine constantly, even at temperatures where I probably shouldn't.
And the Gulf are unavailable with a sunroof.
Yeah, that honestly changes a car dramatically.
If you're a sunroof person, I am too, so I understand.
If you're a sunroof person and you don't have one, it matters a lot.
So in summary, what I'm backing myself into is even the Golf R, which is very close on paper, has the small issue of trunk and the medium-sized issue of sunroof.
The ATS or ATS-V is probably what I'd want.
It's too damn expensive.
The Focus, like I said, it's either front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive, and I look like I am 18 now.
The Chevy SS is really the rightest answer, except the infotainment would murder me.
And now they're not making them anymore.
And so really the problem I have is that either I need to drive an A4 and realize it's not that bad, or I just suck it up because BMW is the only manufacturer.
Like I've backed myself back into BMW and all this whole endeavor was to get myself away from BMW.
And now I've just backed myself into the only option I really got is BMW.
Yeah.
Look, sometimes you get it right the first time.
Yeah.
Thank God I did with Aaron.
Everything else, I'm not so sure.
Yeah.
Except for on the car front, maybe not the color.
What do you think lasts longer, your car or John's Mac Pro?
My car, but not by a lot.
You've got a long way to go to catch up to mine.
You've only had that thing for a couple years.
No, I think Marco's saying what's getting replaced first.
Yeah.
Oh, my Mac Pro.
Because this summer, I'm getting something new, whether this thing breaks or not.
You say that now.
I don't believe that.
I'm just going to get an iMac.
Like, worst case scenario, if they introduce no new Macs, at the end of this year, I will just get an iMac.
Because if they introduce zero new Macs, that means, like, well, forget about the Mac Pro.
Forget about the iMac Pro.
Whatever.
Just get a 5K iMac.
Like, I can take a hint.
There's probably going to be a new 5K iMac, like, in a few weeks.
I'm not getting that one.
Right.
Exactly.
And so this summer, there's going to be, like, a four-month-old iMac in the lineup.
You're not going to buy a four-month-old iMac.
they're gonna do something at wwc even if the something is not introducing a mac pro that will be a signal to be like guess what it's not gonna happen so just give it up i'll be like okay i i think you know based on like rumors and crap i think it's very unlikely that we're gonna see like a new mac pro or an imac pro this summer i think it's too soon uh so what assuming that the summer comes and passes and it's you know july and there's still no no new imac pro or mac pro
Are you going to buy the then four-month-old iMac USB-C?
You say four-month-old like it's so old that I wouldn't buy it, but four-month-old, that's in the babyhood of that iMac's life cycle because it won't be modified again for 18 months.
No, but I'm saying you're going to wait until the next one.
I bet you don't even buy the iMac that hasn't even come out yet.
All right.
That scenario is conceivable, but I still think unlikely.
I'm not going to rule it out because that is something I would do.
I will bet that you don't replace your Mac Pro this year.
I am ever so slightly leaning on John's side, but man, is it close.
Man, is it close.
The other thing I have to take into account, this thing could break.
Every time something goes wrong, it could be a thing that is not as easy to replace as RAM, even if the video card went bad.
I'm pretty sure it keeps showing that it won't break.
I think that's very clear.
how are the fans not seized by now i don't understand that's a good question do you like blow it out you know when i open it up man it's filled with like not just dust but dust that is like like plated on there like it doesn't blow or wipe off the dust has become part of the machine oh my god like i have an air sprayer and i blow it and it does nothing i'm like why am i why do i even bother this is now part of the machine